Chapter 489 – Fishing Day (Patreon)

Aaaand we're back! I got super sick over labor day weekend, so enjoy the return from the brief and impromptu sick-day!____________________________________________________________________

Enlightenment is like truth. It is, and it is not. In this way, all things are true, and all things are false. In this way, all things are on the road to enlightenment. 

Always, it is all in the eyes of those who witness and speak it.

–Words of a wandering drunk, who is no longer drunk and was never wandering.

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To enjoy good health, to bring true happiness to one's family, to bring peace to all, one must first discipline and control one's own mind. If a man can control his mind he can find the way to Enlightenment, and all wisdom and virtue will naturally come to him. 

–Buddhist Quote

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It’s the third day of the week. That means it’s fishing day. 

Jin often misses the group activity, and Chen Tai doesn’t usually have the patience for it, but today makes a surprise exception. Wei Zin, on the other hand, has never missed a day, opting for his tribe’s tradition of spear fishing over line-and-rod, but most surprising of all is Geng He. He’s really taken to the activity, and the stillness seems to have had a real impact on him. 

Her unruliest disciple sits peacefully on a log, unbothered by the sounds of Chen Tai digging a fresh inlet for the lake to spread into the woods, unbothered by Wei Zin’s significantly larger pile of fish. Raika can taste the energies inside him moving, shifting in something almost approaching peace. It’s a rare sight, but becoming more common by the day. 

Geng He’s balance, as a cultivator, is Dreams, Bone, Force, and Light. An awkward combination at the best of times, and the manual he showed her he’d found seemed… well, half-baked, really. Like the author had a hodge-podge of ideas and never actually figured them out before he put them down to paper. 

But the former wandering cultivator never once gave up on pushing forward, stubbornly, to make it work. And she’s helped, adding artifacts and mutations that suit him to his art and let him elevate it.

But sitting here, facing the lake, quiet and calm, his cultivation is flowing more readily and in better harmony than she’s ever seen it. Dreams shift through him, empowered by force, glowing with the brilliance of light, woven through bones-like-architecture. 

The shape of his Nascent Soul is almost there. Deep in his Dantian, in the pearl of his core, its form shifts in a fluid dance with itself. His cultivation was already high enough to make him a danger to a mortal army when she met him, an impressive achievement for a wandering cultivator with a poorly-designed technique, but the difference between compressing Qi into a core and actually understanding the self on the level required to form a Nascent Soul is vast. Most cultivators stop their journey at the Core Formation Realm, and of those who enter the Nascent Soul Realm, the ones who create a fully-formed Soul are in the exponential minority. 

But here he is. After years of tearing himself apart, opening himself up to everything with even the slightest iota of an advantage or improvement, fighting non-stop, here he is, sitting still, waiting for a bite on his line. 

And when it comes, he doesn’t even pull on it. A flick of his wrist travels down the fishing rod, into the lake, and the hook turns and slips free of the fish that has caught itself on it, leaving it free to swim away. 

The water splashes as Wei Zin’s spear crashes into it, stabbing another set of glistening scales and pulling it up out of the water. 

“You’re getting better at that,” Raika tells him. 

He smiles at that, one of his more honest ones. “It’s all in the wrist, master.”

It’s not all in the wrist. She’s not sure if he knows it, and won’t look deep enough to check, but his work with that fishing spear goes deeper than physical action. As he traces movements out of memory, pulling something deep out of himself, he grows more in tune with a wider something. There’s Dao there, certainly, but not just that. 

If she asked, she’s sure that he would tell her it is how his parents fished, and their parents before them, and their parents before them. An unbroken chain of action, traveling through Dao but not beholden to it. 

But she doesn’t say anything. He’s a good kid. If he hasn’t figured it out yet, he will, and it’s better he realize it for himself at this point than for her to tell him. 

And Chen Tai?

Chen Tai is digging again. 

With joy. Freely. Unbothered by any of the broader concerns of the world, joyously, tearing up the dirt in festive sprays that paint the leaves of the trees around them and opens a pathway for water to stream inland. 

There’s probably some cool shit going on with that, too, some deeper layer of reality being milled by her actions, but Raika doesn’t really look for them. She’s having fun. She’s a child. Such should always be allowed. 

