Threads Of Destiny(Eastern Fantasy, Sequel to Forge of Destiny)

[yrsillar]

From high above it seemed like a ribbon of blue silk, with fraying threads winding amongst the mountains and hills. The yet unnamed river flowed down from the sky piercing rampart of peaks at the south of their claim, wending north and down until it joined the river systems of the greater Emerald Seas. It was a rough river, full of rapids and thundering falls.It plunged through canyons at a breakneck current, and here and there wended slowly between rounded hills, and in many places its tributaries would disappear for kilometers beneath the earth, only to come bubbling back up in geysers of heat and steam.

Under the falling curtain of winter, the land it flowed through was painted grey and white, dense pine groves clustered at the rivers edges, growing thicker toward the south, and petering out into a flatter vale in the north. The high cliffs and round little hills were home to wild goats in great breed and number, their herds checked only by the many wolves, bears and mountain cats. Larger beasts, elk and massively antlered and muscular beasts she had seen the White Sky use wandered the southernmost lands on the stretches of flat taiga that lay between immense peaks.

The wind whipped through Ling Qi's hair as she came down to land at the meeting point. Here the main course of the river flowed into an immense cavern in the side of a mountain and on the other side, emerged to thunder down some two hundred meters into a great lake below before flowing on. Here at the top ice floes gathered on the river surface, but below, the churning waters were clear and a bit warmer than the rest.Trees grew in great abundance there, on the lake shore.

"Water eats the mountain and makes it earth, fire feeds the earth and makes it grow," Gui said. "Mm, this is a good place too!"

Ling Qi nodded absently as she came down to land beside Cai Renxiang and Gan Guangli. This place, she still wasn't entirely sure of it. She might have preferred the valleys in the east, whose river flowed much more calmly winding through the densely wooded cleft between mountains that lay like a single strike of a great spirits axe through the mountainside to this more chaotic river.

But, she was not the only one making this decision.

"Your thoughts, Ling Qi?" Cai Renxiang asked. She stood beside an ornate table set in the middle of the snowy field. A map of high quality lay weighted upon it. Fresh ink drying in the icy air. Ling Qi glanced across it taking in the marked out course of the river and a few other locations already spied.

They were not doing this alone. Cartographic teams were already building temporary shelter by the lakeside below, but there were limits to what first and second realms could do.

Ling Qi blew out a breath. "We'll be exposed, like I said, taking the furthest south region. But this river can definitely be tamed for shipping. It will just need a lot of work in some places. There are many good locations for fields as well, despite the cold. Zhengui thinks there are fires underground, heating the earth and keeping it from freezing entirely."

"We will be exposed at first," Cai Renxiang agreed, already knowing her objections. "But we are close to the Wang as well, and the campaigns are not over. Showing that we do not cower from martial duty is important to the success of our more peaceful projects."

"It is not a pleasant acknowledgement that such views must be catered too, but it does not do to ignore the realities on the ground," Gan Guangli said, cupping his chin. "There are many good locations for fortification in the south as well. With good planning we can make this place secure."

"The news on the soil is pleasant, by the by," Cai Renxiang said, glancing up from the map. "Does your Zhengui believe these fires under the earth are dangerous?"

"Gui does not think it is that kind of fire, it is hot smelly water and bits of fire-in-earth,"

"I, Zhen have traced the lines of the earths veins, if Big Sister lets us roam, I may keep the pressure light."

"Mostly no," Ling Qi spoke for him. "And where it is, he thinks he can bleed any dangerous pressure off."

First Threshold achieved.

Veins of the Earth: Heat lives in the frozen earth here, bubbling to the surface in pools and springs, and gathering in the hearts of the mountains. Enables agriculture in otherwise inhospitable locations and enables certain building options.
Cultivation Effects.
+1 to Fire, Mountain or Water projects
???-Not developed

"Very good," Cai Renxiang agreed. "And the mountain in the southeast, cloaked peak to root in thunderclouds?"

"From asking some contacts," Ling Qi said, thinking of Yu Nuan and her new spirit. "And my own scouting, I believe it is the winter grazing site of a family or small herd of dragon horses."

"Troubling," Gan Guangli said, glancing toward the dark smudge on the southern sky. "We will have to discern their grazing routes and ensure we are not in their way."

Dragon-Horses, or Qilin were very powerful spirits, just shy of actual dragons themselves and with an ornery temperament to match. They were one of the few species of spirit beasts which could naturally attain the sixth realm.

Cai Renxiang's inkbrush swiftly wrote a note, encircling the dot representing the mountain in a wide zone. "I will inform the cartographers to keep a twenty kilometer distance, and carry gifts of fresh fruit until we can discern their breed and negotiate."

Thunderclap Mountain: A peak shrouded in perpetual storm where the shadowed forms of dragon horses have been spied.
???-Not Developed

"Were there any more notable items in your initial flyover?" her liege asked, glancing up.

"Only a few very large beasts," Ling Qi replied moving up to the table to note out a few more places where she had seen something particularly large and mobile.

"Good. Now, I will be overseeing and organizing the cartographic teams. Ling Qi, Gan Guangli, I charge you with more thoroughly mapping the lines of the river and the places it descends into the earth. I expect daily reports on this," Cai Renxiang said crisply."If you believe my presence will open a venue you could not handle on your own, inform me, and I will arrive as necessary."

The two of them voiced their agreement and bowed as Cai Renxiang dismissed both table and map to storage, leaving only four impressions in the snow to show it had ever been there. She bid them farewell and descended to the lake below.

Ling Qi took a deep breath, glancing Gan Guangli's way. "Are you concerned by how long it is taking her to speak of whatever her mother said to her?"

Gan guangli rolled his broad shoulders, peering up at the sky."Not as of yet. I trust the resolve in our Lady's eyes. She has not lost her goal, she is only uncertain of the path. She will speak to us when her thoughts are in order."

"Aren't you yang cultivators supposed to be the pushy ones?" Ling Qi said as they began to walk south along the river's edge.

"I give my support freely, openly and without obfuscation, is that not enough?" Gan Guangli laughed. "Let me turn the question to you, Miss Ling. What scares you so about her silence?"

Ling Qi was silent for a long moment."The Duchess is terrifying. Yet somehow, Cai Renxiang, who I saw near the edge of breaking, however briefly, under stress, is now so much more…"

"You worry that the Duchess changed something, perhaps by force?" Gan Guangli said lowly.

She let out a long breath. "I do."

"Well, it is arrogant of me, perhaps, as one who has been absent so long," Gan Guangli said thoughtfully. "But… I do not believe so. Lady Cai remains Lady Cai, tempered where once she was perhaps, brittle, but Lady Cai all the same."
Ling Qi chuckled. "That's the first time I've ever heard you say something that could even be construed as negative about her Gan Guangli. Should I be watching you for treason?"

He laughed, the booming sound scaring up birds from the trees. "Alas, I have revealed myself!"

Ling Qi snorted and shook her head. She wished she could have his confidence, but in the end, she just had to trust their Lady. Right now, they had a river to explore.

***​

Ling Qi lost count of the pockets of air in the stone and earth they found. Most were just that pockets in the porous stone that lay under the soil in the region, half flooded, bearing only small populations of odd fish or silty with odd minerals. Other's stretched on, forming galleries not unlike those she had seen beneath the thunder palace, with structures of damp stone that nonetheless held a vibrant lively qi.

In some places where the river and its tributaries went under the earth, they found only claustrophobic tunnels, passages barely wider than the water that flowed through them. In others they found pools and lakes, hidden grottos among the stone filled with odd plants which they dutifully retrieved cuttings and samples from for testing at the Sect.

In one instance, they found a mountain whose eastern side looked as if it were a sculpture whose maker had ripped a great fistful of clay from its side. Leaving it almost hollow in a way that should have led to collapse. Within was a clear, still lake of water, bitter with salt, and surrounded by strange and brittle fungal blooms like scraggly trees, the air filled with visible, drifting spores. The very air seemed to drink in light and heat and sound here, and although Gan Guangli was very uncomfortable here, Ling Qi found herself feeling relaxed, especially as she gazed into the shrouded depths of the saltwater pool. The air was thick with a darkness and hunger, a silent isolation that resonated with her oldest arts.

Saline Grotto Discovered at Second threshold:
+2 Success to a Darkness project or +1 Success to a Lake or Earth Projects
Reduce Cultivation Upkeep by 1 Green Stone if a Darkness Project is cultivated here
???-Unexplored effects

But, as they traveled south, toward the higher mountains and the headwaters of the river, Ling Qi and Gan Guangli found their way to a cavern greater than any they had encountered yet, from which drifted a faint and inhuman piping song.

 

[yrsillar]

I'm sure that's not ominous at all," Ling Qi said wryly, peering into the twisting chasm in the side of the mountain from which the sounds emanated.

"Your mastery of the art of optimism continues to improve Lady Ling!" Gan Guangli agreed cheerfully, he was kneeling his hand pressed to the rocky soil outside. "Soon you shall surpass me!"

"Something to look forward to," Ling Qi said. "Though of course, I will keep a hand on my escape talisman."

"Well enough," her companion chuckled. "This cavern runs deep, and I sense a very large open space within."

"Anything you can feel, Zhengui, Sixiang?" Ling Qi asked, examining the striated limestone. It was a very high cliff in the side of a particularly ancient and worn down mountain, like a tremendous slumping white dusted hill rather than a cloud piercing peak.

"There's a strong breeze, cool and damp," Sixiang whispered. "Doesn't feel spooky, but that just means no obvious threat."

"The fire is very deep and quiet here Big Sister. Gui thinks this old man is very sleepy," her little brother chirped.

"No obvious hostile spirits," Ling Qi agreed aloud, their thoughts confirming hers. "My eyes can go ahead a little?"

"Of course," Gan Guangli agreed, dusting his hands off as he rose.

Moon qi cycled through Ling Qi's eyes, a faint silver light in the late afternoon sun, and bobbing wisps appeared within. They vanished around a curve in the crevice and Gan Guangli followed, his heavy footfalls surprisingly soft, though still far louder than she was as she drifted in after him.

A few minutes walking, guided by her wisps of moonlight carried them on as the crevice widened into a high ceilinged natural corridor. All the while the eerie piping continued, growing louder, more layered and complex. Still eerie, but increasingly beautiful.

They moved slowly and with caution, but soon Ling Qi's wisps emerged from the crevice and she stopped behind Gan Guangli with a gasp.

The mountain was hollow, she thought.

The chamber was vast, its organic ceiling stretching far overhead, and the stone was shot through with colors, pink and gold, blue and green, with all the shades of the dawn between. Great pillars of limestone, smooth and slick with moisture stretched from the floor to the high ceiling above, shaped wholly by natures hand. The floor of the space was a series of deep inky blue pools in scalloped depressions of varying height, rippling softly under the wind that blew through the cavern.

And there was much wind. Ling Qi felt the movement of air currents above, arriving through holes worn in old stone, the piping arose as the wind flowed through the complex galleries of growing stone in the ceiling. And there was light, because in the west of the chamber, above a series of rising platforms of stone that emerged from the water was a single huge crystal of numerous colors, through which the light of the fading sun refracted. There was a presence there, a spirit and a mighty one.

