Back out into the hallway she went, ears kept perked up, eyes widened to draw in every bit of light they ideally could. Zhichao Tingfeng had already taken to putting out the lanterns and the candles, along with Cao Xin; the entire sect lay shrouded in darkness, naught but moonlight illuminating the grand hall's interior. That would have to do; it would have to be enough. Sound was less her friend than ever before, she knew... and ghosts didn't have a scent, at least not one that she was aware of. So, she'd need to just... think, she supposed.
Where could Hao Ning be?
The first instinct was for Xiao Fan to check back in the storehouse, to see if Hao Ning was gorging herself on pickled plums or something like that. It would have been fitting for the diminutive dame; also, it would've been more than a little predictable. Maybe that was the point, though? Perhaps Hao Ning was _trying_ to be predictable, just predictable enough to give Xiao Fan all the breadcrumbs necessary to find her straight away.
It was possible, sure... A good way to help the both of them have a little fun, that also allowed Xiao Fan to stay on her toes. She'd heard plenty of stories about the martial masters of those distant mountain schools, of course - tales of newly-accepted youths, still wide-eyed and bushy-tailed, who are given games to play by their new sifus. Later, of course, they find out that the games were training in disguise: hunting pheasants trains one's sense of sight, hearing, and skill with a bow... Hopping onto stones in the river or pond exercises one's agility...
And so on, and so forth, until the protagonists of the stories became great warriors through what they had only assumed to be mere play. She would be lying if she tried to deny that she had a soft spot for such things... The concept of children taken in as babes, their parents unable or unwilling to care for them, then being molded into the greatest warriors ever blessed by heaven? It resonated with her, a lot. It resonated her, perhaps, too strongly to focus on the game afoot right now.
Instead, she thought of her mother and father - they had passed around her sixteenth birthday, just a few months after, but that was a blessing now that they had avoided seeing the fate of Er Xin. And more than that, they weren't, and had never been, her parents by blood; they had raised her by choice. It was a debt she never felt she would be able to repay them for.
She thought of her dreamlike youth, in those days of honey-coated yore, back in the fields of Er Xin. Her mother told her very early in life that she was adopted; she hadn't wanted Xiao Fan to grow up assuming anything untrue, and wanted her to know that she was loved, not simply tolerated due to familial ties. Xiao Fan's original parents had been travelers: a southern dignitary, and one of his concubines. He hadn't the time to deal with raising her child, and she wasn't of such standing to stop him from abandoning it; and so, Xiao Fan was taken in by a local couple.
She felt some of that ice on her steaming heart begin to reform, the surface of the hot springs freezing over slowly but thickly. Now was hardly the time for a reverie... She needed to find Hao Ning. She needed to play this little game, to improve her perception and skill at both hiding and seeking. She needed to do what her sifu demanded of her, if only for her own benefit; she still felt a glimmer of amusement that they were playing hide-and-seek, but wouldn't stoop to address it.
So, then, off to the storehouse. She stalked down the darkened hall, reaching the portal to the outside; her hands were careful and precise, going to ever-so-slowly open it up, feeling the gentle rush of the wind as it swept in. She stepped outside into the wind, scanning the remnants of the Tian Lei sect like a cat searching for a mouse. There wasn't anything to see, at first - at least, nothing unusual. All she could lay her eyes upon was already known to her: the storehouse, the bunkhouse, a few other small buildings she was used to seeing but hadn't been inside, and the scattered ruins of others.
That was that, then. Hao Ning wasn't going to be giving her any more hints, it seemed... or at least, no more hints for now. That was fine, Xiao Fan thought; she was more than capable of finding her younger senior sister without any help. The wind, however, was new - it hadn't been windy when she had crawled from the pond, and certainly not windy to this degree. A constant breeze blew in from the east, through the trees and around the stones, making the red-clad revenant's hair waver and stream like a river of ink.
