NOVEL NEXT Chapter 20: Whisper Truths Within The Darkness
Wang Yognaho groaned as he came back to awareness, and felt someone's hand clamp down over his nose and mouth. His eyes flew open, and he saw Qian Shanyi's cold stare boring into him mere inches away from his face, a finger pressed against her lips, her other hand keeping him quiet. She motioned with her free hand, and in the darkness, he saw a pair of characters written on the skin of her forearm in blood.
He nodded, and she slowly moved her hand away from his mouth. He was tied to the tree trunk by a rope, and Qian Shanyi helped him untie himself, moving slowly and silently.
They were sitting on top of a branch, high up in the forest canopy. The forest was quiet, illuminated by faint rays of moonlight piercing through the leaves above their heads - bright enough for a cultivator to see, but not very clearly - and when a whisper of wind passed by, it sent dancing shadows all around them.
It would have been a contemplative sight, but instead it set him on edge, every shadowy movement making him think those rosevines were sneaking closer. It didn't help that the last thing he remembered was falling asleep within his Inner World.
With a start, he realized that one of the shadows down on the ground really was a rosevine. Thankfully, it didn't seem to have noticed them yet, and he focused on preventing any errant spiritual energy from leaking out of his pores.
Qian Shanyi motioned to him to bring his attention back to her, and showed him her other forearm, where more bloody characters were written down.
He looked at her in confusion, and saw her turn one of her palms towards him and start to use it like a writing slate, slowly tracing out characters on the skin. It took many tries - keeping track of what was written or not was difficult when no actual ink was left behind, and the darkness did not help matters - but she simply started over every time there was a problem. Eventually, she settled on closing her fist any time a character was over, and finally managed to convey a full sentence to him.
He blinked twice. She closed her eyes and breathed out slowly, a bit of tension leaving her shoulders, then opened them again with a smile.
He held out his own palm, and slowly followed the same process. She watched carefully, turning her finger in a circle when she needed him to repeat drawing a character.
She nodded at him, and started to write for a long time.
As she finished, she shook her hand and grimaced.
He nodded - that one paragraph took a good ten minutes - and started writing himself.
He motioned to her forearms where the characters were written in blood.
She shook her head.
He tapped his cheek in thought. Something about that description called back to him. Finally, it clicked, and he brought up his palm again.
She frowned at him.
His eyebrows rose upwards.
She pursed her lips.
He grinned, savoring the feeling, slowly writing out his answer.
She scowled at him, strokes on her palm flying faster, more angular.
He winced. Okay, that was somewhat fair.
She frowned, staring off into the forest. He followed her gaze, and saw the entrance portal to his inner world down on the ground. Several rosevines were stalking around it, and as he watched, one of them crawled over the edge and fell in. Just great. He couldn't even close it without immediately giving away their location.
He turned back to her, and continued writing.
She paused, then continued slower.
She squinted at him, then rolled her eyes, and glanced over at the entrance to the world fragment. When she looked back at him, she started writing again.
He nodded.
Her frown deepened.
He raised his palm to respond, but she pointed towards the trunk of the tree they were holed up in. His glance slid downwards, and he saw a single rosevine slowly climbing upwards.
Did it sense us somehow?
He checked his spiritual pores, but they were closed. Perhaps it followed after the spiritual energy that leaked out while he was still asleep?
He turned back towards Qian Shanyi, and saw her grimly staring at the rosevine.
She raised an eyebrow at him.
She shifted around on the branch, and showed him a rope hanging down, stopping a couple meters off the ground.
He shook his head, and glanced back at the rosevine. It was halfway up the tree. He turned back to her with a questioning look.
She looked at him strangely, and started quickly writing on her hand.
She pursed her lips at him, and continued writing. She even stopped cutting the words for clarity, and he followed suit.
She blinked.
She paused, looking away for a moment, then sighed and went back to writing.
He squinted at her.
She shrugged indifferently.
Violation? That definitely didn’t sound right, every other old monster did that.
She frowned at him.
He folded his arms on his chest, in a gesture he hoped looked defiant.
She squinted at him, her eyes growing cold.
