The road had no name anymore
It might have had one once' a long time ago, roads usually did' well most of them, in times when people had reasons to travel them and destinations worth going to. Now it was just the gray path between one ruin and the next, and they walked it around it the way water moves through a cracked bowl, not because that was the way it was, but simply because that was the direction in which their feet carried them.
Supreme was humming something once again, he had been for the better part of the morning, the same four notes, cycling, never resolving into an actual melody.
with a tired sigh Some Purifying Dude said,
"You've been humming that song since dawn,"
"I know, and so?" Supreme replied,
"It not's going anywhere" Some Purifying Dude frankly
"Here's a lesson kid, Most things don't" Supreme replied back with a smirk,
Some Purifying Dude let out a sigh and said nothing more as they continued on their journey, Some Purifying Dude Fuchen had lost another strand somewhere in the night. He didn't know when or how but he noticed it the way you notice small losses in hard times late, without much ceremony
They passed a field that had been burned so thoroughly the earth beneath was glass, not scorched as you did expect?, but Glass. Whatever had burned here had burned at a temperature fields weren't supposed to reach. Some Purifying Dude stopped at the edge of it, and looked across the black mirror surface of the ground.
Something was reflected in it. The gray sky. His own face, and thinner than he remembered himself being, he's cheeks where starting to look Gaunt.
And so he kept walking,
"How long has it been like this," Some Purifying Dude asked, though it wasn't really a question
"Like what," Supreme said,
"All of it."
Supreme tilted his head, A strand of white hair caught the dead air,
"Define all of it."
"The dying, the burning, the"
Some Purifying Dude gestured at nothing in particular but at everything
"This"
Supreme was quiet for a moment, which was unusual enough considering his usual chatterbox behaviour, that Some Purifying Dude glanced at him
"Long enough,"
Supreme said finally,
"long, long, long enough, that people think this is how world naturally is, but they can't be blamed honestly because this was the world they where borned into"
They kept walked on, a village appeared around midday, or what passed for midday under a sky that hadn't shown direct sun in weeks, Just a slight brightening of the gray, like a bruise going yellow at the edges
It was a settlement
Some Purifying Dude saw what was left, a cluster of buildings on the edge of something vast and scorched, the ground around the settlement pressed flat in a perfect radius, the edges of that radius still faintly luminous in a way that had nothing to do with sunlight. The settlement itself was standing. Intact. Every building inside that radius untouched.
Everything outside it was gone.
Gone. just gone, The earth where mountain's had stood was glass, like the field but deeper, a perfect hemisphere of absence pressed into the world like a thumbprint.
People moved between the buildings, Slowly and quietly. The way they moved was like Drug Addicts, they walked around as if they 'bout to fall at any time.
An old woman sat outside the largest building. Her eyes were closed. Her lips were moving She seemed to be praying
Some Purifying Dude stopped in front of her, She didn't open her eyes,
"Ma'am," he said gently.
Her lips kept moving for a moment, then stilled.
"You're not from here, an Outsider, ," she said. Still not opening her eyes.
"No."
"Are you hungry?"
SPD opened his mouth to say no. His stomach answered before he could.
She opened her eyes, then looked at him, then she looked at Supreme, who was leaning against a half-standing wall with his arms folded, examining his own fingernails with great interest.
"Both of you," she said, "Come"
They ate in silence, the food was quite simple, less than simple, but it was warm, and Some Purifying Dude couldn't remember the last time he'd had something warm, Supreme on the other hand seemed like he was tasting more than eating
The old woman sat across from them and watched them eat. She didn't eat herself. Some Purifying Dude noticed but didn't say anything about it, but he did ask another question
"if its not too much could u tell me what happened here"
Then the Old Woman began speaking,
"Something came," she said "Two days ago from above."
Some Purifying Dude looked up.
"We had been praying for a long time,"
she continued,
"Decades, Years, i don't know i stopped counting after time had passed ."
She folded her hands in her lap.
"I didn't think anything would come, I kept praying anyways"
"What came?" Some Purifying Dude asked.
She was quiet for a moment.
"I don't have a word for it," she said. "It was wings, It was fire, It was "
she shook her head slowly,
''It destroyed what was destroying us, and then it left, Didn't stay, Didn't speak to us. Just left,"
Some Purifying Dude set down his bowl,
"Did it help?" he asked. "Are people ..."
