Live The Balance (Original cultivation)

2.6 - Butterflies

Now that he is fully into the Sixth Step, Zhi Gao decides to take a week to broaden his foundations. Certainly, he's the most advanced of those he knows, besides Lady Zhu and Lady Xuan, but cultivation advancement is not all there is to the world. He's let things fall to the wayside while he pursued his advancements, and it is time for him to try and patch up the holes in his knowledge.

The first thing he does is hunt down Jia. He finds her in the dining hall, still shovelling a meal as big as she is down her throat. She's always been a solid source of information for him, and she's happy enough to answer his questions, so long as they aren't too daft; he requests information on what spirits the others in their cohort have bound, and she doesn't even bother to pretend she doesn't already know.

"Most of 'em haven't bothered yet," she says, between bites of rice. "I know I haven't. But Zhu and Xuan have their little inheritances, and so do all the other scions around here. Those creepy snake twins found a pair of regular turtle spirits, but other than that it's mostly little local ones. Flower fairies and seafoam sprites and fish, you know?"

He nods; it's about what he would expect, for this area. While there are plenty of spirits around outside the sect, they are probably mostly docile and fairly weak. The only powerful ones would be in sect possession, or in the hands of local nobles; even the city they're docked at, old though it is, is bound to the sect.

"I can get some more specific stuff, if you like," she says after a moment. "But it's probably not that important, honestly. Plenty of cultivators never bind more than a couple of spirits."

"That seems like a waste," he says. "There's so much they can do, and having companions you can always rely on sounds ideal."

"Hah!" Jia says. "Sure, but you've got to train 'em all, and make sure they're keeping up with your cultivation, or they're useless. Even cultivators only have so much time."

"True enough," he says. "Thank you for your assistance."

She shrugs and waves him off, already halfway through a pile of stir-fried vegetables. She's starting to look closer to her actual age, now, and she's filling out the hollowness of her cheeks and losing some of the fine pale scars that litter her hands; it's quite the transformation, and a stark reminder of the power of even the simplest cultivation techniques.

He can't stick around to talk more, though, because he has a tutoring session booked with Shu Lin once more. The older disciple doesn't have him sit in the dining hall and watch people, this time, but instead takes him on a long, slow tour through the town outside the sect. They visit shops and teahouses and merchants. He watches as she negotiates, as she bickers, as she sits with perfect poise and sips exactly the right amount of her drink at a time. What's most surprising is the way she switches from one persona to another, as appropriate for the situation. He knows that people do so, that they change how they act depending on who they're talking to, but he's never seen such large changes before; Shu Lin goes from demure young woman to brash negotiator in the blink of an eye.

She teaches him how to do the same; she tries, at least. It still all feels too much like lying to him, but he's fully aware that this is a consequence of spending most of his time with spirits. Spirits never lie. They deceive and dissemble and phrase things such that you might be led to an incorrect conclusion, but all of them are so much themselves that they cannot truly lie. He manages to retain some of her guidance, and he feels better-equipped to navigate some of the complexities he's recently been faced with.

He spends other days roaming the wilderness near the sect, in search of a spirit to bind. He invites disciple Yan along on the first day, for company and because she's an experienced spirit-wrangler herself. They spend most of the day in comfortable silence, broken only by brief discussions about what spirits are found nearby. She's a very quiet woman when not talking to spirits, preferring to let her deeds to the talking. She strolls through the trees and hills, splashes with bare feet through the little streams that cut across the highlands, and flops to the soft grass when a weak sunbeam strikes through the cloud cover. If he hadn't seen her working in the gardens, hadn't had her assistance with the finer points of dealing with spirits, Zhi Gao would think there was something wrong with her; as it is, he understands that she's simply closer to the spirit world than the human one.

It's something he's noticed in himself, if only briefly. The drive to simply be in the moment, to experience instead of think. He's worked to fight against it, to plan ahead and stay the course, but it's a challenge sometimes. They don't talk about anything in particular, but the day is a pleasant one; he's gained a few insights as to the location of a spirit he might like to contract, by asking around the area.

