Sky Pride

Chapter 27- Fragments of You

Tian played a lonely flute, peering up at the mystic sky through the hole in the mountain. He tried to harmonize with the moans and screams Heavenly Demon occasionally made. It was a bit morbid, but it had been two weeks already, and not much had happened. The first few days of listening to Heavenly Demon suffering were hard, but his mind eventually convinced his heart that the pain was a good pain, a suffering necessary for growth. His own bodily reformations were anything but painless, and they had been immensely good for him. He got used to the noise. He also got used to the absence of attacks.

The expected wave of bandits, investigating ancients and maddened bands of heretics failed to materialize. They did get the occasional shower of worms, and semi-regularly clouds of crackling noise and dust descended, but they were all handily resolved by the formation. Tian and Liren wound up taking turns to mind things. As expected, cultivation here was interesting. The mountain favored earth, strongly, which didn’t do much for either of them, but the strange starry sky and all its chaotic qi, suffused as it was with shen, was a treasure all on its own.

Qi was naturally gaseous. It was energetic air, as the daoists understood it. One of the main objects of Heavenly Realm cultivation was to fill up one’s energy body with as much energetic air as possible, while also searching for the way to break through to the Human Realm. However, that raised a key issue. What did it mean to “fill the energy body with qi?” “Fill” didn’t deal with the question of density. Nor did it address the question of intensity. Not all qi carried the same energy or force to it.

Tian’s cultivation arts dealt with this issue in radically different ways. While the Darknorth Sea Spell did do some filtering and generally drew in water qi, it prioritized quantity and compatibility over everything. Density and intensity were nice, but when you had enough qi to qualify as a regional weather event, who cares? Conversely, the Sky Treading Art was extremely picky about the qi used, requiring them to build their internal sky one little piece at a time. Both the literal section of the sky, and the qi of various times of day were layered over each other. It was dense, and on some level it was nurturing their shen, but there wasn’t nearly as much of it as there was with the Darknorth Sea Art.

Neither really dealt with how energetic that qi was. Liren had confided in Tian that the Ten Sun Godslaying Body did put a great deal of emphasis on energy intensity, which is why it was so picky about yang treasures. She didn’t just gather fire qi, she refined it, heated it inside of her, using new qi to enrich the old and exhaling the dregs.

She theorized that the energy intensity was why her body had transformed so much- the physical vessel needed to be strong enough to support the energy body attached to it, and her energy body was beyond explosive. And the intensity doubled with every new sun that she formed. Get the balance right, and she was a war goddess. Get the balance wrong…

Tian’s sleep was rough for a few days after that, but was able to put it out of his mind eventually. It had come back with a vengeance since coming to this hidden realm. The chaotic qi might be hard to cultivate with, but that stinging feeling it made striking their skin was just proof of how energetic it was. Each addition to their energy body was a struggle, but what made it in was potent. Tian’s Darknorth Sea Spell churned like a whirlpool, drawing in the starry, chaotic qi and filtering as much water qi as he could from it.

He could feel that what he was drawing in wasn’t just water qi, but he still couldn’t quite figure out how one ‘accumulated’ shen, and Grandpa wouldn’t explain it. He just insisted that everything was fine, and Tian should gobble up every bite of qi he could. It was taxing, however beneficial it was, so he made a point of resting, making tea and playing his flute. Liren painted on her time off, or worked on her secret project. Which led, more or less directly, to Tian looking up at the light streaked dim-grey of the sky and trying to express what he was seeing with the music of his flute.

It wasn’t going well.

“Zihao, if you don’t cease that, that, that…” Liren struggled for an appropriate word and landed on “Caterwauling, I shall be entirely responsible for my actions. But you will be the one who suffers for them.”

“You simply cannot appreciate music.”

“I appreciate it, which is why I can’t stand to see you bullying it that way. You can’t make that kind of mouth-crime and call it music. You just can’t.” She shook her head firmly, then pointed to the wall of the mountain. “Have you seen the little wolf spirit? It ran off hours ago, and isn’t coming back. Because of you.”

Tian could actually see the wolf spirit was deep inside the ground below them, apparently having a good snooze with his paws over his ears, but wasn’t going to admit it. “He, too, doesn’t appreciate music. I’m trying to express the reality of this… strange sky. With music. Because I’m pretty sure I can’t do it with words. Do your eyes start to ache if you look at the sky here for too long?”

“Yes. Oh, hang on, we have a new wave coming in.”

A shower of long, biting worms fell on the array, and were promptly dissolved. Liren flicked her wand to clear the blockages as Tian watched. Not that there was much to see. He looked back up at the sky, then jolted upright.

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“Something’s coming!”

Liren barely had time to look up before a new shape raced down and struck the array hard enough to make Tian race to his position, and put a nervous hand over the prepared spirit stones. The formation was holding, but the burn rate had shot up, the traceries of light struggling mightily to break down whatever had hit it. Tian did what he could, clearing any blockages that formed, and gently nudging more energy towards the intruder without overloading the formation.

