Malcolm Tent
patreon
Wish upon the Stars chapter 991
🕑 Added 2025-10-09 01:45:54 +0000 UTCI woke the next day surprisingly excited. I was supposed to head out today to check the tournaments for possible recruits. I was going to get to explore, see some of the talents of the WCP, maybe try some good food. It was shaping up to be a pretty fun day.
After a night of sleep and some downtime after arriving, I felt a lot less pressured and more…excited. This was my home, or it would be in the future, and I was going to get to experience it at its biggest and most ostentatious. That sounded like a real party any way you sliced it, and being able to go out and do it while I spent time with my wife and friends? That sounded like a blast.
“So, is everyone ready?” I asked excitedly as I strode out of the suite Callie and I were staying in. I felt shockingly refreshed. The bed we’d been given was absurdly comfortable. It was C-rank, because any higher and the Impact would have made it uncomfortable to sleep on, but it was the highest quality C-rank bed I could have imagined.
Callie was almost floating alongside me. “What,” she sighed happily. “Are Peace Sheep, and how much does it cost to buy a whole farm of them?”
“Peace sheep are a special breed of beast used by luxury designers,” my grandfather said with a laugh. “One of them costs enough to buy a small planet. They’re born at D-rank, too, so finding a C-rank juvenile to shear for that bed and having it crafted before you arrived was probably a lot of trouble. Adult Peace Sheep are mostly A and B-rank.”
“Personally, I’m more enthused about the sheets.” I said with a laugh. “The pillows were great, but that Heavenly Caterpillar Silk was like rubbing against the concept of inner peace.”
My grandmother nodded. “They certainly did pull out all the stops. Most of the amenities here are better than what your grandfather and I have at home. To be fair, the WCP IS a mercantile faction, so they have access to the most luxurious goods.”
Honestly, the stuff at my grandparents house was actually really nice, but I’d been staying in the guest wing. While everything was high quality, it wasn’t on the same level as a suite designed for the incoming faction leader. The Church and WCP also had very different styles of doing things. The WCP was all about luxury and excess, so they naturally had the best of everything. I wasn’t planning to go nuts before leaving on my quest, but if they were going to give me a super luxurious bed, I wasn’t going to complain.
“So, we’re doing the Tea Ceremony Tournament first, right?” I asked as everyone gathered up to leave. Bethy, Abel, Mel, Chelsea, Gabe, Fade, Alanna, Zeke, Stella, my parents, and my grandparents. It wasn’t quite the two thousand plus people I’d been traveling with back during the succession war, but it was a decent sized retinue.
My mother perked up. “I’m incredibly excited. I haven’t seen a Tea Ceremony in years. It’s considered one of the most elegant applications of formation arts. Your father doesn’t practice much any more.”
“It’s not the same when you don’t have the time to devote to it,” he grumbled. “I used to grow my own tea leaves. Special blends I created by infusing them with different soul properties. It’s part of why I was willing to help Bethany with her wine grapes. It reminded me of some of my old projects.”
We all laughed as we followed him out into the hall. “So I assume you know how to GET to the tournaments?”
He snorted. “I DID live here for a while. Not all of us jumped right into the deep end during our succession war. I had already reached D-rank for a while before mine started, and you know that after that point you can come back and make connections.”
I nodded, I’d kind of assumed that was the case. My dad knew his family too well not to have had personal experience with them. Plus everyone in the WCP was terrified of him, and while I didn’t know exactly what he DID during his succession war, I was guessing it had taken a while to cook up a rep like that.
We followed him down a side corridor away from the suites, and I put an arm around Callie. “So, you excited about this?” I asked her as we headed after them. “Because I’ll be honest, I’m kind of excited. This is going to be fun, right?”
She beamed at me. “Of course, we get to try some tea, observe some art, just relax and observe. It sounds so peaceful.” Her face closed up. “Shit. I just jinxed us, didn't I?”
I held a finger up in the air as if testing the wind. “Feels like…yes. Or maybe no. It’s definitely one of those two. Or possibly both. Neither is also an option, but it’s not likely. So really, there’s about a twenty five percent chance you jinxed us.”
“You aren’t funny,” she told me flatly. “You THINK you’re funny. But you’re not.” Her tone was teasing, and I could tell she was more amused than annoyed.
“Well you certainly didn’t marry me for my brains,” I noted wryly.
She winked at me. “Now that’s where you’re wrong. I’m planning to eat them one of these days while you’re sleeping. I’m just letting them cook. It happens bit by bit whenever you think about something too hard. I can see the steam coming out of your ears.”
“How dare you,” I said with a gasp of outrage. “I never think about anything.”
That got a giggle out of her and I had to laugh along. I saw her open her mouth to respond, but she was cut off as we came to a stop at the edge of a large chamber we’d just turned into.
