Qing Liao, now at the second layer of the body refining realm after incorporating the stomach meridian into the circulation of his qi, had managed to reach acceptance of his status as a cultivator. He recognized his path, or at least the steps available in the present interval, and worked with the best diligence he could muster to pursue them. Basic cultivation, the incorporation of qi and expansion and saturation of his dantian, was easy. Meditation had simply slotted into place in his daily schedule, one more part of the day; a time to reflect, consolidate, and increase his self.

  Leatherworking, likewise, was simply enjoyable. Messy and odorous curing and tanning hides might be, to say nothing of all the hunting and skinning he'd begun to incorporate into his practice, but he did not balk at such difficulties and found that he possessed a genuine love for this art. Crafting even simple coverings, belts, and fastening strips brought him real satisfaction. His sense of accomplishment radiated out across smooth surfaces, sharp stitching, and elegantly carved edging. Though a single glance around the pavilion's shared workshop revealed his skills as those of a base novice, that was meaningless. He was still young. Learning and working were more important than achievement. Elder Yang Xun claimed that enlightenment would unlock itself in time, and Liao considered that sufficient.

  Practicing the Stellar Flash Steps and his archery lacked this natural ease. His body retained no desire to move in accordance with flickering, impossible-to-observe dictates. Nor did his heart readily summon the desire to unleash qi-strengthened arrows upon nonliving targets or helpless animals. Sayaana, who refused to allow him to relent, pushed him all the harder for his hesitation. “You're still thinking of yourself as a hunter, not a warrior,” she explained. Her green face soured each time she repeated this, sometimes many times per day. “I was born that way. I know this struggle, but you have to discard both titles. You are a cultivator. Violence is part of the universe, part of the dao. You cannot reach the heavens purely through meditation. Martial practice is always necessary.”

  She was right, of course. Liao did not have any doubts as to the truth of that principle, but such truth did not suffice to convince him, however ridiculous that sounded even within his own head. Meditation sharpened the contrast, revealed a deep barrier to acceptance of such truths, no matter how openly he recognized them. Practice improved his body, his technique, and his control of qi, but it was all mechanical. The dao tied to the path of martial achievement, of blood and death, did not readily yield to his insight.

  To argue with Sayaana on the matter was pointless. Remnant or not, she had achieved immortality in the past. Her experience so vastly overshadowed his own that any objection Liao might offer melted away beneath the green gaze long before words were ever necessary. He, weak as he was, dared not object to such an august personage. He lacked the very vocabulary necessary to question her understanding.

  Unfortunately, this made matters worse, not better. It was easy to know that insights from high above exceeded the ability of his naive comprehension to grasp. To take any action that changed this truth, to grow his own enlightenment, could not simply be commanded to occur.

  It was a brutal lesson in the absence of shortcuts upon the cultivator's journey.

  Yet, when Uzay appeared in the middle of his movement practice one day, Liao very much wished there were.

  The arrival of the flame-haired grand elder marked the third celestial ascendancy realm cultivator to take an interest in him. A frightful thing to accept when he'd been a member of the sect for barely a year. It was deeply inappropriate, a violation of ordinary protocol and hierarchy, and ultimately very dangerous. Elder Yang Xun, in a quiet moment, had explained why these barriers were normally ironclad. “Immortals possess a vast, nearly immeasurable, reservoir of qi. Their presence necessarily overawes all far below them, suppresses reason and replaces it with instinctual responses. Worse, it drives students toward imitation, but you cannot rise through imitation alone.” A tinge of bitterness had inflected this statement by the elder, the hint of a long-ago failure that limited his own attainment.

  Liao had not asked for details, of course. Desire did not excuse impertinence.

  Uzay was a vast contrast with both Itinay and Sayaana, though the fundamental force of immortality blasted out from her as ever, continual evidence of the transcendent achievement of her realm. Overwhelming as this presence was, Liao still managed to draw a point of commonality through the two sisters, hidden unity radiated through their shared techniques and stellar-aligned dao. Lives blossomed in his vision, visualizations of the links forged by the dao across many mortal generations, the influence of Orday, the indomitable legacy and its limitations laid bare for a single, sudden instant.

