Chapter 356: 2
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Threads 356-Disruption 2
Embark on a quest to the commencement at n0v#lbin★
Zheng Fu wandered out of the room, loudly citing the need to stretch his legs. She scanned the room. Meng Deming was frowning after him, and so was Dzintara. He'd not been particularly quiet about his departure.
"There’s my cover," Ling Qi muttered. She quietly backed from the table. Meng Dan caught her eye in question, but she shook her head. Later. His uncle glanced between them and whispered something to the younger Meng. She didn't stop to wonder. Leaving through a door at the rear of the hall, she turned a corner and left the waking world.
The liminal of the embassy valley was a wild current like a river in the worst throes of spring. Behind her was a riot of clashing color and sound, a rising glacial cliff somehow fused to a proud castle wall, both things and neither at once. Ice floes cracked and crumbled along the edges and chunks of roadspan floated in the chaotic soup of mixed imagery that was this place, all under a sky filled with the dull red embers of a burning web that enclosed the sky in the shadow of a bleeding, broken mountain. Was it any wonder that things could slip the notice of watchers here with so much noise here?
"Well, we knew this was gonna be rough." Sixiang slapped a hand down on her shoulder as they were carried down a pouring fall of figments like frothing waters shot through with every color in the world and out. "Ah, there's the signal!"
Ling Qi followed their pointed finger and snapped her hand out, grasping the thread of glimmering reflective silver that flashed under her eyes. It felt like a taut musical string, stretched to near snapping and thrumming with vibration.
"Nature of the threat?" she asked as the thread in her hand snapped back towards its source, sending the chaos around her into a jumbled blur.
"Liminal object does not appear to be a conscious creature. Appears artificial. Traveling toward the target zone. Is capable of maneuver in response to interdiction. May be technique delivery mechanism."
She couldn't fault Jin Tae for being short with her here. She sent back understanding.
"Correction: multiple objects. Split in response to interference. Seeking bypass of my reflection arrays."
Well, wasn't that wonderful. Was Zheng Fu moving?
"On my way to the second site, You guys have made a right mess around here, ya know?"
His voice echoed and warped strangely, lowering to an insect’s buzz and rising to a lion’s roar alternatively, but she understood it well enough. Would he arrive soon?
"Yeah, be just a second or two behind, Lady Icicle."
"If you have the spare attention to banter, you can move more quickly."
She pulled herself, propelling through the chaotic liminal landscape toward a knot of small dreams and thoughts, low cultivators reflected through the dream in a place where ice and stone met on a floating berg of earth and stone, a point of solidity in the chaotic soup. She heard a low whine in the air and saw lights flashing. Lights like darting fish in the deep careened through the air, trailing ripples of distorted space.
Flitting about outside were... things. Even looking directly at them, Ling Qi had trouble making out details. Masses of qi seemed to flip from one alignment to the next every time she blinked. They were like motes pulled directly from the unformed liminal, and yet holding together in a way that chaotic soup could not. They flitted to and fro like huge ungainly insects, shooting down toward the collections of muddled thought that were the reflections of the workers here, only to bounce immediately in the opposite direction, their momentum reversed and reflected by a glinting mirror.
One shot away into the chaos, a second rebounded hard with a crack, and a third bobbed and juked crazily, jetting past the spinning perimeter of lights.
Ling Qi shot toward it. Her hand outstretched, ready to snatch it into her emptied storage ring with her thieving technique.
"Understood. Turning over defense and investigation to you."
Around her, Jin Tae’s circling mirror constructs in the air reversed their spin, rotated twice, and shot off into the chaotic sky.
Ling Qi instructed.
Outside, this conversation would have been too long, a waste of time that she couldn't afford. Here, where she didn't have to bother moving her lips or making sounds, the whole exchange was less than an eyeblink.
She turned to the churning column of bubbles that was the man while the halo of multihued light radiating from her sharpened and thickened, taking definition like radial rays of light spotted with eyes. Her gaze swept over the others again. No immediate reaction. So there was only one person that had been affected here, the man from the mountain accident.
