Oliver_Twister
Idea-Man, He Who Shits Ideas
- Location
- West Africa
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I believe this is because of what Jiao told us, about Cao Chun supporting us if we frame the summit as a way to spread imperial methods and ideologies.
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.
I believe this is because of what Jiao told us, about Cao Chun supporting us if we frame the summit as a way to spread imperial methods and ideologies.
EternalObserver
eYe Gaze baCk
- Location
- The Void
Mmmmm alright, I don't mind approval voting. The only one I'm truly meh about is option 1.
[X] Showing that the Wall could be tamed and that the Emerald Sea could pacify its own borders, and conduct itself as a province of the Empire no less than any other.
[X] To establish that there were more methods, more tools that could be used to build the Empire out than sword and fire, even as they showed the Emerald Seas was lacking in neither.
[X] Showing that the Wall could be tamed and that the Emerald Sea could pacify its own borders, and conduct itself as a province of the Empire no less than any other.
[X] To establish that there were more methods, more tools that could be used to build the Empire out than sword and fire, even as they showed the Emerald Seas was lacking in neither.
I just like how all three of these is something that Sun Liling could turn around and use to trump up or legitimize her own province. Yay, we're friends!
[ ] Settling the wall with the aim of ending the raiding that has killed so many of her people since time immemorial. That is the frontmost goal.
Just as the Sun settled the jungle, saving the Bai, and more importantly their subordinates, from the unrelenting predation since time immemorial at the hands of raiders that at Sun Shao's hands no longer exist.
[ ] Showing that the Wall could be tamed and that the Emerald Sea could pacify its own borders, and conduct itself as a province of the Empire no less than any other.
The right and duty of any province of the empire, and the Sun certainly agree that younger ruling clans should be allowed the opportunity to prove their capabilities.
[ ] To establish that there were more methods, more tools that could be used to build the Empire out than sword and fire, even as they showed the Emerald Seas was lacking in neither..
The lands of the empire vary, and so do the best practices to tame them. The Western Territory can see the wisdom in adapting discovered methods to imperial styles of effort, of course.
[ ] Settling the wall with the aim of ending the raiding that has killed so many of her people since time immemorial. That is the frontmost goal.
Just as the Sun settled the jungle, saving the Bai, and more importantly their subordinates, from the unrelenting predation since time immemorial at the hands of raiders that at Sun Shao's hands no longer exist.
[ ] Showing that the Wall could be tamed and that the Emerald Sea could pacify its own borders, and conduct itself as a province of the Empire no less than any other.
The right and duty of any province of the empire, and the Sun certainly agree that younger ruling clans should be allowed the opportunity to prove their capabilities.
[ ] To establish that there were more methods, more tools that could be used to build the Empire out than sword and fire, even as they showed the Emerald Seas was lacking in neither..
The lands of the empire vary, and so do the best practices to tame them. The Western Territory can see the wisdom in adapting discovered methods to imperial styles of effort, of course.
[X] To establish that there were more methods, more tools that could be used to build the Empire out than sword and fire, even as they showed the Emerald Seas was lacking in neither.
Winged One
Not the Simurgh
- Location
- definitely the ground
- Pronouns
- They/Them/It
Yeah right. Anyone with spies to see can observe their ongoing transformation into the red jungle raiders.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
You know you are too deep in this Quest, when you read a line in an article and think to yourself …
"Yo that sounds like an insight!"
"Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person." (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie)
"Yo that sounds like an insight!"
"Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person." (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie)
The Wretched One
- Pronouns
- They/Them
The Wretched One
A part of him was almost afraid. But it was not fear, exactly. He'd left that behind before he'd entered 8th Realm. No, it was more that his very nature could no longer stand company. He'd devoured his own spirits for a reason. (If the Moon was here, to see him.) He hid out here, beyond even the Cloud Barbarians who had been the true ruination. Off in a little bit of nothing in the middle of nowhere.
Even the hated Cai, even the hated Cai who glowed like a deathly beacon, she was just a symptom of those barbarians' invasion before he was even born. But he had left them alone, and would leave them alone and would be alone--
That, at last, soothed him. Loss was the blade he kept always at his side, and the Word he Was had a simple name: Isolation. He stood alone, and there was no sky above him that would not be his own negation. How could one become a Great Spirit when this would end the conditions that allowed one to ascend beyond the concerns of most mortals?
To do so would be to become Nothing, and perhaps one day he would do so.
But not today.
No, it was best to stay here, in this far-off cave, thousands of miles from even the least bit of fighting. If someone came here, he would kill them and keep on fleeing.