Her frown turned into a scowl.
He exclaimed with his hands.
She shrugged, her scowl slowly receding.
He raised his eyebrows, and turned away from her, to watch the rosevine. It was a good three quarters to their branch, and he decided not to wait for it to come any closer. He took off his boot, and threw it into a tree thirty meters away. It rustled through the crown, and he saw the rosevine bolt away towards the sound. Another rosevine came from the opposite direction, heading towards his boot. Qian Shanyi watched what he did carefully, but didn’t write anything. They waited in silence for a while, before he once again brought his palm up.
She raised an eyebrow at his comment.
Her eyebrows climbed yet higher.
He pursed his lips.
She smirked.
He stared at her, not sure if she was joking.
He frowned. What was that supposed to mean?
She stared at him if he just asked if the sky was purple.
He opened his eyes wide in shock. Get rid of his luck?
He sat on the branch in silence, processing what she just wrote. Get rid of his luck. Of the one thing making his life a living hell. Was that real? He had never even thought that was possible, but just maybe…
Cautiously, he wrote to her again.
She simply shrugged.
That was the nicest thing anyone had ever told him. His mind was awash with possibilities, and he quickly responded in kind.
She rolled her eyes at him.
He pursed his lips, and fumbled, needing to write a response several times.
She nodded, putting on the most serene look he had seen on anyone in his life.
He squinted at her, but before he could respond, she asked him a question that brought him down to earth.
He turned away. It did feel nice to have someone else to talk to about everything without half-truths getting in the way, but it also brought up memories, and no matter how nice he was feeling, he wasn’t about to share those.
She gave him a side eye, but didn’t push him. Instead, she asked a different question entirely.
She shook her head.
He pursed his lips.
He turned away, and she gently punched him in his shoulder to bring his attention back to her.
He really didn’t want to think about this, but she just wouldn’t let go, would she? After a while, he decided that revealing a small part was harmless enough.
Her eyebrows rose up.
She looked away from him. They sat on the branch, quietly thinking their own thoughts.
By the time morning rose, they dropped down to the ground, sore from sitting on an uncomfortable branch all night. Wang Yonghao found his boot (thankfully unmolested by the rosevines) and they slowly made their way back to the entrance to his inner world.
Qian Shanyi tethered herself to a nearby tree with one of their two ropes, then kneeled in front of the inner world and pushed her head through the entrance to take a look.
Sure enough, the earth was dug up all over the world fragment where the rosevines burrowed into the ground. She could see a couple places where their flowers poked out of the ground and the open holes of the chiclotron, as they hibernated in the permanent daylight of the world fragment.
She didn’t breathe while her face was within, fearing poison. The half of the chiclotron filled with fire and metal treasures was happily burning, no doubt producing yet more dead air. She pulled her head out of the world fragment entrance, looked at Wang Yonghao, and explained all she had seen to him.
“So what do you want to do?” he said.
“You can fly in, safely kill the rosevines, then move the treasures around to prevent the flow of dead air,” she said, “Then we’d wait outside the whole day and see if the dead air clears.”
He narrowed his eyes at her. What? It was a decent plan!
“Why do I have to fly in?” he said, “You can do it!”
“One of us has to, why not you?“
“You are the old monster here!” he scowled, “With your spiritual shield, you probably can block out any poison in the air in the first place. It’s much safer for you to do this than for me!”
That…would have been an excellent point, if she actually was an old monster. As it was, she couldn’t even block out liquids with her spiritual shield, let alone gasses.
“I already told you, I am in recuperative training,” she said, trying to come up with a better way out of this, “you can kill the rosevines from the air, should they attack. I can’t, not without using spiritual energy.”
“And I can’t block out the poison,” he parried, “What if I lose consciousness there?”
She tugged on the rope tethering her to a tree.
“I’ll put a tether on you,” she said, “if you black out, I’d just pull you out.”
“The same would work if you would go in instead. Both of us would be in some amount of danger. At best, we should flip a coin!”
“With your luck?” she snorted, “You might as well tell me to go in directly.”
