Qing Liao waited twelve years before he at last dispatched the letter Artemay had provided him to request a meeting with Grand Elder Neay. This act of unexpected patience surprised everyone, not least among them the cultivator himself. This long interval resulted from events concerning his parents.

During the winter that followed Rust Reaper's defeat, Liao's father slipped on hidden ice while high in the mountains. He broke his left leg in three places at once. Though he managed to crawl through the undergrowth back to a trail and was eventually rescued, he suffered from severe blood loss and frostbite to the injured leg. The local healer, glancing upon him after he'd been carried back to the village, chose to immediately amputate everything below the mid-shin in order to halt the spread of an otherwise lethal infection.

Though the aging trapper would be fitted with a fine wooden leg – Liao made the leather straps himself and taught his father how to fasten the prosthetic in place – that enabled him to move about with only a single slender cane, he was no longer able to work.

Following this incident, Liao rejected any further arguments and moved his parents to Starwall City. He made a point to visit them regularly, but nothing he did would curb his father's ever-growing habit of spending his days in taverns swapping stories with fellow elders and overindulging in ale. Even sending Chen Chao to care for his parents full time did little to mitigate this habit.

Lacking the ability to work, and with no grandchildren, the old man had no reliable way to keep busy. The bottle served to fill the hours. He was not a miserable drunk, if anything the time spent regaling the old men of the city brought him considerable joy, but Liao could not help but see the habit as a preemptive surrender. With the loss of his foot, his father had also lost his purpose. Everything else was just lingering.

His mother did much better. Though her knees pained her and as the years passed she left the house less and less, her eyes, mind, and fingers remained strong. She took up embroidery and made a business out of decorating and selling the extra boots and gloves Liao sent her from those he rejected as suitable for cultivator use. These proved very popular with merchants and peddlers who needed to spend time on the roads during the winter.

She forged an excellent relationship with Chen Chao, treating the maid as her own daughter. They seemed content in each other's company, to the point the Liao often felt his visits disrupted their quiet rapport. Still, this gave him confidence that she would continue for many years to come.

Unfortunately, his father would not last so long. The combination of alcohol and immobility took its toll. Eleven years after Rust Reaper's death, the old trapper's liver failed. Liao went to the alchemy pavilion prepared to pay any price for healing pills.

The resident elder quietly took him aside and explained that anything strong enough to stop the disease would simply kill a mortal due to qi overload. Instead, they offered remedies that would dull the pain while keeping the mind clear. Silencing his sobs, Liao accepted these.

Clarity mattered. It made it certain that his father's desire to spend his final days in the mountains were not sourced to some fever dream or pain-spawned delusion. Liao made the journey back to the village of his birth slowly that time, carrying both parents strapped to his back.

It was early autumn. His father lasted four more days in the house where he'd been born. The alchemists were true to their word, the end came without pain, calmly, in the night. The village priest, a middle-aged woman Liao did not know, struggled to hold steady through the funeral service under the cultivator's sober gaze. Liao performed the cremation himself and planted a spruce tree over the grave.

In that place, beside a spruce sapling and a pair of now stout ginkgoes, Liao called Neay to meet him on the equinox.

To his great surprise, the grand elder arrived first. Liao found the green-skinned immortal wandering amid the trees, shifting from one familial grove to another. In that context, surrounded by bark and leaves, with her pale green and softly glowing form clad in a nearly black dark green dress seemingly woven out of twisting vines she appeared more like a forest spirit than anything human. Diaphanous hair, dark at the roots, lightening towards the tips, wafted around her, held high on some unseen wind. It was as if the forest itself held her upright.

Tall and slender, with a strong face and jutting chin, eyes blessed with a stark white ring between iris and pupil, she was imposing in a fashion very different from her younger sisters Artemay and Itinay. Command seemed to stream out from her fingertips, the farmer surveying her land with sight, smell, and touch. Land that encompassed all of Mother's Gift.

