Song twitched as Wook applied the dark green ritual paint to his bare lower back. He was seated half-naked in the center of the room while his other brothers ran around applying lines of chalk in geometric circles. At each of the cardinal lines, their drawings would break off into incomprehensible designs that made Song’s brain itch to look at. In the meantime, his father was placing tall wooden posts at the eight points of the compass, their sandalwood surfaces etched with dark red blood.

  After this ritual was done, the Lee family’s yurtwagon was going to take forever to clean. Song suspected with a twinge that he was going to be the one doing that chore.

  “I don’t see why I had to go through the trouble of wearing all those layers of robes if I was just going to take them off again,” Song muttered, then flinched as Wook applied a particularly large daub of paint to his pectoral. The lines now matched his meridians, running in long streaks up and down his body, with ancient hanja characters applied to his prime acupoints. Song recognized most of them from his lessons, like “goat” and “wood”.

  “Ticklish, little brother?” Wook muttered back, pitching his voice to not carry to their father. “It’ll be over soon, in plenty of time to go do our morning workout.”

  Taeyang snorted as he scooted past them, his butt up and head down while he ran the line of chalk in a circle with Song at the center. “It’s a big day for our little Song, you workhorse, he should take it off and get used to his new body. Leave the practice for tomorrow. Or never.”

  “That looks obscene, Tae. Stop it.” Juwon hissed.

  “Make me.” Taeyang shot back, coquettishly curling his one long streak of white hair around a finger. Unlike his brothers, Tae took more after their mother, with long silken black hair and thick eyelashes. It didn’t help that he applied whitening makeup and perfumes like he was some kind of Imperial court official.

  The Patriarch cleared his throat, and the brothers’ eyes all snapped back to their work, their feverish drawing redoubling. Song held back a giggle. Men did not giggle.

  “Will you teach me how to use my new horns?” Song asked quietly as Wook finished applying the paint to his belly. The large hanja that represented the Verdant Mother now lay over his lower dantian – the focal point of the ritual.

  Wook grinned at him. “See? Our youngest understands diligence.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Tae snipped, finishing his own linework and plopping back down onto his pillow. He was soon joined by Juwon and Wook.

  Their father approached a moment later, his eyes surveying their handiwork. “Not a line can be out of place, or Song risks deviation. It looks… acceptable.”

  “Thank you, Patriarch,” The three intoned as one.

  San took his seat on the West side of the circle, completing the fourth cardinal direction, then took out a pair of incense sticks and placed them in a brazier. Thick pungent smoke spilled out and quickly filled the tent, making it impossible to see the walls. The scent was of the forests they sometimes passed in their nomadic wanderings.

  Song had never entered one, though he’d often stood and stared from a distance, listening to the strange creaks and cracks and bellows of beasts he only knew the names of. It seemed a place of nightmares to one raised in the open air of the plains. He’d had nightmares, of being lost between those ancient giants, running and running but unable to find his way home. He remembered hiding beneath his mother’s blanket as she laughed at his childish worries.

  “The needles of a ten-thousand year pine, mixed with the sap of an awakened sweetgrass at the foundation level,” San said, gesturing at the incense. “The paint upon your chest is made using pure elemental water mixed with crushed changpo and the blood of a foundation level shade beast. Tell me the significance of these components.”

  “Strong Wood essence, to bring us closer to the element of the Verdant Mother,” Song pointed to the West, and then the North. “And Water essence to feed the ritual. We avoid any elements tied to Fire, which is destructive to Wood, or of Earth, which is in balance.”

  San nodded. “And the chanpgo and shade beast?”

  “The changpo is tied to my own essence of Man,” Song pointed down. “It acts as a spiritual anchor, while the shade beast represents the Void that connects everything.” Last night's changpo oil bath still sat cloying in his nose. But considering that it was the key to bringing him back from his communion with the Great One, it was a price he was willing to pay.

  “Correct.” A surge of pride swelled in Song’s heart as his father continued, “All of these components, lines, and characters were laid out exactly as outlined in our Lee family’s cultivation manual. They work to bring you close enough to the Verdant Mother to take in her qi, while protecting you from other influences. They’re also extremely expensive. It costs nearly a full year of our Lee family’s profits for each ritual. And it took a decade for the Escort Kings to gather all the materials.”

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  Song bowed his head until it hit his folded knees. “Thank you, Patriarch.”

  “Mmm…” San replied, nodding at his youngest son. “Make sure you don’t waste it.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Song could see brother Tae’s face turn somewhat bitter, but it passed swiftly.

