Heavenly Shae

Chapter 12: "Peer Reviewed."

The old monster stayed calm initially, but as her lecture wrapped up he had grown agitated and then frustrated. Less than an hour had passed and he was pacing around the campfire.

"So you would have me believe that adaptation is all just chance? Random combinations of genetic traits and mutations? All this time, I expected fate, the guiding hand of heaven, or even the collective will of the species gradually controlling qi. But you say it is just pure chaos!" He raved, not particularly angry or out of control, just frustration reaching its breaking point. "You are certain?"

Shae shrugged emphatically. Hands to her side, palms up. "Here? In this place with its mystical qi and unknowable Dao? Perhaps not. Those certainly sound like plausible theories. Yet, this is mortal knowledge, from a place without qi, without Dao or a true heaven."

He simply raised a questioning eyebrow.

She coughed into her sleeve. "Well. At least not in any detectable form, perhaps it has been drained of qi. The stories and myths certainly match quite a lot of what occurs here." She looked up at the mountain. "This place is guarded from most of the mountain's qi, yes? Imagine a place protected from all qi. In such a place you could perform real science, unhindered by the incidental bias of qi or Dao."

The old monster shuddered. "Ugh. Such a place. I'd rather not consider it, even if it were possible and safe to exist." He shook his head. "I know I've complained about this in the past, but really if I accept this... my Dao." He trailed off while slowly shaking his head.

"No one said you had to accept it." She rolled her eyes, but kept her attitude out of her voice. "Dao's can be conflicting, you said so. And besides, reality is much more complex than theory or science. We even believe that humans no longer evolve, so things can change." She gave him a serious look and he perked up a bit, waiting for more. "We have tools, technology, and intelligence to solve our problems for us. And that is just mortals. We do not need mutation to guide us, we can modify our environment and even ourselves as we wish." She gestured around herself, "And here! It is even more true here, qi can provide much more on a short term scale than waiting for evolution to take its course. Even spirit beasts can walk that path."

He looked conflicted. "My Dao does not include sentients, to do so would make it so much larger."

"So just evolution then?" She blurted out, curiosity in her voice.

He frowned. "Bah, it is not so narrow. When I chose it, it seemed like so much more. I'm baffled to hear so much is understood by mortals so easily."

She shrugged her shoulders. "It was not so easy for them, telling the story is much easier than writing it. And you still have room for contradictions, counter arguments, and new theories." She reached for explanations to help him.

"It is one thing to disagree with another cultivator on an interpretation. Quite another to be presented so directly with a strict counterfactual."

"Ahh.. well..." Shae tried.

He waved away her attempt. "Do you know of inner demons?"

She shook her head. "Only in passing, from stories. They can halt your cultivation?"

"They can do worse, but yes. We can't usually tell exactly when they could occur but this seems like a prime case. Especially if I have to watch you progress, not your fault of course." Shae frowned anyway. He sighed, again. "While I may have been dismissive of some of your information. One thing you impressed upon me quite well is the methodology and rigor with which it was discovered. Your insinuation of a qi-less place strengthens that as surely as it shatters my core."

"Eh? Your core!" Shae exclaimed.

"An expression. Though, one usually reserved for very serious matters. Which I fear this has become." He suddenly looked at her with consideration. "You still wish to help, yes?"

She nodded, "Of course."

"I can't tell you my Dao, that is not how that works. Can't try to explain it so we can pick apart the false assumptions. But I can try something equally foolhardy." He turned to face her squarely and the world suddenly changed.

Around them the world warped and skewed just slightly. Certain colors brightened, others dimmed. The fire dulled and appeared to almost stop burning, flakes of plasma caught in mid air. Shae felt this more than just saw it. It was perspective and opinion and fact jumbled together into a different reality and pressed into theirs.

Someone might describe it as synesthesia, but her senses were not cross-wired. It hurt. In a way completely unlike pain. Yet, still so familiar. Much later, the closest she could come to describe it was the discomfort of someone telling you an awful pun, but with them being completely unaware they had done so, even to the point they denied the pun existed. A wise monk would say it was the synesthesia of knowledge.

Shae braced against it. "What is- this isn't qi?" She could guess what this was, and she didn't like it.

"No, this is Dao. My Dao. I cannot tell you what it is, I can only show you."

"It's awful." She squeezed out the words through clenched teeth. Her body's reaction was similar to qi pressure, the feeling of being crushed by something other. She tasted blood in her mouth.

"Hah!" The old monster called out the laugh, but there was no humor in it. He looked disappointed, remorseful. Then he flinched. They both heard a large 'crack', like a single strike of a pick shearing a boulder apart. "You won't have to suffer it long." He said morosely.

Shae couldn't take the weight, the force upon her. She had to get it off, get it away from her. Instinctually she did something, like flexing her Dantian when she had blocked outside qi. A muscle or lever she suddenly pulled that hadn't been there until a whole other reality was leaning on it.

"Oh!" The old monster said. "Now that is a surprise." He walked over to her. "I had felt something inside you, but I would never have expected this. Divine sense or the seed of a core maybe, but this!" He paused in thought.

Shae barely had thought for his words. She needed more room to breathe normally, to be outside of his Dao. So she pushed harder, slowly. Just enough to force it out of her. "Why..."

"Did you hear that crack earlier? That is why. I've been just barely holding it together for the last hour without realizing it. I wanted you to see a glimpse, but you surprised me again. Holding your own right from the start, which means I get to show you even more. Hopefully you can learn more from this mistake than I ever could." He looked sad. Not pitying or regretful, just sad. "This would have been much easier if we were still arguing. You have completed all I've asked, your side of the offered exchange, feel free to go when you are able, you can handle the mountain's qi now."

Shae heard the monologue clearly, having pushed the altered reality out of her body, just to the edge of her skin. He waited a beat for her to parse everything he said, then the world changed again. He dropped all of his reality on her. She lost her grip on what she was pushing back. Like the weight of a held object suddenly shifting, catching a medicine ball to find it more than heavy, full of lead. She dropped to a knee and coughed out a mouthful of blood.

She considered getting angry, she should be angry. Yet, the wisp of divine qi still floated in her mind, easing her rage. She drew on it more, just enough for stability. He was not trying to harm her, not really, he could do that easily in many other ways. So, she calmly lifted his world up off herself, pushing with those new muscles she had found. It wasn't easy, but she managed.

She lifted it off herself and held it before her. She saw it as a whole shape now, and it was a wretched thing. Not just its effects on the world around them, but how it was. A real thing in the warped space between them. She slowly saw how he had made it; how strong it was and where it was weak; where it could use work and where it was hopeless.

She first saw it as a paper mâché globe. A lumpy sphere coated in a collage of newspaper clippings. As he forced it to keep working, fighting against her and its own flaws, the paper flaked off and she saw shards of glass jut out from underneath. Yet, not just glass, shards of mirror, reflecting an impression of the world, his impression. Shae understood these were his observations of the world. Which meant, the paper was... it was other's impressions, second hand stories and all the mortal interviews he had done over the years.

She grimaced, second hand observation was not something to build anything with. She wanted to talk to him, to talk through how to gather and validate information, but he was far beyond talking to now. So she pushed back on the stories and they folded away. Not lost or destroyed, just brushed aside so she could see the whole ball clearly. The ball of Dao, for that is what it was, it had almost turned inside out, rotating out the garbage to reveal the gems underneath. It showed the real foundations on which the whole was built.

The old monster stood, wide eyed and nearly gawking, his expression was limp. His eyes and nose slowly bled dark blood. He could see it too, his Dao laid bare. He quietly mumbled "Incredible."

Shae stared at the thing with clear eyes. It was an incredible sight without all the grubby paper to fill in the gaps. Shards of mirror stabbed into a lumpy gemstone core, faceted in some places like a jeweler had stopped partway through working a large shard of opal and malachite. The large shards of mirror fanned out from it like an abstract depiction of flower petals.

"It's beautiful!" She gasped, and felt tears welling in her eyes. Then she saw the cracks, large crawling fractures like spiderweb cracks crawling across a windshield. Then she noticed the chipping and flaking, the glass mirror shards looked like they had been knapped in places, taking off some of the edge, rounding off some of the sharp corners that should have been there. In a few places it looked like it had been done with intention, to make two shards fit close together, or so one didn't scratch the surface of another. The flaking was all over the place, edges of mirror and gemstone flaked thin pieces of ash as she watched. The cracking continued and she mentally reached out to grab and hold it together. "There is something usable here..."

The old man collapsed before she could touch his Dao. It shattered as he hit the ground. A wave of qi flowed out of him, buffeting her and pushing the shattered pieces out into the world, though they flew slower than she expected from the rush of qi.

The first thing she thought of was that the qi pressure felt weak. It was less than even that of the mountain's when they were doing her tempering. But, the elder's wise words from earlier rang in her head, she hadn't tested herself since the tribulation. Perhaps she was stronger, now?

As the world drifted back into focus. The altered reality shattered, no longer warping the world. She took a breath, had she been breathing? she asked herself. How long has it been? Seconds? Minutes? Those thoughts vanished when she saw the old monster again, and he coughed a red mist.

