Part 8
You'll notice that a) this part is still unfinished and b) I'm trialling a new Peak Fiction-specific font set for both my infrequent author's notes and the main body as well. Here's to hoping it works okay technically but also readability-wise! I've done a lot of tinkering to adjust line, paragraph, word spacing, font sizes and weights so both fonts should be pretty readable although this author's note font is definitely a bit form-over-function and not so clear at a glance as the font I'm using for the general text.
There was a flash as of lightning not quite seen, sky blue light arcing across the courtyard, followed by a muffled boom. A sound so deep as to be barely audible. Layfon swung his sword again, even as he began to fall back to the paving stones of the courtyard. Another flash, this one tinged with gold. The demon bear roared back at him, blood now flowing from two enormous gashes across its chest and forelegs, then crashed back to the ground with a thump that Meishen would have sworn she felt more than she saw. Stone splintered under heavy front paws where they met the courtyard’s stone paving. As the possessed beast panted and snarled, blood ran out from under the bear’s shadow. Somehow, the obvious injury did nothing to make it seem any less terrifying in Meishen’s eyes.
Layfon by contrast touched down onto the broad stone slabs with all the impact of a falling leaf. His hair was windswept and he was grimy with sweat and blood, but between his youthful appearance and the way he stood before the lumbering beast without the slightest hesitation - a beast who stood twice his height at the shoulder - Meishen thought he looked like a brave hero, a noble scion stood fast before evil forces.
The way his gaze flickered with power and intent, the perfect stance, the expression of complete focus on the fight, on victory. What poet would not recount tales of this young cultivator? He was already powerful enough to slay this demon bear by himself, but still humble enough to have spent the night before patching his own robes, to have helped Meishen cook their breakfast that morning. Hardly some trumped up clan heir, indeed until one saw him draw his sword, one would hardly believe that a young boy barely two years into his majority was nearing the second realm.
“How is the array progressing?” Nina asked, tersely. Meishen startled out of her reverie with a jolt. She had not meant to get so distracted, but her brush had been quite still for a while now, while she watched Layfon defend the shrine courtyard from the demonically tainted beasts compelled to assault its boundaries.
“Ah-, it will not take long I hope, the ink array is nearly complete, I think,” Meishen stammered a reply, nervous. Nina was very intense at the best of times, and Meishen was now learning that the blonde commander of Layfon’s alliance was all the more intense in the field. She had only in the past few months become familiar enough to not be intimidated by the headstrong fighter, now she was nervous all over again with Nina stood over her as she worked.
Not that Nina was watching Meishen’s brush strokes. The alliance leader was instead watching her nominal subordinate like a hawk, taking in his every sword swing, every flash and flutter of his qi, the minute details of his techniques and tactics. Meishen didn’t understand the things she’d been told by Naruki previously, something about an envy of Layfon’s strength and yet a need to rely on him. She could tell Nina wasn’t fascinated by watching Layfon fight for the same reasons Meishen was finding it hard to concentrate just a dozen full spans from the young man and his opponent.
“May the guardian of this earth raise up strong walls of stone, and the watcher of the sky above rain down the light of justice upon all trespassers. May the spirits of the wood bar the way to those unwelcome, may the spirits of the streams wash away the unclean. May the sun above and the moon in its…” Meishen mumbled the words to herself as she finished inking on the protective inscription onto the last panel around the entrance to the shrine’s main hall. It was a poor habit to speak aloud the inscription as she wrote it but if she didn’t, she would only end up staring at Layfon again as he battled the bear and then any other demon beasts drawn to the shrine while its defenses were down. He had a way of drawing her gaze and Meishen had not yet figured out how to escape that pull.
The conducive inks used, made from powderised spirit stone among other things, began to glow and spark as Meishen finished the final few characters in the inscription, the effect spreading to the other panels she had re-inscribed that day. Wordlessly, Meishen backed away from the front of the main hall, also staying clear of the pillars around the courtyard, whose newly painted inscriptions were also beginning to glow.
“Layfon, the barrier is about to go up!” Nina called to him, prompting the young man to action. Meishen half watched as he unleashed an immense stabbing bolt of qi at the bear, driving it backwards out of the shrine gate and then used his movement Art - Nakki had once said it was an unusual example of such - to dash further into the courtyard and away from the boundary walls of the shrine.
