Sky Pride

Chapter 16 A World of Wonders, Hitherto Ignored

Days passed in an undifferentiated stream, each with their small troubles and triumphs, the flowing days washing away the boulder of the Heavenly Realm. Earthly matters did have a way of making themselves known, however. One day, a crane flew up with a message. The Wang children had been born- two fine, healthy sons, arriving within hours of each other.

“Huh. They really did it.” Tian shook his head, marveling at his friend’s achievement. Su and Ming had made a pact- since they were pretty sure the kids had been conceived on the same night, they wanted them born on the same day. When one went into labor, the other would take some medicine to trigger their own labor. The babies had developed far enough that it wasn’t dangerous, their mothers had more than enough vital energy, and the mountain’s nourishment counted for a great deal. Medically, it was reasonable. Logistically, it was tidy.

Sister Mei, who had much younger siblings, a passing familiarity with babies, and a smidgen of knowledge about first time mothers, had worn out her tongue trying to argue against it. The failures of lessers and mortals wasn’t enough to move Sister Su. Having both children born on the same day was orderly, and therefore it would happen.

Brother Wang made it a week before begging Tian for drugs that could compel an infant to sleep through the night, or keep a man awake and refreshed throughout the day. Both, naturally, without side effects. Tian sighed, and offered a cup of tea. It was the best he could do. This too, he assured Wang, would pass. All things do, so he reckoned he was on safe ground there.

Cultivation had taken on an odd tension for Tian. The arts and spells were flowing much more easily, now, his slowly developing palm art was coming along very well, and his staff art saw notable improvements every time he practiced. More worrying was when he started practicing, just for reference, some staff or palm arts he found in the scripture pavilion. He picked them up very, very quickly… sort of. It wasn’t that the author’s gibberish suddenly became more comprehensible. He just had an intuitive sense of what they were getting at rather than what they actually said, even if the creator didn’t know that’s what they really meant.

“Are you sure?” Liren asked. “Bold to assume they didn’t know.”

“They didn’t, or why would a man describe a striking snake when he described the winds of the second week of autumn in hill country?”

“Odd way to describe a palm art, either way.”

Tian stood, dressed once more in his shabby white robes, hair floating loose around his shoulders. He bent his knees slightly and started flowing. His palms trailed through the air, shoulders, hips and knees all moving seemingly independent of each other. Strikes appeared and vanished without warning, sudden cold and hard moments in the soft ease of the rest of the stance.

“Huh. I kind of get it. Useful art?”

“No, not really. It seems highly vulnerable to a sharp kick to the balls, to be honest, and that front knee is way, way too far out. It’s just something else to learn, another bunch of possibly useful materials to sift through.”

His main cultivation arts were a different story. They were exactly as advertised. It was just that Tian had never seen an ocean or really had any concept of what a cosmos tree might look like beyond “a tree, but bigger.” Even the sky was a much, much greater, more complicated thing than he gave it credit for being. Liren was kept very busy making sure he ate, and that he was able to find his way back to the tangible world. It was weeks before he could safely manage on his own.

Once he did, however, it was like these precious arts and spells were no different than ordinary breathing. Everything flowed. It didn’t grant instant success, but things that might have taken months to understand now took days or even hours. With understanding came improved visualization, and with improved visualization came improved efficiency.

The Sky Treading Art was all about qi like the sky, and shen like the sun and moon. Tian had some real questions about that, given that the sun and the moon were two different things and shen was supposed to be one thing. Master Treachery gave him a remarkably patient look with her sky blue eyes and explained that they weren’t real, they were a visual metaphor for something that was very real- the qi that filled their energy body. Yes, “the sky” didn’t overlap with the body particularly well, but since the energy body was enveloping the physical body, it was good enough.

Tian had the distinct impression that “Good enough” was her way of saying “It’s been extremely effective for top-tier experts in the Wasteland of Song for tens of thousands of years,” which was fair. There was a charm to it that the Darknorth Sea Spell didn’t have. The idea, according to Master Treachery, was to capture different parts of the day starting with the dawn. You were building that little piece of the sky inside of you. Then you got the early morning, mid morning, late morning, and so on until sunset and you started refining more yin aspected qi. Capturing the different colors of the night, the endless glory of the stars, tracking the phases of the moon and the wanderings of the planets. Until the dawn rose again.

Creating all the skies was the second to last step. Setting them in motion was the final one. To display complete mastery of the art, you had to set it in motion. Yin-yang revolution, the cycle churning and refining, condensing the seed of shen within. Hence the sun and moon. In either day or night, they were the primary source of illumination.

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It was at dawn, on the fifth day of the third month of their year on the mountain when Tian managed to establish an initial proficiency with the Sky Treading Art. Now, somewhere around him, somehow attached to his energy body, was a patch of dawn sky.

Liren had managed it a week before he did. Her existing body refinement and qi refinement arts were all built around suns, so it wasn’t too hard to make the extension to the rest of the sky. Or so she claimed, it all sounded a bit fishy to Tian. She still got uncomfortable out in the wide open, and when they flew, she tended to fidget with something.

