Chương 53: B2 Chapter 13

Orange-crest did not pass out after defeating Yang Wei. But it was a close thing. He was already sitting when his master arrived. He didn't quite remember when that happened. He had not decided to collapse. But sometimes, when you were this drunk, or this tired, your body decided things for you. It must have been when the sky had fallen, and air had fled. Yang Wei's uncle.

"Ignore him." Yang Wei had said. How exactly was orange-crest supposed to do that? He was so very good at ignoring cultivators. So many other disciples were... Twitchy. Apparently unused to living so close to creatures that could snuff their life out in an instant. Orange-crest wondered what that was like. Human life outside the sect. It was supposed to be very difficult.

'Hand-to-mouth'. That was what his brother had once called it. But could it really be that bad, if many disciples arrived at the Azure Mountain so unfamiliar with struggle and violence? His mind was wandering. Orange-crest was getting good at recognizing that. It was part of learning to meditate, to cultivate. He wracked his mind, trying to remember what he was supposed to be thinking about. Supposed to be thinking. Weird thought. Man thought. Oh. Man thought. Man. Yang Wei's uncle. That man was scary. Scary Yang.

He felt like the king. A presence heavier than life itself. Maybe not as heavy as the Monkey King. But he was not like the daoists. Not merely mighty. Orange-crest hated that, but he was too drunk to put into words why exactly. The voices of men blurred together into a great rumbling. Someone was poking him. Quick-fingers? No. His master. Did he want him to move? Were they going somewhere. Orange-crest tried to sit up. When had he collapsed to his back? It didn't go well. His body was so stiff.

Parts of it wouldn't move. Sitting up was hard, so orange-crest rolled over. That felt better, at least for one side of his body. Definitely worse for the other. But sitting back up was an unthinkable amount of work, so he stayed prone. He could see Yang Wei from this angle. See Scary Yang fussing over him, doing something that made the air the color of steel. Orange-crest had so many things he wanted to say to Yang Wei. But he was very tired.

The wild energy of battle, what the medical books called adrenaline, had left him. Like a swarm of locusts, it had left nothing behind. Moving felt like too much work. Orange-crest could talk to Yang Wei later. He definitely was not hesitating because Yang Wei's master scared him. He certainly was not shivering furiously as he slowly rearchitected his understanding of the world. He was not attempting to understand exactly how high under heaven the Monkey King of Mount Yuelu stood.

He absolutely was not attempting to enumerate how many beings that had appeared in his master's stories stood above the realm of Nascent Soul. He couldn't do that. The Monkey King was the mightiest. Everyone knew that. He knew that. While orange-crest lied to himself, Daoist Scouring Medicine was fussing over him. For once, orange-crest did not protest. He had a great deal more holes in his body than usual, a little fussing was not inappropriate. His master fed a pulped up pill into his mouth.

It went down easy, for all that it tasted like spicy tree. Medicinal energy flared in his chest. Orange-crest eagerly awaited what he knew would come next, the way his body was about to do the work of weeks in moments.

"Medicine is amazing." Orange-crest muttered drunkenly, happily abandoning all his heavy thoughts of gods and monkeys. That centipede wine was stirring up his noggin. Really mixing the green onions and fried garlic into his brain-congee. He was starting to forget to remember what he'd promised himself he'd remember not to forget. How to... Do something with stone? Or was it the illusions?

There was something he'd learned in the fight, under the influence of the centipede wine, that he'd wanted desperately not to forget. He didn't think it would come back to him if he let it go.

"Medicine is amazing." Daoist Scouring Medicine agreed, speaking to himself more than the monkey. He was amazed his disciple was still conscious. His stupid, brilliant, impossible, disciple. But Li Hou certainly wasn't quite sensate. It'd taken him almost a minute to respond to his words and prodding.

