Sky Pride

Chapter 15- What is seen is inexplicable

It took six hours for Tian to absorb the ointment, according to Liren. It took him another twelve hours before he was even somewhat conscious, and another week to return to full self awareness. Tian had to take her word for it. That seemed like a long time, but everything was very confusing right now. Sometimes scary, almost always beautiful, but very confusing. The world had changed, and he wasn’t entirely sure why, or even how.

The wolf spirit was very beautiful. It was a bit hard to put into words, but he tried to tell Liren anyhow.

“It is as it should be and is becoming what should be becoming the light right defused in the light reflecting dawn on fur shining dew chewing out burrs taste of fresh blood and organs and the crunch of little bones while it dances in the light of the forests that sway in the space between shadow and light.”

He felt he really couldn’t be any plainer than that, but the sunlight part-person tilted its head to the side, and no amount of strangeness would stop him from understanding that set of the shoulders and angle of the neck. The sunlight sometimes something was Liren, and she didn’t understand, but was humoring him. He sighed. He really didn’t know how to say it any clearer than that. It was a cute wolf cub that was also a spirit. Wasn’t that clear? To whom could that even be a mystery?

Or their cave home. “Treasure, glory, heartlight geode wrapped in grey flesh, the wheel turns to contentment, joy comes and dissipates, anger and sorrow dance with butterfly wings, scattering poison, but soft winds dissipate it all, returning to lukewarm water inescapable as the night sing joyful the flowers of the purity and muck that seek to stretch between heaven and earth, always turning, always given meaning and never revealing their own, sweet rice and sour pickles, chewy snake and savory oil with the bite of brambles and buckthorn delicious poison finished with fine rocks.”

He put his whole love in his gaze, and tried to find her eyes. “One day this will be put in my pocket, and my other half and I will never leave home, no matter how far we fly on white wings or how empty the blue sea of the sky which rests in the cup of stars, attended by jade rabbit and burning crow. What should I bring your ancestors as a gift?”

“You are never going to let that go, are you?”

“What a joy when birds flock together, except when they eat your grain.”

The shape that was sometimes his beloved and sometimes something made of forged sunbeams with wheels of fire near its ankles sighed and shook her head. “Yeah. Except then.”

He smiled and tried to catch her hand. He missed a few times, because he was grabbing at sunlight not the hidden shadow, but she reached out and gently took his. “What sadness? This little bird chose to flock to me. I can be a pond for her, or a rock to roost upon, or a forest to feed her, or steel to sharpen her. I can even be the light and warmth that guides and warms her.”

“And her? What is she to be to you?”

This time it was Tian’s turn to tilt his head. “What a very odd question. Are you feeling alright?”

As time passed, he started to understand that he was seeing two things at the same time, and while they were both, in some sense, always there, they were not always there at the same time. Or, perhaps, they were always there at the same time but not in the same ways. There was surely some reason behind it, but it was a struggle to even pin down what “it” was. Sometimes a rock was just a rock. Sometimes it was a root. Sometimes it was a rock that was going to be a root, or a root that would become a rock, maybe, or a root that was a rock on the inside, somehow, perhaps, or a rock that would grow into a root.

There were, unsurprisingly, many rocks on the mountain. Somewhat more surprisingly was that the rocks were all very different. There was a boulder just a short flight from their house, quite large and oddly shaped. Much wider and flatter than the word boulder would suggest, there was a certain inescapable blobbyness to it, a certain unfortunate lumpiness that immediately obliterated any aesthetic qualities it might possibly have deserved as a lone boulder resting in the rich forests of a magic mountain.

Tian, naturally, fell in love with it at first sight.

“What a beautiful flock of sheep! Just the thing to eat the grass outside of our house!”

It had to be flown in through the gap in the roof. Burning Heaven turned giant and gently extended her claw through the hole, setting the rock down in a plant-free corner of the cave.

“I guess that’s roughly the size of six sheep, huddled together tightly.” Liren muttered.

“Exactly. It’s six sheep huddled together. I always said you have better eyes than me.” Tian nodded.

“I am quite certain I don’t. Not at this point.”

