Chapter 116: STRING AND RED

CHAPTER

116

STRING AND RED

JIEYUAN

—∞—

Jieyuan stood in the middle of the clearing, eyes on the thicker wall of mist ahead that marked the edge of the pocket. How’s it looking, Huaxin?

It’d been about eleven days since their fight with the two-headed snake. Six days since he and Daojue had set off again. And one thing Jieyuan had figured out pretty quickly was that he didn’t need to be that close to the edge for Huaxin to use Fatebloom Intuition.

It hadn’t taken long for that particular discovery to prove life-saving.

If a beast rushed into the pocket, the spot right in front of it was just about the worst place to be, and little surprise there.

UNCLEAR.

Jieyuan sighed. Then he turned to Daojue, who was waiting by his side, and gave a little shake of the head.

Three days ago, he’d have said “Wait,” and five days ago he might have explained further, saying “I can’t get a clear feel for it, let’s give it a little while.” Now, though, just the nod did the trick. It also saved him from having to interrupt Maeva’s chanting. He was still working his way back to his full chroma reserves, now that they’d been increased with his breakthrough.

His gaze lingered briefly on the cut across Daojue’s bare chest. It’d happened three days ago, when they’d fought a pack of chromal wolves. At the time, it’d been deep, but a steady regime of regeneration augmenters, coupled with Daojue’s regeneration rate—far higher than Jieyuan’s, even though they were both at fifth-sign Redsoul—had reduced it to a thin, faded, off-white line.

Jieyuan hadn’t suffered any wounds as bad these last few days, but what he lacked in quality, he made up for in quantity. He glanced down, eying the many, many cuts littering his bare upper body. They were all healing nicely, though, and wouldn’t be getting in the way.

Four days ago, he’d had the idea to dispense with the use of robes altogether and make do only with trousers. They were fighting several dozen beasts per day on average now, and that was a sure recipe for ravaged clothing. Jieyuan didn’t have many more changes left over, and he didn’t see a point ruining them too. Not when there was no need for that much modesty, with only he and Daojue there.

He’d also long since replaced the makeshift rope connecting them to a rawhide one—a chromal one. The clothes-made one had a hard time surviving their encounters, and Jieyuan wasn’t about to risk getting split up from Daojue too. Not when they were in for a hard time surviving together.

He gave the pocket they were in another, more careful look. There were some bushes near the edges, plus some flowers growing around it. He made his way over, started picking them up. Daojue followed, but from a distance.

Jieyuan crouched down in front of the bush and started picking the little white flowers dotting it. They were ones he recognized, ones he’d seen before with Meiyao. Useful for antidote concoctions. He recognized the nearby flowers, too—also used in antidotes.

He had his attention split three ways.

Part of it was on the flower-picking. As it turned out, Meiyao had been right. There was a trick to collecting the flowers, and it was different for each one. Angle and strength—if you got either wrong, you risked damaging it.

As undeveloped as his ability to sense its properties still was, he could still tell the difference between the ones he plucked and the ones still rooted, how the one in his hand was diminished. When Meiyao had done it, there’d been no such change.

Very carefully, very gently, he plucked one out. Shrub flowers, he’d found, were easier to handle than the ones growing on the ground. Even then, though, he saw with his soulsense as its presence darkened a little, its spirit-shadow somehow damaged as its connection to the rest of it was cut off.

If he was fully focusing on it, he might’ve done better. But he didn’t have the luxury. Another part of his attention was on his bond to Huaxin, keeping track of its progress. More than once now, Huaxin would suddenly blast an alarm at him midway, and the sooner Jieyuan got it, the better. Every fraction of a second counted.

The last third of his attention—and the majority of it—was on his surroundings. Huaxin’s predictions were right more often than not. And nowadays, after it’d gotten so much practice getting through the mist, it could tell about nine times out of ten when danger was really close by.

