Liao strapped the little bag, not full, to the belt of his borrowed uniform and walked back to the temple courtyard to meet the cultivator with at least half an hour to spare. He discovered she had relocated, but the priest graciously pointed out where she had gone in between endless repeated congratulations.

  Su Yi, her eerie perfection all the more striking when motionless, had found a large stump at the edge of the village and sat cross-legged atop it. Despite being clad in pure white and shining golden ornaments, she was strangely difficult to observe in that position. Completely still, with not even a sign of breathing to betray life, it was as if she'd dropped away into the background of the world itself.

  Lacking any better guess, Liao presumed this meant she was cultivating. It looked no different in posture from the ordinary meditation all were taught as part of weekly religious services when directing private prayers to the Celestial Mother. Not that he knew anyone who could come close to matching Su Yi's incredibly straight posture. It made him feel sloppy simply looking at her.

  Whatever her ongoing activity, the cultivator detected his approach easily. She turned and faced him without bothering to open her eyes. “You are ready to go then?” she asked without preamble. There would be no questions regarding the hardships of leaving home, clearly.

  “Yes.” A lie, that statement; he was a great distance from ready and did not trust himself to speak upon the subject at all.

  “Good,” Su Yi did not call out the falsehood. It was impossible that she should be fooled by such a bare-faced denial and therefore her choice to ignore it represented a generous courtesy.

  “We must travel rapidly.” She said as she hopped off the stump. With a swift motion, she turned about, bent slightly, and positioned her arms low and wide. “Climb up. I will need to carry you.”

  Liao blanched. There was no way to mistake the implication of her posture. She wanted him to climb up on her back, to be carried like a young child might be by their parents. His father had done so on many trails during his earliest years. It was ridiculous, absurd. He could not cling to a woman, a cultivator and his senior, in such a way. Worse, even ignoring such impressions, it was impossibly awkward, she was barely a finger-width taller than him. “That's...” he sputtered.

  It did not take much for Su Yi to pierce the fog of embarrassment clouding his thoughts. “In the sect, there is no room for modesty.” The words came flat and hard, slammed forth with unrelenting decisiveness. “Men and women train side by side, cultivate side by side, and fight and die side by side. Qi equalizes all differences of bodies, male and female, short or tall, it matters not. You will see, and your hands will touch. These things are bound to happen. It is best you start removing your provincial squeamishness now.”

  “Yes...” Liao swallowed. He took a single step forward, but hesitated again when he tried to take a second.

  “If you are not capable of accepting a carry, I will tie you up and haul you back to the sect in a sack,” Su Yi remained perfectly elegant as she said this, but something in her voice made it clear there would be no third warning.

  That lack of hesitation, more than anything, sufficed to goad him into the cultivator's grasp. The silk, as he'd feared, was terribly sheer. He could feel contours of skin and muscle beneath it without making any movement at all. The cultivator's body was strong, as expected, but also dangerously soft in places. Carefully, he wrapped his hands over her shoulders and resolved to keep them fixed in place no matter what happened, fingers clasped together in front to avoid temptation. There was no helping the rush of warmth that flushed through his legs as they wrapped around the slender, barely-clad arms.

  It was all frighteningly intimate, especially to a fourteen-year-old whose encounters with the feminine had been so far limited to a handful of stolen kisses with farmer's daughters. That Su Yi gave no reaction to this contact, wholly unperturbed by his touch, helped, slightly, but he still felt itchy all over, and his mind filled with endless repeated flashes of all the very wrong things he could do from this position. The cultivator made no comment on the matter at all.

  “We are separated from the sect ground by almost the entire diameter of Mother's Gift,” Su Yi declared, though everyone knew this. “Crossing the distance quickly requires nearly continuous use of the Stellar Flash Steps, at a high level of competency. Doing so will apply considerable stress to your body.” Real caution took up the melody of the perfectly pitched speech. “Breathe only when there is a pause. Otherwise, you must keep you mouth firmly closed. Keep your eyes closed throughout. If you must search for stimulation, focus your attention on me. You are unlikely to have the chance to observe such prolonged invocation of the technique by anyone in the Awareness Integration realm for some time.”

  The label meant nothing to the young recruit. He'd never paid much attention during the priest's lessons on cultivation and history. Other children had listened raptly, but he'd spent the time sharpening tools and stitching patches. Despite this, he suspected this was an impressive achievement. Su Yi seemed unlikely to boast about something fundamentally inconsequential.

