During the journey south, Qing Liao slept in empty haylofts and consumed only prepared food, mostly nuts, that he'd carried along from the sect. He made certain to remain in the cultivator lane on the road and avoided slowing down in towns to avoid offering any impression of welcome hospitality. Aside from with Sayaana, who did not entirely count as a separate person, he exchanged only the most perfunctory of greetings during the four days of the journey.

  This was mostly a matter of personal choice, for he was not inclined to strike up idle conversation with those he did not know and would likely never meet again, but it also served the general goals of the sect to maintain such separation. Beyond this, Liao had learned from his ongoing visits to his parents that any immersion among the ordinary people of Mother's Gift swiftly became frustratingly complicated. Servant families in Starwall City were trained nearly from birth to interact with cultivators as seamlessly as possible, ordinary families in the villages were not. He knew that, if he did something as simple as ask for a place to sleep, he'd end up with the best home in the town cleared out for him and the most attractive unmarried woman waiting in bed beneath the blankets. Cultivation was not heritable, many old world sects had proven this by trying very hard to make it so and failing, but there were always those who did not quite believe. Similarly, should he request any sort of meal at all he was doomed to endure a feast.

  He had made that mistake once and ended up unreasonably exhausted. With no eagerness to go through it again, he settled for avoiding any circumstance that might trigger such a reaction. Moving along the road like a swift-winged ghost was a perfectly acceptable method to accomplish this.

  As he reached the southern section of Mother's Gift the land gradually rose beneath his feet. It ended up reasonably elevated, though there were no high escarpments here, only gentle slopes and rolling ridges. The road narrowed, and eventually, as land suitable for large rice paddies was left behind, it reverted to simple cart tracks just as it did in the western mountains where he'd grown up. Villages thinned out, and the rice was replaced by fields of millet and wheat or orchards of carefully tended fruit trees. Timber stands thickened, and the smoky pillars that marked out charcoal fires became visible all along the edge of the horizon.

  Bamboo, also, multiplied. The plant was common throughout Mother's Gift. It was often cultivated in courtyards within the bounds of villages and homes for the production of baskets, mats, and other simple crafts. Stands by roadsides and ditches were used to make couches, trellis racks, and other outdoor pieces. Such ubiquity meant that Liao thought he knew the plant well.

  He was wrong. The bamboo forest was not like such simple patches, nor did it resemble other forests. It was something else, a field of grass grown to giant size, and yet more mysterious by far.

  Past the last of the villages, the land rose to form large hills with significant slopes and ever narrowing, serpentine, ridges. The only habitation here was found in the form of the scattered huts and lean-tos used by bamboo cutters, herb gatherers, and trappers. At this time of year, with spring just beginning, activity was limited. Only a few prospected prior to planting season, and Liao suspected that even at its most intense, in autumn, human activity was felt but lightly here.

  The bamboo, by contrast, was everywhere.

  It grew in vast stands, thick and dense to the point that moving along the ground often required squeezing between the poles till they bent considerably. In addition to this fence of stems, the stalks were massive. They towered many times Liao's height when fully grown and were often as thick around as his thighs. Beneath such mature stands little grew and the shadows were wide. Other patches were much smaller, filled with thin, narrow stalks or only low stubs of bamboo still working to poke through a mix of low-lying grass and shrubs. The sounds within this forest were strange, and the air beneath the endless stems oddly warm.

  After the first night, when Liao ended his journey by curling up at the bottom of an empty straw hut left behind over the winter by a departing trapper, he realized just how different this place was from the familiar mountain forests of his home village. He recognized no more than half of the common plants and perhaps no more than a third of the birds. Even those, they did not grow or move in the way he expected, their habits had shifted to fit their lives to a new place, one filled with a strange array of hollow tubes rather than solid trunks. The challenge made itself perfectly clear.

  He had much to learn.

  The next morning he discarded all remaining goods brought with him from the sect. Building a small fire, he burned his robes and the remaining pouch of nuts. Once he'd doused the flames he walked into the depths of the forest completely naked save for the circlet atop his brow.

