She never had gone to as many lessons as she could have there was always something to do. People to meet, duties to fulfill, places to explore. Still, the quiet atmosphere of the Elder's lecture site had a comforting air. Of all the Elder's she had met, she did not think she had actually sat in on a public lesson of Elder Ying. Her classroom was a stony grotto, set near the base of the mountain, where falling waters formed a misty curtain on the north side, pooling in a clear sparkling pond in the center. The student benches were raised rounded stone, grown with fuzzy green layers of moss that did not stick to or stain even the more mundane robes and gowns of the other students.
Its one of the low key ways I'll miss the Sect. The lessons were neat, though I imagine the scarcity made them more interesting
"...And so the nature of defense is as complex as the ways of harm, ever changing with the needs of the moment, the battlefield, the opponent, your goals, what is wanted, what is needed. There can be no universal shield, anymore than there may be a universal blade. To think in such terms is itself a failure of thought, a foolish dead end which has ensnared growing cultivators since before the founding."
Sword Cultivators: "But..."
Well, as she said, its a dead end, gets you results fast, but only really a constraint beyond that. Useful in a world where you need early results to get resources to advance, but good for neither yourself nor anyone around you.
Todays lecture was a meditation on the nature of defensive arts. Not merely arts which armored or arts developed to dodge, but on the concept of 'Defense' and 'Protection' itself. What those things truly meant, in their contexts on the battlefield and off.
Ling Qi herself had many small answers to that percolating in her mind, developing and clinging to the edges of other ideas and concepts.
"What most consider the fundamentals of defense, are Armor and Motion. That is the ability to endure and the ability to avoid. But these are only the simplest methods suitable for the lower realm battlefield. Absorption, diffusion, redirection, causal disruption, even these are but slightly more advanced examples of defensive techniques. Consider then, defense is not only a thing for war. Perception is itself a layer of defense, prediction, organization, administration, these things too must be considered, for life is not only war, can never be only war…"
War as an extension of diplomacy by other means.
Keep the purpose in mind, and treat it as a tool, not a way of life.
There lies mistaking the means as the ends.
Many parts of the Empire have been in conflict so long they don't really know how to exist other than conflict.
It was true, Ling Qi thought. She could absorb an attack which would slay a dozen third realms into the impenetrable depths of her Mist, but that was an ability with little use in the project before her. Her foes were not hurling bolts of power from the sky or striking at her with blade and fist. Even the powerful spirits and high cultivators who she dealt with were ofte as not really trying to harm her. Their nature itself wrought harm by their mere existence. Black Sky's Yearning, a hungry void that could only devour. The great thundering beast in her fief, ruinous in its indifference to their small lives, the strange beasts emerging from the glacier.
Xia Ren, an engine of metal and flame that could only keep churning forward, seeking more fuel to burn. Even the Duchess herself, though she did not dare make judgements on what precisely she was. Even with the General she only had the beginning of an impression.
…She had a hunch that she would need to meet and understand all of those who had followed and supported the Duchess onto her throne, if she was ever going to help Renxiang topple her from it.
Knowledge is Power.
Power is Choice.
The ones with no choices remaining are already dead, they're just going through the motions.
"It is the nature of defense to be reactive, but this too is not universal, but to prepare effectively, the nature of the assaults such a project will suffer must be deeply understood, and incorporated into the foundation of your technique."
Ling Qi nodded faintly, the Elder's words echoing her own thoughts. She thought there was something else there though. It wasn't enough to stop an attack. A defense, a good defense, should put you in a position to take advantage of your enemy. It wasn't enough to react, though she knew she did enough of that. The knife she had taken to the throat, her family and friends may not have liked that choice but she was not ashamed of it.
Because it had given Xiulan the opportunity to end the threat then and there, and Ling Qi had lived.
The best defense was one which positioned your enemies to be ruined.
Well that was probably a little too martial, for her current problems. The best defense made their position untenable to hold? That forced them to cede to her advance. Could her negotiating partners be considered enemies in this analogy or just the ones out to obstruct her?
The best defense is one which positions yourself for victory.
Seek not their loss, only your gain. There are an infinity of potential obstacles and threats, destroying one means little if they are replaced
If they are losing, then thats just part of the preconditions to make your winning easier.
There was no answer, and that made her snowballing thoughts peter out.
She really didn't like not being able to bounce her ideas.
Sixiang....
"My style isn't for everyone, but I did not think I had become so boring."
Ling Qi held very still, forcing herself not to flinch or jerk in reaction. Beside her in the empty space on the stone bench, sat Elder Ying, sitting with her chin on her hands, looking ahead. The Elder Ying standing in the center of the grotto remained where she was still speaking, though Ling Qi could not hear her now.
Elders spooking juniors is good civilization!
Elder Ying's drooping eyelids opened a bit wider. Her eyes were glittering green, like raw emerald dug from the earth. "That is my experience. Have you not experienced a little already? To live and walk forward you leave things, leave people behind, it will only grow worse with the passing centuries. New faces might replace them, but become harder and harder to discern."
