A/N
2 chapters combined into 3.5k chap, enjoy!
Chapter 802: The Elder's Ordinary Days
The first place I went was the recovery pavilion where Wei Lin slept.
Lin Mei was there when I arrived, seated in the chair beside his bed with a medical text open on her lap that I suspected she had read cover to cover a dozen times already, and she looked up when I came in with hope that made what I had to say next painful.
"Any progress?" she asked. "Anything from the other world? Anything at all?"
All I could do was shake my head, which made her sigh and look back down at Wei Lin, whose chest rose and fell in the slow rhythm of the karma-induced sleep that Sect Master Yuan had placed him in.
There was a third person in the room, and I recognized him immediately even though we had only met once before, because Wei Lin had inherited the man's exact jawline and the same calculating eyes.
Wei Ye, one of the wealthiest merchants on the Eastern Continent despite being a mortal, stood at the foot of his son's bed in traveling clothes that were expensive without being ostentatious, and the shadows under his eyes told me he had come here directly from whatever caravan or negotiation had finally released him.
"Elder Ke Yin," he said, bowing. "I still remember only less than a year ago you were a talented Qi Condensation disciple, and now you’ve already become an elder. How time flies and how talent soars."
"Uncle," I greeted, returning the bow, “there’s no need to call me Elder, Ke Yin is fine.”
Wei Ye looked me up and down and then shook his head. “If only you accepted my offer, a talent like you would have guaranteed the rise of the Wei Family for generations.”
I remembered the offer he had made after I had defied the odds and defeated Chen Wu back in the Wei Family compound. The position of the family’s primary combat instructor along with access to the family’s technique library, and sweetened up with an enormous salary of 10,000 spirit stones per month. But it was the last perk that almost swayed me, which had been the full sponsorship of my cultivation.
After all, cultivation was extremely expensive requiring unfathomable amount of resources, and with the Wei Family’s connections, I would have had access to things that an outer disciple may never see, let alone be able to use.
The only condition had been that I serve the Wei Family, most might have gladly accepted such an offer, but no matter how generous and alluring it might seem outwardly, I had to say no. I couldn’t sacrifice my autonomy, even though I didn’t know what my Dao was exactly, I felt like it would go against it. And now almost a year later, standing before him as an Outer Elder of the Azure Peak Sect, I was really glad I hadn’t accepted that offer.
Instead of responding to that, I decided to say what had been building up behind my chest.
"I'm sorry for what happened to Wei Lin. It was only meant to be a simple tournament match, but it got out of hand."
Wei Ye was quiet for a moment, looking down at his sleeping son, and when he answered, his voice held a tiredness that had nothing to do with travel.
"The fault isn’t with you." He shook his head slowly. "If we’re assigning blame, then most of it belongs in this room already. My son takes after me. I built my house from nothing by always finding the edge, the advantage, the leverage that other merchants overlooked or were too cautious to reach for. I raised him on stories of those victories, and so when the boy found an opportunity that promised him an edge over others, of course he seized it with both hands and asked no questions about the price. He learned that hunger at my dinner table. Whatever grew in him afterward, I planted the seed of it."
I stood there without a good response, because I had prepared myself for a grieving father's anger and had instead received a grieving father's honest accounting of himself, and there was nothing in my repertoire for that. All I could offer him was the truth.
"I'll do everything I can to wake him," I said. "Whatever it takes and however long it takes."
"The Sect Master told me what it takes," Wei Ye said, and his eyes came up to meet mine. "A Realm Stabilising Tree."
It didn’t surprise me that Yuan had told him. It was his son's life hanging in the balance, after all, he deserved to know. But more than that, the man was a merchant whose trade network stretched across the continent and touched markets that even sects struggled to access, it only made sense to make the most of his connections.
"They are almost impossible to find," I sighed. "Most of them are already rooted in someone's inner world or held by powers that would never consider selling, it’s going to take a lot of luck to find a fresh one."
I almost winced at my own word choice because calling it fresh felt wrong when a Realm Stabilising Tree was a former World Tree Sutra user, a human being, and as for luck I wasn’t exactly running a surplus of that at the moment.
