Winter unfolded differently, when comparing the experiences of a cultivator versus those of a mortal in the wilderness. Liao found this adjustment confusing, at first.

  Cold was not a problem. The bamboo forest remained much warmer than the mountains where he'd grown up even during the worst months through some combination of lower elevation and dense vegetation. It was almost perpetually mild, and snow was a rare and brief occurrence, less dangerous than the intermittent rains. The simply wood and reed shelter Liao had assembled and the woven mats and fur blankets he possessed were more than equal to the mitigation he required. In truth, this was minimal, as a cultivator in the vitality annealing realm he could walk around stark naked in the snow and be only mildly inconvenienced at worst.

  Such enhanced vitality certainly had great utility, especially when answering the basic demands of his flesh, something his cultivation had not yet surpassed, but acquiring warmth had never been an especially grave concern for Liao in winter. He'd learn to make fire using striker and tinder at his father's knees, no matter the weather, and the bamboo forest supplied both an abundant supply of readily stripped tinder strands and swift-burning logs. He kept a little blaze burning throughout the winter months without trouble. It simmered inside the small stove of dried mud bricks he'd assembled during the summer and more than sufficed to serve his needs in the cold season.

  The stove remained primarily devoted to the needs of his craft, rather than heating, though cooking became an increasingly important concern as the days shortened and the chill deepened.

  It was in the acquisition of food that Liao found the great change compelled upon him. His vegetarian diet, a necessity to keep his qi clean given the limited purification resources available, imposed new limitations and requirements upon his survival. Living in the village in the winter had been the high season for meat consumption, taking advantage of the harvest of the traplines and sparing the grain stores. He recalled vividly the endless stews filled with roasted chunks taken from small game pulled from the traps and mixed with an occasional bird or fish taken from a good day's hunting. Rice and millet, traded from the village farmers, joined with the vegetables pulled from his mother's garden patch and rounded out a diet that, though rather monotonous in regard to flavor, was at least hearty and filling. In the sect, matters had not been that different, truthfully. Starchy roots and tubers had largely replaced the meat component, and the cultivators of the cooking pavilion knew countless ways to spice up stew and change noodle texture to provide the illusion of variety to the otherwise very similar components of cultivator cuisine.

  Leaving their skill behind, and lacking any stored grain supply of his own, Liao was left scrambling to compensate around a cultivator diet that he had never been trained to gather and develop. Sayaana, further, demanded he not fall back on meat unless driven to the edge of starvation. This was, in her words, a key step towards self-sufficiency. “If you eat what you trap, you'll survive, but you won't advance. A true seeker always advances. Do not back down from this.”

  In autumn, Liao had gathered wild fruits and vegetables. When winter came these sources withered away. Stockpiles of bamboo shoots harvested just before the first snows threatened served as a stopgap for a time, but by the solstice they were gone and he knew it would take at least a full three months before there was any spring growth to harvest.

  Three months of frost, with the bamboo shrouded and dormant. Ninety days when the forest offered no obvious means to feed him. It was difficult indeed, especially as Sayaana, who knew many times more wilderness lore than he did, was of little help in this grass-ruled expanse. She knew how to gather food in her homeland, but by the time she'd been driven from it had progressed far beyond the need to eat. “You are a cultivator in tune with the qi of the world,” she advised testily. “Use that.”

  Doing his best to follow this directive, Qing Liao walked to a thick bamboo grove deep in the forest, sat at the edge of a small alpine lake, and meditated for a full week.

  He got snowed on, briefly, but did not notice until after it had all melted. All his attention went into feeling the flow of qi around him. He departed from the teachings of the sect this time, looking not up to draw in stellar qi alone, but extending his senses in all directions. Following the advice of the remnant soul bound to his brow he sought to feel all of the qi that flowed through the air, the land, the soil, and all the living creatures that filled the forest.