  Inspirational, that discovery, but also intimidating. For all the other members of the sect possessed a simple task. They need only find their own path to alignment with that great sage and the cosmic illumination that guided her to the heavens. This would carry them as it had so many others, as far as their own enlightenment would take them.

  He was not blessed with such clarity. Between him and the shining night sky of infinite lights stood an equally endless canopy of thickly-needled trees.

  Opportunity and loss, always these came together when the consequences of his strange nature made itself manifest. He'd begun to form a slow-growing grievance regarding this strange and muddled fate, the blessing and curse of his strange qi. He knew that it was foolish, and that it could not be helped. Such realizations offered little consolation. It simply reminded him of personal weakness, of his powerlessness before the choices of immortals.

  Uzay offered up a most significant reminder of all such affairs.

  She was tall, significantly outgrowing Itinay, and slender, but possessed a set of carefully emphasized curves that provided an ideal, athletic, physique. Her hair, orange, yellow, and gold, wafted around her head in constant motion, a raging fire shifting in forgotten winds. These motions caught the light, fractured it, and bathed her body in an ever-shifting blaze of color. Her narrow face with a sharp and prominent chin, framed eyes of multitudinous shades of yellow surrounding a burning orange center. Her eyelashes stood out in her narrow face, a shadowy mahogany shade. They possessed a spectacular, sloping, impact.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Her outfit was a sleek high-necked dress that bared no skin save gold-encrusted hands, but clung to the body with incredible tightness. It presented an absolutely scandalous fashion, revealing absolutely every contour of the immortal's form to any who dared to gaze upon her. If the restrictions of mortal morality had applied to her, the city guard would have screamed upon seeing her. Made of greenish velvet silk, shifting and twisting as it spread a play of light, darkness, and shadow across its surface, it was festooned with countless tiny gems. Color and shadow cascaded across that malleable exterior, never retaining constancy for long.

  Liao imagined it as it she'd taken the surface of a pond, illuminated beneath the swirling stars, and made of it a gown. Gold jewelry forged into complex geometric designs, was welded into that fabric, and she wore eight fang-shaped implements in her hair formed out of a black gemstone that sparkled with rainbow-colored expressions of inner fire.

  Impossibly alluring, Uzay made Liao's young heart race from the instant he glanced upon her. Such luscious, crude, thoughts triggered an internal backlash of absolute terror as the possibility that when they were detected – for there was no possibility of denying such lusts – they might somehow deliver offense.

  Or, even worse, interest.

  Sayaana vanished from his sight as the grand elder appeared. The remnant woman disliked speaking when others were present. She had stated it made her feel ghostly and disconnected, talking with those before her who could neither see nor hear. Though he had denied this aloud, Liao was grateful for the absence, not wishing to serve as translator between two immortals. He was certain she knew as much. It was perhaps a selfish thing to desire, but she'd surely recognized it all the same.

  The respect she offered him in this way was something he continued to receive with immense gratitude.

  He tried to use this shift to avoid thinking about the rest. Some things were best suppressed, especially for teenagers.

  “Your modifications to the Nine Spheres Arsenal are amusing,” Uzay began. Her voice warbled, chimes before a hot wind. “But do keep them to yourself.” Vaguely, memory supplied Liao with the recognition that this flame-kissed woman was the only one of the Twelve Sisters to use the bow as her primary weapon. At a thought, the refined stance of a master archer revealed itself to the observer through the least fragmentary motion, poised to draw and shoot with unyielding deadliness.

  “Of course, elder,” Liao immediately dropped to his knees, ignoring the fact that he was standing on half-submerged sandbar and in doing so immediately soaked everything up to his waist. Some things were more important than comfort, the respect due an immortal certainly among them.

  Though perhaps agreement was not universal.

  Smoldering eyes looked down upon him. “Stand up,” Uzay remarked offhandedly. She sounded annoyed, and more than a little disappointed. “Muddy is stupid.”

