Life in the Textiles Pavilion was nothing like Qing Liao expected. The pavilion was more than a single vast building. That represented merely central workshop, library space, and storage section. The remainder was a sprawling series of courtyards serving as housing for the member cultivators and their live-in servants. Wide roads split these structures, allowing for deliveries of essential working materials in addition to food and other sundries.

  Every member of the pavilion, of which there were currently seventy-one, was assigned a private residence. These varied in size, with larger and more luxurious housing offered to those cultivators of higher realms. A number of the courtyards remained vacant, plans laid down for a larger sect that had never materialized.

  Liao, as the newest and weakest member of the pavilion, had a single courtyard unit. It contained a hall for his personal use, a small side dormitory space for servants, and an open air space covered by tarps in the event he wished to continue outside activities when it rained. There were thirty-five such units currently occupied, with six empty ones. There was no particular organization to the choices, and his nearest neighbor was an elderly-seeming woman who'd been in the body refining realm for half a century or more.

  Several of those nearby were much younger, representing the pool in which he was expected to find friends and long term companions. This task was one Liao approached with considerable hesitation. He found settling in difficult. His assigned hall, though small, was very fine. His couch was master crafted, the pillow a piece of carved art in the shape of bear, and his blankets were silk-covered down so soft he barely felt as if they touched him at all in the night. He had additional silk cushions for guests, screens painted with elegant hunting screens, and a massive carpet occupying most of his floor that depicted the night sky. Even compared to his recruit quarters, these luxuries were overwhelming.

  He was also, for the first time in his life, living with someone other than a family member. Though the pavilion possessed a number of communal staff who organized the workshops, delivered food and materials, cleaned the grounds, and completed similar tasks, proper cultivators were also allowed and expected to keep personal servants. He'd been assigned a young woman named Chen Chao as his personal maid, and been told that to dismiss her would not only be a great insult, it would simply mean a similar replacement arrived the same day. There were obligatory minimums that each member of the sect must maintain.

  The woman, it would be ridiculous to call her a girl when she was several months older than he was, had been born in Starwall City to one of the many families of functionally hereditary servants there. She was competent, courteous, and disturbingly pretty. Liao was quite certain the latter was not an accident. Though her official duties mostly consisted of cleaning, removing daily waste and delivering the occasional message he recorded for supplies or a loan of special tools, the bright-eyed young woman made it explicitly clear that she would be happy to share his blankets during the night if he so much as asked. She even went so far as to bring hot water and a razor to shave his limited stubble each morning, a blatantly intimate affectation.

  At fourteen and a half, Liao was full of emergent desire for intimate encounters with the opposite sex. This ardor was matched entirely by his lack of experience and his general awkwardness regarding his new status. Mindful of the possibility that anyone might become a cultivator at fourteen, betrothals were forbidden for those who had not yet been tested. Children below that edge might have recorded a handful of stolen kisses and perhaps a few quick touches in passing, but that was as far as things went.

  Sudden exposure to the possibility of having nearly any intimate fantasy turned into reality, without the least bit of emotional connection, left Liao greatly confused. There was, of course, nothing unusual about taking a servant to bed. Merchants were notorious for such practices, and Liao was fairly certain he'd witnessed the larger caravans that visited the mountains carry such relationships out. Having just moved in, however, the whole affair felt far too abrupt.

  This did not make having a compact, spritely, and dangerously pretty woman in close proximity any easier to handle. Though Liao avoided spending the night with her from the start, he had a feeling that resistance would not sustain for long.

  One of his neighbors, a nineteen-year-old name Jie Guo, whom he eventually dared to broach the subject with, explained why the servant families encouraged such liaisons. “By city standards the stipend of even a body refining realm cultivator is very generous. If you father a child with your maid, or anyone else outside the sect, a portion of it will be set aside to care for him. Besides, are you cruel enough to dismiss the mother of your child from your service? Probably you'll keep her on for many years, and purchase a fine house for her when she grows old. Such security is highly valued among the servants.”

  “And the sect encourages this?” Liao found it shocking. He'd expected to be assigned an old man as a servant specifically to avoid such things.

  “Lineage is a tie that binds,” the older teen shrugged. “At least that's what the elders say. Can you understand living for centuries until you do it? I'll stick to rope, rope doesn't play games.” Such bindings were his own artistic focus, to the point of absolute obsession. The young man's courtyard looked like some giant spider had made its home there.

