Qing Liao walked along the riverbank in silence. His eyes followed the patterns of reeds and shrub growth that marked the contouring of the water's edge as he moved. The mud beneath his feet, the slow rushing sound of the riffles over gravel, and even the chirping and quaking of birds all served to inform his senses. Even as his mind processed all of this through dense subconscious filtration, he remained in constant motion. Long, light strides propelled him from one point to the next, a steady but seemingly pulsing progression. Qi shifted through his frame with each motion, not expended in bursts of speed but processed and coated along exterior surfaces to calm impacts and cloak footfalls.

  He slid along the riverbank like a ghost, a thing unnoticed by the native wildlife. Every effort was expended to hide his presence so well that not even the dragonflies, able to see in every direction at once, took note of his passage. A mistake, when made, manifested in sudden silence by the countless tiny birds roosting amid the thick shrub layer.

  That sudden stillness lasted only seconds, for Liao froze instantly upon the loss of those chirps. Despite such swift recovery, the failure was not lost upon his own awareness, nor that of his ever-present companion.

  “You snagged a fallen branch with the edge of your right boot,” Sayaana's observation confirmed the result Liao had already guessed. He'd felt the movement, his leg extending too far, even as he took the step. Not that he said anything in response, speech would shatter the silent progression, ruin the exercise that remained far from finished. The remnant soul, inaudible outside his own thoughts, could continue to criticize freely. Her presence did not manifest as a full-body projection, but rested behind his eyes, sharing senses at the point of maximum fidelity. “Keep moving,” she instructed. “Full speed now.”

  The Stellar Flash Steps were not designed for stealth, or for movement that left the surrounding terrain unperturbed. Light, by its nature, touched everything it passed. The Eternal Verdant Stride utilized by the Endless Needles Sect was far more suited to unseen motion beneath the canopy, but it had numerous limitations. It was slow; it required considerably greater qi expenditure; and in the absence of vegetation, a problem in many environments, it was severely hobbled. Sayaana's demonstration of the technique's capabilities had been a revelation not in the power of diverse learning, but in the truly incredible capability of Orday's creations.

  This should not have come as a surprise, had he paid attention to history. Orday was the fifth sage, only the fifth confirmed ascension in all the history of the old world, and the techniques of the first three were largely lost. Having revealed every secret of her power to her daughters in the hopes that doing so might allow them to survive the demon war, she was also the exceedingly rare cultivator who'd not held her best skills back for personal use alone.

  Sayaana recognized this too, with less bitterness than might be expected. Rather than attempt to turn him to her own inferior technique, she'd resolved to find a way that would allow Liao to use the Stellar Flash Steps according to the demands of stealth. Grand Elder Itinay backed that plan fully. She suggested that he could, with practice, shift as light from one dark point to the next, forever unseen.

  Sound though this theory might be, and with immortal skill to supply instruction, Liao was still the one who had to conduct the ten thousand tries needed to turn a scheme into reality.

  It was anything but easy. Sayaana favored the use of water as a means of blocking concealed motion. This inflicted endless unanticipated plunges into frigid liquid on Liao's part.

  As occurred this day, when his full speed motion rapidly brought him up to a sharp oxbow and he failed to fully control his qi when attempting the tight turn. Qi caught in the path from left foot to right while he tried to reorient between steps. The movement technique collapsed between footfalls.

  Waterlogged robes and a face full of mud were his rewards.

  “If you cannot make that turn at speed, you should stop, gather yourself, and then accelerate again,” Sayaana admonished. Her accented speech ground away inside his skull.

  “You said full speed,” he worked swiftly to wring out excess water from his pack and bow case. They could endure a dunking, but prolonged soaking would damage them.

  This feeble protest failed to appease the remnant soul. “I did, but you have to adapt. Changing the move and succeeding is better than continuing in one line and failing. Tell me, how else could you have made it through, while staying dry?”

  Schooled by many weeks of similar training, it took only a moment's thought to supply an answer. “I could have jumped,” he could not jump endlessly, pushing his foot off with full force against the air itself, not yet, for the amount of qi needed to perform such a maneuver exceeded his body refining realm capacity, but he could still jump very high. High enough to clear the banks, orient his body against the wind, and land smoothly amid the rushes on the other side of the oxbow's narrow neck.

  “Yes, and every farmer for a kilometer or more would have seen you take flight,” the remnant soul scoffed. “Maybe, if you're very lucky, they'd confuse you for a heron, but I doubt it. Humans always look awkward in midair, even those who can fly properly. Right idea, wrong move,” she cautioned. “Instead, you could have run up the bank and across, no foolish jumping.”

  Liao looked at the riverbank, a nearly vertical wall of loose mud and ragged burrows almost three meters tall ravaged by erosion as the river slowly worked to cut its way back onto a straight path eastward. He knew that if he put his leg to that and let it take his weight, he'd sink in up to his knee. Any attempt to dash up that wall would simply dump him back down into the river itself, covered in muck.

  Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.

  “Stop thinking like a mortal,” the rebuke, following his path of sight, cut through such plans. Itinay had stated, flatly, that the bond allowed only for shared senses, not thoughts or feelings. However, qi was also a sense, one that revealed more than all the others, and Sayaana possessed the insight of one who'd reached the celestial ascendancy realm. In that way, it might as well allow her to read his mind.

  “You have the ability to do that.” She paused. “In fact, do it.” The order emerged sharply. “Do it right now. Flash up that wall.”

  He did it.

