Data-Driven Daoist

Before reading the chapter, read the author’s note above! Thanks ദ്ദി◝ ⩊ ◜.ᐟ

----

Huang Niuniu couldn’t help but let out a chuckle. It was just like taming a wild squirrel. All she needed to do was feed it.

But it was not a squirrel. It was an amorphous stream of tiny living beings, each with no minds of their own. But when they glowed together, as one, it was as if an illusion of a mind, of a will, appeared in that flowing body of water and light.

Calling it a river of wisps felt… boring somehow. What would Han’er name it? Probably something ridiculous like—huh. Huang Niuniu didn’t know. He used made-up words that were hard to pronounce.

How about… the Living Stream? No… Ghost river? But it’s not dead. Wispstream? That sounds nice.

Slowly, one step at a time, the wispstream exited the stream of marshy water. The surface of the river broke with a chime-like noise which resounded through the tranquil night.

Every once in a while, nocturnal birds would hoot. Animals small and big prowled the forests around. The artificial light of glowstones, lamps, and candles reached them all the way from the residential mountains afar. Even further into the distance, it was as if Huang Niuniu could see the millions of lights from the centrum, the Great Barrier City, and the world beyond.

Huang Niuniu entered the cold river. The current wasn’t strong, but it wasn’t weak either. She dropped the spirit stone under the small waterfall where the marshy stream entered the river.

The Wispstream followed. Hesitantly at first. Then with confidence. It touched the submerged spirit stone, and soon, the rest of the wisping river of light followed.

From a long stream that extended nearly a hundred metres one end to another, it became a shimmering pond. A semi-sphere which pushed against the river’s edge with the spirit stone at the centre.

Uh, is it the wispsphere now?

Slowly, perhaps because of the river currents or even its own will, it became cylindrical.

I can’t change your name every time you change shape. Sorry, my dear wispstream. You are so pretty.

It was a stream. A sphere. A cylinder. And so much more.

A cloud of light. Akin to a great school of fish in the ocean. Huang Niuniu had never seen them of course, but heard tales of them from Shi Miao and Song Yinuo and Han’er.

The spirit stone melted into the cylindrical wispstream, as if dissolved by the wisps. Eaten. Gently. Huang Niuniu felt a cold gust of air, a soft sound of water droplets falling from the sky. It was strange. She did not feel them on her body, but with her bioluminescent light when she looked at the changing flickers of the Wispstream.

What was that?

Feral Spot nudged her again, this time joyfully. Huang Niuniu got the message and took out one of her own spirit stones from her storage pouch. The one gotten from the Mad Bloodhounds.

She lured the flickering, morphing, shifting mass of the phytoplankton with the treat. The Wispstream floated through the river currents towards her. Her light. The light that reflected off the spirit stone.

In some places, it would break apart. In others, it would extend, as if reaching out with a tentacle.

After swimming forward, the great school of luminous wisps stopped, and shifted backwards, towards the waterfall as if to head home back to the marsh.

Huang Niuniu dropped the spirit stone, skipping it on the river surface until it touched the Wispstream.

The light swivelled, and followed after the object as it sunk down.

The depths here reached deeper, as did the Wispstream. They formed a better sphere here, not a strange cylinder. All of it submerged underwater. All of it bright, with no large voids between the motes of light. It was as if an immortal had ripped the night sky and crumpled it into a ball.

The Wispstream sphere was gigantic, but as the spirit stone dissolved, it condensed ever so slightly. It was as if the water of the Wispstream became even heavier.

The cold gust from before hit Huang Niuniu. She stared at the Wispstream with her whole body illuminated by bioluminescence.

This book’s true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

What are you? She wanted to ask. Are you sending me spiritual energy after eating the spirit stones?

As if sensing the words communicated through the flickering of her bloodline art’s light, the Wispstream pulsed back. Water ripped, light spread out.

Huang Niuniu had no idea what it said. Did it even have a mind to say things? She took out another spirit stone, and so the game continued.

Hours passed. She didn’t keep all her spirit stones on her person, but Feral Spot had more than enough to spare.

Her body felt cold. She shivered, teeth clattering together. The frogskin suit kept her warm, but it had its limits.

She had to do this. She had to lead the Wispstream to the sea. It was more like a wisp ball now. A strange sphere of motes of light that played under the river’s surface.

But the sea is so far away. She remembered the Drizzle ride from the First Village of New Tidings to the outer sect centrum. It had taken days.

[Lifeforce -4]

Oh no…

Feral Spot swam with her, ever dependable.

I wish he wouldn’t laugh at Han’er so much.

The worm gestured for her to hold on to his body, or so she guessed. It was funny how expressive the worm and the crab were.

Speaking of the crab, Fei Rui was nowhere to be seen—

Oh, there he was. He was a giant now. Han’er was on his back, all the way on the river’s bank.

Huang Niuniu was floating in the middle of a confluence. Five different rivers joined here. Over the depths below and under the skies above, only she was here to guide the Wispstream to the sea.

To guide them to completion.

To give them a chance to transcend.

