Ling Qi stared at the now innocuous well that the boy had disappeared into. She wasn’t certain what she had expected to happen, but it wasn’t that. Was that boy dead? Did the Elders retrieve him? She didn’t know. Despite having lived in the streets, she had never killed anyone before, not like this.

  Her thoughts flashed back to a memory of a disheveled Gu Xiulan’s expression of satisfaction as the ice-flinging girl was consumed by fire. Would she become like that? Someone who could smile while trying to kill another person? She had known that she would have to fight and kill from the moment she was recruited, but she had thought it would only be barbarians. That was different than having to fight and kill a person – even if that person had been an unrepentant ass.

  Ling Qi shook herself and straightened her shoulders. She didn’t have time to stand here doing nothing. Her plan to rob the other boy after he completed the trial was useless now. If she wanted the star token, she was going to have to do it herself. And if the boy was still alive and present down there, she could at least make sure he didn’t drown in a puddle or bleed out. She couldn’t afford to regret her chosen course of action, but neither did she have to be completely callous.

  Ling Qi let out the breath she had been holding and stepped forward, eyeing the well warily as she secured the rope. She soon had it looped over the high bar that would have once held the well’s actual rope and bucket, with an additional length pulled out several feet away from the well. Sadly, she lacked any proper tools so she broke off one of the ‘legs’ allowing the barricades to stand upright. The wood had splintered with a bit of effort and some leverage on her part. Using one of her knives to scrape the broken end down to a point had taken a little longer, but eventually, she had something with which she could stake the end of the rope to the ground.

  It was surprising how little it hurt when she had used her hand as a makeshift hammer. The force necessary to drive the stake firmly into the hard packed dirt of the street had only made her hand sting but not bruise. Once she had given the rope a few experimental tugs to ensure it was actually secure, she returned to the side of the well and looked down the dark shaft, steeling her nerves.

  The climb down was nerve wracking. Bracing herself against the damp stone wall, Ling Qi half-expected to find it pulling away or for a gust of wind or some other strange magic to drag her down.

  The descent went on longer than she expected. She was certain that the rope hadn’t been long enough for her to be climbing down the well for nearly ten minutes. The tiny circle of light from the surface seemed terribly far away.

  As she descended, some illumination appeared below, looking like dim candles burning in the dark. The wide dark chamber that greeted her was just barely high enough in places for her to stand upright. Its walls were dotted with odd crystalline growths that glowed with the faint illumination of a moonlit night and its floor was a field of mud with the occasional standing pool of water.

  Reaching the end of her rope, Ling Qi dropped the remaining meter to the floor, grimacing at the feeling of mud squishing up under her sandals. Spotting the still figure of her fellow disciple lying in the mud, she felt her stomach drop. The boy really was still down here. His right arm and leg were unpleasantly twisted and the nearby mud and water were stained by red. Despite his injuries, his chest still rose and fell shallowly.

  Maybe he hadn’t been removed because the fall hadn’t killed him? Elder Su had mentioned in a lesson that a cultivator would instinctively use qi to blunt harm, even if it was only minimally useful without a proper defensive art and training……

  Maybe this was why Gu Xiulan had seemed so blasé about throwing lethal attacks during the first test?

  She considered the boy as she peered down at him in the dark. She was glad that he hadn’t been faking, but as much as he had been an ass, she also hadn’t really intended to seriously injure him outside the heat of the moment.

  Ling Qi dragged the other disciple out of the slowly filling muddy crater his impact had dug. Although the movement made the boy twitch and groan in pain, thankfully, he didn’t wake up. Ling Qi looked him over, tearing off a bit of his sleeve to rebind the stab wound she had inflicted. He…… should be fine, and with his limbs like that, he shouldn’t be a threat even if he woke up. The Elders would still retrieve him at the end of the test, right?

  She hoped so, but having bandaged him, she paused. She – perhaps not fairly – had beaten him. She had even taken some time to make sure he wouldn’t die at the bottom of the well. …… She had earned her spoils, right? Besides, this would all be pointless if she failed to get the tokens she needed.