He thought, with a vague confusion, back to the dances and balls that he had once been so happy to attend. Once, back in 7th Realm, there might have been bitter regret at not ever attending them again. But now he was beyond that, almost.
Beyond everything, almost.
Once there was an orphan, whose father was a whore and whose mother was a crime lord and a vicious sort indeed. He grew up wild on the streets, mouth filled with curses and eyes filled with tears and heart alive and beating with fear, and at thirteen he was discovered by a noble cultivator who sought to teach him almost as a trick. So that he would owe him when he joined a Sect… which he had the skill for it. Within a year, he had passed well into the Second Realm, and within a year he was shipped off to Argent Peak Sect, told to prove himself or face the consequences of his sponsor's frustrations. An unusual arrangement, but not entirely unknown, a way to weaken the ability of talented commoners from rising.
In another world, perhaps, he would have stayed there. There were certainly places for a boy who at the age of eighteen had entered the Cyan realm.
A boy who learned piece by piece in the Green realm who he would be younger than many learned who they might be.
Oh, and if he had stayed he would not have been happy, but he would have been safe.
Oh, but if he had stayed he would have simply been one in a million, which was not all that special when one considered cultivators.
No, he had met and fallen in with a young man, Hui Tsao. Fallen in, fallen in love with, a secret offer of being a retainer in fact if not in name, for how could one even imagine a common boy with such power. But he nursed his lonely, vicious heart.
And Hui Tsao showed him the world as it was, not as any one dream of it. But oh, the reality too was a dream when you thought about it. A grotesque, amazing dream, a canvas upon which the great might paint castles in the air that is far more important than the Mortals that he was able to leave behind.
Oh, to think on those days--he shouldn't, and if he had not taken Loss as his Domain Weapon he would not have.
It had been several years since he had left his cave. The time had come to step outside and see the clouds far above once again. Cultivation was like breathing was for lesser beings, for the humans that he was almost entirely removed from if it were not for the Loss that he carried as a sharp, cutting dagger. He stepped out, and he observed it, the endless pageantry of cloud and sky and desolate vale. It was a truly lonely place, and his heart almost sang with it. It could not sing, but one could almost pretend.
But far off, half a mile off, something disturbed it. Several spirit-beast birds were chirping, no doubt thinking they found a strange but hopefully safe place. He could feel them, all together in a small group, sheltering beneath a vast tree at the edge of the territory he had claimed and held for lack of anyone else coming, and for the strength he wielded.
There was a mom bird and baby birds, and--
He reached out.
Here is the truest principle of Cold that one will ever know. The cold is the absence of everything. The coldest place of all is the one that is the most still, the most empty. Even the winds defy the cold. The coldest place is the empty vacuum, beyond which and within which no life can survive. This absence was what he brought to them.
An absence of air, heat, light, and in a fraction of a moment life. They died, flash-frozen, in moments.
Hoh. The mother had been of the 4th Realm, and powerful indeed by the standards of lesser beings. He considered the long trek to retrieve the Beast Core and decided that there was little enough he could do with it. He looked up and saw the high peaks above, but he knew they were not really above him.
Above him was only air. Only the sky and beyond it some void unknown and unknowable.
It was as it must be. Should never come into it, and never could. He breathed in, and then out, though these were not necessary actions.
But the habits of old sometimes came to one. He Cultivated, but of course, he did.
It was far more vital for him than breathing.
Only the sky above him, and even that clouded and far less clear than his Way, finally emptied of distractions.
Bearer of Isolation.
There are things you learn, growing up the children of ruffians and murderers, growing up the pawn of powerful figures who you seek to match and then surpass. He knew that one day he wanted to leap over the heads of all those who doubted him. He knew that he wanted connection, but was lost in isolation. He was afraid of marriage, and not just because of a lack of desires--at least towards women. he was afraid of what it would mean, to be tied down, to be defined and pushed into a box.
It was so much easier just to make fleeting connections, to fall and tumble and laugh and grin and bite, to be entered and enter in turn, to do it all and know that because it means nothing and nobody can truly use it to dominate and control him. A parade of spirits, a parade of men, and then the Hui, the love of his life who taught him something new, a new truth to inscribe upon the friezes. The desire and feeling of just two people could make a family, a world, a universe, something that existed between them and needed no acknowledgment, just the moment of oneness and twoness.
Who needed the world, as long as you had this one other person, this precious bond? Yes, he was not even officially a retainer, and certainly not some unofficial lover and concubine. Hui Tsao married at forty after what to his mind was an unnecessary amount of time waiting on it. He knew it could not be agonizing over anything, for Hui Tsao never agonized over anything at all.