Cathedral of Winds Discovered on Third Threshold.
+2 XP to Wind, Water Light or Sun projects
-1 GS Cultivation Upkeep when a Wind, Water Light or Sun project is cultivated.
??? Unexplored Effects

But, she felt, it was one unconcerned with them, she felt. So long as they did not damage the cavern, she thought that it would not rise to greet them, one way or the other. She could feel other smaller spirits though, swimming in the pure, clear waters and flitting through the gallery of growing stone above.

She relayed this to Gan Guangli as they came to the entrance themselves.

"A most potent environment," Gan Guangli said thoughtfully. "And so large and complex. I do not think this can be wholly wild."

"I agree," Ling Qi said peering at the overlapping pools. She saw pale faces and bodies in the water, glimmering fish scales and fair hair like trailing water weeds. Wide and doe like eyes peered back with a seeming childish curiosity, and soft bubbling voices raised in song.

She shot the luring spirits a sharp look, and they scattered like schools of fish before the net. "We'll want to keep the lower realms away."

Gan Guangli nodded in acknowledgment taking a few steps toward the bright pane of crystal. "Luring spirits are ever troublesome. How do you judge them?"

Ling Qi peered into the pools where the spirits were now hiding, looking back at her with a wary calculation. "Manageable, they can be talked too I think."

"Manageable the same way a hawk is manageable to an eagle," Sixiang chuckled. "Well, I'll go have a bit of a chat?"

Ling Qi nodded, giving Sixiang the go ahead as she trailed after Gan Guangli. "What do you think of the crystal? There's no sign of it outside, but it's clearly receiving sun."

"An illusion," Gan Guangli said. He stepped up onto the highest platform and the light of the shifting crystal pane sent his shadow trailing across the cavern. Ling Qi held hers to more restraint. "Or… no, I think it may just be the material of the earth here."

"What makes you say that?" Ling Qi asked, stopping beside him and peering up. It was hard to tell, with the dense area of the cavern but she didn't think the crystal itself was a part of the spirit, but rather… a dwelling? In so much as those could be said to be separate things for spirits. She recalled well Zeqing's little house on the peak.

"The rock feels strange and light here, as if it might float away into the sky on the current that flows through it," Gan Guangli mused. "And the substance flowing in the stone drinks hungrily of the light and the sun."

"Well, we'll have to make note then. Maybe get a sample back to the Sect's alchemists," Ling Qi said. She clapped her hands twice and bowed toward the crystal, offering simple respect since she did not yet understand the sleeping spirits nature.

"Carefully of course," Gan Guangli said, following her lead. "Let us not forget the lessons of the Argent Vents."

"Naturally," Ling Qi said, straightening up. "Let me guide a little into a container and then-"

Exotic Deposit Found-Shining Air

She fell silent as Gan Guangli held up a hand, frowning deeply. "Ling Qi, focus, can you feel that?"

It was at that moment that Ling Qi felt a pressure in her mind, the feeling of Sixiang returning in a sudden rush. "Hey sorry looks like the there's some trouble! I swear its not my fault, watch the-

[ ] Water!
[ ] Ceiling!

AN: Sorry for the short one guys, shoulda had all of this at the last update but times been tight due to rl stuff so it ended up split in two. Anywho pick your cave gribbly poison for the teamfight!

 

[yrsillar]

"Gan Guangli, the water," Ling Qi snapped, wind kicked up coiling tightly about her feet as she lifted into the air, the hems of her dress fluttering and snapping in the conjured breeze.

Gan Guangli reacted immediately and without a word, stepping in front of her with a wide guarded stance, his fists up. It went without saying that they would need to be careful. Damaging such a valuable and beautiful site would be terrible even if it were not the home of some sleeping higher realm spirit.

That limited their options. She certainly had to hold Zhengui back. Depending on what they were facing they would have too-

If she hadn't been watching for it, she would have missed the faint ripple in the water.

The clear blue surface hardly rippled as something finger thin shot out blindingly fast, gave away only seconds after by a sound like the cracking of a whip. It struck Gan Guangli's upraised gauntlet and stuck their thrumming, a fleshy filament lined with quivering orifices that each contained a sharp barb.

It was the first of many, erupting from the water of the largest pool.

What in the world had Sixiang disturbed?!

"I was just mapping out the water! Jumping from head to head with fish-y people. I was going deeper to check out a tunnel, and then I jumped into a head that was already occupied! It tried to take a bite then and there!"

The air was cooling around her, moisture falling as light snowfall as Ling Qi began to cycle her qi. Shadows darkened flowing like slow black flames along the hems of her gown and pooling in the seams of Guangli's armor, more whip-like tendrils were snapping out with every passing moment, but more and more bounced from gleaming armor. But, if what Sixiang said was right…

"Spiritual defenses first!"

For just a fraction of a second Gan guangli glanced her way just as a faint 'thwip' sound echoed in the air, and something smokey and black like a thorn, impacted in the center of his forehead, sinking soundlessly through his helmet.

Gan Guangli, standing stalwartly against the barrage of attacks, stumbled, a phosphorescent film washing over his eyes. Ling Qi hissed out a curse, preparing to tell Sixiang to leap over and wash whatever toxic qi this was out.

"Too weak!" Gan Guangli roared, his voice strangely doubled, and golden fire erupted from his mouth with the words, it flared in his eyes, and burned like a crown on his brow. His exclamation turned into a bellow of effort as his fists closed around the filaments gripping his gauntlets and like a fisherman pulling in his net, Gan Guangli reversed the creatures efforts to drag him in.

It was hideous. A slopping, heaving mass of quivering shapeless white flesh the size of a horse. Covered in open fleshy tubes like the mouths of worms and flailing tendrils. Milky pink eyes stared out in every direction. It's qi stank like the liquid filth of a sewer, but at the same time, it was sheathed in something more familiar, the dancing, glittering qi od Dream. She could already feel the thing coming apart, trying to slip back to the other side.

Ling Qi's mist flooded out and filled with laughter. Revelers in glittering coats and gowns, of shapes human and not formed a ring about the beast, and clawed hands grasped its multitude of flailing limbs.

"Up!"

"Up!"

"Heave!" her merry dancers shouted and with the strength of dozens of phantoms, the beast's escape was foiled, forcing it back to solidity, and then up it went, tossed into the air.

Gan Guangli was as ever, well prepared to follow up, cocking a fist full of sunfire and radiant light back before the beast had even left the ground.

In the moments before it struck, she saw the beast's flesh inflate, the fleshy tubes across its body dilating. She felt the wind pull in and the natural piping of the wind turned to something eerie and erratic. Ling Qi felt her vision blur, and the world distort startling… but only for a moment as Gan Guangli's fist struck and the creature burst open like a thin paper bag filled with rotted meat.

She gagged as she dissolved in place, reforming her body some meters back to avoid the rain of disgusting giblets. Gan guangli made a similar sound of disgust as it rained down on him, little white fires springing up across his armor as his Cai made garb seemed to flare with disgust itself, purifying the taint which dared to touch it.

"That was only part of it," Sixiang said gravely, their voice carried aloud on the wind.

"What do you mean?" Gan Guangli said warily, watching the blue waters, where the ripples were already fading.

"I mean I sensed something alot bigger down there. That was like, a finger or something," Sixiang said.

Ling Qi's eyes burned silver and wisps of light formed under the surface of the water, seeking and searching. The central pool went far deeper than it seemed as Sixiang had indicated, gray limestone gave way to muddier rock choked with water weeds, and then an opaque black tunnel descending into the earth, where the clear waters grew murky and polluted. There was some manner of barrier there, or filter. It was a subtle thing but it was there. She remembered the strange fungus entity she had dealt with far below on the expedition to the underground people's home. Something similar?

"I am not sensing anything further, do you?" Gan Guangli said, he resumed his defensive stance, but she could feel qi echoing out through his feet.

"No movement," Ling Qi said warily, drifting back toward the floor and the edge of the pool. She looked out across the scalloped pools, through the water to the wary spirits circling there. She then looked to their surroundings the remaining clumps of the creature were already dissolving, without whatever will animated it, that flesh was returning to the liminal realm, its unreality unable to exist here unassisted.

He let out a breath, letting some tension bleed out. "Good work, Lady Ling. I did not think you had such fine control of your constructs."

"Neither did I," Ling Qi said absently. Perhaps there was something to explore with that. It had been easy here, her technique reacted smoothly to simple thought.

She knelt at the pools edge, her phantoms had dissolved back into sparkling light, their laughter joining the piping wind, but her mist remained, and she gathered it too her, a cold mantle of grey and white. Gan Guangli strode up to stand beside her, all sharp lines and gleaming metal to contrast her muted silhouette and cool color. "Spirits of the pools, what nightmare haunts your depths?" she asked. She let qi flow through her voice and her fingertips, tracing ripples on the pools surface.

She let a little qi bleed into the water, offered freely. It was a polite supplication, that of a peer intruding on another's home.

Pale eyes watched her from the water, swirling, darting. Flashes of golden hair and blue scales. She waited patiently for reply, kneeling at the edge, her gathered energy readied in her throat, to sing a song of ending should the spirits be intractable, or another horror arose.

After a minute or so, one of the spirits rose from the pools depths, facing her with only a little fear. The spirits form was that of a lithe young man with pale skin a fair curls, a cherubic face and wide youthful seeming eyes. She saw the serrated ridges where teeth should have been though, and too long fingers that had too many joints, the twitching tail and fins of a fish took place of his legs. When he spoke the waters did not impede the words.

"The Painted Waters School greets the Lady of Winter and the Lord of Spring," said the spirit swimming and circling below her. "We call this thing the Haunter in Darkness."

Ling Qi took a deep breath, observing the spirit, she knew that he was a predator himself. His wide eyes, far from holding the youthful innocence they seemed they should, were calculating and intelligent. The creature was not bothering with deception, knowing it useless here, she suspected. So, she made no effort to appear less than cold and imperious herself. "And where does this creature arise from, has it lived long in your depths?"

"No," the fish-like spirit replied harshly. "Forty and seven cycles of the sun ago, the earth did shake, and cracked open the depths. Poisoned water came, and with it the Haunter. It hooks the flesh, eats the mind and wears the skin. Many, many have been taken, in the dark."

"And why then have you not been taken?" Ling Qi asked.

The spirits eyes narrowed baring teeth. "The Piper wove a net, and sleeps now, containing the dark. Your singer holed the net, Lady of Winter."

"How was I supposed to notice it when you make it that subtle," Sixiang grumbled.

"The Piper is the spirit in the crystal?" Gan Guangli said, breaking his silence.

"This piece of their name is what this school knows," said the spirit. "This mountain is their instrument, but they sleep now, keeping out the poison in the earth."

Ling Qi let out a hum of concern as she felt Zhengui shift irritably in her dantian. He did not like being unable to help. "This hole, is it lasting?"

"No, not unless I pass through it again," Sixiang said aloud. "I felt it closing already when I came back out."

"Then I apologize for the intrusion," Ling Qi said. "Perhaps we may be able to negotiate solving this for you later."

