Qing Liao could have used the Stellar Flash Steps to race across the roads of Mother's Gift. Though he lacked the skill to match Su Yi's feat of carrying him the entire length of the land in an afternoon, hauling himself that distance in a single full day was quite possible. He had done so in order to visit his parents at the most recent autumnal equinox, a proper exertion of the considerable increase in ability that came with rising to the next full realm of cultivation.

  This time, while he still used the technique to lighten his stride and ease his journey, he made the trip slowly, intending to take nearly a full four days before finding a place to make camp out in the wilderness. He told Sayaana he wanted to see civilization properly before abandoning it, and that was true enough, but mostly he just felt like taking a break.

  Striding at only roughly twice mortal walking pace, no more than an ordinary person might achieve by breaking into a light jog, also offered its own benefits in terms of practicing the Stellar Flash Steps. That was important. His skill with the movement technique continued to lag the remainder of his development. Sayaana had admonished him to use the technique constantly. Wilderness survival would serve as far more compelling practice if he depleted his qi in that manner.

  It was early spring, and the first day dawned bright and clear. A little bit cold, perhaps, but this did nothing to touch the cultivator. The farmers were out and about in their fields. Not planting, not yet, but preparation for that critical moment had begun.

  Fallen branches, risen stones, and unruly early weeds were cleared away from fields before the flood. Fires smoldered at the edges of paths, the detritus of winter consigned to their flickering embrace. Men worked with space and pick to repair ditched in anticipation of the flooding they would soon conduct. In elevated areas oxen lowed as they hauled plows through the lengthy paces needed to secure the furrows for the seeds to come. Women and younger men scrambled about amid orchards and long trellis pastures, trimming fruit trees and berry bushes for the season of warmth. Busy, but light work compared to the rush to come that the rice crop would demand.

  Clad in simple clothes and sandals, the health of the people of Mother's Gift was on full display to the cultivator's eyes. Mostly, it was good. There were those bent by the maladies of age, of course, and many who bore scars from childhood illness or accident, but most were healthy. This was the hand of the sect at work, he knew. Pills distributed from low-level alchemists that fought off certain illnesses and limited the spread of plague when it emerged. Such remedies could not save all the mortals, nor even most of them. Liao bitterly recalled his sisters, among those who were not reached in time, but the people of this land were healthier than they would be without the aid of cultivators. Sayaana could confirm this, banishing the worst regrets as she did so. Her homeland had lacked all such interactions, mortals had dealt with cultivators only when tested for potential. The common residents had been otherwise ignored entirely.

  “Why?” Liao decided to question this. The Celestial Origin Sect returned many things to the people. Tools made by blacksmiths, furniture from the carpenters, garments from the Textiles Pavilion, and more. He had made many such things himself, leather aprons cut and tanned by his own hand and sold back to the sect for distribution. Made for training purposes, they lacked the sort of quality necessary for use within the sect, but were perfectly suitable for use in the everyday work of mortal households.

  “There are two reasons,” Sayaana appeared beside him as she spoke. She easily matched his pace, though her long and limber stride lacked that stutter-step aspect of the Stellar Flash Steps. “Responsibility and the dao.”

  “Are those not the same?” Some unnamed impulse, a fragment of questioning insight, propelled this interruption.

  “Linked, perhaps,” this admission came as the green head shifted to one side, suggesting the inquiry surprised the remnant soul. “But everything is linked to the dao, eventually. Responsibility, that is easy to explain. All this,” she spread her hands out wide, taking in fields, timber stands, irrigation canals, clustered villages, and the rest of their extensive compact civilization. A little spin move, coquettish and almost girly, added emphasis. “Demands responsibility. Administration, bureaucracy; there is work behind all of this. Mortal servants and proxies, they are not enough to control it. Someone has to take up the role of command, the more complex the world the mortals build, the more the sect must do to manage it.”

  “Aorkay and Neay,” those two of the Twelve Sisters, the heads of the Cooking and Farming Pavilions, handled such responsibilities. It had not been covered in any recruit lecture, for the sect officially kept the workings of its leadership council secret, but everyone knew who was responsible for such things. Even Liao, disconnected from the rumor mill as he largely was, had absorbed that much.

  “They chose to take responsibility,” Sayaana nodded. Her face bent into a light frown, and she stared away into the distant for several long steps. “We didn't. I didn't. I was taught it was better to let mortals managed their own lives. Maybe that was for the best, maybe not.” Doubt cast unsteady warbles into her normally vibrant, tree-trunk strong voice. “But then there's the dao, and it was never really a choice.”

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  Not foolish enough to probe an immortal’s regrets, a lesson he'd learned after suffering the lash of Itinay's icy cold furious glares when daring to interrogate her priorities, Liao remained silent. Hopefully Sayaana would value him enough to voice the source of such burdens on her own.

