Daisy ate until her mouth was glistening with grease, giving one thumbs-up after another in praise. Lei Kung put away no small amount himself. The table ran ten meters (33 feet) long, and between the two of them they cleared half of it.
The subject of food made Lei Kung a little smug. "K'un-Lun has no need for the planting and herding the outside world depends on. This is food bestowed on us by the gods."
Daisy took that with a grain of salt. The gods were that kindhearted? They knew she was hungry and rushed to roast her a lamb? She didn't believe in any deity with customer service that good.
Seeing her doubt, Lei Kung led her on a tour of the kitchen. He called it a kitchen, but there was no cutting board, no cleaver, no ingredients, no seasonings—only one strange machine.
It should have looked thoroughly high-tech, but the people of K'un-Lun had remodeled it several times over, and from a distance it now resembled a great cooking stove. The kitchen staff only had to name the ingredient they needed, and the machine would conjure it out of thin air.
"Well? Impressive, isn't it? The greatness of the gods is everywhere." Lei Kung was satisfied with the shock on Daisy's face.
What Daisy actually saw was a smart device that absorbed the ambient energy drifting through the air and then, like a 3D printer, shaped and processed it according to preset food samples.
She didn't understand the specifics, but she could more or less reason out the principle.
She circled the machine twice, studying the repair marks. When the alien ship had landed, this machine had surely taken heavy damage too. For reasons she couldn't guess, the ship's survivors had used what little material they had to mend this machine while abandoning the engine. Tens of millions of years later, the K'un-Lun of today could enjoy this "miracle."
She had no idea whether her guess was right. If it were Tony or Reed, those cheat-code geniuses might reverse-engineer the thing after a couple of glances, but she didn't have that kind of talent.
Lei Kung's words were a fair bit of an exaggeration, too. A machine like this, set up in the nobles' quarter, was clearly something only a select few could enjoy.
Still, K'un-Lun's rulers hadn't pushed things to the extreme. They came down the mountain at regular intervals to hand out food for free. It was just as Stick had said—there was no pure land in this world. K'un-Lun's rulers simply handled it more gracefully, that was all.
After the meal, Lei Kung took her to be entered into the register. She'd killed the traitor Madame Gao, was now cultivating chi, and intended afterward to inherit the title of Iron Fist—becoming an elder would be effortless.
An elder's treatment was far better than a disciple's. A robe smooth as silk, a finer and more intricately woven combat suit, and a residence with its own private courtyard. Daisy turned none of it down, taking the whole lot.
Lei Kung's duties were heavy, and K'un-Lun wasn't safe. This alternate dimension held a kind of plant-like enemy, the H'ylthri. To keep their descendants from growing complacent, K'un-Lun's founders had never wiped these enemies out by the roots. Every so often the H'ylthri would assault K'un-Lun, and Lei Kung had to lead the disciples to the front line to clear the threat.
Daisy peeled off the coarse linen disciple's garb, and in the mirror she happened to catch sight of her own back. There was a tattoo of a flaming phoenix with its wings spread in flight. For a long while she said nothing.
Aware of her situation, she quickly changed clothes.
She found a great tree standing in the eastern quarter, sat cross-legged beneath it, and slowly tried to grasp that vague, elusive "will of fire."
Through K'un-Lun's special design, Earth's sunlight still fell here every day, never once interrupted. Daisy felt almost as if she were still on Earth.
Watching the sun rise and set, listening to the breeze rustle through the treetops, she examined herself, sensed the fire, and sensed her relationship with the whole world.
The elder's quarters Lei Kung had assigned her—she never once returned to them. Every seven days she went to eat a meal; the rest of the time she sat beneath the tree in contemplation.
When she got tired she lay down for a bit; when her legs went numb she stood up and threw a few punches.
In all seriousness, she wrote out a question for Lei Kung: was chi truly a prerequisite for challenging Shou-Lao? The way she saw it, let her go in with the full kit and her powers wide open, and taking the dragon down wouldn't be all that hard.
Unfortunately, Lei Kung said that without chi there was no way to contain Shou-Lao's power. If she challenged the dragon before grasping her own chi, the only outcomes were giving the dragon a beating or taking one—nothing more useful than that.
Between her meditation sessions, the Yu-Ti came to speak with her twice as well.
Daisy put no shortage of questions to him about Shou-Lao and the Phoenix. Some the Yu-Ti knew, some he didn't; with some answers Daisy strongly agreed, and some she felt the Yu-Ti had gotten wrong.
Piecing together the Yu-Ti's words and her own memories, Daisy managed to map out a rough outline.
Shou-Lao was not native to K'un-Lun. He came from the eastern alliance of deities, the Xian—the Immortals—and it was the Xian who had granted K'un-Lun this guardian beast. On that point Daisy and the Yu-Ti agreed.
But the Yu-Ti held that the Iron Fist was a gift, a blessing—and Daisy couldn't bring herself to agree.
Every generation's Iron Fist defeated Shou-Lao, took the dragon's heart, and completed the Iron Fist ritual. At that point Shou-Lao was like a player running back to his corpse to respawn in a game: he had to make the trip back to K'un-Lun from the Xian's realm, revive once more, grow anew, and wait for the next challenger.
The last time Shou-Lao met the Phoenix was five hundred years ago. That clash with the Phoenix had wounded the dragon gravely; he'd spent a full two hundred years on his corpse run before he could be reborn in K'un-Lun.
Take away those two hundred years, and there were still three hundred years with no Iron Fist in existence. If it was a gift, a blessing, then why hadn't they claimed it?
The Iron Fist wasn't as wonderful as people imagined. K'un-Lun's fundamental cultivation philosophy still pursued unity of heaven and humanity, and the dragon's power would surely conflict with one's own self. If it truly came to the point of unity, then the one being merged—would it be Shou-Lao, or yourself?
The Iron Fist was more like an insurance policy, a safeguard against K'un-Lun suffering total annihilation. When every master had fallen, the Iron Fist could rely on Shou-Lao for a shortcut, instantly gaining over a hundred years of cultivation to save the people.
But that shortcut came with harsh requirements too. An ordinary person couldn't beat Shou-Lao; even if the dragon went easy, they still couldn't win. The ones who could—Lei Kung, say, or the Yu-Ti—each had their own path, and wouldn't go chasing the dragon's power.
The way Daisy saw it, Shou-Lao was like a prize pool. The older the dragon, the higher his cultivation, and the greater the benefit reaped from defeating him.
Left unchecked, Shou-Lao would eventually grow so strong it was ridiculous. Five hundred years ago, that Phoenix host Fongji Wu had defeated a dragon over a thousand years old and walked off with the entire prize pool in one stroke. Now, five hundred years later, it was Daisy's turn. Subtract the two hundred years the dragon had spent "on strike," and she'd be dealing with a three-hundred-year-old Shou-Lao.
And after her, if things followed the original track, it should be Danny Rand. There was a reason this guy was considered the weakest Iron Fist—the dragon he beat was most likely all of five years old.
Daisy had no interest in any "personal path." She liked shortcuts. Making her sit and slowly cultivate chi was, first, a test of patience she lacked, and second, time she didn't have.
But that initial chi-sense still had to be found. She cycled through several states: the Kree state was the most sluggish, the Inhuman state could barely register it, and the human state worked best.
She didn't have much choice. Day after day she switched to her human state, sat beneath the great tree, and puzzled it out.