Chapter 5- A Home That Trains Your Heart

Tian and Hong jumped down the mountainside, heading home. It was the logical consequence of location and intended occupants- The amount of vertical surface on a mountain would always exceed the horizontal space, so how do you manage housing? Easy. You just build your buildings to hang off cliff faces or steep slopes, excavating inwards if you wanted to expand.

Access was by the front door, usually several hundred, or thousand, feet in the air. The users, that is, the residents, could fly. They could all fly. At some point, somewhere, there might have been earth bound servants, but they would doubtless be stationed in shacks next to fields of medical herbs or some such similar thing. No, all the real housing was for those in the Heavenly Realm, and above.

All of which left the earthbound Earthly Realm cultivators involuntarily confined on the mountain in a bit of a tricky situation. While there technically wasn’t any shortage of available homes, there was a shortage of reachable homes.

The Monastery adopted a two-pronged approach to solving the problem. First, they built dormitories low on the mountain. Need a place? Enjoy a perfectly decent cell with a very decent dining room nearby. Want more privacy? There were plenty of caves, huts, cottages, and even mansions you could make use of, provided you could reach them. Just don’t pick one too far away, and take waiting for a lift from the Martial Aunts and Uncles on ferry duty, (the second prong), as an opportunity to cultivate patience.

Tian and Hong had found a cave they really liked, but they couldn’t be bothered to wait in a queue. Gravity was an utterly adequate replacement for a ferry, at least on the descent. Hong didn’t like the feeling of floating in space, but she still jumped, training her courage. They had added a wrinkle to their movement across the mountain with the assistance of the Snow Grace Crane. Sometimes, things would be a little too vertical even for them, or there wasn’t a good angle to leap from where they were to where they wanted to go. With the right timing, they could land, feather light, on the back of the crane, then use her to launch themselves to the next foothold.

It was a little more than exhilarating, but they kept doing it anyway. Somehow, they never felt quite right without pushing hard against their limits. It didn’t have to be every day, but they could recognize it in each other- the sense that things were too easy, and about to go very wrong.

Jumping over a five hundred foot drop to try and land on the back of a flying crane without knocking her out of the air and then leaping to a palm sized foothold on a sheer rock face was a sort of compromise. They weren’t seeking death. They were just, occasionally, deliberately death-adjacent.

Some days, it was the only way they could relax.

The two were taking a little breather on their drop home, enjoying the view from a ledge barely wider than their feet were long, when Martial Aunt Mei came up on a flying platform. “That never stops looking terrifying.”

Tian and Hong nodded. “You get used to it.” Tian said.

“I doubt that.”

“Yeah, he’s crazy. It’s absolutely terrifying. But what can you do about it?” Liren shrugged.

“Ask me for a lift? Speaking of, would you like one?” Tian and Hong shared a glance.

“Sure, thanks.” Tian smiled and cupped his hands, leaping on board with a casual step that had Mei flinching. She flinched again when Hong did the same, looking even more casual.

“I could have brought the platform closer!” The crane flew over and landed on the platform, looking around curiously. “Miss Crane, are you the only one with sense in this trio? Help your Auntie out. Explain to them that falling from a great height is a bad thing.” Mei batted her wide eyes at the crane. In reply, the crane ducked her beak under a wing and straightened some feathers.

“We were headed back home, if it’s not too far out of your way.” Hong smiled.

“Not at all. I came by because Big Bro wanted me to give you some things for your journey.”

“Please convey our thanks to the Patriarch of the Wang Clan.” Tian’s voice was dryer than dust. “By any chance, purely by coincidence, and in no way related to your visit, did he want us to bring him something back from our trip?”

Mei poked one of her cheeks with her finger and tilted her head to the side. Her eyes traveled upwards, as though the clouds had desperately needed notes written on them. Everything about her, from the pose to the innocently mindless look, screamed that Auntie Mei would have a hard time counting to “one,” and would find writing “one” utterly impossible. Tian and Hong struggled to control a twitch.

“Souvenirs. Big Bro said that you would definitely find stuff that nobody else would, and asked you to bring back souvenirs.” She nodded firmly. “He also said that, since you are old friends, he is willing to break into his personal savings to get you the very best price on anything you want to sell. There were tears in his eyes. It was suuuuper moving!”

That did get a twitch out of them. It was universally believed that, within the slimmed down Outer Court, the Wang Clan was by far the richest group. This was in part because of its size, and in part because Mei was at the Heavenly Realm, but it was overwhelmingly because the combination of Wang and Su meant extremely optimized production and sales for their family’s magic tools. Tools that they had a near monopoly on, thanks to the ‘clan’ including two extremely talented, extraordinarily well educated and remarkably hard working array masters.

Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.

The Five Elements Courtyard’s loss was the Ancient Crane Monastery’s gain. Yet, despite all that, Fatty Wang always looked like the helpless victim of circumstances, struggling his utmost to keep his little family fed and housed. As he loudly put it “Just how many people are there to buy our wares, trapped on this mountain?”

Tian, as a committed devotee of the way of the Brokie, could only salute him and acknowledge that his brother’s skills exceeded his own.

“We will keep an eye out. Jades are at the top of the list, I assume?”

“Mmm! Little Tian understands us the best!” She nodded, managing to bounce cheerfully while sitting down. The platform didn’t wobble. One of the products the Wang Clan made was jade discs with stabilization arrays carved on them, for smoother rides in flying vehicles. Not cheap, but highly valued by many at the Heavenly Realm. Managing turbulence and maintaining stability on flying swords were notorious problems.