Peak Fiction
Technically I think this counts as a very, very Alternate Universe fanfiction since the main characters are very much cribbed from... somewhere(s).
Of course, at this point names and few overall traits are about all that's left of the original versions but who cares. I'm having fun just mucking around in this sandbox.
I'll probably end up shuffling the page splits around as this grows, so sorry if I mess with bookmarking of progress or anything.
RUGRAT IF YOU READ THIS YOU GOTTA LEAVE A COMMENT AT THE BOTTOM TO SAY YOU WERE HERE. BY ORDER.
“Here,” Naruki handed her the Leafstag carcass with ease, “we might get assigned another training exercise in the Leafbone Grove in a few weeks, I just may be able to bring back another for you then!” The taller girl beamed down at Meishen, who returned the expression with a grateful smile of her own. Genuinely, Meishen was grateful for the way her friends did their best to keep her in meat and animal parts for her cooking. They valued her skills and were willing to help her improve, even as others among their peers scoffed at Meishen’s choices.
Her peers in the sect often scoffed at Meishen, she was hardly the image of a driven cultivator. She was of average height, but had a soft, curved figure that others took to mean she lived in idleness and luxury. Certainly, the delicate braiding of the hair that framed her face and the way the rest of it flowed freely down her back like black silk all the way to her hips, the complete lack of scarring visible even when she wore a dress with short sleeves, the paleness of her skin without a hint of a tan, they did imply something of being above menial labor or hard work. This one was clearly no farmer’s child nor a soldier in the making. The kindest of her fellow disciples might give her the benefit of the doubt and assume she was simply a budding artisan rather than a combat-focused disciple but even that tenuous understanding often fell aside once people found out the path of cultivation that Meishen followed. It was uncommon for many reasons and public perception was one of them. That Meishen had friends who did not belittle her chosen path was a miracle she was always and forever grateful for.
That didn’t mean she wasn’t staring down a serious supply issue though, and as she waved goodbye to Naruki’s lithe, long-legged form striding back through the Thicket’s tangle of trees and cottages, her smile morphed straight into a frown. She had this stag, a hundred-weight in meat and bone, with the hide in good enough condition for her to sell it at the market in exchange for more ingredients, and she still had two of the horned rabbits in her stasis box from Layfon’s stake-out mission the other week. Her spice stocks were good but she needed to acquire more of the Dewdrop Mint somehow and buy some dried nectarleaf, and while she was at it, more Demon’s Eye shallots would be a good idea. An expensive idea too, if there were none left to forage for at the edges of the Leafbone Grove.
Cooking: hardly a fitting path for any truly ambitious young cultivator, but if you asked Meishen, she’d say it was much harder than the path of some of the hot-blooded youths around her. Fighting all the time was much less complicated and much cheaper than cultivating through cooking. Case in point. If she was to be able to truly perfect her game stew - the warming and invigorating recipe she’d been working on for the past month - she’d need more meat, more herbs, more vegetables, she’d need time to plan her next recipe changes and time to test those changes, she’d need time to meditate on the precise use of qi in infusing the dish and she’d need to save up that qi too. All this for one recipe, for one assignment even and yet the cultivation progress she’d earn from her endeavors would still be less than the gains that Naruki would see from a two-week training exercise in the Grove.
She closed the door to her cottage softly, and carried her newly delivered carcass through the compact domicile and into the kitchen. Unlike most of the other outer disciples' kitchens, hers was large and full of ingredients and tools. Pots stacked next to pans and bowls on a rack of shelves, a block holding many, many fine knives of varying sizes and shapes stood on a well-worn worktop, the four-pot oven dominating the centre of the room with its perpetual aura of warmth from all the hours spent turning spirit stones into pure heat. The rich, black lacquer with its infinitesimally small silver engravings of her stasis box in one corner of the room, the only box like it in the Thicket. The immense table with hanging hook over it, taking up an entire wall all by itself, where carcasses could be dressed and butchered into usable ingredients.
