The jungle is silent.
To the east, the land plunges down into the green, and to the west the mountains rise high above, but here there is foliage all around, and a game track, and a conspicuous lack of small mammals and birds.
You might even say it's too silent.
It's not where she came from! That's a great start. Her first order of business is to make sure nothing is going to try to eat her right this second, and then sit down with her wings trailing out on the ground behind her and start writing a bunch of stuff.
Nothing immediately presents itself, but after a few seconds seconds, a roar is going to come from somewhere in the jungle behind her. And then, not long after that, a scream.
Okay in retrospect it may have been dumb to sit down without making sure she had enough clearance to take off but, quick question, does she.
There's about ten meters above her before the understory of the jungle starts to fill up space properly.
The question is more about whether she's got space for her wingspan but that is also important information. Fuck.
Okay, she has some writing left. She's going to shove everything in her bag and then shoot straight up through the trees till she's well clear and then snap out her wings to catch herself.
She is now high above the canopy. She is not the only winged creature who has decided this was the correct response to the situation, though she does appear to be the largest by a good margin.
Good, small things are not super likely to try to eat her. She gets her bag fastened shut a bit more neatly and glides around, trying to see if she can get any glimpse of what's going on under the trees.
Over there, there's a clearing formed by several long-ago fallen trees, and in it, a large jaguar whose spots glitter like obsidian is circling around a group of four humans - two with spears and large round shields, one lying on the ground and bleeding, and one with a crossbow that they're trying frantically to load, looking for an opening.
How much writing does she have left. ...not all that much.
But she can sing a spell, too, if she doesn't need that much oomph. She sings: "There are four wingless people in that clearing, and some kind of animal, and one of the humans is badly hurt, and -"
And a static charge builds up in the air aimed right at the big cat. Not really a lightning strike. A daydream of a lightning strike.
The Jaguar will be tazed! It will stumble, and the humans will use this chance to stab at it further. Heavily wounded, it tries to retreat - as it does so, it turns briefly invisible but for its glittering spots - but the fighters will run it down and kill it.
Then, they'll turn to face her. The one with a crossbow will continue loading it, and one of the others will shout out a "Hail, stranger!". The third will go see about their wounded comrade.
She does not love that the guy with the crossbow - she's now seen it in action - is trying to load it again. Maybe he just thinks there are more jaguars. Maybe.
Translation is normally done in groups or at least pairs; one person sings the spell while another communicates and they trade off, catching one another up on what's happened so far as they forget what they sing. It will be pretty tricky to do alone without more writing than she would really like to be expending at this point. But she can get her hand into her bag and do a little of it anyway. Okay, that was just a greeting, and -
"Hello!"
"We thank you for saving our inferior selves! If we might ask of you, who are you and what way do you walk?"
Why are they so long-winded! She only wrote down so much worthless trivia to cast with! "Tireh! I came here looking for immortality."
"We are also seekers on the road to immortality! Will you share our fire for a time? Once we've made one, at least."
(The one with the crossbow gives the one offering an annoyed look.)
"Please forgive his abundance of caution! Most things which come out of these jungles are not interested in cooperating with humans."
He will stop aiming it at her. For now. There are other jungle directions to go be cautious about as well.
Then she will spiral down a bit closer. All the way down, if he doesn't twitch in a way she doesn't care for.
He's going to leave this to his friend, it's on her head if she gets her throat torn out. Instead, he can see about butchering that Jaguar they just killed.
The friend will say:
"I am glad you are willing to honour us with your trust. My name is Guo Rong."
"Guo Rong," she does her best to repeat. She pulls out her notes and resumes writing as fast as she can.
Guo Rong is inclined to think of this as a harmless idiosyncrasy.
"You are as a matter of course entitled to your fair share of the jaguar meat, thanks to your contributions." she says evenly, as though she expects Tireh to contest the statement somehow.
"I've never tried jaguar." The line she just wrote vanishes. She writes something new, unconcerned.
Rong ceased to pay much attention to the writing as soon as she determined it wasn't in a script she could read.
"It's only of the first realm. But that's enough to make this expedition entirely worth it."
"Are you not familiar with the realms of cultivation? I had heard that beasts had patchy cultivation knowledge, but to not know something so fundamental..."
