Chương 88: Chapter 87: The Boat Ride

Senior brother Zhang Linghe kept the boat at an unhurried pace, and Yang was glad of it. The descent from the outer sect peak took the better part of fifteen minutes. For the first few minutes the boat moved through open sky, the floating mountains and peaks visible in all directions, their surfaces textured with forest and stone and the occasional pale line of a carved path.

Then cloud swallowed them entirely, and after a brief grey-white blindness, they broke through the underside of clouds and the world opened up below. Yang leaned forward without thinking about it. The land at the base of the mountains was hilly, the terrain folding and rising in long waves that gave the city built across it the quality of something organic, buildings climbing the hillsides and descending into the valleys between them in arrangements that followed the lands natural waves.

The city moved like a slow wave frozen in place, some structures rising four and five stories on the higher ground, others sitting low and broad in the hollows, the whole thing breathing with a life that no planned grid could have produced. What struck him first was the colour. White stone, almost universally, catching and reflecting the morning light.

The architecture had a consistency to it that stopped short of uniformity, each building following the same vocabulary of arched windows and round pillars and wide entrances while varying freely in every other part. Fountains broke the lines of the streets at intervals. Trees grew between the buildings, old ones by the spread of their canopies, allowed to reach their full size rather than cut back to accommodate foot traffic.

Yang had lived in Tianlu City and Canglong City and almost seventeen years in Markech, and before that in Sun City and for a time in Azure Point City. He had seen cities built by both mortals and cultivators. He can easily say that this is the most beautiful one he has ever seen.

"Impressive, isn't it?" He turned. Ye Xuan had moved closer to him and was watching his expression with the satisfied look.

"The most beautiful city I have seen," Yang said, and meant it without qualification. Ye Xuan nodded.

"You would have seen it a dozen times by now if you bothered to leave your cave residence. The sect takes great pride in it. Every new building must be approved by a committee before construction begins. They review the design for aesthetic consistency with the surrounding structures. If it does not meet the standard they send it back for revision."

"They are that meticulous?"

"About everything. This city has the highest literacy rate in the known world. Education for children is mandatory by law." Yang looked at him.

"For mortals as well?"

"For mortals especially. The majority of the population here is mortal. The sect has always taken the position that its responsibilities extend to everyone living under its protection." Ye Xuan settled back in his seat.

"Corruption is prosecuted strictly. Crime is punished without regard for the status of the offender. Even loose cultivators want to live here, the sect holds public lectures periodically, open to any cultivator regardless of affiliation. People who don't live here travel considerable distances for them."

"All of that must make the city extremely desirable to live in," Yang said.

"Which creates its own problem. It is one of the most expensive cities in the region. Mortals who want to live here spend years saving for it. My own family could not consider relocating here." A pause.

"And slavery is outlawed within the city limits." Yang looked at him surprised.

"I know," Ye Xuan said.

"Mortal and cultivation households and clans keeping bound slaves is still common everywhere, but here its out lawed. Rumour has it one of our ancestors was of slave origin." Ye Xuan opened his mouth to continue but was interrupted by Senior brother Zhang Linghe's even and unhurried voice came from the front of the boat.

"It is not a rumour. It is true." Several disciples turned. Zhang Linghe was looking out over the approaching city with his hands folded behind his back, not turning to address them directly.

"One of the founding sect masters came from slavery," he said.

"The records are not widely discussed outside the sect, because people can't bear to think of a slave being talented enough to create something like this, but they exist. The world isn't kind, the cultivation world even more so." Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation. Ye Xuan looked vindicated.

"I had heard it only as a rumour."

"Now you have heard it as fact." Zhang Linghe was quiet for a moment, then turned and looked at the assembled disciples with an expression that had shifted from his usual sternness into something firmer.

"Junior brothers and sisters. You are new to the sect. Most of you have barely been here a season. You see White Cloud Sect from the inside, and from there, it only looks like what cultivation is supposed to be." He let that land.

"It is not. What you have here is the result of generations of people choosing deliberately to build something worth belonging to, and defending it against everything that power and human nature would naturally turn it into if left unattended. Do not take it for granted. When you leave the sect's protection you will encounter cultivators and clans and sects that will show you very quickly how fortunate you are. Trust no one outside these robes until they have earned it." The boat was quiet.