This haunter by the creatures words was only a part of the problem that had slipped through and a human touch might be able to seal corruption where a spirits approach only contained.

The creature regarded her shrewdly. "A tendril slain and fresh winter qi to cure the waters pays thy debt, Lady Winter."

Or less politely, the spirit had no expectations. They would see if he was right or not, Ling Qi supposed, standing straight.

Abyssal Ossuary Revealed. Location must be fully explored before Cathedral of Winds may be developed.

"Are we done here then?" Gan Guangli asked, glancing toward her.

"Any more will require focus I think," Ling Qi said, turning to leave. "Let us merely complete our survey for now."

***​

"Interesting. Am I right to say a leak into the territory of our enemies is a likely culprit?" Cai Renxiang asked from across the map table. This time they were gathered on a narrow cliffside, overlooking the southern pine forest which crowded about the feet of the mountains which held back the glacier which was the likely source of their river.

"That does seem the most likely," Ling Qi said. "That impure qi is not something which I have seen elsewhere."

"I will send a report to the Sect and a research request to the nearest archives then," Cai Renxiang said, making a note. "Did it seem manufactured?"

Ling Qi thought of what she had seen far below the earth. "My experience is limited, but my instinct says no. It seems more environmental than deliberate. I suspect as the spirit said the recent conflict has caused damages across the region."

"I concur," Gan Guangli said. "The beast did not feel crafted to my senses the way the warbeasts of the shishigui did."

She cast him a look. It seemed that Gan Guangli had better senses than her in that department. Perhaps his focus on metal qi gave him some insights.

"I accept your word," Cai Renxiang said. "That was the most notable find then?"

They shared a look. "Yes, outside of-"

The almighty crash of an avalanche on the southern mountains reached them even here. The sound of falling rock and splintering wood and the groan of the earth under titanic hooves. They could see the shadow in the falling snow even kilometers away. Stalking slowly through the dust, rock and snow kicked up by the avalanche. Four legged and broad like a long legged ox, with wide bowl-like antlers that stretched across the sky, and a broad and ill tempered face, the shaggy grey and brown beast shook itself, casting off masses of ice and snow the size of small houses.

Fourth realm, and from Ling Qi's very brief interaction, utterly disinterested in negotiation. Thankfully, also disinterested in pursuit. Cai Renxiang's expression grew pinched as she looked down at the creature with them.

It's massive head turned, it's body like a miniature mountain itself. She felt its gimlet gaze and it let out a snort that ruffled their hair with a blast of icy wind even from here. It turned and ambled on.

"The headwaters and the southern forest are inaccessible until further notice," Cai Renxiang said, and they could only nod.

Thunderhoof Reserve: Region locked until further notice.

"But leaving that aside. This has been most fruitful," Cai Renxiang said crisply. "I and the cartographers have identified several sites for settlement and promising resource loads on the river. The great waterfall and the lake at its base will serve as the primary settlement, as the region is both safe and fertile."

Ling Qi nodded, they had not found anything better for a large mortal settlement and trade center, though they would likely need to seed villages all over as time went on.

"It is unusual to do this, but nothing of this situation is normal," Cai Renxiang continued. "I believe it is best that we remain together to develop the center as needed before doling out administrative zones. I would understand if you had objections to this."

Ling Qi shook her head, it was a formality with them, though she understood more traditional nobles might have grumbled about a lord delaying divvying out specific territory.

"It will be better for the lands development, it bothers me not at all Lady Cai," Gan Guangli replied, shaking his head.

"Good, although you have uncovered several dangers, I remain highly confident in this project," Cai Renxiang said, and for the first time in a while Ling Qi saw a ghost of a smile on the girl's lips. "There is one more, less serious matter, before we break for now."

"What is that?" Ling Qi asked curiously.

"The river," Cai Renxiang said drumming her fingers on the table. "Our river. It has no mortal name, only the essence of its spirits. It needs one. I am open to suggestions."

[ ] Name suggestions for the river

 

[yrsillar]

"Snow Blossom Huh," Sixiang said, peering over Ling Qi's head. Their weightless image appeared to lean on her back, trailing off into nothingness below the shoulders. "That's kind of fanciful for you lot."

"Well, Lady Cai nixed anything too humorous from the start," Ling Qi said with a slight smile.

"The cabbage pun you proposed right off the bat had nothing to do with that I'm sure," Sixiang said dryly.

Ling Qi gave an offended sniff. It was a perfectly fine pun.

"It was forced, is what it was," Sixiang huffed.

"They can't all be winners," Ling Qi dismissed. "Anyway, Renxiang's proposal was pretty so I backed hers."

The name came from the way the ice floes drifting down from the headwaters dotted the clean blue of the river like blossoms floating downstream, growing steadily smaller and more broken up until at last those that remained were broken in the great falls that fed the lake.

Having answered Sixiang, Ling Qi's eyes flicked back to the letter in her hands, one page of many.

The young miss Cai's ambitions show that she has inherited the fire which raised the Duchess to ascension. This humble scribe is more than pleased to provide the small information that you ask on her behalf Lady Ling. The success of the heiress project and the acknowledgement of the old clans shows for true that the Emerald Seas is finally ready to take its rightful place among the peers of the Empire and-

Her eyes drifted from the page, toward the neat stack of a dozen more pages that made up this letter alone. When she had begun sending out missives using some of Hou Zhuang's neat lists and pieces of advice she had assumed they would reply, trusting the elder cultivators acumen. What she had not expected was the enthusiasm which came with some of them.

"I mean you are a direct line to the province's heir," Sixiang said, the point of their chin digging into her scalp. Ling Qi glanced up with a sour look, and Sixiang tumbled off to the side, coming to rest on the arm of her chair with a wholly visible body.

"It's not just that. I can understand those," Ling Qi replied. People; minor nobles, ministry members, certain craftsmen, obviously would see benefit in connecting to Renxiang. She could even see why they would pile praise on foreign project. Saying nice things about your superiors regardless of your thoughts was just good sense.

"But it feels sincere, in some of 'em," Sixiang said, looking down on their contents. It's like you've made this guys day, what did you write him again?"

"Hou Zhuang's notes said to talk about the advancement and pride of Emerald Seas, making reference to the ability of the Jin and Xuan to push interactions with foreigners as they liked," Ling Qi said absently. "I… this guy, others too, there's this current of not even being focused on the Cai, or like the Cai are just-"

She struggled for a moment to find the words. It wasn't a disrespect really, but more like the Cai even the Duchess, like they were just symbols. Many, many of the letters she had gone through even the less sincere or excited ones felt strange to her, like many of these people were happy to bypass chains of feudal loyalty and even family loyalty.

It was as if the Emerald Seas was more than just the name for a chunk of land, or the Duchess' domain, like it was something that existed on its own, beyond either of those things. This conflict with the Cloud Nomad's and the underground people was their war rather than the Empire's, the alliance with the Bai showed that the Duchess had raised them to the respect they deserved, and the project that the younger Cai was undertaking showed that the Emerald Seas could do what other provinces could.

"This is more of the sunny boys thing, those preachy dawners," Sixiang said, frowning. "But… it's still a kind of dream, isn't it. That you and your neighbor are both the same, that you're part of something bigger, something with history. I think that's the real scary thing about what the Duchess did here, she stitched together a lot of old things."

"It's… not unreasonable I guess," Ling Qi mused, setting down the letter. Most of it was simple forwarding of Commerce reports, things someone of Renxiang's rank was allowed to view anyway. It was important to start these kind of relationships with information like that, according to Hou Zhuang. She knew it was the kind of things that could indirectly outline the movement and numbers of soldiers in the Jia lands, but Renxiang was better for that kind of thing. "I-family isn't really about blood, that's just the way it works out most of the time."

"The result and not the reason huh," Sixiang wondered.

"It's still only a small number really," Ling Qi frowned. "Most of it is what you'd expect, favor trading, simple sniffing after gain."

There wasn't anything wrong with that Ling Qi thought, though she was sure Gan Guangli or Cai Renxiang would debate her on the degree to which that was acceptable. But people needed things, and it wasn't until you could look after yourself that you could look to others.

…Although realistically most cultivators lived far past the point of 'looking after themselves.'

"Sure, but I wonder if its something to focus on and build you know?" Sixiang said, leaning against her side. "Lying too much gets you in trouble, but people need stories and dreams. I think by making this thing you're doing a story and making sure you have an audience. That'll go a long way, you know?"

"Maybe so," Ling Qi allowed putting down the letter and rubbing her eyes. She rarely felt so glad for the constitution of a cultivator. People loved to write small novella's in their letters it seemed. "You know, I let you off explaining before, but what is the difference between the Dawning Sun and the Dreaming Moon?"

Sixiang pursed their lips, sliding off the arm of her chair to float around to the other side of her desk, one leg crossed over the other. It was as if they were still sitting on something solid. "Ugh, do I really gotta? Isn't it enough to know that we're awesome and they're boring?"

"Sixiang," Ling Qi said flatly.

"Fiiiine," her muse drawled. "Look, art is about making people feel things. At the root, that's what we're both about. Dreams don't exist without reality, so we're both into teaching people to take the clay of their experiences and shaping it into something that can convey feeling to others."

"That makes it sound like language is art," Ling Qi said. "Which…"

"It is, the first art you humans came up with really," Sixiang shrugged. "And that rippled out to affect the rest of the world, though don't ask me any ancient history stuff, 'cause I don't know the details."

"Fair," Ling Qi dismissed. "So, the difference?"

"The Dreaming Moon, that is Grandmother, and me, we're about excellence in self, one artist sharing their vision among many, inspiring a hundred hundred copies that change the original works presentation and themes in little ways until eventually something great is born again. And it always is, folks will complain about trends but that's just the cycle art works on," Sixiang said with a shrug. "But, those great works are what Grandmother likes best yeah? It's the opposite with the dawn. I could be rude about it, but its not like they disdain quality mind, just… Dawn cares more about the inspired than the inspiration."

"That sounds contradictory," Ling Qi said with a frown. "The Dawning Sun is supposed to be about inspiration isn't it?"

Sixiang pouted. "And that's why this whole language thing needs refinement. Er- Think of it this way, spin up a revel get a hundred of us dreamers together and its still gonna be a hundred competing artists, all trying to be the best, maybe there will be some teams in there, pairs and trios. But we'll each be pursuing our own vision. Get a hundred dawners together, and you might have one or two teachers everyone looks too, stand outs that'd fit with us. But they're happier trying to teach than excel you know? It's-"

"Communal," Ling Qi said quietly. "I guess it makes sense that I've not heard of as many famous Dawn inspired artists, or that the Hui favored the Dreaming Moon."

"You're not wrong. But I think our way is better," Sixiang said. "Just cause we don't hold hands doesn't mean we don't teach you know? The Hui were rotten, they'd picked their style their theme and they crushed anyone who tried something different, and that's not right. It's funny, I think our fail states look the same."

Ling Qi considered that and gave a small nod. Enforcing an orthodoxy and simply leaving no room or resources for new ideas to grow could both have the same results. At the same time, wasn't that what society was built on, a set of central shared ideas which punished too much deviation? It seemed like an impossible balance to hold. "Ugh, since when did the Dreaming Moon get complicated to think about," Ling Qi sighed theatrically.

