"I think you might be right though," Ling Qi thought aloud.
"No I'm obviously wrong, you evil, evil girl," Sixiang huffed, glaring at her.
"Not about that," Ling Qi chuckled. "I mean about the Central Valley. Meng Diu and Meng Dan are really good contacts, but at the same time, I can't look at things too narrowly. Especially since its so early."
"Yeah you dunno how that business will turn out. Don't put all the eggs in one basket yeah?"" Sixiang agreed, perking up from their brief depression. "Besides you might find some interesting folks out that way too."
"I don't know about that, we'll have to see how the meeting with that Diao woman goes on our trip north," Ling Qi said, tapping on her desk thoughtfully. "I've been looking into information on the ministries but I'd like to hear what she tells me and compare it to what I've read."
"Proooobably smart," Sixiang drawled. "I doubt she'll lie to you but you don't have to be lying to misdirect someone."
"You don't even have to be trying to misdirect," Ling Qi said absently, taking the last of the letters. "Perspective."
"Perspective," Sixiang said absently, flopping back to stare up at the ceiling. "You think this trip is actually going to help Su Ling?"
Ling Qi held back a grimace, finishing the letter. "I…don't know. I sort of made the offer on impulse. I wanted to do something, you know?"
"That sounds about right," Sixiang said. "I think it'll depend alot on her.We can be guides and make sure she doesn't step in any proverbial pits…"
"But she knows what she's looking for, if anything," Ling Qi said. "I hope…"
She trailed off not sure how to articulate her tangled thoughts.
"You don't want to stand against what she wants to do with herself, but you can't shake the feeling she might be making a mistake?" Sixiang offered.
"I can't make choices for her. I guess I just want her to know as much as she can before she makes any choices she can't take back," Ling Qi agreed. "I almost feel like I'm overstepping even with this much."
"If you were overstepping, she'd have said so. Not a girl who'd hold back on telling someone to butt out, that one."
"I guess so," Ling Qi said, putting aside the last of the letters. Either way, we'll see if this does any good. It's about time isn't it?"
***
"Well isn't this a cozy little spot," Su Ling said warily, looking over the fallen cliffside shrine where Ling Qi had led her.
"It's the place where I first spoke clearly to the faces the Moon decided to show me," Ling Qi said seriously. "I decided that made it the best place to cross over for serious trips."
Su Ling took a deep breath and her ears twitched in agitation. "You aren't wrong. I can even feel something in the air here. Like I could see the stars in the middle of the day."
Ling Qi inhaled deeply of the crisp winter air, and nodded. It wasn't a cultivation site, full of energies that could be bent to your will and converted to your own power, but something subtler than that. She wondered what she would use, once they left the Sect. Perhaps she wouldn't need the crutch by then.
"C'mon, quit your dawdling," Sixiang shouted back to them. They had manifested in the center of the clearing, crouched over the faint glowing Labyrinth gate. Faint unreadable shapes drifted in the mist which wafted from within the metal ring.
Ling Qi took the cue to approach, materializing the paired talisman, the compass. It's crystalline surface rippled with a slow shifting of colors throughout the spectrum indicating a calm in the flows of dream. That was good.
Su Ling followed a step after, her arms crossed over her chest as she peered around Ling Qi's side at the glimmering compass. "That a good sign?"
"Calm waters ahead," Ling Qi agreed cheerfully. "Though that only goes for our immediate surroundings."
"Right, we're obviously going to end up chased by a wall of angry ghosts again later," Su Ling drawled.
"Nightmares more like," Ling Qi said impishly, nudging the Labyrinth gate a centimeter to the right with her foot, better aligning with the energy of the clearing.
"Nightmares, of course. That shoulda been obvious," Su Ling sighed.
Ling Qi paused, her smile fading. "Su Ling, I know we joke a lot, but you don't have to do this."
"I know that," she replied grumpily, stepping up to the ring. She gave Sixiang's manifested form a glance, and the muse grinned back. "Look if I didn't want to be here I wouldn't be alright. I…know I'm still kinda ignorant alright? So if you got a way to scout things out, lets do it."
Ling Qi nodded once and offered her hand. "I'm still pretty new, so this will go better if you take my hand."
Su Ling snorted but grasped her hand. The other girls hand was hard and calloused despite her cultivation. She took pride in that Ling Qi supposed. She readied herself, this was far different from simply skimming the border the way she had with Yu Nuan.
And they stepped through the gate.
Colors, shapes, light and sounds rushed by. Ling QI held tight to her friends hand against the ethereal wind which pushed back, rejecting the other girl's stolid, firmly material qi. Ling Qi gritted her teeth in the face of it, tasting red on her tongue and hearing stone and earth in her ears as she focused, grasped the skein of the thin barrier between realms and
pushed.
