The spirits summoned by the shamans didn’t press the attack. They came close to the city walls, but they hung back. Tian wished he understood the mechanism. The city gods defended the city, he could understand that, but how did they understand what the “city” was? What qualified as a city god? What about the god-gods? The celestial court and all the various heavenly ministers, did they play a role in defending the cities of the Broadsky Kingdom? If so, then why not the villages or fortresses? Why not the territory of the country, instead of just the city?
“There must be some limitation to it, or perhaps it only affects cities above a certain size or with certain deities in place. Perhaps spirits can only affect other spirits, much like mortals war with mortals and immortals with immortals. Of course, if the Yuu rush in and smash the altars and trample the statues and burn the tablets, the homes of the spirits will be destroyed.” Tian murmured, watching the spirits vanish from the sky.
“Not much in the storage rings. A few odds and ends, their sect insignia, some ordinary Heavenly medicine and the usual little comforts. Some new additions to your tea collection, and Wine Mountain grows ever taller, though only by a couple of jugs.” Liren handed the rings back to Tian. “No manuals, no treasures, no spare weapons, interestingly. Either they were captured and turned loose with just what they needed to get the job done, or they got so badly beaten, they used everything up before they made it to the city. I’m betting they got captured and turned. No idea how the shamans managed to make them open their storage rings, but the word ‘torture’ leaps to mind.”
“Mmm. Stonecutter had this on him. He threatened to break it, and was implying that it would blow up and flatten the whole city, but the longer I look at it, the more I doubt it. What do you make of it?” Tian handed the stone talisman over to Liren. It still throbbed with dense fire qi, its symbols still unintelligible.
Liren turned it over in her hands a few times. Her eyes widened, her nostrils slightly flared. Tian was reminded of when she tore into the sunflower they found in the slave fort.
“Something your physique can use?” He asked.
“I’m sure of it. I just don’t know how, exactly, or whether eating it would be a waste.”
“Your third sun isn’t active yet, right?” Tian stroked his chin. Should he grow a beard? But truthfully, he wasn’t growing any facial hair at all. Difficult. Very difficult.
“Right. I’m just a bit short. If I start getting more irritable, sorry.” She shrugged.
Neither suggested asking Sweetdove about the talisman. She had stayed very low for months now, and the dao companions had silently agreed to pretend she didn’t exist.
“Grandpa, any ideas?”
About the stone talisman? It’s a little interesting, but nothing you couldn’t live without. I can say that investing in oneself rather than external items is almost always the correct choice.
“So she should eat it?”
I… really can’t say too much on that. Nor can I say how she would even do that. I have told you many times that my energy must be spent on you, and answering that question would cost me energy.
“So if I wanted to know, just for my own information?”
The laws that rule me aren’t so easily cheated. Sorry, Grandson. It makes me mad too. On a unrelated note, what does the Verdant Spring Art, the Hell Suppressing Body Refining Art and the Darknorth Sea Spell all have in common?
“I don’t know, Grandpa, what?”
Think about it.
Tian did, floating over the city on his sword, fiddling with the stone talisman. He felt like everything about the talisman was a clue, but he didn’t have a single point of reference to decode it with. It was maddening.
“They make you stronger?”
Try harder. How do they make you stronger?
“They take the energy from the world and refine it… energy refining, she could just use her cultivation art normally?”
If she could, wouldn’t she have done it already?
“Then what?”
If something can’t be done normally, or it isn’t something she normally does, then maybe there is a way to do it abnormally. Incidentally, why do you need to be the one to figure this out?
“She is my dao companion, of course I want to help her.”
Are you helping her? Have you ever considered just asking her? Her fate is not a simple one, nor is she without fortune. You never know.
That, Tian thought, made sense. “Hey Liren? Does your cultivation art have a way to consume yang treasures specifically? Like, not generally, and not just eating them.”
She jerked slightly, then looked thoughtful. “Actually, ‘just eat them’ is the method, kind of. But I’ve only ever tried it with natural treasures. Herbs, mostly. For the last sun I lit, I just accumulated an excessive amount of yang qi inside of me. Which doesn’t work past the second sun, so I can’t do that again. But yes, there is a kind of… I don’t know, a thing you can do to make things more digestible to the art? But it obliterates whatever is being processed, so it’s not really suitable here.”
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“Sounds perfect. Why make a fuss? Eat up.”
“Why eat the obviously valuable, unknown talisman? The one that could, potentially, flatten a border city? That talisman?” She gave Tian a look. Tian gave her one right back.
“Yes, that talisman. What’s more useful, a talisman that might, maybe, blow up a city once, or you, who can blow up any number of cities, and row a boat? To say nothing of your key skill- appreciating my flute music.”
“Any more oil on your tongue and you will drown.” Liren gave Tian a beady look, then relented. “Zihao, I don’t know what this talisman does, but it’s ancient, powerful, and Stonecutter held onto it even after he gave up all his other treasures. It’s obviously insanely valuable. There should be a limit to being an ascetic. Turning it into a medicine-”
“Liren, I dearly love you, but shut the hell up and eat your lunch in silence, like a well raised young lady should. Good heavens, I knew better when I was ten. We need to get you back to the Monastery, if only so Senior Sister Bai can remind you what manners are, to say nothing of propriety.”
“You’re lucky you're cute,” Liren muttered. She gave him a complicated look that shaded into helplessness, then love. She didn’t say any more, and gripped the talisman with both hands. He felt her cultivation art start to circulate.
