The morning sun bathed the southern terraces in warm, golden light. Along the twelve stepped tiers of the mountain tiered arena, the black fiery soil was moist and fragrant, glistening with the stone dew carried down from the northern ice-slow springhead.
Down on Tier One, Su Ling’er stood beside six large wicker baskets woven from wild river willows. Inside the baskets lay bundles of slender, leafy green vine slips, their freshly cut stems wrapped in moist river moss to preserve their life-force. Beside them sat mounds of plump, oblong wild tubers with rough, purple-tinted skins and firm, sweet-scented flesh.
Lin Xiao bounced up onto the rim of the wicker basket. He peeked inside with an appreciative, hungry wobble.
“Wild mountain yams and purple sweet potato slips,” Lin Xiao noted, his white eye crescents crinkling in pure culinary delight. “Where did you manage to gather so many healthy cuttings, Ling’er?”
Su Ling’er wiped a smudge of damp earth from her cheek. Her three white tails curled with pleased modesty.
“During my flight through the eastern ravines, I noted several sheltered gullies where wild spirit yams flourished untouched by beasts,” Su Ling’er explained. She lifted a long, vigorous green slip. “Yesterday, Xiao Hei and I returned to those gullies. These are wild Purple-Heart Spirit Sweet Potatoes—Ling Dizhua. In the wilderness, they grow small and stringy because the stony soil constricts their roots. But their genetic life-force is ancient and unbending. They endure biting frosts, survive extended droughts, and produce deep, starchy sweetness when roasted.”
Tie Shan walked up the terrace carrying a newly forged tool across his shoulder. A broad, heavy farming hoe forged from folded spirit steel, its cutting blade polished to a mirror sheen.
“A amazing tuber,” Tie Shan agreed. He set the heavy hoe down on the embankment with a soft thud. “In the old days of the Bear Clans, when winter storms sealed the high passes and game was scarce, a cellar full of sweet potatoes meant the difference between surviving until spring or burying half the elders. You can bake them in the coals, boil them into porridge, or dry them into sweet flour. But Lord Xiao... Forty-five mu is a vast expanse of land. How do we ensure these slips take root before the sun parches the leaves?”
Lin Xiao hopped down onto the damp loam, letting out a cheerful ripple.
“In agriculture, technique is everything,” Lin Xiao said. “We aren’t going to just poke sticks into flat dirt and hope for the best. First: we build raised planting ridges. When you pile the earth into raised mounds eighteen inches tall, three critical things happen. One: excess water drains freely into the furrows between the mounds. So the tubers never drown in stale mud. Two: the raised mounds catch the low autumn sun from both sides, keeping the soil four degrees warmer. And three: the soil inside the ridge remains loose and crumbly, giving the tubers room to expand into massive, thirty-pound giants!”
Tie Shan’s fiery eyes lit up. “Loose earth and warm soil! Aye, that makes huge sense!”
“And to make sure they root in three days instead of three weeks,” Lin Xiao added, “we’re going to enrich the irrigation water with my own secret recipe.”
Lin Xiao hovered over the main water inlet notch where the ice-slow karst brook poured into the first terrace.
Opening his internal void dantian, Lin Xiao retrieved a packed pool of purified ancient chaos dew, harmonized with wood-element essence pulled out from the ancient willow and calcium minerals from crushed snail shells. He lowered his internal heat. He allowed the golden-tinted chaos nectar to dissolve into the rushing stream:
Szzzzz-shhhhh.
The crystal-clear ice-slow water took on a faint, rainbow-bright turquoise shimmer. A fragrance like fresh morning rain falling upon blossoming clover wafted over the twelve terraces. The tiny chaos molecules diffused through the water, neutralizing wild leech-like molds and nematodes in the fiery loam while infusing the soil with packed living life-force.
“Now,” Lin Xiao declared with a floating bounce. “Let’s plant!”
What followed was an exhibition of heartwarming, coordinated family labor.
Tie Shan took the lead with his five-foot spirit-steel hoe. With his awakened Divine Titan strength, the giant bear moved down the length of the four-hundred-pace terrace with steady, rhythmic strides. His hoe split into the damp earth, effortlessly heaping the black fiery loam into spotless, raised level planting ridges eighteen inches high, flat-topped and perfectly spaced three feet apart.
Lin Xiao followed directly behind the titan bear.
Adopting a rounded, elastic shape roughly the size of a bowling ball, Lin Xiao bounced along the crest of the raised ridges:
Boing, boing, boing, boing!
With every bounce, Lin Xiao applied exactly eight pounds of downward high-pressure force, stamping a neat, cone-shaped planting hole four inches deep into the soft loam, spaced exactly eighteen inches apart. Under the Dao Spirit’s internal spatial pacing, every single planting hole was matching in depth and spacing to within a tiny fraction of an inch.
Su Ling’er followed close behind Lin Xiao.
Kneeling upon the terrace with her vermilion scholar robes neatly tucked, the three-tailed fox maiden took green slips from the wicker basket. She used her slender fingers. She pushed in each cutting into the cone-shaped hole at a precise forty-five-degree slanted angle.