"All cultivation is founded on the same underlying principles; it should work the same everywhere? No matter who is using it, qi is qi."
"Qi is the profound principle that fuels your powers and which you ingest or respire to deepen your cultivation? I don't know how it feels to you; they say beasts cultivate by instinct, but humans have to do everything intentionally."
"Monsters with innate cultivation are not rare, and some of them, like yourself, possess sufficient intelligence, refinement, and honour, to join civilization. It's rare, though."
"No, I mean like me. My species. It sounds like you don't know about us at all and you are making things up based on others you have met."
She looks mostly human, but in addition to the wings, she's got claws, not nails.
Guo Rong looks embarrassed. "I have never heard of a specific breed of monsters with your precise characteristics, this is true."
"Well, we've all got magic that works like what I do and doesn't have much to do with eating things. But I'm excited to try your kind! My kind does not appear to do immortality!"
The other spear fighter would like to have a furiously whispered conversation with Guo Rong about this!
"We would be delighted to introduce you to the clans so that they can consider you as a candidate for adoption and teaching."
"...sounds great!" she says, continuing to write furiously while some of her progress is undone whenever any information is exchanged.
The unintroduced spear fighter will give her a look. This look translates as: "I've seen what you're doing. And I want you to know I've seen what you're doing. So that you can know you're being watched, if you think of trying something." It is a very expressive look.
The crossbowman has finished stringing up and blessing the jaguar and the injured woman has collected herself enough to stand up and collect her sword from where it was dropped on the ground.
"We should get moving, before all this blood attracts scavengers. We have a reasonably secure place to camp not too far away."
They'll point roughly west towards the mountains.
"Maybe a half hour walk? We'll probably have to go fairly slowly, since we're burdened and have someone injured. If you fly above the trees, will you be able to keep track of us despite the canopy?"
"Hm. I'd need a lot longer to write before I could just teleport us all there."
"Better for us to just walk. If you're having trouble, we can slow down?" Rong turns to address the wounded swordswoman. "Same goes for you as well, Zhu."
(Some of the others form calculating looks.)
They will head off, then.
While they're walking, the second spearman will try and find a chance to talk to Tireh without the others being able to overhear that well.
She does not super want to try to talk while on the move. It's hard enough to stay upright when she's devoting her full attention to it, she definitely can't write at the same time.
Then he will not get a chance to, and they will instead make it to camp with only the typical amount of trouble hiking through dense jungle poses.
The camp is a hollow set into a cliff-face with a firepit already dug in such a location as to allow a third direction of approach to be screened off as well.
The hunters will take a break on log seats, conveniently already present (along with everyone's camping equipment) before they get started with all of the camp activities that need to be done while there's still daylight.
If they go take some hours to chop wood, carry water, and butcher jaguar, will she be done scribbling?
She'll offer to make a small rain so they don't have to carry water? Otherwise no, she wants a backlog of burnable information and is writing down every observation that she won't mind forgetting either because it will be obsolete or trivial to re-observe.
They would greatly appreciate the rain, that seems less likely to give them any waterborne diseases as well.
They won't bother her writing until the celebratory meal of grilled jaguar is completed, at which point they'll invite her to have dinner with them.
She will be happy to try the jaguar with everybody else. She's eaten seals and fish and mollusks, and has no idea what to expect a jaguar to taste like.
It's pretty tough, and tastes milder than seal, but still gamier than most fish, but the crossbowman does a pretty good job of slicing it thin in a way that makes chewing it not a whole project.
"I apologise", starts the crossbowman "But I realise that you have not been properly introduced to us, and that you would not be familiar enough with our clans to immediately recognise us as members on sight or to know what that means. I am Du Ye, and while you have already been introduced to Guo Rong, these other two are Jian Bojing" (the swordswoman) ", and this is Jing Yi. The Du clan manage the farms and ecosystems of the empire, the Guo clan pursue virtue and protect the people, the Jian clan study the blade, and the Jing clan are ... scouts, I guess you could say. They go where others cannot, and do what others will not."
She's got carnivore teeth but the thin slices don't make it any harder for her. It's decent eating. "I'm Tireh," she says, "and my people don't do clans, though I could give you the name of the beach I grew up on if you want it."
