From the moment the circlet settled onto his head, a woman appeared before Qing Liao's eyes. She stood behind Itinay, slightly to the right of the grand elder. In the clear and yellow illumination offered by the Elder Hall's many lamps, she could be seen with perfectly clarity. He knew she must be Sayaana, a lost cultivator from far away and long ago, even before his eyes focused on the new presence.

  The differences from every other cultivator he knew manifested instantly.

  Sayaana possessed a mystic, inhuman nature flooding out from every part of her being, the impact of the immortal body shared by all cultivators in the celestial ascendancy realm. She was monochrome, presented entirely in endless shades of green. The verdant color absolutely ruled her being. Her hair, divided into three braided strands, one in the back and two in the front over the shoulders, was the vibrant, soft green of fiddle-head ferns. The skin of the face framed by those tresses was the dark, deep green of an old forest pine. Line and diamond patterns, as if she'd been painted by countless overlapping needles and scales from endless varied conifer leaves, marked that surface. Against this deep growth emerald tone, her eyes shown bright. They were a triple ring, three different shades. Pale turquoise in place of the white, then bright grass blade green in the outer iris and an inner ring of sharp, yellow-green of sun-kissed floral gleam beyond. Her lips were dusted emerald sunrises pinched together.

  Other differences, detected through careful examination as Liao stared blatantly at the woman, were also present. Sayaana's face had features possessed by no one in Mother's Gift. Her face was broad, with a narrow chin and high, flat cheeks. This, combined with a soft and sunken nose with slightly upturned nostrils, gave her a broad, immensely open face. It was more naturally welcoming than that of anyone he'd met in his whole life. Exotic, with prominent ears and a high forehead, she possessed a natural beauty only refined by cultivation until she easily put Itinay's icy perfection to shame.

  Her form of dress was the final obvious divergence. She did not wear robes, but battle armor, and not in any style the Celestial Origin Sect used. It was formed entirely of boiled leather plates layered together. These were intricately molded, carved, and embossed, with an outer layer of decorative metal gilding poured into complex vegetation motifs. It appeared as if she was wearing a silver and green forest. Fur, exceedingly dark and dense, with a thickness greater than that of any animal Liao had ever encountered, wrapped about both shoulders, her waist, the wrists, and the top of her boots.

  “A young man who appreciates the fine things the forest offers,” green lips twisted in a sly smile, eyes full of weasel cunning. Sayaana spoke with a bright, strong voice. She lacked the whispery restraint the sect's grand elders always adopted when speaking to their cultivation inferiors. The emphasis she placed throughout each word varied from those Liao knew, forming an exotic accent, unlike anything he'd ever heard. It made it absolutely clear that this woman was a foreigner, a word that had, in all Liao's experience been something that existed only in stories. “Perhaps this can work.”

  Liao struggled to find his voice. His first few attempts to speak ended only in sputtering. “I am Qing Liao,” he managed at last, hesitant even in giving his own name. “I am grateful for the chance to meet you, honored elder.”

  “Stop that,” Sayaana interjected immediately. Her words carried force, and her face bent into a furious, angry scowl as they came, a forcible expressiveness that would never appear on the crystalline ice image that was Itinay.

  “No one else can see or hear me,” the remnant soul continued. She demonstrated this by walking in front of Itinay and waving her hand back and forth in front of the pale blue face. “They can't sense my qi either, it's inside of you. Makes formality stupid. This setup, it means I live inside your head. If this is going to work we need to be open to each other, casual, friendly.”

  “That is, ah, elder, it would be...” Liao stumbled. He could not find anywhere to begin. The green-clad woman might be a remnant soul, but she was still the legacy of an immortal. She stood triply separated from him; age, origin, and power all kept them in different worlds. To speak before her without retreating into the protection of formality left him naked and helpless before her centuries of existence.

  Matters only worsened from there. “It seems you made contact,” Itinay's remark stabbed through the cocoon of privacy the circlet pretended to offer, but did not in truth provide. “As listening to half a conversation is pointless, I will leave you two to conduct an accord. Remain in the elder hall, no one it presently using it. I will return by the nineteenth bell.”

  Without further comment, she rose from the couch and departed. It took mere steps before she vanished through the door and left Liao bereft of either protection or advice. He was alone with a woman one hundred times his senior and a task that demanded he somehow face her as an equal. Madness, an absolute impossibility. He did not understand how the grand elder proposed it, or how he could ever have agreed.

  “They say that the dark space between the stars is colder than even the ice sheets at the poles of the world,” Sayaana commented as Itinay left them behind without looking back. “That one certainly makes it sound true.”

