His mom taught him that. Having lots of wives and kids is a status symbol for Destiny-verse dragons.
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.
Imperial Dragon: The Original Boy-Mom.
- Location
- somewhere over there.
- Pronouns
- They/It
Considering her track record with plant themed women, she might even be allied with the Priestess. After all, the garden wasn't nearly as horrific then as it is now.
By the way, for the latest RR chapter I made a table for all the summit favor changes, in particular noting all the different names for the same event and same name for different events.
[X] Perform the sealing first, without the connection to the underworld ecosystem, the parasite will not be a threat.
The great spirit of indecision
still votes going, elder brother of still waters deeping, a sovereign whose way is based upon the inherent chaos of any voting system
Hide your gods, hide your cities, because Diao Luwen is coming.
Edit: Will Diao Luwen be the first architect to give a city a colonoscopy? Stay tuned for the next riveting episode of Extreme Urban Makeover: Emerald Seas.
Edit: Will Diao Luwen be the first architect to give a city a colonoscopy? Stay tuned for the next riveting episode of Extreme Urban Makeover: Emerald Seas.
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- Location
- Chicago
- Pronouns
- She/They
"Now this here is the back entrance, and we'll be taking it on our up towards the heart. It can be a bit of a tight squeeze when you are going against the flow of traffic as we are, and the guardians can clamp down hard on access, but with a few bribes to lubricate the process we can pop right in..."
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Hmmm… Suyin's way is fleshwarping… the parasite is a TERRIBLE fleshwarper… let's shove her face in the worst way her Way could turn out!
Tribulation engine activate!
Tribulation engine activate!
As is only proper in a Ling Qi certified adventure.
Year 45 Month 12: Arc 3-10
"I think we need to hunt it down," Ling Qi said. "Leaving it to recover and learn is just too much of a risk."
"What do you mean by that?" Li Suyin asked, frowning.
"I mean it had already adjusted to my first tactic between our encounter with the water spirits and now. It is only going to return to us better prepared. On top of that… even if we cut it off, I worry that it will escape and go to ground elsewhere, it has proven to be mainly a liminal beast."
Her friend chewed on her lower lip, glancing over her constructs. "...I hadn't considered that. My samples have been primarily physical. But leaving such a thing to fester in your home… Can you cooperate with the Piper spirit to improve our odds of hunting it? I admit I have little expertise in the spiritual realms, I work with flesh and material things."
"I think so…"
Ling Qi tilted her head up, looking at the pulsing crystal. They couldn't spend too long arguing, not with the goal of keeping on the parasite's tail. She paused only a moment to arrange her thoughts and sing a bar into the rippling waters.
"We seek the fleeing foe, to extinguish the mind behind your fall, what aid may you bring my eyes, O spirit of the deeping ways?"
Light flashed through the crystals, thoughts and calculations rippling out through the still active notes, pinging back and forth from distant crystals.
"Guidance. Funneling. Narrow the search, light the gaps. Power forced through channels old and rotted. Exhausting. Worth removing the polluting mind."
"I can, Ling Qi said. "Do you have a way to move quickly Li Suyin? I can't do this entirely with skips through the liminal, especially if the creature is preparing to counter such things now."
"I have a way or two," Li Suyin said thoughtfully. "Armor."
Ling Qi blinked at the non sequitur, but it took only a moment to make sense.
Wires coiled and snapped out, whipping through the water, and dug into the damaged lion and wolf constructs. Silk unspooled, bones came apart, rapidly pulled in toward Li Suyin. Her friends head swiftly rose over her own as bones and silk bonded and melded around the shorter girls legs, ribcages aglow with the spirit stones powering even as they clasped around her hips.
Bear and boar came apart next, armoring her chest and and head, the stone shielded broke into overlapping plates, forming plated armor over gleaming bone. The Horse and Ox were last, dissolving into unspun silk and morphic bone, transforming into lanky, armored arms that held the mancatcher and mirrored shield.
