A/N
2 chapters combined into 3k chap for better readability, especially since it's an alt POV.
I know that not everyone is a fan of alt POVs, but I like to use it to show the perspective of native cultivators, and I feel like it makes the world feel a lot more alive. In this chapter we see how a dao can influence a cultivator's personality.
We'll return to Ke Yin's POV on Monday.
Have a nice weekend!
Chapter 781: The Dao of Not Being the Protagonist
The queue outside Technique Simulation Room Seven had lasted three days before it became a grievance.
It started with four disciples against the corridor wall with their arms crossed and by the second day there were eleven of them, some standing and some crouching and one older inner disciple who had taken to pacing back and forth on the same six foot stretch of hallway like he was going to wear a groove into the stone through persistence.
By the fifth day, the group had thinned down to seven because the rest had given up and either found other rooms or rescheduled their training, having given up on using room seven anytime soon.
The room in question had been taken by Elder Ke Yin five days ago.
Ruan Fe, the inner disciple, managing the reception desk had made the mistake on day two of mentioning that there was no usage limit for Legacy Disciples, which meant that Elder Ke Yin could stay in that room until the walls dissolved if he felt like it.
"Five days," said a heavyset disciple named Chou Bao, he was one of the original four and showed no signs of leaving on principle alone, "five days in the same room and he hasn't come out even once, not even to eat."
"Cultivators at that level don't need to eat the same we do," said the disciple beside him, a quiet young man with ink-stained fingers who would have preferred to be somewhere else, "you know that."
"I know that," Chou Bao said, "I also know I've been waiting for days for a room that someone has been using it like it's his private residence."
"There are other rooms," another disciple cut in.
"The other rooms are all full," Chou Bao said, "there's a list for room five that's twelve names deep, and room three has a crack in the formation panel on the eastern wall that everyone knows about and that nobody has done anything about."
Nobody disputed this because the crack in room three's formation panel was one of those problems that had achieved the status of established fact, acknowledged universally and addressed by nobody.
Some speculated that it was a test by the elders to examine the disciples’ characters.
Others complained that it was simple negligence.
A girl near the end of the corridor let out a short sharp exhale.
Liu Ying had been in the queue since the morning of day four, which put her among the more recent arrivals though she had more than made up for that in terms of vocal displeasure about the situation.
She was twenty years old at the Elemental Realm, her cultivation method was called the Radiant Bloom Scripture, a technique built around the principle that beauty, elegance and refinement were expressions of qi itself and that a cultivator who embodied those qualities could impose them on the world around her.
The thing about the Radiant Bloom Scripture was that it rewarded confidence and five years of cultivating it had produced a person who found it difficult to understand why the world was not arranged to her personal preference.
Standing beside her was Wu Jie.
Wu Jie was twenty-one years old and had known Liu Ying for five of those years.
He was also at the Elemental Realm with a solid foundation and steady progress and an uncommonly well-developed ability to sense when a situation was about to go sideways, and this last trait had been developed like a callus develops, through repeated and painful exposure to Liu Ying's decision making process over an extended period of time.
He was a compact and unremarkable looking person which suited him well because it made it easier to maintain plausible ignorance when Liu Ying set something on fire and the aftermath caused senior cultivators to come down on them.
Wu Jie had taken the fall for her on countless occasions over the years they had been friends.
The first time he had done it out of loyalty, the second time it had been because by the point he realized what was happening it was far too late to step aside, and every time after that it had been habit that he wasn’t able to get out of no matter what he did.
Right now, he was watching her now and thinking about what the next problem she was going to drag him into was going to look like.
"He's been in there for five days," Liu Ying murmured.
"Yes?" said Wu Jie.
"He's not breaking through, it's just technique practice," she said, "he could do that in any room, he could do it outside, he has a compound now."
"He could," Wu Jie agreed carefully.
"He's taking advantage."
"He's allowed to, technically, he’s an elder."
"That doesn't mean he should," she crossed her arms, "he struck me as a reasonable person when I watched the tournament recordings and people like that respond well when you point out they're being inconsiderate, they don't want to be seen as someone who throws their status around and if you frame it correctly they almost feel grateful for being told."
Wu Jie looked at her and did not trust that his friend was capable of framing anything correctly.
"I'm going to say something to him when he comes out," she said.
"Do you have a death wish?" Wu Jie asked baffled.
"It's not a death wish to have a conversation."
