Yuanshu found the perception of qi interesting. To be fair, he found a great deal of cultivator experience and physiology to be interesting. One might even venture to say that it was this intense interest in everything the human body could experience that drove him to become the best healer in Seven Striking Thunder, and possibly one of the best healers of his age and experience across the entire Empire.
The one who supposed that would be wrong.
But at least his broad interests made the journey considerably less boring than it might otherwise have been. In this particular example, the perception of qi: every cultivator seemed to perceive it differently. He doubted that the emanations of qi energy differed from person to person (although wouldn’t be intriguing if they did), so clearly the difference must be within the cultivator themselves. The perception itself arose at the same time a cultivator had their initial breakthrough – but even that wasn’t certain. Some mortals had such a strong, instinctive affinity for a specific type of qi that they could be drawn to it without being able to consciously perceive it. How? There must be some physical mechanism that was present even in mortals, no matter how quiescent it was without a breakthrough into cultivation. And yet, in all his two hundred and fifty years of cultivation, Yuanshu had never isolated that mechanism, much less understood how one cultivator could perceive the flows of qi as rainbows of light, while another heard it as complex music, or a third—that third being Yuanshu—perceived it as an infinite complexity of scents.
And if he knew, he would use every body manipulation art he knew to change that modality, because death qi smelled like burning iron and shit, and he was steeped in it.
Around him, the mobile infirmary was filled with groans and whimpers of the wounded. Mostly not dying; these were cultivators and about anything that didn’t kill a cultivator outright or destroy their meridians could eventually be healed. But these were the lowest of the sect’s Inner Disciples and their healing would be comparatively slow even with all of Yuanshu’s arts.
He couldn’t use other measures to alleviate the smell, either. As pungent and reeking as it was, the scent of death guided him to where his patients needed the most attention. A cut artery or a wound threatening to go bad all attracted death qi. It gathered, stinking, over the danger zone until Yuanshu could address the issue with an art, elixir, or the swift deployment of his acupuncture needles. Then, qi dispersed like a swarm of gnats after you threw away the rotten food they’d been swarming.
Take this patient. He followed the scent of gathering death to one of the silk enshrouded bedsides. This was, after all, no mortal infirmary but an extradimensional space of his own design, free from danger of enemy attack and far more luxurious than most of its ilk. He pushed back the curtain. Unfortunately, the softness of the mattress and fineness of the linens that the young man lay upon did nothing to heal his wounds. Blades of stone had pierced him in a ragged line from his kidney, up the left side of his body. One had caught just beneath the shoulder joint and nearly removed his arm from his torso. More worrisome, it had succeeded in completely severing an important artery. Had the cultivator not been fighting with a bound brother on the field, he likely would have died there.
Instead, he moaned and thrashed against the bonds that were necessary to ensure he didn’t tear his arm off himself. He was conscious a fair amount of the time, but lost in a haze of pain. His meridians had been temporarily blocked through acupuncture because the closest he’d come to being coherent was thinking he was still in the middle of the battle, striking out with techniques and even wild bursts of qi. It was a necessary precaution. But one that damaged a cultivator’s ability to heal himself.
Yuanshu surveyed his body with a keen eye: the gaping wounds up his torso were unbandaged, glistening with salve to keep the flesh sealed and to stop him from bleeding out while still allowing the healer to examine the interior of his body. He bent over one and breathed deep. The tangy, citrusy scent of his salve, the copper-salt notes of blood and sweat, the cool minty scent that told him that this cultivator favored water arts...but no unusual concentration of death qi. He took a moment to study the wound anyway. It was placed in a fascinating position, the blade having sliced through fat and muscle and into the abdominal cavity. The salve was clear and, to appearances, gelid, but in truth it was far more rigid and held a loop of intestine in place while capping blood vessels and sealing torn organs.
It was a beautiful view, one Yuanshu never tired of. Red, certainly, everyone thought about red when they thought about bodies. But there was more to it than that. Pearlescent membranes, hints of blue, green, and purple throughout the cavity. Pale pink like an undiscovered variety of jade, pulsing with life. There was a world inside a living body. He could vaguely sense it—somewhere within this living creature were other living creatures, although he’d never managed to isolate one or see one. He reached one finger delicately into the open space and stroked the salve where it glistened and caressed the intestine. He thought one of the main colonies of this invisible life was here, in the gut. What was its nature and its purpose?
He pressed a little harder. It wouldn’t take much to procure a sample. Cut away a section of the gut, keep it sealed until he could stimulate the healing to regrow what he’d taken. This poor fool would never notice. And cultivator flesh always made such good samples; it took so very long for it to die. Even those invisible life forms seemed to be hardier, better able to resist his attempts at isolating them.
