Her efforts to unlock the shaman bags nearly made her late to her meeting with Su Ling, so she abandoned the project for now to meet with her friend at the vent. Since Su Ling intended to practice with her sword, Ling Qi thought it appropriate to cultivate her Thousand Ring Fortress Art. Ling Qi felt like she was really beginning to get the hang of the art, even if it was against her usual inclinations.

  Of course, that turned out to have its’ own problems……

  “Fuck! It feels like I hit a mountain.” Su Ling grimaced as the practice blade fell from her hand. “I can’t feel my fingers,” she complained as she shook her hand

  “Are you alright?” Ling Qi asked,lowering her own hands from a guard position.

  “It’s fine,” Su Ling said grumpily, glaring down at her trembling hand as if to still it by sheer force of will. “I guess I forgot just how ridiculous you are.”


  Ling Qi looked away uncomfortably. Su Ling had actually landed a pretty good hit, driving her blunted blade into Ling Qi’s gut while she had been distracted trying to fully activate of her Thousand Ring Fortress techniques. It just…… hadn’t mattered. Between her greater physical cultivation and the layers of defensive qi woven into her flesh, she had barely felt it.

  Was this what Meizhen felt like when sparring with her?

  Dismissing that odd thought, Ling Qi suggested, “Why don’t we take a breather then? You still haven’t told me what brought this on. I don’t mind practicing with you, but I’m curious.”


  Su Ling huffed and bent down to pick up her weapon, twin tails swishing behind her with agitation. Ling Qi didn’t miss the still unhealed wounds and patches of torn fur. “I need to get better at this. I’ve been relying on my illusions too much.”


  “Yeah, I can understand how that might be a problem,” she said noncommittally. Ling Qi suspected it was less a matter of necessity and more a desire to avoid using the illusionary skills granted from her heritage. “That said, do you have an art lined up? Mundane swordplay will only get you so far.”


  The girl’s pointed ears twitched violently, and her expression grew sour. “I have some points stored up,” she said gruffly. “Gonna go to the second floor. I just figure it’s no good to get an art if my skills are still crap.” Ling Qi couldn’t help but feel that there was something Su Ling wasn’t saying.

  “Have you considered a tutor?” Ling Qi asked tentatively as she moved to sit down by the vent. She needed to cycle her qi to solidify the gains she had made with her defensive art. “I can barely hold a sword without stabbing my own foot. Sparring with me won’t help with learning swordsmanship.”


  “Too expensive,” Su Ling answered, sitting down herself to cycle. Ling Qi could see the bruises on her palm start to heal already. “Just getting an art is gonna cost me.”


  Ling Qi hummed in response. That was true. Inner Sect tutoring was pretty pricey. She didn’t regret trying it herself though. “Well, if you think so……” She trailed off awkwardly, and an uncomfortable silence fell between them.

  “What’s bothering you?” Ling Qi asked bluntly after a few minutes. “You’ve been really wound up,” she added, looking at the other girl out of the corner of her eye. “It’s not about the sword arts.”


  Su Ling kept her eyes on the stars overhead. “I just wanted to hit something for a while. Got the damn silly idea to ask you, and all I managed was to hurt my hands.”


  “What’s wrong, is someone making trouble for you?” Ling Qi would take care of it if so.

  Su Ling snorted. “No, and if there was, I’d tell ya to stay out of it. The usual assholes aren’t bothering me. I got someone else to sell my stuff through. Just…… been thinking about things.”


  “That usually makes me want to hit something too,” Ling Qi quipped. “.…… I’m guessing it has something to do with your breakthrough?” Ling Qi waited for Su Ling’s answer in the silence that followed.

  “I’m fucking tired of not having any choices on my path,” Su Ling admitted quietly. “Seems like I can only get stronger by being like that fucking fox. But, well, you can see that I’m pretty shit with a sword.”


  “You’re not great, but it’s not like you’ve been practicing long either,” Ling Qi pointed out, knowing that Su Ling wasn’t in the mood for pretty lies.

  “Says the girl who picks up a bow and starts tagging bullseyes a few hours later,” Su Ling replied dryly. “Nah, I’ve worked at it, and I can tell. I’m just not good with it. All I’m good with are illusions and hunting techniques. I wanted something that was mine, and I don’t want to give up on the sword. At the same time, I feel like an idiot wasting resources on something I’m not much good at.”


  Ling Qi didn’t really have the experience to speak on this. She hadn’t really failed at anything she had tried her hand at since coming here.