It looked…outside. Like the ceiling was dotted with crystals that made it seem like there were stars above, and a single bright moon, and I could feel the humidity and wind of a real night out under the stars. Grass covered the floors, and the whole room was filled with small picturesque houses that reminded me of some of the districts back on Callus. It was like a little village.
“Well, this is nice,” I said with a smile as I inhaled the scent of the outdoors. “What is this place?”
My dad shrugged. “Just one of the lowtowns. They’re pop up locations that the lower ranked members of the family cobble together to socialize. There are more upscale districts, but they’re mostly inhabited by candidates and bloodline holders. That’s not even going into some of the branch districts. I’ll take you to your grandfather’s place in the next few days. You’ll be blown away.”
“Maybe literally,” my mom muttered under her breath. “Oh, wait, did I say that out loud?”
My father just rolled his eyes. “I know you don’t LIKE my dad but he wouldn’t try to kill us. He might ignore someone ELSE doing it, but he wouldn’t do it himself. He swore an oath, remember?”
“That’s not the supportive statement you think it is,” she said dryly.
Zeke, meanwhile, was just snickering at both of them. But he stopped at a glare from Stella, who had accompanied us on this little outing. She was my grandmothers apprentice now, and had grown a LOT over the last six months. Being personally taught by a legendary S-ranker whose parents were gods would do that. She was already at D-rank, which was pretty impressive, all things considered.
Choosing not to start a fight, my Uncle turned and pointed off into the distance. “Oh hey, is that the tournament we’re here for?”
It was. A small stage was setup outside one of the wooden buildings, and a crowd surrounded it. The stage had a series of tables on it, and each table had a different contestant at it, each of them performing some beautiful and complicated action.
“Look, we made it in time,” my mother said excitedly. “It looks like they’re at the finals.”
We headed over to line up near the stage, excitedly taking in the various entrants and their ceremonies.
When you hear ‘Tea Ceremony’ you think of a few different things. Or I did anyway. I thought of somber, contemplative intent. Slow and deliberate preparation of tea in beautiful and elegant cups.
Which, to be fair, WAS an aspect of what was going on. It just wasn’t all of it. More than just the act of making the tea, there was a kind of…poetry to the motions. A harmonization with the world. No. Wait, not with the world. With their paths. These Tea Ceremonies were all unique techniques, individually customized by their creators.
There were five tables in total, each person operating their Tea Ceremony in a unique way. The first table was a guy around my age. He had long hair pulled back into a ponytail and a goatee. The cups in front of him floated above the table on clouds made of rainbow mist. As we watched, he played notes on a small pipe, and as the notes rang out, the clouds would rise and fall, tipping water into various vessels and steeping and mixing the tea.
As the tea percolated, steam rose and condensed into yet another cloud above his head, shrinking as he played until finally, he blew one last note, and a single solitary cup floated up off the table and the cloud rained into it, filling it with a rainbow cup of tea made from a multitude of leaves.
The second woman had a paintbrush and an easel. She was dipping the brush into palettes made from tea leaves and painting on the canvas. When the pictures were done they pulled themselves off the canvas and climbed into the water, dissolving peacefully in the different cups.
The third was a swordsman. His blade flowed through a complicated series of cuts, the wind lifted and spinning tea leaves in a whirlwind and carrying water on another. As he cut, they weaved together, the heat and friction from the cuts boiling the tea.
The fourth was using some kind of shadow puppetry to manipulate the leaves. Picking them from the darkness beneath the leaves and making tea from the shadows themselves.
And finally, the last one was doing…poetry. He was speaking to the leaves, reciting poems, and as he spoke, the leaves were changing along with his words. He boiled the water by hand, altering its composition with the leaves and his words, creating something unique with each sentence as he worked his way through a collection of leaves.
The whole thing was just…fascinating. But my dad didn’t look impressed. “Showboating,” he snorted. “Tea Ceremonies aren’t about style, they’re about substance.” He eyed them all critically. “The artist might be ok,” he admitted. “The pictures are manifestations of the leaves conceptions, reinforcing the path of each cup. She’ll probably win.”
We watched the rest with interest, but by and large, he was right. They all seemed to be…lacking something. All except the artist. She seemed to genuinely care about what she was doing. In the end, the judges gave her the victory, and we approached her as she packed up her supplies.
“Tea paints,” my dad said with interest as we approached. “It’s novel, but it retains the spirit of the ceremony. Impressive.”
She didn’t look up. “Thank you. It took a lot of work to perfect my process, but I believe I have come closest to the essence of what my teas mean. It’s nice to meet someone who understands tha-” she froze as her eyes rose to lock on us, her mouth falling open in absolute shock. “Uncle Eli?” Huh. Well, I mean, to be fair given how many siblings my dad had that wasn’t TOO unexpected. Though apparently it was as big a surprise to him as it was to me.
