Threads 487-Ceremony 1

“I still can’t understand it, on the deepest level.” Ling Qi stood from the bed and paced to the window of the room. “I’ve seen it and felt it, but I still…”

Ling Qi thought of the faces turned away from a ratty child, shivering on a street corner. She thought of her mother’s rooms and the scent of alcohol on a man’s breath and sweaty hands. She thought of starving, her belly feeling as if it was eating itself from the inside out.

“I still want to live. I want to live, more than almost anything else.”

Shu Yue hummed. It was a low, resonant noise, deeper than anything that should have come from a human throat. “Denial, though you can’t quite fully lie. A sneaking word. Almost.”

Ling Qi hunched her shoulders at the window. The cool wind from outside tugged at her hair. The shadow she cast on the floor writhed.

“C’mon, Qi. Even I know this isn’t the time for dodging,” Sixiang said.

Ling Qi considered what she would do if the people she had gathered to her were taken away and she, sent back to being a lonely wraith of frozen wind. She wanted to flinch away from what her mind showed her beneath the kinder face she had worked so hard to build for herself.

Boiling shadows and consuming frost. The shriek of a blizzard, the kind that cared not for walls and roofs, and that tore and buried and crushed anything human hands could build.

Would she really care what got in her way, once that howling scream tore its way from her throat? She’d told Renxiang once that she found it hard to care for people she did not know. In response, she’d done her best to extend the framework of who she “knew” and painstakingly built a map of connections in her head to cover a wider net.

How sturdy was that construction?

She exhaled, frost sparkling in the night air. “I don’t understand that hate, the mindset that doesn’t care for yourself, only the pain you can inflict. I hope I never will. But I have seen it, and I can map a mind that thinks that way now. That was the point of this exercise, wasn’t it?”

“A point,” Shu Yue corrected. “A lesson which is told but not felt is one forgotten quickly. After immersing yourself in her life, you will never forget how deep a grudge can run, so long as you recall this lesson.” A pause. Shu Yue towered over her in the dim room. “What else did you learn?”

Ling Qi looked out at the collection of glittering lights, extending away from her window in every direction, the constellation of Xiangmen’s Cloud District.

“You do not need to be a sovereign of cultivation to have lost all ability to care for or know any perspective but your own. It might actually be more common than not.”

“Cultivation takes its shape from its practitioners, as much as they take their shape from it,” Shu Yue acknowledged. “This is true. Humans live in the world behind their eyes, as much or more than they live in the world where all feet tread.”

“There’s a reason you all use that word ‘cultivate,’” Sixiang commented. “You grow, you prune, you snip, you shape, but you’re only ever working with what was already there.”

Shu Yue inclined their head in agreement. “It is so. However twisted, grand, awesome, terrifying or transcendent we become, the core of every cultivator was born in the mind of a mortal, a small, limited thing living in a world that is far greater than their senses can perceive.”

Ling Qi leaned against the windowsill. “At the same time, if people can’t know each other, they could not build this society. We don’t live in a world of lonely titans surrounded by desolation.”

“We do not. That, too, is a dichotomy of human experience,” Shu Yue said. “You will find whole libraries filled with philosophy debating which is the more ‘natural’ way.”

“I don’t know if that’s a useful way of framing it, but then, that might be arrogant of me.” Ling Qi shrugged.

Shu Yue smiled, a thin black line between bloodless lips. “A cultivator who seeks sovereignty must, by nature, be arrogant. A truly humble person could not reach for such power.”

“That, I won’t try to deny. It should be possible to hold that arrogance, and still retain some perspective though. I think there has to be.”

“You think?”

“There is,” Ling Qi said firmly.

It was no good to lack conviction in something she felt would be deeply important in forming her Way. If it wasn’t true, she would make it true. That was the conviction of a sovereign.

“When will we commence the lesson proper?” Ling Qi asked.

“After the day of the ceremony and before the week of feasting and celebration that follows,” Shu Yue answered. “I will meet you here in the early hours of the day after the ceremony.”

“Understood,” Ling Qi said. “Will you be attending?”

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

“Naturally. It is my master’s wedding.” Shu Yue chuckled. “Though perhaps, not visibly. Foolish as it might seem, there is always a chance for… trouble.”

Ling Qi inclined her head at that.