On the morning of the thirty-first day following their induction into the Celestial Origin Sect, the year's new cultivators were introduced to the final pillar of their coming lives.

  “Breathing will gather qi and build the strength of body and soul,” Elder Yu Yong's summary was one he'd clearly given many times. “Movement will channel qi and build awareness of both surroundings and self. Martial practice will expel qi as power, producing resilience and durability. All these things are essential, and they are also complementary. The practice of cultivation is a journey through the dao, and ultimately, ascension to meet it. It is deeply personal. This portion of the path, unique to each cultivator, is fostered through devotion of mind, body, and soul to a method of creation, of craftsmanship. Qi is created by life, and to complete its circulation you too must learn to create, to infuse qi into works both transient and enduring. Though every cultivator's path will ultimately be unique as their qi signature, the sect will support and aid you on the way as it can.”

  Yu Yong swept his arms wide as they stood in the garden and pointed towards the distant buildings that loomed high on the artificial plateau of the sect. “The Celestial Origin Sect has organized this practice according to the Twelvefold Panoply of Arts. Each specialty has its own pavilion and utilizes hundreds of technique manuals. Over the next six days you will be introduced to the full twelve, and then we will spend the remainder of the week guiding each of you to choose the path you will follow for the rest of your journey. All other lessons are suspended. This choice is critically important, far more personal than even your weapon art. The pavilions are the heart of the sect's internal structure. Each one is personally administered by one of the Twelve Sisters. It is in your pavilion that the friends and comrades you will join to your cultivation journey are to be found. Listen to the dao, find the path that calls out to you, surface to core."

  A heady demand to impose on a group of fourteen-year-olds.

  For the next six days, the eighteen students sat on their cushions and watched as blue-belted spirit tempering realm elders presented the approaches, possibilities, and virtues of their respective pavilions under the Twelvefold Panoply. From the beginning it was immediately clear that each of the paths on offer was exceedingly broad, and contained countless specializations within. The very first presentation came from a wizened, white-haired elder who remained a serene beauty despite having obviously reached her twilight years. Her eyes passed over the eighteen students as if they were completely irrelevant, but sparkled brilliantly when she turned to her chosen pursuit of alchemy.

  Though the production of pills, poultices, powders, and all the other sundry compounds and medicines used by cultivators was obviously critical to progress and the sect's survival, Liao found it a struggle to stay awake as this presentation dragged on and their midday meal approached. Others, apparently, had no such trouble, finding something fascinating in the world of formulas and furnaces. This included Zhou Hua, as the bright young woman seemingly made up her mind at once by spitting out a dozen questions as fast as she could form the words from the moment the elder finished speaking. Elder Yu Yong had to call for lunch to staunch her enthusiasm, for the aged alchemist ignored the seventeen others and sought to answer every inquiry.

  Liao, glad that the lecture was finished, took the list of the twelve pavilions each recruit had been given and slashed a line through alchemy. He hoped all of the others would offer such easy decisions.

  That measure of optimism lasted until the next presentation, on armoring.

  The seemingly middle-aged elder, though it was fast becoming clear to the students that outward appearance offered little indication in that sphere, who represented the armoring pavilion looked as if he was made of steel. His demonstration spiked Liao's interest considerably. Assembling, matching, and formulating both personal protective equipment and large fortifications filled his mind with possibility, though he began to loose focus when the explanation shifted from the theoretical to the specific. Putting together a suit of armor sounded fascinating, until the topic veered toward ring size or buckle type.

  Despite such misgivings, armoring occupied first place on his list through the next several days. He held no interest in the working of raw metal or wood as dictated by blacksmithing or carpentry. Neither producing nor preparing food according to the practices of the farming and cooking pavilions moved his interest, though a number of other students gravitated toward them. The complex art of formations relied too heavily on complex mathematics that made his head spin, and the work of husbandry demanded a companionship with animals that his trapper upbringing rebelled against. On the fifth day he similarly rejected the ecstasy of physical performance and its more sedate counterpart the faith-infused invocations of ritual communion.

  He woke up on the final day suspecting that armoring would be his chosen path, even as this thought sat ill in his stomach for some reason he could not name. The morning presentation, on the practice of shaping works through carving, pottery, engraving, calligraphy, and similar methods did nothing to change his mind.

  Last of the Twelvefold Panoply to speak was the Textiles Pavilion. Liao anticipated little from this. He had no interest in embroidery or weaving. To his surprise the young-looking elder laid out a series of samples in front of the class that included not only hemp, linen, silk, and wool, but also sheets of leather and a passel of fine furs. In addition to robes she modeled boots, gloves, hats, and wide variety of casings. “The practice of textiles mastery includes many items, ranging from decorative fringes to sail canvas,” she declared. “It employs a multitude of materials directed to numerous purposes combining aesthetics with functionality.”

