Chương 7: The Eve of the Rite

Everyone had left the Sacred Spring. Only Gu Zhiwei remained, lying in the water with her eyes closed, resting. The spring was warm. The fine needling sting where it soaked into her wounds faded slowly once she was fully under. Remembering what had happened the last time she was in the Sacred Spring, Gu Zhiwei shut her eyes and let her Spirit power sink slowly into the water. This time, she didn't hear waves. What came first was a tangle of sounds, all mixed together.

Water seeping out of a crack in the stone; a thin current curling around a tree root; somewhere a spring-mouth pinned under a fallen rock, giving off a muffled shudder. Mountain wind running south along the canopy, stripping dew from the leaves, then colliding higher up with a current of dry heat. All of it crowded into her mind at once, as chaotic as dozens of alerts firing off at the same time during an on-call shift.

Gu Zhiwei instinctively tried to pick them apart one by one, and a needle of pain went through the space between her brows. Somewhere very far away, someone spoke.

"Don't go chasing every single drop." Mountain wind hit her face, carrying the clean scent of green things. Gu Zhiwei opened her eyes. The Sacred Spring was gone. She stood in an unfamiliar valley, black wet soil underfoot, broad-leafed plants growing in flat sprawling mats, tiny red insects crawling between their veins. The woman from the shore sat by a stream. She was older than the last time. White threaded through her braids, a pale shell hanging at her ear.

In the valley behind her a crude settlement had appeared, with wooden huts built up against the slope and cooking smoke pressed low by the damp wind. Several young people were gathered on the far bank, snatches of an argument drifting over.

"The aberrants only took part of the old coast. We could still go back."

"The fruit here makes people cough up blood. The worms in the dirt burrow into your wounds. Even the animals have six legs!"

"She said we could live here. How many have died already?"

"Don't talk like that. She's the most capable Great Shaman the tribe has, and she said the old coast was completely finished." A young man drove a stone axe into a tree stump, wood chips flying.

"She marched us all that way. Of course now she has to say she wasn't wrong."

"I heard she used to be nothing but a hunter. No Great Shaman at all." The woman heard every word of it and said nothing, only bowed her head and watched the stream creep forward. Gu Zhiwei stepped closer, trying to see her expression. The water was cold. It passed straight through her phantom ankles. And just then the woman spoke, softly.

"You've come again." She raised her head and looked directly at Gu Zhiwei. The insect noise in the valley receded all at once. Gu Zhiwei ventured, "You can see me?"

"Much clearer this time." The woman studied the spot where she stood.

"Like looking through deep seawater. The first time you were very faint. Now you're much nearer." Curiosity surfaced on her face.

"Where do you come from?" Gu Zhiwei was silent for a few seconds. It was all far too complicated, and for a moment she had no idea how to answer. The woman laughed once and didn't press. She held her palm lightly above the surface of the water, and her breathing drew out long and even. An invisible ripple spread outward along the stream. Gu Zhiwei's consciousness was wrapped in it and carried out.

The water crossing the valley; roots interlacing beneath the soil; a few plants drinking the poison out of the ground and sending it up along their veins into bright red fruit. Farther off, a herd of deer treading the riverbank, hoofbeats startling the fish in the shallows. Countless perceptions converged, and none of them crushed the woman. She waded to the middle of the stream and stood there like a reef receiving ten thousand rivers.

The voices of the water passed her by, left behind what she needed, and went rushing on without pause.

"You were chasing too hard just now." The woman looked at her.

"The wind travels ten thousand miles. If you insist on remembering every leaf it touched, sooner or later your head will split open." Gu Zhiwei thought of the stabbing pain in her skull after she'd shot down the giant earthcore beast, and decided the description was fairly objective.

"How do I filter it?"

"First, be clear about what you want to ask. Then let everything extra flow away on its own." The woman pointed at a shrub on the far bank hung with red fruit.

"I asked the water: what is hurting my people? And it took me to the cause. But ask what has happened in these mountains and woods, and all you will hear is the din of ten thousand things at once." So communing with all things was also a matter of choosing your search terms.

"Your awareness has shown up at many of the important moments of my life. Like a god standing somewhere high above, watching my whole life through." The woman glanced back with a small laugh.

"I assumed you'd understood all this long ago." Something in Gu Zhiwei stirred at that, but she still didn't know how to explain herself, so she changed the subject.

