Cultivation was not something that advanced at a thousand leagues a day merely through shutting the door and grinding night and day without pause. In truth, experience in the world and all manner of battle mattered just as much. This was one reason the Zhuang Emperor had set up the Dao Merit Roll, to spur cultivators to complete all sorts of tasks — not that the court could not handle such matters itself, but because such trials sharpened the efficiency of cultivation. Nor was Zhuang alone in this; realms every one and every school maintained similar institutions.
Take the Little Grove Town campaign as an example. After he slew the vengeful spirit, fully a dozen or more new Dao essences had risen in Jiang Wang's Heaven-Access Palace. They had come not from meridian-forging cultivation, but were born naturally in the afterglow of fierce battle.
The Dao essence was the perfect fusion of will and power, the true echo that the spirit of all things gives back to the roots of heaven and earth, and the foundation of all strength, the basis of all transcendence.
This was the very reason Zhao Rucheng was treating everyone to a drink among the painted girls — as cultivators, they all had to round out the experiences that make a full life.
Ling He, with his upright, unbending disposition, naturally refused to wallow in such company, and so his task for the day was to pick Jiang An'an up from the schoolhouse and take her out to play.
Du Yehu could not ask for better, and Jiang Wang went along with half-hearted reluctance — he had at first declined with feigned excuses about caring for little An'an, but once Zhao Rucheng deftly "arranged" for Ling He to cover it, all was delight all around.
There was also one Huang Azhan. He had been drinking with Du Yehu at the time, and hearing of such merry sport, he came all but clutching Du Yehu's thigh to be dragged along. Fortunately the young Master Zhao was generous with his purse and thought nothing of a few extra hangers-on.
The best house of pleasure in all Fenglin City — the Pavilion of Three Parts Fragrance. The most luxurious private room, the most costly girls.
Ever since moving out to live with An'an, the brothers had seen little of one another in private beyond their lessons at the Dao Academy. After they had gone three rounds of wine, Jiang Wang asked the girls to leave.
"Hey, hey, don't go."
"Sister, dear sister, let me come home with you!"
Red-faced, weeping, and howling, it was naturally Huang Azhan — he had just clung to every girl there, trading seven or eight cups each, and was by now thoroughly tipsy. For all the world he wanted to see them ten li down the road, too smitten to part, and keen to surrender his virginity on the spot. But the girls only giggled their refusals and filed out.
They were cultivators, after all; it was hardly likely they would truly wallow in debauchery. For a cultivator, keeping one's pure yang before opening the Heaven-Earth Gate was very necessary.
So Jiang Wang stayed clear-headed the whole time.
And Du Yehu truly only wanted to drink — where or with whom were secondary.
The sole one lingering in regret over the whole room was Huang Azhan, who looked at Zhao Rucheng in pleading aid — in his eyes, the two of them were kindred spirits. But Zhao Rucheng only shook his head. The girl he had gone to the lengths of specially inviting had not come, and he could not hide his disappointment. "Trash and tawdry cates. How dull."
"This is trash and tawdry? This is!" Huang Azhan nearly jumped out of his skin. "How round those cups were! No — how ample those gowns were. No wait — how white those hairpins were..."
He gave up at last and wailed: "Wuuuu, what's so vulgar about them?"
Jiang Wang: "..."
Zhao Rucheng: "..."
Du Yehu brought one heavy palm down on his head. "Drink too much, and you go to sleep — in your dreams you get everything."
Paying no heed to Huang Azhan, who had obligingly slumped over the table and was snoring like thunder, Jiang Wang did a little mental reckoning and said: "These days I've been drifting through this task and that, and took fifteen points of Dao Merit from it. Added to the twenty-five I saved up before, that makes forty. I've no use for Dao Merit at the moment, so I'll hand mine to you first — whoever of you has enough, trade it in for a Meridian-Opening Pill."
The "you" he meant naturally covered Zhao Rucheng and Du Yehu, and of course the absent Ling He as well. They were brothers; to begin arguing over a fixed order would only drive distance between them. Best, then, to give it first to whichever of them had the most Dao Merit.
Manifesting one's Dao meridian was a great matter — the very first step of transcendence — and naturally the sooner, the better.
"None for me," said Zhao Rucheng lazily, half-leaning back in his chair. Toward cultivation he seemed, truly, always indifferent, coasting along on pure talent.
"I need none either." Du Yehu downed a cup in silence, then suddenly said: "I'm leaving."
