That evening Yi Cao led his cousin through his first real session in cultivation. They’d spent the last few nights together this way, poring over the foundation scripture of the sect so that Yang would know what to do when he started pushing Ki through his body to transform infinitesimal lines of his flesh into the channels that would allow him to manifest actual Ki techniques after he completed the foundation stage. If he ever did.
They didn’t use the pill but sat in one of the public grottos the sect maintained for the use of its outer disciples alongside one of the spiritual gardens that oozed Ki in a dozen aspects despite the wall and scripts that separated it from the grotto itself.
“I want you to know what it’s like to cultivate without any support before you start using the resources the elder gave you.” Yi Cao told him as they sat in the dark grotto at twilight.
He hesitated, fighting with himself before he finally added, “This is how I’ve been cultivating since I came here. When I was six.”
Others occupied the grotto with them, visitors who thought they could get a taste of the cultivator’s life style while they were here. Tourists soaking up the Ki normally reserved for actual disciples of the sect, or just drinking, quietly, in the case of one old man who lounged against one wall of the tiny grotto instead of sitting lotus style on one of the meditation stones as he was supposed to.
Yang nodded, and Yi Cao sighed before pointing to his palm. “You cut your first channel here, yes?”
His cousin nodded enthusiastically but didn’t say a word. Yi Cao drew a line from his palm to the tip of his thumb. “Then tonight you should focus on cutting a channel from where you’ve begun to here. Once that line is formed you’ll be able to cut the branches into each of the knuckles and across the arch of the thumb, but for now you want just a straight line all the way to the tip of the thumb. Right?”
Yang nodded again.
“Don’t get too excited.” Yi Cao warned him. “You’d be a prodigy to finish even an eighth of the distance in six hours of cultivation. So…”
Yang just continued to nod.
“Alright then.” Yi Cao studied his cousin. “Do you remember how to do it?”
Yang looked at him as though he was crazy. “I thought I was going to lose my hand.” The boy replied. “It was like pushing out a worm, or… a humor, or something, but with my mind. I massaged it sometimes, but that only seemed to make things worse.”
“If you focus on your breathing it helps.” Yi Cao replied. “Feel for the ambient Ki and try to, listen to it, I guess, is the best description. Sometimes, if you can enter a trance, you can start to feel the law of the grotto, especially in particularly strong Ki.” Not that he’d ever felt it except once or twice during Ki tides.
“Follow the law.” Yang replied, quoting a note left beside the diagrams Yi Cao had read to him as they worked through the foundation scripture together.
“Follow the law.” Yi Cao replied. He nodded, and then together, they closed their eyes and slipped into meditation.
Yi Cao could count the hours he had spent in silent cultivation. Every stitch of the complex tracery of channels he’d cut since beginning his journey at the age of six throbbed when he focused on them, each one of them a record of agonizing hours spent kneeling on a prayer stone in only very slightly higher ambient Ki than he would have found anywhere else in the valley of the Hidden Heart Sect.
Scripts glowed faintly against the darkening sky above them as the arcane glyphs guided excess Ki from the spirit garden into the grotto where two boys sat fighting with the power washing through their channels like waves across a beach, guiding it deeper, pushing it into flesh that needed to transform to build to the wire frame thinner than a single hair that would permit the Ki to penetrate and strengthen what remained. When Yi Cao finally felt that he’d gone far enough he opened his eyes to find that the stars had come out. They glittered behind the faintly glowing scripts as he wrung out his aching hand and wiped away the impurities expelled through his pores by the process.
He’d cut maybe a half a centimeter over something like four hours of cultivation. None of the tourists remained. None except the man who’d been drinking and now snored across the same bench he’d been lounging on before Yi Cao and his cousin closed their eyes.
“It’s time.” He whispered as he touched his cousin’s shoulder.
Yang started as he came out of the cultivation trance. Deep grooves of concentration had been carved into his face by the process and he looked around wildly before he realized where he was and who was standing over him.
“It’s night.” The boy said in surprise.