The first sign of her success was Su Ling letting out an explosive breath, as if she had been punched in the gut as the semi familiar terrain of the liminal realm resolved around them. Like before the endlessly tall trees stretched in every direction through heavy winter fog, the dark canopy overhead shrouding it in eternal night. The air was still charged with an electric tingle, flashes of gold visible in the pinprick gaps between the leaves and branches like brilliant stars.
But it was not the same either, and Ling Qi found herself drawing her mantle close as a faint moaning breeze blew through the forest. It carried the faintest scent of fire, smoky and ominous. Below the faint light of luminescent fungal crowns was visible in the depths of the mist growing upward from the far lost ground of the wood.
"This place makes my skin crawl," Su ling said with a shiver."What the hell is watching us?"
"Sixiang?" Ling Qi asked worriedly, glancing around. She didn't notice anything of significance observing them. There were little spirits, fairies and motes of dream of course but…
"I think that's what she's talking about," Sixiang said. Manifested here they were solid, an androgynous figure in a loose flowing robe with glittering black eyes and pale skin. "Hey why's this bugging you so much? It's not like you don't see plenty of little spirits at home."
Su Ling straightened up, her hunched shoulders slowly relaxing. "Is… that what- Wait, fuck."
What's wrong?" Ling Qi asked with a frown.
"I, my spiritual defense art stopped working when you brought me here," Su Ling said with a frown. "I-Well That sorta makes sense, Eightfold broken paths is supposed to defend by anchoring you more firmly in the 'reality'. It makes you solid, so you can't be moved by the 'unreal'."
"Which kinda breaks down when you step out of reality willingly," Ling Qi hummed. "Will you be alright without it?"
"Yeah, I think. You're here, so its just… uncomfortable."
Ling Qi didn't let herself smile or acknowledge the trust in that statement. She'd just make sure to live up to it. "Alright, so…. Sixiang I have an idea, but do you want to explain how we're getting where we're going?
Sixiang nodded as Su Ling straightened up, scanning the endless gray horizon with wary eyes. "Dreaming is more a state of mind than a place, so if you want to get somewhere beyond what you can see right in front of you, you need to have it mind. So focus on what your looking for, the same way you'd create a mental image when cultivating an art, keep a hold of Ling Qi and keep moving forward!"
"Got it," Su Ling said, scowling as she squeezed her eyes shut. Her grip on ling Qi's hand tightened.
Ling Qi began to walk slowly forward, and when she leapt down from the platform of earth and stone they had began on to a slowly falling leaf the size of the market square in Tonghou, Su Ling followed.
Leaf to leaf, branch to branch, they went, coming at last to a thick bough whose upper side held a carved road of dirt and stone, they traveled on. The travel went slow, with Su Ling's eyes screwed shut, but soon their surroundings began to change.
The branch road shifted from one blink to the next, to became a bubbling river, whose cool water nonetheless supported their feet, it wound down in a spiral through the misty sky bringing them to a shadowed canopy a league below the greater one, where sun dappled trees and soft rolling hills gleamed like an emerald in the shadows interior of the Emerald Seas.
The shadow of a third tail, black as night, glittering with starlight swept through the air behind Su Ling like a ghost. Shadows clung to her like mist, casting her hard face in a light that was at once more beautiful and more feral. Predatory. Patient. Watching.
When atlast their feet touched grass, Su ling's plain brown eyes scattered the glittering green ones which had formed in the shadows on her face.
"We're here," Su Ling said. She looked down at her free hand, at the shadows clinging there, lit by embers of pale blue foxfire to outline talons. She clenched her fist and they dispersed. The Tail remained. Su Ling's ears lay flat against the side of her head.
"And where is here?" Sixiang asked. For once the muse's expression was serious as they looked around at the bright, but somehow unsettling isle of green in the dark grey mist.
"Not home," Su ling said darkly."But the closest thing I guess. It's… hers. Her hunting ground. I can feel it."
"Could Su Ling's Mother be aware here?" Ling Qi asked quietly.
"I don't know what she is exactly, but… not how your thinking most likely," Sixiang said, licking her lips.
There was movement among the trees. Ling Qi's eyes shot toward it.There in the shadows, she met a pair of wide but small eyes. A little girl with tangled bushy hair and sun darkened skin crouched there, dressed in rags. She fled with a yelp, a dark brown tail the last thing to disappear into the brush.
"That could not be a more obvious trap," Su Ling said flatly.
"Maybe," Ling Qi said with a frown, glancing at Su Ling. "This place though, it might not have come from her."
Su Ling pursed her lips. "It's not a memory of mine, if that's what your thinking."
"How are you sure?" Ling Qi asked.
"Granny wasn't dead when I was that age," Su Ling said tersely. "She wouldn't ha' left me to get that filthy when she was 'round."
Ling Qi chose not to comment on the thickening of Su Ling's accent or the look in her eyes as she said that. Instead she let out a breath. "Alright. This is your journey, where do you think we should go?"
Su ling hummed to herself looking around. "I recognize this place, its where they used to gather mushrooms, if we follow this path we'll find…"
[ ]The cemetery
[ ] The old shrine.