Meishen’s kitchen was to her as many of her peers' weaponry or alchemical furnaces were to them: this was her domain and her place of work and learning. It was already, not yet two full years into her time at the sect, a finely honed workshop of culinary arts. Her only problem was keeping her shelves and her stasis box even barely stocked. This stag would help though. Meat for the stew, bones for Little Verdure - her companion beast - to gnaw on, hide and antlers, teeth and hooves for sale at the market to the artisans and alchemists always on the prowl for more resources for their own work. The vines wrapped around the antlers would go down especially well. Naruki had left them perfectly intact somehow and Meishen knew that the third-year disciples taking Alchemist Nadine’s tutorials on rejuvenation elixirs were all paying top prices for Leafstag vines, Tree-eating Viper scales and Cordy-cat fungi.
Even as her hands ran through the motions of skinning the deer, she tallied up costs. Mint, at 20 stones a bushel; nectarleaf was only 3 stones a bundle if she could catch Vinatra at the market and buy from him rather than Steva who charged 4 for lower-quality leaf, and she’d need two lots of each herb. Shallots, barely still in season even with the qi-enriched soils of the Leafbone Grove to sustain them, would be hideously costly at maybe 30 or even 40 a piece. She’d need at least six.
Meishen felt her frown deepen, even as she smoothly sliced through tendons to divest the stag of a hind leg. At worst, she’d be spending 288 spirit stones with no time to take on a commission or assignment for another month. She chopped a portion of the leg meat into diced chunks for the next day’s cooking and carved up the rest into braising steaks and a hefty bone-in shank. She’d need to cut costs somehow. She had the stones to spend now but she’d need more ingredients once she’d perfected the recipe, the assignment from Elder Farafiti would not be complete until Meishen delivered the dish to her mentor’s table, and that meant one last stew’s worth of all the necessary components on top of the resources spent on creating the recipe in the first place.
The sun was just touching the tree tops over on the other side of the Wellrun when she finished with the deer. By the time she’d then cleaned her butcher’s table and mopped the floor, sharpened her knives back up to a keen edge, the last dregs of daylight was rapidly fading from the sky. The day had fled and left her with scant time left to throw together a nutritious but cheap meal and finish her notes on the borrowed volume of botany she needed to return to the archives in just two days. Meishen sighed and sighed again as she realised she’d run out of time for more than those two things, her to-do list be damned. She hadn’t wasted the day, but she hadn’t got as much out of it as she would have liked to either.
She had, however, had an idea.
It took the young woman a few days to think through, time she would rather have spent puzzling through the qi element of her stew recipe. Long-term plans require short-term sacrifices however, that was something she’d been taught for many years. Hardly a pleasant concept but one that rarely failed to show true in Meishen’s lived experience. A tentative plan took shape but the real breakthrough came unexpectedly when an afternoon tea with Naruki, Mifi and Felli yielded a specific date when Felli’s older brother - an Inner Disciple at the sect under Elder Mache - would be visiting Felli for a few hours to deliver a package of materials that had been sent over from their home. Karian Loss was not the only new disciple accepted into Elder Mache’s tutelage for no reason, the slim, bespectacled young man gathered secrets and intelligence about his peers like some cultivators gathered spirit stones or Arts.
Meishen off-handedly offered to drop by Felli’s cottage on that same day, thankfully she had not yet returned a borrowed scroll on tea brewing ceremonies in Grendan from the older girl, and that gave her a ready-made excuse to visit. All that was left was to time this little excursion right that she might have a few words with Inner Disciple Loss.
The two-day wait for the occasion was not spent idly, of course. Like all Outer Disciples at the Sect of the Deepest Earth, Meishen had training sessions and lectures to attend with all her peers from the intake of nearly two years ago. She also, due to her uncommon method of cultivation having attracted the attention of Elder Farafiti, had regular work to complete for her mentor. The stew recipe was the bulk her her assigned tasks for this month but that did not mean it was her only work. An essay on the merits of various culinary herbs - intended to prompt the sort of meditative consideration that might help her gain deeper insight into the topic and aid her cultivation - and also the collection of specimens of some of the wild vegetables found at the edges of the Leafbone Grove.