The light of Li Suyin's artificial eye shone out from the stylized, feminine faceplate of the three meter tall golem of bone and silk which her friend now occupied. "Let us be swift. I can't power this form for long at the highest capacity."
"Of course," Ling Qi chuckled. "O spirit, your eyes?"
Entering Communion.
Ling Qi felt something like a map bloom in her mind, fanciful scrollwork tracing out behind her eyes. It was color and music and countless numbers, and memories of world states going back for years and decades and weaving together behind her eyes, and it made her head itch and throb, in much the same way it did when Snowblossom tried to share with her. She swayed on her feet.
Attuned capacity found, adjusting output."
And then it stabilized. Once more swimming into the shape of a watercolor map in her mind's eye.
"Oof, giving you some extensions, but this is not what I'm made for," Sixiang chuckled weakly. "Think Suyin is right, lets hurry."
Ling Qi nodded tersely, opening her eyes. Their mind, connected directly to the piper calculated a route in seconds, taking in the distortions that had stymied any attempt at a long distance jump thus far.
"Opening the dance, we move right when it resolves," she said crisply, only half seeing her friend and Xinghong, perception already whipping through tunnels clogged with pollution and creeping fronds and flesh.
"Understood and ready," Li Suyin confirmed, her soldier, now standing in her towering shadow, thumped fists against his chest.
And then she tore them sideways from the world, with a single twirling step. Her hands spread wide, sleeves flaring out as she caught a strand of the Pipers thoughts, pulled it taught, and launched them further into the jumbled, warped liminal landscape, scattering one patch of spatial pollution, leaping over the next, skimming along a corrosive river of putrid green terror.
Her feet touched stone, and she blurred to the right, flying down through the winding passage full of silty water, tearing the fronds that reached out to try and grasp at her limbs and slow her down.
Suyin's steel shod skeletal boots beat a pounding rhythm at her side, the strange construct suit's legs blurring and spirit stone fuel flaring bright as her friend pushed her energy into keeping up.
And in the tunnels ahead, silver wisps flew through the water, guarded within scaly bodies, whipping out through the filthy water to map the gaps in the Piper's perception of its body. It made the veins in her forehead throb, to feel even partially the wide spanning spirit's analysis of the information relayed back. She glimpsed fragments of the process, matching the stream of information her eyes sent back to countless snippets of memory. The Piper was matching the streams of information she returned to it, analyzing differences in the present, down to every dislodged stone and miniscule difference in water temperature and composition.
"Disturbance. Spiritual fluctuations indicating trail at points…"
She couldn't convert the deluge of information that crashed over her mind into words; temporal, dimensional and spatial coordinates digging into her mind like the crushing weight of one of Renxiang's densest legal texts across the back of her head.
She almost stumbled, feeling a trickle of warmth running from her nose.
My thanks, O spirit.
Even the quiet whisper, sung back was strained.
"Oh hells, you let me filter the next one if it comes, got it, LIng Qi?" Sixiang whispered in concern as her body shot down the tunnel, wordlessly turning down and to the left along a branching passage. Li Suyin needed no instruction to follow her.
Ling Qi's vision swam as she struggled to push the Piper's coordinates into something her own senses could properly comprehend, she was swiftly getting something, filtered between her spiritual sight, her sense for dreaming space, and her physical eyes, but she needed just a moment or two more.
She doesn't see the motion, the mass of impurity corrupted barnacles and frond bubbling and swelling, the condensing impurity within it all collapsing in on a core of stolen qi bright as the core of perdition's flame.
A mirrored shield cracks down on the stone in front of her. Qi scented of the moon, and fine drink ripples out
The building star of toxic qi dies and comes apart in a cloud of virulent flesh and pollution. There isn't even time for a verbal thanks, she can only lower her head, and be thankful for her companions. Her next step dug a furrow in the muck, and she's dancing again, through twisted thoughts and space.
