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

…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.

Each of the Beast King's was a demonstration of the failure of a form of Power. Each of their deaths was a demonstration of the Power Tsu had woven among the united tribes of the Emerald Seas. In this art, wielded properly, it was demonstrated that their lonely powers too could be welded to greater purpose.

The same way their bones supported the roof of the Throne of Seasons.

Ling Qi drifted up and back on streamers of bubbling water, pushed by summoned air, and her song clashed with the distorted voices which echoed from the parasitized spirits sharp toothed mouths. Qi roiled in the water, distorting the sound of the sweet, eerie and tainted luring song the spirit's furthest back sang.

As if she would let such a poor song taint her friend's ears. She couldn't be turned against her own with such a trivial amateurishly crafted lie. There was no warm embrace in sinking deep, just cold and pressure and the flash of razor edged teeth in the dark.

This alone, this surge of power and leaking mist, had cowed these creatures when she was last here. Here and now their screams to stop their own bodies could not leave their own heads.

She focused her attention on the rotten, parasitized giant hauling itself from the tunnels. It was gray as a corpse, bloated, fat and flesh hanging off of its bones, growths and cysts formed under its skin, wriggling rope thick worms of the impure parasite's flesh wriggling like a puppet's strings under its skin. The only thing that remained fair was its face, flesh preserved and porcelain pale, white blond locks drifting like long waterweed. Its features neither male nor female, but ethereal and inhuman.

Even if she felt it's dead dantian churning, trying to warp her perception, to see a beautiful, chiseled silhouette of masculine beauty.

An eagle screamed, its echo warbling in the water, and a mass of phantom muscle and feathers and ripping talons slammed the corpse puppet in center mass, slamming it back against the far wall, pushed away from the lesser spirits, swarming up around Li Suyin.

The puppet let out a low reverberating groan, that Ling Qi felt in her bones, it lodged in her ears, bouncing in her skull, threatening to burst something. And as it did its massive rotten paw swept down and crushed the eagle phantom's skull.

Its fading body rippled, and erupted into chittering, squealing crimson eyed rats, each gaunt and hungry and mangey in their desperation.

Below, Li Suyin fought, their song could not reach her, nor Xinhong or any others, with Ling Qi here, yet the spirits weren't helpless without their lure. Scales flashed in the dim blue light, they darted and schooled, weaving hallucinations with bent light and glittering water where the spirit failed. The water churned with their control of the chambers qi weight dragging at her friend, invisible bonds seeking her limbs, cudgels of liquid pressure forming and bearing down, imparted force from bare centimeters way.

The water flashed darkly, and two constructs materialized. The driver from before, the horse head, now clad in polished and ceremonial armor, in its hands was clutched a slab of solid mirrored glass cut in the shape of a towering shield. Flanking Suyin with it was a second, wide where it was tall, a skeleton with the low slung head of an ox, with gleaming horns of polished black stone. In its hands was a long wooden pole not tipped with a blade but a pair of curved grasping hooks. A mancatcher, a thing Ling Qi had seen once or twice in the hands of the guard.

The mirror flashed, and the qi invested into the water to control and wield it shattered, all the force imparted into it reflecting outward, in a buffetting wave that scattered the schooling spirits. The mancatcher darted out, catching the closest one, and the parasitized spirit screamed as the barbs installed on its inner surface dug into its skin and flashed with actinic light, sending a rippling tingle of electricity out through the cavern. The captured siren spirit twitched and went lip, wisps of pink leaking from its lips.

Li Suyin herself held poised and steady, her false eye spinning and flashing in its socket, darting around so rapidly that it seemed to blur even in Ling Qi's vision.

"Identifying lowest survival odds, Xinghong, receive data. Begin triage."

The antlion soldier's jaws came together with an echoing crash too loud for mere physical sound as fists crashed together water screamed to a boil.

Ling Qi grimaced and returned her eyes to her own fight, she the last of the thunderous qi of the creatures attack from her head. She had to trust Li Suyin's judgment on that.

Could Sixiang disrupt the parasite spirit's control?

"I can give it a go! Nobody's actually home in there, so I shouldn't have too much trouble," Sixiang whispered. "Just gimme an opening."

Ling Qi spun lazily on a swirl of bubbles as a pawing hand slammed past her crashing against the wall behind. It shook the cavern, spreading cracks through the stone where it impacted. It was only a distraction.

The eerily preserved face of the corpse opened its mouth, full of rowed razor edged teeth and screamed.
The water rippled from the pressure of the thunderous sound, but the physical force was nothing to the disruptive vibration which crashed down on her, emanating through the water.

But her hungry rats were dug in under its skin, and even as they burst with their gluttony, they dulled the emanations that would have driven its former fellows into a higher frenzy. The thunderous force and spiritual reverberations too shattered, Qiyi's threads dulled to solid matte black, the ornaments woven into her hair thrashing, jingling, wetted ribbons curling about her ears.

And the force that would have rattled her bones and shaken up her organs dispersed through the fabric, harmless.