It was the gathering that she did whilst awaiting her visit to Felli. It was not a small task, she left her cottage before sun-up, Little Verdure wrapped around her neck like a scaly green scarf. The Thicket was not easy to traverse even in daylight, the way the cottages were crammed in like grains of rice in riceball and then surrounded by trees, shrubs, flowers and vines to make the outer disciples' home a dense, ever-shifting labyrinth of plants and stone. The Sect did not build its residences along the neat and proper lines of ordinary cities, or even orient the buildings along the proper and auspicious north-south axis. Instead, all its buildings were aligned to the local energies and qi flows or in the case of the Thicket, each cottage was placed not haphazardly as it first seemed but precisely as required to form part of an ancient array that kept the Thicket choked with plants and greenery and suitably challenging for new comer disciples to traverse and live within.
In the pre-dawn twilight it was much more difficult to reach the back of the Cherry Hall at Blossom Hill and its nice, paved stone road up towards the Leafbone Grove. Still, even after most of an hour spent winding her way along paths snarled with vines and though narrow, tree-choked alleys Meishen reached the Hall in good spirits. Little Verdue, still sleepy in the early hours, wrapped himself a little tighter around her neck as she stepped out of the cloying air of the Thicket and into the misty morning breeze wrapping around Blossom Hill. Meishen didn’t need the young Rootwyrm to say anything to know he was not a fan of the brisk wind.
She patted his mottled brown coils as she set out down the road that cut between the Cheery Hall and the Commissary. She’d prefer the scenic views of the path along the shores of Springdeep Waters, but the stone road up to the Grove would let her travel quicker and with less effort. The sect roadways were all inlaid with arrays to aid in fast, low-effort travel. Derived from the Empire’s arrays for the Imperial Highways to enable an Imperial Army to march from one end of the Empire to the other in only a few months. The sect had not invested quite so much into its roads as the Empire did its Highways, but the principle was generally the same. Pour a little qi into one’s feet to match the qi of the road and let the rhythm of the array dictate your stride. It would then impart a little energy into every step, sending you further, quicker and for less effort.
Learning to use the roads properly had been a struggle at first, for Meishen. The roads did not care for dainty, ladylike steps. They demanded a strong stride, a solid pace and clean motions. She did not quite have the same purposeful gait that Naruki or Layfon had developed, nor the graceful elegance of Felli, or even the exuberance of Mifi. Rather, Meishen had ended up with something half-resembling a skip. A skip and a long step and a skip again. Her chosen elements of qi were solidly of the earth, stone, wood types so far so she resonated a little too closely with the earth qi of the roads and had not yet been able to avoid having just a little too much qi in every step. She, well, she bounded along. That was another reason to take the roads before dawn. Fewer people to see her ungainly motions.
The early start also meant that she reached the Grove just as the sun was starting to rise. Outer disciples were allowed to visit the edges of the Grove freely but only during daylight hours. The inner parts were off-limits unless on official assignments or accompanied by an Elder or one of select few Inner Disciples. Meishen had only been into the Grove twice, she did not take sect assignments for culling beasts and such, she stuck to the edges where the only living animals were peaceful critters, even the spirit beasts. Not that she couldn’t fight at all, but it was not her chosen path and she left the serious combat to those who sought it out.
Not that the edges of the Grove were just sunny glades of flowers and sunshine. The entire place was still a hotbed of riotous earth qi feeding into a forest packed with spirit beasts and plants. Even the plainest of trees in the grove would have some qi-enhanced traits such as hardened bark or perhaps the steel-sharp leaves that the Grove was known for. One of the first Arts outer disciples at the sect learned was always something defensive, something to stop the plants in the Grove from lacerating them to the point of complete blood loss. Even the edges were filled with such dangerous plants, and horned rabbits might be peaceful but they kicked like hell - as hard as horse, too - and could really gouge an unwary disciple thoroughly if the little critters decided to bring their antlers into play.
