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CC: Chapter 34
🕑 Added 2024-04-23 13:56:29 +0000 UTC'Premonition'
The clouds of the Dao parted today to show him a spring running open and free.
Beneath the waters there was a city.
The skeletal frames of buildings climbed up to the inviting amber of a morning sky. Each steel giant watched its Brothers with thousands of glass eyes, peering at the tiny people walking around inside their bowels. A whispering wind blew through the forest of steel and glass, and XJ-V closed his eyes as he felt it wash over him, like the spring he’d just fallen through into this realm – into this world where the sun’s golden rays swooned to touch the tips of each great skeletal tower.
Then came a storm.
The watery heavens above opened, and pockets of the spring’s water fell upon the giants, drowning those that inhabited them one by one until XJ-V was forced to see them open their mouths and cry out as the waters of the Dao filled their lungs. They flailed like fish as the deluge increased, and the skies formed clouds that were beginning to break apart.
“Help…us…”
“Please…”
They called out – to him. To the metal man floating harmlessly as the waters gushed over their once prosperous realm. They called out with the voices of their departing spirits. They called out for a hero to take their hands.
XJ-V looked at them as the glassy eyes of their great giants smashed apart and sent their shards flying at his face. He tried blocking the onslaught, and yet felt the shards tear at his arms, his hands, and at his eyes, each piece drawing a thin layer of black blood from his body that bubbled in the light of the dying sun.
“Help…us…Help…us.”
XJ-V felt their hands claw at him and refused to open his eyes. He cursed under his breath, feeling the entity – the engine – that lay within his metal breast urge him on – to fly up to the heavens and block the Dao as only he could. With his hands he could silence it forever. He could stop the tears of a dead world.
“No,” he told the thing that begged him to use its strength. “No…”
Another pair of hands grabbed his face.
“NO!”
“XJ-V!”
He was back in reality. He was on his back, looking into the concerned eyes of Feng-Lung as the latter gripped his hands beside the Qi-pond of Ai-Lee’s Grove.
Yes – yes, he remembered now. They had come here to meditate. To walk the Dao…
XJ-V thanked his friend and allowed Feng to help him up, clawing at his neck where a distinct sting of pain was radiating. As his sensors came back online, and the world of Ai-Lee’s unreality spread once more across his vision, he saw words buzz into life before his eyes:
Anima Cores: 135
“Not as much…as last time,” he said aloud. “Not quite Rank 4…yet.”
Feng-Lung grabbed his shoulders and practically shook him like he was addressing a madman. “Not enough?!” he shouted. “I thought you shut down! You were flopping like a fish on a line, XJ-V! Not even the Huli could get through to you.”
The Cog spared a glance towards Arha who cocked her head worryingly at his side. She panted as she lay her head on his steel palm, signaling her sisters who watched them from above.
“You see what Arha has to deal with?” she shouted up at them. “Arha is a big girl now with big responsibilities. Her metal-man needs her!”
“Fat load of good it seems you do him, dear sister,” one of the mischievous foxes swinging on the branches of the willow above them replied. “If you asked me, this one is a lost cause.”
“Oh, don’t be so mean, Mimi,” the other fox replied. “You know Arha has always had such fondness for broken things.”
“Broken?” XJ-V said aloud, silencing little Arha before she could reply. “I…I suppose I am,” he said, rising to watch the strange ripples playing across Ai-Lee’s pond. “I cannot even spend five minutes in the Dao, for all the time it still takes me to reach its realm.”
“You still draw its power,” Feng-Lung told him as he laid a reassuring hand on his quivering shoulder. “Even though it frightens you.”
“Frightens me? How can you be sure of this, Brother. What do you know of machine fears?”
Feng-Lung met his metal Brother’s derision with a hearty laugh. “I can imagine they are the same things most men fear – whether they are made of metal or composed of flesh.”
“And what would those things be?” XJ-V asked.
“Impotence,” Feng replied with a cheeky wink. “Mocking. Death. Isolation. Prejudice. In a word,” he added. “Failure.”
The Cog looked at his Brother for a moment, noting how the youth met his eyes with trembling, without hesitation.
“Uh, XJ,” Arha murmured. “You – you don’t look so good right now.”
“It is nothing,” he told his Huli guardian. “…Nothing.”
He returned his gaze to the pond, seeing the distinctive shadows of the other Disciples who were here today, basking in the warmth of the Grove, other strange animal spirits twirling around her necks or nibbling at the soles of their feet. Not many Disciples were coming by these days – and few XJ-V knew personally. Through the mists he could see them preoccupied more with their desire to win the coming tournament more than communing with the Dao – and many of them tended to wave away the spirits that came upon them at this time.
No doubt it was fear that brought them here more than anything else. Master Longhua had come to the commune only yesterday and rebuked the men for missing their Qi-building exercises and observing their Cultivation practices.
“Ai-Lee twists and turns in his eternal sleep to look upon you children!” he said, scolding them with such derision that everyone, including noble Mah-Jung, had bent their heads and knees as he passed them by. “Is a warrior made by his hands alone? No – his greatest weapon is his mind, and a strong mind must be in perfect harmony with one’s body if one wishes to become a Cultivator of legend. You all seek the quick path to victory. You all see Ori’un and wish to bask in his shadow. But I warn you all, my Disciples, should you stray from the path of wisdom, you shall fall before you take a single step on the stairway to the heavens!”
So now, here they were, obeying their Master and coming to the most sacred place of all in Ramor-Tai. But most of them, XJ-V knew, were purely here to pay lip-service to the Master’s demands. These days most just wanted to stay out of Longhua’s way.
This, the Cog could understand – the Master had been jumpier than ever these past few weeks. In their private sessions XJ-V could sense the Master’s ire every time the Cog took a wrong step, or became frustrated with his inability to enter the Dao for long.
“You are still a machine without patience!” Longhua told him, whacking him with the tip of his beard like a great hairy whip. “Just like a boy!”
XJ-V had been glad to have Feng-Lung beside him on these days, when it seemed like everyone else was expecting more of him…
He wished he could communicate just how right Feng was to the boy, but XJ-V found that he did not quite have the words. How does one say that they fear not what they are, but what they might be? For that, in itself, is failure.
Is it not?
The question was put to the side as he watched the ripples on the pond suddenly rise. Feng had noticed, too, for the Cog heard the sound of him sucking in the pure air of the grove as though he were about to see something miraculous.
“Oh, here we go,” Arha’s sisters above sighed. “Such showoffs these ones are…”
Across the pond, small fountains were now climbing like thick, turquoise totem poles to pierce the dense fog that lay thick across the Qi pond. Then, much to the dismay of the Cog, a pair of indigo eyes blinked into existence at the tips of the totems.
“By the Dao…” Feng-Lung whispered.
Both men watched as the thin water creatures then spouted six pairs of sinuous, lithe arms – totally transparent against the mist that clouded the air – and two legs that remained connected to the rippling waves below them.
The thin creatures bowed low, exhibiting the courtesy of a troupe of proud performers, and then began to dance.
“Oh, here we go,” Arha moaned beside XJ-V. “Arha is not a jealous woman – but how can a fox compete with curves like theirs? It is not fair, is it?”
“I would not bother trying to reach these boys,” Minhua shouted down to her sister. “Like all men, they are lost in the dance.
The Huli were not lying - both Cultivators watched the lithe, ghost-pale water-spirits spin and twirl on the surface of the Qi pond with dexterity and grace the likes of which neither had every seen. They watched them link their transparent tendrils together and throw eachother into the air, letting droplets fly and splash across the faces of the men who knelt in silent meditation – provoking them to watch, too. One by one, every Cultivator in the Grove became spellbound by the dancing spirits.
And yet, each man was not so much drawn by the sight of the acrobatic beings themselves, or the impossible movements of their limbless limbs, but by the strange sadness that lay within their hollow eyes.
“What are they?” XJ-V finally asked.
“Shuigui,” Feng-Lung replied, clapping for a particularly well-timed somersault. “’Water-ghosts.’”
XJ-V’s eyes flared as he recalled the term – he had come across a sketch of these liquid specters in one of Gira’s books. And now he understood the sadness that could be read even upon their almost featureless faces.
“They are the souls of those who drowned,” he said. “They appear in the body of water that killed them.”
“In other words,” Feng-Lung said. “They are failures.”
XJ-V was struck by the youth’s dark tone, but he saw no change in Feng-Lung’s smile as his eyes darted back to him.
“They are those that tried to pass the trials of Ai-Lee,” Feng explained. “But they could not overcome their fear. So, here they dance, appearing only when they see doubt, or sorrow, or another soul lacking in belief. They come to dance to show that, even in their failure, they are still a part of the Dao. They still have a part to play in our world.”
“So you mean to lecture me now, too,” XJ-V huffed as Arha tried (and failed) to imitate the dancing spirits. “I have heard enough about my doubt to last a thousand lifetimes. Both Fai-Deng and Mah-Jung tell me nothing but how I am destined to enter this tournament and rise to the top. But what if I don’t want to, Feng-Lung? Did I not tell you in Master Longhua’s courtyard that I have left the world behind?”
“None can leave the world behind forever,” Feng-Lung told him with a stern, yet still smiling face. “You can try, but you will always be pulled back, the more you resist.”
“Tell that to your own Master!” XJ-V railed. “You saw it with your own – well, Arha’s – eyes: Master Longhua does not even want to give us the chance to leave. He only accepted the Planeswalker’s tournament because he was compelled to.”
“Indeed, Brother,” Feng-Lung replied. “Because the world came to him, and he even he could not resist it. You have proven my point adequately.”
“Enough,” the Cog said, turning to go. “I do not want to hear this.”
Once again, however, Feng’s firm hand caught his metal wrist.
“You know why we all push you to win, Brother?” he asked. “Because we know you have the chance to change the world out there. Because each of us know that rejecting the Wastes will only lead to more destruction.”
XJ-V grit his steel teeth, trying to stop himself from looking at the final movements of the Shuigui dance, and not paying attention to the reeds rustling behind them both.
“If you want to change the world, be my guest,” he said. “It sounds to me as though it is you who does not believe in yourself, Feng-Lung! Why do you pin your hopes to me? Why not seek to win yourself?”
“Because I have been tested before, Brother, and I failed.”
Both Cultivators looked at each other with very different eyes, then, as each one recognized that they had just given the other a piece of themselves on this day, before the spirits of the dead.
And it was at this moment that the man rustling the reeds behind them deigned to enter into their private sanctum.
“Is that what you think, Feng-Lung?” he said. “Even after all this time?”
XJ-V turned to see Ori’un emerge from the reeds of the Grove, while his Brother merely turned away, hiding his face as though from a great, dazzling fire.
“Planeswalker,” he said. “I suppose I knew you would come here eventually.”