"He's a Stellar Realm cultivator who skipped a realm and destroyed his own pavilion with a sneeze!" Wu Jie had heard about six different versions of this story over the past several days and the details had gotten more dramatic with each retelling, but the core fact seemed consistent across all versions, the pavilion was destroyed, "you want to walk up to that person and tell him he's being inconsiderate."
"I want to walk up to that person and have a polite and reasonable conversation in which I gently suggest he might want to consider the other disciples who also need training time," she smiled at him, "there's a difference."
"There's not."
"People like Elder Ke Yin," she said in the tone of someone explaining something to someone slow, "are manageable, cultivators who care about their dao and not their rank have a soft spot for fairness. You appeal to that and you're not challenging them at all, you're giving them an opportunity to demonstrate their character and they like that, it makes them feel good about themselves," she paused, "and besides, a girl asking has a different effect than a man asking, there's a reason I handle certain things and you handle other things."
"I handle other things," Wu Jie said, "because you get me involved in them before I have had any chance to say no."
"The point stands."
"The point does not stand, Wu Lihua showed interest in him, my cousin, who is and I say this as a relative who has seen her cultivation up close, operating at a level that neither of us is going to reach for several years, and from what I heard he wasn't even moved by any of it."
Liu Ying waved this away, "Wu Lihua is talented, I don't dispute that, but talent and beauty are separate categories and in the second category there is no comparison."
Wu Jie stared at her for a full four seconds.
He was trying to work out whether she was performing confidence for an audience which she sometimes did, or whether she believed what she had said, which she also sometimes did, and whether the distinction even mattered which it usually didn't because the outcome was the same either way.
And that outcome was him begging for forgiveness for her reckless behaviour.
From the look on her face, he realised that she was being serious.
"I'm not getting involved in this," he said, putting his hands up, "whatever happens when that door opens, I am not involved, I'm a bystander, I'm just scenery."
"Nobody's asking you to do anything."
"That's what you always say!"
Liu Ying turned back toward the door and down the corridor, Chou Bao was arguing with the ink-stained disciple about whether waiting in a hallway counted as a formal complaint or a physical expression of dissatisfaction, and the pacing inner disciple had stopped pacing and was now resting against the wall with his eyes closed.
"I'm sick of waiting," Liu Ying said.
"Then leave, no one’s forcing you to wait."
"I'm not leaving! I've been here since yesterday morning," she uncrossed her arms and straightened up, "I'm going to knock."
Wu Jie grabbed her wrist before she could take a step.
She looked at the hand on her wrist and then at him with an expression that was clearly annoyed.
"It's taboo," he said, "you don't interrupt someone else's cultivation session, even if you think they're only running technique drills, you don't know what state they're in internally and you knock on that door while he's in the middle of something and you could do real damage to both of you."
"He's been doing technique runs for five days," she said, "he's not in the middle of a delicate spiritual reconstruction."
"You don't know that."
"I know enough."
"You know enough to get yourself into trouble," he said, "you have never once known enough to get yourself back out of it, let go of this, listen to me for once, it's not worth it."
She shrugged his hand off and walked down the corridor toward Room Seven.
Wu Jie watched her go.
He was not going to follow.
He had been clear with himself about this decision and he was not going to be standing anywhere near that door when whatever was about to happen happened.
He had his own cultivation session to attend to, responsibilities, and a personal philosophy that had been developing over the past two years around the principle that being in close physical proximity to Liu Ying when she was in a state of certainty was bad for his health and general wellbeing.
She was five steps from the door when it happened.
The formation panels embedded in the corridor walls, which produced a faint institutional hum at the edge of perception, went quiet, the light in the hallway flickered, and then the aura came through the door of Room Seven.
Stellar Realm pressure pressed down from the ceiling and up from the floor and inward from every direction.
Wu Jie's legs stopped working, he went down onto his hands and knees on the corridor floor, and his body was shaking. Around him he could hear distantly the sound of other people meeting the floor in various ways.
Chou Bao made a sound that was more air than language, the ink-stained disciple who had been crouching just tipped sideways, and the pacing inner disciple who had been against the wall was now horizontal, which at least meant he hadn't had far to fall.
Liu Ying was on her hands and knees in the exact spot where she had been walking, five steps from the door. She was staring at the floor with her hair fallen forward and her shoulders up around her ears, which Wu Jie would have found satisfying if he had been capable of finding anything at all in that moment.
The pressure lasted a second, then withdrew suddenly, and the door to Room Seven opened.