That was one reason why Meishen had dragged Little Verdure out of his den of leaf mould and loam today. She had a few defensive Arts to use, including one to prevent sharp leaves from slicing her to ribbons, but she needed the Rootwyrm’s offensive capabilities to back her up if the wildlife objected to her presence. Whilst not gifted with venom or a hypnotising gaze like a true serpent might be, the serpentine spirit beast could use the roots around him to ensnare other beings and then bring his crushing coils and sharp fangs to bear to finish the job. Unfortunately, he could only do so once or twice, currently. Hence, he could not exactly hunt alone in the Grove without support, even rabbits would become a risk if there were too many of them. It was enough to keep Meishen safe however.
The two of them drew up to the first looming trees of the Grove, tall and sturdy trunks wrapped with vines and creepers, surrounded by bristling shrubs and whippy saplings. Moss and lichen coated all available surfaces and there was the distinct smell of leaf litter and what Meishen would always describe vaguely as the scent of greenery and growth. It was, to her, the smell of home, although the neat and ordered lines of straight trunks of the Hillward Forest were a far cry from this unkempt wilderness.
There were two clearings Meishen wanted to scour for any last shallots, a stream that might well have at its banks one of the root vegetables she needed and also a patch up where The Cut split from the Marshblood that might supply her with two of the leafy greens she also sought. The searching would not take so long, but the traversal of the woods in between these places certainly would.
The rising sun did not reach the depths of the forest floor except in dappled patches of flickering light. The rest of the Grove was a perpetual greenish gloom, the kind of half-light that made it exceptionally difficult to spot tangling vines or jutting branches before they tripped you up. Meishen channeled a little fire qi to activate an obscure Art she had spent months last year digging for in the Sect Archives - Firelight Watch. Originally meant to be used by the night watch stood by a warming fire to allow them to survey the surrounding night with a clear gaze, but had at some point been co-opted by artisans to sharpen and brighten their sight when working by candle or lamplight. It did not work well in open spaces anymore, the Art worked best in more cramped confines and only in half-light not full nighttime darkness. In other words, perfect for a dim-lit kitchen and workable in a dense, gloomy forest.
She channeled more earth and stone qi to use the generic Stoneskin Art that was made available to all Sect disciples should they not have something better to use. She found Stoneskin to be easier to maintain for long periods than the purely stone-qi Art she also knew for defense, much better suited to a long day in the Grove.
“Mrgh.” The circulation of the cultivator’s qi finally nudged Little Verdure into full awareness. Blearily the serpent loosened his coils from around her neck and raised his blunt, brown and black-scaled head to keep watch. “Will we have time for any hunting while we’re here?” He asked, mildly, his voice clear but high-pitched. He was barely a year old and though spirit beasts might mature quickly, he still had a child’s air about him.
“I’m afraid not.” Meishen absently reached up to pat his coils. “I have a few deer bones for you back home though.”
“Oh!” Meishen felt a ripple go through the wyrm, “well, I do like those, so that’s okay then.” He declared, instantly mollified. He resettled his coils about Meishen’s neck and shoulders, careful not to obstruct her movements, whilst giving himself a position from which he could keep an eye out for any trouble from behind. Firelight Watch enhanced eyesight, it didn’t involve growing eyes in the back of one’s head after all. A rear watch was always advised in the Grove and the Sect actively discouraged solo visits.
Meishen picked her way carefully and quietly through the forest, using wood-qi to mute the impact and sound of her steps over the fallen leaves and low-lying plantlife of the forest floor. Slow, steady and quiet, that was the way Meishen preferred to travel the Grove. Trampling everything in one’s path was an option, or zipping through the tree canopies and hoping one didn’t run into any Tree-eating Vipers or Viney Orbweaver spiders. Both much quicker ways to get around, but high-risk and high-reward was not always the best tactic.
