Su Yi's courtyard adjacent to the formation pavilion was, to Qing Liao's surprise, not all that much larger than his own. It resembled, in many ways, the training ground he'd occupied during recruit training. Half garden and half practice yard, with an open hall in-between. Paired halls on the north and south side of the gardens housing for the elderly couple who worked as her servants and storage for the truly immense rack of formation flags used by the disciple in her artistry.

  There were no further adornments. Su Yi slept and cultivated on a small couch in the open air of her hall, protected from the elements by nothing more than curtains. Heat or cold were broadly meaningless to one of her level of cultivation.

  The garden featured a fairly ordinary lily pond and carefully arranged climbing vines on a series of trellises, all oriented and grown according to a complex mathematical pattern that mirrored some foundational principle of formation arts in the green of vegetation. By contrast, the training ground featured a wide variety of smashed art pieces, ranging from baskets to paintings to tapestries to vases, all bearing the telltale marks of blows formed from pure qi discharge.

  Liao's host clearly anticipated his puzzlement, for her first words upon drawing back the curtains of her couch addressed the unspoken question. “Gifts from admirers.” Her doll-like face maintained a perfectly stern expression during this declaration.

  “Ah, um, ah,” Liao stammered. He tried to look anywhere but at that pale face, currently positively ghostly after losing a tremendous amount of blood as a result of taking an ogre's horn to the gut during the thickest fighting. Though his ignorance of intimate affairs was no longer the totality it had been prior to joining the sect – he'd given into teenage desires and taken his unreasonably pretty maid to bed some months ago – but the concept of flirtation and seduction remained more a matter of fantasy than reality.

  Entirely too many of those fantasies featured the woman now reclining on her side before him in a disturbingly shear, single-layer robe.

  Isolated though he was from sect matters, he knew that this fascination was far from uncommon. Out of the nine hundred initiates and disciples in the sect prior to the demon horde's attack, there had been six woman labeled as once-in-a-century beauties. Su Yi did not make that list, but the unscrupulous rumor-mongering of the back-channels run by the mortal servants suggested she was right on the edge, excluded with far less than unanimity.

  Cultivators were far from immune for such obsessions. One of the beauties, a disciple in the thought weaving realm, had been immolated by the burning attacks of the Fuming Shade. Her portrait now featured prominently wherever mourners assembled, male and female alike.

  “Sit,” Su Yi patted a space on the couch beside her form before Liao could properly find his voice. She leaned back lightly on a generous pile of cushions, wincing only slightly at the motion. “Don't worry, I'm not going to use you for open hand practice, of any kind,” the final appended phrase, spoken low and sultry, served both as deliberate teasing and clear signal that it was to go no further. The shift of pale and elevated qi told him to bury any carnal ideas.

  Sayaana laughed lightly, behind the eyes, a rare emotional indulgence on the part of the remnant soul.

  “Thank you for the invitation.” Lacking any way to regain equilibrium when caught between the two women, for all that one was inside his head, formality and protocol offered the only refuge Liao could find amid sudden desperation.

  With an exaggerated extra lean, Su Yi sighed from amid her piled downy assemblage. “It was obligatory,” she murmured. Eyes rose to carefully examine the ceiling. “It seems I am to be your link to the rest of the sect,” the dark orbs suddenly dropped down and met his gaze, hard as black diamonds. “The only one you're going to get.”

  “I warned you,” Sayaana's voice filled his thoughts even as Liao drove both fists into the fabric upholstery of the couch. The sentence she'd anticipated had been passed.

  It was something he'd expected. Four days in the dark, surrounded by demon qi, alone save for the company of a foreign immortal's ghost, had made that clear. Others fought on the walls, and while they suffered – the bandages on Su Yi's torso made that abundantly clear – they were united. He, placed elsewhere, apart, was not, would never be. The invisible lost all value when revealed.

  “Thank your for you clarity,” he told the disciple. It took a great deal of control to look away, to bury the feelings that surged through him. They were unworthy, those thoughts, and Su Yi was not one deserving of such dark recriminations. She had done nothing but fight. The choices had been made by others, those who did not, could not, care for his feelings.

  Nor should they. He was an ant before the immortals. What use had they for his feelings?

  “It is the elders' plan,” Su Yi spoke from beside him. Her sculpted voice sounded far away. “But it is not wrong.” She raised a perfectly manicured fingernail up and pointed toward the Starwall where its bulk rose up and laid shadows upon them. “The last time a horde came, one with only three hundred thousand demons and a single demonic cultivator weaker than any of the three we just faced, there were three hundred and six deaths. You,” she looked over at him, dark eyes displaying something Liao could not face, forced him to turn away. “Your power, it saved hundreds of lives, and it will make the sect stronger than it has ever been. You already have a place in the history of the Celestial Origin Sect. Few in the body refining realm could say the same. Pulling you apart from everyone else, when placed on the scales, it cannot even make the rest twitch.”