“It’s why I like taking the boat out so much. I can lose myself in rowing and cycling the art. It feels good. Like I’m guiding the boat into magical rivers in the sky that only those who can fly know about. Hidden rivers in the air.”

“I think Burning Heaven mentioned something about that.” Tian tapped his lip. “If you get up high enough, there are winds that blow pretty steadily in the same directions, making rivers in the air.”

“Yeah, exactly.” Liren nodded. “I have my big hat on, so the horizon isn’t too far away, my hands are working, my breath is engaged, my mind is busy with meditation, and I’m not suddenly falling upward into endless emptiness where I have no control and can’t touch anything. I’m on a boat. In a river. A magical river, and I have a magic boat and a magic spell that lets me find it and navigate it, and then I have my man smiling like the moon while gasping at all the things he’s seeing, reading, making tea, playing the flute, and just clearly having the best time for days on end.”

Tian met her smile with his own. “It is one of my very favorite things.”

Tian tried to explain what he was feeling inside of him. It wasn’t easy. “The cosmos tree from Verdant Spring is getting hit with the first rays of dawn. It had been getting watered by the big ocean around it… well, the puddle around it, from the Darknorth Sea, and now it’s getting both light and water. Better, it’s now growing into something real. The sky is the sky now, not the emptiness where the sky should be.”

“Huh. So is there a little island or something in you?” Liren asked.

“Obviously. Surely there is one inside of you too.” He gave Liren a worried look. She just shook her head.

“No islands here, and there kind of already was a sky. Though in a different way, I guess. The suns I already had inside of me are now rising, rather than being at noon. The power isn’t any less, but the feeling is a little different. Not in a bad way. I think I understand what you mean. The suns had been real, the sky had been imaginary. If it isn’t all imaginary.”

Tian chuckled. Silly Liren. None of it was imaginary. It was all quite real. He touched his chest, feeling the softness of his skin and the unyielding strength of his muscles beneath it. One thing he had noticed was that his cultivation had dramatically sped up. The usual dissipation of vital energy and qi that everyone endured just by living seemed to have stopped entirely. He had a feeling that he would race through the Heavenly Realm. A feeling Grandpa gleefully sabotaged.

You think so? Your energy body is building on the foundation of your physical body. If you had filled one percent of your old energy body before, how much do you think that same amount of energy fills now? There are many reasons Earth Milk is such a precious treasure. I have to assume the local yokels don’t know how to use it properly, or there is no way, simply no way, Threadcutter could have accumulated so much. Well, that and needing divine approval to get the full effect. He was pretty thoroughly jammed up on that one.

On an ordinary morning, Tian sat on the edge of the pond, soaking his feet in the cold water. The lotuses were blossoming in their cave home, adding their charming fragrance to the air as butterflies danced and the newly planted reeds brought sweetness and freshness to the sometimes too-still air of the cavern. A feeling of completeness draped over him, a feeling that something had been nudged into place and settled in with nary a click or thump to announce its achievement.

Liren was picking some bitter greens to garnish breakfast. She had her sleeves tied up, her strong arms stretching out of the blue, the rubbed bronze luster of her skin blazed in the soft sunlight. There was a warmth and a liveliness to it that drew his eyes from wherever they had been resting before, calling his gaze to travel along whatever stretches of exposed skin they could find. She could feel his eyes on her, and in the privacy of their cave, she had grown bolder.

Liren would find reasons for her outer robe to hang on a clothesline, the sleeves of her inner robe tied up while she worked in the garden, or hiked up while she splashed in the pond. She found an endless number of reasons to be stretching or bending over. She was displaying what curves she had, and Tian truly enjoyed them but that wasn’t his favorite thing.

He could see the muscles under her skin, when the light caught it just right. The strength of her was usually more concealed, and every time he caught a glimpse, he felt like he had stolen a secret. Perhaps it was a secret she shared only with him. Both ideas thrilled him, and made him want to see the same hunger in her eyes that lived in his.

Tian found his own ways to tease her. Liren’s face when she came home to find him reclining by the pond, shaded by his orchid umbrella and his robe “carelessly” opened just a bit to reveal part of his chest, would be a treasured memory forever. Her laughing when he tried to do the big flexing poses he remembered his brothers displaying back at the Temple would also be a lifelong memory, in a different way.

He had his revenge when he “accidentally” fell into the pond and came out in his wet inner robes, then sprawled on a rock in the sun to dry off. Since it was hot in the sun, he had to cool himself with a peony decorated fan. The rich pink blossoms spilled over the folds of paper, petals trailing, seeming to land with aching softness on his milk white skin. Liren stared at him, unblinking, for a solid minute, before running into their house with a blush leaping up her neck.

This morning was quiet, filled with gathered energy. Yin had reached its apex, ready to be born in a burst of glorious yang. He exhaled, then inhaled the new sweetness of the world. It was a perfect moment, and Liren looked so beautiful, and he knew he was beautiful in her eyes. He knew his heart was safe with her, and hers safe with him. He stretched out his hand. “I’m ready. Are you?”