Low-risk, incremental progress, that was a tactic that gave solid returns over a long period no matter what. The first increment was reaching the nearest of the clearings. That ended up taking two hours. The tree cover broke suddenly, gloom turning into bright daylight as if someone had taken the shutter off a lamp. Golden rays of clear morning sun showed the clearing stretching away before Meishen and Little Verdure. It was a sort of long oblong shape, a little bent in the middle where one enormous, decaying tree trunk anchored the treeline, bare branches doing little to provide shade, bar the dark hollows where enormous roots curled up and out of the earth only to dive back in.
Those dark hollows were often home to mushrooms, and Meishen fully intended to see what might be growing there, but most importantly, the edges of the clearing were prime shallot territory. Some shade when the sun cast the shadow of the trees into the clearing, strong daylight the rest of the day, the Demon’s Eye shallot often grew in such places, rich earth and wood-qi but also good light for all of spring and summer to provide the traces of fire and sun-qi that gave rise to the vegetable’s slightly spicy flavour.
Meishen stopped just one step inside the clearing, casting her eye over all that she could see. There were no vipers sunning themselves before returning to the canopy, no leafstags grazing, no horned rabbits, no other spirit beasts out in the mild warmth of the autumnal morning. Relatively safe, then.
Relatively. There was a reason non-spirit beasts did not inhabit the clearing, the same reason that half the sect didn’t flock here annually to forage and gather materials. Meishen delicately took the wood-qi running through the meridians in her feet and added in just a touch of fire. The barest hint, one thread among a tapestry of wood. As close to sun-qi as she could manage. She diffused the resulting mix, letting it drift out through her skin rather than staying circulating inside her. If this went wrong, she could rely on Little Verdure for help, but that would risk him running out of steam too early in the day and them needing to curtail their trip halfway.
Eventually satisfied that she was trailing the right mix and intensity of qi, a frown of concentration fixed on her otherwise gentle features, Meishen stepped out into the clearing. Nothing happened. With a breathy sigh of relief, her focus never wavering, the young woman stepped out further into the clearing. With precise, deliberate motions she headed first to the barren tree.
Underfoot, she felt the intensity of the local wood-qi growing stronger with every step, and then at some point there was also a tinge of sun-qi and finally a touch also of the qi of decay. That qi grew more concentrated the closer she drew to the tree. By the time she was within a few spans of it, her skin was crawling under the faint pressure of the tree’s aura of decay and her scalp pricking with sweat as she fought to maintain a smooth, unfaltering circulation of qi at her feet.
The roots of the tree shuddered almost imperceptibly underfoot as she stepped up onto them. The tree was bare of leaves, it grew not at all, but it was not dead. Rather, it was a bastion of decay, and it knew what transpired in its domain. Meishen stopped a mere halfspan from the knotted trunk with its peeling bark, and bowed to the old behemoth. Slowly, her hands only trembling a little, she reached out to touch the patchy surface of the trunk and feed through some of her qi. An offering. Another shudder underfoot, and then nothing. The blunt awareness of the tree had seen her, and then turned away, it did not object to her offering, and her presence would be tolerated.
That did not mean she could stop the cycle of qi through the meridians of feet, but it did mean that Meishen could carefully pick her way around the base of the tree, the area where its roots stretched out for multiple spans around it. She found a few mushrooms. Some of which she could not pick for they were too dangerous to handle without specific protective gear or talismans, and some of which were obviously the last of a patch that had been left by previous foragers to allow for next year’s regrowth. Still, a few common Rotstalks but of uncommonly good size and a few Firefly Caps - named for the little glowing dots on their goopy caps that lured in fireflies and moths to their sticky deaths, she could sell these at the market, or see if there were any sect commissions for such materials. Her best find was one large, plain-looking mushroom. White, with a broad, frilled cap and no real distinguishing features, it was either a very delicious Snowcatcher Fungus or a very deadly and alchemically useful Night’s Dish. Either way, Meishen would get it appraised and sell it. It was beyond her culinary skills for the while and would not keep well even inside her box of stasis.