"But you might have a skewed perspective of how effective healing pills are. Very few disciples in your realm could make the sorts of healing pills I have been using to help you recover. Anything made by a daoist close to two great realms your senior is heaven-defying. If you one day match my attainments, you will find that pills like these are far less effective for you. That is why you recover from injuries in days, while I took weeks after burning myself.

The rapid recoveries you have enjoyed are typically the exclusive privilege of noble scions in Qi Condensation and Early Foundation establishment. Nobody else can afford healing pills with both surpassing potency and a gentleness appropriate for their realm." Orange-crest didn't really hear any of that. He was too busy staring at his master's face. The expression on Master Li Xun's face was odd. A strange shade of concern he couldn't quite place. Or, perhaps something else? The look was almost sheepish.

Had orange-crest ever seen his master truly embarrassed? Orange-crest wasn't sure. Remembering things was a lot of work right now.

"I need you to release your stone form, Li Hou." Daoist Scouring Medicine said slowly.

"I can't fully treat your wounds until you do."

"I'm monkey." Orange-crest noted sagely.

"Stone monkey."

"Half your skin is still stone. I need you to release it. Let it go. You won't bleed out. I've already applied hemostatic ointments to most of your punctures."

"How can I release me?" Orange-crest wondered.

"Become un-stone monkey."

"Damn it." His master muttered.

"He's not listening." Was that a hint of worry in his master's voice? No. It couldn't be. He'd won! There was nothing to worry about. Orange-crest flinched. The medicinal energy surging in his chest was starting to hurt! It wasn't supposed to do that! He felt like someone was pouring liquefied wasp stings down his meridians!

"Ow!" The monkey yelped.

"Bad pill! Medicine not amazing! Ow ow ow!"

"Release your stone form and the pain will stop. Your body can't heal itself properly when half of it is petrified."

"Let it go, let it go." Orange-crest sung drunkenly, trying to figure out how exactly to do that. Singing was also a great distraction from the wasps stinging him all over his not-veins. Where were meridians anyway? Could you cut them out and take the wasps out? Or were they like dantians, both real and not?

"Oh. I know. I'll let it go." Orange-crest released what he'd been holding onto. He wasn't sure what it was anymore, only that it was an important thing to remember how to do. Oh well. He shed the stone that was holding in his blood along with the memory. Flesh returned, and he discovered he had even more places in his body that hurt. The stone had been hiding the worst of his injuries.

"Ow!" He hissed.

"Still hurts! You lied!"

"Yes, but now I can do this." Li Xun said, pressing another pulped pill into the monkey's mouth.

"Do... What?" Orange-crest passed out.

"Stubborn beast." Li Xun muttered affectionately.

"This is why I said no more than two mouthfuls of the fortified centipede wine. Now I have to worry about you overdosing on sedatives. I can't even just pump you full of healing pills if your breathing slows either, you're toeing the limit on those too. Still, I'll put you back together. I always do. I always will." Daoist Scouring Medicine felt the sky settle around his shoulders. The very air stilled and thinned as attention settled around him.

He turned and rose, confident that his disciple was stable for the moment.

"Honored Marshal Yang." He greeted, bowing with clasped hands. How ironic, that for all he complained about the tyranny of the sect, he trusted still in its protections.

"Your nephew is a truly remarkable talent, he is well, I hope?"

The first thing orange-crest noticed when he awoke was the pain. It wasn't too bad. He'd certainly had worse in his time. It wasn't the sharp, desperate, pain of life-threatening injury. It was the dull ache of old harm, the stiffness of sleeping in the wrong place, or beneath the wrong monkey. The worst of it was the way his dantian pulsed unpleasantly, a dull sucking sensation in the center of his chest.

It was a sensation that rode the thin line between the ill-seeming pain of injury, and the wholesome suffering that followed after great exertion. Orange-crest chose to simply assume the best. That he'd strained and overdrawn his channels, not that he'd damaged the core of his cultivation. A little more rest and some light cultivation would hopefully fix it. If he was wrong, well, he'd leap off that branch when he reached the end of it. The second thing orange-crest noticed was the smell. It wasn't sausages.

