Hao Nera
Running a bandit clan is no easy task. It’s all squalling mouths to feed, planning heists and assaults, running from the law and from any sect that bothers to give a shit. Honestly, it’s about six headaches a day, with migraines for lunch and dinner and a side order of ulcers for each meal.
So Hao Nera didn’t bother.
The idea fell through quick. For as incredible as his own tremendous skills and talents may be, it’s damn near impossible to carry a whole clan on his shoulders. They’re wide, and great for holding onto in a more intimate setting, but he’s never been one for back-breaking labor. Well. Not his own back, anyways.
Now a spy organization? That’s way easier.
He still gets the side order of ulcers, but only once a week, tops!
With how easily he can slip in and out of a person’s perception, how thoroughly he can erase his presence, most of the people who join his group never even find out his name. They learn a symbol (a closed eye) and learn to track it, and if there’s something there, it means he wants something done.
Now the truly hard part was finding people smart enough to figure out what he’d want, but, more importantly, smart enough to figure out what would happen if they messed up.
And now his recruits have recruits! It’s almost like a pyramid, with each of his newfound “operatives” getting money and supplies traded between each other as payment, and recruiting two or three more people to the operation each. Risky? Sure! Time consuming? Absolutely. Does he still need to step in and invest or give clearer orders sometimes? Without a doubt.
But for the first time in his life, Hao Nera doesn’t feel like he might die at any hour of the day. In fact, looking at Qen Hou… he wonders if he might live a long, long time. Long enough to pick up the pieces if his current organization fails, and learn to make something better.
His partner is seated on a rocky hillside, cross-legged atop a boulder, staring out at the setting sun.
Hao Nera’s been busy. The weeks since they left the cottage and their little valley have been spent learning to hide from the perception of spirit beasts, or arrays, of all sorts of things, and he’s grown in the best way he prefers; through experience. Figuring out tricks and traps, techniques and all that.
Qen Hou is not his like him. Qen Hou… he breathes cultivation.
“How’s it going, peach-lips?” Hao Nera asks, tossing a pebble towards him.
The pebble turns liquid, and then into gas, and then back into liquid and stone on the other side of Qen Hou. He laughs softly.
“It might be better if I didn’t have someone throwing things at me while I’m meditating.”
“Eh, you know how I feel about that meditation stuff. All that sitting and thinking will only hurt that pretty head of yours. You need more going out, more getting experiences! I’m sure we can find some hidden patriarch to steal from, and I’ve always wanted to have sex while rolling on piles of coins.”
Qen Hou opens one eye, raising his brow. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you only ever thought of two things.”
Hao Nera makes a shocked face, gasping theatrically. “How dare you! I absolutely only think of two things!”
“Oh? And all those mortals you have getting paid in gold or those fancy arrays you’ve been playing with? I suppose you were only thinking of stealing and fucking then, too.”
“Well obviously. By learning to master arrays, I can better steal from whoever I so choose, and how better to find the best places to fuck in than by having a network of people smart enough to find good fucking-spots?”
“Even a monkey falls from trees, Nera. Someday you’ll find yourself with a jilted lover and it’ll break you like fine pottery.”
Hao Nera laughs, throwing his head back and making it as unnecessarily loud as possible. He crows to the setting sun, letting it hear his mirth and mockery.
“I’ll believe that the day you manage to walk again after I’m done with you,” he says with a wink.
“Oh? Then I’m afraid you’ll have to step up your training regime, comrade of mine. My Qi already eclipses yours, and I fear your struggle to overcompensate will become impossible soon.”
The fur-clad spy laughs, sitting up to lean back against the boulder Qen Hou is seated on. “I’m growing just fine, thank you very much. Not all of us can be monks pursuing enlightenment. Somebody’s gotta be there to slit purses and throats when it’s needed.”
Qen Hou sighs. “I know you’re developing just fine. To have a technique as advanced as yours at the beginning of Core Formation rather than the end is nothing to scoff at, especially not one you developed yourself. I’m just saying I’d feel a bit safer if you were… a little bit stronger.”
“Strength is for show, darling. You think I keep these muscles so I can carry boxes around?”
“Strength might be useful for when something happens, or someone finds you.”
Hao Nera shrugs. “I’m… working on some ideas. Can’t exactly spend all day chugging Qi like your stationary self. I don’t mind taking my own way if it means I can keep being my own beautiful self.”
Qen Hou smiles softly, shifting just a touch on his rock. “And that sense of self serves you well. I still think I’m more half-baked than you are when it comes to that. If you ever make it to Nascent Soul, you’ll create a beast, I’m sure of it.”
“And how’s your beast going?”