Bare, pallid feet tread silently towards the storehouse. Xiao Fan put everything she could into listening, trying to catch any possible snippet of Hao Ning on the steadily increasing winds. Like before, in the grand hall, she gathered her strength and sent those tendrils of qi coursing through her body - her nose was deadened back to a barely-functional state, while her ears came alive and nearly deafened her with the sudden flow of sound.
Xiao Fan doubled over, not from pain, but out of instinct. Many human instinct were slow to truly die, of course - even without feeling the pain of the sudden boom of sound from the wind alone, she couldn't help but hunch down in imagined agony. It took her a few seconds to realize that her ears and head didn't ache, as they normally would have; they were sensitive, sure, but only to their purpose, not extant senses like touch.
Once the expected misery wasn't inflicted, and she processed that it wasn't going to come, she straightened her stance. Thankful that no one was around to see such a shameful display, she hurried to press her ear to the wall of the storehouse, trying to cut through the sound of the wind to get at any sounds within. All around her, she could hear nature, and pick it apart: the rustle of the leaves on distant trees; the cricket on the other side of the sect, singing its lonely song; even the feathers of a bird as they caught and flapped in the growing gale.
No Hao Ning, though. Nothing so much as a giggle, or the brushing or flapping of robes. She could hear Zhichao Tingfeng breathing softly in the bunkhouse... and Cao Xin's snoring, gentle though present. She could hear her own hair whipping about as the wind picked up even more, setting all the grasses and leaves rustling with its force.
And then, distant-but-not, a soft hum - a song, taunting and light, hummed just below a woman's breath. It was barely audible, even with every bit of focus Xiao Fan could pour into her senses being put forth, but it was enough to give her some information. Wherever Hao Ning was, she was high up. On top of something, most likely - and so, there were two options, Xiao Fan could think of at first: the tall, rocky crag which rose above the pond, or the height of the grand hall itself.
Her head snapped around even as she drew the roots back into her core, ears deadening. She could still hear, of course, but with nowhere near the acuity they had been mere seconds ago. It had been... a lot for her mind to process, to be quite honest, so she was hesitant to put such an effort towards her vision. It was daunting to consider seeing in such a way as she had heard, of course - to see everything, as she felt she had heard everything. So, to hell with it, she would go without for now.
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Her gaze looked up towards the apex of the grand hall: the multi-tiered roof of the building, all shingled rooves and plastered walls, ended in a curious way. The peak of it, a tiny cube not even large enough to be a single room, was capped by a long bronze spindle formed into a strange, flowing shape. It would have been a rather pretty addition, Xiao Fan imagined, if she also didn't get the feeling that there was a reason for its design. Feng shui, perhaps? She had never really understood feng shui.
Once, she had convinced a supposed feng shui master who was passing through Er Xin to take a look at her home. Once he was done rearranging everything, it was practically unrecognizable - pots and pans had been flipped and placed in odd places, the bed had been shifted to a completely different corner of the home and placed in an odd facing, and even the knives had been rearranged. But, she had to admit, her sleep was better - not to mention other things.
That brought a smug grin to her lips, the ice not having fully covered her heart yet. Memories of Zhang Daiyu always seemed to bypass that partition that she felt from her emotions, once the frost started to set in... And memories of their love, even more so. Even more reason for Xiao Fan to get her ass in gear and find her woman, wasn't it?
That gave her the kick in the ass she needed to get moving, heading to the foot of the grand hall, nearly right back where she had started. Xiao Fan looked up at the shingles of the first roof, hanging to slow as to be tantalizingly close. Surely, she couldn't just... Hop up and grab them, could she? What if she could? She tangled with that thought for a few seconds, before again, the humming came through - louder now, surely, given that she could hear it even without focusing on the sound. And it came from above, as expected - and anticipated.
