Qi keeps dumping her garbage in the liminal, first the bomb worm and now this, what a litter bug
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.
- Pronouns
- he him
While possible I think in that case he would have addressed Suyin similarly (though it's possible it just didn't come up naturally). I think it's a title/position that a more mortal creature fills in relation to a more awake piper. Kinda like a captain of a ship.
- Location
- Canada
Obviously, Qi is just misinterpreting "A'tuin-er", and the spirit is just giving props for having such a big turtle.
Damn LQ has gotten scary good at this kind of thing.
Its just shitposting. Happens all the time!Qi keeps dumping her garbage in the liminal, first the bomb worm and now this, what a litter bug
BagFullOfLizards
Some bag, mostly lizards
- Location
- A bag
No no, she's mishearing "a tuner". It's complimenting her on her perfect pitch!
If I had to guess then it's foreshadowing of things to come. This seems to be a thing build by the dragons ages ago and forgotten. It's probably made to do something, but what is a mystery.
But I can speculate that it needs someone guiding it's doing on the outside for best effect. And who just volunteered?
But I can speculate that it needs someone guiding it's doing on the outside for best effect. And who just volunteered?
- Location
- FR
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Worst case scenario I can imagine is that it's supposed to be an energy source for the prison, but as far as we know that hasn't exploded, so probably not that. Second worst case scenario that' not so easily disproved: the maker of the Piper is in fact the prisoner.
Tales of Sun and Steel 5
Ill feeling churned through her dantian, like beads of unruptured air sliding through molten ore, unseen but so dangerous for they would ruin countless hours of concentration and work. She crushed the feeling mercilessly as her wings beat a gale through the storm wracked sky. The qi, fueled on a spark of law flared in her soul, and lit her like a banner in the sky.
Scattered men on glider wings and aerial horseback scattered and fled long before her wrath could reach them. She felt their fear distantly, soot scattered before her heat, felt the panic of young men who fell under her gaze from kilometers away.
A slight twist of her wings, a five degree arc of her flight to the west, and a hundred horses and gliders wheeled and shot back toward the jagged peaks in the south. Beneath them weary soldiers cheered and men, women and children in underground shelters sobbed in relief as the pounding bursts of aerial destruction ceased.
Let them flee. She cared not. Their destruction was a task for others. Her role was to bring succor to the Sect and their mortals on this flank. She let them see her, let them flee from her, and in doing so saved more lives in less time than than a dozen lances of annihilating sunfire.
But she was not merciful. Only efficient.
Who would have a heart full of mercy, beholding such devastation. Beholding broken homes and burning fields, the savaged corpses of the dead.
A quartet of horsemen and a handful of gliders spiraled up into the air from the smoking ruin of a farmstead, the whites of their eyes so wide in terror behind their masks. Their saddlebags bulged with loot. Their hooves speckled with blood and ash.
Her blade arced out. Rain boiled. The stormcast sky lit as if it were a clear noonday over the eastern dunes.
Five men and beasts died. She did not do them the courtesy of reducing them to drifting ash, instead leaving them to live in agony for the few scant seconds before their charred bodies hit the earth.
It saved her a drop of shen, and provided a small satisfaction as well.
Efficient.
But her mind and gaze did not remain long on that, not with the spreading blight impure, diseased qi spreading in the south. Where her sister was stationed.
Her wings beat and carried her past the reeling, now recovering garrison, and her acceleration shot her toward the growing patch of miasmatic qi in the south. Even further beyond, she felt the pulse of a Sect Sister's qi clashing with roaring malevolence. Guan Zhi was in command of this region, and if even she was engaged and tied down, the state of this front made far more sense. What then, could be going on? The Cloud men, for all their ruthlessness, did not use curses and disease as weapons of war. Their arts were cruel only as her arts were cruel, the pitiless bolts falling from an angry sky. They were not this boiling, oily filth that she could feel erupting from beneath the southern mountains.
And the thing she sensed her sister and her companion fighting and killing was no tribesman either.
That was a battle ended by the time she was drawing into range. But the tide of malignant spirits had not stopped with the death of that thing. Even as she tore through the sky, ripping leaves and branches from the canopy a hundred meters below, making the air scream and break in her path, the two younger women and their soldiers were fighting. The powerful spirit beast belonging to her sister's friend was fighting, single handedly holding back the worst of the tide.
Once again, her sword cut through the rain with a hiss of boiling steam, pointed forward, a drop of molten gold formed at the tip. It crawled down the blade, enveloping metal in liquid gold as she freed the furnace of her second dantian to flow, Law interposing on the world.
