Book 3: Chapter 26: A Final Decision |
Meng Li's hands would not stop shaking.
The trembling had started three days ago when the frozen Dao rolled across the lands like a tidal wave from a being who sneezed and accidentally reshaped the weather patterns of an entire hemisphere. Snow had fallen on her mountain. Snow. In the middle of a season where the sun should have been baking the stone black. There hadn’t been any in this arid mountain since her arrival.
She'd tasted the Dao in that freeze.
It was Greater.
A Greater Dao unleashed with the casual indifference of someone adjusting the flames of a campfire they had full control over.
The lemon cake she'd been holding at the time had hit the floor. She hadn't picked it up, rather she gave it to the foxes who ate it with gusto. She didn't scold them for devouring it so fast like she usually did. The rabbits ate what the foxes left behind, though she hadn’t noticed. For three days she'd sat on the edge of her kitchen’s cliff staring down at the makeshift fields for her foxes and rabbits, legs dangling over the drop, her tails flat on the ground, and staring south toward the city where the absence of energy sat like a black hole punched into the fabric of reality.
Days of doing nothing but staring.
Days of her gut telling her to run or hide or do something other than the madness she knew needed to happen.
Meng Li also knew tell her gut to shut up because running meant dying faster.
His world because he had made it obvious time and again including the day he forced it to ascend.
Meng Li stood up from the cliff's edge and her knees buckled. She caught herself on the oven's handle, which was still warm from the batch she'd finished an hour ago. Six perfect lemon cakes sat cooling on the stone counter. Each one radiated enough Qi to make a mortal's head explode from proximity alone. Beautiful golden crusts with crystalline frost layered across the tops in patterns she'd spent forty attempts perfecting.
Her best work so far and without a shadow of doubt too.
Offerings for a being that could unmake her with a thought he'd already forgotten having.
She packed them into a spatial container lined with preservation arrays she'd carved herself. Pentuple-layered heavenly metals, temperature controlled, freshness regulated, and Qi-sealed so the aroma wouldn't leak and attract every cultivator within a hundred miles like moths to a bonfire made of pure ambition and certain death.
Her fingers fumbled the latch twice.
A hiccup escaped her as a tear fell from her eye. She couldn’t help it.
Then another.
Stop that. Stop hiccupping. You are Meng Li. Daughter of the Nine-Tailed Fox Sovereign. Ascendant of the Upper Realms. You do not hiccup like a child who didn’t get their favorite toy!
A third hiccup, louder than the first two combined, echoed off the cavern walls.
She sealed the container and shoved it into her spatial ring alongside the backup ingredients, the emergency ingredients, the emergency-emergency ingredients, and the three sets of cooking utensils she'd packed in case the True Calamity wanted a demonstration of her skills on the spot. Which he might, or he might not, or he might kill her before she could offer, or he might already know she was coming and had prepared something so horrific that—
Hiccup.
Meng Li rubbed her eyes.
I am not going in blind. I am not walking into that city like Hei Gu walked into that forest. Hei Gu is dead and Dao shattered. His cultivation erased. His pride ground into powder and scattered across the dirt by a single backhand from a being that considered the act beneath him.
I felt the moment Hei Gu's existence was reduced to nothing.
I will not be Hei Gu.
She turned from the kitchen and walked to the cliff's edge overlooking the lower cavern. Below, the ecosystem she'd cultivated spread across the stone floor in patches of green, white, and rust-coloured fur. Foxes lounged in clusters near the flower beds. Rabbits darted between burrows she'd let them dig into the softer earth near the underground stream. Two of the rabbits were the size of large dogs now, their fur crackling with ambient Qi that made the smaller foxes give them a wide berth.
Meng Li raised her hand.
Her Qi descended like a curtain of silk and iron.
The cavern went silent. Every fox froze mid-motion. Every rabbit stopped mid-hop. Ears flattened, tails tucked, fur stood on end, and eyes turned upward toward the figure standing on the cliff above them, backlit by the glow of the oven's dying embers.
"Come," Meng Li said.
Twelve foxes rose from the ground floor. Their bodies twisted, stretched, morphed, and bones cracking and reforming with wet sounds that echoed off the stone. Fur receded into skin and snouts shortened into faces. Tails split, merged, and then vanished. Limbs elongated, joints reversed, spines straightened with pops that sounded like someone walking across a field of dried twigs.
Twelve figures stood where twelve foxes had been.
Naked as the day they had been born. Male and female. Lean and sharp-featured with eyes that held vertical pupils and hair in shades of copper, auburn, deep red, and one shocking white that Meng Li had been meaning to ask about but kept forgetting. They dropped to their knees in unison, foreheads pressing against the stone and kowtowing in reverence.