It was too clean for that. Less fatty and salty, without the strange good-funk of preserved meat. Fresh pork. And garlic, and onion, and ginger, and sugar. His mouth watered. Humans made the best food-stuffs. Fresh fruit and fish could hardly compare to the mad culinary alchemy his master could perform when sufficiently motivated. Daoist Scouring Medicine was cooking. He never did that. He said it was a waste of time that could be better spent studying the dao of alchemy or cultivating.

An indulgence that encouraged indolence.

"Master!" It was sort-of-nice to have a way to address his brother-master with a single word. Orange-crest liked the intimacy of it, compared to the way that humans usually needed two or three words to greet each other. The daoist in question stepped into the parlor, still carrying his frying pan. Small pieces of fatty pork sizzled vigorously as Daoist Scouring Medicine kept shifting them, trying to avoid splashing oil on himself or the furnishings.

"Li Hao! You're awake!"

"How long?"

"It is just after noon of the second day after your match. You probably could have awoken earlier, but I kept you asleep until I felt you'd fully recovered."

"Oh." Orange-crest didn't know if he'd expected longer, or shorter.

"Your injuries weren't actually that bad. Well, they would have laid you out for the better part of a week last year. But your body is made a tougher stuff now. And the whole sect knows it."

"What?" Li Xun dashed out of the room, then returned without the pan.

"That'll keep. The rice isn't ready yet anyway." He said, before launching into almost manic speech.

"Everyone with a tongue is wagging it about your fight. I knew it would stir the outer sect, but this result was beyond even my most optimistic expectations. Apparently a sizable number of disciples were so certain of Disciple Yang's victory that they lost money wagering against you. I'd thought the pot would be too small to support that level of volume, but apparently I wasn't even the largest wager in your favor. Some outer disciple I've never heard of wagered four months of his allotment on your victory."

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"Okay?" Orange-crest wasn't really sure what to say in response to that. Good for that disciple he supposed. A pity he didn't have spirit stones of his own to wager. He kept eating them. Or drinking them. He wondered if you could bet wine. It had value and could be easily divided into smaller portions. Why couldn't wine be money?

"But the gambling action was just tinder to the flame of the story itself." Li Xun continued, needing no encouragement.

"Disciples are curious. You leapt from a nobody to a dark horse contender for finalist in the space of a single morning. Disciples have been scouring the Hall of Dawn looking for your illusion art. You know, that technique you continue to refuse to tell your master where you learned it."

"Sorry." Orange-crest muttered, not really meaning it. Well, he meant it in the sense he wanted his master to feel better. But not in the sense he felt any actual contrition.

"Is not my secret." Li Xun ignored him. He'd gotten that same answer half a dozen times, and the matter wasn't important enough for him to press it. Privately, he was convinced it was some sort of inheritance from the mysterious Monkey King. Some lesson the spirit beast gave many of his subjects that only became clear after attaining sufficient cultivation.

"After two days, the consensus of rumor is that it isn't there. Most of the sect's Qi Condensation illusion techniques look nothing like that, after all. Being rooted in the manipulation of light and color, they are less prone to disruption, and more varied in content, than those hollow clones you produce. But techniques like the Art of the Unbound Painter are not a fraction as lifelike or animate as your clones at such a low realm.

I believe the most common theory is that it is either a bloodline technique related to simian trickery, or something I taught you. Either way, many disciples want it."

"Okay?" Orange-crest said, a little confused as to where all of this was leading.

"Not sure if I could teach if I wanted to. Or if it is mine to teach." Li Xun paused, and took a breath.

"Sorry, I'm straying from what I intended to say." He said, now speaking at a more normal pace.

"I just got caught up in the excitement of seeing the sect finally recognize your talent. I'm so very proud of you, you know."

"I know." Orange-crest agreed.

"It is not only your arts they recognized." His master continued.