Where her Wickedness Annihilating Slash fell, the dead and their ilk could not persist.
The sky blazed with the colors of dawn, and her aura swelled washing over the beleaguered cultivators, and countless malevolent spirits were reduced to ash, erased from the world under a crescent of gold.
The chaos of the battlefield ended in an instant, she descended on wings of flame toward her sister and that girl.
"Sister?" Xiulan asked, as if in doubt of her presence.
"It is good you are well, Xiulan," Gu Yanmei replied calmly. Visibly her attention remained on her sister, but the majority of her attention carried by the sparks spread from her beating wings, scanned for threats, for the status of the town, the soldiers… and her colleagues' battle, far to the south. "We will speak later, when this matter is taken care of. I must be off to assist."
"Sister!"
Her eyebrows shot up at the interruption.
"Sister please, my friend, Ling Qi, she has been badly poisoned."
"If there is anything you can do, Senior Sister, it would be appreciated," the girl herself said, swaying on her feet.
A mote more attention, her eyes fixing on the tall girl supported by her sister. How could she have missed such a…
Obfuscation. The poison itself blended with the girl's cold and dark qi, and the blurring touch of pure dream qi added a layer atop that. Even more so, the girl's well of qi was absurd for her stage, and so made her appear healthier than she was.
The earth shook again. She felt the impact of Guan Zhi's blows against the malevolent thing reverberating through the air and earth. She could not spend much time here.
A tiny, dishonorable part of her wished to say there was nothing she could do, for the girl who had driven her sister to risk the lightning. How unworthy.
"I am no medic, but there is a reason I was deployed against this foulness," she said, after only a bare pause. "This will hurt."
It was not as it was with the looting cloud men. The purifying light of the dawn could not be gentle when applied to qi so dark and cold. Never mind that the art she intended to use had been made for purifying toxic impurities from ore and slag in her ancestors' days, for all that she had bent it toward the purification of bodily poisons..
It was not a kind art, for all that it would leave the girl alive. To Ling Qi's credit, she did not waste any time in bracing herself, nor did she scream when the light struck her boiling away frozen blood and toxic leavings.
Her face was impassive as she watched her sister catch the girl, tracking the fluctuation of her partially burning qi. Her foundation was deep and well constructed, the purifying light would not do any permanent damage, and so…
The thousand burning stars fell, and upon the earth, a man became a mountain. Black-bronze muscle flexed. His feet the mountain roots, his raised hands the adamant gates, his spirit a thousand unbreakable banners whipping in the wind. No blow could fall anywhere but upon his walls. The Sky fell, and the Fortress bore not a single scratch.
Gu Yanmei's eyes widened, real alarm thrumming through her every meridians as she felt the world tense under the weight of Sovereign Law. Her sister said something, but she did not hear. She felt instead the rumble and quake
A fist, drawn back in lethal purpose, the weight of the earth gathered in a palm. Retaliation a hundredfold that which had broken upon adamant gates.
Her wings flared, men shouted and shielded their eyes from the blinding glare, her spirit erupting into a blazing solar banner, an erupting shell of white gold flame.
Because an instant later, the sky split asunder, clouds wiped away like dust, and the gale of the blow thrown hundreds of kilometers away was enough to rip trees from their roots and shatter a distant mountaintop.
The lower realms were panicking and shouting. The sky split and boomed with the thunder of dueling sovereigns, one world shattering blow chaining into the next.
What in all the world could be happening, that Elder Guan Zhou would fight with so little restraint?
Scattered men on glider wings and aerial horseback scattered and fled long before her wrath could reach them. She felt their fear distantly, soot scattered before her heat, felt the panic of young men who fell under her gaze from kilometers away.
A slight twist of her wings, a five degree arc of her flight to the west, and a hundred horses and gliders wheeled and shot back toward the jagged peaks in the south. Beneath them weary soldiers cheered and men, women and children in underground shelters sobbed in relief as the pounding bursts of aerial destruction ceased.
Let them flee. She cared not. Their destruction was a task for others. Her role was to bring succor to the Sect and their mortals on this flank. She let them see her, let them flee from her, and in doing so saved more lives in less time than than a dozen lances of annihilating sunfire.
But she was not merciful. Only efficient.
Who would have a heart full of mercy, beholding such devastation. Beholding broken homes and burning fields, the savaged corpses of the dead.
A quartet of horsemen and a handful of gliders spiraled up into the air from the smoking ruin of a farmstead, the whites of their eyes so wide in terror behind their masks. Their saddlebags bulged with loot. Their hooves speckled with blood and ash.
