Threads Of Destiny(Eastern Fantasy, Sequel to Forge of Destiny)

An offering to @yrsillar: One omake, slightly used. A take on something that might have happened to inspire that triple crit breakthrough of Su Ling's. May have a sequel, depending.

***

I sit on top of the boulder that splits the river, meditating as I track the flickering flame skulking through the valley toward me. It is amusing, if one takes the time to think about it. The student whose request for a teacher I took is of fire, yet I am of water. Yet she is also of illusion. It is an exquisite contradiction, and so I am naturally an excellent teacher for her.

Despite the distance between us, my first spirit touches my student, and my second spirit touches that which is between us. Thus, I can tell that the obstacles between us will allow her to detect my presence in three, two, one, and I abruptly turn my head towards her while simultaneously flaring my qi. It is calculated deliberately to make her think that she should have sensed me before, and that I allowed her to sense me through my movement, yet of course she did not sense the dropping of a technique, for there was no technique to drop. It is an illusion, though not an art, and it will be lesson one if she can figure out what I did. She startles, but approaches, and stands before me soon enough.

I get up, and give a courteous bow. "Sect Sister Su Ling."

"You my teacher?" The fox girl is obviously cautious of me, a sharp spike of neutral emotions among the undercurrents of anger and hate that she obviously has let define her. Ah, but it really is amusing; I really am an appropriate teacher.

"If I could keep up the illusion of being your illusion teacher, I dare say you would want to learn from me anyway. You may call me Cang Lin." I keep my placid smile in place as she narrows her eyes at me.

"That's not the name on the letter I got."

"Lesson two. Read the characters back to front." She blinks, fishes a recognizable slip of paper out of her storage ring, squints at it, and then curses rather luridly.

"That's stupid. Why'd you do that? And what happened to lesson one??"

"Lesson two is that things can hide in plain sight. Lesson one was the method of my arrival."

I let her blink over that for a few seconds.

"Lesson three is swords," I offer. A prod of my second spirit, and my art applies itself to the water as it expresses itself in my hand.

She is well and truly angry at me now. "What the fuck do swords have to do with illusions?" She all but shouts at me. Still, she draws her sword and lunges at me.

Of course, I completely disregard the watery sword in my hand, step forward, and actively use her strike to impale myself. Anger turns to shock as a chunk of my side turns to water and splashes over her clothes.

"Swords cannot hit illusion. It must be broken through other means. Lesson four is that there are two sides to the practice of illusion," I state, deadly as the grave. "The foxfire you practice currently only belongs to the first side; namely, that of insubstantiality. Your temptations of food and treasure are as air; they are not actually present."

She looks positively freaked out. "What the fuck. I hit you. I felt my sword hit ribs! Why the fuck is there water??"

I let my domain begin reconstituting myself, and water flows back up over my robes to reform into flesh, bone, and cloth. "Lesson five." I draw on my first spirit and Su Ling takes an involuntary step backward as my words become a vector for its intent. "The second side of illusion, the pinnacle of illusion, is when your illusion expands on what is real. The air behaves like food, and fills the belly. My body behaves like water, and flows away from attack."

By this time, my faux wound is as if it had never been dealt. Therefore, I stimulate my art, and my entire body dissolves, draining into the river, a bucket of water in an ocean, although I allow myself to retain the outline of a human body. "Find me," I instruct my student.

She does. Then I make it harder to do so.

***

Half the lesson is spent teaching my student to find illusions. By the end of it, she is wet and frustrated, scowling at me, but entirely focused on me, making sure I do not abruptly disappear again. Truly, an excellent state of mind to learn in. For the rest of the session, I will teach her to create illusions herself.

"Tell me, what exactly do you do to cast an illusion? How does your foxfire really work?"

She can't really answer, but I let her try to explain enough to realize she doesn't really know.

So, I answer for her. Lesson six: Her illusions of treasure are hopelessly crude. Forced to rely only on one sense, she uses her art to deliberately draw attention to what she has done to her opponent's senses. That is the wrong approach, ultimately. It is good if your opponent is weak enough to have their mind clouded by the secondary effect of the art, but against those stronger it only tells them that something is wrong all the quicker. It also is good at higher levels when you can change everything they see and pull attention away from a second illusion, but it is still a crutch.

Instead - lesson seven - she should have her illusions be more like hers of food. Let them see the food. Let them smell it. Evoke an anticipation of tasting the food. Fool all the senses, not just sight. Let them notice the food on their own. But, don't bother actually making illusions of food; that's out of place in a fight. Lesson eight. Instead, make illusions of what the opponent expects to see. If, in a fight, the other sees what they want to see, and hears what they want to hear, feels what they want to feel, and it is seamless enough to be a reasonable happening… they will not question it. And then you will have them.