  She continued from there, but Liao was staring at the layered furs and piled hides and lost all comprehension of her words. Though he was only fourteen, he'd been working traplines with his father for over seven years. In that time he'd handled the hides of over twenty animals, having skinned, cleaned, and tanned them all by hand. Though most days it was a bloody, smelly process that left him stained and raw through the night, he recalled it fondly anyway. He had never been allowed to keep or wear any but the worst furs, the ugly bits his mother cobbled into warm but ill-looking clothing. The best had always been sold to provide for the family's needs. He'd often wondered what it might be like to have a proper fur coat. Now, it seemed, he could find out.

  For the first time in his journey as a cultivator, Qing Liao felt himself again.

  Doubt vanished. He knew this would be his path. It even fit his weapons. The bow would serve against demons, but it was also a hunter's tool, and daggers would serve to skin and dress game in addition to cutting throats.

  Find a great beast beneath the stars. Step behind it in a flicker of swift motion. One arrow through the heart. Fur reclaimed from the fallen. Rendered into garments for the sect thereafter.

  A simple dream, but Liao found he suddenly wanted it more than anything. A cycle he could complete himself, matching the qi taken into his body and soul, and repeat endlessly.

  Perhaps others possessed dreams of complexity and grandeur, but he was happy with the grounded path. Whether it came from the influence of his parents or entirely from within, this sufficed. Others, he suspected, might mock this. They had heads filled with legends of the ancients. He could never match that, but neither did he wish too.

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  After all, he'd never expected to become a cultivator. Why should he, whose dreams differed, conform to traditional expectations?

  He was not able to proclaim this choice immediately, for the elder took only a few questions prior to dismissing the recruits for the evening meal. Yu Yong then explained to the class that, for the remaining four days of the week, all of the elders would be present. They intended to work with interested recruits in order to discover which of the many techniques the pavilions possessed suited the first steps of their personal artistry. This, he stated, absolutely required one-on-one interaction.

  Liao found it impossible to meditate effectively that night. Sleep was only achieved after he worked himself down to exhaustion by practicing the Stellar Flash Steps, and that arrived only fitfully. He came awake instantly at the bell in the morning.

  Shortly after breakfast, he walked into a practice yard transformed. The training dummies were gone, replaced by twelve small tents, each with an elder standing behind a low table advertising their respective pavilion. The elders reclined on modest couches, goods spread before them, and idly worked on some small aspect of their craft. They appeared completely relaxed, as if ready to speak to anyone who just happened to pass by.

  It made for a somewhat amusing illusion.

  Zhou Hua shattered the tableau instantly by walking directly toward the alchemy elder as if drawn on a string. Without the slightest hesitation she dropped to her knees before the elderly-seeming woman, pressed her head to the ground, and asked for acceptance. “Honored elder, it is my greatest desire to be permitted entry into the Alchemy Pavilion.”

  The white-haired cultivator quirked a brief smile at this. “Decent manners on this one, at least,” she remarked, eyes laughing as she looked back toward Yu Yong. “Get up girl, this is the path of kings, not beggars. Grab the mortar and pestle there,” she pointed a slender finger in direction. “And let us see what the dao has to say upon the matter, shall we?”

  With trepidation dispelled in this way, the other students advanced quickly toward their chosen pavilions, only a handful hesitated, torn by last minute doubts.

  Out of the eighteen, Liao discovered he was the only one to chose textiles. This was, it quickly became apparent, unremarkable. No more than three students picked any single pavilion, farming being chosen by a trio, and aside from a handful of pairs, the remaining pavilions acquired a single new student. No one picked husbandry, and the swarthy elder with a very long mustache representing the pavilion graced the class with a glare of extreme disappointment thereafter.

  The textile pavilion's elder sat lightly on a cushion and worked upon an embroidery piece in pale silk. Several multi-colored threads rested beneath her knees. When Liao approached she ignored his presence until her stitch was completed and the needle put aside. The thread she tied off for later resumption of the project. Only when this was done did she examine the recruit before her.

  She appeared young, this elder, and possessed the sort of perfected form that all such advanced cultivators possessed. Inevitably, Liao compared her appearance to Su Yi, and the beauty who carried him to the city won that contest. This woman displayed similarly arrested aging, with flawless skin and features, but unlike the gorgeous doll-like elegance the disciple had been refined to display, the elder was not a true beauty. Her body was willowy and thin, critical curves were missing and her back was too long to provide a truly enticing natural posture. She intimidated through the majesty of her presentation, but did not innately inflame desire.

