Ling Qi landed in front of her door in a flutter of silk and swept inside without pause, her steps taking her unerringly toward her meditation room. Between one step and the next, her silhouette flickered, skipping entire stretches of distance. In only moments she was before the heavy door that marked the vent chamber.
Ling Qi opened the door with a shove, striding through uncaring as the stone slab reverberated with the force of its rebound from the wall, taking a full second before it began its automatic drift shut. The silvery mist let off by the vent washed over her, tingling on her skin.
"Did you need anything else Sixiang?" She asked aloud, brows furrowed. "This is good enough, right? I can find something more potent…"
"It's… f… worrywort," Sixiang whispered. "S… down and relax… Want… show you."
Ling Qi frowned mightily, the way her friends voice was fading in and out seemed like ample reason to worry. However, she had already done what the spirit had asked, and as the door behind her closed and sealed, the clinging silver mist only grew thicker. She felt a trickle of the room's energies being drawn inward, the way it did when she cultivated here, so presumably Sixiang was already working to restore themselves.
She forced herself to take a deep breath and moved to seat herself. Sixiang wanted to show her something, and she would have to remain here until the spirit was done with whatever they were doing, so she might as well indulge them. Besides, even if it was only in her own head, seeing Sixiang would ease her nerves.
So, as she settled into a meditative position before the vent, Ling Qi closed her eyes, and cut the flow of qi that served to salve her body's mortal needs for rest. It took only a brief moment of concentration after that to send her mind drifting off to sleep.
When she next blinked, Ling Qi found herself once again seated atop a mound of cushions and blankets. Sixiang's dreamscape had not changed much. The endless mounds of pillows and cushions were arranged more neatly, with lanes between for easy movement. Stepping off of the mound she had awoken on Ling Qi found the off white ground to have the texture of fine cloth, and the springiness of a high quality mattress.
"Sixiang?" she called walking between the pillow mounds, toward the sound of lapping water. "Sixiang, where are you?"
"Everywhere and Nowhere," Ling Qi twitched as Sixiang's voice emanated from the air around her, sounding… floaty in a way that was hard to describe.
"That's not very helpful," Ling Qi replied dryly, crossing her arms and looking up at the rainbow mist that comprised the sky. "Seriously, are you alright?"
"Mmm… I think so," Sixiang whispered. "I guess I gave you a scare, huh?"
"Just a little," Ling Qi replied. "Why were you fading out?"
"It's like being a butterfly, you know? The caterpillar can't reach the world outside its cocoon, you know?" Sixiang mused.
"But now I'm inside the cocoon too huh," Ling Qi replied, shaking her head. "Why did you need me to come to a site then?"
"I didn't want to nap for a month like that sleepy boy of yours," Sixiang laughed. "...and hm, I think it will be better this way, I want to show you something."
Ling Qi felt a tug at her right hand, and for a moment she had the impression of phantom fingers grasping hers, urging her along the path. Not needing any more prompting, Ling Qi resumed walking along the path. "Alright, that's fine, I wish you would have warned me," she replied grumpily.
"It's not like I know what I'm doing," Sixiang replied, amused. Ling Qi did not find that comforting at all. Still, she kept walking, and as walked around a particularly large pillow mountain, she saw again the sea of color. Last time she had been here it had felt unfinished and unreal, but now, bright blue waves crashed upon rocks of garish orange and yellow, the ripples in the water perfectly realistic. The fluid shifted in color, bright blue, to shimmering jade, to darkest indigo with more colors in between. It was oddly beautiful.
"Is this what you wanted to show me?" Ling Qi asked absently. It was a pretty sight, but it seemed like an awfully trivial thing.
"That mindset…" Sixiang sighed. "But no, what I want to show you is here though."
In response to her words, Ling Qi just raised her eyebrows, giving the misty sky an expectant look.
"...I've seen your memories you know? Experienced the clearer ones, and read the wisps of the rest," Sixiang said thoughtfully. "It's just… we're friends, right? So it seems kind of unfair."
Ling Qi continued walking, reaching the damp shore of the sea of color, she looked out thoughtfully over the churning waves. "I don't really mind. I knew I was inviting you into my head."
"Maybe so, but… I want to share anyway. I put a lot of work into making sure you could see and comprehend safely," for once the muse's voice held a note of trepidation. "...So, want to take a swim?"
Ling Qi thought back to the last time she had gone out with a friend on the water, and felt Sixiang's wry shrug of apology at the similarity. Still, Ling Qi rather doubted that this time would end like that had. The circumstances were just a bit different after all. Ling Qi let out a sigh. "...Sure thing, Sixiang."
Then diving into the waters, she dissolved into seafoam.
In Dream Ling Qi was surrounded by kin. Through the currents of thought and great abyss of conciousness, she swam with countless millions of her kin, forming patterns of color and brightness of incomprehensible beauty and complexity. In and out of Dream did her kin swim, individuals breaching briefly into the alien realm of the Real. Each time they carried a hint of Dream's Spark, and returned themselves, enriched by new droplets of thought to add to Dream.
