After a minute of waiting for Wan to return, I saw the ambassador enter the inn and entered as well. The place looked reasonably large, but couldn’t accommodate all of our people, especially because there were around thirty locals eating, drinking, or playing board games in the dining area. The other inns had food, drinks, and entertainment though, if the men wanted them, though I wasn’t sure if the caravan would pay for any of those expenses or if we would need to pay for our own.
I saw a level one man eating at one of the tables and went over to him. “Do you mind if I join you?” I asked, and he shook his head.
“I don’t mind. I like speaking with outsiders. Especially cultivators.” he said, motioning for me to take a seat.
I nodded and sat down. “Can I buy you a drink?” I asked, pulling a few gemstones from my storage bag.
He shook his head. “I don’t drink until after my shift is over.”
“Oh,” I said, “So you work night shift? What do you do around here?”
“I patrol around the city and outside the wall.”
“Then you are part of the city guard?” I asked. He was wearing some sort of fancy robes with an even fancier tall hat, not armor, and only carried a staff as a weapon, so he didn’t look like I would expect a city guard to look.
“Not exactly. I’m the head priest of the Daoist temple in this town. None of the other guards are truly skilled with magic, though, so if any monsters are found, I have to be around to deal with them. So I help them on patrols just so I’m available to deal with supernatural threats.”
I nodded. “Magic? I heard that your people have a special type of power called magic. Can you explain how it works to me? Is it like qi techniques?”
The man sighed and shook his head. “A similar idea, but much different in practice. To explain it, I need to explain a bit about the difference in daoism and cultivation.” A waitress came over and I ordered some sort of grilled meat and wine for myself. The daoist took another bite of his soup and, once she had left, continued. “Modern cultivation has developed from a mixture of ancient daoist teachings and the original form of cultivation, which focused on increasing one’s personal power. Modern daoism seeks to understand both the world around us and ourselves, so that the two can exist in harmony. While the two aren’t inherently incompatible, as increasing one’s understanding of the natural world and oneself can lead to greater power, and improved power can lead to a greater understanding of nature and oneself, they are largely contradictory. Modern cultivators tend to use whatever they can to get stronger, but ignore the underlying reasons for why things work the way they do. If a simple understanding gained over a week allows them to extract half the benefit of something, they will often be unwilling to spend years or decades learning as much as they could to get the full benefit.”
He finished the soup and ordered a glass of tea from a passing waiter. “This explains the difference in our techniques. We seek to maximize our understanding and skill. They seek to gain the greatest strength. While their techniques use qi, a powerful source of energy, ours use mental strength, a much weaker but more skillful and accurate form of energy.”
“One can effect the outside world without qi?” I asked, confused. If that was possible, surely people on Earth would have been able to do so in the past, and we would know about it.
He smiled and waved his hand at his bowl, and it slid a few centimeters. “Now, as a cultivator, did you sense any use of qi?”
I shook my head. “No, but it was quite subtle. Can I focus on trying to sense qi while you do that again?” He nodded and I amplified all of my senses, focusing on the bowl. I nodded, and he twitched a finger, causing it to slide half a meter. “There wasn’t any change in the qi that I can detect.” I said, “but there was… something. I’m not really sure what it was. It reminded me of the feeling you get when someone else is watching you.”
The man looked surprised. “Quite observant. I’ve demonstrated that to thirty seven different cultivators in the past, and you were one of only two to sense that. It was indeed the same energy that causes you to feel another person’s focus on you. We call that Presence. It is the result of a mind being focused on something. Whenever you think about something, your mind tries to travel there, and if you focus on it enough, it becomes Presence. Through your Presence, you can effect the physical world. Doing so is not easy, however. It takes much training to be able to effect the physical world. Cultivators have a shortcut, though. If one mixes their Presence and mental strength with their qi, then the qi can be manipulated wherever one focuses their mind, thus making it much easier to effect the world. Qi, however, limits what can be done with the mental power. That is why we usually don’t mix them, instead using abilities that only use mental strength, what we call magic.”
I nodded. “Is this also how Buddhist abilities work?”
He shrugged. “Depends on the technique. Cultivation has influenced the Buddhism of the outside world, making it different than the Buddhism here, within Trilon Nation. While Daoism focuses on the development of the mind, the Buddhism here focuses on development of the soul, and our martial arts focus on the development of the body. Thus, here the Buddhists focus on using the power of the soul to perform spiritual effects. In the outside world, most of those techniques are mixed with qi, and just like when one mixes the power of the mind and qi, mixing the power of the soul and qi limits that power.”
