Chapter 50- Standing at the Peak, Seeing Only Despair

“We describe the Earth Realm as divided into nine ascending levels, but this is merely colloquial convenience and an intellectual misstep. In truth, it’s nine cycles of destruction and creation, returning to one at the end. Upon that return to one, there is a greater transformation, and a new cycle begins.” The ancient diviner explained.

Tian and Hong listened patiently. They didn’t have any choice. Once they read the sign, they found themselves irresistibly guided onto the stools in front of the booth. Even the crane was given a stool to perch on. They had barely settled before the diviner, who hadn’t yet introduced himself, started his monologue, the words forming a mysterious harmony with the rain battering on the awning. They would complain, but that seemed both unwise and impossible at the moment.

“Each time, the vessel breaks and a new, greater, one is formed from the accumulation of what came before. We can learn by analogy from this principle.” The diviner’s voice was still rich and smooth, despite his apparent age.

Tian appreciated the easy listening. He had gotten better at interpreting metaphors and had memorized the more common ones, but he still trusted analogies less than the discount tea leaves at the bottom of a peddler’s box. Also, he had several burning questions for this diviner, none of which had anything to do with basic cultivation theory. Asking them was becoming increasingly urgent. The diviner plainly didn’t care.

“Kingdoms fall. Sects fall. The people wither, their accumulated wisdom is lost. Virtue is lost. The long chain of filial piety is broken, and the ancestral tombs are left unswept, for those who would sweep them are scattered bones. Yet we see a trend. That which is broken becomes something new. New kingdoms rise, new sects, new people, building on what lessons they can take from the successes and failures of those who came before. There are times of stagnation or regression, but the trend is positive. Ultimately, what matters is the foundation set by the ancestors, and the will of their successors. Should they be firm and deep, the future will be better than the past.”

The diviner stroked his long white beard and smiled. “Yet, we revere the ancients, revere our ancestors, and as a matter of both logic and doctrine, those things which are eldest, the most primordial, are the most powerful and truest to the dao. The more complex and cluttered things become, the more we suffer and the poorer our lives. How do we resolve this? Disciple Hong?”

Hong’s mouth shifted, clearly wanting to say something colorful and controlling herself. Eventually, she said “Complexity and simplicity are also cycles, and there is a difference between reaching simplicity because you have the right mindset, and the simple life of the broke and ignorant.”

“Corrcect, but incomplete. If the goal of daoist cultivation is a reunification with the dao, or at least as much as is humanly possible, then that requires a return to simplicity. It requires moving away from complexity. Severing relationships or simply allowing them to whither. Caring about fewer irrelevant matters. Wanting less. Doing less. Secluding oneself in the mountains to surrender to nature and illuminating our true selves. The simple act of living is an explosion of yang, fading inexorably to yin and death. The more brilliantly you burn, the faster you fade. How do we differentiate our Daoist stillness from death?”

Tian shook his head while Hong leapt into the answer. “Balance. One can move and be still. One can think a lot about a few things, not letting their mind get cluttered. Nobody gets out of life alive. So what if we burn out? So what if we eventually become so still we die? We will be relieved of our burdens in the afterlife, and rise again, ready to explode.”

“It seems your brother disagrees. Disciple Tian, where does her analysis fall short?”

“At the very beginning, Elder.”

“How so?” The diviner looked curious.

“She accepted your premise, so her conclusions can never be more correct than her foundations. However, there is a part of those foundations that…” Tian struggled to find a polite way of saying “You are talking absolute nonsense,” and couldn’t. He opted for silence instead. A year of debating policy on the Windblown Manor had exposed him to many traps of logic and rhetoric. A senior’s easy confidence wasn’t enough to blind him any longer.

The old diviner didn’t take any offense. His gentle smile widened into something truer.

“Indeed, indeed. Where do you see an error in my framing?”

“Elder, this junior has heard a lot about cultivation, but he’s never once heard that the goal of cultivation is reunification with the Dao. It’s impossible just as a matter of logic. The dao is, and is in, everything. We are the dao or a very small piece of it. We can’t unify with something we are already part of. We can only understand ourselves better. Since the dao is the myriad things, understanding ourselves is understanding the simple and understanding the complicated. Sometimes that means living stark naked in the jungle, hiding out from everyone, and sometimes it means building complicated irrigation systems and figuring out rice farming.”

Tian tried to keep his language polite, but his enormous irritation, and growing fury, made it difficult. “It also means trying to understand our Elders.”

“That can be difficult.” The diviner faintly raised an eyebrow. “You seem to have had some success at that, however.”

Neither of the juniors said anything. Swearing at someone beyond the Heavenly Realm seemed unwise.

“You have had almost a year and a half to work on your assignment. You understand, better than almost anyone, just how we got to our present situation. You know just how dire the situation is, and how intractable. Tell me. How do we win the future?” The diviner wasn’t wearing the sect uniform. He was wearing a dusty blue robe, the tortoise shell in front of him looked battered and worn, even the coins and wooden sticks on the little booth looked battered and worn. Items with a past, for divining the future.

“The answer you wanted us to find is that ‘we’ don’t. ‘We’ accept that the kingdom and the monastery will fall, which will clear away all the corrupted elements and leave room for healthy new growth. Us, Senior Brother Fu, Elder Rui, and some others.” Hong answered.

Tian didn’t nod, but followed up on her answer. “A natural, healthy cycle. Elder, I wonder if you could clear some of my confusion.”

“If I can.” The diviner nodded, and tapped the sign behind him. “Questions answered, Heaven’s Secrets Revealed. Though I don’t know most of the secrets.”

