CedeTheBees
Probably high right now
- Location
- Somewhere
- Pronouns
- They/Them
I've just been assuming that, unless stated otherwise, any enemies we face will be at our level.
-
Going forward, links to content from Twitter (now X) will no longer be embedded. Pre-existing links should not be affected.
Threads Of Destiny(Eastern Fantasy, Sequel to Forge of Destiny)
- Thread starter yrsillar
- Start date
- Original Users' Choice!
Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
- Location
- FR
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Well, it's certainly not told to us, but it's an enemy she felt confident taking alone and without Gui's aid or Sixiang's intervention, so probably early/middle green. My personal guess would be green 3, maybe 4 if you push it
Sorry mate but votings closed already
Turn 15: Arc 4-6
And she had found the answer in it. Her answer at least.
The most important thing for an artist to do was question. Question tradition, question history, the past and the present alike, to reveal the absurdities that grew like fungus and rot in the cracks, before they could bring the whole thing crashing down. To point out when her liege was being absurd in her expectations, whether they were for herself or others.
But, she thought as the Ith-ia gardener raced toward her,those thoughts were for later.
He leapt, and she vanished, ghosting backward, a dress and the silhouette of a face in the dark Mist, without hands or limbs like her teacher once had. She disappeared, and the stalking beasts and men and things between that stalked her mist circled and closed in.A burst of red powder incinerated a cloud of screaming birds, a short knife of yellow bone spun into a backward grip in his other hand, slashed the head from a laughing horned spirit whose mirth echoed even as his head splashed into the water around their ankles. A plume of dark blue shredded the phantoms caught in its arc into less than dust.
But there were so many, without any hard shape. Figures melted into one another, moved without stepping, their hands and claws and teeth reached for the desperately keening undergrounder, and drew dark blood from a hundred cuts.
And out in the billowing mist that had swallowed the world, a howl sounded, deep and resounding. A black shadow with crimson eyes larger than a man's head, towering higher than should have been possible in the confines of the cistern. But if one listened close, they would hear that howl was a funeral dirge, a mournful call to ending. Invisible in the Mist, Ling Qi sang, and called upon the second dirge, the song of the wolf god, practiced and mastered alongside the completion of the eagle god in her play.
The shade of the wolf gods howl was a blanket of malice across the mist, and under it her phantoms grew sharper, their silhouettes sharp against the mist, the bodies settling with a weight of reality that a moment before they had lacked.
The gardener's knife lashed out and this time, rather than carving through illusion like air, it stuck into the guts of a great black hound as if it truly were two hundred kilograms of muscle, fur and meat.
The moment of surprise was enough for hands to grasp his strap covered shoulders, for hungry jaws to close on an ankle with a squelch.
Far back in the Mist, all but touching the damp ceiling of the cistern that only she could see, Ling Qi palmed a glittering bundle of diamond cord. In the tedium of waiting in the Ministry, she had taken the chance to reset her diamond snare, leaving Yan Shenyi to the Ministry's currently non existent mercy. And here, with a foe she could not risk killing, was this not the best place to put it to use?
Below, the phantom of the wolf god leapt into the fray, scattering lesser shades and revelers around his feet, jaws open to catch and trap. Dragged down, held and grappled by others, the ith-ia gardener let out a cry of pain as teeth like swords dug into his flesh.
But, as she was winding back to through the snare, her eyes caught on the movement of his hands fingers covered in glittering kaleidoscoping dust dragged through the dark ichor that wept from his wounds, spinning headache inducing patterns across his skin.
She felt the fabric of space within the cistern buckle, and in the instant she had to react, she turned her Mist outward, shattering their isolation together as she gathered her little brother and allies, who had by now made a ruin of all but one of the fungal blooms into a cold embrace of impenetrable Mist.
The cistern rocked as weight and direction and distance all warped at once ripping down columns, and turning the water into fractal streams flowing between briefly bent space, it was only in the embrace of the Mist did the world remain right in that single instant of twisting chaos.
It passed, the Mist dispersed. Two of her allies fell to their knees, blood leaking from the eyes and strange bruises on their skin, but otherwise unharmed.
As Ling Qi grimaced feeling her twisted senses righting themselves, she saw the wheezing gardener on his knees in the cistern, raising his dagger to his own throat. Silhouetted by the last fungal bloom.
It was at that moment that the falling drops of water from the newly cracked ceiling transformed into a man, hooded and cloaked in grey, one fist cocked back, swelling with monstrous and disproportionate muscle, and the dark fur of a great ape in the instant before it smashed the gardener into the earth, with a shockwave that flung a ring of filthy water in every direction and pulverized the stone beneath.
