"I've long thought of Isolation as my weapon of choice," Ling Qi said thoughtfully. "Through that, sharpening it with a study in ignorance seems the most obvious choice."
"But not the one you're going to make," Sixiang said, looking at her askance.
Ling Qi nodded, stepping out past Shu Yue, sliding around the lazy grasp of one of those pallid hands, peering past it into the bright light behind a distorted window to the wavering shadows beyond, two, maybe three people, even her sight was indistinct here. "You've been saying it more. Telling me off when I call myself greedy."
"I just don't like you talking down about yourself," Sixiang said, frowning. "That doesn't mean you gotta… what try to be better about grasping?"
"No, but it does mean I should understand greed, want, and desire better. I think I'm still more than a bit selfish… grasping, like you say. But you don't think so. So obviously there's a level of want I don't understand well, an…"
"I don't really think you're that ignorant, Qi. You know there are people who want more and give less than you. I think you know dang well the things you want are little things, except when someone's pissed you off enough that you rob them blind."
"It has been a long time since I've done that, hasn't it," Ling Qi said wistfully. "I should see if Ling Nuan will invite me to the Thunder Palace again; that could be a fun game."
She felt that using those skills would soon not be so light-hearted.
Sixiang sighed and scrubbed a hand through the wavering, smoky black stripe that had formed in their hair. "Ahh, I can't even say you're wrong. And… attacking people through what they want and need… yeah, some won't find any purchase with, but its not that many. And It's not like any of these are gonna be fun."
"It won't be, I understand that," Ling Qi said. "Is that a good enough reason, Shu Yue?"
"Your choice is sufficient, whatever your reasoning," her teacher replied, their silent stride carrying them further from the alley they had also emerged from. "But it is interesting. You understand desire most through the lens of need, of lack."
"I do know that this gives me a strange perspective. I have read a few treatises which claim that there is little difference philosophically between what a man needs to not starve, and what a man needs to feel fulfilled in mind and spirit… I can only think that those writers should take a little more time to experience the former."
"Some have, over time," Shu Yue said. "Among those early students of the dreaming way, some would immiserate themselves to understand better desire, who would starve and scourge their bodies to understand pain. Could you do this?"
"...I do not know. The thought frightens me," Ling Qi admitted, resting her hand over her stomach. She had locked those memories in her soul, bound by the blade she had made a part of her, so that she could never, ever forget them, no matter how mighty or wealthy she grew. Could she bring herself to do that again? To lock away the qi she used daily to support her body in good health, make herself lesser, and make her body more mortal again?
"I respect the resolve it must take to do that to yourself when you may end the experience with a thought," Ling Qi said. Any cultivator could do so. "...Though I wonder if having the option to make it stop is a flaw in that understanding itself. It is not something the world is inflicting on you, but a challenge you are setting yourself."
"A fair proposition, and one that has been raised before," Shu Yue said. "Perhaps we should speak of such things at a later time. It is not the thrust of the lesson, but…"
"I would not mind that," Ling Qi said simply. "But yes, it is probably best to focus for now."
Shu Yue pushed the door of the nightmare hovel they lingered outside open. Ling Qi flinched back, enveloped by screams, grasping hands, and twisted faces… but they were all as smoke to her. They pawed and grasped and sought to tear pieces out of her mind, but they were no more capable of doing so than Biyu was of wrestling Ling Qi to the ground. Feeling Shu Yue's eyes on her back, she stepped through the door.
Within was a deep murk, like her own mist in the negative, dark clouds rolling through a dim foyer from which halls with subtly wrong geometry branches in very direction, some of which were not even strictly physically possible, a fractal hub of place and time, it was…
"These are the memories of a home, isn't it? Not conceptually, but the actual building itself."
"Xiangmen's structures never rise to what those outside might call full spirits, but they retain memory and experience in their way," Shu Yue said. "It is useful for demonstration. If problematic for reclamation. Xiangmen's nature is to preserve, both for ill and good."
Around them were shades, so many many shades, moved through and over each other, overlapping, seeming to vibrate and resonate subtly, through a web of connections that actively made her head throb with strain as she examined them, as it had when Snowblossom tried to show her a thousand years of weather conditions at once.
"We will begin with older, more fragile shades. I have selected this building for its history… it served as the district office of the Ministry of Commerce in the lower root districts since the late Xi. It has passed through many hands and consumed many lives," Shu Yue said idly. "I find it poetic.
But first, immerse yourself and tune the qi in your channels. I know you have already meditated much on want and desire. Bring that qi to the surface and find resonation, but be mindful of identity bleed. Immerse yourself, familiarize yourself. I will guide your shaping of the blade."
