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

"We risk doing more damage in breaking through to a node, but I think it might still be the right choice," Ling Qi said thoughtfully. "In the end, none will know the spirit's own body better than itself, no?"

"I suppose so," Li Suyin said, rubbing her chin through her mask. A few bubbles emerged along with her words. "Being able to secure conscious cooperation from the Place Spirit where the seal will be installed may increase overall efficiency."

"And we did choose the equipment to give us a longer time in the tunnels," Ling Qi agreed. "May as well use it. Can you fight to subdue?"

"It's not my specialty, but I suppose adjusting some of my toxin dosages should allow for disablement rather than death… Rather than quick death."

Ling Qi stared at her.

She looked away, color creeping up her cheeks. "I can administer restoratives, if we have the time and ability."

"Aw she's just being shy. Linlin can totally just fuse somebody's spinal column together if she wants them to hold still. Or their knees," Sixiang chuckled, voice rising from her shoulder.

"I do not think we will encounter many knees down here, and I would really rather not perform alterations to the spine on a subject you wish to recover. The complexity and potential for damage is…"

"I get it," Ling Qi said a little too quickly. "And Xinhong? Can you grapple?"

The red antlion soldier clacked at her, staring.

"Oh, Xinghong, please activate the routine…"

Before she had finished, the carapace along his sides made a sharp click as the shell unhinged, and two additional burly arms emerged from beneath the spiny chitin. These had only sharp three fingered graspers rather than humanlike hands. Under her eyes, Xinghong flexed, posed, bent his limbs as if going through a martial drill.

…She recognized some of those movements from Gan Guangli's basic drills. "You can then," Ling Qi said, relieved.

Li Suyin's brows were drawn together. "Hm, your ability is very useful. He generally only understands a handful of command words, and only with careful tones. But yes, I installed a jade slip containing many basic martial styles into their growth chamber, absorption is… uneven, but Xinghong has taken to the unarmed drills the best."
She wasn't precisely sure how the antlion was able to make chitin pectorals flex like that, but he was very pleased with the praise.

"Alright, the question then is which one we should pursue," Ling Qi said.

Water! Murky yuck bad no good clogging silencing stilling.

Ling Qi blinked looking down at her dress. "That's not a bad point."

"What isn't?" Li SUyin asked.

"Qiyi is suggesting the water node, since the flows of the water could be said to correspond to the spirits circulation."

"I might think the Heaven node, as that would be the closest to its higher thoughts," Li Suyin. "But I suppose if we want to ingratiate ourselves by clearing the threat from an embattled one, then water might be our best option. Water is often a purifying element as well, representing cleanliness…. It would most likely break up the underworld qi if restored fully.

"Is that the official word for it now by the way, 'underworld?"

"Nah, Suyin's just impatient so she's using the simplest, least controversial one till somebody higher makes a decision," Sixiang drawled.

"I don't know if I agree with how you said that," Li Suyin huffed, but yes. "Now, we know which section to follow, but can you sense where the water node is?

"...It's too attenuated, the impurity is too thick in the passages ahead," Ling Qi said, frowning. "I can send my eyes ahead quietly, but the impurity would damage the constructs too quickly… I can use my new technique…"

"But it will bring the attention of the impurity spirit-or beast- you mentioned attacking Gan Guangli and yourself…. Which is fine…"

"But we don't want it to attack here, since it would just make the Piper, the crystal spirit, respond indiscriminately, to an attack on one of its undamaged nodes."

It was nice going back and forth with Suyin, her friend picked up her thoughts swiftly.

Li Suyin gazed down into the darkness of the passage thoughtfully. "We just approach loudly then, and accept the attacks in the tunnels?"

"At least while I get a feel for the spiritual dimensions of the place. Impurity bends space, but so do I," Ling Qi said lightly. "And I have Sixiang here, to help me navigate."
Her friend nodded, and that was that. They advanced on the crevice, from which drifted tendrils of dull gray polluted water, even at the entrance. Even a few meters down the winding passage, physical sight was useless, it was like peering into a pool of stinking mud.

But, there were more senses than that. She advanced alongside Suyin drifting through the heavy waters like a wraith, while her friend's wire limbs pulled her along through the viscous water with little resistance. Xinghong loomed just behind, heavy footfalls and solid body wading through the darkness, aglow from within by fiery light, streams and bubbles of steam wrapping his chitinous frame.

It was not long before they met resistance. Again, water churned, silvery scales flashed fins slapped and pushed against silty water, and fish darted off schooling around her eyes. They found darkness and winding passages, and stone run through with veins of flesh.

There could be no doubt that this tunnel was respiringing.

"...It's not just physical Qi. This slimy boy is straddling the border, like a predator hiding under the water, and only snapping its jaws when somebody touches the surface."

Ling Qi inclined her head, feeling her constructs as they rippled out through the passages, pounced on, killed, speared, dragged into silty pits. It all gave her information.

"Incoming. We want to keep left for now, follow the wall," Ling Qi said curtly, as they turned, entering a straight open gallery of a cavern, spacious for the underground.

Li Suyin didn't have time to answer before the first real attack came.