“Fine, how about this,” he said, walking around a tree so it was between them. He unsheathed his sword, and quickly sliced across the bark with small, precise movements. She realized what he was doing halfway through and tried to step to the side of the tree to watch him work, but she was too late by far.
“Rock paper scissors, and I already picked what I play and drew it on the bark,” he said, “my bet is set, and my luck is out of the picture. Now play your hand, and we’ll be done with this.”
She grit her teeth. If only she was a half step faster, she could have traced the back of his sword and figured out what he drew.
Her mind scrambled to find a solution, but she really didn’t see one. At the end of the day, one of them would need to go in to move the treasures, and Wang Yonghao was right that they would be exposed to unknown dangers.
If she played the game with anyone else, then her chances of winning were probably about two thirds - as long as she didn’t lose the first round, she was pretty sure she could figure out what he carved in the later rounds. It wasn’t ideal, but it wasn’t terrible either. Of course, his luck was strong enough that it might actually sway her decision, but it was hard to be sure whether it actually could. That was the usual problem with luck - proving whether a given outcome was even affected by luck at all was, outside of very simple cases, entirely impossible.
Well, whatever. All gambles come down to risk in the end.
She sighed, and threw out paper. Wang Yonghao grinned, and she went around to the back of his tree to check. He did in fact play scissors.
“This isn’t fair in the first place,” she complained, “with how strong your luck is, it could have easily swayed my decision here.”
“Sore loser!” he cheered, “Come on, I’ll help you with the tether.”
She didn’t move, and crossed her arms on her chest. Wang Yonghao looked at her in surprise.
Backed into a corner, she could only put all her cards on the table. What he said this night made her more hopeful, but she really was hoping she could delay this until they got to a city…
“Well, perhaps this deception has reached its natural end point…”, she muttered, before raising her voice and running a hand through her hair, “I can’t do that because I am just a refinement stage cultivator. I don’t know any flying techniques. If I went in, I would probably just die.”
“What? No you aren’t,” he laughed softly.
“I very much am.”
“Oh come on, this again?” He threw his hands up in the air, “Stop lying and just do it!”
“I said I almost never lie directly,” she scowled at him, showing her teeth, “Now I am telling you, directly, that I am not any kind of old monster. Do I need to push this idea through your skull with the back of my foot for you to understand it?”
He opened his mouth, then closed it. His hand rose in a strange gesture.
“No, wait, that can’t be. You said -”
He frowned, considering what she actually said. She waited for him patiently.
“You blew away the poison fog from that giant cave,” he said slowly, unsure of himself.
“It took me a full day of working your fly whisk,” she responded, “Even a low refinement stage cultivator could manage it.”
“No, you… You won against me in shatranj…,” he trailed off.
“I’ve never played that game before in my life,” she grinned maliciously, “How does it feel to lose to a complete newbie? Face it, you fell face first into my trap then, just as you did when I convinced you I was an old monster.”
His eyes widened as the realization finally hit him.
“You… Then you did lie!” his face turned into a scowl, and he pointed an accusatory finger at her. Spiritual energy flowed out of his pores, whipping the air currents around him into a frenzy, and she dropped one of her hands on the pommel of her sword, recirculating her own energy to match. “Why didn’t you just tell me who you were?!”
“Because you beat me up over nothing and then left me for dead inside of a void prison with no food or water?” her scowl grew wider, fire in her eyes. “How in the name of the thirteen gates of Heaven was I supposed to know what else you would do? Maybe you’d turn me into a cauldron!”
“I apologized!” he threw his hands in the air, “Even back then, I apologized! Yet you kept lying! How could you?”
“Apologies are cheaper than dirt.”
“Did you even lie about wanting to help me?”
“It was the truth, contingent on you not being a scumbag.”
“Oh fuck you,” he scowled, “I am not a scumbag! You are!”
“Get over yourself,” she scoffed, “You yourself said you can’t be sure why you took me with you, and regardless of your intentions, kidnapping is still kidnapping. I would have been justified to kill you on the spot for pulling a stunt like that. A couple deceptions is nothing. Now will you do what is necessary to keep both of us alive, or will you keep whining?”