This was where where Want brushed against Isolation, Ling Qi thought idly. She squeezed down on Sixiangs hand thoughtfully, running her thumb in a circle along the back of the muse's hand. It felt real and insubstantial at the same time; it was too light for all that it was warm.
More or less, ya think? Their voice imprinted on her thoughts, not bothering with spoken words.
Both. She thought. Too much or too little were both equally poisonous.
She reached for a phantom with her spirit and held it captive. She couldn't help but think of the times when she had seen a spider, mundane or Suyin's, winding up its meals in silk as she felt it struggle to break free from her grip.
Was this really right? Scraps and fragments they might be, but they still felt alive, especially at the higher spiritual frequencies.
…She had to develop her technique, which required practice.
"The first vulnerability in this desire is its lack," Ling Qi said quietly. "Steal a person's hunger, remove a person's fear… they'll be discomfited maybe, but would they even notice in the heat of battle?"
Shu Yue gave no response, merely letting her verbalize her thoughts.
"Steal a person's desire for love, acclaim, community… and would they even remember why they should be fighting?" Ling Qi mused.
I can think of a few reasons, but they are usually still tied to those.
She nodded faintly. Anger and hatred were both strong motivators, as was the first fear, the simple drive for survival… If she could take that from them, there would be no fight to begin with.
And even if it can't be stolen whole, steal away the desire for support between comrades, corrode the desire to bring pride to their clan or nation, how much of an army formation collapses as the first form of desire reasserts itself?
Ling Qi turned over the phantom in her grasp, examining the currents and veins of Want that ran through it, binding it together. She heard the distant weeping of a woman, driven to the point of breaking her body with labor to provide just one more day of shelter for her children.
Just one diverted trail, one pluck of virulent darkness, and despair overcomes determination, the memory embodied in the phantom ending long before she sold herself into indenture. The phantom crumbled. She felt the cold churning in her gut worsen.
"It is the most straightforward path, but not easily accomplished. To sever, to steal these things… against a peer or any cultivator who has even the foundations of a Name, it will be a difficult task, until and unless you are already well under their defense," Shu Yue said. "The second method, then."
She could see that. Excising things… the mind resisted that far more. Dampening was a little easier, but it was still more noticeable.
Amplification, then, as you did with the hunger.
She nodded, and another phantom fell into her grasp. It writhed around, nearly breaking free. A man who was brought in, the leader of a small cell of criminals stealing and selling from the Hui-run food warehouses and granaries, storing Xiangmen's bounty for export.
The spirit lingered here from its last memories: interrogation… It was not a kind interrogation, and this far in the roadways, for such a minor crime. There were only mundane methods.
She understood well that the keepers of the law were rarely the friends of those who lived at the bottom. He'd broken at the end, sold out his fellows. He'd been released for his troubles and died months later from infections due to the damage taken in interrogation.
This was a spirit of torment, reliving those last days again and again in aching clarity.
…Darkness flowed, pulsed, fortified, black veins running through spiritual matter realigning. Magnify desire, magnify want to community, to comrade.
The memory changed; he died spitting in the interrogator's face, satisfaction in his heart. The spirit crumbled.
It didn't churn her stomach as severely as the last one, but it was still bittersweet. She couldn't help but feel…
"Inspiring a suicidal stand is useful if the target is your mission goal, but less so otherwise," Shu Yue's voice spoke gently. "It was not the best practice piece to choose."
I don't think there's anything wrong with not liking this. I'd dislike it a lot more if you were fine with it.
Ling Qi let out a low, even breath, recentering herself in the web of churning, lingering phantoms
"Transforming love into possessive paranoia, manipulating a web of bonds to create envy between its anchor points, and disrupt cohesion, to inflate or deflate the importance of different communal loyalties to cause friction within larger circles. All of these are within the sphere of this kind of desire," Shu Yue
"...Many ways to manipulate the connections within a group to weaken and disrupt, but this is all most useful before an actual fight starts," Ling Qi said quietly.
She could see, painfully, how effective arts like these might be. So much of her own Way and Domain was tied to benefits for those she loved and harm for those she hated.
…She supposed the easiest one to affect with this art would be herself. She knew her own defenses best of all. It wasn't even truly that far from traditional cultivation… more direct if anything. And once you had come to the notion of… cultivating people this way, was it truly unthinkable to use it to…
Would she ever be tempted to 'snip' something if she felt it was causing Biyu trouble in her cultivation, holding her back from ascending in the Way?