"Commoners don't really do clans either, they just keep track of who their father was and maybe their grandfather if he was important. If you join the world of cultivators rather than the world of mortals, whichever clans teaches you will probably adopt you."
"What's a beach? I've never heard that word before."
(It does seem to be a real word in the language Du Ye is speaking.)
"I don't think the earth has an edge? It just goes on as far as anyone has ever been since the days of the ancients."
"Wow, no ocean? Well, I don't know what it's shaped like here. I'm from a beach though."
"There might be an ocean somewhere, I've heard the term before, but only as a metaphor in an old book that I had to get explained to me. Thousands of years ago, humanity lived in more places than it does now."
"Records are patchy. There was a war between the immortals, they say, and then monsters moved in over the ruins in most places, which wiped out nearly everyone who survived."
"They can be all sorts of ways. There are demons and devils, but most monsters are just - animals who cultivate by instinct. Like the Jaguar we just killed - it was walking the same way as the Jing clan."
Jing Yi bursts into laughter in the background.
"Not a mundane way - a Way. One of the thirteen paths to immortality. Each is a way to live, a path which we will spend our entire lives walking down and never reaching the end."
"The imperial family are - well they're the closest of all of the clans to immortality, only they know the secret of achieving the fourth realm, which is the highest of the mortal realms. And they're in charge, and rightly so." (Guo Rong snorts) "Adopting you would be like them saying that you could be in charge of every living human one day. Obviously nobody would tolerate that."
"Well. For one thing. But also they wouldn't stand for some peasant joining either."
"A peasant is a commoner, born to tend the land of their ancestors and produce the materials used to support the lives of their superiors."
"Unless they do well enough in their exams to get adopted." interrupts Guo Rong.
"Thier position is low but nonetheless honourable." continues Du Ye as though they hadn't been interrupted.
Du Ye looks genuinely disturbed. "Farming is the most essential and holy act! It's the cornerstone of all human civilization, the way all food and goods are produced, the essence of the human relationship with the heavens and the earth, even the root of cultivation itself. There is no activity more essential or sacred than farming."
"You put plants in the ground and let them grow. And then you eat them. Or feed them to a pig and then eat the pig." supplies Guo Rong.
"Well, yes. You're not human. If you become a cultivator, it shouldn't be hard to afford a steady supply of meat. If you don't..." He shrugs as though it's not worth thinking about.
Du Ye puts his face in his hands.
"So, there's this concept called money where - some peasants farm potatoes all year and some farm corn all year and some farm divine wisdom lotuses all year, and then nobles own the land and manage the peasants and then cultivators protect everyone from monsters. So some portion of the corn and the potatoes and the divine wisdom lotuses needs to be distributed from the peasants to the nobles and the cultivators to see that they're properly rewarded. The portion given to the nobility is called 'rent' and the portion given to the cultivators is called 'taxes'. But because the world is very complex and it would be impossible to organise the distribution of all this everywhere it needs to go. So we have money. The peasants exchange everything they make that they don't need themselves for money - coins made of bronze, silver, and jade - and then they pay their rent and taxes with the money and keep whatever money they have left for themselves. Then everyone, the peasants with what they saved, and the nobles with their rent, and the cultivators with their taxes, can go exchange the money back for everything they need when they need it, and you have to decide on if you want to spend the money you have on say, opium or wound healing tincture. With the amount of money that even low level cultivators tend to have, it's not hard to exchange for enough meat to eat. That's what I mean when I say you can afford it. This is a greatly simplified model, you understand."
"If you take fish from a safe river, you need to pay rent and taxes to whoever is protecting it and making sure nobody eats all the fish. Out here in the jungle, it's too dangerous for anyone to live long term. A powerful cultivator could live like that, but it'd be more comfortable and easier for them to live in civilization as a harmonious part of the whole ecosystem."
"I have to... pay someone... for the service... of making sure that people... like me... do not eat the fish?"
"If people eat all the fish, or demons eat all the fish, then there won't be any fish next year."
"...You need to leave a certain number in the river each year or they won't be able to spawn and produce new fish. So we assign ownership of the fish to one person, who is responsible for understanding all this and portioning out the rights to use the quantity of new fish which are born and making sure that the people who protect the river directly and indirectly are properly paid for their work as well."