  Nodding at her own reasoning, Ling Qi quickly searched the other boy. She checked his belt pouch first, the strings securing it deftly sliced by one of her knives. Ling Qi found herself grinning with relief when the first item she pulled out was a golden disk with the character for sun carved into it.

  Lucky. She was very lucky.

  Thinking of the strange pills resting in her own pouch, she couldn’t help but wonder. Maybe it had nothing to do with the spirit that was apparently interested in her, but she could afford to take some incense from the storehouse and make up an offering. It certainly couldn’t hurt.

  The pouch didn’t have much aside from the token, but she was glad for what it did contain: three red spirit stones and a clay bottle with two dark blue pills of some kind. She was going to have to find someone who could identify medicines.

  The rest of her search turned up frustratingly little. The boy didn’t even have a weapon or any talismans. Ling Qi was beginning to think that maybe he hadn’t been quite as much of a wealthy young lord as his behavior had suggested. However, she did find something tucked under the collar of his robe, between the underlayer and the upper one. The three odd bronze cards shined with a mirror finish on one side and stylized swirls on the other. Turning them over in her hands, she couldn’t begin to guess at their purpose.

  Tucking the items into her bag, Ling Qi stood up. Now that she had a sun token, there was only one other that she needed to acquire to pass. She began to search along the walls, squinting in the dim light. At first, it seemed that this small muddy chamber was all that lay down here, but eventually she found a point of egress: a low, muddy tunnel set near the floor of the chamber.

  After a moment’s hesitation, Ling Qi sighed and kneeled in the mud to peer through the exit. Thankfully, the tunnel retained the dim lighting from the strange crystals, but the crawl was still going to be uncomfortable. She scowled as she leaned forward, hands sinking into the mud with a wet splorch as she began to shuffle forward on her hands an knees. She hated tight spaces like this. Absolutely hated them.

  Ling Qi kept moving as quickly as she could manage, alternating her gaze between the tunnel ahead and the ground below. Several times, she nearly slipped, but she managed to avoid face planting into the deepening muck. The cheap clothing she had bought was less lucky. By the time she could see the end of the tunnel, her sleeves and top were sporting several rips where they had caught on the crystals.

  For all that she felt relief as she poked her head out of the narrow tunnel and into the open space beyond, she was still brought up short by the sight that met her eyes. Not only did the tunnel drop off into clear, knee-deep water, but the temperature had suddenly dropped as well, enough that her breath was coming out in puffs of steam.

  Warily climbing to her feet, Ling Qi peered around, confirming what she had hoped was a trick of the light. The chamber had three other passages leading out from it, and every wall was coated in a solid layer of ice from which her reflection stared back at her in the dim light.

  It made her skin crawl to have her gaze reflected from multiple directions like that. She looked positively filthy: her hair was askew, her arms coated in mud up to the elbows, and her clothing tattered from the passage. Grimacing, she took care of at least one of those things, washing the silt and mud on her hands away in the icy water.

  Ling Qi shivered and not just from the chill. She didn’t like this place. Glancing between the three identical-seeming passages, she chose the leftmost one and flipped a knife out of her sleeve to mark the ice that made up the wall. It failed, the knife’s edge only grinding uselessly against the reflective plane.

  Gritting her teeth Ling Qi instead crouched down, shivering as the water further soaked into her clothes. She picked up a handful of mud and smeared it over the mirror. She was going to mark her path one way or the other.

  Navigating the icy passages proved difficult. At first, when the tunnel was straight, it was easy enough, but the tunnel quickly began to curve, twist, and split. The reflective walls only made it worse. Gradually, they began to distort, showing off twisted reflections that made her head spin as she tried to make her way through the labyrinthine passages. It didn’t help that all the while, even with her efforts to mark the walls, she was feeling less and less sure of whether she could find her way back out. She couldn’t afford to turn back……

  “Why were you so concerned about killing him?” Ling Qi whipped around, a knife already in hand as an echoing voice sounded just behind her. However, instead of a person, she found her own distorted reflection looking back at her from the curved mirror of the wall behind her. As she stared into her own shadowed eyes, she thought she may have simply imagined it.

