She glanced between her subordinates while they chorused 'Yes, Ma'am', but she did not notice any discontent. That was good, she thought. "I am more experienced with spirit beasts and moon spirits than earth spirits," she continued. "Do you have any advice on how to approach the task?"
There was a brief pause, but then Chang He spoke up. "The trouble with earth spirits is getting them to notice you. That goes double for wild spirits of mountain and vale."
"He is right," Mo Lian agreed. "To a mountain, we are all flickering, ephemeral things. It is difficult for them to hear our words as more than the buzzing of flies."
Sounds like usual Mountain diplomacy involves some serious percussion. Especially wilderness earth spirits which are like "things can talk?"
Their third member gave a grunt of agreement. "I mostly hit things, but that sounds about right."
"Hi, I like swords."
Ling Qi hummed in thought. She just might have the seed of an idea.
"...Yeah that's a you idea all right," Sixiang laughed.
"Big Sister can count on me!" Gui agreed happily.
"Assuming that I can get one's attention, do you believe you can make contact?" Ling Qi asked aloud.
The three soldiers shared a glance, marked with unease. "...Yes, I believe so Ma'am," Chang He agreed.
You can tell how these are veterans by how they can sense a Plan even before they know her. A talented young cultivator's Plans are...unpredictable.
It did not take too long to reach the edge of the troubled area. Little hills and peaks rose from the vale, and branches of the river threaded between like ribbons of silver. The afternoon sunlight gleamed beautifully off rocks and water. However, despite the appearance of serene majesty, it was clear that something was wrong. No birdsong rang in the air, and the rivers paths were distorted, water flooding through trees and plants rather than flowing through the proper channels. At a glance, there seemed to be no source to this, but if one watched very carefully, the mountains moved.
It was so slow as to be near imperceptible to the eye, noticeable only after minutes of watching. It would take many hours for one of the peaks to move even a meter, but when the thing involved was so large… Ling Qi could feel the vibrations of their migration in her bones when she stood upon the ground. It took some time to find what they were looking for among the moving peaks, and in that time, Ling Qi explained her plan. Soon enough, they found their target, the smallest of the peaks, more of a large hill than a mountain, moving positively quickly compared to its larger kin.
As predicted-ish, the mountains moving are blocking the rivers and the water is going everywhere. Some mountains are going to erode through too, and that means flash floods later whenever the water breaches.
...though the small mountains moving FASTER is probably a little alarming.
Stopping on the shore of the river that wound around its base, Ling Qi released Zhengui.
Her little brother stamped his feet in happiness as he materialized, pleased that he could be of help. Ling Qi smiled, and pretended not to notice the expressions on her subordinates faces at the appearance of Zhengui.
"Are you ready to begin?" She asked instead, patting Gui on the head as he bumped his blunt snout against her affectionately.
"Y-yes Ma'am," the old Chang He replied, tearing his eye away from Zhengui. He stood at her side. The others were fanned out through the area, watching in case things became troubled. "When you are ready."
Zhengui is happy that he's useful!
Also are they more surprised that she has a Xuanwu here of all places or concerned because Zhengui is big enough to use them as snacks?
"Alright then," Ling Qi said, slipping out of her authoritative tone as she grinned. "Zhengui, make this fellow stop for a moment."
"Yes!" he announced cheerfully, turning toward the hill so very slowly moving toward them. He stomped forward, and qi flooded into the earth. Grass and shrubs gleamed with emerald light as unnatural roots churned the soil growing downward and anchoring the earth as Zhengui rammed his head into the stony hillside.
"My Big Sister wants to talk, so you had better listen," Zhen announced, eyeing the great pile of earth and stone imperiously. Behind him, Ling Qi silently breathed out, and activated the Thousand Rings Unbreaking technique, enhancing the roots laid down and making her little brother truly immovable.
For a time, there was no sound save for the growl of effort made by her little brother as the stone he had pressed his head against pushed harder and against him. Ling Qi grimaced at the expense of activating the expensive technique a second time, but she was soon rewarded as stone splintered with an audible crack and the hill shook, a noise like a sub-sonic groan rattling her bones.
Irresistable Force, meet Immovable Object.
For the first time, she felt the weight of the hill's qi shift, changing from a dissipate half awareness to a focused attention on the obstacle in its path.