  Liao blanched. Such a remark, such open commentary directed against one of the Twelve Sisters, he could hardly conceive of it. No one would dare to voice such thoughts without being at least an elder, and it was unwise to even think them, lest they leek out involuntarily. Worse, he found he could not agree, not truly. “Grand Elder Itinay has been attentive and respectful,” this was a weak counter, for one could be cold as ice and be both those things, but it took all of Liao's will to muster even such meager truths in the face of the green immortal visage.

  “Because she's using you,” Sayaana's words were sour, but somehow without any anger. “Just like she's using me. The Twelve Sisters, they are stuck in an ancient war, fighting the longest siege in history. Every weapon, every tool, they bend it all to their grand plan, to their memory of their master. Nothing is spared, certainly not their own, or themselves. It's very sad.”

  “The Celestial Mother saved us all!” Some things were not to be disparaged. In faith, a foundation built not merely on weekly services, but on countless invocations, prayers, and stories throughout his life, Liao found a reservoir of defiance. One that gave him the voice to cry out across boundaries of station and cultivation. “And the sisters have protected us for twenty-five hundred years.”

  “Well, you have at least a little spirit,” emerald lips twisted once more into a sly smile. “And that's true, they have,” Sayaana admitted this with a quick toss of her head, as if it made no difference. “But you're still stuck here, in this little land of river plains between the mountains. One million souls living out their lives, one generation after another, stuck in this farmer's pen of a land.”

  Crude and cruel as those words were, Liao could not find any way in which they were truly false. His father had brought him deep into the mountains once, to the very edge of the hidden land. He could recall that place in the forest where the sky warped and a step forward somehow, in a process that defied all orientation, became a step back. Rather than contest the assertion, he fell back into curiosity. “How do you know that?” He reached up and tapped the gemstone now strapped to his forehead. “Are you not trapped inside this jewel?”

  “They do talk to me you know, the sisters, from time to time,” Sayaana shrugged. She spun about lightly and moved to lean against the nearest wall. Liao was somewhat surprised when she did not pass through it. “And the blind one, she wore the circlet, for almost a century, so I could explain the contours of the land beyond hearing. Once she'd memorized the position of every hill, mountain, and structure, she took it off. She did that for the same reason I can understand this place. Hidden lands don't change, they can't. A knot of qi holds this place together, try to shift it too much, and it snaps.”

  The creation and maintenance of hidden lands lay at the very pinnacle of the formation arts. Liao knew nothing about them. Sayaana might be wrong, but her casual confidence seemed unlikely to be deceptive. Rather than pursue the concept, which would merely induce a headache, he moved back a step in their conversation. Hopefully it would help explain what the green woman sought. “So, you think we should leave then?”

  “No!” The snort indicated that he'd managed to surprise the remnant soul. Carefully, Sayaana moved to Itinay's couch. She laid down stomach first, so her face was no more than a forearm's length away from his own. It was a languid, eerily foreign approach, one that he had to forcibly swallow to avoid stepping back from. Her plated leather armor flowed around her form as she moved, emphasizing a figure with a muscular core and modest but deeply enticing curves.

  It was a scandalous approach, barely mitigated by the stiff outline of the battle armor, if anyone had been able to see. It occurred to Liao, very briefly before he banished the thought with all the fervor he could manage, that the green woman could strip naked and no one else would ever know.

  “You are so young,” green skin aside, Sayaana's appearance was of a woman who'd barely entered her twenties. Her vibrant and youthful beauty made this remark feel bizarre, a grandmother's thoughts broadcast through a child's mouth. “And know so little. I suppose I'm the one who has to do something about that.”

  She sighed, and rolled back and forth across the couch. The springy wooden platform made no sound at this, nor did it shift and bend from her weight. A reminder that the remnant was a projection, not physically present. She sighed a second time, low and long, shaking her head as she came to a stop. “Three hundred and thirty years ago, a demonic cultivator, the Scouring Wheel, slammed his wind and fire wheels through my chest. On that day, I was nine hundred and twenty-four years old and in my fourth century as an immortal. I reached the celestial ascendancy realm in my sixth century, which is considered a very swift pace, but I was and am young for an immortal.” She tossed her head again, braided hair twitching, and looked toward the door. “That cold star, Itinay, is near to thirty-five hundred. Iay, the eldest sister, might have passed five millennia and is still younger than your Celestial Mother was on the day of her ascension by a good thousand years.”

