Threads 132: After-Action 1

The medicine hall was a hive of frantic activity. Disciples rushed back and forth with supplies and equipment. Potent medicinal energies suffused the air, filling it with conflicting scents of flowers and spices and blood.

Ling Qi stood in the entrance hall, one among many. On the wall before them was posted a roll of names. There were fifteen of them in total now, but Ling Qi knew that more had been added since the first posting. It was a list of the Inner Sect disciples who had died.

There was a name there that she recognized.

Shen Hu had been assigned to the mission below to defend the construction and formation disciples. Already, there were rumors, a whisper from one of the production disciples he had defended. He’d taken one of the tunnel entrances and held it against all comers until the defensive arrays behind him had finished and Elder Jiao’s project had snapped into place.

It seemed Shen Hu had really taken the Bloody Moon’s Dream to heart.

It was a relief that it hadn’t been someone she knew better. That it had not been Li Suyin or Su Ling, or even Xuan Shi. The thought shamed her, but it was there all the same. She had liked Shen Hu well enough, but there had just never been time to get to know him better. Now, she never would. It was a bitter feeling.

<I don’t think it’s wrong to think that way,> Sixiang whispered. <It’s not wrong to be glad others aren’t gone.>

It was probably a little wrong that she didn’t feel something more though, Ling Qi thought. He was only an acquaintance, but shouldn’t she feel something more than a muted sadness?

<I don’t think there is a right way to feel,> Sixiang thought carefully.

“Ling Qi?”

Ling Qi looked away as someone called her name. There was Li Suyin, looking haggard and exhausted and wearing a physician’s smock spattered with blood and other things.

“Li Suyin? Are you alright?” Ling Qi asked, stepping out of the crowd. She scanned her friend for injury, silver gleaming in her eyes. She saw only exhaustion, an echo of burns, and the lingering marks of cleansed shishigui corruption. “Were you one of the ones down there?”

Li Suyin nodded and swayed. Ling Qi was at her side in an instant, catching her before she could fall. At some point, her friend had reached the appraisal stage in her cultivation.

“I was, but I wanted to keep helping. Went to the medical wards after,” Li Suyin muttered as Ling Qi helped her move out of people’s way. “The elder just sent me away, ordered rest.”

Ling Qi grimaced. That sounded like Li Suyin alright. “Was Su Ling down there too?” she asked, dreading the answer.

Li Suyin leaned against her, eyes drifting shut. “No.”

That was something. “Li Suyin, what happened down there?”

“They just kept coming,” Suyin whispered, her voice barely audible over the noise of the hall. “They fought, and they died, and it just didn’t stop. Dying only made them stronger.”

Suyin paused and took a shuddering breath. “Elder Jiao was fighting, and it felt like we were the infection, and they, the body fighting back. There was so much pain.”

Ling Qi thought back to the fourth realm she had encountered down there, the nails driven into its flesh, and the self-mortification she had witnessed in their rituals. She tried to imagine what it would feel like to be in the presence of something like that except scaled to fight an elder, one whose cultivation would match the thing that had come from over the southern mountains.

Ling Qi felt a chill.

“C’mon, let me help you get home,” Ling Qi said quietly, turning her friend toward the door. “You should rest.”

She cast one more look at the list, eyes scanning down the names. She paused briefly as her name caught the last name on the list. She hadn’t noticed it before, focusing on Shen Hu.

It seemed Yan Renshu had died down in the dark as well.

At least she didn’t have to feel bad for not mourning him.

***

“It feels a little surreal, doesn’t it?” Ling Qi asked.

They sat together in Renxiang’s study. The furniture had been pushed aside to make room, and yet, even then, Renxiang’s rooms were a study in clockwork precision. Everything was spaced just so. Her liege sat across from her at the center of part of the repeating geometric pattern in the carpet. Ling Qi sat opposite in the center of another. Briefly, she had considered seating herself just a touch to the right, but she didn’t have the energy for jokes.

She kept remembering that list of names. Had she known any of the others on that list? Had she spoken to them before and immediately forgotten their faces?

“We were already at war,” Cai Renxiang replied.

“It didn’t really feel like it before,” Ling Qi said. “The barbarians just got a sucker punch in, using a method we didn’t expect. That was what it felt like, didn’t it? They weren’t a real threat. That’s why we were still worrying about sect ranks and the elders were still taking volunteers instead of giving orders and…”

Cai Renxiang’s fingers tightened on her knees, and Ling Qi fell silent. For anyone else, it would have been nothing, but she could read the frustration and regret in the girl’s posture. Their talk from before the mission felt wrong now.

<You weren’t acting differently from anyone else in the Sect,> Sixiang whispered. <It’s not like anyone else treated it differently until it was.>

“Matters have indeed escalated beyond heightened raiding,” Cai Renxiang agreed blandly. “Tell me, Ling Qi, are your spirits well?”

Ling Qi ducked her head and accepted the deflection from the subject. She tried to focus inward as she organized her thoughts. The cultivation of Playful Muse’s Rapport was not coming easily to her right now.

<Probably not much use where you’re going,> Sixiang muttered, uncharacteristically bitter.

“Zhengui is well. He’s very tough. Even the injuries he took will be better in a couple of days, now that the impurity is out of his system,” Ling Qi replied. She had visited them after their release from the physicians. Zhengui seemed satisfied by his performance for once. “Hanyi… She’ll be fine too in time.”

“I believe you had an event planned for her. Will her wounds allow it to go forward?” Cai Renxiang asked. Faint radiance flickered in the room, casting shadows at perfect right angles.

“She won’t let it stop her, even if it takes awhile to heal. It’s not like she actually needs her throat to sing, any more than I need my flute to play,” Ling Qi responded. She was confident in Hanyi because Hanyi was confident in herself. Half of healing the body came from the mind. Her eyes strayed to Renxiang’s own bandaged throat. “What about you? I saw those stains on your domain weapon.”

Renxiang continued to breathe steadily and rhythmically in her mediation. “The stains will out. It is merely a matter of time. Their resistance is vexing however.”

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

“Do you think your mother will notice?” Ling Qi asked. It wasn’t the real question. Obviously, the Duchess will notice, but will she react?

“They are not permanent,” Cai Renxiang said. Ling Qi didn’t comment on the faint tremor that entered the girl’s voice. “We performed above any reasonable expectations given the situation.”

Did they perform above the Duchess’ expectations though? She had to hope that they at least met them.

Of course, that left aside the matter she had been avoiding. After the medine hall, she had almost gone back to the elders. But if there was a chance to make those lists shorter in the future, shouldn’t she take it?