She glanced at Chang He, who nodded sharply and kneeled down digging his hands into the soil. He spoke slowly and deliberatively, clearly enunciating each syllable. "Old One, what ails you? Why do your kind move with such speed and in such numbers?" She felt the pulse of qi in his words, conveying more than spoken words. An art then, to more clearly communicate with spirits?
Ooo, thats a useful one. I want it.
Interestingly, the hill might not be a discrete spirit to begin with, it seems like its more of a conglomorate spirit formed out of all the component earth and rock spirits? Which would probably explain the real difficulty in getting their attention in the wilderness, they literally just combined for the occasion, and normally you'd wind up talking to a smaller area.
It took a long moment before there was any response, but eventually with much groaning and grinding, the hill's eyes opened. Two great clefts in the earth, black as pitch save for the flickering of pale blue flame in their depths. The whole hill rumbled, a long string of noise and jumbled expression that Ling Qi was nonetheless able to decipher, thanks to her skill at music.
Chang He spoke the words even as she mulled them over in her thoughts. "The fallen star stirs. Destruction burns below," the old man said slowly, sounding troubled.
"It is afraid," Ling Qi confirmed what she could sense him thinking, and wasn't that a worrying thought. "Ask it where the 'star' is."
Chang He repeated his question, but the reply was only marginally helpful. "South, always south and deep below," Chang He grimaced as the rumbling ceased.
Further questioning proved mostly useless, and they received only fragmented answers and vague references. There was 'Poison rising from the deepest depths', and the 'the winter winds would awaken the crumbling titan'. All very ominous, none of it very helpful. The longer they forced the hill to remain still the more agitated it was becoming too.
Stellar qi. Disturbed tomb.
And a timeline for when something fuckhuge would awaken.
Note a SMALL MOUNTAIN just called it a titan.
Not many things we know of that fit the bill.
Eventually they withdrew, and as they others rejoined them, she asked the first question that came to mind. "Did any of that make sense to you? I've never heard of a falling star." The whole concept was strange, stars didn't move, they were just hidden while the Sun moved overhead.
"Right? I don't get it," Sixiang said, sounding frustrated. "Still, I feel like I almost remember something."
Sixiang probably had the Void Beyond knowledge redacted in this form.
Chang He and Mo Lian remained silent, the younger of the two tugging nervously at his beard. However, it Chun Yan who spoke up, a frown on her hard features. "...I remember my gran telling a story 'bout the gods sending down a star to punish a wicked dragon king. Just an old folk tale though."
They all fell silent for a moment. "...It is probably just a flowery metaphor for something," Ling Qi said, even reading the expression directly, 'the star' was just a burning radiance descending from the sky. It almost reminded her of the Duchess, but the Cai's light techniques lacked the rippling veils of color expressed by the hills 'words'. "Perhaps a powerful spirit beast died in the south and its blood is poisoning the earth."
@yrsillar
Uh, Ling Qi forgot about Falling Star Art?
It seems she wouldn't find the concept so foreign would she?
"I dunno, something gives me a bad feeling," Sixiang murmured in her thoughts as they set off.
"I didn't like it either," Hanyi said, speaking up for the first time in awhile. "The mountain was being creepy, I don't like it."
"Do not worry, I Zhen, will frighten away the scary lights for Hanyi," Zhen hissed teasingly.
It occurs to me that our spirits reaction to Stellar Qi...is awfully similar to their reaction to Caiworks isn't it?
Below, her subordinates took on a triangle formation, with Mo Lian at the head and the other two fanned out behind him. The search was rather dull to begin with, with false leads appearing that lead only to minor parasitic spirits or earth gasses tainting soil, but in wholly usual ways.
She left the subdual of the former to Chun Yan, who was quick and competent about striking and cutting down spirits with strong thrusts of the spear she carried on her back. The three of them worked well as a team, strengthening her suspicion that the three were quite familiar with each other. Chun Yan was the spear, Chang He was the shield. Mo Lian was the odd man out, acting to support the other two with a more varied set of skills.
We've seen teamwork lets a group hit significantly above par. I'd bet they wouldn't just assign any randoms to babysit a new officer.
As they traveled further south however, the false starts dried up. There was a winding vein of something strange in the earth. Where it passed, grass and trees showed faint signs of withering sickness, and certain spirit beasts were more aggressive. It seemed that the more closely aligned a spirit was to earth or wood qi, the greater the effect. Even Zhengui reported feeling slightly queasy when he dug his roots into the earth where the strange taint passed.They struck down maddened beasts as necessary, and kept pressing south.
