No!

  She wasn’t going to give up. She couldn’t afford to be weak, and she couldn’t afford to doubt herself. Not in the middle of a dangerous test. Even if what the reflections said was true.

  “It’s true that I have lied. People have probably died because of things I did…… and Mom……” Her voice, despite being little louder than a whisper, resounded in the utter darkness she was in.

  “You should stop,” the childish voice responded with resignation. “More excuses won’t help.”


  “Shut up!” Ling Qi snapped, straightening her sagging shoulders. “Do you really think you’ve said anything I haven’t thought of before?” More than anything, Ling Qi felt angry: angry at these stupid spirits playing with her mind; angry at herself for stopping to listen to them; and angry at their reminder of things she had so deliberately forgotten. The spirit wasn’t wrong.

  She knew she had hurt people with her actions. It wasn’t possible to live at the bottom without doing that.

  She knew she was selfish.

  She knew she wasn’t a virtuous person……

  She knew that mother hadn’t really wanted the same life for her. Her education was proof of that, even if it hurt to admit it.

  Ling Qi barely noticed the flickering of the lights overhead, allowing her to see the dim outline of her hand as she pointed accusingly at the thing wearing her face.

  “You’re wrong. I’ve stolen things, left people behind, and made plenty of other shitty decisions I can’t even remember, but…… I know that. I know I’m not a good person. I never said I was. Just because I’m not a saint doesn’t mean I’m a monster,” Ling Qi snapped angrily.

  “I’d make those decisions again if the situation was the same,” she admitted in a more subdued voice. “That doesn’t mean I’d do the same if I had more choices.”


  As the light grew, she could once again see the child, now staring at her skeptically. “Words like that won’t do you any good, you know. Saying that you didn’t have any good choices is just an excuse.”


  Ling Qi’s vision swam, and she found herself wobbling on her feet as the creeping fatigue sapped the energy her anger had given her. the little girl’s voice and tone had changed somehow.

  “.…… That’s bullshit, and it pisses me off to see someone wearing my face say it.” Ling Qi frowned, forcing herself to continue speaking. “There’s a reason I stopped thinking that way.” She shook her head, trying to shake off the fuzziness of her thoughts. “Because – I’ve thought about it – what it means to be free. I…… I left mom just for that after all, even if it started because I was scared. It doesn’t matter if it wasn’t what she wanted…… If I’d stayed, then……” Her words were a bit slurred, but she managed to keep her focus on thing’s face.

  “.…… As long as you’re poor…… as long as you’re weak…… you aren’t really free. I’ve seen that. There aren’t any real choices there. You’re bound by all kinds of things.” It was getting hard to concentrate.

  “Point is – I…… Things can be different once I change that.”


  “Does that really make it better though? You’re still the same person in the end.” The not-child sighed.

  “Won’t you make the same excuse when Li Suyin needs your help? Or when your fellow disciples finally manage to find their spines and gang up on Bai Meizhen?” The voice was different now, lower and more mature. In the corner of her vision, something shimmered.

  That shimmer seemed to break through the clouds filling her head, and for a moment, she found clarity.

  “.……Maybe,” Ling Qi admitted quietly. “But that’s something to work out for myself in the future, not something to discuss with a damn parasite messing with my head.”


  “What……?” the illusion began, its childish features drawing down in a pout.

  Ling Qi’s hand snapped out in a blur, launching a sliver of metal upward toward the sight that had flickered in her vision. A shrill squeal shattered the silence, and with it, the world. Everything around her wavered: the reflections, the darkness, even the sense of fatigue that had been creeping up on her again.

  A glittering web, beautiful in its intricacy, hung across the ceiling of the tunnel in front of her. Its occupant, a spider the size of a small cat with glittering silver chitin, fell from it, spasming around the knife buried dead center in its abdomen. It kicked up a splash as it hit the ankle-deep water. Ling Qi moved forward without hesitation, renewed anger burning in her veins, and brought her foot down as hard as she could manage, again and again, until the damned thing finally stopped twitching.

  “Stay out of my head,” she hissed under her breath. She reached down and jerked her knife out of the corpse.

  She was left staring at the milky-white, oblong shape stuck on the end of her knife. She could feel qi in it. She recalled Li Suyin’s roommate had mentioned something called a “beast core.” Maybe this was it?