Her motions, slow, methodical, and perfectly unhurried only reinforced this impression of domain.

Rather than approach directly, Liao went to the family graves, knelt, and said his prayers. Silently, he hoped dearly that Orday heard them and that she would guide those souls back to Mother's Gift in the next life. Perhaps, he supposed, he might even meet his reborn sisters, someday, though even the greatest of immortals was unable to recognize the resonance of souls. Only the sages could bridge that cosmic barrier.

When he was done, he discovered the Neay was standing beside him. "The lines are different," she remarked on the prayer. Amazingly, it sounded as if she had genuinely encountered something new. "Farmer, artisan, merchant, even servant, they all have their own variations. I had not heard the hunter's before. The faith has grown strong, here in the mountains."

She placed a hand on one of the gingkoes, palm flat. Her soil-dark and strained fingers where a shadow against the lighter bark, an unexpected and slightly frightful contrasts. "It is quite beautiful. Hopefully we can still preserve much of the forest even as the population grows. The tension between the spade and the shears, it is always present, and difficult to balance in the timescale of ordinary human lives."

Liao said nothing. Some instinct, an observation of the lighted lines that flowed from Neay's eyes to her ears and across the front of her neck, suggested that she was not finished. "Lives have such different spans, measured across different forms. A stalk of wheat will not last a year, a berry bush might survive ten, a human one hundred, a tree one thousand." She bent down and ran dark fingers slowly through the rough soil of the graveyard. "The fungus beneath our feet, living between the grains of silt and clay, ten thousand."

She rose and turned, looking far away to the east. "It is said that there are creatures in the ocean that can greatly exceed even that. No cultivator has ever surpassed ten thousand years, and yet we claim to be immortal. Arrogance, but at least some of that is necessary to seek the dao. Calling me here, you have revealed you possess that essential aspect. A useful discovery." She paused. Pale green lips twisted slowly into a mild grin. "Well, I am here. What is it you seek?"

"If there really are creatures tens of thousands of years old in the ocean," the idea that the grand elder would falsely proclaim such as thing struck Liao as monumentally unlikely, but such a claim remained difficult to believe all the same. It sounded too much like a fable. "I would like to see them." Surely that would be something to stir the soul, the dao attached to a being of such immense longevity. Even that dream, limited though it was, could be hedged. "Truly, I would like simply to see the ocean."

"Outside," the soft smile did not waver. "A suitable ambition." Neay took a single step. Her long strides covered ground easily. "Walk with me." The command was casual, but still absolute. The shining green glow of her qi was no less furious in its stellar origins than that of any other immortal.

Liao fell in to stride slightly behind the grand elder. He did not speak. Neay seemed inclined to lead the conversation, accepting simple answers. It made things easier, for the moment.

"You are an initiate in the sixth layer of the vitality annealing realm," she summarized his growth over the preceding decades. "Most scouts are of the ritual or formation pavilions, but this is not a requirement. Aekay leads the formation pavilion, second youngest among us. As Itinay serves as your patron, and they are allied, she would permit you to enter that path."

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Though he knew the grand elders considered his capabilities as if he was a prized sword, Su Yi had said as much explicitly in a quiet moment, it did not make hearing such determinations any easier for Liao. Neay, a farmer, made it somehow worse. He felt as if he was a bull being scheduled for the stud season.

"Traditionally, to join the scouts one must be at least in the thought weaving realm," Neya turned her hand and, without stopping, measured him from head to toe with her eyes. "You will reach that stage soon enough," she assessed. "There is no reason to waive that requirement."

In that moment, hearing those words, Liao resolved to breakthrough to the next major realm within ten years. A silent vow, for he said nothing in response. The grand elder's statement was stone solid and brutally reasonable. He could tell, perfectly clearly, that contesting it would be pointless.

At least he could control his own cultivation, and the next realm was not so far away. He might, he thought as they moved past the great trunks marking old graves, achieve it before his mother passed. Perhaps he could bring her a flower from the ocean.

