"Oh shit, oh fuck, whyyyyy why is it squirming like that!"
Liu Xin's cry echoed up from the tunnel. Xiao Fen's hand knifed out, cutting through the reaching fleshy grasper that snapped out at her like an overlong tongue from a crack in the crumbling stone. Her fingernails sheared through it, and veins of toxic black raced back down the severed length, leaving it spasming and dying, rotting to sludge even as she raced by.
"No, no, no, no no. Hells no! Get blasted you slimy shit!"
The tunnels rocked, tongues of flame scorching the stone, the shockwave yanking at her hair and the hems of her gown. The stone groaned, pebbles and worse raining from the ceiling. She swerved through them, the dark passage flashing by in a blur. A second blast erupted. The ceiling groaned like a dying giant, and a slab of rock fell from the ceiling of the tunnel, thousands of kilograms of solid rock collapsing atop her.
Xiao Fen snorted irritability, qi pulsing through her veins, lowered her shoulder, and charged through it. Rock burst into dust, bounced from her skin, scraped across her clothes, and shattered into powder on its impact with her body.
She had told him it would end up like this.
***
"You really don't gotta do this Xiao Fen."
"I am doing it regardless." She replied flatly. She did not understand why he had to make things so difficult. "Assuming Senior Sister does not object."
The short, blue-haired young woman whose workshop they had arrived at chewed her lower lip. Xiao Fen did not understand the purpose of the anxious charade. The calculating metallic gleam of the talisman eye in her scarred socket, and the near-intoxicating miasma of impurity and blood aspected qi rising from her shimmering gown like a cloud.
"W-well. I am not offering points for multiple inner disciples. It's not in my budget you see."
"I do not require these. Will my presence disrupt the task?"
"Xiao Fen, c'mon. Senior Sister is just having me test out her new deployable spatial fortifications," Liu Xin sighed. "I'll be fine."
She knew that. She also knew this woman was a close companion of that girl. Let alone the dark rumors that swirled around her, of the dark experiments she worked under the aegis of the Sect.
"I was looking to test the strength of the warding and spatial infrastructure against common breaking techniques, As well as human testing the results of spatial displacement."
Xiao Fen glowered. Such techniques were highly irregular in the hands of mere third realms. The Emerald Seas was extremely lax in who it allowed to practice such things.
"And to make sure they don't warp too much underground, right? Cause the shishigui got their own space-bending tricks."
"Quite a lot of them," Li Suyin sighed. "Zhenli? Two inhabitants shouldn't strain the prototype unduly."
The dog-sized pink spider crouched over the fortified hole in the sunken earth waved her pedipalps in agreement. "Rated for up to six individuals."
"I suppose it's fine then…"
***
She sensed the end of the solid earth and stone she was plowing through long before her eyes were freed to see. There was a space beyond, hazy and humid with heat and a pulse that she could only compare to the beat of a vast heart
Liu Xin crouched, panting in the middle of a circle of scorched stone, ropy veins of gooey organic matter already growing in jagged rootlike patterns back toward him from the twitching, pulsing walls. Before him stood a hulk of soft, quivering pink flesh in the shape of a tall man, broad of shoulder and chest… it was a skinless thing, all raw muscle and sinew, connected like a puppet through strands of soft flexing white tendon that fed back into the walls.
"Don't f-fucking touch me. I spirit, I know, I know you're not…" Liu Xin ground out.
Ah. Liu Xin did have to work on his tendency to drop into common vernacular under stress. He had turned down her shock treatments. She might have to insist. But she thought she might understand now, the threat that had spilled in during the rupture.
By the time she had finished that thought, her feet had torn through slick, slippery flesh, and she bounded into the circle of stone, trailing pebbles and grit and embers of black fire.
***
"We're seeing a strange fluctuation in the trench circumference during the turn. Junior Brother Liu Xin, please relay back the breaking operation you used again?"
"Uhh Stream Splitting Stone method. Just one of the basic five. Didn't leave a scratch as far as I can tell…"
"That should be so. Yet.. Why is the spatial frequency fluctuating so chaotically? I…"
"Oh dear."
Xiao Fen looked up sharply, there was a change in the air, a…. Leak in the spatially fortified tunnel.
The world spun.
***
"Contact with our senior sister?" Xiao Fen asked flatly.
"Only a quick message. She's… disciplining the malfunction? Kinda garbled, so maybe that's wrong?"
Xiao Lin grunted, watching the bulky thing stalk toward them, quivering tendons stretching thin between it and the wall. The fleshy tendrils were almost back at their feet. She wouldn't be surprised if this was simply part of the testing, but she also would not be surprised if it was otherwise. "That thing, I assume you are seeing something different from me?"
Liu Xin's face flushed scarlet, and the dust whorling around his hands snapped and popped with dozens of tiny firecracker explosions.
"Dark qi then. Desire based. I suppose it will extrude a construct based on my Mistress, to paralyze me with loyalty," Xiao Fen shook her head. As if they were not
well-conditioned and instructed on such an obvious ploy. With the arts inlaid in her very blood, nothing short of a wielder of law would even stand….
Her eyes flicked to the side, where something moved in the shadows, and bloomed from them. A grin, a smile, a crescent of white floating among a halo of stars.
Got you again junior sister, I can't believe you actually fell for this prank. Are you sure you can watch Mei-mei's back?"
"Xiao Fen, what…?"
Her hiss was high and loud enough to deafen her own ears as she shot off into that shadow. This smirking, irreverent, overly familiar
witch.
Her heart soared as she struck out, and the grin faltered, finally, finally faltered. Her knife hand cut through and scattered strands of starry hair, her rising knee brushed past silk, and then, and Then! Her forehead cracked across the bridge of that irritating woman's nose!
Triumph.
"Xiao Fen!"
She jerked as heat and fire washed over her, and the shadows evaporated. It left heat, it left wetness, it left writhing flesh clinging to her face with the consistency of mud.
The wall was cratered, her forehead buried in an inch of rock layered with bubbling flesh. Tendrils clung to her cheeks, to her hair. She felt them squirming between her teeth, and breathed out furious sparks, biting through the tendrils and grinding them to paste as she wrenched herself out of the rock.
She was
filthy now.
Today, Xiao Fen decided, was an awful day.
***
"I am so, so sorry for this," Li Suyin bowed before them both, standing in the mouth of the tunnel. "I never imagined the assistive intelligence I installed into the arrays would become so… um… mischievous."
"Mischievous." Xiao Fen repeated dully. She squeezed her hair in her hands unmindful of the needles prickling her palms. Frothy pinkish muck was wrung out, splattering on the rock.
"She, um, didn't mean to harm anyone. I cultivated her from a moon fairy with some assistance from an expert, but I thought I'd instilled proper behavior guidelines during the growth process," Li Suyin said swiftly. Under her arm was a small cage-like one that might be used for a bird.
Inside it was a winking, bobbing coin of ethereal silver light. Xiao Fen glowered at it. She did not sense contrition at all.
"You're uh… you're actually doing all that artificial spirit stuff people talk about, Senior Sister?" Liu Xin asked. He too was drenched in… fluids.
"Of course, the Duchess has shown there so many fascinating avenues to take, and my impurity research has revealed many routes not particularly well explored. The synergy with automaton and reactive formation research is quite high," Li Suyin said cheerfully. "Um, but yes. She didn't intend any harm. I don't know what came over her…"
Xiao Fen's eyes narrowed. She knew. An expert. She knew well that Li Suyin had been housing a certain dreaming moon spirit for some time.
Even now… Ling Qi was still toying with her.
