Threads 17

Ling Qi stood ready for another few moments after the creature’s last twitch subsided. Only after a swift kick to one of its remaining eyes failed to bring a reaction did she allow herself to turn around.

“Everything alright up there?” she called.

“Y-yes,” Li Suyin called back from the edge of the pit, her voice muffled. Ling Qi looked with bemusement upon her friend’s solution to the issue of being dragged down.

Li Suyin stood in a veritable cage of bone, metal, and silk formed by her guardians. The one with the shield stood below, its shield spiked into the ground. The simple slab of metal had expanded, twin plates of steel bursting from its sides to form a curved barrier. The other one stood behind, the hooked ornament at the base of its gaundao now stuck firmly into the ceiling at the end of a chain. It clasped the extended weapon in one hand while the other seemed to be holding the first guardian’s collar, but a second look showed that the gauntlet and armor had fused into a single piece. Metal flowed as she watched, the two guardians detaching from one another as Li Suyin peeked out from between them.

“I take it that that’s new,” Ling Qi said dryly, gesturing to the dead beast.

“Nothing like that has come up here before, no,” Li Suyin replied with a frown, making her way down the slope carefully. “It could just be bad luck, but…”

“You did have a way out with you before, right?” Ling Qi asked worriedly. While Li Suyin had weathered the peripheral of the fight fine and even helped distract the creature, she didn’t know if her friend could have handled it on her own.

“I have an escape talisman,” Li Suyin answered, examining the creature. “You would think a predator like this would leave more signs, considering how destructive it is,” she mused absently.

“Unless this isn’t its normal hunting grounds,” Ling Qi offered.

“Well, we can determine that later,” Li Suyin replied, reaching into her bags to retrieve a leather surgical mask and a pair of goggles. “I need to harvest this! A core this potent will be a great boon for my work.”

Ling Qi sighed and resigned herself to standing guard while her friend butchered hundreds of kilograms worth of beetle monster. She was glad Suyin was happy, but should she really be this blase about a threat to her life? What had happened to the wilting girl who hated fighting and blood?

“Do you think we should follow its trail?” Li Suyin asked, crouching near the beast’s oozing maw. “I had scouted out a path to the third level already, but if this leads back to a nest… There could be so much more to find.”

Ling Qi raised an eyebrow. “You want to tangle with a bunch of these?” she asked incredulously.

Li Suyin shook her head, and she flicked her wrist, drawing a carving knife the length of her forearm from storage. “There isn’t enough nutrition in this region to support multiple adults of this size. It would be a mated pair at most. The upper caverns would be stripped bare if there were more. We might find juveniles or even eggs though! A sample of the carapace still in development could advance…”

Ling Qi watched as her friend sank the knife into a crack in the creature’s carapace, and the formations on its blade glowed, even as a spurt of blood stained Suyin’s facemask. She listened to Li Suyin discuss the improvements she could make to her constructs.

What a change that she was the one feeling a little timid.

But one way or another, they were going into dangerous territory. It only made sense to follow the obvious trail, and she couldn’t afford to start jumping at shadows. She had handled the beast easily enough, and Li Suyin had acquitted herself well.

Of course, having decided that, Ling Qi could only wait for Suyin to finish. Butchering the bug-thing took the better part of two hours. Oh, Li Suyin needed her help once or twice to pry a section of chitin too thick to cut open, but Ling Qi had little to do aside from keeping watch.

Eventually, after the fist-sized greasy black lump that seemed to be the beast’s core and many kilograms of chitin and tissue had vanished into Li Suyin’s and Ling Qi’s storage rings, and with the butchered corpse dragged out of the pit, they were finally ready to descend. Ling Qi ended up carrying her friend down, looping her arms under the shorter girl’s. With so much stone converted into sand, there was nothing to attach a grapple to.

The bottom of the tunnel lay half a hundred meters down. The walls glistened with the slimy secretions of the beast they had killed, but they were at least solid. Ling Qi glanced at Suyin as the other girl released her guardians from storage again. She was glad they were moving again, but…

<I think it’s kind of cute,> Sixiang commented lightly.

Suyin’s arms were caked up to the elbows in chunky black and green gore, and her facemask and smock weren’t much better. Ling Qi glanced at her own hands, speckled with bug goo as they were. Her gown had repelled the gunk almost violently, thankfully, so it was just her hands and forearms stained with gore.

“You really have changed quite a bit, haven’t you, Li Suyin?” Ling Qi mused aloud as Suyin sent a pack of skeletal mice skittering down the passage to scout.

Li Suyin looked to her in confusion, her gleaming eyepatch contrasting with her pale blue eye. “What do you…?” She glanced down at herself then and gave a sheepish shrug. “Medicine is a dirty profession,” Li Suyin continued, somewhat self-consciously. “You have to deal with many things that others find hard to look at or disgusting. I suppose I have just adjusted to it.”

“There’s nothing wrong with that.” Ling Qi hummed as they began to move forward, walking quietly down the lopsided tunnel. “I am surprised that you have gone so far with these constructs though. Surely the Sect had resources that needed less reverse engineering.” She had treated the pale manual’s constructs as more of a hobby. Even the Ossuary Horror was more of a distraction tactic for her than a core part of her combat style.

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“Sometimes, things shouldn’t be beautiful,” Li Suyin said. “Isn’t it better not to hide the nature of some things?”

“I suppose not,” Ling Qi said. “They don’t need to be pretty to work.”

“It might be a little childish, but I admit that I like the idea of turning things people consider unpleasant to good ends,” Li Suyin said. “After all, so many things considered virtuous are…” She trailed off, shaking her head.

Ling Qi hummed in reply, not really sure what to say.

<She’s having fun with the idea of inversion of aesthetics is all,> Sixiang whispered. <Like the frost flowers Hanyi showed you. Beauty arising from desolation.>