She gathered her focus, her will around her fingertips where the last of the dissolving sludge was vanishing. Thief of Winds. Thief of Names. This was her cultivation, and when she mastered her arts...
There would be no secret or treasure beyond her reach
She let her manifestation in the dream dissolve, becoming only will and self ensconced against the corrosive energies of the liminal. Her dissolving hand touched the outer edge of the roiling bubbles, and she stepped into.the man's reflected thoughts.
She was not Shu Yue, and she never could be. She couldn't become another person so easily. But she could see them, know them, and understand them.
This man, his name was Chen Gang, and he was a road formations foreman. An expert in standardized construction, he had been working under the Wang clan for close to a hundred years. He hoped to achieve the third realm someday, but he saved the majority of his spirit stones in the hope that he would be able to provide his three sons an education at the Blue Mountain Sect without needing to rely on the draft scholarship. One had already gone off, the boy aiming to be a soldier anyway, though he suspected the foolish boy was trying to help both his father and brothers with how high the cost was. The second...
Ling Qi pushed her way out of the rush of information. What manifested before her eyes was a simple workshop, a place filled with tools and pages of notes. |Blueprints hung upon the walls, and vehicle parts were suspended from the ceiling.
She peered at the ghosts manning the tables, transparent shades of human silhouette shimmering like the skin of bubbles. She understood instinctively that these were the man's sense of self and active thoughts, reflected and conceptualized by her own perceptions.
She drifted like smoke beneath the worktables below their notice. They couldn't hurt her, but even noticing her here would certainly hurt him. Shu Yue had explained that much in training her in this art. She could easily break a person's mind by disrupting things in their “world.” It was different for third realm cultivators or those higher still, whose mind and self-conception could potentially crush any disruption, like her, but low realms and mortals could not endure such violent intrusions into themselves so easily.
Flowing through the space, she peered at everything, looking for irregularity. She saw several of the thought silhouettes stopped in place, some leaning on walls, others hunched over the tables. These must be signs of the agitation and stress from her earlier, cruder theft of the agent that had tried to hatch in him.
Not what she was looking for.
The pages and the parts were scattered on the tables. Normal memories, she skimmed them as briefly as possible. Many were about actual formation specifications, the details of his current duty. She let them slip from her memory immediately and deliberately.
Another lesson from Shu Yue. Taking too many of another's thoughts into her head and keeping them there would end her as surely as letting the energies of the liminal flood into herself unchecked. She didn't let herself dwell too long on the dregs of Huisheng still lurking in her mind.
What she sought to master was not trivial. Most who sought these sorts of arts overreached, stole too greedily, and in doing so, emptied themselves out.
Her eyes caught on a shade headed out of the workshop. It held in its insubstantial arms what appeared to her eyes as a box of scrap, immediate short-term memories being discarded rather than made long term.
Then she caught a whiff of acrid rot and saw something twitch.
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Threads 356-Disruption 2
Embark on a quest to the commencement at n0v#lbin★
Zheng Fu wandered out of the room, loudly citing the need to stretch his legs. She scanned the room. Meng Deming was frowning after him, and so was Dzintara. He'd not been particularly quiet about his departure.
"There’s my cover," Ling Qi muttered. She quietly backed from the table. Meng Dan caught her eye in question, but she shook her head. Later. His uncle glanced between them and whispered something to the younger Meng. She didn't stop to wonder. Leaving through a door at the rear of the hall, she turned a corner and left the waking world.
The liminal of the embassy valley was a wild current like a river in the worst throes of spring. Behind her was a riot of clashing color and sound, a rising glacial cliff somehow fused to a proud castle wall, both things and neither at once. Ice floes cracked and crumbled along the edges and chunks of roadspan floated in the chaotic soup of mixed imagery that was this place, all under a sky filled with the dull red embers of a burning web that enclosed the sky in the shadow of a bleeding, broken mountain. Was it any wonder that things could slip the notice of watchers here with so much noise here?
"Well, we knew this was gonna be rough." Sixiang slapped a hand down on her shoulder as they were carried down a pouring fall of figments like frothing waters shot through with every color in the world and out. "Ah, there's the signal!"
