Threads Chapter 384

The crow’s wings fluttered once, a loose feather drifting down and clinging to Liming’s fabric even as she accelerated away, crossing the compound to cleave the twitching head from a locust-like nightmare gnawing and ripping at a crack in the barrier of warding energies. She swung Cifeng out in a wide arc, trailing radiance, the light coalescing into glowing spheres of power that ripped outward, raining down on the nightmares outside the walls to the soft chiming of bells, heard even over the din of battle.

But the feather remained. Unthreatening and fragile, nothing more than a conduit for words and intentions. She could feel the cold thrum rippling back up the connection.

“Lady Wang, reinforcement incoming from our guests. Inform Sir Luo.” The words were barely even spoken, imprinted mostly on the qi pulsing down into the formations embedded in the fortifications.

The stolid, earthy qi of the Wang noblewoman, spread so thinly over the defenses of the valley, paused for a moment in its motion, the energies of the barriers stilling and then resuming their circulation. Agreement. Wang Lian would not question her here and now.

The sky shuddered, and flame gouted forth, mingling with acrid white smoke and boiling ichor. To her eyes, it almost seemed like the sky was bulging outward. Cracks were spreading, as if the heavens themselves would burst with the pressure on the other side.

She heard a song, low and melancholic, interwoven with another, strident and firm. She could feel the vibration of it deep in her bones.

In the cracked sky, a vast flock of ravens took flight, and the Weeping Sentinel, the woman-shaped tree that had stood over the foreigners’ camp throughout the summit, spread creaking wooden limbs wide. Crimson sap dripped from curling, branchlike fingers.

The face of the creature—the cultivator—was revealed. It was a face of stripped bark, as if it were flayed, with lines and curves of muscle and tendon exposed and wet. Empty knothole eyes wept blood. The Weeping Sentinel’s mouth opened, revealing teeth of dull and rusted iron, and her voice became the song.

Light rippled out, a ring of dancing runes writ in stark and primal crimson light forming in the air. The pulse reached the distending sky and shattered into fragments of light. A second pulse came and shattered, too.

Under this onslaught, the bulging sky shuddered and retreated. Crimson threads stitched shut spreading cracks. They blackened under the burning flames, but held strong.

Crows joined the hounds in their aerial feast of nightmare flesh. Locust-men and writhing, many limbed things fell from the sky, blanketed in clawing, pecking birds. Other cracks in the sky halted expansion and closed by millimeters under the cawing song of circling crows.

As her people fought and pushed the nightmares from the makeshift walls, as Gan Guangli forged an open path, and as her light shone brighter, drawing the reeling nightmares back onto their spears, the sky erupted. The pressure that had been building, the fury and power of something unseen straining against the skein of reality, exploded behind the cracks in the sky.

The treesong grew in force, rings of unbreakable runes lighting the sky. Swarming crows blotted out the burning clouds, and beneath them a dozen mighty white hounds raised their heads and howled, silver fire erupting in a spreading circle to fill the vault of heaven. Below the hounds, the meridians of the earth lit up, a zigzagging network of light.

The ripple of power passed. Windows shattered, and trees were stripped of their leaves and needles, but that was the end of it. The nightmares began to boil away as the cracks in the sky dissolved into ashen smoke. All around her, soldiers let out cheers of relief, led by Gan Guangli’s thunderous cry of victory.

Cai Renxiang sunk back down to the earth, not allowing a single hint of fatigue in her posture.

“Emissary Jaromila would speak with you at your earliest convenience.”

“She will have it. I must first ask after my subordinates.”

“We understand. Shall this feather remain?”

Cai Renxiang considered it. The black feather was graying and crumbling at its edges already.

“It may. I will communicate when a meeting is possible.”

She was going to be very cross with Ling Qi if her retainer was conscious.

***

Pain.

A deep, aching pain throbbed outward from her core, fading to a fuzzy numbness. For a long time, there was nothing else, not even a notion of who she was or where she was.

Pressure came next. She was lying on something, and a thin sheet lay over her. Then temperature, in the form of cold and heat. She could feel the pulse of acerbic medicinal energy scrubbing away at her insides, pushing back against the numbness and the pain alike.

“Told you she’d wake up. Ling Qi is tough. Aren’t ya?”

Right. She was Ling Qi. She was a cultivator, a baroness, a diplomat, an emissary, and a thief. There were many facets, and all of them were her.

Her eyes cracked open, and she looked up to see Sixiang seated backwards on a chair by her bedside, arms crossed on the backrest.

“Obviously! I was just worried, you old jerk.” Hanyi gave the muse a dirty look. “A lady is entitled to fret.”

Ling Qi painstakingly turned her gaze. Nothing felt right. She was so heavy, so stiff. Hanyi was sitting on the foot of her bed, kicking her legs fretfully. She looked at Ling Qi, and her little sister flinched, looking away.

“You were correct. The physician underestimated her resilience.”

Cai Renxiang stood with her back to them, looking out the wide window set in the wall of the recovery room.

Ling Qi tried to raise her hand. She sent the command down her nerves, but she felt only the distant, fuzzy sensation of a twitch. She reached inward, cycled her qi, and found it barely flowing, like porridge hardened into the bowl.

“Ling Qi, do not. You will damage yourself further. The physicians have already informed me that you will recover… in time.”

The panic starting to flutter in her chest receded. Cai Renxiang’s calm was infectious.

“How bad…?”

To her surprise, her words came out clearly. There was no scratchy undertone, no broken or labored breathing. But then, she realized that neither her lips nor throat had moved at all. She had thought, and the words had come, imprinting themselves on the air.

“Well, you’re gonna need to grow your hair back out at least,” Sixiang observed. “We managed to protect your head mostly, but that was kind of a no go.”

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“Most of your meridians are too damaged for use, particularly in your extremities. The physical flesh is the same,” Cai Renxiang said. “You will require significant assistance until you can recover. The physicians estimate that it will be some months before you are fully mobile again.”

“My cultivation?”

Hanyi puffed out her cheeks. “Siiis, is that really the first thing you worry about? You can feel all the bits are still there, right?”

Cai Renxiang looked back over her shoulder. “You have not lost a stage, but most of the qi you were building for your advancement to the next stage has been lost, too tainted by the energies you were immersed in. It had to be flushed from your body.”

Ling Qi squeezed her eyes shut. Slowly, she worked her tongue across the back of her teeth, swallowed once, and flexed her jaw. Feeling was coming back, even if most of her body still felt like it was made of stone. This was better than she had any right to expect. But even then…

“I can still feel my dantian… My domain, I’m speaking with it.”

“You held onto yourself real well despite the flames, the muck and the forgetting dark alike,” Sixiang said. “’Course you can. You looked worse till you popped out. Then your spirit tried to correct your look all at once, but you just didn’t have the energy for it.”

“The solidity of your cultivation foundation prevented worse complications,” Cai Renxiang explained. “It is still suggested that you not strain yourself or cultivate further until the physicians have cleared you.”

“Understood.”

It itched at her, making her want to squirm and shed her own skin, but she would only hurt herself more if she tried to pick up and resume running on her path right now. She felt something deeper too. Her domain was shifting internally. It felt like it was consolidating. She had a feeling that her new ability to speak with others via her domain had to do with it.

Maybe she would have something to work on, after all.