“Oh? Did something happen to your eyes? Can I help?” Tian asked.

“No, my eyes are fine. Look at this for me, please?” She held up a pair of shears. They were a dull iron color, black without shine. They were also uncommonly sharp. Just looking at them made Tian feel like his fingers were in danger of being snipped away.

“Cruel cutters. Sharp enough to cut away a shadow.”

“Heh. I wonder… actually, could you do that?”

“When did I ever lie?” Tian said, righteously.

“Every time you ever discussed your personal wealth?”

“A mouse doesn’t lie when he hides under a log, nor a stick bug leaning on a branch. It was merely protective coloration.”

“Mmhmmm, yes. Certainly. Those are all words you used, I’d know them anywhere.”

“I have on at least one occasion said that you are very smart!” Tian nodded, smiling bright and true.

“Yes indeed, this is certainly good for training my dao heart. All this… great training.”

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“Incidentally, sis, what’s with the broken sky that keeps peeking at us?”

“Broken Sky?”

“Yeah, right there” Tian pointed upwards. “I’d give it a poke if I could.” He gave the shears a speculative look. “Maybe I could. But that seems… wrong. Cruel.”

“What do you mean, broken? How can a sky be broken?”

“When it’s not complete, and it’s not complete because it got broken?” Tian shrugged. “I don’t know how to explain it. It just looks like part of the sky. And it’s broken.”

“Ah… maybe it’s Master checking up on you?”

“I guess?” Tian frowned. “We should get her a rug or something.”

“Eh?” Liren rubbed her head. “Doesn’t she already have one?”

“She has a prayer mat, not a rug. She’s not a stalagmite. She needs to grow from human cloth.”

“Hey, you know she isn’t a stalactite, that’s progress!” Liren’s voice was filled with forced cheer.

“Of course she isn’t a stalactite. Those grow from the ceiling. She’s planted on the floor. And she isn’t growing. She should be, but she isn’t. I’m not saying a rug would fix her, but it definitely wouldn’t hurt.” He paused, then frowned. He sat hard, raising a small cloud of dirt as he did. The frown intensified. He rubbed his knuckles hard on his white hair, then pulled on it a few times, as though he could yank out answers to the problem that vexed him. After three minutes of intense concentration, he slapped his knee and beamed at Liren.

“A cushion! She needs a good rug, and a nice cushion for her back. Nothing silk, mind you. It wouldn’t hold up in a cave. Would you kindly ask a crafter to make me a good cushion to recline on, and a cover for it made of hemp? That’s what our master needs. A nice lively green hemp, and maybe a few embroidered flowers on it. Like a nice meadow to lie down on.”

At the end of seven days, when he could be reasonably trusted to drink his soup rather than argue with it, he was summoned with Liren to Cruel Treachery’s cave. The cushion hadn’t arrived yet, but not all was lost.

“Thank you for your care, Master. My body’s condition is outstanding, and whatever the vision is that I unlocked, I seem to be slowly getting the hang of it.”

“Not completely, I see.”

“No, there is a long way to go.”

“Indeed. Is there any reason you are speaking to a point three feet above my head?”

“Well, that’s where you are… aren’t you?”

Cruel Treachery’s face was unchanging, but he still got the impression of a funny little smile. “In a manner of speaking, perhaps.” She let the silence pool for a moment, then pressed on. “You have achieved a vanishingly rare feat, one I have heard of occurring exceedingly rarely outside the Wasteland of Song, and is unprecedented within it. You have achieved a transcendent body while still within the imperfect human realm. I have usually heard it referred to as a saint body, sanctified physique, deathless, incorruptable, words like that. I won’t pretend to have any special status outside the wasteland. My cultivation and connections were and are simply too shallow to come in contact with the truth behind such stories. Such fifth hand rumors are the best information I can give you.”

“I appreciate whatever insight you can provide. Do the stories explain anything about the changes in my vision?”

“No, not at all. In fact, the double pupil phenomenon is not mentioned at all, which leads me to believe that it was something that was occurring in your body before the Earth Milk forced it into prominence.”

“Yes, I absorbed a great deal of a giant wolf spirit. It fueled my body cultivation art. I believe the change has its origin there.”

