For the next two months straight, Xu Long’s days remained largely the same, he would slowly run the Clear Spring technique during the day with his mother sitting across from him watching, he would frequently stop to discuss his insights or listen to any advice she had for him regarding what she had witnessed. It wasn’t until near the one month mark that he felt comfortable enough to start trying to cultivate the Clear Spring technique while he was running through his sword forms.
To say that the entire process was slow and monotonous would be an understatement, and yet Xu Long found that he enjoyed every moment of it. He was utterly fascinated by the intricacies of qi and how it interacted with his cultivation technique, and he truly enjoyed the discussions this sparked between him and mother. His whole life he had been passively absorbing as she lectured from her vast stores of knowledge and experience, but now they were having discussions. Not having practiced the Clear Spring technique herself, she was by no means an expert, however her deep experience with cultivation and qi in general gave her many insights to share with him and his experiences with the Clear Spring technique in particular allowed him the insights to counter her points and spark debate. Granted he was proven wrong most of the time, but such discussions remained thoroughly enjoyable and helpful to his progress nonetheless.
This state of affairs culminated at the end of the second month when Xu Long finally reached the point that he could cultivate perfectly whilst he was running through the sword forms, or just meditating whilst concentrating almost entirely on the sword in his lap and the feeling he had while blindfolded sparring with Old Wu. Incidentally he had not actually worn his blindfold during the entire two month period, his mother having convinced him that it was a crutch and that if he wanted to truly master the Clear Spring technique then he would need to master it without any aids, lest he become dependent on them.
A few days after they had both deemed their joint endeavor a success and Xu Long had begun cultivating on his own he awoke and was surprised to find his mother sitting at his table sipping tea, apparently waiting for him to wake. When he sat down across from her he could tell that something was bothering her.
“Is everything alright Mother?”
“Do you remember all those years ago Long’er, when I was explaining why I had kept you in the dark about cultivation and the larger world outside of the valley, I told you that I would never lie to you but that I would also wait until you were older to explain things to you that no child should have to worry about?”
If Xu Long was in any way still waking up when he sat down, he was awake now. He nodded his head, waiting patiently for his mother to continue.
“I believe you are old enough, and it is time for me to explain some things to you, first and foremost of which will be my history. Not that it has ever come up with only the three of us living in the valley, but if anyone ever asked me my name I would tell them it is Xu Li, but that is not the name that I was born with, I was born Zhao Li.
“The Zhao are one of the oldest and most powerful clans in the realm, they have survived and retained their power through various means, but at the heart of their longevity and power is a single-minded dedication to the mastery and gatekeeping of the art of divination. In practice that involves a zealous guarding of their cultivation technique, Clarity of the Stars, and maintaining meticulous control of the clan bloodlines to ensure as many children as possible are born with a high stellar affinity, which you should know, Long’er, typically manifests eye colors in varying shades of purple.”
Feeling more than a little shocked at his mother’s revelations, Xu Long blurted out. “I have a high stellar affinity?”
HIs mother gave a single nod in reply. “You have obviously never been tested, but it is all but assured, your eye color is the first and most obvious sign but your superlative intuition all but confirms it. Are you curious why I never offered to teach you Clarity of the Stars despite your obvious affinity?”
“I would have declined anyway, but I imagine it has to do with what Old Wu told me years ago, that you had no talent for divination.”
His mother let out a bitter laugh. “Indeed I did not, if you had taken to formations you could have walked a similar path to me, but that was not to be. Anyway, my lack of divination talent brings us handily to the next part of my history. As you yourself can attest to, the art of formations requires a particular kind of mind, analytical, detail oriented, meticulous and perhaps the death-knell of any chance I had of succeeding in the arts of divination, a mind that views the world through the prism of logic.
“At a young age my obsession with the art of formations made me somewhat of a clan oddball, but other than a few strange looks and raised eyebrows from elders and harassment from brats who I had no interest in interacting with in the first place, my treatment was relatively benign.
“That is until I came of age to start cultivating, where despite my misgivings I was manipulated into cultivating Clarity of the Stars and began training in the art of divination. This lasted about a year, long story short, It did not go well. My utter failure in the core arts of the clan turned me from an oddball to a pariah in the clan and viewed by many as a waste of such exceptional stellar affinity.
