Threads 107-Descent 9

For just a moment, Ling Qi’s mind flashed back to the last time she had tried to infiltrate a fortress. It hadn’t gone well, even though it had only been a “play” set.

But she had grown a great deal since then.

<I have your back,> Sixiang whispered, and the murmur of her other spirits joined them.

She wasn’t alone either. So she could afford mistakes even less. Ling Qi inclined her head in acknowledgement of the well wishes of her spirits and flowed down the trunk of the fungal tree she had been hiding in.

She slipped through the grassy ferns toward the fortress as little more than a shadow and a wisp of mist before reforming next at the base of the fortress wall. Drawing moonlight to her eyes and lungs, she moved across the clear cut ground along the fortress walls. Tiny glimmers of silver blinked into being, muted and clouded.

Those silver sparks shot ahead of her, vanishing into the wall, and Ling Qi took a steadying breath while different perspectives flashes through her mind.

At first, there was only the darkness of solid stone, the wisps of moonlight created by her Roaming Moon’s Eye traveling in careful, criss-crossing lines as they searched for open space. In a matter of moments, they found purchase. One emerged in an empty gray hallway with a floor of carved bone tiles of irregular shape. One, which had traveled down, poked out of the ceiling of a large chamber where over a score of second realm shishigui were fighting in trios and quintets, undergoing some kind of drill.

Ling Qi blurred back into mist and shadow, soaking into the dark grey stone. Traveling through a solid object always felt strange, and this was no different. What was different, however, was the burning pain sensation that assailed her. The very rock was poisonous, she could feel, and it was only the protective effects of the talisman mask she had been given that stopped her from having to burn more qi to stave off harm from intermingling her being with the stuff.

Resolving herself back into shadow on the arched ceiling of the training room, Ling Qi took a moment to breathe. She would have to avoid overusing that method down here. While she cycled her qi, purging the lingering toxin, she peered down at the creatures below in the midst of their drilling. She only glanced over the majority, noting their armaments. Lots of straps, but they included light chitin armor covering vital points. If the coverage was any indication, the creatures had similar layouts of arteries and organs to a human, barring their lack of apparent eyes.

Yet as she turned her gaze to the instructors, a discrepancy stood out. Scattered among the second realms, they stalked along, standing out like beacons to her senses, even though she was sure that they were only early third realms. These had the characteristic plethora of bandoliers and pouches, and their armor more ornate, though just as colorless. There was something distinctive about it.

<Heat. There’s rigid and unnatural flows bound to the armor. Gotta be artificial,> Sixiang noted.

Huh. Perhaps that was the shishigui equivalent of an officer’s bright plume or banner? That might be useful for disruption tactics, Ling Qi thought as she eavesdropped.

“Stop resisting the instincts,” one instructor barked, swatting a second realm who had stumbled mid-combat maneuver with the padded rod held in its paws.

“Cooperate with your meld!” another barked

“Harness the pain.”

“Accept the fear.”

Ling Qi frowned as she watched them. Without context, it was difficult to really understand, but the mistakes that the second realms were making were not the same kind of mistakes that she would expect of untrained soldiers. They would execute perfect maneuvers with their weapons, only to stumble or jerk halfway through. They collapsed, not out of physical exhaustion, but something that looked very much like panic, curling up on the ground and letting out canine whines as their limbs twitched spasmodically.

Ling Qi watched a moment longer as her wisps searched out the layout of the halls above and below. Like their construction in the village, the shishigui still seemed to favor curved and rounded rooms, even if the exterior of the fort was more angular. It seemed her instinct to go down was right. Above, she found equipment storage, guard posts, and other things of the sort but relatively few shishigui walking the halls. Like the village, the majority of actual activity was taking place underground.

With one last glance at the trainees, Ling Qi, deposited a spider into a crevice in the ceiling and flitted down one of the halls that left the room, sticking near the ceiling as a current of mist.

Like that, she began to work her way through the fort, vanishing into the cracks and spaces between blocks of bone and stone whenever a particularly potent enemy passed by. She was able to avoid having to directly pass through the impurity-stained material again this way, conserving her energy.

The halls were very busy, and it was obvious that the building was operating at or just above its intended capacity. The chamber that she tentatively considered the war room did have some kind of odd mural which seemed to occupy the place of a map, but it was just a lumpy frieze of meaningless shapes encoded with indecipherable trails of heat.

She left one of her dwindling supply of spider constructs there as well, and she slipped out before the framing stage presence moving down the hall could enter the room.

Leaving that room behind, Ling Qi began to skulk her way down the less busy halls which, if her sense of direction had not failed her, were leading down and back into the wall of the cavern toward what she hoped would be the river’s source.

All the while, she had her wisps slipping down different corridors and traveling ahead, mapping out tunnels and marking paths while the ceiling overhead grew damp and warm like the slick heat of a rotting corpse. It was because she had a wisp traveling well ahead that she stopped suddenly slipping into a shallow cubby in one of the increasingly natural tunnels.

She did so because her wisp had just slipped into something that made her instincts cry out.

At the end of a passage on the layer below, there was a great amphitheatre. Its shallow carven seating was filled with only a scattering of shishigui, but it was the great ravine at the bottom which drew her attention. From the ravine roared a rising vortex of black tar-liquid. With the distance and only the presence of a single wisp, it took her a moment to pick out what was bothering her about the ravine.

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The floor wasn’t stone. It was flesh. Quivering and rubbery, oozing with rot, the black liquid poured from an open wound that could have swallowed the governor’s mansion of White Cloud Town and around the wound, little shapes cavorted.

The six lithe creatures cavorting were all too similar to the one which had nearly opened her throat only a month ago. It occurred to her that these figures were the first shishigui that had the same feminine outline as the assassin she had faced. Ling Qi felt her expression screw up in disgust. It was even more obvious now, naked as they were, with only trailing scarves of some pale white cloth bound to their wrists and ankles.

Despite herself, Ling Qi couldn’t help but glean meaning from the spinning, agile dance they performed around the roaring column of “water.” Propitiation, ecstasy, worship, hope and longing and sadness. They performed in perfect synchrony, and it was only then that she noticed the blades in their hands, dark metal shot through with veins of green, matches to the one she had carelessly stored away in her storage ring.

Blades flicked across flesh as they danced, drawing droplets of brackish red, and lithe limbs flicked, flinging the droplets of blood into the roaring column.