Ling Qi felt an inkling of memory, a figure briefly scene in the raucous tavern within the Dream of Xiangmen.
There was no time to dwell on that though. Zhengui charged from the hissing cloud of steam and fire, an unstoppable mass of scale and stony shell to crash into the last pillar, his healing ash surrounding the others as they staggered back to their feet and moved on the final fungal tower.
The gardener bounced away from the powdered floor in a grey blur and the man, arm shrinking back to normal proportions followed, his legs bending strangely as he crouched and launched himself after, chitin rippling down his left arm as it bent and sharpened, a grass green organic blade emerging from his handwraps.
"Don't kill them!" Sixiiang cried out. "Capture!"
There was a faint twitch of the man's head, the only acknowledgement. The blade rippled, becoming flesh, and instead, his hands grasped the gardeners shoulders even as flames erupted setting his cloak alight.
He flung the enemy back toward Ling Qi, where she flew near the broken ceiling. Her hand snapped out, the diamond snare flew, a glittering web in the ruddy light that filled the cistern. The gardener fell into the water with a splash, a squirming and immobile bundle. His flesh distorted weirdly as if made of soft clay, pushing and straining against the gaps in the snare, but it merely tightened, changing its size to keep them bound.
"Hah, was too slow, hardly needed me at all," said the man as he hit the water with a splash. He threw his burning cloak aside, revealing a tall, thin man, bits of red hair peaked out of the wrap over his face. "Zheng Fu, at your service."
"We're not done yet," Ling Qi replied, qi carrying her voice through the Mist as she turned, keeping on eye on the prisoner and the other on the crumbling fungal tower. It burned, blades and hands carving it into burnable chunks. She wasn't taking any chances…
A pulse of power rocked through the cistern and far beyond. It was a sudden gale, wind that screamed through the tunnels and streets. Power, not of a sovereign perhaps, but only one step down.
"Ah, looks like the big man finally woke up his grandad," said Zheng Fu conversationally. He moved to stand over the prisoner, eyeing the snare and the squirming creature alike. "So, you goin back south after this?"
Some things never change.
Ling Qi continued to cycle her qi, feeling the flecks of darkness, the motes of want and desire that filled the goal like so many droplets of dew in the morning. The qi here was so intense, so focused, that even without the thieving games of the old skeleton, her cultivation flowed as smoothly as as a stream. A stream flowing into a dam in this case, the building pressure in her meridians, in her bones.
She was nearly there, nearly broken through to the fifth stage of the Green realm. This long journey was coming to its next step.
"You're familiar with the Zheng clan then, elder?" Ling Qi asked, pausing her tale.
Once I lived in the mountain of flowers and fruit, a beautiful decade of youth.
Wistful, that was new. Ling Qi supposed. "He is an envoy it seems, the whole Empire has an interest in the Emerald Seas these days."
Dangerous is the attention of the world.
Ling Qi inclined her head. "With the awakening of the Xu patriarch, things became much simpler. The Ith-ia it seems were not inclined for that level of conflict, their active elements went into full retreat at that point. It just left cleaning up their sacrificial weapons."
She frowned thinking of th ecollapsed streets, the place in the south where one of the fungal towers had briefly blossomed into the fourth realm, it's poison puncturing a shelter. Light casualties she had been told.
She supposed this was what Cai Renxiang felt like when told that something was 'efficient enough'.
"But, this too was soon done, and I found myself invited to the Manor of the Xu. Did you know, I'd actually met members of their family before?" Ling Qi said absently. She remembered Li Suyin crying in her arms. A bold duel in the dcenter of the Sect. Facing the elder sister of Suyin's tormenter with the backing of the Cai, to keep the duel fair.
"It feels small though, in comparison, and not my grudge to hold."
People are not their rulers.
They are not," Ling Qi said. "I was honored. The Patriarch took a moment to meet me. He did not bow his head exactly, but I have the family's favor. He was livid, though whether it was because he was awakened or because of what happened to his city I can't be sure."
She closed her eyes, remembering the feast and the talks, and the thanks. "I had to stay, until an agent of the Duchess could collect the prisoner. They were very eager to show their gratitude. Diao Hualing spoke to me on the Ministries communication stone. She was honestly a bit flustered."
Ling Qi smiled slightly at the memory. The older elegant woman was very irritated. She had been assured that there would be an audit, and she had Diao Hualing's promise that there would be no one in position to hold a grudge against her about it.