Her blade arced out. Rain boiled. The stormcast sky lit as if it were a clear noonday over the eastern dunes.
Five men and beasts died. She did not do them the courtesy of reducing them to drifting ash, instead leaving them to live in agony for the few scant seconds before their charred bodies hit the earth.
It saved her a drop of shen, and provided a small satisfaction as well.
Efficient.
But her mind and gaze did not remain long on that, not with the spreading blight impure, diseased qi spreading in the south. Where her sister was stationed.
Her wings beat and carried her past the reeling, now recovering garrison, and her acceleration shot her toward the growing patch of miasmatic qi in the south. Even further beyond, she felt the pulse of a Sect Sister's qi clashing with roaring malevolence. Guan Zhi was in command of this region, and if even she was engaged and tied down, the state of this front made far more sense. What then, could be going on? The Cloud men, for all their ruthlessness, did not use curses and disease as weapons of war. Their arts were cruel only as her arts were cruel, the pitiless bolts falling from an angry sky. They were not this boiling, oily filth that she could feel erupting from beneath the southern mountains.
And the thing she sensed her sister and her companion fighting and killing was no tribesman either.
That was a battle ended by the time she was drawing into range. But the tide of malignant spirits had not stopped with the death of that thing. Even as she tore through the sky, ripping leaves and branches from the canopy a hundred meters below, making the air scream and break in her path, the two younger women and their soldiers were fighting. The powerful spirit beast belonging to her sister's friend was fighting, single handedly holding back the worst of the tide.
Once again, her sword cut through the rain with a hiss of boiling steam, pointed forward, a drop of molten gold formed at the tip. It crawled down the blade, enveloping metal in liquid gold as she freed the furnace of her second dantian to flow, Law interposing on the world.
Where her Wickedness Annihilating Slash fell, the dead and their ilk could not persist.
The sky blazed with the colors of dawn, and her aura swelled washing over the beleaguered cultivators, and countless malevolent spirits were reduced to ash, erased from the world under a crescent of gold.
The chaos of the battlefield ended in an instant, she descended on wings of flame toward her sister and that girl.
"Sister?" Xiulan asked, as if in doubt of her presence.
"It is good you are well, Xiulan," Gu Yanmei replied calmly. Visibly her attention remained on her sister, but the majority of her attention carried by the sparks spread from her beating wings, scanned for threats, for the status of the town, the soldiers… and her colleagues' battle, far to the south. "We will speak later, when this matter is taken care of. I must be off to assist."
"Sister!"
Her eyebrows shot up at the interruption.
"Sister please, my friend, Ling Qi, she has been badly poisoned."
"If there is anything you can do, Senior Sister, it would be appreciated," the girl herself said, swaying on her feet.
A mote more attention, her eyes fixing on the tall girl supported by her sister. How could she have missed such a…
Obfuscation. The poison itself blended with the girl's cold and dark qi, and the blurring touch of pure dream qi added a layer atop that. Even more so, the girl's well of qi was absurd for her stage, and so made her appear healthier than she was.
The earth shook again. She felt the impact of Guan Zhi's blows against the malevolent thing reverberating through the air and earth. She could not spend much time here.
A tiny, dishonorable part of her wished to say there was nothing she could do, for the girl who had driven her sister to risk the lightning. How unworthy.
"I am no medic, but there is a reason I was deployed against this foulness," she said, after only a bare pause. "This will hurt."
It was not as it was with the looting cloud men. The purifying light of the dawn could not be gentle when applied to qi so dark and cold. Never mind that the art she intended to use had been made for purifying toxic impurities from ore and slag in her ancestors' days, for all that she had bent it toward the purification of bodily poisons..
It was not a kind art, for all that it would leave the girl alive. To Ling Qi's credit, she did not waste any time in bracing herself, nor did she scream when the light struck her boiling away frozen blood and toxic leavings.
Her face was impassive as she watched her sister catch the girl, tracking the fluctuation of her partially burning qi. Her foundation was deep and well constructed, the purifying light would not do any permanent damage, and so…
The thousand burning stars fell, and upon the earth, a man became a mountain. Black-bronze muscle flexed. His feet the mountain roots, his raised hands the adamant gates, his spirit a thousand unbreakable banners whipping in the wind. No blow could fall anywhere but upon his walls. The Sky fell, and the Fortress bore not a single scratch.
Gu Yanmei's eyes widened, real alarm thrumming through her every meridians as she felt the world tense under the weight of Sovereign Law. Her sister said something, but she did not hear. She felt instead the rumble and quake
A fist, drawn back in lethal purpose, the weight of the earth gathered in a palm. Retaliation a hundredfold that which had broken upon adamant gates.