I nodded. The waitress returned with my order, and I placed the money on the table. “I’ll pay for his as well.” I said, and she nodded, then told me how much. I added that money as well and she left. When she did, the priest started speaking again.
“I’m sorry.” I said, holding up a hand, “But I couldn’t help but notice that you didn’t seem to want to speak with her. Do the two of you not get along?”
The priest shook his head. “That isn’t it. I have taken a vow not to speak with women for five years, and I am only three years into that.” I gave him a confused look. “The problem is that I get along with women too well.” he said, with a bit of a smile. “I used to be quite the womanizer, and it got me into too much trouble. Not only did it keep me from my pursuit of the dao, but I spent all of my money on them, and even ended up seducing several women that weren’t the type that were free to be seduced. I was forced to leave my home and flee to the capital. There I took refuge in the head Daoist temple, and learned their ways. When I managed to gain the rank of True Daoist, I came to realize that my desire for female companionship was actually a desire for acceptance and love. I took my vow and dedicated my life to protecting the people. When my vow is over I will seek a wife who is also a follower of the Dao, a true dao companion, but for now I will focus on my job and my studies.”
I nodded. “I understand. It is both a means of training self discipline and a way to prevent yourself from falling back into old habits.” He nodded. “In that case, why don’t we change the subject. You mentioned the Trilon Nation. What is that?”
He smiled. “That is the nation you are currently in, the nation which controls all of what outsiders call ‘the mortal valley’.” With a bit of further questioning he explained to me how their government was structured, and how the land was settled. Most people lived along the central river, which flowed from the northern cave to the southern cave, the only two ways into and out of the valley. Many cultivators had sought to fly over the mountain and into the valley, but something in the mountains disrupts the qi inside the flying boats and other craft, causing them to crash. The same happens with flying swords and flying techniques, and the only thing that people know for certain is that it isn’t because of the rapid decrease in qi density.
Along the central river there are dozens of settlements, including the capital city of Trilon, named for the founding king. While the nation is currently a democracy, it only became such when most of the royal family was killed in a coup attempt six hundred years ago, and the surviving fourth prince, knowing nothing about ruling, handed most of his power over to the prime minister and his counsel. Over time more and more of the king’s power was shifted to the national counsel and the local governments, until the king became nothing more than a figure head. At that time, the king gave up the throne and married the daughter of the prime minister, head of one of the largest Daoist noble families, becoming an elder. The role now remains empty and is only a symbol for the nation.
Eventually the man stood up. “Well, it was nice talking to you, but I need to start my patrols.” he said. “I’m Sin Bai,” he said, holding out his hand.
“Li Kev.” I said. “If you would like, I don’t actually need to sleep, and would love to learn more about what threats we might be facing while in the valley, as I’m currently working as a body guard. Do you mind if I go on patrol with you?”
He smiled and nodded. “Very well, I’m willing to continue this discussion as we work.” I nodded and, after telling the ambassador what I would be doing, asked the woman at the front desk to give Jiang a message that I would be out working tonight, so she can have the room to herself. She promised to give her the message and after I gave the woman a small gem stone I went back to the priest. He grabbed his staff, nodded and we left the inn.
The first thing we did was walk down the main street. The temple was at the other end, so we walked by the pleasure house. I could tell that the priest wanted to go inside, as his steps slightly slowed when we were near it, but that his oath prevented him from doing so. While he could easily avoid the area, I suspected he took this path just so that he could fight the urge to give into his base desires. He was essentially poisoning himself to build up an immunity to poisons.
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Eventually we made it to the temple. We entered a small room on the side of it which contained a six by twelve grid of chairs and had shelves of books on the walls. The priest went over to one of the shelves and pulled a book off of it, then handed it to me. “This is an introduction to Daoism book that all of the students study from. It explains the basic tenants and lists several exercises for training the strength of the mind. If you succeed with the last exercise, you will be able to affect the world with just your mental strength, becoming a True Daoist. At that point, I can start to teach you the basic spells.”
I nodded. “How long do you think it will take me to do so?”
The priest shrugged. “It took me almost a year of intense training, but I had already performed the basic training when I was younger, as I also went to a Daoist school as a child.”
“In that case, can I get a copy of the spells to take with me? I’ll be leaving the town tomorrow morning, and the Black Dragon region in a couple of weeks, so I won’t be around for you to teach.”
The priest thought about it and went to a different shelf. He handed me a different book. “This spell just drives spirits away. It can’t really be used for evil, so it’s one of the most commonly taught spells.”