  She gingerly prodded the thing. It felt like warm stone, not fleshy at all, so after a moment’s hesitation, she tucked it into her belt pouch.

  As her anger and adrenaline faded, Ling Qi found her thoughts turning back to her recent ordeal. She knew now that it hadn’t been real, just another illusion twisting her own thoughts and blaring the distorted results back in her face. The last thing she wanted was to think about her old life, but that stupid spider had pulled it all back to the forefront. Now, she couldn’t stop thinking about it.

  She glared darkly at the tunnel ahead, carefully studying it for more webs or any other sign of a trap. She even strained the vague sense for qi she had managed to cultivate as she advanced. But despite her best efforts, she remained distracted.

  Ling Qi hadn’t lied. She didn’t like hurting people or abandoning them…… but she had to put herself first, and in her previous position, that hadn’t left much room at all to care for others. She still believed leaving Mother had been for the best – for both of them. Even now, knowing that she had misread the situation due to her fears, she still held on to that belief……

  Still, maybe she could send out a letter along with some of the coin she had recently acquired once the Sect restrictions on communication ended. She hadn’t wanted to chance getting entangled in things again back in the city, but she was beyond that now.

  Mother had done her best for her daughter, even if Ling Qi had rejected it at the end. Ling Qi could afford to give…… something back. It wasn’t as if she had much use for silver anymore after all. Assuming the silver was real anyway, she thought irritably. After this day, she wished that she had some ability to sense that kind of thing.

  The path ahead was still a maze, although she wasn’t knee-deep in water anymore. Perhaps that was the trick? She needed to follow the decreasing water level?

  The last trap had left her feeling tense, but perhaps that was a good thing because it allowed her to maintain focus and keep her sense of direction in the maze. Ling Qi kept working toward a single direction even when the twisting paths didn’t allow her to proceed directly. Several times, she found herself stopping and backtracking to avoid more glittering webs or places where the darkness grew unnatural.

  Gradually, the water grew shallower, first to lap around her toes then to simply leave the ground wet and muddy. The number of turns, twists, and splits in the path began to taper off as well until finally, the tunnel opened up into a small chamber dimly lit by a single crystal growth on the ceiling.

  Ling Qi peered inside warily, easily spotting the stone plinth that lay directly under the light with a glittering black jade token shot through with veins of white laying atop it. If that wasn’t the star token, she would eat her sandals.

  Unfortunately, the plinth rose from a pool of crystal clear water. Stepping into the chamber, Ling Qi could not help but stare suspiciously at the pool. She strongly doubted that it was so simple as simply walking up and taking the token. If the rest of this spirit-infested city was any indication, the token would be guarded by some kind of water spirit.

  Perhaps she didn’t need to confront it? Spirits could be placated, and Ling Qi recalled a few things about water spirits that had slipped in among her etiquette lessons with Bai Meizhen when conversation turned to the girl’s home province. Ling Qi didn’t have incense or offerings, but…… maybe she could talk the spirit into just handing the token over or at least explaining what it wanted before she went and stuck her foot in the thing’s pool?

  After deliberating, she decided that it couldn’t hurt. Ling Qi stepped into the chamber, straightened her posture as best she could, and then bowed, pulling on dim memories of priestly ceremony and hearthside conversation. She then clapped her hands together, once and then twice before holding them apart.

  “Scion of waters, child of the the Eternal Ocean from which all life rises, this one would treat with you. Will you appear?” Ugh. Ling Qi had nearly stumbled over the odd and formal words, but she thought she had gotten it right. Ling Qi almost grimaced, feeling increasingly ridiculous as she held her pose in the silence that followed.

  Then, she heard the sloshing of water and witnessed the calm surface of the pool growing frothy with motion, lapping at the shore. The water bubbled and rose, an indistinct face forming from the waters. Its eyes were two unsettling dark holes, and its other features were little more than outlines, like an amateur sculpture of a person’s head. She could feel a weight in the air which had been absent as those pits focused on her.

  Its words, if the sudden barrage of meaning that struck her mind could be called that, made her body tremble in discomfort. Ling Qi did her best to ignore the pressure that she felt weighing down on her. For all that this was no great spirit, she had a feeling that the New Moon had been distinctly taking it easy on her, body and mind, if something like this could make her feel so pressured.