“Truth be told, despite them treating me like dirt, I was somewhat relieved when they stopped trying to force me down the path of divination and started basically ignoring my existence. It allowed me to return to my first love and obsession, the study of formations. I convinced my Grandmother, at this point one of the few members of the clan that was still talking to me occasionally, to send me to one of the great Academies, something that is quite rare for a Zhao, so that I could escape the stifling atmosphere of the clan, or so I told her, in truth I only had one goal in mind.
“I entered the White Tiger Academy at the age of 16 and dove head first into the study of formations, besides my cultivation, it was my sole focus. Something that I deeply came to regret. As my stellar affinity was exceptional, I blazed through the foundational realms of Clarity of the Stars at an astonishing rate, and was regarded as somewhat of a genius by my fellow students when I entered Core Formation at 25 years of age. This prompted the unlocking of the Core Formation portion of Clarity of the Stars and opened my eyes to the dead end that I had been set upon. There was no path forward for me but the art of divination.
“I availed myself of the extensive library of the Academy, searching for answers, only to be dismayed to discover how easily I could have discovered their deception before it was too late had I not been so hyper-focused on the study of formations. But it was too late. The fact that I had entered Core Formation also meant that I had technically graduated from the Academy and would have to leave soon. As the blows to my psyche were piling up, I received a letter from the clan, it was from my mother, informing me that a marriage had been arranged for me and that I was to head home immediately.”
Xu Long felt his heart drop, and he saw his mother’s eyes misting up just remembering this time in her life. Then she took a breath and continued. “I fell into a pit of despair, I was going to be trapped in the Core Formation Realm for the rest of my relatively short life, married off to someone I had never met and no doubt forced to conceive as many children who would hopefully inherit my stellar affinity as I could. Even the study of formations had lost all of its allure to me. In the end, I couldn’t see a way out, except one, I went out into the Endless Forest, hoping to die.”
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Unable to stop himself anymore, Xu Long stood up and rounded the table with devilish speed, when he got to his mother he pulled her out of her seat and into a hug, and he just held her there in silence. Finally after receiving a tap on his back from his mother he relented and let go to see her smiling at him.
“It’s alright Long’er, although it is difficult to rehash these memories and I would not do so for anyone but you, ultimately this is ancient history, I am alright now. But thank you.”
He nodded his head and then returned to his seat. “You don’t have to subject yourself to this Mother.”
“That is where you are wrong Long’er, this was all just backstory, I have not gotten to the parts that are relevant to you, parts that you absolutely have the right and the need to know. In fact we were just approaching one such part of the story. Obviously I did not succeed in ending my life with my trip into the deep forest, but I did stumble into something, or in this case someone, that would change the course of my entire life.
“Ironically, for someone going into one of the most dangerous forests in the realm looking to die, I made it a remarkable distance in. So much so that by the time the danger I was looking for finally found me, it was quite the danger indeed, I found myself face to face with an Abyssal Tiger, possibly a relatively young one, but at least at the level of a Nascent Soul cultivator, who seemed completely confused about the seemingly weak young woman who was strolling through the forest as if unafraid of any on its denizens at all. It froze as I casually walked towards it, and did not decide to attack until I had walked right up to the point that I could see the flecks of red floating in its pitch black eyes.
“As I saw its claws coming straight for me, I closed my eyes, then…nothing. I opened my eyes only to see that the tiger was gone and in its place was a young man. I still remember it like it was yesterday, he just looked straight at me and said ‘do you want to talk about it?’ I just stared at him for a while before something inside of me just broke. I burst into tears and told him basically everything that I just told you, but definitely not as succinctly. Then when I had finished bawling my story out he just looked at me and said ‘I can’t help you with your loathsome family, but your cultivation problem is pretty straight forward. My name is Yang Yun, would you like to follow me?’
“I can’t tell you why, perhaps because I had nothing to lose, but I believed him, so I nodded my head and started following him, and I never stopped following him. He never explicitly told me how to fix my cultivation problem, he merely hinted that the solution could be found in my love of formations. I spent 20 years following him in his journey’s around the realm before I had a breakthrough and was able to marry my Dao of Formations with the Clarity of the Stars, all the while he was brushing off the people my family were sending after me like they were flies annoying him. After I entered the Nascent Soul Realm with my newly created merger of formations and the stars I was able to develop a formation that could block them divining my location, even though they had a plethora of excellent foci to use, such as the blood of my direct relatives or old possessions of mine, they couldn’t break my formation.
“I was safe from them, and I could go wherever or do whatever I pleased. But truth be told, I didn’t want to be anywhere else but by his side as he traveled the realm on a seemingly aimless journey. Over the course of the next few hundred years we traveled the realm together and grew very close, and eventually we fell in love. That was when he told me who he really was. He was the arbiter from the Immortal Realm, and his name was Xu Yun.”
