Threads 43 Justice 4

Ling Qi felt the familiar fluctuation in the radiant qi emanating from Cai Renxiang’s blazing sword, the unstoppable pulse that could tear up even the roots laid down by her Thousand Rings Unbreaking. So as the upward slash launched the Bai up and back, hurtling backward through the air with his guard broken, she was prepared. Almost without thought, she followed up on her liege’s attack.

She flickered through the sky, carrying with her the corona of winter cold and the echoes of the frozen melody passed down to her from Zeqing. Behind them, the fading phantoms of her festival howled a cheer and raised their cups even as they wavered and faded into twinkling light and moonmist. Her enemy felt the chill of her presence first and tried to twist in the air, but the momentum of her liege’s attack was not yet spent, trapping him in its trajectory.

Ling Qi’s hands grasped his shoulders, and for a single moment that seemed to stretch on far longer, she met his golden eyes, so much like those of her best friend, as he half-turned his head. The Call to Ending fell from her lips. It was not so much a note or a melody as its opposite, a deafening, all-consuming silence impressed upon the world.

The insidious chill of the Hoarfrost Refrain in his blood flared up and his skin split open, weeping half-frozen blood. His veins burst and his lungs contracted in the impossible cold. She saw his eyes mist over with crystals of frost. Sharp spikes of stony qi erupted from his back, his last wild retaliation slamming into her chest. It threw her back, and she caught herself as it flung her to earth, skidding backward on her heels and digging furrows in the earth as his frozen, stiff-limbed form flew overhead, no longer resisting the force of her liege’s technique.

The wound in her side throbbed, the burning pain penetrating the veil of adrenaline and enhancing techniques, and Ling Qi felt Sixiang begin to weakly whisper something, but she had no time to listen. She had barely a moment to turn as she heard the sound of tearing roots and a mental roar of hate and anguish. Several tons of furious snake slammed into her raised arms and drove her into the dirt. She tried to flicker away but found herself unable to, shackles of black earth bound her to the physical world as she strained to push back against the blunt reptilian snout plowing her into the bleached dirt. Rock and sediment parted beneath her, sharp edges ground against her back and wore at even the steel-strong threads of her gown. The wound in her side screamed, and something in her right forearm splintered as the world blurred by outside the meters-deep furrow in the earth being plowed by her body.

It ended when a ray of light fell from the sky like the wrath of the heavens and brought her assailant to an immediate halt. As Ling Qi’s movement came to a halt, her fingers digging into hard packed and inert earth to halt her momentum, she saw the light fade, revealing Cai Renxiang kneeling atop the thrashing snake’s head, her blade driven down to the hilt in its skull. Tendrils of light, taut as cables, dug into the earth on either side, the anchors that had halted the beast’s momentum.

Ling Qi rose to her feet, gritting her teeth as she clutched her throbbing forearm. Though the limb remained straight, she could feel the break in the bone, shards digging into the surrounding muscle. The wound in her side burned fiercely as well, but it did not spread further, the poison inert or…

<Sixiang?> Ling Qi hissed in alarm, even as her eyes darted back and forth across the battlefield, searching for signs of threat.

<Still here, boss. Poison jumped to me when I tried to get rid of it. What kind of nonsense is that, huh?> her muse laughed weakly. <Gonna… Gonna take a nap now.>

“Ling Qi, do you require assistance?” Her eyes snapped over to Cai Renxiang as the girl stood. There was a wet sucking sound and a spray of blood as she stood, drawing her saber out of the skull she had sheathed it in. Not a droplet touched her, the liquid boiling off before it could mark Cai’s gown or skin.

As Ling Qi forced herself to return her breathing to a stable pattern, she looked inward in alarm. Sixiang was still there, diminished, reduced in a way that was hard to describe, but the poison seemed to have run its course in both of them. “I’ll keep,” she replied shakily. “I… I got him?”

“You did,” Cai Renxiang said, floating off of the still-twitching corpse under her feet. Her right arm was covered in ugly acid-like burns, the skin darkened and split open in bloodless gashes, but she showed no signs of pain, save for an almost imperceptible tremble in the fingers clenched around her sword’s hilt. Ling Qi followed her gaze back toward the start of the furrow she had made in the earth where a tangle of stiff limbs jutted up at odd angles from a pockmark in the bleached earth.

Ling Qi felt her vision swim, and her stomach contract. She tasted acid in the back of her throat. She’d killed him, and he hadn’t even been the first, had he? It was funny. She knew she had caused many deaths indirectly, and she knew she had done so much harm in the time before. But she’d really outdone herself today, hadn’t she? It had seemed like nothing in the moment, no more than reacting to an advantage in a duel, but how many people’s lives had she ended today?

Ling Qi felt her balance desert her, and for a moment, the dirt beckoned. Something caught her though, and she looked up to see Cai Renxiang as the girl’s unburned arm slipped around her shoulders. Most of her light had faded, and Ling Qi found herself surprised out of her thoughts as she saw the look of unreserved sadness on the heiress’ face.

“Come along then. It is time to carry out the duties of victory,” the other girl said quietly. “Hold yourself together for a time yet. The violence is over, but the battle continues.”

Ling Qi understood distantly what Cai Renxiang meant. They still had to oversee the return to the village. She laughed, and it was a hollow sounding thing.

Hadn’t Xiulan told her all the way back at the beginning? Appearance was strength as well. She nodded and forced her wobbling legs straight and the bile in her throat back down. That could come later.

She could not bring herself to speak much in the aftermath despite that. Instead, she fell back on her old standby, copying her best friend’s aloof and distant manner, clutching to it like a desperate mask even as her emotions churned underneath. She allowed it to crack for Zhengui, wrapping his gigantic head in a hug as he worried over her wounds and stewed in regret that he hadn’t been able to help more. Hanyi needed no reassurances, skipping away from the battlefield like a child coming home from the park.

The soldiers regarded her with a wary respect as they loaded up the surviving bandits onto open wagons which came rolling up sometime later. The armored woman had been stripped of her talismans and bound in chains of clear crystal that glowed with powerful formations in her senses, but the spindly man lay dead in the dirt, his eyes empty. She watched him dragged into a pile with the rest of the dead as she sat stoically under the ministrations of the nervous physician that had accompanied the wagons.

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As her arm was splinted and the wound on her side dressed, she watched the dead burn in a pyre of unnaturally hot flame born from talismans carried by the soldiers. She watched as a man with a jangling staff like Xuan Shi’s marched around the pyre, murmuring prayers and planting golden sutra scrolls on the hastily raised posts that marked the boundary of the pyre. Bandits deserved no honor, but the potential danger of angry spirits still needed to be contained.

The Bai was not among those burned. His remains were sealed away until it was decided what needed to be done with them. For once, Ling Qi found that she had no interest in a defeated foe’s gear.

She barely found herself able to care about the tablet of white jade containing her arts. She browsed listlessly through them as the soldiers did their grisly work. There were many arts within, most in the first and second realm, the sort of things necessary to get a family started. Ling thought that she would have to work with her mother to see which cultivation art fit her best. There were a handful of potential arts for her that she would have to study later when she could concentrate. The Cai had truly been generous in putting together such a comprehensive and no doubt expensive art library for her. This alone would probably ensure that her family and descendants, if alive, could maintain a Baroness rank.

It was a relief when an enclosed carriage finally rolled up to take her and Cai Renxiang back, along with the most important of the stolen items.