  Then, the image cocked its head to the side and crossed its mud-stained arms over its chest.

  Ling Qi hadn’t moved at all.

  “Why?” her reflection asked, its eyes narrowed and pitiless. “He was a threat. You heard the Elder. If he died, it would have been his own fault.”


  “That doesn’t mean I should be trying to kill people.” The words slipped out even as she inched backwards, away from the unsettling doppelganger. “I don’t need to make more enemies.” She didn’t quite know why she was explaining herself to the thing wearing her face, but if it wanted to talk that gave her time to find an exit. There was another split behind her, but she was pretty sure the left path wasn’t real, just another twisted reflection.

  Unfortunately, inching backwards did not prevent the mirror thing from stepping forward through the plane of the mirror as if it were merely water.

  “Ah. So you were just being a coward again. That’s not really surprising,” it said condescendingly.

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Ling Qi snapped. The thing’s attitude irked her as condescension usually did, but it seemed worse to hear it in her own voice. “There’s nothing cowardly about showing restraint.”


  “What restraint?” the thing asked, its expression warping into an ugly sneer. “You don’t give a damn about that idiot. You tipped him into the well with barely a thought. So why feel guilty afterward? Or do you really believe that you’ve never killed anyone before? How delusional are you?”


  “I haven’t,” Ling Qi responded, her uneasiness increasing. Should she just run? This was obviously some kind of spirit trick. “I – I’m a just a thief, not a murderer.” She was babbling. Was this part of the trick – something making her want to keep talking?

  “Liar, liar, Ling Qi’s such a liar.”


  Ling Qi stiffened as a second voice, high pitched and childish, sounded from behind her. A careful look over her shoulder made her silently curse. The path behind her had gone dark, all of the crystals beyond a half dozen meters extinguished. Sitting in front of the inky cloud, seemingly in mid-air, was another reflection of sorts. It was her as she had been right after running away from home. Ling Qi felt a stab of regret as her eyes caught on the flower shaped ornament keeping the little girl’s unruly hair in check. That had been her last birthday gift, and it had broken a few months after she had run away.

  The child reflection grinned, seemingly noticing where her eyes had gone. “Did you already forget Wei? He really thought you were gonna pull him up after you, you know? How about old man Shen? Even after he gave you bread, you still stole his blankets when winter came.”


  The thing leaned forward on its invisible seat and added in a conspiratorial whisper, “But you don’t even remember, do you? I guess there were so many……”


  Ling Qi felt colder than before even as she tried to keep both spirits in sight. This…… What was…… Were these spirits plucking things from her mind? While she didn’t have more than a vague inkling of recognition at the names it spoke, she could not say that she didn’t recall events that were at least…… similar.

  “Kids – People who join a heist know what they’re getting into,” she said defensively, memories of the first person she had ever partnered up with bubbling up.“I didn’t pull him up because I would have gotten caught too. I didn’t kill him. I mean – the guards caught him, but……”


  The older reflection let out a derisive snort. “Idiot! Do you think that scrawny little dumbass survived long after the beating you’d get for theft?” It rolled its eyes as she fell silent from the interruption. “And he said he’d protect us. As if anyone could do that.”


  “You didn’t even try to say anything about the old man,” the child added with a giggle. “I could bring up some more, but we both know you’d just make more excuses!”


  “Cut the crap,” Ling Qi responded roughly, her hand tightening on the grip of the knife. “What do you want? This…… this is some kind of test, right? Get to the point.”


  She had to hope it was part of the test, because the lights were winking out one by one around her, steadily shrinking the circle of light she had to see by. If she needed to, she could break through in the child thing’s direction, but……

  “If it is, then you’ve already failed,” the older reflection sneered. “Do you really think the Sect wants a disloyal coward like us anywhere in their upper ranks? Especially if we can’t even bring ourselves to dirty our hands? We’re meant to be a warm body on the front line at best.”


  “Stop calling me that!” Ling Qi snapped. “If you’re really me, then you know damn well that I just…… I just did what I needed to do!” The justification sounded lame even to her. “Besides, I can be better now, right? I’m a cultivator. Improving myself is what it’s all about!” Ling Qi straightened her shoulders and glared at them defiantly. Was it just her, or had a few of the crystals flickered back on?

