Ling Qi and Su Ling slipped deeper into the ruins, following patches of remaining pavement between the crumbled walls of old buildings. Behind them, they left the dead, still pressed up against the barrier of the ward. It was still only late afternoon, but one would never be able to tell going by the overcast sky.

  “Sorry for getting you into this,” Ling Qi said quietly, peering carefully into the shadows as the other girl focused on the ground, her eyes following something Ling Qi could not sense. “I suppose we should have taken this a little slower, huh?”


  “I knew this was gonna be dangerous,” Su Ling replied bluntly, pausing at a crossroads before leading Ling Qi to the right toward the more heavily clustered buildings lying like scattered bones in the mist. “I’ve never seen that many ghosts in one place though,” she grumbled, glancing furtively over her shoulder.

  “I’ve never seen a ghost before at all,” Ling Qi said uncomfortably. There was always a priest or two around to perform an appeasement and funeral rights when someone died. It was the one service that even the poorest people could expect. In the slums of the city, some even joked that only the dead could expect any care from the city’s officials.

  “They’re more common than you’d think,” Su Ling commented, expression sour as she sniffed the air. “Still, something about that didn’t feel right. I dunno how well you can feel this kinda thing, but the river’s qi – It feels wrong. Stiff, maybe?” Su Ling seemed to have trouble articulating precisely what she was feeling.

  Ling Qi narrowed her eyes, concentrating on the feeling of the qi around her. She couldn’t really feel anything odd…… Well, beyond the obvious cloying weight of death in the air. “If there’s something wrong, it’s probably connected to whoever is out here,” she said with not entirely feigned confidence. After all, someone out in a place like this would obviously either be captured by spirits or up to no good.

  “Maybe,” Su Ling said dubiously. “Doesn’t feel like a cultivator though.”


  Ling Qi could only shrug in reply as they made their way further into the ruins. The air was full of tension, but as they ventured further from the ward boundary, the feelings staining the air seemed to grow almost sullen. They soon began to pick up more physical tells of the trail they were following. There were drag marks in the dirt, a bloodstain less than a day old, and even a child’s tooth, far too fresh to belong in these ruins. They crouched near the place where they had found the tooth as Su Ling tried to determine where the trail lead next because despite the apparent freshness of the signs, the trail grew faint here.

  It made Ling Qi think of the way her Sable Crescent Step art obfuscated her trail wherever she went. Perhaps that was why she was distracted when Su Ling suddenly jerked, her pointed ears twitching wildly, and shouted, “Get down!”


  Ling Qi threw herself down and felt the brush of the wind as something small and feathery shot through where her head had been. She caught a glimpse of it as it flew past her, a pale white crow’s skull shrouded in shadows in the vague shape of a body with feathery wings. Ling Qi only had a moment to observe before Su Ling’s sword smashed through it, fire licking at the blade, and clove the skull in half.

  It dropped to the stones with a clatter, trailing a few sad and scraggly feathers.

  “What the hell was that?” Ling Qi said as she pushed herself back up from the ground, head swiveling from side to side as she searched their surroundings for more foes.

  “Some kind of puppet. I think it wasn’t alive,” Su Ling said warily, eyeing the sky along with Ling Qi. “Suyin was looking into stuff like that; she can only do the needles though.” Su Ling paused then, peering into the distance. “.……Hells. Fine, I have no more objections. No way is that not shady as shit.”


  Ling Qi followed her gaze, stilling when she saw what had drawn the fox girl’s reaction. She could see the crumbling wall surrounding the broken remains of what had probably been the village headman’s house going by the size and the space left around it by the other buildings. It sat at the edge of the river that curved lazily through the ruined town. Dozens of little white skulls and their shadowy bodies perched atop those walls and on the collapsing ceiling of the home, facing the pair in eerie stillness.

  Worryingly, Ling Qi could not feel a single bit of qi from any of them. As far as her still new senses from Argent Mirror were concerned, the bird puppet things were not there. She ducked down behind the cover of a crumbling wall alongside Su Ling.

  “Not disagreeing, but does the trail go that way?” Ling Qi asked quietly.

