I was working on editing the next chapter when I realised that I needed a bridging chapter, so I wrote this over the last few nights. I might need another one, but I'm not sure yet, so see what you think over the next few days.Chapter 116
A Student Suitor
Ming Dia Lu lay in Tobias’s pavilion with her head resting on his lap as he fed her pieces of frost melon and read to her from his personal collection of manuals and manuscripts. Snow fell across the garden in a gentle rhythm, causing silence in the surrounding world, but the bitter chill did not touch Ming Dia Lu or the Silver Blossom Pavilion. Ming Dia Lu had done away with the heavy makeup she had worn on earlier visits, choosing to see him barefaced. Tobias didn’t personally care, but this was considered nearly as scandalous as her coming to meet him due to local customs. A woman of her standing was supposed to keep others at a distance, appearing with him without makeup was to say there was no distance between them, they were as close as family.
Ming Dia Lu tilted her head back and gazed into Tobias’s eyes, pausing for a moment. Tobias could tell she wasn’t paying attention to what he was reading, but didn’t stop. He was still trying to foster a relationship of trust with her, gently encouraging her to be more comfortable in his presence and to be more forthright and direct with her thoughts and words. It had been less than a month since she had stopped blushing every time that she looked at him, so he didn’t expect the changes he wished to create would appear anytime soon.
Ming Dia Lun inhaled as if gathering her thoughts from a dream, then asked the question clearly weighing on her heart. “Is there anything that I excel at more than Hun Fen?”
Tobias wanted to sigh as he closed the manuscript. The insecurities of youth no longer touched him. The tedious bother they had once caused him was nothing but a distant memory, but that did not mean these feelings were not important. They often shaped who you would become.
Tobias looked down. Ming Dia Lu stared up at him with hope-filled eyes and no small amount of fear and poorly hidden self-doubt.
Tobias didn’t want to feed into these insecurities. They would shape her character and become twisted by her cultivation if he allowed them to continue. Lung Mia had opened his eyes to how cultivation twisted personalities, how dao reinforced upon itself through spiritual energy, and he would not let this happen to Ming Dia Lu.
Tobias smiled down beautifully, attempting to manifest what little he understood of the dao of beauty. “Your sister could never lie still for this long.”
Ming Dia Lu stared at him for a second before snorting at the absurdity of his statement. “That was a serious question, Teacher.”
“And I gave you a serious answer, my student.”
“So, there’s nothing.”
The defeat in her tone was all too clear.
Tobias softened his gaze. “When you fight a battle, you use your strengths against your enemy’s weaknesses. You are trying to use your weaknesses against your enemy’s strengths.”
Ming Dia Lu frowned as she considered Tobias’s statement. “You are saying my aptitude for cultivation is weak?”
“Next to Hun Fen, everyone’s aptitude for cultivation is weak, but this was not what I was suggesting.”
She paused, re-examining his words. “Then you’re suggesting that cultivation is not the only way I could compare myself to Hun Fen.”
Tobias lifted his gaze to the falling snow, enjoying the quiet beauty before him. “A merchant with a dotting wife and loving children should not look at a merchant with a scornful wife, unfilial children and a bigger house and think the other man has it better.”
“But I’ll always be second best.”
“Is second best with tens of thousands standing beneath you, dreaming of what they could achieve with your divinity and talent, something to be ashamed of?”
Ming Dia Lu’s eyes widened as he gently reshaped her perspective.
“Focusing on what you don’t have instead of what you do have is the path to misery, Ming Dia Lu. You can consider yourself lucky that there is only one person whom you aspire to be, and you can spend your days being grateful for this, or you can continue to ignore how many cultivators wish to be in your position.”
Ming Dia Lu swallowed. “Do you envy Hun Fen’s potential?”
Tobias dropped his gaze and shook his head, expressing the dao of beauty with the simple action. “Hun Fen is the most interesting cultivator I have ever studied, but I do not envy her potential. This world would look much too simple and boring if I had been born like her.”
Ming Dia Lu opened her mouth, and Tobias fed her a piece of melon before she could ask the foolish question which was obviously on the tip of her tongue.
Ming Dia Lu got the message and chewed, reorganising her thoughts, before swallowing and asking a much politer version of her question. “Do you expect me to believe that you enjoy struggling to become immortal?”
Tobias could see she didn’t understand. “Do you enjoy sparing with your mortal cousins?”
Ming Dia Lu frowned again and then shook her head. “No?”