She stashed her finds carefully in her interspatial ring - a bland brass band that wrapped dully around her right ring finger. It looked like a bargain find from the bimonthly Blossom Hill bazaar but it held ample volume of material to store Meishen’s findings from a day in the Grove. Another bow, and another offering of qi to the tree as thanks, and Meishen trod a careful path out to the north edge of the clearing. From here, she scoured the edges, working around from north, through the west and then along the south edge of the clearing and then back up the same way. The east side, home of the tree, was not safe to forage from. The tree might allow some visitation to those properly deferential, but the treeline it pulled with it to bulge into an otherwise rectangular clearing tended to be home to grabbing, predatory vines that thrived in the decay-rich environment.
This hour’s work rewarded her with three Demon’s Eye shallots, and some bitterstem herbs that Meishen could turn into bittersalts later, a useful ingredient in cooking and alchemy both. This bounty also want into her ring, and with Little Verdure keeping a watchful eye on the clearing as she went, the cultivator set out northwards towards the stream she hoped would yield up a similar bounty for her.
The gloom shifted as she traveled, deepening, she was getting deeper into the ‘edges’ of the Grove. The temperature dropped and those sparkling patches of sun breaking through the canopy became more and more rare. Green half-light and still, humid air, the muted sound of birds and the rustling of leaves, these things became all Meishen was aware of, until her ears picked up the faint warble of running water. Louder, louder, she followed the noise to its source: a bare two handspans width of running water. Clear as the bluest sky, banked by hard stone like a natural aquaduct, the stream ran swiftly. Meishen wondered, as she always did, if the water was as cool and brisk as she thought it would be, but she had been warned by Elder Farafiti in her first year in the sect not to touch this stream. It was narrow but it was deep, and the cheerful sound of it was in fact a battle cry. The unwary had more than once before been dragged down into the deep waters within the natural channel, only to wash out into The Cut days later, stripped down almost to the bone by the many ravenous little water sprites that had come to call the stream home.
The stream’s water nurtured the plants around it, but any animal or man too rich in qi that reached for its clear waters would only feed the spirits that inhabited the hidden depths. Cool. Meishen was sure the water would be cool, crisp, like a bite of fresh apple on a warm day. She stayed away. The vegetable she had been assigned to find was one that grew broad, flat leaves on thick stems, all over a bulbous root with a rich, buttery taste and a flaky texture that grew best in places equally rich in earth and water-qi and so also gave its best results in dishes that invoked such elements.
She needed three for her assignment. Two were all she had found after an hour of poring along, gently parting the undergrowth around the stream in places where it grew thick enough to hide underlying plants.
“I don’t suppose you can sense any more nearby?” Meishen tried to avoid relying on the wyrm’s innate feeling for plants, it would harm the development of her own senses to be dependent on him in such a way, but two trips out to this place would be too much a strain on her time.
The Rootwyrm peered this way and that, mouth yawning open now and then as he tasted the air, or to be more precise the qi in the air. He tilted his head to one side, and then the other. “Maybe, maybe left, by the pine?” He pointed Meishen away from the stream, past a leaning birch tree and to a pine tree that Meishen was sure would be too far away from the stream to allow for healthy growth of this particular vegetable, yet her companion was correct. There were two crowns of broad leaves splayed out in a little hollow a few handspans in front of the tree, just waiting for her to dig them out of the moist soil in the shadow of the drooping pine tree. Run off, rain runs off the drooping branches and gathers in this little hollow, Meishen thought, storing that little realisation away for her evening meditation. So not all water-qi comes from streams and lakes. Obvious when talking about battle Arts and animals which actively channeled and controlled their qi, but not so obvious when applied to growing plants reliant on the ambient qi. Even as she stored the two vegetables away and turned to a more westerly heading, she turned the matter over in her head, were there other plants that she might find in similar positions in the Grove? Could this also be used in her gardening? Perhaps if one plant shed one type of qi like this pine tree had shed the rain, then her planting layouts could take advantage of that. Rather than just growing fire-rich plants with other plants of similar elements, there could be another layer of compatibility to consider, to do with the growth of the plants and not just their innate natures…
“Little Verdure?” Meishen tapped the top coil around her neck. “Remind me to ask Elder Tola about how plants affect the qi nearby aside from their innate alignment.”