"Since you decided you were gonna be more than just a wandering musician," Sixiang chuckled. Dreams don't come from nowhere, they're born here in the mud and the muck. They grow up and out and expand, and then they wither and die too. In the end you gotta choose which ones you want to encourage."

"What if I don't want that kind of responsibility," Ling Qi grumbled.

"Then stop cultivating," Sixiang laughed. "If you got power, choosing to do nothing is an action too yanno?"

"I know, I've learned that much," Ling Qi said with a frown. It… wasn't so different than what she had already chosen, with the foreigners, with her dreamwalking. There was a story to tell, a song to compose. Communication, connection, the crossing of gaps. There was something there, a seed, that she could not articulate yet. And this was such a small thing really, a matter of a handful of people sprinkled across the south of the province.

[ ] Encourage and lean into this strange thinking about the Emerald Seas. (+1 Community XP, ???)
[ ] Use it where you need too, but try to keep things practical and gently guide pride toward the Empire overall (+1 Community XP, ???)

 

[yrsillar]

"Let's lean into it shall we?" Ling Qi mused. "I'll have to double check with Renxiang, but I think it will be fine."

"Really?" Sixiang asked, tilting their head. "That seems a little bold to assume."

Ling Qi nodded slightly her eyes moving rapidly as she scanned through the rest of the letter and began to open the next. "It's a little strange, but every other province has their pride, don't they?"

"I dunno about that, seems most like the ruling family has their pride," Sixiang chuckled. "But I guess I have to wonder where the line on that is."

Ling Qi paused in breaking the seal on the next, from a courtier in the southern Meng lands. "I… think it's hard to tell, and I'm not sure family is the right word for that."

Thinking of what she knew of the Bai and had picked up from context with Meizhen calling even the White Serpent branch alone a family seemed comically farcical to her. Maybe that was why she was doing this, something about people choosing to build a connection this way appealed to her.

"Stone for your thoughts?" Sixiang asked, their frame shrank and blurred, and quickly Ling Qi found draped over her shoulders a thin cat with shimmering multihued fur and a waving tail that trailed off into smoke.

"That's a new one," Ling Qi deflected.

"It's all just bending light," said the cat, licking a paw. "Gotta practice. No wiggling out."

"You could just read them if you'd like," Ling Qi said.

"Saying stuff out loud helps though," said Sixiang peering down at the letter. "Fashion advice huh?"

"I'm not familiar with the region, and I need to know for Hanyi's dresses when she performs," Ling Qi said distractedly. "What are you asking about anyway."

"Your thinking deep thoughts, spill 'em," Sixiang gave her the sort of unimpressed look that only a cat could manage.

Ling Qi reached up and flicked the cat-xiang's nose making them recoil. "I've just been thinking about what family really means, with everything going on. Everyone treats the connection as important- even our doubters grudgingly acknowledge that some ancient marriage gives us a veil of legitimacy. That tapestry we found is going to sell for enough to fund the start up of a whole town. But you know from talking to my friends, watching people, not a lot of people seem to value it. A clan, especially a big one, isn't a family. It might have families in it."

"Seems a bit harsh," Sixiang purred, amused. "What's that got to do with this?"

"I feel like its not really different?" Ling Qi said. "We all organize ourselves by family, but family isn't necessarily blood. It isn't even really exclusive. I consider Meizhen like a sister, and even if she won't admit it, she feels the same, but her aunt never would. You can be part of several families and they can only sort of overlap."

"Ah, that thing you were thinking about with the folks at your house," Sixiang said wisely.

"Right, those people are important to my Mother, but… I won't pretend they mean that much to me, but I care a little anyway because of her," Ling Qi said with a frown, rapidly reading through the letter and setting aside the next. This one of her own design, Wang Lian had been prompt about getting back to her now that they had a site in mind for settlement. A branch would come off the road the Sect was building soon.

"So you're thinking of this as people choosing to connect up to a bigger family?" Sixiang wondered. "Most of 'em will never meet though."

"Isn't that fine?" Ling Qi said quietly. "I can't do that. I don't think like that. But I don't really think its a bad thing."

Each person only cared about a small number of others really, in her experience, but those groups overlapped, and when enough did you got a community, the trouble came with people who fell into no or very few circles, and places where there was no overlap, and thus no understanding.

Was it really such a bad thing, for there to be a story that many people could invest in? The Empire was that already in some ways she supposed but…

"Well I can see why you'd not want to say that out loud," Sixiang drawled. "But I'm sorry for distracting you. Are you actually going to reply to each of these by hand? There's a ton of 'em."

"I was thinking of involving mother for some of the merchant and ministry people," Ling Qi said. "I think she'd like having more to do."

"That you don't want to write them all's got nothin to do with it of course," Sixiang laughed. Their feline form twisted, reshaping back into a fairy sized Sixiang perched on her shoulder.

"The true sign of a good leader is the ability to trick everyone else into doing the work, while taking all the credit," Ling Qi said primly.

"Don't let your boss hear that."

"I know, I already listened to her deconstruct the whole work that line came from," Ling Qi said with a grimace. "It was just a book of funny little sketches about the ministries, I had no idea she'd take it so seriously."

Sixiang gave her a look. Ling Qi looked away first. "...Okay, that one is on me."

In the silence that followed, more letters were read, and Ling Qi sketched out further notes of her own in a lazy hand, organizing what information was relevant and what would need to go into the responses.

"This all still feels overwhelming you know," Ling Qi said absently, tucking another finished letter into storage, her ring was beginning to look like that Hui's on the inside. "Building communication with so many people, no matter how surface level most of it is."

Sixiang blew out a sigh. "Yeah, I gotta admit, this is not what I picture when I think of spymastering."

"I guess its a a lot like soldiering that way," Ling QI said. Hou Zhuang's notes had put it succinctly. Intrigue was ninety percent simple pleasant conversations and correspondence, and only ten percent daring escapades.

"Still, I should probably pick a place to focus on building a network first."

"What's this accepting a limit," Sixiang laughed. "Have you abandoned your pursuit of the heavens cultivator?"

Ling Qi huffed. "I have too many things to do. I'm thinking that building contacts in the southern Meng lands is best, it will help Hanyi's concerts gain greater penetration. What do you think?"

"What would I know?" Sixiang asked innocently.

"I know you've been paying attention, even if you don't look it," Ling Qi replied.

"Central valley would be my bet," Sixiang shrugged. "It's in the name, its central, almost everything going down in the south goes through there at some point. Might take longer to see results though."

"You're not wrong, it might be better in the long term to start there," Ling Qi sighed. "Ugh, is it tomorrow yet?"

"Looking forward to going out with Su Ling and me that much?" Sixiang said with a grin.

"Compared to this, definitely," Ling Qi said, placing down the newest letter and rubbing her temples. "There's just… so much there to see."

"I get you," Sixiang said. "But business first, yeah?"

They then paused, dawning horror on their face at the words they had spoken. Ling Qi let out an unladylike snort of laughter. Truly, she had corrupted her spirit with the impurity of this base earth.

[ ] Focus your network building efforts on the Foundations (+1 to region rep on completion of the Hou Zuang's gift project, Improves effect of Hanyi's concerts on Meng projects)

[ ] Focus your network building effort on the Central Valley (+1 to region rep on completion of the Hou Zhuang's gift project. 50% chance on completion of gaining a +1 rep boost with Thundering Hills or South River Jing region)

 

[yrsillar]

"I think you might be right though," Ling Qi thought aloud.

"No I'm obviously wrong, you evil, evil girl," Sixiang huffed, glaring at her.

"Not about that," Ling Qi chuckled. "I mean about the Central Valley. Meng Diu and Meng Dan are really good contacts, but at the same time, I can't look at things too narrowly. Especially since its so early."

"Yeah you dunno how that business will turn out. Don't put all the eggs in one basket yeah?"" Sixiang agreed, perking up from their brief depression. "Besides you might find some interesting folks out that way too."

"I don't know about that, we'll have to see how the meeting with that Diao woman goes on our trip north," Ling Qi said, tapping on her desk thoughtfully. "I've been looking into information on the ministries but I'd like to hear what she tells me and compare it to what I've read."

"Proooobably smart," Sixiang drawled. "I doubt she'll lie to you but you don't have to be lying to misdirect someone."

"You don't even have to be trying to misdirect," Ling Qi said absently, taking the last of the letters. "Perspective."

"Perspective," Sixiang said absently, flopping back to stare up at the ceiling. "You think this trip is actually going to help Su Ling?"

Ling Qi held back a grimace, finishing the letter. "I…don't know. I sort of made the offer on impulse. I wanted to do something, you know?"

"That sounds about right," Sixiang said. "I think it'll depend alot on her.We can be guides and make sure she doesn't step in any proverbial pits…"

"But she knows what she's looking for, if anything," Ling Qi said. "I hope…"

She trailed off not sure how to articulate her tangled thoughts.

"You don't want to stand against what she wants to do with herself, but you can't shake the feeling she might be making a mistake?" Sixiang offered.

"I can't make choices for her. I guess I just want her to know as much as she can before she makes any choices she can't take back," Ling Qi agreed. "I almost feel like I'm overstepping even with this much."

"If you were overstepping, she'd have said so. Not a girl who'd hold back on telling someone to butt out, that one."
"I guess so," Ling Qi said, putting aside the last of the letters. Either way, we'll see if this does any good. It's about time isn't it?"

***​

"Well isn't this a cozy little spot," Su Ling said warily, looking over the fallen cliffside shrine where Ling Qi had led her.

"It's the place where I first spoke clearly to the faces the Moon decided to show me," Ling Qi said seriously. "I decided that made it the best place to cross over for serious trips."

Su Ling took a deep breath and her ears twitched in agitation. "You aren't wrong. I can even feel something in the air here. Like I could see the stars in the middle of the day."

Ling Qi inhaled deeply of the crisp winter air, and nodded. It wasn't a cultivation site, full of energies that could be bent to your will and converted to your own power, but something subtler than that. She wondered what she would use, once they left the Sect. Perhaps she wouldn't need the crutch by then.

"C'mon, quit your dawdling," Sixiang shouted back to them. They had manifested in the center of the clearing, crouched over the faint glowing Labyrinth gate. Faint unreadable shapes drifted in the mist which wafted from within the metal ring.

Ling Qi took the cue to approach, materializing the paired talisman, the compass. It's crystalline surface rippled with a slow shifting of colors throughout the spectrum indicating a calm in the flows of dream. That was good.

Su Ling followed a step after, her arms crossed over her chest as she peered around Ling Qi's side at the glimmering compass. "That a good sign?"

"Calm waters ahead," Ling Qi agreed cheerfully. "Though that only goes for our immediate surroundings."

"Right, we're obviously going to end up chased by a wall of angry ghosts again later," Su Ling drawled.

"Nightmares more like," Ling Qi said impishly, nudging the Labyrinth gate a centimeter to the right with her foot, better aligning with the energy of the clearing.

