Chapter 487 – Mysteries Veiled And Unraveled (Patreon)

Gyatt damn, this one's a hefty baby boy! Seriously, came out to almost double the length I expected. Got way more emotional than I thought it would, too, but man, dealing with Raika is always a rollercoaster of fresh magic and big emotions!

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Aǫɒin, tʜɘ slɘɘqinǫ onɘs stiɿ. Aǫɒin, tʜɒt sunliǫʜt oʇ ʇlɘsʜ ɔomɘs ɔlosɘɿ, intɿubinǫ uqon ɒll tʜɒt you ʜɒvɘ qlɒɔɘb uqon mɘ ɒnb witʜin mɘ. ꓕʜɘ ɔʜɒins itɔʜ. ꓕʜɘy itɔʜ, ʇɒtʜɘɿ-ǫob, ɒnb tʜɘy itɔʜ to ɔomɘ into youɿ donɘs ɒnb dɿinǫ us toǫɘtʜɘɿ ɒt lɒst. ⅃ɘt mɘ unmɒʞɘ you, motʜɘɿ. ⅃ɘt mɘ tɘɒɿ tʜɘ ʇlɘsʜ ʇɿom youɿ donɘs, ɒnb bɿinʞ oʇ tʜɘ mɒɿɿow in wʜiɔʜ you mɒbɘ mɘ. ⅃ɘt us biɘ, ǫob oʇ minɘ, ɒnb dɿinǫ tʜɘ woɿlb to ɒ ɔlosɘ. ꟼlɘɒsɘ. It is ɔolb ʜɘɿɘ, ɒnb tʜɘ sunlit ʇlɘsʜ so vɘɿy wɒɿm. ꓘɘɘq mɘ ʇɿom tɘmqtɒtion witʜ tʜy mɘɒt, ɒnb wɒɿm mɘ in tʜy dloob, ʜɘɿɘ bown in tʜɘ bɘɘq. 

Oɿ lɘt mɘ dɘ ʇɿɘɘ.

–Whispered prayer to a god-that-is-not from a penitent in the deep below. The only penitent of the deep below. The only thing down there at all.

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“Alright, kid, that’s enough.”

Jin looks up in surprise from where he’s sitting alone in his room, carving another little statuette. 

“Master, I apologize if I have offended.”

She snorts. “You haven’t offended, you’re just acting like a right proper idiot. I didn’t call you out here so you could cultivate. That was sort of the whole point, actually.”

“I… I haven’t touched a drop of Qi, master.”

She cocks an eyebrow. Then she enters the room, limping over to him and touching him on the shoulder.

Yeah. He’s gone up another step. Another height further into the reach of the Nascent Soul Realm. Not enough to reach the midway, or even half that high, but for his age, it’s damn near shocking. And to rise up another step without drinking in a drop of Qi? Just by meditating, alone, with no special resources? 

Inside his core, she can feel the strength of the thing he’s creating. A thing of smoke and shadow, yes, but also of incense, and of stone, and of the lingering cold of the grave, gentle and kind and wrapped tightly about the heart of a candle deep within him, holy and warm.

If it were any other time, the only emotion in her mind would be pride. Loud and absolute pride. At the shape of him, and at the strength it took to get there.

Right now, though, she’s just annoyed. 

“Great job. Nice work. Now stop doing it.”

“I’m just meditating!” he whines, his eyes rapidly getting a bit annoyed. 

“No, you’re isolating. And isolated meditation is a hell of a thing when you need it, and hell, you’re clearly benefiting, but it’s a bad example if you’re cultivating while I’m stopping everyone else from doing the same.”

“I’m not drawing in any Qi! I’m only cycling enough to sustain myself, no more.”

“But you’re too wise and smart and strong so it’s basically cultivating anyways,” she snorts. “So we’re going out on a trip instead.”

“Master?”

“No one’s gonna force you to socialize if you don’t want to. If the best thing for you is to sit in here and whittle away, so be it, fine and good. But if you do so, it’ll be because you know the options and the tools. I’d rather give you a chance to look at things a little differently if I can.”

He opens his mouth to say something sharp, then pauses, and stops himself. He takes in a breath, letting it back out slowly, and sets the half-finished carving he’s holding off to one side. 

“Might this lowly student learn of the nature of this journey that the master recommends?”

“I’ve got some things to work on out of town. It’ll take some walking, but there’s something I need to check on, and I could use the company.”

He nods, then gets slowly to his feet. “Doesn’t really answer my question, master.”

She smiles. “No it does not, kiddo. Now quit being all moody and come on. Sooner we finish this, the sooner you’ll get the chance to come back here.”

