Chapter 46- What It Means To Burn

The bone was quite pretty. Tian dug out a few more and gave them a quick polish, and they were all more or less the same- dense, a creamy white color more like stone than bone, and when the light caught them right, filled with a brilliant iridescence. Like rainbows trapped in jade.

Tian hadn’t seen much jade, but he had pestered Brother Long to show him a couple of pieces after the cultured young man referred to a sister as a “Jade Beauty.” He sputtered pretty impressively when Tian asked him if he preferred green women. It turned out jade came in white varieties too, and this bone looked like that white jade.

“I wonder if it’s a sculpture of some kind. Not a real skeleton I mean.” Tian softly rubbed a femur clean. It was something to do with his hands while the medicine worked.

No, this is real bone. Depending on the cultivation method, this is something that can happen. The whole body transforms and becomes more intensely spiritual. I guarantee that if you looked at your own bones now, they would strike you as unusually firm and beautiful.

“Kind of creepy to think about.”

Meh. Some people work very hard for jade bones, you know.

“Really?”

Oh yes. There are whole body cultivation arts for it. I bet you this person was strong as hell when they were alive. I kind of wonder if the Six Turns Cavern was a cultivation cave they sealed up. It’s not strange for old cultivators to die during a final meditation seclusion.

“Hmm. I think it’s getting heavier.”

The bone?

“Yes. Or, wait-” Tian slowly waved the bone around. “It’s not very strong, but it seems to be pointing back towards where I found it.”

Interesting. Check if the other bones are doing it.

They were. Tian switched to polishing the skull. Purely out of curiosity. There weren’t any hidden carvings on it, which felt a little anticlimactic. It was still quite beautiful.

Check the ring.

It too wanted to go back to where he found it. It wasn’t a strong pull, but he could tell it was building.

“Things inside a storage ring can’t break out on their own, right?”

Depends on the type of storage ring, depends on the thing affecting it. But a good rule of thumb is to bet on higher realm stuff stomping all over the common sense of lower realms.

“So maybe.”

A non-zero possibility that as time goes on those bones jump straight out of your storage ring and go back where you found them, yes.

“Looks like there is a time limit for solving this mystery. I’m sure not going back into the flames.”

Fair.

Tian looked around the chamber. No sign of the entrance to the Null Cavern. No sudden burst of insight from watching the vermilion bird flutter around. He could feel the flames trying to crank him up into a state of manic joy, but the overwhelming pain tamped that down effectively.

“I really have no idea what I am supposed to do here.”

Hmm. Fire is a tough one for you. It’s restrained by water, and consumes wood. So it’s fair to say it’s the element you are most antagonistic towards. When considering your body makeup I mean. And while you are philosophically more yin, there is more fire and yang in you than you give yourself credit for.

“There really isn’t.”

Tian, one of the components of fire qi is kindness. Not a single goddamn person told you to sit with the sick and the dying. You just remembered being sick and in pain and lonely, and decided to do it all on your own. Unrelated to your current situation, but if I haven’t told you recently, I am furiously proud of you. As is Brother Fu, Brother Su, all your brothers and sisters from the West Town Outer Court are proud of you. It’s a bit of a cliche, but you really do bring them enormous face.

Tian was a bit messed up for a minute. When he composed himself, he said “That doesn’t tell me what to do next.”

No, because this is a problem for you to solve. Though if you think about how I usually operate, something might occur to you.”

Tian was a young daoist. The five elements and the study of yin and yang were every day things to him. He might be lost saddling a horse or building a bench, but those fundamental forces of the universe had at least a little familiarity to them. So he stood on his stalagmite, and thought.

“Fire- overwhelmingly yang, associated with… all kinds of things. None of which help me, because I’m stuck up here and this isn’t providing me with any kind of insight or helping me crack this storage ring.”

It was hard to be any kind of daoist sage when you were on fire not too long ago, and the medicine is still rushing around inside of you. Actually…

“Hey Grandpa? Can I run the Hell Suppressing Art without running Advent of Spring at the same time?”

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Yes, of course you can. You will just run into a qi deficit sooner rather than later.

“Right, but I was thinking, if I have all this fire qi in me and medicinal qi, one yang and the other yin…”

Oh. Interesting. Yes, by all means, give it a try.

Tian drove his attention and vital energy to the mysterious statue floating in his lower dantian. He tried to drag fire and medicinal qi towards it, with little success. Feeling helpless, he used his own vital energy to activate it. Once again, he had the sensation of a wheel spinning. He had come to think of it like a waterwheel turning with vital energy, the stones made of prayers grinding down curses and poisons, turning them into his strength.

The result was anticlimactic. It wasn’t so much that it didn’t work, it was that it did with absolutely no drama. The rampant qi was steadily pulled from his body and meridians, tamed and poured back into his flesh. His healing accelerated, and the fire qi seemed to vanish entirely. Which couldn’t be right, but it was hard to see what exactly had happened.