Without speaking, or even moving her head, Su Yi continued down the line. Her testing of the final four candidates concluded swiftly. The entire process had taken no more than a few minutes.

  When it concluded, the cultivator took a single step backward.

  Everyone gathered together, for the youths in line to the priest before her feet to the assembled hundreds of villagers expected the cultivator to simply dismiss them. That was what she did the previous year, and the year before that, and for a succession of years stretching all the way back to the end of memory for even the most elderly residents of Echuantun. When, in defiance of this seemingly eternal pattern, she raised her right hand instead, stunned silence suppressed the crowd.

  Her hand came down next, and Qing Liao discovered, to his immense shock, that Su Yi had pointed an exquisite porcelain-textured finger with nail painted emerald green directly at the space between his eyes. “You,” she commanded in a voice that invoked the absolute, nigh-divine authority of the sect. “Step forward.” All knew that the power of life and death rested upon that tongue. Though she stood before them unarmed, none doubted the woman's immense power.

  Liao felt ice grip his heart. Thoughts flashed through his mind, every one of them overwhelmed by terror. He trembled at the possibility that he had, somehow and without any conscious knowledge, offended the cultivator or defied the will of the sect. It was possible, for who could know what an existence so far above his own truly considered courteous? Trepidation shattered all focus, and only blind obedience remained in its wake. He took three steps forward without any awareness of moving his legs. His vision never left the emerald-bordered digit for an instant.

  “What is your name?” Su Yi asked. The voice of command remained unchanged, its authority lapsed for not one syllable.

  “Qing Liao,” it took four tries to form the words, to enunciate his own name. His knees shook and his were clenched into white-knuckled fists. He wondered, nearly breaking out to ask aloud, if the next sentence would proclaim his death.

  “Qing Liao,” Su Yi repeated simply. She directed the simplest of nods in his direction. “You have formed an active dantian. You will become a cultivator.”

  There was a moment of absolute stillness. Totally frozen, the whole village paused, trapped between declaration and reaction. The aged priest, standing in front of the line of youths, shed a single tear. Liao watched it slide down his cheek and drop from his chin under the bright light of the noonday sun.

  Everyone in the village broke out into wild, incoherent cheering.

  They shouted, hooted, clapped, and stomped. Spontaneous hugs were thrown between neighbors whether friendly or feuding. Exuberance consumed the community. It had been a century, longer than the life of any standing there, since anyone from Echuantan had passed the test. Their village had produced a cultivator at last. The long drought was over.

  Standing still in the center of that jubilant whirlwind, Liao felt only utter numbness. He had passed, a possibility he'd never expected, never dared to consider real. Even in his dreams he'd purged that desire. Cultivation, the life of a sect member, he knew nothing of such things, living in an isolated village as he did. It was said to be a great honor and a path to grand pleasures and wonders; the life everyone secretly desired but that almost no one would receive. Maybe those stories were true, but as he stared at Su Yi it was only to find her stone-faced. The beautiful cultivator, a living doll-like masterpiece, had simply stated that he'd passed. She gave no words of congratulations, nor did she smile. Any effort to read her expression bounced away, as if seeking to find answers on the surface of a brick.

  Such emptiness left him lost, unable to decide what to think, what to feel. His mind retreated from this moment, unwilling to embrace the fervor of his fellow villagers. He could only stare at the cultivator, the woman from the sect to which he now apparently belonged, and wonder what came next.

  Su Yi allowed the crowd to indulge their vigorous release for a while. Then, abruptly, she put an end to it. “Enough!” The vocal proclamation cracked the air with tremendous force, a detonation beyond what any human throat could naturally summon. Silence was restored at once.

  “Regrettably, none of the others,” she gave a swift gesture encompassing the other fifteen in line. “Here formed dantians. The testing is concluded. Disperse! I will speak to Qing Liao alone.”

  It was their village, their square, and their temple. She was an outsider. None of that made any difference. Eight hundred bodies rushed to obey. The feast would be delayed, held in abeyance so long as the cultivators remained. Su Yi walked through the open gate and into the temple courtyard. A corridor of lanterns, lit the night before to guide the journey to the next year under the stars, still smoldered and sputtered in their sheltered mounts. A single twitch of her hand sufficed to beckon Liao into following her wake.

  Stumbling as he went, for his legs felt loose and gelatinous beneath him, he did so. There was nothing to say, events overwhelmed his curiosity. As did the prospect of posing any sort of question to such an imposing and impossible personage as the cultivator.

  Once inside the temple, the emptiness helped, a little. There were small trees and shrubs in the courtyard, carefully tended and kept green despite the season. It was not the welcoming embrace of the mountain forests he knew so well, but it offered a measure of steadiness all the same. Absent the rest of the village, the brutality of an audience, he was able to relax somewhat and find himself. Su Yi was still a ridiculous, impossible thing to address, a statue brought to life with unbelievable might gathered within, but with no one around to see it was possible to imagine sharing words with such a being just as he might whisper secrets into a hidden pool or shelter from his fears in the boughs of an ancient tree.

  He could, and had, done such things many times. Though hearing a response would rather alter the process.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  Su Yi walked to the center of the courtyard before turning to face him. As she did so, her posture changed dramatically. Though her face and skin retained their unearthly perfection and she remained ridiculously gorgeous, everything about her softened. It was as if, rather than being carved from stone, she became a being molded of clay. Her dark eyes, stunningly immense, took in everything he cast in their direction, a bottomless mirror to his thoughts.

  “You are not celebrating,” she announced; an observation rather than a question. “You do not burst with joy. Instead, you are afraid.” She cocked her head ever-so-slightly to the left. “Hardly the reaction of one who has been told all their dreams have come true.”

