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

The chamber at the bottom of the pool was only a couple of meters across, a rounded bowl of a floor filled with silt and mud, from which sprouted the grasping, fleshy fronds. One reached for her as her heels touched down on the mud, and she didn't even bother to glance its way, the water swirling as she pushed air into it, turning up a churning current.

The voices were distorted. They are not thinking things begin with. The eyes that peered in the dark, the fronds, they were only reactive things, impulses tied to primitive instinct. Her hair swirled around her head like a halo, as she peered around the dark waters. One… two… three… four… the number of twisting cracks and crevices branching off were numerous, though only a few were large enough for a solid human to pass through.

"We'll be looking for a chamber defined by green crystals. From there we will want the east facing tunnel," Ling Qi said. She didn't bother moving her lips, no bubbles escaped her mask, she simply impressed the sound onto the water with a flex of will.

"Oh, yes you did say your mentor had given you a little scouting advice," Li Suyin's responding voice hard a faint distorted warble to it, and a few silvery bubbles emerged through her mask. Unlike Ling Qi she did seem to using clean air generated by the seals inside of her mask, where Ling Qi had chosen to just convert her qi to breathable air inside of her lungs.

"I can't say I'm sad to avoid poking through a a few dozen muddy, yuck filled empty tunnels, but it does take a bit of the exploratory feeling away," Sixiang chuckled.

"Well, we're hardly just Outer Sect disciples, with nothing to do but poke around mysterious caves and vales," Li Suyin said lightly, a wire curled and shot out through the water, punching through the hardened hornlike shell of one of the impurity growths clinging to the walls and dragging her a bit further into the chamber. "Besides, it is not as if we haven't been left the bulk of the work in the sealing."

She hummed as the wire spun back, trailing dark purple ichor. "Hm, hybridized. Corrupted as others might say. The underworld ecosystem has not displaced the surface one fully yet."

"That is… some manner of mutated shell fish then?" Ling Qi wondered, drifting over.

"Some breed of freshwater mussel I think," Li Suyin said idly. "Now that I see the dimensions down here… let me bring out at least one guardian."

Her clawed glove flicked, something clicked and whirred, and a disc the size of a go chip, crimson red shot out into the murky water. Ling Qi sent herself drifting backward, giving more room as she felt the qi swell within.

Red.

The faint 'whump' of water displacing and bubbles erupting cleared to reveal a figure a few centimeters taller than her. It at first seemed a man, broad shoulders and heroically proportioned, clad in spiny, shell-like plate armor.

Only… those broad, fierce black domed crescents on the helm with glinting multifaceted eyes, the plumes, feathered antennae and even as she watched the stern 'faceplate' split open jaggedly into split and sharp mandibles which clacked and clicked, tasting the silty water.

The crack of a chitin fist against its breastplate shell was muffled in the water as it bent the knee to Li Suyin.

Mother-creator-great-lady. Humbled-protector-chosen-from-brothers-presents-inspection.

"Oh good, the moisture sealant is working properly," Li Suyin said absently. "Rise Xinghong. You're to focus on protecting my person while I work today."

Ling Qi pursed her lips. "...Can you hear his words Li Suyin?"

It was definitely a he now that she felt at the edges of the qi. Low third realm too… Suyin's experiments really had paid off.

"Hm, no my antlion soldiers aren't so advanced. They can follow complex commands but don't show the spiritual activity for human level abstract thinking yet," Li Suyin said, blinking. "Is this your 'sharp ears' again?"

The insectoid face turned to her tilted, assessing, jaws clacking.

"...He is extremely pleased to have been chosen from among his brothers, and honored to protect you."

It was true that the antlion's thoughts were simple, childish, not even quite to the complexity Biyu expressed, untranslated by Ling Qi's own cognition. But she thought Suyin was underestimating things… She didn;t know that it would be good to bring it up here though.

Li Suyin smiled. "Oh, I could pick that up well enough. Xinghong is a good boy, the most disciplined and obedient of his batch."

Click-clack-clack. The antlion soldier practically vibrated with resolve.

"Ling Qi is to be treated as a Level one companion and combatant as well Xinghong, defer to her in absence of my own orders."

Less enthusiastic, but understanding.

Sixiang, how many of these does she have, and how advanced are they?

"There's five of them, counting him, though she's got a sixth still growing. Other ones are only second realm though. First gen that hasn't exploded, withered or eaten each other." Sixiang said cheerfully. "Wait till you see the combo she's set up with the lot! I like 'em!"

Ah. Ling could only think. She wasn't even sure where to guide her thoughts on this. "So shall I begin scouting for our green crystals?"

"Please. You said you were intending to use a new technique?"

"Yes," Ling Qi agreed. "My usual perception extensions suffer some degradation in impure environments, but, this refinement of my Beast King's Savage Dirge Art should help."

Ling Qi drew in a breath, though it was only a mental exercise really.

This art had always been an awkward thing, so many movements and techniques, too many patterns to easily keep track of in battle. She understood why. It was ultimately a theater art, a form of expression she was only tangentially skilled in.

"You do a pretty good job of it when you try," Sixiang chuckled.

She could. That didn't change the trouble though. But as she studied more and more of the movements and arcs, she had begun to realize she was doing it inefficiently. She Expressed the the first low bars, it was a twist on the imperial anthems of the second dynasty. Regal, but with a pompously bombastic edge that invited mockery.

