The first of Itinay's new plans manifested as a missive dispatched to Qing Liao. It was fairly simple, little more than a list of skills the grand elder desired him to develop in order to be fully prepared for wilderness activities. A second series recorded texts within the sect library that would be of value in developing such new capabilities. Sayaana, reading through the instructions using Liao's eyes, agreed with the general approach, but added her own wrinkle. “The sisters, they want to make you into the weapon that saves them. Not a bad idea, but it may fail. You need to be prepared to go if this place falls.”

  Liao, seated on his couch and reading through the Endless Strides Surveyor's Art, one of the many techniques recommended by Itinay, jolted all the way to his feet upon hearing these words. “What?” he protested, facing the green-skinned remnant who appeared leaning up against the nearest wall as was her wont. “You want me to abandon Mother's Gift? My hometown, my family, everything I know is here.” He'd never even been beyond the gateway. Most members of the sect hadn't, only a trusted few of the formation and ritual pavilions conducted scouting missions, all under oaths to slay themselves rather than be captured. The world beyond was a complete unknown. However much he wished to run out and see all of it, having no home to return to would be an abject catastrophe. Such a thing was not to be contemplated.

  Every time he imagined an overwhelming horde descending upon Mother's Gift, something he, like all sect members, did in the darkest moments of his nightmares, he stood atop the Starwall with bow in hand firing arrows into the red mass until the shafts were gone. He never ran, not even when the crimson wave washed over everything. Though he did not think himself especially brave, he had the resolve to defend his home. That much, he believed, anyone could summon.

  Terrible grief flowed out of the remnant soul, an endless rain of sorrow. She moved, coming to sit down beside him on the couch. Her exotic features, legacy of a people who no longer existed, had never seemed so foreign as they did then. “You will not have a choice. As you are, your strength contributes nothing. Even your friend Su Yi is barely more than a grain of sand upon the scale. Your senses can strike a blow, but not your arms. If the end comes it will be decided long before the first blow lands. That's why there's a chance to survive, to escape, and if you live, hope survives. Hope for recovery. Hope for restoration. Hope for revenge.”

  “Revenge?” Liao stared at her green eyes. Shock warred with anger, his whole vibrated from the strain. “There are fifteen immortals here. How could I take revenge on anything powerful enough to destroy all of that?” Such a force would possess world-shattering might.

  “By becoming one,” Sayaana laid this statement down flatly, but it was a gauntlet thrown. The words hung there, echoed endlessly as they burrowed deep within. “You are an archer, and the enemy cannot sense you.”

  Stealth. Ambush. The lost art of cultivators whose qi revealed their presence to their foes long before eyes ever could. The bow, a weapon capable of killing unseen. His weapon, his choice. The skills of a master hunter, possessed by the woman sharing his qi. The mercilessness of a trapper, learned at the feet of his father.

  Demons. Demonic cultivators. They were less than animals. He'd felt it. Stuck in a hole and surrounded by nothing but monstrous qi, he'd found those concentrations of malevolence far worse than the plague itself. They were not people, not even truly alive. Nothing more than puppets dancing on red plague strings.

  An infection, a cancer, that must be dug out of the flesh of the world.

  Unable to deny Sayaana's words, her proclamation of his capabilities as a potential immortal, he? ? raised up the alternative instead, the one cloaked in depths of fear. “The odds are against that ever happening.”

  “There are no odds,” absolute conviction slammed back at him, green eyes flashing with the full force of her own immortality. “Tribulation is not a matter of bones or dice. You are capable, or you are not. You are ready, or you are not. You live in defiance of heaven's will, or you die in submission to it. That is all.”

  Liao fell back before the fury in those burning emerald orbs. He felt weak, and small; a child chastised by his parents. “I,” he stumbled. “I don't know if I will be like that, committed.”

  Sayaana stepped forward and put a hand on his shoulder. There was no weight to the touch, no feeling, but conviction transmitted down deeper than such things, bound together through their shared qi. “Liao, you are twenty-five. Of course you do not know. If you did, that would be terrifying. You can't be made to find the dao, but,” her broad lips twisted into a fearsome smile. Sunlight burst across the totality of her features. Her ghostly form's proximity revealed her verdant beauty, and stirred a melange of emotions through the young cultivator. “You can go looking for it. That's what we should do, and train to evade the worst should it come at the same time.”

  “Train how?” The training regimen he already practiced was intense. He spent little time not working on some essential task. Lacking friends or comrades in battle or artistry, he had little else to fill his hours.

  The remnant stepped back, rose up to her full height once again. “Itinay bound you to me because I survived in the wild,” she put fingers across forearm, tapping rapidly. “She wanted me to teach you stealth and ambush, but that's too small. I'm going to teach you all of it. If this land is destroyed, you'll have to survive out in the wastes with nothing. So that's what we'll do.” She smiled again, this time the full enthusiasm of the hunter who'd just sighted her quarry on display.

  “I already know how to survive in the wild,” Liao countered. Few, even among the sect's centuries-old elders, could be said to have a better understanding of backcountry life.

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  “No, you don't,” the green skull gave a sharp shake. “You know how to travel in the wilderness, clad in the riches of your village. Clothes, tools, weapons. You take these things with you, and when they are depleted, you return and acquire more. We will put all of that aside.”

  Confused, the young cultivator could only stare. “You want me to walk into the wild naked?”

  “Basically,” the green smiled widened. The forest within was suddenly hungry. “Su Yi is your only real friend in the sect. With her gone, there is no reason to stay here.” She put a ghostly hand through the wall, reaching out toward the vistas beyond. “We can go, and return only when her tribulation unfolds. Itinay will permit it. Take nothing but basic clothes and sandals. Burn them upon arrival. Yes, I like it.”

