Data-Driven Daoist

The Wisping Serpent Isthmus lived up to its name. It was a narrow strip of land between two different wetlands; one was a swamp with trees and the other a marsh with reeds and bushes.

The strip was certainly serpentine. It turned and curved and coiled. And more importantly, there were a lot of wisps here. Fireflies that flew in swarms, large mosquitoes with faintly illuminated red wings, and snails that lit up ever so slightly the surfaces they traversed on.

Gu of the skies, and those of water too. Wisps. Bugs. What other names did they have?

The faint buzzing was everywhere. On the swamp side of the strip, there was a hunched tree by the land. Even hunched, it was massive, about ten stories tall. Wisps of all kinds played in between its branches and leaves. A beehive at its lower branches was busy with life. It was made of muddy-looking wax. Bees that glowed slightly yellow and slightly white came in and out.

Fei Rui shrunk and hopped along the rocks and other swampy remains until he was at the base of the tree. He waved at the bees. A few flew down, each the size of the palm-sized Fei Rui. Two of them landed on his back and groomed his carapace. The others clanked their stingers with his claws.

Fei Rui patted them each in turn.

“Do you miss living here?” Yu Han asked.

「A little. My friends here will live and die, and maybe one day one will turn into a spirit beast?」 the crab said. 「Isn’t that why Soft Niuniu is here? She wants to make water think. Too bad she only wants a river of wisps, but not a cloud of one. The bees might have helped her then. Are clouds swarms of feathery water?」

“That’s a good thought,” Yu Han pondered. “Maybe a river of wisps means something else, and a cloud can be considered an ‘evaporated river’. Or not?”

「Nope. I’ve seen a river of wisps. It wasn’t a condensed cloud of bees. It was thick and slimy and it did not have nice dreams.」

When Yu Han and Huang Niuniu were brainstorming what her new trial meant, Fei Rui had cut in. He knew of such a river. A glowing stream of water that supposedly dreamt of other wisps as they died.

That’s why they were here.

「The river that glows is mostly water though? Slimy water but water. And not so much tiny edible friends that glow? It’s so pretty. The light goes into the water and bathes the world like the stars do from the sky. But that doesn’t mean the water is the wisp. Are stars wisps? Oh! Do stars dream?」

Fei Rui came back after waving goodbye to the busy bees. He climbed up the cart, then Yu Han’s clothes and hair, until he was perched on his head. 「I like this spot!」

Do stars dream, huh? … Niu’er might turn level 3 before me. That would suck. But the Mirror Earth… I really don’t want to go there now.

Yu Han let the crab play with the girl and the worm for the next hour. He brooded in silence, and when asked, he replied he was pondering important matters.

「Ah, there! There is the place where the long stream of water turns bright like the stars in the sky.」

They stopped the cart. Huang Niuniu jumped down and went to the back.

“Do you need help getting out?” she asked the worm.

Feral Spot hissed a no. He slid down like a snake and burrowed into the ground at the isthmus’s edge. A few metres ahead in the marshy side of the isthmus, a geyser of mud shot up in the sky. When the view cleared, Feral Spot’s two-spotted head appeared.

“Hiss!”

“I’ll get down in a bit!” Huang Niuniu took off her clothes.

If Yu Han wasn’t prepared, he would’ve blushed, covered his eyes, and then called the church. But luckily his mind was not fully in the gutter at the moment.

Underneath her baggy clothes was the full-body skin-tight latex-esque superhero-like frogskin outfit. She stepped into the wetland, and her feet dipped into the mud with a gross, wet splat.

“It feels icky,” she giggled.

“Imagine how I felt when I waded into the cesspool to get Feral Spot out,” Yu Han said.

The worm hissed what felt oddly like laughter.

「Big Small Worm called Yu Han a wussy. What’s a wussy?」

“Feral Spot is a wussy, but don’t tell him, okay?”

「Okay. So Big Small Worm’s version of Yu Han and Yu Han’s version of Big Small Worm are both wussies. Neat!」 Fei Rui whispered with a conspiratorial rotation of his eye-stalks. 「This is the dynamics of duality.」

Yu Han had stressed that they were here to find Huang Niuniu a river of wisps. She said it was a play-date. The crab was preparing for his Tribulation, and apparently this would help. Feral Spot wanted to tag along because he hadn’t walked his human in a while. Yu Han knew the worm was secretly worried about Huang Niuniu and was too shy to admit it.

The human girl didn’t mind, and talked the worm into playing catch.

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Huang Niuniu took out a monster-skin ball from her new storage ring. These were quite cheap, barely a single ghoul core for one. Kids from outer sect disciple families around the centrum made stuff like these in their free time, selling them for small cash. Usually they went in ships outside the sect to be traded with the many immortality cultivating clans of the Great Xia mainland and around the Sunken Mountains Peninsula, from the archipelago down south to the unaffiliated kingdoms and empires to the northwest and southwest.

The girl threw the ball fifty feet to the worm’s left. The foundation-building realm spirit beast had no trouble gliding atop the wetland like a speedboat. He hit the ball back with his tail, and the ball burst.

“Hah! I win this round. If you can’t control your power, then you lose.”

The worm let out an indignant hiss. He was to practise controlling his new foundation-building realm power.

「I want to! I want to play. Can I play?」

Feral Spot didn’t let the crab join. But he said whoever would win the next round would get to play with the crab. The match started again. Huang Niuniu took out another ball and threw it. Feral Spot returned it successfully with his tail. The goal for Huang Niuniu was to use Pale Spine, her bone-made whip, to whip it back, of course without the spikes extended.