The problem was that one time out of ten that Huaxin still got it wrong. That one time out of ten where, all of a sudden, without warning, a beast would come rushing into the clearing, all murder-eyed, and he and Daojue would have to scramble to deal with it.

That was also why Jieyuan picked flowers with only one hand, holding a Shifting Feather with his other.

And also why he now had attached to his belt a series of small, makeshift little purse-like bags. Like their new rope, these purses were made from the hide of some of the many, many beasts he and Daojue had killed these last few days. In them were his Orangesoul scale-made murder tools. Reaching into his glyph-stretch pouch for them took too long—he needed to be able to draw them on a moment’s notice.

He’d also reserved a purse for his few remaining talismans—he’d been forced to use more than half his stock already—and another for pills.

He always kept three pills on hand nowadays, one of each type. An agility augmenter, a regeneration augmenter, and a general antidote. Meiyao had left about half of all pills she’d refined with him, and Jieyuan couldn’t have been more grateful for that now. They hadn’t needed the antidote ones much so far, but the two augmenters had more than come in handy.

Right now, he had hundreds of each pill in his glyph-stretch pouch. A few days ago, he’d have thought that he had way too many of them—but at the rate he and Daojue were going through them, and with how much ground they still had to cover, it didn’t seem like his stock would be anywhere near enough. A hundred thousand wouldn’t have been enough, really. Not in the long run. He could’ve sure used more talismans, too.

It didn’t take him long to collect all the flowers. He didn’t manage to pick a single one the right way, but it didn’t matter all that much. He wasn’t yet at the level where he could do structured refining—the standard way, following clear, thoroughly tested instructions—much less Meiyao’s unique brand of free-forming on-the-spot refining.

That didn’t mean he wouldn’t try to refine them anyway, though. He always spent at least some time trying his hand at it after he and Daojue stopped for the day.

He’d failed at each and every attempt so far—always right at the beginning, during essencification—but he kept at it. Whenever he tried to refine, he felt as if Meiyao was there, guiding him through the steps. More than that, he wanted to surprise Meiyao with how much he’d improved when they met again.

Because they would meet again.

Jieyuan would burn the Heavens before he’d accept a world where that didn’t happen.

He plucked the last of the flowers and put it away in his pouch. Huaxin wasn’t quite done yet, but he could tell it was almost there. That was a good sign. Like how Huaxin sometimes missed incoming danger, it sometimes failed to get a read on the next pocket. Jieyuan wasn’t sure why that was—what was different about those times, only that they happened.

Over the last few days, he’d figured out there was a cutoff, a point where it became useless waiting any longer, where he knew Huaxin wouldn’t be going anywhere. It wasn’t a fixed thing, though, because Huaxin was improving.

Six days ago, when they’d been just starting out, the cutoff had been about an hour—if it took any more than that, it was a wash. On the second day, Huaxin started getting reads within forty-five minutes. On the third day, half an hour. Now, Jieyuan usually gave it only ten minutes or so for Huaxin to get a prediction before he’d decide to take his chances.

Just a little while more, then.

Jieyuan stood up and unsheathed his other Shifting Feather. Just in case Huaxin got it wrong.

He moved back to the center of the clearing to wait. Daojue trailed behind him.

SAFE, Huaxin sent him.

He started toward the edge again.

Three steps in—

DANGER. LEFT.

Heart racing, Jieyuan jumped backwards, whirling toward the side of the clearing. Daojue followed suit.

Long, thin, white pincer-like legs broke out of the mist, digging into the ground at the edge of the pocket. They were striped green, and covered in a coat of sparse, fine hair.

As they rose and fell slowly, smoothly, moving forward, the head came into view–round, ball-like, large as a man’s chest, as white and smooth as bone and green-patterned. Dotting the front of it were multiple beady green eyes, arranged in a curved row.

Just below the eyes was what Jieyuan took to be the mouth—two fleshy, stubby, green-fanged protrusions, bunched together. And extending from either side of them, longer, limb-like appendages, angled forward.