Two more shapes shifted behind them.
The rabbits.
These two were different, being broader and denser than their fox counterparts. Their transformation was slower and more deliberate. Muscles layering over bone in thick cords that made the foxkin look like paper cutouts by comparison. One male, one female. Both with white hair that fell past their shoulders and red-tinged eyes that swept the cavern with the wariness of prey animals who had survived long enough to become something else entirely.
The foxes had tried to eat them and failed time and again, even when grouping against them.
Meng Li had let them live because killing useful things was wasteful and she was many things but wasteful was never one of them.
Fourteen figures knelt before her.
Meng Li waved her hand and white robes materialized in the air above each one and descended like falling leaves. The fabric caught the dim light and shimmered, flowing across their bodies like poured water finding its level. They dressed in silence, pulling sleeves over arms, tying sashes, adjusting collars with fingers that were still learning the geometry of human clothing.
One of the foxkin tied his sash backwards.
The white-haired fox beside him fixed it without looking, her vertical pupils locked on Meng Li the entire time.
Meng Li surveyed them.
Each one was weaker than Zi Zhen. Individually, none of them could challenge the old bag of bones and survive the first exchange. Together they might last a few seconds longer, which was the difference between dying quickly and dying with the brief illusion that resistance had been possible.
They were getting stronger though.
The failed cakes she'd been feeding the rabbits, which fed the foxes through the food chain, had accelerated their growth beyond anything natural. Another month and the strongest among them might approach Zi Zhen's base level. Another year and they could surpass it.
The problem was that she didn't have a year.
She didn’t have months or maybe even more than a couple weeks before the True Calamity finally grew bored with her.
The frozen Dao had been a summons.
She was sure of it now.
A few days of analysis, meditation, secluded cultivation, and panic attacks had crystallized the certainty in her mind like frost forming on glass. The True Calamity had unleashed a Greater Dao across the entire continent and the message was clear to anyone with the senses to read it.
I am here and I can use your greatest strength, your ice Dao, better than your entire lineage could imagine. Come or be found.
Meng Li preferred to come on her own terms rather than be dragged.
"That city," she said and pointed south.
Fourteen heads turned in unison. Twenty-eight eyes locked onto the distant horizon where, beyond mountains and forests and hundreds of miles of wilderness, Yellow HearthStone City squatted like a bloated tick on the landscape. They couldn't see it from here. They could feel the direction though. Every one of them could feel the absence that marked the Ancient's location like a wound in the world's Qi field.
They just didn’t know it yet until Meng Li decided to point it out.
The strongest of the foxkin rose from his knees. He took one step forward. Copper hair tied back, jaw square, sharp eyes of a warrior, shoulders set with the confidence of a spirit beast who had eaten well and grown fast and hadn't yet learned what real fear tasted like.
"Do you wish we annihilate its inhabitants, Lady Meng Li?"
Meng Li's blood went cold.
Sweat broke across her forehead, her neck, the small of her back, down her arm, over her backside, all at once, instantaneous, as though someone had dumped a bucket of ice water directly into her blood stream. Her eyes widened and she lunged forward, grabbing the foxkin by the front of his freshly materialized robes and yanking him down to her eye level. Bastard was taller than her.
"What?! No! Don't even think that!" Her voice cracked on the last word. She released him and spun toward the south, scanning the horizon and the absence. Searching for any indication that those words had carried, that the air had shifted, that something vast and incomprehensible had turned its attention toward her mountain because one of her idiot foxes had just casually suggested genocide within earshot of a being that could hear a butterfly's wings from a thousand miles away.
Nothing changed while she waited with bated breath. No world ending catastrophe had come her way just yet.
The absence remained where it was.
Meng Li's shoulders sagged. She wiped her forehead with the back of her sleeve and turned back to the foxkin, who stood there with his copper brows furrowed and his head tilted at an angle that screamed confusion.
"W-Why not?" he asked.
"Because I said so!" She jabbed her finger into his chest hard enough to make him stumble. "A-And because there's a monster in that city. In that direction, and on this entire continent. A monster that makes me look like—" She searched for the comparison. "—like one of the rabbits before they transformed. Before they even ate the cakes when they were just regular rabbits doing regular rabbit things and had no idea what Qi was."
The female rabbitkin shivered. Her red-tinged eyes darted south and her broad shoulders drew inward, arms crossing over her chest. "That terrifying?"
