Threads 64-Foreshock 1

“To think, you finally choose to change your style, and I am left out of it,” Xiulan said, aggrieved. “Ling Qi, am I truly so poor a friend that you would not even ask my advice?”

Ling Qi rolled her eyes at Xiulan’s dramatics. “And I told you that it was something that got sprung on me suddenly. Who am I to refuse the advice of an apprentice to the Duchess?”

“You could have at least angled to get me an invitation, you terrible girl,” Xiulan grumbled, looking over to study her. “I suppose I cannot argue with results.”

Ling Qi shifted under her attention. She still felt odd about changing her looks on the regular since she was worried about messing it up. Since they were heading out into the wilderness and the weather was cooling, she had gone for an ‘autumn-winter’ look, not that she had more than a basic understanding of what that meant.

Her winged mantle had been traded for a thicker cloak that covered her shoulders and chest and hung down almost to her feet with a high fur-trimmed collar that brushed her chin. She had switched out the front panel of her gown for one showing falling snowflakes that seemed to move as the cloth shifted. A few of the underlayers of silk had been switched out for thicker cloth, lending the gown a bit more ‘weight,’ and the hems had been drawn in and a trim of dark purple fur had been added. She liked the sleek, black calfskin boots that she had picked out, even if she was less fond of the fact that they were visible beneath the raised hems.

On her left hand, she wore the Three Moon’s Chime talisman that Lin Hai had made. The hand jewelry consisted of a silver ring and a silver wristband with butterflies and songbirds etched into it in powdered ruby. The two were connected by fine chainlinks with three charms carved from colored jade representing the Grinning, Hidden, and Dreaming Moons attached to them. Tiny bells hung from the links between the moons, letting off a pleasing chime if Ling Qi did not want them to be silent. As befit a talisman created by a master, it even had an active technique that would allow her to absorb hostile dispel techniques.

“I assure you, next time that I am going to be poked and prodded and measured for hours, I will be sure that you get an invitation,” Ling Qi replied dryly.

“Be sure that you do,” her friend said imperiously, the gravel of the road crunching under the soles of her own boots. She gave Ling Qi another assessing look. “Really, I do think you chose well though. It is not my style, but that sort of cut suits you.”

LIng Qi reached up, tentatively brushing her fingers through her hair. Lin Hai had convinced her to lighten up on the straightening elixirs. Her increasingly long hair was now bundled at the base of her neck, leaving a tail of wavy locks reaching almost the middle of her back. The whole thing was held together with a silver butterfly pin in deference to her liege. She still wasn’t sure if she liked it or not.

“Thank you,” she said. “I see you’ve been experimenting yourself.” Her friend’s glossy hair had been woven through a complex golden hairpiece made to look like a rising sun with rays that radiated out, supporting the bundle of hair behind it. The girl had also been working some dark red highlights in, but whether that was an effect of cultivation or dye, Ling Qi did not know.

“Ah, do you like it?” Xiulan asked, tilting her head to let the piece catch the sunlight and gleam. “I am considering commissioning a talisman, but I wished to wear a piece of similar make before I invested.”

“It’s very mature,” Ling Qi said with a slight smile.

Xiulan made a face at her. “Ugh, must you put it like that?”

“It does seem like something your mother might wear,” Ling Qi teased. In her thoughts, she felt Sixiang’s amusement.

<Humans are weird. You should just let your hair grow long and pretty without tying it in knots,> Hanyi muttered mutinously. <Can’t believe the big lump fell asleep.>

“And what is wrong with that? Mother is the peak of fashion,” Xiulan boasted. “I can hardly go wrong in emulating her.”

Ling Qi did not think Ai Xiaoli was the sort of woman to be caught outside in less than three dozen layers of silk, let alone something like the mere three-layered light yellow gown Xiulan was wearing with its scandalously bare shoulders and hems that came down only to the calf.

“I hate to interrupt, but I can see the walls.” The third of their number, previously silent as he walked a few paces ahead of them, spoke up. Shen Hu had not changed much over the last half year, except that he had unfortunately taken to wearing a loose shirt of dark green silk.

Ling Qi was gaining on them in cultivation – and noticeably so. Xiulan had just reached the appraisal stage, and even Shen Hu had only recently reached full foundation cultivation despite starting the year a full stage ahead. It couldn’t be helped. “We’re still pretty early. Should we have a look around the town then?” she asked.

“I doubt there is much to see,” Xiulan replied, giving the low stone walls ahead a faintly disdainful look. “But I suppose it is not a bad way to spend an hour or so. Will you escort us then, Sir Shen?” she asked sweetly.

“I suppose,” the older boy said, his hands held together casually behind his head. It seemed that over the course of the last few months, he had become inured to Xiulan.

Ling Qi glanced over as a disgruntled look passed over Xiulan’s expression. She had a feeling that she had missed something. Sparring and shopping was all well and good, but she recognized the signs of mounting frustration in her friend; it looked like they needed another girl’s night sometime in the near future.

“Well, let’s have a look around then,” she said brightly before the silence could grow awkward.

Ling Qi had done her research before this mission. While her Senior Brother Liao Zhu would still be on the mission as well, he would not be there to mind her as he had done in the previous scouting exercise. After completing the last lesson in the previous month, she, now in her seventh month in the Inner Sect, was a provisional officer of the Sect’s scouting division. She did not want to fail or do poorly now.

The region they were deployed to, a hilly scrubland rich in mineral wealth, was a few days east of White Cloud Mountain at a first realm’s pace. The town they were approaching was the region’s center, a township of a little over two thousand people laid out behind neat square walls and sectioned into districts. The smoke and heat of smelters clouded the air here as raw ore was turned into bars to be shipped out to larger settlements, and heavily laden wagons full of blocks of quarried marble, granite, and jade moved slowly through the wide streets.

At the north end of the city was a well kept market district where traders from outside the province came to purchase raw goods in exchange for foodstuffs, worked goods, and luxuries. At the city’s very center lay its Immortal district, kept clear of smoke by formations set into the inner marble walls. It was the luxurious barracks there that she and the others were bound for.

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The town had very few cultivator residents. There was a Sect Overseer which the mortal governor and ministers answered to, a man at the fifth stage of the third realm, and a bare handful of early third realm officers in the hundred and fifty strong permanent garrison of first and second realm soldiers.

“How very rustic,” Gu Xiulan said dryly as she strode through the inner gates, paying no mind to the first realm soldiers manning it. She did not acknowledge the bowing men as she strutted past, once again in the full flower of her confidence. “Still, it could be worse.”

Ling Qi favored the guards with an apologetic smile as she swept past, but it didn’t seem to comfort them. “Perhaps for you. I don’t really care for the soot in the air,” she said wryly as they left the gates behind. It wasn’t too bad – a handful of formation markers kept the worst of it from settling in the streets – but Ling Qi had grown used to the clear, crisp air of the Sect’s mountains.

“Breathing in a few sparks now and then is good for your character,” Gu Xiulan jested.

“It reminds me a bit of the charcoal makers at home,” Shen Hu commented. “Smells bad though.”