Ch. 038| The Bottom of the Rift

Four days later, Lin Que again took on a back-mountain herb-gathering run.

This time the old pill-kiln held rather more. With the spirit stones traded from the qi-deviation beast, Han Bosheng had added two oil-lamps, a coil of coarse hemp rope, and a small pot of wound-closing salve; Qinghe had nailed a plank to the stone wall, spread out her set of brush, ink, and cinnabar, drawn seven or eight new talismans, and pressed each beneath a stone to dry in the shade. In a corner of the kiln were heaped the things Lin Que had gathered over these days—a few kinds of fresh herbs picked here, half a sack of mixed grain.

A roost, worn into a little warmth of habitation.

"That rift, I've watched it three trips these past days." Lin Que crouched by the fire-pit and, with the charcoal-ash, sketched the run of the sleeping small rift. "The light along its edge has stayed even, never once breathed—it's truly sleeping dead. And inside, apart from that point of living-qi at the end, I saw nothing else large moving."

"Saw nothing doesn't mean there's nothing." Han Bosheng scraped his short blade on the stone. "A rift is dark inside; however true those eyes of yours see through the gash, once you're in, the nooks and crannies still hide things. My four brothers—it was only after going in that they learned there was a second thing, a third thing inside."

"Which is why you bring up the rear." Lin Que set down the charcoal stick. "I lead, reading the path and the vital gates of things; Qinghe in the middle, laying talismans; you at the back—the moment you sense wrong, call the retreat."

Qinghe gathered the shade-dried talismans into her body-pouch one by one, and at the last picked out three to stack at her wrist: "Probing, snaring, warding—a small sheaf of each. The rift drinks my talisman's qi hard; how many breaths it can hold, I won't boast. Point me to where there's no rift, and only then can I lay a talisman."

"That's it, then." Lin Que stood and cinched the bone-pick pouch Han had given him tight at his waist. "Inside, don't be greedy—take that piece at the end and go."

"That one's mine you're quoting again." Han Bosheng gave a "heh," took up his short blade, and followed.

---

That sleeping small rift, in the afternoon light, was faint enough to be dispersing.

Lin Que went first, turning sideways to squeeze in against the gash. The moment he was in, the daylight outside was gone; all around was black and deep, only the line of "clean" faint light on the rift-wall glowing faintly to show a narrow passage wide enough for one. The air was cool, and in the cool a hard-to-name reek of sweetish blood.

Beneath his left eye the heat burned swollen. On both sides of the rift-wall, that layer of "clean" light brightened inch by inch in his sight—walk against it, graze a point of it, and hide and hair, a piece is gone. He raised a hand and signed behind him: keep left, follow my footprints.

Han Bosheng and Qinghe followed one behind the other, treading dead-steady. The three of them hugged that narrow passage and edged inward step by step.

After some twenty paces, the narrow passage opened out into a small clear space.

Lin Que was about to let out a breath when his left eye twitched—

Overhead.

From the ceiling of that clearing hung a great mass of blue-black vine, its stalks growing dense barbed thorns, the leaf-edges glowing with that "clean" faint light. Ordinary vine was a dead thing, but this one mass, a thread of the rift's flaw-lines wound through the vine's heart, had come alive—it was moving, very slowly, drooping down.

"Don't move!" Lin Que barked low. But it was half a breath too late.

Qinghe was just lifting her head when that mass of vine coiled down, a thorned tendril wrapped her wrist, and yanked hard upward. Qinghe grunted; her whole body was dragged off the ground, the talisman-pouch at her wrist burst open with a rustle, and the talismans scattered across the floor.

"The spirit-devouring vine." Han Bosheng's short blade cleared its sheath and cut into that tendril, but the edge was as if hacking into water-soaked ox-sinew, leaving only a white mark. "You can't cut it! It drinks qi—the more spirit-qi it drinks, the fiercer it grows; that's how it drained my brother dry back then!"

Qinghe hung in mid-air, the vine at her wrist coiling ever tighter; her other hand had already pinched out a talisman, but the blue glow on it flashed once and was drunk faint by the vine. Her face went white: "My talisman's qi… I've fed it into its mouth!"

