Chapter 65: The Formation Of Stars |
I did my best but after I had left Hao's side I couldn't sleep that night.
I lay on my back in the dark of the front room and listened to the village settle. A dog barked once at the western bank. A child cried somewhere in the Pei compound across the river and was hushed. The wind moved through the bare willows along the bend at the south end of the village. By the third notch of the night, the bell at the garrison had gone silent.
I rose to my feet.
I got dressed in the cloak I had been wearing since I traveled to the cave, and I walked towards the river.
The river was low. The thin film of ice that had been on it the morning we marched to the cave was gone, and the water moved past the bank slow and dark. I sat down on the ground and settled my breathing into a familiar cycle and closed my eyes.
I began to cultivate.
I sensed that the river moved on my left. The wind came over me from the west, and the cold of air pressed against my skin, yet through it all my dantian felt warm in my gut.
When I opened my eyes, I noticed that the stars were out.
I have not looked up in months.
The first thing I felt was that the stars were alive.
I did not mean metaphorically, I meant that I could feel that the stars themselves radiated Qi like a cultivator could, its very light that permeated throughout the world was a result of thousands of years of cultivation in space.
Those stars have been cultivating for as long as anyone has looked at them, and they will be cultivating long after we are dust.
The thought stayed with me awhile.
All life is cultivation. The light reaching me here at the river is what they refine, the way a man refines what is within him.
I lowered my hand from where it had been resting on my knee and turned it palm-up against the cold of the stone.
Qi is the underlying energy of all things. The barley in Lin Zhi's fields. The river in Sun Hai's bend. The fire Mu Renshu grew up sleeping beside. The iron in Cao Yan's father's forge... all of it is energy, and all of it is can be cultivated by someone. It is cultivation that allows the energy to move through the world, and perhaps beyond it.
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The thought weighed on me more than I expected.
Perhaps beyond it.....
I had not said the words out loud, and I was not going to. But once the thought had formed, it was hard to shake.
The anomaly that brought me to this body in this village was the kind of anomaly a man could spend a lifetime trying to find the answer to.
If the energy that moved through this world could move beyond it, then whatever had pulled me from my world into this one must have been a powerful thing.
Some questions do not have easy answers.
I tried to move on from the thought but I did not succeed.
The hard line of thought I had been refusing since the morning I had first looked at my own hands came bubbling to the surface.
What happened to the original Pei Liang.
I did not have an answer to that one either. He had been here before I had, then something had happened that I was not awake for, and I had opened my eyes one morning in his body, and the boy who had inhabited this body was gone.....or he had merged with me.
I had grown soft in the years since I took his body. I had let the village in my heart, I cried over the death of my mother, and I had built a clinic with Suyin, and I had taken students, and I had named four of them founding disciples of a sect that had not existed yet.
It had all lowered my guard, and the lowering of my guard was what had let Pei Yan get as far as she got.
The man I was before this body would not have hesitated. He would have read the suspicion at the first sign and put a blade through her at the second, kin or not. The man I have become in this body did hesitate, and the hesitation cost us innocent lives, including my brother's.
The cold of the stone had reached my hips. I drew the cloak tighter, and I turned my mind to what I had been doing with my cultivation and what I had not yet done with it.
I had developed the water-jet to be potent enough to slice a man in half if need be. I had refined the killing intent on the Academy stone until the stone brightened against it rather than dimmed, meaning that I could bring most cultivator to their knees.
I had deepened the sensing work with Shan Pei until I could read kinship signatures across the commons without opening my eyes.
I need to develop a technique that controls a large space. If five Qinghe soldiers came over the western ridge tonight while I sat on this stone, I could cut them down one at a time with the water jet technique, and that would be the extent of what I could do. I need to be able to stop their advance with a barrier.
I wracked my brain over it but couldn't find an easy solution, so I shook my head clear of the thinking and tipped my face back up to the stars.
The constellations were strange.
I traced them with one finger against the dark, the way I had traced them on summer nights at the back porch of the house I had grown up in my original world.
Three bright stars in a near-perfect line, with a softer trail beneath them.
Orion's belt, with the sword. That is what it would be at home.
But the angle was different, and the trail of the sword bent the opposite way, and the bright stars that should have framed the belt as the hunter's shoulders and feet were not there at all.
The eastern cluster. Seven stars in a rough ladle, The Big Dipper. I traced where the handle should bend, where the cup should sit, and the stars I traced over were not the same at all. There were too many on the handle and too few in the cup. It was completely different.
The southern line of five. I tried Cassiopeia, the lazy W my grandmother had taught me to find by looking the opposite way from Orion. The five stars on the ridge formed a sideways "M" instead of a W.
None of these match up at all.
I sighed.
"The formations are different," I said aloud.
The words echoed in my mind.
The formations.....
I sat upright.
"Formations...!"