  To live for thousands of years. It sounded absurd, but Itinay was no myth, she had spoken to Liao not an hour previous. He'd seen her image carved onto temple stones that were said to be as old as Mother's Gift, and had the scouring of endless snows worked atop their surfaces as proof. Immortals were real, creatures both stepped out of legend and perfectly contemporary. Even Elder Fu Jin, who had just started to teach him to weave, claiming it was an essential skill for all pavilion members, had lived nearly five centuries.

  Someday, far in the future, Liao hoped he could properly understand such immense spans of time. Today, he doubted he could manage to grapple with them.

  “Even if I count living and remnant years together, which is a cheat,” Sayaana smiled wickedly. “My lifespan reaches only halfway back to the demon war.” A slow and wistful sadness began to roam through the remnant's words, a sense of loss so profound it could never be fully articulated, beyond language's grip. It made her diction difficult to grasp, but the emotions bled through with perfect clarity.

  Liao found himself leaning forward, terribly close to the green face, in order to hear better.

  “I was born in Endless Needles Land, far from here, north. A small place, compared to this one, no more than twenty thousand souls. Scattered through the forest they lived, and our sole grand elder ran our little sect. I lived there seven hundred and thirty-nine years. Evergreen forest, my whole world.” Her expression grew grim, and bright green eyes turned away from him, stared upwards at the distant ceiling. “Ragged Edge shattered it all in an afternoon.” Her body shook, hands trembling, leaves in a terrible wind. “He was sloppy, advanced too far ahead of the demon horde. Our grand elder died at his hand, but the demonic cultivator was not uninjured. Five of us, soul forging realm all, fell upon him. Three from my home, two from foreign places he'd laid waste who'd sacrificed everything in pursuit. We tore the rotten monster apart.”

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  The grim satisfaction in her words did little to mitigate the pain they contained. “That battle, it carried me up and through my tribulation, but Ragged Edge's death blow shattered the boundary. The barrier fell and the plague rushed in.” She shook her head, tears blinked away at the edge of her green eyes. “My first deed as one in the celestial ascendancy realm; kill the demons my people had become.”

  “Rot,” Liao whispered, unable to stop himself. It was ridiculously sad. Thousands of lives ended at a stroke because of the actions of one madman. The callousness, the senselessness, of it left him hollow. The motives of demonic cultivators lay utterly beyond his understanding.

  “Demons and their cultivator masters must drain qi to grow,” Sayaana shrugged, but the words were bitten out through clenched teeth. “So they come for us. Why do you think they destroyed the old world? Food, nothing more, nothing less. I know, I wandered for centuries. I saw what was left behind. Whole cities still exist, in the deserts, cloaked in sand but untouched and lifeless.”

  Slowly, she turned to look at him. “You wonder how I survived?” She answered the unspoken question locked upon his face. “Motion, constant motion. Less than one hundred demonic cultivators in the celestial ascendancy realm survived the demon war. Many have died since, and all their subordinates have succumbed to the cold grasp of aging. They can see far, but the world is truly vast. You have no idea how massive it truly is. Demonic cultivators, they claim ranges as their prey. Move from one to another, and they do not follow unless they are willing to fight each other. I stayed one step ahead, for a time. Foolish,” she swallowed, a sour expression on her face. “Two centuries until I was caught. Not very long at all.”

  Suddenly, sorrow vanished from her voice as her brilliant eyes focused on him once more. “But you're different.” The force of her attention lacked the massive qi backing of Itinay or other immortals, remnant that she was, but Sayaana still retained the furiously formidable focus of one who had achieved the highest state beneath the heavens. It was more than enough to freeze him in place. “You won't have to run away. You could hide. If you grow strong, you could even strike back. You know that's what Itinay wants don't you? A demon hunter, a silent killer to trim away the ranks of the demons until the world is cleansed, no matter how long it takes.”

  “That sounds worthy,” the comment slipped out unbidden, but Liao found it felt real and true. He had learned the titles of a number of demonic cultivators. They were listed on the memorial plinths recalling the names of all those who'd fallen in battle with the leaders of the many hordes crushed before the Starwall. Those living horrors were imaged in nightmarish art, creatures barely more human in shape than the demons themselves. To remove them from all things under heaven seemed only right and just.

  “So young,” Sayaana smiled. She sounded both happy and sad at once. “This is where I'm supposed to say that to slay even one of those old monsters would be a worthy legacy for any cultivator to leave behind, but I won't.” Her smile vanished. Her green face shifted into a startlingly serious expression, a crystalline emerald, sharp and unchanging. It felt as if a whole forest was staring at him. “You get only one life, one dao. Live it for yourself. You'll never get far trying to live someone else's dream. I won't go with you to hunt demons, but if you want to see the world, I'll happily be your guide.”