He was just in time, as were the other two of the group who appeared from around the side of the shine hall running at full pelt. The crackling energy of the fresh inscriptions, the latent energy of the spirit-stone-based ink being awoken, would not differentiate between friend and foe for the moment. To touch the leaping tendrils of energy spreading from the shrine hall to the courtyard pillars, to the walls, to the gate, would be to face the full force of the ancient defenses of the shrine and its locus spirits. The party of five disciples present at the shrine gathered in a cluster in the most open part of the courtyard to wait out the burst of arcane activity.
There was an odd pressure, like the sky was reaching down to press them into the stone slabs beneath their feet, the air constricting around them. Whispered voices spoke in a tongue entirely alien to their ears, the ground shivered beneath their feet with a rhythm that did not follow any appreciable pattern. The arches of energy formed between the shrine hall and the rest of the site began to sink into the stone and wood of the shrine structures, the boundary walls shed flurries of sparks and the gate and its sweeping tiled roof dripped molten light that vanished before it could touch the ground.
A bell tolled. There was a snap, as of jaws clicking shut. The light vanished all at once, the pressure and voices with it. For a single breath, there was not sound or motion in the courtyard.
“Did… Did it work?” Nina was the first to speak, gazing around at suddenly still, quiet surroundings.
“Oh, yes.” Meishen confirmed, preoccupied with a tenuous feeling of connection in her dantian. The shrine was very old and used terribly archaic wards, the reason refreshing them was a sect mission was because whoever replaced the inscriptions would be tied to them for the next two phases of the year while the wards bedded in and settled fully. She had not thought the feeling of being linked to the place would be so distinct, let alone so immediate. It was like a heavy chain pulled on her, not by force but by virtue of its weight - it could do nothing but drag at her.
“Thank the spirits,” Naruki sighed, she and Felli had been around the far side of the main hall, “There was something moving just out of range, I think we were about to get attacked on a second front.”
“I cannot sense any hostile beings now,” Felli chimed in, her voice as emotionless as it was soothing. Felli made anything sound like it was but a mere commonplace, even attacking demon beasts.
“Then it’s mission complete, yes?” Layfon said, sheathing his sword in the scabbard at his back. “Should we head back?” For having just fought off every possessed beast that had tried to stop them from re-activating the shrine, he looked none the worse for wear - just a touch grimy. Meishen felt as if his qi hadn’t even decreased, his aura was as subtle but unwavering as ever.
Nina shook her head. “No, it’s only a few hours until sunset and the shrine’s power won’t cleanse the beasts in the area before dawn. We should camp here.” She followed her own edict and began retrieving her camping gear from her storage ring. “We head back at sunrise tomorrow.”
Meishen was silently relieved. The feeling of the chain was… uncomfortable. It was growing stronger too, she suspected the sect description of the penalty for renewing the inscriptions had been rather understated. She could feel no ill effects on her spiritual veins and meridians but by the same token, she had spent a lot of qi and energy on the inscribing, she would need a good night’s sleep before she could handle the trek back to the Sect.
“Right, I’ll go and find us some wood for a fire,” Naruki was saying.
“I’ll get the tents set up,” Nina said. The other four made their decisions about what they would do to set up the camp. Meishen said nothing. She would turn their lacklustre travel rations into a nutritious and nourishing meal but first, first there was something else to do before anyone so much as lit a campfire.
She walked carefully back across the courtyard to the shrine hall, her balance strangely altered by the phantom weight she could feel. The wooden posts supporting the roof over the great open doorway into the hall were aged but solid, the tiles on the roof green with moss but showing no cracks. The stone flooring was smooth underfoot, and echoed her steps as Meishen entered the hall proper. There were no furnishings, only the illegible remnants of faded couplets still lingering where they had been pasted up around the room and hanging iron holders where once lanterns had hung from the beams above. The underside of the roof, sloping steeply up in the centre to nearly double the height of the edges of the room, was thick with cobwebs. Meishen saw traces of birds nests in the bracketing and where beams met posts.
The focal point, the purpose for the entire shine was at the back of the room. It was stone, rather than the typical wood, and it alone was free of dirt and dust. Meishen knelt before the carved jade tablet ensconced in the altar set into the masonry high up on the rear wall. The scene depicted in the jade was hard to make out, and the characters in the middle were… Elusive. Meishen found her eyes slipping away from them as she tried to read them. The chain between her and the wards thrummed faintly.
Indecisive, she vacillated for a while between trying to read the tablet and perhaps drawing onto the chain and the connection it represented to do so, and just making a generic prayer to the spirits of the shine.
