On Cosmic Tides

The days following Laurel’s awakening were uneventful. The ambient mana was too thin for sustained movement techniques like flying, so she was forced to run through the wilderness. Scrublands transitioned to prairie which faded into dense forests as she ran east. Every few hours she would stop and meditate for a while to make sure she was still following the strongest mana currents she could find. Each pause ripped away a little more of her hope, spurring her into a faster run when she saw no change. The whole thing would have been boring if not for the underlying dread, increasing the longer she went without any signs of other people.

The same meditation sessions were bringing her internal cultivation back to acceptable levels after her time in stasis. Her mana was flowing through her channels as fast as she could make it, reinforcing her body and preventing exhaustion from setting in. Connecting to and drawing in the ambient mana, however, was still agonizing. She felt vulnerable, hunted, even without evidence of any predators. External techniques required controlling the ambient mana according to her will. With so little mana around, most of her more potent combat arts would be extremely limited, if not outright useless. She would not be blasting through any obstacles with overwhelming amounts of lightning. If she was honest, this severely limited her repertoire. She hadn’t felt so exposed since she was a teenager venturing into the wilds for the first time to find resources for the sect. Like a novice, she had taken to wearing a short sword and several knives as she ran, though thus far she had been undisturbed by anything bigger than the grouse she had eaten for dinner the previous evening.

Five days after leaving the compound, Laurel ran into a sight that nearly brought tears to her eyes. Tension dripped from her shoulders and she took what felt like the first deep breath since her imprisonment. Kneeling with her right palm flat on the ground she pressed a small amount of mana into the earth in the traditional cultivator ritual of thanks. A laugh bubbled up and she let it out, startling a bird into flight off a nearby branch.

A road. A trail really, packed dirt extending northwest to southeast. So rudimentary it would shame her sect were it to be found on their lands. The best thing she had seen in days. Animals and spirit beasts did not build roads. The isolation of her reawakening, and the subsequent lack of settlements had made her more and more convinced that whatever had leached the mana from the world had destroyed humanity as well. But here was proof that civilization still existed. She would find out what happened and then she would make her way back home. If the people of this kingdom had survived then surely her sect would have as well. Her pace was faster and her smile bright as she followed the road.

She ran through the night and the following morning, without stopping for anything more than strict necessities. Fate rewarded her persistence as she crested a hill to another beautiful sight. A small village surrounded by farmed land was splayed out before her. The pastoral scene would not have been out of place in a painting or tapestry hanging in the sect house. Sunlight glinted off the water of a nearby stream as wheat stalks swayed gently in the breeze. There were dozens of buildings in the village proper. Mostly wooden with dark tile roofs. She could not detect anything in the way of defenses. Neither traditional mortal fortifications nor mana infused enchantments protected the area, but the village might have been small enough that such things were not needed. With such a small village they were likely spared most beast attacks, and certainly wouldn’t face the waves that periodically challenged her own home city. She slowed her pace to a brisk walk. Cultivators showing up at a flat sprint would induce more panic and confusion than Laurel wanted to deal with at the moment. Instead, she would savor the release from the existential terror that had gripped her on and off since waking up.

Villagers worked the fields, as she expected, while the sound of barking dogs and giggling children floated on the wind. A twinge at the back of Laurel’s mind told her something was off about the scene, but stopping to stare at the people wouldn’t be the best way to gain their trust. Besides, master cultivators did not go around ogling farmers.The clouds shifted slightly and sunlight gleamed off a metal construct in one of the farthest fields. The blocky golem was rolling along with a long barred area in front that appeared to be pulling the wheat underneath it and into some sort of receptacle on the back. Black smoke was puffing out of the top as it seemingly destroyed a fields’ worth of crops. None of the farmers were reacting to the outrage. Laurel watched until she spotted a man and a small boy sitting on the front of the construct. It clicked then and she realized this was some sort of harvesting device. The discovery buoyed her spirits even higher. Not only had civilization survived with a pittance of mana, they had learned some very clever and efficient enchanting techniques, to be using such a device. If this wonder was in use by common mortal farmers, she could hardly wait to see what marvels her sect had developed during her time away. Perhaps whatever cataclysm had struck would now be looked upon as the crucible that finally allowed her sect to ascend to a place as a true power in the wider cosmos.

No guards challenged her as she strolled into the small village, reinforcing her suspicion of relative safety. The main street was cobbled and flanked by the various shops that such a place always needed. The tell-tale clanging of a smithy echoed from the far end of town. Several small children were drawing in the dirt of one of the side streets and stared at Laurel with wide eyes as she came into view. A wave and a smile from her sent them running. She paused for a moment, but strangers were probably important news in a town like this and the interaction was forgotten as she anticipated finally getting some answers. In the center of the town a tavern dominated one side of a large, open square. It was a handsome building, if rustic, with paned windows and a door painted bright red, propped open to let in the breeze. As Laurel stepped inside she saw a few older men playing a tile game in the corner, with a stern-faced woman behind the bar.

“Hello!” Laurel used her brightest ‘don’t scare the mortals’ smile, which was admittedly out of practice. “My name is Laurel, and I’ve recently returned to this land from some travels far away. I got lost in the mountains and am trying to figure out exactly where I am. Is there anywhere I might be able to buy a map?”

The barkeeper stared at Laurel. Laurel’s smile grew forced but she refused to let it drop. Glancing around the room the small amount of conversation had stopped. The old men had paused in their game. They looked at Laurel, then at each other, then back at Laurel. The woman tilted her head to the side as if trying to solve a riddle. Finally, the woman responded.

“...” she said.

Now it was Laurel’s turn to stare around the room in confusion. “I'm sorry, could you repeat that, slower?”

The woman’s eyes narrowed and her hand crept below the bar. Laurel had spent enough time fighting to recognize the signs of someone reaching for a concealed weapon. Concerned by the escalation, Laurel tried again, raising her hands in front of her, palms out, she did her best to enunciate each word “I don’t mean anyone harm, I’m just passing through.”

The other woman barked something at this that Laurel again couldn’t make any sense of. The matron pulled an object out from behind the bar and pointed it at Laurel. It was a long tube reminiscent of a blowgun, but made from metal, with a wooden paddle coming off the back.

Were it not aimed directly at her from two meters away, Laurel would have been very interested in taking a closer look at the weapon. Presumably an enchantment caused a projectile to come out, maybe one tipped in poison. Tamping down on an instinctive flair of anger, Laurel considered her options. Starting a fight with a weapon pointed directly at her was not ideal, but not impossible either. Everyone in the town was mortal, and being a master cultivator meant she had the overwhelming advantage in speed and reaction time. There was a chance she could disarm the woman before anyone else made a move, but she was less confident in doing so without injuring the bartender. And even if she was able to wrest the weapon away, that left her in a standoff with the mortals.

With both hands splayed wide in front of her, Laurel eased backwards towards the door. Everyone in the tavern continued to stare, games and drinks forgotten, and the woman behind the bar gestured with her tube indicating Laurel should leave. Once outside Laurel turned and jogged back out of the town the way she came, keeping her spiritual senses focused behind her in case anyone decided to speed her on her way.

When she reached the forest Laurel ducked off the road. “You idiot! Stuck underground for centuries, you don’t think the language might have changed.” She lashed out with a kick at a nearby tree, causing it to shiver and a few leaves to fall to the ground. A cautious approach would have saved her the aggressive interaction but it was too late now. Such a small town would be rife with gossip, and there was no doubt that by tomorrow everyone would have heard about the stranger lurking about. Not to mention the shame of backing down from a group of mortals. If she were not alone and far from home, she would never have allowed that level of disrespect to go unanswered.

Hidden at the edge of the forest, she settled in to wait and watch. The patterns of life in a village like this had been the same since humans first settled down to start working the land. The people worked their fields until the sun touched the horizon, and then returned to their homes. Faint shrieks of laughter drifted up into the tree Laurel was sitting in as the people began to relax after their day’s labors.

Her vigil continued into the evening and she was barely able to stay focused on the unchanging scene before her. Instead she distracted herself by cataloging everyone in the town. Farmer number one, child number seven, cow number six.

She perked up when the scene changed. Spots of light marked where villagers were running back and forth to their neighbors, carrying torches or lanterns. Laurel scowled when she realized what the most likely cause for the excitement. Only one event that day that would concern the villagers enough to lose rest over, and it was the sudden arrival of a mysterious stranger. The lights began to congregate by the tavern she had so thoughtlessly wandered into. The small crowd hovered around the town for a while, milling in the central square. No distinct words reached her perch in the forest but Laurel had seen enough. Giving the township a wide berth, she circled around to the road leading further southeast. The town was going to be suspicious of her no matter what; there was nothing to be gained from trying to salvage a relationship with these people. She had the distance to the next village to think of a better approach.

Navigating by the moonlight, she thought fondly of times when wandering into a town and announcing her name and sect resulted in the mortals falling over themselves to provide anything she asked for.

Travel was pleasant but dull as Laurel alternated between running down the road and mana cycling. The woods cut away so abruptly before the next town that she almost burst into the fields at a run. Instead she pulled up just within the treeline to take a survey. Nearly identical in layout to the first, she would have almost thought the last few days a dream if not for the difference in the fields. These people had peach orchards as the dominant crop, rather than wheat. The last village’s lesson in caution prevented Laurel from wandering in immediately. A nearby rocky hilltop provided a perfect vantage point from which to observe the town throughout the day.

From her hidden overlook, Laurel could make out the individual villagers as they went about their day. To alleviate the monotony of sitting and watching the peaches grow, she began to make up stories for them. The man in the straw hat had the heart of a poet, composing verses as he examined the base of each tree in his section of the orchards. The girls hiding amongst the trees, obviously avoiding their own chores, were engaged in a conspiracy to take one of the pies cooling in the tavern windows. The young couple walking out of the town, standing close but conspicuously not holding hands, were in search of a hidden place to while away the afternoon together.

With a jolt, Laurel realized she was spot on with the last guess. The mortal couple was approaching her hill. Chagrin set in along with a rueful smile. The perfect vantage point for being able to see the town, without being seen in turn, would be well-known among the inhabitants. Since she had time before they arrived, it was a perfect opportunity to practice a skill she’d never had much talent in. If she was going to spend this much time in mortal backwaters she may as well do some training.

Laurel thought back on Master Ronden, the best light aspect cultivator in her sect–maybe the world– who taught stealth skills to all the initiates. Laurel had struggled with the lessons, and the crotchety master had not hesitated to point that out. Repeatedly. The extreme precision necessary didn’t come naturally to Laurel and she had been young and foolish enough to decide that meant the skills were superfluous. After all, subtlety was only necessary when you couldn’t leverage overwhelming power instead.

Trying to remember the techniques now, Laurel was thankful her complaints and attempts to skip out on the lessons had been quashed by the masters. True illusions were fiendishly difficult, and more so for vortex cultivators like her, that focused on large scale effects. But it was precisely what the situation demanded in order to move around the village without alerting the mortals. For a true illusion all the details need to be held in place at once, while dynamically changing to appear to interact with the world. Hair needs to move in the breeze, shadows need to shift with the light, and a thousand other small factors that no one thinks of until they aren’t there. Eschewing the precision of such techniques, she had gained her master rank instead by focusing on large-scale workings, honing her willpower to control massive amounts of mana. However if she wanted to continue progressing she would need to master the more subtle aspects of cultivation as well. The end of the world as she knew it would not be an excuse for stagnation.

She dropped into a light meditative state to focus on the necessary mana weaving. Her goal was not a convincing illusion but rather erasing her own presence. Invisibility involved the difficult process of forcing light to bend around a position. This meant the subject then had no light to see themselves and had to operate with the rest of their physical senses along with their spiritual sight. Certain legendary assassins were rumored to use more extreme versions of the technique to be undetectable, erasing not just visibility, but scent, sound, and spiritual presence as well. Luckily, Laurel did not need anything that advanced. Instead she leveraged one of the easier skills Ronden had taught her. She wove mana so that less light hit the area directly around her, causing a dimming effect. Then she layered her will into the working so that the attention of anyone looking at her would slide away with the light. It still took concentration to maintain and it wouldn’t fool an animal that came sniffing, but it was far easier than a true illusion, and this way she could still see.

The couple had reached the base of the hill and began to climb by the time Laurel had the technique active. They were maybe 20 years old, and deeply tanned from regularly working in the fields and orchards. The young man had taken the slightly rougher terrain as an excuse to hold the woman’s hand in order to ‘help’ her up. Laurel grinned and began easing her way down the opposite side of the hill. Moving too fast would draw attention even through her concealment. Ten minutes later, she had traded places with the couple, as she arrived back on level ground while they sat together at the top. The murmurs of their conversation floated down, reminding Laurel of the much more distasteful skill she would be practicing later. She carefully made her way to another viewing point to wait for the sun to set.

