Threads Chapter 499-Roots 3

This was where Want brushed against Isolation, Ling Qi thought. She squeezed down on Sixiang’s hand, running her thumb in a circle along the back of the muse’s hand. It felt real and insubstantial at the same time; it was too light, for all that it was warm.

“More or less, ya think?” Their voice imprinted on her thoughts, not bothering with spoken words.

Both. Too much or too little were both equally poisonous.

She reached for a phantom with her spirit and held it captive. She couldn’t help but think of the times when she had seen a spider, mundane or Suyin’s, winding up its meals in silk as she felt it struggle to break free from her grip.

Was this really right? Scraps and fragments they might be, but they still felt alive, especially at the higher spiritual frequencies.

And yet, she had to develop her technique, which required practice. Better a fragment of a spirit than something more substantial.

“The first vulnerability in this desire is its lack,” Ling Qi analyzed. “If you steal a person’s hunger or remove a person’s fear, they may be discomfited, but would they even notice in the heat of battle?”

Shu Yue gave no response, merely letting her verbalize her thoughts.

“Steal a person’s desire for love, acclaim, community, and would they even remember why they should be fighting?” Ling Qi continued.

“I can think of a few reasons,” Sixiang responded, “but reasons for fights are usually still tied to those.”

Anger and hatred were both strong motivators, as was the first fear, the simple drive for survival… If she could take that from them, there would be no fight to begin with.

And even if it can’t be stolen whole, if she could steal away the desire for support between comrades or corrode the desire to bring pride to their clan or nation, how much of an army formation collapses as the first form of desire reasserts itself?

Ling Qi turned over the phantom in her grasp, examining the currents and veins of Want that ran through it, binding it together. She heard the distant weeping of a woman, driven to the point of breaking her body with labor to provide just one more day of shelter for her children.

Just one diverted trail, one pluck of virulent darkness, and despair overcame determination. The memory embodied in the phantom ended long before she sold herself into indenture. The phantom crumbled. She felt the cold churning in her gut worsen.

“It is the most straightforward path, but not easily accomplished. To steal and sever against a peer or any cultivator who has even the foundations of a Name will be a difficult task, until and unless you are already well under their defense,” Shu Yue said. “The second method, then.”

She could see that. The mind resisted excising desires far more. Dampening was easier, but it was more noticeable.

“Amplification, then” Sixiang suggested, “as you did with the hunger.”

Another phantom fell into her grasp. It writhed around, nearly breaking free. This was the shards of the leader of a small cell of criminals that had stolen from the Hui-run food warehouses and granaries, storing Xiangmen’s bounty for export.

The spirit lingered here from its last memories: interrogation. It was not a kind interrogation, for all that only mundane methods had been used, this far in the rootways, for such a minor crime.

She understood well that the keepers of the law were rarely the friends of those who lived at the bottom. He’d broken at the end and sold out his fellows. He’d been released for his troubles and died months later from infections due to the damage taken in interrogation.

This was a spirit of torment, reliving those last days again and again in aching clarity.

Darkness flowed, pulsed, and fortified, black veins running through the spiritual matter realigning. Magnify desire. Magnify want to community and comrade.

The memory changed. He died spitting in the interrogator’s face, satisfaction in his heart. The spirit crumbled.

It didn’t churn her stomach as severely as the last one, but it was still bittersweet. She couldn’t help but feel…

“Inspiring a suicidal stand is useful if the target is your mission goal, but less so otherwise,” Shu Yue lectured. “It was not the best practice piece to choose.”

“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with not liking this. I’d dislike it a lot more if you were fine with it.”

Ling Qi let out a low, even breath, recentering herself in the web of churning, lingering phantoms.

“Transforming love into possessive paranoia or manipulating a web of bonds to create envy between its anchor points and disrupt cohesion, and inflating or deflating the importance of different communal loyalties to cause friction within larger circles are all possible within the sphere of this kind of desire,” Shu Yue explained.

“There are many ways to manipulate the connections within a group to weaken and disrupt, but this is most useful before an actual fight starts,” Ling Qi asserted.

She could see, painfully, how effective arts like these might be. So much of her own Way and Domain was tied to benefits for those she loved and harm for those she hated.

The easiest one to affect with this art would be herself. She knew her own defenses best of all. It wasn’t even truly that far from traditional cultivation, more direct, if anything. And once she had come to the notion of cultivating people this way, was it truly unthinkable to use it on herself, her family, or her friends? Would she ever be tempted to snip something if she felt it was causing Biyu trouble in her cultivation, holding her back from ascending in the Way?

She wouldn’t. She absolutely would not, but she could see how someone who had not bound the axiom of Choice into their soul would.

“You grasp the thrust of these arts well. These soften and sabotage, rather than striking decisive blows,” Shu Yue agreed.

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“A sidearm, or well, a knife you stick in when you’re already in their head.”

She made a face. Thank you so much for that image, Sixiang.

Even if it was accurate.