  “This one requests the knowledge of what must be done to acquire the token at the center of your pool,” she pressed on, knowing that it was too late to back out now. “This one has no wish to unnecessarily defile your waters.”


  The face in the water regarded her silently, and she found herself dearly wishing that it was more expressive, less flat and alien.

  Ling Qi concentrated on keeping her limbs from trembling. The spirit’s words were difficult to parse, but she thought she understood what it wanted. Loathe as she was to give up her prize for having killed that damn spider, it was probably a…… part of this spirit? She knew vaguely that spirits were often interconnected in weird ways.

  Hoping she was right, she slipped a hand into her pouch and brought out the core she had torn from the dead spider and held it out. Sure enough, the thing vibrated in her hand and shot from it the moment she opened her fingers, hitting the surface of the pool with barely a ripple and dissolving.

  Ling Qi stumbled back as the star token hit her chest, having been flung with significant force. She managed to catch it before it hit the ground though despite the throbbing where it had struck her. She would probably have a nasty bruise on her chest later.

  “Thank you,” Ling Qi said, bowing her head a fraction lower. “I apologize for disturbing your rest.”


  Ling Qi stiffened as the world seemed to twist and distort around her, squeezing down on all sides. She was just beginning to panic as she found herself unable to move, but before she could even get going, she found herself blinking as the light of sunset stung her eyes.

  Carefully peering around, Ling Qi found herself standing at the edge of the square which contained the well, hidden in shadow behind several haphazardly stacked crates. She frowned as she saw another disciple, a girl she didn’t recognize, watching the well intently with a fine saber in hand. Ling Qi’s rope was still there, and from the way the girl stood, her intentions were clear. Ling Qi supposed she owed the water spirit thanks, even if it had been irritatingly cryptic and condescending.

  Ling Qi crept away with the girl none the wiser, eyeing the sky. She still had some time, but the sooner she got to the temple, the better. At this point, every moment she spent in the city was a risk with no reward.

  Luckily, she doubted any of her fellow disciples would identify her at a glance; she was wet, muddy, and wearing cheap, torn clothing. Unless they could sense her qi or they recognized her personally, she could pass for a commoner, unless the wrapped staff on her back drew attention……

  At least until she got to the wealthier part of the city. There, her appearance would start to stand out.

  However, that concern could wait for the moment. Ling Qi focused on making her way further into the city at the quickest pace she could manage while sticking to back streets and alleys. As she traveled, it became more and more clear that the city had quite a few disciples in it now. Smoke rose in the distance, and people were hurrying away from that location with frightened looks on their faces. These signs and other little things caused Ling Qi to pick up her pace even more.

  Once she moved out of the poorer, outer districts, Ling Qi made a small detour to clean up and dry off. A stop at a pawn shop afterward bought her a cloak to throw over her tattered clothes. Leaving the shop, she worked to blend in with the street traffic as she approached the inner walls around the wealthy districts. She could see a huge tower, carved to appear as a tightly coiled dragon rising over those walls. Going by the guard’s words, that was her destination.

  That just meant she needed to be even more cautious.

  She saw some of her peers on the way. Some loitered on street corners, scanning the crowd. A tiny number had even gotten the same idea as she had and dressed down, making themselves less obvious. Ling Qi focused on remaining in the background and kept a tight leash on her qi.

  As she neared the inner districts, Ling Qi slowed her pace even more. She no longer weaved through the street traffic for maximum speed without compromising her anonymity. Instead, she walked normally. She even stopped periodically at street stalls or entered shops, making sure she didn’t appear to be in a hurry to reach a particular destination.

  It seemed to work. Her fellow disciples took no notice of her as she worked her way closer. There were at least a dozen guards in plain sight at the intricate bronze gates that separated the outer city from the inner, including two who wore marks of rank. Here, there were no disciples that she could see. Perhaps they assumed that the guards would intervene in violence that occured right in front of them.