  Close as he was to her, in constant skin to skin contact, he could feel a strange sensation. It resembled the unknown energy she'd pushed at him during the test. Now it felt faint, and distant, but at the same time strangely warm and bright; a lamp on the opposite side of a screen. This muted power emanated from the cultivator's body, reflecting great potency.

  Liao supposed this must be some portion of her qi, though had he been asked he would have never found the words to explain why.

  “We are departing,” Su Yi declared without further elaboration.

  Liao took a deep breath. He clenched down hard and closed his mouth with jaw tight, but entirely forget the admonition to close his eyes.

  Su Yi took a single step. As her foot rose up something vast and molten welled up deep within her. When the leg swung forward this pulse of power burst.

  A flash of brightness exploded across Liao's awareness. Not light, it caused blindness in another place, another understanding. Power he could not explain, could not comprehend, burst across senses unnamed and left him dazed.

  Wind blasted across his face. Air ripped at his eyes and brought a sudden burst of pain. Vision instantly vanished beneath a wall of tears, everything blurred to hallucinatory shapes. Through the distortion of liquid it was just possible to recognize that their surroundings were shifted, askew and bent by the constant acquisition and loss of focus as they flickered across the landscape at impossible speeds.

  All else seemed to stand still. Faster than the deer or the wolf, was the flickering stride of Su Yi. Perhaps, Liao dared a guess, she might even outrun a hawk on the wing.

  He could not watch for long. The narrow mountain trails that wound between the foothill villages cut through thick forests and included numerous switchbacks. This forced the cultivator to switch directions constantly. Bursts of qi flowed free from the soles of her feet with every step as she darted along a course that matched no pattern known to any hunter or trapper. Liao felt the wind slap at him with every shift in direction. He was forced to duck his head, burying his face in Su Yi's midnight black hair, and close his eyes against this erratic assault.

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  Observing nothing, he felt them descend in height, leaving behind the foothills as they blasted down every slope toward the distant flat and river-cut expanse of the Zhong Plains.

  Periodically, the cultivator stopped, pausing to reorient. This gave Liao just enough time to gulp down air desperately before she blasted ahead again. A struggle, grasping these moments as they came. Each time that he failed to heed the advice to fill his lungs with every pause his throat was left burning by the time the next opportunity arose. Despite this, every attempt to grab at air while in motion achieved nothing, wind flashed past too fast to be channeled inward and exited past lips cracked and tired by the effort.

  They moved very fast, but not impossibly so. Opening his eyes to catch a glimpse with every pause, he was able to gauge their progress by the string of villages that they passed. Those in the hills, on paths whose length he knew well, served to calibrate what came later on the long road to the city.

  Su Yi crossed a day's travel distance of twenty kilometers in as many minutes. This pace, furious though it was, yielded some speed to the needs of terrain and the limited pathways. The pressure of qi that rose from her body, strengthening bones, empowering muscles, and shielding surfaces made that clear to Liao. He did not know how he knew, but he could somehow recognize that this was not the fullness of her exertion. She could go faster, wanted to run even harder.

  This truth was made manifest when they left the forests covering the lightly settled mountains with their terrace-dependent villages and dropped down into the wide plateau of the plain of many rivers that formed the core of the Mother's Gift.

  Here Liao opened his eyes again when Su Yi made a prolonged stop, nearly a minute without moving. She was breathing heavily, the action audible for the first time, but it was a steady process; far from winded. She took the opportunity to grab a drink of water from a skin hidden against her leg somewhere, an act she managed somehow without dropping her baggage. This gave him a brief moment to observe the plains, the first in-person visit in his entire life.

  He had stood atop the high peaks and looked down at the farmland below many times, marveling at the endless lines carved into the land by the actions of his fellow humans, but had never journeyed to the lowland regions. It struck him then, a hammer blow to his persona, that in less than an hour the cultivator had carried him farther from home than he'd ever traveled in his life. A place he'd never thought to visit, for what reason had a trapper to come to a place transformed entirely to the demands of the plow?

  A second devastating realization followed the first. He was not a trapper anymore. He was a cultivator, and cultivators did not live in tiny mountain villages. They lived in sects.

  He was utterly unable to grapple with the meaning behind this revelation.

  “We have entered within the bounds of the Seventh River Prefecture from this point,” Su Yi took the moment to offer up this information. “From this point onward we will utilize proper roads.” She pointed ahead to the track before them. No longer a winding series of cuts and scrapes carved out by laboring cart wheels, it was a wide and level corridor of thoroughly pressed earth laid atop a base of stone. “Cultivators use the sect's lane.” A quick flick of a finger marked out a narrow span of road on the left edge. “This method reduces the chance of deadly accidents.”