Hmm...is it the tendency for Earth and Wood spirits to absorb energy? If so taking in Stellar qi like that without knowing would be super bad juju.
Eventually, the trail led them to a grey and withered valley, filled with bubbling muck. The grasses and plants within were twisted and grey, save for tumorous patches of color that marked the bark of some trees. They had not been able to investigate peacefully. Blighted and glowing insects had swarmed out the moment Mo Lian had stepped over a seemingly arbitrary line, and it was only a swift activation of the Forgotten Vale Melody that had driven the bugs back.
From there she had stayed with the group, her melody driving back the veritable carpet of chittering, sickly beasts that would have otherwise threatened to overwhelm them with sheer numbers. The sickness in the soil ran deep here, welling up from a depth far beyond the ability to sense. At the very center of the tainted valley, the mud gleamed with vibrant color from all across the spectrum, glowing and pulsing eerily under the darkening sky.
Okay...anyone without a good AoE DoT technique would be swarmed by zerglings apparently. Thats seriously bad juju above our pay grade.
Even Ling Qi had little desire to linger once they had found the center of the phenomenon. They dug for a time, to see if the source could be unearthed, but it resulted only in a growing nausea among her subordinates. Even Ling Qi found her skin prickled under the strange glow, and perhaps it was only her imagination, but her gown rustled unnaturally, the trailing hems seeming to shy away from the sickly light.
And we found something even the gown, which I would remind everyone, happily took a chomp out of a white-emulating spirit, wouldn't eat.
And its deeply rooted.
I'm not sure how you'd even get it out, earth spirits are particularly vulnerable to the radiation. Maybe Cai-brand All-Bleaching Dispel Lasers?
She had ordered the withdrawal after that, and ordered the three of them to set fire breaks around the valley. Once it was done, she had Zhen spray his venom across everything even vaguely flammable. When in doubt purifying by flame was rarely wrong.
Kill With Fire.
Xiulan taught her well?
This is totes what the Purifying Sun would do.
Once they had reached a safe distance, she dismissed them to make camp. They would rest for two hours to recover their qi and then begin working on the rest of the region. As Ling Qi seated herself atop a flat rock to meditate however, she saw movement out of the corner of her eye.
"Senior Brother," she greeted calmly, refusing to rise to his bait.
...he likes doing the Batman Hi-bye?
"Junior Sister," Laio Zhu greeted in turn, seated on the trunk of a tree that hung crookedly from the cliffside on which she was perched. "I am glad to see your nerves remain in good condition."
"Of course," she replied dryly, she was not really in a joking mood though. "Senior Brother, what do you make of what we found today?"
"Ah but that would be telling, Junior Sister, I am disappointed that you would seek to use your Senior Brothers unmatched experience to pad your score," he replied lightly. She turned her head just enough to give him a flat look. He laughed at her, but his gaze sharpened. "It is somewhat concerning. This is not a matter for Inner disciples, I think. You did well."
Yeah, this shit shouldn't be on an Inner Sect milk run at all.
"Though our current duchess has little use for physicians. Why my father told me that she performed the operation to deliver your liege herself!"
(o.o)
Shenhua scares me.
"Perhaps," he agreed, the grin fading from his tone. "But… I have spent many long hours watching and infiltrating the Cloud Tribes," he said gravely. "There is an old tale, which they speak of in the same way that we do our Fishers, Diviners, and Conquerors. They say that, pitying the plight of the men who toiled under the dragons, Father Sky summoned the brightest star in the sky, his daughter, to free them of their bondage. Before the star, the artifice and mighty works of the dragons crumbled like dust. When the dragons fell, the star elected to remain on earth and took a husband from among the freed tribes, she bore a son who would be their first leader. However, while the star was the daughter of Father Sky, she was not born of Mother Earth, and so they and their descendants be denied the blessings of earth and live their lives in the Sky and the Mountains."
Ling Qi shifted uneasily at that no doubt abridged legend. "...Do you think the Cloud Tribes really have a Sublime Ancestor, somewhere in the Wall?"
It would be quite the thought. If none of them could reach White they couldn't awaken her.
And seeing as Imperial Formations is based heavily upon Dragon stuff, it might have similar deleterious effects.
[X] Leave them to their individual tasks and search the southern border for signs of barbarian activity.
I think they got their individual jobs covered.
We've scouted the area and theres no difficulty which would hinder them from their tasks.
And tracking barbarian activity is part of a scout's job too.