So he assumed it was negotiation and an attempt to get a better position. Either way, he grew into a better shadow and a better agent, someone who could do what too many Hui was unwilling to do. He turned twenty, then he turned thirty, his pace slowing, and then he hit 5th Realm at thirty-four and in those days that Cai was not even born, and all seemed to have been brought to some kind of conclusion.
He was mercifully alone except for those who mattered most to him, and that was all he needed.
It had been several years since he had bathed, and over a century since he had talked. He could talk, his throat allowed for it in theory. But what was there to say, and to who? He could think in his own head if he wanted, and so he did so. Now he thought of the void, of the emptiness of all things and the emptiness therein of all the tools that others use. This was another Truth that he had carved into the world and thus discovered, that all the rules and laws of Cultivation could be false.
Pills? Potions? Talismans? Sites?
Perhaps there were some distant people who declared, not knowing of a world beyond the 3rd Realm, that it was impossible for a Cultivator to fly without a Talisman of some kind.
So too was it for every understanding and crutch that was not needed in his Way.
When one's Way was Isolation, was it so surprising that you needed nothing at all? No words, no pills, no tools other than the certainty of one's Way.
But then this was not a rule all followed. The Cai, Progress and Creation, and who knew what else written upon her Way, a reliable, a desperate, he had thought in the end pathetic reliance, on those unworthy of such reliance.
The bitter moment passed as he contemplated the nature of the Upper Heavens. Loss was powerful, but anger, and desire for revenge, these things ultimately faded to nothing…
He'd met Cai Shenhua before, though never while she was at 5th Realm or above. Hui Tsao had pointed her out absently, at the Argent Sect's Tournament, which he went to sometimes for his own amusement, and for his shadows' as well.
He said, "Look upon her, a pale shadow of my shadow. Third Realm at fourteen and nine months, as you were at four months. She is a favorite, they say. Should we bet on her?" The privacy screen was up, and so he had Smiled faintly, a sixth realm looking down at a callow child, hiding her nervousness and doubts and fears well from any of her peers but still filled with them.
A most unrestful youth, he had thought, with the smiling ironic knowledge that at sixty and at the top of the 6th Realm he was also regarded as an unrestful youth by most. But she kept on rising, faster and stranger than most… until when he was newly within the 7th Realm she had against all expectations and sense reached the 8th, and even before that had managed to go from half a step behind him to a half-dozen steps ahead of where he'd been.
He did not laugh then about the way that she was just trying to catch up. He just began the long, slow, difficult road up the second to last step to the top of the mountain.
At one-hundred he was just barely old enough that the Hui who did not know who he was would treat him as an adult rather than a dangerous child--not that any of them valued adults not of their clan.
His love began whispering of the possible necessity of new blood, a modest restructuring of things, some new way. Doubt, perhaps, began to be sewn. But he did not understand it then. He did not look at this new 8th Realm and think, "This is the woman who will kill the man I loved."
By the time he'd reached the 7th Realm, he'd fired almost all of his servants that weren't maintaining his home itself. Even then he did not have regular contact with them, because it was bad for his cultivation. He had the one person who mattered, and when two became one that was the key.
The bounds of the cave were very limited, but there was a passage that he could slip through. Of course he could, he could slip through the space between the bonds that hold together objects.
He had learned, over centuries, a truth that was not often acknowledged, that almost everything in existence was almost nothing. What was solid was in fact full of holes and gaps. So in one sense, everything should be frozen. Everything should not be.
But the desire to go out and make it so, whether he had the capacity or not, was not something that fit his Way.
It was Reality, and Reality needed no help. The end… he vaguely remembered something he'd been told. But the lesson slips away.
It was hard now to remember his links, his bonds, remember the things that had learned that had mattered so much.
Had mattered.
He looked up, and saw beyond the mountain.
The Hui, of course, had many faces and the man he had loved was no different there. In private, then, there was passion in that last century but also worry, talk of modest shifts, of perhaps some minor concessions to allow the south to recover so that they could be brought more fully in line once they were less unsettled. He went around and around in private loops and schemes, half a realm behind his lover, his own progress slow.
Dissatisfaction was the order of the day, in that last century. A feeling as if something was going wrong but so slowly that it was hard to tell. Someone said that his efforts were futile, and pathetic, an act of trying to make minor changes far too late.
He'd killed the Viscount who slandered his love in secret, by touching him on the shoulder and freezing him. And then his lover had panicked and acted with strange fury, strange cold. Almost like concern, and he knew some of it was concern.
But he also knew and had through two centuries been told that there were limits to that concern, that he was in one sense disposable. He knew that the concern could not be so bad, and so he reassured Tsao that if need be he would die for him.
And in those last decades, it seemed as if this didn't satisfy him.