  The offer could not have been more clear, or more unexpected. Liao thought the remnant soul would press far harder, demand some sort of contract, perhaps even beg if rebuffed. He could not imagine anyone willingly agreeing to stay trapped within a gemstone if any alternative existed. Maybe nine hundred years provided a person with a different definition of patience. Regardless, he felt no effort to coerce him from Sayaana. Perhaps, he worried, it was simply pity. He was an adult in the eyes of the world and the sect, but he knew he was only fourteen. Compared to this woman he was a bleating whelp, not worth pressing.

  Instead of demands, he was faced once more with the question that seemed to arise again and again since he'd become a cultivator. What did he want? What was his path to find it? The dao, mysterious and infinite, was always the goal, the unknowable glorious existence that lay beyond ascension.

  As ever, Liao felt inadequate to even ask such questions. A boy with ordinary dreams, such inquiries demanded too much of him. That should not be true. The old lore, and Orday's own words, claimed the dao lay closest to the simplest of tasks, to everyday living. It was so nonetheless. A paradox he had not yet fully understood.

  Perhaps he never would.

  The Twelve Sisters laid out one path before him. Itinay had pressed the circlet into his hands herself. They were wise and experienced. They believed he should take this road. It was impossible to discount that, to not consider it a powerful reason to agree. Sayaana herself, though she professed otherwise, exuded similar pressure. She was trapped in a stone. He could carry her outward. Failing to do so felt cruel, spiteful.

  Hunting demons would protect Mother's Gift. His village, his parents, even his fellow cultivators. An honorable duty, one worthy even if he ultimately achieved little. The addition of a road filled with violence made the celestial ascendancy realm only marginally less likely. The chances were already poor, he would defy them, or not, one way or the other.

  All the practical arguments, these and others, indicated he should, he must, agree.

  But that was not enough.

  He might have only taken the very first step, but he'd felt that much in doing so. It was impossibly clear, hidden in the stars behind his eyes. A cultivator could walk only their own path. The dao, the heavens, they were not reached upon a road laid down by another.

  It was a strange revelation to grasp when considering binding oneself to another soul.

  Liao fixed his vision upon Sayaana, put everything in the blatant stare. That was, in the end, the only true question. This woman, this remnant soul, and a bond that would carry until death or immortality. He could follow Orday's teachings on his own. Or he could join himself to what he saw beneath those threefold green eyes, the endless forest of the world.

  The demons, the threat, that was a distraction. The duty was important, that lay beyond all doubt, but it stood apart from the path to ascension.

  She said she'd traveled the world for over two centuries. Turning that claim over in his mind, Liao found himself infused with sudden vigor. He examined it deeply, unpacking its meaning. She'd been in the celestial ascendancy realm at the time, possessed of a movement technique of great power. Even if it lacked the efficacy of the Stellar Flash Steps, it surely carried her across the land faster than Su Yi had carried him a few months previous. At such a pace, faster than an eagle's flight, surely she would have found a place of refuge in a few years at most. She could have stopped there, returned to waiting out the demons.

  Instead, Sayaana kept going.

  “Is this land really a farmer's pen?” he asked, trying to measure the truth by invoking that terrible insult once again.

  “Yes,” agreement was offered without rancor. The green face was somber, not wicked. “This is a fine land, if you're a farmer. Fertile land beside rivers that endlessly provide the water farmers treasure, with a little ring of forest-covered mountains to buffer it. It's nice, but it's small, and it's simple. That's what farmers want, but it's not the world. The whole world, the real face of it, is wide, complex, and messy. It has things you've never seen. Endless forests, trackless steppe, blasted desert, and more strangeness than I ever imagined. You, you've never even seen the ocean.”

  The last statement, though perhaps the simplest of them all, struck deepest. Liao had a vague idea of what the ocean was. The sect library contained a globe with the diameter of a wagon wheel that claimed to show a map of the old world entire, and it was mostly painted in blue. Old stories spoke of ships that sailed for weeks at a time, so far from shore they could not see it, and of immense creatures the size of houses that lived beneath the waves. It all could be real, the details were too bizarre to use as deception, for who would believe such outlandish lies, but only the Twelve Sisters had ever witnessed any of it.

  Suddenly, Liao realized just how terribly sad that was. A million souls within Mother's Gift, and of them only twelve – he stopped and amended this to thirteen, for Sayaana surely counted – had ever seen the sea.

