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Bùjiàn <不见>
To the world she is a ghost.
No one of merit (if you define merit as the great cultivators do) has seen Bàoshān Sànrén in over a century.
Even before she retreated from everything, she was of a hermetic nature. She preferred the company of stone to that of people, preferred her own thoughts to the demands of society. For a while she lingered with the Lán because out of all the sects they best understood what it meant to be world weary. For a while she even thought she had found a match, someone who could pull her out of her shell, make her corporeal and real, someone who made issues of clan and family seem worthwhile.
Then Lán Yì fell to recklessness, and Bàoshān Sànrén disappeared again.
That night in balmy Wú was the last time she drew her sword.
The little girl she once was, before the title Sanren or the name Bàoshān, named it Not-Seen because it sounded like Not-A-Sword and that appealed to her childish sense of humor. In the dawn of cultivation, when there were a dozen emperors and a hundred little wars, the ability to laugh was a blessing. Besides, her classmates had always mocked her for her withdrawing nature. Wasn’t humility a virtue? Wasn’t introspection, self-reflection, an invaluable quality?
The sword smith was a simple man, whose works would not go down in history, whose gifts were not exceptional or rare. He gave careful attention to each new blade, however, and for her he took especial care. Perhaps a god came to him in a dream and told him this sword would outlast all his others. Where the blades he made for her classmates would rust away on battlefields, Bàoshān Sànrén’s would endure.
Plain black and grey trappings, shagreen leather and camphor wood, a refrozen-ice fuzziness to the metal that made all reflections in its surface waver. A simple sword. A forgettable one. One for the ages but not for the story books.
It is dependable, it serves well, and in some lost years it is the only living creature she knows.
When she first gained wings so many years ago it lay in front of her, a companion in her meditations. When she decided to stay on earth, keep her unchanging body and remain a differentiated object (a long lasting one, preserved by the flow of energy and the knowledge of the universe) rather than a sylph, invisible to men, she chose with her blade in her hand.
Now she is a teacher, on a mountain far from the wars of others. Now she keeps her sword hidden in an old tree trunk, where her students can not find it. They do not need to learn of swords or killing, they can practice with wooden facsimiles and never hear the song of steel. Sometimes she’ll use it to beat carpets or stir their laundry. There is more use for sticks on her mountain than for blades, and she is so proud that she has made it so.
When she does step foot off the mountain (to gather up those unfortunates she can bring away) she sheathes it in a walking stick and never draws it. A precaution that never needs use.
There is enough blood shed in the mortal world, why contribute to it? No thief or highwayman poses a threat to her. She no longer associates with those few cultivators who might be able to match her. Their way of life makes her tired.
Bùjiàn stays hidden, its blade growing dull, its spirit sluggish.
The sword is not a sword. Bàoshān Sànrén disappears.
Mínglíng <冥凌>
Yānlíng Dàoren is the first of her students to wish to rejoin the world that threw him out and she is so, so proud of him.
She invites a sword smith she knows, the greatest in the province, to visit the immortal’s peak and make a blade for her fledgling soon to fly.
All the children, young and old and withered (too many of her students live and die on her mountain, for immortality is not a bar many can reach) gather round as the master builds a blast furnace out of clay and fills it high with charcoal and stones. The spritely ones take turns on the bellows, eager to help their brother, who is meditating deeply in front of the forge.
The blade takes shape slowly, by cold blast and icy river water, until at last it sits in Yānlíng’s hands.
He thanks the swordsmith profusely, as is only right, and when asked for a name for the weapon pretends to give it ample thought. It’s a silly show of contemplation when Bàoshān Sànrén knows he’s had a name in his heart for weeks.
The Chǔ Cí has always been his favorite text. There are few books on the mountain as visiting the booksellers has not been highest among her priorities for the last few decades. In the long winter months her students learn to recite those texts they do have access to out of boredom as much as duty. The little ones chase each other around, tripping over lyrical verse, and Yānlíng holds them upside down and corrects their pronunciation for he is the cleverest young man she’s ever known. Out of all the poems, he likes Guóshāng the best, a fact that worries her though she knows she can do nothing to change his nature.
Respecting his teacher’s sensibilities, he chose his sword’s name from the Dà Zhāo, the Great Summons. A good song about beauty and the joys of the world, the pride of which is softened by the fact that it extolls a kingdom long destroyed.
The name however… the name concerns her.
He names it Deep Ice, after the thick sheets of permafrost that coat the mountain they have made their home, after the river caves he loves to explore and the cold that never bothers him. (What cruelty that her adopted children all hold a bit of Lán Yì’s character, and that Yānlíng Dàoren bears the greatest part.) It is a bit of affectionate narcissism as well, the first character means underworld where the second character of his name means tomb, and the last characters of both are homonyms. Shǎngfá would have been more authoritative, Guīlái more optimistic, yet there’s a presumption to both that feels off putting. Of all the choices in the Summons, Mínglíng is the strongest. It fits.