It perhaps helped that in the week since that day in the sewer, there had been a spate of reports details similar plots in settlements across the south and central Emerald Seas. Some much more successful.
Strange and dangerous foes these.
"It's strange to think that their communalist minds make them all the more cruel as foes," Ling Qi admitted. It wasn't the sort of war that the Empire knew how to fight.
Most any concept may be turned to cruelty or kindness. Are you ready then, to tell your tale?
Ling Qi considered, feeling the pulse of qi in her body, the now familiar feeling of being a too small container.
"I think I am."
AN: So originally intended a vote here but ultimately I couldn't come up with a good second or third option for Phantasmal Mastery and your isolation concept, so we're just gonna roll on to the last update with your gainz here.
Domain Changes
+1 to highest Social Trait when 'Home'=> +2 to highest Social Trait when in debate with opposing concepts.
+1 to Highest Perception Trait
-1 Potency to Divination effects applied to you
+1 to highest Social Trait when 'Home'=> +2 to highest Social Trait when in debate with opposing concepts.
+1 to Highest Perception Trait
-1 Potency to Divination effects applied to you
The most important thing for an artist to do was question. Question tradition, question history, the past and the present alike, to reveal the absurdities that grew like fungus and rot in the cracks, before they could bring the whole thing crashing down. To point out when her liege was being absurd in her expectations, whether they were for herself or others.
But, she thought as the Ith-ia gardener raced toward her,those thoughts were for later.
He leapt, and she vanished, ghosting backward, a dress and the silhouette of a face in the dark Mist, without hands or limbs like her teacher once had. She disappeared, and the stalking beasts and men and things between that stalked her mist circled and closed in.A burst of red powder incinerated a cloud of screaming birds, a short knife of yellow bone spun into a backward grip in his other hand, slashed the head from a laughing horned spirit whose mirth echoed even as his head splashed into the water around their ankles. A plume of dark blue shredded the phantoms caught in its arc into less than dust.
But there were so many, without any hard shape. Figures melted into one another, moved without stepping, their hands and claws and teeth reached for the desperately keening undergrounder, and drew dark blood from a hundred cuts.
And out in the billowing mist that had swallowed the world, a howl sounded, deep and resounding. A black shadow with crimson eyes larger than a man's head, towering higher than should have been possible in the confines of the cistern. But if one listened close, they would hear that howl was a funeral dirge, a mournful call to ending. Invisible in the Mist, Ling Qi sang, and called upon the second dirge, the song of the wolf god, practiced and mastered alongside the completion of the eagle god in her play.
The shade of the wolf gods howl was a blanket of malice across the mist, and under it her phantoms grew sharper, their silhouettes sharp against the mist, the bodies settling with a weight of reality that a moment before they had lacked.
The gardener's knife lashed out and this time, rather than carving through illusion like air, it stuck into the guts of a great black hound as if it truly were two hundred kilograms of muscle, fur and meat.
The moment of surprise was enough for hands to grasp his strap covered shoulders, for hungry jaws to close on an ankle with a squelch.
Far back in the Mist, all but touching the damp ceiling of the cistern that only she could see, Ling Qi palmed a glittering bundle of diamond cord. In the tedium of waiting in the Ministry, she had taken the chance to reset her diamond snare, leaving Yan Shenyi to the Ministry's currently non existent mercy. And here, with a foe she could not risk killing, was this not the best place to put it to use?
Below, the phantom of the wolf god leapt into the fray, scattering lesser shades and revelers around his feet, jaws open to catch and trap. Dragged down, held and grappled by others, the ith-ia gardener let out a cry of pain as teeth like swords dug into his flesh.
But, as she was winding back to through the snare, her eyes caught on the movement of his hands fingers covered in glittering kaleidoscoping dust dragged through the dark ichor that wept from his wounds, spinning headache inducing patterns across his skin.
She felt the fabric of space within the cistern buckle, and in the instant she had to react, she turned her Mist outward, shattering their isolation together as she gathered her little brother and allies, who had by now made a ruin of all but one of the fungal blooms into a cold embrace of impenetrable Mist.
The cistern rocked as weight and direction and distance all warped at once ripping down columns, and turning the water into fractal streams flowing between briefly bent space, it was only in the embrace of the Mist did the world remain right in that single instant of twisting chaos.
It passed, the Mist dispersed. Two of her allies fell to their knees, blood leaking from the eyes and strange bruises on their skin, but otherwise unharmed.
As Ling Qi grimaced feeling her twisted senses righting themselves, she saw the wheezing gardener on his knees in the cistern, raising his dagger to his own throat. Silhouetted by the last fungal bloom.
