Elder Braveheart may have given her a number of orders, but they are not necessarily orders she would obey. The inheriting disciple was a prestigious position, yes, but it was also mostly a ceremonial one; his commands were, in every sense but the social, merely suggestions.
As she watched the disciple descend the mountain, Goldenseed weighed different predictions in her head. What was likely to happen if she disobeys, following young Lu and confronting him as quickly as possible? If she obeys, leaving him to fumble about on his own? If she obeys the letter of the order, but not the spirit; if she goes to his mentor Bu Guanyin, or his other associates, and just happens to be there when he shows up?
Lu’s image distorted and blew away like dust as he passed beyond her divination art’s ability to see. For many other Elders that would have been the outskirts of the Salt village, where the warding formations began, but her poor spellcasting ability meant she lost him much sooner. He was only at the foot of the mountain, leaving her plenty of time to ponder the decisions.
Obviously, she would acquiesce to at least a few of Braveheart’s commands. Pointless antagonism is no better than pointless appeasement; she may have rated the man a less capable leader than White Knuckle, Winding Wind, Seventh Wheel, or any number of other Elders who remain alive, but she would still take his words on their own merit.
The longevity research could be put off easily; that particular branch of inquiry had been slowing down lately anyway. Pill efficiency was, she thought, less reasonable to discard – even more than her own ‘pet issue’ of special constitutions. Luckily, it wouldn’t be difficult to slip it into weapons research.
As for putting more into studying Salt, that order was blatantly contradicted by the latter one – to ‘stay away from’ Lu. That disciple is the primary source for our understanding of their planet.
The natives were withdrawn and near-hostile – which was itself due to Braveheart’s fumbling, she felt the need to point out – and the returned disciples had been already wrung dry of usable knowledge. In contrast, Lu had a partial map of their entire cultivation system grafted expertly to his subconscious.
And that was putting aside everything she could learn from his body.
No, she would not be obeying that last command. A poor understanding of Salt had led to the deaths of entirely too many people; she would not allow that mistake to compound itself.
Striding purposefully down the mountain, Goldenseed took a small flask out from her robes. With her other hand she did the same with a number of herbs and inserted them into the flask, and as she passed under the front gates a flame was boiling off excess moisture from the concoction. Away from the crowds she could move more quickly, and within thirty seconds not only had the Three Aspect Transparency Pill finished cooling, she had reached the boundary of where the Salt natives should be able to sense.
She swallowed the pill, disappearing from both mundane and spiritual – and hopefully extra-spiritual – senses, and stepped out from the receding treeline.
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Listening to the alien Stinger-Tail’s accounting of the event did little to reveal new information, though it did help her brush up on their language after her brief time away from the sect. She already had a wealth of hands-on experience charting their internal energy flows, and knew through trail-and-error that Jiendao’s situation wouldn’t benefit from simply copying the Salt warrior’s own spiritual makeups.
Which is why Braveheart’s order is so contradictory. Am I meant to come up with new medicines without a subject to study? A sample size of one is far from ideal, but it’s infinitely better than zero. The situation was incredibly frustrating. He acts like I’m being unreasonable, after he goes and kicks the hornet’s nest? Our relations with Still Water were perfectly amiable, before he sent his investigators mucking about.
It was possible she was being uncharitable. But the fact remained that she was floating a handspan above a lazily flowing stream, enduring the sizzling pain of alien qi where it touched her spirit, because of Elder Braveheart’s poor handling of their allies. Before she had left the sect, she could have simply walked in and had a conversation with the inhabitants; now, they wouldn’t speak to her except in the most laconic of ways, their manner drenched in insular paranoia. Getting an audience with one of the Warbosses was an impossible dream, much less the Patriarch himself.
It was like walking into a rival sect’s special operations wing and asking to speak to their leader, except special operatives at least had the advantage of diplomatic training.
As the woman’s story reached its end, Goldenseed’s attention turned back to the strange trio. Her understanding of alien facial expressions was lacking in comparison to the human equivalent, but it wasn’t difficult to see the grim tenseness of the situation. Lu and the woman volleyed questions and answers back and forth for a few minutes – these were more useful, and she committed Stinger-Tail’s replies to memory – before the group began to break up. Lu turned to the alien man, Cobo, and…
Yes. This is where I step in. He’s hit a dead end with Stinger-Tail, so he’ll be more-
The thoughts froze along with the rest of her as the tip of the knife kissed the back of her neck. She did not breath, did not blink, did not even allow her heart to beat lest it aggravate the presence that had appeared behind her still-invisible back.