  “If you weren’t a coward, you would have talked to Mama when you saw her in the market last year,” the child reflection’s voice cut in, sounding subdued instead of gleeful like it had before. The phantom idly kicked her feet, sending the painstakingly stitched hem of her dress flapping. “We saw how thin she was.”


  “If you weren’t disloyal, you wouldn’t have left mom to rot just because you were scared,” the older one growled.

  Ling Qi flinched.

  “Oh, it looks like you remember Mama at least,” the child taunted.

  Ling Qi’s free hand balled into a fist even as the circle of light shrank. “I wasn’t going to let her make me like her,” she snapped. “I couldn’t be what she wanted. So why not run away! It saved us both pain.”


  “Liar.”


  “Coward.”


  “That wasn’t what you were thinking when you ran,” the older reflection said, her voice dripping with contempt.

  “You were scared of that gross man,” the child added with a shiver. “And you didn’t trust Mama to protect you anymore.”


  “You just kept telling yourself that stupid lie until you believed it,” the older one sneered

  “Ling Qi runs, Ling Qi hides, and Ling Qi only loves herself. This is who we are,” they both continued with eerie synchronicity. There was something wrong with their voices; they were distorted as if speaking through water. The last of the lights were flickering out. She could barely see either of them, save for their eerily glowing eyes, staring at her with derision and pity.

  She didn’t…… She wasn’t really like that, was she? Was that the kind of person she was?

  Why was she so tired? Why were these words affecting her so much? She had been called worse things before. Suffered worse things before. So why did she feel so hopeless?

  It was……

  Why was it so cold?

  Threads 16

  For three mornings every week, Ling Qi would be devoting her time to learning scoutcraft and tactics under the tutelage of her Senior Brother and later, the core disciple in charge. She was somewhat chagrined to learn, upon asking, that Guan Zhi was actually one of Elder Zhou’s nieces. She really did need to stop assuming things.

  That aside, she was already learning much. Seeing that she had some basic skill in tracking from time spent with Su Ling last year, Liao Zhu focused on teaching her the more esoteric aspects of tracking that were beyond mortal skill. The qi of a Cloud Tribesman had a different texture to that of an Imperial cultivator, and a keen scout could detect traces of a bound spirit’s partner in the traces they left behind.

  She was also learning the ways to detect the disturbances in the background energies of the world left by the passage of higher realm beasts and cultivators as well. It was hard to describe, but potent auras left behind ripples and eddies that could be detected long after their passing. She had begun to dampen the signs of her own passage instinctively over the last year, the lessons of Sable Crescent Step showing dividends.

  It was very educational, and Ling Qi was sure that she was on the edge of an advancement in her ability to conceal herself, but it had not come yet.

  Letting her idle thoughts drift away, Ling Qi turned her attention back to the present. “This is the place, huh?” she asked. It didn’t look impressive.

  They had climbed down into the depths of the new valley, now full of nascent greenery. The river, once haunted and corrupted, bubbled and flowed freely once again, clear and pure. Here, though, at the valley’s deepest point, the resurgence seemed tepid. The grass was yellow and withered, and the other plants stunted. A yawning crack in the ground, three meters long and half that across, stretched deep into the earth. The darkness within was no barrier to Ling Qi’s sight, and she saw only barren rock below. By the crack stood three squat square pillars of stone, carved with formations beyond Ling Qi’s comprehension.

  Li Suyin detected her unasked question as she fiddled with one of the many pouches on the harness she wore across her chest. “The reason we can approach and find it so easily is because we have the tokens that bypass the formation. Anyone else would be compelled to avoid this place. It also seals the hole against further contamination from outside, and vice versa.”


  “There’s something poisonous in there then?” Ling Qi asked with a frown, peering down at the chalky floor of the cavern visible through the crack.

  “It’s more of a mutual toxicity,” Li Suyin answered before gesturing for her attention. Li Suyin handed her a small blue pill. “This should shield you from the effects of the air below for six hours. If we do not go too deep. I have more if we look to be running longer.”