Liren once described her body cultivation art like driving a rowboat through dangerous rapids. With her strength, it should be completely manageable. However, the slightest distraction or mistake, and she would be ruined. When Tian had stared blankly at her, Liren had found a river with a frankly brutal stretch of rapids, and ran them down it in their old rowboat. Tian understood the metaphor afterwards.
Liren’s hands clenched, claw-like, on the talisman, then slowly separated. The talisman floated between her hands in a distortion of air formed by the pressure she was emitting. It couldn’t hold out for long, and crumpled inward. The rigid stone was balled up like paper, pressed under the consuming power of the Ten Sun Godslaying Art. Before Tian’s widening eyes, the crumpled talisman condensed, and the intense yang energy evaporated the dead earth around it.
“Yang fire sublimating yin earth. She’s condensing and intensifying the Yang qi, purifying it. If this isn’t refining a tonic, what is?!”
The talisman was condensed into a ball the size of a lychee, then a fingernail, then the head of a pin. Each condensation increased the brightness, until it was too painful for Tian to look directly at. He could feel the bonfire trying to explode outwards, to blaze mightily for a moment, then perish. The art didn’t permit such a thing. Liren guided the blazing pellet into her mouth, and swallowed. Tian could see the light flowing down her throat. She floated in the air for a moment, then her eyes rolled up in her head and she collapsed. Tian grabbed her, ignoring the blazing heat coming off her.
“I’m okay. It won’t be so bad this time.” Her voice was a breathy whisper. “Get me back to the courtyard. I can keep the qi from leaking, now. I just need time to process it.”
She was blazing hot. Her silk robes smoldered, only spared from bursting into flames by the mermaid silk robes below. Tian didn’t waste a moment, flying swiftly back to the courtyard.
“No one is permitted in this courtyard without my invitation. Should any dare to barge in, then they shall stay forever!”
Tian swiftly removed Liren’s outer robes, his qi thundering in the ears of immortals and officials. Those not already sitting found themselves kneeling with their heads pressed to the floor, once they regained their wits. The Emissary of Heaven’s Mercy had an unmatched reputation for benevolence and righteousness. How terrible a thing, how great the listener’s fear, when they heard supreme fury and killing intent in his voice!
Something must have happened in the battle over the walls. Two unknown immortals had barged in, begging to be saved, then the top of the wall exploded. The immortal guardians dragged the foreigners up into the sky for their battle, there was another huge explosion, flashing lights too bright to look at, and some said the Guardian Faerie was seen suppressing a second sun before falling from the sky. But whose eyes were good enough to have seen so high, and what iron dog had the nerve to publicly repeat such a thing even if it was true?
One thing was certain. For the next three days, not a soul even turned their eyes towards the entrance to the Heavenly Immortal’s Courtyard. None spoke loudly when they went past it. They avoided mentioning it, even indirectly. It was whispered that it would be safer to wear the City Lord’s sleeping robes and nap in his bed, then to let your shadow brush the wall of that place.
Sometimes the public is correct in their whispering. Tian forced himself to sit still, one hand resting on Liren’s back to monitor her condition, the other clenching a spirit stone. He didn’t try to assist her. He didn’t know enough about her body cultivation art to know how to assist her. He just wanted to know instantly if something went catastrophically wrong, and have the power to stop it. Monitoring Liren took three tenths of his concentration. Another three tenths covered the city, making sure there were no big moves he wasn’t aware of. The last four tenths focused on the courtyard and the area around it.
Nothing was permitted to approach that might interfere. Flies buzzing too loudly in the alley were crushed. Birds were driven off by flying needles. A drunk, laughing and raving too loudly, blocks away, suddenly passed out. It was said that for three days and three nights, the water near the City Lord’s manor was colder than usual, while the fires burned hotter. It was harder to move. Not impossible, but it was widely agreed that it was easy to sit and hard to rise. Easy to sleep, hard to wake.
Smarter lay daoists and scholars concluded that some terrible yang treasure had been about to rampage, and was being suppressed by the strength of the Guardian Faerie, and the healing Yin magic of the Emissary. From how the Emissary was acting, it wasn’t going well.
Lines stretched outside the city shrines, making offerings of incense and prayers for the Guardian Faerie, begging the gods and the Martyr Venerable to intercede for her. Mortal knees wore away flagstones, bowing and clapping before idols, obediently closing their eyes and listening to the chanting of the priests.
Liren’s temperature would have killed any of those mortals in an instant. Their death would have been lingering and unpleasant if they even approached. The center of the courtyard was burnt black. The flagstones below her shattered from the heat. Only the suppression of Tian’s water qi kept the heat from destroying the courtyard, and large parts of the City Lord’s manor, entirely.
The Yuu must have heard something because they launched human wave assaults every night, and used quick cavalry to pepper the guards with arrows during the day. Never allowing a moment’s rest. Constantly attacking morale. “Your strongest guardians are dying beneath our schemes. What can you do? How can you stop us? We are stronger, smarter, crueler than you. Give up. Just give up.”
Worse, they started building things out on the steppes, out of balistae range and far beyond what catapults could reach. It was just that they didn’t look quite like anything anyone had ever seen before, and the Yuu were carting in what looked like whole trees to make them.
On the dawn of the fourth morning, a second sun rose, born in the courtyard of the City Lord. And even if it was just for one moment, all the shadows were banished from the city.