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

"Take the core, I'll have all the reagents I need, from Lady Cai's coffers," Ling Qi said, with a small chuckle.

"I appreciate it," Li Suyin said cheerfully, as the beast thrashed, trapped in its own, warping, cancerously bubbling flesh. "Now."

Her qi flared, and the tendril wound her skin spasmed violently, making her friend's flesh split, beads of blood appearing briefly, only to be sealed again a moment later. The cordlike muscle in the tendril went taut, and then contracted, ripping the beast out of the liminal vortice ahead of them on the back of its own strength

It was almost anticlimactic, how pathetic the true body looked. A wriggling pill-like lump of black flesh no more than two handspans long, host to countless wriggling cilia which formed the base of liminal tendrils. It had no eyes or ears, its only feature was an open squealing wormlike mouth. Black ichor gushed from that mouth as its form seized and the remaining tendrils flickered. Ling Qi grimaced at the wet, tearing sound that emerged within it, the sound of pockets of fluid rupturing.

Finally, it went limp, and a dull black shape, oblong, the size of a chicken egg, squirmed out. It stank so badly that her eyes watered, even through Qiyi's fabric. She kept her eyes on the twitching corpse even as it began to melt into a sizzling acidic puddle, and waved her hand through the air, pushing the veil perforated by the dead things tentacles shut once again, sealing off the flow of liminal energies into this unstable sealed space.

Li Suyin merely stepped forward, shaking out her palm as her body expelled the liquifying remains of the tendril through the hole in her palm. "My, such a high content, and with a novel aspect too. XInghong, store that please."

Ling Qi stared at the wound in her friend's palm even as it closed. She still did not understand how the tendril had breached her technique. It didn't…"

"I think it does. You already decided to preserve choice, didn't you?"

Ling Qi hid a grimace. Of course… hadn't she already accepted that she couldn't let herself become a smothering force? If someone under her protection WANTED to face hardship and harm, knowingly so…

Of course her technique would be like nothing but mundane mist then.

Xinghong's clawed fist thumped against his chest as he stepped out ahead of her, scooped up the sizzling impurity core and… swallowed it. Well of course. Why not at this point.

"I feel like that's kinda the vibe she has in the Inner Sect, with folks her own age. Course the upper ranks are all 'oh what a precocious junior' and stuff." Sixiang chuckled.

Ling Qi chuckled weakly, accepting the subject change, pressing her palms to her temples as she reached out to the spirit.

The Deed is done, I must ask that you withdraw, my humble self cannot continue this level of communion."

Immediately, the throbbing ache in her head seceded, leaving her to sigh, shoulders sagging as her head was once again left with only two occupants.

Pollution flows. Taint remains. Corruption levels passively rising.

"I know," Ling Qi said aloud. "We shouldn;t dally, will you still be well to perform the sealing?"

Li SUyin's bone armor was disassembling before her eyes, vanishing back into storage piece by piece. Her face was drawn and wan, but she smiled nonetheless. "I will, but I think I may need a rest after."

"I'm sure Su Ling can carry you on her back, like she used to when you tired yourself out."

"I'm not that exhausted," Li Suyin huffed. "But we shouldn't take any further time

The journey to the broken fire node was made quickly, but compared to the frenetic pace of the chase, it felt like an idle stroll, traveling through the tunnels, watching silty pollution slowly clear while the underworld flora writhed and slowly died, choking on the purified waters made for a morbid sight. But soon they moved from tunnels of white and gray stone, crossing a threshold where the rock turned black and rippling in texture, wide passages that still whispered with the heat of the earth's molten blood.

It was here that the pollution was thickest. The water nearly had the consistency of tar for long patches, and many legged things burrowed and wormed through it like they might mud on the surface. Here the underworld environment clung on with tenacity, and sought to drink the very heat from their bones.

Ling Qi pushed their seeking fronds aside with only half a thought.

The crystal chamber lay at the top of a great lava tube ten meters across, plunging into the earth. The crystal itself looked like an open cyst in the stone, shattered crimson crystal slowly going black like infected flesh, a sludgy pool of melted material pooled in the crater at its center. They soon left it behind though, descending another forty meters or so before they finally found the wide scarred split in the tube, which led out into a low ceilinged, abyssal tunnel, from which impurity spewed in great black clouds. She felt Sixiang shifting uncomfortably in her head, and Qiyi drawing herself tighter as if to close even the most miniscule gaps in her threads.