Sixiang gripped her shoulder; Ling Qi squinted into the reverberating mass of shadows and memories so difficult for her eyes and physical senses to render anything intelligible. So she shut those senses off.
Sight, sound, scent, none were of particular use here, and so she closed them off one by one, opening herself more to the sensations of the spirit. To the vast pool of want.
Scrabbling. Desperation. This was the want she was most familiar with: dusty hands with cracked and broken fingernails scratching in the dirt, pawing for anything, anything at all they could hold onto. The want came in many forms: the body's hunger, fear of threat, and the flinch of a body impacted by pain.
Ling Qi folded her legs beneath her without moving at all, positioning herself to meditate. With her sense of touch, she felt Sixiang positioning themself against her back, mirroring her position.
This kind of want, at its core, boiled down to a single, overriding desire.
I want to live. Just one second longer. Just one minute longer. Just one hour longer. I don't want to disappear.
A million, million voices crowded in her ears, clamoring that sensation, the cold she was so familiar with, and those were the words, the feeling she distilled.
"This was what I didn't understand all when I was made. This feeling… I knew it the way you knew the words in a book," Sixiang said idly. "There was no fear in me then."
"This is the deepest foundation, the most fundamental want a human holds," Shu Yue's voice echoed in her perception like a reverberation reaching her while she was immersed deep underwater. "It is the desire that those who climb to the peaks of cultivation inevitably lose."
Ling Qi stirred at that but didn't rise from her position or restore her physical senses. "How does that…"
"To seek Sovereignty is to seek something beyond yourself, to devote yourself to a purpose larger than living a mortal life in a mortal perspective, with mortal sensations. One whose most fervent wish is more years to live will break themselves upon the gate of wielding Law." Shu Yue intoned
"...Because most people don't really have the dedication to seek that," Ling Qi said quietly. "But there is far more to Want."
"There is. But do not lose sight of this; though it is chipped away as one climbs to higher realms, it remains of great use to tune your eyes too."
"I thought I was sharpening a blade," Ling Qi said. "But I understand… this is not something that can be wielded with brute force; this is still… an exercise of the eye."
"You already know how this Want is used to hurt. Select a shade, demonstrate."
Scraps. These were only the scrap of people, long dead, long broken… like a swordsman practicing their cut on a carcass. Ling Qi breathed out. She focused herself, picked a single bundle of emotion and suffering from the sea around her..
Please, please! They took it, my last coins, my last hope… I will lose my home! Honored sir, I beg you, please investigate these thieves, help me…"
It wasn't like diving into a whole person; it was… airy, incomplete. And not just because she could not afford a full dive. Like looking into a book with seven in ten pages torn out. She did know, though. She did know feeling the pain that came after, the starvation, the bite of beatings, the broken fingers that were the fate of caught thieves.
It was as light as a caress, touching on the veins of Want that ran through it all. 'I don't want to die' so easily became, 'I am going to die.' Panic, desperation, rashness. The shade writhed in the grasp of her spirit, like a desperate cornered animal hurling itself at her, scrabbling, scrabbling, wanting in, wanting to eat, wanting wanting not to die.
Its feeble scratchings broke upon her will, and she heard the sobbing of a starving man being beaten to death for his theft by the very guard he had begged aid from but months before.
She felt a little curdled coil of sickness in her gut.
"Desire is not only this."
Shu Yue's voice was implacable.
"The next step of greed…. My greed is the desire for other people," Ling Qi said quietly. Shu Yue's qi pressed down on hers, but she did not greatly need its guidance yet. This melody was one she knew quite well. The near blackout in her spiritual senses cleared just a little, the forms of the shades growing more apparent, more distinct as she raised the level of her attention above the sea of privation.
"To want to be loved, admired, to have worth in others eyes, to want comfort. These things demand other people in their fulfillment."
"It's hard for a human to survive on your own, but you could do it theoretically," Sixiang said. "Not with these. Vulnerability, built right into their foundation."
Ling Qi frowned, silent. "I know how this Desire becomes cruel too. I faced it in Zeqing. A love that consumes and takes."
It was where her fears were rooted. It was what her nightmare had been about. She was afraid of taking; she was afraid of giving, even as she found herself drawn in, needy of the warmth that was other people.
She conceptualized bonds as burdens willingly taken but feared the touch of the chains. She slid her hand back and grasped Sixiangs in hers, not needing to look.
"Then immerse, and show me." her teacher's voice said.