"Some people who would have died lived"
she said simply.
"Whether that's help, I don't know. The thing that came didn't ask us what we needed. It just did what it came to do."
She looked at her folded hands.
"We're grateful, I think, It's hard to be grateful for something you don't understand"
Some Purifying Dude said nothing for a long time,
Supreme had stopped examining his fingernails some time ago in the conversation, He was looking at the old woman with an expression Some Purifying Dude had not seen on his face before, not amusement, not boredom
Just looking,
They left before evening,
The road continued its grayness, Its dust
Some Purifying Dude steps were slower now, not from exhaustion, though he was exhausted, it was something else,
He was thinking about the old woman's hands, folded in her lap, her words her expression, and the expression of people in the settlement plus the way they moved like zombies
He was thinking about the child on the road three weeks ago who pointed at the sky when he asked where her parents were,
The man at the well who said the war never ended, it just changed.
The woman under the bare tree who didn't move when he set bread beside her.
All of it. Every face. Every dust road. Every burned field and dry riverbed and collapsed temple with the statue's face smashed in,
He hadn't been trying to remember it just came into his mind naturally,
He didn't notice when Supreme drifted off,
One moment the white-haired figure was beside him, the next there was just road. no announcement, no goodbye, just Supreme, somewhere else, doing whatever Supreme did when he wasn't complaining about dust or humming songs that didn't make sense
Some Purifying Dude kept walking Alone.
The road ended at a ridge.
It just stopped, the gray path giving out at a line of cracked earth beyond which the land dropped away into a valley Some Purifying Dude couldn't see the bottom of' smoke rose from somewhere below, Not smoke that came from fire, just smoke.
Some Purifying Dude stood at the edge.
The wind came up from the valley and it smelled like all of it. Like every road he had walked, Like dust and old ash and the particular kind of cold that lived in abandoned places.
He didn't sit down, didn't kneel, He just stood there standing,
And for the first time since leaving the mountain, he stopped trying to do anything.
Not meditating. Not cultivating. Not thinking about the Dao or the sect or his Ex Master' Aydris or the war or what came next, Just standing blankly,
Letting the wind from the valley move through him.
The old woman's lips moving,
The soldier's breathing stopping,
The child pointing at the sky,
The dry riverbed warm under his hands,
The bread beside the woman who didn't move,
It wasn't grief. He'd passed through grief weeks ago and come out the other side into something he couldn't yet describe, it wasn't peace either, It was something that sat between the two, a stillness that wasn't empty, that was full of everything he'd witnessed and hadn't looked away from, heavy and clear at the same time.
"The Pure Mind is the still lake"
Aydris's voice, from a memory that felt like someone else's life
The moon reflects, The stars shimmer, The clouds pass, and Yet the lake remains unmoved
Some Purifying Dude closed his eyes, his body leaning back a bit,
He thought:
[I was moved, By all of it, Every single thing moved me. The soldier. The child. The old woman. The bread. I was moved every day, on every road, and I didn't stop it and I didn't cultivate past it and I didn't sweep it away like dust on a mirror.
And I'm still here,
And maybe that is a kind of purity, my answer, not the absence of being moved, The willingness to be moved by everything and carry it anyway. Not a still lake Something that receives and gives back always moving pure and untainted,]
.
.
.
Qīngjìng Dào.
He didn't think the words, They simply arrived like a theif in the night, except in his head, the wind from the valley continued, the smoke rose and drifted away~~
Some Purifying Dude opened his eyes.
His hands were glowing, not brightly A faint luminescence, the color of morning before the sun actually appears, the kind of light that emits warmth
He looked at his hands for a long moment,
Then the light spread' slowly, from his hands upward through his arms, through his chest, into his face, like sediment settling out of water until what remains is transparent. His torn blue robe. His Fuchen with its missing strands. His thin face and hollow eyes.
All of it being consumed by the light, becoming still, becoming, for one long moment, completely clear, clear in a world tainted by Gods, Monsters, Devils, Angels, etcera etcetra, and then Some Purifying Dude was gone
What remained on the ridge above the smoking valley was a gem no larger than a thumbnail, Pale' Clear' Faintly luminous' Sitting in the dust of the gray road and yet untainted