Threads Chapter 402-Recovery 10

Ling Qi completed the adoption ceremony by extending her hand toward Ling Nuan. It was awkward doing so while sitting down, but she was tall enough that it still worked.

Ling Nuan took her hand and raised her head, turning to look out over the gathered household.

“Thank you, my clan head,” she said roughly. She did not strictly need to continue holding Ling Qi’s hand for any longer, but she did not let go. “I would like to show my appreciation.”

Ling Qi nodded. They’d discussed this, just after the fittings were done.

Yu Nuan—no, Ling Nuan now—would perform a piece of her own up on the stage, a presentation and demonstration to the clan introducing who she was and what she was bringing. Ling Qi had considered asking the other girl to improvise a duet between them, but in the end, she had decided otherwise. They were establishing a new tradition here. Not every cultivator adopted into the Ling clan in the future would be a musician, after all, so this would be better.

“I would be pleased to see it, as would we all,” Ling Qi said.

She gestured, and Mother closed the cabinet containing the ancestral tablets. As she stepped back, the roots enclosing it rumbled, curling to cradle it protectively as they withdrew the cabinet back down beneath the stage.

“Come,” Ling Qi continued. “Let us cede the stage to our new kin.”

Mother, Hanyi, and herself descended the ramp from the stage. She felt Sixiang’s presence retreat from her mind to the puppet body nestled in the dark of the garden. The ground shook as Zhengui emerged, trundling up to the far end of the family table where a trough piled high with fruits waited for him. She took a seat beside Mother, who quietly dismissed the older woman who had been tending to Biyu back to the household tables. Hanyi remained standing at her side, and an empty seat was reserved for Ling Nuan.

Faerie lights bloomed, casting new light across the stage. Ling Nuan stood tall and straight-backed as the air shimmered and her lute, a rich, redwood instrument chased with elements of black enamel and gleaming steel, appeared in her hands. She twisted the knobs, adjusting the strings.

“I’m thankful for the welcome, so listen up. The Ling clan is a good one, better’n I deserve, and all of you are part of that, from what I hear,” Ling Nuan called out. “You’ll never gain something you don’t grasp for. You won’t keep something good by resting on your laurels. This piece is called, ‘Thunder Under Snow.'”

She slashed her hand down across the strings. Electricity sparked off of her fingernails, thunder cracked in the sky above, and the lute rang out with a harsh metallic strum that echoed over the garden.

Ling Qi smiled, letting the music wash over her. Ling Nuan was not going to overwhelm an audience like this with a cultivator’s full theatrics, but that did not mean that Ling Qi could not feel the meaning thrummed in time with the sound.

She saw that more than a few of her household was taken back by the chaotic sound that followed the opening riff, far from the harmonious noble or rhythmic teahouse styles that were more in fashion.

It was lightning crackling amidst a whited-out sky and thunder rolling off the steep, southern mountain cliffs.

A front swept south, carrying all caught in its wake on its wind. The song of the blizzard howl could not be ignored, and beasts great and small raised their eyes from their hunts, their haunts, their contests, their wars.

Only wind. Only wind. Ethereal, weightless, soft snow turned to cutting daggers. It could not be ignored.

Ling Qi could only be flattered at the comparison.

Thunder rumbled. Small storms content to lash the valleys with wind and rain, but in truth, a quiet crash, a wind without direction. Small ambition. Thoughtless ambition. Rage without a target. Rage that knew itself futile, dashing carelessly upon the stones until its energy was spent.

South, spoke the wind. Up, spoke the wind. See the sky. Find direction. Move, dance, laugh, rage.

Rage together. Rage loud. The wind carries. The blizzard song advances. And where mountains cannot be bowed, they will be left behind, one drop, one gust, one rumble at a time.

So sweeps the snow, and so sings the wind on and on and on, direction ever unwavering….

The music itself is loud and demanding. It roars for attention from the listener to look, to hear. It inflames the blood with purpose, purpose to drive forward to the song of the listener’s desire.

Ling Qi was glad Ling Nuan had found something she truly wanted even if she couldn’t yet accept that one could look at Cai Renxiang’s actions and be inspired.

Despite the initial confusion over the music, she saw the faces at the tables below rapt with attention as well. It resonated. So many had uprooted their lives to join this household. Some had done so out of trust in her mother’s word, but more had come for the simple hope that anything would be better than the run-down streets, no matter the risk. That the border, seething with conflict, was better than wallowing another hopeless, helpless day in Tonghou.

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Some people would rather have their place commanded, their days ordered by higher hands. But many people wished for a choice, to be able to say that “this is the road that I have chosen, for good or for ill.” Her Ling clan would be a place for people with such spirits.

Ling Qi closed her eyes and allowed herself to sink into the clash and crash of Yu Nuan’s thunderous ode to striving.

***

“Hells, I feel like one of those grandstanding noble pricks,” Ling Nuan grumbled into her winecup. With her head tilted forward, her blue fringe fell over her eyes, but even with the hunch of her shoulders, Ling Qi could see the flush on her cheeks.

“Language,” Mother warned. “Be mindful.”

“Momma, what’s a pr—” Biyu began only for Mother to clap a hand over her mouth and lean down to whisper in her ear.