Miu Ai stood at the prow of their small craft, bracing herself against the updraft as she looked forward and down through the clouds to examine the land below. Her brow furrowed. She stepped back and pulled a parchment scroll from her waist. Unfurling it she studied the map's lines, glancing down, between the gaps in the clouds often.
“We’re going too fast,” she complained, “have you gotten stronger again?” She looked back to her wind cultivator, Yunfei. She had hand-picked the wind prodigy for this mission.
“Maybe. But it’s not my fault this time,” Yunfei lifted her head to reply, her hands tightly gripping the rail. She hunkered down between two benches that flanked the port side of their small craft.
”We’re caught in a galestream, a fast one.” she yelled over the whipping sails.
Ai jumped down to the deck, and darted back the length of the sloop to the stern, before looking down through the gap in the clouds. She brought the map up again, her fingers wrapping tightly around the coils of parchment.
“How long have we been in the galestream?” she yelled over the wind.
Yunfei thought about it for a moment, her brow furrowing, “We entered back when we passed through those thin snow clouds.”
“That was an hour ago,” Ai did some rough calculations while stuffing the map into her belt. “Bao! Wake up Song. Yunfei, let’s lower the sails.”
“Oooff!” Bao hit her head on the companionway, as she tried to quickly leave the cabin. Easily the tallest of their team, she found the tight quarters of the air sloop difficult to navigate. “What’s going on?”
“We’ve gone too far north. Way too far. We’re caught in a strong galestream.” Ai stepped to the pulley nearest the mast, spread her feet to both sides and pulled. Once the pressure was released on the halyard, Yunfei grabbed the main sail and pulled it out folding it in on itself; Ai slowly lowered it.
Hana Song, stepped under Bao’s arm, slipping around the large girl, to stand on the deck. Exhausted, she woke to the sound of their team leader’s urgency. She pulled her robes around her, covering her head with the thick cowl. It was cold. They must have been high. Higher than when she fell asleep, that was certain. She turned to Bao, her hands forming signs for her protector.
“She wants to know how you can tell how far we’ve come without being able to see down,” Bao asked.
With the mainsail lowered Ai tethered it to the boom. “I’ve been looking through the gaps in the clouds for the last ten minutes. I can’t be sure, but I think we’re out past the desert, there’s too much green below.”
“Out of the desert lands, to the north?” Yunfei’s voice squeaked, “That means we could be…” She swallowed, then remained silent - her eyes nervously flicking over to bow to the clouds beyond. Yunfei and Ai moved to the jib and dropped it much faster than the mainsail, recessing it into the wooden deck.
“Don’t tell me you’re afraid of a few Spirit Beasts,” Bao grinned, excitement building. This mission had been the worst; bribing guards, stealing a corpse, stealthily slipping out under the Celestial Temple’s nose at night, and sailing quietly away. To Bao that was boring and dishonorable, she was hoping the Celestial Temple would follow them or catch them in the act so she could fight, but that didn’t happen. It had all gone most predictably, thanks to Song’s skill, but that had exhausted her charge, the girl had collapsed, so Bao had laid her in the cabin to rest. With a growing smile, Bao tightened the leather straps of her chest armor and each of her gauntlets.
An abrupt drop caused Bao to stagger as Ai canted the foils, rapidly dropping their altitude. She looked out over the starboard side as they dipped into the thin cloud layer. Side conversations stopped as the visibility dropped, bringing silence to the air sloop. As they dropped further into the clouds the clouds closed in above them, exchanging the brightness of the day for an increasingly gray pallor. The mist swelled around their swoop, wisps reaching over and into the deck, like the cold fingers of a white beast.
Clop. Clop. The tackle of the mainsail lines knocked against the mast, and the whistle of wind dropped to a whisper. Then even that stopped as their small craft fell out the bottom of the galestream, and rapidly decelerated.
“Do you smell that?” Yunfei asked. They were still dropping through a cloud layer so visibility was next to nothing. She sniffed the wind and looked around, as though expecting to see something.
“Anytime Song,” Ai shouted from the helm, “any time now.”
Song stood centered on the deck, her eyes closed in meditation. With a sudden realization, Yunfei darted back to the stern and nervously stepped over the transom onto the stern deck. Her fingers shook as she took her position, hooked the silk harness over her shoulders and around her, and clipped herself to the deck cleats. She forced herself to calm down, taking a few deep breaths before she began cycling her energy around her core, in preparation for the next command.
Ai looked back to Yunfei and nodded to the wind cultivator, before turning her attention to Boa, who sat at the bow, her gaze focused on Song. Song for her part stood motionless, her cowl lightly shifting in the silent breeze; beneath her cowl the lower part of her face, from her jaw to just under her eyes was covered in steel plate. The plate was inscribed with her oath of silence.
The silence drew out. The surrounding clouds blanketed their descent in a cold wet mist. Moving with the wind, the stillness, the silence became eerie as they continued downward.