It worries her how well they are suited, heavy name and heavy boy. She doesn’t like to send him away with a sword bearing the name of the underworld. She doesn’t want him to be destined for cold caves and poor choices. It exacerbates the dread that has been building since he came to her and said he wanted to go and put the world on a better Way.
The doom that sits upon her students has not yet been made clear to her. Old and experienced as she is, premonitions still creep up on her long before Yānlíng finally bids farewell, his black-ice sword in hand as he bows his last.
Against his white robes it looks like a gash, like a slash of ink cutting through his pale back.
As a way of discouraging her students from returning to the world, the depravities of which she knows too well, Bàoshān Sànrén has told them that if they leave her and her mountain they may not come back.
With her edict in mind, she does not expect to see him or his disquieting sword ever again.
Long after the stories of his ruin and death have come and gone, after she has mourned once and moved on from the student she could not save, it comes back to her in the hands of a Lán disciple who claims he has been searching for this mountain for a long time.
She makes it a point to not let any of the great clans know where she lives, and she is going to have to move after this, but she doesn’t mind too much. With him, he brings her students ashes and his blade, blood-rusty and battered and still a piece of his spirit. The white scabbard and patinated metal trimmings, the delicate engravings of ancient warriors locked in battle, the details are obscured by damage but still visible if you know what the original looked like. When she tries to draw it she finds it sealed against her hand.
“We thought if anyone could put his spirit to rest it would be his teacher,” the Lán disciple says. “Soul settling rituals were performed but our grandmaster says it is best not to underestimate a student of Bàoshān Sànrén.”
He does not say, “This is a gift, because you love our clan once and it has only been three generations since then. Some people still remember.”
The Lán are still foolish, like the rest of them, but they are kind.
Burial rituals are simple among her students. They ensure the ghost is settled and all the manifold spirits of the body find their proper place with talismans and small rituals, burn flowers and incense, and pile rocks to keep the animals away. There’s no need to linger on the dead when those who die in Bàoshān Sànrén’s care usually do so as part of a grander spiritual plan.
Yānlíng’s death is sudden and messy, cannot be reversed with great magic or healing that borders on resurrection. His body was cut by a thousand swords and he was burned in the presence of dozens of cultivators. Any spirit that remains would be a furious, resentful thing, ill-inclined to cooperate with the gentle coaxing of her usual rites.
As her students pack up their lives, she makes her way down into the deep, cold caves he loves. When she reaches the fast flowing underground river full of transparent blind fish, she knelt. Bit by bit, careful not to overload the delicate chemical balance of the water, she feeds in the ashes, lets the river take them away.
The sword she keeps on a high shelf above their book collection. It’s so solidly sealed in it’s scabbard that even the most mischievous student couldn’t get into it, and it serves as a warning to those who might think the world wants them.
Her sorrow when she looks on it is for her pupils, past and present and future, and for the troth that was betrayed. When he left he promised not to return.
Jīngdōng <經冬>
Cángsè’s sword-name doesn’t come to her attention until after the woman is dead.
This student, the second to leave her, the first who she knows for certain will come to no good end, walks off the mountain armed with only a stave. There will be no more swordsmiths in Bàoshān Sànrén’s glade.
Instead she gives her a recommendation for a good weapon maker nearby, and tells her to stop there before proceeding to Cloud Recesses. It has been many years but if she’s lucky the Lán will still have some respect for Bàoshān Sànrén’s name.
Her darling, brave girl bows, then embraces her tight, then turns and walks away.
Many years later rumors of Cángsè Sànrén’s death reaches the mountain and Bàoshān Sànrén goes to confirm them. She makes her students swear not to return, she makes no promises about not following after them. It’s not about salvation, she tells herself, it’s about resolution. Cángsè’s fate is out of her hands but at least this time she can make a reliable account to her brothers and sisters, so they know how their wandering sibling fell. At least this time she might be able to bury the body before it’s burned.
Parents aren’t supposed to bury children, but they are not truly her sons and daughters and she’s an immortal. Any filial duty they might have to outlive her is nullified, and she is left with a grief somewhat assuaged by laying them to rest. Though she is empty of desires that doesn’t mean that she’s empty of regrets, or of love.
Staff in hand she follows stories of Cángsè Sànrén southeast, between Yílíng and Méishān. There she hears that Cángsè and her husband (she married some years before) and son (a newer revelation) stopped in town for the season to cleanse the ever tumultuous region. Burial mounds do not make for good neighbours. After a particularly dangerous band of bandits had been spotted in a nearby farming village, they stopped coming to buy groceries. No bodies had been found but there were hills near the village where law-abiding living humans dared not walk, so there had been little real investigation.