  A handful of bloody footprints that had yet to be smeared away by passing foot traffic seemed to give credence to that, as did the fact that several of the guards had blades drawn. As much as it went against every instinct she had to openly approach such a group, Ling Qi finally broke her casual pace as she reached the open square in front of the gate. As she expected, the two men flanking the gate raised their halberds to block her way, staring at her with cold disinterest. She glanced at one of the two officers in their ranks, digging into her pouch to reveal her tokens. She hoped that what she had really was a star token. The guard officer stepped forward to examine the offered tokens. Ling Qi held her breath until he silently gestured for the two men to lower their weapons. This was it! She had managed to pass! She felt almost giddy at the realization.

  She murmured a breathless thanks to the guard officer and darted through the gates, hurrying through the opulent buildings of the inner city. Even the confused disdain on the wealthy citizens she passed couldn’t bring her mood down. Soon, she stood before the wide open gates of the temple with fires burning merrily in the braziers that flanked it.

  Ling Qi forced herself to pause and examine the temple’s grand interior for potential traps, but there were none. Smiling triumphantly, Ling Qi stepped through the doorway.

  Threads 17

  Ling Qi stood ready for another few moments after the creature’s last twitch subsided. Only after a swift kick to one of its remaining eyes failed to bring a reaction did she allow herself to turn around.

  “Everything alright up there?” she called.

  “Y-yes,” Li Suyin called back from the edge of the pit, her voice muffled. Ling Qi looked with bemusement upon her friend’s solution to the issue of being dragged down.

  Li Suyin stood in a veritable cage of bone, metal, and silk formed by her guardians. The one with the shield stood below, its shield spiked into the ground. The simple slab of metal had expanded, twin plates of steel bursting from its sides to form a curved barrier. The other one stood behind, the hooked ornament at the base of its gaundao now stuck firmly into the ceiling at the end of a chain. It clasped the extended weapon in one hand while the other seemed to be holding the first guardian’s collar, but a second look showed that the gauntlet and armor had fused into a single piece. Metal flowed as she watched, the two guardians detaching from one another as Li Suyin peeked out from between them.

  “I take it that that’s new,” Ling Qi said dryly, gesturing to the dead beast.

  “Nothing like that has come up here before, no,” Li Suyin replied with a frown, making her way down the slope carefully. “It could just be bad luck, but……”


  “You did have a way out with you before, right?” Ling Qi asked worriedly. While Li Suyin had weathered the peripheral of the fight fine and even helped distract the creature, she didn’t know if her friend could have handled it on her own.

  “I have an escape talisman,” Li Suyin answered, examining the creature. “You would think a predator like this would leave more signs, considering how destructive it is,” she mused absently.

  “Unless this isn’t its normal hunting grounds,” Ling Qi offered.

  “Well, we can determine that later,” Li Suyin replied, reaching into her bags to retrieve a leather surgical mask and a pair of goggles. “I need to harvest this! A core this potent will be a great boon for my work.”


  Ling Qi sighed and resigned herself to standing guard while her friend butchered hundreds of kilograms worth of beetle monster. She was glad Suyin was happy, but should she really be this blase about a threat to her life? What had happened to the wilting girl who hated fighting and blood?

  “Do you think we should follow its trail?” Li Suyin asked, crouching near the beast’s oozing maw. “I had scouted out a path to the third level already, but if this leads back to a nest…… There could be so much more to find.”


  Ling Qi raised an eyebrow. “You want to tangle with a bunch of these?” she asked incredulously.

  Li Suyin shook her head, and she flicked her wrist, drawing a carving knife the length of her forearm from storage. “There isn’t enough nutrition in this region to support multiple adults of this size. It would be a mated pair at most. The upper caverns would be stripped bare if there were more. We might find juveniles or even eggs though! A sample of the carapace still in development could advance……”


  Ling Qi watched as her friend sank the knife into a crack in the creature’s carapace, and the formations on its blade glowed, even as a spurt of blood stained Suyin’s facemask. She listened to Li Suyin discuss the improvements she could make to her constructs.

  What a change that she was the one feeling a little timid.

  But one way or another, they were going into dangerous territory. It only made sense to follow the obvious trail, and she couldn’t afford to start jumping at shadows. She had handled the beast easily enough, and Li Suyin had acquitted herself well.

  Of course, having decided that, Ling Qi could only wait for Suyin to finish. Butchering the bug-thing took the better part of two hours. Oh, Li Suyin needed her help once or twice to pry a section of chitin too thick to cut open, but Ling Qi had little to do aside from keeping watch.