  Other aspects of his new life, thankfully, were easier to fit together with his natural inclinations. Elder Fu Jin explained that as a member of the sect he had two primary duties. The first was defense. As a body refining realm cultivator that meant periodic patrols of the Starwall, ten days out of every hundred. He was strongly encouraged, though not mandated, to continue with regular weapons practice to maintain readiness in addition to advancing his cultivation. That was an easy thing to schedule, and Liao took to daily archery practice in the mid-morning, after his initial post-breakfast meditation.

  The daily journey to and from the archery hall also offered a chance to utilize the Stellar Flash Steps. The weapons hall was a calm, careful place full of fletching stands, target courses, and straw bales. The elders there demanded nothing of the new arrival save that he shoot and conduct maintenance of his own weapons. They were not a talkative group, a distinction from many of the other weapons. He assumed greater attention would come in time, for several of the elders observed his initial sessions, but for now practicing the basic forms of the Nine Spheres Arsenal he'd been taught by the manual sufficed.

  The second duty was production. The sect maintained commitment to both self-sufficiency and to generate a usable surplus sold to the population of Mother's Gift above that. The people of the hidden land paid their taxes primarily in kind, not coin, and the cultivators turned these levies into goods for use or sale. “Work guides your hands and mind toward the dao,” Fu Jin directed. “While also having practical benefits.”

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  Liao swiftly realized that these sales contributed to the bulk of his stipend. The upper classes of Starwall City, the market towns, and even large farms paid a premium for cultivator-made goods. He also learned that the meals he'd been eating were prepared by his fellow sect members in the Cooking Pavilion, where the body refining realm members churned out a huge quantity of daily meals in bulk. Servants in the small local kitchens completed only final presentation and reheating.

  This served to explain how meals devoid of meat continued to taste appealing no matter how many days they appeared.

  His own duties were integrated into this setup readily enough. Of the seventy-one members of the pavilion, most were focused on traditional woven textiles. They made all kinds of clothing, from robes to gloves, and also padding including blankets, cushions, carpets, and tapestries. Countless accessories were fashioned in addition to such simple offerings, and they even produced the base layers used by the armoring pavilion. Other aspects of the production of garments and coverings were handled either as secondary dressing, which meant lesser effort and attention, or by a small group of roughly a dozen cultivators focused of more obscure aspects of the dao of adornment. Jie Guo, dedicated to chords, ropes, and bindings, was one member of this sub-group, and Liao soon found himself appended to this modest association.

  The little group was led by Yang Xun, one of the pavilion's five Spirit Tempering realm elders. A wizened, white-haired man in his eighth century of life, he stood heavy with the weight of years in a manner Liao had not before seen on any other cultivator. Sensing this confusion after a few days, Jie Guo provided an explanation. “His cultivation progress stalled out long ago. He'll never attempt the next tribulation and is likely to reach the end of his years in mere decades.”

  Many in the pavilion seemed to consider this status, though not at all uncommon, a sign of fundamental weakness and sought to avoid the elder's direct instruction, working around him as much as possible. Liao, innocent of such prejudices, simply thought the circumstance sad, and listened to such wisdom as the old man had to offer without complaint. Though the heavy narrow eyes with wild brows held little interest in furs, the elder was a master of buckles, ties, hooks, and all the other sundry bits used to hold complex outfits together. As many of these components were cut and bound from leather, he was the closest thing to a master of the craft the pavilion possessed.

  “Start at the beginning,” Yang Xun instructed, sagely working to bind together the fringe of several decorative pillows as spoke out from amid the cluttered shelves of his private workspace. So many crates surrounded them that no one else could possibly overhear. “Take one animal source and learn every part, every stage of the process, from skinning to curing to tanning all the way to finishing. Only by going from beginning to end, skipping nothing, can you gain the vast knowledge needed to obtain mastery of a material. I suggest beginning with pigs, they are sufficiently abundant in supply to conduct such a project without incurring any strain upon your stipend.”

  That was true enough. Out of all the lands in Mother's Gift, those within the shadow of the walls were owned outright by the sect, for the common people were terrified to set foot upon them. A trait the sect encouraged so as to avoid foolish young boys attempting to climb the Starwall. Save in the very extremes of the north and south it was never left idle.