“Why not?”
“There’s no challenge when we spar. They have nothing to teach me.”
“Now imagine if this applied to every aspect of your life, not just sparing?”
“You make it sound like her gifts are a curse.”
“She is a goddess in a mortal world. Merely existing here is painful for her.”
Ming Dia Lu paused, and then her frown deepened. “She seems happy enough.”
“She is loved. She is cared for. But there are no challenges in this world for her to face, no sense of accomplishment in her achievements. She went looking for that when she snuck into your tournament, but she did not find what she was looking for.”
“Because her victory came too easily.”
Tobias nodded. “Before that day, Hun Fen had never crossed blades with someone who knew what they were doing. By the end of that day, she defeated you. A sword saint who has had the best training your clan could provide. Now imagine yourself as her and how bored you would feel if your lifetime of training, something you pride yourself on, had only taken you a day to achieve. This would give you no sense of pride. No sense of accomplishment. You would barely view it as a moment of importance.”
“She has you now, Teacher, so I imagine she is grateful she defeated me.”
Tobias chuckled, filling the silent garden with beautiful laughter. “You vastly overestimate my capabilities if you believe I can provide her a challenge.”
Ming Dia Lu sucked in another breath, shocked to her core, so much that Tobias could sense her chi tremble. “You can’t keep up with her?”
“I can so long as she doesn’t cultivate. However, once she does, it will only be a few short decades until she surpasses me, and when that happens, there will be no challenges in this world for her to overcome.”
Ming Dia Lu glared at him, forgetting who she was glaring at because of youthful emotion. “You stand among the most powerful beings in this world. How can you say that so casually?”
Tobias smiled again and returned to watching the snow fall. “Because I know my limitations.”
“Aren’t you afraid of what she will become?”
Tobias shook his head. “I am no more afraid of what she will become than I am of what you will become.”
“Me?”
Tobias nodded. “Is there any doubt in your mind that you will fail to reach the nascent soul realm under my tutelage?”
Ming Dia Lu shook her head.
“Then do I not have one of the heirs to power resting her head on my lap, giving up face for my own amusement? Am I not tormenting a future powerhouse?”
Ming Dia Lu froze, realising the truth of his words, before slowly nodding.
“Should I not be just as concerned with what you will do with that power as she will? Should I not be worried about the retribution you will offer when you have the power to do so?”
Ming Dia Lu slowly nodded her head again.
Tobias looked down and smiled. “You and your sister have more in common than you think, and I have no concerns with what you will do with the power I bestow upon you.”
“What if Hun Fen changes?”
“Your sister is a mortal goddess. However, even a goddess can fall from grace when enough people lose faith.”
***
A few months later, in spring, Ming Dia Lu walked up to Tobias’s pavilion, sat down beside him, and then lay back, resting her head on his lap. She had grown a lot more confident over the past few months, and the envy she felt for her sister’s potential was slowly fading. She opened her mouth a moment later, and Tobias fed her a piece of melon.
She reached into her robe and handed him designs for an array. It was part of the homework Tobias had given her. Tobias scanned the designs, nodding to himself. Ming Dia Lu had a gift for arrays. Combined with her status as a sword saint, it would eventually make for an interesting combat style. There was no term for an array prodigy like there was for a sword saint, but if there were, Ming Dia Lu would have fit the description.
She reminded Tobias of Sung Lu, the ancestor of the Sung Clan. Her inheritance had formed the basis of his clan’s and the Academy of Science and Cultivation’s understanding of arrays. She had seen connections that no one else had, creating works that others could not hope to understand.
Ming Dia Lu sighed as she waved the designs before him. “I can’t make it work no matter how hard I try. What am I doing wrong?”
“You are trying to run before you have learned to walk.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you are attempting to create something beyond the array principles I have taught you, and do not understand why your array cannot function.”
“There are other principles?”
“Many. Now your issue here is that mortal materials cannot channel enough chi to make your design work, not when you are trying to make the array this small.”
“I thought about using celestial steel instead, but it’s far too valuable for something like this.”
“Celestial steel is a mortal cultivation material, but that’s an entire lecture in itself.”
Ming Dia Lu put her design aside and stared up at him with curiosity. “I thought celestial steel was considered a natural treasure.”
“That’s a common belief, but it is incorrect. Celestial steel is an alloy of a material called immortal silver and iron. The immortal silver is the natural treasure, not the celestial steel.”