Ling Qi followed their pointed finger and snapped her hand out, grasping the thread of glimmering reflective silver that flashed under her eyes. It felt like a taut musical string, stretched to near snapping and thrumming with vibration.
"Nature of the threat?" she asked as the thread in her hand snapped back towards its source, sending the chaos around her into a jumbled blur.
"Liminal object does not appear to be a conscious creature. Appears artificial. Traveling toward the target zone. Is capable of maneuver in response to interdiction. May be technique delivery mechanism."
She couldn't fault Jin Tae for being short with her here. She sent back understanding.
"Correction: multiple objects. Split in response to interference. Seeking bypass of my reflection arrays."
Well, wasn't that wonderful. Was Zheng Fu moving?
"On my way to the second site, You guys have made a right mess around here, ya know?"
His voice echoed and warped strangely, lowering to an insect’s buzz and rising to a lion’s roar alternatively, but she understood it well enough. Would he arrive soon?
"Yeah, be just a second or two behind, Lady Icicle."
"If you have the spare attention to banter, you can move more quickly."
She pulled herself, propelling through the chaotic liminal landscape toward a knot of small dreams and thoughts, low cultivators reflected through the dream in a place where ice and stone met on a floating berg of earth and stone, a point of solidity in the chaotic soup. She heard a low whine in the air and saw lights flashing. Lights like darting fish in the deep careened through the air, trailing ripples of distorted space.
Flitting about outside were... things. Even looking directly at them, Ling Qi had trouble making out details. Masses of qi seemed to flip from one alignment to the next every time she blinked. They were like motes pulled directly from the unformed liminal, and yet holding together in a way that chaotic soup could not. They flitted to and fro like huge ungainly insects, shooting down toward the collections of muddled thought that were the reflections of the workers here, only to bounce immediately in the opposite direction, their momentum reversed and reflected by a glinting mirror.
One shot away into the chaos, a second rebounded hard with a crack, and a third bobbed and juked crazily, jetting past the spinning perimeter of lights.
Ling Qi shot toward it. Her hand outstretched, ready to snatch it into her emptied storage ring with her thieving technique.
"Understood. Turning over defense and investigation to you."
Around her, Jin Tae’s circling mirror constructs in the air reversed their spin, rotated twice, and shot off into the chaotic sky.
Ling Qi instructed.
Outside, this conversation would have been too long, a waste of time that she couldn't afford. Here, where she didn't have to bother moving her lips or making sounds, the whole exchange was less than an eyeblink.
She turned to the churning column of bubbles that was the man while the halo of multihued light radiating from her sharpened and thickened, taking definition like radial rays of light spotted with eyes. Her gaze swept over the others again. No immediate reaction. So there was only one person that had been affected here, the man from the mountain accident.
She gathered her focus, her will around her fingertips where the last of the dissolving sludge was vanishing. Thief of Winds. Thief of Names. This was her cultivation, and when she mastered her arts...
There would be no secret or treasure beyond her reach
She let her manifestation in the dream dissolve, becoming only will and self ensconced against the corrosive energies of the liminal. Her dissolving hand touched the outer edge of the roiling bubbles, and she stepped into.the man's reflected thoughts.
She was not Shu Yue, and she never could be. She couldn't become another person so easily. But she could see them, know them, and understand them.
This man, his name was Chen Gang, and he was a road formations foreman. An expert in standardized construction, he had been working under the Wang clan for close to a hundred years. He hoped to achieve the third realm someday, but he saved the majority of his spirit stones in the hope that he would be able to provide his three sons an education at the Blue Mountain Sect without needing to rely on the draft scholarship. One had already gone off, the boy aiming to be a soldier anyway, though he suspected the foolish boy was trying to help both his father and brothers with how high the cost was. The second...
Ling Qi pushed her way out of the rush of information. What manifested before her eyes was a simple workshop, a place filled with tools and pages of notes. |Blueprints hung upon the walls, and vehicle parts were suspended from the ceiling.
She peered at the ghosts manning the tables, transparent shades of human silhouette shimmering like the skin of bubbles. She understood instinctively that these were the man's sense of self and active thoughts, reflected and conceptualized by her own perceptions.