  “I think it’s too soon to begin giving up on swords. Besides, what it comes down to is that you enjoy using a sword, right? It’s worth doing just for that. We don’t have so little that we have to put everything into just getting by anymore.”


  “Hmph. Easy for you to say,” Su Ling retorted, but there wasn’t any heat in it. “You ready to keep going, or are you just gonna sit around all night?”


  Ling Qi looked back to see the other girl standing up and dusting off her pants, ready for another round. “Sure,” she laughed. “I can always use the exercise.”


  The two of them practiced well into the night, and soon, sparring and cultivating with Su Ling at the vent in the evenings became another part of her routine. The rest of the week flew swiftly by.

  However, there remained one thing to do that Ling Qi had been putting off. Namely, she had to compose a response to her mother’s last letter. She honestly wasn’t certain what to think of the idea of a younger sibling. Despite what she had told Zhengui to call her, she had only the vaguest idea of what siblings were supposed to do. She was glad her…… younger sister was apparently healthy, as was her mother, and that her support was helping them both. At the same time, she was even more unsure of what to say.

  The tone of her mother’s letters also bothered her. Her mother was good at talking in circles and not saying what she meant. It was hard to tell what she was really thinking, especially through the medium of letters. Ling Qi wished she could meet her face-to-face again and have a proper conversation.

  Unfortunately, meeting in person just wasn’t possible. Ling Qi could probably pay for transport, but the presence of her sister complicated any plans. A child that young had no business going on such a trip, and even without a child, travel between cities was deadly for mortals. They were just so…… fragile.

  That in itself was a slightly discomfiting thought. When had she started thinking of people that way? Ling Qi did not particularly care for that line of thought and wasn’t sure what to do with it frankly. She shook her head and began to compose her letter.

  It had taken her a few tries, but eventually, her letter was composed and sent. She was unsure about blatantly discussing cultivation matters with her mother, and she certainly wasn’t going to tell her about the fights she had been in, but this…… It felt like something a child should write to their parent.

  She would look forward to the response, and perhaps, in the not so distant future, she would find the occasion to visit Tonghou City again. She wondered if any of the guards would recognize her when she did.

  She hoped so, if only to see what their expressions would look like.

  Threads 106-Descent 8

  While she was curious about the purpose of the dome, even if it did have a military purpose, Ling Qi had a feeling that she would get more information on their enemies by infiltrating the actual settlement. Ling Qi cast one last glance back at the fields and then darted off into the tall grass without even a rustle.

  The approach to the village was eerily quiet despite the shishigui crowding the streets. The noise that she would have expected to hear in a human settlement of this size was absent. The creatures made sound, but they didn’t seem inclined to shout and chatter, and their bare feet only made a whisper of sound on the paved roads. The clatter of carts and the unsettling sticky-sounding flow of the river were the main sounds that she heard on approach.

  The layout, too, was strange. Without a wall, the village splayed out like an organic nest. It was like the worst parts of Tonghou writ large where twisting and meandering paths replaced the clean, straight lines of the inner city. Her first impression, that of artificial stalagmites, proved enduring. Their buildings were round, conical things with fat bases and varying numbers of thin spires which rose to different heights. The tallest buildings had multiple spires over four stories high, many of which emitted a foul, drifting miasma.

  Hidden within an irregular “ripple” in the sculpted stone on an outlying building, Ling Qi observed the creatures loping through the street below. Even here in their town, they seemed to spend as much time on all fours as standing upright, only seeming to bother when their hands were otherwise occupied. They scampered in and out of buildings through entrances which resembled the mouths of burrows more than doors, and in the moments when she was able to peer inside, she spied spiraling ramps going down.

  Of course a significant part of the town was under the ground. They obviously weren’t deep enough yet, Ling Qi thought irritably. She began to make her way through the chaotic sprawl of the village, a flitting shadow moving from one rippled or scalloped facade to the next.

  One thing that struck her as odd when she glanced down into the streets was that she saw no children, no elderly or infirm members. Even barbarians or monsters should have had children and elders, right? But no, every grey-skinned creature was roughly the same size and seemingly in their physical prime. She saw some that were scarred, missing fingers or ears, or suffering other lesser disfigurements, but there was little else to separate them. They were all first realms, too, so far as she could tell.

  It wasn’t until she began to get closer to the river that she spotted more powerful enemies. There, on the road that paralleled the river, loped a pack of second realm creatures armored with patches of spiky chitin with a single, emaciated third realm festooned with bandoliers and pouches at their head.

