Chương 26: B1 Chapter 26

On Mount Yuelu, winter was a time for testing. Were your skills sharp enough to find fish or catch rodents? Did you know the best rocks, where worms still squirmed even in the frozen earth? Were your stores deep enough to keep your strength up on days you could do neither of those things? Were the bonds of the pack strong enough, for months of bitter cold and bellies never quite full? The rhythms and concerns of the days were much the same, everything simply became harder.

Easy food disappeared, and on the darkest of days food itself became a secondary concern to simply staving off the inescapable grasp of the cold. When winter's grasp was at its deepest, the Monkey King would come down from his peak and set fires for his subjects, blazing treasures they would keep fed even as their own stomachs cried out, until the snowstorms passed. The bleak season was very different on the Azure Mountain.

As much as orange-crest did not appreciate being stuck indoors, he also did not appreciate the biting winds and driving snows. His master had a hearth, a stone cage for a fire to live within his wooden cave. A great treasure, one that had filled orange-crest with wonder when his brother had first shown him how it worked. Daoist Scouring Medicine largely ignored it. His explanations made sense.

He had a pill furnace after all, the complex formation wrought of copper and stone that sat beneath it could burst into flame at a single gesture from the alchemist. It was all too easy to simply ignite the furnace, stick a taper beneath the fierce looking cauldron, and light the hearth anew. To the daoist's mind, the hearth's true purpose was for making tea for guests.

Orange-crest knew his brother could produce fire from nothing with his own qi as well, but he'd not seen him do so since the day he had burned like a sun and struck down the daoist who carried winter on his sword. Yet despite these explanations, to his brother's continual bemusement, orange-crest kept the fire going all day, and through much of the night. It simply felt right. A thing to do during these dark, interminable days, filled with reading and alchemy. Orange-crest liked fire.

It was the same color as so many good things, rich unctuous yolks and fragrant honey, and his own fiery fur. It made the season feel not quite so bleak. His other brothers feel not quite so far. He could almost see them, staring at more precarious fires of their own. With every carefully chopped stick he fed into the blaze, he imagined one of them doing the same on Mount Yuelu. And then he got back to cutting cocoons open, gently fishing out the goopy little worms within, and stuffing dried centipedes inside them.

Daoist Scouring Medicine watched the monkey from his position by the pill furnace, where he was slowly infusing earthen qi from half a dozen disparate plants into a lump of rock salt.

"Have you used such a technique before?" He asked suddenly. Orange-crest carefully finished his current caterpillar surgery, before looking up.

"No."

"Did your mysterious king teach it to you?"

"No."

"Then, how do you know it will work?" The monkey shrugged.

"Seems right." Orange-crest had needed to dig deep into his store of bug-lore before the answer had come to him. Cocoons were how bugs changed. He'd never seen a centipede make a cocoon, but then he'd never seen a centipede the size of three tigers stacked end to end either. So he would put little centipedes in cocoons, the qi would try to make them big, and the cocoon would turn big into different.

Truth be told, it was a rather small leap in logic compared to discovering that letting fruit rot in the right tree produced the most wonderful of drinks.

"No scrolls on mountain. I do things. Is how learn."

"Seems like a good way to waste valuable materials." Daoist Scouring Medicine muttered. He didn't have a use in mind for that beast core, and even he would be hard pressed to come up with one without at least knowing where the monkey had acquired it. But Li Hou had been uncharacteristically tight lipped about where he got it, or what it came from. It was quite strange, he knew that the monkey would have shamelessly informed him if it was merely the product of theft.

"No waste. Only make." Orange-crest corrected.

"Oh? And what if your recipe doesn't work?"

"Then I make bad tasting bug wine. Still will make drunk. And rice wine already tastes bad."

"And if the result isn't suitable for cultivating? If the qi is uncontrollable, or outright toxic?"

"Then I make enemy drink it."

"What if the core dissolves but the qi leaks out?"

"Check every day. If core gets tiny but wine is bad, I take core out."