"...we don't have this problem at home but maybe this is something that happens if you don't have a whole ocean," she allows.
"It's rare for the empire to have enough water for all its needs, let alone a reasonable quantity of fish. Stewarding the wells and aqueducts that move water where it is needed is one of the responsibilities of the Du clan, and one we take very seriously."
"It depends - do you have the ability to make it rain even if the air is completely dry? If you can do that, that would indeed be very profitable and I'm sure the Du clan would be delighted to work with you. But if you need the wind to be full of water, then you'd have the same problems as the cultivators we sometimes hire from the Feng clan, who can bring rain in the eastern jungle where we are now, but can't at higher altitudes where the air is dryer."
"I can think of several profitable career paths for you then, depending on the quantity you can produce on a daily basis. I would need to confirm details with my uncle before I can make any firm offers, but..."
"Already trying to poach her out from under the Feng?" comments Jing Yi. Du Ye glares at him.
Wingshrug. "Could you teach me some of the language so I can translate less?"
"I will hire a proper tutor in the matter when we get back to civilization. For now, I will do my best."
Cool, they can start naming things in the environment. She takes notes as they go.
He tutors languages like an extremely monolingual person who has never considered the problem at all, but will answer whatever questions she has.
She's never learned another language either, though she did recently invent writing! A list of nouns to start out is plenty and will be very burnable if she has an emergency.
This language has many nouns. The others are going to get bored and go play a card game rather than watch them talk about nouns.
They can pass some time this way, then. The sun will go down and the group will want to sleep. If Tireh really wants to stay up learning, Ye can take the first watch and short cut the argument about who should do it given that Jian Bojing is wounded.
Yeah. This jungle is full of them. They'd be delighted if she'd take a shift, since a member of the party is currently wounded and should rest.
It is an uneventful night. Someone will wake her an hour before dawn, and she will be able to see what passes for dawn, half in a cave obscured by deep jungle, as she keeps uneventful watch. Then it will be time for breakfast, which is more jaguar meat, and people's morning exercises and mediation, which Jian Bojing will be abstaining from due to her injuries.
Eventually everyone else will have finished their standard routines of one handed pushups and consideration of the mysteries of the universe and so forth, and they'll start packing up the camp; with a notable success and also someone wounded, it's time to head home.
Two days of not terribly pleasant hiking. On the second day, it's mostly stairs.
Well she's going to skip those, though she can skip them by waiting at the bottom and catching up later if she's going to need introductions made at the top.
Introductions would be a good idea, yeah. It might be fine but there's no point taking a risk. There are lots of rest stops along the stairs where she can wait, because it's ten hours worth of stairs and even cultivators will need breaks.
Then she will fly up to each landing in turn to wait for them, and at the last one have a good idea of how long to wait before making it to the top.
She's got lots of writing to do in between the short flights. And she's restocked on charcoal from the campfire! Though that won't last forever. She'll have to see if that is one of the things she can "buy".
Du Ye will explain the wonders of ink to her, which is what real scholars use.
It's easier to avoid making mistakes, produces a better looking result, and is more prestigious.
Then she can keep using bits of charcoal if she prefers, even if it is a weird beast-person sort of habit to have.
The next evening, Jing Yi would like to try and get her alone for a private conversation again.
"Some advice, as a favour I hope you will repay me one day. You aren't being paranoid enough."
"You clearly grew up with a pretty small group of people. Maybe just your family, maybe a few others. You're not prepared for how a large society will treat you. There are millions of people in the empire and some of them will mean you ill for no reason other than opportunism. You got lucky, Guo Rong is as Guo as they come and Du Ye is a guileless fool, but if you keep going around talking about how you have impossible powers to strangers you're going to get stabbed in the back by someone who thinks they can get your powers by eating your heart or something."
"It's literally ever worked out for someone, eating the heart of a powerful monster to gain its powers? But mostly it does nothing and mostly when it does do something the something it does is throwing your qi into deviation. I wouldn't recommend it, unless the only alternative was death."
"For every person who thinks like that there's going to be more people who will just want to kill you to keep down the competition, or enslave you for your powers, or who'll just think you look like the kind of rube they can ask for twice as much money from because you're too ignorant to know any better."
"...well, they can ask, I don't actually have any, but I guess perhaps you mean later on when I do."
