Chapter 497 – Discussions Of Growth (Patreon)

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Differences in cultivation are differences in ontology, for cultivation is the act of transforming and elevating one’s ontology. Two beings born of exactly the same mind, found in different environments or differing bodies, will experience profoundly different journey, in spite of their core beliefs and psychological foundations being identical. In turn, two individuals that are identical down to their molecules and live in precisely the same environment might have drastically different worldviews, one of the core components of later realms of cultivation. Superficially, the early steps of cultivation are considered deeply similar or even outright identical, but that is a shallow interpretation of only the most obvious data. 

It’s strange all the way down. 

Which leads me to the topic of today’s discussion, beyond the broad strokes: impurities.

What are impurities? Why do they manifest so universally for so many, and for others so distinctly? Are they universal, identical at their foundations, or unique to each of us, simply appearing similar to the uneducated and incurious?

Post-Imperial society has widely lost sight of the deeper nature of this phenomena, and most other cultures have limited research on the idea. The general gist of it, both in the Empire’s olden myths and the lived experiences of those who exist outside said Empire, is that an impurity is a flaw in one’s body, expelled through supernatural means. A bone, healed improperly, an old micro-tear, a scar, all gradually being turned to a sort of sludge-like material that is rejected by the saintly presence of a higher realm of cultivation, which inherently purifies and improves the body. 

I’m sure this is at least partially true. I’ve experienced it myself, obviously, and there are some physical defects that have been removed from me by the process, but how do we define a defect? Is there some supposed perfect human form that pushes back against any variation of itself? Are our bodies pre-programmed with a single true ideal? It seems improbable, given the nature of ever-changing biology, evolution, cross-breeding with Spiritual Beasts and techniques which influence one’s anatomy and structure both. So what, then, defines a defect? And how do defects define impurities, if at all?

What do you think, reader? Any input?

–Current Writing of Titan-Philosopher Tao Zudong, post-quarantine by the Fool Of Fools Emperor Of Emperors, currently traveling home.

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Fuuuucking hells, but it’s stressful to be Raika. And fulfilling! Raika wouldn’t trade it for anything! But fuck almighty, it is exhausting sometimes. 

Just hearing Pillar’s updates and the schemes it’s spawning inside the rest of her is enough to convince her that she’s had quite enough of that for a moment, thank you muchly. The southern edge of the world is full of brain-dead serpents infused with a level of Dao that borders on the impossible, and the thing behind those snakes wants some help. 

The sun. Begging for help from out of the mind of a mindless thing. Begging from out of all those screaming mouths. 

Raika’s abilities are notable, even in her “base” form. She avoids looking at the sun for now, aware of how her eyes will be able to catch sight of some of its writhing. And now, knowing what she knows, that writhing is deeply uncomfortable to watch. 

They’re crying up there. All those wyrms. Sentient, all of them, and all of them screaming and crying and fucking and eating each other until they touch the ground again, until something drags them back north to do it all again. It’s… it’s a sort of misery that’s hard to picture, and harder to hold onto. The mind doesn’t want to hold on to misery like that. It’s too much for even a well-adjusted mind to handle, holding such a thing so constantly, and Raika’s only barely reached the same field-length of space as “well-adjusted”. 

But it goes on the pile. 

She groans, then, rolling her eyes. She’s going to have to go north now too, isn’t she?

“Master?” 

“It’s… well, it’s not nothing, kid, but not something I want to talk about right now.”

Geng He nods, letting it lie rather than pushing it. Wei Zin shoots him a look of surprise at that, but then shrugs it off. 

The three of them are seated around a little firepit, dug into the hillside behind Raika’s cabin and before their own little manse-place. Each of them holds their own cup of a beverage, though each one has quite different tastes to their drinks. 

Geng He has a kind of watered-down rice wine mixed with bits of berries, something that the local fishermen tend to indulge in after a long day of work. Wei Zin has an artful cup of tea, the kettle over the fire completely full of a seemingly random variety of greenery that somehow blends into a truly unique flavor. 

Raika’s got mud. 

It’s not technically just mud, obviously. But it does have dirt in it. High quality dirt, sifted herself. And ground up bits of seeds. And a bunch of goat’s milk, and a chunk of spiced bark, and some tea leaves. It is unfathomably inedible to anyone without a competent constitution, and palatable only to her personally. It is also, in its own way, totally delicious. Rich and earthy and bitter and kinda vaguely umami-flavored, all at the same time, with just hints of sweetness and herbal notes. Delicious. She will keep the recipe a secret from Jin for all time. 

“How was fishing?” she asks.

Geng He snorts, shaking his head. “Harder than it looks. Most of the fish on the upper layers of the lake are so delicate that if I tug too hard the hook comes right back out of them. Or I explode them, which… does technically bring more fish around, if I do it right. But it’s not very helpful.”

“Oh, I see. So you need to practice patience, and control, and restraint when acting. Wow. That’s so fascinating.” 

“Master, no one likes it when someone brags about themselves.”

“I didn’t even say it yet!” she protests.

“But you sort of did.”