“Exorcism? Interesting. I’ll have to try it once I’m strong enough.” He nodded. “So, how much do I owe you?”
He shook his head. “They are free. We built this school to educate people, and it doesn’t make a difference if you are a child of the village or a traveling cultivator.”
I thanked him and put the books away, and we left, closing up the school behind us. As we walked he explained that this school is a charity run by the Daoist temple, to educate the children. It taught the basics of Math, Science, and Literature, as well as teaching them about Daoism and giving them a basic martial arts training so that they would remain healthy. A monk from the local Buddhist temple would even come by occasionally to teach about Buddhism, and sometimes they would have guest speakers to teach about combat, or plants, or animals, or farming, or other subjects that the children would need to learn about. The children were divided into six age groups, five and six, seven and eight, nine and ten, eleven and twelve, thirteen and fourteen, fifteen and sixteen. Each one would come in one day a week for lessons, and would be given home work for the other days. “In the larger cities they have separate school rooms for each class, and sometimes a room for each age, so that they can come in six days of the week for lessons, but here we only have about six hundred children every year, so we have to do things a bit differently.”
I wondered how they got one hundred five and six year old kids to sit still for long enough to get through their lessons, but that might be part of the training. Either that or they managed to keep the lessons interesting enough that they didn’t have to worry about it. If that was the case, Earth schools could learn a thing or two from them.
As we toured the poorer parts of the town he told me how he never kept a steady patrol schedule, as that might mean he missed things, and would allow criminals and evil spirits to more easily avoid him. We finished the area without incident, however, and then left the town. The town had many farms surrounding it, with almost one hundred farming families providing its food, so we walked the roads near them, making seemingly random turns so that our route was unpredictable.
As we walked outside the city we discussed the local threats. Dead were the worst threat, as they liked to eat people and animals. They craved the life that they no longer had, and tried to replace it by eating the living. But spirits were also a problem. The moon was past the halfway point on its way to being full, so the spirits would start to appear soon. The means of fighting them wasn’t difficult for a cultivator, as qi would naturally injure them, but they could remain hidden from a cultivator’s sight and attack without warning, having the ability to become almost entirely transparent and make little to no sound. Even the stronger ones, which had learned to cultivate qi, absorbed it so well that they couldn’t be seen with qi sense. There was a trick to seeing them, however. If one could learn to tell the difference between yin and yang qi, they could look for increased density of yin qi. Spirits naturally attracted it, like how flowers attracted bees or blood attracted predators, so if you saw an area with dense yin qi it had either been the site of a death or there was a spirit there, possibly both.
Daoists, of course, had a different method for detecting them. Spirits had a hard time focusing their Presence outside of hunting and combat. That difficulty would cause it to drift almost randomly near them, and if a person approached a spirit the spirit would naturally focus on them for a few seconds. The Presence of a spirit and the Presence of a living being were quite different, however. Daoists learned to tell the difference between the two, so that they would know if a spirit had noticed them. There was also a more complicated scanning technique which could actively look for spirits, but that could only be used by True Daoists.
I opened up my qi senses to their maximum level and started looking at the qi around me in detail. While it was sparse, I could see many different types, all of the types that I had noticed in my own qi reserves and in the same ratios as the qi outside the valley. Earth’s qi had slightly different ratios, as did the hidden realm, but since I had replaced my internal qi so many times since coming to this world it was almost identical to this world’s ratios. I wasn’t sure which variety was what they were calling ‘yin’, however. Perhaps it was a category?
As I pondered this we passed a field. There were mostly female sheep in the field and, remembering that females were supposed to be slightly more yin attributed than males, I examined the qi around them. Like he had described with the spirits and how they attracted yin qi, I could tell that the ratio near the female sheep was slightly different than near the few male sheep, and that neither was identical to the ambient qi. I paused to stare at the sheep and study the qi. The types of qi that were heavier seemed to focus around the female sheep and the types that were lighter seemed to focus around the male sheep.
“Did you discover anything?” asked Sin Bai.
I nodded. “I was told that women are more yin and men are more yang, so I was looking at the qi around the sheep. The qi around the female sheep seems to be a bit different than that around the male sheep. Just a little bit heavier.”
He nodded. “Good. Now, can you use that to find a spirit nearby?”
I looked around at the qi around me. Past about twenty meters it was difficult to see, but I eventually saw a slightly more yin dense area on the outside of the herd. “Right there.” I said, pointing at the spot.