"There is, of course," Neay continued as if Liao was not present at all. "An argument that the sect should not risk someone of your unique abilities. You are special, an irreplaceable herb in the garden. The conventional viewpoint would be to treat you as a resource that must be carefully sheltered." She looked over to him, and the white rings of her eyes flashed in the fading light of late afternoon. "That little trick with your blood, it had a profound impact. The significance is such that it is difficult to even acknowledge. At the same time, you are a new cultivar, and the proper growth method is unknown. We are forced to guess, with no second chances. Itinay is, in my reckoning, reckless. Why should I be guided by her schemes?"

It hurt to be considered as a plant, as a thing to be farmed. Still, the earlier discussion of longevity provided a measure of perspective. A decade of lifespan for a berry bush. Bushes were trimmed, pruned, sometimes even transplanted, but never considered for themselves alone, only their production mattered. Neay had watched over the lives of over thirty-five thousand cultivators. They were not individuals to the immortal farmer; they were a crop. Only the yield mattered.

Thinking in this way, trying to reason as a farmer, Liao recalled something mentioned when he watched Artemay sewn up to serve as a vessel for his blood. Further, he recalled the wreckage of those clothes when the grand elder returned. It had held together through battle, reinforced by qi, but had disintegrated to strips when removed. They could never be used again.

He had studied sharkskin afterward; in every text he could find in the library. A swift quest to learn its properties. There had been much valuable lore, but he had also found depictions of the sharks themselves.

A special kind of fish that did not live in rivers or lakes, but only in the ocean.

This truth clicked into place in his mind. He launched it into an argument without leaving any space for hesitation. "If the sect hopes to use my blood again, it will need more sharkskin. I can go to the ocean and acquire it, secure a supply for multiple missions, maybe even enough that multiple members of the council could act at once." If he reached the thought weaving realm, the amount of blood he could conceivably donate at once would allow that.

"Indeed you could," the serene expression on the glowing green face made it abundantly clear Neay had considered this already. Despite this, she offered him a kindly, almost motherly expression. "It is good of you to embrace such needs. Sharkskin is merely one thing that the rest of the world offers that Mother's Gift cannot supply. Each pavilion has a list. Put together on a scroll, it would be substantially longer than you are tall."

She stopped walking mid-stride. "If we send you out, it will be as a harvester and a hunter. An agent sent to serve as the sect's minion, one conducting tasks far below the pride of a cultivator in the third major realm. Nor will such service be short. You will need to bear this burden at least until you reach the awareness integration realm. It will likely last at least a century, perhaps more."

To a man in his forties a century was an immensity of time, but Liao was prepared for that limitation. Sayaana, he realized, had been preparing him for this from the very beginning. Living by himself in the forest he'd not only learned the necessary skills to survive alone in the wild, but he'd also inscribed the patient rhythm needed to endure such labors into his life. Fetching and carrying in the wilderness was not burdensome, it was ordinary. New places, new animals and plants, new weather, all these things took time to appreciate properly.

A century was barely a beginning.

It would not be the freedom to wander as wished, traveling whenever and wherever his dao directed. That, he recognized now, would never be truly obtained until he could face the white rings of Neay's eyes with his own unflinching immortal gaze. And that was too far away to properly imagine. But the wilderness, the open land untouched by grasping hands, that was a piece of it. A strip of jerky to satisfy for now, the full steak could wait.

"I understand," he told Neay. "I'd rather that duty than service atop the walls." This was all too true, and did well to cover his true motives. To avoid endless hours working the ramparts was a privilege he did not hesitate to grasp tightly.

"Most would, at that," the greenish grand elder sounded genuinely amused. "And perhaps that makes the answer too easy." The expression of jovial emotion faded swiftly. "I wonder, Qing Liao, what is your ultimate goal?" Before allowing him to answer, she pointed a dark finger straight upward, high towards the sky.