There was a persistent buzzing in Xu Long’s ears. Did he just hear right, his Father is from the Immortal Realm? “When you told me that my Father was a long way away and couldn’t come back, did you mean?”
“That’s correct Long’er, he is in the Immortal Realm and cannot come back. But we are not quite at that point in the story just yet.
“Now, where was I, ah yes, your Father and I were now, as far as we were concerned officially Dao Companions. And we continued our journeys as such, except now there was a fire lit under me, a very strong motivation and desire to pass through Transcendence and enter the Immortal Realm. I sought out and devoured every source of formation knowledge that I could get my hands on in every place that we visited and cultivated like my life depended on it. My determination paid off when I stepped into the Soul Amalgamation Realm at the age of 450.
“Once I had accomplished that, I changed my strategy for advancement. I knew that to both advance in this new realm and then past it was going to require something rather special, considering the unexplored path I was walking down with relatively little guidance. That is when I started creating the valley, with the help of your father, and with it my greatest formation to date, the Star Gathering Formation, the core of which you are very familiar with by now.”
Xu Long mumbled, “the garden”
His mother slightly nodded her head with a smile, confirming his guess. “From this point forward, my life was pretty evenly split between staying in the valley and journeying with your father. Little did I know that the clan had never really stopped looking for me, I suspect upon reflection that it has to do with my demonstrated ability to evade their divinations, they had apparently spent centuries trying to find me using more conventional methods. Which, given my and your fathers erratic movements throughout the realm, followed by our total disappearance when we started spending time in the valley, was an endeavor doomed to fail from the beginning. This storm that had been brewing unbeknownst to us for centuries finally came to a head not long before you were born.
“It happened on one of our journeys outside the valley, which looking back was an inevitability considering the valley is integrated with my most powerful version of my divination blocking formation, not that we were even on guard looking out for the clan, it had been almost a millennium since we had even heard from them. This time was different, however, two of the most powerful Dao Seeking experts of the clan had exited closed door cultivation at the same time, both of whom had been absent from the daily affairs of the clan since before I was born. They cooperated with each other and the three other Dao Seeking elders of the clan, who no longer have the will to advance and thus manage the affairs of the clan, one of whom by the way is my Grandfather, in order to break my protection against their scrying of my location.
“As you may have already guessed, it worked, and your father and I were ambushed by 5 Dao Seeking experts of the Zhao clan one fateful day. When they arrived and surrounded us they were very surprised to see your father next to me, after all the arbiter of the Immortal Realm is completely invisible to their divination, just like they cannot see into the Immortal Realm itself. They pressed on regardless, quite unaware of who your father was, your father had told me that though he had been the arbiter of this realm for many millennia, he had rarely interacted with the ruling powers and had simply kept a low profile in his wanderings. They demanded that I go with them, I refused, they threateningly insisted, your father tried to intervene and was also threatened, all in all it was clear to everyone involved that violence was inevitable.
“What happened next requires a little explanation of the mechanisms involved in being the arbiter from the Immortal Realm. In order to walk a Mortal Realm freely the arbiters have their cultivation suppressed to the peak of Dao Seeking, but obviously they would not put their lives at such risk by administering judgements on people who could very easily gather uncounted Dao Seeking experts in retaliation. So all arbiters are permitted to break the seal on their cultivation in emergencies, and that is exactly what your father did in this instance. He did not kill them, much as I may have wished him to, just as he had not killed any of my family members that had come after me so long ago, for the simple reason that to him this was personal business and not arbiter business. Instead he broke the seal and in less than an instant had transported both of us back to the valley.
“When we returned to the valley I thought that was the end of it, that is until your father informed me of the cost of breaking the seal on his cultivation, namely that it can only be done once, after it is broken they will be recalled to the Immortal Realm and a new arbiter will take their place. They have a day to get their affairs in order. We did not leave the valley, and you were conceived that day.”
Xu Long saw the slight blush on her cheeks as she said that last part. Then when she continued, he understood why she had forced herself to say it.
“Thus your father does not know that you exist, you are somewhat of a miracle after all. The higher one’s cultivation, the lower the chance of conceiving a child becomes, Even in this Mortal Realm, cultivators in the Dao Seeking Realm who conceive a child are a rarity amongst rarities, you can imagine how that translates to the denizens of the Immortal Realm.
“But here you are.”