"You will find that the marketplace is not an optional extra you can only engage with at your leisure. Also, Guo Rong is planning on giving you part of her share of the money for selling the skin and core of that jaguar, because she's excessively Guo."
"Maybe. But more likely she's going to throw herself in front of some monster or asshole and die trying to save some idiot from their own mistakes. Because she's kind, and it would be the right thing to do."
"Well. That must suck. You might want to think about keeping that secret in future as well - people aren't supposed to study cultivation until they're at least eighteen. Sometimes older."
"I think you're doing very well at being a person, for a four year old."
"What does our age even have to do with Rong's imminent death by heroism?"
"Ah. She's adopted, you know. Her parents were some down country peasants. So. Still longer than you've been alive, I guess."
"Uh. So literally the process is that if you impress a clan enough, usually by doing well on the examinations, they can make you a member of the clan, and you get access to their secret teachings and Way and a share of the cultivation resources the clan earns, and in exchange you contribute to the family and follow the commands of the elders. But everyone knows the clans basically only do this so that nobody could compete with them by collecting a group of smart ambitious cultivators who aren't part of their system together, and adopted members have to work four times as hard as born members because they don't have connections or inheritances and they haven't already spent eighteen years practicing all the skills of the clan. Except Guo Rong convinced some old knight to give her his inheritance somehow so she's actually doing pretty well for herself?"
"Uh, no clue really. I think they don't really have clans, just their parents, and then they basically just do whatever their parents did?"
"Uh, yeah? Even mortals live like fifty or sixty years. I think they often see their grandkids grow up?"
"That's sounds like it would suck. I wouldn't want to be taught by some random adult with no investment in my wellbeing."
"But they care about them enough to not teach them that it's morally obligatory to give your teacher half the food you collect, or to not teach them like, a defective sword style that will work fine until they're in a fight with a Jian master and their teacher and then it'll get them killed messily in a way that gives their master an opening to win the fight?"
"...well, we don't have swords, and mostly people catch their own food once they can catch any."
"Oh, no, you have lots of things we don't that seem nice that we don't have there."
"I'm glad we had this talk. Don't forget that favour, when you've made it big."
"Yes, yes, write it down in your magic papers that foolish people will also seriously consider the viability of killing you to steal."
"The extremely foolish would not consider this to be relevant and the moderately foolish would kidnap you to make you teach them?"
"Uh, do you want the basics of interrogation as I would do it under remotely sane circumstances or do you want how I think someone stupid enough to think this plan would work would do it."
"The fundamental problem with interrogating someone you have captured is that you have them entirely in your power but you still don't have access to the inside of their head. An idiot will solve this by getting a large stick or a knife or something and threatening to hit you with it. Then you will refuse to give them what they want out of principle. Then they'll hit you some more. Eventually the desire to cease being in pain will overcome principle and you'll tell them something, but it doesn't need to be the truth. This leads to two key problems. If they believe, for example, that your book records your heterodox cultivation techniques that they would also like to use, you can misinform them that the word 'not' in the sentence 'you should not channel qi into your eighth meridian or else your head will explode' means 'must' and then when they try and use the technique their head will explode. Secondly, if they believe that your book describes your cultivation techniques and in fact you've just been noting down everyone's name and description so you don't get embarrassed by forgetting, you have no way to convince them of that and will just get tortured forever or until you make up something that seems persuasive."
"If I were doing this, I firstly would choose to ask about information I could verify, like the location of hidden treasure or the passkey to a vault, rather than the translation of the text in a mysterious enchanted book. Secondly, I'd talk to you, discover what principles make you want to conceal this information from me and how they can be put in tension with your other beliefs, make sure you believe in the possibility of a future outside this cell if you cooperate, and in the mean time keep you hungry and sleep deprived and isolated and emotionally off balance so you're not in a good state of mind to actually refute any arguments. And then maybe if that didn't work I'd get someone else with a big stick to hurt you, but I'd be very apologetic about it. And I would let you go at the end, because my reputation matters too."
"Wow. I think possibly not all the things that have been invented here are good. The book isn't magic, I can do the same thing to any writing I read."
"If you intend to continue having whatever it is you do be visible, it might be wise to do it to some local books as well so it's obviously you and not the books."