Tobias held out his hand, and an ornate box the size of a cigar box appeared beside him. He picked it up and opened the lid, exposing the eleven immortal materials, which had been recognised as both pure and distinct. He handed the box to Ming Dia Lu to study.
Ming Dia Lu looked at the contents with interest, but without understanding. She couldn’t sense the potential of what lay in her hands. “Which one of these is immortal silver?”
Tobias reached out and pointed to the lump of silver metal. It was the size of his thumb.
“How much celestial steel could you make with this?”
“A few thousand swords.”
Ming Dia Lu gasped and began choking on her own spit. If she had been allowed to cultivate using her family’s old cultivation method, the one Tobias had corrected, she would have coughed up blood.
Tobias chuckled at her shock. “Spirit stones grow when you channel chi into them. This is because they are a purified immortal material. The other immortal materials you see before you also have this property. Every so often, I take out that piece of immortal silver and cultivate with it, or channel my chi into it, causing it to grow, so it’s significantly bigger than when I started.”
Ming Dia Lu glanced at him before returning her focus to the contents of the box. “Why haven’t you turned it into something useful?”
“It grows faster the larger it becomes, and I want to be able to turn it into something without needing to alloy it one day. I’m a long way off being able to do this, which is why I haven’t touched it.”
Ming Dia Lu didn’t seem to know how to process such a statement, so she pointed to another golden material. “What’s this?”
“Immortal gold. It’s another immortal metal, though neither is technically silver or gold, or a metal. It’s also what makes celestial copper a natural treasure.”
“Is this a lot?”
“More than the immortal silver.”
Ming Dia Lu gave an audible gulp. “And you’re just carrying it around?”
“I can’t cultivate with it if I don’t.”
Thousands of members of Tobias’s clan were also assisting in the project of developing a supply of immortal materials, so Tobias expected the proper research to have begun by the time he returned. It might have begun already.
Ming Dia Lu’s hand moved to the next sample. “I’m almost afraid to ask, but what’s this one?”
“Immortal jade. It’s just a display piece.”
“What do you mean by display piece?”
“Immortal jade grows much faster than immortal silver and gold, so I can double the size of that piece in a night.”
“Is it jade or stone?”
“No immortal material is like its mortal counterpart, but you’ll only understand this when you reach the nascent soul realm.”
“You didn’t answer my question?”
“It has properties of both jade and stone, but not in the way you would think or could be understood by someone with your cultivation.”
“What about this one?”
“Immortal glass.”
She frowned at the next one. “Is this a spirit stone?”
“Yes.”
“This next one looks like clay?”
“Immortal clay.”
“Did someone just add the word immortal to what these look like to name them?”
Tobias had.
“Yes.”
“Shouldn’t they have names worthy of their status, like Gods Defying Clay?”
“To what end? Only a core realm cultivator can tell the difference between what you hold in your hands and actual clay, and only a nascent soul realm cultivator can see what it truly is, so why give it a name that doesn’t match its appearance?”
“It’s the principle of the matter. Something this extraordinary needs a name that’s just as impressive.”
“Will it upset you to learn I used it to make my tea set?”
“Yes.”
“Then I won’t tell you what I’ve done with it.”
“You said it wasn’t clay.”
“It isn’t. It’s dao and spiritual energy. And like many dao, you can add other dao to it. Enough to make a tea set, I might add.”
Ming Dia Lu pointedly ignored his comment. “Are you saying these are physical manifestations of dao, created through dao and spiritual energy?”
Tobias nodded. “They are no different from my own existence.”
“Then these don’t have limitations on what they can do.”
“They have limitations, but these limitations are significantly less than what mortal materials have, and their potential is significantly more.”
“What makes them immortal materials?”
“The ability to pass through the immortal veil when bound to an immortal realm dao.”
Ming Dia Lu’s eyes widened. “You’ve tested this?”
Tobias smirked.
Ming Dia Lu had been trying to find out if he had reached an immortal dao enlightenment ever since he had introduced her to the concept that dao had realms. Tobias had chosen not to answer because her questions never required him to be honest. This one did.
“I have. Multiple times. Each one has passed through without trouble, never to return.”
Ming Dia Lu’s eyes widened.
“To answer your next question, I’m a living sword of the fourth blade, but only three qualify as an immortal realm understanding. I also have many other dao enlightenments which would qualify me for immortality.”
“Who are you?”
Tobias smiled, not willing to answer that question. “Just a humble courtesan, ready to entertain his suitor.”