  “I know,” of course he did. How many times had Sayaana shouted at him to think of those same precious lives, the comrades and innocents on the wall, while he sat in the dark and red ruin assaulted his very soul from all sides. The memory of those days, locked in seamless horror, slipped away swiftly, a bad nightmare banished by the returning brightness, but it would never fully fade.

  Certainly not the three spikes of demonic qi that passed overhead. Three true monsters: unrelenting predation, ashen ruin, and discarded disdain. Nexus negativity, the antithesis of everything he'd ever loved and cherished. Three unseen impressions that he'd be able to recall perfectly all the rest of his days.

  Opposition to such monsters had already crystallized in his dao, though the form such resistance would take remained undefined.

  “I know,” he repeated. “But it's still not easy.” The woman at his side was thirty times his age. He was going to spend centuries isolated, an existence known to a bare handful; all of whom, save for this woman, were beautiful and terrible grand elders, formulations of a world, a dao, he could not understand until the time came to stand among them. Even to a fifteen year old it was obvious. The sect, the structure of the halls and pavilions, it was designed to prevent this sort of thing, but the sect was not for him.

  “True,” Su Yi sighed again. She laid back down, gingerly moving cushions about to mitigate her pain. “Gains, losses, these things aren't fair. Your path has been severed from mine, from the rest of the sect, from this whole land, and all because of an accident of birth. But,” she looked up at him and smiled. “I happen to know that it was the same accident of birth that opened that path in the first place. You might not have wanted it, but it is here. Make the best of it.”

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  “To do that, I need to know what I want,” Liao sputtered. “All I know is that I can't wait out a battle by sitting in a box again.” It might have been valuable. It might even have saved hundreds of lives, but it had been humiliating and horrible all at once. A living alarm, nothing more, that was what Itinay had made of him. A tool more than a person, a weapon in the hands of the elders.

  He couldn't keep doing it.

  “You are fifteen,” Su Yi chuckled lightly, a sound like rose petals crumpling. “And in the second layer of the body refining realm. You don't know what you want.” She looked, for an instant, like an immortal cultivator then. That flick of presence, of enlightenment, silenced all objection.

  “I don't want to be in a box, kept like a monkey and trotted out to perform the demon-killing trick,” Liao almost growled. He would not be kept trapped. He refused to accept it. It was the reverse mirror. He was the trapper.

  “Do you know,” Su Yi's head moved in a slow circle. “That with the right formation arrangements even a cultivator in the body refining realm can direct a flow of power as great as that summoned by one in the soul forging realm?” As Liao's eyes widened in confusion she kept going unabated. “It is never allowed, of course, because flooding qi into a soul?that is not ready, even if the formation insulates the dantian from backlash, fills the mind with hunger it cannot fulfill and cripples future advancement. During the Demon War every last cultivator who experienced such boosts of power turned to the plague.”

  She looked at him again. Deep sadness infected her eyes. “Your body, it has done something like that to you, it provides a lever that extends your reach beyond your grasp. To overcome that, only the dao can provide. Become strong, regain balance, then no one will lock you in a box, you'll be more valuable outside of it.”

  Simple though this statement was, it was not easily absorbed. Even as Liao struggled with it, he blinked in surprise as Sayaana materialized before his eyes standing beside the injured disciple. “I like this one,” the green-tinged remnant smiled. “But you should ask if that was coached.”

  Control failed Liao, hearing that. The accusation simply spilled out. “Did Grand Elder Itinay tell you to say that?”

  “She told you to ask that, didn't she,” Su Yi smiled softly. “The remnant soul?” She did not wait for confirmation, easily reading it off his face. “How attentive. And yes, some of that was directed, but that does not make it untrue. For now, everyone is using you. It is not malevolence. It is simply the imbalance at work, the inevitable nature of interactions between mortal and immortal. Whether it is Itinay, the other sisters, or the remnant soul in that headdress, it's all the same. You are not strong enough to be anything other than a tool to them.” The soft smile deepened. “I am not strong enough, but the goal, it is enough that we all have to accept this. The demon plague uses everyone far worse, down to destruction.”

  “The celestial ascension realm is a long ways off,” Liao countered. He did not, could not, disagree, not exactly, but the truth did little to mitigate the pain. He'd checked the records. Even if he advanced at record-matching speed, something he thought unlikely, it would still be centuries before he became an elder, and half a millennium at least before he could possibly reach for immortality.

  Far too long. Who would he even be by then?