  An extremely difficult process, for there were countless different sources of qi, all bonded and flowing together according to an incredibly complex network, like a thousand spider webs layered atop each other and intertwined. There were, he discovered, creatures that lived inside other creatures that lived inside of fungus that lived within plants, a nested sequence that left his mind agog.

  Drawing out and isolating single sources was impossible. Liao quickly ceased all such attempts and pulled back his scrutiny a layer to focus not on points and sources, but on drops and flows. Masses of qi were easier to track, to feel, as they moved in aggregations across the forest according to unseen patterns.

  In the summer he had learned that stellar qi streamed down into the forest and was absorbed by the plants, the central force behind all growth across the land. In the winter, this continued, in some places, but much of that qi was lost, dissipated away as the cold kept the vegetation from gathering it within. Growth largely ceased and the qi that moved upon the surface was sluggish, weak, and limited. Tracing this dissipation, he discovered that in the absence of bright energy from above, other motions took place.

  Some of it followed liquid paths carved by the brooks and creeks of the hills to pool in marshes and ponds. That, he expected, for animals always retreated to shelter in such places during the cold times. He did not anticipate, however, the vast well of qi that moved about below ground. A huge reservoir of life, waiting in steady, sustained, spaces beneath mud and soil where the cloak of earth and its qi insulated them against the hungry chill of the air above that sought to strip it away.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  The insight, when it came, was stunningly obvious, enough to shock Liao free of his meditative trance entirely. So simple, so basic, he struggled to reconcile his failure to realize it for so long against this new understanding. He knew the seasonal rhythms of animal life, the countless creatures that retreated to burrows below the earth to endure the winter. That plants should do the same thing ought to have been something he recognized as a child, yet he had never grasped this basic truth. Their immobility had deceived him, even though it made no difference. Plants extended below the ground, and though their bodies could not move, their qi was not so inhibited. They could shift it through their bodies without harm, just as a cultivator might. The only difference was timing. Plants did not function in a world of minutes and hours, but one of days, weeks, and months.

  “Thinking like a mortal again,” Liao recalled Sayaana's common mockery of his mindset. This lesson, he could only hope, would offer one step further beyond such blinders.

  On the more practical side, when he emerged, shocked free of the grasp of meditation, he knew how to feed his nearly starving body.

  He would have to dig for his supper.

  It was both hard and easy at the same time. Hard, because even after acquiring and slowly refining the skills to recognize where wild roots and tubers might grow, they were widely dispersed and demanded he cover a great deal of ground to supply sufficient quantities to make a meal. Many were also found in the muck beneath the marshes or along the edges of creeks, making their acquisition a messy and cold affair that was distinctly unpleasant in the middle of winter days. Liao took to rooting for vegetables wearing nothing but rough wraps formed from scraps of boar leather. Such strips had the strength to endure well and were sturdy enough to spare his skin the lash of thorns and slivers. For the cold, he simply relied upon his qi.

  The easy part was the capabilities enhanced strength unlocked, enabling practices no mortal could undertake. He discovered that, upon finding the likely position of a root or bulb beneath the soil, he could simply spear his arm into the ground directly, even when the soil was stiff and half-frozen, up to his shoulder. That was more than far enough to grasp his targets and pull them free with a sharp jerk. He completely bypassed the long and hard effort of digging holes with a sharp stick. The increase in pace was so massive as to be largely incalculable.

  It did not take long, hunting through the forest, to refine his targeting. The heart of the thick bamboo strains made for the poorest gathering. The tall stalks crowded out all other plant forms, making anything other than their own shoots almost impossible to uncover. Instead, he had to search other areas where the dominance of the towering grass had been broken apart; whether permanently by water or temporarily by fire, landslide, or even the steady grazing of the rare pandas. His gratitude directed towards the curious bear-like creatures grew day by day, for Liao swiftly discovered that the little patches created by their rolling and grazing offered some of the very best harvests.

