Dao of the World Walker (Xianxia) Book 2

The elder returned to the stage and invited the next performer.

The fourth performer brought no instrument that Yang could identify at first.

She walked onto the platform carrying what looked like a scroll. Yang first assumed it was a prop, but then she flung it into the air, and it spread open, suspending itself in front of her. It was not a scroll at all. It opened in a wide curved arc, and instead of paper, the interior was strung with vertical wires, each one threaded at intervals with small metal beads. Some wires carried many beads, some only a few, some none at all. The overall impression was of an abacus, but a hundred times more elaborate, and a lot more beautiful.

She raised both hands and began running her fingers across the strings.

The sound was unlike anything Yang had heard so far that day. A shimmering, ringing, layered tone, the wires and beads sounding together and producing something almost airy.

As she played, the air before her began to take shape.

A figure formed. A man, tall and weathered, dressed in the clothes of a farmer, a hoe resting over one shoulder. Another figure appeared opposite him. A young woman. She raised her hand in greeting.

The two figures spoke. There was no sound to their words. But Yang could read the conversation in their posture, in the way the man’s shoulders eased at the woman’s greeting, in the way she stepped forward and took his hand. They were father and daughter. Yang did not know how he knew. He simply did.

The music shifted, and the figures shifted with it.

The daughter brought the father a meal wrapped in a cloth. They sat together at the edge of a field that had grown out of the mist around them, golden grain swaying in an unfelt wind. They ate. They spoke. The father laughed at something the daughter said with his head thrown back, his shoulders shaking.

A third figure entered. A young man. He approached the father with visible awkwardness. The daughter’s hand crept to her mouth. The father set his bowl down very carefully and looked at the young man for a long moment.

Then he stood and embraced him.

The daughter wept openly. So did the young man. The father held them both.

The mist shifted, and time passed within the scene. The daughter’s belly grew round. A child appeared in her arms. The father, older now, bounced the child on his knee while the young man, his hair already touched with grey at the temples, watched them with an expression of happiness.

The music continued. A lifetime unspooled itself in the mist, compressed into the span of a performance. The father grew very old. He sat by the door of a house where he watched his descendants flourish. He watched his grandchild grow into a young man, then a man with a child of his own, and he smiled for every part of it.

The end came gently. The very old father, still sitting by his door, simply closed his eyes. The daughter, herself now old, knelt beside him and pressed her forehead to his hand.

The mist dissolved.

The performer lowered her scroll, and it rolled itself back into her hand.

It was a beautiful performance, heartfelt and human, and Yang could feel how close the story was to the performer herself.

But this performance was just not on par with the previous ones. This disciple also had the misfortune of following the previous participant, who managed to deeply affect the audience.

The music played before hers had reached into each member of the audience and brought forward their deepest desires and best moments, even if only for a few minutes.

A simple and happy mortal tale, however beautifully told, could not touch as deeply as one’s own love and one’s own loss. The performer herself seemed to understand this. She bowed quickly and left the stage without lingering.

The elder called the next participant.

This performer carried a weathered guqin. The instrument looked older than the disciple carrying it, its surface worn and darkened with use, like it had been handled by many hands over a very long time. He set it down on the platform with great care, lowered himself to sit before it on the floor, and placed his hands on the strings.

Then he began to play.

The first note was soft. The music built from it slowly, a gradual crescendo that unfolded without hurry.

Yang noticed the elders straighten in their seats. Several disciples around him did the same, an alertness passing through the audience that he could not yet find a reason for.

It took a little longer before Yang felt it himself.

The qi in the air began to respond.

The qi in the air around him was changing. Not the way it had moved in the mist outside, not the way it had responded to the vine performer or the light-animal performer. It was gathering. Every current of qi in the venue was slowing, turning, and beginning to draw toward the platform.

The performer added more notes. The sequence built slowly, and Yang found it felt less like a melody and more like a summons.

And the qi answered.

The air began to glow with an even luminescence that filled the entire venue. As the qi thickened and concentrated, it became visible, the density of it showing up as faint points of light, like tiny fireflies, where the concentration was highest.

The performer’s playing deepened.

Yang’s breath caught as lines began to form in the air above the platform. Curving paths of brighter light intersected in patterns he could not fully follow. He recognised what he was seeing only because he had read about it in passing and seen a diagram once in the library.

The performer was drawing a formation. Not with any tools but rather with sound.

The qi in the air was being shaped by the music itself into lines and nodes and convergence points, and it was activating as he drew it, each completed section beginning to do its work even as the next was still being laid down.

The formation opened like a gate, and the qi around the venue began flowing inward like a tide.

The performer played on.

The light thickened until it was almost dazzling. The qi concentration became the densest Yang had ever experienced anywhere, denser than Lingcao Peak, denser than the other inner sect peaks he had been to. Around him, audience members were breathing differently. A disciple two rows ahead closed her eyes, crossed her legs in her seat, formed a mudra, and began to cultivate. Several others did the same, one after another.

Well. If everyone else was doing it.

He brought his legs up, crossed them on the seat, closed his eyes, and let his cultivation technique begin.

The qi flooded into him. The Ren meridian filled with what felt like an entire morning’s worth of cultivation in a single breath. The qi rose to the crown point, descended along the Du meridian, split at the diversion point, and Yang felt his Sea of Consciousness brighten with the inflow in a way that usually only happened after many sessions aided with the Pink Lotus Tea.

He cultivated.

Around him, hundreds of others cultivated.

The participant played on.

How long the piece lasted Yang could not have said. He was aware only of the qi flowing into him and the music sustaining the formation that kept the flow steady and abundant.

Eventually, the music began to slowly ease.

Yang felt the qi concentration beginning to ease. He opened his eyes in time to see the lines of light softening as the formation faded with the music, each line dimming as the notes that sustained it released, until the last of them dissolved and the air was simply air again.

The performer finally lifted his hands from the strings and rested them in his lap.

He bowed his head to the guqin, rose slowly, and walked off the platform without looking back.

Yang sat with qi humming through every meridian, his dantian heavier than he had ever felt it after a single session, his Sea of Consciousness clear and full in a way that usually took a hundred rounds of Heavenly Diversion to achieve.

Once back to his full senses after enjoying and taking advantage of the tsunami of qi, Yang had to admit.

These Golden Core cultivators were simply on another level entirely.

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