The next few days are spent narrowing down his search, and he finds his target in a hilltop meadow. The grass is lush and green beneath his feet, the wildflowers are a riot of every colour he can imagine, and the flows of qi are pleasantly harmonious; it's a good place, even without the spirits that dwell there. Butterfly spirits, unlike their non-spirit cousins, tend to be good for the plant life near their lairs. Their caterpillars devour the qi of the sick and weak plants, leaving those more healthy to flourish, and the fully-grown butterflies aid that growth further. He's after a particular kind of butterfly, though - the Shining Dust Butterfly. It's a large spirit, by butterfly standards, with a typical wingspan a foot across. Its wings are plain black in dim light, but once they are struck dead on by the sun they shine with every colour of the rainbow, and the spirit can scatter a fine iridescent dust from its wings with a flap and an infusion of qi.

They're quite handy to have in a field, because they help keep some of the rowdier spirits in line; their dust can paralyse or poison a target. He's heard of some that can emit hallucinogens, and there are rumours that, at higher cultivation ranks, the Shining Dust Butterfly can even heal with its dust.

There's a small colony of them in the meadow, and his first visit seems well-received. The matriarch, a butterfly half as big as he is, accepts his gift of honeyed water, infused with some qi to make it more palatable, and bids he return in two days to talk to a member of her family that might be interested in a binding. It's not ideal, he'd rather have negotiated a binding immediately, but he understands the need for patience. He returns to the sect, thoughtful, and wonders what, exactly, the spirit will want for its aid. He knows that insect spirits tend to be short-lived, so there could well be a desire to live longer than normal. It could be as simple as wanting to see the world; unlike plant or natural landscape spirits, animal spirits sometimes want to adventure. He'll find out soon enough.

His nights are spent in the library, researching. He's been told by enough people that he needs to consider where he wants to stand, when he does his year's service on the front, that he's finally buckling down to look into it. First, he searches out information on alchemy. It's a deep topic, unsurprisingly, but there are enough scrolls with overviews of the subject that he can glean enough information for now.

Alchemists work with ingredients to make pills, potions, and a variety of other items; the principal other thing they make is ink, which is used in formations and talisman crafting. Typically, an alchemist will work with plants, but there are plenty of recipes that require minerals, gems, parts of animals, and even cultivator remains. The primary way they create these items is through refinement; they remove all unnecessary elements from their ingredients, and then combine what is left. This is normally done with a fire technique, but there are potentially ways to use every element for refinement; an example he finds is a metal technique that cuts away the impurities with tiny blades of qi.

It's certainly something he feels he could do, if he invested the time needed to learn it. The alchemists would serve away from the front line, as the creation of medicines is too important to risk them near the enemy. He'd also be well served learning medicinal techniques to support his pill creation. One technique mentioned by name is the Woven Switch Prosthesis technique, which allows the user to create a functional replacement limb out of thin wooden branches; a pill to regrow arms and legs would be a significant investment of resources, which could be better spent on a different pill.

There are plenty of other roles available that would mean he didn't have to serve on the very front lines; armourers and talisman makers would both spend all their time creating weapons for those fighting. There's even a job to grow and harvest the necessary food to supply the soldiers; a cultivator is required to force the plants to maturity in days instead of months, so they can keep the soldiers deployed to the front full-time.

He could also simply fight on the front lines. Swordsmen, spearmen and bowmen are all needed, and a cultivator specialised into those roles can be the difference between victory and loss. Medics and healers who can survive the fight are at a premium, and the ability to get a soldier back into the battle moments after they fall is invaluable. Commanders who can improve their troops with their mere presence, combat art specialists who can set acres ablaze with a thought, even assassins who can strike unseen - all of these people play a part.

There are even riskier positions to hold. Scouts who push behind enemy lines recruit heavily from the Speakers, as they are the people most likely to be able to recruit spirits to wreak havoc. Mounted fighters also like the Speakers, as they have a deeper bond with their animal than a normal soldier can manage; some of the most famous cavalry in the Empire recruit exclusively from the Speakers, including the elite Imperial Guard Dragon Knights. To charge headlong into the enemy, with no guarantee that you will be followed, is a dangerous role to hold, though. The most dangerous, though, is the role that combines the two - the aerial scout. The requirements are strict, the danger is immense, but the reward is just as great as the risk. To fly above the enemy and map out their lines, to survey the ever-shifting landscape, and to survive to communicate the vital information back to the commanders is a brinksman's game of riding the razor's edge, but the survivors are universally offered lands, riches, and noble titles. The Raging Ocean sect has its own variant for the wars they wage beneath the waves, and it is, if anything, more dangerous.

