The Magistrate: Chapter 53 (Patreon)

Chapter 53

Mountain Tea

Tobias sat in his grandfather's glasshouse, examining the young tea plants and seedlings the old man was raising despite the snow sitting outside. Formations covered the walls of the glasshouse, holding in the heat and preventing the cold from entering. It was an expensive luxury, but Tobias didn't mind the expense. This was his grandfather's passion and the future of their family.

With much of the family working as gatherers or undergoing weapons training, his grandpa was working alone. Tobias stopped beside a sickly-looking Three Towns Tea plant. It was in a beautiful pot but looked like it was dying. Tobias raised his hand to the plant and closed his eyes, drawing on the chi within him and creating a link between himself and the plant.

His grandfather slapped his hand away. "Stop that."

Tobias opened his eyes. "I was trying to see what the problem is?"

"I know what the problem is. Your brother already asked one of the sect gatherers to help."

"What did they tell you?"

"The air is too thin."

Tobias had to agree. He'd only connected with the plant briefly, but he could tell that it was starving for carbon dioxide. The percentage in the air was still the same, but the air pressure was so low that it couldn't pull in enough.

Tobias looked around, found a small scrap of wood and summoned it to his hand with chi. The wood floated above his palm for a few seconds before bursting into flames.

His grandfather frowned. "What are you doing?"

"I'm changing the air so your plants can get what they need to survive."

"What are you talking about?"

"Plants feed through their leaves as much as they feed through their roots."

"How do you know that?"

Tobias pointed to the plant in the pot. "If you weigh the soil before you plant something in there and then leave it for a few years, the plant and the soil will become heavier."

His grandfather nodded. "I know that."

"Where do you think the extra weight comes from?"

"Water."

"No. It's the air."

"How can you be sure about that?"

Tobias could have told him this was common knowledge in his previous life, but there was a perfectly serviceable answer in this world. "The plants told me."

"You can speak with plants."

"You could too if you practised the techniques in the manuscript I gave to you."

"I don't see the point."

Tobias rolled his eyes and raised his hand towards the sickly tea plant. He changed his breathing, drawing upon the chi in his body and wove it into a technique, feeding it into the tea plant before him. Before his grandfather's eyes, the sickly plant began to regain its colour and vigour, growing several inches in the process.

The transformation had stripped the carbon dioxide from the air. It would have done the same for water with its roots, but Tobias had been drawing water into it while it grew.

Tobias smiled at his grandfather. "You may not have any interest in being a cultivator, but you'll be much more effective at producing tea if you learn a few of their tricks."

His grandfather scowled. "It feels like cheating."

"Do you consider it cheating when a young man has a strong back?"

"That's different."

"Is it?"

His grandpa smiled. "Probably."

Tobias chuckled. "Read the manuscript I gave to you."

His grandfather leaned closer and examined the plant. "Fine." He ran the leaves between his fingers. "Something's wrong."

"Healing it and accelerating its growth has stressed the plant. It will make a truly disgusting cup of tea until it recovers."

"How long will that take?"

"It should recover by Summer."

"A lot of effort for something we can't use."

"I could grow it to full maturity, and it would still only take a few seasons to recover."

His grandfather perked up. "How long will that take you?"

"Not long. Why?"

"We could be here for several years. It seems wise to have a source of decent tea on hand if that's the case."

"You'll lose your glasshouse and your ability to experiment."

"Nothing I grow here lives long enough to matter."

"Only because you haven't studied the manuscripts that I gave to you. I know of techniques that will allow you to raise tiny plants that retain their potential. When you plant them in the ground, they will grow a season for every day that passes. I know other techniques that will allow you to refine their bloodlines, or their bloodline equivalent, to produce better specimens. There is a lot you can do here."

His grandfather walked over to the nearby stool and sat down. "And then what?"

"And then you learn everything you can about Three Towns Tea. So that when you go home, you're ready to produce the best tea in the empire."

"I'll consider it. How are your new disciples coming along?"