"I will keep an eye out," Wei Ye nodded. "I might be able to find something."
The way he said it made it sound more than a simple possibility, but the look in his eyes suggested that the price he would have to pay wouldn’t be normal by any means. As I left the recovery room that day, I couldn’t help but wonder if it had something to do with Wei Ye’s past.
Because I knew something about Wei Ye that his own son didn't, which was that the man was a created being, someone born inside the inner world of a Civilization Realm expert and later brought out into the wider Cultivation World.
If Wei Ye intended to find a Realm Stabilising Tree through channels that few could access, then the most obvious channel was his creator, and appealing to a Civilization Realm cultivator for a treasure of that magnitude would carry a price that made spirit stones irrelevant.
But everything I had observed about Wei Ye's methods, his hunger for leverage, the merciless efficiency of his trade empire, suggested to me that his creator walked a demonic path, and demonic cultivators didn’t deal in discounts, which meant the price would be measured in years of life, or in service, or in something worse that I preferred not to think about.
Then again, for a father, there was probably no sacrifice too great when it was your own child sleeping on the bed.
***
The next few days passed gently, which after the week I had come through felt almost strange.
I visited Liu Chen at his core disciple compound and found him vibrating with news, because he had broken through to the third stage of Qi Condensation under Elder Song's guidance, and he demonstrated his improved earth manipulation for me by raising a column of stone from his courtyard floor with a control that impressed me given where he had started.
"Elder Song says my foundation is finally thick enough to be proud of being a Core Disciple," Liu Chen said proudly, dusting off his purple robes. “And that if I keep making progress as fast as I have, she won’t keep calling me ‘boy’.”
"That’s high praise," I agreed. "At this rate she might call you adequate before you're a hundred years old."
"Don't joke about that, I would cry if she kept calling me ‘boy’ and I’m old and grey." He glanced toward the training yard, where a familiar massive shape was currently attempting something I couldn't immediately identify. "You should congratulate Rocky too. He had his own breakthrough three days ago. Scared the life out of half the compound when the pressure released."
Rocky had broken through to the Elemental Realm, and when I offered my congratulations the stone beast carefully arranged his enormous rock hands to spell out the word THANKS, which he had apparently been practicing specifically because the spelling at my celebration had gone over so well.
We spent a lazy afternoon together, the three of us, doing nothing that mattered and I liked that. Liu Chen ordered food from a stall he swore made the best scallion pancakes in the outer sect, and we ate them sitting on Rocky's back while Rocky pretended to be a hill. Liu Chen gave me all the gossip that he had heard over the past few weeks, including a scandal involving two elders, a disputed pill recipe, and an alchemy furnace that now had a hole in its ceiling. I listened, and I laughed in the right places, and for a few hours the Two Suns World and its dying loop and the eye in its sky belonged to a different person entirely.
I needed that afternoon more than I would have admitted to either of them.
They weren't the only people I crossed paths with that week, because on my walk back from the core disciple district I came around a corner near the supply depots and nearly collided with a broom, and holding the other end of that broom was Zhao Yu.
Zhao Yu, the younger of the two bandit brothers who had once tried to steal Rocky off a mountainside under the impression that he was some rare treasure boulder. He was the cautious one with the naive streak, forever being scolded by his older brother Zhao Xing, who was ambitious and overprotective and had decided that his little brother was too dim to survive without him.
After everything had been sorted out, I had recruited the pair of them into the Azure Peak Sect, though at thirty-five and forty they had been far too old for the outer disciple intake and had entered as sect servants instead.
Zhao Xing had accepted the arrangement with grinding reluctance, viewing servanthood as beneath a man of his talents, while Zhao Yu had been so grateful to leave banditry behind that he had thanked me four separate times in one conversation.
This was the first time I had seen him since my elevation to Outer Elder, and the poor man realized who I was mid-collision, went pale, and dropped into a bow so deep that the broom clattered out of his hands entirely.
"Elder Ke Yin! Forgive me, I wasn't watching, I…"
"Zhao Yu, stand up, please," I said, retrieving his broom for him, which seemed to short-circuit something in his brain. "How have things been? It's been a long time."