  “Yes, grand elder, as you say,” Liao lurched back upright, now dripping steadily. He did not understand what he'd done wrong, and trembled in fear at the prospect of Uzay's unleashed wrath. The rules of the sect forbade such final actions as killing and maiming, but everyone knew that extraordinary punishments were possible without departing from such constraints.

  Uzay was famously mercurial. Every story said she was immensely fond of setting those who displeased her on fire. The same tales claimed, perhaps more unbelievably, that this could be done without inducing any permanent damage to the flesh while leaving wounds to the psyche that lasted a lifetime.

  Unexpectedly, the grand elder demurred. The sharp expression simply melted away as she turned to look at him. “So young. A little boy from a mountain village. The rare one who comes to us without a head full of dreams, and Itinay drowns you in shadows and hands you nightmares. So much you do not know,” She tossed her head and spun about. Brilliant hair flashed in the afternoon sun.

  A brief burst of qi, barely detectable, washed out from beneath her fingernails. Nearly instantaneous, this pulse of power, but it rendered him utterly dry, to the point of stealing away even the spit from his tongue and tears from his eyes.

  Liao was left gasping, blinking and coughing as he struggled to restore his membranes.

  “Follow,” Uzay ordered. With a step she left the stream where they stood and strode across the riverbank to the fields beyond. It was as if she was simply strolling about idly, but her stride varied with her will. One step might carry her no more than half a meter, the next hundreds of times that.

  It took everything Qing Liao could summon to dart across the narrow span of water, run up the steep embankment, and charge through the knee-high wheat without falling upon his face. This effort exhausted much of his control and wasted huge quantities of qi in overcompensation as he hurled his body forward. Even then, to simply keep up with the grand elder's casual walk he had to sprint across the lanes.

  That was immensely disrespectful, but he retained absolute certainty that this both did not matter, and that if he fell behind doom would snatch his heels.

  “So, you can grasp the essentials,” these words reached Liao's ears with perfect clarity, though Uzay was at least one hundred meters ahead and had not turned back to so much as look at him. “A lesson then. Ceremony, formality, these things are a performance. They exist for a purpose, and like any art, are bound to time and place. Fail to adjust, to compensate for environment, for context, it perverts their intent. Such efforts are less than useless.”

  “Yes, grand elder, thank you,” Liao gasped out the words as he managed to catch up at last. He did not understand, not truly. Surely the rules were not entirely aesthetics? They could not be as malleable as the placement of a painting. But Uzay was master of the performance pavilion, she must know much he did not. He could only resolve to contemplate this later, and ask Sayaana for perspective, if he had time. The current moment made it clear that other matters had greater demand upon his schedule.

  Fields of green growth spread out all around them. Here and there mortal farmers in gray robes, the contracted servants of the farming pavilion, worked to remove weeds and insect pests from the crops. At the edge of his perception a white-robed cultivator of the pavilion, a middle-aged man Liao did not know, was doing something inexplicable regarding a large mound of dirt and a pile of tree roots. Never taught more than the rudiments of tilling the land, he found many aspects of the practice utterly opaque. They must have some purpose, but it was less explicable than the esoteric practices of cultivation.

  Liao did know that whatever it was the farming pavilion did, it worked. The wheat grew swiftly and abundantly. Though it was the earliest part of autumn, this was the third crop these fields would bring to harvest this year, and each one a bounty no mortal-tended field could match. The noodles served in the sect, even when he cooked them plain himself, tasted better than those sourced to any other fields.

  Uzay led them to an isolated spot, one with black soil at the surface as a result of the cutting, clearing, and burning of a timber stand some months ago. No one was nearby. Only weeds and insects observed their meeting. They stood together, surrounded by black soil, for a long, silent interval.

  “There is a demon horde coming,” the grand elder revealed unprompted. Though Liao already knew there was trouble with demons, this revelation struck heavy.

  Without waiting for the young man to process through this, the grand elder dropped a further stone into the perturbed pond. “The sect has a stratagem in mind, but it depends on you. So, we are going to find out if you are capable. Right now.”