In the end, she felt the spirits perhaps desired privacy or otherwise had a reason for hiding their names from her. She bowed low before the altar, her forehead just barely touching the floor as she made the genuflections due aged and venerated powers. Once, twice, thrice, she counted each kowtow in her mind even as she offered respects and praise to the spirits aloud. She thanked them for protecting the lands beholden to the shrine, for acting as guardians against foul and evil spirits, for helping keep the lands verdant and healthy. Then, as was only proper, she implored the spirits permission for she and her companions to stay for the night on the shrine’s grounds, to rest in the safety of the spirits' demense.
She knelt there after this, with her back straight but her head still lowered against her chest, her eyes half-closed. Waiting.
A cool breeze brought in a flurry of brown, brittle leaves with a crackling susurrus. The worn iron hanging from the beams above squeaked as rusted metal was set to swinging in the wind. Distantly, Meishen heard her friends chattering as they raised camp.
She blinked, and breathed a soft sigh of relief. She knew, as she knew up from down, that they would be allowed to stay the night. She bowed once more.
“Thank you for your generosity.” She murmured, and then rose to her feet. Her knees protested harshly as if she’d been knelt motionless for an entire day.
To her mild surprise, time had indeed flown by while she had been at worship. The fire was lit, the tents up and her friends were sat around a kettle only just beginning to steam.
Perhaps- perhaps my time was taken as an offering? Meishen mused, not entirely shocked that the spirits had possibly taken a couple of hours instead of just one. Growing up, she had been told never to go to some of the local shrines because those spirits would take too much from a child unaware of the weight of promises and the consequences of careless words. She yet remembered a man crying in the hall, pleading with her father’s steward to intercede when the man’s son had fallen afoul of a shrine spirit in such a manner. His pleas had fueled ceaseless nightmares for months thereafter.
“Meishen! Where have you been? We’ve started boiling water for tea, but did you want to do the cooking?” Naruki hailed her with a warm smile as she drew near.
“I can do it, if you’re tired.” Layfon offered, kindly. “Writing out such a long array over so many boards, it must have been hard work.” He said, genuine in his concern.
“No, no need, you worked far harder.” Meishen declined his offer, “let me help out as I can, you’ve done your fair share.” She wasn’t going to be more of a burden on the group than she had to.
There was a sound of clinking chains as she retrieved a cooking pot from her interspatial ring and gathered up the travel rations they had brought along for the trip. The clinking lasted well into the night, long after dinner was eaten and the dishes cleared away, long after Meishen had crawled into her bedroll in the tent she shared with Naruki. Long into her dreams; a distant clatter of metal links scraping over stone.
The journey back was… Odd. It was again, just a single day of travel back to the Sect but on their way home the group found the forest paths to be straightforward and easily followed. The sunlight gleamed through gaps in the tree canopy, there was copious birdsong. It was almost just a pleasant hike back to the nearest roadway.
Or at least, Meishen might have found it so but her qi was slow to recover from the previous day’s expenditure on the arrays and so the energy needed to keep pace with her more athletic companions was not in full supply. She felt tired still, as if she’d barely slept and the hours of trekking across untamed forestland were just laborious. She could not even summon the energy to take part in the idle chatter that sprung up sometimes between Naruki and Layfon, or when Nina began drilling the other three on formations and tactics to much comedic effect since only Nakki remembered much of that.
She trailed behind her friends, narrow-minded in her focus: one foot in front of the other, other foot forward, mind the tree roots. On and on until they stopped for a brief, belated lunch at the side of the road. Meishen didn’t taste what she ate, she was just glad of the momentary rest, and something to fill her stomach. Her qi was lower than she would have liked and her less-cultivated body was aching.She could not draw in enough qi with her breathing to keep her stamina up as much as she would have liked. She wanted a bath. She wanted a proper meal. The weight of the tether on her dantian was still annoying her, it yet felt out-of-place and showed no signs of fading. She halfway regretted agreeing to help but the thought of the hefty payment she was due at the end of the day was enough to nip that thought in the bud. Just.
Of course, lunch could not take forever to eat and in too little time, the party had to resume their travels. The last leg of the trip back was much the same as the forest part - a mild effort for four of the group and Meishen felt her jaws ache with tension as she concentrated on working with the road arrays and not sending herself flying, nor looking too clumsy compared to the ever-elegant Felli or the infinitely-skilled Layfon to whom using the roadway arrays to boost his speed was second-nature.