Lin Que's eye stared dead at that great mass of vine.

Tendrils by the hundred, thousand, every one able to coil and every one drinking qi—but the one thread of flaw-lines that had brought it alive was not on the tendrils. It ran up the main vine, climbed to the stone crack at the top, and at the place its root drove into the stone, the flaw-lines twisted into a knot.

That was the vital gate. Cut the tendrils and you'd cut till dark without finishing; sever that root-knot, and this whole mass would wither.

"Qinghe, stop feeding it talismans! Hold your qi in!" Lin Que snatched a scattered snaring talisman from the floor and thrust it back into her hanging hand. "Up top—where the main vine drives into the stone crack—slap it on! There's a knot there, seal it dead!"

Qinghe, her spirit-qi being drunk by the vine, her heart in a panic, at his shout, instead steadied. She stopped struggling in vain, gritted her teeth, twisted her wrist, and flung that snaring talisman out—the paper spun, and "phat," slapped onto the knot at the top where the vine-root drove into the stone.

Lin Que's bone-pick left his hand at the same instant. He was below, seeing truest, and cast a pick straight at the center where the talisman had stuck.

The bone-pick drove into the knot.

That great mass of blue-black vine, as if seized by its throat, shuddered all over, and its tendrils by the hundred and thousand slackened all at once. Qinghe dropped straight down from mid-air—Lin Que was right below, and without a thought surged a step forward and caught her in his arms.

The moment he caught her, he sensed the wrongness: this slip of a girl was lighter than she looked, and falling into the crook of his arm her whole body was still drawn taut with a coiled force. But he had no room to dwell on it; his eyes had already gone past her shoulder to that vine—the "clean" faint light was dimming at a visibly quickening rate, the leaves curling scorched and blackening one by one, drooping into a mass of dead grass. Only when he confirmed the vine was dead through did he let go and set her steady.

"Can you stand?" he asked—asking whether she was steady on her feet; the words no sooner out than his hand was reaching to gather up the scattered talisman-pouch.

In the crook of his arm that instant, Qinghe's face had reddened first, then swiftly pressed it back down. Landing, she turned her eyes aside, and paid no mind to the ring of blood the vine had wrung about her wrist, but bent first to gather the talismans scattered across the floor.

"Next time I'll watch the ceiling myself," she said, her voice still tight. There was no thanks at all in the words, only vexation—vexation at her own moment of panic just now, and at something else she could not name.

Lin Que took no notice of that flush. He took it only that she was vexed at losing her composure: Qinghe had hung in mid-air by that vine without a single cry of pain, and that temper of hers, he understood. As for the rest—when it came to such things, he had always been slow.

---

Past that dead vine, the narrow passage sank down a stretch further.

The rift's end was reached.

It was a small stone-chamber of a clearing; on the rift-wall, that point of living-qi Lin Que had glimpsed through the gash was set right in the center—a piece of gentle jade marrow, half a fist in size, congealing a pool of faint living-qi, thicker than that broken jade years ago by no less than double. Lin Que's left eye swept it, and his heart beat half a step faster: the flaw at breaking the sixth layer of Qi Condensation, the mending method traced from the deep scrolls—the conducting-material it lacked was this.

But before that jade marrow, a thing crouched.

At first it looked like a stone. Lin Que's eye swept across it, and sensed wrong—it was a man. A man seated cross-legged, in a robe rotted past all color, flesh dried shrunken to the bone, its breath long gone. But all about it wound the rift's flaw-lines, and those flaw-lines bored in through a caved-in place at the small of its back and out again through its seven apertures, propping this corpse that should long have rotted through into a thing half dead, half alive.

"A flaw-marked corpse-cultivator." Han Bosheng pitched his voice very low, his blade-hand sweating. "One who went into the blighted ground and never came back… never died through. The rift's flaw-lines prop this last breath in him, and set him to guard here."