She hunts, and her head throbs with the pain of expanded perceptions. Space twists, and she draws her will inward, harmonized with the shell of adamant thread which Qiyi has woven around, maintaining both her own self and theirs through the tides and eddies of bent and even malicious space.
A mancatcher, a shield, needles of flying bone, phantom hands and ripples of chaotic dreamstuff, burning claws and tearing mandibles rip apart obstacles in their way, catch and snip sneaking tendrils, trying to wriggle into vulnerable flesh.
The effort grows more desperate with every jump, every catch, every burned off defense.
The map in her mind goes fuzzy, snaps and ripples like a reflection broken by a tossed stone. It snaps back into crystal clarity, a model completed now.
A single coordinate burns like a coal behind her eyes, fueled by rage of the Piper spirit at the creature who had been wearing it down, breaking it, corrupting it for years on end.
Together with her friends, she danced out of the curtain of material once again, and returned upon a bed of squirming flesh.
It was an airless pocket in the stone, some flaw or fissure of the earth sealed off from any physical connection unknown ages ago, a refuge immune to any but the most destructive physical entry.
Ling Qi landed, startled by the sudden dryness, legs flexing to absorb the impact. By the time she was straightening her knees, countless whipping, wiry tendrils were reaching for her, from vortices in the veil, the whole skein of the material world week and crumbling here.
Her hand slashed out, but there was very little room, the screech of a dozen predatory birds, more flacon than eagle broke the silence claws and beaks tearing and bouncing away the bladelike edges of the tendrils reaching for her
"It's already trying to flee again, we-," Ling Qi said, eyes scanning, feeling past the many holed curtain between the liminal. It had thrown so much at them, it's reach so much reduced. But even now she could feel it reeling away. She was interrupted by the sound of shattering bone.
She glanced to her side, heart still in her chest as she shield falling from Li Suyin's hand, the arm of her construct shattered, revealing her bare hand, and the wirey tendril sunk into her skin, squirming its way under her flesh already wrapping its way around her arm. How had her technique…?
The glowing blue iris visible in one eye socket of her friend's helm glittered, and flashed to a dark, malicious red.
"Analysis complete."
Her impaled hand clenched around the translucent tendril, fingernails digging into the half liquid flesh. The cavern screamed.
Or so it felt like to Ling Qi. The parasites wail shook stone and sent the Liminal rippling. She saw it try to sever its own tendril as it has many times before. Just as she felt Li Suyin's countermanding qi flooding its nerves, taking over and disabling the nerves which enabled it to control its own flesh.
"This has been a fascinating delve. I am thankful for all the things I have been shown today," Li Suyin said, looking down at the still squirming tendril squirming under the skin of her hand. "Ah, these organs process and weave liminal energy patterns, and control dimensional relocation, I think you don't need this anymore, snip snip."
Ling Qi almost absently brushed away the desperate thrashing limbs and wildly growing organic spines that sought her friend, even as Xinghong interposed himself both sets of arms crossed, between Li Suyin and the widening vortice in the liminal where Ling Qi sensed the creatures rising fear and desperation… and unmistakable presence from their first encounter.
"Do you want the liminal organs for reagents, Ling Qi? Or should I take the impurity core? I don't think I'll be able to preserve both without it wriggling free while I destroy it," Li Suyin asked her cheerfully, behind her expressionless face plate. "Ah, quickly too. It's surprisingly resistant to my shaping, even now."
[ ] Preserve the Liminal organs as cultivation reagents
[ ] Preserve the Impurity core for Li Suyin's use.
"What do you mean by that?" Li Suyin asked, frowning.
"I mean it had already adjusted to my first tactic between our encounter with the water spirits and now. It is only going to return to us better prepared. On top of that… even if we cut it off, I worry that it will escape and go to ground elsewhere, it has proven to be mainly a liminal beast."