  This time, Su Yi brightened, and a few of her teeth crept past curled lips. “You don't have to get that far, not to gain back control. You just need to get strong enough that they let you out past the gateway to travel the Ruined Wastes. Out there, nothing can touch you. Besides, it's what they really want you for anyway.”

  “Why would they want that?” He asked this question while trying to cover his complete failure to consider that scenario. Beyond the boundaries of Mother's Gift he would not be free of all constraints, duty bound mortals, cultivators, and immortals alike no matter where they stood on the earth, but we would be free to act as he wished. To do things his way, to roam about as he willed.

  He did not know what he willed, not yet, but it hardly mattered. Nothing did, compared to the chance to see the world.

  “There are countless old world treasures yet to be recovered,” Su Yi answered the question as asked. “The demonic cultivators haven't found them all.” The eminently material reason, easiest to understand, was given first. “And they crave news. Detection arrays and short, furtive scouting missions report little. We don't even know how many demonic cultivators remain.” This need, strategically obvious even to his limited knowledge, was comprehended with equal swiftness. “Beyond that, you might even be able to prevent a horde from forming,”

  These last words did not come by way of Itinay, Liao realized. Some unnamed insight assigned them as Su Yi's own. A deduction made by the disciple's own enlightenment. “The mathematics support it. Imagine how strong the sect would grow if our numbers were not periodically pruned. It might be possible, even, to significantly increase the mortal population of Mother's Gift.”

  This final point was well chosen, for Qing Liao was not long removed from mortal life and still recalled its many burdens viscerally. The sect imposed rules regarding how much land could be cultivated, how many children families were permitted per village, and more. Such dictates played an outsize role in village life. If he could catalyze a change in such rules it would not benefit him, but his village, and any family he might retain down across the generations, they would feel that shift.

  “How strong to I have to be to go outside?” All effort to hide his eagerness failed utterly.

  Grand Elder Itinay told me you need to be able to defeat a giant,” Su Yi revealed the criterion, one shockingly straightforward.

  “Not a bad choice,” Sayaana agreed from her perch. “I would have said the same.”

  As an awareness integration realm cultivator in the seventh layer Su Yi could defeat a giant with relative ease. In a single blow if she took it by surprise, more slowly if forced to bleed it dry. Her battle during the horde had been hindered by the presence of other demons, her full potential restrained. The requirement could be met with a greatly reduced cultivation, probably one only in the upper layers of the thought weaving realm. There were combat manuals describing such victorious encounters.

  Even that goal would take an entire mortal lifetime to reach. Though immense, Liao still held onto hope in the face of it. He could imagine working for decades to reach the necessary heights, not centuries.

  “Until then, I will try to be your friend,” the beautiful cultivator declared. She sounded very tired, but kind. “Combined with the woman in that gemstone on your head, that should give you two. That ought to be enough. Plenty have sought the dao with less.”

  Liao nodded. He had seen that, even only months into his tenure as a cultivator. Socialization within the sect was limited. Many cultivators spent more idle time at meals or after bathing speaking to their mortal servants than any of their fellows. Even fellow pavilion members rarely associated outside of active projects. The roads and courtyards of the sect were remarkable for their silence.

  The road to the heavens was lonely indeed, more than even Elder Yu Yong, who'd tried to prepare the recruits, had been properly able to convey. “Thank you,” he bowed down low in gratitude. He'd expected Su Yi to resent being assigned as his minder, an unfair burden acquired purely by chance. Her willingness to embrace this twist of fate happily astonished him instead.

  The warm residue it left behind would be something he clung far into the future.

  Daring to hope he might find a way to pay back that regard somehow, Liao offered up a small secret, only that violated the spirit of Itinay's orders. “Maybe I can give you an extra friend in return. I think Sayaana is fond of you. You cannot speak to her, but you could send messages.”

  “Amusing,” Su Yi chuckled again. “It might be nice, but you would have to see any message I sent, and I do not let young men read my private correspondence.” She lightly punched one of her cushions, amused but at once deadly serious.

  “If there is a book in your sect's library describing the Chulmyk language, she can write to me in that,” Sayaana looked at Su Yi as she spoke. Her green, fey, face held an openly wistful expression that spoke to frightful vulnerability on the visage of an immortal. “They are all gone now, so I have no reason to teach it to you.” She had begun to teach Liao the language of her own people, Sakanai. But like most immortals, had once known dozens.

  Liao relayed this to Su Yi and received a tight nod in return. This gesture earned him a simple but pivotal piece of advice, one connection balanced against another. “It is almost the equinox. Go home and see your parents. There are no duties preventing this.”

  He would always be grateful that she'd told him to do that.