Chapter 3- Bitter Water

The little village didn’t have a name on their crude map. It was just another little farming village off the Pebble River, a safer tributary of the Agate. They grew rice, kept ducks and chickens, had vegetable plots behind their houses, and some lucky few grew fruits on stumpy trees. Many lived to adulthood, and most of those who lived had a lot of kids. Then the older generation grew weaker, grew sick, and died. Their bodies were buried in the village graveyard, incense was offered, Hell Money was burned, and the living carried on living.
Mortal lives. Utterly ordinary, and uniquely precious to those living them. Or who had lived them. The cycle was cut short in this generation.
“Easy, easy Mother. Easy now.”
“My babies. Where are my babies?”
“My sister is looking for them. Easy, easy now. Let me tie the bandage- there. Now lie here and don’t move. You will reopen the wounds if you do.”
The smoking shells of farmers’ homes didn’t leave much room for hope, but there had been some survivors.
“Why did they do it? We pay them their tribute! So why did they do this?”
“Who harmed you, Mother?”
“Yellow Banner Bandits. It was the Yellow Banners! They said, they said…” She broke down sobbing.
“Brother Zihao!” Hong rushed over carrying a little boy. The boy twisted in agony, charred skin, laboring to breathe. “Save him!”
Tian closed his eyes. One part of him said the boy was beyond saving. That unless he had an immortal destiny, his future was brutally short and defined by suffering. Then he exhaled sharply, and got to work. “I’ll do what I can. Keep looking. There must have been four hundred people living here. I see thirty living. Where are the rest?”
He started with pulling out the infection. The Demon Pulling Art Doctor Pei had gifted him had started seeing a lot of use since they started their adventures along the river. Mortals had so little qi, it was reasonably safe to learn on them. Carefully manipulating his vital energy, modulating the elemental composition to just the right combinations to pull disease from tissue and blood, took a dreadful degree of understanding and control. It was a marvelous exercise, which he definitely appreciated when he wasn’t trying to clear out all the infections drilling into a child’s body through the burns covering a fifth of their skin.
“I have another here-”
“Put them on a clean sheet. Triage?”
“Bleeding internally. Not breathing well. Not conscious.”
“Damn!” Tian got the burned child stable-ish, and switched over to the middle aged woman. The crane cried from a rooftop. “She found some more.”
“I heard her!”
Tian wiped the sweat from his face. This wasn’t a job for a single orderly. There should be teams of people. Teams of doctors with decades of experience. There should be clean sheets and boiled cotton bandages and wall-sized cabinets of medicinal herbs and powdered medicines. There should have been soldiers here to stop the village from burning down in the first place. There should have been someone, some cultivator that went out and stopped the bandits before they attacked. Or someone to teach them better people before they became bandits.
What there was, was Tian, Hong and the Snow Grace Crane. No strangers to atrocities. This wasn’t the first massacre they had come across.
“More middle aged people.” Hong yelled.
“Any other kids?”
“Not so far.”
Tian nodded, doing the triage and trying to get things as stable as he could, so that he could repair what he could, extending the period of stability. He wasn’t going to get anyone healthy again. He just wanted to stretch out the time until death.
“We are about forty miles from Longhill Town. Make sure you found everyone you can here, and then-”
“I’ll let the magistrate know and bring the doctor back.” Hong nodded. “Shouldn’t take more than an hour, even going slow for the doctor.”
“Switch back to your robes. Let them know we are here on Monastery business.”
“Didn’t need reminding.” She was rushing back into the smouldering buildings, ripping them apart, trying to find anyone she might have missed. Tian got his head down and stuck to bandaging, suturing, giving what remedies he could that wouldn’t kill the mortals. Immortal medicine sounded wonderful, until you remembered a dose of medicine that would be effective on the cultivated body of a level nine Earthly Realm cultivator would exterminate a dozen mortals. Quite possibly more.
“The difference between medicine and poison is the dose.” That was an old saw. It was mostly true too, though some things were toxic in any quantity. His hands moved quickly, tying off a tourniquet a hand’s width above where an elbow should have been. Poking a hole open in a throat and threading a hollow reed inside, watching the wounded man breathe convulsively. Sickness was sure to get in. Certain to. But for the next few minutes, the man would live. Long enough for him to tend to the next one. And the next one.

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“DAMN! Brother Zihao, I found a mass grave. Has to be sixty, eighty people here!” Hong’s voice was a mess. Tian closed his eyes and breathed out slowly. Then sharply inhaled.
“Make sure none of them are still alive, and keep moving. You know what to do!”
“Yeah, yeah! Damn it all to Hell, I sure do know what to do!”
“I don’t suppose you have a magic ‘Fix all this’ technique?”
Not… in the sense you mean, no. I can help diagnose some issues, but right now, battlefield first aid is the best we can manage. Wait. Leave this guy, that kid needs your help now. He’s going into shock.
“Hey, hey, I know it hurts, okay? I know it hurts. But you aren’t alone. You aren’t alone. You are going to be okay. I know how to help you, kid.” Tian scrambled over to the kid. Bloody spit had started slowly leaking from the little boy’s mouth, his eyes going glassy and his face turning an awful white around the burns. Tian threw a blanket over him, and gambling on how well his bandages were holding, propped the boy’s feet up so they were a little above the level of his head.
