Threads 156-Past 2

Ling Qi inhaled the scent of stagnant air and ancient parchment, nearly sneezing. She grimaced, restraining the urge to scrub at her nose. The air in here felt thick and heavy.

She opened her eyes to see that she stood between two tottering stacks of hastily bound books of notes, looseleaf papers sticking out haphazardly from between covers that smelled of poorly cured leather.

Outside, she knew, her body was perched on the shelf formed by one of Zhengui’s shell spikes. Hanyi was in her lap, and Zhen loomed watchfully above. The ring was held in her cupped hands, and Meng Dan sat below, perched meditatively on a lower plane of Zhengui’s shell.

There was a faint rustle, and then a sound of leather and paper sliding. Ling Qi spun to face the sound as a stack of notes collapsed to the floor in a cloud of dust.

Sixiang stood there sheepishly, covering their mouth and waving off dust. “Haha… Whoops?” the muse said sheepishly, cracking one eye open.

“This is why I left Hanyi outside,” Ling Qi said pointedly. She tugged at her cloak, and once again, it added a pale blue scarf that she tugged up over her mouth and nose to keep out the dust. Briefly, she ran her fingers over the silk. Her robe was very helpful.

“Aw, don’t be like that. You know you want to go treasure hunting with me.” Sixiang bumped a shoulder against hers. “C’mon, let’s find Meng boy and my cute lil cousin.”

Ling Qi rolled her eyes fondly as she followed Sixiang out through the stacks. She could feel Meng Dan ahead through the twisting lanes of paper. His aura shone like a well-fueled table lamp, steady and calming.

They found him soon enough at an intersection of lanes where there was a small, clear space. Meng Dan sat, having acquired a dusty antique looking chair etched with gold filigree from somewhere. A trio of texts hovered around him, circling his head slowly as their pages flipped with blinding quickness. Yinhui lay on the floor, tracing her fingers across neat lines of characters. She kicked her feet idly in the air, not raising her head as Ling Qi approached.

“Getting right to it, I see,” Ling Qi said.

“You have a poor impression of me if you had imagined otherwise, Baroness,” Meng Dan teased, glancing her way. The pages of the books did not stop turning. “I am quite ecstatic right now. Primary sources from an internal clan perspective are very rare.”

“Are they? The Hui are, obviously. They burned their library after all, but don’t most clans keep good records?”

Maybe Cai Renxiang’s exhortations on the subject were not the norm.

“Excuse my mispeaking. Access to such records is rare. There is no doubt that the ancient clans hold records which any scholar would prostrate themselves in the dirt to access, but they do not share,” Meng Dan clarified. “I should know. My own clan certainly does not.”

That made a lot more sense. Ling Qi nodded. “Anything interesting yet?”

“The texts in this area seem relatively recent,” Meng Dan noted. “Journals and reports speak of communications with hidden cells. Destroyed, of course. There was a great hunt for the surviving Hui after their fall. I will log them regardless. This fellow does seem to have become rather unhinged as time went on.”

“What kind of unhinged?” Sixiang asked, peeking under the cover of a journal at the top of a stack.

Meng Dan flicked his sleeve, and a narrow folio flew up in a cloud of dust, covers parting. Inside, scrawled on page after page, were the words “traitor,” “cowards” “half-barbarian trash,” and more rude things in the same vein scribbled tightly across dozens of pages, interspersed with highly unpleasant screeds about the fates deserved by such.

Ling Qi swallowed a lump of distaste as the book snapped shut, and beside her, Sixiang nodded knowingly. “That kind of unhinged. Gotcha.”

“Quite,” Meng Dan said.

“What did you find there, Yinhui?” Ling Qi asked, glancing down at the young spirit.

Slowly, Yinhui raised her head, peering up at Ling Qi through her black blindfold. “It is a dream journal. This man was most unseemly,” she said solemnly.

Ling Qi blinked, glancing down at the pages. Then, she frowned. Why would you do that with a…

Her cheeks flushed scarlet, and she swiftly looked away. “Why are you reading something like that?!”

“Cataloguing a human’s carnal desires is sometimes useful for constructing a psychological profile.” Yinhui returned to running her fingers over the characters. “And such things do not disturb me. Secrets like these are the most common of all due to social mores which discourage open expression.”

Ling Qi glanced at Meng Dan, and he shrugged helplessly. “She is a Hidden Moon spirit. Secret trysts are secret too. You would be surprised how many historical events proceeded from such motives.”

While they had been speaking, Sixiang had crouched down beside Yinhui, eyes flicking over the exposed pages. “Technically speaking, he’s not a bad writer. I’d probably enjoy it better if I didn’t know he was a jerk though.”

“Probability of the subject being a ’jerk’ even before deterioration approaches one hundred percent,” Yinhui agreed in a bored tone, flipping a page.

If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Ling Qi coughed into her hand and hauled Sixiang upright by the back of their robe, drawing a startled yelp. “We should get hunting. Will you be in this section long, Meng Dan?”

“I will have to stop indulging and begin cataloguing.” Meng Dan sighed. “This is not the time for a deep study unfortunately. I will keep my aura extended however, so I should not be hard to find. It seems likely to me that items that are not this man’s writings will be deeper inside. There is certainly a natural organization by age to these, like the rings of a tree.”

Ling Qi nodded once. If the crazy hermit was endlessly writing and tossing things inside, they’d pile up with the oldest stuff being on the figurative “bottom” of the ring. Meng Dan returned her nod as she left, pulling a sulking Sixiang, and rounded the corner of a stack.

***​

It was hard to move here, Ling Qi found. Not physically, but via her techniques. She couldn’t move through the solid stacks, and even flying took far more effort than it was worth. She wondered if it was because this projected space was a bit of someone else’s dream, and so its Laws were a little different.

It didn’t slow her down too much.