He straightened cautiously, accepting the broom back with both hands as though it were a ceremonial artifact. "Good, Elder. Truly good. Warm bed, two meals a day, nobody trying to put an arrow in me over territory. The supply depot supervisor says I'm the most reliable sweeper he's had in ten years." He said this last part with unmistakable pride, and I found it endearing that a man could find that much satisfaction in honest work after a lifetime of the other sort.
"And your brother? How is Zhao Xing taking servant life?"
Zhao Yu's face performed a complicated maneuver. "He's... adjusting, Elder. He works hard, I'll say that for him. But he still talks every night about how we're meant for bigger things, how he's going to find an opportunity, make connections, rise up." He scratched the back of his neck. "I tell him the bigger thing we found is not being bandits anymore, but you know how he is."
"I remember how he is," I said, and Zhao Yu grinned despite himself.
Then he hesitated, glanced around the empty corridor, and gathered his courage with visible effort.
"Elder, forgive me if this is out of line, but... back then, in the Azure Peak Trading Hall, I asked you something. I asked if you ever became an inner disciple, whether I might serve as your personal servant." He wrung the broom handle with both hands. "You've gone a fair bit past inner disciple now, and I know a man of your station has his pick of servants, proper trained ones, and I'm just an old bandit with a broom, but I was hoping you’d give me a chance."
I remembered that conversation, and I remembered not promising anything but telling him to work hard and prove himself trustworthy, even though I had been slightly surprised at how eager he sounded to be my servant, but now thinking about it, I understood why.
The personal servant of a Stellar Realm elder lived better than the majority of outer disciples did, with better quarters, better food, a monthly allowance of spirit stones despite having no cultivation to spend them on. And above all, the protection of a name that no reasonable person in the sect would ever cross, and for a former bandit in his late thirties with no cultivation prospects, it was probably the best position achievable.
As for me, it didn’t take long for me to make my decision.
What I wanted in a servant, if I was going to have one, was someone trustworthy who wouldn't leverage my name for schemes, and Zhao Yu had spent his entire criminal career being the brother who smelled trouble first and argued for walking away from it, an instinct for danger avoidance so well developed that it had kept two mediocre bandits alive for two decades in a world full of things that ate mediocre bandits. A man who created no problems and could sense approaching ones was worth ten servants with better cultivation.
"All right," I said. “You can be my personal servant.”
Zhao Yu blinked at me. "Really? That’s it? You’re not going to test me?"
"No tests needed," I said, and I was laughing a little. "Report to the Legacy Disciple compound tomorrow morning and ask for my pavilion, they will direct you from there, I will handle the paperwork with the servant administration office." I paused. "I should tell you that my pavilion has already been destroyed once so the position comes with occasional excitement, you should be prepared for that."
That didn’t even make him hesitate, he bowed so deeply and so many times in succession that I had to walk away to make him stop, and I could hear him thanking the heavens all the length of the corridor behind me, which, given my current standing with the heavens, I hoped wouldn't jinx him.
***
The rest of my week belonged to my inner world.
The new residents had spent my absence settling in, and the settling had gone about as smoothly as could be expected when you introduce multiple Stellar Realm souls, a nation of blood-drinking refugees, a colossal Leviathan, and a stolen moon into an already unusual ecosystem within the same day.
Ru Jian, the alchemist, had claimed a corner of the garden quadrant near the herb beds and had already begun cataloguing every spiritual plant with the fervor of a scholar handed a new library, though his enthusiasm had caused the week's first minor incident when he harvested several Azure Bellflowers without asking. Little Bloom had burst into tears over the theft, a diplomatic crisis that Azure had resolved by establishing a formal harvesting rota and having Ru Jian brew the sapling an apology tonic that made her leaves especially glossy.
Wen Suli had taken to sitting by the Crimson Lake in the evenings, and the Leech-kin children, fearless like all children everywhere were, had adopted the elderly soul as a storytelling grandmother. Azure reported that her lectures on the outside world had become the settlement's primary entertainment.
