v5c1: A Winter Tale Begins

The best part about winter was definitely being lazy by the fire. The chores were all done: the animals fed, the barn mucked, and the pathways shoveled after the fresh snowfall yesterday. Which would have been one hell of a job to do by hand… if I wasn’t a cultivator.

Instead, it just took a while, moving what had to be several tons of snow.

While it couldn’t hurt me, I still felt the cold and the damp, so I was taking a well deserved rest.

I reached out into the coals, grabbing a chestnut that had reached optimal roastiness, and I cracked the shell open the rest of the way.

Half, I popped into my mouth. The other half, I ground into a paste with the back of a spoon. After making sure it was cool enough, I scooped it up and presented my offering to the Young Master.

Zhuye, or Little D as we often called him, eagerly opened his mouth to receive the offering. My son’s amethyst eyes were wide and happy, and he burbled gleefully as he smacked his lips.

“Was that tasty?” my wife asked, her voice lit with amusement. Meiling was laying back on the couch reading a medical scroll. Her green hair was splayed all around her head, and her eyes, the same colour as our son’s, were sparkling with amusement as Zhuye bounced in place.

“Little man has good taste. Chestnuts are great,” said Gou Ren, one of my best friends, while lounging on his own couch. He was the perfect picture of sloth… or rather, of a lazy monkey. His sideburns had grown out again and he wasn’t wearing his bandana, which hid his hairline, so the resemblance to our distant ancestors was rather strong today.

“That they are,” I agreed.

I gently tousled Zhuye’s brown hair and grabbed another couple of chestnuts.

Meimei opened her mouth with an “ahhh” the request clear—and I got nothing but net from the three point line. As Meimei chewed on her prize, I ground the other into paste. Though this time, instead of giving it to my son… I spread the chestnut paste onto two glutinous rice dumplings that had been roasting over the fire.

Both dumpling skewers were promptly retracted from the fire by two muscled, scaly arms which were attached to the sides of a rather portly brown carp who was leaning out of a nearby trough filled with water. One disappeared immediately into his mouth. His eyes sparkled with delight.

‘Another delightful combination!’ Washy, our resident dragon and glutton declared. ‘But the rice dumpling needs more char!’

The other skewer was held out so a massive, rust-red boar who was laying on a cushion could munch on it. Chunky oinked happily as his friend fed him, and when he was done, the fish chucked the skewers into the fire and started preparing fresh ones. He set those newly made rice dumplings up beside the other ten that were hanging over the fire charring.

There were dumplings slathered in maple. Others had honey, and still others had pickles or even hot pepper paste. It was a really eclectic mix, but no one could ever say Washy was unimaginative when it came to food, and the good ones found their way into our cookbooks.

Washy grabbed one of the hot pepper dumplings and examined it carefully before nodding with satisfaction… and opening his mouth with a sly smile.

‘Wa Shi, you scoundrel!’ a prim, offended voice rang out. A pink pig that had been laying beside Chunky shot to her feet and glared at the fish.

‘Just a nibble?’ he asked teasingly, and Peppa glared at him. The fish started laughing as he handed over the skewer, which Peppa took with a huff before making a pleased noise.

‘Ah, I can taste the smokiness!’ she said happily.

‘The roasting time is paramount! Too little, and the taste doesn’t change! Too much, and it burns and tastes horrible!’ Washy declared. ‘It took this Master ten tries to find this optimal char point! Achieving the correct strength of flavour that you now enjoy!’

Both me and Peppa rolled our eyes at his pompous tone, and Peppa sat back down beside Chunky, snuggling into his side. I smiled at the comfy scene, before turning my attention to the sound of soft humming.

Bowu, a young man with wavy blue hair, was reading as he hummed tunelessly to himself—though unlike Meiling, he had a technical manual on pill furnaces in his hands rather than a medical scroll. With a contented smile on his face, he was a far cry from the rather grim looking young man who had come to us last year. He was also bouncing one of his legs up and down as he read—the one Meiling had fixed last year, after the lad had spent years having to use a crutch to compensate for his mangled leg.

Nearby and closer to the fire was the long green, noodly form of… well, Noodle. The old, scarred snake was bundled up in a knitted tube and conked out completely. He had never been the best with the cold in the first place.

Last but not least were Babe the ox and Vajra the queen bee. Babe was gazing contemplatively at the flames and Vajra was, for once, still instead of dancing, the three inch long iridescent bee settled by the fire with a couple of her workers.

Finally, I closed my eyes as I reclined in front of the fire and traced the connections of my Qi to a world beneath the earth.

There, in a little cottage with a snowman standing guard outside, rested the last member of our family. I poked my head in and checked on the little Earth Spirit, Tianlan, as she slumbered.

There were golden cracks along her face—but her clothes were new and clean, and she had a soft smile on her face as she slept.

She looked content.

I left her to sleep.

It truly was a perfect day. A warm fire and companionable silence… though the fact that it was so quiet only highlighted that there were people missing, because it was rarely so still with them here.

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Tigu, Xiulan, Xianghua, and Yin had gone off to the Dueling Peaks, in an attempt to stop the feuding between the sects of the Azure Hills. They, at least, were coming home soon, their task having succeeded.

The other group, made up of Big D, Rizzo, Yun Ren, and Gramps, had gone to the Shrouded Mountain Sect to infiltrate it and make sure they were not conspiring with demons.

The last I heard from them they had found out that the sect had been innocent and were now on the trail of the actual demons.

It had been a long, slightly melancholic summer, knowing my family was doing dangerous things without me—but that was their choice.

All I could do was support them as best that I could; with food from home and a place to come back to.

Our little slice of heaven.

Hopefully, I would see them all soon.

And hopefully, they would be whole, hale, and have wonderful stories to tell as I pampered the shit out of them.

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Fa Bi De, First Disciple of Fa Ram, let out a breath as he stared at the titanic trees before him, looming out of the perpetual night that had descended upon the north. Their trunks glowed with luminescent fungi, and their boughs were surprisingly largely clear of snow. The rooster, currently in the form of a man who had long red hair and eyes as green as his Master’s, was once again surprised by the Sea of Snow. The moon shone brightly down upon them with a silver glow, casting the trees in cold light as well as revealing a break in the snowfields.

“They’re… so big,” a voice gasped from beside him, and Bi De turned to look at Ri Zu. The short woman with dark purple eyes and freckles across her nose looked slightly intimidated by the sight before them.

At first he had imagined, by the name, that it would be like the Grass Sea: a vast expanse of rolling hills, but white instead of green.

He had been categorically wrong.