Longevous Disciple

A withered branch once made into a hairstick, with a flower bud opening at its tip. Now that the old story is over, a golden bud is inlaid on the hairstick, to commemorate the beginning of a new life.

A nameless man awoke from a long sleep. A tension both distant and familiar stretched on without end, and the pain was clear and sharp. The past had become jagged fragments, and he had forgotten even his own name.

During one aimless wandering, he drank melted snow to soothe his thirst, slaughtered wild beasts to satisfy his hunger, and cut a withered branch to pin up his long hair.

His black hair flowed like a rushing spring, the muscles beneath his skin stirring like fish swimming with the current… A miraculous power reshaped his body without pause, and the agony of bones shattering and knitting back together spread everywhere. Along with countless torments, the broken past began to fit itself back together… As he gazed at his own reflection on the water, the beginning and the end of the tragedy also grew clear.

By the time the face beneath the water was no longer a stranger, the nameless man suddenly saw flower buds opening on a dead, withered branch.

He was struck by a sudden realization. The curse of immortality still burned fiercely, the old grudge had not yet gone out, and he was the flower newly blooming on this withered branch.

An ingenium prosthetic limb made specially for the Long-Lived, one that requires no invasive procedure upon the body when it is used.

Spread the protective gel over the end of the underdeveloped arm, then press the neural signal receiver firmly onto the skin, and finally adjust the tightness so that the Ingenium Hand is fixed securely to the body. This is what she has done every morning for several hundred years.

The arm draws attention that she does not want. But she has no wish to invite trouble, and no wish at all to receive pity.

As a person with a disability, although she possesses a talent rare in this world and holds the power of decision within her department, she has never once been able to change the distance in other people's attitudes: the wicked who bully the weak will end up as birds and beasts anyway, and certain hypocrites who believe themselves compassionate hover about her like flies and praise her as “the gifted one-armed blind woman”.

She has heard that a million times, and every time it sickens her. Now that she witnesses those pitying gazes with her own eyes, she is more troubled still.

Without thinking she laid her left hand on the hot stove, and all at once a stab of pain came. She pulled her hand back quickly, and the burn on her palm was already healing fast.

“Sometimes I feel that the original prosthetic arm was far more useful.”

A feather garb woven according to ancient records. It belonged to a demon woman of the most ancient age, who was the savior of ten thousand people.

Searching for information in records outside the official histories is extremely hard work for a blind person. Her friend read a great many ancient books aloud to her, and she distilled and compiled anew from those words and phrases, groping her way toward the secrets hidden within them.

Her keen intelligence allowed her to remember everything after hearing it only once. Only the strange tale of the “Feather Witch”, found among that pile of old papers, did she listen to again and again without ever growing tired of it.

The story tells that the master of a certain Immortal's Grotto saved her own life partner by turning that person into a sparrow and granting immortality. But in the end she could not resist the call of that bird, and she too turned into a bird, so that they stood wing to wing. As the days and months stretched long, the master of the Immortal's Grotto finally lost her own nature and became a demonic thing, half human and half bird. When her subjects led an army into the palace city and drove a burning arrow through her, the pair of sparrows raised one last mournful song, and together they turned to ash.

She loved this story, and so she took the essence of the sparrow, refined it into form in an alchemy furnace, and had it woven into a garment of feathers of surpassing beauty. She could not know the beauty of the garment, yet she loved to wear it as she walked about her room… because she was wearing it for someone who is no longer alive in this world to see.

When the sleeves flutter, she always feels that a soul is hopping and flying upon her shoulder like a little bird, one that has never left.

A pair of silk sandals with soles as thin as a cicada's wing. Their owner must not have walked on her own two feet for a very long time.

Whenever she performed the miracles of the immortals before her followers, flying in midair, freed from the grip of the ground, she always found herself thinking of the myths of an ancient country.

“There was one who succeeded in the cultivation of the Way. Walking upon the ground, he drew in the breath of the earth's veins, performed the way of the immortals, and worked countless transformations, and every one of them came true. The cultivator wished to walk against the wind and to stand among the stars, but he found that he had long since grown far from the earth's veins, and in the end he stumbled and fell into the abyss of death.”

But the situation now is different, she said. The Xianzhou had no roots of its own, and it was the Ambrosial Arbor that gave it roots, so that it could exist together with the lord of Abundance, and so that it was bound tightly to the vast pure land that Yaoshi promised. But now the traitors have cut the link of the immortals' way, and the Xianzhou has become a lone island adrift once more.

The false earth of the Xianzhou cannot supply her with power. The roots she is seeking do not lie beneath her feet, but in the abyss. She will lead her disciples to bring the Ambrosial Arbor back to life and to receive the supreme grace of Abundance.

Wearing those thin silk sandals, she hovered above a thousand people and declared in a ringing voice: “O multitude, when you raise your heads to look at me, what you are looking up at is not me, but the place in the sky that should rightfully be yours.”