Is that the meaning behind her changed trial’s poem?

Even without meaning, her bloodline demanded so. She was of the sea, not of the river. Though she could be, it was not her true home.

But she was tired, this was as far as she would go.

She held onto Feral Spot and took a deep breath, filling her lungs. A second later, the worm dove down. It pulsed with light, the same light of a wisp.

Ah, right. That’s how I understand him. Huang Niuniu had thought she was intelligent enough to parse his wormy gestures. But it was the language of the wisps, the tongue communicated through flickers of light borne of blood and flesh and spiritual energy.

The cold water streamed around her. Her hand gripped a spirit stone. Behind them, the Wispstream lazily followed. Streams would break off here and there, then join back in again. Sometimes it would morph into a long cone shape, diving fast. Other times, it would become like an egg, slowly falling down as if it was a feather.

The confluence was deep. And at the bed, there was sand and soil and boulders and mud. Plants and underwater weed, fish, crabs, life. And death and darkness.

Feral Spot separated from Huang Niuniu. He struck the bed with his tail, and the soil there shifted away in crater shape as if repulsed. He struck again and again, and the crater turned into a giant cave. His light flickered, and Huang Niuniu followed his instructions.

She placed the spirit stone in the cave.

Feral Spot swam away with her holding on, and the Wispstream entered the dark abode.

When it did, Huang Niuniu sensed the light on Feral Spot’s body shift in particular patterns. It exited the worm’s body, and created a symbol in the water.

No, it wasn’t just light.

It was an array! She recognised the shape. Han’er would pull her ear if she hadn’t. Would this be a script-array? Or would it be a talisman? She couldn’t read the words. It was an unfamiliar language. Was this mud-speak, what Fei Rui claimed Feral Spot spoke? An earthly script?

The array broke down, and a transparent seal of qi blocked off the cave entrance. A wall of gravel and dirt and mud rose up, blocking the cave like a dome. Before the sight cut off, she saw the Wispstream finishing their meal. They floated there and made no movements to swim out. If they were bothered by Feral Spot trapping them, they didn’t show it.

The worm hissed. He swam up, surfacing with Huang Niuniu.

Tonight, they would end it here. They’d try again tomorrow, until the wisps reached the sea.

After that… would they accord?

***

Huang Niuniu had gone home for the night. The girl was tired, swimming in cold water even with a body cultivator’s physique would have unpleasant consequences. She herself seemed to have no regrets, but the clattering teeth disagreed.

Her trial was coming together. She would become stronger.

A level up. More heavenly and primordial qi allocation.

Not to mention the Wispstream as she had named it.

Neither Feral Spot nor Fei Rui had any idea what it actually was, though the worm seemed to have an inkling. He wanted to ask his tribe, but Yu Han suggested they kept it a secret before Niu’er’s trial was over.

Fei Rui only knew that a ‘river-like glowy-thing’ sometimes ‘swam out to play with the other glowy things’ at his former home, the isthmus.

Niu’er thinks it’s sentient, but uh, is it? Just the fact that a bunch of glowing micro-particles and microbes could actively respond made Yu Han’s spine crawl. Maybe it’s like a siphonophore or a jellyfish? Rather than moving with intention, it simply reacts to environmental stimuli and just… exists? If not, would it be a hivemind?

Yu Han put the fantastical creature out of his thoughts and flipped through the stack of papers, checking over his practice attempts from the previous nights.

Flip, flap, the sound of pages rustled against the quiet hum of rainy night outside, mingling with the faint scent of cheap ink bought from the marketplace. He didn’t want to use the better stuff they’d gotten from the Mad Bloodhounds.

The night air pressed cool and heavy, sneaking in through the gaps of the window boards.

Fei Rui was asleep. Yu Han had made a nest with a hemp cloth. The crab washed himself in the rain outside, scuttled into the room, dried himself with a towel, made his bed on the nest, then covered himself up with the rest of the blanket, before retracting all his bits to become a box.

Soft breathing sound came from the bundle on the bed. A claw would click, a leg would twitch, breaking his boxy state.

Is he dreaming? Or is he messing around in the crabscape?

The preparations for his level 10 to 11 tribulation were going well. “Pincers crossed”, the crab had said. He would molt afterwards, and decorate the shell with flowers and cat fur.

Yu Han picked up a formation brush, a Mad Bloodhounds loot. He dipped it in ink, and on a new sheet of paper, wrote down the character for ‘light’ in imperial script.

Now that he had Inner Awareness, he could feel the essence leaving his body through his hand, fingers, then into brush and onto the page, alongside the slightest bit of qi and lifeforce.

Stroke after stroke, the brush moved. And at the same time, Yu Han visualised light. Light of the sun, the glowstones, the lamps, the Wispstream.

Light, the meaning of it. Scientific, emotional, physical. He honed in on the physical meaning. As he thought, as he concentrated, the meaning seemed to crystallise in his brain.

It flowed alongside the ink.

As the final stroke completed, he lifted the brush, and the words glowed white…

…before sputtering out.