Hong Fanyi

Back in her day, a newly minted Inner Disciple would never have been assigned a Core Disciple to babysit their first contribution.

The first contribution was a rite of passage for those who’d taken their first step on the Path. Upon such a successful Core Formation, without exception, an Outer Disciple would be promoted. And, without exception, they would give back to the Sect and undertake a task outside the Valley. Every subsequent century, the sect was owed another such contribution.

Most of the year, the Sect had no such needs and would have to invent one. Usually, it involved fixing a section of the Skybound Path or patrolling for imagined threats just outside the gates of Tianbei. It was a celebration of finally being allowed to leave the city. Master Feng and his peers heavily discouraged banditry and disagreeing with a Peak Master rarely ended well.

In fact, there was only one terrible time of year to form a Core - the only time there was legitimate work to be done. Immediately following the annual auction, goods had to be delivered expediently to buyers. Unfortunately, expecting a buyer to take a purchased good home was considered improper - an artifact of times from when the Nine Great Sects held a deep mutual distrust for one another.

Back in her day, promising disciples would never have been so casual about their Core Formation. A Peak Master or, at the very least, an elder from the Star Council would have been asked to supervise, and a more auspicious day would have been chosen.

If this actual child beside her had waited a week or two, he would still have been the fastest disciple to ever form a Core in the Ascending Sky's written history - by decades.

Disciple Ji gave her a smile that was too sarcastic to be respectful and too placid to be resentful. Hong realized she'd likely been glaring at him.

Back in her day, inner disciples had known something about gratitude.

Hong fixed her glare into something less aggressive.

"Honestly, you really don't need to be here if you don't want to," said Disciple Ji. His earnest concern infuriated her. "I've been to Dongjing before, and Huzhou is, by all accounts, only fifty li southwest of the city."

It was the third time the newly Inner Disciple Ji had said something to this effect and Hong had gotten angrier each time. She chose, once again, not to answer.

Their boots swept along the square slabs of slate on the ground - their feet fell fast enough that the sound was closer to rainfall than drumming. Hong could go faster still, but she'd already discovered that her companion could not.

This was a colossal waste of time and Hong could no longer hold it in.

"Surely you can't be so-" Hong paused to sneer, "inexperienced as to believe I should disregard the Sword's orders and return alone."

Disciple Ji shrugged. "Unless I'm misinformed, the only sect we have any sort of beef with is the Iron Scripture. This should be a relatively safe journey. I'll probably be okay if you start heading back."

"What does food have anything to do with sect relations?"

Disciple Ji shrugged again, this time with a touch of something between exasperation and embarrassment. "It's just a turn of phrase from my hometown," he explained.

Back in her day, disciples would try to shed their regional slang and adopt the precise pronunciation that characterized the Tianbei dialect. Being easily understood had been a common courtesy.

In truth, coming up with new reasons to be angry with the boy was the only thing keeping Hong sane. Disciple Ji would never be able to match the speed she wished to travel. To make matters worse, Hong was a martial cultivator and practicing her craft was very much at odds with traveling.

Not that Hong would have dulled her attention to their surroundings by cultivating on this stretch of the journey. This was enemy territory, whether or not it was officially acknowledged. This was the Iron Road.

The road was only three meters wide. Were a carriage and a man to meet, there was room for the man to pass - but just enough - if the carriage would allow it. And that carriage really could determine such a man's fate, were he not a cultivator, because on either side of this particular road was a forest of bamboo that had grown for so long it was unclear whether the hour was high noon or midnight.

There were countless stories about the treasures and dangers that could be found off the Iron Road, but there were simply some places not worth the risk to explore - not without a guiding Principle.

A thin trail of qi ghosted past the proud arrays of the Iron Scripture and drifted past Hong like smoke. But surely someone who’s survived her Ignition would survive a forest.

“Do you feel that, Disciple Ji?”

While Hong plotted a course firmly along the dead center of the path, her companion veered from one side of the road to the other. Earlier, he’d had the bare audacity to pick a bamboo flower off one of the stalks that encroached onto the path.

“Feel what? The whispers? If you don’t ever step off the path, there’s nothing they can do to hurt you,” said seventeen year old Disciple Ji, as sure as summer rain. As they continued to run, the boy suddenly leaned forward and squinted. “Halfway there,” he decided.

A stone sat on the road slowly grew in size on the horizon. “You’ve been on this road before,” Hong realized.

Disciple Ji nodded. “That’s how I arrived at the sect. We went up this very road from Dongjing to Bei’an, and then took the Skybound Path east to Tianbei Valley.”

“Awfully brave of you to use this deathtrap rather than the perfectly good highway along the western edge of the continent.”

“It wasn’t that bad,” said Ji. “Like any other road we’ve traveled, just a little more haunted.”

“Just a little haunted,” echoed Hong. She was shocked the boy wasn’t dead, with how defective his danger sense was. “This is a psychic attack that’s pierced the array beneath our feet. We’re not even sure what it’s capable-”

Ji shook his head. “It’s pretty harmless if you know what it does,” he said. “It just tries to convince you that something you need really badly is out there in the forest. If you stop to think about it, it falls apart really quickly. There’s a greater chance that you’ll wake up next morning as an immortal than my mother being just out of sight off the road.”