"Nightmares, of course. That shoulda been obvious," Su Ling sighed.

Ling Qi paused, her smile fading. "Su Ling, I know we joke a lot, but you don't have to do this."

"I know that," she replied grumpily, stepping up to the ring. She gave Sixiang's manifested form a glance, and the muse grinned back. "Look if I didn't want to be here I wouldn't be alright. I…know I'm still kinda ignorant alright? So if you got a way to scout things out, lets do it."

Ling Qi nodded once and offered her hand. "I'm still pretty new, so this will go better if you take my hand."

Su Ling snorted but grasped her hand. The other girls hand was hard and calloused despite her cultivation. She took pride in that Ling Qi supposed. She readied herself, this was far different from simply skimming the border the way she had with Yu Nuan.

And they stepped through the gate.

Colors, shapes, light and sounds rushed by. Ling QI held tight to her friends hand against the ethereal wind which pushed back, rejecting the other girl's stolid, firmly material qi. Ling Qi gritted her teeth in the face of it, tasting red on her tongue and hearing stone and earth in her ears as she focused, grasped the skein of the thin barrier between realms and pushed.

The first sign of her success was Su Ling letting out an explosive breath, as if she had been punched in the gut as the semi familiar terrain of the liminal realm resolved around them. Like before the endlessly tall trees stretched in every direction through heavy winter fog, the dark canopy overhead shrouding it in eternal night. The air was still charged with an electric tingle, flashes of gold visible in the pinprick gaps between the leaves and branches like brilliant stars.

But it was not the same either, and Ling Qi found herself drawing her mantle close as a faint moaning breeze blew through the forest. It carried the faintest scent of fire, smoky and ominous. Below the faint light of luminescent fungal crowns was visible in the depths of the mist growing upward from the far lost ground of the wood.

"This place makes my skin crawl," Su ling said with a shiver."What the hell is watching us?"

"Sixiang?" Ling Qi asked worriedly, glancing around. She didn't notice anything of significance observing them. There were little spirits, fairies and motes of dream of course but…

"I think that's what she's talking about," Sixiang said. Manifested here they were solid, an androgynous figure in a loose flowing robe with glittering black eyes and pale skin. "Hey why's this bugging you so much? It's not like you don't see plenty of little spirits at home."

Su Ling straightened up, her hunched shoulders slowly relaxing. "Is… that what- Wait, fuck."

What's wrong?" Ling Qi asked with a frown.

"I, my spiritual defense art stopped working when you brought me here," Su Ling said with a frown. "I-Well That sorta makes sense, Eightfold broken paths is supposed to defend by anchoring you more firmly in the 'reality'. It makes you solid, so you can't be moved by the 'unreal'."

"Which kinda breaks down when you step out of reality willingly," Ling Qi hummed. "Will you be alright without it?"

"Yeah, I think. You're here, so its just… uncomfortable."

Ling Qi didn't let herself smile or acknowledge the trust in that statement. She'd just make sure to live up to it. "Alright, so…. Sixiang I have an idea, but do you want to explain how we're getting where we're going?

Sixiang nodded as Su Ling straightened up, scanning the endless gray horizon with wary eyes. "Dreaming is more a state of mind than a place, so if you want to get somewhere beyond what you can see right in front of you, you need to have it mind. So focus on what your looking for, the same way you'd create a mental image when cultivating an art, keep a hold of Ling Qi and keep moving forward!"

"Got it," Su Ling said, scowling as she squeezed her eyes shut. Her grip on ling Qi's hand tightened.

Ling Qi began to walk slowly forward, and when she leapt down from the platform of earth and stone they had began on to a slowly falling leaf the size of the market square in Tonghou, Su Ling followed.

Leaf to leaf, branch to branch, they went, coming at last to a thick bough whose upper side held a carved road of dirt and stone, they traveled on. The travel went slow, with Su Ling's eyes screwed shut, but soon their surroundings began to change.

The branch road shifted from one blink to the next, to became a bubbling river, whose cool water nonetheless supported their feet, it wound down in a spiral through the misty sky bringing them to a shadowed canopy a league below the greater one, where sun dappled trees and soft rolling hills gleamed like an emerald in the shadows interior of the Emerald Seas.

The shadow of a third tail, black as night, glittering with starlight swept through the air behind Su Ling like a ghost. Shadows clung to her like mist, casting her hard face in a light that was at once more beautiful and more feral. Predatory. Patient. Watching.

When atlast their feet touched grass, Su ling's plain brown eyes scattered the glittering green ones which had formed in the shadows on her face.

"We're here," Su Ling said. She looked down at her free hand, at the shadows clinging there, lit by embers of pale blue foxfire to outline talons. She clenched her fist and they dispersed. The Tail remained. Su Ling's ears lay flat against the side of her head.
"And where is here?" Sixiang asked. For once the muse's expression was serious as they looked around at the bright, but somehow unsettling isle of green in the dark grey mist.

"Not home," Su ling said darkly."But the closest thing I guess. It's… hers. Her hunting ground. I can feel it."

"Could Su Ling's Mother be aware here?" Ling Qi asked quietly.

"I don't know what she is exactly, but… not how your thinking most likely," Sixiang said, licking her lips.

There was movement among the trees. Ling Qi's eyes shot toward it.There in the shadows, she met a pair of wide but small eyes. A little girl with tangled bushy hair and sun darkened skin crouched there, dressed in rags. She fled with a yelp, a dark brown tail the last thing to disappear into the brush.

"That could not be a more obvious trap," Su Ling said flatly.

"Maybe," Ling Qi said with a frown, glancing at Su Ling. "This place though, it might not have come from her."

Su Ling pursed her lips. "It's not a memory of mine, if that's what your thinking."

"How are you sure?" Ling Qi asked.

"Granny wasn't dead when I was that age," Su Ling said tersely. "She wouldn't ha' left me to get that filthy when she was 'round."

Ling Qi chose not to comment on the thickening of Su Ling's accent or the look in her eyes as she said that. Instead she let out a breath. "Alright. This is your journey, where do you think we should go?"

Su ling hummed to herself looking around. "I recognize this place, its where they used to gather mushrooms, if we follow this path we'll find…"

[ ]The cemetery
[ ] The old shrine.

 

[yrsillar]

"We'll find the old shrine," Su Ling said wearily. "Well assuming this place makes sense at all."

"It makes as much sense as you can impose on it," Sixiang said absently. "It's warm here."

"Village was a good ways north and west," Su Ling grunted, stepping toward the ill kempt dirt path.

"What makes it the 'old' shrine?" Ling Qi asked quietly, peering warily at the shadows under the canopy. This place was warm and bright, but there was something in the air here that raised the hairs on the back of her neck. She didn't feel watched precisely, but…

It felt like stalking the den of a sleeping beast.

Su Ling scratched absently at her ear, the two real tails curled about her waist twitching and coiling tight. Her brows furrowed as she searched her memory. "I think Gran said… long time ago, the village got wrecked, a big disaster, so it got moved and when it did, some big priests from the city came down to consecrate a new shrine. The old one got exorcized and abandoned."

Su Ling chuckled and it was both fond and sad. "She said the old spirits would take away dumbass nosy children too curious for their own good."

"Did they?" Ling Qi asked, tilting her head.

"Dunno, but most folks stayed away, made it a good hiding spot when I really needed shelter," Su Ling shrugged. "But… guess it is where I met the Ministry of Integrity guy. So maybe Gran wasn't wrong."

Ling Qi shared a mirthless laugh with her friend. If you looked at it that way. "How did that go?"

"He let me think my swinging log trap got him, then appeared behind me with his hands on my shoulders. Dramatic fucker," Su Ling laughed.

Ling Qi smiled wanly, her own finder had been a little less good humored, striding in the space between eye blinks to capture her as she fled from a heist whose point she no longer remembered. Not so different from how she moved at times now that she thought of it. That too was amusing.

In the company of memories the oppressive feeling of this place was a little less.

It was obvious when they were nearing the shrine. She saw the tree at its center from minutes away. It was a massive thing, more than ten meters across at the base, stretching more than a hundred into the sky. An ancient growth that stood out like a sore thumb in the younger growth around it. Ancient and hoary with deep brownish red bark and wide leaves of a bright vibrant green.
"Was it really that big," Ling Qi asked.

"...Yeah," Su Ling said, frowning. "Actually, dunno, mighta been a little smaller, but not too much. It really did loom like that."

Ling Qi just nodded quietly as they approached its base.

There was once a clearing here, an area paved with stones, the contours of a garden, but it was now nothing more than weeds, brush, saplings and broken rocks. Built into the base of the tree was a run down structure. It's tilted roof sagged, shoots of growth rose through the holes. It was clearly a temple once with a high painted archway and hooks for lanterns. It wrapped against the tree, built against it, into it, with narrow walkable paths seemingly carved or grown into the thick trunk, and the tattered remnants of rails.

It's interior lay in an unnatural shadow, so thick and cloying that tendrils of it spilled from the windows and doorway like rivulets of ink.

"You stayed in there?" Sixiang asked Su Ling, tilting their head.

"It's never been like that in reality," Su Ling said, watching the liquid darkness that ran down from the broken shutters of a window. "Like it always felt bad, so I never went into the main building. But there's a shed round the other side I slept in sometimes. Had stuff for me to build with, rope and wood and tools."

Ling Qi saw the image of it shimmering like a mirage, small and overgrown with ivy, crumbling with the passing of days, before it dispersed like mist in the air. "But we're not heading to the shed are we Su Ling?"

"No," Su Ling said, staring hard into the darkness. "Always wondered what was inside."

Ling Qi nodded in acceptance, but gathered her power around herself, frost touching the grass and her shadow growing just as inky and black as that which spilled from the old shrine. That though was less important than her attention to the stuff of dream that made this place. She was ready to tear them free and hurl them back to the gate at a moment's notice.

Sixiang put a hand over hers and she gave a small nod, following her friend toward the ruined shrine.

Despite the darkness, the air only grew warmer as they approached, until it was a musty, humid heat, like the breath pouring out of an open mouth.

Su Ling sighed, nudging the moldy splintered floorboard with her foot, making the ink-like darkness spilled across it ripple.."Man, this is a pretty obvious trap too huh?"

"Maybe a bit," Ling Qi said warily. "But… with what little you've told me about your natural abilities, is that a surprise?"

Su Ling wrinkled her nose, fingers curling into fists. "Traps within traps, labyrinths and illusions… yeah, I s'pose that's fair."

The entrance beckoned, and Su Ling Stepped inside, her sandals touching down on liquid darkness and making a sound like she was treading on wet mud. She passed under the eaves, and stepped past the half broken doors. Ling Qi hurried to follow.

The interior was as dank as any swamp. Mold, slick and wet clung to rotting, sagging walls and liquid of indeterminable origin dripped from the bubbling ceiling. Su ling gave her an amused look as Ling Qi gathered cool wind around herself, isolating her person from the scent and liquid.

"Didn't take you for dainty."

"I'm not," Ling Qi sniffed. "What about you, where did your wariness go?"

"Dunno, I just… don't feel like I'm in danger," Su ling said with a frown.