Nobody offered a response, and none seemed expected. Yang nodded once and said nothing. He had spent almost seventeen years outside the sect's protection navigating exactly the kind of arrangement Senior brother Zhang Linghe was describing, had felt the particular pressure of an alliance that was always more binding on one side than the other. The warning was not without merit. The boat set down at the city's edge and Senior Brother Zhang Linghe made it disappear with a gesture.

The group assembled and followed him into the streets. The city received them. That was the only way Yang could frame it. In other few cultivation cities he had been in, cultivators and those adjacent to them occupied a register separate from ordinary people, acknowledged and deferred to but not met with warmth. Here, the mortals they passed looked up and smiled, offered small bows, held eye contact without the reflexive fear.

The disciples nodded back with the ease of people accustomed to this, returning bows without ceremony, occasionally exchanging a word with a stall vendor or stepping aside to let an elderly mortal pass on a narrow pavement. No one cleared the street. No one turned their face away, scared. Yang watched and understood something about White Cloud Sect's reputation. Ye Xuan fell into step beside him almost immediately and became a continuous quiet commentary on the city's food options.

Every restaurant they passed prompted an opinion. Every stall vendor prompted a memory. Yang listened and let the rest of his attention take in the architecture, the fountains, the way the white buildings stepped up the hillsides in their long ranks.

"Is there any establishment in this city you have not already eaten at?" Yang asked. Ye Xuan laughed.

"The ones further from the main roads I have not reached yet. And the place today is completely new to me." His expression acquired a note of genuine excitement.

"It is too expensive for outer sect disciples under ordinary circumstances. They make everything from rare spirit beasts to rare spirit-cultivated fruits and vegetables. The menu caters entirely to cultivators. It is supposed to be made up of meats and fruits that the sect doesn't usually prepare for the food hall because of its astronomical expense." Yang thought about the spirit fruits from Senior Cheng Mo's courtyard in Tianlu City, the warmth they had produced.

Almost seventeen years of ordinary mortal food in the Cardwright World had been one of the grinding deprivations of that life, so gradual he had stopped registering it as a deprivation and simply accepted it as how food tasted. He found he was considerably more interested in this restaurant than he had let himself acknowledge. It took perhaps twenty minutes of walking before Ye Xuan touched his arm and pointed.

They had come to the edge of a lake, wide and very still, the morning light lying flat across its surface. In the middle of it, connected to shore by a long bridge of the same white stone as the rest of the city, stood a building several stories tall, every side open to the air behind low curved railings, the interior visible from the bridge as a series of receding spaces filled with tables and light.

Where most of the city's buildings were finely made, this one had been made with care on top of care, the pillars carved in detail, the railings curved in long arcs, the whole structure sitting grandly on the water.

"Senior Brother Zhang Linghe's cousin booked the entire restaurant," Ye Xuan said. Yang looked back at the building. Five stories. Open on all four sides. Even from the bridge, he could count enough tables across the visible floors to seat well over a hundred people.

"The entire restaurant," he said incredulous.

"Every table," Ye Xuan confirmed, in the tone of someone repeating something they are still processing. The group had gone quiet. A private room at a fine establishment was generous. A full floor was exceptional. The entire building, on a lake, in the most expensive city in the region, serving spirit-food, for a celebration attended by outer sect disciples the host had never met and invited on a passing whim was insanity. Senior brother Zhang Linghe, without stopping, said, "My cousin is extravagant.

No need to inflate his ego. Come, don't block the way." They crossed the bridge, their white robes catching the reflected light off the water, and were admitted through the entrance without pause or question. Yang stepped inside. Almost every robe in the room was white. Yang stood just inside the entrance and took it in. It was the first social gathering of any kind he would be attending since joining White Cloud Sect.

He had spent his early months here alone in his cave and his tasks and his study, and then almost seventeen years elsewhere, and now he was standing in a room full of people who belonged to the same sect he did, wearing the same white, part of the same thing he was part of. Yang glanced at Ye Xuan beside him, who was looking at the room with an expression that suggested he had also not entirely anticipated the scale of what they had walked into. A sea of white.

He stood at its edge for a moment, and then he stepped forward into it.