“How in the world do you maintain this?” asked Sen.
He was staring at the qi web that stretched for hundreds of feet between widely spaced trees. Sen wasn’t sure exactly why the spider had constructed such a thing, but that question took a distant second position to the how of it. Sen was no stranger to large-scale techniques. The difference was that he often relied on the internal momentum of the techniques to keep them active. After all, once a storm got moving, it didn’t usually need much help to keep going. What Glimmer of Night had done was a completely different animal. There were thousands of individual qi strands involved. To rub a bit of salt in the wound, the spider was frowning at the web like he was more worried about some imperceptible flaw in the pattern than the impossible mental strain of keeping all those strands active and stable. Sen was used to doing difficult things. This beggared his imagination, though. The spider turned his attention away from the web to look at Sen.
“What do you mean?” asked Glimmer of Night.
“I mean how can you possibly divide your attention so many ways? All those strands. How does your mind hold up under the pressure?”
The spider regarded Sen in contemplative silence before repeating himself. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that I couldn’t maintain a web a fraction this large, and it would take every last bit of my concentration to do it.”
“Why?”
Sen briefly thought that the spider was having a joke at his expense but dismissed the idea. Glimmer of Night sounded genuinely perplexed by what Sen was saying. He tried to think of a better way to explain it.
“I mean, assembling all of those individual strands and keeping them in place would be a huge task.”
The spider tilted his head a little to one side. “What kind of human madness would possess you to do it like that?”
Sen wasn’t entirely sure how to respond to that question. He was sure that Glimmer of Night wasn’t trying to insult him. There had been an almost horrified quality to the spider’s voice, like he couldn’t comprehend why anyone, not just Sen, would do things that way. On the other hand, it also seemed like the spider took it for granted that there was a better way and that everyone should know it. Sen didn’t know how everyone was supposed to possess that knowledge, though.
“What other way is there?” Sen asked, still half-waiting for the spider to let him in on the joke.
While he had gotten better at reading Glimmer of Night since the spider’s transformation, it was by no means a perfected skill. There were moments, like the one Sen found himself stuck in right then, where the spider remained a wholly alien being. Again, Sen didn’t believe that Glimmer of Night was intentionally being unreadable. It was just that whatever spiders normally did to convey their emotions didn’t convert terribly well to the vaguely human form that the spider now inhabited. Sen’s automatic response for gauging people’s state of mind was to look at their faces and eyes. Glimmer of Night’s face was usually an impassive mask. The spider’s eyes were just black, liquid pools that conveyed nothing. After a moment of reflection, Sen reasoned that they’d probably be downright unnerving for a mortal. He’d simply faced down too many people and things that posed a literal threat to his survival to find strange eyes anything more than a curiosity. The spider must have come to the conclusion that Sen wasn’t trying to be difficult.
“You hold the pattern in your mind and fill it with qi,” said Glimmer of Night. “The web manifests from that mental pattern and largely sustains itself, as long as you maintain the mental image.”
It was a remarkably concise answer to have left Sen with so many uncertainties. Sen gestured at the massive web.
“You’re holding that pattern in your mind, right now?” he asked.
“Yes,” said the spider, as though it were self-evident.
“You thought that up and can keep all the details straight?”
“Of course not,” said the spider. “I didn’t think this up in its entirety. I modified one of the inherited patterns, although this one is a failure.”
Glimmer of Night glanced at the web, and the qi that made it up dispersed into the environment.
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“Inherited patterns?” asked Sen, certain that he was missing something crucial.
The spider looked back at Sen and drew the obvious conclusion. “You don’t have those?”
“If I do, no one has ever made me aware of them.”
“That is unfortunate.”
Sen waited for more information, but the spider just stood there looking at him.
“What are the inherited patterns? I mean, I get that they’re web patterns that you somehow automatically know, but what are they for? What do they do other than let you make webs?”
“They let us understand, interpret, and influence the layers of reality,” said Glimmer of Night in such an offhand tone that the magnitude of the statement didn’t fully sink in before the spider continued. “They are, of course, simplified mechanisms based on the pure perfection that is the web of the Great Matriarch. Her web intersects with all truths and all universes. We, her children, are lesser beings. We cannot hope to withstand the knowledge and inherent power contained in the full reach and breadth of her web. In her benevolence, she gave us the inherited patterns, each of which touches on a single, lesser truth. By mastering each of the inherited patterns, we gain insight and grow in strength. Master them all, and we can begin to touch upon the greater truths and even, perhaps, receive instruction directly from the Great Matriarch.”
