Chương 184: Thank You Yggy

There's something unsettling about an empty village. All of the noise that fills a living settlement, merchants calling out to potential customers, children running and shouting through the streets, the constant overlapping sound of people existing and moving through their routines, all of that was gone and replaced by a silence so each footstep I took rang out against the packed earth and stone.

I walked through the empty streets of Floating Reed Village and my feet kicked up small drifting clouds of dust as I moved. The evacuation had gone as well as these things could have gone. The elderly residents and the children were safely inside the mountain caves by now, with enough stored supplies around them to sustain everyone for several weeks if the situation required it. My parents had been among the last people to leave the village, because of course they had been.

They were stubborn people, and they had refused to move until they had secured every item of value in their shop. I had needed to guide them toward the door while repeating the same promises, yes I would be careful, no I would not do anything reckless or unnecessary, yes I understood that being a cultivator didn't make a person impossible to kill. Now I was standing in front of the family home and I took a moment to consider the irony of my current situation.

Here I was, preparing to perform what would from any outside perspective look like some variety of forbidden or demonic ritual practice, in the location where the original owner of this body had spent his childhood learning to be afraid of that kind of thing. But before any of that could happen there were basic precautions that needed to be handled first.

I reached into my storage ring and retrieved a wooden tablet, one of the cultivation tools that every sect disciple was expected to carry on their person at all times as a matter of practice. This tablet stood two feet in height and had been carved from spirit infused wood selected for this purpose.

The front face of it displayed the traditional warning symbols, interlocking hexagram patterns that spelled out the words "Cultivation in Progress" written in the ancient script, and surrounding those central markings were ward symbols that would work on a subtle level to give anyone who approached the impression that they remembered having something urgent to attend to somewhere else.

The back face of the tablet was covered in more practical protections, defensive formations built into the material that would activate if anyone attempted to disturb whoever was working inside.

"A bit dramatic, isn't it?" I muttered, setting up the tablet outside our front door.

"All this just to say 'do not disturb'?"

"Given what cultivators get up to behind closed doors," Azure replied dryly, "the dramatics are probably warranted. Would you prefer people accidentally walking in on someone attempting breakthrough?" He was making a fair point and I knew it. Breakthrough attempts that got interrupted at the wrong moment had a documented history of producing qi deviations with unpleasant catastrophic consequences for the cultivator involved.

"And beyond that," he added, "given what we are about to do in there, having more privacy protection seems like sensible planning."

Even though there was nothing prohibited about the act of inscribing new runes onto a cultivator's body, body enhancement markings were used broadly enough to be considered practice, but the majority of cultivators performing such inscriptions weren't working with an energy source that caused their runes to emit a glowing red light that would raise serious questions from anyone who happened to see it.

I went inside the house and stood for a moment taking in the familiar combination of sights and smells that the space held. The main room still carried traces of the last meal that had been prepared here, rice congee and pickled vegetables, the smell lingering in the air even after everyone had gone. My mother's sewing basket was in its corner where it always lived, needles sorted and arranged by size the way she kept them. My father's accounting books were stacked on his desk in the ordered way he maintained them.

Standing here alone felt strange. This room had never been a quiet place during the years when the original Ke Yin had grown up inside it, it had been a working space as much as a living space, customers coming in to be measured and fitted for new garments while both parents worked around them. Now it was me and the silence and a task that could be described as illegal body modification performed in secret.

"The things a person ends up doing to survive," I said to the empty room, and then I pulled the knife that Wei Lin had given me from my storage ring and set it on the low table, its edge maintained at a sharpness that could divide a single hair along its length without difficulty.

"Master," Azure said, "are you sure this is the right approach? Attempting to inscribe three new runes within a single session is not easy."

"Better to do it now instead of waiting around," I replied, laying out my materials on the low table.

"It can't hurt to have more weapons during the battle."

"Which rune are you planning to begin with?" Azure asked.

"The Scorpion Rune," I decided, studying the pattern I'd memorized.

"It's the most complex, and if something goes wrong, I'd rather deal with it before adding anything else." The design itself had a beauty to it that existed alongside its destructive function, a series of interlocking curved lines that looked like a physical arc of a scorpion's tail during a strike and the underlying molecular structure of the venom that made that tail dangerous.

The main body of the pattern would need to be placed at my tailbone and from there secondary lines would need to extend upward across my lower back in order to channel the energy through the structure.

"This would be a more straightforward process if there was a trained runemaster available," I said, becoming aware of just how awkward the physical positioning required was going to be.

"Or at least an assistant who isn't just a voice in my head."

"You do have an assistant who is capable of holding things," Azure pointed out.

"One who has been waiting for this moment." The words had barely finished when I felt a presence beginning to stir somewhere in the space of my inner world. Yggy had been subdued since our arrival in the village, picking up on the tension that had been saturating the atmosphere since we got here, and now vines came erupting out of my sleeve. The vine creature came into being, its tendrils moving through the air with enthusiasm. It looked at the knife sitting on the table and then turned to look at me.

"You seem confident about this for someone who has never done this before," I observed, though I could feel that I was smiling at the energy coming off of it.

"Unless you have done something like this before?" Yggy responded with a sequence of movements that carried the meaning of both "you can trust me on this" and "this is going to be interesting" at the same time.