The corpse-cultivator seemed to sense the living; its withered eyelids lifted a slit, and within were no eyeballs, only two knots of faint "clean" light. The legs it had folded stirred, and it slowly rose, a withered hand lifting, its palm turning out a chill, cold force—an art it had cultivated in life, unforgotten even in death.

Han Bosheng fell back half a step. "It can still wield force! Contact wounds!"

Lin Que's eye had already seen through it.

The flaw-lines wound and knotted all about it, seeming impervious to blade and spear. But every flaw-line bored in through that one caved-in place at the small of its back—that was the root of the flaw-lines, the source it was propped up from, and its one and only flaw. Sever that place, and the rift-qi propping it disperses, and this corpse becomes a dead corpse once more.

"Qinghe, snare its legs!" Lin Que barked low, already hugging the rift-wall to circle behind and to the side of the corpse-cultivator. "Han Nine-Lives, draw it head-on!"

Han Bosheng understood, spat, and thrust his blade in a feint, drawing the corpse-cultivator to turn to face him. Two snaring talismans from Qinghe slapped the ground in succession, their glow flashing, binding the corpse-cultivator's withered legs and slowing its turn by half a beat.

That half a beat.

Lin Que had already circled to the small of its back, fixed on that caved-in root of flaw-lines, gripped the fine-steel needle, gathered the whole force of his fifth layer of Qi Condensation, and drove the needle in.

The needle's tip pierced that caved-in place.

The flaw-lines all over the corpse-cultivator, with a hiss, as if their mainstay had been drawn out, collapsed and dispersed inch by inch from the root. It froze in place, withered hand halted in mid-air, and those two knots of "clean" eye-light guttered out point by point. It slumped soft to the floor, become once more a dried corpse that had sat cross-legged for who knew how many years.

Lin Que had no breath to spare; he reached to the rift-wall and gouged out that piece of living-qi jade marrow, tucking it into his robes. Warm. Through his clothes, that living-qi soothed his left rib—the very thing to mend that flaw.

The moment the jade marrow left the rift-wall, that stone-chamber of a clearing, the "clean" light on all four sides suddenly flickered bright and dim, as if a pool of dead water had been stirred. From deep in the rift-wall came a very low sound, not quite a sound, a muffled groan. Lin Que's heart tightened: this rift, sleeping dead, had stirred at his gouging.

"It's woken!" Han Bosheng's color changed, and he shoved him. "Once a rift wakes, nothing inside is certain—don't linger, go!"

Lin Que gripped the jade marrow in his robes, but did not hurry to run. He crouched, propped up that soft-slumped dried corpse, set it back seated cross-legged in its place, and gathered its scattered robe about it.

"This one went into the blighted ground and never came back too," he said low. "Now the flaw-lines have dispersed—let him rest easy."

---

Out of the gash, the afternoon sun was glaring white; the three of them each caught their breath a good while on the loose-rock slope.

Han Bosheng had flayed the heart of that dead vine, and from a stone crack gouged out two rift crystals this rift had congealed, weighing them in his hand: "The vine-heart's usable for tool-forging, the rift crystals the Guangyuan Company buys. This trip's not empty." He divided it clean, and pressed a rift crystal into Qinghe's hand. "You put a ring of blood at your wrist into it—this one's yours."

Qinghe did not refuse. She took it with a businesswoman's briskness, the blood-mark on her wrist already dressed with wound-closing salve: "The jade marrow is yours." She glanced at Lin Que's robes. "You went into this rift for it to begin with."

"Jade marrow to him, the two rift crystals one each for me and the girl, the vine-heart I'll take for tool-forging." Han Bosheng grinned, reckoning the accounts dead clear. "Every trip from now on we split it so—no one takes advantage of anyone."

Lin Que nodded. This was best—clear accounts made for a long road.

He touched the warm jade marrow in his robes, against his left rib through the cloth.

The thing to break the flaw at the sixth layer, ready. All that remained was to find a place no one would come upon, and make that move.

【Ch. 038 End · Xuanzhao's back-mountain · the sleeping small rift of the blighted ground · the rift's bottom】