"Do you know any useless information you would find amusing to recite and not be offended for me to forget about?"
That's okay, she can observe how many clouds there are and stuff, it's just annoying to keep up for long.
Those are also interesting! What things have been invented about camping here?
Well, they have steel axes to cut wood with, tents of oilcloth that do a good job of keeping off the constant jungle drizzle, small metal devices that produce sparks for fire, metal pots and dishes to cook with, and nice bottles to keep water in while they walk.
She sings it away without bothering to translate what the words mean and without even touching her notes.
The cultivators greatly appreciate the improved comfort and are able to hike more easily.
She can keep that up while they walk, too, though she will slip and fall slightly more often when she's not solely focused on her feet.
The cultivators don't really know how to deal with someone who is that clumsy, though none of them are rude about it.
She seems used to it, anyway. Her toe claws make funny noises when they're walking on rocks.
Are they there yet?
Eventually they are; the mountains grow steeper and the ground grows steeper, going from a switchbacked path to stairs running up the hill to a final passage of steep and narrow stairs that runs up a cliff. At the top of the cliff, a small watchtower with a red tiled roof guards the stairway, and beyond it a little river valley where a river winds through cornfields before plunging into the jungle below. Not far beyond the watchtower is a village where a few dozen simple peasant homes and half a dozen nicer pavillions cluster behind a low wall of unmortared stone.
The guards look nervous about bringing an unknown into the town, but the ones on duty don't seem interested in contradicting a cultivator about it.
Okay then. She'll... make faces back at them, maybe this is the face-making ritual, how would she know.
Not right now! They're more obviously cowed by the cultivators (who are doing some paperwork over here for the sale of jaguar parts.) than anything else. She can, at least for now, aggrieve random soldiers with impunity.
Well, it seems like she guessed wrong about it being making faces at each other time so she'll just stick by the cultivators and keep quiet.
The cultivators are going to exchanging various jaguar corpse items for a small handful of jade coins, and then go find a pavilion to stay at; it's a stone building large enough to give each of them a private room.
The pavilion is! It's not abjectly wasteful when it comes to space but it's also not cramped, and the beds (with nice sheets and mattresses stuffed with wool) are clearly intended to be large enough for two people to share if that comes up.
The others are going to go do their training some more and then have an evening meal together to celebrate. Does she want to join them for that?
They suppose that since she hasn't joined a clan she doesn't have a specific training regime yet, but surely she does something to keep her body in condition?
...she goes flying, and this means she is in shape adequate to fly? She can choose this moment to do some of that.
Does she normally not worry about needing to fly exceptionally well during a moment of high stakes, such that she needs to train to a higher level than she needs on less exceptional days?
Du Ye seems to be vaguely annoyed; Guo Rong laughs and says that she should enjoy her idleness while she can, since cultivation needs a lot of training.
Maybe it was on purpose! Though possibly not for the reasons it amuses them. Anyway. Flying.
And after training, dinner! Someone has already cooked all the food for them - there's a dozen different dishes, meat stewed and steamed and roasted alongside tortillas and various vegetables, everything in savoury and well-salted sauces or served with condiments. Some dishes are even spiced. None of it is fish. Instead of water, the meal is served with beer and rice wine.
She tastes a vegetable, swallows it but doesn't take another, sniffs the beer and wine and sings some rain into her cup instead, and mostly eats various meats. The sauces are fine, at least.
Having already been informed that she is a carnivore, nobody is surprised - though Du Ye is disappointed, having assembled himself a diverse platter of every dish. Everyone other than her gets noticeably drunk, celebrating their victory and survival - and the fact that this will allow them to get one over an unspecified adversary.
Guo Rong will! "Oh yeah, you wouldn't have context for this. But Jian Bojing got into a fight with this guy, Zhang Ya, over a girl, and he tried to make it impossible for her to put together a proper hunting party so that she wouldn't be able to progress in cultivation and he'd win by default. So I decided I'd put together a hunting party instead, and once it's obvious her career isn't ruined other people will stop listening to Zhang Ya about it."
Guo Rong will start blushing, so Jing Ye will take over. "They both wanted to fuck her."