Raika casts her own line back out, still using her staff as an improvised rod and using her massive frame to make it work. It flies out into the water, far and deep, a chunk of worm-flesh dangling at the end of it and drifting down into the water. 

It’s a nice day. The sun is setting, making the air comfortably cool. The world is turning, as it always does. The skies wink with stars overhead, and when she looks up at them, they seem polite. Unbothered. 

She wonders if they see the world as she does. If they see the ripples of the lake, hiding billions of miniscule lives, which are fed on by millions of fish and a whole biome of plants. How those lives ripple out in turn, dying to feed the ground, releasing gases to the air, enriching the soil, performing an impossible dance over and over. If they can see the water that leaves the lake and becomes the clouds, which rain down into the soil, which flowers and sustains, which feeds the beasts, who die and sustain the earth in turn. 

If so, perhaps they are welcome. Perhaps their voyeurism is as much a part of the world as anything else, and she just hasn’t found out exactly how yet. 

Maybe that’s enlightenment. Seeing things for what they are, and knowing there is more that you do not yet see. 

Or maybe not. 

Still, she thinks her cultivation stirs a bit at the thought. 

Then again, it stirs at a lot of things. And it’s weird enough to have cultivation again at all. 

She turns her thoughts from that part of her existence. That’s for later. She’s got a few months left with her disciples, and more to do in town before she leaves.

Because she will, eventually. Leave. For all her enlightenment, there’s still a few simple parts of reality that are louder to her than the peace of existence. 

There’s the way that things stutter, now and again, like an illusion going off-center for a moment. 

There’s the way that one of the three moons visible in the sky is made of metal, its shape carved by engineering and industry, and that another, flickering in and out of reality, is bound by chains. Chains which lead down to the center of the first and largest of the three sisters, who occasionally shivers. 

There’s the way that she can taste the Echo of things, in the back of her throat like a thin film of cold. How there are too many and too much that is dead, and how it all goes down too deep, exerting a gravity of their own towards that Cold Sun in the sky. 

There’s the screams on the horizons, coming from so far away that she could walk for years and not reach them. From atop a Wall that spans a genocide-war that has killed for millenia, and from a pillar at the center of the world, atop which is a thing that shines and cannot be seen clearly by her senses. 

There’s the shadows in the earth, so far down that there should be nothing but stone and where instead there is too-soft dirt and strange currents of power. 

There’s the trickle of Qi, thought, and strange unmatter, colorful and oily, emerging from every single person she can sense in the entire Empire at once. 

She sighs. 

Yeah. There’s a lot that’s beautiful and wonderful and awesome. Awesome in that it inspires awe. Wonderful in that it is full of wonder. Good and evil and totally alien to both such mortal concepts.

And some things truly vile. 

Too many reasons to go. Not enough to stay.

Not even for more fishing days with her kids.

Even when she cuts off her more advanced senses, delegates the detail-work to the other parts of Raika, leaves the machinations to others… there’s too much. Even when she restricts herself to the point that she is more mortal than even the villagers of West Laketown, more mortal than anyone natural-born in the whole Empire, she can’t ever totally forget it.

Once you hear the sun screaming, it doesn’t go away.

Literally. Even when she deafens herself, she can hear it. It ends only at night, once that flaming orb has hit the southern edge of the world and come apart to reconvene at the northern. Its screaming, once heard, goes deeper than sound, deeper than memory.

Every day. All day. Starting slowly, when the wyrms of flame that make it up meet in the northern sky, and climbing to a fever-pitch throughout the rest of the day. A cacophony of voices, hoarse, broken, shrieking and wailing and whimpering with the sound of a grief and pain so deep that they are felt in her bones. 

She knew the sun was wyrms before. Everyone does, if they have the strength of sight to be able to look straight-on at that ball of fire. It’s a fact of the world.

Except Many-Mouths told her very directly, didn’t they? All those years ago, when she first entered the Overgrowth. 

The world is dying. The world is smaller than it should be, to survive. 

There used to be a different sun. So far away that it makes the whole of the world seem like the space between one finger and the next. 

And now there is this one. Made of things that scream out as if in the midst of the most agonizing tragedy, every moment of the day.