“Of course,” his little voice came piping back from behind her head immediately, he always sounded very pleased to be able to help Meishen, even with such a small matter.
“Thank you,” she replied, still turning the idea over in her mind as she carried on walking north-west.
The second clearing on the itinerary for the day was small, barely large enough for the edges to all get daily sunlight. It had no unusual properties, bar the sunken middle where one large tree had evidently been torn out of the earth, roots and all, a long time ago. The work of a large spirit beast, or a cultivator, or just time, erosion, a storm, who knew, but on the edge of the dip on the far side, the tuft of leaves from another shallot waved to Meishen in the breeze. She looked around one last time, checking for dangers, before quickly circling around the hollow, and deftly digging the Demon’s Eye shallot up and storing it in her ring with just a few well-practiced motions.
Well, that was four shallots. Two-thirds of the supply she needed, meaning a huge saving in costs that could then go towards her meat-supply plan instead - if she could get that off the ground.
It was times like these that Meishen wanted to whistle, or at least hum along to herself and her companion. They had spent hours trekking through the forest at this point and the meridians in her feet would feel fuzzy for days after those hours spent diffusing qi out of them like that, but at least the time was productive, successful even.
The contentment of having achieved such measurable progress towards her immediate goals helped power the long two-hour hike to the north-western point of the Grove’s edge where it met The Cut and the Marshblood. Whilst she had not left the ill-defined ‘edges’ of the Grove, the north-western part was definitely more arduous to travel through, her defensive Art twinged repeatedly, with increased frequency as more and more of the plants displayed sharp leaves, or proffered barbs and thorns as Meishen passed by. The drain on her qi was not worryingly quick but it was very much a step up from the occasional tug from the start of the day.
Thoughts of plant-qi interactions faded into a longing for a nice, hot bath and a soothing mug of tea that lingered for a long while before the rushing of The Cut became audible. The Marshblood was relatively wide for its depth, and ran with a strong but smooth current. The Cut was a more narrow waterway, but still held its depth and the water thundered along, made all the more boisterous by the jagged outcroppings of rock that jutted out of the water all along its course from the Marshblood to its end above the Springdeep Waters. The name even came from those blades of stone, cutting through the surface of the water like knives, making the river a single, long course of rapids. Such vigorous flow of water meant plenty of spray, and a very good environment for many plants not found elsewhere in the Leafblood Grove. Too much water to earth for more of her earlier vegetable find, but that just meant different plants, more variety here.
Meishen felt her eagerness to finish her work here and head home surge, but counseled herself to continue the steady approach that had carried her through the day. It would be a poor end to her labours to rush now and risk startling some thirsty beast and end up in a fight that could set her back by more than they day could earn her. Healing work wasn’t cheap and neither were the elixirs to help regenerate a large expenditure of qi. Even Little Verdure, slung about her shoulders was alternating between tension at this last task of the day and slouching in relief that his day-long shift as Meishen’s second pair of eyes was not too far from over.
The trees thinned dramatically, light flooding back in to push back the murk, the air grew heavy with moisture and positively vibrated with the continuous crescendo of The Cut’s raging waters pounding along towards the river’s end near the Springdeep Waters. Meishen peered around the relatively open space by the river’s stony banks, wary of surprising a roaming beast or even another cultivator. It wasn’t as if she was the only person to come here and some disciples took the path to Inner Disciple status as a fierce competition more than an individual challenge.
There was nothing moving, nothing lying in wait, nothing but water spray, thriving greenery and the dappled shade of the scattered trees. Meishen decided on a section of verdant growth a few full spans deep alongside the riverbank, stretching maybe a dozen or so full spans long. She had been taught in her first year to limit her foraging activities in unsecured places to a specified area at a time rather than roaming around mindlessly and that was how she would work here. One stretch, full of burgeoning leaves and thriving life, and an hour to search it carefully for anything of value or interest.