Her friend chewed on her lower lip, glancing over her constructs. "...I hadn't considered that. My samples have been primarily physical. But leaving such a thing to fester in your home… Can you cooperate with the Piper spirit to improve our odds of hunting it? I admit I have little expertise in the spiritual realms, I work with flesh and material things."
"I think so…"
Ling Qi tilted her head up, looking at the pulsing crystal. They couldn't spend too long arguing, not with the goal of keeping on the parasite's tail. She paused only a moment to arrange her thoughts and sing a bar into the rippling waters.
"We seek the fleeing foe, to extinguish the mind behind your fall, what aid may you bring my eyes, O spirit of the deeping ways?"
Light flashed through the crystals, thoughts and calculations rippling out through the still active notes, pinging back and forth from distant crystals.
"Guidance. Funneling. Narrow the search, light the gaps. Power forced through channels old and rotted. Exhausting. Worth removing the polluting mind."
"I can, Ling Qi said. "Do you have a way to move quickly Li Suyin? I can't do this entirely with skips through the liminal, especially if the creature is preparing to counter such things now."
"I have a way or two," Li Suyin said thoughtfully. "Armor."
Ling Qi blinked at the non sequitur, but it took only a moment to make sense.
Wires coiled and snapped out, whipping through the water, and dug into the damaged lion and wolf constructs. Silk unspooled, bones came apart, rapidly pulled in toward Li Suyin. Her friends head swiftly rose over her own as bones and silk bonded and melded around the shorter girls legs, ribcages aglow with the spirit stones powering even as they clasped around her hips.
Bear and boar came apart next, armoring her chest and and head, the stone shielded broke into overlapping plates, forming plated armor over gleaming bone. The Horse and Ox were last, dissolving into unspun silk and morphic bone, transforming into lanky, armored arms that held the mancatcher and mirrored shield.
The light of Li Suyin's artificial eye shone out from the stylized, feminine faceplate of the three meter tall golem of bone and silk which her friend now occupied. "Let us be swift. I can't power this form for long at the highest capacity."
"Of course," Ling Qi chuckled. "O spirit, your eyes?"
Entering Communion.
Ling Qi felt something like a map bloom in her mind, fanciful scrollwork tracing out behind her eyes. It was color and music and countless numbers, and memories of world states going back for years and decades and weaving together behind her eyes, and it made her head itch and throb, in much the same way it did when Snowblossom tried to share with her. She swayed on her feet.
Attuned capacity found, adjusting output."
And then it stabilized. Once more swimming into the shape of a watercolor map in her mind's eye.
"Oof, giving you some extensions, but this is not what I'm made for," Sixiang chuckled weakly. "Think Suyin is right, lets hurry."
Ling Qi nodded tersely, opening her eyes. Their mind, connected directly to the piper calculated a route in seconds, taking in the distortions that had stymied any attempt at a long distance jump thus far.
"Opening the dance, we move right when it resolves," she said crisply, only half seeing her friend and Xinghong, perception already whipping through tunnels clogged with pollution and creeping fronds and flesh.
"Understood and ready," Li Suyin confirmed, her soldier, now standing in her towering shadow, thumped fists against his chest.
And then she tore them sideways from the world, with a single twirling step. Her hands spread wide, sleeves flaring out as she caught a strand of the Pipers thoughts, pulled it taught, and launched them further into the jumbled, warped liminal landscape, scattering one patch of spatial pollution, leaping over the next, skimming along a corrosive river of putrid green terror.
Her feet touched stone, and she blurred to the right, flying down through the winding passage full of silty water, tearing the fronds that reached out to try and grasp at her limbs and slow her down.
Suyin's steel shod skeletal boots beat a pounding rhythm at her side, the strange construct suit's legs blurring and spirit stone fuel flaring bright as her friend pushed her energy into keeping up.