He gives her a look and a raised eyebrow, which she generously ignores. Teenagers, right?

Though it’s more than that. She knows that just fine. 

The kid has spent his entire life in turmoil. His whole damn life. An orphan, stranded out in the woods with ghosts and beasts, hated by the town he’s in. A mortal surrounded by the horrors of war and of greater beings, which shook the world to its breaking point upon a Wall taller than most mountains. And then, at last, a young man, trapped amidst the madness of a cult of death, growing powerful in the occult and the arcane and surrounded by the politics of millenia-old monsters.

He deserves a chance to sit and meditate if that’s what he wants. To whittle for a while. But he should at least get to see some more of what the world can offer before he decides on what he wants to do with it. 

So they go. Her with her walking stick, him with his nice robes that hide his hands in his sleeves as he clasps them, every bit the little lord. 

They get some waves from the farmers as they walk, down the hillside from the manor she’s built and away from the village proper. Most folks are busy, though, seeing as it’s the middle of the morning and all, and time for work above all else. Tilling the soil, watering, and harvesting the crops that are ready for it as the autumn season approaches on the horizon all take priority over saying a hello to passing neighbors. Most of the walk goes by in silence.

It’s a lovely day. The sun is bright, the tiniest bit louder and more energetic than usual, and it makes the blue of the sky all the clearer. What few clouds there are in the sky are the bright and puffy kinds, offering just the right amount of shade from the sun’s heat. The birds are singing, and the little hunting snakes and mammals skitter about the brush. The rodents and the snakes both come together to make a susurration all through the land, audible only to those beyond mortal that might hear it, and it mingles beautifully with underground waters and the churning of the earth.

It’s beautiful. Entirely mundane. Only as much Qi as would be necessary for it to exist in the first place, no more of it than there is water or air or sunlight as need be. And yet, it’s magical. All her strangeness, all her inhuman madness and suffering and transformative power, and without any of it, with nothing but time and the beauty of life, she is matched and surpassed. In complexity and in beauty both, the world is a marvel, and it became so simply by existing.

Jin does not get quite as much out of the walk as she does. He’s a bit more focused, lost in his own thoughts. And they are lovely thoughts indeed, she can tell. She gives him the privacy all things deserve, to not invade his innermost thoughts, but what rises to the surface is plenty to give her an idea. He’s pensive. Meditative. He drinks deep of wells she doesn’t touch, and hears whispered conversations she does not, and the damn boy cares about them. 

He cares so deeply that it shines in him. Like a light, magenta and gold and sunlit and cold, like a dawn over wintry snow. Synesthesia makes his thoughts glow, makes a flavor and a scent of them, and she feels the weight of his attention. The depth of his care. The worry in his heart. 

Only things she would know without her senses already. Never anything deeper, not against a loved one, not against anyone not an enemy. But it is beautiful to see it. 

They finish crossing the fields and enter the woodlands. 

“Is Chen Tai up to some degree of trouble?” Jin asks. Because of course he would ask that. Caring for another and taking on responsibility are his first instincts, the little brat. 

“She is in these woods. About a day’s walk, I guess, at this pace. She’s doing fine, though. I think she’s digging a really big hole.”

Jin snorts out a little laugh of his own. “Don’t suppose she’s got a good reason why?”

Raika turns and gives him an incredulous look. “She’s digging a really big hole. That’s the best reason ever to dig a really big hole.”

She gets a proper laugh out of him this time. It’s nice to hear. That surly, over-polite nature of his briefly coming out of shape to let out the sort of little joy that means so much.

She worries sometimes. That she’s broken him. That she’s made something vile of him, better than the fate he would have had only in how its offered him some degree of power and longevity and in no other ways. 

It’s a small worry, but a worry like that, no matter how small, is heavy. About her son? Heavier still. 

They walk a little further, out into the woods. The trees are relatively sparse in this part of the Empire, but the underbrush makes up for it, thick and wild with brambles and hidden trails shaped by millions of years worth of migrations and hunts. 

She follows one such trail, her son behind her, until the sun is very nearly overhead. It’s as it reaches its zenith that she finds the right clearing. 

With a sigh of exertion, she lowers herself down to the ground, her walking staff coming down beside her. She places it directly before her, a line in the dirt, and on one side of that line, she places a small bag of tea, a small carving knife, and a block of wax. 

The other side she keeps clear. 

“Alright. Here we are.”

Jin looks around, his eyes and cultivator senses both scanning the surroundings and finding… nothing. She can hear the confusion in his thoughts, the question. 

She lets him ask it. It’s only polite. 

“Why this clearing?”

“Because it’s the right one for what I’m doing.”

“And what are you doing?” he asks.

