The Door To All Marvels

Mingtian was not, notably, at the library. The whole building had been shut down for the moment, until they got enough people in to do repairs; apparently there was some benefit to the bureaucracy, as some forgotten laws about criminal vandalism and public servants and all that mess entitled him— and the other librarians— to full salary while their place of work was being rebuilt. Given that they hadn’t been getting full salary to begin with, what with how he was technically underpaid for his role and Lexi was salaried out of the funds they used to run the library… well, nobody was feeling too bad about the whole thing.

No, Mingtian was enjoying his time off in the park, sitting on a bench he’d swept clear of snow and relaxing the winter sunlight. It was twenty or so odd degrees below freezing, but, well, that wasn’t the sort of thing he’d let get him down. It was nice outside. The last bits of clean-up from the festival had finally been finished, the full brunt of winter had descended upon them, and… a crystal blue sky hung above, ice glittered on denuded boughs, and a blanket of snow covered the ground more downy than down. What wasn’t there to like…

He blinked, realizing that someone had approached him with remarkable subtlety. He’d almost not noticed them coming, which… well, given just what he was, that was impressive. Even if he wasn’t paying attention… still looking up at the sky, he smiled widely. “Avyr. I see that you’re doing well. You’ve kept up on your meditations.” It was not a question.

The big cat flopped down beside him with a pout, the snow finding no purchase on his fur. “How’d you spot me? I’m pretty sure I managed to sneak up on cultivators far stronger than you before…”

“A secret. I can’t tell you everything, can I?”

For a long moment, Avyr was quiet, pondering the question. That was part of what he appreciated so much about the cat— he was intelligent, of course, but there was a… contemplative essence, a wisdom to him that few really began to grasp until far, far later. “I see,” he finally murred at last, voice quiet in that melodious sort of cat-like way. “You have a lot of secrets, don’t you.”

The sky was rather nice, was it? It had that perfect, azure blue— just tinged with a hint of whitish touch, lacking actual clouds but not the promise of them— that a good winter sky should have. The sun, of course, completed the picture, a brilliant little pearl suspended so far away, cold despite its beaming radiance, a white-hot coal held at remove.

Avyr snored. “Fine, I get it.” Then, quieter, and maybe— it was hard to tell with only mortal senses and the species barrier— a little more sadly… “I get it.”

“We all have our secrets. For example, only one of us is related to a Sundering-level cultivator.”

“I heard from Avyr that you were instrumental in… calming him down.” Mingtian huffed out the breathiest of laughs. “I guess you have a point. Apologies, I’m… I don’t know. Perhaps I’m merely feeling combative today.”

“Why so? It’s nice outside.”

“Too cold by far.”

“You should wear a jacket, then.”

The big cat flicked his tail in what might have been dry amusement. Maybe. “Who’s going to make a jacket for me? And how would I even put it on? And how would I even…” he shook his head in what was clearly exasperation. “It sounds… uncomfortable. Clothes and my kind don’t particularly mix well; it would probably chafe against my fur.”

“I remember the socks.”

“A benighted article of clothing from a benighted time, before I learnt how to manipulate my qi finely enough to warm myself.” It was rather neatly done, he could admit, the way he cycled his qi through his body— not just enough to keep him warm, but twice over, a careful anti-circuit layered on top of that to keep the heat inside of him.

Clever, especially given he’d probably scraped the technique together out of pure qi theory and persistent iteration. “You wouldn’t need it, I admit. You’ve done a good job with what you have… though, you would look cute.” Whatever pride he had in his technique was immediately erased by the sheer ire of his glare.

Mingtian just laughed.

“Well, you’re in a good mood at least.” He curled a paw, cutting cleanly through the snow, harshly. His claws had slipped out, Mingtian couldn’t help but notice. “I don’t even know why I came to find you. I could be doing something else with Lily, or, I don’t know. Helping out around the orphanage. Annoying Guxi.”

“Annoying Guxi is a noble goal, I will admit. But I think you know exactly why you came to find me.”