It was at that moment that the falling drops of water from the newly cracked ceiling transformed into a man, hooded and cloaked in grey, one fist cocked back, swelling with monstrous and disproportionate muscle, and the dark fur of a great ape in the instant before it smashed the gardener into the earth, with a shockwave that flung a ring of filthy water in every direction and pulverized the stone beneath.
Ling Qi felt an inkling of memory, a figure briefly scene in the raucous tavern within the Dream of Xiangmen.
There was no time to dwell on that though. Zhengui charged from the hissing cloud of steam and fire, an unstoppable mass of scale and stony shell to crash into the last pillar, his healing ash surrounding the others as they staggered back to their feet and moved on the final fungal tower.
The gardener bounced away from the powdered floor in a grey blur and the man, arm shrinking back to normal proportions followed, his legs bending strangely as he crouched and launched himself after, chitin rippling down his left arm as it bent and sharpened, a grass green organic blade emerging from his handwraps.
"Don't kill them!" Sixiiang cried out. "Capture!"
There was a faint twitch of the man's head, the only acknowledgement. The blade rippled, becoming flesh, and instead, his hands grasped the gardeners shoulders even as flames erupted setting his cloak alight.
He flung the enemy back toward Ling Qi, where she flew near the broken ceiling. Her hand snapped out, the diamond snare flew, a glittering web in the ruddy light that filled the cistern. The gardener fell into the water with a splash, a squirming and immobile bundle. His flesh distorted weirdly as if made of soft clay, pushing and straining against the gaps in the snare, but it merely tightened, changing its size to keep them bound.
"Hah, was too slow, hardly needed me at all," said the man as he hit the water with a splash. He threw his burning cloak aside, revealing a tall, thin man, bits of red hair peaked out of the wrap over his face. "Zheng Fu, at your service."
"We're not done yet," Ling Qi replied, qi carrying her voice through the Mist as she turned, keeping on eye on the prisoner and the other on the crumbling fungal tower. It burned, blades and hands carving it into burnable chunks. She wasn't taking any chances…
A pulse of power rocked through the cistern and far beyond. It was a sudden gale, wind that screamed through the tunnels and streets. Power, not of a sovereign perhaps, but only one step down.
"Ah, looks like the big man finally woke up his grandad," said Zheng Fu conversationally. He moved to stand over the prisoner, eyeing the snare and the squirming creature alike. "So, you goin back south after this?"
***
Some things never change.
Ling Qi continued to cycle her qi, feeling the flecks of darkness, the motes of want and desire that filled the goal like so many droplets of dew in the morning. The qi here was so intense, so focused, that even without the thieving games of the old skeleton, her cultivation flowed as smoothly as as a stream. A stream flowing into a dam in this case, the building pressure in her meridians, in her bones.
She was nearly there, nearly broken through to the fifth stage of the Green realm. This long journey was coming to its next step.
"You're familiar with the Zheng clan then, elder?" Ling Qi asked, pausing her tale.
Once I lived in the mountain of flowers and fruit, a beautiful decade of youth.
Wistful, that was new. Ling Qi supposed. "He is an envoy it seems, the whole Empire has an interest in the Emerald Seas these days."
Dangerous is the attention of the world.
Ling Qi inclined her head. "With the awakening of the Xu patriarch, things became much simpler. The Ith-ia it seems were not inclined for that level of conflict, their active elements went into full retreat at that point. It just left cleaning up their sacrificial weapons."
She frowned thinking of th ecollapsed streets, the place in the south where one of the fungal towers had briefly blossomed into the fourth realm, it's poison puncturing a shelter. Light casualties she had been told.
She supposed this was what Cai Renxiang felt like when told that something was 'efficient enough'.
"But, this too was soon done, and I found myself invited to the Manor of the Xu. Did you know, I'd actually met members of their family before?" Ling Qi said absently. She remembered Li Suyin crying in her arms. A bold duel in the dcenter of the Sect. Facing the elder sister of Suyin's tormenter with the backing of the Cai, to keep the duel fair.
"It feels small though, in comparison, and not my grudge to hold."
People are not their rulers.
They are not," Ling Qi said. "I was honored. The Patriarch took a moment to meet me. He did not bow his head exactly, but I have the family's favor. He was livid, though whether it was because he was awakened or because of what happened to his city I can't be sure."
She closed her eyes, remembering the feast and the talks, and the thanks. "I had to stay, until an agent of the Duchess could collect the prisoner. They were very eager to show their gratitude. Diao Hualing spoke to me on the Ministries communication stone. She was honestly a bit flustered."