He didn't know why, and he just tried to enjoy that when those moments came up, the sex was always worth it.
In the end, if he was alone, Hui Tsao was with him. If he felt more strongly for Hui Tsao then he knew that Hui Tsao felt for him, but that what Tsao felt for him was precious and special all the same.
Then came the last days, and he made the decision, he needed to go south and… deal with these problems.
He almost died. (He did die, in one sense.)
The higher one went, the thinner the air. But all air was thin, that was the truth, and so were all solid things. Even those who seemed close to each other were actually an infinite and impossible distance apart. There was nothing but the truth in this statement, and yet for the longest time he had believed that there could yet be two. That in moments of passion and moments of isolation two could become something almost like one.
It was the delusion that held him back, the fact that had left him vulnerable. Yet a part of him still could not help but regret his Loss, because that too always came with him.
How baffling, how vexing. His gaze went past the thin air into the void. Between the stars, between the stars…
The man who wasn't a man killed him. The one who could see into the eyes of everyone. But he had perfected a new technique, a new understanding of space and isolation and death the likes of which he would not be able to do often. Which would always take something from him.
So he survived and slept, and woke well over a year later in a dark, hidden cave where none could find him.
He almost couldn't remember his name, everything felt faint and vague like a dream. So he didn't expect what he'd learned.
Hui Tsao had transformed. He'd gone from one of the few advocates for some sort of settlement (though of course, the Cai would have to be destroyed) to the most fervent advocate for a fight to the very last. The greatest advocate for blood and violence and revenge.
(He didn't understand.)
Hui Tsao let go of his weaknesses, fought--or so some said--as if he had nothing to lose and everything to gain by going all out. He did every atrocity, tossed aside every aspect of doubt, and came to his Way in full.
(He didn't understand.)
Hui Tsao was a dangerous, bold, vicious monster in the eyes of those who now worshipped the Cai monster. He had been reckless, and eventually, Cai Shenhua had faced him and he'd died terribly and unmourned.
(He did understand now.
There was nothing left for him.
There was nothing that could ever be left for him.
It was almost like freedom.) But at first when he went south, he went to die. He went knowing that eventually he would freeze up into nothing.
But with each step, he realized more and more that at last he was free. That all he had to do is know that two had become one and that it would therefore become none in time.
He'd found a Truth, and cast off his last weaknesses.
Some days he couldn't even remember what he'd missed.
Above and above spiraling up to the vast infinity there was nothing at all, and it was so beautiful.
What are we in the end, a child asked, and the parent lied again and again, from the gutters, from desperate letters attempting to make it out as if one was not filial to learn the lesson that there were some people that you did not need, that there were some people who'd hurt you too much to ever be part of his life. (A lesson that had been childish, that he'd cast aside but which at fifteen, at sixteen, had seemed so care.)
But the answer is: what we are in the end is
Alone.
He meditated on nothingness and Cultivated towards the moment where one could, at last, become zero and ascend to total nothingness.
A memory that had been forgotten, cast aside. In isolation, the memories of not being alone fall away, bit by bit, a last purification.
A memory of days in the Sects.
A memory of what was perhaps young love.
"You know, there are so many beautiful dreams, so many beautiful kinds of art," Hui Tsao had said so many years ago, looking at the boy beside him. Both of them are teenagers; both of them are invincible. One might say that this was a repetition, for what brilliant young cultivator was not invincible?
The sheets were soft, but no sweat clung to Hui Tsao, for what were they that was common and base?
The boy across from the Hui was half-asleep, barely heard it. He was nestling into his pillow, someone who slept more often than a Cultivator had to, and said that he dreamed of the Moon, that he had already in this begun to take after Tsao.
"You're singular, you're exceptional, and yet I get to touch you, and you get to deserve to…"
A slight laugh, and he drifted off.
"Deserve to? How silly I am."
He was too asleep to ask what was silly about it? Of course it was something he had to deserve. Love was something earned and continually earned, something sacred that needed to be held carefully lest his base origins corrupt it, turn it into something tawdry.
"A wretched gutter rat? Nay," a voice said, "Something precious and so much better than the muck and mortals you were found among."
Something that would shine in the sky alone.
"There are few things more wretched and pitiable than a human who is truly alone."
--The Dreaming Moon
"A billion to one, don't the odds make you sick?
To be one in a billion's a terrible trick
You're the wretched one."
--Vampire Weekend, "Rich Man."
To be one in a billion's a terrible trick
You're the wretched one."
--Vampire Weekend, "Rich Man."