Lesson nine. Timing, unfortunately, is not art. It is skill. But that skill can then be used for all arts.

Of course, she then loudly realizes that I have not opened my mouth for some time, and have been creating the illusion of speech. She asks me if I just like stupid mind games. It is not that I like it, Su Ling, but that I must do it, if I am to know how to create my illusions. Lesson ten. Everyone is different in what they expect. Don't use your art to force changes. Let it lie on me, let it show you what I expect to see, and then cast that illusion…

I am using my own illusion art to convince myself that I expect to see her obscured behind a ball of hot, crackling foxfire ten feet wide, far beyond what she can produce, and so I am effectively shouting my expectations in her art's metaphorical ear. Thankfully, she casts the correct illusion.

Yes, holy shit, the art can be used that way. Yes, it's qi intensive. It is not your usual, obvious illusions, though, so your opponents will never suspect it, will they? I was going easy on you, though, so let's up the difficulty of the exercise before I let you try that against actual opponents, hmm?

***

At the end of the session, she is not just wet, but exhausted, and extremely angry. She can't get it when I'm not helping her, so I expect that will have to wait until Green Soul, at least. But until then, she can guess. And that is still excellent. She does not have book learning, but she can obtain low cunning, and that is just as good.

"Do you think that I am your illusion teacher yet?" I gently prod her.

Happily enough, my student does not give me a glare, merely waving me off with a tired sneer. "Yeah, you know your stuff. Not gonna lie."

"Lesson eleven. That is a good mindset, because to use illusion you need more than just illusion, unlike the Wen family or what have you. You cannot just obscure. You must also reveal." I poke at her with my first spirit again, dragging her attention to focus on me one more time.

"This, Su Ling, is an example of what you can accomplish, thinking this way. This is the technique that got me into the Inner Sect, although it has been refined since then." My greatest work, I do not say, and merely the keystone to my masterpiece, my self-created, though unfinished, Water Convergence Art.

Contrary to what some believe, yin water is not only cold water; it is simply water without movement. Still pools, stagnant pools. Yang water is not just hot water, either. It is water that moves.

The yang water comes first. The globe of water floating over my palm thrashes with currents, then boils as the currents tear themselves apart, then vibrates itself into a fine mist. Then, from extreme yang, yin is born. In a maelstrom, water rotates about the center. The closer to the center, the faster the rotation. But at the very center, the axis that the whirlpool rotates about is utterly still. The outer edges of the mist abruptly resolve into a thin film of calm water, where infinite droplets freeze for the barest instant as they reach the film and cease their outward movement before being drawn back in, the film itself held in place only by the fact that that is where yang turns into yin, its' shape changing from moment to moment.

I flex my illusions, convincing myself that it should move in a specific pattern, my art responds to my shaped intent, and I hold a handful of flickering, iridescent flames made out of water. The result of a simple Shredding Water Claw technique, that I reworked into the Yin Yang Water Knife that I crushed my tournament with, further refined into the true technique, Water Like Fire.

"Water, that is fire. Not illusion," I say quietly, "but reality." And I cast the flames into the river at our side. It catches like fire tossed into oil, my qi reserves and those of my second spirit dropping precipitously as the flames spread and soar to ten feet, twenty, thirty…

My flying sword, Netherworld River Painting, created solely for the control over water it affords me, unrolls behind me. With a roar, I rip the flaming water from the riverbed, leaving dry earth, and smash the firestorm into the foliage on the far bank. The yin water covering the flames, propelled by the yang water inside, stabs into the trees like so many tiny knives, tearing the water within out and absorbing it into the conflagration, and the old trees scream as they are reduced to less than splinters. Just as humans behave, when their flesh is subject to this attack.

Breathing hard, I allow my second spirit to briefly manifest, a whirlpool forming in and drinking up the water flames before vanishing to restore to me the qi infused into the flames not spent to smash the foliage. "Of course, you won't follow my path to completion; you are Fire, I am Water," I inform the stunned sect sister in front of me, who has fallen on her rear end. "But, I do hope that you take some inspiration. Until next time, Su Ling." I bow, deeply… and vanish.

By the time the shock fades and she thinks to pierce the illusion, I am far away, borne on the water even now refilling the riverbed. A most satisfactory session.

Even more satisfactory come the following afternoon, when I laugh long and loud at learning of her breakthrough that very night and of the expertly smashed attack on her home that morning.

How amusing! Perhaps she may even tell Ling Qi of me! Truly, I cannot wait!