By the time they reached the Commissary, Meishen was feeling rather unsteady on her feet. She felt her qi was perhaps too low despite her efforts to replenish it as they had traveled. It was only the vision of the clinking, glittering spirit stones she was about to receive that kept her on her feet and moving. Even then, she waited outside, on the porch area of the Commissary while the others went in to finalise the mission and collect the rewards.
“Here, your part of the rewards,” Nina was the one to hand over the stones, as team leader. “For the array work.” Specifically for the shrine inscriptions only: Meishen had not contributed to any of the other main aspects of the mission. Still, just the fee for the inscriptions was more than enough.
“Thank you very much,” Meishen bowed over clasped hands, even with friends proper gratitude was important.
“Oh it’s nothing, we couldn’t have managed the inscriptions without you after all,” Naruki waved away her thanks with a smile, the sentiment echoed by the others.
“Ahhh, but I’m for the bath tub.” Nakki yawned as she spoke. “That was a long trip and I want to soak. I’ll see you at training the day after tomorrow?” She asked Nina and Layfon.
Meishen watched them agree their return to their pre-tournament training schedule even as she stored the portion of spirit stones that they had given her. Her share of the mission rewards. Her first mission outside the sect grounds, in fact. Not that she had done so much aside from the cooking when they made camp, and the mission-critical inscriptions. Not that Felli could not have done the inscribing and Layfon the cooking, but they had asked for her to help instead and she had done so.
Clink.
She was not surprised Felli had declined to undertake the inscribing work, she had a hunch that Karian Loss’s little sister was too well informed to be saddled with the tether to the shrine wards during the winter tournament.
It was not a drain on her qi but Meishen was already sick to her back teeth of the feeling of the tether, the sound of slinking chain links, the sensation of her dantian being weighed down. Such a minor burden but a persistent one.
Still, that was three months' stipend in one mission and she had done little compared to the others who had fought off the possessed spirit beasts, navigated unnaturally twisting forest paths as if they were waymarked roads and defended the shrine from assault.
Meishen had plans for this windfall. But first, as Nakki had rightly said, it had been a long trek to that old, strange shrine buried deep in the woods outside the Sect's lands yet also distanced from the highway towards the neighbouring Clan’s territory and Grendan beyond that. A long trek, hard work and eerie environs that left an ineffable feeling of something lingering on the skin. Meishen wanted to see Little Verdure, have a long soak in the bath and a proper meal, although perhaps not in that order.
Her windfall went quickly, but on necessities. Meishen had not agreed to handle the shrine arrays for her friends purely from the goodness of her heart and they would not have asked her to. The greatest part of the reward had been split four ways between the alliance members but the portion given to Meishen was, to her, significant. Most importantly, it was well timed.
Better quartz when the market wishes for it than diamonds when demand is gone, Meishen thought, even as she walked up the steps to the Commissary for the second time in as many days, Little Verdure asleep around her neck like a drab-coloured scarf. In her case, better this windfall now than a greater one when she had no urgent need of extra funds.
She enquired once more at the requisitions desk about wood or other materials. The ebonwood was still available, but so also was copper-clad birch. That was at a much more reasonable price if still higher than Meishen had previously budgeted for. She now had the funds though, and so at 70 stones a basket of offcuts it was a deal. Five baskets went into her ring - she was always grateful for the larger than typical capacity of her storage space - and then she headed down the road to the Archives.
She collected the transcription of the almanac, and then scoured the shelves for the two books on teas she had not been able to read previously. Little Verdure kept watch this time, no-one would snatch her tea books away from her today. These, she flicked through and found them at least promising. The herb compendium, a book on advanced plant raising to follow the basic one Elder Tola had given her, a book on more complex qi movement and storage principles than those Elder Tola’s other guide illustrated, these all were handed over to a bemused clerk for transcription too.
If Meishen could not read in the Archives, then so be it. She’d have what she wanted to read copied, she would make an early start on building her own library. She’d like to see anyone snatch that away. Obstruction was one thing, theft was another.
She even had a browse in the scrolls building and picked out a few scrolls to be transcribed for her: a scroll on qi transfer arrays and another on qi balancing arrays, a third on garden layouts for the beginner and one last roll of thick paper on farming under the same principles of balance as an immortal garden. A strange concept but Meishen was both intrigued and feeling the influence of stones in her pocket to burn so it went on top of the pile.