And in the tunnels ahead, silver wisps flew through the water, guarded within scaly bodies, whipping out through the filthy water to map the gaps in the Piper's perception of its body. It made the veins in her forehead throb, to feel even partially the wide spanning spirit's analysis of the information relayed back. She glimpsed fragments of the process, matching the stream of information her eyes sent back to countless snippets of memory. The Piper was matching the streams of information she returned to it, analyzing differences in the present, down to every dislodged stone and miniscule difference in water temperature and composition.
"Disturbance. Spiritual fluctuations indicating trail at points…"
She couldn't convert the deluge of information that crashed over her mind into words; temporal, dimensional and spatial coordinates digging into her mind like the crushing weight of one of Renxiang's densest legal texts across the back of her head.
She almost stumbled, feeling a trickle of warmth running from her nose.
My thanks, O spirit.
Even the quiet whisper, sung back was strained.
"Oh hells, you let me filter the next one if it comes, got it, LIng Qi?" Sixiang whispered in concern as her body shot down the tunnel, wordlessly turning down and to the left along a branching passage. Li Suyin needed no instruction to follow her.
Ling Qi's vision swam as she struggled to push the Piper's coordinates into something her own senses could properly comprehend, she was swiftly getting something, filtered between her spiritual sight, her sense for dreaming space, and her physical eyes, but she needed just a moment or two more.
She doesn't see the motion, the mass of impurity corrupted barnacles and frond bubbling and swelling, the condensing impurity within it all collapsing in on a core of stolen qi bright as the core of perdition's flame.
A mirrored shield cracks down on the stone in front of her. Qi scented of the moon, and fine drink ripples out
The building star of toxic qi dies and comes apart in a cloud of virulent flesh and pollution. There isn't even time for a verbal thanks, she can only lower her head, and be thankful for her companions. Her next step dug a furrow in the muck, and she's dancing again, through twisted thoughts and space.
She hunts, and her head throbs with the pain of expanded perceptions. Space twists, and she draws her will inward, harmonized with the shell of adamant thread which Qiyi has woven around, maintaining both her own self and theirs through the tides and eddies of bent and even malicious space.
A mancatcher, a shield, needles of flying bone, phantom hands and ripples of chaotic dreamstuff, burning claws and tearing mandibles rip apart obstacles in their way, catch and snip sneaking tendrils, trying to wriggle into vulnerable flesh.
The effort grows more desperate with every jump, every catch, every burned off defense.
The map in her mind goes fuzzy, snaps and ripples like a reflection broken by a tossed stone. It snaps back into crystal clarity, a model completed now.
A single coordinate burns like a coal behind her eyes, fueled by rage of the Piper spirit at the creature who had been wearing it down, breaking it, corrupting it for years on end.
Together with her friends, she danced out of the curtain of material once again, and returned upon a bed of squirming flesh.
It was an airless pocket in the stone, some flaw or fissure of the earth sealed off from any physical connection unknown ages ago, a refuge immune to any but the most destructive physical entry.
Ling Qi landed, startled by the sudden dryness, legs flexing to absorb the impact. By the time she was straightening her knees, countless whipping, wiry tendrils were reaching for her, from vortices in the veil, the whole skein of the material world week and crumbling here.
Her hand slashed out, but there was very little room, the screech of a dozen predatory birds, more flacon than eagle broke the silence claws and beaks tearing and bouncing away the bladelike edges of the tendrils reaching for her
"It's already trying to flee again, we-," Ling Qi said, eyes scanning, feeling past the many holed curtain between the liminal. It had thrown so much at them, it's reach so much reduced. But even now she could feel it reeling away. She was interrupted by the sound of shattering bone.
She glanced to her side, heart still in her chest as she shield falling from Li Suyin's hand, the arm of her construct shattered, revealing her bare hand, and the wirey tendril sunk into her skin, squirming its way under her flesh already wrapping its way around her arm. How had her technique…?
The glowing blue iris visible in one eye socket of her friend's helm glittered, and flashed to a dark, malicious red.