*******

The rest of the day slipped by in gentle cultivation. The town was big enough that the ambient mana was slightly denser than the desert that was the rest of the countryside. Not enough for most of her usual methods, and still painful to cultivate directly. Instead she focused on refining the mana flows within her own body while keeping her stealth working active.

Once the sun set behind her perch she came out of her meditation and began inching her way towards the town. The target here was the same as the last village, as she angled for the tavern. Moving along walls and sticking to the long shadows from the occasional lantern, she made it to the center of town without being seen. The tavern was two stories tall, made from deeply stained lumber. The windows glowed from the lamps inside, and the pleasant roar of a packed taproom filled the street. Slipping into the narrow alley behind the building, Laurel found a pipe leading down from a cistern up above. Hesitating only long enough to glance around the alley, she shimmied up the pipe and laid down on the roof. Entirely hidden from sight, she let her working drop. Holding it all day had been mentally exhausting and she would need her full focus for what came next.

Deep breaths calmed her racing heart, but not the feeling of disgust at what she was about to do. This kind of technique always left her feeling slimy. The masters at her sect had taught her to use it to gather information when she was alone and vulnerable. Laurel was both of those things at the moment, and she didn’t have time to find a friendly area to stop and spend a year learning the language. She was desperate to find out what was going on, some basics about the new political landscape, and then she needed to get back to her sect.

She sent a silent apology to everyone in the tavern and expanded her senses. Even in a time when every small town had a sect or independent cultivator in residence, the vast majority of mortals had no natural ability to shield their thoughts. As Laurel relaxed her own mental shields, she could feel their consciousnesses brushing against her own. It was then a simple matter to let her own subconscious absorb the surface-level thoughts of those below. Understanding the language would be a side-effect.

One man was becoming belligerently drunk to drown out the thoughts of his trees flowering later than usual this year. The sturdy man behind the bar was watching this and wondering if he should cut the farmer off, while keeping an eye on two friends in the other corner arguing about where they should pasture some of their animals. Another corner held a group of young adults, reveling in being allowed in the tavern after dark. The whole tapestry of life in this small place played out beneath her. Laurel stole it all. Intimate secrets and irrelevant details seeped into her mind without distinction. An hour after midnight, everyone below stumbled home. Laurel returned to the overlook on the hill to meditate and process everything she’d heard and felt. Finding her mind too clouded to concentrate, she eventually tried sleeping instead.

Her dreams were filled with harsh accusations and disapproval from indistinct shadowy figures amid hopes for a good harvest. She rose before dawn feeling almost worse than when she went to sleep. Instead of trying to cultivate, or training techniques, Laurel spent the next day escaping the tumult in her own mind by reading some of her favorite stories from the sect library. Traveling with the precious books was the best privilege for being declared a master of the sect. She journeyed with the heroes, raged against the villains, and exulted when they overcame insurmountable obstacles. The familiar cadence calmed her down enough to make peace with her discomfort. By the time night came again Laurel still didn’t feel particularly good about the situation, but she was ready to do what needed to be done.

The pattern repeated. She skimmed surface thoughts in the evening and meditated or cultivated during the day. When she became overwhelmed she took breaks to explore the local countryside. After the third night, she could make out some of the words she was hearing in the conversations she eavesdropped on. By the fifth, she could follow the thread of a conversation, if not its details. It was at this point she realized the town was officially called, creatively, Northwest Peach Orchard 2. On the sixth day, a man emerged from the forest with a large canvas pack. Flinty-eyed, with the beginnings of a brown beard streaked with gray, he marched directly into the center of the town.

This was the first traveler Laurel had seen since awakening and beginning her trek, even after days on the local roads. She followed him into town at a distance, with her stealth technique active to avoid attention. He had one of those long weapons the tavern keeper had used to threaten Laurel, slung over his shoulder where she would have expected a bow. He entered the tavern just as Laurel slipped around the corner and settled into a position where she could hear the conversation through the open window.

“...any strangers?” a gruff voice said.

“Nothing since the early-season traders last month.” The tavern keeper responded. Laurel had a sinking feeling she knew exactly where this was going. Her time in Peach Tree was coming to an end.

“Last week… speaking some nonsense language, carrying a sword. Hilda drove her off but…” Laurel missed a few of the newcomer’s words, but caught enough to figure out what was going on. He had been sent to warn the locals here about her. Listening to the villagers here had given her a certain fondness for the town, but she knew there was no point in staying. There would be no honor in fighting villagers if they saw her and came to dark conclusions.