Sky Pride

Chapter 29- Ghosts of Ghosts

“What?” The thing possessing Heavenly Demon, his hallucination, whatever personality was animating the excessively tall man, sounded very confused.

“Madam, no matter how charming your voice is, this little daoist isn’t so foolish as to ignore his instructions. The array has not completed its purpose, and you are not the person I journeyed with. The array will stay, and I will not enter it.”

“You can ignore my voice? You shouldn’t be able to ignore my voice. I can feel it affecting you.”

Her bewilderment was rapidly shading into irritation, bordering on outrage. The downside of such an expressive voice, Tian supposed. It expressed what you were feeling exceedingly well.

“I’m not ignoring your voice. It’s quite lovely.”

“It’s more than lovely, it’s perfect. Why aren’t you coming to me?”

Tian thought about it, then shrugged. “Dunno. I guess I’m just content with my path.”

“That’s not… that’s not how that works. My voice is perfect. The tone, pitch, rhythm, I am exactly who would be perfect for you. Even if you think you want something else, I’m speaking, even now, to a deeper part of you. You should want to be with me more than you have ever wanted anything else in your life.”

Tian shook his head. She seemed really stuck on this. “Don’t know about that, Miss. I want a lot of things. But, you know, I canʼt have everything. Oh well. Guess I’ll just do my job. Surely you have had similar experiences.”

“No, I can’t say I have. What is the point of being a demon if you are not willing to be a demon?”

“What exactly is a demon, anyway? I know what I mean by it, but I know Heavenly Demon meant something else entirely.”

“Come in here and I’ll tell you.”

“No thank you, but since you are an expert on sound, perhaps you would be willing to help me on another matter?”

“Oh? What’s that?”

“I’m working on a new flute piece, and could use your advice.”

Tian didn’t get much useful feedback from the possessing personality directly. He had a suspicion once it started spouting philosophy- it was shallow. It had one trick that it understood perfectly, but everything else was merely surface level. It didn’t even seem to have all of Heavenly Demon’s memories to draw on, which struck Tian as particularly ironic. It all sounded good, but you would be a fool to trust it. It’s cheers and groans were a bit more honest. It took some work, but Tian was able to study it a bit. When he stopped feeling like he was learning anything with the flute, he changed to his chant. Infusing his understanding of the elements into the sounds, now nuanced by the buckets of beast core pills he had eaten since Burning Flag City. All those curious twists on the basic elements, cinder-fire, bright-water, venomwood, rot-iron, ten whistle sulfur, red salamander cinnabar, and on and on and on. Each with its own assertion about what the elements were, and what they meant. All adding to his chant in their own subtle ways.

He didn’t think her screaming was necessary. Apparently some of the sounds really bothered her, even if she couldn’t explain why. Just that they were bad, or wrong, or in one case, immoral. How his impression of a blend of wood and fire qi as presented by blue starlight grass could be immoral, Tian didn’t know. At the very least it wasn’t boring. This went on for several hours, until the next rain of worms came down the hole through the mountain, and the woman just stopped talking. As far as Tian could tell, the personality had vanished entirely. He was back to Heavenly Demon groaning, but much less bored. Now, every new descending qi-shen-thought-thing brought with it exciting possibilities.

His patience was rewarded when a little rain shower fell through the hole. It was rain and clouds alike, and they held up against the array longer than the sword did. Why? He had no idea. They certainly made Heavenly Demon howl. Tian was very curious about what they were transforming within him. Was it like the beast cores and their traces of elemental truths?

It was an appealing idea, but it didn’t seem right. Heavenly Demon didn’t strike Tian as the sort to appreciate someone else’s opinions on things. The man was arrogant in a way Tian found almost impossible to comprehend. It also didn’t match the whole concept of a furnace. Why would the fragments hurt, if they were teaching him something? Pain was a lesson most learned quite quickly, and he suspected Heavenly Demon had learned all about it long ago.

“I am alone.” The voice came from inside the pit. Not female this time, a man’s voice, old and bitter.

“No, I’m here. My name is Tian Zihao. Might I ask the Senior’s honorable name?”

“That isn’t your name.”

“It is the only name I have ever known, and any other I might have had died long ago, with the only people who ever knew it.”

The voice was slow to respond. “Ah. We have that much in common. Everyone who knew my name also died long ago.”

“But surely your achievements must echo through the ages! What was your greatest triumph? This little daoist will happily keep its memory alive for you.”

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“Triumphs? Did I have any? I recall only false glory and fleeting joy. With enough time all is tragedy. A daoist should know this.”

“But I believe just the opposite!” Tian slapped his knee. “With enough time, all is an indifference, neither good nor bad, tragic or joyful. Enough time and distance brings peace. Sir must have met some bad daoists if they misled him so.”

“You think you, a mere ant, know the Dao better than I?” The cold voice was warming up to anger. “Do you have the faintest idea how many of your so-called schools I burned, how many of your fraudulent disciples I slaughtered? None could withstand my truth, and yet you, barely out of your first millennium, wish to debate the dao with me.”

Tian decided that it would be rude to correct an unknown senior and said “Yes. It seems you are in pain, and it would be wrong not to comfort you if I could.”

“Did you somehow miss the part where I said I butchered daoists? There’s an achievement worth remembering.”