Flush with satisfaction at finally having her books on tea and having acquired the crucial wood she needed for Little Verdure’s hibernation burrow, Meishen was too busy chattering away with her companion beast to notice that there were only two other disciples on the road down to the Tower of Inquiry and they did not favour her with amicable stares. Not even neutral.
No, they were two artisans, and like the rest they obviously thought her a waste of the resources they all were competing for. In their eyes Meishen represented a spot in the outer sect that they felt would be better off filled by someone with a more orthodox Way. Someone with a respectable, sensible Way like carpentry or metalworking, alchemy or medicine.
Too caught up in her conversation, in planning ahead as to what she would do after visiting the Tower, Meishen didn’t notice a thing until she felt Little Verdure tighten around her neck convulsively and stopped still. The young Rootwyrm’s warning was just quick enough that she hadn’t run into the two young men in front of her, but she was far closer than she would have liked, stood in their shadow and craning her neck back to look up into a pair of unfriendly faces.
“You should watch where you’re going, Torrinden.” The first said, an alchemist going by the strange stains on his sleeve cuffs. He was plain-faced with dark hair and dark eyes and a rather nasal voice. He wasn’t immediately known to Meishen, wasn’t someone she had so much as spoken to before now.
“Wouldn’t want to offend someone by walking into them,” the other disciple said. A burly blacksmith, complete with tiny pockmarks from errant sparks all over the backs of his crossed arms. He was likewise a perfect stranger, and of course they both were strangers. When did Meishen socialise with alchemists and metalworkers? She traded with a few alchemists on market days and nothing more. Yet, it seemed these strangers knew her on sight.
“Ah- I-” Meishen felt her heart rate accelerating rapidly, “my apologies, fellow disciples.” She settled for a tone of general politeness but perhaps she should have not-
“Fellow disciples?” The alchemist evidently found her phrasing objectionable. “That should be honoured disciples to the likes of you, it won’t be long before you’re relegated to the village after all.”
“Do you require tutoring on etiquette, Torrinden?” The smith asked, and the irony of him asking that with the broad drawl of a labourer was not lost on Meishen, even if she was too petrified to so much as think of smiling at it. She had been taught since before she could walk how to be properly respectful, this blacksmith had probably never heard of the Imperial Guide to Status and Hierarchy as Ordained by the Heavens until he started in the sect. She certainly didn’t think he’d ever read it.
“Would you like to try that greeting again, Torrinden?” The alchemist asked, and the way he sneered, the way the smith uncrossed his arms and balled up his meaty hands, Meishen was suddenly aware that she hadn’t even started to practice that staff technique. She was, practically speaking, defenseless.
Her sense of impending doom only deepened as the two disciples both unleashed their qi, a swirl of molten iron and burning wood that wrapped Meishen in a crushing vice of metal, fire and wood qi. She spun qi through her own meridians to defend herself but her still sluggish energies were nothing compared to a pair of mid-first realms. She was barely through the early stage of the first realm, they could stamp out her paltry resistance with but a flex. Worse still, she could see in their faces that her two ‘fellow disciples’ were well aware of how much they outclassed her in terms of cultivation base.
Little Verdure flexed as the encircling qi began to stir into an invisible tornado, shifting his coils around Meishen’s neck. He would do his best to help, and that just made Meishen’s growing anxiety deepen. She didn’t know what she would do if he got hurt because of this stupid, pointless prejudice. Qi-inflicted injuries now, just before his hibernation, could cripple his development permanently, and all over petty fools with a baseless grudge against her. Better to swallow her pride than let it come to such violence. She would just have to bow and scrape a little and hope the two young men could be so placated.
“Torrinden.” A new voice joined the conversation, and a third shadow fell over Meishen. This voice was deeper, and the shadow stretched further. The two outer disciples were tall, Hardy loomed over them with ease. Even stood a span away, the two younger men had to look up to meet his gaze. Their unleashed qi vanished, even though Hardy had no so much as let loose a sliver of his own. Indeed, he showed not the slightest interest in whatever he had just interrupted. His voice had been perfectly level, his tone utterly bland, his face as he looked at the three disciples stood there was completely blank. He showed all the emotion and interest of a man watching ink dry, or perhaps more fittingly, of a man watching ants skirmish in the dirt before him.
“Honoured Disciple Hardy,” The pair of antagonistic artisans bowed and greeted him in sync, their voices polite if not especially warm, their manners suddenly much improved.