  Similar figures perched here and there among watchtowers built into the supports and arch of the great bridge, clutching spears made of fungalwood and black stone. Seeing enemies who could be a threat, Ling Qi paused, observing the river and the groaning, busy bridges.

  The first thing she noticed was that the river did not flow under the edge of the cavern as she had suspected, but rather flowed up, frothing and bubbling as it flowed toward the village and wound its way deeper into the cave. In several cases, the river moved uphill, defying common sense.

  Peering at the edge of the cavern, she could make out a squat bridge structure huddled right against the cavern’s edge, arching over the river. She could just make out the figures of many shishigui pacing its walls, bristling with arms and armor.

  Well, that would be her next target.

  For the moment, Ling Qi focused on what was before her, trying to figure out just what they were doing on the many bridges over the river. At first, she had just thought it was some kind of strange, oversized fishing setup, but that wasn’t quite it.

  No, she could see large, heavy nets made of some kind of braided wire floating in the water, attached to sturdy ropes and cranks. On one bridge, particularly brawny members of the village growled and yipped and grunted as they worked on heavy cranks to raise nets that were full.

  The nets that rose from the water were filled to the brim with wriggling, phosphorescent masses of material. The things in the net thrashed as if alive, but they resembled no kind of fish she had ever seen. The closest thing she could compare them to were eels or hagfish, but even that wasn’t quite right. They had featureless, bulbous heads and dozens of wriggling tendrils lining their sides.

  But peering at those nets with eyes tinged silver, their auras didn’t seem like living creatures or even like the shishigui. No, if anything, they felt like…… spirit stones.

  Once they reached the bridge’s platforms, shishigui wrapped in thick leathery garments that covered the whole of their bodies would step forward to manipulate the catch into metal crates arranged on carts, which then crossed to the far side of the river. On the opposite side of the bridge from where the nets were raised, things were reversed.

  Carts from the far side of the river trundled toward her and were unloaded by workers, pried open, and emptied into the tar-river below. Corpses, she saw. They were dumping corpses into the river, corpses of their own kind and those of beasts. The corpses they were dumping were badly mutilated, seemingly harvested for some parts.

  There were even, she noted, a few crates containing more familiar corpses. Stinking and slick with rot, she watched a badly mangled human body tumble into the river below. It bobbed once, the thick slurry of black liquid seeming to soak into bloodless flesh, infecting and darkening it before the current pulled it under and away.

  Ling Qi wrinkled her nose and looked away. She wasn’t going to understand what was happening just from watching. She needed to put Senior Brother Liao’s gift to use. To that end, she flowed downward, one shadow among many, to slip under the feet of the workers.

  It was hard to understand at first. Even if they were less noisy than a similar crowd of humans, there were a lot of them, and although she could feel the qi within the ring working to turn their noise into something understandable, so many conflicting inputs were scrambling it.

  Ling Qi worked to focus as she slid into the shadow of an empty metal crate. There, she spotted a pair of shishigui crouched beneath one of the bridge supports, conferring quietly. In their paws, each held a long blackened stick on which was impaled what looked like a fried millipede the size of a garden snake.

  “Haul is still bad.” The one that spoke first was one of the brawnier ones. It, or he, wore very little, even by their standards, a single belt on which hung a handful of basic and recognizable tools. Thankfully, the creatures seemed to lack…… features which would make their nudity even more grotesque.

  “It’s picked up.” The other one was a narrow shouldered creature whose rubbery hide was marked by patchy black bristles around its ear and jaw. “Better than last month.”


  “Still worse than last year,” the first grunted, biting the head off his snack with a crunch. “Which was worse ’n the year before that, which was worse ’n the year before that, too.”


  “It’ll recover,” the scrawny one replied, sullenly nipping legs off of his meal. “Has to. Just needs fertilizing. Might take a while, but there’s been slumps before.”


  The bigger of the two let out a raspy growl that was probably the equivalent of a noncommittal grunt. Swallowing the last of his snack, he reached into one of his pouches and pulled out a dented, scratched little tin full of something viscous and brown. Whatever the nasty smelling gunk was, he popped a piece into his toothy maw and began chewing the sticky lump.

  “You think they’re still taking volunteers for up top?” the scrawny one asked, grinding his teeth in a way that she couldn’t help but interpret as anxious. “Just a couple meldings like the Caretakers doesn’t seem so bad.”


  The brawnier creature remained silent, noisily chewing his sticky tar. He let out a faint whuff, wrinkling his muzzle. “Seems stupid. Hack a hundred years off your life, and for what, a bit of power?”


