"I've left a lot of your lessons behind," Ling Qi said to the empty sky. There were many things from those cruel years that she had put behind her, and though she retained some, others she had rejected, one by one. "Total freedom is a lie," she said softly.
The moon twinkled overhead, silent.
"Living only for yourself is empty and childish, and only the mighty and the foolish can pretend that it offers anything but misery and destruction," Ling Qi said thoughtfully. "Such a life is the life of a rabid beast."
Ling Qi held out her hand and watched the play of moonlight, filtered by the clouds on her skin. "But it isn't wrong to do things for yourself. Some chains should be broken, some rules are wrong. It isn't wrong to want to fly, as long as you remember your landing."
There was a charge in the air, an attention that she could feel, beating down on her mind. "It isn't wrong to steal the wind from its vault, to let it out into the world."
Beneath her, the ground, the forest and the Sect dropped away. She stood now on a promontory of crumbling stone, over a ravine miles deep, its bottom hidden even to her eyes. It was a fall even she could not survive. Below were the Gods, cruel and greedy, with all the riches and wonders of the world in their vaults.
And she was just one girl, so very small in the end. What madness could possess her, to think that she could defy the gods so?
Ling Qi smiled to herself, and stepped out into the open air.
The wind screamed in her ears as she plunged downward, and Ling Qi's heart pounded with it. The walls of the ravine blurred by, and the cold stone below beckoned. This was a dream, but dreams were real enough in their way.
The Grinning moon was many things, it rejected constraints, all constraints, this she refused. It loved cleverness and tricks, and this she accepted. She recalled vaguely a text she had read last year, claiming that the Grinning Moon was not the patron of criminals, but clever investigators. She had found it odd at the time, but she now knew it was not wrong.
The Grinning Moon did not care about goals, it did not care about motivations. Perhaps it's manifestations and avatars did, but the moon did not. The Grinning Moon was a thing of action and movement. Call it a heist or a sting, a casing or an investigation, the moon cared not. It only cared that you acted, that you sought to live and run and fly, to match your mind against others and come out on top.
As the ground approached, solid and inviolate, Ling Qi came to understand the core virtue of the Grinning Moon. That which underlaid all the rest.
Self Assurance.
Ling Qi looked at the approaching ground, and felt dormant meridians churn to life. The howl of the wind transformed into her laughter, and the shadows of the ravine closed in as a welcoming embrace.