"I've told you alchemical bodily cultivation is not exactly a favored practice among the gentry, or orthodox cultivators as a whole. It is not heretical or demonic, it is simply regarded as impractical. The domain of eccentrics and rare talents. The materials required are too expensive to use on retainers or soldiers, but the process itself is too fraught with risk to use on noble scions or prodigies.

Why risk it, when every clan worth the name already has tried and true spiritual cultivation methods that lead to at the very least the Great Circle of Foundation Establishment? But that doesn't mean interest does not surge every time someone accomplishes something remarkable with it. Especially since I am assumed to be relatively impoverished for a cultivator of my standing.

None of the noble talents envy your stone body, but more than a few clans are likely quietly salivating over the idea of a legion of stone-fleshed soldiers. I have not received an invitation to the welcome banquet yet. But between you reaching the main stage, and the interest and rumor you have provoked, I am all but certain to. My service might belong to the Azure Mountain Sect, but the secrets to my practice are not wholly theirs to disperse."

"That's... Good?"

"It is excellent." Li Xun corrected.

"And the spirit stones! I wagered fourteen of them on your victory! We're no longer poor, Li Hou. We're not wealthy exactly, but no longer will you be forced to rely on solely your own good fortune and the sect's common resources for your advancement!"

"Yay." Orange-crest said sleepily.

"You don't actually seem too excited about all of this." Li Xun noted, clearly a little disappointed.

"I'll probably care more when I'm less tired." Orange-crest said honestly.

"Food smells good enough to eat. Want to eat. Then sleep more. Then eat more. Then I can care about human things."

"Human things." His master said, shaking his head gently.

"As if one's future prospects are a thing only humans care about." Li Xun sniffed the air.

"The rice should be done. I'll make you a bowl. It is not quite how my mother used to make it, after we reunited and she had the money for such indulgences. But it was the best I could do with the time and ingredients I had. Han Jian will be by later. He wanted to give you more time to recover, before he tendered his own congratulations." The daoist turned to leave for the kitchen.

"Wait." Orange-crest said, forcing the word out with a downright heroic exertion of will. He could smell even more now. The subtle aromas of what men called the five spices. The earthy-wet deliciousness of freshly cooked rice. But he had to do this now. Once he ate, he knew he would immediately surrender once more to the inexorable call of the bed-nest.

"Before food." The monkey continued.

"I want to write a letter." Daoist Scouring Medicine raised an eyebrow, but immediately turned to help his disciple into a chair.

"You've never done that before. Who will I be seeing this delivered to?" Orange-crest inked his brush delicately. Other people would need to be able to read this one. Yan Delun had thrown no end of shit at him for his poor handwriting when he'd purchased insects from the sect.

"You are a very sharp person..." The monkey began, speaking aloud as he wrote. It hadn't worked the first two times, but he wasn't the sort of monkey to give up after just a couple of failures. He'd never have learned to make wine if he was.

"You should come and drink wine with me."

"I'm not drinking!" Orange-crest insisted, slurring his words as he maneuvered his tongue through a mouthful of wine.

"It's not better if you spit it out!" Li Xun cried.

"That's just wasting wine!"

"Manual said to." Orange-crest insisted, turning away from his master. He sloshed the wine around in his mouth, trying to taste the qi he was attempting to imbue into the liquid. He wanted this to work. To figure out how to exhale flames. He was a little frustrated by his fight with Yang Wei. Not the victory. That was good. Nor the way the disciples of the sect had reacted to it. That had brought a great deal of joy to his master.

Orange-crest was frustrated by the way that so many of the tricks he'd pulled off under the influence of the centipede wine were now slipping through his fingers. It'd felt so easy to stonify only part of his body, to deliver punishing blows with stony fists. He'd created six moving and speaking illusions at once! Even if he had the normal measure of his qi, orange-crest considered himself lucky if he could manage a single moving illusion while sober. Sometimes they took far more qi than they should.