But Li Suyin's impurity protection held.

"I will begin the ritual and placement now. Would you please commune with the spirit? If it interferes and reacts in the wrong way it could very easily ruin things."

"Soothe the patient while you perform the stitches, hm?"

"You understand why it's a vital task then, since it can't be sedated."

Ling Qi nodded, drifting back from the seal as Li Suyin extended her hands and began to materialize the Five Temples Seal, like the array above, it came into existence only slowly, a cross hatched disc of dark gray metal some three meters wide and half a meter thick, inscribed with complex arrays filled with jade and gem dust.

As XInghong hauled it into the center of the split in the stone and Li Suyin waved her head, calling out five steel tipped jade spikes in different shades to spin out and hover equidistant over the stone around the plug, ready to be pounded in, Ling Qi closed her eyes and retreated into her own mind, and reached out to the now slightly dim and distant of latticing crystal radiating out through the spiritual realm which surrounded them.

Attuner.

We have reached the breach and are beginning the seal, please trust our method, honored spirit, and that the sensations you feel are no attack. You have my pledge, and your lingering connection.

Li Suyin probably would have beaten her over the head with the Five Temples Seal if she properly understood the level of connection she had allowed with the Piper spirit, to fold their senses together so acutely. The spirit could after all, easily crush her mind by merely flooding her with sensation and memory until the mortal channels gave out, burned out.

"You're lucky I understand your reasoning so well, you big doof," Sixiang grumbled.

The Piper, whatever else it was, was not an entity that would do this though, not without being brought through some truly unlikely decision paths. There was not a chance it would hurt her, but there was only a very very small chance.

And not through the method beside.

I hear and watch. The Attuner understands the breadth of my gaze.

Especially as it could easily pull from her own, feel her intentions too deeply for deception.

"I do. Harmonizer of Lands, Composer of Strands. More proper names than Piper, no?"

The spirit's answer was a lingering silence, a holding thrum in its song, devoid of all but the base beat of its existence.

"Six Hundred and Seventy Ninth Incarnum of Discordia Realignment Orchestra."

Ling Qi sucked in a sharp breath, the throbbing pain in her head that had subsided coming to the fore in an instant, as the veins in her temples. It echoed with the weight of age which exceeded the Empire, which exceeded Tsu the Diviner and the Legendary King's, harking back to the dim ages before any true history was known.

And it sang with edges of jagged glass and crumbled rubble, a structure that had broken and receded, made less again and again, broken and receded…Six Hundred Seventy Nine times.

"There would have been no Six Hundred and Eightieth Incarnum."

"There would not."

What was left here was only the barest, minimum scraps, less even with the two shattered and corrupted nodes.

"What purpose do you bear?"

"None. All macro functions are defunct. Replaced. Maintenance of the internal environment and spirit creche remains. Knowledge of the Discordia project lost in the seventeenth Incarnum. Irrelevant to the current environment. Harmonious Memorial Piper. Sufficient name."

"Then let it be so, Harmonious Memorial Piper."

She felt in her bones Li Suyin's ceremony progression, a shiver, a ripple through the liminal as a steel spike and its jade cap were pounded in, calling on one of the great spirits of the Empire. So too she felt the reflexive twitch of the spirit all around her, the reaction from its foundations, a roar of rage at the intrusion of a foreign sovereign.

Or so it should have been, it bent through the layers of spirit built atop those foundations, and emerged more as the raspy cough of an ill old man. Li Suyin's ritual went on without interruption.

Your song. It sings harmony. The ordering of seasons. The replacement of fallen function, the fall of chaos.

What is YOUR purpose?

Ling Qi tilted her head back, that was a fair question, given her own. Though she was far from finding an answer to that herself.

"Life's a lot easier when you've only got one track to run on," Sixiang chuckled wryly. "I can't even say it's less fun… but I kinda like stumbling around a bit anyway, you know?"

Ling Qi chuckled. She agreed with Sixiang, even if she knew it wasn't something that could last forever. One who chose to seek the height of cultivation didn't have that privilege.

Why did she sing? Why did she seek to be heard? It was because…

+2 Expression XP

[ ] The truth of art is Communication. There are many paths to the Way. The Master of Communication seeks to show how each path may join one future.

[ ] The truth of art is Communication. There are many paths to many ways. The Master of Communication seeks the parallel, the flow of many paths in harmony.