Threads 298 Identity 3

“What you said, those were the Duchess’ words?” Ling Qi asked.

“Only the first. The rest are my thoughts.”

Ling Qi wanted to share them with Renxiang.

“You desire to question. How long until your intended descent?” Shu Yue asked plainly.

“Evening under the Dreaming Moon.”

“There is time for one question then, if you wish to train.”

“Are you really willing to speak secrets so freely?”

Shu Yue’s smile was a black crescent gash in their pale face. “Only some.”

Ling Qi managed not to shiver. But didn’t she need to take every opportunity to know the foe that awaited at the end of her path? In the end, there was only one question that came immediately to mind, and once she had thought it, there was no way for her not to speak it.

“Why did Cai Shenhua do what she did to Cai Renxiang?”

Shu Yue’s eyes drifted shut. “That is not a question which will bring any comfort. Not to you, nor to her.”

“I am not looking for comfort. You have to understand why things happen, not merely that they have. Isn’t this true?”

“It is. I may only explain from my own perspectives. I have not been Cai Shenhua nor the Duchess of the Emerald Seas.”

That was an odd thing to say, Ling Qi thought. In her mind, she felt Sixiang’s hands on her shoulders. They agreed.

“I don’t expect anything else.”

“Very well.” Shu Yue drew their hands together in front of their chest, steepling their long fingers together. “There are multiple factors. The first arises from Cai Renxiang herself. She desired once to know her mother.”

Ling Qi’s expression slowly began to draw down into a scowl, but she didn’t interrupt yet.

“Of course, fault lies with Lin Hai, my junior, to a degree,” Shu Yue continued, and it was the first time she had heard the unsettling person before her sound genuinely sad. “A thoughtless moment, offering a child reward for success in her lessons and cultivation. He, of course, redirected her as one does with a child asking for foolish things, but he could not erase Cai Renxiang’s request from his own mind.”

“I’m not sure I care for what you are implying,” Ling Qi said. “A child can’t hold fault for asking for something that they don’t know would hurt them. The Duchess…”

Shu Yue held up a hand. “Your anger is correct. However, you asked for an explanation. You also, I think, do not understand fully how intractable those who achieve the highest realm become.”

Ling Qi pursed her lips.

“Consider what you know of spirits,” Shu Yue said. Their words were flat and relentless, without inflection. “And allow me an example in the recent business with Cai Tienli, and my master’s advancement in the realm of artificial spiritual organs and spirits. For this purpose, a deception of silence was perpetrated.”

Ling Qi nodded. She had wondered at this, knowing the relentless, pitiless Truth that lay at Cai Shenhua’s core.

“This damaged my master’s cultivation significantly. The damage is as much as the overall losses of many of her weak simulacra during the period of her personal administration of Xiangmen. If even one person had asked who the child’s other parent was, the scheme would have failed. It was only through her connection to Diao Linqin that it was even possible for my master to consider this action.”

It brought her up short to see it spelled out so plainly. She knew that the higher realms of cultivation require great sacrifice, the removal of everything which was not core to the Way one had built and the Law one sought to master.

“You said there were multiple factors,” she said tersely.

Cai Renxiang held no fault. There was no doubt in her mind.

“Indeed. As you think, there is no fault for a child,” Shu Yue acknowledged. “But it did interact with a flaw in my master’s cultivation method.”

Ling Qi’s eyes widened.

“The Duchess of the Emerald Seas is not the desire of Cai Shenhua, the fifth realm, who set out upon the Way of Progress and Creation and held not any desire to rule and who wished to be a mother, despite her disdain for certain, then necessary activities,” Shu Yue said.

Stolen novel; please report.

“What is that supposed to mean?” Ling Qi demanded.

“You have seen Liming’s true face,” Shu Yue said relentlessly. “Know that the Duchess Cai did nothing to her daughter which she had not already done to herself. I seek no pity here, no understanding nor apologetics. What happened happened too soon, but even if all had been optimal, it would still have happened, merely… later. Parentage, too, is a form of progress, or should be.”