“Not this little daoist you didn’t.”

“No, because you were born hundreds or thousands of years after I died!” The voice was fully woken to wrath now. It really didn’t sound anything like Heavenly Demon either. “You would never have survived under my hand.”

“Oh, I don’t know. My dao companion and I used to fight all the time, and aren’t we happy together? Did you really have no daoist friends?”

“Bold of you to assume there were any in my generation worthy of being my friend. My companions were the beasts of the far north. Bold Gruul Redtooth, clever Yi-iit, the twins Sui and Tiri. They would switch around which was which at a whim, and we could never keep them straight.”

“They sound wonderful. Was Gruul Redtooth a bear?”

“Pah, a bear! He ate bears! He was an Archaic Steelblood Sabertooth Cat! More spirit than flesh and blood, of course, practically a deity of the snowfields. Same with the rest of them, all more spirit than dross.”

“How amazing! I’m fostering a little spirit wolf right now, and I worry I’m doing a poor job of it. Please, Senior, if you have any advice, I would be most grateful.”

“Any chance you would come into this pit to learn first hand from me?”

“Absolutely none.”

“Haah.” The anger fled from the old voice. “Well, nobody ever accused a daoist of being bad at sitting around and talking about nothing.”

Tian felt there probably wasn’t a good answer to that, so he let the silence gather. The old voice sighed again, and began to speak. “There are two realms, broadly speaking, that of the material and that of the spirit. The world, the whole universe the daoists believe in, is merely the material. Spiritual matters, they believe, are part of that single unified whole. This is wrong. There is a higher world, a place of eternal truths. This is the realm of the spirit. The beings we call ‘spirits’ are echoes of the eternal truths of that realm, manifesting into the material world. They look and act like living organisms, but they are not. However, we can look to the thing being echoed for guidance…”

It was quite interesting, hearing about the world from an utterly non-daoist perspective. Tian wasn’t sure he believed what he was hearing, but beneath the questionable philosophy was some very practical advice.

“So I should just pet him more?”

“Pet him, play with him, hell, train him if you can. Canines like attention, pick up on enthusiasm, and are very food driven. So play with him and give him treats when he does something good, ignore him and scold him when he does something bad. Don’t hit him. I know that everyone says that’s the way to train beasts, but I speak with some authority when I say it isn’t true.”

“It never crossed my mind, and I certainly won’t do it after receiving your teachings. What kind of treats are suitable for a spirit wolf?”

“Obviously spirit meat. Or at the very least, meat that is very dense in energy. Qi, I suppose you would call it. Monster meat, monster cores, that kind of thing. They don’t need to eat, but they are echoes of truths, they are affected by what they are bouncing off of. In your case, a wolf.”

“Echoes of truths… so the Great Horse Spirit is echoing off truths of conquest.”

“Among other things. Well, I don’t know which horse spirit you are talking about, there are lots of them running around.”

The voice was fading away, becoming blurrier. Tian didn’t know if it was running out of whatever mental power sustained it, or if Heavenly Demon was finishing refining it.

“Sir, please, I would remember your name, if you would care to leave it with me.”

“Hah. Didn’t I tell you? Everyone who knew my name has died, and so have I. I wasn’t some weak thing when I lived. I know that the ‘I’ speaking is just a tiny fragment of who ‘I’ was. The rest has transcended the material world. The tiny spark of me that held the divine, that was a true thing rather than a thing of seamings and approximations, has returned to the origin of all. Don’t be deceived by the echoes you hear, stripling. There is no truth in any of us. Just echoes…”

It was another hour until Liren returned, looking a bit scuffed and very grumpy. “If you hit them enough, they break apart. Stormfall works better than my Faerie Maiden spearplay, though maybe that shouldn’t be a surprise.”

“And?”

“And it gave me a filthy headache and not much else. I broke apart one of those cloud looking things, and if it has tempered my Shen or anything, I can’t tell. Maybe the headache is what that is supposed to be? Any way you cut it, it’s not fun or particularly productive.”

“You look like you have been in a fight.”

“They blow up. If you pound on them long enough, they explode. Part of what the formation is doing must be keeping the damned things from blowing up when they get broken apart.”

“Ah, I can see why that would make you grumpy.”

“That’s not why.” She sat with a thump on the stone floor of the cave, glaring at the pit like this was all somehow Heavenly Demon’s fault. “Burning Heaven can practically dissolve them. She just spreads her wings and shines this multicolored light on them and they break apart like salt dissolving in water. But she says she doesn’t get anything from it. Literally nothing, not even a headache.”

Tian looked thoughtfully at the array. He had some exposure to arrays and the theories behind them, but only at the level of learning how to use the more basic ones. It was one of those infinitely deep fields, and quickly descended into depths of mathematics he simply couldn’t fathom. A bit like architecture- it was very useful stuff, and he appreciated others working hard on it so he didn’t have to.

“Breaking apart but condensing, and then refining into something usable. Hmm.” He smiled over at Liren. “He’s started getting possessed by some of the bigger fragments. They are interesting to talk to, even if they are a bit tricky. I’m going to see what I can get from the fragments.”

“You’ll get a headache is what you will get.” Liren was making no effort to get over her grump.

“Maybe. But I have a scheme.”