Qing Liao dressed and skinned the deer very slowly, with much deliberation and extremely careful knife movements. This would, he hoped, offer sufficient delay before coming back down the mountain that he could avoid questions about how he'd stalked, found, and killed the animal in mere minutes.

  Luck had played a part, admittedly. A stag, even a young buck such as this one, would rarely come so close to the village. But where other hunters had failed to notice the cagey and skittish animal's presence, Liao's enhanced senses had detected it practically from the moment he stepped within the boughs. His speed, the natural application of qi reinforcement into his legs even without the use of the Stellar Flash Steps, made catching up to the deer nearly effortless despite the dense canopy and thick undergrowth. The shot, taken from a range that a year ago he would have called impossible, was stunningly easy. It claimed the life of the target with equally trivial exertion.

  He'd thought using a borrowed bow, for he'd deliberately left all his sect gear save his robes behind, would offer an increased challenge.

  This ploy had failed completely. Everything was far too easy. Even the least, reflective use of his skills left all the other villagers impossibly far behind.

  The little village of Echuantun still felt familiar. The small cabin where his parents lived had lost none of the warmth that childhood memories supplied. Old labors in support of hunting and trapping filled his drained spirit back up just as they filled the stomach and strengthened the body. The truths of his previous life had not become falsehoods in his absence. That would never be the lesson of home.

  Instead, he was left with the swift recognition that the lessons he'd learned here had become like the clothes of a year past. They were now too small. This life, a little one tucked into the mountains, could no longer hold the being he'd become.

  Perfected dressing methods might buy time enough to fool his father, but never Sayaana. Certainly not after she'd taught him the skills her sect possessed for processing game, a rare space in which her native talents surpassed those available to the Celestial Origin Sect. “It only takes one step,” she appeared seated on a fallen log, green form looking down appreciatively at the clean and cold carcass. Her body blended perfectly into the mountain foliage, a backdrop that suited her in a way the red and gray walls of the sect never could.

  She did not say the rest. There was no need. Doing so would simply have hurt him, and while she could be harsh, Liao had learned she was never cruel.

  Nor did he answer. He could feel the truth of it now. It was enough to still hold tight to the love he had for his parents. To continue to visit and be the dutiful son they deserved. That reason, among others, remained to keep him coming back to the village.

  Even if it was no longer, and could never be, his home.

  The sect's isolation, a platform constructed away and above the city, made sense now. The strange and often hereditary families of gray-robed servants as well. Schooled from birth to recognize and adapt to the predilections of cultivators, they provided a perspective ordinary people could not.

  Instead of dwelling on the changes in the place where he'd been born, changes entirely within him, Liao looked to Sayaana. “Was it like this where you were born?” he asked instead. The remnant soul rarely spoke on such matters, but in this moment he dared to try and push over that wall.

  “It was,” she nodded lightly. Her remnant visage stood and put a hand on a nearby tree, one of the scattered conifers that grew more and more abundant the higher one proceeded towards the summits of the low mountains. “In the Endless Needles Land everything was covered in trees like this,” she whispered. “A vast forest of conifers broken up only by marshes and grasslands born of fire. The villages were small, scattered, and always on the edge of starvation no matter how hard the people labored. It was cold there, a chill you've never experienced and can't understand.”

  She turned to him, emerald eyes stone. “You think your little village is isolated, and by the standards of this farmer's pen that's true, but this is Mother's Gift. Orday gave her daughters an easy home, with fertile soil, pleasant weather, and kind mountains. Your sect collects taxes to build its wall and forge its weapons, but otherwise ignores the mortals and they are happy. We took nothing but those capable of cultivation, for they had nothing else to give. Everything we had we provided for ourselves, and when the demons came they swept the forests and so many of the mortals died. Over and over, every time. The wild is not easy.”

  “I would have like to have visited.” It was a kind thing to say, in the face of the open grief on the green face, but Liao found that he meant it.

  “The forests, the grasslands, the swamps, those things are all still there, covering the north,” Sayaana's answer surprised him. Grief, overwhelming for a moment, faded instantly, pushed away to some place beyond his sight. “As I traveled, I saw many places. We should visit them all, when you are ready.”

  A tired refrain, that last, but coming home had helped him to understand it. The village, his place of birth, was too small for him now. He was still too small for the Ruined Wastes beyond the gate. “Balance,” he understood now.

  “This hidden land is larger than most, maybe any other,” Sayaana addressed his regrets at once. “Rivers, lakes, fields, forests, mountains, and wide valleys. Great variety here, even given over to farms as it is. Master all of it; hunt, trap, skin, and cure. Every animal here, all the birds, all the fish, all the scaled and fur-bearing creatures. Make that the goal for now.”

  He had spent months working entirely with pigskin. His father had taught him the forms of dozens of other fur-bearing animals, nearly one hundred birds, and an equal number of fish. All that, just in one corner of the mountains. “That could take centuries,” he whispered, struck by sudden awe.