A part of him was almost afraid. But it was not fear, exactly. He'd left that behind before he'd entered 8th Realm. No, it was more that his very nature could no longer stand company. He'd devoured his own spirits for a reason. (If the Moon was here, to see him.) He hid out here, beyond even the Cloud Barbarians who had been the true ruination. Off in a little bit of nothing in the middle of nowhere.
Even the hated Cai, even the hated Cai who glowed like a deathly beacon, she was just a symptom of those barbarians' invasion before he was even born. But he had left them alone, and would leave them alone and would be alone--
That, at last, soothed him. Loss was the blade he kept always at his side, and the Word he Was had a simple name: Isolation. He stood alone, and there was no sky above him that would not be his own negation. How could one become a Great Spirit when this would end the conditions that allowed one to ascend beyond the concerns of most mortals?
To do so would be to become Nothing, and perhaps one day he would do so.
But not today.
No, it was best to stay here, in this far-off cave, thousands of miles from even the least bit of fighting. If someone came here, he would kill them and keep on fleeing.
He thought, with a vague confusion, back to the dances and balls that he had once been so happy to attend. Once, back in 7th Realm, there might have been bitter regret at not ever attending them again. But now he was beyond that, almost.
Beyond everything, almost.
***
Once there was an orphan, whose father was a whore and whose mother was a crime lord and a vicious sort indeed. He grew up wild on the streets, mouth filled with curses and eyes filled with tears and heart alive and beating with fear, and at thirteen he was discovered by a noble cultivator who sought to teach him almost as a trick. So that he would owe him when he joined a Sect… which he had the skill for it. Within a year, he had passed well into the Second Realm, and within a year he was shipped off to Argent Peak Sect, told to prove himself or face the consequences of his sponsor's frustrations. An unusual arrangement, but not entirely unknown, a way to weaken the ability of talented commoners from rising.
In another world, perhaps, he would have stayed there. There were certainly places for a boy who at the age of eighteen had entered the Cyan realm.
A boy who learned piece by piece in the Green realm who he would be younger than many learned who they might be.
Oh, and if he had stayed he would not have been happy, but he would have been safe.
Oh, but if he had stayed he would have simply been one in a million, which was not all that special when one considered cultivators.
No, he had met and fallen in with a young man, Hui Tsao. Fallen in, fallen in love with, a secret offer of being a retainer in fact if not in name, for how could one even imagine a common boy with such power. But he nursed his lonely, vicious heart.
And Hui Tsao showed him the world as it was, not as any one dream of it. But oh, the reality too was a dream when you thought about it. A grotesque, amazing dream, a canvas upon which the great might paint castles in the air that is far more important than the Mortals that he was able to leave behind.
Oh, to think on those days--he shouldn't, and if he had not taken Loss as his Domain Weapon he would not have.
***
It had been several years since he had left his cave. The time had come to step outside and see the clouds far above once again. Cultivation was like breathing was for lesser beings, for the humans that he was almost entirely removed from if it were not for the Loss that he carried as a sharp, cutting dagger. He stepped out, and he observed it, the endless pageantry of cloud and sky and desolate vale. It was a truly lonely place, and his heart almost sang with it. It could not sing, but one could almost pretend.
But far off, half a mile off, something disturbed it. Several spirit-beast birds were chirping, no doubt thinking they found a strange but hopefully safe place. He could feel them, all together in a small group, sheltering beneath a vast tree at the edge of the territory he had claimed and held for lack of anyone else coming, and for the strength he wielded.
There was a mom bird and baby birds, and--
He reached out.
Here is the truest principle of Cold that one will ever know. The cold is the absence of everything. The coldest place of all is the one that is the most still, the most empty. Even the winds defy the cold. The coldest place is the empty vacuum, beyond which and within which no life can survive. This absence was what he brought to them.
An absence of air, heat, light, and in a fraction of a moment life. They died, flash-frozen, in moments.
Hoh. The mother had been of the 4th Realm, and powerful indeed by the standards of lesser beings. He considered the long trek to retrieve the Beast Core and decided that there was little enough he could do with it. He looked up and saw the high peaks above, but he knew they were not really above him.
Above him was only air. Only the sky and beyond it some void unknown and unknowable.
It was as it must be. Should never come into it, and never could. He breathed in, and then out, though these were not necessary actions.
But the habits of old sometimes came to one. He Cultivated, but of course, he did.
It was far more vital for him than breathing.
Only the sky above him, and even that clouded and far less clear than his Way, finally emptied of distractions.
Bearer of Isolation.
***
There are things you learn, growing up the children of ruffians and murderers, growing up the pawn of powerful figures who you seek to match and then surpass. He knew that one day he wanted to leap over the heads of all those who doubted him. He knew that he wanted connection, but was lost in isolation. He was afraid of marriage, and not just because of a lack of desires--at least towards women. he was afraid of what it would mean, to be tied down, to be defined and pushed into a box.
