Threads 48-Signs 3

Once again, she took an overwatch position as they began to make their way south, painstakingly searching for unusual qi in the soil.

Below, her subordinates took on a triangle formation with Mo Lian at the head and the other two fanned out behind him. The search was rather dull to begin with. False leads led only to minor parasitic spirits or earth gasses tainting soil. She left the subdual of the former to Chun Yan, who was quick and competent about striking and cutting down spirits with strong thrusts of the spear she carried on her back. The three of them worked well as a team, strengthening her suspicion that the three were quite familiar with each other. Chun Yan was the spear, and Chang He was the shield. Mo Lian was the odd man out, acting to support the other two with a more varied set of skills.

As they traveled further south however, the false leads dried up. There was a winding vein of something strange in the earth. Where it passed, grass and trees showed faint signs of withering sickness, and certain spirit beasts were more aggressive. It seemed that the more closely aligned a spirit was to earth or wood qi, the greater the effect. Even Zhengui reported feeling slightly queasy when he dug his roots into the earth where the strange taint passed. They struck down maddened beasts as necessary and kept pressing south.

Eventually, the trail led them to a grey and withered valley filled with bubbling muck. The grasses and plants within were twisted and grey, save for tumorous patches of color that marked the bark of some trees.

They had not been able to investigate peacefully. Blighted and glowing insects had swarmed out the moment Mo Lian had stepped over a seemingly arbitrary line, and it was only a swift activation of the Forgotten Vale Melody that had driven the bugs back. From there on, Ling Qi stayed with the group, her melody driving back the veritable carpet of chittering, sickly beasts that would have otherwise threatened to overwhelm them with sheer numbers.

The sickness in the soil ran deep here, welling up from a depth far beyond her ability to sense. At the very center of the tainted valley, the mud gleamed with vibrant color from all across the spectrum, glowing and pulsing eerily under the darkening sky.

Ling Qi had little desire to linger once they had found the center of the phenomenon. They dug for a time to see if the source could be unearthed, but it resulted only in a growing nausea among her subordinates. Even Ling Qi found her skin prickling under the strange glow, and perhaps it was only her imagination, but her gown rustled unnaturally, the trailing hems seeming to shy away from the sickly light.

She had ordered the withdrawal after that, setting the three of them to set fire breaks around the valley. Once it was done, she had Zhen spray his venom across everything that was even vaguely flammable. When in doubt, purifying by flame was rarely wrong. That done, she resolved to mark down both the valley and trail of poison in her report and let someone more qualified deal with purging the taint.

Once they had reached a safe distance, she dismissed the scouts to make camp. They would rest for two hours to recover their qi and then begin working on the rest of the region. As Ling Qi seated herself atop a flat rock to meditate however, she saw movement out of the corner of her eye.

“Senior Brother,” she greeted calmly, refusing to rise to his bait.

“Junior Sister,” Liao Zhu greeted in turn, seated on the trunk of a tree that hung crookedly from the cliffside on which she was perched. “I am glad to see your nerves remain in good condition.”

“Of course,” she replied dryly. “Senior Brother, what do you make of what we found today?”

“Ah, but that would be telling, Junior Sister. I am disappointed that you would seek to use your Senior Brother’s unmatched experience to pad your score,” he jested. She turned her head just enough to give him a flat look. He laughed at her, but his gaze sharpened. “It is somewhat concerning. This is not a matter for Inner disciples, I think. You did well.”

“Have you ever heard of a falling star?” she asked, almost whimsically.

Liao Zhu, however, considered her question seriously. “I have, and it is why I am concerned.”

Ling Qi frowned. “Where have you heard of it? An old village tale like Chun Yan?”

“Nay. My family is from the capital, Junior Sister. We have served the Dukes of Emerald Seas since the early days of the Hui.” He laughed. “Though our current Duchess has little use for physicians. Why, my father told me that she performed the operation to deliver your liege herself!”

Ling Qi blinked and then shook her head. “You’re trying to distract me,” she accused.

“Perhaps,” he agreed, the grin fading from his tone. “But I have spent many long hours watching and infiltrating the Cloud Tribes,” he said gravely. “There is an old tale, which they speak of in the same way that we do our Fishers, Diviners, and Conquerors. They say that pitying the plight of the men who toiled under the dragons, Father Sky summoned the brightest star in the sky, his daughter, to free them of their bondage. Before that star, the artifice and mighty works of the dragons crumbled like dust. When the dragons fell, the star elected to remain on Mother Earth and took a husband from among the freed tribes. She bore a son who would be their first leader. However, while the star was the daughter of Father Sky, she was not born of Mother Earth, and so they and their descendants were to be denied the blessings of Earth and live their lives in the Sky and the Mountains.”