Qen Hou sighs. For the first time since the sun rose in the morning, he moves from his seat. The boulder warps around him, melting like magma or as if it’s in a forge, and he slides peacefully down to the ground. The earth he touches warps, melting into glass, evaporating into gas, and reforming back into itself as he walks.
He only deactivates his Domain when he approaches Hao Nera, close enough to lean down and sit on the ground beside him.
“Not well. I’m still… figuring out who I am. It’s a lot easier to figure out what I believe in than what I should actually be. There’s something there, still forming, but it’s not real yet.”
“Not like your bubble?”
He smiles, waving a hand in the air.
[Domain of Twisting Flames Around Faithful, Molten Worlds]. It’s a mouthful, but, well, that’s… what it is. Qen Hou waves a hand, and magnesium flame warps the world, so subtle it’s practically clear and invisible. His Domain extends- rather than a perfect sphere around himself, he pushes it out, shaping it to his will, so that the land he waves over is washed in his will. Earth rises like a liquid, transformed by Flame and concept, warping in on himself. It turns to wind, carried on air currents he generates through heat, and warping back into earth, in a simple orb that he leaves floating.
“It’s developing nicely. It’s… easier to feel what I know about the world than what I know about myself. I can feel the Dao, guiding things, and I can decide off of that. I think I’m already pretty close to Purple for my Flames, Orange, too, but the rest…”
“You know you lose me when you start talking color theory.”
He sighs. “I know. And it’s not like I understand it much either. But the closer I get, the realer it feels. Like… like there’s a curtain, and if I tilt my head just right, I can peek behind it to see how it all works, change it if I want. I can keep it on for almost a full day now, and it’s costing me less and less Qi as I refine it. I want to train and see if I can keep it on while asleep too.”
“Aww, but then you’ll turn me all melty when you try and crawl over to my side of the bed!”
Qen Hou gives him another raised eyebrow. “I sleep still as a stone, as anyone with proper self control should. You’re the one that crawls around like a tarantula in the night.”
Hao Nera shrugs. “What can I say, even asleep, I know what I like to get my hands on.” He flourishes one of those hands, a half dozen sealed letters appearing in it. “Speaking of getting my hands on things…”
“Oh! Raika and Li Shu?”
“The very same. Got their letter about hitting the fortress city, carried through the teleportation arrays faster than anything. Really need to get more people involved with those. Anyways, she’s got two for that cat-girl of hers, so I sent those along already, and cat-girl sent another one back, though I’m not sure she’ll get it before they hit the fourth. I’m good, but not “make a postage system in a post-apocalypse” good, so it’ll be quiet for a while.”
“Think we should still talk with Maen, then? Keep in touch?”
He shrugs. “I have been, but it might be good to work more actively. Spread faster through the second ring if I have someone with Qi I can work with over there, and again, might nab me access to some of those teleporters. I’ve only got, what, a fifth of the cities out there? Give it a year or two and I’ll have half the ring, never mind the little villages, and that’s when I’ll really get moving.”
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“You’ll have to have cultivated enough to sustain that amount of travel. And focus. And strength. And-”
“Here we go again.”
“It’s true!”
He groans so long and loud it turns into a weird kind of gargle. “Fiiiiiine. If we find a nice spot full of Qi, I’ll shove some elixirs up my ass and sit around for a while. But if we find spirit beasts first, I still say I need to spend time around them. The easier I learn to trick them, the easier I can trick anybody.”
Qen Hou shakes his head, laying it on Hao Nera’s shoulder. “I suppose that’s a decent compromise.”
Hao Nera snorts. “Would that you were born a woman with money,” he mumbles. “You’d make all those other prim little jade sharks dance for your pleasure.”
Qen Hou rolls his eyes, leaning against his paramour. “I doubt it. I can’t imagine anything more boring than court shenanigans. Cultivator politics are nightmare enough as it is.”
“Eh, same thing nowadays. Especially when it comes to that-a-ways.”
He points at the shadow blocking the sun.
The mountain view paints the world in the colors of forests, of stone fields, of lightly fallen snow. They look out at a world that stretches before them, the writhing of the sun sending beautiful rays across leaves and other mountaintops.
And at the far side of the horizon, blocking about a third of the sun’s light from this angle, is the first ring.
A pillar of stone, so tall and vast it has its own weather patterns. It stretches into a sky on a perfect cylinder of rock, making any other mountain seem like a hillside, stretching up so high that it looks like the top of it is amongst the stars.
“...yeah. And we’re diving in.”
Hao Nera grins, wide and toothy. “Ah, don’t be so worried. It’s only the most populated, surveilled, hard-to-hear-about place in the world, and we’re only going to its base. What could possibly go wrong, building a spy network with a bunch of traitors in the Emperor’s own shadow?”