For a long moment, he was silent, just… stead there, for a moment. His qi was placid, his spirit undisturbed… but, he was still sad. He could tell, not by any quirk of cultivation, but rather by something far more simple; mere mortal perception informed him. “Yes.” He finally responded. “I do know why I came here. There’s… you’re the only one who ever knows. I hate that you’re the only one who ever knows. Not even Rr’an did, and yet somehow…”

“It’s a bit of a personal follicle of mine, to know. Everything that I see, I try to understand— and if I didn’t know something so evident, then I’d be ashamed of myself.” It was almost even true; as the sunlight itself, as the bequeathment of heavenly radiance, limitless and boundless over all the earth, he did know. His was the enthronement of the great observer, the solar eye. Not that he had enough mental capacity to truly process everything his domain might be able to tell him, but…

As the sun watched in its lofty, careless way, so too did he observe.

In the distance, a child bumbled through the snow with one of his friends, shrieking in joy as she tackled him and laid him out in the snow. They rolled around for a bit, tossing snow at each other and making patterns of innocence on the vast and featureless white, alive… and as they lived, Avyr watched, eyes heavy. “I’ve been keeping up with my meditations. The ones you gave me, so long ago… but, you know that. However you know things.”

“It’s evident. You would not be able to miss Lily’s meditations, would you?”

“They’re… obvious. Even a mortal would be able to realize that she’s a genius when it comes to formations and a talented disciple of the sword, and peerless amongst her contemporaries when it comes to the art of perception. My mediations are…”

“Relaxing?”

“Troubling.” He growled the word out, then, a second later, visibly recomposed himself. “I don’t understand what I’m doing wrong. I don’t even understand what I’m doing right.”

“So it goes, with these sorts of things. What is truly worth doing is rarely so clear as to tell you what it is.” It felt a little like a platitude, and— to his own suprise— he felt a little guilty when Avyr clawed at the ground in frustration… but these sorts of thing couldn’t be rushed. They would come in their own time.

“It’s merely… frustrating, to sit there and do nothing and know that despite my best efforts, I’m not progressing in anything. I am a powerful cultivator, but that’s merely by virtue of the cultivation technique you gave me. I won’t be so arrogant as to claim that victory as my own. My herbalism is… poor, despite my best efforts. I could grow a plant or two, or maybe even a spiritual herb, but I will never be able to grow some heaven-defying spiritual treasure like Lily seems to be able to make with a flick of her brush. My qi, my spirit, my self…”

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“You feel like you’re stagnating.”

“I know that I’m stagnating.” A hint of something… not fear, not frustration, not even anger, slipped across the cat, and was gone just as quickly. Hopelessness, maybe? No, not that… if there was one thing he knew Avyr would never be without it was at least that one small spark of hope.”I wish…” ah. Hope. So similar, so diametrically different. “I just don’t want to leave her behind.” What a delightfully selfish way of looking at it. To be left behind, and yet see it in turn as leaving someone else behind…

Cute.

Relatable. In a soul-deep, stunningly sharp way that almost nothing was. After all, was he not the one who had ascended with his sister all the way to the Immortal Sovereign realm? For a second, he wistfully wondered how she was doing. Probably getting herself into fights with enemies that she really shouldn’t bother, knowing her…

“Well.” He smiled. In the distance, the two kids had started to work on a snow sculpture of some kind, piling up as much snow as they could… perhaps a snow fortress. “Ponder it, then. Do you think they’re useless? Truly, beneath all of it— do you think that it’s pointless?”

“Compared to—”

“Not compared to anyone. Just for you. Alone. Imagine yourself the solipsistic one, solid against the ceaseless void— is the meditation useful?”

“It’s not useless,” he spoke, haltingly— almost begrudgingly. “But it’s not really cultivation.”

“What is cultivation, really, anyways? Packing qi into your body until you reach a bottleneck and then waiting until you have some incredible treasure to burst forth into the next realm?” Avyr started to nod, then caught himself— wise enough to notice that it was a trick question. “Is that really all there is to it? Is that all of it?”

“Is it?”

“You think that I know?” In return, he just got a gaze, so very meaningful. “Fair enough, I suppose. The answer is obviously not. In a matter of semantics, perhaps, Cultivation, Ascension through the various steps and realms, is that. But only as a matter of semantics. There exists beyond that, if you are willing to dare, to look, a manifold world of the infinite possibilities. The exalted path of the sword. The path of the ruler. The path of the holy one. Artifice. The path of the smith.” His own. “The path of the formations master. The path of the alchemist, the herbalist, the mortal and the god, the—”

“Dao.”

“So you do understand.”