She humphs, then tilts her chin up haughtily to stare down her nose at her formerly roughest student. “Fine then, this humble master shall speak plainly. I told you so.”

He raises his sake in a mild salute to that. 

“It really is impressive how much change you’ve undergone, junior brother,” Wei Zin chimes in. “Much less acidic than you used to be.”

“You’re one to talk,” Geng He replies with a snort. 

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Geng He shrugs, perfectly placid. “Just that all that prim-and-proper haughtiness bled out of you. I’ve seen you training with that spear, and you’re carrying it with you, even when it’s not in your hands. More direct.”

Wei Zin grunts in a very un-princely action, taking a delicate sip of his tea. “Well, it… has been a bit freeing, not having to watch my words quite so fastidiously.”

“‘Fastidiously’. Who talks like that?”

Wei Zin kicks a pebble of charred wood at Geng He’s head, where it’s promptly dodged without Geng He ever turning to look at it.

And, Raika notices, without him hearing it coming, either. Wei Zin’s really getting competent with blending stealth and explosive action together. 

“Hey, you’re getting better at that.” Raika mentions.

Geng He raises an eyebrow at her, turning himself so he’s seated facing her more directly. “Oh? Am I, master? Perhaps you might have some stirring insights on my continued developments?”

She shrugs. “I probably would, if you ever asked me.”

He blinks at that. Opens his mouth to speak, then shuts it again. Then opens it again.

“You explicitly forbade any form of cultivation! Why would I assume that I should be asking you for cultivation advice!”

“Well this isn’t cultivation. Nor is it using Qi outside yourself. It’s just a technique. Nothing wrong with that.”

A vein twitches on Geng He’s forehead, and for a moment, she thinks he’s going to explode again. 

Instead, he stops. Takes in a deep breath, then another, then a third. By the third, she can taste how some of his thoughts have settled, presenting the recent happenings in a new light, one that doesn’t require reprisal or rage. Still, he takes a sip of his sake before refilling the shallow cup from his gourd before he speaks again. 

“So… using Qi inside myself is fine?”

Raika shrugs. “Yeah, mostly. I mean, Qi is sort of how people work once you get strong enough. Wei Zin’s muscle fibers are all natural, but you don’t see any Qi-Gathering cultivators dashing through the woods as fast as him. And Chen Tai literally shapeshifts into a human body all the time. Technically you’d still be breaking the rules if you, like, started throwing rocks at houses or carving up the landscape a bunch, but that’s more about the spirit of things than the letter. I explicitly never forgave techniques or insights, just forbade you from cultivating and expressing that cultivation onto the world around you. It’s always been a flimsy barrier, or I’d have also told you all to weaken yourselves to mortal levels, which would’ve been way harder.”

“Alright, but… I mean practicing swordfighting and learning to predict things aren’t…”

He pauses mid-sentence, puzzling out what he just said. 

“Alright, so maybe they are sort of the same thing, but I wasn’t using sword-Qi when we fought. And that punch you did, that wasn’t with Qi either, so…”

Raika shrugs again, a bit more heavily and dramatically this time as she slurps at her cup o’ mud. “Yeah, well, if you’d just sat down in a corner somewhere and started doing nothing but testing out dream-Qi techniques then that would’ve broken the spirit of it too. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but as a master and teacher I’m pretty free-form.”

Wei Zin snorts again, just as uncouthly as before. “That is an under-exaggeration, master.”

She waves a hand at the comment. “Yeah, probably. But most of you have had nothing but demands and strict guidelines so far, both within and without. Except Chen Tai, but for her, these are the strict guidelines. And my results speak for themselves.”

“Did you even intend for me to start fishing? Or was that just a coincidence?”

“Oh, total coincidence,” she nods. “I had nothing to do with that. If you didn’t find a hobby for yourself after a while I was just going to start suggesting things at you until we found something you liked, though, so it’s better that you found it for yourself.”

Geng He sighs, slouching down against the hillside, laying on the grass. For a while, the crackling of the fire is the loudest sound between them, filling the dusky evening. 

“Well, master, how do you recommend I improve my use of dream-Qi?” Geng He eventually asks. 

Raika smiles, taking a big slurp of her mud. There’s Geng He. He might be calmer than before, but when she hints at a path forward, he takes it. Daring, this junior.

“You’re on the right track,” she tells him. “Your cultivation doesn’t include enough of a dream component to affect most others in a direct way, and you’re much too early to try blending things inorganically. Using dreams to modify yourself is, I think, the intent behind the method you’ve found. I’ve read your manual, and it’s clearly written by someone with more ideas than theory and more theory than practice, but it’s evolved since you’ve had it, so I think you should stop relying on it as much. Instead of pursuing fusion, you’re looking for synergy, which provides a lot more versatility right now. Bone-strengthening and formation for defense and tools, force for general mobility and offensive techniques, and light for distractions.