  The pure smile those words unlocked on Sayaana's face granted surpassing understanding.

  Of course the path could not, would not, be swift. The dao laid upon the earth encompassed ten thousand things and more. Surely that, vast though it was, represented a mere fragment of the greater celestial dao, to say nothing of the all-encompassing infinities beyond even that.

  His blade sped up. There was no point in wasting time.

  The rest of the day was devoted to trapping squirrels, mice, and voles. Such tiny creatures were usually ignored with regard to skins and furs, but a cultivator's eyes and hands allowed Liao to work upon a small scale with precision mortal dexterity could not match. Liao, in studying such trembling forms, developed the first seeds of an idea. Very thin leather straps, tiny fringes of fur woven together into composite coverings and decorative badges that might, with research, even be used to anchor fist-sized formations. Pointless perhaps, for it had no pedigree or reference and did nothing that linen squares could not accomplish, but it opened an avenue research he could call his own, one without competition and an abundant untapped supply.

  He did not bring these little furs, stretched on tiny, hand-woven frames Sayaana had shown him how to construct, back to his family. The deer was gift enough. The village, his parents, they took pride that a cultivator walked among them, but only with hesitation. It was impossible to avoid noticing how fear and curiosity mingled on the faces of all save the youngest children.

  The rhythms of village life flowed away and around him. His motions disrupted all activity simply by walking past. A rock dropped into a small pond.

  Stolen story; please report.

  It would get worse, Liao knew. He was barely more than mortal now. Ordinary blows and weapons remained a threat. Hunting the deer had been easy but still required skill at stalking and archery. Su Yi could have simply run the stag down and taken its life with a punch to the neck, effortlessly. Grand Elder Itinay could have killed it by shouting.

  The power he would gain, the strength he needed to acquire balance, it would draw him further and further from the village, from his origins.

  He would never have seen that if he'd not come back. Going to the city was not the same. The people of Starwall City lived a life of obfuscation through service. They molded themselves to the needs of cultivators in a way that made him feel strange and disgusted Sayaana.

  “That one step, it's a big one, isn't it?” He told Sayaana as he sat on the roof of his parent's home in the middle of the night. He'd tried meditating under the stars, for sleep would not come. It was not simply that he'd grown used to the exceedingly comfortable blankets of his couch.

  “Yes,” the remnant soul agreed. She sat beside him, her green form sad and drawn inward. “So much that I forgot this, these ordinary ways. You are two steps on the path of immortality. I made it forty-three. That far and mortal life becomes a foreign thing, full of needs, of mess, that no longer touch you. I would not have survived without that separation, wandering for centuries is easier when you don't eat, but seeing you like this, it reminds me of how big those steps are.”

  She turned her neck and looked upright. “Ascension, the path to the heavens. We only know one way. Defy nature, defy heaven, dare everything on a terrible gamble. A bad deal, by some lights, but it calls out, more and more, the closer you get. Maybe, I've dreamed, there might be another way, but if so, it's not for cultivators. The great betrayers, they tried to make a new path, and look what happened. The short and narrow path to enlightenment is brutal, but perhaps we have to accept that.”

  Introspection beckoned further reflection. There, under the stars, Liao found the courage to ask a question that had festered in his mind from his earliest lessons. “If the heavens are kind and the Sages watch over us, why did they permit the plague to occur?”

  “I have lived a century to each of your years,” the green-shaded lady of needles and scale replied with unexpected swiftness and terrifying confidence. “And could not find the answer no matter how far I wandered. When I came here, shattered as I was, I put it to the Twelve Sisters, desperate to hear the secret from those who had known the Fifth Sage as plain flesh. Surely the goddess told her daughters the truth?”

  Green eyes turned to the stars in forlorn desperation, then shifted back down to look upon Liao. Something horrible waited there, a truth at the very edge of despair. “And I was right, they did know. Iay explained it to me herself.”

  Liao had met the eldest of the Twelve Sisters but once. Those terrifying white eyes that pierced through all things and measured their deepest core were something he hoped to evade for centuries to come.

  “If you think you can bear the burden of that answer, ask Itinay,” Sayaana sighed heavily. “I think that blue one would tell you, she lacks mercy. I won't relay it secondhand.”

  With a surge of impetuousness he was unlikely to ever match, and guided by the insights recalled from his early life due to geographic proximity, Liao grasped a possibility and dared, under the stars, to venture it aloud. “Is it that they can't open the trap without breaking it and crushing everything within?”

  Sayaana said nothing, but her green eyes widened. When dealing with one who lived inside his own perception, that was more than confirmation enough.