She drifted like smoke beneath the worktables below their notice. They couldn't hurt her, but even noticing her here would certainly hurt him. Shu Yue had explained that much in training her in this art. She could easily break a person's mind by disrupting things in their “world.” It was different for third realm cultivators or those higher still, whose mind and self-conception could potentially crush any disruption, like her, but low realms and mortals could not endure such violent intrusions into themselves so easily.
Flowing through the space, she peered at everything, looking for irregularity. She saw several of the thought silhouettes stopped in place, some leaning on walls, others hunched over the tables. These must be signs of the agitation and stress from her earlier, cruder theft of the agent that had tried to hatch in him.
Not what she was looking for.
The pages and the parts were scattered on the tables. Normal memories, she skimmed them as briefly as possible. Many were about actual formation specifications, the details of his current duty. She let them slip from her memory immediately and deliberately.
Another lesson from Shu Yue. Taking too many of another's thoughts into her head and keeping them there would end her as surely as letting the energies of the liminal flood into herself unchecked. She didn't let herself dwell too long on the dregs of Huisheng still lurking in her mind.
What she sought to master was not trivial. Most who sought these sorts of arts overreached, stole too greedily, and in doing so, emptied themselves out.
Her eyes caught on a shade headed out of the workshop. It held in its insubstantial arms what appeared to her eyes as a box of scrap, immediate short-term memories being discarded rather than made long term.
Then she caught a whiff of acrid rot and saw something twitch.
Threads 356-Disruption 2 Embark on a quest to the commencement at n0v#lbinZheng Fu wandered out of the room, loudly citing the need to stretch his legs. She scanned the room. Meng Deming was frowning after him, and so was Dzintara. He'd not been particularly quiet about his departure. "There's my cover," Ling Qi muttered. She quietly backed from the table. Meng Dan caught her eye in question, but she shook her head. Later. His uncle glanced between them and whispered something to the younger Meng. She didn't stop to wonder. Leaving through a door at the rear of the hall, she turned a corner and left the waking world. The liminal of the embassy valley was a wild current like a river in the worst throes of spring. Behind her was a riot of clashing color and sound, a rising glacial cliff somehow fused to a proud castle wall, both things and neither at once. Ice floes cracked and crumbled along the edges and chunks of roadspan floated in the chaotic soup of mixed imagery that was this place, all under a sky filled with the dull red embers of a burning web that enclosed the sky in the shadow of a bleeding, broken mountain. Was it any wonder that things could slip the notice of watchers here with so much noise here? "Well, we knew this was gonna be rough." Sixiang slapped a hand down on her shoulder as they were carried down a pouring fall of figments like frothing waters shot through with every color in the world and out. "Ah, there's the signal!" Ling Qi followed their pointed finger and snapped her hand out, grasping the thread of glimmering reflective silver that flashed under her eyes. It felt like a taut musical string, stretched to near snapping and thrumming with vibration. "Nature of the threat?" she asked as the thread in her hand snapped back towards its source, sending the chaos around her into a jumbled blur. "Liminal object does not appear to be a conscious creature. Appears artificial. Traveling toward the target zone. Is capable of maneuver in response to interdiction. May be technique delivery mechanism." She couldn't fault Jin Tae for being short with her here. She sent back understanding. "Correction: multiple objects. Split in response to interference. Seeking bypass of my reflection arrays." Well, wasn't that wonderful. Was Zheng Fu moving? "On my way to the second site, You guys have made a right mess around here, ya know?" His voice echoed and warped strangely, lowering to an insect's buzz and rising to a lion's roar alternatively, but she understood it well enough. Would he arrive soon? "Yeah, be just a second or two behind, Lady Icicle." "If you have the spare attention to banter, you can move more quickly." She pulled herself, propelling through the chaotic liminal landscape toward a knot of small dreams and thoughts, low cultivators reflected through the dream in a place where ice and stone met on a floating berg of earth and stone, a point of solidity in the chaotic soup. She heard a low whine in the air and saw lights flashing. Lights like darting fish in the deep careened through the air, trailing ripples of distorted space. Flitting about outside were... things. Even looking directly at them, Ling Qi had trouble making out details. Masses of qi seemed to flip from one alignment