Sky Pride

Chapter 30 - An Admirable Simplicity

Had anyone pressed him on it, Tian would have admitted that it wasn’t a very complicated scheme. He would have defended the simplicity as a virtue, but all he got from Liren was a sardonic smile and a flick of her fingers. He gathered his robes, his dignity, and his peerless reputation for schemes around him and strode boldly from the cavern. He would prove his mettle on the battlefield.

There wasn’t much to the hidden realm besides the mountain. It was an ordinary sized mountain, a mere foothill compared to Ancient Crane Mountain, but even an ordinary mountain is vast to the humans scrabbling around it. The void extended a good distance from the surface of the rock. He couldn’t tell where the boundaries of the realm were, and he had no intention of experimenting. He just sat out on the rock and looked up into the blue-grey infinity, watching the little streaks of vivid blue light zip past. Waiting.

It was a little easier to be patient outside the chamber. Falling into the cultivation cycle, losing himself in the repetitive meditation and visualization, that was no different. He just wasn’t yanked out of it by trivial things, by nonsense, intrusive thoughts or simple irritation, the way he was next to the array. He vaguely wondered if it wasn’t because of the intensity of foreign shen in the chamber.

He saw the little wolf spirit scampering out of the ground, and let go of his meditation. He couldn’t pull down one of those shen-things, but he could play with the wolf.

Or so he thought. It seemed the wolf was playing with him.

Tian thought he was on safe ground with the petting. You reach out, you pet. But the wolf ducked his hand then patted his knee with one of his paws. Then Tian got on all fours, trying to get on the wolf’s level to apply pets. This caused the wolf to jump from side to side, forcing Tian to jump from side to side, which made the wolf jump even more and the whole thing just escalated. It was a solid half hour of increasingly absurd four-legged jumps as the two spun around each other.

Eventually the wolf settled down enough for Tian to pet him. Twice. Then he ran off again, vanishing into the rock. Tian wasn’t sure if that counted as a triumph or a defeat, and spent several minutes ruminating on it, before slapping his forehead.

“The scheme!”

He quickly sat, folded his legs and resumed cultivating. Why this pose was supposed to help cultivation or why people thought it looked like a lotus, he didn’t know. It was just habit at this point. Deep breaths, each lasting just long enough, held for long enough, exhaled for long enough, the cycle turning even as the visualization was held unwavering. Tian was using the Darknorth Sea Spell. It seemed appropriate. A big, big fish. So big, it could swallow anything you could imagine. Pulling things in.

The blue streaks were usually only visible for a second or two before they vanished, so patience and positioning were required. He could make his whirlpool big, but the sky was much, much bigger. Still, sitting around and cultivating was no hardship. Sooner or later he’d grab one of those blue streaks, and see if he couldn’t pull it down and smack the life out of it.

He wasn’t quite sure how long he had been cultivating for, when the realization struck. “Smack the life out of it.” These things were resistant to qi attacks, Liren had said, and tended to just fall apart. Well, what if he used righteous qi to smack ‘em. Would that break them apart faster? Would it calm their chaotic natures? He could use the staff art, but that would definitely shatter them into uselessness. What he wanted was something broken, but not too broken. Like Thunderous Palms, destroying the inside structure while preserving the exterior form. He had played around with it a bit, naturally, but hadn’t paid it too much attention. It took on a fresh urgency now.

It wasn’t like he was starting from nothing either. He had been developing his own palm arts for a while, and the Dragon Suppressing Palms were already very comprehensive. What if he were to replace the yang qi with the related-but-different righteous qi? It should work. It absolutely should work. Testing was required. He hopped to his feet and started swinging his palms for half an instant, only to feel a sharp stabbing pain squarely between the eyebrows.

“Did I… oh damn!”

He had gotten so distracted by the thought of his new palm art that he had carelessly broken his cultivation and suffered a bit of backlash. His art was high enough quality, and his foundation sufficiently immense, that the “backlash” only consisted of a bit of headache. A lesser cultivator might have suffered serious injury. A really lousy one might even have gone into qi deviation, with the potential for madness and death that came with it.

This time Tian sat with a worried frown. “Grandpa… I’m not this scatterbrained. Am I under attack somehow?”

Not an attack, exactly. It’s what you might call a natural effect of the environment you are in, that just happens to negatively affect you. Just extend the thread of reasoning you and Liren were spooling out. You’ll get there.

Tian frowned more, and tried to piece together the various bits of guesswork. “We are in the remnants of Old Freak Song’s shen, which is disturbing my concentration?”

Mostly correct, though missing a few key things which aren’t worth my paying for. It’s fortunate that the four of you have such sturdy foundations. This kind of steady bombardment of foreign shen could easily send you mad.

“All of us? But Burning Heaven-”

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Is having a harder time than you and Liren, but she’s hanging in there. She knows perfectly well this place is damaging her mind, and she’s using the opportunity to temper herself. Hence her mostly cultivating silently. You can’t see her, but she’s already stopped hunting. She’s perched up on the other side of the mountain, cultivating again. Just letting the world batter her, then healing herself. A rather ascetic cultivation method, but it’s working. Before you ask, no, you and Liren have developed your shen too much to benefit from that kind of training. You two are on broadly the right track with your current plan.