Oh no, was Disciple Ji the sort of cultivator that took any opportunity to launch into a tragic backstory?

“If you just ignore that particular Song, it’ll give up on you, probably because you’re too hard a target.”

Ji frowned. “Makes you think, doesn’t it,” he continued. “If the slightest mental resistance is too much to bother with, doesn’t that imply the target audience is unsound of mind?”

“Isn’t that a bit too much? It could just be an unhappy spirit.” Hong had evidently judged Disciple Ji unfairly. The boy was too cynical to die.

Ji’s smile briefly revealed a faint pair of dimples. “Don’t give it an excuse just because it’s a spirit. If a person did that, you’d probably try to stop him.”

Hong probably wouldn’t have done so, as it wouldn’t be any of her business, but she reluctantly agreed with him.

As they drew closer and closer to that stone that marked the halfway point between Dongjing and Bei’an, the blanket of qi that had made it past the arrays of the the Iron Road was drowned out by the humming conflux of qi that the Linking Stone pulled it, filtered and then expelled back into the world.

Hong had passed each and every Linking Stone on the Middle Continent at different points during her travels. The timbre of qi that emanated from the different stones were all slightly different. The Stone of Approach rarely had visitors in living memory and its qi had taken on a somewhat aggressive, anti-social cast.

“Tell me, Daoist Hong, what came first - the Eight Linked Cities or the stones that pair them?”

Hong glared at him suspiciously. Disciple Ji met her stare easily. There wasn’t a trace of mockery in his eyes - this was something that he was actually curious about.

“I wasn’t born on this continent,” he explained. That had been obvious from the moment she’d first heard him speak. She recognized neither his accent nor the style of the flute he carried with him.

“It’s a rather famous subject of speculation,” she said. “Records about the Linking Stones vary, even within the same sect and during the same eras. But to tell the story of the Linking Stones first requires me to tell the story of the Middle Continent.”

Disciple Ji nodded. They’d slowed to a near stop just twenty paces from the stone in all its oblong, pockmarked glory.

“The most well-accepted story of the Middle Continent is as follows - the first dynasty we know of is the Fu. This was an improbable discovery - cave paintings left by the Moonlight Immortal in the catacombs at Jiangxi. This is rarely disputed amongst people who don’t immediately follow with some alternative theory about how civilization actually originated in their own hometown.”

She found it hard not to return his grin.

“Then, there’s a period of time that’s commonly called the Silent Dynasties - no one’s sure how long it lasted. The common folk believe that the Xi Emperor Who Broke the Chains founded the Eight Linked Cities.”

Hong paused, trying to put to words that sense of skepticism that most cultivators had about this narrative of the world.

“Even the shortest consideration of this claim invites doubt. The architecture in each of the cities is unique. You’ll find none of the carefully chiseled white stone from Tianbei Valley even fifty li to the west. Likewise, you won’t find a single building in Tianbei cut from that dark mountain-glass favored by our closest neighbors in Bei’an. The idea that the cities were raised in the same generation is preposterous.”

They considered the stone from an arm’s length. Disciple Ji’s eyes followed the uneven surfaces of the Linking Stone. His eyes ran across every crater and crack, searching for its secrets.

“These Linking Stones were, by all accounts of the era, placed here to commemorate our triumph over that era of silence. It’s really a shame that no one remembers why such a triumph was necessary or what it even looked like.”

“I find it a little strange,” said Disciple Ji, after they’d stood in contemplation of the Stone for a few moments. “Cultivators live for a very long time and are quite good at hiding things. Some of them even become immortals and leave the realm entirely. Don’t immortals come back to visit sometimes?”

“Once in a while,” said Hong. “But immortals have their own trials and tribulations, by all accounts. There are advancements to cultivation beyond the Heavenly Tribulation - we make a distinction between Immortals and Celestial Venerates, don’t we? Surely something more than just time differentiates them.”

She paused. “There are three greater tribulations between the successful formation of a core and immortal ascension, the final being the Heavenly Tribulation - a test of the Principle you’ve carved out for yourself and whether it’s a fundamental truth of the world or just an empty delusion.”

Disciple Ji was frowning heavily, but he didn’t interrupt her.

“The core is known as the lower dantian - it’s somewhere in your body that you can point to. The Principle you seek is referred to as the middle dantian. Now, if there’s a lower and a middle, that seems to imply something, doesn’t it?”

Ji understood her point immediately. “Cultivation gets harder and the rates of survival get lower as you move further along the road. There’s really no reason to believe that it won’t continue to be that way.” He gave her a searching look. “What was your Ignition like?”

“Painful.”

There was a short silence. Ji folded his arms. “That’s it?”

Hong rolled her eyes. “What did you expect? Opening a meridian creates a problem with your qi that you’ve never had to deal with before - a lesser tribulation, some more deadly than others. Each of your twelve primary meridians comes with a different tribulation. It just so happens that when you’re trying to survive this shock to your cultivation, the Heavens above pay you your first visit. I’m sure you’ve seen lightning hit a tree during a storm. What do you think it feels like?”

Back in her day, disciples were more sensible.