Bàoshān Sànrén knows when something is being hidden from her. She pushes harder with her questions and eventually a smalltime peddler in a pub cracks and admits that the donkey the couple kept trotted into town, half dead and carrying a criminal with a slit throat. They’d thrown the body in a ditch and kept the donkey.
“What of the child?” she asks, because even if she can’t save Cángsè she can help her son. Orphans are in Bàoshān Sànrén’s purview.
“Dead or ran off, we haven’t seen him. He was a quick little thing and knew the roads so he might have made for the city.” The man’s eyes make it clear he cares little what happened as long as it is no longer happening in his town.
Saving that information for later, she goes to explore the hills.
It takes some hours to find the bandits hideout, deep in the foothills of Yílíng, though all she has to do is follow the traces of resentful energy that hover aromatic in the air. They have, had, a well disguised and well supplied cavern that reminds her of the burial mound’s landscape a few miles away. Maybe all places filled with dead men look the same. Instead of the handful of desperate men on the run she’d been warned of, she finds three hundred corpses, a small army of evil-doers hiding behind the reputation of Yílíng, disguising their crimes as the attacks of fierce corpses and hungry ghosts, living off the shunned land as well as the terrified people. To aid in their deception they have a handful of ghouls chained in wicker cages or locked in talisman pots. Clever. They’d need some cultivators among their number for that.
Cángsè and her husband’s heroics would have cut them off, made them desperate, until they were driven out into the open. Realizing that they were facing humans but not fully grasping how many their enemies were, they had charged forward recklessly.
They died for it, had bled out surrounded by enemies, lacking even the comfort of each other. Bàoshān Sànrén discovers their bodies on opposite sides of the cave, facing each other but separated.
Perhaps if they’d faced only normal bandits they could have survived but there’s at least one Niè saber pulsing furiously among the bodies and the man (what was Cángsè’s husband’s name? Wèi?) is caught in a spelled net. Exiles, rogues, and wolf’s heads. Cultivators taught their magics recklessly, and good people paid for it.
It will take a while to put all these bodies in the ground, even with her skill, honed over centuries, at burying bodies. This close to Yílíng, they’d only make trouble though, so Bàoshān Sànrén rolls up her sleeves and goes to work.
She saves her student and her student’s spouse for last. After washing and straightening the bodies, she sets their swords by their sides.
The man, a servant of one of the greater clans if she recalls correctly, has an easy enough blade to identify; the purple tassel matches the purple stripe on his robes and the pommel bears dragonflies and lotus flowers.
Cángsè’s blade surprises her. To start with, it’s pinning a dead body to a wall. How lethal her child became, out here among the howling monsters. It looks different than she expected too. Whenever she imagined her errant student she had privately conjured up pictures of a sword like Yānlíng’s, or Bàoshān Sànrén’s own. Stark, neutral colors and clean lines.
When she moves Cángsè the scabbard she discovers beneath her corpse is lacquered a bright, new green. Too vibrant to be called jade and too pale to be mistaken for foliage, it reminds her of the newest buds on a pine tree or the sticky color of a caterpillar. Enamel insets of the same hue dot the guard, pops of springtime in a setting of silver. Engraved into the base of the blade, below a branching needle pattern are two characters; Enduring Winter.
(“Away from home, I was longing for news”)
Now it’s summer and Cángsè is dead.
Swords have spirits, it’s true, but they rarely communicate as humans do. There are many things that are alive and do not speak, or do not think in the manner of people. Like a wild horse or a barn cat, they follow their own rules. Unlike an animal they do not tire or grow old, or mourn the passing of the years. Their loyalty is absolute, however, and their intentions are easy enough to read if you know the signs.
As she goes to lay the blade in the open grave next to her student, she feels it shiver in her hand. “Not eager to be buried then?”
There’s no answer. It’s a sword.
“I suppose I can take you back up the mountain.”
It has been too long since Yānlíng. Too many of her students are curious about what happens in the places they left. A reminder of their sister, dead before thirty, and the live steel that took her to her doom will serve them well.
She vacillates over whether to leave a grave marker. When you have lived centuries, such motions seem pointless. A stack of stones, a carved plank, how long do they last? All tombstones are quickly swept away especially when you die as Cángsè did, alone in the woods, with few people to wonder where you went.
Let memory and the records of history fall where they will, cast her as a villain or a heroine, or forget her entirely. Bàoshān Sànrén bowed out of that world long ago. She won’t provide fodder for the grindstone. She won’t do anything.
She does look for the boy. To spirit away the abandoned is a course of action she’s long stood by, because in the end they too are forgotten. With Bàoshān Sànrén they can live long lives away from those who discarded them.
A week of searching proves pointless. She doesn’t even know his name and there are too many lost and hungry children in the towns around Yílíng.
With the spring green sword strapped over her back and a promising orphan girl from Xiāotíng (who has Cángsè’s eager smile and mischief) holding her hand, she begins the journey home.