“Easy to lose track of time.” Yi Cao replied. “Come on. Can’t spend all our time cultivating or we’ll be useless tomorrow. Balance is the first thing you have to learn when you start cultivating for real.”
Yang looked down at his hand and made a face as he wiped the impurities off on his cloak. “I don’t think I made very much progress.” He said.
Yi Cao laughed gently in the dark. “Welcome to cultivation.” He replied. “It’s taken me ten years just to finish reinforcing my legs arms and chest and those are just the first three steps of the first circle. I still have to finish my hips and waist then strengthen the connections between all of them before I get to start all over with the second circle.” He made a face. “Not looking forward to cutting channels in my guts.”
Yang grunted and stood, wobbling on legs gone numb from kneeling. “Aren’t there three circles to the foundation?” he asked.
“There are.” Yi Cao said. “That comes later. After you’ve learned the first stage of the scripture.” Probably not till the boy could read either.
“What’s in that one?” Yang asked.
Yi Cao shrugged. “The third? The head. Mostly. Also your spine, which is the dangerous part. I guess you can puncture your lifeline if you aren’t careful and then you get a lot of power for a couple of years before you die or get taken over by hostile Ki.”
“Like the thing in the lesser treasure hall?”
“Like that thing. Only you keep your flesh.” Yi Cao replied. “Or so I’ve been told. I don’t really know any of this. I’m barely ahead of you.” Ten years later, he didn’t add.
Yi Cao gestured for Yang to follow him out of the grotto and the boy fell silent as they made their way through darkened streets. Torches and tallow candles lit the sect in pools of orange light outside the homes and shops where visitors still partied despite the late hour. Other voices drifted from bonfires glimpsed briefly amongst the tents set up along the interior of the sect’s walls and occasional sparks of light shot up from the inner sanctum as cultivators in the second rank fired off silent techniques into the sky.
“They don’t seem to plan on sleeping.” Yang said as they passed through the pools of darkness, headed towards the Junior Disciples Baracks.
“They usually don’t.” Yi Cao replied. “Not tonight.”
They fell silent as they passed the blacksmith’s forge, loud with the laughter of young men Yi Cao recognized from his long youth with the sect. Apprentices his age who’d left the barracks up to half a dozen years before to take up residence with their new masters.
They moved on down the street until the laughter faded.
“Don’t you?” The boy asked as he followed Yi Cao through the night.
“Don’t I what?”
“Stay up. With your-” He tripped on a cobblestone and nearly caught the ground with his face.
Yi Cao paused as the boy caught himself.
“Wish your friends.” Yang finished.
Yi Cao studied his cousin’s silhouette in the dark. He turned away and continued down the black street.
“They left me behind long ago.” He said after a minute. “I don’t have many friends. Not anymore.”
The junior disciple’s barrack was mostly empty when they arrived. Bearded and severe master Gen sat at the table of the common area reading by candlelight but he barely looked up as Yi Cao collected a couple of rush lights and led his cousin up the ladder to the sleeping loft.
Only two other boys occupied the beds arranged across the floor and both snored softly as Yi Cao followed the flickering light of the rush he’d lit in the common area to his own bed. He lit a second rush and tucked them both into a seam between two boards in the wall as Yang leapt into the rafters to retrieve his bag and they both unrolled their blankets.
The flame of one rushlight died as Yi Cao shifted the chunk of wood he used to support his head and Yang continued to shuffle through his bag. “Do you have another light?” The boy asked.
Yi Cao reached for the bundle he’d snagged and touched one to the still burning rush in the wall. He held it while Yang dumped a section of his pack out onto his pallet. “I brought something for you, and I almost forgot about it.” The boy shifted the pile of mundane items aside in his search, a bowl, a spoon, bits of cold weather clothing he wouldn’t need for another four months, a bundle of wooden cards. Undergarments. String.
“Here it is.” He held up a thin booklet of bound pages to the light. The symbol for “The North” was painted across the front cover in bold broad lines along with the symbol for the imperial office stamped, rather than painted, in the bottom right hand corner. Some kind of official communication from the imperial family.