  “The next step will be for you to meditate and enter your mindscape,” San continued. “While you do, I’ll inject a trickle of the Verdant Mother’s qi into your governing vessel and guide it to your dantian. Then I’ll speak to you a Name of the Great One. Allow the image of the Name to form naturally in your mindscape then hold it there and stabilize it; do not try to comprehend its dao. That way lies deviation, or worse, Demonic Cultivation.”

  “I understand.”

  “You do not!” San snapped, and everyone flinched. “Until you hear the Name, you cannot understand. We protect ourselves from the influence of the Great Ones by using aliases, mere hollow words that shield us from their essence. The Verdant Mother, the Azure Scholar, the Golden Emperor, the Crimson Hunger, the Dark Dreamer. To ascend through the levels of cultivation is to know Names that guide you on a path to their true being. At the pinnacle, in order to shuck your feeble shell and become a Nascent Soul, you must know and speak their True Name. But to speak that True Name is to take the full attention of a being our mortal minds cannot comprehend. So you listen, but you do not understand.”

  Song gulped. “I… listen, Patriarch.”

  “The Names we know were puzzled out by our ancestors at great cost. They are but an aspect of The Verdant Mother’s True Name, and all cultivation paths use different Names. Our manual contains a total of three, but I myself have only ever learned two.” San smoothed his robes and settled himself with a deep breath. “Today you’ll learn the first. Let’s begin.”

  Song nodded, and closed his eyes. His arms dropped into the familiar easy position of meditation as he cleared his head and allowed the grey mist within the yurtwagon to envelope him. A moment later, the calloused hands of his father came to rest on his lower back, right in line with the symbol laid upon his belly.

  “We call upon you, oh Verdant Mother, the wellspring of life,” San intoned with reverence. There was the unmistakable sound of a knife piercing flesh. “We your children beseech thee! Take my blood into your abundant soil and grant growth unending! Let this Lee Song be one of the saplings you allow to sprout beneath your boundless canopy!”

  The smoke seemed to grow thicker, and there was the faintest sound of crawling insects. A trickle of warmth flowed from his father's hand down to below his stomach.

  "Allow the Name to guide your thoughts, and the veil of your mortal mind will part as you enter the outer mindscape of the Verdant Mother,” his father’s voice was muted, as though it came from many li away. “It will appear as an ancient forest, taller than any you have ever seen, with moss thick as the spring rains. Do not be drawn into its depths – stand at the entrance and listen. From the sounds of the forest, try to separate out the bleating of a baby goat. One will become many, a raging cacophony of cries. Focus your mind, steel your heart, and allow the sound to pass through you. Through you and into your dantian. When your dantian is full to bursting, let the excess qii overflow into your governing vessel. When it’s complete, follow the scent of changpo flowers home. Don’t tarry; Chohee will have your favourite meat buns waiting for you, and you won't want them to get cold.”

  Song listened intently, doing his best to comprehend all the deeper meanings within his father’s words.

  San’s voice came again, from further away as Song slipped into the familiar nothingness of meditation. “Repeat after me. Her Name is ‘The Mother of Countless Mewling Mouths’.”

  “The Mother of Countless Mewling Mouths,” Song whispered.

  And then it was within him. From the fog of his meditation it broke, like the silver flashing fin of a fish breaching the surface. It was greater and more vast than Song could possibly imagine; he felt like a mouse trying to take in an mountain. But he remembered his father’s advice, and didn’t try to comprehend it. He allowed the Name to form within his mind, vast and alien, and then followed its lines. It led him in directions he could not name, not forward or up, but out. It made his mind ache to look at, but he couldn’t look away.

  Breathe in, breathe out.

  Head of stone. Heart of steel. Hold your tongue. Hide your thoughts.

  Breathe in, breathe out.

  He smelled it first. The acrid scent of the incense making way for the freshness of loam. Ahead loomed the shape of a great canopy as tall as mountains, and the sound of birds that had no name. He could just barely make out the shadows that lay between those boughs, and of the deep darkness he’d been told not to tread. Like the forests of his childhood.

  In the Gangho where Demonic Beasts ruled and cultivators roamed.

  In the dark of the woods.

  In that moment, his attention wandered from the Name for the briefest of instants, his mind straying to the nightmares of his childhood.

  He tried to focus back on the Name, but it was too late.

  Suddenly, there was a pull, like the sucking of a bamboo straw. His mindscape stretched, and he tried to scream with a mouth that didn’t exist. The forest was no longer ahead, it was behind, it was elsewhere.

  And he fell as darkness took him.