How? No, stupid question; why?
Slowly, so slowly it would hopefully not be noticed even by someone looking directly at her, Goldenseed pivoted in place inside her voluminous robes. Lu and Cobo’s unfolding duel disappeared from her vision as she left the slit between her hood and veil behind, and she dared not extend her sense to continue observing.
No, it was a matter of surviving first. She had only the barest inkling of why Still Water had ambushed her, and even less as to why he wasn’t attempting to communicate, but the intersection of those two facts left room for very few options.
If she couldn’t feel the sheer hostility radiating from him, she would have attempted diplomacy. If he had attacked her with any greater violence, she would be free to respond in kind.
As things were, all she could do was silently observe and prepare. The fabric she wore was thick, but designed to breathe; through the forest of golden threads her tenth realm eyes could just make out the wrinkled face of the Moving Water Clan’s Patriarch, his feet planted on the stream’s surface as he pressed a crudely-made spear through the back of her hood. She had to admire his control; he was as still as she, the tip of the knife having moved not at all from the moment it had touched her. Her neck now bore the thinnest of white lines going from the back, across her right side, and ending where the rusty-looking knife now rested against her windpipe.
The stillness held for long enough that the chaotic waves of qi and Salt energy began to subside, the young men’s duel ending in a fashion she was too preoccupied to care about. The emergency pills she held under her tongue disappeared down her throat, though she would leave them undigested until the last possible moment; the effects were potent and instant, but short-lived. Water Dragon’s Terrible Resilience and Hour of Stillness, two of the few core realm spells she kept memorised, lit up her mind’s eye, each a hair away from activation.
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A fish leaped up from the water to snag a fly, and in that moment three things happened: time ceased as the powerful movement art accelerated her perception and motions; the knife skittered across her throat, drawing blood but missing her arteries; and finally a voice reached her ears, somehow not impeded at all by the difference between their personal timestreams.
“You people all remind me of my wife.”
Her eyes widened, her stomach acid dissolved the pills, and then a sensation of flow tore the movement art off her skin. Water rose and crashed about her, but her defences remained- no, they were even better with the alchemic effects bouncing around her bloodstream.
She parried the next thrust with her open palm. “My condolences.” Her robes were gone, the enchanted fabric shredded in an instant, but her doubly-reinforced skin held without further mark.
The rest of the fight took four seconds, roughly half the span her pills would have lasted. Water constructs and explosions lashed out, but it was mainly hand-to-hand; two dozen exchanges later, the two venerables paused, seemingly caught in mutually-suicidal positions.
Her fingers were dig knuckle-deep into the side of his throat, sharp nails placed on either side of Still Water’s jugular-analog. She, in turn, had gotten a spear directly to the eye; it was only barely penetrating the flexible tissue, but the slightest motion would pop the orb from its socket.
After a moment of stillness, both combatants retreated. They stood on the water’s surface without causing ripples, small drops of blood diffusing into the slow current before their mutual regenerations closed their wounds.
Four Salt men erupted from the banks, but she paid them no attention. “Was that some sort of test?”
Still Water replied, his nostrils flared. “Was your intrusion? As if I would let my Matriarch’s blood be taken while I watched.”
His Matriarch’s..? Ah, it seems we underestimated her importance. “I was spying on the boy, if you must know.”
He snarled, before the sincerity in her words caught up with him. Then his face became even more wrinkled with disbelief. “Why?”
“His body is of great interest to me, but the new… let us say Warboss of my sect has forbade me from speaking to him.” She could see him misunderstand her words as she said them, but didn’t feel the need to correct things. “This place is beyond his eyes. I apologise for trespassing, though this response seems a bit much.” A wind blew across her body, unseasonably warm air nonetheless reminding her of her unclothed state. “I will be taking my leave now.” After a moment’s thought, she added, “Thank you for not stabbing me through in the first moment. If the opportunity presents itself, I will afford you the same courtesy.”
She floated upwards, spellcraft and her sense working together to allow flight. The Patriarch allowed her to go, though if this was due to believing her words, or simply because he was unwilling to throw away the lives of his men, she did not know. As she flew away, one of the warriors commented in their gravelly tongue.
“Wow, Lu is really bad at describing human women. She doesn’t look like what he said at all.”
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Well, that went well. The thought was only slightly sarcastic; hopefully a humorous misunderstanding would cut the tension with levity in the coming days. She would have to come back to speak with Still Water again soon; he was, at this point, the closest thing she would get to intelligent conversation. At least until Persimmon or little Yu get back.