She wouldn't. She absolutely would not, but someone who had not bound the axiom of Choice into their soul… she could see how they would.
"You grasp the thrust of these arts well. These soften and sabotage, rather than striking decisive blows." Shu Yue agreed.
A sidearm, or well, a knife you stick in when you're already in their head.
She made a face; she thought, thank you so much for that image, Sixiang.
Even if it was accurate.
"What you're teaching me wasn't meant as a weapon at all, any more than a rake or a set of shears is," Ling Qi said quietly. "That's the trick in this lesson."
"I would not call it a trick. A machete is made to chop brush and bamboo, and a saber is meant to chop men; there was a point where the tool developed into a weapon," Shu Yue replied. "I am guiding you to do so. I also understand the discomfort in this realization. I thought it better you come upon it yourself."
"But, there is another layer of Desire, perhaps the one most would think of first when mediating upon Want," Shu Yue's voice resumed, cutting short her thoughts. "That texts speak on forfeiting first before they begin to carefully approach discarding or reducing the two you have brought up first."
"Possession. The desire for things. For wealth, for fulfillment, for comfort." Ling Qi said. "Or… no, it's not only tied to physical things. Authority, control… security."
It's hard to tell apart from the last category in that way, but I think you gotta make a distinction. There's things that people understand as coming from other people, and here… things that people understand as being theirs."
Entitlement. 'Deserve'. Shu Yue's discussion with her on Yan Renshu's mindset drifted to the fore. Everything he had was deserved; what others had was illegitimate, by whatever excuse.
"...I'm not sure how to weaponize this… I can turn it over in my mind. I think… this kind of desire is something more complex and finicky. It's what drives when one's basic needs are fulfilled. It is still not an evil thing to me… even if I can see how the excess can cause so much harm.
How many phantoms writhed here, at this still higher layer of the dream she adjusted to? Individual forms were now more apparent, the shades of ministry workers and supplicants, of guard officers, magistrates, and notaries.
What was wrong with insisting that their fingers be greased a little to make the gears of the ministry turn a little quicker? What was a 'forgotten' petition that allowed them to go home to their wife an hour sooner? What was a case decided against all evidence when doing otherwise would ruin the chance for promotion? What was a few dead beggars when it meant the street under their authority could be declared free of vagrants? What was a condemnation of a man for fraud when it meant their friend could gain a new business? What was a few alterations to records to show that the homes in the way of the new construction on the roots outside were fraudulently owned? What was the suffering of a few hundred mortals to better refine an art that would change countless lives? What was the nightmares of a city compared to the ascension of a god? What was? What was What was…
Ling Qi spat a gobbet of blood from her mouth and shuddered, pressing her palms to her currently sightless eyes. She closed her mind like a woman violently slamming the shutters against a storm outside. The desires before were simple things, straightforward things, bits of memories, and self-narrative; each of these numerous phantoms scoured the inside of her skull with a lifetime of context.
"These phantoms are, by necessity, more complex things," Shu Yue said, though she felt something off, an odd twinge to their voice. She could have imagined it, something brought on as she purged the foreign whispers from her mind.
"...This is part of what the Duchess strips away, isn't it," Ling Qi croaked. "The comforting lies, the distance from indirect consequences. That… it burns away the webs we weave ourselves, telling us fulfilling our greed hurts no one who matters and makes all sins clear and stark. This is the layer where her light burns most stark."
"Not the point of the lesson, but correct," Shu Yue said. "That is why her final question was 'What do you most regret?'. What was felt after the full weight of all they had done through every choice was confronted in its fullness, with all rationalization stripped away, was the most telling test of character."
She remembered what the woman who ran the Gold Autumn school had said describing The Duchess' purge of the Ministries; the answer from the head of her ministry office had been many years ago. 'Angering you, your Grace.' He'd been executed by Cai Shenhua, immediately after, annihilated in radiance.
"Now, ending the aside, the question is, how do you make of this a battlefield weapon?"
Ling Qi frowned, letting her vision return, and looked down at her hands. Her eyes flicked up. Sixiang was kneeling in front of her now, looking up at her with concern.
[ ] I would wield it to put them on the defense, to be miserly with their power and resources, and loathe to expend anything that is theirs.
[ ] I would wield it to encourage glory-seeking, to make them willing to sacrifice what they should not for their dreams.