Kaena
It’s all going perfectly wrong.
Taurus is very, very good at what he does. He’s an outright artist when it comes to playing with bureaucracy, putting puzzle pieces together, playing mind games with systems designed to know and see everything. But… with how he’s pushing himself, and worse, how he’s not as good at reading people as he thinks, he needs help. Here and there. He needs Kaena, in a way that no one else really does. And he has never asked anything of them that they weren’t willing to offer, which is more than can be said for almost anyone in their life.
Taurus is an exceptional talent when it comes to manipulating systems. Kaena is an exceptional talent when it comes to manipulating people.
And it’s all going perfectly wrong.
News of the fall of Fortress City #180 spread quickly. While not unheard of, it’s been centuries since the last time the Wall had a true breach. It turned out better than they’d hoped, actually: a Tribulation struck, interfering with surveillance and communication arrays, making the exact cause of the fall unknown. Better by far than anything they could have hoped for.
The fortress is fallen, and what’s to come cannot be stopped without time and resources. Real resources, the kind that need to be spoken for, that need to be written down, that need to be properly deployed. Not the War Daemons of a lesser fortress, made to be summoned and cast aside in moments. Not just Core Formation infantry.
For a true breach, there is a demand for greater constructs. Daemons of higher spheres, ones which demand days and weeks of effort to manage and sustain. Bioplagues and flesh constructs stronger by far than what a lesser Creation Engine is capable of, one kept well-shackled for mindless hordes.
For a true breach, they will call a Blade.
And with so much shifting, there’s just so much room to play.
Taurus has had to leave his rooms, engage in meetings, make a show of responding to the struggle. Putting himself at the disposal of the more useful potential targets, the ones that really couldn’t care less about the whole mess and just want to turn their eyes away. Researchers looking to finalize experiments, cultivators trying to improve their realm, and those on assignments they’d rather not put on hold- what better way to show support without needing to bother, than to foist it onto another? One who is just the right mix of reluctant and eager to be of service. One who is stoic enough, servile enough, competent enough and proven just enough that he can be trusted?
And given tacit or implicit permission to act on their behalfs.
It’s not many, not even all of them, but it only takes a few pebbles to cause an avalanche.
And Kaena… well.
They’re looking at the fruits of their labor. At their just rewards for being ever so useful, at long last.
They haven’t poisoned Taurus, like they did so many others they were… gifted to. Perhaps their superiors think that Kaena’s finally been tamed, been “fixed” by the Division they were placed in. Perhaps they’re simply willing to risk letting a Snake back into the Garden, if it means that the Garden has access to a placid beast that it can control.
The letter on Kaena’s table is polite. There’s little in the way of meaningful statements in it. Platitudes and nuances, mild and light, with very little of import being stated. There’s only one line with any weight at all behind it, weaving the other pretty phrases into a thorny bramble of intention.
Kaena’s been invited to a lunch.
A little sit-down, tea and snacks, perhaps.
With a Gardener.
Their Gardener.
After so, so long, the source of so much of Kaena’s pain is asking them back to lunch. Asking them for a quick hello, for instruction at what’s to come next.
It’s all going perfectly wrong. Just as planned.
But it doesn’t make it any easier.
The Twins are here too. Reading the letter together with their controller, through Kaena’s eyes. They used to have names. They don’t have names anymore, really. That got hollowed out over the last few months, replaced by something more useful. Kaena picked their own name a long time ago, and the twins are almost ready to do the same.
The poison beneath Kaena’s skin, beneath their cultivation, stirs at the thought. They feel the vile, wretched thing they have made and are made of, roiling alongside the words of the letter in their mind. They can feel the poison forming in the Twins as well, the way it has been built beyond any possibility of obfuscation- at least, not without aid. Kaena buries it down inside the three of them, a triune of vile venom hidden beneath sweetness and freshness.
And the Garden has invited them back.
If not for the chaos, it would not be so. If not for Taurus’ rise, aided in part by Kaena themself, it would not be so. But they have been invited back, to be once again amidst the branches and roots as fruit of the Emperor’s will.
The first ring calls.
And Kaena sits quietly, burying deep the pain of what they are and the horror of what they do, burying the pain of the two former people that have been made a part of them, and starts writing a letter of their own back.
Kai (4th blade)
“And they’re making me go out there! Me! As if I didn’t just capture an Emperor realm master barely a few months ago. There’s giving face, and there’s using face to drag me into work. ‘Oh, great and gorgeous Fourth Blade, however shall we do this without you! Only your majesty could save us!’ Ugh. Spare me the horrors of obsequious bureaucrats.”
His captive audience remains silent, as is only befitting a captive of his stature.
