Chapter 28- A Chance to Change Fate

Brother Fu sacrificed twenty years of accumulated merits to get Advent of Spring for Tian. Brother Fu sat Tian down after his first spar with Hong Liren and told him to go make friends, or at least a friendly rival. It was Brother Fu who taught him how to serve tea, and with bloody hands on a cold battlefield, showed him the heart of it.

Compassion. Generosity. Connection. Peace. That was the Tea Dao handed down from father to son. In an awful world, you could make a kind place. It wasn’t an illusion. The bad things didn’t magically stop existing. The tea session existed in contrast to them. A quiet declaration of shared, orderly, human warmth against the roaring chaos of human cruelty. At the tea table, everyone was worthy. Everyone had dignity. Nobody threw rocks.

Now his father was sharing what he learned from those at the pinnacle of cultivation. That compassion and virtue had meaning beyond petty morality and the smug self righteousness of those who could be frugal on a full stomach. Virtue was recorded by unknown heavenly forces, and it earned merit. In real, tangible ways, your virtue made the world you inhabited a better place. Perhaps in tiny ways you didn’t notice, but it all contributed.

He remembered the heretic he fought who stuffed herself with insects and hissed that he was a rich kid. That he deserved to die for leading such a spoiled, luxurious life. Blind to the hell of her own making.

A cold tendril reached through the warmth and tapped him softly on the back, gently insisting on pointing out some inconvenient truths. Tian, by the fate he was born with, should never have been a cultivator. He was born with broken or missing meridians. He lacked that spiritual root, or that rare physique that would let him cultivate. “You need something. Some special thing.” That’s what Grandpa had said, and he had been right.

Tian rebuilt his body for the first time by destroying it with snake venom and pulped Earthly Realm Dustless Lotuses, then rebuilding it with the same ingredients. He’d had to risk his life repeatedly to do it, and in practice, he had sacrificed powerful vipers and earthly realm lotuses to give him the ingredients he needed to overturn fate.

Bloody Cleaver Wang wasn’t willing to trade his own pain for power. He butchered peasants, engaging in a heretical blood baptism for his cultivation. The cultists in Burning Flag City all relied on burning victims alive and inhaling the smoke to cultivate immortality. There were Gu cultivators and Necromancers, people who used the power of curses and insects, or death itself, to cultivate a form of immortality.

People without fortune, seizing the fortune of others. It took something substantial. It took a special something to cultivate. And presumably, the higher you wanted to climb, the greater the fortune you needed.

A country’s worth, perhaps.

Ancient Crane Monastery set itself on the biggest geomantic node in the country and created a virtuous system with the Broadsky kingdom. It wasn’t perfect. It was breaking down dramatically, in fact. But it was intended to be benevolent and encouraging growth.

The heretics of Black Iron Gorge took a different approach. They found endless ways to bleed fortune from the Kingdom, and collected it for themselves. No wonder the heretics as a whole were so powerful, while the individual mercenary heretics on the ground were so miserable. Black Iron Gorge’s true currency wasn’t salt or slaves, it was fortune.

Tian sat bolt upright. “The slaves! No wonder they want endless slaves. Laboring to process the brine would kill a lot, but using them as sacrificial vessels or offerings would be far, far more profitable.”

Oh yes. Keep extending that logic.

“Bleeding the kingdom, first of money and virtue through the salt and slave trade, weakening its merit and thus its fortune. Spreading heresy amongst the civilians, making the process self-sustaining. Then the war. They were content to let the kingdoms bleed out, and they are just as content to fight the war. The masters of the Gorge aren’t spending anything they really care about. All the rewards they promise to their fighters are just stuff, not something important. The masters only care about their personal losses. A million heretics could die in the Wastes, and the masters of the Gorge would be no worse off than when they started. Every dead orthodox cultivator, however, weakens the fortune of the Kingdom.”

And on the home front?

“Within the kingdom, there are fewer heroes suppressing villains. The merit depleting cycle accelerates. Then the heretics start taking more direct actions- exterminating villages, impeaching the Emperor, cutting away the roots.”

Mmm.

“The roots. My body rejects absorbing things without their roots in… what, good fortune? How does that make sense?”

You haven’t quite figured out what “fortune” or “merit” are really doing. What does it mean for something to have a root? Actually, before that, what do roots do?

“Hold a plant in the dirt?”

That and gathering nutrients from the dirt, like you did with Gourmet. They also use them for communication through a complex… not relevant now. Focus on the holding the ground bit.

“Rooting the land in the dao?”

There was a long, ghostly sigh. You are a smart boy, Zihao. Try a little harder.

“That seems right though.”

What is the dao?

“Grandpa…”

No, really. What is the dao?

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

“Everything.”

Mmm. So explain to me how something can be cut away from everything without remaining part of ‘everything.’

“It can’t.” Tian felt a sudden wave of the crushing shame known to all children, even teenage children, when an adult patiently explains just how stupid they sound.

Correct. But you have my assessment that “something” is being cut away from “something else.” So… what? What is being lost? What could be so fundamental that your body, which has been reforged in a quite saintly way, would outright reject the very water and food upon the rootless ground?

“I have no idea.”

Just keep it in mind. I have a feeling you are going to figure it out soon enough.