"Analysis complete."
Her impaled hand clenched around the translucent tendril, fingernails digging into the half liquid flesh. The cavern screamed.
Or so it felt like to Ling Qi. The parasites wail shook stone and sent the Liminal rippling. She saw it try to sever its own tendril as it has many times before. Just as she felt Li Suyin's countermanding qi flooding its nerves, taking over and disabling the nerves which enabled it to control its own flesh.
"This has been a fascinating delve. I am thankful for all the things I have been shown today," Li Suyin said, looking down at the still squirming tendril squirming under the skin of her hand. "Ah, these organs process and weave liminal energy patterns, and control dimensional relocation, I think you don't need this anymore, snip snip."
Ling Qi almost absently brushed away the desperate thrashing limbs and wildly growing organic spines that sought her friend, even as Xinghong interposed himself both sets of arms crossed, between Li Suyin and the widening vortice in the liminal where Ling Qi sensed the creatures rising fear and desperation… and unmistakable presence from their first encounter.
"Do you want the liminal organs for reagents, Ling Qi? Or should I take the impurity core? I don't think I'll be able to preserve both without it wriggling free while I destroy it," Li Suyin asked her cheerfully, behind her expressionless face plate. "Ah, quickly too. It's surprisingly resistant to my shaping, even now."
[ ] Preserve the Liminal organs as cultivation reagents
[ ] Preserve the Impurity core for Li Suyin's use.
*****
A small afterward, If you enjoy the quest, please consider dropping a few dollars to the patreon or for a fun bit of merch. For patrons even as quest followers you get early access to commissions, full access to Journey to the East as well as the new sidestory featuring Meizhen's trip in Zhengjian underway as well as first access to new stories if I make them!
Check out them out!
Patreon
and
Destiny Store
Thank you your readership and participation in the Quest!
*****
A small afterward, If you enjoy the quest, please consider dropping a few dollars to the patreon or for a fun bit of merch. For patrons even as quest followers you get early access to commissions, full access to Journey to the East as well as the new sidestory featuring Meizhen's trip in Zhengjian underway as well as first access to new stories if I make them!
Check out them out!
Patreon
and
Destiny Store
Thank you your readership and participation in the Quest!
*****
Alectai
Speaks Words of Wisdom... On occasion
Yeah, I think Suyin should get the core, looks like we made the right call hunting it down before it could dig in. Much as I'd like the organs for a boost, Suyin is the Expert on the Abyssal Ecosystem right now, and giving her a spiritually aspected one right after she acknowledged she has a hole in her understanding seems like a good move.
It's also a nice carrot to the Argent Sect for letting her cooperate with us, if she manages to pull new lines of research out of our collaborations.
It's also a nice carrot to the Argent Sect for letting her cooperate with us, if she manages to pull new lines of research out of our collaborations.
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Elden Ring boss, phase 2.
The liminal shittery is straight up the third biggest card the Underecosystem has going for it besides the Stealth memes and general nature of their impurity based cultivation
Suyin being able to extend her work into it is going to utterly terrify people, especially given what she just pulled here
Suyin being able to extend her work into it is going to utterly terrify people, especially given what she just pulled here
[ ] Preserve the Impurity core for Li Suyin's use.
Suyin still on top of the whole "Adventures with Ling Qi are extremely profitable" thing I see.
Suyin still on top of the whole "Adventures with Ling Qi are extremely profitable" thing I see.
Oliver_Twister
Idea-Man, He Who Shits Ideas
- Location
- West Africa
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Let's keep the liminal organs. Suyin has an influx of resources from the Secret and the war, and they'll only increase from there.
We've recently lost cultivation, and having cultivation reagents will be a good way for Yrsillar to reintroduce the drugs we've been promised into the narrative.
We've recently lost cultivation, and having cultivation reagents will be a good way for Yrsillar to reintroduce the drugs we've been promised into the narrative.
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