The old woman's gaze was wistful, even as the illusion of her humanity wavered under Ling Qi's attention. Eyes of verdant ore, skin like deeply cracked and weathered stone. She sat on the bench beside a worn and mossy mountain, looking down upon her disciples from so high among the clouds. She was glad to proffer shade and shelter, but there was only so much a mountain could perceive of the doings of humans.
To protect, to provide. To care.
But no longer to be a part of them.
…It was sad. Ling Qi felt it unbearably sad. "I think you must be wrong. I have left some behind, will leave more, but… there is room to connect even on a higher peak. I don't believe that it can become truly impossible to connect, if you choose not to discard that."
"It's not bad, to be a little naive," Elder Ying hummed. "My Way is at its end, I will climb no higher than this. But… I once thought as you did, as a girl. I can remember that, even if I could not tell you why. Being alone does not mean you do not care. That you must be as a heavenly machine, unfeeling and disconnected. There are many Ways whose attention remains on this earth, with their people and kin. All the same, you will not be one of them. The relationship is different, distant. When your will is a Law of the world they live in, when you have half become a fixture of the world, how can you be?"
I think she'd make fine friends with the Polar Nation's own elders.
But its incredibly tragic that she ultimately had to cut off what led her to walk the path to begin with
Ling Qi didn't answer at first. The Elder's words were a deep vibration in her bones as much as a sound in the air. It was so different, perceiving a Sovereign now, with the senses she had, than when she had spoken with the Elder as a girl barely more than mortal.
"Never again. Never again will there be such slaughter. So many of our children dead, our people wailing. If all the earth must rest on my back, so be it. I will be the mountain, upon which the storm breaks."
And we have a moment of [Communication].
That moment of resolution and Sacrifice.
The community needed an immutable force, so she became one.
Ling Qi winced, a stinging feeling in the corner of her eye, she reached up, wiped at the wetness there, and her fingers came away with a trace of red. This was the second time.
"You've chosen a cruel path, to see so deeply. Though I suggest you refine it soon," Elder Ying said mildly. "Ah, but you've learned how to refine arts by now."
Oh yes, learned to open the eye, next is to learn to close it, and then to focus on what you want to know.
An unblinking eye is a torment of its own.
"It's been very recent," Ling Qi said. "Elder, may I ask, what were the beasts bound in your trial, the tortoise, the rotting dragon?"
The two spirits who could be said to be Zhengui's parents, one dead and eternally regenerating, the other chained and bound powering the Sect's formations.
Elder Ying pursed her lips. "Old sins. You aren't the first to make friends with foreigners, disciple. Though you might be the first to try to make it more. You know a certain Elder of the old Argent Peak Sect was a traveler of the world."
The sword saint, the grave with the broken sword, Xuan Shi's favorite author, who had died in Ogodei's invasion, holding back the invader so that the disciples of the Sect could evacuate. "Then why…"
"Wars are ugly things, and we make sacrifices, and debase ourselves to win them. In the tales the hero's virtue wins, but it is never so clean," Elder Ying said absently, gazing up at the sky. "Well, I have my oaths. You'll learn something of our sacrifices, running about in the liminal with your spirit beast."
Ling Qi wasn't fully happy with that answer, but she could feel the crushing pressure with which the word 'oaths' was spoken. It was not some idle promise she spoke of, but something soul deep, carved right into the base of the Elders cultivation.
Nothing comes for free. Especially not breaking the storm that broke the province.
She can only give hints, I reckon Zhengui is a key to actually reaching those histories.
"You will," she said. "Does your conviction come from the Duchess I wonder? What she has is no thing you can achieve with normal methods, I think."
"Is there any such thing as a normal method for reaching sovereignty?" Ling Qi said. "...But no, I don't think I want the same. It's… you can grow without becoming unmoored. Without returning to isolation. The weak are not a burden to be borne, and lack of power is not… something that makes people lesser."
"You truly are a bit greedy," Elder Ying said, looking at her with amusement.
Indeed. The ambition to fill the void.
Though she's not entirely wrong.
Shenhua's cheat is inspiring. And horrifying.
[ ] The purpose of protection is to preserve Choice, both your own and of those you shield.
Choice is Power, Choice is Freedom, Choice is Life.
In preserving choice, one must sacrifice commitment.
Freedom assured is also freedom to choose wrong.
In protecting their freedom, they may choose death, as we had offered to Sixiang twice now.
Choice requires knowledge and power, or it is no choice at all.
[ ] The purpose of protection is to preserve your World, to maintain the community, the things and people you have.
Of the hearth fire against the darkness, of the line between the Community and the Other, if you cannot protect everything, then protect what matters to you.
A path tread by many tyrants.
Sun Shao's bloody trail is rooted in this.
Xia Ren protects her people by destroying the way of life they cherish.
The Hui tearing the province asunder to ensure none challenge their shakey throne.
The Forever King watches.
[X] The purpose of protection is to preserve Choice, both your own and of those you shield.
To ensure that our protection does not become worse than what it shields from.