Yang gave Yi Cao an embarrassed look as he handed him the book. “Auntie Yinua said I should give you a present when we met.” He said. “She said she didn’t know what you would like anymore, but that everyone likes a good book, especially about places they’d never been. I just forgot about it until today.”
Yi Cao took the book and then lit another rush light so he could examine it in the flickering orange flame. It had the look of something well loved before it was flattened in the bottom of an eight year old’s pack and forgotten. He flipped it open to a page describing the districts of the north as they’d been a thousand years before the Black Blood Immortal opened his inner world and vomited up his Heart Demons in a bid to manifest his law across the northern continent.
“Momma said when I got here I’d get to learn how to read too.” The boy said. “Like uncle Bao. She seemed to think that… that… That we could read it together. Eventually.”
Yi Cao closed the book and examined his cousin in the red light of the burning rushes in his hand. The boy stared at the floorboards, face turning red.
“I’ve always wanted to read.” He muttered.
For long seconds Yi Cao didn’t respond while the flame of his light moved down the twined stems towards his fingers.
“I’ll be busy.” He said eventually. “We… may not have time.”
Yang shrugged uncomfortably and started shoving stuff back into his bag. “That’s alright.” He said. “It’s really for you anyways. Mama just… wanted us to be friends.”
Yi Cao picked up the bound stack of pages again and looked at the painted cover as his light started to fade.
“One more light?” Yang asked.
Yi Cao lit one and held it up so his cousin could finish packing up his things before turning in for the night.
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The ship came for him a week after the festival of testing, although ship was the wrong word. The thing that fell from the sky in the quiet hours of the morning had more in common with a dragon or a dying star than with any ship he’d ever seen depicted in the tapestries of the Eastern Sea. Instead of wood the thing was built of crystal and steel, and where seaborne ships used sails to fly against the waves, this monster walked across the sky on four legs of fire that roared in the morning air.
Yi Cao did not wait for it alone.
He woke the morning he would leave to the ringing of the sect bell and Yang jerking awake as though someone had struck him, just as he had every morning since the festival ended and the sect returned to its normal cycle of life. Bell Toll also queued the line for the public pits and the two threw on robes to join the line before sitting down with the rest of the junior disciples to yesterday’s rice and the dispensation of tasks for the day. Even a week after the festival bits of it were still getting cleaned up. One of the guests had choked on a ham bone and died leaving his tent and belongings in the middle of the sect yard while its attendants fought over who would claim them and the sect kept it from being ransacked. With the dispute finally settled three of the unluckier disciples would have the dubious privilege of picking up after them before they joined those tasked with sweeping out a few of the common halls that still hadn’t been taken care of since the festival and seeing to the regular chores handed out to them by various masters of the inner and outer membership.
Only Yi Cao was exempt. “The elders have some task for you.” Master Gen told him. He eyed him speculatively. “They said to send you to the four banners field. So, I send you, and your cousin, I think. Since he isn’t any good anywhere else right now.”
Yi Cao didn’t thank the master. He ate his rice in silence, then waited for Yang, who always ate slower than everyone else. He gathered the things he thought he would need and led the boy to the Four Banners field outside the walls where all twelve elders waited. A delegation of inner disciples waited beside them, all in green. They glowered at Yi Cao and his little cousin as they approached.
Elder Guan made Yang Lei wait in a corner of the field beneath a willow tree while he studied Yi Cao by the morning’s watery light. “You know your task?” The old man rasped.
Yi Cao nodded, mute, until elder Guan demanded that he repeat back all he had been instructed when he stood before the elders ahead of the Festival. Elder Xia stood behind the old man in the shadow of the sect wall surrounded by the other elders. He watched Yi Cao, unsmiling, eyes glittering as he stroked his mustache and Yi Cao repeated the orders he’d been given. Xia nodded when he was done and looked away.
“Good.” Elder Guan said. He glanced at the gathered elders who nodded in turn while the delegation of inner disciples continued to glare. “And you have everything you need for the journey?”
Yi Cao almost didn’t hear the old man. He jerked slightly when the question finally registered and nodded quickly.
