Threads 446 Cathedral of Winds 5

They advanced on the crevice, from which tendrils of polluted water drifted. Just a few meters down the winding passage, physical sight became useless; it was like peering into a pool of mud.

But Ling Qi was a cultivator, and there were more senses than sight. Alongside Suyin, she advanced through the viscous water. Xinghong, aglow from within by fiery light, loomed behind them, heavy footfalls and solid body wading through the darkness.

It was not long before they encountered another branching of the tunnel. Again, water churned, silvery scales flashed, and fish darted off, schooling around her eyes. They found winding passages, and stone run through with veins of flesh.

There could be no doubt that this tunnel was respiring.

“It’s not just physical, Qi,” Sixiang commented. “This slimy boy is straddling the border, like a predator hiding under the water, and only snapping its jaws when somebody touches the surface.”

Ling Qi inclined her head, feeling her constructs as they rippled out through the passages and were pounced on, speared, and dragged into silty pits. It all gave her information.

“Incoming. Keep left for now. Follow the wall,” Ling Qi ordered.

Li Suyin didn’t have time to answer before the first attack came.

Tendrils lanced out of the dark. They emerged from rippling vortices in the water, silt, and stone. Sickly pale, like fleshy worms, each one bristled with near invisible, hair-thin barbs which stunk of toxin.

She sang the beat of war drums into the tunnels, and the water teemed with fang and claw. In this narrow space, there was little definition to her phantasmal beasts. It was a hideous display, and the song had a chaotic tempo, but it illustrated where she’d gone wrong before in using this art.

Each Beast King was one part in the play, and there, they came in sequence, one after another. A battle was far too chaotic for that. She had been taking each instrument in an orchestra, and making its part a solo. They could be used apart, but the potential of the art was in its freeform, mix-and-match use.

A bird screamed, and from churning phantom flesh, an eagle’s beak punched through a thinned barrier to crash into the pulsing liminal flesh beyond it. The jaws of wolves snapped and tore, and vermin dropped in the wake of her footsteps, devouring the twitching scraps that fell in the bloody water. The song rose to a crescendo, and the rumbling roar of a bear smashed the swarming tendrils to paste before they could reach her.

Ling Qi spared a glance for Suyin.

Wire snapped out, gleaming with pale blue qi. It speared through reaching tendrils, and where it touched, flesh twisted. Flesh bulged and warped in tumorous growth, making muscles snap like overdrawn strings and barbs become ingrown, jabbing deep into the beast’s own flesh.

Xinghong’s fists and grasping claws drew boiling furrows through the water. He stepped right into the grappling limbs and let the barbs skitter off chitin. Even where the barbs pierced the flesh between his armor, he vented blood and burned off the toxin.

They were doing fine in fending off the beast, but she didn’t want to be bogged down here. If it wouldn’t damage the caverns more, sterilizing them, she’d sing ice into being. As is, her constructs were still the best solution.

“I think I’ve got a lock on a spot closer to the center of the water qi,” Sixiang whispered as the veil between material and liminal strained. Dozens of new limbs emerged, some thicker and more muscular, dense with parasitic qi. “The way to it is pretty turbulent though, cause of fatty here.”

Ling Qi eyed the echoes of flesh she could feel beyond the veil, walls of pallid meat studded with hungry eyes and sucking mouths. These weren’t even the core of the creature, just fused refuse from its prey. She sang a warning to the beast to withdraw from this place, to flee to preserve its own self.

The next attack was all the more furious. She tugged gently on Qiyi’s spirit, and the dress responded with giddy excitement. Qi pulsed through her fabric, threads spun out, and the lowest, metal-threaded layer of the gown turned snug as fabric wrapped her from her neck down to her toes. This, sleek and lethal, was Qiyi’s “battle form.”.

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A spiked tendril snaked through her phantoms, and rebounded uselessly off of her dress. The drumbeats of her art repeated her silent warning, and this time, there was a moment of hesitation from her opponent.

She laid a hand on Suyin’s shoulder, warning her. “Jumping.”