  “My packmates want a pup,” the scrawny thing admitted. “But not many are awakening any more. Waiting list goes on for years. You volunteer, you can skip the line, get a place in the city.”


  The brawny one spat his glob of chewy resin into the river. His fangs were stained an ugly brown. “Gonna get your fool self killed fighting those ugly ape things, ‘n then what use are you?”


  Ling Qi turned her attention from the pair. The wisps she had scattered through the throng at the base of the bridge allowed her to see many such little moments, and it seemed to confirm what that one implied. There seemed to be a general malaise about, a concern for the haul from the river shrinking, grumbles about lessening rations, and complaints about people in the city.

  There was a secondary concern, too, about the population shrinking, which may be related. Maybe that’s why she hadn’t seen any children.

  Sixiang thought.

  Ling Qi acknowledged Sixiang’s words as she slipped across the bridge, one shadow at a time, her presence well hidden from the creatures tramping around above. Every so often, she would have to be more careful, circling around a creature that felt like a third realm, but none came close to detecting her.

  She did notice something odd about the way the weaker shishigui regarded the ones with higher cultivation. There was respect, of course, but there was also…… pity. She remembered the words she had heard a short time ago. Did their cultivation actually shorten their lives? How in the world had they produced an expert who could fight Elder Zhou then?

  Pondering that, Ling Qi crossed to the far side of the bridge, which seemed like something of a foundry or crafts district. Silently, she shadowed one of the wagons holding the wriggling river things, hiding in the undercarriage as it rattled its way into a large structure with three smoke-spewing points.

  Here, she was carried through winding labyrinthine tunnels which grew hotter by the moment until at last they came to a large chamber that sweltered with heat. On its far side was something like a wood furnace writ large embedded in the wall, and inside of it, sickly green flames roared. For just a moment, Ling Qi stiffened in alarm as she felt a mighty presence within the furnace, whose awareness nearly brushed her, but whatever spirit inhabited the flames was not looking for her. The weight of its focus was on the phosphorescent things that were even now being fed to it.

  Covered shishigui hauled crates down from the wagons and dumped the writhing, squealing things into the flame. There, they withered and burned, and from the bottom of the furnace, brownish-black fluid flowed through a metal channel into a grate set in the floor.

  Ling Qi tasted vomit in the back of her throat the second she looked at the stuff despite her currently immaterial form. Instinctively, she could feel that it was the same gunk she had cleansed herself of in physical breakthroughs, but somehow, more distilled.

  Ling Qi shuddered as she slipped out from under the wagon, flitting into the shadows. Carefully, she planted a tiny spider husk on the wall and left the room behind.

  From there, she began to explore their warren. She would plant another spider on the bridge on the way out, but right now, she wanted to see if she could find something like leadership among them, the barbarian equivalent of a governor’s office.

  It didn’t really work out.

  She found places where overseers seemed to congregate to pass reports and records, and dutifully, she “bugged” them, but she could find no signs of an overall leader. Perhaps because this was a small village, they had their central office elsewhere. Unfortunately, even listening in, no one seemed to refer to a king or a chieftain or even a sub-chief. She did find one grouping of overseers arguing about who was going to represent them at the city this year so maybe that was where their leader lived. She bugged that room, too.

  It seemed like it would be unwieldy to have no local leadership.

  Once she had carefully mapped out the warren beneath the village, she slipped back out and placed one last spider husk at about the midpoint of one of the bridge’s underside, along the thick beams which supported it.

  From there, she took a moment to poke around underground on the near side of the river, but the warrens beneath seemed to be nothing but residences. There were still no children or elders below.

  Having explored the village, Ling Qi turned her eyes toward the fort which straddled the “mouth” of the river. It was a squat structure, a thick arch of stone with carved bone battlements and no apparent entrance from the surface except for at the top.

  It was also thick with what could only be soldiers and warriors. Second and third realm shishigui patrolled the battlements, and she could feel even more inside, including enemies whose cultivation were difficult to read. She felt sure there was at least one shishigui near, if not slightly superior, to her own. She did not quite dare to fly above to get a view inside just yet. Did she want to risk trying to infiltrate?

  It was possible that this was where the real leadership for the region was. It would make sense. This was where all the strong cultivators were. Maybe she could……

  Sixiang whispered flatly.

  Zhengui said immediately.

  agreed Hanyi.

  She hadn’t seriously been considering that, Ling Qi thought irritably as she hid in the boughs of a fungal tree, staying solid for the moment to give herself a breather. No, she would have to use her wisps then move through the walls.

  This would be so much easier if these things didn’t seem to hate the idea of windows.