Threads 456-Geomancy 1

The days that followed were far more routine. She reviewed travel plans, double-checked the town planning that was within her responsibility, spent time with her family, and oversaw the burgeoning religious rites of their town of Shenglu.

She had to admit, gathering up a score of burly quarrymen to ensure that their work songs were not straying from the desired format of the spirits under their feet was not an experience she had ever thought to have. Thankfully, at least one of them did know how to properly carry a tune and remember the right rhythm, so he ended the day with a promotion. She could have some comfort that the observation of religious rites should remain well at Shenglu for a month or two without her intervention. She could also see how it was that so many cultivators might slow their cultivation down so badly as they took up more and more worldly responsibility.

That would not be her. She would find the time to cultivate and to keep advancing down the next steps on her path.

“It is not often that my lessons are regarded as the break in one’s work day.” Meng Duyi leaned heavily on his stick as they climbed the graded path on the cliffside that backed Shenglu. “You are truly ill suited to stillness, for one so steeped in yin.”

“My need to move is one of the balancing factors in my cultivation,” Ling Qi said. “I’m still often reactive, but…”

“You feel you must seek out new things to react to. A strange, but not unheard of, twist upon your character,” Meng Duyi agreed. “Being well anchored to duty is a good trait for one who will lead and rule.”

Ling Qi grimaced. She still wasn’t enthusiastic about that part of being a baron, but the administrative duty, at least, the responsibility over many lives, was a burden she had accepted at this point. “Perhaps. I can only hope it’s enough. May I ask why you’ve chosen this place for our conversation?”

“The vista is demonstrative. The cliff is yet a border and barrier, a useful lecture aid, and this old man simply enjoys a good climb,” Meng Duyi replied. “You have asked after the foundations, the thoughts which underlie the forest ways, and what the fundamental difference between it and the imperial ways are.”

“Not the old and new ways?”

“No. Neither is older than the other. That is a false comparison. We do not practice what the earliest Weilu did. How could we? In ten thousand years, the landscape has changed beneath us.”

They mounted the clifftop and turned to look over the vast expanse of the lake and the vale surrounding it, stretching out into the rolling rocky hills that gradually rose into more mountains.

“Look upon this. The majesty of nature, to a mortal, and even to a young cultivator, evokes a primal awe. This is the world untouched by man, eternal and magnificent. But it is not so. These stones travel, these woods die and grow anew, and even that great lake which you have contracted is a young spirit by the standard of the world. It was not here when the Horned Lord walked the world nor when the glacial ice still crouched atop this cliff. The ground changes. A wise man must be ready to change with it.”

Meng Duyi continued his lecture.

“One could call this the difference, the power of pacts and negotiation that a geomancer of the Weilu tradition must commit to. Spirits change, if differently than men do. Their long existences may be broken up into sharp divides, or they may evolve with the changing patterns of wind and water. The River Jing has shifted its southern course from east to west and back again a dozen times in our recordings alone.”

Meng Duyi concluded, “We cannot bind the world in place. We can only bend it to our needs. Adjust, react, and negotiate. In many ways, our methods are deeply yin.”

“And the imperial ones are the opposite,” Ling Qi realized. “They are forceful, domineering, and yang.”

“It is so. I will not pretend they have no points. Their origin was not ours. Even before Tsu set the course of seasons, the lands of the south were rich with the bounty of the forest. In the crumbling citadels and pollution left by the fallen gods in the north, our accommodations would have been foolish.”

“That is surprising to hear you say, teacher. Why so?”

“Because there are spirits which men must deal with using a closed fist.” Meng Duyi rapped the point of his staff against the stone. “There are the foul winds which blow from the eastern wastes, the Rasping Wind and its millions of vile children, the Twelve Poxes. Many of the spirits of the Celestial Peaks were akin to them, the broken and malicious leavings of the Dragon Gods. To understand a philosophy or approach, one must comprehend how it arose. To the first geomancers of the Celestial Peaks, to do anything but cut and carve and tame through force and guile was foolish.”

“Were the Peaks truly so unnatural?” Ling Qi wondered.

“An incorrect construction,” Meng Duyi corrected. “Natural. A meaningless term. Is a wasp’s nest ‘unnatural’ because it is constructed? No. Rather, the Celestial Peaks are the Celestial Peaks, and the Emerald Seas are the Emerald Seas. Different foundations give rise to different houses. This is where the imperial method errs. It sees all lands as the same malicious ruin on which it was built, and so seeks to ‘tame’ them all in the same way. One can quibble over which spirits are best treated with as neighbors and which are best exorcised and driven forth, but the base assumption that all must be locked into their current shape and only allowed change when it suits their engineering is where we must butt heads with those northerners.”

“Is that the difference then? That the Weilu method sees spirits as people to be negotiated with and lived with or fought and potentially slain, and the imperial method sees them more as obstacles to be broken down, repurposed, or removed?”

“That is how most understand it. The imperial method is suspicious of spirits. Down to its core, it is built to protect men, no matter the cost to spirits. This has its own costs to those men in the future.”

Ling Qi looked over the vista. She imagined it as it might be in the future, roads winding through it like veins, and the lights of little settlements springing up, nestled amidst the hills and spreading along the curve of the lake. She could understand that urge. Nature could be beautiful, but so, too, were the works of people, and if it came down to it, she was human, and she valued human lives.

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Zhengui, Hanyi, and Sixiang were her family. It was not the same as imagining their settlements and human presence intruding on random spirits of wood and hill.

“What is the downside of the Weilu method then?”

For a moment, she worried she had offended him. Then, the old man rolled his shoulders, bones cracking and popping. “Danger. Where two tribes of men meet, squabbles will come, and men and spirits are more different than that. Men will give offense, and spirits will take where the words of a contract are loose. The flexibility of our method is its own weakness. Diversity is strength. It is also a promise of conflict.”

Ling Qi didn’t know if she liked that particular construction of words, but she did feel some resonation there.

“The cost of multitude is multitude. The benefit of multitude is multitude. Folly to dream of ending one without ending the other.”