In Dream, Ling Qi was born and died a thousand times. She emerged wriggling from the hide of great leviathan [Grandmother/Emerald Dancer/Sister Brightsong/Dreaming Moon Local Avatar &*^*&%^(&)] to dance and play and sing with her siblings, in the churning wake of the leviathan's passage. To breach the surface and the Real with dreams and hope and creative sparks. Then when she had swum and danced and played, and gathered the hopes, creativity, and desires of the real onto herself until her belly bulged and her eyes sagged with exhaustion, she returned, the shed scale resuming its place, and dying so that a new dream could take its place.
It was beautiful, a system without loss, old ideas and abandoned thoughts falling into Dream to be renewed and returned to the Real, subtly different than before. The people of the Real fed the Sea of Dream, and the Sea of Dream buoyed the Real, urging them to new heights of creation.
Here, Ling Qi knew not fear or sadness. Though she touched thoughts of those kinds in every cycle, never did they cling to her. They were often the seeds of creation, but the feelings themselves could not take root in a being without permanence. Without context, such things were meaningless.
And so Ling Qi experienced a thousand thousand cycles, and never learned a single thing. Each momentary existence, each creative spark, each muse passing and fading like a waking dream. With each passing cycle, Ling Qi felt her own mind diverging from the experience she was following, until at last she felt like an observer, rather than a participant.
It repeated until the cycle that came one night in a broken tower under the bright moonlight. It was boring as such things usually were. The dreams of spirits were bland and lacked in the fundamental spark that humans had, but Grandmother had obligations, and she had been shed to entertain. What a joy it was then, when a human had swept in, sending ripples through Dream with her potential! Sixiang could feel right away, that this was the one she had been created from. Grandmother sure liked playing around.
That had been when the real party had begun, in Sixiang's opinion, the human had performed wonderfully, and Sixiang had gotten swept up in the humans inebriation, laughing and singing and dancing all the night, until at last, feeble flesh failed to keep up with shining spirit, and the human, Ling Qi, fell into a stupor and ceased to be much fun at all.
Ling Qi felt a bit indignant and embarrassed, watching her escapades from the outside, but such thoughts ceased as Sixiang found herself faced with her Grandmother once again. Before, from the perspective of… proto-Sixiang, or whatever you could call it, she had perceived the other spirit as a great leviathan, from which muses were shed like scales, but with herself separated, she saw more.
Because the leviathan was herself only a single scale of something greater. Stretching out far beyond her perspective, Ling Qi beheld the Dreaming Moon whole, and found herself insignificant in its face. If Cai Shenhua had been a mountain of impossible vastness, the reality of a great spirit dwarfed even that. One could comprehend reaching the top of a mountain, no matter how high, but this… it was if the world had flipped upside down, and the whole of the earth loomed overhead.
And, to her growing incomprehension, she found that this was only the face which looked upon the empire, a spike of pain shot through her mind, and she saw in the blurry distance; a green skinned man of with beard bound in a strange stiff coil, holding a strange golden scepter in his hand, another with gleaming silver helm and shining ruby who soared through the stars, and beyond even that an androgynous figure with eyes of purest flame that danced in cruel merriment, and...
Ling Qi shuddered as Sixiang tugged at her sleeve, and her attention was dragged away. She felt a sense of sheepish shame as Sixiang chided her for her distraction and looking too closely at things that she was not meant to see. They floated bodiless in the churning Sea that formed Sixiang's metaphor for Dream, the memory they had been in dissolved like mist.
Sixiang laughed at her befuddlement as she mentally flailed, suddenly free to move on her own in this space which was not strictly speaking space. Yet despite her lack of body, she found herself comforted by a feeling much like a hand holding her own. Ling Qi calmed herself, and for a moment, allowed herself to enjoy the beauty of dream, simplified as she knew it was. Yet, even now, the colors were fading away. What was happening?
She had spent longer than she had thought, staring at the Dreaming Moon, she understood, understanding coming from Sixiang without the barrier of words. Sixiang would have to sleep soon to complete her transformation. But first, here, in this place, bolstered by Argent Energy, filtered through Ling Qi's own dantian, Sixiang wanted to know one more thing. Which of her elements did she feel was most important to what she wanted to be?
Was it wind? It had fallen behind in her arts, and she had rejected the idea of absolute freedom, but did they playful joy of the wind spirit still exemplify what she wanted to be at the end. Would she have done better in recent trials, if she found again the thread of cunning and creativity that had kept her alive in latter days?
Was it Darkness? So many of her arts cultivated it, and it went so well with her own covetous nature, of never wanting to let anything go if she could at all help it? Yet… perhaps it was only growing strength, but had it not encouraged a more brute force approach to things?
...Was it Water? She did not often think on it but many of her arts incorparated the element as a secondary. The virtues of persistence in pressing forward that arose from water had been a part of her for some time, even if it was not as visible and prominent as the others.
Or Perhaps Wood? When she had begun cultivating boundless growth and vitality were hardly among her virtues, but… had it not served her very well indeed? Many trials remained in her future she was sure. She could not remain still but that was not all that there was to the element, now was it?
[] Wind
[] Darkness
[] Water
[] Wood
Two hour moratorium on this. Approval voting is A-ok. Please don't burn down my thread.
I'm going to fix the formatting on all the threadmarks tomorrow
) and ice doesn't have wind!