From her meditative stance, Song’s eyes remained closed as her hands came up; signs flew from them.
“Hard to starboard!” Boa yelled back, her gaze remaining fixed on Song.
When Boa yelled out directions, Ai and Yunfei, moved immediately, Yunfei to create a gust of wind propelling the forward, and Ai to pilot the ship hard starboard. Under the combined work, the ship veered forward and starboard, even as it dropped further through white clouds.
Just seconds later, a granite cliff face pushed the white clouds aside on the port side, jagged rocks poking through the mists as the sloop slipped by, nearly scraping the hull as Ai continued to push starboard.
“Cutting it close Song!” Ai yelled forward. The sloop moved away from the mountain back into the white mist.
“Hard to port!” Boa called out instructions.
Ai swore under her breath and swung the helm around tacking towards the port side. They dropped through the clouds further before exiting the bottom and seeing the landscape open before them. To the starboard side, another mountain peak stretched upwards.
“We’re not going to make it,” Ai called out, pulling as hard as she could on the helm. The mountain swelled in her vision as they approached it.
Yunfei’s eyes opened wide as their sloop continued on its collision course with the mountain. Her mouth tightened into a short line, as she swirled a ball of wind between her fist, pulling air in and building up the speed before releasing it. The ball of wind shot around the hull and pushed forward until it reached the bow. At the last moment, the ball exploded into a stream, shoving the sloop off her course.
The starboard airfoils carved a chunk of rock from the cliff face before Ai managed to pilot them safely away. Peaks and mountains stretched out before them, but without the white cloud layer, they were much easier to avoid. She piloted for a gap between them.
“Tribulations! That was too close!” Ai grumbled glancing over to their priestess in training.
Song opened her eyes before collapsing. Bao watched her crumple and lept to help, catching her before she could hit the wooden deck boards.
“She is exhausted captain,” she grunted. Bao settled her down on the starboard bench. Then turning to Song, “You shouldn’t have even been asked to do that.”
“It’s fine Bao. I need to push myself to continue to progress.” Song’s hands came up, and she sluggishly signed her response to her guardian.
“It’s this whole cursed mission.” Bao looked back into the cabin at the child-size casket. It was an ominous sight, and she couldn’t help but feel that robbing the graves of another sect had somehow cursed her. Her mind turned to wards and curses. “Bless the Mother, may she always look kindly on us.”
“Superstition,” Ai piloted the sloop south. They couldn’t continue north across unknown islands. There was no way to tell what level the spiritual beasts were in the northern wild zones. After setting a course she turned to help Yunfei back onto the deck. “Find us a southerly wind and we can set the sails.”
This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.
Yunfei nodded, glancing nervously through the cabin portal to the casket within. She wasn’t superstitious, but this whole mission was creeping her out. Once aboard the sloop, she hurried forward, purposely avoiding looking in the cabin again. She sat on the deck and began to cultivate.
“You should head back in and get some rest while you can,” Bao stood over Song, shielding her from the cold breeze. She wanted to verbalize a complaint about asking too much of Song again, but with how dangerous the islands to the north were, she knew that the captain hadn’t had much choice.
“I can’t rest in there,” Song’s hands moved to form the signs of the secret corps. “I feel… his spiritual energy.” She glanced nervously back to the cabin.
“Still?” Bao looked back at the black-enabled casket. “Cursed soulforgers, why can’t they just die like normal cultivators,” she muttered under her breath as she stepped to the cabin, and reached in to pull the hatch closed. When that didn’t remove her unease she locked it before turning away.
----------------------------------------
Sound wasn’t a problem, at least that’s what Kai thought. The idea was simple, just hyper-focus his awareness on a few very small areas around his body. He decided to focus on the vellus hairs around his body. That’s when he ran into the first problem; he didn’t have many. His body had burns over most of the surface area leaving him precious few places where the delicate hairs survived.
He managed to find about thirty that survived, but most of them were not near meridians or vessels he could safely channel energy through. In the end, he only had three he could observe with his spiritual awareness, at least with visible light, and hidden as his body was under its silk wraps and ceremonial garb; he couldn’t tell if there were just no air vibrations because it was silent where he was or if he was just isolated from the sounds by his wrappings.
So he abandoned using visual light. Using spiritual light proved effective at perceiving spiritual energy, twice since he was wrapped he was able to detect spiritual energy coming from a source other than his own. It looked like softly glowing lights, distinct from his own. It was difficult for him to isolate it, as his spiritual energy burned so bright, but he did make the determination that it had absolutely no utility for detecting sound waves.
And so he purposed to read the complete God’s Eye Art, before using it again, to lay a strong understanding of what the cultivation method attempting to achieve. He read it. Then he read it again. Then he read it again a third time, this time with Relay, where they discussed it in detail.
