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

"I won't constrain your thoughts too much," Ling Qi said slowly. "This isn't a commission or a trade or even a favor. I think… the shape of it should be something you decide."

She'd have to think as well, decide where the obligations of her own heart lay. Should she try to compose something, which might discern her feelings better?

"But, it should be something for peace. I have war gear in plenty." Her missing flute aside, which she… still didn't feel right asking him for. It was something she had to resolve, before the war, but this wasn't the moment for it. "If you want to make me a gift, then let's not make it a thing for battle. It feels wrong."

Xuan Shi mulled over her words in silence for a time, and slowly nodded. "One understands the sentiment…. It speaks to the times that those things were the first thoughts, ones mind came upon." He turned his head, looking out over the lake thoughtfully.

"An idea occurs."

"Oh? Already? Whats in your thoughts?"

"One shall not share."

Ling Qi frowned. "What? You can't mention it and then say that."

He smiled behind his collar, tipping his hat down. "One can. Surprise has value."

Ling Qi huffed with faux irritation, crossing her arms. "I suppose I shall allow it then."

She didn't know that this feeling was what one could could call romantic, but… it was a nice thing. She would have to explore it more fully when there were less ominous things on the horizon.

"Lady Ling is generous."

"That is unacceptable," she said wryly. "I allowed it for formalities sake, but you will use my name."

He chuckled, turning away from the lake fully. "One will remember, Ling Qi. Shall we walk back? Time marches on and…. One did not truly expect this outing when the journey was planned."

She glanced up at the sky, wincing a little at the position of the sun. "Ugh… I suppose so, if I don't complete my days workload then Lady Cai is going to bury me in fresh correspondence tomorrow."

"An awful fate," Xuan Shi agreed, straight faced.
"It is," Ling Qi sniffed. "Back through the waterfall, or straight across?"

"...The waterfall, that much time can be spared."

They could at that, she supposed. No matter how much work remained to prepare the fief for their journey north.

The days that followed, were far more routine, reviewing travel plans, double checking the town planning that was within her responsibility, spending time with her family, and overseeing the burgeoning religious rites of their town of Shenglu. She had to admit, gathering up a score of burly quarrymen to ensure that their work songs were not straying from the desired format of the spirits under their feet was not an experience she had ever thought to have.

Thankfully at least one of them did know how to properly carry a tune and remember the right rhythm, so he had ended the day with a promotion and she could have some comfort that things should remain well there for a month or two, without her intervention. She could see how it was that so many cultivators might slow down so badly as they took up more and more worldly responsibility.

But that would not be her. She would find the time to cultivate, to keep finding the next steps on her path.

"It is not often that my lessons are regarded as the break in ones work day," Meng Duyi said, leaning heavily on his stick as they climbed the graded path, climbing the cliffside that backed Shenglu. "You are truly ill suited to stillness, for one so steeped in yin."

"My need to move is one of the balancing factors in my cultivation, I think," Ling Qi said thoughtfully. "I'm still often reactive, but…"

"You feel you must seek out new things to react to. A strange but not unheard of twist upon these things," Meng Duyi agreed. "Though being well anchored to duty is a good trait for one who will lead and rule."

Ling Qi grimaced, she still wasn't truly enthusiastic about that part of being a Baron, the administrative duty, at least, the responsibility over many lives was something she had accepted at this point. "Perhaps. I can only hope it's enough. May I ask why you've chosen this place for our conversation?"

"The vista is demonstrative, the cliff is yet a border and barrier, a useful lecture aid, and this old man simply enjoys a good climb," Meng Duyi replied. "You have asked after the foundations, the thoughts which underlie the Forest ways, and what the fundamental difference between it and the Imperial ways are."

"Not the old and new ways?"

"No. Neither is older than the other, it is a false comparison," Meng Duyi replied. "We do not practice what the earliest Weilu did. How could we, in ten thousand years, the landscape has changed beneath us."

She remained silent as they mounted the clifftop, and turned to look over the vast expanse of the lake and the vale surrounding it, stretching out into the rolling rocky hills that gradually rose into more mountains.

"Look upon this. The majesty of nature, to a mortal, even to a young cultivator, it evokes a primal awe, this is the world untouched by man, eternal and magnificent," Meng Duyi said, inclining his head. "But it is not so. These stones travel, these woods die and grow anew, even that great lake which you have contracted is a young thing by the standard of the world. Iit was not here, when the Horned Lord walked the world, when the glacial ice still crouched atop this cliff. The ground changes, a wise man must be ready to change with it."

Ling Qi listened silently.

"One could call this the difference, the power of pacts and negotiation such as a geomancer of the Weilu tradition must commit. Spirits change, if differently than men do. Their long existences may be broken up, into sharp divides, or they may evolve with changing patterns of wind and water. The River Jing has shifted its southern course from east to west and back again a dozen times in our recordings alone."