  Su Ling nodded slightly. “Afraid so,” she said in a soft voice. Su Ling paused in consideration. “So I’m sure you want to go in, but hear me out, alright? I think I can get us past those things without a big, drawn-out fight.”


  “I wasn’t going to suggest barging in the front,” Ling Qi grumbled. She wasn’t so reckless as that, not when she could see what lay ahead of her. “They’ve noticed us already though.”


  “Which is why we are going in the front,” Su Ling replied. “Well, it’s gonna look like we are,” she amended at Ling Qi’s raised eyebrow. “It’s kinda costly and I can’t use any other arts while I’m doing it, but I can cloak us and make a decoy illusion. Then we can sneak around the side.”


  Ling Qi followed Su Ling’s pointed finger toward a hole in the crumbling wall around the house. “That sounds good. Will you still be able to fight afterward?”


  “I have a couple of pills I can use,” Su Ling said. “Don’t worry about it.”


  Ling Qi thought that she probably could deal with the flock of birds, but it would certainly take time for dissonance to wear them down, even if they were fairly fragile. At this point, she didn’t want to dally around using a strategy that slow. She signalled Su Ling to start, and the fox girl closed her eyes, an expression of intense concentration on her face as her tail stiffened.

  Ling Qi felt the girl’s wispy qi wash over her, clinging like a sheet of gauze and rendering everything slightly fuzzy. She could see through the other girl now, and faint shadowy silhouettes moved out to approach the large house.

  Ling Qi and Su Ling began to circle around, roughly paralleling the wall, as a great cloud of bones and black feathers descended on the illusions. Other crows hung back, clustering together and blurring, their forms shifting to combine into a single, much larger puppet that loomed over the apparent battlefield.

  While the crows screamed and circled, fighting an enemy that was not there, she saw the strain on Su Ling’s face increasing. Luckily, the distance they had to cross was not a great distance for cultivators like them, even when having to slow down to avoid being spotted.

  They soon slipped in through the gap in the wall and made it under the crumbling eaves of the home, finding themselves in what was once a kitchen. Su Ling let out a soft gasp and twitched slightly a moment later.

  “That’s it for that,” she said with a grimace, popping what Ling Qi recognized as a wellspring pill into her mouth. “C’mon, it’s faint, but the trail goes toward the cellar. Let me send the decoys down first.”


  Ling Qi considered then took one of her own qi pills. She could afford to waste a couple of red stones now, and it was better to go into a probable fight at full capacity than to be stingy.

  Given the increasing clamor outside, the two of them hurriedly yanked open the ancient cellar doors and headed down the stairs, following the trail of already disturbed dust, a few steps behind the illusionary doubles made by Su Ling. Ling Qi kept a careful eye out for anything that might be a trap, but there was only hard packed dirt and the musty stink of rotten air.

  That changed as they reached the bottom and crept to the right while the figments proceeded forward. The cellar had obviously been enlarged, the hard packed dirt giving way to hastily dug expansion on the far wall, wet and muddy from the water trickling down from the ceiling. Was it under the river outside? Ling Qi thought it might be.

  A grotesque totem of bone was built into the far wall, a pillar of pale ivory that nearly reached the ceiling three meters above. The main pillar seemed to be formed by the lashed together ribs of some large beast, but the smaller affectations were far more human, cleaned skulls and rib cages nailed to the main pillar with stone spikes, painted with strange characters that glowed a sickly green.

  Pungent smoke hung in the air down here, rendering everything blurry, but Ling Qi could see a tall figure moving to stand, revealing a stone slab at the base of the pillar. Upon the slab lay an unconscious young boy, perhaps ten or eleven years old at her guess. He was stripped to the waist and painted with strange whorling symbols.

  The figure standing over him was tall, tall enough to look down on Ling Qi, and seeming taller still due to the black feathered plumes sticking up from the bloody crimson headband he wore. Several heavy necklaces of beads clacked and clattered against the beast talons woven into the thick, form concealing robe of beast hide he wore. Really, but for his dark skinned face and sharp green eyes, he looked almost like nothing more than a shadow himself. His features were smooth, seemingly not much older than the two of them.