  Ling Qi took the pill, and after rolling it between her fingers, popped it in her mouth. It tasted like the fresh, unsullied air of an unspoiled vale, with a hint of mint. Next to her, Li Suyin was doing the same, but with two pills. Presumably, Suyin needed one more due to the difference in their realms.

  “Let’s not waste any time then,” Ling Qi said brightly. She’d keep her friend safe, and they’d leave this place laden with loot. She wouldn’t let it end any other way.

  She landed on the cavern floor in a puff of dust. The small chamber around her was still and silent. The withered remains of fungal growths clung to the walls and floor, and the scattered bones of vermin lay half-buried in the chalky dust that coated the floor. A faint, sickly sweet scent of rot and decay made her wrinkle her nose.

  Li Suyin descended slower, crawling down the wall with no regard for hand holds or grip. Ling Qi saw eight glittering eyes and fuzzy pink legs peering at her out of the girl’s backpack. Zhenli, Li Suyin’s spirit, wasn’t much of a combatant, but she could act as another lookout.

  Sixiang murmured.

  Ling Qi thought.

  “Why do you have that pack and all of those pouches anyway? Did something happen to your storage ring?” she asked as Li Suyin dropped the last few meters, landing with a thud that seemed thunderous to Ling Qi, even if it wasn’t truly loud.

  Li Suyin peered at her, and it occurred to Ling Qi then that her friend couldn’t see in the dark as she could. Ling Qi felt a small shift in the other girl’s qi, and the stitched patterns on her eyepatch lit up, casting a dim cone of light from its surface. “I want to save the space for reagents,” she explained. “And storage rings have trouble holding large numbers of complex or volatile formations.”


  Right. Something about interference with the ring’s own formations. That was why talismans took up so much more ‘space’ than mundane objects, or even beast cores and such.

  “Fair enough,” she acknowledged. “What’s our plan then? This is your expedition.”


  “Just a moment,” Li Suyin said. She pressed her hand to the wall, and Ling Qi cocked her head to the side curiously as a half dozen skeletal mice scurried out of her sleeve, skittering away into the cave. They formed a shifting perimeter around the two of them. Li Suyin next threw a pair of pellets to the floor, producing columns of smoke from which emerged two hulking skeletons. Ling Qi raised her eyebrows. Impressive.

  The first looked to be an evolution of Suyin’s first guard prototype. It had the skeleton of a bear sculpted into humanoid shape, save for its grinning skull attached low on its broad shoulders. The bones were bound together with silk and armored in overlapping bands of iron, and it clutched a heavy mace in one hand and a thick iron shield in the other. The second looked to have been crafted from a wild boar, its tusked skull sitting so low that it seemed to almost jut from its chest, and was armed with a heavy guandao.

  They were only late second realm, but they seemed like solid constructions. Ling Qi wouldn’t have much trouble with them, but they would even or tip the odds for Suyin against any enemy of her own realm.

  “Ready?” Ling Qi asked.

  “Ready,” Li Suyin replied and stepped toward the tunnel that led further down.

  Ling Qi found as they descended the twisting tunnel leading deeper into the earth that the further they delved from the surface and the sun, the more the caverns came alive. It began small. She saw stalks of wriggling, pale white fungus growing from the floors and ceiling, and they grasped weakly at the hems of their skirts as they passed.

  Towering columns of fungal flesh stretched from the floor to the ceiling of the next chamber, bloated and putrescent, their size crushing them against the ceiling and sprouting spider webbing growths of pulsing blue white mycelium across the roof. Pale lizards with blind, bulging eyes and mouths that trailed fetid spores darted in and out of the waving tendrils, chasing insectoid puffballs that moved about with jets of spore-choked air.

  Li Suyin seemed at ease, moving among the not-trees with a purpose. Ling Qi kept a wary eye open regardless, but it seemed this was not their destination. Li Suyin had already collected plenty of samples from here. Their destination lay deeper.

  Ling Qi glanced back as they descended from the first living cavern. “So, what should I be worrying about? Everything has seemed pretty docile so far.”