In flagrant disrespect, he ignored their greetings. Meishen didn’t see so much as the faintest hint in his expression that he noticed their existence. Truly, his reign over his emotions was impressive. His rein over his qi was just as precise, she felt a flicker of steel and bone crawl over her skin in an instant like a touch of static. A check to assess her condition, she presumed. No weight to it, though he doubtless could crush all of them with a thought, what use a trio of first-realms against someone in the last stage of the second realm?
Whatever he sensed, or saw, he showed not the slightest reaction. He just stood there, waiting.
“Good afternoon, Honoured Disciple Hardy,” Meishen bowed herself, curious as to what he needed from her that he would approach her in public. She had thought he kept their contract private, hence the visits to her cottage and no meetings at the teahouse or High Commissary. Certainly an outer sect squabble was beneath his attentions, much less his intervention.
“Fortunate I ran into you and Little Verdure,” Hardy said, perfectly impassive, “wanted to give you these, spares me finding you later.” He gestured with one hand for her to come and collect whatever it was he wished to deliver. The pair of other disciples parted for Meishen to walk between them, they had no choice if they didn’t want to be seen to interfere with an Inner Disciple’s business.
“Here,” Hardy held out one closed fist, Meishen cupped her hands and felt the cool, polished weight of several stone orbs drop into her grasp. She stifled a gasp as she looked at the handful of spirit cores. They were small, but vibrant. Not too big or high-grade for a young beast like Little Verdure, but very rich with qi for their calibre.
“I am most grateful,” Meishen bowed on reflex.
“Most grateful,” Little Verdure echoed her from his perch about her shoulders.
“Just delivering what I ought to.” Hardy said, nonchalant. “I’ll deliver the rest next week,” he gave a small nod.
“I shall look forward to it,” Meishen replied, a touch more formal than she would ordinarily have been with Hardy.
Hardy just waved, and walked away, leaving Meishen and Little Verdure stood bemused in the middle of the road as he headed up the road back towards Blossom Hill and then turned into the Glen.
There were no more words and taunts out of the two outer disciples. All their outward antagonism gone with the clear display of Meishen’s connection to a notorious Inner Disciple. They gave the barest, most perfunctory of bows and left also.
Meishen would have sighed with relief were it not for the added intensity of their parting glares. She had not made friends here today, and even Hardy’s most fortuitous appearance would not stop future trouble. If anything, it seemed it would worsen things.
There are none so greedy as those already comfortable, Meishen thought to herself, absentmindedly stroking Little Verdure’s smooth scales as she went. The Tower drew nearer and nearer as she walked, lost in thoughts of what it was that made her such a pariah amongst the other artisans and whether the support of an Inner Disciple would help or just make her even more of a target. It was natural, she supposed, to dislike the foreign, the other. What it was about her Way that made her ‘other’ she just couldn’t fully comprehend - was she not just another outer disciple striving to advance? It seemed that there was a difference she was overlooking, and it appeared fundamental.
“Will we be okay?” Little Verdure asked, his normally bright voice terribly small.
“I shall find a way, we’ll be fine,” Meishen reassured him, feeling his taut coils relax just slightly around her neck. Would that she could reassure herself so easily.
She found the tome she wanted in the Tower’s hall. It described in great detail the hibernation habits of many creatures, and how they could be replicated in controlled circumstances. Meishen took many notes, with Little Verdure chiming in often with what he felt was better than the book’s suggestions, or when a detail was particularly appropriate to his mind. She put her own emphasis in places too, where certain materials and resources were easier to find than given alternatives, where one style of den was easier for her to build than another, and so on. She would have liked to follow the manual letter-perfect. But alas, her situation, her funds, her power, none were sufficient for a textbook set up.
She would do the best she could with what she had and maybe by her companion’s next such critical hibernation, Meishen would be able to go above and beyond. Or so she hoped.
With all the information she could extract from the tome splayed out in neat handwriting and serviceable sketches across sheets of rough paper, Meishen returned the book to the shelves. For a moment, stood before the table she had been using, she considered just sitting back down to draft her plan for constructing the hibernation space there and then. Little Verdure was with her, now would be a good time.
No, no she had other things she could be doing, and places to be that were not so public. Places not filled with belligerent artisans.
She fell back on the better part of valour, and fled the hall and its imagined would-be assailants lurking around every corner. She knew it for cowardice, to retreat from public places over a few minor squabbles with her peers, but the knowledge did not help her find any more courage.