Which opened up some curious questions in and of itself. When a cultivator broke through, did they drag these small lifeforms with them towards enlightenment? Did even the gods have smaller creatures living within them, as immortal as they, bewildered by their good fortune?
The patient let out a shuddering cry, and Yuanshu realized he had been pressing really quite hard into the intestine. He withdrew with a murmured apology, and moved to take a cool, wet cloth and wipe the sweat from the patient’s face and neck, soothing him.
He wasn’t a sadist, after all.
That done, the man subsided back to his uneasy half-doze, and Yuanshu bent over again to sniff each wound. If he’d been the sort of man who bets—and he was, actually—he would have bet that the danger came from the largest wound at the shoulder. He would have been wrong. The death qi was gathered around a puncture that he’d considered one of the more minor; it hadn’t even gone all the way through the body, and much of the force had been blunted by a glancing blow off the rib. He hummed to himself as he reached for his tools.
With a set of what, to the uninformed, might look a lot like chopsticks, he pried the wound apart and froze the probes in place with a whisper of qi. The patient cried out again; this time, Yuanshu ignored it in favor of reaching for more delicate probes. He cut through the salve, exposing raw flesh. It immediately began to fill the wound with blood, but another art drew the blood up in a steady stream, weaving it in a random pattern in the air off to the side as he searched for the source of the problem.
“Ah, there we are.” It was such a tiny thing. A sliver of stone that had adapted itself to look almost identical in color and surface to the flesh around it. Yuanshu tapped it delicately with the end of the probe, and watched as it tried to burrow itself deeper into the flesh to escape the touch. Left alone, it would slowly cut a path towards...something. Most likely the heart; that was the only sure kill on a cultivator. But depending on the skill of its cultivator, it could simply roam around the body for an age, cutting and weakening its host. A constant, chronic pain that would surely damage one’s cultivation and leave one open to further attacks. “Wicked little thing, aren’t you?”
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He changed his grip on his probes and plucked it out with a single, deft movement. The stone, he dropped in a jade bowl next to the bed; it was enchanted to resist spells and curses and should hold the shard until he could examine it further. The death qi wisped away. He could almost imagine a sense of disappointment from it, a resentment for his constant thwarting of its purpose and its propagation. Nonsense, of course. Qi, while a fundamental energy of life and creation, was not alive in the sense of having wants, needs, desires, or frustrations. It was more like iron shavings drawn to lodestones, or the way oil and water attempted to separate themselves. Energy and attraction, nothing more.
And yet, Yuanshu felt the same petty glee to see it disperse this time as he did every time that he scattered it. Were it up to him, death qi would have no hold on any human body, ever again. Let death be the stuff of lesser beings. Humans were meant for more eternal things.
Just...not today. There was a shout from the door as another couple of cultivators were brought in. “Healer! Healer Yuanshu, sir!”
He finished reapplying the salve and gave the patient a fond pat on his good shoulder, then turned to deal with the new arrivals.
*
Cultivators rarely needed to eat, or sleep. Which meant that in a war between sects, the fighting rarely ever stopped. When it did wane, it was simply because the frontline forces had exhausted their qi reserves and fell back, while the more defensive rearline fighters moved up to ensure that the other side didn’t retake lost territory during this time of vulnerability.
Right now, the more rare circumstance where both Seven Striking Thunder and its enemy, Blossoming Red Lotus, had to withdraw their heavy hitters at the same time, was the closest thing to “peace” they were likely to see until one side accomplished their goals. Even so, the air was alight with a dozen colors of arts in opposition. Neither side wanted to damage what they were here for: a small and (until recently) forgotten set of ruins on the edges of the Beastlands. As such, they were restricting themselves to careful violence and a great deal of covert arts. He'd had to create cures for two plagues and a nasty parasitic infection already and they'd only been here for a week.
Yuanshu had emerged from the infirmary and made his way towards one of the temporary pavilions. The entire war camp floated a few feet over the earth that had been ravaged with battle arts and scarred by spell and curse. For a mortal, it would have been a strange sight: engraved wooden tiles, hovering several feet above the muddy ground, going to portals of carved jade with no markers or signs to where they might lead. If you were supposed to be here, you knew. If you weren’t supposed to be here…
Well, if Seven Striking Thunder was doing its job, you wouldn’t live long enough to wonder where any of the portals led.
Yuanshu touched a carved mark on the portal as he arrived. The air inside sparked with pale lightning and he walked through. He hated the way portal energy felt on his skin, if he was honest. The nausea of teleportation arrays felt more...natural, in its way. Portal energy was an invader, like an illness, seeking a way to penetrate the refined barriers of his skin.
Only a moment of assault, and then he was through, his smile firmly in place. The two sitting on the floor around a table spread for a lavish if intimate dinner made a very pretty pair: white and black, almost perfect of form with one glaring exception. “Hello, old friends. How goes our mission?”