Meng Li joined her. The shivering spread through her frame like a contagion, starting at her hands, and climbing through her arms, down her spine, and into her core where it settled and made itself comfortable. "Yeah. Strongest person I've ever noticed. Strongest anything I've ever noticed. By far." She shook her head hard enough to send strands of hair whipping across her face. "Listen. All of you. Listen carefully because I will say this once and if any of you deviate from what I'm about to tell you, I will feed you to each other and start the breeding cycle from scratch."
Fourteen pairs of eyes locked onto her. The shivering rabbitkin went rigid and the confused foxkin's jaw snapped shut.
"We need to enter that city, quietly. Without anyone noticing and without him noticing, if that's even possible, which it probably isn't, but we're going to try anyway because the alternative is sitting here until he comes to us and I'd rather meet death walking than cowering in a cave surrounded by cake crumbs and fox droppings."
She paused to let a hiccup pass.
It came out as more of a strangled squeak.
"I need eyes inside those walls, feelers. People who can move through crowds, slums, noble quarters, markets, and alleyways without drawing attention. People who can watch and listen. Then report back to me so I know what I'm walking into. I need to know if it's a trap and if he's already decided to kill me and is just waiting for me to arrive so he can do it in person because beings of that magnitude tend to have preferences about how they end things."
The strongest foxkin stepped forward again, scratching at his head where his ears had been. "How do we do that?"
Meng Li blinked at him blankly…
…
"I don't know." She shrugged with both shoulders, palms up, in a gesture so helpless it would have made her father disown her on the spot. "Find the city's smugglers? Beat them up a bit until they cooperate? Bribe them? Threaten them? I don't care about the method as long as it's quiet and doesn't involve the word annihilate in any context whatsoever."
Fourteen figures scratched their heads just like the copper haired one, simultaneously.
Different levels of confusion, but the synchronicity of the gesture was so precise it looked choreographed.
Meng Li watched them and felt something inside her chest deflate.
These are my elite infiltration force. Fourteen spirit beasts who learned to wear clothes ten minutes ago and whose combined strategic experience amounts to "eat things smaller than you and run from things bigger than you."
Father would be so proud.
She took a breath and held it for a few moments. Then released it through her nose in a stream that fogged in the cavern's cool air.
Fine. Everything’s going to be perfectly fine! I'll figure out the details on the way. The important thing is... Momentum. If I stay here one more day I'll bake another three hundred cakes and feed them to the rabbits until they're the size of houses and then the foxes will try to eat the house-rabbits and there will be a war in my cavern and I'll have to clean up the mess and by then the Ancient will have gotten bored of waiting and come here himself and find me elbow-deep in rabbit fur and cake batter and that is not the first impression I am going for.
"Pack nothing," Meng Li said. "We travel light and travel fast. We stop for nothing unless I say otherwise." She paused and looked at the cakes cooling on the counter above them. "I'm bringing the cakes… and the oven."
She sealed the last of the containers, checked her spatial ring a few times patted down her robes for the fourth time to make sure the ring was still on her finger, waved her hand and the oven vanished, and then turned south.
The absence pulsed in her senses.
A void shaped around the entire city and had no idea that a terrified nine-tailed fox ascendant was about to uproot her entire operation and march toward him with fourteen naked-until-recently spirit beasts and six lemon cakes that she'd poured her soul into.
Or maybe he knew exactly.
Maybe he'd known since the moment she arrived on this planet.
Maybe the frozen Dao hadn't been a summons at all and she was reading meaning into the actions of a being so far above her that attributing intent to his movements was like an ant trying to divine purpose from the direction a mountain faced.
Meng Li's hands trembled harder.
Her thoughts were spiraling and she didn’t know how to stop it.
She clenched them into fists, shoved them into her sleeves, and stepped off the cliff.
Her Qi caught her a feet from the cavern floor. She drifted forward, robes billowing, and the fourteen figures fell into formation behind her without a word. Through the cavern's mouth, past the arrays she'd carved into the stone, out into the harsh mountain air where lightning still crackled across distant peaks from the residual energy of Zi Zhen's domain clashing with something she'd felt days ago but couldn't identify.
She didn't look back at the cavern, because if she looked back she'd find a reason to stay.
The wind hit her face and carried with it the faintest trace of cold. Residual frost from a Dao that had already faded from the world but left its fingerprints on every surface it touched. She could taste it on her tongue, a clean and sharp sensation from an ancient being beyond reckoning.
Meng Li hiccupped once more and began her descent toward the flatlands.
Fourteen white-robed figures followed in silence.
Six lemon cakes sat in her spatial ring, sealed and preserved and utterly, catastrophically insufficient for what she was about to face.
I hope I find him in a good mood… Do Ancients have good moods? What if they’re grumpy all the time? Oh, heavens am I going to be screwed before it even–