Threads 30 Adventures 1

It was a little unsettling, Ling Qi found, to be looking at herself from multiple angles. To study and analyze her own appearance and aura with supernatural precision. To see the hairs that were out of place, the imperfections in the subtle applications of her cosmetics, and the unsteadiness and minute errors in the flows of her qi.

Yet turning those lines of visions outward, she couldn’t help but feel that it – and the work she had put in to clear some meridians for the art – was worth it. The silent broken stones of the dream grove stood all around, and she knew them perfectly. If she had to fight here, she was certain that she could navigate it exactly and could read the way the flow of natural qi here would affect her techniques or allow her to hide her own aura in plain sight, completely without thought.

She understood Xin’s words to her better now. This was the basest root of personal divination, a perfect analysis of her immediate surroundings, such that it became obvious what would occur in the moments to come. Of course, she was alone, and so it was easy to feel like she had mastered the techniques of the Curious Diviner’s Eye art, but despite her prodigious progress in nearly mastering the art in a single week, she knew that the art was only the introduction to divination.

She could know which leaf would fall next from the tree to her right with decent accuracy, but if she tried to predict the next action of the sparrow perched in its branches… Well, her success rate was still abysmal.

“Big Sister, are you done sitting around playing with lights yet?” One of her points of vision swiveled to see Hanyi sitting atop a crumbling stump of a wall, kicking her legs in irritation. Ling Qi could not help but notice the snarls in her qi, clogging the meridians in her body related to motion and movement. “I’m pretty sure you’re supposed to be going to meet that weird guy now.”

Ling Qi blinked, and the ‘eye’ constructs of her new art vanished in glittering light, collapsing her vision back to a single perspective. “Is it that late already?” she asked, squinting up at the cloudy sky.

“It’s been hours,” Hanyi said with the sort of put-upon exasperation that only the young could manage.

Ling Qi grimaced. She had only shifted her cultivation plans to prioritize the Curious Diviner’s Eye art because of Xuan Shi’s invitation in the first place; it would be embarrassing to miss her appointment because of her cultivation. She had been quite surprised a few nights ago to find the odd boy on her doorstep with a request, but he had helped her enough in the last year that she wasn’t going to refuse, even if the thing he wanted assistance with wasn’t an apparent trial site.

“We should get moving then,” Ling Qi said. “Thank you, Hanyi.”

“Of course,” the young girl preened at her thanks. “You’re gonna have to wake up that big doofus though.”

“What happened to Zhengui?” Ling Qi asked curiously.

“He ate and fell asleep,” Hanyi huffed. “See if I sing a bunch of deer to him again,” she grumbled darkly as she hopped off the wall to lead the way.

Ling Qi chuckled. Of course it was something like that. With a thought, she gave Sixiang a mental nudge to stir them from their own cultivation. She got a blurry sort of response, something like “five more minutes” if translated into words. Ling Qi let out a huff. There were some things she would rather Sixiang not pick up from her.

***

With her spirits gathered up, she soon reached the place where Xuan Shi had asked her to meet him, near a ruined old road that wound a ways into the mountains. When she arrived, she found Xuan Shi leaning against one of the weathered distance markers, paging through a thin volume.

“I hope I did not make you wait long,” Ling Qi said as she approached. She had chosen to travel on the ground to preserve qi and to make it easier for Hanyi to skip off and follow her for a while when she got tired of bantering with Zhengui in her head.

The book snapped shut in his hands, and Xuan Shi straightened up, giving her a nod of greeting. “The baroness did not delay unduly,” he replied. “This one thanks you for your agreement.”

“There is no need to call me that,” Ling Qi chided. “And I would hardly refuse a request like this. How did you find this place anyway?”

Xuan Shi glanced to the side, tugging his hat down to cover his eyes. “… Study of a text may reveal many hidden things.”

<How evasive,> Sixiang mused.

Ling Qi narrowed her eyes, thinking back to the many times she had seen Xuan Shi in the Outer Sect archives. “Just what sort of text?” Ling Qi asked. “I might need to start reading more.”

“This one discovered a cipher within a certain series of novels. The final volume was filed among the shelves of the Inner Sect,” Xuan Shi answered after a moment.

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“Huh. I never would have guessed,” she said, bemused. “Do you mean those books I saw you reading in the archive last year? Why would they have a cipher leading to a place here?”

“In the days before the Great Sects, the author resided here when not voyaging himself.” She could detect a hint of excitement in the boy’s tone as he began to speak on the subject. “This one sought out placement in this Sect for that purpose.”

“So you figured out the cipher before you ever came here?” she asked. She supposed that Xuan Shi really was a smart guy.

“Yes. Though the goal remained shrouded, the path, of course, intrigued this one,” Xuan Shi agreed, perhaps a bit too quickly.

“You’re a bad liar, mister,” Hanyi said, emerging from the trees behind Ling Qi. She then shot Ling Qi a dirty look. “Big Sister is mean, walking so fast on her stupid long legs.”

Ling Qi shot her a cheeky grin, which earned her a frustrated huff, but in her head, Zhengui said suspiciously, <Yeah, why is he lying? Big Sister, you should be careful.>