"Clever disciple. You have answer for everything. But, what if-""What if you trust?" Daoist Scouring Medicine sighed. This is what he'd wanted, wasn't it? A disciple who would be an alchemist in their own right, doing more than merely following his recipes and aping his attainments. He just hadn't considered that their methods might be less refined than his. More instinctive. The monkey was right, after all.

The most likely scenario was that soaking a beast core in insect-saturated alcohol simply did nothing to the core.

"Very well." He conceded. His stubborn disciple would be more amenable to more structured investigation after it failed anyway. For several hours, they continued working together in comfortable silence. After several close calls, he finished his refinement. Another component of the bath completed. It was the most ambitious qi condensation level treatment he'd ever devised, built on his experiences tempering his own body, as well as his work for The Idiot's treatment.

Normally, it would have taken mere weeks to be ready. A clear production schedule and being forced to limit himself to relying on only ingredients from his stores and garden greatly reduced the delays in any project. Unfortunately, Li Xun struggled to work at his typical pace. His qi was... Not the most stable it had ever been. The majority of the searing power of the Quaternary Heartfire pill had long since been expended. His physical injuries were nearly healed.

His meridians were slower, but with every passing day the shooting pain that accompanied marshalling his qi steadily diminished. His current problem was that traces of the pill remained in his system. Whenever one flared into life, his control suffered. For an alchemist, any lapse in control was a potential disaster. Working in small batches, he'd managed to avoid getting close to a cauldron containment failure. Sadly, even with such precautions, he'd ruined ingredients he could hardly afford to lose.

"Done!" Li Hou chirped. He stood over a clay jug, stuffed cocoons bobbing at its lip like the world's most disgusting boiled dumplings. The monkey dropped the hefty beast core, watching it vanish with a plop. He placed a lid atop it. A moment later, the monkey changed his mind, and slid the lid halfway off. The alchemist was fairly certain the mixture would perform the same with air as without.

The rice wine Li Hou used as a base had already finished its fermentation, anything else he added now would simply be a soak. Daoist Scouring Medicine shivered. He'd tried the mundane wine the monkey had made. Found it passable, if weak and cloyingly sweet. Not to his taste, but hardly unsuitable for the palate of man, and better than many mortals could manage. He wasn't touching this one. Li Hou could have it all. Mayhap he'd borrow a cup for proper analysis, if his disciple's efforts proved fruitful.

The Fourfold Marked Rotworms had proven that there indeed was something to the monkey's instinctive herblore. Li Hou looked up at him, as if expecting praise or derision. The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

"Ah, that reminds me." Daoist Scouring Medicine said instead.

"Come, I have a gift for you." The curious monkey followed him to the pantry. His qi washed outward, saturating the concealed formation against the side wall. His qi split into a pair of threads, each infused with elemental power. Wending their way into the depths of the lock, the thread of water suppressed the nexus of flame at the center of the formation. With the way cleared, the thread of metal struck at the living fragment of Two-Shadowed Yew, breaking the illusion that covered the entrance to his cellar.

Any elder, and most of the sect's daoists, could no doubt break open the way into the most secret workshop he kept on site. But to do so without destroying the formation? He doubted even Elder Lu or Weeping Lotus could manage it, not without hours of study. LI Hou's eyes widened, as the wooden door shimmered into view.

"Come now, surely you did not think you'd found all my secrets? The pantry was hardly intended to be secure. I would be impressed indeed, if you managed to open this one." Not that he kept anything truly damning here. Only the suggestive. The majority of the jars he'd commissioned from Daoist Enduring Oath dwelled far from the mountain, buried beneath a village long since abandoned in the wake of a beast tide.

"You expressed disappointment, that the Azure Mountain does not have a native population of Fourfold Marked Green Rotworms. I did not wish to take another trip back to your home, and potentially bring unwanted attention to your fellows, but Mount Yuelu is hardly the only place where these lowly spirit beasts breed." He'd had a devilish time finding the things. But once he had, it had been simplicity itself to establish a breeding population both here and in his more secret workshop.

One of his samples had already evolved. After allowing it to gorge upon the flesh of a Cloud-Dancer Hare, his fattest specimen had advanced. The worm, its bulbous body now the deep blue of the open ocean, exerted a clear foundation establishment level aura. He'd already begun trialing different poisons with it, from aconite and scorpion venom to the flesh of various toads. The medical applications of a Gu that could take properties other than poison were substantial, but he didn't need a panacea right now.