  It was almost shockingly easy. So much so that Liao ended up vaulting into the air and descending hard in the middle of the stand of bamboo planted atop the peninsula of the oxbow. It took a series of contortionist motions upon landing to avoid crushing the valuable grass as he flopped down.

  “I pushed off too hard at the crest,” he made the diagnosis himself. It was perfectly obvious. “I'll do it again.”

  “I do enjoy it when you told as you're told,” Sayaana smirked from inside his skull.

  He did it ten times, each time picking a different spot along the bank. The goal was to sense the necessary reinforcement at the moment of contact, not to achieve success through pure trial and error. Every elder, every lesson, stretched that reflection and improvement must be constant. Rote repetition was useless on the path to ascension, each new attempt must provide learning.

  They all had favored metaphors to describe this process. Liao like Fu Jin's the best. “You must weave a ladder to the heavens, with only yourself for thread.”

  “Progress,” his guide granted when they were done, and took the opportunity to materialize in his vision at the same moment. “We'll keep at this. Your father taught you bushwhacking, and that's good, the instincts are useful, but you have to channel them properly. You're light slicing through the leaves, not a human walking the trails. Remember?”

  A quick nod. It was obvious, even though it wasn't. Just hearing the words, internalizing the reasoning, that was not enough. He had to work the understanding through muscle and bone, beat it down through his meridians to his core. There would be, Liao knew, many more soakings to come.

  “We'll go back full speed,” this order was delivered with perfect command impartiality. All friendly teasing removed. Sayaana shifted moods often when conducting instruction, as if testing different methods of relationship. The wind seemed to carry her across endless perspectives. “But this time, carry your bow ready to shoot. The farmers say no shooting the ducks,” The farming pavilion was extremely territorial regarding the lands in the shadow of the Starwall, which they managed directly as mortal farmers had been taught to fear those looming shades. “And demons don't fly anyway. I want you to shoot me instead, each time I appear.”

  “That's...” something in Liao revolted at this command. He fought hard, searching for a means to express the profound surge of discomfort that flooded him upon hearing this request. “I'll know when you appear,” he countered weakly. It was true enough, he could feel the slight pulling on his qi, a tension at the edge of his eyelids, when Sayaana materialized his apparition.

  “Good,” this did nothing to forestall the scheme. “Your qi sense would detect a demon too, so it is useful. Besides,” gold-green eyes flashed against the reflected light of the water as she walked atop the river without touching the surface. “You can't harm me. Even when I was alive you couldn't have. My qi would simply cancel out the blow the moment it touched my flesh. It would take a hundred or more body refining realm archers, all shooting the same spot, to have any impact at all.”

  This statement provided no reassurance at all. “I will not shoot at my friends.” Somehow, Liao found absolute certainly backing these words, drawn from some impossible to locate place within himself. “I just won't.” He discovered that he didn't need a reason, it was simply a truth he held. “Find another way.” He hated saying it that way, for it sounded like the pointless defiance of a child, but he meant them all the same and would not take them back.

  The bow within the tanned leather case was no hunting tool, and the broadhead arrows in his quiver were shaped to rip through and lodge between the ribs of demons. A killing tool, fashioned by cultivator hands. It was not a thing to be unleashed idly. Liao made no move to release it from the treated cocoon.

  A curious expression drew across the green face, the rare puzzlement of an immortal faced with something unexpected. “Fine,” Sayaana did not push back in the slightest. Without further comment she simply accepted this assertion and moved ahead, leaving Liao stunned. “I will call out trees for you to hit instead, and it will be harder.”

  “I understand.” The increased difficulty, punishment or otherwise, made no difference. He had never, not in his whole life, shoot an arrow toward a human being, and he had no intention of starting now, regardless of whether or not Sayaana's body had any physical presence. Perhaps the day would come. Even discarding demonic cultivators, Mother's Gift was not a land free of violence. The sect was required to patrol and keep the peace.

  He would face that challenge on that day. A cheat to make an exercise more effective did not suffice as a reason.

  “Then begin,” the remnant soul behind his eyes commanded.

  It was harder, much harder. Liao completely failed to hit a single one of the trees Sayaana indicated and managed to get himself, his bow, and a pair of angry geese all thoroughly soaked. That last led to an impromptu demonstration of melee combat and a cutting review of his use of the empty hand arts of the Nine Spheres Arsenal. Dutifully, Liao acknowledged he needed to practice those more.

  Supposing that defeating angry animals without killing them was a worthy goal, and perhaps that was, sometimes, though Liao was of the opinion that geese were not on any such list, it offered a motive.

  He said absolutely nothing in protest of this, regardless. In silence, he dragged his tired and soaked body up and along the Starwall to endure the long walk back to the sect. He'd be able to bathe once returning there, a privilege he'd never thought important until his daily routine became filled with repeated immersion in the thick scum of farmland rivers, a truly messy thing compared to the clean flow of mountain streams. It felt like twenty different oils clung to his skin and hair.

  “You are getting better,” Sayaana insisted that he practice the Stellar Flash Steps even on the exhausted walk back. She claimed, and he could not refute, that the wilderness would never care how tired he was. “Perhaps, in the future, we can arrange for a servant to put out targets. That way we'll-”

  She stopped mid-sentence.

  In the distance a great gong rang out atop the wall. It did not signal the hour, and it did not stop. The clangs resounded over each other upon repeat, a steady three-part pattern.

  That signals had only one meaning. One everyone in Mother's Gift knew.

  Demons.