Shuānghuá <霜华>
It’s many years before she encounters Sòng Zǐchēn again. He is polite enough not to return to her mountain after his surgery and recovery. Even when she hears word of a tall cultivator in black asking desperately after Xiǎo Xīngchén, he stays away from her doorstep.
Time passes, the rumours ebb and flow, and she learns in bits and pieces what a terrible fate befell the latest of her delinquent disciples.
Poor Xīngchén. His nature was so very good, more trusting than Cángsè, more forgiving than Yānlíng. The first of her pupils to surprise her with his determination to go out into the world, the first of her pupils to betray her (because he loved too much for rules or promises). Bàoshān Sànrén knows the spirit is hardy and the soul can never be truly broken. She’s lived with ghosts and raised the dead, she knows that Xiǎo Xīngchén carries on. Shattering is still a painful ordeal. It doesn’t take Lán spirit songs to know that the part of him that remains is diminished and suffering.
She can grieve for that. She can grieve for all her laughing winter children, who went to lower altitudes and melted away. Though the water they were made of has only changed shape they are beyond her now.
Even hurting for Xiǎo Xīngchén she doesn’t seek his friend out. They are both immortal now, or so she’s heard, and they’ll have plenty of time to get to know each other. Why force meetings that are already inevitable?
Inevitable it does prove. A decade after Xiǎo Xīngchén leaves home for the second time, she comes across him in an abandoned house by the side of a mountain road. When the hailstones outside finally drive her to shelter, she discovers him already settled inside and huddled by a fire. Understandable, without blood to warm the body a corpse would have to be more careful of frostbite, whereas she has not felt cold in many years.
They are both travellers, her intermittently, him full-time, so it’s not extraordinary that they should stumble over one another. It is lucky that it should happen here, in private, rather than in the bustle of a city or a roadside inn.
If there were other people around, people of modest means, they might feel they had to keep their voices down.
He has harsh words for her, and she bears them. She doesn’t make him face his regrets, even though he wears them openly. It falls on the older of their pair to demonstrate restraint. Neither does she hide her expressions (it’s been years since she’s worn any face except the one she was born with) and after he accuses her of driving Xiǎo Xīngchén away, driving him to his death, her grief shows clearly enough that he falls silent.
Sòng Zǐchēn never seemed like a man much given to loud rage. His outburst is an exceptional event, driven by their forced proximity and the anguish that threatens to overfill him. In the aftermath he apologizes, helps her settle by the fire, and offers some of the scant rations she carries.
It’s not difficult to respond in kind, to be cordial to a polite man whose eyes she ripped out of his skull. What does prove troublesome is how her own eyes keep drifting to the white sword strapped to Sòng Zǐchēn’s back.
The story of Xiǎo Xīngchén was also a story of his sword, stolen and misused and rescued too late. She learned its name long ago. Shuānghuá. Her own fault for raising children on the clearest mountain peaks and then being surprised when their first thoughts are of the cold.
When Xiǎo Xīngchén came to her, returned to her desperate and carrying his friend, she paid the sword little attention. Now she cannot help but note the elegance of the piece, the clean lines and floral details. Swords like this are made for the young lords of the cultivation world, chased with silver and spells.
“May I?” she asks, and Sòng Zǐchēn knows what she wants. He unsheathes the sword in one clean motion and hands the bare blade to her.
There is no protest from the sword but no recognition either. Anything she taught Xiǎo Xīngchén was far outweighed by what the world showed him, pressed on him at knife point and painted on him in blood. By the time he died he was a far cry from the hopeful boy she raised.
“It’s a lovely sword. Do you mean to keep it with you?”
“Until I can give it back to Xīngchén,” Sòng Zǐchēn says, voice flat (though perhaps that is the insensitivity of vocal cords long dead).
She hands it back. “Thank you. For taking care of him.” When I could not, when I would not. Given the difference in age between them it would be improper to bow but she does incline her head.
After what has been done to her children, it’s good to know this one lies in safe hands.
The logs in the fire shift, sending up sparks. “... His soul? Could you mend it?”
“Not anymore than I could keep him from walking off the mountain. Be patient,” she advises, “You are a more permanent fixture in the world now.”
“Like you.”
“Yes. It is not a happy path but it can be peaceful. When you understand what you cannot change and acknowledge what you have always known, you find yourself at one with your surroundings.” Seeing friends make terrible mistakes until it can no longer be borne. Collecting children. Collecting legends. Collecting swords. Never calcifying but never exerting undue influence. Knowing that all things are part of a whole.
Sòng Zǐchēn is well on his way to being a proper earth immortal, albeit by a roundabout route, and Bàoshān Sànrén is glad to have his company, glad to have another person to settle swords on.
She leaves Shuānghuá in safe hands.