Threads 323 parting 9

Ling Qi blew away the steam rising from the cup in her hand. She sat by a low table on a thick woolen cushion.

This was the least visually offensive room in Elder Jiao’s manor thus far. The table was surrounded by dense shelves, interspersed with little silver and glass tables which each held a lantern lit by a pale blue, ghostly flame. The table she sat by was polished ebony, topped with dark green, nearly black, jade. She could almost see her reflection in the shine.

“Yes, I decorated this room,” Xin answered her unspoken question. She sipped from the cup in her hand.

“If you wish to be boring, that is your business.” Elder Jiao lounged as if seated on a couch set back from the table where Xin and Ling Qi sat with his own cup in his hands.

Ling Qi decided not to comment. “What blend is this? I’ve never drank tea with such a bitter scent.”

“Because it’s not tea. It’s some foreign drink imported by the Xuan. Appropriate for your nonsense, no?” Elder Jiao drawled. “And besides, it has a good bite.”

Ling Qi raised her eyebrows. This tea was probably hellishly expensive then. There was a certain mix of qi in the dark, almost muddy, liquid, too. An earth-heaven mixture. How strange. She raised the cup to her lips, sipped, and immediately blanched, her face scrunching up at the horribly bitter flavor.

Xin sighed. “Do add some milk, dear. The raw flavor isn’t for everyone.”

Ling Qi coughed into her sleeve, set the cup down, and hurried to do so from the chilled silver pot on the table.

Elder Jiao smirked at her from behind his cup. “Foreign goods have always trickled in without notice or high attention. But the unfamiliar is a bitter pill for many to swallow.”

Ling Qi narrowed her eyes at him. “Elder Jiao is wise.”

The elder snorted. “I am no such thing. The word you are looking for is ‘experienced,’ girl. You cultivate that old spirit-speaking art, don’t you?”

She blinked at the non-sequitur, using a little spoon to stir milk into the strange drink. “I do. I’ve been cultivating it whenever I can spare a moment since it seems to me that high cultivators and spirits are not so different.”

“Correct, though it’s impolitic and rude to say it.” Elder Jiao tsked. “Going by the fluctuation in your meridians, you’ve been looking into the lessons on harm mitigation. Why?”

Ling Qi considered the question. “A spirit does not need to be malicious or predatory to do harm to lower realms. It seems to me that this is also true of people, high realm or no. I thought it might be useful to meditate on the lessons in dispersing dense qi pressure around the user and her companions.”

She thought of all the high realms involved in the upcoming summit. Not one of them outright wished her harm and failure, but all the same, they threatened her project in many ways simply by being who they were and their inability to view the world outside of their already extant understanding of the world they lived in.

“It is a good lesson to internalize how to recognize harm without malice. There is a difference in mindset needed to deflect and disperse what is not an attack but which may crush others regardless,” Xin said. “While I find results matter most, intent does matter. Without understanding your opponent’s mind, producing the outcome you wish for is more difficult.”

Elder Jiao rolled his eyes. “Tinkering with old and abandoned things for parts will not earn much respect.”

“I think,” Ling Qi said, “the key to that is making your new idea appear to be sourced in older ones. People do it all the time.”

He smirked. “True enough. Cao Chun. What do you know about him?”

“He is a storied inspector and respected hero in the Celestial Peaks, a retired but formerly high ranked member of the Ministry of Integrity. He respects our desire to make the border safe for our people, but little else, I suspect. He seems very invested in inspecting Hui formation craft at the embassy.”

“Of course he is. His last duty was rooting out the sleeper cells left in their wake, as part of the terms in dealing with the new duchess.”

“Sleeper?” Ling Qi wondered.

“Cultivators and mortals left with deeply implanted mental suggestions and formation bindings, unaware of the effect they are under,” Xin answered. “It was an ugly business.”

“There is a reason the throne backed that woman. An and I were already developing plans to collapse the Hui. What we saw in the Ogodei incursion could allow nothing else. Our method, though, would have broken this province as its own entity.”

“I’m not sure I want to know that,” Ling Qi said flatly.

Elder Jiao snorted. “That sounds like a you problem.”

“It is certainly not something you’ll want to blurt out, but it is also not… hm, actionable, dear. He wouldn’t have said it otherwise,” Xin said.

Elder Jiao harumphed and took a deep drink from his cup. “Cao Chun. Not one of my direct students or companions on the path of integrity. Too young. He is from the first generation of apprentices though. He was a boy from a low branch of the Cao clan, rescued from a furnace cult that had grown among their branch clans, though you’ll find no record of that.”

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

Before Ling Qi could speak it, Xin answered her question.

“Furnace cults were an ideology and method, born in the second dynasty among the Peaks, which professes that human cultivation materials are superior to spirit stones or beast sourced materials.” Xin’s usual faint cheer was replaced with a more clinical tone. “It professes that only those of the most superior talent and skill should cultivate for themselves, and that those below them exist to fuel such cultivation. The world may be set to right and human life carried forward only when all have been made one in the persons of a few exalted individuals.”

“Human spirit stones, pah.” Jiao grunted. “Tainted, filthy nonsense. There are only a handful of paths one could cultivate with those, and not one of them should ever be written into the world. The point, girl, is that Cao Chun is a man who is both unshakably righteous and doggedly cynical. He sees those insisting that the current way of the world is wrong through the lens of the zealous cult he was pulled from. He holds rigidly to imperial orthodoxy because we are the ones who stamped all such nonsense down into the lowest and furthest gutters.”