It was so much easier just to make fleeting connections, to fall and tumble and laugh and grin and bite, to be entered and enter in turn, to do it all and know that because it means nothing and nobody can truly use it to dominate and control him. A parade of spirits, a parade of men, and then the Hui, the love of his life who taught him something new, a new truth to inscribe upon the friezes. The desire and feeling of just two people could make a family, a world, a universe, something that existed between them and needed no acknowledgment, just the moment of oneness and twoness.
Who needed the world, as long as you had this one other person, this precious bond? Yes, he was not even officially a retainer, and certainly not some unofficial lover and concubine. Hui Tsao married at forty after what to his mind was an unnecessary amount of time waiting on it. He knew it could not be agonizing over anything, for Hui Tsao never agonized over anything at all.
So he assumed it was negotiation and an attempt to get a better position. Either way, he grew into a better shadow and a better agent, someone who could do what too many Hui was unwilling to do. He turned twenty, then he turned thirty, his pace slowing, and then he hit 5th Realm at thirty-four and in those days that Cai was not even born, and all seemed to have been brought to some kind of conclusion.
He was mercifully alone except for those who mattered most to him, and that was all he needed.
***
It had been several years since he had bathed, and over a century since he had talked. He could talk, his throat allowed for it in theory. But what was there to say, and to who? He could think in his own head if he wanted, and so he did so. Now he thought of the void, of the emptiness of all things and the emptiness therein of all the tools that others use. This was another Truth that he had carved into the world and thus discovered, that all the rules and laws of Cultivation could be false.
Pills? Potions? Talismans? Sites?
Perhaps there were some distant people who declared, not knowing of a world beyond the 3rd Realm, that it was impossible for a Cultivator to fly without a Talisman of some kind.
So too was it for every understanding and crutch that was not needed in his Way.
When one's Way was Isolation, was it so surprising that you needed nothing at all? No words, no pills, no tools other than the certainty of one's Way.
But then this was not a rule all followed. The Cai, Progress and Creation, and who knew what else written upon her Way, a reliable, a desperate, he had thought in the end pathetic reliance, on those unworthy of such reliance.
The bitter moment passed as he contemplated the nature of the Upper Heavens. Loss was powerful, but anger, and desire for revenge, these things ultimately faded to nothing…
***
He'd met Cai Shenhua before, though never while she was at 5th Realm or above. Hui Tsao had pointed her out absently, at the Argent Sect's Tournament, which he went to sometimes for his own amusement, and for his shadows' as well.
He said, "Look upon her, a pale shadow of my shadow. Third Realm at fourteen and nine months, as you were at four months. She is a favorite, they say. Should we bet on her?" The privacy screen was up, and so he had Smiled faintly, a sixth realm looking down at a callow child, hiding her nervousness and doubts and fears well from any of her peers but still filled with them.
A most unrestful youth, he had thought, with the smiling ironic knowledge that at sixty and at the top of the 6th Realm he was also regarded as an unrestful youth by most. But she kept on rising, faster and stranger than most… until when he was newly within the 7th Realm she had against all expectations and sense reached the 8th, and even before that had managed to go from half a step behind him to a half-dozen steps ahead of where he'd been.
He did not laugh then about the way that she was just trying to catch up. He just began the long, slow, difficult road up the second to last step to the top of the mountain.
At one-hundred he was just barely old enough that the Hui who did not know who he was would treat him as an adult rather than a dangerous child--not that any of them valued adults not of their clan.
His love began whispering of the possible necessity of new blood, a modest restructuring of things, some new way. Doubt, perhaps, began to be sewn. But he did not understand it then. He did not look at this new 8th Realm and think, "This is the woman who will kill the man I loved."
***
He had once thought he was alone when he was in a room with servants. It was a common affliction of the Hui and many other nobles, to say "I am alone" or "There is nobody else here with me" and then walk by a half-dozen mortal servants. By the time he'd reached the 7th Realm, he'd fired almost all of his servants that weren't maintaining his home itself. Even then he did not have regular contact with them, because it was bad for his cultivation. He had the one person who mattered, and when two became one that was the key.
The bounds of the cave were very limited, but there was a passage that he could slip through. Of course he could, he could slip through the space between the bonds that hold together objects.
He had learned, over centuries, a truth that was not often acknowledged, that almost everything in existence was almost nothing. What was solid was in fact full of holes and gaps. So in one sense, everything should be frozen. Everything should not be.
But the desire to go out and make it so, whether he had the capacity or not, was not something that fit his Way.
It was Reality, and Reality needed no help. The end… he vaguely remembered something he'd been told. But the lesson slips away.