“I’ve read enough of the religion and philosophy of East Saffron.” A little more relaxed, now, “I didn’t think that you’d be the sort of person to be religious. I’ll freely admit that it doesn’t match my perception of you.”

“The religious have their dao, but even thieves have their dao. I am no more religious than a robber, and certainly less than any of the great robbers.”

“I don’t even know what you mean.”

Mingtian chuckled. “An old reference, to something you’d probably not even understand. So things simply go.” Avyr gave him an annoyed look, but not too annoyed. At least he’d clear enough to get his words across— he wondered what the big cat would’ve thought if he’d decided to speak with the same sort of impossibly obscure scholar’s speech that some of the more powerful cultivators used when they were designing something with a stupid name like ‘Drop of Starlight Descending; Divine Realm Piercing Subtle Aperture Formation.’

“I suppose…” he seemed reluctant to drop it, but he also seemed reluctant to dismiss it out of hand. Good. That showed the first threads of wisdom… and, perhaps, he might even find some benefit out of. “If you would say what your path was, then what would you say?”

“Now that is a good question.” Proudly, he gave the big cat some scritches in reward— he’d not doubted him, per say, but there was a certain sort of validation that came from hearing him finally ask something really, deeply intelligent.

It was for that reason, too, that he’d actually give him a response.

For most, he imagined, to define the whole of their path in a sentence, in a paragraph, in a billion words and a databank of computers and a planet-sized repository would be all but impossible. For, at its core, he was the whole of who he was. Everyone was the whole of who they were. For him, though…

It was easier. After all, he knew what he was, and what he was knew it was him. “I am Boundless Radiance.”

“…like the Empire of Nine Sunlight’s state religion?"

Nevermind. Well, he supposed that for every genius question there had to be a stupid one, too. “No.” He rolled his eyes. “Obviously not.”

“Hey. It’s not my fault they sound similar.”

“And it’s not my fault either.”

“Fair enough.”

“Avyr…” as the sun streamed down against them, so brilliant, not warm but carrying, in its sparkling breadth, that hint of boundless vibrancy, he asked— “what is your path?”

“How am I supposed to know! That’s… it’s too much of a question. How could I tell you who I am? You could not, could never understand.”

“Then you understand, don’t you— part of the nature of things.”

“Except you were able.”

“I’ve had the benefit of thinking about this a little.” A lot. As an Immortal Sovereign, by the very nature of their existence, stood at the absolute pinnacle of their domains. He could not count how many years he’d spend pondering his own nature— he was rather sure that it was a number so large it began to be meaningless. “I don’t expect you to know immediately. I don’t expect anything of you. I merely see what is, and what could be.”

“I just… it feels like grasping at clouds, or trying to empty a lake with my paws. It slips through my grasp without so much as an acknowledgement of my efforts. I just… how can someone know the nature of their self, if their self is constantly changing? I just feel like no matter what I do, I build on shaky soil. Every step I take, every movement, every press forward… I’m changing too fast to know.”

“Do you fear it?”

“Change?” Mingtian nodded in response, softly. “No. No… I do not fear change. I just find myself frustrated about what it means for my progress.”

“That’s good. I never did take you as the sort of person to fear the shadow of what might…” it was a question he could answer, ultimately; any cultivator of sufficient power had probably at least stumbled across the answer. It was something that most found after living for a few millenia, whether they liked it or not.

The crux of the issue, though, was if he should answer. There was something to be said about reaching the conclusion on one’s own; to truly grapple with it and desperately strive against it, and cherish it and spit on it— that was a virtuous way.

Still, it was not the only way. And if he could spare Avyr that, small pain, or grand…

He supposed he was just trying to justify what he’d already chosen. “Change,” he spoke softly, and yet with all the firmness of a master of the craft— “is inevitable. All things grow. All things decay. It is not something apart from living. It is living.” Avyr was silent for a long moment, as the wind blew, and the kids trundled away to some other place, and the sun hung high overhead— not enlightened, but… contemplative. “Contemplate that. Perhaps you may get something out of it.”

The big cat dipped his head. “I will meditate on your words.”

The sun still shone.

The sky was round and blue. For a long moment… together, they just sat in contemplative, comfortable silence, embraced by the cold and the echoes of a heavy conversation.

Perhaps Avyr would even figure something out.