“The war against the heretics- we have already lost many brothers and sisters, and will lose many more, strategic array or not. The Heretics won’t leave anything left to build a kingdom from, let alone a monastery. Not to mention what will happen when our ‘allies’ see us collapse.”

“True, as far as it goes, but you are missing some key pieces. Daoist Blackiron and I reached a similar epiphany many thousands of years ago- to tie our fate to the fate of a kingdom and use that to clear any obstacles to our cultivation. I, being orthodox in outlook, accepted the imposition of merit and sin, and worked to ensure a virtuous cycle formed. Daoist Blackiron, being heretical, was unwilling to accept any judgement of morality or propriety beyond his own.”

Tian’s eyes flew open, as did Hong’s. She leaned forward and asked “You can simply… deny sin? Or merit?”

“It can be done, if one is willing to pay a sufficient price and suffer atrocious consequences. Most often, one pays a bitter, bitter price for a mere deferral. But then, Daoist Blackiron never lacked resolve. Morals, compassion, or the faintest shred of humanity, yes, but not resolve. I, on the other hand, was raised differently.” He laughed lightly. “I have really let down my teachers! Not to mention those brothers who outgrew our little mountain and spread their wings in the bigger world.”

A few more things clicked almost audibly inside Tian’s head. Starsieve glanced over at him. “It’s as you imagine. I was the third generation Sect Master, which makes the Ancient Crane my Grand-Master, and my master, the Myriad Blessings Child, created your cultivation method. I was privileged to hear the Ancient Crane herself proclaim the dao, and her teachings still echo and unfold in my ears.”

The old man sighed. “And then she flew away. She had only stopped on the mountain to rest a little while. But how could a crane not migrate? Perhaps in a few tens or hundreds of thousands of years more, she will return and look for us. It’s nice to imagine, anyway.”

The ancient looked into the sky. “Then my seniors left, my master left, good brothers and sisters left, or died, another form of leaving. My cultivation wasn’t lagging. I was my generation’s leading genius, if you can believe something so absurd. I just didn’t want to go. I loved it here. I loved my monastery. Loved my mortal family. Loved my juniors and the rivers and mountains and the wheeling birds and the feeling of peeking directly into the Celestial Court as I watched the stars and toasted the Goddess in the moon.”

His voice drifted away, then returned. “I think you know what happened next. If not exactly, then close enough.”

Tian and Hong nodded.

“Forgive me. The old ramble. You asked about the outcome of the war? I have arranged for quite a lot of people to die, many of them wearing the blue and white. People who should die, and some whose deaths will be unjust. Not everyone who deserves it, but quite a lot of them. The heretics are my borrowed knife, there. The surviving remainder of villains, or the merely surplus, have been maneuvered so they can’t interfere with the next step- bringing the surviving good and useful ones back. Those who have accumulated merit, or who will be pillars for the next Monastery.”

The heavy rains battered on the awning and on the tile roofs around them, layers of drums and thunder echoing around them, nearly as loud as the racing thunder of Tian and Hong’s hearts.

“Ancient Crane Mountain, as far as the kingdom and the world are concerned, will die. Faded into nothingness and memory. But it won’t die alone. I will break the heretic’s spine, and with it, scatter their strength. Without its spine, all its hard bones will be useless. The Black Iron Gorge will find itself without defenders, its wealth plundered by any whose fists are big enough to take it. Most likely one of those one-time defenders, but quite possibly not. The heavens are unsettled on that point.”

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Tian and Hong felt cold fear clamping down on their spines. He sounded far less moved by the thought of exterminating thousands of his own juniors than he did by the memory of his old brothers moving on to greater things.

“The Mountain supports the kingdom. When it vanishes, the kingdom will collapse. Awful people will prosper in the chaos, tens of millions will suffer and die. Those most deserving to suffer will live comfortably. For a time. Someone will take over, a prince, a noble, a general, someone. They will be raised by scholars trained in pursuing human virtue and benevolence. Some of it will stick. Good lessons will be learned from the Broadsky Kingdom and reinforced by cultivators. The new kings and nobles will exterminate the parasites, both to seize their wealth and prove their own virtue. The tension of benevolence and cruelty, the tension between vital energy, qi and shen, it’s much the same. The wheel will turn, and the world will be a better place soon enough.”

The diviner looked at the two growing immortals with soft eyes. “As for our neighbors… their juniors will test us, and nibble at the land. Their seniors will keep away, and nothing too dramatic will happen. In time, you will understand. This course was laid down before you were born. It is far too late to change it now. Surprises do occur, even for me. I had no intention of taking another disciple, but little Fu was just too perfect to pass up. Still, a single droplet flying from a wave doesn’t change the course of a river. These things will happen.”

“And the kids nailed to the floor?!” Hong’s voice turned raw.

“You asked the wrong question earlier. The key isn’t refusing sin and merit. It’s who is deciding what’s what. It’s not like sin or merit are inherent in the dao or some unshakable universal principle. Someone had to make the decision. Someone I know very, very well. One tends to be intimately familiar with old creditors. And now it’s time to pay up.” The diviner smiled. “Come, I will show you just how I intend to settle accounts. You really should have read my sign more carefully.”

“Elder?” Tian’s feeling of dread spiked to levels that would have had him running if his legs were still working.

“‘Special’ prices for Burning Heavens Cranes, not ‘better.’” The old man, so old he could remember the previous kingdom, grinned like a naughty child.

The old diviner snapped his fingers, and the short wooden sticks on the table flew into a bamboo tube. The tube gently shook in the air, once, twice, three times, and at the third shake, six sticks flew out and landed in a strange, blocky pattern.