to the next every time she blinked. They were like motes pulled directly from the unformed liminal, and yet holding together in a way that chaotic soup could not. They flitted to and fro like huge ungainly insects, shooting down toward the collections of muddled thought that were the reflections of the workers here, only to bounce immediately in the opposite direction, their momentum reversed and reflected by a glinting mirror. One shot away into the chaos, a second rebounded hard with a crack, and a third bobbed and juked crazily, jetting past the spinning perimeter of lights. Ling Qi shot toward it. Her hand outstretched, ready to snatch it into her emptied storage ring with her thieving technique. "Understood. Turning over defense and investigation to you." Around her, Jin Tae's circling mirror constructs in the air reversed their spin, rotated twice, and shot off into the chaotic sky. Ling Qi instructed. Outside, this conversation would have been too long, a waste of time that she couldn't afford. Here, where she didn't have to bother moving her lips or making sounds, the whole exchange was less than an eyeblink. She turned to the churning column of bubbles that was the man while the halo of multihued light radiating from her sharpened and thickened, taking definition like radial rays of light spotted with eyes. Her gaze swept over the others again. No immediate reaction. So there was only one person that had been affected here, the man from the mountain accident. She gathered her focus, her will around her fingertips where the last of the dissolving sludge was vanishing. Thief of Winds. Thief of Names. This was her cultivation, and when she mastered her arts... There would be no secret or treasure beyond her reach She let her manifestation in the dream dissolve, becoming only will and self ensconced against the corrosive energies of the liminal. Her dissolving hand touched the outer edge of the roiling bubbles, and she stepped into.the man's reflected thoughts. She was not Shu Yue, and she never could be. She couldn't become another person so easily. But she could see them, know them, and understand them. This man, his name was Chen Gang, and he was a road formations foreman. An expert in standardized construction, he had been working under the Wang clan for close to a hundred years. He hoped to achieve the third realm someday, but he saved the majority of his spirit stones in the hope that he would be able to provide his three sons an education at the Blue Mountain Sect without needing to rely on the draft scholarship. One had already gone off, the boy aiming to be a soldier anyway, though he suspected the foolish boy was trying to help both his father and brothers with how high the cost was. The second... Ling Qi pushed her way out of the rush of information. What manifested before her eyes was a simple workshop, a place filled with tools and pages of notes. |Blueprints hung upon the walls, and vehicle parts were suspended from the ceiling. She peered at the ghosts manning the tables, transparent shades of human silhouette shimmering like the skin of bubbles. She understood instinctively that these were the man's sense of self and active thoughts, reflected and conceptualized by her own perceptions. She drifted like smoke beneath the worktables below their notice. They couldn't hurt her, but even noticing her here would certainly hurt him. Shu Yue had explained that much in training her in this art. She could easily break a person's mind by disrupting things in their world. It was different for third realm cultivators or those higher still, whose mind and self-conception could potentially crush any disruption, like her, but low realms and mortals could not endure such violent intrusions into themselves so easily. Flowing through the space, she peered at everything, looking for irregularity. She saw several of the thought silhouettes stopped in place, some leaning on walls, others hunched over the tables. These must be signs of the agitation and stress from her earlier, cruder theft of the agent that had tried to hatch in him. Not what she was looking for. The pages and the parts were scattered on the tables. Normal memories, she skimmed them as briefly as possible. Many were about actual formation specifications, the details of his current duty. She let them slip from her memory immediately and deliberately. Another lesson from Shu Yue. Taking too many of another's thoughts into her head and keeping them there would end her as surely as letting the energies of the liminal flood into herself unchecked. She didn't let herself dwell too long on the dregs of Huisheng still lurking in her mind. What she sought to master was not trivial. Most who sought these sorts of arts overreached, stole too greedily, and in doing so, emptied themselves out. Her eyes caught on a shade headed out of the workshop. It held in its insubstantial arms what appeared to her eyes as a box of scrap, immediate short-term memories being discarded rather than made long term. Then she caught a whiff of acrid rot and saw something twitch.