More legs were connected to the ball-like head. Behind the front two appeared another pair, and then another. And then the final pair, and together with it, another round body, larger than the head and colored just the same, white and green. 

A spider. A massive chromal spider. The tips of its legs were just within the thirty-feet range of Jieyuan’s soulsense. Tenth-sign Redsoul.

The spider stopped there, staring at them with its smattering of bright-green eyes.

Now, Jieyuan didn’t have anything particularly against spiders. He saw them the same as any other insect—

“Arachnid,” Maeva cut into his thoughts. She’d stopped chanting the moment Huaxin had sent his warning.

Did I ask? Jieyuan glanced to his right, where Maeva had just appeared. She always did that nowadays, whenever a fight started.

Jieyuan passed control over his soulsense to her, then released his hold on one of the Shifting Feathers. Instead of falling, it floated over to where Maeva was. She took hold of the weapon.

His footwork was improving, and so were his senses. Unless he was up against an Orangesoul beast—or at lot of Redsoul ones—he’d found he was better served with Maeva fighting by his side, through his soulforce, rather than through his body.

His right hand free now, Jieyuan slowly reached into the pouch by his waist and fished out a scale dagger. He didn’t reach for the pills, yet. Their stock was limited. He only went for them if he needed to, and he wasn’t sure yet how fast this spider was. He’d never faced a chromal spider before, hadn’t even known they were a thing.

Go away, Jieyuan thought at the spider. Come on, you’ve taken a look at the two funny humans. Be happy with that and turn around. Be smart. Come on.

The last thing Jieyuan wanted was for this to turn into a fight. He and Daojue should be able to handle it—they had dealt with an Orangesoul snake already, for Heavens’ sake—but more often than not, the sounds of their fighting drew more beasts in. And the sort of beasts drawn to the sound of fighting tended hard toward the dangerous end of the spectrum.

More than that, there was always a risk with fighting beasts they’d never faced before. They didn’t know its beast-skills, and that kind of unknown could very well lead to terribly unwelcome—not to mention deadly—surprises. The two-headed snake had been proof enough of that.

About one time out of three, the beasts they came across eventually retreated. Jieyuan hoped this was one of those times. He really wasn’t looking to find out what kind of nasty tricks a chromal spider might have up its nonexistent sleeve.

Its mandible opened and closed. Twitched. Viridian mist drifted around the spider, curling lazily around its limbs.

The next thing Jieyuan knew, something green and bright and liquid was shooting towards him.

He reacted instantly, jumping to the side, while Maeva shot forward, putting herself in front of him, swinging her Shifting Feather. But it’d come too suddenly, too fast, and he got splashed on his chest, arms, and down his legs.

The liquid hardened on contact, congealing into thin, sticky glowing green strings. A good deal of the liquid had landed on the ground, too, and all of it was connected—and he was anchored to the spot, the strings pulling at him as he tried to instinctively move away. His arms weren’t spared, either, as the hardened string bound them tight to his torso.

Maeva had also been in the spray’s way, but she wasn’t really there, didn’t actually exist. The Shifting Feather she was holding did, though—and now there was a tangle of green strings connecting it to the ground.

Maeva was trying to pull it loose, twirling it around, trying to get it free, but it was useless. There were strings on the blade itself, and even those stayed unbroken despite Maeva’s efforts.

Ahead, the spider slowly advanced toward them.

Come on, come on, come on, Jieyuan thought as he contorted wildly against the strings.

But then it stopped—and at the same time, Jieyuan caught a flash of red from his left.

Jieyuan glanced toward it, not taking his eyes off the spider entirely.

It was Daojue. The glow hadn’t come from Gleaming End, though. He wasn’t even holding it—the spear was floating beside him.

Rather, the glow had come from Daojue’s arms. From the red, glowing gauntlets Daojue was wearing all of a sudden.

And as Daojue quickly waved the gauntlets in front of him, over his body, all the strings it touched snapped on the spot.