“So why did you say Liren would get the most benefit out of this place?”

It’s coming. And incidentally, while it won’t grow your shen, it’s certainly not a bad idea to train your mental discipline with what you were doing here. You can usually focus well, but it’s never a bad idea to keep practicing.

Tian reckoned that was as good a hint as he was going to get. He settled back down into lotus and resumed his cultivation.

“Out of curiosity, could you tell me what those blue streaks zipping across the sky are?”

Specifically? No. Generally? Tian could practically see Grandpa stroking his beard. There was just something about the way old men ended a word that implied beard stroking. If Vital Energy is yin-tending and qi is yang-tending, what is shen?

“Balanced?”

Good guess, and mostly correct. It very, very very slightly favors yang, but it would be like adding a single hair to one side of a mountain versus the other. Thinking of it as balanced is not wrong. It can also be thought of as the energy closest to non alignment. You have probably heard the “one begat two and the two begat three” thing until you are sick to death of it, right? Well… why? Why three? What does shen do that qi and vital energy can’t? What makes the thought ‘divine?’

“I have no idea. Does anyone?”

All the people who reach the perfected human realm, for one thing, and actually, a lot of mortals too. In the daoist cosmology, at the beginning of all things, there was the dao. From the dao came a primordial chaos. Out of that chaos arose two forces, yin and yang. Yin and yang gave birth to the three qi- vital energy, qi-as-you-know-it, and shen. Only then did the elements emerge. Why? What is it about the interplay of those three things that give rise to the entire physical universe?

Tian blinked and shook his head helplessly. Does anyone know the answer to that? Really? And I think we have strayed a long way from finding out what those blue streaks zipping across the void are.”

Did we? I don’t think so.

Tian let his thoughts drift upward, the funnel of the Darknorth Sea spell expanding and pulling in that strange qi. If vital energy was the force animating a physical body, and qi was the base material of the whole universe as well as the energetic air that was the spiritual fuel for a daoist, what, exactly was a divine thought? Qi and vital energy could both directly influence your mood. Many mental and emotional disorders were a result of imbalances of vital energy or qi. Likewise, a good diet and balanced organs were crucial to a good mental state. But divine? You couldn’t really call it divine. How was a good mental state akin to a thought like a god’s?

Blue streaks, vivid and brilliant against the blue grey haze of the sky. The only things he had ever seen that could approach such a vivid color was the shimmer on a butterfly’s wing, or a bolt of lightning. Maybe there were fish that color. He’d never seen one, but then, he hadn’t seen a lot of things. Most of the world, from the sound of it. And there were people so mighty, they could simply leave this world and go somewhere else. Transcendence, leaving the material world for something else.

Hadn’t Sectmaster Rui said something about this? Once you completed your novitiate, you left behind the mountain and had found truth. A zhenren was a true person, a transcendent. The mountain connected heaven and earth, vital energy and qi, so what was a divine thought? A truth so primordial, it exceeded both those forces? That didn’t feel quite right. Daoism was about mutual generation and restraint. It wasn’t one thing beating another, it was everything working as part of a system. Many parts of a single unified whole that was the dao and the great cycle of the universe. Shen wouldn’t exceed vital energy or qi, it would complement them, and be the necessary key to transforming them.

Divine thought, one that could shed both heaven and earth, and merge the person with what was true and real. But what was more real than the heavens and the earth? Definitionally nothing, right? If everything was part of everything, then the only thing that wasn’t real was illusions and self deception. Tian’s head started to hurt, and he felt a sudden jolt in his cultivation. He quickly directed his attention upwards. His drawing in of qi had drawn in one of the blue streaks of light. And it wasn’t at all happy about it.

What followed was one of the oddest mental battles Tian had yet fought. The thought, whatever it was, was stronger than the pulling power of his cultivation art. Tian could feel it, that it could rip away at any moment. It kept trying to pull away, and succeeding. It just kept getting pulled back in. Tian had the feeling he was dealing with someone that really wanted a cup of tea, but felt that politeness required them to refuse the tea. Over and over again.

It took him hours to wear it down. Hours of exhausting back and forth, of struggling to maintain his cultivation while being stung by the strange qi of the mountain. Keeping the funnel pulling in qi intact even as the blue streak tried to rip it apart. Keeping the image of the big fish swallowing an ocean firmly in mind.

That was the scheme, really. If the things they were after were qi laden thoughts, then what if he trawled for them with a qi laden thought that was all about capturing and pulling in? No need to go fight them, he had thought. It seemed he had thought too simply. By the time he had pulled the blue streak close enough to grab, they had about worn each other out. It wasn’t moving around much, and Tian felt not the faintest urge to move about either. It was fitfully circling his head, like a lethargic worm of light.

Qi, shen and vital energy. Qi is the everything-thing, so really you have to ask yourself why shen and why jing- why vital energy? What thought could be so important that it could be considered divine?

“Oh. Master said something about this. It’s not a bunch of different things. Everything is all one thing, we just break it up so we can understand it better. If jing, vital energy, is earth and rough matter, and qi is heavenly energy and cycles, then shen must be the idea of it. The thought that gives it shape, that defines the part of the whole. Why is it blue and wiggly, though?”

Regrettably, it was at this moment that the blue wiggle blew up.