Sky Pride

Chapter 33- Pressed By Memory

“It’s not even a tavern. It’s a few benches and a little shack with a covered porch and the owner is coming over with a jug of wine and there is something in his face that just looks so, so dumb, he’s got a face like a monkey and walks like a duck, and the wine is crap but it tastes so good right now, it’s the very perfect drink to drink at this exact moment. It’s been a good trip. Ah!” The pain in his eyes momentarily overwhelmed him. Tian had to look away, pressing his palms to his eyes.

Liren could only give him a few moments to recover. The rate the stones were being burned through hadn’t slowed. One after another, the precious refined spirit stones, each worth a thousand ordinary spirit stones, turned to ash. It wasn’t even really fair to say they were ‘worth’ a thousand to one. That implied they could be bought at any price in the Wasteland of Song. If a sect had even one, they would treat it as a Sect Defending Treasure, only brought out in extreme emergencies to power the mightiest of arrays or rituals.

Heavenly Demon had three minecarts full of them, all prepared for this day. And one of those carts was going to be empty in just a few minutes.

“Alright, it’s a memory of visiting a tavern. How do we break it without it blowing up? Did the spear thrust do anything?”

“I don’t know, give me a - It destabilized it, I think. It’s not quite as cohesive. Let me try a palm.”

Tian slapped out a palm. He wasn’t putting too much into it. He picked a spot that looked a bit more solid, and watched carefully as the white-gold hand landed. It sank in with barely a ripple.

“Well that didn’t do much.” He muttered.

“No, wait.” Liren’s eyes were flicking back and forth between the formation and the mass of shen pressing down on the lattice of light. “It changed things over here. Things that were thrashing around have gotten a lot more still. There must be some kind of internal structure, and your palm shifted it somehow. Or weakened it.”

Tian watched another refined spirit stone turn to dust. There really wasn’t time to find the perfect answer. “We take turns attacking and minding the array. I’ll start.” He slapped out three more palms in quick succession, then dove back onto controlling the array without waiting to see the result. “Switch!”

There was already a mess of blockages, slow downs, and places where the energy flow was simply a snarled mess. Tian could only try to pick through it as quickly as he could.

“Switch.”

The memory-construct-thing was still massive, still crushing down, but Tian could see changes happening. The bands of light from the array were starting to find purchase on it. He could see spots that weren’t yet fractures, but looked like they could be soon. Good spots to strike. He sent out another three palms, this time putting a bit more into them.”

“Switch. Aim for the spots that might fracture.”

Liren grunted her reply. Was the burn rate slowing? Perhaps, perhaps. He had to focus. The blockages were piling up, threatening to destabilize whole sections of the array. Tian wasn’t entirely sure what would happen if the array collapsed, even partially, but felt safe in assuming “bad things.” And, promise of future backing notwithstanding, he didn’t particularly want to see Heavenly Demon die or fail his ascension. Grandpa had been right. Heavenly Demon might be a pretentious ass, but he had been good to the two of them.

Wait. He kept battering them with aura. Had the tall man actually been trying to kill them all this time?

“Switch.”

Damn. “Alright.”

The cycle repeated three more times.

“I think it’s working.” Tian didn’t take his eyes off the array. “The burn rate is sharply down, even if the quantity of impurities is up.”

“It’s definitely working, I can see the formation digging in. At most one more cycle.”

“I… no! Quick, help me!”

Tian felt time slow as the blockages formed faster than he could break them. Energy stagnated, forming back eddies that cascaded through the array. Nodes became destabilized, swelling with energy or dwindling to almost nothing. It would take a more experienced person to know if it would shatter first, or explode.

He forced himself to treat it like a surgery. Sometimes this happened. Sometimes, people’s bodies just… went to hell extremely fast for no obvious reason and all their organs started failing and you had to scramble like hell to try and get ahead of the cascade while not letting everything piling up behind kill the patient. It was energy flows. He could follow an energy flow, and anticipate it.

The bone wand flicked out, sending lances of fine, dense qi to break up the largest blockages he could find. Using his other hand, he sent out threads of qi finer than hairs from his fingertips. They burrowed into the array channels, guiding the strange energy within. Aura definitely was a combination of qi and shen, he could feel the flow of the energy in the array eroding his consciousness nearly as fast as it burned away his energy. It was fine. Well, not fine, but it was endurable. He had a lot of both.

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He could see the effects of Liren’s work. Each move was a stab from the bone wand, shattering a single blockage that would trigger the fall of several more. Her ability to read the energy flows had always been better than his, perhaps that was the reason for it, or perhaps it was a spear daoist’s instinct. Whatever the reason, it sent cascades of energy smashing into withered sections of the array, threatening to overload them with the sudden “nourishment.”

“Change of plan. You break up the blockages, I guide the energy.” Tian yelled. He dropped the bone wand and focused entirely on the threads of qi coming from his fingers. It wasn’t as simple as smoothing a path or yanking a stray bit of aura one way or the other. Aura was damned difficult to get a grip on. You could steer it, with some care, but controlling it was orders of magnitude harder. He felt like he was trying to control thousands of streams of mercury with thousands of hair sized hammers.