  “The Celestial Origin Sect, stellar qi, all that the stars were, are, will be, and have made,” green lips murmured these words. Had she been physical and not lodged in a gemstone atop his brow, they would have been almost inaudible even to cultivator ears. “It is big, vast, isn't it? A huge dream, a huge dao, a very literal path to the Heavens. Not surprising that Orday ascended, not really. She knew how to think like a goddess. Other sects, well, they aren't like that.”

  The sect library contained numerous teachings taken from hundreds of foreign sects, all scavenged from the wreckage left behind during the Demon War. Liao had read a number of them governing leatherwork, an otherwise obscure topic. Though such materials were far removed from the core teachings of those fallen creeds, those pages still revealed critical glimpses into the lives of other cultivators, the lost legacy of the old world. The paths those long lost sects followed were narrow, nothing compared to all things in Heaven and Below.

  He did not know how to walk towards the stars properly, not yet, but he'd gained a sense of the immensity of what he'd begun to seek and channel. Nothing else, save perhaps the red heart of the demon plague, could even come close.

  “Stars stand above, distant and mighty,” Sayaana continued, unusually somber. “A natural place to start as rulers. My dao, the dao of my sect, was that of the forest. Live and grow, not dominate. To take control of the mortals, it would betray that, so we left them alone.”

  The path of a star. The path of a forest. Itinay versus Sayaana. Liao did not consider either superior. Both had led their practitioners to immortality. Whether either would lead to ascension, no one could say. He wondered, then, on that road, where his own might be found. The sect had one answer, and it seemed Sayaana intended to show him hers, in time, as much as she could.

  Neither would be enough, the realization came to him suddenly, looking upon those who labored in the fields. The dao, one could not follow another there. It was like following footprints in the snow, the space where you put your feet did not impact the same space as that of the pathfinder, stepping onto unbroken white powder. Nor was he way to walk the same.

  A formidable revelation, he gathered it against the growing core of his qi and felt its truth resonate there, but knowing not to follow blindly would not teach him to find the steps he needed. He'd have to determine those alone, one at a time.

  No shortcuts to the dao. The saying only grew ever more true as time passed and one advanced.

  For some reason, Liao found that very encouraging. He wished he could articulate why.

  “I think I understand,” he told Sayaana, doing his best to pull the remnant soul away from the reverie of dark memories.

  “Good,” this was less effective than he hoped, for she vanished again with that word. It left Liao worried. He was supposed to be aiding Sayaana, a bulwark of experiences against the madness of isolation, but sometimes he wondered if being there, speaking with someone so much younger, simply caused her to relive old tragedies. Her sorrow, tied to the flow of his qi, had deepened across the course of the past decade.

  He could only hope that spending time in the wilderness would lighten the burden.

  The fields he passed along the roads varied little. Crops, timber stands, reed beds, and fish ponds all surrounded villages at the edges of abundant slow rivers. Occasional oddities such as clay pits, quarries, and mills serves as landmarks in the otherwise flat landscape. These offered minor variations in the rhythm of daily life written through the endless fields. They were invariably busy, being without tether to the pattern of the seasons that dictated the farmer's life. Liao discovered he was able to get quite a good look at such things using the enhanced nature of his vision despite being some distance away. This made for a welcome distraction, especially when passing a large pottery kiln with everything ready to be fired laid out in the open by the hillside.

  He would end the day with much greater understanding of brick-making, practical examples lining up with all he'd learned from reading the introductory texts of the Twelvefold Panoply. Simple acquisitions perhaps, such ordinary bits of knowledge, but satisfying nonetheless. Even Sayaana briefly appeared to observe, which brought a remarkable and rarely felt warmth to his heart.

  Beyond the backdrop, the road itself had stories to tell. Liao was the only cultivator about, something he'd expected. The members of the sect rarely traveled far from the Starwall save for the purpose of specific acquisitions. Others were far more numerous. Local travelers predominated, farmers carrying heavy loads by hand, using wheelbarrows, or leading a single pack animal. These did not go far, and Liao overtook their heavy steps quickly indeed. Most reacted with surprise to see someone using the road's dedicated cultivator lane, but aside from jolting with shock all were respectful and said nothing.

  Liao knew that, for a sect member, he cut a fairly mundane profile. He had grown into an adult frame but was neither especially tall nor broad. Su Yi said he was ruggedly handsome, and she had cut his hair very short while giggling about it, but for a cultivator in the vitality annealing realm such status was merely average. He did not yet possess the obvious signs of supernatural purification that would come after he began the journey to higher levels of his current realm and beyond, though if he took off his shirt the beginnings could be seen upon the chest.

  Less common were the peddlers and merchants driving carts and wagons across the land. They moved slowly, to the point that most had little time to notice Liao's passage before he left them well behind. Ignoring the men and women of such parties, he studied the goods themselves instead, nothing that base materials moved toward Starwall City and finished items traveled in the opposite direction.

  “Center on the side,” he whispered the common saying, the one that recognized the preeminent position of the sect in the commerce of Mother's Gift. Purely mortal traffic, far less common, took the somewhat unique route of moving along the rivers, dragged on barges by oxen.

  In this way he passed through a land unchanging between city, river, and mountains.