  There was no question embedded in those words, but the long pause that stretched out after they concluded gradually emerged as a gap intended to be filled by Liao's voice. Entirely too late, he recognized that, and the embarrassment of the realization gave him sufficient brashness to speak. “Not my dreams,” he managed to croak out the first few words, cheeks burning from how childish, how cowardly, they sounded.

  “Really?” Perfect eyebrows rose up along a porcelain-smooth forehead. “You never dreamed of smashing mountains with your fist, flying across the sky upon strands of starlight, or even of the possibility of immortality? I had thought every child dreamed of such things?”

  “My father taught me to wish for a prize that might be found inside the trap, not the one in the tree that will never be caught.” The older trapper loved that proverb. Liao had been forced to memorize it almost as soon as he could speak. “I dreamed of rich seasons on the lines, a pleasant house, pretty girls, and never having to be cold. Maybe, someday, if the goddess was kind, I could hunt a snow leopard.” The elders claimed there were still a handful left, in the least traveled sections of the highest peaks at the edge of the land.

  “Remarkable,” Su Yi's voice lost all pretense of cultivator perfection as it revealed genuine, recognizable surprise. Her response resounded with unexpected introspection. “The day I passed the test I dreamed of fighting with a spear made of lightning, commanding the clouds themselves, and swimming in a pile of silks as high as a horse. The disciple who tested me said I was unusually unambitious.”

  She smiled then, a true expression of delight untouched by the mask of formality or procedure.

  It was as if a second sun had risen.

  Liao stared at her, mind blank. He could not have been more breathless had a charging ox struck him in the stomach. He did not so much as twitch when she gently put her left hand on his shoulder. He did recognize, keyed in by the motion, that somehow, Su Yi was barely taller than he was, and at fourteen he hoped for at least a handspan more of growth to come.

  This mundane but significant revelation, that the cultivator was not the oversize giant her presence projected into his mind, gave him the necessary perspective to assimilate what she said next. “That you did not dream of this is different, and perhaps it will be useful to approach the dao without a path sketched out in the illusion of imagination stretching before you. Or perhaps it will not be. Only the dao itself, and perhaps the Celestial Mother, hold the answer to such things. In the end, it makes little difference. You are a cultivator now. You will find that the dao gives and the dao takes both dreams and nightmares in turn.”

  There was no real way for a trapper's son to properly comprehend those words. They demanded too much thought, too much perspective he lacked.

  The radiant smile vanished. “You will understand, hopefully, in time.” A frown followed this, very briefly evident before being erased with effort even unschooled eyes could tell was deliberate. “But for now, time is constrained.” Su Yi raised her hands and briefly turned to stare directly at the sun. Such a move, which impeded her not at all, served to slam home the casual power of cultivators with a potency that, in its silent, effortless nature, was far more formidable than any flashy dramatic action. “It is half past the twelfth hour,” she explained. “And we must return to the sect grounds outside Starwall City before the day ends. You may have until the fifteenth hour to say your goodbyes.”

  This demand must have prompted a terrified expression on Liao's face, for a quick amendment followed. “It is not forever, but there will be no home visits until the summer solstice at the earliest. Here,” from somewhere beneath her robes she extracted a small silken drawstring bag. “The clothes you are wearing belong to the sect and a suited to a new recruit. Anything else you take with you must fit in this bag.”

  Liao took the bag in hand. It was not large. Quite small, if anything. He suspected it would hold no more than he could stuff inside one of his boots.

  That would be more than enough.

  “Make sure to eat something,” the cultivator added. “As the journey is lengthy, but avoid the roast pig. That's liable to come up, and badly. You do not want to arrive at the sect reeking of vomit.” She shook her head and chuckled, a light, airy sound. “There is one every year.”

  Simple advice such as this was far easier to accept than mystical pronouncements. Liao thought it the most human thing she'd said so far.

  Witnessing that glimmer of a human side from the cultivator made saying goodbye to the village a little easier.

  It was still monstrously hard.

  His mother was the easiest. She cried as she hugged him, but the pride that swelled through her from inside to outside mitigated the sorrow. Her son, the village's first cultivator in a century. That would sustain her for years at least. And if he made progress down the path, that too would please her. The promises to be careful and avoid city girls of low character were just as easily made as Liao suspected they both knew breaking them in the future would be. He found himself saying the words with great feeling regardless.

  His father, Qing Rong, was harder. The veteran trapper expressed his astonishment mostly through grunts. They shared an awkward hug after eating, dried venison jerky instead of roast pork. After that, Rong pressed an old knapped arrowhead into his son's hands. Scars from trap and rope work marked both sets of digits. “My grandfather made this,” he said simply, gaze wandering around watery eyes. “Do not lose it.”

  Liao promised he would not and, rather than trusting the cultivator's bag, tied it to the long hairs at the back of his head.

  His few friends were comparatively easy. Given to a profession that demanded long trips through the woods, he'd never been especially close to any of the other village children. They shouted ribald goodbyes at each other even as they silently made the sort of plans to quietly forget each other once out of sight that filled teenage minds when life interrupted their grand designs.

  The hardest part was his sisters. One tree above each grave. Little Hui, taken by fever at the age of three. Ting, only two years old and one morning she simply did not wake up, lips blue when mother checked. Brief lives lost before the same dao he was now called to walk the long road to reach. They'd planted gingkos over the burial plots, as was tradition. The priest said those trees could live for centuries, maybe even a full millennium.

  Liao looked at the saplings and realized that, if he managed to keep the promise his mother extracted from him to become a grand elder one day, he would outlive even these.

  Nothing in his imagination could grapple with that, he simply cried until the tears ran dry.

  “Orday guide and succor us all,” he whispered the prayer to the Celestial Mother as he stood and walked out of the forest to meet the cultivator and leave fourteen years of life behind.

  He wondered, then, how anyone would find this day a happy one.