The sparse but homely comforts of her cottage soothed her anxieties somewhat, once she had set a sleepy Little Verdure down on his cushion and fetched herself a pot of fragrant, honey-sweetened tea. With warded walls and arrays to keep thieves and ne’erdowells from intruding, Meishen felt her shoulders slacken a little as she sat at her table. The tension bled off slowly over the evening and she still could not quite relax entirely, but she managed to lose herself in her work and forget the fraught moments of the day for a few hours.
Not that she spent the time idle. She knew the space she had to work with, now she had materials and solid information on what she needed to build and maintain. Meishen unrolled a large sheet of foolscap, something she kept to hand for planning arrays and talismanic configurations, and set about drawing out the den she would build for Little Verdure in full detail.
There was first the depth and size of the hole she’d need to dig out, deep enough to have a steady level of ambient earth qi, not so deep as to lose out on wood qi or be out of Meishen’s reach, and with plenty of room for the interior construction. Meishen noted the dimensions of the space she’d measured in her back garden area previously, then worked inwards, adding more sketched lines and numbers. Size of the hole, the space taken up by linings and other additions, the space needed for Little Verdure plus extra to allow free growth and for storage for spirit cores. It would all just about fit in the room she had, provided she made sure everything she added in was sized appropriately.
The space would need to be lined with solid timber to hold its shape and to provide a workable surface for Meishen to inscribe arrays to help gather and stabilise qi within the den. She had some larger pieces among the offcuts she had bought but no planks or boards of substantial size. These would not need to be very qi-rich though, just sturdy. A trip to the market would provide what she needed at low cost. Another note went onto the sheet before her: sizes, stalls to check for bargains, a neat little column of numbers where she worked out the uppermost affordable price point in case the market was strangely short on boards.
Then Little Verdure would need a surface softer than wood to curl up on. Especially since he would be sleeping upon that stone slab with the wood-qi attraction inscription, which would be very beneficial but hardly comfortable. Rootwyrms living wild might forage fronds and springy vegetation for their dens, Meishen would need to provide something like a cushion instead but one that could withstand months in a box underground and also wouldn’t have an unwanted effect on the qi in the den. Maybe some of those Leafstag vines were fine enough to be woven into something workable? Or she could wrestle with her poor sewing skills long enough to make a rough, canvas cushion. Maybe some mortal-cured leather would do if it didn’t have much alignment. Vines she had, canvas or leather she didn’t. Another little list appeared in ink, to check her stash of vines and if she hadn’t enough to work with, the market would need to provide an alternative. Some rough ideas joined the list shortly after, small diagrams of how vines might be worked into something bed-like, or how cloth would need cutting to make the right size and shape of cushion to fit the limited space of the den.
Meishen sighed over her desk, and reached for tea long gone cold. This was just the simplest of provisions for a hibernating, reptilian companion and even this was a complex task. So many things to consider in detail to be sure it would all work together in the end. Like a strong spice, one part out of balance could render the whole arrangement skewed. She would hate for Little Verdure’s growth to slow over her incompetence, for a shoddy den to slow his development in this critical period.
To drag on him like shackles. Like a chain.
Cold tea nevertheless drunk to he last dregs, Meishen refocused herself: hole, linings, padding. What left was there to plan out? Ah. Yes. How best to use her newly acquired birch offcuts. The book had suggested bundles and little bags of wood chip arranged around the space like strange padding, or neat layers built up encircling the cushioned part like walls. Little Verdure had preferred the latter method but wished also for something less… Rigid in structure. He disliked the prevalence of neat, orderly shapes and lines in cultivation. A known trait among spirit beasts, to be sure, that preference for natural and flowing forms over the unyielding symmetries and calculated arrangements of mankind and their feng shui.
Meishen settled for the same layered, enclosing effect but noted down a need for strong, tough twine. Perhaps she could sort of web the wood offcuts into the required shape rather than layer them? That might work to give a more random orientation to each piece as would suit Little Verdure better, but still achieve the overall dimensions. Like tying up a joint of meat, almost. Or so she hoped it would be. She made some rough sketches, attempted briefly to decide how she would get the ‘walls’ to slant in and curl over the top of the space, before realising that would have to wait until she was making the whole set up and had the wood and twine in her hands, until she could adjust and amend as she went.