Jian Bojing will defend her honour "I wanted to *court* her. But it's a moot point. She said we were both being ridiculous and that she didn't want to talk to either of us until we'd sorted this out. And then went back to the capital. So I can't speak to her until I've beaten him, and also won a tournament or something like that, to impress her and show I wasn't just wasting my time."
"I'm not nine yet but I think even when my species is nine it's different."
"What? You're not nine?" says Du Ye, not having been appraised of previous conversations.
"That might be better." says Jian Bojing with a love-lorn sigh.
"And then you die at ten, is the important point you didn't clarify here." says Jing Ye.
"Seems almost weird to want to cultivate for the sake of living longer. Like hearing someone was planning to move an entire mountain one rock at a time for the sake of their morning view." says Du Ye.
"I can't say I'm a fan of the idea of old age myself." contributes Jing Ye.
"Maybe if we lived as long as you I wouldn't be so excited about living forever but ten years isn't enough."
"People are considered children until 18, when they've grown up enough to take the exams. A ten year old would be this high." Du Ye gestures.
"It is written that other species have very different life cycles, but I've never talked to anyone who actually experienced it."
"They're so rare, or they live deep in the wilderness, or in a hell. Most monsters aren't people."
"Well, if they're not people it isn't that surprising that they would be different, like how seals don't lay eggs and fish never learn to fly."
"Yeah. That's true. But you are a person and you're still pretty different."
"Yup. There aren't any other kinds of people where I'm from, at least that I've ever heard of."
"There is precedent for intelligent monsters joining the clans, but not much. More in legend."
"People love to say that Grandmother's father was an intelligent jaguar. But she's so old that nobody but her would know the truth." Chimes in Jing Yi.
"The fact that the Jing do it is not sufficient evidence that it is proper." Replies Du Ye staidly.
"It's not evidence it's not proper either."
"Just so. I do believe it would be considered proper, despite how rare it is."
"I wouldn't expect a jaugar to be able to have descendants with one of you guys!"
"I think it's a cultivator thing? A mortal human and a mortal jaguar couldn't have descendants, certainly."
"This just... becomes an option at some point in the process? That seems really random."
Du Ye shifts awkwardly. "I'm not sure I want to discuss the details with a four year old girl. Perhaps a member of my clan of a more maternal bent."
Guo Rong: "I'd tell you, but I don't actually know either."
Jian Bojing: "It probably has to do with how the more powerful at cultivation something gets, the more humanlike or dragonlike they get."
"The supreme form of monster. The intercessor between the mortal realm and the heavens. The form out of all forms in the universe best suited to wielding raw power. ... They're sort of lizardy?"
"The imperial clan does. Everyone else stays human - I think we would be becoming more human-y but becoming more like yourself doesn't change anything."
"It's not an accidental process, and you're pretty human-y already." Says Du Ye.
"If one of the members of an elder council looked like you, I'd imagine they started as a regular bird." Says Jian Yi.
"No. I don't think you're alone, here, in wanting to keep your useful natural features."
"I'd miss my claws too," she's noticed by now that humans have those weird flat things, "but not as much."
"...I mean, flying is what I do with them but also imagining myself without them just seems really incorrect."
"Huh. That's the sort of fact about yourself you should pay attention to, when you're cultivating."
"Uh. Talk to your teacher before believing anything I say, but - cultivation is about bringing yourself into alignment with a Way. So you need to pay a lot of attention to what your self is like and what bits can bend and which will break."
"...well, I don't understand what that means so hopefully a teacher can explain it."
Du Ye look vaguely mortified by his inability to communicate the profound principle.
"That would be wise."
What would, hoping a teacher can explain it? Not worth burning notes on translating that. She goes back to scritching down more random expendable observations.
Everyone else will let her do that while they finish their dinner at a lazier pace.
Observant people might have notice that she can apparently talk in her language while actively chewing, though when she's translating all they hear is their own tongue as if that were what she'd spoken.
People notice this, but it seems rude to ask, so they'll just let her eat and/or hum.
Dessert! Which is steamed bao filled with custard or chocolate (or the regional speciality of pumpkin and chocolate called "Leopard Bao"), and bowls full of wobbling translucent substance covered in sweet syrup and toppings of your choice (from amongst: Nuts, candied fruit A, dried fruit B, a brownish paste, a yellow paste, and more sugar syrup.)