  Those panda clearings yielded artichoke, carrot, onion, radish, and a strange brown and vaguely egg-shaped tuber neither he nor Sayaana recognized at all. Marshes and ponds, though they made for long afternoons of soaking cold, surrendered burdock, lotus root, and water chestnut in great quantity. After a few weeks of effort his senses and experience combined to the point where no more than a few hours of effort each day sufficed to yield sufficiently scraggly forms – for the wild varieties bore none of the clean and straight growth of the shapes prized in farmer's gardens – to fill his pot.

  Lacking any real skill at cooking, Liao simply mashed everything together, strained it in a creek, and then added together a measure of dried mountain vegetables from those hanging beneath the roof of his lean-to in the hopes of providing flavor. The result was a porridge-like slurry that, no matter what he did, came to perpetually taste of onions. He grew rather sick of that taste, and the texture was hardly appetizing either. Sayaana came to make incessant jokes regarding the faces Liao made while eating.

  Tasteless though this diet largely was, it sufficed to keep his body strong. However, as the winter progressed, he came to sense that the rather bland mix of roots and tubers was lacking in something else he needed beyond energy alone. He came to wake in the morning with aching gums, and his skin often felt strange and itchy.

  “Fruit. No fruit, no meat,” Sayaana made the diagnosis swiftly after Liao grew convinced enough to mention it. “A common winter problem of the body. I saw it often when I was young.”

  In response, Liao scoured the bamboo forest for any possible fruits, eventually discovering lingering wax gourds that, though foul-tasting, seemed to provide whatever strange fragment his body needed. This made a significant difference, for attempting to restore his flesh from this strange scourge using his qi had been incredibly wasteful. “A useful lesson,” he admitted, considering future journeys. There would be no carrying pills in the Ruined Wastes, their qi, though minor, could still be noticed by the demons.

  In many ways, Liao realized that the whole process was unnecessary. As a vitality annealing realm cultivator he could consume almost any substance, even toxic plants. He could have lived entirely on fish, acquired with trivial effort, if he'd wished. The power to use his qi and ignore his surroundings beyond the most basic need for fuel, it was largely within his grasp, and as he advanced it would only grow until it eventually became absolute. Su Yi, he suspected, could go without eating anything at all for many months, relying upon her vast reserves of qi to sustain her as she prepared for her tribulation. A pill or two, prepared for the purpose – and he knew the alchemy pavilion made such things – would suffice to make up any deficiencies.

  Despite that, he regretting nothing of the need, for it taught him much about the land and how qi moved through the forest. Stockpiling and meditating in isolation might have advanced his cultivation in one way, but it would not have offered that lesson. Appreciation of the slow flow of qi through the forest as a whole offered a mirror to the realm of his own body. He moved qi through his tissues in much the same way, the difference was nothing more than an expression of pace and volume. As he continued his work through the long winter months, he felt his cultivation approach the edge of the next layer, held back from advancement only by the need to fill his dantian to bursting once again. Time and practice, not enlightenment, remained the only barrier.

  A realization that instilled a great deal of contentment. It was a fine thing, to find value in scrambling through the mud.

  As the season advanced, Liao split time accordingly. Rooting up tubers in the morning, curing and tanning during the warm hours of the afternoon, hunting and trapping at dusk to replenish his stock of skins, and meditating under the stars. He needed no more than five hours of sleep each night now, allowing for much time spent each day. This was set to reduce further as he progressed, and Liao looked forward to taking in the full scope of the daily cycle without needing to face exhaustion.

  “Do you like this life?” Sayaana asked when the first green sprouts emerged from the earth in the signal of spring. “Does it bore you?”

  “I accept it,” that was the most honest answer he could manage. The remnant soul would know he spoke the truth regardless, he tried to be open with her given the pointlessness of lying to one tied to your own qi. “I miss certain things, but a walk to the sect every few months would supply them all.”

  “Good,” the green-shaded woman answered. “But for now, you need to push your own skills forward. The next year it coming. It's time to add a real challenge to this effort.”

  Liao shivered even though the nearby fire kept him perfectly warm.