Kuei 2.6
Kuei had never been told that she was beautiful. As burdens went, this was a small one, and as a young woman, she had thrown herself into cultivation and the practice of martial arts. She had been so diligent that some of her early tutors had thought she was a prodigy, but though she had achieved her first star at the tender age of nine, her progress had slowed significantly after that, and talk of her burgeoning talent gave way to indifference over another lackluster pupil.
In her late teens, she had convinced herself that she was in love with an older man who happened to appreciate muscular women, and he promptly broke her heart. After that, the closest relationship she would develop was with her partner Timu, but they had never been lovers.
After she finally achieved her second star, she was given a comfortable position as part of the security force in Fringe Town, answering directly to the First Elder. She was barely able to use her ascendancy technique, producing just enough of her color aura for just long enough to qualify for the rank. After that, like so many of the cultivators of Fringe Town, she had accepted her limitations and settled in for a lifetime of maintenance meditations.
Living at the edge of the world, it had been easy to imagine that she had advanced as far as she would ever need to. Some of the village elders were as weak as she was, and she had no desire to be first among them if she was ever elected to a position of influence.
Seeing what had become of her home since the coming of the barbarians, it was the first time since she was young that she had truly wished to be more than what she was.
For as long as she could remember, there had always been more space, and more housing, than anyone needed in Fringe Town. Now all that extra space was occupied by barbarians. They had taken over all the empty houses and erected more domiciles from the trees of the First Elder's personal forest. Their banners had been thrown up all along the roads and the town center, a white serpent curled into the shape of a spiral on a sable background.
Many of the villagers, those without stars, had been put to work on nonsense construction projects, digging trenches and building structures that didn’t seem to serve any comprehensible purpose. The Soma fields, acres upon acres, had been stripped down to the roots. The stalks had been cut, and the bodies of Hachi bugs lay in mass graves. It was madness.
Kuei wasn’t sure what had happened to the elders, but they had to be dead for this degradation to have been allowed.
She had gone in search of a disturbance in the foothills of Jigoku, a missing party of hunters, signs of large groups traveling in the woods, and on instinct, she had returned to the den of the Red Spider. The demon was gone, but someone had been in those caves since she crawled out of them with her scars and her cabochon.
There were new webs, arrays, all of them, and some of those still charged with mana, bringing light to the tunnels. In the room where Dappo had died and she had nearly bled to death, there were signs of industry. Some kind of forge, scorch marks and slagged stone, more arrays, and a wagon of strange metals. She couldn’t make sense of what she found in that place, the work of a dreaming tinker, or else the barbarians had gone down a new and terrifying path.
The men of Goth had smithies, certainly, but they were not known for their ingenuity, and they did not use arrays. Had Sunwhisper returned to the cave with the Red Spider, mocking Fringe Village by their very proximity? Whatever the explanation, she doubted it had anything to do with what she had seen in the woods.
On the way up the mountain, she had come across an abandoned campsite, dozens of small fires, and the kind of detritus she would have associated with an army on the move. If Kuei had returned then, she could have warned the First Elder, but he would have written off her fears.
Barbarians were of no concern to cultivators. They had no power.
Going back to the cave had been like scratching an itch, and the impulse had cost her the time it would have taken to catch up to the Goths before they came to Fringe. But if she had caught them, what then?
The barbarians as a group were stronger now than she could have ever imagined, but not all of them were strong.
This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.
Kuei had made her way back down the mountain, finding evidence of more groups on the move as she went, and having no difficulty following them. There had been stragglers as well, and she caught one for the purpose of interrogation.
She spoke only a few words of the Gothic language, and the barbarian knew less than a few of the immortal tongue of the Middle Kingdom, but she had managed to confirm the name of their leader.
Titanus.
Then she had killed him. It was an invasion, after all.
Her element was earth, and she knew a technique that allowed her to move overland in haste and in silence as long as she remained in contact with the soil. It helped her keep clear of lookouts around the village, who were only mortal anyway, so she was able to spend several days observing the changes in Fringe Town without being apprehended.
There were barbarians in the village who wore strange armor, metal plates forged in twisted shapes, geometries that confounded any eye that attempted to follow them. Treasures were not hard to understand. The men who wore the armor were strong enough to cow the cultivators of Fringe Town. The armor was infused with mana, or it must have been, but it did not glow with any color of magic that she could see. The barbarians weren’t supposed to be able to manipulate mana in any case, as they had been born in a spiritless land.
Or so she had always been taught.
Their leader was a blonde lion of a man with a wild coif who must be vain of his hair to style it so particularly. She saw him giving orders, but even if she had been close enough to hear his words, she wouldn’t have understood them.
What she understood was what happened on the last day of her vigil, when Father Ji roared a challenge and sent a torrent of fire meant to incinerate the invader. She saw it all from a distance, hidden in the twisted boughs of a tall elm, how the man stepped from the flames without a single strand of his perfect hair displaced.
She recognized Jammu Jin, Janna’s brother, nearby. He went to the defense of the barbarian, though the man obviously needed no defense, and attacked Father Ji. The enmity between their families was well known, but that did not excuse siding with Goths over his own people.
The young man was wearing a metal epaulet, and though she was not close enough to make out the design, she had no doubt it was of barbarian make. So they weren’t simply subjugating as they went, they were recruiting.
Why Jammu had given his allegiance, she could not guess, but he made swift work of Father Jin. They were both one stars, and even if Father Jin was further along, Jammu was water aspected, and combined with his raw talent, that gave him an obvious advantage over the man who had been wounded in the last harvest.
After that, she had seen enough. She could not save Fringe Town, but she traveled to the next village to warn them of what was coming. It did not take long for her to gain an audience with their elders, but those codgy derelicts refused to take her seriously. After the entire story was told, the idea that the barbarians had become a threat was too hard for them to accept.
In the end, they reluctantly agreed to send someone to verify her story, and she decided to travel further inland from the border, carrying her message to any who would listen. On the way, she came up with a better framework for couching her story, putting less emphasis on the barbarians, and more on the treasures that made them strong.
Cultivators were always eager to hear of treasures, especially ones that were in the hands of those unworthy to wield them. Her tale became less of a warning, and more of an invitation. Fringe Town has been overrun by bandits equipped with enchanted armor, perhaps discovered in an old tomb or temple. It did not matter how they had gotten them, what mattered was that there were spoils to be had.
She did not know how great the threat truly was, only that it had despoiled her home, and if she wanted to be sure that it would be dealt with, she needed to attract the attention of stronger cultivators.
For that reason, she had journeyed to the Middle Kingdom, and finally Poppy City, which was known for its cosmopolitan nature. Surely there she would find fighters willing to chase a rumor like hers. What she had not expected to find was Sunwhisper and Janna Jin.