More often they just didn't work, refusing to move at all. Sober, one such illusion was a struggle. Six at once, cast in a moment? Unthinkable. He liked wine, but the very idea he might be dependent on it to bring out the full measure of his techniques irked him greatly. Lots of things were irking him greatly this evening. He was frustrated by the way Yang Wei could have easily triumphed over him. So much of his orange-crest's victory was a product of the decisions Yang Wei had made.

If his opponent had fought more seriously from the beginning, or been more patient or paranoid toward the end, he could so very easily have snatched victory away from orange-crest. But mostly, he was frustrated by the very existence of Scary Yang. The man his master had told him was called Yang Shui. The way his very presence had stilled the air, threatening to steal the breath from orange-crest's lungs. He had not liked that one bit. It was one thing for the Monkey King to be so mighty.

The Monkey King of Mount Yuelu possessed more than just power. Every monkey knew his character and wisdom. He might be a walking calamity, but he was a walking calamity they loved and trusted. Yang Shui was a hurricane of steel held back by good humor. A natural disaster with the capricious temperament of a man. Daoist Snowclad Heart had possessed power that orange-crest could not hope to match, not even as he was now. But even before his crippling he was something that could be evaded or tricked.

Even Daoist Enduring Oath, a core formation cultivator, was an existence that a mortal could at least hide from. Orange-crest simply hated the idea that there existed beings that could hold his life and death in their hands. Beings not merely above him, but beyond his ability to defy or impede in any meaningful capacity. It filled him with a zeal for cultivation he'd never had before, a pressing hunger to reach their level, or surpass it.

He understood a little better now why Yang Wei was the way he was, to have grown to adulthood in the shadow of such a man. And all of this together meant he really wanted this damned technique to work! This was supposed to be a night of celebration. Orange-crest should not be so irritated, it was rude to his brothers. He tried to pour all the anger and frustration that gnawed at his heart into the wine he was about to spit out.

"I said you need to recover, to refrain from drinking alcohol for at least a day, and limit your exertions, especially spiritual ones." His master continued.

"So you're practicing a novel technique the very day after pushing yourself dangerously close to your limits?" Orange-crest sometimes hated when his master was right. It made him feel bad to ignore him.

"Mahbe is bad. But gottah-" Orange-crest coughed, then gagged. Some wine had gone down his air-hole. He spun, turning away from his master, lifting the candle up in front of his lips, and spit. A moment too late, he registered a large shadow in front of him. Daoist Enduring Oath, returning through the darkness from his quest to fetch more nuts for the three of them to snack upon. And then a great ball of flame banished the night. Orange-crest did not breathe a stream of fire.

It was more of a single great belch, followed by a hacking cough that sent flames up his nostrils and embers into his fur.

"Ow! Sorry! Water!" A cup was thrust into his hands. He drank quickly, triumphant and panicked. Surely Brother Han Jian would be fine. He was the toughest of them all, and his master had done far worse on the day he cooked himself.

"I did it! Also sorry!" When orange-crest finally looked up, he saw his other-brother gently patting at his robes.

"It is probably good I do not have hair to ignite." The bald giant said sedately.

"Nor skin that easily suffers burns. But perhaps that is enough of whatever that was for the evening."

"Perhaps." Orange-crest agreed.

"But I did it! I knew it was a real manual. Also sorry again." Han Jian's eyebrow rose.

"Unattributed manuscript from the Hall of Dawn." Li Xun explained.

"The Drunken Phoenix's Breath. It's content's are... Interesting."

"I see. And your apology is accepted, Li Hou, so long as you take more care in the future."

"Yes-yes. I see." Orange-crest echoed. Maybe that was what he'd been missing. There was a passage in the manual about what burned when wine was put to flame. Several actually. Perhaps he needed more than just qi and wine in order to produce a proper spiritual flame. He needed something to burn.

