Threads 457-Sincerity 1

“You sure about this, Qi?”

“It would feel wrong to put this off any longer. He should at least know what I’ve chosen to do with his teachings,” Ling Qi replied.

She sat atop the waters of the pond in the floating isle she had made her entrypoint into the dream realm, an eerily silent but beautiful lake surrounded by sky-piercing mountains whose peaks burned with angry blood red flame. Golden scales and swarms of crows flashed amidst churning clouds in one stretch of the mountains, which remained coated in falling snow. The shadow of the moon shrine she had found in the sect’s peaks drifted above.

“Besides, I won’t be getting any healthier. For this last spark, I’ll need to smother or process it myself.” Ling Qi rested a hand on her stomach. The twinges of pain were well faded from her meridians, but like the dark particles of Huisheng’s Qi, that wrathful spark still burned down in the depths of her dantian.

Sixiang’s chosen avatar faded into existence, a frown on their lips. Their own hair was more flamelike than misty here, and in patches, their robe smoked, tongues of black and white fire clinging to their robes. “I dunno. Even if he helped us, I can’t help but be uneasy around this guy.”

Ling Qi inclined her head. “I understand.”

“Not even gonna ask if I don’t wanna go?” Sixiang laughed.

Ling Qi smiled. “No point in asking a question I know the answer to.”

“Fair, fair. Shall we go then?”

Ling Qi stood up. The water rippled under her feet as she turned to the frameless door, standing to one side of the little garden. That was enough for it to drift open, black petals whispering as they stirred on the cold stone that lay on the other side of the threshold.

Sixiang lay a hand on her shoulder, and they descended down into the shattered gaol of Huisheng, the remnant shade of the Arch Heretic of the Dreaming Way.

Ling Qi scanned his chamber carefully as they reached the bottom of the stairs and felt concerned. The chamber had changed. The dark stone of the ceiling glittered like starlight, the same way her hair did when her qi was active, and the bare, damp rock and mud of the floor was now blooming in patches. The lush black lotus flowers which infested Huisheng’s bones were now spread across the whole chamber. Only the pool of liquid darkness and the isle itself were much the same. The bronze spear struck into the moldering loam of the isle burned with eerie green light.

And there was Huisheng himself, a bare skeleton threaded through with thorny vines, bound to a pillar of stone, black flowers blooming from ribs and jaw and eye sockets, the proud rack of bleached white antlers sweeping back from the temples of his skull.

“Student. Long has it been.” His raspy, grandfatherly voice bounced around the inside of her skull.

Ling Qi responded the same way, impressing meaning onto the world without a word. “My teacher sensed the searing, unless that was only the figment you left from our games.”

A single flower petal broke off from the skeleton, drifting down to settle on the fathomless black pool without a ripple. She felt the impression of an indulgent smile.

“A choice was made. This one felt the flame.”

Ling Qi stopped a few footsteps from the edge of the pool and respectfully knelt, Qiyi’s fabric pooling around her in the rustling flowers. Cowling herself in the mantle of Huisheng’s power to escape the Emerald Mourner had been her choice.

Its consequences were hers, too.

“What are your thoughts on the Crucible of Peoples, teacher? This student is curious.”

Sixiang cast her a surprised look, but didn’t say anything as they knelt at her side. Their qi was coiled tightly, ready to scatter from this place with all haste.

“When the world groans for change, when traditions become shackles, it births such engines. It names itself the Crucible today. In the past, it bore other names. In the future, it will bear still more. I am beyond fear, but I am not beyond pity for the person who hollowed themselves and filled what was left with the hells’ purging fires. Study your foe, and pray that you need not give rise to its successor to claw your future into being.”

Those words echoed through the gaol and through her head, stirring even her dantian. “You know my next question, teacher.”

“The student has chosen to forget. You have earned the answer; you merely hesitate at its implication.” He intoned, “Choice is pain. Choice is strife. Choice is disunity. Choice is life, the grand dream of the Nameless.”

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

As they had under his mantle when facing Brother Darksong, Ling Qi, Sixiang, and Huisheng spoke as one. She did know. She did. So why did she hesitate?

“The sword is unkind. Its cruelty is difficult to bear. You have been immersed in the flame of surety, a sovereign’s annihilating intent. What child would not shy away from what caused them such pain?”

She grimaced at that observation. In the aftermath of the sovereigns’ clash, Ling Qi had turned her thoughts toward peace and harmonizing peoples and spirits with such abandon, but she had already chosen. Meng Duyi had spoken truly in that she had already rejected the fundamental premise of the Dreaming Way, that the path to transcendence via the sublimation of desire was worth pursuing. Ling Qi had chosen the path of Choice when she defied the Nightmare’s conundrum.

And there were consequences to that. They, too, were hers.

“Thank you for helping me order my thoughts, teacher.”