Ling Qi gave Sixiang a worried look, but the muse shrugged. "Can't see any outside effects. If you're feeling weird its something that was already there."

Su Ling's good humor faded from her face, like a heavy stone sinking into a lake. "...Right. Let's keep going."

They continued through the sagging hall in silence, passing by and through rooms and halls. Living areas for priests and places of gathering and performance. The black tar that ran and dripped from inside the walls remained ubiquitous.

Ling Qi found herself hunching her shoulders as they went. This place felt… unhealthy, like she was wading through an open wound. "You said you knew stories, but is there really nothing clearer than that?"

Su Ling rolled her shoulders showing the same discomfort as they tread the hall toward the paired doors that would lead to the shrine's center, within the trunk of the tree. "I think I heard others say, a sickness or something? Poison in the earth-"

"In ten years return with the cure, we don't wish to cull this garden entirely, pet."

Su Ling and Ling Qi's heads whipped around at the sound of that voice. It was a sickly sweet thing and it did not carry on the wind. It oozed and dripped. It was too distorted to here gender or age in that voice, it was a hideous thing. As if the filthy tar in this place had pooled in her ears and its undulation was sound.

"Why-" Su Ling began sounding disgusted and pained.

Shadows wavered in the hall, like a slick of slime and oil cast across reality. Two people and lumps that might have been bodies once sprawled on the floor. That awful voice came again rising and falling in volume like the chaotic ripples in disturbed water.

"Why pet, these poor creatures must be moved to a new reserve for their own good. Left to their own devices they will rebuild these old barbarian practices when we turn our eyes away. You, their lord must strike down these petty gods, and end these barbaric agreements with your own hands."

Ling Qi shivered, glaring at the space where the shadow was, now gone and vanished like a popping bubble in a puddle of oil. "Su Ling-"

"Beasts you might have been, but we made you better, did we not, pet?"

Su Ling's ears were flat against the side of her head, and her expression was twisted in nausea. "C'mon. I want to see the center of the shrine."

And the bent and battered doors opened.

Beyond was the shrine center, filled with the fallen icons of little gods. Peeling paint, that should have been too faded for detail, nonetheless spoke the old tales of creation and the coming of Tsu in the currents of the liminal energy woven tight still through the walls. There, in place of honor stood the withered flowers of the Bountiful Earth, born of Tsu, patriarch spirit of the Emerald Seas, there the silver disc of the Mother Moon untarnished still, there a icon of a river god in tarnished to black, and a dozen others less recognizable than even that.

At the center where the god of the shrine was to sit, sat a broken figure of gold, its altar painted in the bright colors of dawn, its nine tails drooping, melted, broken.

"When festivals stop, when offerings end, blood and flesh remain," Sixiang said quietly.

Su Ling whirled on them, lips drawn back in a snarl. "Don't you dare try ta excuse this shit 'cause of something a disgusting fuck did forever ago!"

Sixiang raised their hands defensively. "Not giving excuses here. Spirits are spirits though, you know?"

"Not all deals are good ones," Ling Qi said quietly. "But there's consequences even for breaking bad contracts."

Su Ling shot her a hurt look.

"Explanations aren't excuses Su Ling," Ling Qi said steadily.

Her friend grimaced, dragging a hand through her hair. "I fuckin know that. Sorry. That doesn't explain why that bitch isn't dead. Plenty of places broke with the old ways and didn't leave the spirits to do as they liked."

"That's true, Ling Qi agreed. "An unwanted god is just an obstacle after all. Why leave it… or being realistic a descendant of it, still wandering around in one of the strongest counties of the Emerald Seas."

Su ling gave a terse nod as she moved into the room, glaring up at the broken statue in it's center. It stared back with empty eye sockets, the gems that had once filled them long gone.

They both flinched, qi rising against a threat as they heard a crash from behind them, the sound of something falling. A wisp clinging to the back of Ling Qi's gown spotted a bushy haired shadow, darting into a side hall. She shared a look with Su Ling whose sharp ears had surely caught the pattering of feet.

"Do you still want to ignore that?" Ling Qi asked.

"Not all of us get all worked up just because they see a cute kid," Su Ling said dryly."Wouldn't they just be a weird memory figment at best?"

"Could be a little cousin playing around I guess," Sixiang mused. "What do you want to do?"

"I… don't know. Say I accept this, that something way back went wrong, and caused… her? What do I do with that?" Su ling asked.

"It might not help your peace of mind, but figuring out your obstacles will still help your goal," ling Qi said.

Su ling grimaced. "You're right. I shouldn't ignore that. It's just…"

"What did you want to find?" Ling Qi asked quietly.

"Dunno, some conspiracy or cult keeping her around?" Su Ling mused. "Not that she's probably just the shitty result of something unrelated."

Ling Qi thought back to her conversations with Meng Dan and sighed. "You've described most major events in history right there, or so I've been told."

"Izzat so?" Su Ling said, letting out a bark of laughter.

"Well historical events are usually several unrelated fuck ups piling up in one place," Ling Qi said, allowing herself to be just a bit a bit vulgar. She was taking liberties with his words, but it was helping Su Ling, so she could apologize later.

There was a scrape, something fell again. "She's not very good at that," Su Ling grunted. "Not sure if that makes it more or less believable."

Ling Qi hummed. It was just her gut, but she didn't think the child, or thing wearing one's face was a trap, at least not from Su Ling's mother. "If she's going to keep following us maybe we should just meet her now.

"Times probably better spent here," Su Ling said. Maybe… I dunno, maybe I get that sicko's memory talking again, find something more."

They both looked to Sixiang who held up their hands. "Whoa whoa, what am I some kind of tiebreaker?"

"Yes," they both agreed.

Sixiang stuck out their tongue. "Fiiiine, we should-

[ ] Check up on the Kid, if they are up to something, better to know.
[ ] Keep teasing memories from the shrine, there's definitely a deeper something here.

 

[yrsillar]

"We should check upon the kid.If they are up to something, you really want to just let them set up as they like?" Sixiang said.

Su Ling grimaced, not being able to refute the logic. "Fine, you know its not a real kid though, right?"

"It's pretty unlikely,'' Ling Qi admitted. The only reason she even considered the possibility was that a child with a foxes bloodline might theoretically be born with a gift for dreamwalking.

"Let's go check this out then.I guess I kinda… already got the basic picture here," Su Ling grunted moving back toward the door.

"Yeah," Sixiang said unhappily, buffing the tarnished icon of the Mother Moon with her sleeve. "The picture isn't subtle. This place musta wanted to show it for a long time."

Ling Qi nodded silently and sharing a glance with Su Ling, ghosted out of the room as a ribbon of shadow. Shapeless, bodiless she flowed along the splintered ceiling, seeking the source of warmth and life and light in this dark place. Her companions followed behind in silence.

It did not take long to find her quarry. The fox crouched inside the doorway of a room, in one of the side halls, fearfully peering around the corner, piled with the collapsed remains of some furnishing. They were as Ling Qi saw them last. Tiny, skinny and filthy, with brush and leaves and now smears of black ooze in their bushy hair, a single quivering tail curled around their body.

But Su Ling was right, observing her for longer than a moment while molded into the shadows of the ceiling, she was clearly not a younger Su Ling. The hair was the wrong shade of reddish brown, her eyes were gray rather than green and her facial features subtly different. The child could have passed for her friend's sister though. Which was unsurprising.

Her spiritual senses showed her a child with innately awakened qi born from beast blood only a couple of meridians and a flicker of light in her dantian a tiny wisp of power. Perhaps not long ago Ling Qi would have only seen that, but her eyes were sharper now, an insight burned silver in her channels even without physical eyes to see through. The girl was not normal. Her meridians twitched and moved, one moment winding along her spine, the next branching through her legs, and now coiling toward her eyes.

It was unsettling and unnatural, not quite like anything she had seen before. She thought the information to Sixiang, who would pass it to Su Ling.

The child looked up. Her eyes were liquid gold now.

Though she was not breathing for a moment, Ling Qi's circulating qi caught in her channels. But then the child looked away, peering warily down the hall at the faint sound of Su Ling's footsteps.

"So squirt, you've been following us huh!" Sixiang said cheerfully, manifesting directly above, crouched on the broken table. Ling Qi tightened her grip on the energy of the dream preparing to hurl them back out through the gate if need be.

But the child fell backward, sputtering and scooting their bottom across the dusty floor until their back hit the door frame.

"Ah, I'm sorry I'm sorry!" the girl yelped, covering her face with her hands. It was unpleasant to watch, Ling Qi knew that particular posture of cowering, expecting the rapid onset of pain.

"Don't apologize, tell us what you want," Su Ling said bluntly, as she rounded the corner. Her arms were crossed over her chest, and her tails lashed behind her two real, and one of shadow and stars. But she couldn't hide the flicker of discomfort that showed in her eyes from Ling Qi. Su Ling didn't like this scene either.

"I'm sorry," the cowering girl repeated, peeking through her fingers. "But your not 'upposed to be here."

"Yeah, who decides that," Su Ling said, her discomfort was palpable, and Ling Qi saw her gaze sliding to the right and left as if searching for something else to focus on. Finally she grimaced and uncrossed her arms coming up to crouch by Su Ling. "Look, we don't want to hurt you. We're just looking for information, okay? Who are you."

"I'm Xisheng," said the child, they were still afraid, Ling Qi could still feel their… fuzziness the shifting of meridians, and she saw now in the shadow something disturbing. "You're too big sister. Momma won't like that."

Su Ling narrowed her eyes at the name, no doubt recognizing what Ling Qi did. Xisheng, the girl called herself Sacrifice.

Sixiang looked a little sad peering down. "You're not a dreaming mortal, or one of us, you're not even quite a fox are you kiddo? What are you."

The girl finally lowered her hands, hands now holding a darker shade of skin, more pronounced claws. Her eyes were brown, her hair was black, her features a little rounder. But she was still afraid. "I'm Xisheng. I told ya. I'm the lost."

That childish face tilted showing a spark of wisdom beyond its years. There was a shadow there behind her ever so briefly. Small forms still in the snow, blood and pain ugliness Ling Qi thought left behind in the worst streets of Tonghou.
The girl's face changed again, lighter hair, lighter skin, a boy, a girl,indeterminate. Their voice echoed strangely. "Most of us aren't so lucky sister. Why did you come back? Are you gonna eat us? So you can get even bigger?"

Su Ling had flinched back, her hands white knuckled as she glimpsed what Ling Qi had already seen. This was… a ghost of sorts. But not of one little girl. They were a ghost of many, many little girls and boys, pressed together.

"Fuck no, I don't eat people," Su Ling spit.

The child-ghosts head tilted the side, their curls auburn red now. "But how else are you gonna eat Momma. If you don't, she'll eat you. That's what we're for, she takes what she's owed and gives back the prettiest gifts! But they give us back. We're all sacrifice. And it makes her strong."

"I'm gonna kill her," Su Ling said lowly. "Not eat her. Maybe I'll make a rug, but I'm not gonna eat her."

"That's dumb," said Xisheng, now a little boy with mornful blue eyes and muddy hair, his dark furred ears twitched as he tilted his head, and his nose was black with frostbite. "Sacrifice is how you get big and strong. You might even get your sixth tail! No one has done that here in forever."