She regarded it calmly as she drifted away on the current, still singing her warsong. It ignored the rats in its flesh careless of the damage to its puppet, save where they chewed close to its tendrils. Good to know. Sixiang, there was the opening.

She threw out a her hand, and from the churning silt and cloudy mist drifting from her dress a quartet of snarling wolves emerged as if darting from high grass, running through the water as if it were air.

The corpse bellowed, tearing at them as they pounced on it and began to savage.

"Right-o, think I got a lock on where to hit!"

She didn't see anything but she felt Sixiang's presence draining from her thoughts and dantian, and sensed their movement through liminal space, a curving streak of rainbow color on the back of her eyes.

She saw one rat in particular jerk, kaleidoscopic color rippling through its fur, somehow managing a manic grin on animal lips as it suddenly clawed with more purpose at the corpse… and leapt directly into its mouth when the spirit opened it to bellow.

Sheer mechanical reflex saw even a corpse gag, and Ling Qi grimaced as bits of flesh and gore streamed past its open lips. She was glad it was already dead.

Rainbow qi flashed in the dim cavern, shining out from every orifice in the puppets preserved face, and suddenly its limbs snapped taut, its muscles straining against the suddenly panicked thrashing of the tendrils under its skin.

They ripped free in a cloud of gore but the corpse, whose eyes now shown with rapidly shifting colors, snapped up a hand to grasp a whole bundle as they tried to snap back into the liminal and retreat.

Ling Qi released her concentration on her phantoms, brushed her hand through the water, parting the veil between material and imagination and stepped through to face the heaving squirming mass of eyes and flesh now trapped close to the surface.

And here, on the other side, she sang a song of frigid death and shattering cold without worry. Pallid and putrid flesh recoiled, blackened, broken apart into drifting chunks that swiftly dissolved into the churning chaos of unformed dream, and something tiny and black shot off, too fast for even her to catch. Disappearing into the liminal deep.

She narrowed her eyes but didn't chase. She'd had a look, a taste, a scent. That was enough for now. She stepped back through the veil, not gone long enough for her silhouette to even flicker.

Somewhere ahead, she felt a pale cyan light brighten as a mass of caked and filthy pollution broke apart in its depths.

"Ew. Ewewewewewewewewew. That felt so grosssss," Sixiang whispered, emanating disgust.

Before Ling Qi, the now badly torn corpse twitched, bobbing limply and beginning to…come apart in the churning waters.

"Corpses are the absolute worst," they gagged.

She was sorry Sixiang had to do that, but thankful that they would. It had ended things much more quickly and exposed some of the creatures…. Mass to actual damage.

And it left the parasitized sirens who remained drifting and confused, bodies twitching as they fought the residual will broken off from the parasite, leftover in the controlling flesh embedded in their bodies.

Not that there were a huge number left. Many drifted in the current twitching, occasionally emitting a spark. Others…

Xinghong emitted a warbling, distorted shriek as he brought a struggling siren pinned in his upper down against the wall, lower arms beginning to blur and pummel the pinned spirit roughly where a human's kidney's would be.

Given the others bobbing around him, bruised, battered and scorched, it wasn;t the first to receive the treatment.

"Xinghong, desist," Li Suyin said calmly, eye flickering examining those still struggling to regain control of their own nerves. "You drove it away Ling Qi?"

"And dislodged some of the impurity, I expect…"
She felt a frisson of tension in the cavern, the crystals glowing along the mouth of the tunnel above flared and pulsed gently. She felt something like a massive eye rolling her way, twitching awake from sleep.

"It seems I should have a conversation with our true host," Ling Qi said quietly. She winced looking over the freed water spirit, those who remained conscious. She let out a breath. Reassurance. Aid. An end to what had ailed them. "Can you please heal them, excise the foreign matter, make sure they can't be taken again.

"I can, best not to strain the place spirit any more than it already has been," Li Suyin replied, idly, already winding a thread around the poor thing XInhong had just been pummeling and winding it-him- in.

She sang another note, soothing, reassuring as the others stirred.

Time to learn what was going on properly.

"You should have been harsher in your reprimands."

Mother's voice was cool and quiet, every syllable measured to express a disappointment deep enough to drown in. Yet, Gu Yanmei was not a child anymore. While those words hurt her, that tone made her wish to lower her head and apologize, she could see the tremors in the surface of the lake, if not its depths.

She did not think she had ever seen her Mother so out of sorts.

Ai Xiaoli sat across from her in the tearoom of the temporary manor house which had been arranged for the tournament viewing. Her mother had not a hair out of place, and only the smallest downward curve of her painted lips, showing sorrow.

But the oven-like interior of the Gu manor was not rippling with distortions of heat, but rather, manifested discontent.

"I felt it was more important that Xiulan receive support and encouragement toward recovery," Gu Yanmei said, only the slight sheen of sweat on her brow showing the intensity of her Mother's regard upon her. "While I have scolded her a great deal, it would have been folly to push her into the despair which could have consumed her in the first days."