"We cannot bind the world in place. We can only bend it to our needs. Adjust, react, negotiate. In many ways, our methods are deeply yin."

"And the Imperial ones are the opposite," Ling Qi said thoughtfully, looking up at the lip of the cliff the birds that winged by only a little overhead. "They are forceful, domineering, yang."

"It is so. I will not pretend they have no points. Their origin was not ours. Even before Tsu set the course of seasons, the lands of the south were rich with the bounty of the forest. In the crumbling citadels and pollution left by the fallen gods in the north, our accommodations would have been foolish."

"That is a surprising thing to hear you say, teacher. Why so?" Ling Qi asked curiously.

"Because there are spirits which men must deal with using a closed fist," Meng Duyi said, rapping the point of his staff against the stone as they reached the top of the cliff. "The Rasping Wind and its millions of vile children, the Twelve Poxes, the foul winds which blow from the eastern wastes. And The spirits of the Celestial Peaks, many of them were akin to these, the broken and malicious leavings of the Dragon Gods."

"To understand a thing, one must comprehend how it arose. To the first geomancers of the Celestial Peaks, to do anything but cut and carve and tame through force and guile was foolish."

"Were the Peaks truly so unnatural?" Ling Qi wondered.

"An incorrect construction," Meng Duyi said. "Natural. A meaningless term. Is a wasps nest 'unnatural' because it is constructed? No. Rather the Celestial Peaks are the Celestial Peaks, and the Emerald Seas are the Emerald Seas. Different foundations give rise to different houses. This is where the Imperial method errs, it sees all lands as the same malicious ruin on which it was built, and so seeks to 'tame' them all in the same way. One can quibble over which spirits are best treated with as neighbors, and which are best exorcized and driven forth, but the base assumption that all must be locked into their current shape and only allowed change when it suits their engineering is where we must butt heads with those northerners."

"Is that it then, that the Weilu method sees spirits as people, to be negotiated with, fought, lived with or slain, and the imperial method sees them more as… obstacles to be broken down, repurposed, or removed?"

"That is how most understand it. The Imperial method is suspicious of spirits. Down to its core, it is built to protect men, no matter the cost to spirits. This has its own costs to those men in the future."

Ling Qi frowned, looking over the vista. She imagined it as it might be in the future, roads winding through it like veins, the lights of little settlements springing up nestled amidst the hills and spreading along the curve of the lake. She could understand that urge. Nature could be beautiful, but… so too were the works of people, and if it came down too it, she was human, she valued human lives. Zhengui, Hanyi Sixiang, these were her family it was not the same as imagining intruding on random spirits of wood and hill.

"What is the downside of the Weilu method then?" She asked quietly.

Meng Duyi was silent, and she worried for a moment that she had offended him. Instead the old man rolled his shoulders, bones cracking and popping as he straightened up. "Danger. Where two tribes meet, squabbles will come, men and spirits are more different than that. Men will give offense, spirits will take where the words of a contract are loose. The flexibility of our method, is its own weakness. Diversity is strength, it is also a promise of conflict."

Ling Qi frowned, she didn't know if she like that particular construction of words, but she did feel some resonation there. "The cost of multitude is multitude. The benefit of multitude is multitude. Folly to dream of ending one without ending the other."

She stilled, finding herself pinned by Meng Duyi's gaze, a sharp and searching stare, a pressure which made her shoulders shake. And then it was gone, as ephemeral as the passing wind. "Where did you hear that phrasing, Baroness."
Ling Qi was silent. She did not want to answer that. Not when those words bubbled up from the dissolved qi of one who called himself Arch Heretic.

One she was going to have to speak with soon at that.

After a long, tense moment, Meng Duyi turned his head away. "No matter. Those kind of words, they broke free under the Radiant Tyrant. But, Baroness, one should also consider this; want is the root of life, want is the root of suffering. It is not wrong to seek what lies beyond this petty and broken world, to seek the peace in oneness, in the completion of the soul.

The error of the Hui was not in seeking that, but in the mad dream that transcendence could be forced on others. Pfah, deeper than that, the idea that one who dreamed of such mastery of other men could ever call themselves enlightened."

She felt a stirring in the scraps of that qi, a response that wanted to bubble up, but she clamped down on it, else she arouse the older man's suspicion more.

"I am too inexperienced to say, I was only repeating a thing that I had heard, forgive my ignorance, Sir Meng."

"It is nothing, just a turn of phrase that reminded me of an obnoxious, peacock of a man," Meng Duyi snorted. "Regardless, let me ask you, have you decided where you wished to take these lessons first. You have spoken of borders and doors as your interests, but in geomancy these are much different subjects. Which do you intend to pursue first?"

Ling Qi relaxed a hair, glad that the awkward moment was past. Ultimately she had long left the study of formations and geomancy fallow, but to begin, she wished to…

[ ] Study the nature of borders
[ ] Study the nature of doors