He needed a weapon that even an elder would fear. A trump card with which he could credibly threaten mutual destruction, should Li Hou fail to shake the sect. Better to be a demon feared than a daoist disgraced.

"You have green worms?" Li Hou asked breathlessly. Li Xun lifted a vessel from a sparsely populated shelf. The cellar was nigh empty these days, with his orthodox reagents so thoroughly depleted. He popped the lid off. The worms did surprisingly well with complete confinement, provided enough dead flesh to subsist on. Li Hou stared at the wiggling contents of the jar. The monkey's eyes grew so wide he thought they might simply fall out of its head. Li Xun waited patiently for it to say something.

Instead, its tail began to quiver. Then it started swinging wildly, slapping the ground. The monkey turned its back to him, spinning in a circle, then pacing furiously. Its steps became small hops, and it let out several almost involuntary looking claps. A moment later, Li Hou leapt into the air, sprinting across one of the cellar's empty shelves, before launching himself at Li Xun's face.

"Ach! Pff!" Li Xun bore the indignity stoically, careful not to drop the expensive containment vessel.

"Best worms! Best brother!" The monkey shouted into his scalp, before twisting to rocket down his arm. A moment later, it had wrested the jar from his grip, and it was rocketing out into the pantry.

"Need to find best tree! Make best wine! Get even daoists drunk! Make monkey grow big and strong!" Li Xun's hand rose to his eye, wiping away an irritating clump of orange fur.

"I can see you, foolish monkey."

"Damn." Orange-crest muttered. It was hard to hide in an empty cave. He rose from where he'd been curled, attempting to emulate a furry orange rock. Formless-gleam chuffed smugly. She did that a lot. Orange-crest stared at the second orange monkey in the cave. He was a handsome fellow. Small, but fit, with a stylish poof of flaming hair atop his head. He was also still as a corpse, frozen mid-step. The monkey reached out for his doppelganger, hand set to tousle his hair.

The moment his hand made contact, the illusion's head blew away like smoke. The rest of the body followed in an instant, leaving only one monkey. His heart-fire felt dangerously low, it took so much of his strength to make an illusion that faded the moment it was touched.

"You say I'm doing it right, but why are my tricks so bad?" Orange-crest asked the fox. He'd grasped the technique easily. It wasn't much more complicated than his brother's binding spell. He flared his qi, and let it coat his fur like a second skin. He filled the qi up with whispered lies, and then slipped out of it like he slipped out of the 'robe' Daoist Scouring Medicine had once tried to force him into.

"You're too honest."

"What!" Orange-crest screeched.

"You take that foul libel back! I am very good at lying." Formless-gleam sighed.

"You have too much energy. But that idea is the problem. You think of it as a separate thing, lying. Your deception is static, a single untruth held up to the world. So your illusion is the same." Orange-crest sat back on his butt.

"But... It is? Am I supposed to not know what's true?"

"You cannot pay so much attention to where you are. The world knows when you are lying to it, so deception must become as natural to you as truth."

"So, I lie to myself."

"No, that's stupid. Just lie better." Formless-gleam flicked her tail, and it split in twain. She rose on her haunches then stepped forward. The air flickered like rippling water as two foxes strode in opposite directions.

"Maybe I stepped to the left, maybe I stepped to the right. I'm not dwelling on where I am, but where I could be."

"But you are somewhere."

"Yes. My mother can walk in two directions at once and decide where she is later. That's far beyond me, for now. But I'm not always thinking about the lie, like you are. It's just a thing that is, like the direction I chose to walk."

"This makes my head hurt."

"I told you it would be hard."

"Break time then. I brought wine." Orange-crest popped the lid off the jar. It was pleasantly cool, one of the few good things about winter. His poor feet still ached from the trek through the snow from his brother's house to the foxes cave, made all the worse for the fact he could hardly traverse the trees with a jar of wine in tow. He took a deep draw, enjoying the way the drink chased away the lingering chill of the season. Formless-gleam's tails stiffened as she sniffed his work.