Her nail pivoted until it reached a point where, in a few hours, the sign of the red wanderer, the fourth planet, would appear. "I will share mine first. I desire to, someday far in the future, turn the red world green. That would be an achievement worthy of ascension. In order to grasp immortality, I did the same in the desert, restoring a lake lost to salt back to verdant marsh. What will you do, to carve your path to the heights?"

It would be pointless to claim ignorance, to lie and pretend he had no such dreams. He might not have envisioned a life in the sect as a boy, but once there, its patterns carried him along. Though he had never allowed himself to contemplate it seriously, the daydreams and waking idles of his meditation provided more than sufficient fodder to rise and answer. "I want to circle the world," he recalled the globe posted in the sect library, the vastness of a round world covered mostly by water. "Around the middle and top to bottom." This would require a great deal of swimming, but Sayaana had taught him how. He could even use the Stellar Flash Steps, in a limited way, while fully submerged. "If I did that, I could see enough of the world to reach immortality."

"It is so very curious," Neay offered by way of circuitous answer. "The way we can never truly escape our origins. My parents were farmers. Itinay's, as you may know, were weavers. Even Orday herself, the grand astronomer, was born to a sect servant family whose primary duty was to calculate the seasonal winds for the benefit of sailing. You, the trapper's son, choose a wanderer's path, same as the hunter whose remnant is joined to your dao. Perhaps that was always the way that matters would unfold."

Neay bent down again, and this time placed both hands upon the earth. "So many trees, marking the many, many lives bound to Mother's Gift. One hundred generations, nearly thirty-five million lives, and yet nothing compared to the old world. A farmer has her patch. This is mine, and it is enough for me, for now. It seems it is not enough for you, but so long as you are willing to fight for it, it does not matter. Do you know, there are, in the deserts of the world, ants that live inside hollow thorns? They care nothing for the plants that house them, but they still fight in the defense of their shared home. This can work much the same way."

She looked up, and Liao found he faced a suddenly wicked smile far more terrifying than any unleashed by Artemay. In that moment he understood how the two grand elders, seemingly so different, could call each other 'sister.' "You will need to travel far indeed, to find that sight."

"It seems I will have time, grand elder," Liao bowed his head and kept his face completely serious. He was not much interested in ants, but surely strange hides and furs could be found in a place where such pests sheltered within thorns. To bring such a thing back to Neay, one day, would be a worthy retort.

"Mind yourself carefully and, yes, you should," she stood slowly, unbending like a fern frond rising from the earth in spring. "The plague cannot find you, and the eyes of the demonic cultivators are few and lazy. Most in the sect die to the overwhelming force of the enemy and their fighting prowess makes little difference. You, however, will face such blades only if you are foolish. Mind that, and listen to Sayaana."

Recalling Aning Suying, slain purely by the backlash of the Fuming Shade's attacks on another, Liao nodded somberly. The plague had no eyes. To evade its sight was not invisibility. He could not tempt fate. Care would be needed to eliminate the demonic cultivators and reclaim the world, unseen or not.

But it could be done. Their numbers were not limitless. One by one, they could, would, fall. He would donate his blood as many times as it took.

"The thought weaving realm then," Neay turned away a final time. "Reach that achievement, and you will find the path into the scouts open to you. From there, only the dao itself shall halt you." She did not step into the air as some of her sisters would have, but instead strode through the forest at incredible speed to leave him behind. Even the swiftest of deer would have been deeply shamed by that pace, and none could have left the forest completely undisturbed by their passing.

"Circle the world is it?" Sayaana's voice emerged once the grand elder had gone, instantly revealing that she had listened to everything. "I like that, it sounds fun. These sisters won't let you go until the war is won though, nor should you seek to escape. Not while the plague's poison remains."

"Yes," he agreed calmly. It was a hard truth, in some ways, but incontestable. The true road was almost impossibly long. For now though, he need only walk a part of it, a goal that would carry him through a full century at least. More than enough time.

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