“It hurts, I know. But you can use the pain to grow. There are ways. I can teach you. Ways even mortals can use. I have been there. I have been exactly where you are, and aren’t I living well? You will too. What’s your name? Can you tell me the name of this village?”
“That’s all of the wounded. Barely thirty. Thirty! There must have been three or four hundred living here. No kids mixed in with the bodies. Which is not a blessing. Will he live?” Hong slammed her spear butt against the ground.
“Maybe. I’ll do what I can. Grab a wagon, load up as many stable wounded as you can. Run to the Town. Bring a doctor back.” Tian’s words came out clipped.
“Yeah. I’ll do- what’s going on with his eyes?”
The boy opened his eyes. They had turned a faint gold, with vermillion thread-like symbols shimmering and vanishing every moment. As though it were an impossibly precious sutra that was only legible to the fated.
“A human body is hard to obtain, to be born in a virtuous kingdom is rare, to hear a true scripture preached is rarer still. How can you say that you are not favored by the heavenly immortals? Your suffering is an opportunity to clear the sins from your last life, your cultivation might not achieve immortality this life but it leaves a root. And which of the immortals ascended without a root? So you are blessed beyond all others.”
The boy’s voice was old. Strong, and old. Then he convulsed, vomited again, and went still. His eyes returned to a glassy black color. His breath stopped. Tian shoved Hong out of the way and started compressing the boy’s chest. The heart had stopped. Everything had stopped. He worked on the boy for five minutes before he stopped. A three fingered hand closed the boy’s eyes.
“Damn.” Tian muttered. Then he shook his head and moved back to his other patients. Hong smashed down a wall. She screamed, full of fury and frustration. Then she went and found a wagon, and got people loaded on.
“I’ll be back in an hour.”
“We’ll be here.”
“Grandpa, what in the hell was that?”
Something that should never happen. Something I have never seen before, actually. I know what it is, but…
“And?”
And I hope you have enjoyed the last four months. Things are going to get a little too interesting. Which is good, in a way. Lots and lots of opportunities when the water gets this muddy. But a lot of danger too. Drink some water. Get it from the well, not the river.
“This close to the river, what’s the difference?” Tian grumbled mentally, but still went and drew up a bucket of water. He took a sip- cool, fresh… he spat it on the ground, gagging, then rinsed with cold tea from his calabash.
“What the hell was that?!”
That was pure, clean well water. But its roots have been cut away. That last body reconstruction you did is coming along very well. Building from your Dustless Physique and Pre-Natal Immortal Breath, refined by the Hell Suppressing art and my own intervention with the Demon’s Finger, your body is drawing sharp lines between what it will accept and refine, and what it rejects utterly. Taste the soil. If you can find any food here, you can taste that too.
“What do you mean, the roots have been cut away? What kind of roots can water have?”
Grandpa Jun chuckled softly. Everyone talks so easily about “The Dao,” or “Yin-Yang” being these huge concepts. They acknowledge a truth mentally, without accepting it in practice. The mortals are a little more honest in their ignorance. From infinite chaos came the one, the one begat two, the two begat the five elements, and from thence came the myriad things.
“Yes? I know. Everyone knows that.”
Kind of a big jump from “Five elements make up the entire universe,” to mediocre poetry and the invention of the water clock, don’t you think? For that matter, how does virtue or vice arise from all of this elemental chaos? Or all the things invoked when people start chanting spells? Because they aren’t doing it for no reason.
“I guess? And I don’t know. And what does that have to do with a village full of dead and dying peasants?”
It means that someone is doing something extremely nasty, and on a huge scale. They are doing it using magics you have no context for, and I don’t want to spend the energy explaining without a highly urgent reason. And you have caught the edge of it. And, cold as it is to say, once the village is dead, the problem is no longer urgent. Care for the living, Grandson. You will find out the truth step by step.
Tian looked over the burnt out village. There was no reason it should be burnt. Bandits raided for food, wealth and women. Slaughtering hundreds and burning down the huts- that was the sort of thing you did if you wanted the peasants to run away and never return. It was the sort of thing that got the Provincial Governor out of bed, shoving his concubines to one side and roaring for his generals.
Worse, the Yellow Banner Bandits had some degree of cultivation. That meant local sects like the Lone Saber sect might be called in to suppress them. It might even involve Ancient Crane Mountain, and there would be no running away from that. It was the exact opposite of what a sensible bandit wanted.
He thought back to the boy and his golden eyes. The bright red squiggles looked like ancient writing, and the words he spoke sounded like a senior preaching the dao. Hardly evil things. The root of the water cut away? Even food and dirt were affected?
The crane flew over, brilliant white against the merciless blue sky, and gently headbutted him. She looked as worried as he felt.
“We’ll do our best. And in the meantime, we save the ones in front of us. If the heavens are blessing me with hardship, I’ll get all I can from it. One day, we will be sure to return the blessing a hundredfold.”