A board to cover the space, with a hole in the top to let air in, and allow Meishen to feed cores through when needed. Hibernating Rootwyrms were able to unconsciously eat readily available food and would leave space in their dens for a stockpile of cores or bones, whatever they could acquire and keep. Meishen had left a pocket of empty space for this purpose in her design, and would need to put that hole in the top board off-centre and over that storage space so she could keep Little Verdure’s larder stocked as he slept. More measurements went onto her increasingly dense schematic, written small betwixt earlier annotation.
An array for the board, for qi draw of course. Meishen paused for a moment then, and scribbled a reference to a security array too. One too complicated for her to use normally, but it was small and insular. It would not compromise the other arrays in the den, even if it would take her hours to etch in the tiny characters in their tightly constrained spiral alongside the main inscription. The main arrays she already had planned out, taken from the tome from the Tower and also from some of the scrolls she had used when researching for Elder Tola’s tutorial sessions on qi transfer. What was she looking for but to transfer ambient qi into the den? Her new and in-progress transcriptions from the Archives might hold more useful information too, of course! The two scrolls on qi she’d chosen more for future use than now but there would be little harm in checking them for particularly pertinent details, as with that book on qi movement. A reminder went into an empty corner to skim through the transcribed copies once she had them, if she had them in time.
The last thing was the cover for the den, something again to aid in drawing qi in but that was easily moved for when Meishen needed to add cores and that Little Verdure could move aside himself when he emerged. A board of wood wouldn’t do, not for this specific part. Meishen knew such dens as these were best kept hidden, even when belonging to a sect disciple. The best security arrays were the ones nobody ever knew to test, the ones utterly unknown to all would-be troublemakers.
Leaf litter would make for an excellent cover, but would be a pain to move aside and replace every time she had to replenish the cores in the den. An entire plant, potted or just loosely planted in the hole over the den, might be easier to move as a unit than handfuls of leaves and twigs but would be a struggle for Little Verdure to lift up from below. So, if not any of those, what else was there? No ideas were immediately forthcoming and her brush hung idly over the page, one fat drop of ink waiting to fall if she didn’t begin to write soon or set down her brush.
Meishen chose to set down the brush. She stopped her deliberating for a while, and meandered into the kitchen to brew a fresh pot of tea. Staring blankly out of the kitchen window she saw that night had not so much as just fallen but was well settled. Her back had a dull ache in it that spoke of too many hours in one day spent hunched over books, notes, plans. She steeped her tea absentmindedly, still thinking about covering materials even as she rued how the hours had shot by without her noticing. There went half-plans to meditate. She was still finding her qi slow to accumulate, even a couple of days after that mission, and was already trying to make more of an effort to set time aside just for keeping her qi up.
Ah, there was nothing for it. Little Verdure’s hibernation was growing closer and closer, her meditation would just have to wait. Weight. Yes, yes that was it. Meishen took her tea back to her desk and nearly spilled some as she set her cup down a touch too quickly. Rough cloth, weighted with stones and lumps of wood around the edges. Then she need only lift a stone or two and be able to get her arm under the cloth to put cores in the den, and Little Verdure would have no trouble slithering out from under cloth, even if it were covered by leaflitter, or snow, whatever was least conspicuous. Meishen could even dig a slight furrow out to make that part easier. If she chose the right weights, they would not seem out of place in or under whatever she used for the cover, and the cloth would make it all more functional under the disguising material. A neutral cloth with no qi would not be easily detected and yet even mortal treatments for fabric could help a strong canvas hold up to time spent outdoors.
One last note, and then a final list and a final tally. Meishen sipped her fresh tea even as she made the finishing touches to her plans. She would discuss them with Little Verdure on the morrow, he was too deeply asleep for her to wake him at this late hour, but if he approved of her full design as scrawled over the sheet before her, then she was all set. Her sigh this time was one of relief, she would be able to do this after all. She had plenty of meat and bones to feed her companion up before his somnolence, she had some cores courtesy of Disciple Hardy with more to come to supply Little Verdure during the hibernation, she knew what she had left to purchase, craft and build to make a fitting den. Her own growth was slow, though her progress recently had been a little quicker, but she would see to it that her loyal friend had all the help she could possibly give him to develop as quickly as he could!
Meishen spent the last of her evening tidying up her schematic as best she could, before making her own preparations for sleep. This night at least, despite the tensions of the afternoon, she had no dreams of clinking chains or vicious peers. Deep, restful sleep carried her through the night uninterrupted.
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