"Those people blame you." The woman followed her gaze to the far bank. The young ones had scattered. Only the stone axe was left, sunk in the stump.

"Mm."

"You led them away from a homeland that was falling apart. A lot of them died. The boats nearly went down at sea. You brought them all the way here. And now they think you were wrong." The woman came back to the bank and sat, fingers brushing the trickling water.

"Some of them lost fathers and husbands. Some buried children in the sea. The pain has nowhere to go, so of course it needs an outlet."

"You're not angry?"

"Sometimes, maybe." She answered lightly, and there was no visible irritation in her face.

"But if people are going to survive something hard, someone has to make the decisions, and carry the weight of having made them." This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version. Gu Zhiwei felt a pang of something.

"Where I come from, plenty of people love being in charge and making decisions. Very few of them carry any weight." The woman laughed softly.

"Then it must be a place of abundance. When every decision is a wrestle with life and death, that kind of pressure makes most people choose not to decide at all." Gu Zhiwei was quiet for a moment.

"Maybe not everyone has that much of a conscience." The woman looked at her.

"That won't do. If you're going to stand out in front and decide for people, you need the courage to face their eyes when they weep." Mountain wind swept across the stream, and the shell at the woman's ear gave a small click. Gu Zhiwei looked at the low huts on the slope.

"I remember, at the very beginning, you were only a warrior. What made you step forward and take all this on?" The woman didn't answer right away. From the settlement came a child crying, and soon after, someone humming an old song from the seaside. A few youths caked in mud came back hauling game, and as they passed the stump, one of them pulled the stone axe free without breaking stride.

"My mother was the Great Shaman before me. I didn't go looking for power. Power came looking for me."

"Then the aberrants came, and power like that gathers trust to itself, naturally." The woman went on, "And trust brings responsibility. That night, when the space left to live in had been squeezed down to nothing, every single one of them stood waiting for me to point the way." She stepped onto the slick mountain path.

"Later I worked it out. Whether it was worth it is for the people who come after to answer. My part is only to make sure those 'people who come after' get the chance to arrive in this beautiful world at all." The force packed into those words rooted Gu Zhiwei where she stood, and she found herself thinking of the name this regression carried: Grand Sacred Spirit Shaman. She suddenly, badly wanted to tell the woman: They did understand, in the end. They honor you as sacred.

But she also suspected the woman wouldn't care about the title in the slightest. She had laughed more purely back when she was a hunter. The woman turned, looking at her across the stream and across countless years of mist, and gave her a blessing sincerely.

"I can see the light in your soul. May it never go out." The valley shook. The image shattered. Gu Zhiwei sat up out of the Sacred Spring, water pouring from her hair. She braced against the pool wall, breathing hard, and under her palm the warm stone bed carried a faint tremor, as if something were churning at the base of the entire Sacred Mountain. The panel unfolded on its own. 【1. Grand Sacred Spirit Shaman. Progress: 35% → 70%. 】 Gu Zhiwei closed the panel.

She laid her palm flat on the surface of the spring and asked, inside her mind: Where is the Earthfire Rock Beast? Several overlapping echoes came back from the depths of the water. One of them was scalding and heavy, climbing up from the northwest, drawing slowly nearer to the mountain's belly. The Sacred Mountain's barrier had stalled the Earthfire Rock Beast for now. But the rate at which it was eating through that barrier was picking up.

The sky had barely begun to gray when Su Ye came to the Sacred Spring. She hadn't slept well; the skin under her eyes was bruised-looking. The cloud beast cub was sprawled on her shoulder, its tail filament tangled into her low ponytail, one twist short of a proper knot.

"You and your precious baby getting along?" Gu Zhiwei reached over to work the filament loose. Su Ye complained with obvious indulgence.

"It's exactly like my dog back home. Clingy, obsessed with food, checks out the second training starts." The cub cracked one eye open, let out a thin coo, and went back to playing dead. Su Ye sat down at the edge of the spring, fingers picking absently at the hem of her hide skirt.

"At the Rite I have to work with the other priest's attendants to guide them into resonance with the sealing pillars. The High Priest says they'll listen to me. But I keep feeling like… I'm going to blow it."

"Did something go wrong in training?"

"Don't even ask. Yesterday all I wanted was for them to line up in a row. They ended up circling me and fighting each other."