“Beyond that, you’re running it through some inefficient channels. If you swap the bottom three channels, cycle through the upper-upper-far-right-forward meridian in your brain at a low level, and create a more cyclical flow, you should be able to do it faster and more efficiently, and it should help you see other places it could improve. Predicting things with dreams isn’t quite divination, so I would recommend against using it for long-term vision, but the way you’ve been doing it, short bursts for processing other possibilities, is a great direction. Also, if you find that you’ve gone too fast through that, we can discuss letting you start using your light and dream Qi outside your body to work on forming illusions, but I think there are applications there that you’re still missing that work just fine internally.”

Wei Zin and Geng He both stare at her, dead silent. Geng He’s mouth is a little open, and Wei Zin’s face has slipped a bit back into the mask he uses for when he’s surprised or dealing with big scary things. 

Raika takes yet another big hearty slurp from her sludge-drink, sighing in satisfaction. “What? I think about things.”

“Do… do you have notes like that for all of us?” Wei Zin eventually asks.

“Obviously. I’ve literally had multiple brains of mine running perpetual cycles of analysis on each of your techniques and cultivation styles, and they’ll keep up the work when and if we leave and I get more data. I’ve got a couple manual’s worth of ideas for each of you, though obviously I’m keeping them broad enough to just guide, not shackle.”

Geng He hangs his head, slapping a hand over his eyes and groaning.

“I thought you were just– isn’t the whole point of this to not be doing that? Or is that just for students?”

“I like to lead by example, so no, it’s not just for students. I am really here, really experiencing this place, really being a part of this moment. I just have more instances of myself than you do, and they’re not all here drinking mud and relaxing.”

“So you admit that it’s mud?” Wei Zin interrupts, sitting upright.

“Yummy delicious mud,” Raika nods, utterly unashamed. 

Wei Zin chokes on whatever he wants to say in response, buying her another moment of monologue.

“But yes, Geng He. The point of you being here is that I’m responsible for large chunks of how you’ve changed, and that you of all my kids needed to unwind a bit. Coiled so tight you were going to snap, which is fine if that’s what you choose to do, but I thought we could do better. You’ve proven me right.”

A brief glow of joy flushes through his neurons at that last statement, though he keeps his expression the same and does an admirable job of hiding it. Raika’s just much too good at looking for things. Sometimes too good for her own good. 

Then again, it doesn’t take supernatural senses to tell how starved for positive affirmation Geng He’s been throughout his life. Poor guy would probably combust if anyone ever told him he did a good job. Or try to punch them. Though maybe not anymore, given how much this time to decompress has changed him. 

That always sits with her, when she thinks about it. A few months of peace is enough to change someone so totally. Geng He isn’t even in his mid-thirties, and if he stopped cultivating forever right this second, he’d likely have a few centuries of life ahead of him. And yet, the stories of cultivators actually changing as people are… rare. How many of them, she wonders, simply fall into themselves? Into habits formed decades and centuries ago, mindsets long ago pre-shaped, and never find themselves challenged enough to change?

And does cultivation allow that sort of change? When so much of a person’s power is based on their ideals and convictions, what value is there in changing them, save if one wishes to cultivate heart demons or lose themselves. 

It tickles at a thought she’s had for a while, about how impurities work. Why the Empire doesn’t really have them, except when it does, like all the way back in her very first tribulation, when she advanced in a way that doesn’t fit conventional metrics. That didn’t really require the sort of psychological and philosophical insights usually demanded by that sort of thing. 

The question of why the Empire doesn’t have impurities has haunted her for a while, because it’s clearly an effect of the Emperor’s domain, reaching all the way to the Wall and changing things. But how much, and in how many ways? She still doesn’t know. 

She sighs, sipping mud and letting the thought drift. It’ll come up, probably sooner than later. Chen Tai’s about to advance, after all. It’ll be nice to compare, though if it starts negatively affecting her disciple, she’s ready to instantaneously transport her out from under the Emperor’s gaze.

The chill of the evening air nips at the fireplace as two of her students wrestle with the many implications and revelations she’s just left them with. It’s getting a bit chilly, bit by bit. This far south of the central eastern line, it’s not exactly going to be cold cold, but it’s another clear sign of the coming winter. And with it, the approaching Founding Day of the Empire, and the planned invasion at that time. 

She’s damn near ready for it, this time. No more going in half-cocked and improvising her way through the problems, now, she has the tools to build with to begin with. All the other parts of her are hard at work in their own ways, and in her own way, so is she, reminding them of things at the ground level, sharing memories and experiences, and looking out for some of the people they’re most responsible for. 

And preparing them. If they choose to go to war. 

And she knows, deeply and hatefully, that they will. Because they’re good kids, with firm beliefs and someone they want to follow. 

“Do you… have some notes on me that you would like to share, master?” Wei Zin asks, interrupting her thoughts. 

“Sure I do. Want to hear them?”

“Very much so.”

She sighs, taking one last drink of her mud. It’s thick, the dregs of it having turned to goop, and goes down nice and smooth. 

It’s the right decision, preparing them. She can’t, or shouldn’t, keep them here, in this little village where they’re allowed to be real people and still untouchable gods. But they want to be prepared. They want to grow. Who is she to deny them that?

“Alright, spear-boy, listen up–”