Dao Renqiu had gravitated to the Lithari mining operations, where his blacksmith cultivation and their stonework had found common ground, and the second minor incident of the week had involved him and Elder Gralth getting into a forging dispute so passionate that it disturbed the Stone Emperor's lecture schedule, which the Stone Emperor had complained about at extraordinary length to anyone who would listen, which was nobody.
Sun Li Hua remained withdrawn and wary, but Azure told me she had begun following Little Bloom around the garden, watching the sapling tend her plants, and I decided that was progress enough for now and that pushing her would undo it.
When I went to check up on Yggy, I found that my buddy wasn’t so pleased with me.
I found Yggy coiled around one of the meditation plateau railings in the southwest quadrant, and the moment I stepped onto the platform, Yggy turned away from me, which was about as clear a cold shoulder as a creature without shoulders could manage.
"I know," I said, sitting down on the edge of the plateau. "I owe you an apology."
Through the soul bond I could feel the memory Yggy was pointing at: the Red Sun Academy, the war, the chaos of Lightweavers and Skybound tearing the grounds apart, Elder Molric striding through the middle of it all with Yggy wrapped around his neck.
A Lightweaver had stepped directly into his path and raised a hand to inscribe something in the air, and Molric had drawn himself up to his full height, which wasn’t impressive, and begun to complain.
"Another one? I just killed five of you. I don’t have time for this. I have seventeen experiments that need monitoring at precise intervals, a specimen that will begin its tertiary growth phase in approximately four hours, so I have no interest whatsoever in fighti—"
Then the karmic explosion had reached him, and everything, including Yggy who was midway through coiling more securely around Molric's collar, had stopped existing.
The good news was that the soul bond meant that Yggy couldn't be permanently destroyed outside my inner world, because the connection between us ran too deep for that, so when the blast had erased everything, Yggy had simply reappeared in the inner world an instant later, unharmed, bewildered, but not unannoyed.
Yggy turned back toward me and extended one long vine very slowly, then made a sweeping gesture with the tip of it, a broad, flat erasure motion that communicated the concept of everything being wiped away, then pointed that same vine directly at me.
"Yes," I said. "That was my fault."
The vine pointed at me again, more firmly.
"I know. It was rude." I leaned forward and rested my elbows on my knees. "Yggy, I didn't plan it. I was fleeing for my soul, and I used the only thing I had, and I’m sorry that it caught you in the blast.”
The vine that had been pointed at me slowly lowered, and Yggy drifted forward across the plateau and settled into a loose coil against my side, which was Yggy's version of accepting an apology without completely giving up the moral high ground. I reached over and ran my hand along the smooth leaves and was grateful that the soul bond had been built to survive things like me making catastrophic mistakes in foreign dimensions.
"Next time," I whispered, "I'll be more careful. I promise."
Yggy pulsed once through the bond, already past it.
I had released a sigh of relief at that, that had been pretty easy to deal with, but what Azure had told me next in his weekly wasn’t.
"There is one more thing, Master. Ignis is injured."
"Injured how? By what? There's nothing in here that would touch him."
"Nothing in here did," Azure said. "I think you should see him yourself."
I found the old Ash-Seer in the Leech-kin settlement beside the Crimson Lake, laid out on a woven mat inside the dwelling the refugees had built him, and the sight of him stopped me in the doorway. The skin around his empty eye sockets had cracked and blackened as though burned from the inside, thin lines of damage radiating outward across his temples, and his breathing came shallow. Snik hovered beside him looking concerned, and the blood-vapor dish beside the mat had shattered into pieces that nobody had cleared away.
"Ignis," I said, kneeling beside the mat. "What happened to you?"
The old seer turned his ruined face toward my voice, and despite everything, the corner of his mouth lifted.
"You’re back," he rasped. "Good." He drew a slow, rattling breath. "I did something foolish, and I knew it was foolish when I did it, which I suppose makes it worse.”
“What did you do?”
“I…I scryed the Heavens of a foreign world.”
My spiritual manifestation went still, because there was only one foreign world whose Heavens had any reason to be within his reach, a world with a dying loop and a tear in its sky.
"The Two Suns World," I whispered. "You looked at the Two Suns World…"
"I looked," Ignis agreed, and the cracked skin around his sockets tightened. "And I saw something."