Chapter 12- Flowing Water Becoming a Landslide

Brother Long was Tian’s friend. Brother Long was an elegant young man who cultivated sophistication. He studied the four arts a gentleman scholar should master with the grace of someone who would never be pushing a plow or digging ditches for a living. He cultivated immortality the same way- as a duty expected of a gentleman such as himself, though not one he enjoyed.

He should have been an insufferable prig. Tian found him easy to talk to. Brother Long wanted to be friends. He wanted to share his hobbies. To bring something civilized to the barbaric hell of the Redstone Wastes.

Brother Long was born into a good family. He had a distant grandfather in the Inner Court, and while he was the only member of that clan in the Outer Court, the Four Treasures Trading Company had a network that included a significant percentage of the Crafters, Quartermasters and Beast Tamers in the sect. Tian had never discussed the mortal influence of the company with Brother Long. Neither thought it was worth discussing.

Maybe it had been worth discussing after all. Tian hadn’t spared a single thought for those mortals, beyond their use to the sect. They were all still rock throwers to him. He wasn’t seeing much to change that opinion.

When the base was under attack, Sister Li converted her workshop into an arrow making factory. She cast arrowheads by the hundreds, made strong, straight shafts, carefully fletched each arrow. She made them in whatever shapes and sizes she could, hands, arms, back, shoulders, neck, legs, feet, all working until they cramped, then screamed with pain. Sister Li crushed pills between her teeth to keep working, keep the production rate up, keep the fighters on the front line fighting.

Brother Long’s job, his only job, was to run the arrows to the quartermasters distributing them to the fighters. That was it. All the crafters had their staff doing the same- dozens of people running back and forth under the shuddering dome of the protective array. Seeing the hideous Giants fighting with the enormous Redmane and Windmother, seeing their elders making moves that would vaporize the little people with the aftershocks should the array fall.

Back and forth. Back and forth. Watching Sister Li burning what life she had in a blaze of toxic pills and furious creation.

Then the array fell. Horrors swarmed in. Even with the Elders thinning out the invasion and the Inner Court fighting the enemy experts, it was a massive, hideous, cruel tide. The heretics weren’t fighting for glory. They wanted loot. A lot of them, far, far too many of them, went for the crafters.

Sister Li snatched an axe off her workbench and, fueled by pills and pain psychosis and sheer fury, gave a good accounting for herself. For a crafter. For a time. Then a heretic hacked off her arm and hit her so hard, they both thought she had killed her. What actually saved Sister Li’s life was that the heretic immediately moved to steal every single thing in her workshop. No time for the “dead” crafter.

Brother Long saw the enemy coming, and ran. He ran for his cell, slammed the door shut, plastered the room with defensive talismans, concealment talismans, warding talismans, and hid. In the aftermath of the battle, he refused to leave his room. For anything. The stink had nearly blinded Tian when he went to check on him. Brother Long wouldn’t open the door for him. The smell came straight through the wood.

The Four Treasures Trading Company. A powerful merchant house with the support of a Heavenly Person and a cultured youngster who disdained “Mere wealth.”

Sometimes, Brother Long would show Tian one of his paintings. They weren’t very good, and Tian was always at his wits end to find something nice to say. They had spent hours and hours playing go and drinking tea together. He couldn’t just trash the man’s paintings.

The Master of this company branch was a heretic. This was a frontier city, and not a small one. It was militarily important, and a trade hub. With the company’s network and the might of Ancient Crane Monastery opening the way, this Master Ji would be a powerful man in a crucial location.

Such a person was an intolerable danger to the city and the kingdom. He could not be ignored. But his death would cause the company to lose immense face. If he was revealed to be a heretic, the loss of face would be nearly unrecoverable. Worse, it would reach the Sect, damaging the Ancient Crane Monastery’s face too. But the most burning slap would be for the Heavenly Person ancestor behind the Long family.

Tian dared to do a lot of things, but he was scrupulously well behaved in front of Heavenly People. He had no illusions that he could fight them. The barrier was uncrossable. Since the ancient days, the Heavenly was above the Earthly, and while the low ones might rage, the heavens remained untouchable.

Except, his father had done it. He beheaded the heretic, and crushed the false heaven’s wrath.

Tian breathed out with a long sigh and stopped rubbing the bloody jade rosary. His soaked hands were only making the mess worse. He tucked the string of beads into his belt, and turned to one of the paralyzed apprentices. A single touch and a gentle circulation of Tian’s vital energy was enough to revive him.

“Where is this… Ji?”

Tian raced across the rooftops, flowing like a black cloud over the city. Grandpa tried to ease his mind a little, describing similar monks he had seen to wandering monks of the Pure Land Monastery. Their humility and resolve. Their astounding acceptance of life and death and boundless compassion for the suffering. The magic that they could make in people’s hearts with the sincerity of their preaching. Some of it got through.

If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it’s taken without the author’s consent. Report it.

Tian stopped to drop into a back yard to steal a broomstick. He left a silver coin and the bristles behind. The shaft was half as wide as his wrist, and tall enough to make a useful short staff. It would do.

As he got closer to the Ji Clan manor, he had a growing sense of a nearby presence. In a city of mortals, the breath of cultivators was hard to ignore. He half closed his eyes, stopping and reaching out with Counter Jumper. The city was chaotic, a maelstrom of noise and vibration. But he was very familiar with this qi.

“Sister Liren, are you hunting too? Did you find good brothers and sisters in the disciplinary squad here, or did you bully them into taking action?” He tracked the qi’s motion through the streets. She was moving at the pace of a running mortal, and coming at the manor from the rear. An ambush, then, supported by mortal forces. She must have found something too.