It was not easy, the river was deafening from close up, the water spray made everything slick and damp, and crouching down, sifting through the leaves, buds, sprouts and stems all growing as they pleased in one big jumble of brown and greenery was back breaking, even for someone with a Brass-level physique. Meishen shunted all her frustrations aside with a quiet huff. Time dragged on slowly, first she began to feel a little hungry, then the ache in her back became more pronounced, then her mind traitorously turned back to images of her bathtub filled with hot water and steaming gently. One span, two, four, eight, the remaining area left to be searched shrunk without little yield aside from a few common herbs. Meishen nevertheless disentangled another plant from the plain old hornweed wrapped around it, only to blink in surprise.
“Oh!” She couldn’t help the exclamation, and felt Little Verdure moving around behind her even as she froze. Once the Rootwyrm relaxed again, she relaxed too, reassured nothing had heard her inadvertent blunder. Ducking her head back down, she set about removing the carpet of hornweed entirely from the carpet of plants immediately in front of her. A full span along, and another span deep she unwound, unraveled and uncovered until the hornweed was lying in limp feathery strands all over the already search plants - not uprooted just pulled free of its climbing frame of other plants. In its place, a few reedy grasses and some clovers, but also a large, vigorous Dewdrop Mint plant!
The first stem she had seen from under the hornweed had been a little straggly, but still valuable. The full plant however, was large and in excellent health with strong stems and full leaves. The hornweed had not been able to smother the life out of it. Meishen sighed as the fresh, crisp scent of the mint washed over her.
Cool mornings, barely a breeze, water droplets lining the spiders' webs hanging from the branches of the tall, straight trees in their ordered lines, the mist still rolling over the fields below the forest’s slopes. That was what the mint smelled like to Meishen. A pinch or two and it was just an exceptionally clear, crisp flavour or scent, but with a live plant in hand, the qi-enhanced nature of its fragrant leaves often evoked the image of something clear and crisp instead. A refreshing vista instead of a refreshing taste. It was part of Meishen’s objectives for her next few recipes to start drawing more deeply on the unique properties such as this of the qi-rich ingredients in her cooking. She did not feel like she would be able to do so wit the mint in her game stew, but gazing down at the rare plant before he, she wondered if maybe the recipe after that, or the one after that.
One day she would be able to cook food that could do more than just stir up the blood and qi of the consumer, she would be able to invoke such phenomena as this mint. Indeed, maybe the mint would help her achieve this for the first time.
The reinvigorated young woman thought for a second and then pulled not her normal clippers for trimming off the required stems but her small hand trowel out of her interspatial ring. She would ask for Elder Tola’s help in growing this mint back in the Thicket, perhaps the elder might even lend her a spot in the greenhouse for it. It would cost her, Elder Tola did not help those who did not help themselves too and asking for this favour would doubtless result in more work one way or another, but Meishen suddenly, dearly, wished to grow this Dewdrop Mint on, to cultivate it for her cooking as she cultivated her own qi. So rarely did one find a spirit plant healthy but young enough to be relocated, and for it to be such a staple in the culinary arts, Meishen could not bear to let this opportunity pass her by.
The mint plant’s roots were rather deep, it took a few minutes just of judicious digging to get them all free and loose from the ground. Then came the task of moving the delicate plant into a pot - Meishen had rarely before been so grateful for the easy convenience of her interspatial ring - and getting it bedded in enough to survive the few hours walk back to Blossom Hill and from there down the road to the Tower of Inquiry where Elder Tola spent her days.
It took a good fifteen minutes and the aid of Little Verdure’s innate sensitivity to be sure that the mint was happy enough in its new home, for the time being at least. Once she was sure it would be okay though, Meishen wrapped a ribbon around the pot, tucked a talisman between ribbon and pot to protect the plant from the effects of interspatial storage, and put the whole thing in her ring. Not ideal for most disciples for transporting live items, interspatial transport tended to just kill whatever you were carrying once the talisman ran out of stored energy but she was very confident in the quality of the slip of paper she’d used and the enchanting of it. It would last until Meishen reached the tower, of that she was certain. She turned to follow the outer edge of the Grove back down towards Blossom Hill and set off, fresh purpose fueling her every step.
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