Tendrils lanced out of the dark. They emerged from nothing, from rippling vortices in the water silt and stone. Sickly pale, like fleshy worms, each one bristling with near invisible hair thin barbs which stunk of toxin to Ling Qi's senses.

She sang the beat of war drums into the tunnels, and the water teemed with fang and claw, in this narrow space, there was little definition to the her phantasmal beasts, only a shimmering cloak of snapping fangs and reaching claws and tearing beaks. It was a hideous display, and the song had a chaotic tempo like this. But it illustrated where she's gone wrong before.

Each King was one part in the play, and there, they came in sequence, one after another. But a battle was far too chaotic for that. She had been taking each instrument in an orchestra, and making its part a solo. A bird screamed, and from churning phantom flesh an eagle's beak tore a tendril away from her face, sending up clouds of silt as it punched through the thinned barrier to crash into the pulsing liminal flesh which lay beyond it. The jaws of wolves snapped and tore, and vermin dropped in the wake of her footsteps devouring the twitching scraps that fell in the bloodying water. The song's crescendo rose into the deep, rumbling roar of a bear, the sound smashing swarming tendrils to paste before they could reach her.

They could be used apart, but the potential of the art was so much more freeform than that.
She spared a glance for Suyin.

Wire snapped out, gleaming with pale blue qi. It punched through reaching tendrils, and where it touched, flesh twisted. Tumorous growth, warping and bulging flesh, making muscle snap like overdrawn strings, barbs turning ingrowth, jabbing deep into the beast's own flesh, sinew and fat bubbling like wax, deforming and melting.

Xinghong's fists and grasping claws cutting boiling furrows through the water in flashes of red, stepping right into the grappling limbs and letting the barbs skitter off chitin, or even pierce the flesh between, venting boiling purple blood from pinprick wounds, and burning off the toxin. Tendrils ripped, tendrils tore

They were doing fine. But they could be bogged down forever here. She wished she could sing of ice here… but it would only damage the caverns more, sterilize them of life and freeze the currents solid.

No, her constructs were the best use here.

Hm, feel like I got a lock on a spot closer to the center of the water qi," Sixiang whispered as the veil tensed and strained, dozens of new limbs emerging, some thicker, more muscular, dense with parasitic qi. "But it's pretty turbulent, cause of fatty here."

Ling Qi eyes the echoes of flesh she could feel beyond the veil, walls of pallid meat studded with hungry eyes and toothless sucking mouths. But even those weren't really the core of the creature.

No, it was mostly more fused refuse from its prey, if she had her senses right. She sang a warning in her voice; to withdraw from this place, to flee, to preserve its own self.

The next attack was all the more furious. She tugged gently on Qiyi's spirit and the dress responded with giddy excitement as qi pulsed through her fabric, threads spinning out, the lowest layer of the gown turning snug and dry as the metal threaded fabric wrapped her from her neck down to her toes, and even the outer layers of the gown shifted to something more sleek and lethal.

She let a spiked tendril punch through her phantoms, and rebound uselessly off of her dress. The drumbeats of her art repeated her silent warning, and this time there was a fractional moment of hesitation.

She laid a hand on Suyin's shoulder. "Jumping."

She waited just long enough for a wire to snap out and curl around one of Xinghong's many wrists.

Dreamwalking here felt like sliding through rotten meat, overgrown with slime mold and rot. It stung her eyes and made the mask on her face burn hot, the formations woven into the cloth flaring to bright and straining life.

It would have been so easy to get lost here, in a vortice of decay and sucking depression, but she was better than that now.

And beside, another hand pulled her along. They emerged back amidst stone and waving fronds of cave kelp, a wide circular chamber, with two tunnels branching off near the ceiling, one speckled with the faint growth of blue crystal. Of course…

"Ahaha, well. I didn't say it was unoccupied, but we got this, yeah?"

They did, Ling Qi acknowledged, looking up at the spirits schooling overhead. Slender human bodies and glittering fins, black staring eyes and pale waterweed hair. She supposed this was where the luring spirits had gone.

It was a sad thing to see the writhing fleshy veins under their skin, the knots of black impurity and chitinous growth. Their 'voices' echoed, in two tones, the toneless predation of the beast they were fighting, and the wild struggles and howls of the trapped.

"Try to subdue where you can."

Something larger, sinuous and dark moved. A fleshy corpse gray hand studded with coral growth grasped the edge of the crystal tunnel. It was large enough to close around her chest like she was a doll.

"Except for that one," Ling Qi said quietly. There was only one voice there.

Constructs flowed like mist from the hems of her gown, beasts and shadows, the phantoms of dancers and the shades of long dead gods. In the end, the central lesson of the Beast King's was one of power. A simple lesson, some might call it trite or naive. Each Beast God was a manifestation of pride and authority. Their last march was made in alliance, but not together.

Together any three, even any two, might have broken even the Great Tsu. But they could not have done that, any more than a man could pluck the sun from the sky.

+2 Power XP

So they died, and their bones built the Throne of Seasons. That was the first lesson of Tsu. That…


[ ] Power is the ability to act on or resist the world, it manifests through many forces. The great and the small, the subtle and the strong, amplify in unity.

[ ] Power is the ability to act on or resist the world, it manifests through many forces. No individual is great in all. Power united is greater than its parts.