  “I saw it happen, once,” he told her by way of explanation. “There was a moose fawn caught in a heavy snare. Her mother found her, tried to drag her free, but killed the fawn in the effort.” He had seen it, afterwards, one of the most terrible days of his childhood. The cow moose had gone mad, afterward, tearing at the entire forest in a rage. The village's hunters had made the collective decision to put her down, no matter how ill it was to kill fertile females that way.

  A second thought extended out from this revelation. “But if they can't touch the world, how can they dispatch heavenly lightning during tribulations?” He'd seen that too, from far away. Everyone had. There had been one five years past, and Mother's Gift was not so big that it was not visible everywhere. A week long mandatory mourning period had been declared afterward, for the elder did not survive.

  “Cultivation violates natural law,” Sayaana's answer was swift, but full of profound sorrow. “Human lives are not meant to last centuries, take control of the soul, or gain the power to transform the landscape at a gesture. It takes effort, enlightenment, and luck to impose one's dao against that of the whole world. You must be willing to claim a place where no one was ever meant to walk. So many try, only to fail. We do not know why cultivation exists, or what calls the lightning. I do not think it is truly part of the heavens, just a fragment of the dao trying to balance things out.”

  It made sense, in a way. Perhaps it was right, and the tribulations were not any kind of wrath from on high, but simply a reaction of the world itself. The equivalent of trying to shake off a flea.

  Sayaana did not stop there, though she looked away, and Liao saw that tears descended down the green cheeks. “The plague,” she returned to the original question. “Is different. It does not go against the natural order. No, it is an expression of it, just not the order as it exists now, with humans and cultivators. The plague takes all that away, the same way it robs demonic cultivators of ascension. They can borrow its strength, but never surpass its limits. Eventually, they'll all be gone, and only the demons will remain, siphoning away a portion of the world's qi. That seems to satisfy the heavens. What do they care if humanity dies in the process?”

  Though he heard those words, Liao did not fully understand them, not then. He knew he would need to understand more of the nature of qi, and the dao, if it were ever to properly make sense. He resolved instead to ask again, far in the future, at a time when he could do more than simply listen in silence.

  In the end, everything came back to power. Though he hated that answer, it was clear. The balance of the world only shifted upon the movement of heavy weights. For now, he was nothing more than a feather on that scale.

  Still unable to sleep, he spent the rest of the night on the roof, meditating. The stars seemed closer, somehow, in the mountains. This was probably an illusion, he could feel, through the nature of the qi entering his dantian, that proximity had not changed. One day, he hoped, he would understand how that too worked, the structure of the spinning heavens. That, and countless other mysteries that Sayaana occasionally let slip, filled the world beyond Mother's Gift.

  A world he was not ready to reach.

  It made for a long night, gathering and compressing qi to fill his dantian, knowing that. The path to the next meridian was clear, but it was going to be a long walk. Far further than the simple one his feet would take back to the sect. Without sleep, he would be tired along the way, but it made little difference. Itinay's manipulations had not only severed him from the friendships of his peers, they'd removed him from the regular duty schedule. He was not required to stand watches on the wall at any point. If he spent an extra night sleeping in a hayloft it was of no consequence.

  He took the morning meal the next day with his parents. They spoke only of ordinary things, weather, crops, births and deaths in the nearby villages. Silently, everyone sensed that it would not be well to touch upon weighty matters.

  Against the natural order, Sayaana called cultivation that. The books and elders echoed that sentiment. Sitting there eating rice mixed with bits of leftover venison strips, he caught a glimpse of this truth. There was no animosity stretched between him and his family, and they had been apart a mere nine months to the day. Youths sometimes left the village for years, pursuing some apprenticeship, only to be welcomed back with open arms as if they'd never left upon their return.

  Not him, not Qing Liao. Not this time, and never again.

  The life of a mountain trapper he'd once thought he wanted more than anything, it no longer belonged to him and he no longer regretted losing it. He'd stepped outside the boundaries of village life in a way he could not even fully describe, and there was no going back.

  The sect lived apart. The servants born in Starwall City learned to move among them without living among them, a refined skill whose inestimable value he was only beginning to recognize. They visited each village only once per year, to test to new recruits. Other interactions were left to trained administrators. Any more than that would strain the invisible separation necessary to allow the villagers the independence of their own lives.

  One life in every one thousand. Severed from ordinary humanity to pursue the path of ascension. Qing Liao suspected he'd never know why, not until he made it all the way tot he end of that road.

  He promised his father he would visit every year. A promise he intended to keep. He also made the offer that his parents could come and visit him at the sect, if they wished, knowing it was nothing but empty air. They would never make that journey. Even the families of those born in the city, who could reach their children and siblings in under and hour, never did.

  “I did not want to be a cultivator,” he told Sayaana as he left the village, wondering briefly on what might have been. “I still believe I do not want this. But, seeing as it is all that remains, I will do it properly.”

  The ghostly woman projected at his side said nothing. Her enigmatic smile stayed in place all day long.