She followed the stream out towards the north as she dressed, and by the time she was once again clothed the runoff from the village had lost any supernatural consistency, Persimmon’s work more than adequate to scrub the foreign energy away as it went. Enough to be annihilated by the ambient qi, at least. Hopefully it isn’t quite strong enough to destroy my sample.
She touched down at the bank where the runoff met the more riotous rapids coming off the mountain, sat, and meditated while waiting. Her sense extended like the feathers of a peacock, almost aching after being confined for so long.
But still, that was a strange encounter wasn’t it? Even knowing now that I was spying on his descendant. A few minutes later she detected it; blood, just a drop’s worth, drifting in invisible ribbons through the water. He must be stressed and uncertain. No doubt we’re as alien to him as he is to us. She gathered it up with a straining art and deposited it into a small vial – she may have studied dozens of blood samples at this point, but never Still Water’s. And given the mutations they underwent as they aged, she had no doubt there would be something interesting.
Perhaps I was premature in deciding to scrap my research. Given the similarities between their mutations and ours, it isn’t impossible that- hm?
Unlike the Patriarch’s knife, what stopped her thought this time was subtle and far away – indeed, she only sensed it because her spirit was fully extended, luxuriating in the brief freedom before it would need to be stuffed back inside her skin.
She didn’t bother with stealth or subtlety; she bounded across the river, into the thick underbrush, and knocked the invader down with a swift kick to his forehead. The armoured man sprawled, unconscious, and she quickly secured him with a Self-Knotting Rope Pill.
His camp was in a minuscule cleared space, barely enough for four men to stand side-by-side. A machine – one of the speeders she had heard of? – sat propped up by a log to serve as a very poor lean-to, a second man already unconscious underneath, his eyes half-open and his breaths ragged. Dying. Actually- yes, the other one is in poor health as well. Deserters from the invasion force?
Their armour fit the descriptions the survivors had given, though the build was much more slender than she would have assumed – almost human.
She nudged the sicker man with her foot, receiving only a thin trickle of bloody drool in return. “You picked a poor spot to camp, invader.” But lucky for me, I suppose.
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Ded woke up, which was unexpected. He wasn’t sure what had hit him, only that it was fast. One moment he had been watching a smudge in the distance, and the next he was out.
His eyes cracked open, and he was momentarily pleased to not be blinded by the alien sun – a pleasure that was immediately reversed as two bright lances buried themselves in his pupils, a hideously overpowered incandescence shining down.
Fighting against the instinct to shield himself, he called out. “Lam, you alive?”
There was no reply, though whether his sole remaining cavalryman was dead or only continuing to die wasn’t obvious.
From somewhere behind him came a voice, indistinct, not identifiable as young or old, male or female.
“[Greetings, traveller. You’ve come a long way, haven’t you?]”
He forced his eyes to fully open and wrenched his head, and as his vision cleared just a touch some awareness of his surroundings filtered through the glare – he was in a room, smallish, no furniture. A… creature was here, maybe a human, though its exact features weren’t any more observable than its voice.
His mouth remained clamped shut. I’m captured. I’m already dead. There’s no reason to talk; they won’t leave me alive.
After a good half-minute of silence, the figure stepped forward. He tried to stand, but his limbs were secured tightly to his sides with thick rope. It put its hand near his face so he lunged and bit, but the figure was either anticipating him or just too fast; his teeth snapped shut on air, and the human drew a finger across his brow – lost my helmet too, that’s not good – and suddenly everything was fuzzy and far away.
“[Rude. Tell you what, why don’t we start with introductions? I’m Miss Gu.]” An amount of time, dripping like soft melted pus. “[Ah, a little bit of willpower, hm? Let’s try this: tell me your name.]”
There were too many of him all bunched up inside his skull, it was impossible to tell which one was him. One of them opened his mouth, and in a voice too soft to call a whisper, replied.
“[Dog Eats Dog.]”
The figure, whose name was already gone, nodded. “[Good. I’ve got a lot of questions for you, so it’d be tedious to have to give an order every time. For both our sakes, I hope you loosen up. Now, what were you doing near the river?]”
A dozen dozen hims scrabbled against each other, trying to answer or prevent the others from answering. Eventually, one made it through. “[Dying.]”
The figure sighed. Under its breath it said something, which a him caught, and a different him – one that remembered the little bits of human language he had learned – helpfully translated. “Throw me into the deep end, huh? First interrogation and it’s a delirious alien… “[Other than dying. Why were you there, instead of somewhere else?]”
The hims squabbled. Dogs eating each other, but the number only grew. “[Lu. I caught Lu’s scent.]”