Elder Guan nodded again in return and peered up at the pale dawn sky. “If things go well you’ll be back here in a little under five days.” He said. “If they go poorly, well,” he glanced down at Yi Cao, “try to delay. The inner disciples know your mission. They’ll be right behind you if there are any unforeseen complications to your part in their task.”
Yi Cao nodded but didn’t say a word.
“If you wish to say anything,” the elder said, glancing at Yi Cao’s cousin underneath the distant willow tree. “Best that you say it now.”
Yi Cao turned to join his cousin, but he paused after just a few steps and stood listening to the wind playing in the trees around their little clearing. He turned back, and saw elder Xia watching him sidelong from the Sect’s shadow.
Elder Guan raised an eyebrow as Yi Cao’s eyes moved to the old man’s face.
“If something happens to me.” Yi Cao said. “Will you, promise, to take care of my cousin?”
Elder Guan peered at the boy waiting and watching underneath the willow tree then looked back to Yi Cao. “I don’t see why anything would happen to you if you follow the plan.” He said.
Yi Cao looked at the grass that waved in the breeze, then back to elder Guan. “All the same.” He said. “If, I don’t come back. Will you take care of him? Personally? As a favor to me.”
The Elder frowned. “If you don’t come back there will be no reason the sect should owe you anything.” He said.
“You said it would be dangerous.” Yi Cao said, and met the old man’s glare. “For me, then. A promise.”
Elder Guan studied Yi Cao for a moment under the pale sky.
“For the risk I take.” Yi Cao added.
“For the risk you take.” The elder added eventually. “I suppose I can promise a little on behalf of the sect. If anything happens that would, prevent you, from returning.”
Yi Cao studied Elder Guan for a moment in turn, then he nodded and glanced up to Elder Xia. Xia stood with his hands behind his back, eyes averted as though he hadn’t listened to the whole thing. Yi Cao turned away.
The willow tree whispered in the morning breeze as Yi Cao joined his cousin in its shade. He listened to the susurration, blind to the empty field and the gathering of the sect as he hefted the bag holding everything he would need for the journey. A string of money from the elders. A change of clothes. A receipt for the item he would collect and, the heaviest object by far, Elder Xia’s key, hidden in the first few pages of his cousin’s gift-book.
Clouds shifted slowly overhead. Somewhere nearby an aspen tree rattled loud in the breeze.
“What do they use the money for?” Yi Cao asked abruptly. “Do you know?”
He turned to the eight year old but the eight year old just looked up at him, confused. “What money?”
“We get paid. Didn’t you know?” Yi Cao watched him, then shook his head and turned away. “I always meant to ask Uncle Bao what they did with it and just, never did, I guess.” After a moment of silence he went on. “Some of the boys save theirs, those that don’t send it home to their families. They use it to get cultivation resources, like that pill Elder Xia gave you, only better.” He glanced towards the delegation. “Some of them are inner disciples, now.”
The boy standing next to Yi Cao looked pale and green all of a sudden, no doubt remembering the agony of using the pill to accelerate his cultivation only a few nights before. Over just a couple of hours he’d cut as many channels as Yi Cao cut in his first four years with the sect. He’d been so covered in expelled impurities by the time he was done that they’d thrown his gray travel robes into the rubbish heap behind the sect’s public house. Yan Lei had been quiet ever since. Getting used to the new energy that came from opened channels. Digesting his new reality.
Neither spoke. A flight of laughingthrush winged past on the wind and the voices of the inner disciples beneath the walls mingled with the sighing of the trees.
“There was, some talk, of empty coffers, before I left.” Yang Lei said hesitantly. “After uncle Bao brought back two oxen for Forty Taels from Hu-Fu village. Uncle Wei-De said they would breed well, and we could sell their offspring to the traveling merchants or butcher them for stew.” The eight year old paused. “I think he only said the part about the stew to frighten the girls.”
Yi Cao grunted.
A thrush landed in the tree above them and gave its odd piping crying before winging away again. The sound seemed lonely for a forest silent except for the sound of the wind.