"No it's not," Su Ling growled, standing up. "I don't want the tails I already have."

"That's easy to say when you're already big," Said the ghost, once again the young girl with twigs and leaves in her hair. The shadows of bruises and the scent of burning hair wafted gently from her. "When you're already strong. Did you really forget how it is to be hungry already?"

"I know being hungry ain't everything," Su Ling said. "Solving that is only step one. You need more than that, else you're just a monster. Like her."

"What's a monster, sister?" asked the little ghost, through a broken jaw and a mouth of shattered teeth. "Is it another word for a human?"

It was hard for Ling Qi to remain silent, and she saw Sixiang biting their lip as well. But another part of her recognized that Su Ling needed to be the one who answered these questions.

Su Ling's expression folded into a scowl, and for a long, long moment she stared down at the floor. The ghost child just looked at her curiously, now through the empty eyes of a skull, filled with the same dripping black tar.

"You're not all the way wrong, you cheeky little shit, but its not another word for human, it's another word for person," Su Ling said quietly. "It's what we all are, when we don't try to be better."

She grimaced itching at her right eye, and Su Ling's nail broke skin. The little cut bled, and the trail looked not unlike a crescent.

"But what's the difference between killing someone and eating them. They're gone either way?" asked Xisheng innocently. "Isn't it dumb to waste them?"

"No, cause it's more important to keep in mind what the death is for. I don't want to kill her cause it'll make perfect cultivation materials or some shit," Su Ling growled.

"Hehe, Sister is a weird one. Maybe that's why you got to be big, and we never will," giggled the ghost. "But I guess it doesn't matter."

"Momma is waking up from her nap."

Despite her immaterial form Ling Qi felt a sensation like goosebumps on her nonexistent skin, a sensation of crawling predatory awareness.

"Bye Sister," said the little ghost smiling sadly now, with a face that was whole and unscarred. "Meet'cha in Momma's belly."

"We need to go," Su Ling said, her eyes flying open, her ears and tail standing on end. The only hesitation was a faint grimace, as she glanced toward the beatifically smiling child.

[ ] Run Immediately, flee before the monster Su Ling calls mother is fully roused (100% success. Base rewards for action)
[ ] Grab the ghost-child-whatever, grab the young spirit and run (50% success, injury to party based on degree of failure. Additional benefits for Su Ling on success.)

AN: Might be one sided, but you gotta walk into it with open eyes.

 

[yrsillar]

Ling Qi met Su Ling's eyes. For that single moment, it is as if she can see the thoughts turning in her friend's mind.

"Like-" Ling Qi began.

"-Hell," Su Ling growled.

"Eh?" said the ghost, expression twisted in confusion, flickering between a half dozen faces of cruelty and death as Su Ling's arms wrap around them, and she is tossed over Su Ling's shoulders like an unruly sack of rice.

"Bitch is fat enough already. Ling Qi, what do we do?"

Sixiang shimmers and vanishes, not a mote of attention can be spared for frivolous manifestation as they both gaze out of Ling Qi's eyes, observing the flow of the dream. Wooden walls groan as if under the force of a gale, tar bubbles, and the mists weep with the the grief and pain of the forsaken.

"This should remind you of something," Sixiang whispered.

Ling Qi swallowed and her hand knifed forward, splitting apart rotted wood like soft clay, not cutting or breaking material but merely finding a seam and opening it. She was not the same girl that had fled blind through the house of her mentor, the belly of a hungry high realm spirit. "Take my hand and don't let go!"

Su Ling grasped the hand she threw out in a crushing grip and Linq Qi leapt through the gash in the shrine, through the veil of scintillating color and unshaped dream. The rush of motion came like the wind screaming past her ears and the ground blurring away beneath her feet, wrapped she was at once one with the chaos of shifting colors and stubbornly separate from it anchored by will and love for a friend who would not take submergence in the formless chaos of the liminal realm half as well.

But there was something wrong. A chain, a binding, a terrible weight, grudges and pain and sadness, the terrible aching loneliness of children born and dying without the most meager scrap of love, more hollow than the belly of a streetrat who'd not eaten in a week.

The realm of dream made these chains as real as any steel. And the beast they were bound too felt their tug.

Ling Qi stumbled as her feet touched grass.

"No, no, no," Sixiang murmured frantically in her head.

Ling Qi did not need the reminder to run, to flee as fast as her feet could carry her. She tried for her wings, but they did not answer, her dress was still.

Little children couldn't fly, little beggars did not have fine dresses. What fairy tale did she dream?

Ling Qi's heart thundered in her chest, her bare feet cold on the frost touched grass. The trees seemed so tall now, their shadows so deep. Her lungs burned, her breaths rasped, tears filled her eyes. Because she was alone, save for the one who hunted behind. Just a ragged beggar girl who had wandered too far, never to be missed, never to be found.

Except, except. Wasn't there a hand in hers?

At Ling Qi's core was darkness, a want so deep that she knew in her heart of hearts, would never be filled. It was desperation and hunger and privation, the desolation of the soul, the death of higher thought and all the things that made a person more than a thing. If a single petty human word could be applied, it was Isolation.

But she had wrapped herself in so many other things. Most of all the grasping, yearning wind. Hers was not the open blue sky of limitless freedom, the emptiness that accepted no chains. Hers was the blizzard howl, tugging at shutters, begging to be let in.

Her wind was the wind of Want. A greedy, grasping wind for a greedy, grasping girl.

Desire, the desire for more, the desire for the aching to stop, to be warm by the fire for just a little while. Want was the soul reaching out, the impetus of connection, the abrogation of Isolation, the seed of Community and Home.

Ling Qi is not the little beggar girl. She holds her friend's hand in hers. She does not die alone in the snow, cherishing a warmth she can never hold. Her dream asserts itself.

A blizzard erupts, mist and snow and cold, and a lightless fire burns at the core, rejecting the dream of desolation.

Spoiler: mechanics

Want advances to III
Want III- Want is the soul reaching out, the impetus of connection, the abrogation of Isolation, the seed of Community and Home.

Home advances to I
Home I: Home is is a binding, woven with each breath

Effect added to Domain
Spiritual Defense Potency is increased by 2 against Isolation effects

And yet, still she runs, grasping that calloused hand in hers even tighter, because though she had thrown off those chains, she knows it is only the edge of the beasts awareness, not it's true strength. But she can also sense that the beast is a languid thing, slow to wake, slow to rouse.

Behind her, she hears Su Ling murmuring under her breath, between breaths.

"...no truth but what you carve. No justice but what you hold, no meaning but what you make. Reject oneness, reject enlightenment, be one of many, accept the world's bounty."

Something sparks in her meridians, something heavy and coarse and solid, and Ling Qi can feel its conflict with the realm they now stand in. The qi she is trying to cycle struggles to even maintain form.

"What happened," she rasps a moment later as they soar, leaving the rough ground to dart among the trees of the grim fairytale forest as something old, and awful and hollow stirs in its heart.

Ling Qi understands at that moment why those shadows frighten her, when she has long been their kin. This darkness does not want to be filled, it is a hunger without end, a stomach with no bottom, it is something beyond her greed, it was born wrong, with a wasting rot in its soul. It suffers and this has made it cruel. "Something dragged us back, like a chain, I couldn't jump us out of this little dream realm."

She doesn't need to say what it is. Su Ling's eyes narrow. "Can you-"

"She can't, I belong here. Silly sister, and you do too now. You shoulda just been happy to get away," says the child sadly. "Now you really are gonna be eaten too."

"You don't belong here. You don't belong to her, or them, or anyone else who hurt you," Su Ling hissed over the rushing wind. "None of you ever did. Fuck I miss my Gran."

Ling Qi grimaces, preferring to pretend she hadn't heard the hoarse whisper her friends voice had dropped into. I don't know if i-" she mumbled thoughts racing. Some application of the Opened Vault technique maybe? The concept was there, the theft of a precious thing, no matter the vault, but she had only just begun to master the technique, to do something so far beyond its purview was-

"Not likely to work," Sixiang whispered voice tinged with fear. "I dunno, maybe I can help, I could try to dig my hands in fray the connection, but-"

Time, time, precious time. Did they have time to play and experiment and try?

"Set us down a second," Su Ling said grimly.

She glanced back at her friend, a frantic question in her eyes.

"I may not be good for much, but I know how to Cut," Su Ling said, the last word spat like a curse that splits a branch from a passing tree. "Sometimes that's all you need to solve a problem."

Something in her, an echo of an echo screams to leave the broken ghost, that it would be easy, and simple, and save them both. That it wasn't a person, just a dream, only a dream.

Her heartbeat thunders in her ears, and Ling Qi's feet touch down on the grass.

"Please hurry Su Ling," Ling Qi said tersely, releasing her hand to scan the darkness.

"Don't need to tell me," Su Ling mutters, swiftly setting down the ghost girl, who looks up in confusion.

Su Ling's saber appears in her hand, unsheathed, the crimson cloth tassel that hangs from its hilt flutters in the wind. "Look… Xisheng, just hold still, alright, we'll get going againin a second."

The ghosts head tilts blood welling up around her neck to stain dirty clothes. "Oh. I don't like this part. But I like you better than Momma, okay!"

Su Ling grits her teeth so hard Ling Qi swears she hears something crack, but there is no time for a back and forth and she knows it. Su Ling's moves into a stance, one even Ling Qi recognizes as one for overhead strikes, having had Renxiang's saber crash down on her head enough times.

"You don't belong here, or to her," Su Ling says, and her qi surges, sharp edged, metallic. Ling Qi sees her eyes mist over, becoming pools of liquid steel. "My blade is Truth."

Air parts around the edge with a soft sigh, the earth splits, and Ling Qi feels an invisible chain sever with an angry shriek.

Xisheng blinks, looking down at themselves in curious wonder, their features a blur of a dozen faces.

But far away, eyes open in the darkness, and it pains Ling Qi to say they are strikingly similar to Su Ling's.

-TBC-

 

[yrsillar]

Quiet wind blew through the nocturnal forest, playing a song of leaf and branch and moaning lonely wind. Ling Qi could sense the writhing of the threads of the liminal, the reshaping of the reality that lay beneath the skein that was visible under the eyes.

Su Ling stiffened, sensing Ling Qi's distress and quickly following her gaze. She went still when she saw those eyes.

The trees bent away from the shadows, twisting and moaning like mourners as the forest began to melt and run like watercolor paints splashed by rain. Yet, what emerged from the darkness didn't seem monstrous. It wholly shredded expectations. No padding fox and whipping tails and frothy hungry maw, no sumptuous temptress of dark silks and painted beauty. None of the images that this creature's legend had conjured in her mind appeared.

A gnarled cane tapped the ground, the shuffle and drag of elderly feet, made uneven by age and injury. Fraying sandals, a shapeless roughspun dress and slightly hunched back covered by a pale grey shawl. Her face was a mass of wrinkles, and her skin as rough as old boot-leather, thin white hair clung to her head,wispy and dry, pulled back in a tight bun.