Nearly everyone Tobias had contacted had written back, saying they wished to become his disciple. The rest hadn't bothered to write back. Instead, they had uprooted their family and travelled across the country, arriving at his doorstep with their letter in hand. There were eighty-two disciples currently undergoing their one-hundred-day trial period, but Tobias had already worked out that only nine of them were close to his equal in talent.

"I've worked out that those with a divinity of one have a minimum cultivation talent of seven," Tobias replied. "Without that talent, I don't think it's possible to survive childhood illness. Even with it, they grow up sickly. A cultivation talent of eight seems to be the minimum to live a healthy life, but it still stunts their growth like it did mine."

"I don't remember seeing many healthy people among your disciples."

"There are nine that were as healthy as I was growing up. They'll be allowed to become my disciples. I'm considering turning the rest into guards."

"But they're sickly."

"They're sickly now. Improving their cultivation will fix that. They also have a minimum talent of seven, which means they have more cultivation talent than four out of five disciples who join a sect. They also might have more potential than I'm currently aware of, so sending them away seems foolish."

"Why not have them train with the family now?"

"They're helping me understand more about those with low divinity and cultivators in general."

His grandfather suddenly frowned. "Have you worked out that thing that was bothering you?"

"There are a lot of things bothering me. You will need to be more specific."

"You said something about you losing your divinity being the reason Lingling was a cultivator."

"That's still an assumption. I'm not sure how I will prove that without giving stomach meridian opening pills to the families of every disciple who joins a sect."

"Those are hard to come by, I hear."

Tobias shook his head. "Not as hard as you would think. Our family has received a lot of cuttings, sprouts, and seeds because of all the work we've been doing. We already have enough spirit herbs that in a few years we'll be able to make hundreds of pills each year."

"That's a long time in a war."

Tobias shrugged. "It's better than I'd hoped for, given the situation."

"I heard the war isn't going so well for our side."

"It's going better than most people think."

"How do you know?"

"Xu Feng has the widest information-gathering network of anyone outside the Great Clans. The reason it sounds like it's going poorly is that the 3rd Emperor is specifically targeting the Wei Clan's army, hoping to divide the Great Clans. The Wei Clan has been given the majority of the pills Cloud City produced this year to compensate for their losses."

His grandfather sighed. "Have you heard back from Cultivator Plum?"

"Not yet, but he's unlikely to change his standards even with me offering to help him with his cultivation."

"Why do you say that?"

"Because I wouldn't change my standards if I were him. The only reason I sent the letter was that Lingling refused to begin studying until I did."

"So, she'll have to reach the foundation realm to follow her dreams."

"It won't take her long."

"She told me she's years away."

"Most of that time will be spent waiting for her body and mind to finish growing."

"How's your own cultivation progress coming along?"

Tobias shrugged. "I've made little progress when it comes to understanding the core realm and dao. I understand the theory, but I don't know how to put it into practice. Part of my problem is that the sect libraries are so vast that I've barely made a dent in them. Many of the manuscripts aren't worth the paper they're written on, but I have to read them to find out. However, my practical skills are growing quickly, but I'm reaching the end of what I can do."

"You said you were exceptionally talented."

"I am, but many techniques require a minimum amount of chi to perform, and I can't expand or strengthen my energy meridians without more pills."

"I understood very little of what you just said."

Tobias held out his hand and conjured a small ball of flames. "Imagine this technique as a baby. As a baby, it doesn't need much food to live and grow. That food is the equivalent of chi for this technique. If I wanted to make these flames the size of my head, that would be more like a small child than a baby and a small child requires more food."

His grandfather nodded. "You can't water a field with a bucket."

"Exactly. There are things I can do with my chi, but if something requires more, I can't do it, and I'm quickly running out of things I can do that don't require more."

"Isn't your divinity high enough to cultivate now?"

"It would be if I were still a mortal who had to open and cleanse meridians, but expanding and strengthening body meridians requires a minimum of four divinity, energy meridians require five. The progress I can make is far too little considering how time-consuming it would be to achieve those results."

"It's reassuring to know that cultivators are so limited. When I see them flying over the city on their swords, I can't help but think they're gods."

Tobias smiled. "I'm sure many of them think the same, but numbers don't lie."