Now he sat on his dais in his soul space, deep in thought. The God’s Eye Art was fascinating in its simplicity, but terrifying in its principles. When he first read the manual he thought of the twelve geometries that opened a dimension of his awareness, as matching one of the bands of the electromagnetic spectrum. He fully expected there to be a symmetry that allowed him to perceive X-rays, gamma-rays, radio waves, and all the rest. Of course, he didn’t expect the author of the manual to call them that, no doubt having a different term, but that’s what he expected to undergird the unique terms the author used.
So when he discovered the twelve shapes were examples, and explicitly not instructions he had to go back and read that section again. It came as a surprise because the first two examples provided worked perfectly well as is.
“Apparently,” Kai spoke for the first time in a while, “everyone’s meridians are different. Each cultivator’s meridians are unique like a fingerprint. The shapes required by The God’s Eye Art need to be composed of same-length segments, and anchored to the eye core.”
Kai had taken to thinking of it as the eye core, because it was centered between his eyes, just slightly back inside his skull. “Strictly speaking the shapes don’t need to be symmetric, but symmetry increases the stability of the technique.”
The basic shapes were used to create groups of shapes called yantras. With enough practice, yantras could be combined to form sigils. To Kai, It almost seemed like a programming language.
“Each shape - or let’s call them modifiers since they modify the function of the eye core - each modifier can be formed in several different ways.” Kai looked at the screen closest to him. There he formed several variations using six equal-length segments. There were radial symmetric variations, bilaterally symmetric variations, and asymmetric variations. He plotted out a dozen or more variation of the six linked two-dimensional modifiers before stopping.
“Because each cultivator's meridians are unique each person using the God’s Eye Art has to discover the best way to create each modifier.” Relay observed from his seat on the control panel.
“Not just that, but yantras have to be formed from non-interfering modifiers. By the time you’re forming four of five modifiers at once…” Kai sighed again.
“You may have to use asymmetric variations to prevent interference.” Relay concluded.
“I’m starting to understand why this cultivation method hasn’t dominated the cultivation world.”
Stepping down from his dais Kai stepped to another screen. With a thought, his meridian pattern was outlined, three completed cores, four empty cores, primary channels, secondary conduits, and a complex network of tertiary vessels.
He swiped the screen rotating the display to look at his spiritual body from the side instead of straight on.
“And to make things more complex, we have a three-dimensional network of nodes which means our modifiers may also be three-dimensional.” He walked over to the screen with the simple two-dimensional shapes and added a few three-dimensional variations with six segments.
“It’s a puzzle where the solution is different for every person.” The fox was also contemplating the implications of The God’s Eye Art.
“It should be easier for us. My meridians are naturally symmetric and we have you to calculate and project the solutions for me.” He turned and stepped back onto his dais before kneeling.
“Let’s get started.” Kai closed his eyes and shifted his awareness back to his body. He was greeted with the blazing pattern of his own spiritual body.
“I’m going to form the next modifier,” Kai thought. Before starting he undid the bilateral diamond he had formed to see light. That was useless with his current state. Then he navigated the pyramid modifier he’d plotted earlier. The solid primitive shape was created from six equal segments and felt, to Kai, to be inherently stable. As he completed the modifier his awareness expanded.
Indistinct mists formed around his body, before resolving into shapes and varying opacities. Closest to his spiritual body he could see the outline of his physical form in a blue-white haze. The translucent glow was distinct enough that he could see the details of his ceremonial robes and his merit sashes. He noticed the distinct seal of the Soul Hall and noted it was more opaque that the others.
Beyond his body, Kai could make out the shape of his casket, and beyond that, not much else of detail. Occasionally he could see a blur of motion or a streak of something more solid, otherwise, it was just a gently rolling barely visible cloud of white.
“You getting this?” Kai thought.
“I have it; I’m analyzing it. Based on the manual’s descriptions six segments should have been the motion modifier.” Relay replied.
Kai struggled to make sense of what he was looking at. “I can see my body, my robes, the casket, all things that aren’t moving. I can even see inside myself,” Kai focused his awareness on his body, after a moment of concentration he could see his bones, the larger densest bones were represented more solidly, but he could easily see the smaller and finer bones as well.
“If it is motion, we should be able to use it to pick up sound, we just need to focus on something that will move with the air vibrations.” Relay suggested.
Let’s focus on the air then.
Kai found a small area on the outside of his casket to focus on. After a moment of concentration, he felt the volume of space grow larger in his awareness, himself almost shifting to that location; it felt like everything else was pushed to the periphery, and the area he was observing was right in front of him. It was mostly empty, only distinguished by the uniform nearly transparent glow filling the whole volume of the area.
As the area came into focus Kai moved his attention to a smaller section and concentrated on that. After a moment of progressively concentrating on smaller and smaller areas, he was finally able to make out something besides a transparent glow.
“Motion,” Kai thought. His awareness was focused on a small area, barely wider than a single hair. Air spread out in front of his awareness, filled with particulates - dust, dirt, soot, and smoke all glowing from their motion as they passed through.
“That will work,” Relay responded. “I can analyze the particulates and extract the common vibrations. I’ll get started.”