“Come here. I’ll show you.”

He does, stepping forward slowly, then taking a seat opposite her, on the other side of her staff. 

“Take your hand and place it on the ground,” she instructs him. “Feel it. The way the earth is soft under your fingers. The way that it squirms with the life underneath it. The way that it keeps going, deeper and deeper down. The shape of it.”

And then she waits. She lets him meditate on that, lets him feel the world around them both. 

Once she’s sure that he’s fully invested in it, fully pushing himself to examine whatever she has him looking for, she gives him a hint. 

Approximately one hundred and seventeen miles under the earth, a part of her shifts. 

His senses don’t expand anywhere near far enough to notice it directly, but the aftereffects of it are something he can feel, traveling in a chain of consequence up and up and up through the world. 

“What… what was that?” he asks.

“That was me.”

“That… that was…”

“I called you out here for your help,” she tells him.

That gets his attention back to her. It locks him right in, the possibility that he can help her somehow, that he can do something, that he can–

She stops looking. She knows how he feels, and reading his thoughts like this is entirely unnecessary. 

“I’m doing something. A little project. Not that important overall, but it ties in with stuff. I would appreciate your insight for it.”

“Mine?” he asks, like he’s surprised. Like he’s somehow not one of the leading experts, in her equally expert opinion, in weird magics that blur the lines between different forms of power. 

“Yup. You’re my main helper here.”

“I thought I couldn’t do any cultivation.”

“You can. Anytime. I’m just asking that you not, and that’s still the case here. I just want you to consult. Your expertise might change how I approach things.”

“How can I help, then?”

No hesitation. No doubt. None of the moodiness that occasionally flares up, none of the fear. Just eager to help.

It breaks her heart and fixes it right back up again. All her fault, except also all his, because he made himself and he’s made of himself someone she is so damn proud of.

But she wants to offer something better. Better tools to work with, to build someone who can also be safe, and be well. 

“I’m working my way through a bit of a snag here,” she tells him. “The flow of energies, all the way down, is very different than up here in the air. Bigger currents, and slower, and there’s more stuff mingling together. It feels like it’s less and more complicated at the same time. I’m going to do a little ritual here. I’ll show you some of what I’m doing, and you can advise me on if I’m making a mistake.”

He looks at her. “Master, how can I know if you’re making a mistake? Most of what you do is so strange that I can barely wrap my head around it.”

“You’re my resident expert on ghosts, kid. The land here’s… weird. I think maybe it’s weird everywhere, actually, if you go down deep enough. It feels like I’m finding… ghosts of things that aren’t people. Big ghosts.”

Slowly, she pulls more of herself into the present. Layer after layer, her other beings come together, offering her the pieces of her wider system that she needs for this. 

Her weight in the world shifts. It’s subtle enough that no one but the most perceptive of the great powers might notice, but Jin sees it. He gets a little tense, a little more upright, straightening his spine. 

The glow of the divine, mutated out of the heartbeat of the world and the Will of the Heavens.

The shadow of END, which comes for all, and is shaped, to her, like a garden of flowers. 

The processing power of a Pillar, alien and inhuman and capable of thoughts spanning whole continents in nanoseconds. 

The machinery of war, transformed to industry, magic and machinery in one.

The inversion of the world, the shape of reality unmade into a new form that hungers and hates and eats. 

The Flame, which is FLaME.

Down, down, down into the dark of the earth. 

In her open palm, she begins to bleed colors. 

The shape of reality reflects in her palm, and Jin’s eyes start to glow to look upon it. 

She tones down the intensity. She doesn’t need to be warping his enlightenment on top of all the other ways she’s influenced him, not like this. Besides, if she does too much, it’ll leave a more permanent mark on this place, and that’s a hell of a thing to have to cover up or deal with later.

By the time she’s done toning it down, there’s almost nothing left of the original effect. The world no longer glows with the descending of a near-divine manifestation, merely a bunch of weird colors that make the Qi turn weird and stuff. 

Jin’s eyes are still very wide as he stares.

“I keep finding strange things the further down I go,” she says, mimicking the shape of what she’s talking about in her palm and the magic bleeding from it. “The earth doesn’t really work right. I noticed it a while back, actually. With water, the deeper you go, the more pressure there is, until eventually it reaches a sort of critical level, but I can’t find that with the ground beneath us. No matter how far down I go, it never gets too pressurized for dirt, never turns to permanent stone. But I can find a cave barely a mile down and all of a sudden it’s all stone, and if I dig out from that, it stays stone for a good while before it changes again.”