Sin Bai nodded. “Good. That is actually the spirit of a sheep that died here a month ago, when a wild wolf got into the pen. It isn’t evil, so I let it remain. Because it died in terror and pain, it has forgotten that it is dead and tried to live with its herd. If your senses are good enough, you can sense the qi in the grass underneath it. The grass is slightly weaker, as the sheep spirit is still trying to eat it, but can only draw out some of its life force and qi. If you come back during the night of the full moon you might be able to use your qi sight to see it properly.”
“You know a lot about qi sight for someone who doesn’t seem to like cultivators.” I said jokingly. “Though you are level one, so I assume someone taught you.”
He nodded. “That would be Ti Jai. He is a retired cultivator that lives in town. He retired from caravan guard duty about twenty years ago and married a local widow. Now he has seven grand children. Him, the monk Mongu, and myself are the only level ones in the town. That doesn’t make us cultivators, though. While Ti Jai is one, Mongu and myself broke through due to our intense practice, simply knowing that we could reach beyond human limits one day and letting it happen.”
“Effortless breakthrough?” I asked, surprised. While my breakthrough to level three might be called an effortless breakthrough, even that required that I bring in a large amount of qi from outside to fuel the rebirth. “I was actually hoping to learn about that phenomenon. I recently realized that I had several flaws in my early cultivation that I’m hoping to repair, and hearing about your experience would really benefit me.”
He nodded and started answering questions. We discussed it for the next two hours. He blamed the fact that such flaws were common in a cultivator’s body on the cultivator’s lack of discipline. Rather than wait for their body to fix all of the flaws, slowly building themselves up through repeated training, they rushed things, using artificial means of forcing a breakthrough. This allowed the body to mostly ignore the minor flaws during normal times, but created barriers to advancement and slowed their progress. I wasn’t sure if the bottlenecks we faced during cultivation were actually the result of these flaws or if they reflected a flaw in the technique itself, but he didn’t believe it made much of a difference. Rather than studying the principles upon which cultivation was built, cultivators mostly studied a specific technique, relying on it to take them to higher levels. My method of studying multiple methods and using them to fix the flaws in the others was interesting to him, and he said that it was a better way of doing things than what cultivators normally did.
I explained to him how I went to a scholar sect and learned the theory behind qi and techniques, so I had a much better understanding than most people. We had a bit of a debate about the nature of qi and matter. He seemed to know about atoms somehow, and that there were around ninety elements which, in different combinations, made up all of the things in the natural world. He also knew that there were ‘elements’ of qi, though there was no consensus of how many types among scholars, and that they had slightly different properties. These were all things he learned while training as a priest in the capital city. From this I could tell that, while the technological development of this place was low, the Daoist Temple in Trilon had a large amount of theoretical knowledge. I would have to tell the Ambassador about this. Perhaps these people would make a decent ally, as they had the most advanced science in this world so far.
I was debating whether to tell Sin Bai about cultivation seeds and the Chasing Tribulation book, believing that they might be a better form of cultivation and have closer ties with daoism, when a sudden chill went down my spine. Remembering the ghost stories from Earth and how ghosts were supposed to cause something similar, I opened up my qi senses. All of the air around me was heavy with thick, cold qi. “Spirit.” I said, and Sin Bai nodded.
“Powerful one too.” he said. “The entire area is covered in yin qi.” We were about a li from the town gate, so it would take a little while if the guards had to come out here, but he was the town’s strongest ghost hunter, so we should be okay.
A fog seemed to roll across the ground and I sensed powerful qi fluctuations, like someone was just learning to use their abilities. When the fog reached me a feeling of dread came over me, like I was in a hopeless situation. A thought crossed my mind that I would suffer less if I killed myself, but I recognized it as coming from outside myself. I wasn’t depressed, and nothing particularly bad had happened recently, outside of almost dying in the hidden realm, so the thought seemed too out of place. There was a slight shift in the feeling and now I felt like things were still hopeless, but now it was because I was facing an overwhelming enemy. I released my qi and the feeling weakened but didn’t go away. “This is the spirit’s attack, right?” I asked. “It’s trying to make us give up?”
The monk nodded. “Yes. Some human spirits have the ability to project negative emotions onto their opponents. Against the weak minded this type of attack can be quite powerful. I’m glad you were able to resist it so well. It means that you might be strong enough to reach True Daoist once you master the mental techniques.”
I nodded in return and was about to ask how we would find the spirit when someone stepped out of the fog, the head of the bandits. “What are you doing here?” I asked. “You should be in the bunkhouse, asleep.” That’s when he looked at me and I could see that his eyes no longer had pupils or irises, now being only white orbs with a few red veins showing.
“Demon Archer, Liu Fan?” asked the priest in surprise.