"But you can resonate with them. That's the part that matters, isn't it?" Gu Zhiwei had picked up at least the outline of how the Rite worked.

"But the Rite can't go wrong." Su Ye's voice dropped lower and lower.

"I've been slow at things since I was a kid. My family always said so. When I was choosing a major my dad said girls' brains aren't built for it and told me to study education and become a teacher, so I'd marry well later." She stroked the cub's broad wing, her head full of doubts.

"I don't even know why the System dragged me in. As cannon fodder?" Gu Zhiwei stirred the water with her hand. Ripples spread, and the cub lifted its head, curious.

"We both got skills assigned by the System. They just point in different directions. If you want to control that power, first you have to admit it exists." That caught Su Ye's interest.

"So is your skill, like, insanely broken archery?" Gu Zhiwei rubbed the back of her neck, helpless.

"Honestly, I still haven't figured out how mine actually works. Once I do, I'll share." Then she raised a hand toward the cloud beasts playing in the spring.

"Anyway, try this. Don't try to control all of them at once. First get clear on what you want them to do, then send the intent over." It was what the Grand Sacred Spirit Shaman had just taught her. A method that worked, so obviously it was worth passing on. Su Ye closed her eyes and tried letting her Spirit power spread out. The cub on her shoulder gave its tail-wing a shake. In the water, the other two cloud beast cubs raised their heads one after the other.

And instead of darting off in every direction the way they always had, they drifted slowly toward her. Three tail filaments wound gently around her wrist. When Su Ye opened her eyes, a fine sweat had broken out on the tip of her nose.

"What did you tell them to do?" Gu Zhiwei asked.

"I just asked them what they wanted to do."

"And what did they say?"

"Hungy hungy. Food food."

"..." Su Ye dug dried fruit and jerky out of the small pouch at her waist, and all three cubs swarmed her at once. Her face got smeared all over, and in the middle of the scramble she laughed until her shoulders shook. From far off came the long drums calling the muster. The Rite procession was preparing to set out.

On the lowest platform of Cloudperch. The old head hunter sat in a vine chair, the stump of his left leg wrapped in thick medicine cloth, his face still ashen. But he'd insisted on being carried down here. The High Priest stood at his side, her gaze mild as it settled on Gu Zhiwei. She gestured at the space in front of the old head hunter.

"Good child. Come here." Gu Zhiwei did as she was told, took her place, and went down on one knee. Her aunt came forward from the front of the crowd, the blue-green feather band held in both hands. The three missing long feathers had been replaced. Chen Li had gone and found them, apparently, in whatever spare time he could scrape together. The new feathers were a shade paler, pressed tight into the faded weave with fine hemp thread. Her aunt circled behind her and bound the band across her brow.

"Don't mind how it looks," her aunt said under her breath.

"There wasn't enough time."

"It's beautiful." Her aunt's expression softened. The old hunter touched her shoulder lightly with his spear, then touched the hand that held her bow.

"From this day, you are grown." His voice was hoarse.

"You are the sharpest spear of this tribe, the swiftest arrow. May the winds of the world guide your way. May the mists of the cloud sea carry you home." The hunters around them drove the butts of their spears into the platform in unison; someone struck a beast drum.

The High Priest tapped the ground lightly with her bone staff, and above the canopy, at the crest of the far falls, several grown cloud beasts cried out together, clear and ringing, the sound rolling back and forth through the deep forest and the cloud sea, refusing to die away. Her aunt tucked a loose strand of hair up under the feather band. Her eyes were red-rimmed, and shining with something bright.

"Child, you are my pride." A pause, and then: "If my sister could have seen today, she'd have said the very same thing." Something knocked, gently, against the inside of her chest. Gu Zhiwei lowered her eyes. The ends of the blue-green feathers rested against her temple, the fine down tickling in the wind, and all at once she felt a little envious of this identity the System had handed her. To have someone who was genuinely proud of her. In her short life back in the original world, she had never once felt this.

Strange, and warm. She blinked away the ache in her eyes and reached out to hug her aunt. Her aunt went rigid all over, and only after a long while patted her back.

"Be careful out there. Your wounds aren't fully healed."

"Mm." The drums sounded again. Gu Zhiwei let go, slung Windlisten across her back, and walked toward the Rite procession waiting at the head of the cloud bridge.