Elder Ke Yin walked out with clean robes and the neutral inward expression of someone cataloguing the tail end of an insight before it faded, he stopped when he saw the scene in the corridor.
Seven disciples on the floor.
He looked at them, then at the floor, and then back at them again.
"I'm sorry," he said, scratching the back of his head, "my power got away from me for a moment, are you all alright?"
Ruan Fei from behind the reception desk at the far end had gotten back to his feet, "Elder Ke Yin," he bowed, "no harm done, and congratulations on your breakthrough to Stellar Realm! We sensed the energy signature from out here."
Ke Yin looked embarrassed and murmured something brief and modest as he started moving toward the corridor exit.
That was when Liu Ying stood up.
"Elder Ke Yin," she said in the warm tentative tone she deployed when she wanted to seem like she was overcoming shyness to speak, it was a trick Wu Jie had seen her use too many times to count. "I was hoping to speak with you."
"About?" the elder paused, looking surprised.
"I have heard so much about you, I thought perhaps you might enjoy some company after such a long session..." she stopped to give him a suggestive look.
Ke Yin didn't even look back at her.
"I'm not interested," he said and backed away like she had threatened to massacre nine generations of his bloodline.
He was gone around the corner before she could even respond.
Wu Jie, who had gotten up more slowly than several of the others and still had a tremor in his left hand from the spiritual pressure, said, "I told you."
Liu Ying did not answer and was still looking at the far end of the corridor where Ke Yin had disappeared.
"I told you," Wu Jie said again because it felt important to say it a second time, "I said don't do it, I said it multiple times, I said it when you were about to walk toward the door, and not only did you do it, you basically throw yourself at him."
Liu Ying still didn't answer.
"Are you alright?" he asked, a little worried now that something was wrong.
"Stellar Realm," she breathed out with her face flushed, "within a year."
Wu Jie looked at her carefully, wondering if she was going to start salivating any second.
"He said he wasn't interested," he said, "I was there for that, all of us were there for that," he gestured at the corridor where the other disciples were minding their own business, "he said it and directly."
"He wants me to pursue him," Liu Ying shook her head, "I can feel it."
Wu Jie blinked at her, trying to work out what was going on in her head.
He had known her for five years and in that time had developed affection for her like one would for any good friend.
He had found her entertaining, had found her confidence refreshing, and had found her conviction, even when it was pointed in directions that made his stomach drop, to be something he respected.
But standing in this corridor looking at her face, he was having the clear and uncomfortable realization that Liu Ying, plus this conviction, aimed at this person, in this direction, was going to produce outcomes that ended with him somewhere he didn’t want to be.
Which was the enemy of perhaps someone who would one day be the greatest cultivator of their generation.
Wu Jie picked up the small silk pouch he had brought for his own technique session, which he had not gotten the chance to use, and looked at Ruan Fei who was updating the room assignment board, then he looked at Liu Ying who was still staring at the corner.
"I can’t deal with this anymore," he said. “I’m going home.”
She didn't respond.
As he walked away, he had already made his decision about the future, he was going to get as far away as possible from that girl and get even further away from the young elder she had apparently decided to make a personal project of.
He was going to train at the steady sustainable pace he had always trained at, and he was going to reach a cultivation level that was respectable, then he was going to retire somewhere in the southern provinces where the spiritual energy was thin enough that nobody ambitious would ever bother visiting.
His cultivation method was called the Unbroken Thread method.
It was not the most efficient method available to him, and it was not going to produce breakthroughs that rearranged the geography of training halls, but what it did produce was a cultivator with an unusually stable foundation, consistent regeneration and spiritual reserves that most at his cultivation realm couldn’t compete with.
It was, his master had told him, and he had later confirmed through his own observation, a dao that suited someone who intended to survive more than they cared about advancing.
The Dao of Continuity was not a popular choice among the ambitious, but the cultivators who followed it outlived most of the cultivators who rose through the ranks like a shining star. Wu Jie had always found that statistic more meaningful than it was fashionable to admit out loud.
He had once heard a senior disciple describe his dao as a coward's dao, he had thought about that description for a while and ultimately decided it was correct in a way the senior disciple had not intended it to be.
Sure, his dao was a coward’s dao, it was a dao for someone who had looked at the cultivation world with honest eyes and assessed how most of its remarkable figures ended and decided that the unremarkable ending was the one worth working toward.
It was a dao for surviving people like Liu Ying.
Whether it would be enough to save him was something that was becoming less certain with each passing day.