Threads 297-Identity 2

“I’ve been ignorant,” Ling Qi said. “My world was small, barely larger than what lay before my eyes.”

She thought of scrabbling for food and shelter, never able to look up, barely able to look around. No time for anything not immediately relevant. It was an awful way to live and one which no person should have to endure.

“You didn’t stay that way for long.”

Ling Qi furrowed her brows at Sixiang’s words. Was that really true? Without being on the edge of death, she had been able to pause and think, but she hadn’t gotten better at first. In many ways, she was still incurious, tunnel visioned on what was right in front of her.

But that wasn’t good enough for who she was now. There were too many ways to be blindsided, too many ways to misunderstand or stumble. The world was wide, and there was so much in it. It was frightening to admit that she ultimately understood little. She was only just beginning to piece together concepts of why.

She didn’t think she’d be able to achieve her goals, if she couldn’t even answer such simple questions.

“A person’s ‘why’ is anything but simple,” Sixiang drawled.

“Maybe,” Ling Qi said, looking up to meet Shu Yue’s black gaze. “I want to suss it out anyway. And while I can’t disappear entirely like you do, Shu Yue, I’m still quite good at getting into places I’m not supposed to be in. But I wonder if I can really consider it theft if I don’t intend to take anything.”

“That is a thought you will have to interpret for yourself. It is outside of my expertise,” Shu Yue said.

Ling Qi nodded absently, but she found her thoughts coming back around again to a question she had already asked.

“You really don’t control them at all? Change them?”

“I become. Change or control in the way you mean it would be at cross purposes with this, but…”

“But?” Ling Qi echoed.

“Is it possible to observe a thing without changing it?” Shu Yue mused. “Or rather, what we, who have not found our ultimate truth and become Law, say what ‘I’ is.”

“I think we can,” Ling Qi said slowly. “We change and grow, but while I am not the same as I was a year ago, I am still Ling Qi.”

“Yes. This is the common answer. I am unsatisfied by it,” Shu Yue said. Ling Qi sensed no rebuke in their words.

Shu Yue stepped up to the trunk of the cherry blossom tree, sliding their fingertips along the bark. “I have been many, many people, though Shu Yue recalls only the faintest echoes of most,” they said thoughtfully. “I, Shu Yue, have observed mortals, seen them crawl from the cradle and fall to the grave. Countless, countless candles in the dark. I have endeavored to understand what ‘I’ is more deeply than any being born with such a concept, I think. That may be arrogant.”

“I don’t doubt your experience,” Ling Qi said.

They hummed, continuing to trace the contours of the bark. “‘I’ is malleable. A sharp blow, a trauma, may remake a man entire. An extended hand might do the same. Or it may not. You may observe a mortal throughout their life, and there will not be a single moment which you can isolate and say: This is the truth.”

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

Ling Qi listened as Shu Yue mused.

“A cultivator is different. Ultimately, what we seek is to freeze one single moment, one unchanging ‘I,’ and burn it into the world that we may never be forgotten.”