  Though it was spring, and the land had woken from wintry slumber and put forth early flowers, attempting to survive here would be a grave challenge to a mortal human, alone and bereft of tools and shelter. The mornings were cold, the days short, and much of the available game remained slumbering in their winter burrows. Worse, the areas of greatest fertility were well-camped. In order to avoid unwanted human encounters Liao had to move into the very heart of the bamboo forest, at the absolute edge of Mother's Gift where mortals rarely ventured.

  But Qing Liao was a cultivator. Certain challenges that could easily kill a mortal became little more than inconveniences to one such as he. After discarding his clothes, he became truly aware of how deep the transformation had reached. That which might well have been impossible for even the most skilled mortals became merely challenging to him.

  Vitality annealing realm elan, with qi flooding through his chest, kept his core warm regardless of the external temperature. He could roam about naked and never suffer worse than periodic twinges of chill in his extremities. Similarly, the weight of the sun on his unprotected skin or the scrape of thorns against his bare flesh was greatly mitigated. The base background dangers of forest existence were simply erased by the power of his embedded qi.

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  “It feels too easy,” Liao commented to Sayaana after the first few hours. He sat at the edge of a small stream weaving reeds into simple foot wraps and a basic skirt. A slow process, for he did not know these reeds and they often slipped free of his preferred pattern or broke strands beneath the strength of his fingers, but he was in no hurry.

  “An elder can stand naked on a mountaintop and live on qi alone, for decades,” Sayaana commented dryly. “Mere survival is not the goal. You must become superior to this place, master it and use it as a weapon against the plague. There will be challenges to come. Keep working.”

  Clothing made from woven reeds. A knife struck and knapped from a chunk of chert. A fishing spear hardened in the fire he set that night. These were the first, and most basic, of the tools he began crafting. That sufficed to fill his belly with small fish caught in the swift streams of the hills, ignoring the prohibition on meat consumption for the moment, though Liao knew he would pay for it later in long nights purging improper qi from his system. On the second day he added a stone axe, formed by using his enhanced strength to lift and drop heavy stones until one shattered in an appropriately shaped shard with a sharp edge. This allowed him to cut bark from the small trees that grew on slopes bamboo disliked and form better and more durable pants using bark strips. They were also more comfortable than the reeds, which chaffed terribly against his highly sensitive touch. The axe also supplied the cut and split vines needed to form the first simple snares. This allowed him to add animal parts to his plans for further, better tools and gear.

  Mice, rats, rabbits, and other small creatures began to die beneath drop and snap traps, day by day. Bamboo, cut and split by the axe, was stripped, dried, and formed into canisters to carry water, strips to provide support, and pins to hold pieces together. He also made blades, an awl, and racks using the ubiquitous plant, with tiny bones and teeth providing precision tools and the beginning of a saw. The narrow bones of fish served as his needles.

  Bark, bamboo, reeds, sinew, and tendon, these combined to produce the first full set of protective wear that could properly be called clothing. A saw made from bone allowed him to cut a simple bowstave and rabbit guts provided the means to string it. The implement was weak, nowhere near capable of handling the enhanced strength of a cultivator, but even simple arrows allowed him to hunt birds and thereby add feathers to his growing list of resources. Shed antlers, left behind by deer from last year’s rut, allowed him to carve and split additional functional blades.

  Such progress, to which he also added collections of moss and herbs, allowed for the assembly of cached supplies. It did not, however, resolve the problem of hunger. While he'd filled his belly with fish on the first day, it quickly became apparent that the time necessary to process such food without damaging his cultivation consumed far more time than was saved by using this readily available resource. He needed other nutrients, especially as Sayaana refused to allow him to skip daily meditation at any point during the process. As active as he was, he needed to eat far more than normal. Though he stopped eating fish and refused to even start with the small game, he refused to waste the meat. Smoking it in strips, he left it in baskets outside the hut of an aging herb gatherer instead, a kindness he felt appropriate to a cultivator in such circumstances.

  Finding fruits and vegetables suited to his diet in an unfamiliar forest represented a new and very different kind of wilderness challenge.