  “The third level is a bit more dangerous, and it is where I’ll begin harvesting,” Li Suyin replied confidently. “Um, the danger is mostly in carnivorous lizards and certain kinds of fungus. There shouldn’t be much real danger yet. Once I’ve harvested what I need, we can descend to the fourth. I turned back last time since I sensed a third realm presence below.”


  Ling Qi nodded as they reached the bottom of the tunnel. The growth was thicker here, and the wildlife more aggressive, though still not much of a hindrance. For the first time in a quite a while, Ling Qi had the chance to exercise her skill with throwing knives. Her songs would be far too destructive against such foes. Despite the novelty, it was difficult not to sink into boredom as she made a game of pinning the various lizards and fungus bug things with her knives when they got too close.

  Li Suyin’s guards did their share of pest swatting as well, and once, Ling Qi held back and let them handle a larger foe, a relatively strong second realm fungus beast that shambled out of the ‘woods’. The beast must have taken offense to Li Suyin’s cutting and sampling. They performed well enough, the shielded one summoning a barrier of wind that blocked the miasma of spores the creature released while the other efficiently removed its limbs and chopped it to pieces.

  “I am sorry if this is a little boring,” Li Suyin said, shooting Ling Qi a nervous smile as the thing stopped spasming. “I have been through these areas several times. Things should get more exciting soon.”


  “It’s fine,” Ling Qi dismissed. It wasn’t much of an adventure so far, but after her expedition with Shen Hu last month-

  Sixiang asked.

  Ling Qi frowned as Li Suyin moved to harvest the dead fungus beast, looking down at the floor, drawn by Sixiang’s silent direction. There was a growing disturbance in the earth qi below her feet. A twisting, snarl with a ravenous, all consuming hunger at its core was approaching. Ling Qi’s eyes darted to the side as vibrations traveled up the fungus stalks, and a pebble began to rattle.

  She flew to Li Suyin’s side, pulling her back as the floor beneath their feet shattered and fell. Her friend let out a surprised yelp but recovered well, landing on the now shattered, sandy slope of the sinkhole that had consumed the cavern for twenty meters around. Her constructs landed with heavy thuds, digging their weapons into the earth to avoid sliding further down. Even as they did, dozens of the beasts they had been casually slaying fell, squealing and fighting, sliding through the newly formed sand toward what lay at the bottom.

  What Ling Qi saw down there, unhindered by the darkness, was hideous. Once, she might have thought it nightmarish.

  Eleven beady eyes were haphazardly scattered across the misshapen face. It gazed balefully up at them from both sides of its vertical maw. Protruding a full meter from both sides of that maw were a pair of snapping, spiked pincers that gleamed with traces of metal in their chitin. The beast’s body lay hidden, half-buried at the bottom of the sinkhole, and was shelled like a beetle’s. Its two foremost limbs resembled the arms of an ape with three-fingered stubby, clawed hands large enough to grasp a human around the waist.

  The thing inhaled, and Ling Qi braced herself, along with her friend, as a pair of scrambling dog-sized lizards fell shrieking into its gnashing teeth, immediately ground up into gore and meat. The thing let out a ululating shriek then and turned hungry eyes toward the pair of them.

  Ling Qi grimaced as she felt a feeling of weight crashing down on her shoulders like the pull of the earth magnified. The feeling washed away in shimmering sparks of moonlight, but she saw Li Suyin grimacing, her shoulders drooping because of the pressure. Above, Ling Qi heard a faint crack, and a narrow fracture appeared in the ceiling.

  It looked like they were getting a bit of excitement after all.

  The air beside Ling Qi rippled, and her Singing Mist Blade wailed out. Ling Qi had made little use of her flying sword outside of spars yet, but now seemed like as good a time as any to start. As the blade darted toward the beast’s misshapen head and sang its discordant song, Ling Qi flooded her meridians with wood-aligned qi and activated her Deepwood Vitality technique, spreading its aegis across both herself and Li Suyin.

  She grimaced as she felt her technique fail to dissipate the heavy chains of qi dragging at her friend’s limbs, but they were both fortified now. Her flying sword made the beast flinch and snap, darting around its head like a bothersome bee, so she moved forward with the next part of her plan. There was no time to talk and make true plans, but she trusted Li Suyin to follow up.

