Threads 19-Dreams 1

As they fled the cavern at Suyin’s top speed, the roar of explosions and collapsing stone at their back, Ling Qi could not help but laugh. No, she really couldn’t let fear control her because this is what being alive felt like. As they reached the top of the dead beetle’s tunnel that they had originally followed and Li Suyin stopped to gasp for breath, she saw a little bit of a grin in the other girl’s expression as well.

If she had followed her knee-jerk instinct and simply focused on keeping her friend out of danger, could Suyin smile like that? If she had treated Suyin like a fragile vase that needed to be kept on a shelf, wasn’t that insulting?

Perhaps she had been thinking of things the wrong way.

“Ling Qi, are you alright?” Li Suyin asked as she straightened up, her face still red from exertion. “You’re staring.”

“I’m fine,” Ling Qi said. “Are you satisfied with your take, Suyin?”

The girl nodded happily. “Yes! I’ve acquired so much more than I could have hoped for! And it was amazing seeing you fight like that. I’m sure that once I break through, we’ll be able to go even deeper!”

Yeah, Ling Qi decided. She had to think about what it meant to protect her friends.

***

In the days that followed their expedition, Li Suyin vanished into her workshop, and Ling Qi did not begrudge her for it. She hadn’t missed the way that Li Suyin’s eyes had lit up when she handed over the bandoleer she had torn from the beast’s corpse. She expected her friend would be doing the equivalent of closed door cultivation for most of the month’s remainder.

Ling Qi’s plans were not so far from that. She had been given one of Suyin’s meridian cleansing wands, and it would definitely be helpful for her efforts. Between the expensive pills purchased from the Sect market at the cost of most of her points and her newly improved cultivation, Ling Qi planned to make this a very productive month. However, the days when Ling Qi would thoughtlessly retreat into meditation without consideration for anyone else were well past, so Ling Qi was sure to take care of her obligations first.

Her friends were all settling into their own routines in the Inner Sect. Meizhen was getting comfortable in her new home, which wasn’t much larger than her own but was definitely better appointed. Xiulan was in the midst of heavy cultivation, catching up on arts which advancement had been stymied by her partial breakthrough.

Everyone was quite busy. Ling Qi found herself drifting to the archive when she was not making preparations for her upcoming cultivation binge or attending to Cai Renxiang. It was a center of activity, and Ling Qi still needed to keep an eye on her peers. While she wasn’t sure if she intended to challenge this month, she could be challenged by another.

She hadn’t expected it to be so dull. Sitting in a corner, a tome on Imperial history open in her hands, Ling Qi tried to keep her mind from wandering. Listening to the murmur of small conversations throughout the archive, she thought she might go a little stir crazy. While she knew that she wouldn’t get anything really interesting with this method, the mundanity of a cultivator’s day-to-day lives still surprised her sometimes.

Remembering the cavern expedition and the nightmare before it, it seemed so incongruous that cultivators could still be interested in petty concerns when they were, one and all, people with real power at their fingertips in a world filled with tribulations and challenges. She was being unfair she knew, and she supposed she wasn’t any better. Hadn’t she spent yesterday morning just chatting with Meizhen about nothing in particular?

But it didn’t help that even Sixiang was silent again, leaving her alone in her own head to try and focus on other people when the siren call of cultivation was singing in the back of her mind. Sighing, Ling Qi refocused her eyes on the text in front of her, listening carefully to the snippets of conversation that reached her ears.

Then she found herself distracted again. This time, she was distracted by the feel of a familiar aura moving through her senses. A bolt of lightning stalked the archives, tense and crackling, tiny arcs of electricity snapping and coiling at any that dared approach it. There was only one person Ling Qi knew who cultivated heavenly qi to such an extent and singular purpose. At his side moved a frolicking wind that danced around the lightning, poking, prodding, and floating away laughing when the lightning snapped and crackled in turn.

“Junior Brother Rong, to make an enemy of the archivists so early in the year. You truly do excel.” She heard the second of the pair’s voices first, and it conjured to her the image of a rather pompous fellow.

“Yeah, yeah, laugh it up. This is all the books, right?” the living lightning snapped testily. Ji Rong was as taciturn as ever, but it looked like he had made a new friend.

“Just the one more,” the other voice replied lightly, and Ling Qi heard the sound of leather striking flesh. He had presumably tossed Ji Rong another book.

“Fu Fan’s Guide to Administration for the Simple… Are you making fun of me, you windbag?” She could practically hear the twitch of Ji Rong’s eyebrow.

“Hmph. To show so little respect for your kind senior, Junior Brother Rong. Where did I go wrong in raising you?” The stranger laughed. “Off to the reading room, you. This Senior Brother has his own tasks to attend to.”

Ling Qi caught sight of the second speaker then, moving swiftly between the aisles in front of the reading area she occupied. His mustache was rather ridiculous looking, but he seemed pretty unassuming otherwise. That set her on edge; she couldn’t clearly read his aura. He was gone as fast as he appeared.

“Jackass,” Ji Rong muttered to himself as he slouched around the corner, cradling an armful of books. “What I get for askin’ that guy for help.”

He looked up then as he trod on the plush carpeting that marked out one of the reading areas in the archive.

Ling Qi restrained herself from matching his grimace with her own. “You never struck me as the type, Baron Ji,” she said dryly, eyeing the titles of the books he held. Treatises on leadership, logistics, and yes, administration, filled out most of the stack.

“What’s it to you?” he asked, meeting her eyes defiantly. “You think I’m too stupid to learn anything but punching or something?”

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

Ling Qi debated just leaving, but curiosity drove her to ask. “Why these books? Did my phantoms jar something loose when they were spinning you around?”

Ji Rong looked like he wanted to spit blood at the reminder of his loss. She found it funnier than she probably should have. “Dunno. Why do you care about the past all of a sudden?” he spat in return.

Ling Qi glanced down at the book in her hands that she had been casually perusing. “Even if it doesn’t matter, seeing the patterns is important, I think,” she replied, thinking back to her encounter in the dream and Senior Brother Liao’s own words on the futility of it. “I’ll leave you to your study,” Ling Qi said, closing her book and standing. There wasn’t much point in antagonizing him, aside from petty satisfaction.

And she had already indulged in that. Doing more would just be gluttonous.

As she moved to pass him by, Ji Rong spoke. “They aren’t any different,” he said. “But that doesn’t change the fact that I’ve been a shit Boss in the Sect so far.”

Ling Qi paused, eyeing the scarred boy without turning her head. “Are you making the comparison that I think you’re making?” she asked, vaguely incredulous.

He let out a bitter laugh. “Yeah, guess I am. Gang Boss, Baron, Viscount, Count, Duke, Emperor. It’s all a matter of scale, innit.” He shook his head. “I’m never gonna be leading packs in a fight like that Cai or her pet giant, but if a Boss is what I am, I’m not gonna be a shit one.”

“That’s not the kind of thing you should say, Sect Brother,” Ling Qi said dryly. “Please consider your words more before you tarnish the Sect’s reputation.”