The fact that the scroll he's reading explicitly calls it out as a dangerous profession drives home that it must be truly lethal; the fact it mentions the rewards makes him even more suspicious.

Zhang Shui finds him buried in the scrolls, halfway through the week, and shoots him an amused look as he tries to figure out how it all fits together. She's got a scroll of her own, one of the jade-capped technique guides that cost sect points to browse, but she sits down across the table from him nonetheless.

"Greetings, Zhi Gao," she says. "You look confused."

He sets his scroll to the side with a sigh and smiles back at her. "I am. I'm looking into what positions are usually available during the year's service, and it doesn't make much sense to me. I don't know anything about fighting."

"Mm. Well, as a former soldier, I would advise you don't go to the front lines unless you have to," she says. "The easiest way to die is for someone to stick three feet of iron through your lungs."

He blinks. "I would have thought you'd be all for the fight," he says.

"I can fight," she says, lips quirked into a thin smile. "But I would rather not have to. I intend to aim for a position in the general staff, if possible. I have some training in strategy and tactics, and this should make me better." She taps the scroll. "I do not enjoy the drudgery of counting soldiers and allocating grain, but I enjoy being stabbed even less."

"That's sensible," he says. "I can't imagine the sects get many people willing to fight on the front lines, given what I know."

"Most don't get a choice," she says. "If you don't make Inner Human, you go where you're assigned, and you're mostly assigned to fight directly, unless you have a specific skill set."

"Leng Jin was saying he intended to aim for alchemist, despite his struggles with cultivation," Zhi Gao says. "I suppose that's one of the specific skill sets?"

"Yes. Anything to do with crafting or medicine gets you assigned to the relevant posts," she says. "We probably don't have to worry about not being able to choose, though, with the way we're advancing."

"I'm only Sixth Step," he says.

"And three weeks ago, you were Second," she says. "If you're still Outer Human by the time we leave port, I'd be surprised. Even I've managed to get to Ninth Step in the body path."

"That's impressive," he says. "You only need to raise your mental path, then."

"Only. Hah! It will be a struggle, I have no doubt," she says. "But that is the way of things."

"If I can manage, so can you," he says. "I didn't even know how to read when I started here, and now here I am, looking at scrolls as though I've been doing it my entire life."

"It does seem astonishing, how fast things can change," she says. "I should read my own scroll, since I paid so much for the privilege. If you'll excuse me?"

"Of course," he says, and turns back to his reading.

He's never been near Zhang Shui when she reads, before; it's surprisingly amusing, the way her face animates with every word. He wonders if he looks the same, if that's why Jia sits near him so often.

He doesn't spend all his time in the library, though. He tries to gain a deeper insight into the technique he picked up most recently, Ancient Oak Patience. He sits in the groves of trees in the gardens and contemplates the bark. He walks the little forests in the hills around the city, and listens to the spirits talk. He simply lays under the sun and lets the weak heat filter into his body. It's a deeply passive ability, and it's strange to work by doing nothing, but the patience of the ancient oak is not something that comes from vigorous activity. It's a technique of slow, constant growth, of inner and outer awareness, of steady hands and even breaths. It winds through his bones in fine green strands, threads his nerves and wraps his tendons. It pulses in time with his heart, slower and more regular than it was before.

He feels like he's gained a little insight into the technique, but it would probably be faster to get some guidance from someone who understands it deeply already; he has sect points, and he can probably afford a tutor.

Finally, the appointed day comes; he heads back up the hill to the wildflower meadow, another gift of honeyed water in his pack. He's intending to go for an agreement binding, for this spirit; he wants a friend who can grow with him, who will work with him because they want to, not because they have to. He's brought a contract with him, though, just in case, and he's willing to negotiate terms if necessary. He's met by what seems to be the entire flock of Shining Dust Butterfly spirits, who fly around the meadow in a whirlwind of shimmering wings. In the middle of the meadow is the matriarch, hovering without flapping her wings at head height, and a smaller butterfly who flits from side to side with sharp, almost jarring flaps.