She had the air of one whom life had chewed up over and over, until naught but sinew, gristle and spite remained, a woman whose age had robbed her of fear and propriety alike.

"Don't you fucking dare," Su Ling whispered, it was a strangeled, hateful noise, shaky with rage.

Gimlet eyes squinted in the melting darkness, firelight growing as a hearth was painted from nothing. Dirt and grass molded into rough wooden planks and woven straw mats, the night sky began to bleed into rafters and straw. But on the wall forming behind the old woman, the twisting shadows of tails appear, they weave through and among each other, too swiftly and chaotically to count.

"Damn rude way to greet your grandmother isn't it," said the fox. "Coming unannounced, and stealing the gristle from the trash. Fool girl. I always told you, if you're hungry just ask."

"Don't even try it," Su Ling said, pointing her saber. Ling Qi winced, knowing this wasn't something that could be opposed by force. "Think I'm supposed to fall for this shit, are you gonna say you were Gran all along?"

"If'n I was," considered the thing wearing the face of an old woman. "How do you figure you'd know, girl? Think a blind kit's eyes can pierce past her mother's arts?"

Please, please let the spirit's attention be focused, Ling Qi thought, reaching out with her thoughts, seeking out any imperfection in the weave of dream they were caught in, a seam, an unstable whirl, anything at all she could use to slide them out of here, a way to hide in the chaos of unformed dream, anything at all.

"You're just pulling things out of my head," Su Ling breathed out, rage grinding out into cold discipline. "You think I haven't researched you? This isn't how you operate, you smash and grab and run back to the woods, you'd never stick around in one place long enough for a big pair of boots to notice."

Tap, tap went the cane, the little house had finished forming, a merry hearthfire, strings of drying herbs hung from the ceiling, haphazard shelving sagged with the weight of clay jars filled with roots and reagents. "Why'd you think I 'died'. Or did you really think a woman could love the child of the woman who took her last grandson? She'd have dashed your head on the hearthstones if I'd not taken her too."

The fox smiled, and the teeth were black and rotten. "I taught you didn't I, how humans are. Keep 'em scared else they run out on the bill. You can't let 'em push you around, think they can dictate terms. If you can't make yourself too big a bone to swallow, you hide and you wait. Heh, you didn't turn out bad, 'till that Sect filled your head with nonsense."

The face of the old woman turned dark, darkness pooling in the deep crevices of her wrinkles. The world that followed echoed in a half dozen voices, high and low, bouncing from the walls "What's the world coming too, can't even raise your children as you like anymore."

"Will you take off her face," Su Ling hissed, not lowering her saber. "I told you I'm not falling for it. You're wasting your time."

"Deny as you want, but tell me, what were you gonna do with these scraps?" asked the fox.

Xisheng cowered behind Su Ling's legs, their eyes shut.Their form was still in flux, features changing between eyeblinks.

"Not a bad meal, not for a girl at your stage. You thought to get one over me?" the monster said, pursing wrinkled lips. "But… no you cut it off, can't even use it to nip at my power."

"I didn't take her for some shitty reason like that. I took her because they all deserve better than you, they've already suffered enough," Su Ling said flatly.

"You've killed it though," said the fox, cocking her elderly head, birdlike. "Look, buncha scraps like that, course they'd start falling apart without the only thing that binds them.

Both of them glanced toward Xisheng, who had now hidden their face in Sixiang's trousers avoiding the old woman's gaze. Their qi was disordered and… coming apart. A wisp, like steam streamed up from a dissolving sleeve.

"Don't lie to me girl, even if you've not inherited my hunger, you've inherited my hate," the gentle tap of the cane and the drag of elderly feet were far too loud, the shrunken old woman loomed. "Or…well are you even that different? Think I can't smell the man on you child? Oh but he's a strong one ain't he. Won't even notice if you take a sip. Lucky little kit."

"It's not like that, I didn't- It was just-" Su Ling's own tails snapped and waved wildly in agitation, and her blade wavered, only the ghost at her feet stopped her from taking a step back.

"Maybe you didn't want to eat that, but you wanted to take it from me. It was spite, not some pretty nonsense that moved your hand. What foolishness these people have filled your head with."

She hated the verbal assault her friend was under, but if the beast could just remain distracted… Perhaps here, Ling Qi thought, if she could just work her will into the miniscule gaps between the weaves of this illusion world, she could pry open something, just a little crack…

"And you, quit pawing at the shutters girl," Ling Qi froze as the old woman's eyes fell on her. "You're one of the ones who went and confused my girl. Made her forget how things are, when you should damn well know better."

"Your half nightkin as it is. So much Yin you're a half step from drinking the life breath of men yourself, and you go and fill my Su Ling's head with nonsense."

"I am not yours," Su Ling snarled, but the thing that called itself her mother ignored it, staring down Ling Qi.

Ling Qi swallowed, pins and needles on her skin. Some part of her wanted to deflect and talk around, to try and desperately go for more time. But… could she really beat this creature with words and misdirection? No, obviously not. She felt Sixiang's arms embrace her without form. "All your power, and it's still not perfect, huh?"

"Hm?" wondered the fox, raising an eyebrow.

"It was like that with Black Skies Yearning too," Ling Qi said, steadily meeting her gaze. "A cruel old monster that preys on the week, so powerful, but there were holes in her illusion, because she lacked understanding too."

She smiled in reminiscence."You know I think my teacher's illusions were the only really perfect ones, she only tripped up because she was fighting herself."

Su Ling was starting to furrow her brow, looking her way.But the old woman's cane struck the floor with a boom. "You got a point in that rambling girl?"

"Yeah, illusions and art don't make you elegant or smart, they're as blunt or graceful as their maker," Ling Qi said steadily. "Su Ling is the righteous one, the one who remembers peoples names and hurts. No one has filled her head with anything, she came on it honestly. Me, I'm only a thief. And you're a poor liar and a brute."

The thing about cruelty Ling Qi found, is that it made you sloppy. Inattentive. It was something to be inflicted on one helpless before you. Combine this with the pride of a beast who by all indication wished to break rather than kill. A beast who, most importantly, she could feel was not entirely here, connections reaching out into the waking world in three directions.

And, if you are caught in one act, so often the catcher will be less attentive for others.

Subtly gathered, Dream Qi surged, Sixiang slammed the full weight of their qi, the full weight of their existence into the the thinnest most unstable part of the illusions, a wash of chaotic and unraveling qi.

Dreamwalker Trait Increases by one

The tiniest split appeared in the weave, and Ling Qi grasped Su Ling's hand. The world erupted in a kaleidoscope of light as Ling Qi reached for the image of power, far more expansive than her littlegate. Her mind dreamed of golden scales, coiling kilometers into the sky.

The world flew, or they did, Ling Qi could not tell in the chaos.She threw every ounce of her will and her speed into this jump, Sixiang expended the entirety of their qi in a single tremendous burst of dissolution to leave the path behind unknowable.

It was not enough.

Death came as fire, purple and smoky, a haze in the shape of a lashing tail, it's bone white tip far sharper than mortal steel. Ling Qi felt a lance of terror in the bare instant she had, and pulled deep upon the dark qi that ran through her body, forming the pattern of the Black Mirror technique in the bare instant she had. Her form became the void, a bottomless hole in the world that would absorb any attack.

The void filled with fire and overflowed. Ling Qi heard a crack like breaking porcelain and her technique shattered.

She hit the ground rolling, bile and blood in her throat, something sharp and pinching in her chest. Smoke trailed from the burned hem of her dress, and distantly, she heard Sixiang cry out in pain. Her flute materialized in her hands as she rolled to her feet, already beginning the steps of her dance, to summon mirror copies or speed herself on the wind.

A tail the size of a tree trunk smashed into her, she felt her right arm snap like so much kindling and her flute shatter, splinters digging into her lips and neck. She struck something hard, and nearly blacked out, slumping down to the base of a tree.

"Ling Qi!" she heard Su Ling scream in her ringing head.

"Such a rude girl. But if that is what you think, shall this one not oblige?" The voice wasn't raspy and old anymore deep and thick with menace, only a bare edge of feminine purr softening the bestial growl.

All Ling Qi could see was a shadow, a looming thing, of lashing tails and bony limbs. She was thin, the fox, Ling Qi thought, for all her greed. Fur clung tightly to bones, a nightmare of starvation and murder in half formed blackness of a wooden clearing they had landed in.

Ling Qi spat a mouthful of blood onto the half molded grass, belying her fear. They had been so close, so close, Just a moment more and they would have reached the gaze of the Sect's spirit lord, the companion of the head.

A bestial paw rose, obsidian nails gleaming in the mist. It descended on her, and Ling Qi struggled to gather the qi to move.

Somewhere distant, she heard a child's voice cry out. God's this whole thing had been too bold, even for her.

Su Ling appeared before her, in a burst of speed, the side of her saber held up like a shield, braced on one arm. That dull gray qi from before snapped and hummed. It filled her meridians, crawled on her skin and around her the stuff of dream stiffened and froze, the ground turning gray, the air turning to choking dust. But in that cloud, Ling Qi saw a string of formations burning black on her blade. She recognized them from that time so long ago that she had seen Su Ling working with Xuan Shi.

The sound of impact could not be described, it was simply a deafening noise. With all her strength, Ling Qi exhaled her mist from every poor, gathering it in a protective cocoon around them as she had in the caldera.

Su Ling slammed into a stone to her right and bounced, blood erupting from a pair of deep cuts across her body and chest. Her sword had shattered into shards, and she clutched now only the hilt and stump of a blade in her hand.

This almost felt familiar, Ling Qi thought, her head still ringing.

"Stop, stop! I'll go back, I promise, please stop!" Xisheng was running across pale green grass, the dreamscape showed no sign of ruin. Ling Qi pushed herself up, forcing herself to sit up.

"Pitiful thing, imagining that you had a choice," the voice emanated from the shadows, near to the gigantic fox's skull like head, and she hears it inhale a torrent of air and qi.

She hears Su Ling scream something unintelligible, a curse or a wordless roar of anger she knows not. She feels a stinging pain in the corner of her eyes. Still not enough. But she catches crimson in the corner of her eyes.
There is a clearing in the cloudy sky, and in it hangs a baleful red sickle.

Su Ling has staggered to her feet, the child is wailing, their limbs breaking apart into light and mist. Su Ling stumbles forward, half blind with blood, and stiffens her posture into a high attacking stance. The meridians in her arms burn, writhing visibly under her skin. And at her back, for less than an eyeblink, an iron haired matron whose face is a skull reaches up, sniffs and adjusts the angle of her broken blade like an instructor.

The red is blinding, and she hears the echoing scream of a fox, more in shock and outrage than hurt. She sees, in the fading flash a bead of blood from a thin cut across its muzzle

Su Ling collapses to the ground, her own blood soaking her arms, meridians ruptured.

And Ling Qi feels something cold on her palm. The foxes' enraged gaze whirls onto her wayward daughter. Ling Qi sees a crack in the ground, from which black flower petals blow.

There is a time for suspicion and wariness, this is not it. With her will, she seizes Su Ling, what is left of the child, and dives down the crevice in a slick of shadow.