  Ling Qi darted forward, passing Li Suyin’s twin guardians as she closed in on the beast. Compared to her, they moved in slow motion. A moment later, the beast loomed above her, malformed and ominous. She ducked under its swiping arm, her limbs shimmering and fading in and out of the cave’s darkness. When she stood directly in front of the beast, she brought her flute to her lips and played the Spring’s End Aria.

  The beast flinched at the spread of the unnatural cold, frost spreading across its carapace and freezing solid the sand beneath her feet. Eleven glowing eyes fixated upon her, and gaping jaws opened wide, the metal-threaded chitin gleaming in the pale light cast by her friend’s eye patch.

  Ling Qi heard something flying through the air and a puff as a tiny clay sphere shattered on the massive beast’s raised forearm. The scent of fresh air and mint reached Ling Qi’s nose, along with a mild breeze that sent her hair fluttering. The beast found it much more distressing, letting out an earsplitting shriek as it pawed at its face and gnashed its jaws. It released another burst of heavy earth qi, but this time, it washed off of her without effect, and Ling Qi avoided the boulder that fell from above by taking a step to the side.

  Capitalizing on and maximizing the creature’s distraction, she sent her flying sword spiralling on a direct course for one of the thing’s glowing eyes, and as it swatted at the blade, drawing a shower of sparks where the edge met chitin, she bent her legs and leaped, carrying herself up until she was level with the beast’s maw. Hoarfrost Caress howled from her flute like a wild blizzard, and the gore, slime, and saliva in the creature’s mouth froze. Chitin split, fangs shattered, and one of the beast’s eyes frosted over and exploded violently, showering her in frozen chunks of ocular fluid.

  How the beast shrieked! A swinging fist the size of her torso lashed out at Ling Qi’s side, only to careen wildly into the cavern wall as she dodged through it, becoming absence and void. However, the beast was not just flailing wildly.

  Even as she fell, her eyes widened as the beast hunkered down, curling in on itself. She had only an instant to see its chitinous flesh writhing, dull spikes on its carapace sharpening and growing in fast motion before they fired in a burst, hundreds of organic arrows firing outward in a moment. She twisted through the deadly rain, avoiding most and letting others flow through her, but several struck regardless. Her shoulder, abdomen, and thigh were hit, and the faint viridian light playing over her skin rippled and shattered, deflecting the last of the projectiles.

  Ling Qi’s ears caught no cry of pain from behind her either, only the staccato of impacts on metal and the feeling of her Deepwood Vitality fading. Her friend’s condition was confirmed when a skeletal crow zoomed past overhead and exploded violently in midair above the beast’s head, releasing a misty rain of rust-colored liquid. A little washed over Ling Qi, but it seemed benign to her. The beast on the other hand thrashed and flailed, some of the gleaming metals in its shell turning dingy and corroded, forming cracks in its carapace.

  Ling Qi’s flying sword sang again, trailing sparks as it skated across the creature’s carapace, and Ling Qi felt its hunger take hold. Through her connection to the weapon, she felt it hungrily siphon away the beast’s qi, venting it into the cavern around them in a miasma of dark grey mist. As the beast raised its head, brackish, frozen blood flowing in slushy chunks from its jaws, Ling Qi struck again. The winds of winter howled, and another two of the beast’s eyes exploded, and a fracture formed in one of its great snapping jaws.

  The cavern shook as it shrieked again, dust raining from the ceiling as the beast, maddened with pain, lashed out with spike-laden limbs. It swung furiously at the tiny figure darting around in front of it, shattering rock and sending up plumes of sand. The song of her sword carved into it relentlessly, and another clay vessel of fresh air shattered, darkening another eye as the ‘venom’ seeped in through broken chitin.

  The next time the blizzard sang, the beast gurgled, its shriek choked off as its wavering aura broke, and blood and saliva froze solid in its throat. The beast spasmed, a pulse of heavy qi erupting again and making the cavern rumble ominously, before shuddering one last time, and falling still.