  Orday's creation was invaluable. It protected humanity from the demon plague and its treacherous champions. Without it, they would never have survived. It was even comfortable, as much as any place could be, but no fragment could ever contain the wonders of an entire world.

  'Opportunity' Itinay had declared. She meant to destroy the demons, but Liao realized it carried another meaning. Defeating their foe would at the same time reclaim the world. Sayaana, at least, was willing to try, no matter how slim the chances might be.

  That path, that journey, was one Qing Liao realized he wished to take. Knowing he was trapped in a pen, he refused to stay there when another showed him the way out. “Then let's see the world, together,” he told the remnant soul. Tapping the circlet with one finger as hesitation dissipated like morning dew beneath the light of his new resolve, he asked the final question. “What do I do?”

  Green lips smiled, equally swift in their acceptance. “Extend you qi from your dantian up to the stone, as if bringing a new meridian into your circuit. That will touch the core of my essence that remains. After that, keep it steady, no more. I will handle the rest.”

  “Will it hurt?” Liao did not fear a few moments of pain, but by being forewarned he might avoid jerking back out of instinct.

  “Shouldn't,” Sayaana spread her hands around his skull. “But it's probably going to feel really strange.”

  Liao noticed, in that moment, that she wore remarkable gloves, made from a very fine hide unknown to him and dyed a green shade he'd never seen before.

  Grasping his qi, unwilling to wait any longer, Liao pushed, hard. There was a brief wash through his senses, cool and fresh, as the energy brushed up against the natural qi of the turquoise. Then, suddenly, he felt something warm press against him from the other side of that barrier. Dual contact brought it down without effort. Connection followed instantly. Later, older, he would compare the sensation to the moment of insertion during intercourse, an interlocking of will rather than flesh, but otherwise similar. Crass as the comparison sounded when voiced, there was no more accurate way to convey this joining of souls through the touch of qi.

  Afterwards, as Sayaana merged her essence into the circuit of his qi, an eighth meridian, with the swift manipulation of an immortal, Liao felt strangely heavy. The stone on his brow weighed not simply upon the bones of his skull, but on his dantian. After a moment, qi sense directed inward, he realized this came from the measure of energy being drawn out of his being and assembled into the visual and audio construction that was the remnant soul's projected existence. The next breath supplied recognition that his body was drawing in more qi now, his dantian expanding rapidly to compensate. Whatever impoverishment he currently felt would swiftly abate.

  “This,” he murmured, wondering at the peculiar adjustment. “Will this make me grow stronger faster?”

  “No,” Sayaana stood up from the couch and shook her head. She did not look different, but her presence had acquired new substance. Now, in addition to sight and sound, she could be felt. The nature of her qi, greenish, verdant, and deep, was laid bare. It struck Liao dumb, so different from any member of the Celestial Origin Sect. “There are no shortcuts to the dao,” she scowled, an act of pure reflex. “The rotting demonic cultivators thought they'd found one and destroyed the old world, but not one ever even tried to ascend. As you grow in strength, so too will what I draw, it evens out perfectly. But,” she added with a quirk of her lips. “It will make it easier for me to act as a second set of senses, and to guide your qi when teaching, so you benefit beyond just my company.” Her teasing manner saw her dance lightly around his still form.

  Another pair of eyes would be the difference between salvation and doom in the wilderness. It explained much as to why Itinay had encouraged such a strange scheme. One body invisible to demon qi, but two minds, two people. He knew enough of the wilderness to esteem this value, and welcomed it.

  “I see,” Liao agreed. Contentment followed, his body felt warm, his qi flowed peacefully. The choice, once made, fostered no regrets. Certainly that would have been pointless. There was no going back. Even as basic as his cultivation was, he knew that trying to detach Sayaana from him would tear his cultivation, and possibly his entire soul, apart. “What is the next step?”

  “You train yourself,” these words, carried across the length of the elder hall via its perfect acoustics, came from Itinay's mouth. The chilly blue grand elder strode over the floor tiles with her full power unfurled. It was as if a frozen star had descended upon them. “And you prepare for battle with the enemy. You are weak. Only when you grow strong will you be able to fulfill the promises you have just made.”

  “She's right,” Sayaana chimed in, though she moved to stand at Liao's right, letting them both face the grand elder together. “The Ruined Wastes is a terrible thing to call the world, but it does get the dangerous part across.”

  A simple directive. Liao liked that. He enjoyed simple goals, though he suspected having an immortal living in his head would make for endless complications.

  Itinay confirmed the remnant soul's statement at once. “For this day forward, your path diverges from that of all of members of the sect. I will give you until tomorrow morning to prepare. Be ready when dawn comes.”