  She spun about the little room. Her motions took on an unusual vigor usually present only when training. “But not in the western mountains. You know them too well. We need somewhere else, though I doubt we'll find a proper wilderness in this tamed land where the stars farm cultivators. Still, perhaps there is somewhere close enough to work.”

  This line of speculation resulted in another trip to the sect library, where a very detailed map of Mother's Gift lay preserved under glass in the first hall. Made by the hand of Grand Elder Iaray, it presented a perfect scale model of the entire hidden land sculpted in clay, painted, and glazed. Built using observations from high in the sky, it revealed the contours of the land on a level Liao struggled to grasp. “The world an eagle sees,” he recalled saying when he saw it for the first time. Perfectly layered mountains, precisely carved rivers, every feature in place. Even the Starwall marched across a gray crescent line at the eastern end, a sharp division of cold gray.

  Sayaana was less impressed by the construct than her youthful host. “Farms, farms, and more farms. Marshes drained to make more farms, full of rice paddies and duck pasture. Rivers dammed to feed mills, and grind the product of farms. Everything arranged to pack people in place, farm them for the sect.

  The wondrous map concealed none of this. Liao grasped the point the remnant soul intended quite swiftly. Save for the western mountains where he had grown up, almost all of Mother's Gift was heavily managed, converted from wilderness to the needs of humans. Farms utterly dominated the lowlands, and the patches of forest and marsh not sacrificed to the plow were kept to provide wood, reeds, clay and other key resources. A reference text, appended to the map, diagrammed the many types of plots into which the land had been divided in detail. All had been measured, surveyed, and tabulated to insure proper production was maintained and taxation kept level.

  It did much to explain how the gray-robed servants who kept the sect supplied were so notoriously efficient.

  The purpose, as Sayaana indicated, was clear. Produce as many people as possible in order to produce as many cultivators as possible. Dense villages, highly organized and managed farmlands. His mountain village home, surrounded by endless terraces lovingly reproduced in clay, was powerful evidence of this plan. Liao thought on it, and though he considered it rather odd to reduce lives to a calculation in this manner, he could find no obvious fault in the motive.

  The expression on the remnant soul's face, full of deep and unspoken pain, suggested otherwise. “Is it not a good thing, to grow the sect as much as possible? We are at war, every hand is needed to fight the demons.” He might have endured the most recent incursion stuffed in an earthen box as an alarm, but he'd seen the devastation afterwards. The enemy offered no peace, no quarter. Extermination was the only option.

  “True, but the dao is infinite. How can a sect follow it fully by making everything the same?” Green eyes stared at the map, unusually serious in focus. “Your sect grows cultivators, and it has been successful, but it added immortals to its sisterhood rather than making new ones. It feels, somehow, like a trap.” She moved a long finger, pointed toward the very southern edge of the map. “There is only one real option, here, in the south. The bamboo forests.”

  Eyes moved to follow that digit. Yes, there was a band of green there, a narrow strip of forest filling the hills that occupied the very edge along the southern border of Mother's Gift. Even so, there were villages and terraces nearby. Nor was that forest unused. Bamboo cutters roamed those hills, harvesting the valuable poles for baskets, construction, and countless other needs. Hunters and trappers too, surely they walked the thick groves. The map marked out the presence of several mines and quarries amid the rough terrain as well. “Not a great deal of space,” Liao quietly noted this. He rather suspected the plan would need considerable adjustment.

  “Then you'll have to get used to avoiding people,” Sayaana's enthusiasm strenuously resisted this objection. “It will serve as practice for avoiding demons. Neither can sense you, but both have eyes.”

  This was true enough, though Liao retained more than a few doubts. Despite this, he did not see any point in arguing with Sayaana over the matter and swallowed them instead. He found the idea of starting off naked in a bamboo forest rather ridiculous, but, thinking even a little further, recognized that if that was the price to be paid for spending months or years out in the wild, he wanted that. The desire grew each moment he thought about it, a revelation of just how stifling he'd felt working through endless days in the sect compound with no one other than the remnant soul to properly speak with. Exercises in the nearby farms and managed woodlands had always possessed a flat feel, a sense that he could not properly replicate the wastes no matter how hard he imagined.

  With Su Yi gone, he found few reasons to remain in place. Leather and fur could be worked in the wild, the same as anywhere else. “I'll need a week to wrap up my ongoing tanning,” rather than objecting, he offered this truth that Sayaana already knew. A soft agreement, but an admission nonetheless.

  “It will probably take Itinay that long to respond even if you dispatch a request tonight.” the green-skinned remnant mused with a smile. “Immortals like to overthink things.”

  That had not been Liao's experience, but he knew better than to waste time trying to argue such matters. Regardless, he waited until next morning to write out and dispatch the request. It took him nearly ten attempts to compose a satisfactory letter. Not a matter of words, which were simple and formalized, but of handwriting. He had learned, through Su Yi, who had been unsparing in her assessment while at least displaying the kindness of honesty, that his calligraphy was atrocious. Effort improved it, slightly, but producing something that would not shame him before the grand elder took an entire night's worth of time and repetition.

  Sayaana's presence offered no help at all. She could read and write, of course, having been taught the universal orthodox script of the old world after becoming a cultivator, but her hand was miserable, motions that produced little more than gibberish when Liao attempted to copy them. Ironically, this inspired him to work on his penmanship all the more. The opportunity to demonstrate superiority toward a thousand-year-old immortal, no matter how trivial the field, was not to be neglected.

  Itinay, to the surprise of both, returned a response so swift she must have scratched it out and handed it to the messenger as he waited. She offered only a single word in answer.

  Approved.