"Still alive?" she mimicked him, from what felt like so long ago. He didn't respond, blood on his lips. She cursed her foolishness and rushed to him, then moved him onto his side, 'the recovery position' it was called on Earth, so he didn't choke on his own blood.

"Elder?" She called to him. "Elder Ghon? Fixiu!" He didn't respond but his eyes moved, tracking the largest pieces of his Dao, drifting away from him. "You old fool!"

She saw his mouth move, the word "Go." barely escaping his lips, with a mouthful of blood following.

Now, she felt, was the time to get angry. "Fuck you, idiot!" She screamed in his ear. "You pull this shit and think you just get to die in front of me?" She screamed, taking another deep breath.

She kicked him in the stomach, she was pretty sure she couldn't hurt him, but she used her weaker leg just in case. He spat out another mouthful of blood. She went back to shouting. "Get your ass up and clean up this mess, then get back to work. For real this time, start by getting more of these." She grabbed one of the glass shards out of the air and held it in front of his face. As she held it in her hand, she noticed what she had done, and smiled wickedly. "If you don't, I'm going to do it for you and you sure as shit won't like it." She stood and flicked the piece of mirror down at his midsection like a throwing knife, it stuck in his arm, she had kind of missed.

"Most of these are not completely worthless, there is plenty to work with here." She mused, wandering out to grab one of the larger shards of malachite. Then dragged it back to him, "Like this one." She showed it to him, right in front of his eyes. Two breaths later she slammed it into his stomach, right where she had kicked, embedding the sharp edge into him. She noticed he didn't bleed from either stabbing, which was probably good. He flinched and gasped in shock from that second one; he was still alive.

"You can't just leave this crap laying around," She lectured, "someone could get hurt." She threw another mirror shard at him, it bounced in front of him and stopped flat against him, not stabbing in, but she figured any contact was probably good. She collected a few more of the larger pieces, one by one. The large gemstone shards were difficult to move, like dragging a cart with broken wheels, they wanted to turn and drift in the wrong directions. She took breaks in between to clean up the mirror shards. Some of the smaller pieces shattered or flaked away into nothing when she grabbed them. Even when she was more careful with these smaller pieces they were still destroyed.

One of the smaller shards looked new. It had held together perfectly, only a single chip, and a slight scuff on the surface marred it. Looking into it, Shae smiled warmly and tucked this ace up her sleeve for later.

When she returned with the fifth larger gemstone piece. A wide and flat square of opal the size of a slice of bread. She showed it to him for the customary two breaths, but this time she felt it resist movement more than usual, refusing to be pulled away, and the old monster spoke. "Please, stop." He gasped. "That hurts quite a lot, actually."

She smiled warmly and released the shard. "All you had to do was ask." It floated in front of him for a few more breaths, so she motioned him to take it. "Go ahead, it is yours after all."

He didn't reach out for it, instead choosing to try to sit up. She helped him move into a lotus position with the floating opal in his lap. "How?" He asked. "How did you do this?" He didn't look up.

"This? I did not do this. This," She pointed at the opal slice, "is yours, you made it."

"But it's... real." He said with exhausted bafflement.

"It's no more real than when you pressed it onto reality itself, overriding the True Dao with your own." She grimaced internally at the words.

He grimaced externally. No one could override the true Dao, but he did not correct her. He merely stared.

When Shae grew impatient. Which did not take particularly long. She might have waited longer if the old man had been trying to do something. She sat beside him and pulled out her trump card. "Look at this. Who made this?" She held the stashed shard of mirror up to him, and they both gazed into it.

It was like a small window into a memory, a dark night with only a campfire in view. The viewer sat close enough to feel the warmth. Shae recognised it immediately, she had been there. It was the same campfire they sat near now, but a few months ago. She also recognised it because, if you paid attention to the light of the campfire, you would see it was being overtaken by a bright golden glow originating from the viewer's position.

Shae continued. "Would you say I created this?" and the old man flinched at her words, almost breaking his gaze away from the shard. "No, this is something you made. Just like all the others." And she could tell it had been. She might have been there, might have had some small influence on the situation, but the enlightenment was his and his alone.

He clutched the shard and pulled it to his chest, scrunching his face up like he was about to cry. He reached for the opal slice and did the same. The two pieces melded into him, phasing into his chest like they were ghosts passing through. She stood and saw the others she had stabbed him with do the same. Then, after another two breaths of him just sitting there, she smacked him across the top of the head and said, "Good, now go clean up the rest."

She stalked over to the fire and grabbed her stick. Sitting to enjoy the warmth and poke the coals aimlessly.