He bows his head and presses his fists together in greeting, and the matriarch taps her antennae against his head. He presents the honeyed water, infused with his qi, and she accepts the gift; it vanishes when one of her wings passes over it, and then the matriarch glides backwards to let the smaller butterfly talk.

"This one is Eager Seeker of Novelties," the butterfly says, its voice surprisingly deep and solemn for its size. "It is understood that you seek a companion?"

"I do," he says. "Would you be amenable to an agreement binding, that we would work together as allies?"

"I-" the voice is high-pitched and excited for a moment. "Ahem. This one would. This one wishes to explore the outside world beyond what this one could alone."

"Better you don't pretend," Zhi Gao says. "I'm not seeking a contract binding. Isn't it for the best if we treat openly?"

Eager Seeker of Novelties bobs around for a few moments, probably thinking, then turns to gaze back at the matriarch. Zhi Gao gets the impression she's amused; somewhere between exasperated mother and fond aunt.

"I guess so," Eager Seeker of Novelties says, voice now much higher pitched and significantly more chipper. "I'm Eager Seeker of Novelties, but you can call me Novelty! All the others do. I want to see the world. Did you know that there are places you can't see the moons? And places you can't see the sun! If you can promise to do some exploring, I'm happy to come along."

It's not too much of a commitment, honestly. He's going to be doing a lot of travelling over the next two years, and he's probably not going to stop there. In any case, Novelty is what he was looking for; she's a relatively powerful spirit butterfly, and her species can paralyse and poison their targets. He estimates she's roughly Fifth Step equivalent, though spirits don't quite work the same as humans.

Do you bind Novelty?

[ ] Yes. (Agreement binding)
[ ] Yes. (Contract binding)
- [ ] Terms?
[ ] No.

What's the week plan?

You may choose 2 people to spend time with this week:

[ ] Lady Zhu.
[ ] Ma Gang.
[ ] Jia.
[ ] Zhang Shui.
[ ] Leng Jin.
[ ] Liao He.
[ ] Shan Hong.
[ ] Lady Xuan
[ ] Other (you will go wandering and try to find someone interesting. Now that you are an outer disciple, new options will be available).


Pick a job to spend 7 blocks a week on.
[ ] The Garden Job. Now that you're an outer disciple, the job pays better, but has commensurate difficulties. 5 sect points as base income, +1 sect point per hour per Step increase. At your current level (Sixth Step Outer Human), offers 29 sect points per time block, plus the Degrees of Success on your Spirit Ken roll.
[ ] Other. See the Jobs Board post in the Informational threadmarks.

You have four (4) 4-hour blocks a day (28 blocks a week) free to spend as you wish. Cultivating takes 1 block, jobs take 1 block, various training will take up blocks as noted in the description in the Sect Points post in the Informational threadmarks.

An example plan would be:
[ ] Jia.
[ ] Liao He.
[ ] 1 block a day on mental cultivation lessons.
[ ] 1 block a day on physical cultivation lessons.
[ ] Search for a spirit to bind. (Spirit Ken)
- [ ] What kind? (Type of spirit, associated element)
- [ ] What powers would you like it to have? (Rough outline)


You have six technique slots available in the mental path, and four in the body path. Discuss what you would like for them. You do not have to fill these slots immediately, and can choose to wait. Please feel free to ask me questions on this. Requires 5+ votes to lock in a technique.

[ ] Free technique.
- [ ] Physical or Mental
- [ ] Type: Attack, Defend, Support, Heal, Move.
- [ ] Element: Fire, Earth, Metal, Water, Wood.

[ ] Purchase Technique (50 sect points)
- [ ] Physical or Mental
- [ ] Type: Attack, Defend, Support, Heal, Move.
- [ ] Element: Fire, Earth, Metal, Water, Wood.
—[ ] Specifics. What do you want the technique to do?


You have fully broken through to the Sixth Step. What insights into the world around you have you gained? Take four (4).
[ ] Fire is raised from the kindling.
[ ] Earth is born from the flame.
[ ] Metal is drawn from the stone.
[ ] Water quenches the flame.
[ ] Earth absorbs the rain.
[ ] Wood pierces the stone.
[ ] Metal cleaves the oak.
[ ] Fire melts the blade.
[ ] Write in.

Vote closes 1800 BST Wednesday. New sect point purchases are available.