It was quite good, if he did say so himself. Even his picky brother conceded it was 'drinkable'. The persimmons and bayberries were a good combination.

"I have seen that drink turn men into monsters. Drive them into rages that lead them to strike their cubs and and mates." Orange-crest shrugged.

"Doesn't seem to take much to do that. Men will kill over a couple spirit stones. I like it. Makes me feel warm and happy. Just decide not to turn into a monster." Formless-gleam chuckled. It was an odd sound, half chuff and half yip, strangely guttural coming from the normally dainty fox. She dipped her nose into the jar anyway, lapping at the alcoholic soup. Daoist Scouring Medicine had made him filter the remaining chunks out of most of the jars, but this was a proper unadulterated batch. Why waste good fruit?

"Yekh. The scent lingers in my fur."

"Heh. Your nose is more orange than mine. Drink more. You'll forget about the smell."

"Shush. You have no idea how much of a trial it has been to be born in a world ruled by those with thumbs."

"Monkey hands are best hands." Orange-crest sang happily.

"Shush." With the fox's assistance, orange-crest easily polished off the jar. He lay back against the cool stone. Formless-gleam cuddled up next to him. Her great bulky tails kept flicking against his nose.

"Stop that. It's itchy."

"No. You deserve it. For singing."

"I will sneeze in your face."

"Try me, foolish monkey. Your senior will burn that little puff of hair you're so proud of right off."

"For someone who hates men so much, you sure do talk like one." The fox shifted, pulling away from his side.

"Just this once, I will forgive you that insult. I am nothing like those rapacious monsters. The civilization they are so proud of rests atop a foundation of bones. Beneath the skies, they alone can do nothing but take."

"Tigers." Orange-crest felt proud. Truly, it was a most eloquent argument.

"Tigers are but hunters like any other. They kill when they hunger, or if you irritate them. When men come for your mountain, they will kill every monkey upon it. Not merely for food or even your fur, but because they do not share. They covet every treasure, whether it is the gift of heaven for the good of all, or the flesh your mother gave you."

"Why do you so hate them?" Orange-crest asked.

"What did they do to you?"

"My history does not exist for your amusement. Let it suffice to say my enmity is well earned." Orange-crest rose to his feet, easily balancing atop the unsteady floor of the cave. He was very good at walking.

"I'm gonna try lying to the world again." The fox didn't want to talk about humans, so he subtly changed the subject.

"Fine." Formless-gleam said.

"I promised you a lesson, and you shall have it. An illusion is not a merely a lie. What is, is, and I am not strong enough to shift that. You cannot even dream of attempting it. An illusion is a story. There are as many foxes as there are tails. The monkey never stopped running. That rustling you hear is but the whisper of wind. Stop trying to lie to the world. Tell a single story, that encompasses both the truth, and the falsehood. They are but two halves of the same thing." Orange-crest was pretty drunk.

He'd definitely downed more of the jar than formless-gleam. That statement didn't make a lot of sense to him. He stoked his now recovered qi, letting it gently seep out to form a tight shell around him. He understood the lesson. But also it didn't make sense. He stepped forward, and he remained in place.

"I don't get it." He said, and didn't.

"It's not complicated. It's just hard. You're very young. Don't be surprised that a child cannot yet grasp my mother's lessons." Orange-crest kept walking. He marveled at the monkey he'd left behind, as real as the one that slowly crept behind the fox. Those tails looked very fluffy. He grabbed one, feeling it stiffen. He immediately gave the tail a good tug. Formless-gleam leapt into the air with a very satisfying yip.

"Got your tail."

"How dare you!" The startled fox paused, staring at the two monkeys. The illusion gave her a wave, before pausing midway through. Oh. He'd lost the right frame of mind.

"Incredible." Formless-gleam said breathlessly.

"You of all creatures would have a breakthrough when you're drunk. Truly, foolish people have foolish fortune." Orange-crest burped. Not loudly. A quiet, dignified burp.

"Then why aren't you lucky?" He asked the fox. Two baleful candles of foxfire burst into being, casting their wan light across the cavern.

"Eep."