  Without explaining further, she blasted into a furious dash. Now, unrestrained by constant turns, their pace nearly doubled. By Liao's best guess only the swiftest of birds would be able to keep up. Despite this, he saw more than before. With the benefit of straight and level motion he was able to steal glances even as he stole lungfuls of air. Several times he mistakenly turned his head as Su Yi turned or altered her stride in order to leap clear over dim-witted livestock crossing the road and received a bitter lash of windburn for his trouble. This did not serve to restrain his curiosity, and he accepted the burning strikes as the price to be paid for his first real glimpse of the land beyond the peaks.

  It was both more and less different than he had imagined it would be. The villages, spotted in quick blurs, were little changed. The same pressed earth walls, courtyards, and municipal structures. Barns and pens for livestock replaced drying racks and hanging rooms for game, but otherwise little stood out. People dressed much the same way, if perhaps with fewer layers, carried the same tools, and even painted similar images upon their walls. Wool and hemp robes, men working with iron implements in fields, and women carrying heavy loads strapped to back frames were all familiar sites. Even the rice paddies, dry fields, and orchards bore the signs of similar crops, though in this coldest part of the year most were fallow or sporting only covering weeds.

  Even here, patches of woodland remained, featuring the varied trees he knew well. They were small, and clustered near the villages or along the course of waterways in a reversal of the role played by crop terraces in the mountains. Rivers and swamps were similarly found surrounded by vast fields, but were otherwise little changed. Though the trapper's youthful mind knew there must be countless differences only close examination and immersion could reveal, the rest of his understanding took comfort in finding that even in a foreign place basic patterns held strong. Mountain or plain, some things remained constant.

  Tirelessly, Su Yi ran on, invoking the Stellar Flash Steps to carry them across the road with both unbelievable swiftness and unreasonable endurance. Despite progress that would shame the best mounted courier utterly, time crawled ahead. Though their surroundings changed little, one village being not much varied from any other when viewed from without, the afternoon proceeded. Hours passed, and the sky grew dark above. It was the day after the solstice, and night came on swiftly.

  In fading twilight, coupled to such light as the recently risen moon could provide, Su Yi abruptly stopped and set Liao down. “There,” she pointed eastward along the path they followed. “We are close enough now that you can see the Starwall from here, and the city. Do not neglect the chance.”

  Dim though the light was, the evening was clear, and they stood atop the arc of a small bridge. Liao squinted and looked eastward. There, at the edge of perception, he saw a strange thing, an impossible thing. A flat line, straight and low, cut across the horizon. In the center of that unreasonable, ridiculous construction rested a glittering cluster of lights, sheltered beneath the shadows cast. Out along the course, stretching north and south, were a series of spikes. “That is the Starwall?” It must be, nothing else could possibly appear in such a fashion, or dominate the landscape so far beyond the hands of masonry, but he could not be sure with only stories to go on and no details visible at such distance.

  “Yes,” the cultivator's voice dropped to a fearsome whisper, each word invested with importance. “It stands twenty-five meters high and stretches a distance of ninety-seven kilometers, a crescent sealed against the edge of the land itself at both ends. Beyond it, sealed away behind mighty formations, lie the trap of the Killing Fields and the gateway to the Ruined Wastes that are all that remains of the world beyond. Twelve towers, one for each of the sisters, ward its ramparts. One million souls stand on this side, protected from the plague by that barrier. And atop it the sect stands guard, sustaining that wall between obliteration and survival. That is our duty, a duty that you now share.” Moonlight danced with silver fury in Su Yi's eyes as she proclaimed this. Absolute commitment radiated out from her small, immaculate frame.

  “It seems,” Liao struggled to find a word that suited, a means to describe stepping out to witness a story made real, even at great distance. “Unreal.”

  “Ah,” Su Yi briefly ran her right hand through her hair, a beautifully alluring action that somehow served to humanize her in a way nothing in her performance to this point had done. “I suppose it would, at first. It is hard to recall what that felt like, initial arrival having never seen the city, the Starwall. For me, that was two and a half centuries ago, the memories fade.” She twisted rosy lips into a smiled, this time holding a layer of devious wickedness. “But you will understand soon enough.” All sense of mirth vanished as swiftly as it had come. “When you stand on the wall and see the demons. Come,” she dropped down to carry him again. “We need to hurry. There are procedures to conclude, and morning will come all too soon.”

  With far less hesitation, this time, Qing Liao grasped the cultivator. His mind, reeling from the revelation of her true age and not the barely twenty years implied by her countenance, pushed modesty aside as unimportant and let her carry him to the city.