“Is that a sword?” He asked

“No. But it looks like one.” Liren kept her eyes fixed on the array, the tip of her wand twitching, trying to anticipate problems. “I keep thinking there should be something more we can do to help the array.” Tian could see the tendons on the back of her hands flex. “I hate being so passive.”

“If I think of something, I’ll say something. What is that thi- oh!”

The formation finally made the sword-thing crack, then shatter, then the fragments were ground down and funneled into the pit with Heavenly Demon. The screams picked up again. It seems the fragments weren’t purely a benefit. There was a price to be paid in pain.

“Those fragments looked a lot bigger this time.” Tian stroked his chin. Still no sign of a beard, but perhaps one day. On the plus side, he’d never needed to learn how to shave. One less thing to worry about.

“I’m still not understanding- fragments of what, exactly? I get that you can form qi into a stable-ish form and use it to do things away from your body, but this is very much not qi in a stable form. It’s qi mixed up with what we are guessing is shen, broken into less-stable bits and dumped into the… the…”

“Heavenly Demon Furnace?”

She ran her hand through her hair. “I guess. I keep coming back to this idea of ‘sticky.’ Qi isn’t sticky, you have to kind of force it together. Vital energy is very sticky, it doesn’t want to leave the body at all, and even the guys who learn sword controlling arts at Level Nine aren’t exactly impressive. At least, I was never that impressed.”

“I’ll admit I thought it was just ‘darts with extra steps’ even then.” Tian agreed.

“Right. If you want to throw something, throw a spear like a normal person. Anyway, shen. The ‘divine thought’ which is different from normal thoughts somehow. Can they be sticky? Are they gluing together the qi and that's what’s hitting the array?”

“Related, much more interesting thought- if shen is a sort of divine thought, a kind of special brainpower that you accumulate like vital energy or qi, that means it’s a thought someone had.” Tian paused and thought through what he was trying to say and rephrased. “It’s not like qi which is in everything and, sort of is everything. It’s a thought, and people have thoughts. The sunlight doesn’t have thoughts, or the wind, or water.”

They exchanged a long look.

“You sure about that?” Liren asked.

“Not as much now as when I said it, for some reason.” Tian looked up. “More incoming. One of those clouds of noise, I think.” Tian observed the strange thing drifting down the long hole. They never fell very fast and had an amorphous shape, so they just called them clouds. As threats to the array went, they were only modestly dangerous.

“What kind of thought do you think that is?” Liren asked.

“A confused one. No, I’m not trying to be funny, look at it. How often have you just felt trapped in a fog of noise and been lost?”

“Almost never, at least, not since I started cultivating my body refining art.”

“Huh. Score one for yang qi, I guess.” Tian muttered. “Well, take it from me. That is what it feels like when you are overwhelmed and there is just too much going on and you know you need to do something but doing anything seems impossible because you are sure whatever you do will definitely be the wrong thing and you really really don’t want to do the wrong thing but you have to do something and you aren’t doing anything you are just standing there frozen and you have to do something right now but -”

“Breathe! Breathe! I get it.”

“You see what I mean.”

“I do when you put it like that. Do you feel that way often?” Liren looked worried.

“Not often. Not anymore. Not never though. I sometimes wonder what precise combination of unbalanced organs makes you both electrified with stress, your body flooding with nervous energy, but you are still paralyzed. On a different but surprisingly related topic, if the clouds are confusion and anxiety, what are the worms?”

Liren threw her hands up in the air. Tian pressed on.

“And the sword-shaped qi-thought-thing. Is it a thought that is cutting and pointed like a sword? A thought about a sword? A thought about swords in general or a specific sword?”

“Oh, you aren’t going nearly deep enough. We are fixating on the word ‘thought’ but what about ‘memory?’ Isn’t a memory a kind of thought? If these aren’t random blobs of energy, what if they are the memories of some…” Liren’s voice trailed off. She and Tian, by silent agreement, didn’t make eye contact for a few seconds while they collected themselves.

“I mean, it’s possible. I don’t know how, but it is possible.” Tian tried to sound reasonable.

“He would have been miles beyond the Imperfect Human Realm, so we can safely assume his shen was a mountain to anyone in the Monastery’s grain of sand. We have no way of knowing how something at that level behaves when a breakthrough goes dramatically wrong.” Liren also did her best to sound reasonable and serious. She didn’t do much better than Tian.

“And why do the thoughts linger here, and not out in the… wasteland… which is full of chaotic qi that you thought felt like desolation and grief…” Tian’s voice trailed off.

Burning Heaven stirred, looking up from her cultivation and speaking for the first time in days. “It’s like seeing a leaf, then another leaf, then another leaf, and thinking maybe there is one big thing that all these leaves are attached to, but not knowing that trees exist let alone a whole forest. And for what it’s worth, Master said a single thought could change the world. I thought he was just trying to sound profound, but what if he was finally persuaded to just speak plainly?”