Her sister had been listless and fragile lying in that bed. The tears flowing as she acclimated by degrees to the now chronic pain that would define her life for decades or centuries to come had shaken Yanmei's heart. If she had not already breached the fourth realm, she might have endured a heart demon, seeing what the result of failure to cultivate the divine fire of Shen within her flesh would be like in no uncertain terms.

Mother's long eyelashes drooped down, her eyes drifting shut in acknowledgement. "...That was correct. I see it in her even now. But, I know you Yanmei. Your skill with words is not so crude. You could have reassured her, shown her the way back to proper self regard without encouraging her recklessness."

"Only a body forged and purified into a vessel to match my own can contain the sparks she has taken into her flesh," Yanmei said. "I will not encourage my little sister to live the rest of her life in such pain."

"And I have read the reams of scrolls provided by the Sect's physicians. A cultivation of the body into the middling stages of bronze would be sufficient for her to live a life no worse than a grave poisoned veteran," Ai Xiaoli said. "And from there she might make a careful climb to the fourth realm through safer methods over the course of decades."

"Now she seeks to burn herself pure and match your speed. She will only hurt herself more in doing so. Pain can be endured. Death cannot."

"I have found a smooth path, at least to this place. The mountain yet looms high, but I stand undaunted. I am happy Mother," Gu Yanmei said quietly, tracing her fingers around the rim of her cup, the tea within, cultivated in the gardens of Phoenix home, came back to boil before she raised it to her lips, letting the heat and flavor settle in her core. This was a conversation she and Mother had already had, back at her own end of year tournament.

When Mother had recognized her ambitions.

"You are," Mother acknowledged. There was a grudging note in her low, soft voice, but it was a small thing. The ghost of something more intense. "My daughter, the gold-clad and glorious, who seeks to embody flame-in-metal. It is not what I wanted for you, but I acknowledge that it is your path. However, Yanmei, you understand the gulf in talent that lies between you and your sisters, do you not?"

Her hand tightened on the cup fractionally, disturbing the bubbling liquid within. She lowered her head in acknowledgement. She did understand. She was the unusual one, in finding cultivation such a smooth experience. Where other's experienced a climb up a sheer cliff, she experienced a pleasant stroll.

It had been difficult to reconcile, as she so swiftly surpassed them all. Just as she had found herself at an increasing distance with her brother and sister disciples, save for the few who kept a modicum of pace.

She could admit she had uncharitable thoughts about their focus and effort in her first year or two at the Sect. How could they be content with such trundling speed? There were a hundred, hundred ways they could streamline their schedules, improve their efficiency, remove unnecessary cruft which took up cultivation time.

But she had come to see that following her methods only brought misery to most, and rarely even improved their cultivation much. Even Gu Xiulan was not…. Like her in the aftermath. She had tried, but in the end, she worried that she had actually made things worse.

It was that friend of hers who had convinced her to stop trying to break herself.

"...You say I am skilled with words, but when it comes to matters of inner motivation…. I am not. You are right Mother. There is a gulf between my sisters and I, and it is one I cannot begin imagining a path to bridging."

Her Mother sighed, her head low. "That is what cultivation is. Pulling away, further and further until you are naught but an island in the darkness, looking uncomprehending on those you once loved."

"And yet you reached for the fifth realm, only a step below sovereignty," Gu Yanmei said quietly.

An eye cracked open, deep pale blue, the unruffled surface which pulled at Gu Yanmei, which enticed her deeper, down down into resplendent waters where all could drown softly in darkness.

"I did. But you understand, don't you Yanmei. By the time your Father stole this flower from that cruel garden… It was far too late to stop. And even now, I must dread the day when the man I love makes himself into naught but a forgefire, or I should become a mask of silk over a sharpened blade."

Gu Yanmei could only close her eyes. She did understand. By the time one broke into the fourth realm… there was no contentment with your place, only failure or stagnation. To forge a Name, and with it a purpose, the drive which was the fuel for the furnace of Shen generation. To cultivate beyond mere qi… it required an ambition, a drive to change an aspect of the world.

Lower cultivators did not understand. So many thought they could scrabble up the mountain with naught but the desperate animal fear of death to drive them.

Impossible. Such a small desire could not support a wielder of Law, let alone a Sovereign. There was a reason high realm corpse Immortals were so rare. Such a fear could not survive in one who had seen and felt what came with the rigors of breaking through to the fourth realm.

"It is true. But it is also too late for my sister."

"She is only in the third realm. The injury she has done herself can be undone. Do you think I would not burn a thousand favors and a palace of coin to see my daughter healed?"

"And to undo what she has done would cripple her advancement. Mother. You must understand that this would cripple her." Gu Yanmei insisted.

Her Mother's tiny, dainty knuckles rapped once against the tabletop, and the entire manor shook. Gu Yanmei flared her own qi against the wash of her mothers power, as the whole room and everything in it wavered like it was no more than a reflection on water.

"I know this."

"You do. So why do you still deny it, Mother?" Gu Yanmei replied quietly.

She did not reply.