Ling Qi smiled slightly at the memory. The older elegant woman was very irritated. She had been assured that there would be an audit, and she had Diao Hualing's promise that there would be no one in position to hold a grudge against her about it.
It perhaps helped that in the week since that day in the sewer, there had been a spate of reports details similar plots in settlements across the south and central Emerald Seas. Some much more successful.
Strange and dangerous foes these.
"It's strange to think that their communalist minds make them all the more cruel as foes," Ling Qi admitted. It wasn't the sort of war that the Empire knew how to fight.
Most any concept may be turned to cruelty or kindness. Are you ready then, to tell your tale?
Ling Qi considered, feeling the pulse of qi in her body, the now familiar feeling of being a too small container.
"I think I am."
AN: So originally intended a vote here but ultimately I couldn't come up with a good second or third option for Phantasmal Mastery and your isolation concept, so we're just gonna roll on to the last update with your gainz here.
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We're all about smiting corruption and tearing down rotten structures? Mom Shenhua will be delighted.
fictionfan
Please sir, may I have some Meows?
- Location
- Tempe, AZ
[] Someone is never more alone than then when they are surrounded by people that they can't understand or relate to.
[] Sometimes isolation is useful for when one needs to recover from the chaos of the world.
[]No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, the world is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.
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Oliver_Twister
Idea-Man, He Who Shits Ideas
- Location
- West Africa
- Pronouns
- He/Him
No CRX reaction T_T. Next turn then
- Location
- Norway
Not smiting, exposing. It's a concept that relies on a functional system, but it's healthier in the long run since it does not demand conflict.
New husbando option? New husbando option!
Zheng Alert! Zheng Alert! Hide all your unmarried (and possibly married) scions! This is not a drill!
Oh man, this might mean we get to see Meizhen and a Zheng snipe at each other while FenFen fumes and the boys inch away from the blast radius
Oh man, this might mean we get to see Meizhen and a Zheng snipe at each other while FenFen fumes and the boys inch away from the blast radius
Thus begins Ling Qi's career of clowning on 'em
It looks like shapeshifting and dream are his specialties? I'm not sure Ling Qi is ready for a Zheng boy, though…
kfrar
Aspiring Encyclopedia
To be clear, it's not really about exposing something bad and just walking away.
The Domain bonus boosts our social traits, after all. With the right presentation, there is little difference between revealing the rot someone has allowed to flourish and demanding that the rot be dealt with.
In short, it's a conviction and tool built for social combat and for working with rather than outright replacing existing systems, which seems pretty much perfect for our job and goals.
Blood leaking from eyes. Basically unharmed. Just Cultivator things.
The understanding of Cai continues...
Also, semi random city having a prism level Cultivator just sleeping there... Must be cranky for being woken up and told 'we're kind of in war'.
Nah, just indigo. Sovereignty is a thing you get in Violet and the patriarch did not quite have that according to LQ.
FriedIce
The Authentic Fake
- Location
- Hyperreality
The Patriarch is only supposed to be fifth realm, so Indigo. So either he's been hiding his cultivation, being a 'sovereign' indicates you're a Violet, or Greens just don't have the capacity to tell the difference between an Indigo and a Prism - it's all massively overwhelming power to them after all.
Oliver_Twister
Idea-Man, He Who Shits Ideas
- Location
- West Africa
- Pronouns
- He/Him
It says a lot that Ling Qi describes Shen as " a step below Sovereignty". She's been around too many high realms
CRX: *smug paperwork filing* "None can resist my Renxiangness."
- Location
- USA
I want my little Cai.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Yes! YES! ZHENG! We finally got the Zheng! HAHA! I love him already!
Dynamic entry? Check! Cool cultivation? Check! Air of mystery? Check! Quipy? Check!
Make way Bao boy. Move aside Turtle man. End of the line Meng Dan. We've got a new possible contender entering the ring!
Dynamic entry? Check! Cool cultivation? Check! Air of mystery? Check! Quipy? Check!
Make way Bao boy. Move aside Turtle man. End of the line Meng Dan. We've got a new possible contender entering the ring!
@yrsillar I know this was a few chapters back but I really want to know. Did Fan Yu make it into the inner sect in the fifty provisional ranks?
Oliver_Twister
Idea-Man, He Who Shits Ideas
- Location
- West Africa
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Should have been "Bao Qian" for a full rhyme. What a missed opportunity 😢
A delightful update
Intense not intentense, and focused rather than fucsed
Intense not intentense, and focused rather than fucsed