  Members of the Farming Pavilion turned most of this land to crop production, and though the cultivators consumed no flesh, they had no qualms against raising it for use by others. With pork highly in demand in Starwall City, the sect raised many fat hogs on the edges of their fields and orchards. In return for assistance with the slaughter, the pavilion was happy enough to allow Liao to keep the hides he needed.

  Qing Liao's first kill as a cultivator was an aging sow, no longer able to bear additional litters. Several of his neighbors mocked this as an inauspicious beginning, saying that anything less than a demon was a sign of weakness. Liao grimaced at this, a little, but held his tongue. Demons might infiltrate the Killing Fields in a steady but irregular stream, but few in the body refining realm had the chance to strike at them. The elders did for the monsters as soon as a sighting was reported.

  He could only expect to kill demons if a horde arose, and that was nothing to wish for, ever. Such events scared the sect, brutally. Only the youngest of cultivators had not lost friends to red claws and filed teeth. Each pavilion contained a memorial plinth to the fallen, covered in thousands of tiny names.

  Bloody and messy as learning to process pig leather was, filled with lime, salts, and extractions of bark that stained his hands, Liao did not mind it comprising his primary afternoon activity. The work kept his hands busy without clouding his thoughts. He worked, and watched, and slowly absorbed the subtleties of each step, gaining new knowledge each time.

  “From true mastery of a single facet, one shall know the gem entire,” so Orday had written in the manual of the Twelvefold Panoply of Arts. As ever, her insight was shattering in its accuracy. By starting with the basics, and grinding their knowledge deep into his bones, he gained a flickering understanding of a far greater principle.

  Perhaps more importantly, by spending endless hours in the beamhouse and curing room, he discovered that no other member of the sect presently had any real interest in the process. Much of the essential work of preparation was done not by cultivators, but by carefully trained mortal servants hired? ? by Yang Xun, occasionally supplemented by the elder himself. The sect had great demand for finished leather, ready to be cut and shaped to the needs of many pavilions, from blacksmithing to performance, but few who worked to fulfill those orders. Exotic orders, requiring hides from unusual animals or complicated tanning specifications, arrived with some regularity as well, and none but the elder was able to supply them.

  If the elder's life was truly to reach its end soon, Liao supposed he would not mind stepping into the vacant space. At least, not for a while. Neither blood, foul odors, nor strange stains bothered him much. He'd already learned to handle those as a boy.

  In the evenings he studied the manuals of leatherworking the library possessed, or meditated under the stars. Day by day, he stretched the flow of qi through his heart meridian. Each cycle increased the volume of his dantian by a minuscule amount. A single step on the seemingly infinite staircase leading to the heavens.

  He made a point of taking the evening meal at Yang Xun's table in the workshop. Most of the cultivators in their little gathering of cast-offs ate together, and their nightly discussions were wide-ranging. Liao spoke little, letting others gossip on sect or city affairs. In time, he supposed, he'd learn enough to add something to such undercurrents of social talk.

  There was no rush, even body refining cultivators measured advancement progress in many months, if not years. Every elder he met cautioned him to take his time and be careful building his foundation before pressing for further advancement. Reaching the second layer in two years, the goal he set for himself, felt both ambitious and reasonable at the same time. Only one other young cultivator in the textile pavilion had been faster, and everyone agreed she was a rare talent.

  Given such relaxed approaches and steady scheduling, the summons from Elder Fu Jin after no more than a week had passed living in the pavilion came as an absolute shock. Fear spilled through Liao from the moment he read the missive, coupled with an inescapable determination that he'd made a terrible error of some kind. It made him want to run, an impulse only blocked by recalling that the sect made use of even the most worthless cultivators. Being reassigned to wall maintenance would be a terrible fate, but more survivable than somehow trying to escape.

  Liao only wished he could understand what he'd done. Quiet and capable obedience had seemed only appropriate, what all the elders wanted. Every parent taught their children to act accordingly. He'd simply done his best to match himself against such expectations. He thought he'd succeeded. Whatever error he'd made, he could not recognize it.

  The walk to the elder hall felt like the march of a condemned man, and only pride kept him upright along the way. He expected reassignment to the torment of endless masonry, and passed through the door only by actively holding back tears.

  He never expected to find Grand Elder Itinay waiting for him.