He returned to his small residence and cultivated.
Most disturbances during those early weeks were minor — a stray Beast wandering in from the surrounding forest in search of an easy meal, a formation flickering out of alignment after a sudden storm, or an herb withering for reasons none of the field workers could immediately explain. Mo Xuan dealt with each problem calmly, without fuss, and gradually earned a quiet reputation among the other disciples as someone who noticed things others missed.
It was several weeks before he stumbled onto something he hadn't expected to find at all: the fields were not just rows of plants waiting to be guarded. They were layered, quietly, with knowledge.
Every herb, he realised, existed according to its own hidden logic. Every plant carried its own particular demands. Some drank in Spiritual Energy the way a parched traveller drinks water; others turned their leaves toward the sun and drew their strength from light alone. Certain plants thrived only in bitter cold, curling inward the moment the air grew warm, while others required heat so intense it would have scorched anything else nearby. Stranger still, he learned that a handful of rare species responded not to temperature or energy at all, but to specific frequencies of Soul Power.
The more he learned, the more he wanted to know. What had started as a simple desire to understand what exactly he was protecting slowly deepened into something closer to fascination. He began borrowing texts from the storage building during his rest hours, poring over faded records on medicinal herbs and the intricate relationships between Spiritual Energy and the environments that shaped it. Without quite noticing the shift, his duty had become his curiosity, and his curiosity had begun, quietly, to become something more.
One afternoon, several months into his assignment, Mo Xuan found himself seated beside a modest patch of Moon Dew Grass — nothing remarkable to look at, the small plants barely reaching the height of his palm. Their pale green leaves glistened with tiny droplets of moisture, an odd detail given that the soil beneath them was bone dry, cracked faintly at the edges from lack of rain.
He had walked past this same patch more times than he could count by then, barely sparing it a second glance. But that afternoon, something about it snagged his attention and refused to let go.
He frowned, leaning closer. The Spiritual Energy surrounding the plant was behaving strangely, in a way he couldn't immediately name. Curious, he released his Spiritual Sense, letting it spread gently across the patch of grass. The energy came into focus slowly, like a blurred image sharpening into view, and what he saw made him go still.
The energy wasn't simply being absorbed the way it was everywhere else in the fields. It was moving. Spiritual Energy drawn from the surrounding soil gathered inward toward the roots, then circulated outward again in a slow, deliberate arc, only to curve back inward once more. A continuous, unbroken cycle, repeating with a kind of quiet inevitability.
"Interesting," Mo Xuan whispered, his eyes narrowing as he leaned in further, his focus tightening around the strange rhythm unfolding in front of him.
He pushed his Spiritual Sense further, trying to trace the exact shape of the cycle, trying to understand why it moved the way it did. For one fleeting instant, something clicked into place in his mind — some fragment of understanding brushing against him like a whisper — and then it was gone, slipping away the very moment he reached for it, as though his own awareness had scared it off. He tried to chase it down, to force his focus back to that same precise angle, but the pattern had already blurred into something formless and unremarkable again. He refused to let this rare opportunity go to waste.
He fumbled for his notebook, hands quicker than his thoughts, determined to write down whatever fragments remained before they slipped away entirely. But by the time the notebook was open in his lap, the sensation had already faded past reach. He tried again anyway, straining to recall it through sheer will — and came up with nothing. He knew, with a frustrating certainty, that he had been close to grasping some kind of principle. Something real. Something just beyond the edge of his understanding. But no matter how hard he reached for it, it refused to return.
He closed his eyes, forcing himself to sit still, to breathe, to recall the exact feeling of that fleeting sensation.
Nothing came.
He opened his eyes again and released his Spiritual Sense a second time, hoping — perhaps foolishly — that the same feeling might resurface if he simply tried hard enough. Instead, his face paled, drained by the effort; he had already spent the better part of his Spiritual Sense chasing a memory that no longer existed. Recognising the futility of it, he shook his head and finally let his Spiritual Sense withdraw, closing the notebook in his lap with a quiet, resigned exhale. Forcing it any further, he told himself, would only cost him more than it could ever give back.
For a long while, he sat there beside the Moon Dew Grass, staring at it in silence, as though the plant itself might offer an explanation if he waited long enough. Eventually, his gaze drifted down to the notebook still resting in his hands, its pages empty of the answer he'd hoped to capture. He closed it gently and rose to his feet, tucking it away into his Storage Ring.
Before he left, he allowed himself one last look at the Moon Dew Grass, still swaying faintly in the afternoon breeze — utterly indifferent, utterly unaware that it had just planted a question deep inside the mind of a young cultivator. A question he would carry with him, unanswered, for years to come.
As the months slipped by, Mo Xuan's days settled into a rhythm so steady it barely required thought anymore. He cultivated each morning before setting out to inspect the fields, practised swordsmanship through the afternoon heat, and spent his evenings buried in texts on herbs and formations until the candlelight grew thin. Whenever a spare moment presented itself, he found himself drawn back to the plants, watching them with the same quiet attentiveness he might have once reserved only for his cultivation technique.
He never again felt that strange, cyclical pull he had sensed beside the Moon Dew Grass, though he tried — more than once, in idle moments, he would kneel beside the patch and release his Spiritual Sense, hoping for even a fraction of that same sensation.
Nothing ever came of it.
Eventually, he stopped trying to force what clearly wasn't ready to be understood, and let the memory settle quietly into the back of his mind instead.
The year continued to pass, one quiet month after another.
Three months.
Four.
Five.
By the sixth month, Mo Xuan had all but memorised the entirety of the medicinal fields — which herbs demanded shade and which begged for sunlight, which drank Spiritual Energy greedily and which barely touched it, which formations tended to drift out of balance after heavy rain, and which plants shifted subtly with each change of season, as though breathing along with the world around them.
Through it all, the Moon Dew Grass remained one of his favourites — not for any particular rarity or value, but simply because it was the one thing in the entire valley that had shown him a glimpse of something he still couldn't name. For one brief, fragile moment, he had touched something that existed beyond the reach of words, beyond anything his current understanding could hold onto.
Mo Xuan did not know it yet, but that fleeting moment would remain buried somewhere within his memory.
Years later, long after he had all but forgotten the patch of grass and the strange cycle he'd once glimpsed beside it, that image would return to him.
A small patch of Moon Dew Grass.
A cycle he had once seen, but failed to grasp.
Perhaps, one day, he would finally understand exactly what he had witnessed that afternoon.
But for now, he was only a little over twelve years old. He had no real understanding of what he saw, and he could barely make sense of the strange feeling that had brushed against him beside the Moon Dew Grass, let alone explain it. And so he did the only thing he knew how to do — he kept cultivating, kept walking forward, without ever realising that somewhere deep within his heart, a tiny seed had already taken root.