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.

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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.”