  The bamboo itself offered the first solution, thankfully. The shoots were edible, if boiled, and the springtime was a period of abundance for such growth. These filled his stomach for many days, despite possessing a strong scent and a taste he generally found foul. He quickly grew sick of those meals and sought out every possible alternative.

  It was not easily done. He beat stream-side grasses against rocks to free their seeds and then boiled them in a great stone bowl he'd fashioned in order to make gruel, but this tasted no better. Tree bark, ever the last resort of the starving, produced equally foul and considerably less nourishing results.

  He quickly discovered that it was too early in the year for most fruits, but herbs sprouted abundantly. Making many reed baskets and carving bowls from wood using his qi-backed strength to carve away the excess from the ends of fallen logs, Liao began to harvest every possible vegetable. Mashed or cut and cooked over hot stones, many proved quite edible and some were even tasty, though in the manner of all leaves and stems they were watery and provided only a minimal amount of energy unless consumed in vast quantities. Many of these plants also often induced grave rebellions within his guts, and though he was able to avoid any truly drastic outcomes by flushing qi through the relevant meridians, it was another burden on his time.

  “Learn the qi of each plant,” Sayaana taught him. “Identify the energy, the nourishment, that they carry. Discover the different ways cutting and cooking alter the balance. Do the same thing when weaving.”

  He did. The process felt neither slow nor tedious when it controlled the source of his meals and clothing. The study of vegetation became the most essential part of his life in this narrow world of the bamboo forest.

  In this manner his qi sense developed in a new way. He learned to identify nutritional sources within plants and mushrooms alike through their qi, as members of the Farming Pavilion were taught. This expanded his harvesting as he sought fungi under logs and bulbs beneath the ground, new prizes added to the pot. The roots and tubers were the most welcome discovery. Relatives of ginger, turmeric, and yaro were familiar, but even the roots or orchids, lilies, and shrubs whose names he did not know served as sources. Individually, each one was small, but they were abundant, if scattered, throughout the forest, and made a satisfying mash in the bottom the bowl when mixed together with the right green herbs.

  This approach was not without its complications. Wild plants were not the friendly growths of the farm. They carried many strange fragments and toxins, which straining and cooking did not suffice to remove completely. Though the body of a cultivator in the vitality annealing realm could easily endure such subtle poisons, it impacted his qi flow. Nightly meditation grew difficult and sluggish. It worsened as time passed.

  “Purification pills,” Liao realized what had happened after spending nearly a month in the wild. Pure stellar qi was mixed with countless other sources, clogging his circuits and tissues. The product normally used to purge the detritus all cultivators acquired through handling food, crafting materials, and even weapons, was no longer available without the sect's alchemists to draw upon. Even a single month without taking the regular purification pill and draining away the build up of fragments within sufficed to reduce the efficacy of his meditation by a fourth.

  He could remove the impurities manually, sieving them out one by one when cultivating, but it was an inefficient process, and brutally slow. Worse, his lifestyle in the forest constantly increased the impurities within. He had no access to the sect's purified crystal-clear drinking water, and he could not simply spend full days in meditation removing impurities from his qi.

  These difficulties increased his appreciation for Orday's genius. Without the use of naturally pure stellar qi cultivation would be much more difficult. He wondered how the sects of the old world had ever managed it. Perhaps they'd been totally dependent upon their alchemists.

  Such speculation did nothing to provide a solution to his problem. “How do I resolve this?” he asked Sayaana. “I'm not an alchemist, and there is no furnace, no laboratory, I could use here in the forest.”

  “So make one,” the green-eyed immortal smiled wickedly. “And test endlessly. You need only pull a single formula free from the forest, suitable to one person alone. Sure the wild can provide enough for one lonely young man.”

  Recognizing that the remnant soul had not brought him here to solve all his tests for him, Liao did not contest this declaration. Instead, he gritted his teeth, grasped his knife, and looked to his immortal companion. “How do I build a furnace then?”

  The green woman's amused smile was absolutely terrifying.