It was hard now to remember his links, his bonds, remember the things that had learned that had mattered so much.
Had mattered.
He looked up, and saw beyond the mountain.
***
The Hui, of course, had many faces and the man he had loved was no different there. In private, then, there was passion in that last century but also worry, talk of modest shifts, of perhaps some minor concessions to allow the south to recover so that they could be brought more fully in line once they were less unsettled. He went around and around in private loops and schemes, half a realm behind his lover, his own progress slow.
Dissatisfaction was the order of the day, in that last century. A feeling as if something was going wrong but so slowly that it was hard to tell. Someone said that his efforts were futile, and pathetic, an act of trying to make minor changes far too late.
He'd killed the Viscount who slandered his love in secret, by touching him on the shoulder and freezing him. And then his lover had panicked and acted with strange fury, strange cold. Almost like concern, and he knew some of it was concern.
But he also knew and had through two centuries been told that there were limits to that concern, that he was in one sense disposable. He knew that the concern could not be so bad, and so he reassured Tsao that if need be he would die for him.
And in those last decades, it seemed as if this didn't satisfy him.
He didn't know why, and he just tried to enjoy that when those moments came up, the sex was always worth it.
In the end, if he was alone, Hui Tsao was with him. If he felt more strongly for Hui Tsao then he knew that Hui Tsao felt for him, but that what Tsao felt for him was precious and special all the same.
Then came the last days, and he made the decision, he needed to go south and… deal with these problems.
He almost died. (He did die, in one sense.)
***
The higher one went, the thinner the air. But all air was thin, that was the truth, and so were all solid things. Even those who seemed close to each other were actually an infinite and impossible distance apart. There was nothing but the truth in this statement, and yet for the longest time he had believed that there could yet be two. That in moments of passion and moments of isolation two could become something almost like one.
It was the delusion that held him back, the fact that had left him vulnerable. Yet a part of him still could not help but regret his Loss, because that too always came with him.
How baffling, how vexing. His gaze went past the thin air into the void. Between the stars, between the stars…
***
The man who wasn't a man killed him. The one who could see into the eyes of everyone. But he had perfected a new technique, a new understanding of space and isolation and death the likes of which he would not be able to do often. Which would always take something from him.
So he survived and slept, and woke well over a year later in a dark, hidden cave where none could find him.
He almost couldn't remember his name, everything felt faint and vague like a dream. So he didn't expect what he'd learned.
Hui Tsao had transformed. He'd gone from one of the few advocates for some sort of settlement (though of course, the Cai would have to be destroyed) to the most fervent advocate for a fight to the very last. The greatest advocate for blood and violence and revenge.
(He didn't understand.)
Hui Tsao let go of his weaknesses, fought--or so some said--as if he had nothing to lose and everything to gain by going all out. He did every atrocity, tossed aside every aspect of doubt, and came to his Way in full.
(He didn't understand.)
Hui Tsao was a dangerous, bold, vicious monster in the eyes of those who now worshipped the Cai monster. He had been reckless, and eventually, Cai Shenhua had faced him and he'd died terribly and unmourned.
(He did understand now.
There was nothing left for him.
There was nothing that could ever be left for him.
It was almost like freedom.) But at first when he went south, he went to die. He went knowing that eventually he would freeze up into nothing.
But with each step, he realized more and more that at last he was free. That all he had to do is know that two had become one and that it would therefore become none in time.
He'd found a Truth, and cast off his last weaknesses.
Some days he couldn't even remember what he'd missed.
***
Above and above spiraling up to the vast infinity there was nothing at all, and it was so beautiful.
What are we in the end, a child asked, and the parent lied again and again, from the gutters, from desperate letters attempting to make it out as if one was not filial to learn the lesson that there were some people that you did not need, that there were some people who'd hurt you too much to ever be part of his life. (A lesson that had been childish, that he'd cast aside but which at fifteen, at sixteen, had seemed so care.)
But the answer is: what we are in the end is
Alone.
He meditated on nothingness and Cultivated towards the moment where one could, at last, become zero and ascend to total nothingness.
***
A memory that had been forgotten, cast aside. In isolation, the memories of not being alone fall away, bit by bit, a last purification.
A memory of days in the Sects.
A memory of what was perhaps young love.
"You know, there are so many beautiful dreams, so many beautiful kinds of art," Hui Tsao had said so many years ago, looking at the boy beside him. Both of them are teenagers; both of them are invincible. One might say that this was a repetition, for what brilliant young cultivator was not invincible?
The sheets were soft, but no sweat clung to Hui Tsao, for what were they that was common and base?