“Really? Feeling any particularly canine traits coming on?”

“I don’t believe so.” Tian smiled, helpless, but what else could he say?

“I’ve never seen a wolf with two pupils in each eye either, so perhaps it has more to do with that… curious statue in your belly. But since I was the one who created the rule about not coveting a disciple’s fortuitous encounter, I shan’t ask about it. Nor do I want you to tell me, you understand?”

“Yes, Master.”

“The myths about the advantages of such a perfected body are many, and often contradictory. You should be, I believe, immune to disease, and any curse that affected you would have to be in the perfected human realm or above. Spells in general will struggle to work on you, I suspect, or at least the harmful ones. Your ability to heal will be phenomenal, and your resistance to fire and water will be equally extraordinary. ‘Impervious to both blades and arrows’ is another phrase that gets used often, but that’s pretty normal for any half way decent cultivation art. It’s only ever true up to a point anyhow.”

Tian and Liren both nodded at that.

“All of which is… simply ephemera. If this was the limit, it would be unworthy for such a supreme treasure as Earth Milk.”

It would? It seemed pretty incredible already, but he supposed his body could already do most of those things.

“Taking a step back a moment, let us speak about another common phrase- ‘Heaven, Earth and Human.” Cruel Treachery’s mental voice settled into a teacherly cadence. “It suggests there are three separate things, and the imperfect human realm is divided cleanly into those three phases, and we divide them yet further into sub-realms. Level One of the Earthly Realm, Level Two of the Earthly Realm, and so on.”

“How are the Heavenly Realms divided?” Liren asked.

“Can this bastard kill me before I can kill him?” Cruel Treachery’s voice went utterly dry. “It’s a mad sprint to accumulate resources and understanding enough about shen to make the ascension to the Human realm possible. What use would chopping it up be? Some of the more… basic… Heavenly Realm cultivators do divide the realm up into tenths, same as they do for the Earthly Realm. It’s sheer ignorance. The Earthly Realm is nine transformations. At best, dividing the Heavenly Realm is estimations on how far someone has filled a bucket. What makes it even more worthless is that they never ask if all the buckets are the same size.” She didn’t wave the question away, but it felt like she did.

“The Human Realm does have its subdivisions, but that isn’t relevant right now. The point I want you to focus on is that humans break big things into little things, because little things we can manage. We can understand a little thing. If we do enough little things, we achieve something big. If someone wanted to dig away a mountain, they would do it one shovel at a time, one boulder, ridge, outcrop at a time. But it’s all one mountain.”

“Understood.” Tian nodded.

“There is no heavens, no earth, no human. There is no mortal world, no Diyu, no Celestial Court. No sun, no moon, no earth, no mother, no father, no master, no disciple, no you, no me, There is not even no or yes, nor is there negation or affirmation, nor is there existence or non-existence. There is only the dao. The Great Dao, singular, unified, always changing yet eternal, existing within and without the very concept of time itself.”

“We just break it up into smaller pieces, to better understand it.” Liren tapped her fist into her hand, nodding slightly.

“Yes. We say the Heavens are heartless, treating the ten thousand things as straw dogs. To the ignorant, it sounds as though we are calling the heavens cruel. But there are no heavens, and if the ancients meant ‘cruel’ they would have written ‘cruel.’ They wrote ‘heartless.’ The distinction matters. The Great Dao is uncairing. It simply is. It is a pattern, a cycle, a thing with seasons and rules. Rules we can learn and accommodate ourselves to. Your body has reached an unprecedented depth of harmony with those rules, far in advance of your cultivation.”

Her eyes blazed like a summer sky at noon. “Dao Body. That’s the other name they call it. Dao Body. The most perfect foundation imaginable for both mastering arts in the lower realms, and when it comes time to ascend to the perfected mortal realm, one third of your foundation will be utterly, utterly perfect. You are, I believe, impervious to old age. At least as far as the weakening and dissolution of your body is concerned. The mind and soul, I cannot say. Well done, disciple. Well done. Your future will be limitless. So long as you don’t die along the way, of course.”