Rogue Cultivators

Cultivators whom no sect will take in and whom no master’s lineage protects are called rogue cultivators. They scrape a living at the bottom of the market town: odd jobs for the pill shops, digging spirit materials down the mines, copying out tattered scrolls and teaching themselves the breathing, climbing on a handful of spirit stones they can count.

They come from everywhere. Some had a master once and came down in the world when the sect broke up. Some were driven out as freaks in childhood and begged their way here. Some were born on this street and have never seen what a sect looks like. Only one thing is common to all of them: nobody behind them to cover the fall.

Some 800 rogue cultivators are on the registers in Qingqi Market, and another 200 or so are unregistered, living off the black market. Seven in ten are between the first and third layers of Qi Condensation, which is about 700 men. Above that the numbers drop away layer by layer like a cliff. Nine in ten train the Lesser Heavenly Cycle Breathing Art that circulates openly in the market town; the remaining tenth train copies of tattered scrolls of no known origin.

A month’s accounts are easy to work out. 1 spirit stone changes for 100 copper coins. A regular hand at the West Street mine earns 80 copper coins a month, and a pill-shop apprentice less. The cheapest rented room runs 15 copper coins a month. Qi Condensation Powder is 3 copper coins a pill, 8 copper coins for a dose of 10. Take them sparingly and the pills alone eat up nearly half a month of work. What is left over is the capital for climbing.

The arts rogue cultivators train are mostly the cheap versions circulating in the market town, and their pills are the seconds left over on the shop shelves. The quick ones stick at Qi Condensation for three or five years. The slow ones take one qi deviation and never get up again. After a qi deviation the poorest meridian-mending medicine runs 10 spirit stones a dose, and that is a number few rogue cultivators in the market town can put their hands on.

Their days run much the same. Work for somebody in the daylight, back to the rented room at night, bar the window, stuff the gaps with a wet rag, keep one oil lamp the size of a bean — light leaking out while a man breathes at night might bring the ones who collect the levy, or something else; no telling which. Saved copper coins get split and hidden in several places, some under a bed board, some carried against the skin. The more money, the more eyes on you.

Watch the market town long enough and you can pick a rogue cultivator out without asking. The men hauling herbs on West Street wear their cuffs through on the outer side; the South Market men wear theirs through along the edge. The narrow copper clasp at the waist is cut a different way on every street. Which street a man begs his food on, his clothes say for him before he opens his mouth.

There is an uglier line in the market town: a rogue cultivator does not count as a man, he counts as a thing with a few more spirit stones left to squeeze out of it.