Sen felt like he’d taken a very hard blow to the head. He was dizzy and didn’t trust that he had full control over his body. He was dimly aware that his mouth was hanging slightly open, which was probably making him look like an idiot. Yet, it was hard to focus on such mundane concerns with so many revelations dropped on him in short order. Laughing River had implied that there were other realities and dropped some hints about it, but Sen had sent him away before they ever really discussed it. Of course, he’d also assumed that the elder nine tail was simply having fun at the expense of a young human cultivator because, after all, that’s what nine tail foxes did. It seemed that all sapient spider spirit beasts took this piece of information for granted and even got knowledge imparted to them to help them understand and navigate that truth.
Beyond that, it seemed that the Great Matriarch, a being that Sen was increasingly frightened of, had given her children the means to manipulate reality. That wasn’t quite as mind-numbing, as Sen himself manipulated reality in some ways with qi. He was also aware of the fact that layers of reality existed. Fu Ruolan had made that much clear with her explanation of how the shadow walking technique worked. Yet, it seemed that manipulating those layers was a normal and expected part of a spider spirit beast’s life. The implications of that left Sen feeling a little cold, given how many of the spiders he had butchered back on Mt. Solace. Was the Great Matriarch the kind of ascended being that took those kinds of slights personally? Would she hold a grudge? If she could manipulate the layers of reality, would Sen find himself stepping through a hole in the world to some terrible and lethal place? Oh, this is bad, thought Sen.
Glimmer of Night continued. “You truly don’t have the inherited patterns?”
“No,” murmured Sen, his mind still back on all of the other things that spider had said.
“A pity,” said the spider. “How are you ever to understand reality without such insights? The gap in your knowledge will only grow more profound if you ascend.”
Sen didn’t even begin to have the context to understand what the spider was getting at. So, he just tossed out the first thing that came to mind.
“I’ll just have to stumble through. I wouldn’t be the first to do so.”
“I wonder why the Great Matriarch withheld them from you. Perhaps it is because you are not her children.”
Sen shrugged at that. “Perhaps she couldn’t. It might have been forbidden.”
He could feel the skepticism radiating off of the spider, which gave Sen a bit of insight into the spider’s view of the world. As far as Glimmer of Night was concerned, the Great Matriarch sat at the pinnacle of power in the universe. Sen had doubts about that but didn’t feel any pressing need to express those doubts. He didn’t have any proof that the spider was wrong. It was just an intuition that things were more complicated than that. With his equilibrium returning, Sen recognized that most of what he’d just learned wasn’t something he had to explore immediately. He’d need to think about it and ask more questions later, but he’d had a purpose when he came over.
“So, you said that infuse the pattern in your mind with qi to make it manifest?”
“Yes,” agreed Glimmer of Night.
“How do you infuse something that only exists in your mind? I infuse objects with qi all the time, but I don’t think I’ve ever infused an idea with qi before.”
“You do it all the time,” said the spider.
“I really don’t.”
“You do,” insisted Glimmer of Night. “Every time you shape a technique. You structure the technique in your mind and fill it with qi.”
Sen frowned. It was sort of true, but it also wasn’t. Those things didn’t happen in his mind. At least, he didn’t see it that way. He fashioned his techniques out in the world. It was a complicated interplay of his qi, environmental qi, and mental manipulation of both. Granted, he could build techniques using nothing but his own qi if he ever found himself in a place devoid of environmental qi. Even then, he didn’t think he’d be doing what Glimmer of Night was describing. Maybe the spider was doing what Sen did and just didn’t talk about it the same way.
“Could you show me?” asked Sen. “Could you make a web? Just do it slowly so I can observe.”
The spider nodded enthusiastically. Sen paid close attention to what happened with his spiritual sense. He felt Glimmer of Night’s qi stirring, and then a web appeared. Sen frowned. The spider had definitely done something. Whatever he’d done, though, it didn’t involve constructing a technique that interacted with the environmental qi. Sen resigned himself to spending a long afternoon feeling like a novice again.
“Could you show me again?” asked Sen.