  Eventually, after the fist-sized greasy black lump that seemed to be the beast’s core and many kilograms of chitin and tissue had vanished into Li Suyin’s and Ling Qi’s storage rings, and with the butchered corpse dragged out of the pit, they were finally ready to descend. Ling Qi ended up carrying her friend down, looping her arms under the shorter girl’s. With so much stone converted into sand, there was nothing to attach a grapple to.

  The bottom of the tunnel lay half a hundred meters down. The walls glistened with the slimy secretions of the beast they had killed, but they were at least solid. Ling Qi glanced at Suyin as the other girl released her guardians from storage again. She was glad they were moving again, but……

  Sixiang commented lightly.

  Suyin’s arms were caked up to the elbows in chunky black and green gore, and her facemask and smock weren’t much better. Ling Qi glanced at her own hands, speckled with bug goo as they were. Her gown had repelled the gunk almost violently, thankfully, so it was just her hands and forearms stained with gore.

  “You really have changed quite a bit, haven’t you, Li Suyin?” Ling Qi mused aloud as Suyin sent a pack of skeletal mice skittering down the passage to scout.

  Li Suyin looked to her in confusion, her gleaming eyepatch contrasting with her pale blue eye. “What do you……?” She glanced down at herself then and gave a sheepish shrug. “Medicine is a dirty profession,” Li Suyin continued, somewhat self-consciously. “You have to deal with many things that others find hard to look at or disgusting. I suppose I have just adjusted to it.”


  “There’s nothing wrong with that.” Ling Qi hummed as they began to move forward, walking quietly down the lopsided tunnel. “I am surprised that you have gone so far with these constructs though. Surely the Sect had resources that needed less reverse engineering.” She had treated the pale manual’s constructs as more of a hobby. Even the Ossuary Horror was more of a distraction tactic for her than a core part of her combat style.

  “Sometimes, things shouldn’t be beautiful,” Li Suyin said. “Isn’t it better not to hide the nature of some things?”


  “I suppose not,” Ling Qi said. “They don’t need to be pretty to work.”


  “It might be a little childish, but I admit that I like the idea of turning things people consider unpleasant to good ends,” Li Suyin said. “After all, so many things considered virtuous are……” She trailed off, shaking her head.

  Ling Qi hummed in reply, not really sure what to say.

  Sixiang whispered.

  Ling Qi thought back dryly.

  Sixiang shot back.

  “Ling Qi?” Li Suyin asked, glancing over at her as they paused at a curve in the tunnel, waiting for Suyin’s scouts to return.

  “Just chatting with Sixiang,” Ling Qi replied, “about the aesthetics of your constructs.”


  Her friend blinked, looking befuddled behind her mask. “Oh. What do they think?”


  Sixiang rattled off.

  Ling Qi blinked slowly at the response before relaying it. “Sixiang thinks you should use some conventionally beautiful elements in the mix. The contrast will improve the overall unsettling vibe.”


  Li Suyin frowned. “Um…… I see. I will take that into account.” She did not sound as if she was sure of that at all. The conversation petered out as they turned their focus back to exploration.

  The tunnel wound for a fair distance before breaking out into empty air. They emerged on the wall of a chasm, too deep for even Ling Qi to see the bottom of. The yawning gap simply stretched down until all Ling Qi could perceive was undifferentiated gray. They did, however, emerge on a sloping cliffside so there remained a trail of slime and scrapings to follow.

  On the way down, Ling Qi saw many things skittering and flying in the darkness in more shapes than she could count. Some ignored them while others stared down at them with inscrutable eyes. Ling Qi remained on guard, but none seemed prepared to attack. She still felt relieved when their trail led back into a tunnel and away from the abyssal chasm. Eventually, they came to a wide, circular chamber some forty meters across with a floor of soft white sand. The bug thing’s qi marked the place as deeply as the gouges and scratches left by its limbs did. Another two tunnels led deeper into the earth, seemingly natural this time.

  As Li Suyin hurried to examine discarded moltings and fragments of shell scattered across the cavern, Ling Qi peered around carefully, her flute in her hands. She felt an itch, a feeling in her gut, telling her to stay alert. But after nearly a quarter hour had passed and nothing had happened, she still very nearly leaped out of her skin when the sand off to her right stirred.