She'd never know if she didn't try. Up she reached, and up she jumped. Her fingertips brushed the shingles, just enough to goad her into another try, and this time she nearly got the tips past their ridge to grip with the first knuckle on each. It wasn't enough, though... Just barely not enough, agonizingly not good enough. She knew what she had to do, of course; the question was, did she want to? Of course she did, she figured... She'd never get up there without it, and if she still thought of this all as a training exercise, it was training her in its own way.
Down came the spindles of qi from her centre, running jagged pathways through the dead veins of her legs, waking them up and setting their blood to flow once again. It was invigorating, she had to admit - feeling some part of her live again, if only for a moment, the temporary virility of life anew sprouting some confidence within her. She squatted down as far as she could go, readying herself like a frog to jump, or a tiger to pounce. It was now or never - if this didn't work, she'd have to find a ladder or something. Surely there was a ladder here.
But as she lifted herself, legs striking out with the force of a lightning bolt, she knew at once that it was unnecessary. A ladder wouldn't be her key to victory - because, as she jumped, she flew so very high that her midsection met even with the tips of the shingles. A six foot leap, at least, she thought... Six feet straight up, and with an effortlessness that made it feel nearly natural to get such height. If she had been in a more excitable mood, she figured she may have even been proud of it.
No such pride rose up within her; instead, her arms slammed down, taking a strong grip of the shingles' edge. She leaned forth, folding at the middle; her chest and face pressed to the roof, cold body upon cold slabs, as much weight as she could give being thrown forth to keep herself there. Waiting for a fall that never came, she closed her eyes and drew in a deep breath - and when the aforementioned fall never came to fruition, she fumbled to roll onto the roof proper.
The winds had picked up to gale force now; the moon was barely a blot in the sky, the entire world seeming as dark and foreboding as a crypt. Qi was recalled from now unimportant legs, deadening her again; it was fine, she wouldn't need to make such a large jump again to get to the top of the hall. Xiao Fan pushed herself to a stand, brushing off her cheongsam from all the dust that had accumulated simply from her rolling around on the shingles. Once she was standing, then, she cast her gaze back up to the highest roof.
That strange spindle-thing had begin to shift in the wind, ever so slightly - Xiao Fan figured that maybe it was just attached improperly, and was being caught by the storm's force. Near the bottom of the bronze decoration, she saw something - just a hint of movement, though in the darkness, it was hard to tell exactly what it was. She knew in her heart, though, exactly what it had been: Hao Ning.
She grinned again, this time with grim satisfaction. Oh, so this is where the little ghost had been hiding, was it? Xiao Fan said a silent thanks to the heavens that her spiritual sifu hadn't run off to the top of the waterfall crag... that would have been even more troublesome to clamber her way up, especially in this wind. This was much more manageable. She stepped as slowly as was feasible as she crept towards the second roof, trying not to alert Hao Ning to her presence - thankfully, the roar of the wind was more than enough to muffle her footsteps.
The second roof was cleared, and then the third. One more left. Xiao Fan stopped for a moment, considering how to approach - she wanted to leap out and yell, to spook her senior sister a little bit. It felt like her duty, as the older sister, to bother her younger sibling when at all possible. Giving her a little bit of a fright was perfectly aligned with that sort of thinking. As she pondered how best to do so, she looked up at the sky, those black clouds as impenetrably dark as the depths of a deep lake. And then... the lightning began.
Bolts flashed across the sky in haphazard design, arcing and flaring, the fractured streaks of a shattered vase. One after the other, shedding light upon the entire world in pockets of blistering luminance; Xiao Fan realized how far up she truly was, then, gazing out above the treetops to view the woodland around. She wondered if she could've seen Xinmeijin from here.
And then, a new lightning bolt struck - and its searing tip connected with the bizarre metallic thing on the roof, only a few feet away from Xiao Fan at this point. The sound of it was enough to produce a shockwave, nearly throwing Xiao Fan from the rooftop; the spindle itself glowed red-hot now, and as it spun, Xiao Fan realized what it was. While it had seemed as nothing before, in the darkness... The glow revealed the image of a storm cloud, with a dragon descending from it.