"Leaving? Going where?" asked Jiang Wang.
"Earlier Wei Yan asked if I would join the army. I thought it over for a few days, and I've decided — I leave tomorrow."
The words came so abruptly that Zhao Rucheng sat bolt upright. "Tiger Brother, you'd best think it through."
"I have." Du Yehu grinned, baring his teeth. "Wei Yan says I'm cut out for the military road, and I think so too."
That he was, and Jiang Wang and Zhao Rucheng both knew it. Du Yehu's body was unlike other men's, his vitality and blood-qi mighty and abundant — a veritable seedling of the military arts. But all of Zhuang Kingdom cultivated chiefly the Dao, and its masters of the War School were few indeed.
Even the nominal supreme commander of Zhuang's armies, the Great General Huangfu Duanming, was himself a strong Dao cultivator. All of Zhuang lacked soil for the adepts of other schools — including the War School. Even Wei Yan himself cultivated Dao arts.
If Du Yehu chose this road, it meant he would go for a long stretch without any systematic space for cultivation, possessing only the scattered and fragmentary manuals of the military arts.
Not that the War School was weak. The reason behind it all was that Zhuang's long peace under Yong's covetous stare rested heavily on the support of the Dao schools. Zhuang's court dared not hold itself too stiff; it could not, like the courts of Qin and Chu, embrace all schools at once. Zhuang cultivated the Dao by choice, and could only cultivate the Dao.
Yet Jiang Wang could not bring himself to speak words of stopping. Because he knew Du Yehu's nature too well. Within that great man burned a fire, fierce and wild, that would not lose and would not admit losing, and certainly would not bear falling ever farther behind Jiang Wang. But the Dao canons made his head ache whenever he looked at them; the two simply had no affinity. And his physique, his blood and qi, were in truth a natural prodigy. Were he in Muo Kingdom, or any land where military cultivation thrived, he would surely be a gifted child upon whom all eyes turned.
"Who was it Wei Yan recruited you for?" asked Jiang Wang.
"No small number of vacancies have opened up in the Jiujiang Profound Armor, and a few quotas were handed down to us here in Fenglin City. Wei Yan judged me fit and recommended me."
Likely Du Yehu's dauntless, forthright nature sat well with the soldiers, for after the Little Grove Town assignment, Wei Yan had indeed struck up a friendship with him.
As for the Jiujiang Profound Armor... it was all but the crown of Zhuang's martial honor, the most lethal army in all the kingdom, its name ringing greater even than the White Feather Army that encircled and guarded the capital, Xin'an.
Indeed, precisely because of the Jiujiang Profound Armor, Jiujiang City — a single city though it was — was often called the Fourth Prefecture of Zhuang. Nominally it fell under Daishan Commandery, yet in truth it enjoyed a high degree of autonomy. The governor of Jiujiang City was at the same time the commander of the Jiujiang Profound Armor, a tradition unbroken since the founding of the kingdom — and that said how singular it was.
"Even with the Jiujiang Profound Armor, you'll still need Dao Merit." Because Du Yehu was about to join the army, Jiang Wang had already resolved in his heart to first transfer his own Dao Merit to him.
"No need." Du Yehu still shook his head. He was no man for false display; he said flatly: "Since I'm taking the military road, I have no intention of taking the Meridian-Opening Pill. Naturally I'll walk the War School's most traditional, most ancient path!"
What the military tradition referred to was that a cultivator did not rely on medicine, but chose to force open the Dao meridian with his very blood and qi. It could already be called "ancient" because among those who walked that road, fewer than one in a thousand succeeded. The best end for the failures was to be ruined utterly; most died on the spot.
Bear in mind that twice-daily meridian-forging cultivation, to sublime blood and qi and condense Dao essence, was already the limit of an ordinary person's cultivation. To gather a surging torrent of blood and qi and charge straight through the Heaven-Access Palace, manifesting the Dao meridian — how perilous was that?
Yet it was precisely because of that peril that the madmen of the War School exalted it as orthodoxy, holding it in the highest esteem.
The reward, should one succeed, was also immense. Those military cultivators who opened their meridians by this method often achieved beyond ordinary men.
Jiang Wang and Zhao Rucheng both fell silent. They could feel the resolve of this tiger.
"So hand the Dao Merit to Eldest first. Mine can go to him too." Du Yehu spoke lightly, severing his own retreat, snatched up the wine jug, and gulped down half of it.