Threads 447-Cathedral of Winds 6

The antlion soldier’s jaws came together with an echoing crash too loud for mere physical sound as fists crashed together water screamed to a boil.

Ling Qi grimaced and returned her eyes to her own fight. She had to trust Li Suyin’s judgment.

Could Sixiang disrupt the parasite spirit’s control?

“I can give it a go! Nobody’s actually home in there, so I shouldn’t have too much trouble,” Sixiang whispered. “Just gimme an opening.”

Ling Qi spun lazily on a swirl of bubbles, avoiding an open palm hand that slammed past her and crashed into a wall. It shook the cavern, spreading cracks through the stone. It was only a distraction.

The eerily preserved face of the corpse opened its mouth and screamed. The water rippled from the pressure of the thunderous sound, but the physical force was nothing to the disruptive vibration.

Her hungry rats had dug in under the corpse’s skin, and even as they burst with their gluttony, they dulled the emanations that would have driven the other spirits into a greater frenzy. As the thunderous force and spiritual reverberations impacted into her gown, Qiyi’s threads dulled to a solid matte black, and the ornaments woven into her hair jingled. Ribbons curled about her ears.The force that would have rattled her bones and shaken up her organs dispersed through the fabric, harmless.

Ling Qi regarded it calmly as she drifted away on the current, still singing her warsong. The corpse was ignoring the rats in its flesh, save where they chewed close to its tendrils. Good to know. There was an opening.

She threw out her hand, and a quartet of snarling wolves emerged out of the silt and mist as if darting from high grass, running through the water as if it were air.

The corpse bellowed, tearing at the wolves as they pounced on it and began to savage it.

“Right-o, think I got a lock on where to hit!”

Sixiang’s presence drained from her thoughts and dantian and moved through liminal space, a curving streak of rainbow color on the back of her eyes. One rat in particular jerked, kaleidoscopic color rippling through its fur. Sporting a manic grin on its lips, it suddenly clawed with more purpose at the corpse, then leapt directly into its mouth when it bellowed.

Sheer mechanical reflex made even a corpse gag, and Ling Qi grimaced as bits of flesh and gore streamed past its open lips. She was glad it was already dead.

Rainbow qi shone out from every orifice in the puppet’s preserved face, and suddenly, its limbs snapped taut, muscles straining against the panicked thrashing of the tendrils under its skin. The tendrils ripped free in a cloud of gore, but the corpse, whose eyes now displayed rapidly shifting colors, snapped up a hand to grasp a bundle of them as they tried to retreat into the liminal.

Ling Qi released her concentration on her phantoms and brushed her hand through the water, parting the veil between material and imagination. She stepped through to face the squirming mass of eyes and flesh now trapped close to the surface of the liminal.

Here, on the other side, she sang a song of frigid death and shattering cold freely without worry. Putrid flesh recoiled, broken apart into drifting chunks that dissolved into the churning chaos of unformed dream, and something tiny and black shot off, too fast for even her to catch. It disappeared into the liminal depths.

She narrowed her eyes but didn’t chase. She’d had a look. That was enough for now. Ling Qi stepped back through the veil, not gone long enough for her silhouette to even flicker.

Somewhere ahead, beyond the cavern, a pale cyan light brightened as the mass of filthy pollution caking the crystal broke apart.

“Ew. Ewewewewewewewewew. That felt so gross,” Sixiang whined, disgusted.

The now badly torn corpse bobbed limply before coming apart in the churning waters.

“Corpses are the absolute worst,” they gagged.

She was sorry Sixiang had to do that, but thankful. Their efforts had ended the battle much more quickly and exposed some of the parasite creature’s mass to actual damage. It had also left the parasitized sirens confused, bodies twitching as they fought the residual will leftover in the flesh embedded in their bodies.

Not that there were a huge number of the sirens left.

As she watched, Xinghong emitted a warbling shriek as he pinned a struggling siren with his upper arms against the wall, lower arms beginning to blur and pummel the spirit roughly where a human’s kidney’s would be. Given the condition of the others around him, bruised, battered, and scorched, it wasn’t the first to receive this treatment.

“Xinghong, desist,” Li Suyin orders, eye examining those still struggling to regain control of their own nerves. “You drove it away, Ling Qi?”

“And dislodged some of the impurity. I expect…”

The crystals glowing along the mouth of the tunnel above flared before beginning to pulse gently. Something like a massive eye rolled her way, twitching awake from sleep.

“It seems I should have a conversation with our true host.” Ling Qi let out a note, communicating to the freed spirits. Reassurance. Aid. An end to what had ailed them. “Can you please heal the sirens? Excise the foreign matter. Make sure they can’t be taken again.”

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“I can,” Suyin agreed. “Best not to strain the place spirit any more than it already has been.”

Winding a thread around the poor spirit Xinghong had just been pummelling, Suyin began reeling him in.

She sang another note, soothing and reassuring, as the others stirred.

Time to learn what was going on properly.

Ling Qi spiraled up, away from the foul waters below, clogged with the gore of the broken giant’s corpse. Up among the blue crystals growing from the cavern walls, she kept her pace sedate, hands to her sides and no flicker of qi running through her more offense-related meridians. She was being watched, and the spirit was rightfully wary of any new visitors.

“Are you certain you’re well after getting into that giant?” Ling Qi asked.

“I mean, I need like a dozen hot baths, but I’m good. I’m not gonna get polluted by a lil corpse juice and puppet strings,” Sixiang replied.

“How would a bath even help you?”

“It’d have to be like a purification bath, with some pretty girls and boys waving incense sticks over it. I guess I would just kinda dissolve into the water and let the bad filter out and sink to the bottom?”