  Like the shadow birds outside, she couldn’t sense any qi at all from him or from the pillar or anything else in this cellar. Even the qi of the earth, which should have been all encompassing down here, was muted.

  He scowled at their illusions from across the twenty odd meters of distance separating them and gestured once, saying something in a low and guttural sounding tongue. A wide circle of stretched hide appeared in his right hand, painted with strange geometric symbols, while a strange baton of knobby bone appeared in his left hand. Was that…… some kind of drum? Or maybe a primitive shield?

  “That thing,” Su Ling hissed. “That bone charm on his wrist, the silver painted circle. It’s what’s screwing with our senses.” Ling Qi glanced at her with alarm, but the man didn’t notice Su Ling’s words.

  Ling Qi…… was honestly hesitant. This was entirely outside her expectations. How was a Cloud Tribe shaman – for what else could he be in that get up – have made it here, under the nose of the Sect? Hadn’t Bai Meizhen mentioned that Elder Ying watched over this whole region? She couldn’t sense his qi. What if he was completely above them?

  On the other hand, if he was, why was he fooled by Su Ling’s illusion? She felt a bit better at that thought. She had to believe that they could still handle this. She couldn’t expect that he would be fooled for long so she needed to make her first shot count.

  So what was the most important target?

  Threads 68-Foreshock 5

  “What happened here?” Ling Qi asked bluntly as her feet touched the ground in the village square in front of the bowing second realm wearing the marks of a lower officer. “Where are my fellow disciples?”


  With her qi ebbing a little low from the use of so many powerful techniques in quick succession and the events of the day churning in her thoughts, Ling Qi’s grip on her power was far more frayed than usual. The ground frosted under her boots, and the wind whispered a cold and unfriendly melody.

  “My apologies, Officer Ling,” the second realm officer said without raising his head or unclasping his hands. “We do not know the disposition of Officer Song, but Officer Deng was found dead just before the attack.”


  Ling Qi’s brows furrowed. “Explain.”


  “Officer Deng had been taking tea while preparations for the evacuation of the fields were being made,” the armored man replied stiffly. “When I entered his rooms to inform him that the attack was nigh, I found him dead. His throat was cut. There was no sign of struggle. I have no excuses.”


  She watched with a blank expression as the man bowed still lower somehow as if expecting a reprimand. “You did the best that could have been expected of you,” she said mechanically. It seemed that things were only continuing to grow more alarming. She had certainly heard nothing of the Cloud tribesmen fielding assassins of all things.

  As she pondered how to proceed, her head whipped around to the south in time to see a star born in the dark and stormy sky. She felt in her bones a clash of raw power near the jutting silhouette of Icebreaker Peak. A powerful wind hit her next, sending her hair fluttering and unsecured shutters and debris moving. There was a second flash then, and the earth shook, a plume of dust rising from Icebreaker Peak, visible even so many kilometers distant.

  She recognized that qi from training sessions and briefings. Her commander was fighting something, something strong enough to push her. She felt the earth beneath her feet shake minutely like a gong swaying after being struck.

  “O-Officer Ling?” the man beside her asked, his composure finally cracking.

  “Continue the evacuation and rescue,” Ling Qi ordered hastily. “I will search for Officer Song.” And then go directly to her village, she added silently. Things were continuing to spiral beyond what she had expected, events happening far too quickly for her taste. She forced herself to calm. Rushing would not help her. “Prepare a basin filled with water,” she said, her voice stiff and clipped. “I am going to have a look at Officer Deng. Has the scene been disturbed?”


  “No, ma’am,” the soldier replied, clapping his fists together and bowing his head. “There was no time, nor was the barracks damaged in the fighting.”


  “Good,” Ling Qi said, turning on her heel. It was easy enough to discern the direction of the barracks, the people of the village huddled in the shelter beneath a morass of fear and pain to her senses. The earth shook again, and a gust sent her hair fluttering, a few flyaway strands dancing in the wind.

  That certainly wasn’t helping, Ling Qi thought darkly.

  When she entered the officer’s office in the barracks, Ling Qi did her best to not gag at the stench. She felt her stomach turn over as she saw the body. It reminded her of bad days in alleys and gutters. She forced her mind off of old memories as she stepped over the threshold, silver light flickering in her eyes. From the folds of her gown, flickering wisps of light fluttered out, spreading throughout the room, skimming the ceiling, slipping under and around the furniture, feeding her information on the scene.