  Her outfit, robes of incredibly thin silk almost blindingly white in their bleached shade, gave off the impression of a woman wearing finery that belonged to a much prettier younger sister.

  Not that Liao would ever give voice to such observations, for this woman's nearly black narrow eyes instantly revealed that her outward youth was a complete lie. Though she looked no more than twenty-five, this woman had seen many centuries pass. He doubted she was significantly younger than any of the other gathered elders, several of whom wore their longevity openly upon their flesh. She achieved the impression of youth not through rapid growth but instead by the greater strength of her cultivation. Though his qi sense remained rudimentary, every droplet condensed into his dantian strengthened it. Up close, it was enough to allow a rough gauge. Seven layers in each major realm; all those gathered were blue-belted spirit tempering realm elders, but this woman was in the seventh layer, on the very cusp of the transition to the soul forging realm. She held her power back tightly, but in proximity the mask fell away, and leaked out undeniable might.

  “Honored elder,” Liao bowed with his face pressed to the earth. “It is my great desire to be permitted entry into the Textiles Paviliion.” Lacking any better ideas regarding formal address, he simply repeated Zhou Hua's invocation verbatim.

  “You are not a weaver, a felt-maker, a knitter, or anything similar,” the elder declared this as absolute truth from a single glance. She possessed a flattened face with a high forehead and narrow chin. Her jewelry, ubiquitous on elders, was worn entirely as a series of interlocking necklaces. She'd grown out her glossy black hair till it reached below her waist and held this in a single train using a complex arrangement of ribbons and knots. Liao suspected there were over one hundred such binds, and that they were far more than mere ornamentation.

  “So,” the interrogation flipped around. “What are you seeking from us?”

  Thinking with desperate haste, Liao pointed at the elder's feet. Unlike all the recruits, clad in simple slippers despite the cold, the representative of the textiles pavilion wore a pair of ankle-high boots covered in gray fox fur stitched with images of dancing deer that all but laughed at the very idea of cold mornings. He was fairly certain that if he tried to purchase such boots it would cost more money than he'd ever seen in his life, and that was before applying the surely astronomical value of the qi constructs infused into them during creation. “I wish to devote myself to materials of this type.”

  “Hides and furs?” the elder slowly raised a single narrow, effortlessly smooth, eyebrow. “They certainly have their uses, but if your interest is primarily in the functional, perhaps the armoring pavilion would suit you better.”

  There was no rancor added to this question, no effort to display superiority. The elder's manner of speech was ordinary, suited to everyday conversation. Her inquiry appeared casual, and truly genuine.

  Liao had considered this, it had consumed him throughout lunch. Now, faced with the dark eyes and earnest attention of someone vastly above his own existence, he made a final effort to examine his motives. If he had missed something, anything, in his choice, he needed to discover it now.

  For some time he was silent, churning through the differences in presentations between the two pavilions, scouring his memory for the proper way to justify the decision he felt, he knew intuitively, was correct. In the end, he came back to the same answer as before. “I want to produce, not simply combine,” he told the waiting elder at last. “I do not wish to sit in a workshop handling that which others have gathered, I want to find my own components.”

  “Reasonable,” a single small nod returned. “Harvesting focused paths are rare, but their pedigree is ancient and unassailable. Leather and fur, even before they become garments, offer presentation all their own. I think a focus on tanning and the use of leather in other arts may be suitable for you, perhaps with an emphasis on the production of items used in ritual and formations. We shall see, four days ought to suffice, with only one student.”

  She reached down beneath her table and pulled free a small roll of tools, bound in leather casing and with knotted chord. Undoing this and placing it between them, she revealed a set of implements so finely made that Liao had to repeatedly swallow to avoid drooling openly in front of the elder. One glance was enough to make it clear that no ordinary smith had produced these. The echoes of the qi used into their fashioning positively wafted across precisely formed surfaces. He glanced over to stare at the blacksmithing representative without realizing it.

  “Not bad, that observation,” the elder noted. “It is called the Twelvefold Panoply for a reason. In time you will absorb the basics of all the arts, for one cannot reach the narrow heights without a broad base, but for now, focus will bring its own rewards.” She pulled free the first tool, a skinning knife with perfect mirror edges that gleamed as the sunlight wrapped around an edge sharper than his eye had the power to resolve, even with qi pushed into the organ. “I am Elder Fu Jin. Tell me your name recruit, that we may begin.”

  “Qing Liao,” he answered to a face suspended in an unreadable smile.