“I know, right? You’d think when you turn into a pillar of a nation they’d let you sit back, eat, fuck, kill whoever you want, but noooo, it’s always “Kai, do this” and “Kai, do that”, “Kai, kill this thing,” “Kai, stop killing those things”. No one ever makes up their damn minds until they need something. Ex-hausting.
“Why don’t I leave? Well that is an excellent question, thank you for your engagement. It’s true that if I leave, I can kill whomever I choose, and eat whenever I want, and fuck whoever I pick, but frankly, I’ll have people harassing me the whole way. Is it really a relaxation if you can’t ever stop? Don’t get me wrong, it’s good for a vacation, but sometimes you just want a place to lay your head knowing no one is going to stab you through the pillow. Nostalgia is all fine and good, but hells, it’s ok to change! I mean you of all people remember the bad old days, don’t you? Hells, it’s been… probably fifty years since I’ve wiped out a bloodline for some perceived slight. Used to be every other month, and back then they expected it. Now everyone acts all surprised when you do it.
“...you know what, I talked myself back into it. Bad old days it is. They can pay me in as many specially-cultivated whores and drugs as they want, it just doesn’t quite measure up to a good old fashioned bloodline-ending spree. That’s the part everyone forgets, too, it’s always a spree if you let it be! Only the real weird clans don’t have any marriages to other families, and then one of the spouses insults you or cries too loud and bam, whole new house to plunder. Nowadays, you have to deal with paperwork and oversight and people complaining when you try to just have some fun.
“But who am I kidding, right? Wasting my time, talking to you of all people. If anyone knows what it’s like to slaughter a couple of houses because someone whispered too loud, it’s the Butcher of the Plains.”
Kai smiles, enjoying the way his captive audience squirms, straining against the chains that hold it suspended in the center of the vast chamber.
“Theeeere he is. What a look in your eye. Almost makes me wish they’d let you keep your jaw. It would really stir up my passions, hearing you talk how I’m courting death. There are few who have courted her more finely or frequently than I, but oh, to hear it reaffirmed.”
Another brief rattle, a musical note ringing from the arrays all around. Five pillars of jade that rise a hundred feet tall glow and crackle with power, formulae carved in minute detail smaller than a mortal eye can read flaring with light and heat. Lightning, colored with all seven aspects of comprehension of Dao, crackles between each pillar, dancing and forming into intricate patterns as they surround the figure chained in the center of the space.
The chains are made of carved pearls, gold and more jade, the materials most conducive to infusion and enchantment, but each link is connected to the next with a solid hunk of lead, titanium, tungsten, and circuits of bismuth, the most non-conductive metals that occur without alloying or enchantment. Together, they form a chain of impossible power, with each link interrupted and protected from feedback by dense chunks of nonconductive material.
And still, despite all of this, despite each of the seven chains being pulled taut and immobile or the sheer weight of arrays focused on a single point… the captive still struggles.
Kai lounges at the bottom of the formation, leaning in a small chair some meaningless pretend-person brought out for him. He smiles as he stares up at the beautiful sight hanging above him.
Seven chains. Seems excessive for a man with no limbs. With only one eye. Who is missing so very many, many pieces. But he’s still struggling, the cute little thing. The failure of so much as a single aspect of the containment chamber might still be enough for him to break free and come alive once more. What a horror. What a beautiful, glorious beast.
What vindication, to see the one who took so much from him here at last.
Revenge and luxurious indulgence, married together in a joyous symphony.
He takes a sip of some drink or other, barely noticing the taste. Live long enough and you’ve basically tasted them all. You have to really pick and choose to care about the particulars, and he has something much more important to enjoy.
“Three thousand years. Three thousand years. I never forgot your face. Not once. Never forgot the blood on your blade. You’re a real inspiration.”
The room bends. Nothing physical, nothing in the stone or jade or materials of the room. It falls inward, towards a single point, gravity and mass and time and space folding inwards in the direction of the prisoner above.
A feeling, like watching a mountain ridge shift ever so slightly, as if alive, comes over the room.
No, not as if alive. Not just as if alive. As if, by shifting, they have revealed the shape of a hand, large enough to hold every river and valley in the world in its palm.
Kai smiles, giggling a bit to himself.
All this, and he still can’t shake the feeling that the thing in chains is only ever a hair’s breadth away from pulling him to pieces, spreading him through strata of stone and quartz and strange, shifting mountains.
“I look forward to delivering your disciple’s head to you. I’m sure he’d love to hear me chat about the bad old days.
“But… you know what they say. Duty calls. I suppose I’ll give the poor bureaucrats some face and see if I can’t clean up some of the pretty little mess they’ve gifted me.”