The array wasn’t nearly the largest Tian had ever seen. Not even a hundredth of the largest ones. It was, however, the most complex one he had ever been personally involved with. He simply didn’t know what parts were the really important parts. He had been using it for two weeks, which was enough time to learn what the array looked like when it was working optimally. A bit like a human body. He didn’t need to know the why behind everything so long as he had a pretty good idea of how it was supposed to look. So he smoothed and pushed and hoped until an idea burst into his head. He had a tool for this, an art that was specifically for pulling energy around a body. He had better spells now, but none he had properly practiced. It was time for the Demon Pulling Art to step forth once more.

The demon pulling art relied on minutely controlling one’s vital energy to draw out harmful qi inside a body. Usually the body’s own, or an infection, or a poison. You just had to match your qi to what you were pulling out, then subtly tweak it as it shifted through different organs, as each organ would have different qi profiles, and those profiles were by no means consistent through the organ in terms of density or elemental distribution.

Really, a brute force job luring streams of aura around was comparatively simple. Exhausting, yes, due to the way the aura ground down his mental energy. That, and maintaining more than ten streams at a time. It was less exhausting than trying to bash away at everything, though, and that counted for a very great deal.

“Almost there! The memory is cracking. Almost there!” Liren was shouting, her wand moving like a thousand pecking birds. The energy flows barely had time to grow congested, but there were impurities all through the array now. Everywhere was contaminated. Tian was moving and evacuating it as quickly as he could, but he knew that the instant the memory broke apart, the array would be overloaded with a fresh wave of impurities.

He had to be faster. He couldn’t control more threads, so he could only move the energy more quickly. But it was aura, not qi, and he couldn’t control his shen intentionally to let him truly mimic it. What could he do? Could any of his arts- no, that was stupid, they weren’t designed for that… Were they?

“Grandpa, the Hell Suppressing Body-”

Nope! You are strong enough to ride out the aftermath of what you are planning, but don’t do it. He sounded quite calm. Almost chipper, in fact. I’ve told you this before. You keep underestimating Liren. She’s capable of solving complicated problems too. In an admittedly very… direct… way.

Tian didn’t even have time for a grunted “Eh?” before the memory finally crumbled under the array’s pressure. Heavenly Demon howled, a sound of pure suffering, but Liren seemed to think it was a hymn of victory.

“OPEN FOR THIS YOUNG LADY!” She dropped her bone wand and clapped her hands together, twisting her palms, then opening her hands into a circle. Between her palms blazed a white-yellow sun, too blinding to look at, shining straight into the array. The impurities vanished, evaporated under the unrelenting yang. Liren might not be a doctor, but she certainly understood impure things. And yang was very, very good at purifying things.

Heh. Now she’s in for it. Don’t act rashly, Grandson. It wasn’t how I thought we would get there, but this is her opportunity. It would be more than a shame to interfere with her good fortune.

Once again, Tian didn’t have time for an inquisitive “Eh?” before events overtook him.

“So much fuss and nonsense. With a single move, This Young Lady can sweep away all impurities.” She gave Tian a victorious look and a supercilious sniff. Then grinned. Then her eyes rolled up in her head. “I… need to lie down…” Her head cracked against the stone floor of the cavern before the words finished echoing. Tian could see the whites of her eyes and little else. He was beside her and taking her pulse before he realized he had moved. She was cold. Her usually warm, dry skin was damp and clammy.

“Absurdly strong yang depletion. Easily remedied.” Tian pulled a pill from his storage ring but hesitated. He had been avoiding looking at it, but the fiery orb was still floating over her chest. Directly over her heart, in fact. “Grandpa, I can’t help but notice there is a sun floating over my dao companion’s heart.”

Is there?

“There is. I can say with some authority, as a doctor in training, there should not be a sun floating over her chest.”

A common misconception. Right now, there should be exactly this. I know some things about suns that you, and she, don’t know. It’s true even when speaking of very small white suns. Which, important tip, are not to be confused with the dead white suns. They are entirely different things. Well, I suppose the last part isn’t really that important right now. It’s the knowing one really big thing about suns that is really important.

“Um. What’s that, Grandpa?”

You know your very creative theory on why things that go up come down?

“Yes?”

“It’s wrong.”

“It seems right, though? And what does that have to do with the sun? The sun and moon are in the sky because they don’t have any earth qi in them, or far too little to matter. Otherwise they would fall down. The sun is supreme yang, fire qi, the moon is supposed to be water qi, but it must be some kind of gelatin because it’s got craters that don’t heal and there are structures on it.”

Grandson, that’s not even logically consistent. If the moon is water, and yin, it should be sinking… Good heavens, your ability to drag people into absurd conversations is getting stronger and stronger. I’m going to pretend you didn’t say all that. Particularly because it is the exact opposite of the truth. Well. Figurative truth. Truth-ish. Tian felt an old hand patting his shoulder. From a certain point of view, the whole world is falling into the sun. It just keeps missing.

“That’s impossible. Wait. What’s happening to Liren?”

Things are falling into her, and not missing. Get ready. She’s going to be fine, but the array is going to be catching the worst of it. You are about to get very busy!