"You were next, were you not?" Li Xun said, gesturing toward Han Jian.

"Yes. I've already told you about the Loong King of the River Huai, have I not, Brother Xun?"

"You have, but I would not mind hearing it again if you're not in the mood for a new story. As I recall, Li Hou was somewhat incapacitated the last time you told it."

"When was this?" Orange-crest asked. He was more than a little curious about these dragons. During his stone dream, Shan had mentioned them, along with men and monkeys, as creatures with unique destinies. Plus the idea of a big horny snake that soared through the sky and commanded storms and rains sounded really cool. He wondered if you could ride one.

"When we gathered to celebrate your breakthrough into the second stage and you promptly drank yourself into a stupor." Li Xun said dryly.

"Oh. Don't worry. I won't do that this time." Han Jian stifled a chuckle.

"How far you have grown. You could scarcely speak properly back then, now you are walking your own road, humbling prodigies and mastering techniques neither of us have ever seen before. I have no doubt that one day soon you will have your own adventures out in the wider world. I eagerly await the day you return to us with tales of them." Orange-crest nodded. His eyes felt wet, so he blinked until they dried. He shuffled a little closer to his brothers. His master and uncle.

The three of them sat in a tight circle in the shadow of a dozen pines, the light of the day slowly fading around them. A small bowl of nuts made its way between them, and orange-crest eagerly grabbed a handful. Daoist Enduring Oath launched into his story. He spoke slowly at first, steadily gathering momentum as he continued.

"There are many sorts of dragons beneath the heavens. And no shortage of them cavorting among their azure expanses. Perhaps a more learned man than I could name them all, and set them into a proper taxonomy. But such a thing is yet beyond me. I will instead speak only of this dragons that I have met and known. Men call them Flood Dragons, because by their will waters rise and fall. Not all rivers play host to one.

Not even all rivers of size, for they tend to congregate in courts, serving at the pleasure of the greatest among them. The Empire of Xiao contains three rivers known to play host to such courts. Standing at the Great Circle of Core Formation, the Loong King of the River Huai is not the mightiest flood dragon in the empire. But he is among the most well known, and most watched, for his territory contains several cities of size that directly abut his domain.

A flood dragon is surpassing dangerous when it has access to a great body of water. But the acknowledged lord of a river or sea is more dangerous still, for they have nigh absolute control over the waters in which they dwell. Within the vicinity of the River Huai itself, even a mid-stage Nascent Soul cultivator would be wise to think twice before defying the Loong King. Especially since were they to successfully slay him, the wrath of the emperor might well fall upon them.

Flood dragons rarely condescend to speak to humans at all, that the King of the River Huai does is a credit to his name and a benefit to the empire." Han Jian cleared his throat.

"All of this goes to say, that when the River Huai rose two feet in the course of a single night in which no rain had fallen, every cultivator within two hundred miles descended upon it. Whether to fight, evacuate, or negotiate, we did not yet know. I was only in the early stages of Foundation Establishment at the time. I can still remember the moment he rose up out of the water, announcing that his son was missing, presumed taken by one of us. I felt like my heart would stop from the sheer terror of his presence."

Orange-crest munched on his nuts as Daoist Enduring Oath wove his tale. He wondered if he truly hated the fact that beings that the Loong King and Yang Shui existed, or if he hated that he did not number among them. It felt like it would be easy to say that he merely did not like being young and weak. That the world would feel more fair when he truly numbered among the mighty. But he did not think that was true. Would he discover that there were heavens beyond heavens, when he reached such a stage of life?

Surely there had to be some creature at the apex of the world, even if he now knew that it was not the Monkey King of Mount Yuelu. Yet it hardly seemed right or good, that one being should stand above all. But did the world care, if one small cultivating monkey thought its order good or ill? Orange-crest had no answers. Perhaps it was simply yet too large a question for him to grapple with. Instead, he huddled close to his brothers, took another sip of water, and did his best to engrave this moment in his memory.