Molting the Mortal Coil

The Jade Horde continued to expand its influence. Given that he was recruiting mercenaries to do work as mercenaries, all he did was supply them with equipment and cannon fodder troops in the form of the Hoplites. Their bravery and resilience were exemplary, and their commanders treated them well. Sage had already started selecting and training his agents, with their first tasks being to investigate the other members of the Jade Horde. Sage hadn’t had time to carefully check the background and qualifications of every new member, so this was a good first test for the agents as well as a check to root out any spies from other organizations. Every new member had to swear an oath to keep the secrets of the Horde, but ‘secrets’ only pertained to a few important bits of information. Spies could still pass information about their movements or daily activities. Nobody would go around declaring each and every thing the squad did or was going to do as a ‘secret’. Without such a declaration, the oath wouldn’t come into effect.

Very quickly, a dozen Jade Horde members at various ranks were rooted out. Only two of them were actual undercover operatives, the other ten were just those who had taken payment to share information with outsiders. Those ten weren’t harmed, instead they were moved into specific squads with agents as their commanders. They could be used to spread misinformation in the future. As for the two real spies, they were sent out on a series of increasingly dangerous missions. One of them was killed in action while the other tried to desert and was killed by his own squad in the process. Searching for infiltrators was a good test to promote agents and soon Sage had twenty hand picked members formed into a special squad for himself.

If they were just going to act as regular information gatherers, it would be a terrible idea to move them onto a special squad and then send them back out to other squads with no explanation. It would be a mystery that would draw much curiosity. The problem would lie with the reason for such a squad to be dissolved so rapidly, forming one wasn’t an issue. Sage wasn’t planning on sending these twenty agents back into the Jade Horde. Instead they were going to take on his role of selecting and training new agents. A few of them would stay with the Jade Horde to recruit and train internally, while the majority of them would head out into the world to build an information network.

‘How to be a Little Birdy’, was mostly about selection and training, but it also had five main techniques that Sage learned and then taught to the agents. As they were to be his trainers, he even created copies of How to be a Little Birdy, and the Beauty of Birds. Passing out the seemingly innocent children’s book and the huge scroll of bird related literature. They were quite easy to pass off as being something a bird lover would carry around.

The first two techniques were alchemical in nature. They were very simple and weren’t very exacting on the materials required for concocting. They didn’t even need pill furnaces or any heat to prepare, instead just grinding together the materials into a type of paste and using a special Qi technique in the process. The first was called ‘Mud Mask’ and was something like temporary plastic surgery. Sage saw it as a more useful version of a botox injection. By rubbing it onto the face and applying the Qi technique, it could make the face puff up, shrink, smooth, or wrinkle. The effect only lasted for about a week before it had to be reapplied again, but it had no side effects in the short term. If used constantly for many years it would cause damage to the skin and muscles of the face, but it was perfect for a quick and easy disguise.

The other alchemical technique was called ‘Bird Bath’. This was more of an alchemical soup then a paste, and when the Qi technique was applied it turned into a heavy mist. In an ideal situation, the cultivator would perform the technique in the nude and let the mist coat their skin. The mist clung to the skin and created a thin film. For the next two to three hours, they would seem just like a mortal, a person with no cultivation. The film blocked the Qi pores, not just the widened and strengthened ones a cultivator used in their techniques, but even the most microscopic and unused ones. Normally these pores released a slight amount of energy, just like a normal person’s body created heat. Without these slight emanations of energy, other cultivators would see them as nothing more than a normal non-cultivating mortal. It wouldn’t hold up to a more detailed inspection, but it was a good combination with Mud Mask for a quick disguise.

The third technique was called ‘Birdwatching’, and Sage took it to be the key ability that named this whole manual. Contrary to the name, it was actually a cloning technique. A very unusually specific and focused cloning technique. First, catch a bird. Second, clone one of the bird’s feathers. Third, train the bird. Fourth, release the bird. Cloning a single feather from a bird seemed like a completely nonsensical idea, but it was actually quite ingenious. The cloned feather wasn’t under the control of the original bird, instead it was a mirrored image of feather and anything that happened to the original feather also happened to the clone. The ingenious part was the accompanying Qi technique that used the most miniscule of vibrations from the feather to transfer sound. One feather became a microphone and the other, a speaker. The final portion of the technique was a special beast taming method that could use the feather as a control mechanism. Things that happened to the clone also transferred over to the original feather and by twisting, bending, or stroke the feather in certain ways the bird was trained to alter its flight path. Birds were already a decently common messenger bird, so many common methods existed to have them fly to a certain location or person. Birdwatching let them use the bird to eavesdrop from anywhere a bird was.

The fourth technique was a direct counter to the third. ‘Windscreen’ was a Qi technique similar to the one used to hear sound from a feather. It blocked the air vibrations in a small area, preventing any sound from passing in or out. It didn’t stop any other forms of eavesdropping, but it was quick and easy to keep a conversation hidden and also had lots of other uses. By making the bubble smaller it could be placed over the lower body and silence their footsteps and movements. Expand it to cover other people and muffle their struggles in an assassination. The downsides being that the technique wasted quite a lot of energy, and there was a threshold on the sound level it blocked. If there wasn’t enough energy to block a sound the technique would collapse.

The final technique was the most brutal, but a necessary evil. ‘Birdbrain’, a name which Sage was pretty sure got changed from some old technique to fit the theme, was a technique that a cultivator could use to selectively burn out a portion of their own memories. It was an ultimate method of protecting vital information from being discovered. The problem was that it didn’t just target specific memories, but wiped clean the portion of the brain where it was stored. Any use of the technique would have collateral damage, and wasn’t to be used lightly. In fact, if pushed to the limit it could be used as a suicide technique. All it took was targeting the portion of the brain that controlled the basic functions of the body and a cultivator could tell their heart to slow its beating to a crawl which would quickly lead to death. A powerful cultivator would be able to control their own body functions, but this was like disabling the autopilot. Then they just had to let go of the wheel and let death take them. Thankfully, Birdbrain was a voluntary technique that could only be used on oneself.

Teaching all five techniques in their entirety was very quick, meant to be possible over the course of a couple months even with just an hour of training once every few days. A prospective agent would only have to spend a few hours a week, barely disrupting their normal habits. Sage spent a few months with the twenty new agents, whom he called Falconers, before sending them out into the province to start recruiting agents, whom he called Falcons. Bartenders, Accountants, Shopkeepers, and other normal folk were then recruited by these Falcons and called ‘agents’. They collected rumors and then sent them up to their handlers, the name of ‘agent’ was just to make them feel important. In the organization they called these people ‘little birds’.

Building an intelligence network wasn’t cheap, and the majority of the earnings from the Jade Horde were put to use. The mercenaries thought these earnings were going to the Emerald Horde, and didn’t think it was unusual. The race of demi-humans formed a mercenary team to make money. They didn’t seem very smart so they used their talent for combat to earn money for their people. This was mostly true, especially considering most of the Hoplites had no idea of their origin. Their children each underwent a sort of baptism that transformed them from bugs into humanoids, but none of them even thought a thing about it. It was a secret they didn’t even know they had, and most never even realized they couldn’t share it. The ceremony that placed the Human Seal also included a seal to block speaking about it. Sage set it up so that half of the rewards going to the Jade Horde and the Hoplite Tribes were actually funneled to the two Falconers that worked within the Jade Horde and was then distributed to the rest of the information network.

In the span of a few years, they spread their wings over the whole of the Bronze Tiger Province and the information started to roll in.