Ling Qi shifted uneasily at that abridged legend. “Do you think the Cloud Tribes really have a Sublime Ancestor somewhere in the Wall?”

“There is no proof of such a thing,” Laio Zhu replied. “And you will be laughed at if you suggest it. Imperial scholars have long debunked their primitive myths, and the living dragons scoff at such stories.” She couldn’t help but feel that he was being a bit disingenuous with that statement. “But your Senior Brother is perhaps a touch paranoid.”

“You’re pretty bad at setting the mind at ease,” Ling Qi said.

“I am no such thing,” he denied in a voice full of wounded pride. “For that was not my intent. Be careful on the morrow, Junior Sister.”

Before she could reply, he was gone.

<He’s great to look at and all, but I think he likes that mysterious act a little too much,> Sixiang said flatly.

<You’re not wrong,> Ling Qi sighed, closing her eyes to meditate. She couldn’t let herself get worried over stories. If a horde of barbarians came screaming over the border, she’d worry about it then. For now, she needed to plan the rest of the scouting.

***

“You sure this is what you want to do?” Sixiang asked, the breeze kicked up by their speech sending Ling Qi’s hair fluttering. “You decided yesterday that sticking together was better.”

“It is,” Ling Qi agreed, looking down from the cliffside at the shrinking backs of her subordinates as they descended into the valley. “That’s why they’re staying in a loose formation while they do their tasks. They’ll be able to support each other.”

“That’s not what I mean, and you know it,” Sixiang replied dryly.

“I know,” she sighed, looking toward the south. “I’ll link up with them in the afternoon, but I need to check out the south. I just have a bad feeling.”

“I guess I can’t tell you to ignore that. Adventure ho then, eh?” Sixiang called out.

<You guys are so weird. It’s not like you’re going by yourself,> Hanyi huffed in annoyance.

<Hanyi is right! There’s nothing to worry about!> Zhengui agreed.

Hanyi wasn’t wrong, Ling Qi thought wryly, turning to the south as her feet left the ground. They weren’t far from the area she wanted to search, so she would not have to fly far. Their hunt for the source of the poison in the earth had already taken them to the southeastern quadrant of their assigned area. The edge of the zone was easy to see, little mountains, hills, and vales gave way to ramparts of sheer stone that rose up to pierce the clouds, marked only by occasional straggling patches of vegetation.

As she soared over the land, Ling Qi had to wonder at that. Here, just south of the jutting peaks where the Sect made its home, the wall was green and vibrant, these stretches of verdant valleys and little mountains stretching across the landscape, interrupted by chains of much higher peaks. But go only a short distance further, and the Wall rose in truth. The peaks that rose to the south were massive things. White Cloud Mountain pierced the clouds at its peak, but the mountains of the Wall blocked out almost the whole of the southern sky.

At least those mountains were not moving, Ling Qi thought wryly. They would all be in trouble then. Even still, there was something ominous and humbling about them like being in the presence of a higher cultivator. It brought to mind troubling thoughts about how very small she was.

Now was not the time for philosophical quandaries however, so Ling Qi focused on her destination and flew ever higher. She had learned in her lessons that the Cloud Tribes preferred to make their camps near the cloud line. Camps above the clouds were more common for raiders, who did not have to worry about the survival of younger and less hardy individuals.

With that in mind, Ling Qi flew through the clouds, the dense moisture failing to so much as wet the tips of her hair or the hems of her gown. Soon, she soared above the slowly churning cloudscape and began her search of the bare masses of stone that jutted into the sky through it. Without a spirit like her mentor, no snow could fall here, and yet many were still dotted with thick sheets of ice.

The high mountains were a unique place. Very little lived or grew here, but what did was always strange and a little alien. She searched through fields of pale lichen as thick as the grasses below and soared over strange plants with pale fronds that rustled and seemed to follow her with their upturned leaves. At the very highest peaks where the sky began to grow dark and the faintest twinkle of starlight peaked through, Ling Qi did not linger long. There was no air fit for breath there, and even the world’s qi grew thin, making her skin prickle uncomfortably, similar to being in the presence of the source of that strange sickness she had ordered cordoned off.

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However, Ling Qi did not pay too much attention to the region’s natural features, and instead focused on what signs she could find of barbarian activity, any distortions in the natural qi left behind by their passage or old bones and the scorch marks on the ground from old campsites. She did not meet with much success.

There were marks of their passage of course. She knew the tribes did not recognize Imperial borders, viewing the whole of the mountains as their domain. However, what she found were only old hunting camps, months old at best, certainly nothing that she could really follow up on nor anything that would legitimize the niggling ill feeling in her stomach.