  The shifting grains mounded up as something beneath burrowed upward. Ling Qi had a moment to see some pale-skinned and grub-like thing beginning to emerge before the single sharp note that she blew from her flute blasted the top half of the creature into a sticky red and green mist.

  Li Suyin paused in harvesting the empty moltings in the echoing silence that followed, and Ling Qi felt her nerves somewhat subside. It had only been some kind of weak beast, no more than a first realm.

  Why hadn’t she felt its approach though?

  “A scavenger……?” Li Suyin proposed, even as her clanking guardians moved into more defensive positions.

  Ling Qi focused, and behind her eyes, Sixiang did the same. Her eyes rippled silver, argent and lunar qi mingling to enhance her senses still further. She felt it. They were not presences per se, but a disturbing sort of absence like a shadow glimpsed in a dark forest. The sand boiled beneath their feet, and this time, the creature that emerged was not alone. Ling Qi got a better look, and she wished she hadn’t.

  Their flesh were glistening and pale like a maggot’s, and their movements betrayed a repellant softness at odds with their shape. The creatures resembled humans, if humans had been forced to crawl on all fours like bugs until their limbs bent unnaturally out, lending them a skittering, rodent-like gait. Their heads were worse. Eyeless and bald, their pale, blue-veined flesh stretched thin over empty eye sockets. Bristling whiskers protruded from their otherwise hairless skin just below their elongated nose and chattering teeth. Their visages were like some hideous combination of human and rat.

  Now that she knew what to look for, Ling Qi could feel the shadow of even more presences from further down. They were under the sand and down the tunnels, a creeping horde that she could not count. Even now though, Ling Qi wasn’t worried. The creatures, within the bounds of the first and second realm, were weak.

  Ling Qi played, and her mist rolled out, engulfing the pale and skittering beasts as they turned their snouts and sniffed the air. Crimson eyes and black claws bloomed in the mist, and the creatures were torn apart, their soft flesh like paper before the claws and fangs of her phantasms.

  Yet Ling Qi could feel greater presences amidst the sea of not-qi like the ripples left by a larger fish. There were at least three third realm entities coming up from below, though none were above the first steps into the realm. Even deeper than that, Ling Qi thought that she felt the presence of still more, but at this distance, it was impossible to be sure.

  “Ling Qi?” Li Suyin called through the mist, moving to stand next to her as more rat-things emerged into the mist only to die. “There is still a great deal more to harvest here. Do you think you can keep these things away?” she asked, peering down at the twitching corpse of one of the rat things.

  Ling Qi grimaced, letting her qi carry the tune while she spoke. “I can’t count how many of these creatures there are, but there’s some third realms approaching.”


  Li Suyin winced. “I suppose we should begin retreating then. The molts will have to be enough. I was sure that I found the signs of a nest though……”


  Ling Qi considered her options. She looked out at the pale, thrashing forms swiping and hissing at the phantoms in her mist. She remembered the promise she had made to herself last year, that she wouldn’t allow herself to be chained by fear. She remembered, too, the sobering experiences of learning just how high the mountains rose. Feeling creatures rising in such vast numbers gave her unsettling flashbacks to the horde of rats she had been part of in the Bloody Moon dream, but this was hardly the same, was it?

  While she had learned that fear couldn’t be conquered so easily, she wouldn’t let herself become a coward. She wouldn’t treat her friends like they were made of glass.

  “Keep looking for the nest,” she directed. “I can hold them off.”


  Sixiang lamented.

  Ling Qi thought to Sixiang as she raised her flute, preparing to play again. To Suyin, she said, “Stay away from the center, Suyin. My other art is less ally-friendly than my mist.”


  Li Suyin glanced at the tunnels then back at her as the echoing sounds of many scrabbling feet reached them over the dying wails of the burrowers. She gave a determined nod. “This will not take long. Yi, Er, begin search and excavation,” she spoke in a clipped tone, sending the constructs into motion.

  Ling Qi smiled. She really had to talk to her friend about her naming sense. Zhenli was fine, but calling her guards “One” and “Two”? That was just dull.

  Sixiang laughed.