Lian Lu snorted, his artifact eye glowing in the scarred half of his face. “You’ve been in the infirmary all day. How do you think it’s going?” He poured three cups of plum wine. “Sit. Mock this fool with me.”
Yuanshu took his place on the provided cushion and reached for his wine. Voice gentle, he chided, “Mock my friend? Why would I ever do that?”
“Because if this fool had managed to do one simple task, we wouldn’t even be here right now, turning a piece of perfectly good land into a wasteland that shall birth curses and beasts.”
Yuanshu glanced towards the third man in the room.
Sun Feiyun’s mouth was set in a thin, irritated line...but he didn’t deny the accusation. He inclined his head instead. “Forgive me. But not even the greatest of hunters can capture prey which is not there.”
Lian Lu rolled his eyes—a truly unsettling sight to witness with the artifact eye as it literally rolled in the socket with the faintest sound of sliding and grinding. “Maybe if you’d left someone alive, they could have told you where they hid it.”
“They didn’t know. I extensively questioned every man there.”
Now, Yuanshu raised an eyebrow. “Only the men?”
Sun Feiyun reached for his cup, drained it, poured another for each of them. “Who would have entrusted a woman with such knowledge? Besides, I have no stomach for questioning the weak. Mortals are bad enough, but women and children? There’s no reason behind it.” His expression turned sour.
“If it wasn’t there, then it wasn’t there,” Lian Lu said with a shrug, his teasing of a moment ago apparently forgotten. “But the second fragment is here, and I’ve not yet worked out how Blossoming Red Lotus figured that out or that we were going for it.”
Yuanshu took a sip of the wine. It was a sweet and pleasant palate cleanser after all day spent with blood and death. “It would seem that someone told them, wouldn’t it?” Both of the elders stared at him, and he smiled, the lift of his shoulder self-effacing. “It makes sense with the timing, doesn’t it? They could not be here without guidance from the scrolls we unearthed...or information that someone shared with them from those scrolls.”
“Only the elders knew anything about this,” Sun Feiyun snapped.
Lian Lu gave one of his sharp and crooked smiles. “The elders and our good friend Yuanshu.”
Yuanshu nodded cheerfully enough. “Indeed. I would certainly have to be counted as a suspect, if we were looking for a traitor. But then, so would both of you.”
Sun Feiyun picked up his cup, then slammed it down onto the table, undrunk. “So would every elder. Is that what we’re thinking? That an elder of the sect sold this secret to another sect? But why? If they wanted the fragment for themselves, wouldn’t it be better to simply sneak out here before we arrived and take it?”
Lian Lu’s eye was glowing brighter, the blue light casting its own strange and twisted shadows. “That would be fairly suspicious, hm? Especially after the failure to retrieve the first fragment.” He cut off Sun Feiyun’s protest with a raised hand. “I’m not saying anything against you, there. But the augur said the scrolls whispered the name of that specific mortal village, and the fragment was not there. If this fragment also wasn’t here when we arrived...well, that would raise questions.”
Yuanshu hummed. “You think a traitor might have taken the first fragment quietly before Feiyun arrived? And now seeks to cover the tracks of his thievery of the second with a war?”
“It’s possible. At the very least, if the fighting ever gets to the damn sepulcher and it’s broken open and the fragment is gone? That’s a suspect list that would go far beyond the elders and yourself. And it isn’t as if Lotus will ever admit if they have it.”
All three lapsed into an uncomfortable silence, drinking slowly. This time, it was Yuanshu who filled their cups for the next round. And it was Yuanshu who broke the silence. “If we assume that this admittedly wild conjecture is correct, my friends, and are agreed that no one of the three of us is the traitor,” they both nodded—Sun Feiyun strongly and Lian Lu in such a small movement it barely registered at all, “then it’s one of the others, isn’t it?”
“Not the Bear,” Lian Lu said without hesitation. “This is too indirect. If he wanted the fragments, he’d have demanded to duel us over them.”
There was some small amusement in the fact that no other names came immediately to their lips as protest. Any of the elders could have the personality and the capability to try and steal the fragments for their own; the fact that the scrolls were only half-translated and they still were unclear on what these fragments did was not a concern.
Power was its own reward, and the one thing that the scrolls and the augur both had made clear is that whatever whole these fragments made? It sang with a power that might shake Heaven itself. Which, Yuanshu reflected, brought one interesting thought to mind. “We have another suspect, don’t we?”
“Who—ah.” Sun Feiyun hissed. “The augur. But she would never betray High Elder Long.”
Lian Lu said nothing, just looked thoughtful.
Yuanshu smiled his warmest smile, and said, “I wouldn’t be entirely convinced of that, my friend. After all, family is...complicated, isn’t it?”
