Threads 265 Perceptions 2

Eye of Grudges. An art? A technique? Ling Qi wasn’t sure, but it sounded ominous. Nonetheless, she was confident that she could make any lessons her own.

“It’s been some time since I’ve had a chance to cultivate the eyes I was born with,” Ling Qi said, referring to her early words. “If the elder has lessons to teach on eyes and ears, I would like to hear them.”

“A good choice for you,” Shu Yue said thoughtfully. “It is ever the curse of those who align with yin energies to instinctively become reactive, and despite showing impulse in the field, you suffer this in your social life. Other people are still ciphers to you, are they not, child of the streets?”

“I am not ignorant of etiquette and grace,” Ling Qi said defensively.

“You are not. But you do not peer behind the face. Most you meet are still the phantoms in your mist, insubstantial and fleeting. Even those who truly exist in your mind, you do not quite understand their drives, do you? Hence, your misstep with the young miss, or further back, the escalation of the conflict with the disciple Yan Renshu. Their thinking is opaque to you, who has not had the luxury of grudges.”

Ling Qi swallowed her retort. “I suppose.”

“That will be the lesson. Humans are petty creatures. We are dolls constructed from pride and grudges and fears. Understand those, and you will be one step closer to peering into the cipher behind another being’s eyes. That is the first step of glimpsing worlds not your own.”

“There’s more to people than that,” Sixiang interjected, breaking their silence. “I’m not gonna let you make her go back to thinking like that.”

Shu Yue gave another one of those rasping wheezes, laughter from a throat not built for any such thing. “If she comes to see the world as I do, the lesson has failed. I may only teach how to look, not how to see.”

“I will take wisdom where I see it,” Ling Qi placated. “Elder, is there anything else?”

“What were you contemplating here in this place of dryness and preservation?” Shu Yue asked curiously, tracing a lengthy finger along a shelf of fungus growing from the faintly damp wall. It glittered with salt crystals.

She knew the cultivator wasn’t referring to her letters. “Do you know of the play, Last March of the Beast Kings?”

“Ah, that art. You still find it suitable?”

“It is good practice, even if I will need to make it my own. I have begun to contemplate the second half, the ode of the Great Tree. It’s…”

“Where the dirge begins with the march to war, the ode begins in their deaths,” Shu Yue said. “Alone, for kings and gods cannot have equals, nor friends.”

“And so they are broken one by one upon the roots of Xiangmen.”

Shu Yue’s eyes drifted shut, and they seemed contemplative. “Aesthetics, faces, shapes, these things are easy to change. It seems you understand.”

“I’ve started to.”

“Then let me leave you to it. I shall enjoy arranging lessons, I think,” they mused.

And then Shu Yue was gone.

“One after another. You really like your spooky teachers, don’t you?” Sixiang observed.

“Says the one who is going to lead me into the heart of nightmare soon,” Ling Qi retorted, reaching up to wipe a bead of sweat from her brow.

Sixiang grimaced. “Ling Qi…”

“Not a complaint. I don’t have the option of taking it easy.”

“You do,” Sixiang insisted.

Ling Qi thought of what she had seen of the world. She thought of Cai Shenhua and Xia Ren and the sect elders and all that had come before. She thought of a terrible hunter and a little rat whose first thought was to save her own skin.

“Even if the option is there, I don’t want it,” Ling Qi said firmly. “How many more letters?”

“Nah, that was the last one.” Sixiang shrugged. “Probably why tall and spooky decided to arrive then. Which means…”

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“Back to preparing for the party,” Ling Qi said.

Sixiang drifted away from her to lounge on empty air. “You usually sigh a bit when you say that.”

“Well, it’s not like I want to leave Wang Chao out to dry. He’s not bad when he isn’t choking on his own foot. I want to make sure he can hold the group together when I leave.”

“Gonna ask some of Gan’s folk for support?”

“Making our support clear and material helps Wang Chao’s position. And it will be good for them too. Without Gan Guangli there, they’ll have less support in the Inner Sect,” Ling Qi replied. “What’s worrying is…”