She didn’t come out of her cabin for a week after she heard them. After she turned her ears to the sky and broke whatever forced or accidental ignorance keeps everyone in the world from going mad. 

Nothing has tugged at her line, but she reels it back anyways, rolling it over her hand slowly. When the hook returns, holding that still-pink flesh of a worm she found, already dead, she stares at it for a bit. 

Opening her mouth wide, she bites down on the hook. 

The worm flesh is cold and still, and the hook hurts when it goes through her lip.

She pulls it out, veiling the entire action from her disciples with a working of Intent, and stares at the hook. Now clean of worm-flesh, but painted in a droplet of red. 

She casts it back out over the lake. 

“Think you’re going to catch anything, master?” Chen Tai asks. Her youngest disciple is crouched on all fours, head tilted like a curious dog wondering at a sound.

So perceptive, her children. 

“I think so,” Raika says. “Might be better if I don’t, though. I wouldn’t want to help Wei Zin with his effort to depopulate the lake when he seems to have it so handily under control.”

Her fanciest disciple has the gall to blush, shirtless in the water, his fine grass robes tied around his waist and hiked up above his knees. 

“Sorry, master. I’ll…”

Then he pauses. Mimics Chen Tai, albeit probably unconsciously. 

“Do you want me to stop?”

She smiles. 

For once, it’s a genuine question. He’s not sure, so he’s asking, and she can feel from the flavor of his thoughts that her answer may very well not matter to whether he continues or not.

Albeit in this small way, he’s facing down someone stronger than him, and choosing a sincere and open question rather than the more political assumption.

“Feel free to keep going,” she tells him, shaking her head. “You seem like you’re getting into a good rhythm.”

He smiles at that, boyish and proud, and starts talking about how he’s gotten the spear just right this time, and that the fish here are different but he’s figured out where to spear them for them to die painlessly, and she nods along, listening.  

Even Geng He chimes in after a while, pointing out that Wei Zin isn’t paying enough attention to his footing, which is true. But the comment is gentle, intended as genuine, and so different from the Geng He of a few months ago that it feels like night and day. 

She inhales, letting the sounds of her kids discussing the merits of different styles of spear-fishing (and of her youngest going back to singing a tuneless little song about tasty tasty rivers as she goes back to digging) wash over her. 

The screams of the sun fade into the background, unable to fight back the sounds of this moment. 

The world is broken. Bad, in so many ways. And she will make it better.

But this part is important too. As much as it’s helpful for her disciples, it’s important for her, too. A moment, barely a blink in the face of all time, of even the Empire, but long enough to hold forever. Just a few months, to feel every part of who she is. 

In the home she’s built for him, Rai Jin, her son, breathes peacefully, sleeping, surrounded by statues honoring the fallen and embracing the stories of all the families around them. 

Across the world, her sister, Li Shu, hums a little song as she waters her latest experiment, the runes lining its pot shining brightly. 

In the shadows of the corners of things, a black cat dances across the world, so much more than she was when they decided to go separate ways for a time. 

In a lovely little mountain complex, Hao Nera and Qen Hou, who she misses dearly, sit and drink tea together, listening to Qen Hou play a harp that sings strange notes. 

In the shadow of flesh and gold, dear friends who she has asked too much of take a moment to breathe. Almost a hundred other souls join them, a celebration of things to come and preparation against the dark, as another part of Raika continues to get to know those who have sworn their lives and vows and blood to her.

And so many more. 

Cragend. Paleblossom City. Weyun Village. Singheart. Godsfall. A dozen other cities beside, and so, so many more places, all of which are a part of her and apart from her, in memory and history and form. 

So many people. So many lives. All of them as real at the moment she is in right now. 

The world is beautiful. And it is so much more than what it looks like from only one set of eyes, in only one moment, in only one place. 

She exhales, letting the breath flow out of her. 

She took in no Qi, but still, the feeling of things changing and resonating with her thoughts runs all through her. 

The world is perfect. Good, in so many ways.

And she will make it better. 

It deserves it. 

She pulls back her line, lifting up the fish at the end of it, and stealthily sneaks it into Geng He’s pile. Considering how much larger it is than any of the fish that Wei Zin has caught, she’s willing to bet they’ll get a little competitive about it, and it’ll be adorable.