“What’s it like?” Yi Cao asked without looking at his cousin. “Back home?”
“Home?” Yang asked.
“Yes. Home.” The word tasted like the lonely birdcall on his tongue. Unfamiliar. Yi Cao looked at the little cousin standing next to him in new junior disciple robes then turned abruptly back to the field of trees that extended beyond their little field. “I left when I was six.” He said. “I sometimes wonder, what it might have been like, if I stayed.”
The wind filled the silence for a few moments and Yi Cao thought his cousin might not answer him when he finally spoke up.
“It’s busy.” He said quietly. “There was always something to do. Swimming the creek with Ghou Ba, or playing leaves in the cookhouse attic while the wives made supper. Listening to Zumu or Zufu under the meeting pines. When we weren’t doing that papa and the fathers always had work for us in the field, and sometimes Qiang or one of the older boys would take some of us out into the woods to learn hunting and tracking, or just to scare us by abandoning us after asking us to climb up a tree as lookout. There was always something. Someone.”
Yi Cao struggled to remember similar stories from his own time. The creek where he’d been tossed in by cousin Bogang only to hit a tree root and choke as he screamed while the other boys laughed. The kitchens where he’d held onto his mother’s skirts while she ripped feathers off of a chicken, the down falling around him like snow while the women talked about their husbands and their children and things far beyond his ability to comprehend at that age.
He couldn’t remember what their voices sounded like, just, the whisper of the trees, buffeted by the wind of a cultivator’s blow.
“I’ll probably never see it again will I.”
Yi Cao looked down at his cousin and tried to remember what it had been like to be eight years old, six in his case, and to realize that Uncle Bao was the last you’d see of home. The boy eventually looked up at him, expression solemn as the night they’d thrown away his travel robes before climbing into their pallets to sleep.
“I just got here.” The boy whispered. “Do you really have to go?”
Yi Cao turned away.
The noise of the wind changed subtly as they waited, like thunder rumbling in the distance, low and continuous. Yi Cao looked for the source, but the sky was bright, the clouds white in the morning light with long streamers of blue sky peeking through.
“Zufu is getting old.” The boy said, as though speaking to himself. “There’s been some talk of breaking new fields and dividing the household to start a village. The wives are against it though, even the youngest ones. With the great grand children running around there’s almost a hundred and fifty Caos inside the walls. The place looks like a village already but Mama says formalizing would mean making room for a magistrate, and setting aside land for sect merchants and other families to move in. She says Yinua doesn’t like the idea of sharing the land with people that aren’t family, even though she wasn’t family until she married in.”
Yang Lei fell silent and scuffed at the dirt with one shoe.
Yi Cao had a sudden and vivid memory of his father standing with his back to a much younger Yi Cao beside his Zufu as both men stared down at a stump they’d fought at digging out of the dirt. The memory was heavy with the scent and texture of rich clay, textures he hadn’t seen or felt since following Uncle Bao out of that wilderness into a wilderness of a very different kind.
“When I left.” Yang Lei said. “Mama said I’d be making a future for the rest of the family, that you’d already been here, preparing a future for me, like I would for the next one they send to the sect.”
Yi Cao glanced at his side to find Yang Lei studying Yi Cao through his bangs.
“They said having a cultivator in the family, one who could control the weather or throw sunbeams from his eyes, would make any magistrate a lot easier for them to handle.” He looked away. “They said if I progressed fast enough, it could even be me they sent as magistrate, or you.”
Yi Cao turned to the sky as the rumbling grew louder and closer.
“No one can control the weather.” He said. “Maybe if you’re an immortal.”
“Still.” Yang Lei scraped the ground with his shoe.
Yi Cao watched the clouds. “It would be nice.” He whispered.
The boy next to him nodded.
The rumbling grew as something dark rose from the horizon beyond the trees. The thing rose on pencil thin legs of fire, two to each side, a circular body of crystal and polished steel suspended in between. The thing howled as it walked across the sky, the sound of its passage supplanting the rattle of aspen leaves and the whisper of the willow tree even as the branches around Yi Cao lashed the air and the wind picked up.