Amazingly, she did, though it took manoeuvring. Feral Spot didn’t throw the ball too far from her, and the speed was slow enough with a high arc so that Huang Niuniu had plenty of time to control the whiplashes.

Huang Niuniu lost that round. Fei Rui took her place.

Yu Han brought out a sketchbook. It was one of his homemade notepads, but with larger paper and bound to a thin square of wood as the cover and board.

He sketched the scene, the crab and the worm. Finally, he did a few full-body sketches of the girl cheering on the two spirit beasts. All the sketches ended up looking less realistic and more anime-inspired stylistic.

Huang Niuniu switched out with Feral Spot after the crab let the worm win.

In Yu Han’s psychic art-augmented eyes, he could clearly see the difference. Huang Niuniu struggled, though her body moved far faster than a mortal’s. Fei Rui’s movements had a magical synchrony to them. As if everything inside him was contributing to each action taken. It was so mechanical it was beautiful.

For Feral Spot, it went far beyond beauty. It was supernatural. Inertia meant nothing, and neither did friction. Yu Han couldn’t see the unseen qi the worm no doubt utilised. But sometimes, the worm would pulse with faint light. It was a wisp too after all. Yet those pulses of light were accompanied by motes of the same that gathered seemingly from empty space on his tail. Was that ambient qi shaped and intensified until it was visible to mortals? Or was it a discharge of the worm’s own spiritual energy, similarly visible because of some art he used?

Body-tempering and foundation-building. Even with Synaptic Bloom, Yu Han could not fully appreciate the sheer difference in power.

Night fell fully. The stars peeked out one by one at first, and in but a moment, all of them appeared in sparkling glory.

The earth was not to be outdone.

The living stars of the soil and waters shone. In between the blades of grass, the shrubs of berries, rotting logs and branches, and in the disturbed waters of the wetland.

It was as if a constellation had fallen from the sky and sunk into the glassy shallows.

A faint whisper.

An ethereal glow.

It began to pulse just beneath the water’s surface. It was a soft, otherworldly blue, green, and yellow, spreading in delicate, shimmering branches.

A stream between the reeds and the rushes. A small river.

Each ripple from a passing breeze or the splash of a fish sent a cascade of tiny, sparkling lights across it. Yu Han was awed. He could only see. But Huang Niuniu felt it more than anything, the bioluminescent whispers of countless phytoplankton awakening to the darkness.

***

Huang Niuniu submerged herself in the wisp-glowing water. Water that should have been muddy and unclear, filled with bits and pieces of moss, algae, rotten wood, dirt, and bugs, appeared to her clearer than crystal. Like liquid glass. Like a winter lake.

If she opened her mouth, maybe she could even breathe in it. Like how she was breathing in the light of the wisps.

Under here, under the water, it was another world where so much life blossomed. As she swam beneath the surface, the reeds became towering forests and lilies cast shifting shadows above. Minnows flickered like silver sparks, while tadpoles wriggled through the eelgrass. Water beetles skimmed by, their legs slicing like oars, and dragonfly nymphs crept among roots, waiting to rise into the air.

As each touched the river of wisps, as each swam in it and flowed through the currents and streams of the ever so slightly heavier water, they glowed. Wisps glowed brighter, and non-wisps gained their own light.

The river of wisps was like Huang Niuniu, as if they were one and the same.

A crayfish scuttled backward, claws raised. Fei Rui raised his claws back, perhaps to engage the creature in a game of pinching. A snail traced a slow spiral on a submerged stem as Feral Spot looked on, the two spots on his head almost squinting. The giant worm slithered like a serpent, even as the mud under him stirred with mortal worms of his own kind, not to mention all other manner of darting insects.

Down here, she wasn’t a visitor. She was part of the flora and fauna, and she was surrounded by the natives. Her light mixed with the light of the wisping river and wisping creatures, woven into the marsh’s endless pulse.

What do I do?

She didn’t know. She had to accord with the stream of wisps. But how would she convince the river of wisps to take part if she could not communicate with it?

She felt something inside her tug towards the direction the river of wisps extended.

The long form of Feral Spot slithered to her left. The worm made his way between two submerged bushes, his fascination with the glowing snail satisfied. The crab gifted green blades of flora to the crayfish after he cut a stalk of eelgrass tangling one of its legs.

Their sounds echoed underwater and in her bones like peaceful thuds of rocks hitting wet dirt after rain.

She broke the water surface to breathe. Han’er waved from the isthmus, the funny man had a notebook and pencil out. Huang Niuniu waved back.

She swam to a shallower area and waded through the glowing waters. Wisps gathered around her, both in the air and in the water. Her destination was to the far end of the marsh, where the river of wisps ended, and where the next river valley began on the border between the outer sect centrum and the rest of the Sunken Mountains.

There, the glow of the river of wisps ended. As if it dared not leave the nutrient-rich waters. It was safe here, with plenty of food and no harsh currents to break them up. They were one whole here. In the river, they would not.

Huang Niuniu wanted to break that peace. Her soul called for a body of water far grander. With salt in its veins and fossils of ancient beasts dotting the floor.

She flickered, as though she wanted to sway a feral cat into giving her a paw.

“Come with me,” she said.

The river of wisps flickered back as if hissing a harsh no.

Feral Spot nudged her from the back.

“What is it?” she asked. She didn’t know what to do. She was lost again.

The worm dropped a spirit stone in her palm and pointed at the river of wisps with his tail.

Huang Niuniu eyed the spirit stone. It was the size of her nail, hexagonal, glowing. So pretty. She had many of them too.

As she held the spirit stone on top of the river of wisps, the light of the river seemed to reach up, ever so slightly.

She held the spirit stone back, and took a few steps forward towards the river valley.

The river of wisps followed.