  The disciple was slumped over his desk. The soldier had, if anything, undersold the death wound – only the young man’s spine kept his head attached to his shoulders. A ragged gash clove the flesh of his neck in twain, but there was very little blood. The crimson fluid that stained the desk was stained black and seeped slowly, heavy and thick with toxic qi. There really was no sign of struggle. A cooling pot of tea still sat undisturbed on the desk and not a single book nor scroll on the shelves was out of place. Of the assailant, she could find no sign……

  No, Ling Qi thought, narrowing her eyes as she traced the room through multiple viewpoints. There was something familiar. It was faint. Even with all of her focus, she could only just barely sense the fading remnants. It could best be described as a film like the skin that formed on curdled milk, a scent of rot and impurity that she had only caught thanks to her previous experience underground and time spent in Li Suyin’s workshop.

  She would have to order messengers sent out. The other officers needed to know of the threat of a rat-thing assassin, and she would need to make sure this was reported to the Sect.

  She turned swiftly from the scene, marching out. There was nothing more she could do here. Even as she proceeded out to the village headman’s house where the basin had been prepared, she felt time ticking by all too quickly. Trust or no, she wanted to get back to Zhengui and Xiulan.

  She swiftly set about her task, weaving her qi into the water as she focused on the face of her fellow scout officer. She dearly hoped that he was within range. The water in the basin churned and darkened, shimmering like the night sky, and her hope was rewarded. The image was dim and a bit blurry thanks to her unfamiliarity with the young man, but she saw him huddled among the roots of a massive tree. He was wounded, but not too badly, and breathing shallowly, the corpse of a barbarian lying a few meters away in the mud. Ling Qi could only assume he was exhausted as her qi sense did not extend through the basin. At least for the moment, he seemed, fine.

  Tersely, Ling Qi reported her findings to the second realm officer.

  “I will discuss the matter with the local members of the garrison. Thank you for your aid, Officer Ling,” the second realm officer said, bowing low. “What will you do now?”


  Ling Qi regarded him out of the corner of her eye as she stepped outside of the headman’s home. She sympathized with his stress, and she dearly hoped that the soldiers could weather events until reinforcements could arrive. “I have been away from my command for too long. I need to return.” As if to punctuate her words, the ground shook again, wind gusting down from the south. “Hold on. The Sect must have detected something amiss by now, and if not, the messengers are on their way to them.”


  “Of course, officer,” the soldier said. She did not detect any blame in his voice or posture, only a certain fatalistic determination. It seemed the Sect trained their lifetime soldiers well. “We will hold until the last breath if needed.”


  “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” Ling Qi said. “Good luck.”


  Then the man and the village were gone, shrinking below her as she rose into the sky. The moment she gained enough clearance, she shot forward like an arrow, carving silently through the rushing wind as her depleted qi sent her south.

  There was no banter this time. The sight of her fellow disciple lying dead at his desk, the thought of the tribesmen she had killed today, worry for her friends and family, they all combined to drive Ling Qi to silence. The oppressive weight in the air, the clashing of qi so far beyond her, certainly did not help matters. Every time the storm-wracked sky lit up from the raw force of two fourth realm entities clashing, she nearly flinched. The rushing wind was nothing to the unnatural ripples that were spreading through the world in her spiritual senses.

  She could sense beasts stirring even here, fear spreading like poison through the woods and hills. In the distance, she could see great flocks of birds rising from the trees, uncaring for species, uncaring for each other as they beat their wings and fled the brewing storm. She heard trees groaning and twisting, leaves raining down on the forest floor as they shied away from the south, and dirt and rock crumbled as roots began to move with ponderous but irresistible strength.

  She just hoped that Commander Guan Zhi and Liao Zhu were able to finish their clash with whatever they were fighting soon. The disquiet in the world only grew worse as she flew further south, but she turned her mind from the forest below and kept her eyes ahead on the gleaming blue ribbon of the river leading to where the village she had left behind at the beginning of all this lay.