Yang Lei’s hand clutched to Yi Cao’s shirt sleeve at the sudden onslaught of noise and motion and the thing maneuvered overhead. Yi Cao himself might have run, but a glance towards the elders showed them stone faced as they looked up at the approaching monster, and the other inner disciples merely stirred and stood back.
The ship, for it must be the ship, for all that it lacked sails or wooden sides, passed overhead in a blast of hot air and whipping wind. Yi Cao glanced again at the gathered elders, then he seized his cousin and pulled him around in front. He had to shout to be heard, even inches away from the other boy’s face.
“If I do not return, don’t stay!” He had to take care to enunciate each word clearly as grass and grit whipped around them. Behind him the Elders did something, stepping forward together and casting out with their hands, or their Ki, enfolding the wind, capturing it and redirecting it as the monstrous thing settled closer to the ground. The boy turned to him, wide eyed whether at the thing falling from the sky, or Yi Cao’s warning, he couldn’t say.
“What?” The boy shouted.
Yi Cao pulled him closer. “I said don’t stay!” The grass at his ankles lashed Yi Cao’s feet painfully as the wind changed, the roar warbled and the massive thing threw its shadow over the whole field as it eclipsed the light.
“Go home!” Yi Cao shouted. “Run away! Go to another sect! It doesn’t matter, just get away! You have to get away!”
The storm around them raged as Yi Cao pulled his little cousin until they were practically touching noses to make sure he was heard. “You need to tell Elder Guan, Elder Guan, you understand? No one else! Tell him, that Elder Xia can’t be trusted, and tell him, if I don’t come back, that he had something to do with it! Do you understand?”
The boy shouted something that was lost in the maelstrom.
“Nod if you understand!”
Yang Lei nodded.
Yi Cao glanced again at the elders but elder Xia was focused on the Ki working that made the air resonate against the roaring engines.
“If Elder Xia tries to give you anything,” he told the boy, “anything at all. A pill, a scripture, a hip knife, I don’t care what it is, you have another elder look at it to make sure it’s safe! And whatever you do, if you remember nothing else, never, never,” the wind began to die, the roar of the engines soften, as the telltale burn of Ki residue washed out of the technique the elders wove together, “Whatever you do, don’t ever, ever go with him into the woods! Don’t ever, go.”
The noise died and Yi Cao stood holding his little cousin by the shirt as the thing above them settled slowly under the elder’s guidance to the wind torn grass below. Yi Cao squeezed Yang Lei’s shirt a little tighter and looked him in the eyes. “Do you understand?” He asked.
Yang Lei just looked up at him and nodded.
Yi Cao set him down and stepped back. He dusted himself off, then studied Yang before he turned to watch the elders withdraw their power from the air, leaving a suffusion of different aspects drifting in the ambient energy of the field.
Elder Xia stood along one edge of the line of elders picking at his mustache as he stepped back from the complex working he’d just performed. He never looked towards Yi Cao and didn’t notice the glance Yi Cao gave him before refocusing on the ship in front of him.
Clanging noises reverberated the guts of the machine but Yang Lei continued to stare at Yi Cao.
“The disciples aren’t the only ones who fight over cultivation resources.” Yi Cao said, risking a sidelong glance to his cousin. “Don’t ever forget, and always, be careful.”
His cousin turned abruptly to the ship just in time to wath a piece of its side collaps, only to reveal a stairway leading up into the machine’s belly alongside tubular devices that pinged and whined as they hazed with heat.
A man appeared in tightly cut gray trousers and a gray jacket. He bowed to those gathered in front of him, then looked at a piece of paper in his hand.
“Ship bound for Downfall Imperial City.” He said. “Here for a Bojiang, Ming De, Fu Da, Yuchen, Jia Hao, Zhipeng, and Yi, all of the Hidden Heart Sect?” He looked up, as though in question, and elder Guan nodded in response.
“They are all here,” he rasped, unruffled by either the working or the wind of the ship’s descent, “and ready to depart.”