The Dirge of the River King, once the River Jing, fallen scion of dragons. A carp which deemed himself a dragon, on the strength of bloodline alone.

Scales shimmered in the water around her as her eyes multiplied. Five more points of vision blooming in the water, expanding her senses, silvery coins that swiftly flickered invisibly.

"Hm, I remember the play and the story both," Li Suyin said thoughtfully watching the gathered schooling phantom fish which surrounded them. "The River God, the fat and furious carp, squanderer of heaven's treasures."

"Disdained even by Vermin God. Who looked upon the glittering heights of his fathers, and only ever descended, descended the falls, sure his destiny was to be a dragon anyway," Ling Qi said absently. That was how the story went.

The fish skirled around her, mingled with the wisps, and shot off in every direction, swirling and swimming in shafting flashing patterns under the faint luminescence cast by some among the growths on the walls. Li Suyin's antlion soldier followed their motion with quick snapping turns of his head and clattering mandibles. She understood why Li Suyin had brought him. He was inexperienced.

It was a strange technique, and one which showed her more than others that in the completed combat form of the art, each King was more a component of a line in a more complex dance. The darting carp were not creatures of power but fright, she sent them out in panicking schools, where they would swarm and obscure the motions of others. Empty and blown up with the phantom of threat, to trigger defenses, trip ambushes, and take attention and blows. This was their basic function

As the stupid, prideful River God, least descendant of dragons, was cajoled and flattered into fulfilling the Spider Gods schemes.

It was very much not in her usual style, but there was definitely something to be said of 'scouting in force'.

Things shifted in the dark. Maw's yawned in the fungal flesh overgrowing the underwater tunnels deeper in. Tongue tendrils grown through with spiny bone shot out, speared furiously swimming phantoms, nests of wriggling white worm nests erupted, tangling and stinging with with toxic spurs embedded in slimy flesh. Mutant eyeless fish with sleek armored skulls and sharp bony jaws snapped and clattered.

Even clouds of toxins and impurity belched forth, dissolving them, dispelling them, but absorbed in turn by their dying throes. But most importantly, her 'eyes' traveled unmolested, unseen among the swarming school. She caught glinting green, spiking growths of crystal, jutting from the walls of a narrow winding passage, like the teeth in the throat of one of Yan Renshu's worms.

"We'll want to take this one here," Ling Qi said, pointing to a tall, narrow passage on the right. We'll want to mind the chamber that will come up after the second turn, it's filled with parasitic worms. They'll attempt to get under our skin or into any opening and nest."

"Understood. Xinghong, stoke your fire," Li Suyin said absently. "And stay close."

Click-clack, chitin fists crashed together, and steaming bubbles began to rise from his joints, the water around him rapidly heating to boiling.

"That will work," Ling Qi said with a laugh. She could just step past the chamber but probably best not to alert anything on deeper layers of reality just yet.

Together with her friend, she descended into the mouth of the cave.


The chamber Shu Yue had vaguely described was unmistakable in the end, through the spiraling sikey growth of a tunnel was a chamber wreathed in emerald green light, pulsing gently.

The light warmed the water hear, and where it shone, the corrupted life of the tunnels did not reach, here the water was clean, and clear, and only clinging slime mold and water weed of normal types grew. Most of the light came from a central stalagmite of the organic crystal, a great fang rising from the floor as tall as Ling Qi herself. In it slept a node of power.

"This is certainly a qi locus of a kind…. Wind aspected?" Li Suyin wondered, examining it.

"It's connected to the spirit on the surface," Ling Qi said.

"...It's a chunk of their body, kinda distributed. A bit like the little bit I left back in my puppet, but more deeply grown," Sixiang voice animated from near her ear. "And…"

"There are others," Ling Qi said, gazing into the depths. Though the spirit of the Cathedral remained uncommunicative, she could feel it here, down below the sense blurring blanket of corruption. "This is wind aspected… I sense…. Heaven, the touch of lightning on the mountainside, earth, deep and rich… and the mountain cracked and breaking. There's others; extinguished fire, silenced thunder. Dead and broken. Water… polluted, flickering."

She shook herself, coming free from the vision.

"Li Suyin rested her clawed fingers against the crystal as well. "Useful. The spirit is a neutral entity overall then? Or at least a gestalt of smaller entities?"

She was hypothesizing, Ling Qi could tell.

"...Or the fire and the thunder in the deep was a different guy, doesn't the rule the other out though," Sixiang said.

She saw that Shu Yue had sent them here for more than taking the correct turn.

"We could attempt to cleanse one of the damaged nodes. This might get the spirits attention, and allow it to help us," Ling Qi mused, drifting around the crystal thoughtfully.

"Or we could go in the direction of the broken nodes, which will be wear the taint is strongest… and the breach will likely be," Li Suyin pointed out. "The main underworld entity is some sort of puppeteer creature right?"

Ling Qi nodded thoughtfully. Detouring might just mean doing more damage to controlled guardians and creatures of the natural ecosystem down here. But then, plunging right ahead could be risky.
"Not like that's ever stopped us."

[ ] Clear a node, see if the Piper can be reached.

[ ] Go unto the breach, into the belly of the beast.