“A slanted angle,” Su Ling’er murmured in admiration as she worked, her three white tails swaying in rhythmic harmony with her hands. “By burying four leaf nodes beneath the earth instead of two, each buried node will generate its own cluster of sweet potato tubers, doubling the harvest yield per slip. Such simple, deep agricultural wisdom.”
Behind Su Ling’er came Tie Shan once more. She used his huge, gray-furred paws to gently push the crumbly loam back over the stems, patting the earth down around each seedling with the tender, delicate care of a father tucking in a sleeping cub.
Meanwhile, Xiao Hei served as the mobile logistics courier.
The sleek black hound bounded between the wicker baskets on the lower terrace and the planting line above. He carried bundles of fresh vine cuttings securely in his jaws, his tail wagging with enthusiastic canine pride whenever Lin Xiao gave his velvety ears a passing scratch.
Down in the stone water chutes, Xiao Long glided through the turquoise water, his pearl-white horns trailing gentle wisps of mist that kept the air humid and cool, shielding the tender green leaves from the midday heat.
By mid-afternoon, all twelve tiers of the Southern Terraces had been shaped, mounded, and planted with fourteen hundred vigorous sweet potato slips.
Lin Xiao bounced up to the dark rock weir-gate at the top of Tier Twelve.
“Let the water flow!” Lin Xiao announced.
Tie Shan pulled the cedar lever, raising the dark rock slab three inches.
A sweet, singing torrent of chaos-enriched ice-slow spring water surged through the stone notch. It poured into the header water chute, cascading down through the spreading spillways and into the deep furrows flanking each raised ridge. The water didn’t flood the plants. It rose halfway up the furrows, soaking laterally through the loose fiery loam and delivering moisture and minerals straight to the buried roots through natural tiny blood vessel action.
Then, before their very eyes, a botanical miracle unfolded.
Beneath the warm autumn sun, the newly planted green slips didn’t droop. It should have wilted for days from transplant shock.
Instead, as the chaos-infused water touched their cut stems, the seedlings shivered with visible, vibrant delight. Tiny white root filaments erupted from the buried nodes. He plunged deep into the black fiery loam like eager fingers. He anchored themselves into the earth with ferocious life-force.
Along the stems, dormant buds swelled and burst open!
Tiny, heart-shaped leaves of vivid emerald green unfurled in real time. It spread out across the dark soil. Within three hours of planting, the brown ridges of the twelve terraces were painted with lush. He waved ribbons of vibrant green foliage that fluttered merrily in the afternoon breeze!
A crisp bronze chime echoed in Lin Xiao’s mindscape, with the joyful confirmation of the Omniscient Dao Spirit:
Lin Xiao rested atop the warm granite retaining wall of Tier Twelve. That let out a deep, contented fluid hum.
The transformation of the hillside was nothing short of miraculous.
Twelve tiers of spotless stone walls held back oceans of rich earth, now crowned with shimmering emerald ribbons of sweet potato vines. Between the ridges, clear mountain water flowed with a soft, musical babble. It reflected the twin moons that were already rising in the pale eastern sky.
Su Ling’er walked up to the wall, brushing a stray wisp of hair from her forehead. She looked out over the thriving terraces, her amethyst eyes shining with wonder.
“Twelve thousand pounds of spirit sweet potatoes...” Su Ling’er whispered, her voice full of awe. “Even if the Crimson Flame Pavilion burns every beast settlement in the northern province, our valley can feed hundreds of refugees without diminishing our reserves. We have built a rock-steady granary.”
Tie Shan sat down on the stone coping, letting his massive legs swing over the terrace edge. The titan bear scooped up a handful of the damp earth. He smelled the rich, sweet loam with a wide grin.
“And the taste, Lord Xiao?” Tie Shan asked, his stomach letting out a thunderous rumble that made Xiao Hei perk his ears. “When autumn frost arrives and we dig these tubers up... How do we eat them?”
Lin Xiao’s white eye crescents crinkled with pure, blissful excitement.
“Uncle Tie,” Lin Xiao said, his mouth practically watering inside his fluid core. “When the autumn harvest comes, we’ll bury these sweet potatoes deep inside the glowing embers of your white charcoal kiln. We’ll roast them until the purple skins are blistered and crisp, oozing caramelized golden honey from the cracks. When you break one open with your paws, it will steam with sweet, velvety fragrance, so soft and creamy you can eat it with a spoon.”
Lin Xiao gave an elastic bounce of sheer delight.
“And that’s just the beginning. We’ll make sweet potato cakes fried in boar lard, sweet potato porridge boiled with rock sugar, and sun-dried sweet potato chews to snack on while watching the snow fall over the river. Agriculture isn’t just about survival, my friends. Agriculture is about eating like kings!”
Tie Shan threw his head back and let out a bellow of joyous laughter that echoed across the southern ridges. Meanwhile, Su Ling’er covered her mouth with her silk sleeve, laughing softly with tears of happiness in her eyes.
Beside them, Xiao Hei gave an enthusiastic bark, trotting around Lin Xiao’s base. Meanwhile, Xiao Long leaped from the top water chute, doing a celebratory loop through the evening clouds before splashing down into the singing water.
Beneath the protective boughs of the Primordial Spirit Willow, the first seeds of abundance had taken root. The Myriad Spirit Safe hall was no longer merely a haven of safety. It had become a land of boundless life and sweetness.