Her wings flared, men shouted and shielded their eyes from the blinding glare, her spirit erupting into a blazing solar banner, an erupting shell of white gold flame.
Because an instant later, the sky split asunder, clouds wiped away like dust, and the gale of the blow thrown hundreds of kilometers away was enough to rip trees from their roots and shatter a distant mountaintop.
The lower realms were panicking and shouting. The sky split and boomed with the thunder of dueling sovereigns, one world shattering blow chaining into the next.
What in all the world could be happening, that Elder Guan Zhou would fight with so little restraint?
Understandable, but still disgusting.
- Location
- Space between realms
- Pronouns
- He
OH SHIT! We get to see how it went DOWN! By the way, fuck that Rat who assassinated Elder Guan, all my homies hate that Rat.
The Ith'ia assassin managed to weaken him, but it was the Cloud Khan who struck the final blow.
Yrsillar said:
Sirrocco
Pedantic
Hey.. the cloudies were literally murdering her people and taking their stuff.
Still, your disgust is your own.
- Location
- CA
Really, the big reason not to indulge in cruelty as a cultivator is that it risks making it a part of you. The harm done to those dying men in the last handful of seconds they had is transient, but a cultivator becoming more cruel is an ongoing damage that lasts hundreds of years. Maintaining your morality as a younger cultivator is a shield against the potential harm done by the increasingly inhuman immortal that will replace you.
Lady_Story
Humble Teller of Stories, Villainess of Legend
- Pronouns
- She/Her/They/Them
I freaking love the Gu Family. They're always such a joy to read about and Yrs does a great job with every chapter that involves them.
Yanmei is pretty nutty. That woman is DANGEROUS and I love it. At least she's not completely writing Ling Qi off.
Yanmei is pretty nutty. That woman is DANGEROUS and I love it. At least she's not completely writing Ling Qi off.
- Location
- California
To be fair, if my sister's friend almost drove them to suicide I'd probably not like them either.
- Location
- USA
As compared to chat with our very kind and cruelty free fighting method of… checks notes… dragging people into impenetrable mists while we torment them with haunting music and the inability to find their way out while we slowly freeze them solid.
Glass dantians and thrown heart demons here
Sirrocco
Pedantic
"Even worse" is a matter of moral calculus... which is incredibly subjective.
Like, one of the basic ways to run that math is "What horrible thing are they doing?" times "How many people are they doing it to?" The Cloud Tribes have pretty much settled on "murder you and take your stuff, plus maybe a bit of enslavement and/or rape". I honestly don't recall whether or not the enslavement and/or rape was part of their deal. It wouldn't surprise me either way. The Emerald Empire has (to the best of my recollection) settled on "kill a bunch of you, and then utterly break the culture of the rest of you, and turn you into Empire citizens."
For my personal utility-meter, I feel like "murder you" is notably worse on a per-person level than "break your culture and replace it with one of our choosing". I'm not going to go into detail on how much worse, but I feel like murder is probably more than twice as bad. At the same time, once you've murdered someone, taking their stuff doesn't really affect the calculus all that much. Any raping or enslaving from the Cloud Tribes is also fractional murders, but there's probably little of enough of that going on that we can largely ignore it. So... the worst stuff per target on both sides is the murder, and then you tally up the folks who are having their culture broken and multiply it by some fraction, and you have your comparable.
I don't know the actual numbers here, but given how few folks there are in the wild raider-type cloud tribes in general, and the fact that they were wiping out entire cities at their height, I feel like jumping straight to the assertion that the Emerald Empire is the worse of the two offenders is at least premature.
That would be the Math Cabal's work I think , good job guys.
Did she ever find out that the only reason LQ ever took that stab was because LQ didn't want the Skaven to back off and stealth up and go after Gu Xiulan? Unworthy indeed.
Aliya
Someone I might become
- Location
- Kazakhstan
- Pronouns
- They/She/It
No, most of it settled on genocide. Like, Jiao trolled Muscle Elder about how he missed one apprentice when wiping out a tribe, which can only makes sense if he literally murdered everyone.
And, as far as I am aware, Cloud Tribes don't really take slaves, because mortals are useless to them and cultivators are too much of a hassle. They are very much a memetic raider "I don't give a shit, I'll take your stuff and kill you." Mind, it wasn't always this bad. Pre-Xi, raiding was less lethal. However, Xi's genocidal campaign made Tribes also be much less restrained in mass murder department.
Last edited: