Sky Pride

Tian and Liren used their voices like whips and cudgels, driving the slaves one way and the tribesfolk another. Some screamed that the sorcerers might as well cut their throats, rather than shame them this way, or that they would die regardless. Tian and Liren didn’t entertain them. Anyone speaking up was knocked out. Any who raised a weapon was knocked out. Any who didn’t move fast enough was knocked out. There weren’t any more grand shamans hiding in the crowds, despite what their informant had told them. Just scared people. Scared for different reasons, admittedly.

They didn’t bother organizing the slaves, just pointed them north and told them to start running. They could stop by Burning Flag City, but there was already a food shortage there. Smarter to keep running north. Run until you hit the soft lands and the plentiful waters.

“What game are you playing?” The voice came in a whisper, dry and disinterested, from the fortress.

“We are stealing the slaves from the Yuu. Or liberating them. Call it what you like.” Tian shrugged.

“To what end?”

Liren quieted Tian with a hand, and in her most proper voice, carefully inflected, sweet as the lark’s song, replied, “Because fuck ‘em. I’ll fuck their mom, I’ll fuck their granny, hell, I’ll put their daddies in a red dress and fuck ‘em too. Fuck each and every one of their ancestors individually and collectively. If the grand shamans don’t like it, they can hang around because we’ll be coming back to do it again. If you don’t like it, come on out and do something about it. Otherwise, keep hiding until we are well gone. But just so you know, the two of us are famous brokies. Win or lose, you won’t profit from it.”

The owner of the fortress made no reply, but he didn’t stir out either. Once Tian found out that no matter how much side eye he gave Liren, his eyes never felt strained, he snorted. Of course the Heavenly Person inside didn’t move. They weren’t his slaves. And making a move out in the open? Only fools and rookies did that. They would have to push him a lot harder than they had to draw him out. They would have to postpone the ambush plan.

“Let’s secretly trail behind them for a while, see if we can’t draw some shamans or heretics out of cover. Someone is going to hear about this and come looking for a big score. Right now, all these people and horses are money on the hoof.” Tian sent his thoughts over to Liren, declining to comment on her utter lack of decorum. He would need ample time to cover her defects of character later. “By the way, if you ever try to put me in a red dress, I’m fighting you to the end.”

The two drifted high above the fleeing former slaves.

“I don’t know how you can do that.” Liren shook her head.

“What, fly in a white robe instead of a red dress?”

“You are never going to let that go, are you.”

“No.”

Liren groaned. “I mean fly on a sword and read a spell manual at the same time. It does take at least some conscious attention to fly.”

“Not that much, really. If you can meditate and hold a conversation at the same time, you can manage it.”

Liren hummed, then shifted track. “Do you think we are fighting wrong?”

Tian looked up from the spear manual he was browsing. “How so?”

“We are attacking mostly physically, rather than using our qi to attack. Most of the attacks I can remember our Martial Uncles and other heavenly people using were all qi based.”

Tian frowned, then pulled out his little wooden table. He sat like he was perched on an invisible chair, then crossed one leg and balanced the table on top. He then quickly set out a half dozen manuals.

“For heaven’s sake, Zihao!” Liren looked torn between laughter and tears.

“We could land if that makes it easier on you, but really, it’s just about staying balanced. It’s not like you have bad balance either.”

“No, that’s not the problem.”

“The problem is that we don’t fight right. You said so. And now I’m seeing what the books say.”

“I didn’t say we fought wrong, I was asking if we fought wrong. Did that ghost box your ears?”

The two settled into some useful bickering, which didn’t slow Tian’s eyes or fingers as he flicked through the manuals. His memory was excellent, but the manuals were always written in a sort of half-gibberish that resisted easy memorization and actively fought comprehension.

“From what I am seeing here, and these are all Heavenly Realm spells, the interaction of a physical weapon and the spell is… weird.”

“No, it’s normal, you just think it’s weird. Continue.”

Tian silently swore vengeance, but pressed on. “This-” he held up a dog eared manual, the paper yellowed and crumbling, “Says that each spell is activated with the thrust of the spear, and it’s a combination of specific motions and qi movement that creates the attack. You basically spin the spear over your head, move the qi in the right way, then thrust downward at your target and it hits them with lightning. Fake lightning, anyway, I can’t imagine it’s the real thing. Qi of wood and fire. But the spinning over the head thing is essential, and the spear never leaves your hands.”

“Really.”

“Yep. See for yourself.”

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

“Later.”

Tian nodded, looking very understanding. Liren glared at him. He grinned, and continued. “On the other hand, this book is a little more interesting. It doesn’t use weapons at all. Remember Elder Rui and that whisk he had?”

“The horsetail whisk? Hard to forget. Three headless giants with axe hands chopping down a whole base, then being struck by lightning…”

Tian shuddered, then quickly continued. “Well it’s the same kind of idea. You can either use a specialized wand, cut from certain trees and processed with all kinds of things that I’m assuming make sense to a crafter, or you can form seals with your hands, mudras, basically, and combine it with a specific chant. The chant helps guide a visualization, which forms a complicated qi structure, which is then launched following the caster’s intention. That’s the attack.”

Liren blinked, then blinked again. “Sorry, what?”

“Remember that mantis guy doing weird hand things and shooting sprays of acid at you? That. Only this is for balls of fire.”

“Huh. And… it works, does it? What am I saying, of course it does, I’ve seen it work. But what if you just… punch the prick while you are casting the spell? Let the spell ride on your knuckles instead of a wand or the air in front of you.”

“You break the spell structure, and better hope your boxing is good. Also the spell might backlash and cause damage to your meridians.” Tian shrugged. He couldn’t tease. That had been his first thought too. The image of punching someone with fireballs over your fists was simultaneously terrifying and exciting.

Liren fell into deep thought. Tian didn’t disturb her, and kept flipping through his collection of manuals. It was growing into a decent little library, even if Grandpa rated them as-

Sixth rate, except for the ones that are worse. The only vaguely acceptable one is that kidney refining manual, and the only reason that gets a strong upper Sixth from me is that it only tries to do one tiny thing, and basically succeeds at it without major side effects. Should you ever need such a garbage spell to juice your kidneys, you died and didn’t notice yet. Your kidneys are already better than the best that spell could make.

Which was nice to hear, though not very useful under the circumstances. “But are we fighting wrong? Should we be focused on using qi attacks?”

Yes but no. Or, I guess, “No but yes,” would be the right way to order that. No, you aren’t fighting wrong. Yes, you should be focusing more on qi based attacks, but that means more than you think. Mmm. Seems Liren has figured something out.

Liren was pointing at him in a rather accusatory manner. Tian couldn’t imagine what she figured out. It wasn’t like he was the one going around putting people in red dresses.

“Look at you.”

“How? Pull out my eyeballs and turn them around?”

“Wiseguy. No, I mean, we are flying on swords. You are sitting at a table while you are flying on a sword, kind of, and reading books. You have books lying flat on the table, and the pages aren’t even flapping around much. The whole thing should go flying off the sword. You should go flying off the sword. But you don’t.” Her hand was flung with excessive enthusiasm and drama, Tian thought, for such an obvious fact.

“Yes. Another amazing thing you might not have noticed, the sky is a lovely blue color today…”

She made a rude gesture, then a second one for good luck. She pulled a piece of paper out of her storage ring with a flourish and held it above her head. “Observe. One piece of paper, not flapping around.”

Tian nodded.

She let go of the paper. It vanished, falling far behind them in much less than a blink of an eye.

“We are traveling much faster than a horse can gallop, zig-zagging back and forth. If we were on the ground, our clothes would be flapping like crazy from the wind as we ran forward. But it’s not. It’s barely at the level of a nice breeze. And if I focus…” The gentle flapping of her clothes slowly came to a stop, falling naturally around her. She let out an explosive breath, and the flapping resumed.

“Not as easy as it looks. But do you see what I mean? Our qi isn’t something intangible. It’s intangible until we make it tangible. The spell gives it form, but our intention, how we visualize the spell, that shapes it too. Our qi has weight. It’s heavy air, not just energetic. That’s why you can use it for spells, it holds together if you build it up right.”

“Yes? Water is wet, fire is hot. So what?”

“No, no, I’m on to something here. Let’s land for a minute, I want to test something out.”

Liren dove for the grassland, her spear drawn before her feet touched the ground. She used an ordinary spear from Lian’s warehouse, but it quickly showed a bit of color in her hands. Plain ashwood and refined steel took on vivid streaks of orange, then shimmered in a haze of heat. She drew the spear back, and thrust out a textbook lunge. There was a complete absence of visible result. Despite that, Liren laughed like she had solved an enormous puzzle.

“It’s about vital energy! That’s why body refining arts and physiques matter so much, it’s all built on vital energy. Auntie Bai once said that all three dantian were vital, but the most important of them was the lowest, the golden furnace. Without it, there is no body to refine and channel the qi.”

Tian just waited for his dao companion to start making sense.

“Don’t you get it? In humans, qi is a transformation of vital energy. Logically, you can’t have more qi than you do vital energy. When we ascended, the amount of vital energy we already possessed increased five times over. Instead of a hundred and eighty or two hundred years of life, we get a thousand. More than that. If a normal person, one who reaches the heavenly realm without a tribulation, has ten parts of vital energy for every one part they had in the earthly realm, we have more like twenty parts. Or a hundred.”

Tian didn’t know what she was basing that assertion on, but didn’t interrupt. Liren spun around, waving her hands, smiling from ear to ear.

“All that energy builds up inside of us, reinforcing our bodies, getting converted into qi and shen in our dantians. We only think we have more qi than vital energy, because qi expands. It acts like boiling steam. Then it gets expressed out of us when we use our spells. But we don’t have any decent spells, or hardly any, and we don’t have weapons tough enough to stand up to the beating our qi puts on them. Other than the horn spear, but that’s too strong. For now.”

Tian slowly nodded, starting to see where she was going with this.

“So we just keep fighting like we always have, just with better weapons and vaguely following the crummy spells available to us. Or babying our weapons, in my case. Zihao, don’t you see? We can use long range spells, hack out spear lights, throw your darts across the city, all that, but we shouldn’t.”

“Wouldn’t that make our spells much stronger than the enemy’s? Why not stick to flinging spells?”

“Because qi is based on vital energy, which is based on our bodies, and our bodies are miles stronger than most people’s. A spell is an attack that overwhelms our body’s qi and vital energy. We can’t ignore spells, obviously, but we can survive them better than the enemy can. And when we fight, we can pour comparatively more strength into the blow. But,” And here Liren’s smile turned infernal. “Haven’t you noticed how tiring it is to use qi outside the body compared to vital energy inside of it? Even flying around gets tiring, and that is with the assistance of a special tool. Zihao we can hit the bastards a whole lot harder with our fists, and for a whole lot longer, than they can hit us with their heavy air!”