The boy across from the Hui was half-asleep, barely heard it. He was nestling into his pillow, someone who slept more often than a Cultivator had to, and said that he dreamed of the Moon, that he had already in this begun to take after Tsao.
"You're singular, you're exceptional, and yet I get to touch you, and you get to deserve to…"
A slight laugh, and he drifted off.
"Deserve to? How silly I am."
He was too asleep to ask what was silly about it? Of course it was something he had to deserve. Love was something earned and continually earned, something sacred that needed to be held carefully lest his base origins corrupt it, turn it into something tawdry.
"A wretched gutter rat? Nay," a voice said, "Something precious and so much better than the muck and mortals you were found among."
Something that would shine in the sky alone.
*
"There are few things more wretched and pitiable than a human who is truly alone."
--The Dreaming Moon
While this is almost certainly apocryphal, I did try to vaguely fit within what we know about the last days, and also not introduce anyone who couldn't just be a nightmare from the past.
The parallels and divergences from LQ are intentional, he's a different version of who she might be.
This is probably the last omake I'll be writing for a while, because I'm falling behind on my Quests and more, but hope you enjoy.
The parallels and divergences from LQ are intentional, he's a different version of who she might be.
This is probably the last omake I'll be writing for a while, because I'm falling behind on my Quests and more, but hope you enjoy.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
My my, the only cross-border incursion I can recall happening in recent memory was some manner of Bai bandit.
Winged One
Not the Simurgh
- Location
- definitely the ground
- Pronouns
- They/Them/It
I meant culturally. The raiding hasn't started yet.
I think the Sun rebuttal here would be that the Bai are well-practiced in gratuitous blood sacrifice. They just lack the honesty to put their own blood on the table. Instead, it was always that of vassals, or 'lesser' cousins. If anyone is guilty of adopting the ways of the red jungle raiders, it was the Bai who so eagerly used those raiders as an instrument of suppression of the Sun and countless other Families like them. It's the Bai who fell to that corruption, as long ago as the founding of the Empire itself, and it's only the Sun's successful rebellion and taming of the jungle that allows the Bai, today, to pretend otherwise. To conveniently forget the blood on their hands, the source of that blood, and, through their deliberate inaction over millennia, their bloody handprints all over the implement of devastation that was the jungle barbarians.
Or something, heh. The Bai/Sun conflict is pretty fun because it's so easy to cast the Bai as the bad guys. Because, well, they were! Doesn't make the Sun sunshine and roses, of course, but it's probably important to remember that the Bai are shitheads.
Lady_Story
Humble Teller of Stories, Villainess of Legend
- Pronouns
- She/Her/They/Them
Alright everyone hear me out because I'm something of a genius: what if Ling Qi grew tentacles? It's a totally genius idea.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
We did not have tentacles, but we did have worms.
The leap from worm to tentacle is honestly not that big.
So you could design an AE+ were you grow the worms from your own body.
- Location
- the internet
You're hilarious.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Unfortunately I think 4th Realm Immortals "just fly" or whatever, because imagining Ling Qi sprouting huge dark moon-dream wings is really cool.
Or imagine the kind of wings Shenhua might sprout if she decided to fly?
Instead I think they just declare that they're flying and rise up into the air without any cool, unique, personalized wings.
Or imagine the kind of wings Shenhua might sprout if she decided to fly?
Instead I think they just declare that they're flying and rise up into the air without any cool, unique, personalized wings.
Lady_Story
Humble Teller of Stories, Villainess of Legend
- Pronouns
- She/Her/They/Them
Okay but like hear me out. If Ling Qi had cute tentacles she could do all sorts of stuff at once, like give cute people headpats, entertain kids, shake hands but with tentacles, be able to hols a dozen things at once, etc. And best of all: tentacles.
- Pronouns
- He
What if Dress-Chan did all those things with ribbons of cloth when they become a fully conscious object spirit
Lady_Story
Humble Teller of Stories, Villainess of Legend
- Pronouns
- She/Her/They/Them
I approve of cloth tentacles! They're warm and fuzzy and very comf yes!
Some fourth realms (like Gu Yanmei) still use techniques that create wings to fly. Yanmei uses fire wings for instance. Iirc Ling Qi's dress does sometimes grow silk wing like projections when she is flying, though even without the dress Ling Qi is probably gonna fly through wind control due to wind thief. Then again she already has wings in her domain kinda.Unfortunately I think 4th Realm Immortals "just fly" or whatever, because imagining Ling Qi sprouting huge dark moon-dream wings is really cool.
Or imagine the kind of wings Shenhua might sprout if she decided to fly?
Instead I think they just declare that they're flying and rise up into the air without any cool, unique, personalized wings.