Threads Chapter 452-Cathedral of Winds-Finish

The journey to the broken fire node was made quickly, but compared to the frenetic pace of the chase, it felt like an idle stroll through the tunnels, watching silty pollution slowly clear while underworld flora writhed and died, choking on the purified waters. It made for a morbid sight.

Soon, they moved from tunnels of white and gray stone to wide passages that still whispered with the heat of the earth’s molten blood. It was here that the pollution was the thickest. The water nearly had the consistency of tar for long stretches, and many-legged things burrowed and wormed through it like they might mud on the surface. Here, the underworld environment clung on with tenacity.

Ling Qi pushed the seeking fronds aside with only half a thought.

The crystal chamber lay at the top of a great lava tube ten meters across. The crystal itself looked like an open cyst in the stone. Shattered crimson crystal was slowly going black like infected flesh, and melted material pooled in the crater at its center.

They left it behind though, descending another forty meters before they finally found the split in the tube. It led out into a low ceilinged, abyssal tunnel, from which impurity spewed in great black clouds. Sixiang shifted uncomfortably in her head, and Qiyi drew tighter around her, as if to close even the most miniscule gaps in her threads.

Li Suyin’s impurity protection held firm.

“I will begin the ritual and placement now. Would you please commune with the spirit? If it interferes and reacts in the wrong way, it could very easily ruin the ritual.”

“Soothe the patient while you perform the stitches, hm?”

“You understand why it’s a vital task then, since it can’t be sedated.”

Ling Qi nodded, drifting back as Li Suyin extended her hands and began to materialize the Five Temples Seal. Like the array above, it came into existence slowly, a cross-hatched disc of dark gray metal some three meters wide and half a meter thick and inscribed with complex arrays filled with jade and gem dust.

As XInghong hauled it into the center of the split in the stone and Li Suyin waved her head, calling out five steel-tipped jade spikes in different shades to spin out and hover equidistant over the stone around the plug, ready to be pounded in, Ling Qi closed her eyes and retreated into her own mind. She reached out to the distant lattice of crystal radiating out through the spiritual realm which surrounded them.

“Attuner,” the spirit acknowledged.

“We have reached the breach and are beginning to seal it. Please trust our method, honored spirit. The sensations you feel and will feel are no attack. You have my pledge, and you can confirm it through our lingering connection.”

Li Suyin probably would have beaten her over the head with the Five Temples Seal if she properly understood the level of connection she had allowed with the Piper spirit. Folding their senses together so acutely allowed the spirit the ability to easily crush her mind by flooding her with sensation and memory until the mortal channels burned out.

“You’re lucky I understand your reasoning so well, you big doof,” Sixiang grumbled privately.

The Piper, whatever else it was, was not an entity that would do this though, not without being brought through some truly unlikely decision paths. There was only a very, very small chance of this occurring.

And if so, it would not do so through this method.

“I hear and watch. The Attuner understands the breadth of my gaze.”

It could easily feel her intentions too deeply for her to deceive it.

“I do, Harmonizer of Lands, Composer of Strands. More proper names than Piper, no?”

The spirit’s answer was a lingering silence, a holding thrum in its song, devoid of all but the base beat of its existence.

“Six Hundred and Seventy-Ninth Incarnum of Discordia Realignment Orchestra.”

Ling Qi sucked in a sharp breath, the throbbing pain in her head that had subsided coming to the fore in an instant. The Name echoed with the weight of age which exceeded the empire, and also the time of Tsu the Diviner and the Legendary Kings. It harked back to the dim ages before any true history was known. It rang with edges of jagged glass and crumbled rubble, a structure that had broken and receded, made less again and again…Six Hundred Seventy-Nine times.

“There would have been no Six Hundred and Eightieth Incarnum.”

“There would not.”

What was left here was only the scraps, less even with the two shattered and corrupted nodes.

“What purpose do you bear?”

“None. All macro functions are defunct. Replaced. Maintenance of the internal environment and spirit creche remains. Knowledge of the discordia project was lost in the seventeenth Incarnum. Irrelevant to the current environment. Harmonious Memorial Piper. Sufficient name.”

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“Then let it be so, Harmonious Memorial Piper.”

She felt Li Suyin’s ceremony progression as a ripple through the liminal when a steel spike and its jade cap were pounded in, calling on one of the great spirits of the empire. So, too, she felt the reflexive twitch of the spirit all around her, the reaction from its foundations as a roar of rage at the intrusion of a foreign sovereign.

Or so it should have been. It bent through the layers of spirit built atop those foundations and emerged more as the raspy cough of an ill old man.

Li Suyin’s ritual went on without interruption.

“Your song. It sings harmony. The ordering of seasons. The replacement of fallen function. The fall of chaos. What is YOUR purpose?”

Ling Qi tilted her head back. That was a fair question, given her own. She was far from finding an answer to that herself though.

“Life’s a lot easier when you’ve only got one track to run on,” Sixiang commented. “I can’t even say it’s less fun, but I like stumbling around a bit anyway, you know?”

Ling Qi agreed with Sixiang, even if she knew it wasn’t a state that could last forever. One who chose to seek the height of cultivation didn’t have that privilege.

Why did she sing? Why did she seek to be heard? It was because…