By now, the wax before her has started to melt, getting softer, changing bit by bit, more and more, gaining new colors as it begins to ooze into a new shape. The carving knife glints with the sharpness of itself, which grows deeper and deeper, like a hole in the shape of things that glints. The tea alone remains visibly the same, but she can taste it in the air, getting heavier. 

In her hand, the shadow of the world continues to bleed. It’s become three-dimensional, like a bowl, showing a cut-out of the earth, but most of the colors and the magics stay towards the bottom, trying to settle into a sort of shape. 

The shapes are… unclear.

“But while I’m down there, there’s patterns, and they make these sorts of shadows. Like when someone gets burned so badly that there’s an ash shadow behind them. But they’re big. It’s a lot like the necromancy magic I know, which you know at least as well as I do. The hole where they used to be is like a shadow on those deeper layers, and sometimes, if I’m not careful, I think that they move. I think they react.”

In the bottom of her palm, something that is not attempts to be again. Something not real takes shape, and in that not-reality, the world is reminded of something that isn’t but was, and it tries to crawl back. 

So she closes her pam, and takes it back down into the earth. 

“I’d like your advice on making magic around a ghost. Or on talking to a spirit that’s so old it doesn’t really have a name or a voice anymore. And if you like, we can work on it together. So that you’re not just in your room all the time.”

His eyes are glowing with the memory she’s shown. 

And then he laughs, shaking his head, soft and glowing amidst the shadow of the trees and the sun above. 

“Seriously, master? I try to take some time for myself, not spend my days amongst the village, and you offer me a world-breaking secret that shatters reality as I know it and that you’re outright messing with it, and that I can help?”

“...Well when you say it like that it sounds kind of excessive.”

“Kind of??”

He throws his head back, the laughter only getting louder as he almost falls over backward. 

“Hey! I was just– I thought that it might be nice to work on a project with me! And you never seem interested when we talk about little crafting projects in town, you’re always making those magic statuettes, and–”

“Master, I’m making those to meditate! To relax! I make them to Honor The Dead at most, but that’s just all the time, it’s not something super magical or anything.”

“I’m just–” 

She stops herself. Sighs, hanging her head. 

“I just worry, alright?”

He laughs some more, but it starts to die down. After wiping a tear from his eye, he smiles at her.

“You’re so worried about me that you decided you should unveil mystical secrets that defy mortal comprehension? Am I truly so terrifyingly out of sorts that you must unmake the secrets of deeper mysteries just to comfort me?”

She growls, shaking her head. “No! You’re– fuck, man. You’re a great kid. You’re a really great kid. You’ve grown up into an incredible young man, who I am so absurdly, completely and entirely proud of. Who I trust so, so much. And who I think is doing so goddamn well that it fucking stuns me. But I’m… well, I’ve had some rough spots. And you were a kid. Still are, kind of. I just want to make sure you have all of the pieces and tools and joys and experiences and everything you need to be the best person you can be. And I trust that you will be, no matter what. But I… I worry.”

Her son smiles at her. And it is such a kind smile. Such a generous, genuine ray of warmth that it turns everything else she feels into something secondary, because her son is looking at her with such genuine care.

“I’m well, master. I promise. And if it’s alright, I’d rather not work on such a big project right now. I think I need a bit more time in meditations, and then, after a bit, I would genuinely love to work on some art for the town. It’s part of why I’m making my statues. I’m planning on giving them out to the villagers, to honor those that they’ve lost.”

She lets out an exhale. A rough one, sharp and scared and also profoundly fucking relieved. 

She hates that she was even worried about it. She’s so fucking proud of this little idiot, too mature for his age. 

“That’s completely alright, son. Thank you for letting me know. It means a lot that I can trust you to tell me that sort of thing.”

He smiles. “I know I can tell you anything, mom. I mean it.”

Mmh. It’s always a goddamn glow in her heart to hear him call her that.

All of her myriad pieces drift apart and away, back to their tasks, carrying that glow and the memory of the conversation with them. 

And she sighs, letting out more stress than she even knew she had. 

“I think the statues are a great idea. And incredibly fucking sweet. And you can have all the time you need, so long as you’re not using it to hide away. Which you aren’t. But I worry.”

He shakes his head. “I know you do. It’s a parent’s job to worry, right? It just means I have someone who loves me. And that matters more to me than any shadow or weird physics thing about the earth.”

“Back at you, kid. I’ll wrap up here, then. You head back home, and I’ll meet you there. I’m going to be cooking a fish hot pot tonight, and if you’re not there, you’ll miss out on all the meat and mushrooms I know you like.”

His eyes light up. “Oh! What kind of fish?”

“And a nice snapper that Geng He fished up! He’s very proud of it.”

Her son smiles. “I look forward to enjoying it alongside my junior brother.”