Given that this creature was a sentient plant being that had come into existence through the experimental work of an eccentric elder and then bonded itself to me through circumstances I still didn't fully understand, the possibility that it had some prior experience with processes of this nature wasn't something I could rule out.

"Alright then," I said, taking off my outer robe and lowering myself face down onto the floor.

"Just be careful with it. Please." Lying in that position and surrendering control of the process to something else felt strange and vulnerable, but then I thought about the fact that I had already at an earlier point bonded my soul to another living being and this seemed less extreme by comparison. Yggy's tendrils took hold of the knife and began tracing the pattern into my skin.

The blade was sharp enough that the initial cuts registered as sensation, though the experience of having intricate patterns carved into your lower back by a vine creature working from memory wasn't something that had any obvious comparison point to draw from. Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

"Your vine friend has a steady and controlled working method," Azure said.

"The quality of the line work here is better than most lower rank Skybound inscribers would produce." He wasn't wrong, despite Yggy's energetic and chaotic personality, the work it was doing on my back was precise. Every cut landed at the depth without variation, every curved line flowed into the next one without any deviation from the intended path.

"The reference patterns being used here are interesting to observe," Azure said as Yggy continued working.

"The primary design is derived from scorpion anatomy as expected, but these secondary branching lines have a structure that looks more like plant root systems than anything from the original rune design."

"Blending animal sourced patterns with plant sourced patterns in the same rune?" I said, the words coming out muffled given the position my face was in.

"That's not a bad idea. It should help the rune connect more naturally with my wood-based cultivation base." Yggy made a sound from somewhere above me that carried a clear self-satisfied quality to it, and its working tendrils didn't pause or slow down while it made it. The pattern was getting close to complete now and it covered a portion of my lower back in an interconnected design of lines and curves that had become complex to look at.

"The carving is finished," Azure reported.

"You should prepare yourself for the activation sequence. It's going to be an interesting experience." I pulled in a slow breath and held it for a moment before releasing it. Rune activation was always the part that carried the most risk in the process because the amount of energy being channeled and the precision of the pattern it had to follow had to both be correct at the same time.

Any meaningful error in either of those factors could produce outcomes that ranged from painful to catastrophic depending on the degree of the error. And with red sun energy as the source being used, the window within which things could go wrong and produce bad results was narrower than it would have been with conventional qi.

I activated the Shroud rune first, feeling the sensation of my energy signature becoming hidden and masked from outside detection, and then I began directing red sun energy into the freshly carved pattern on my lower back. The response was intense.

The closest comparison I could come up with in the moment was that someone had reached inside my body and replaced my spine with metal that was molten and fresh from the forge, a burning that started at the tailbone where the rune center was placed and then spread upward along every secondary line.

The carved pattern blazed with that distinctive red light for a moment that felt longer than it probably was, and then the light seemed to pull inward and downward and disappeared into my flesh as though it had been part of it. And then something new started happening that had nothing to do with light or heat.

The sensation that followed was unlike anything I had a reference point for, the closest would be if a new limb began existing at a location on your body where there had previously been nothing, with all of the muscle structure and bone and whatever the equivalent of a nervous system was in something that was being built by runic energy all coming into being simultaneously. When it finished, I had a tail extending from my lower back. It was a hybrid structure that combined scorpion anatomy and plant biology.

It measured four feet in length and the core structural framework of it followed the segmented architecture of a scorpion's tail, but the outer surface was covered in what appeared to be scales made of flexible bark rather than the chitin a natural scorpion would have. Running between and through the segments were dark green tendons that looked and functioned like vine material, giving the whole structure an appearance that was between constructed and grown.

The stinger at the tip had formed to look more like a dense thorny seed pod than the pointed structure it would have been if the rune had been inscribed without modification, but I could sense that the venom production it had been designed for was working.

"That's a pretty good improvement over the base design," I said after examining it for a long moment, and I meant it. The plant elements Yggy had woven into the structure weren't there only for appearance, I could feel the way they connected to the Worldroot Conduit like it had been part of my cultivation system all along rather than something added on from outside.

"The improvement goes further than the integration," Azure said.

"The wood based structural materials are producing a stronger physical result than conventional chitin would have. The Worldroot Conduit is maintaining a constant reinforcement of the bark scales and increasing their density to a level that exceeds what natural chitin achieves. And the vine based connective tissue between the segments allows for a speed and precision of movement that a purely scorpion derived structure would not be capable of reaching."

Yggy's tendrils were doing something that communicated smugness, and the level of pride was justified given what it had produced.

"Alright," I said, pushing myself up from the floor to a sitting position and getting used to the new weight and presence behind me.

"Let's see it in action." Moving the tail came as naturally as moving any other part of my body, it responded to thought the same way an arm or a leg did without any of the adjustment period I had expected. I ran it through several positions, curling it up over my shoulder the way a scorpion carries its tail at rest, wrapping it around my waist to see how well it held position that way, extending it back to its reach.

To test the precision at the tip, I directed it toward a spare piece of cloth from my father's cutting table and had the stinger pick it up and move it without tearing the fabric, and that worked without any issues. I then pulled a wooden practice dummy out of my storage ring, set it up at a distance, and had the tail strike it at what I estimated was close to full speed.

The stinger went through the hardwood like the wood had offered no resistance worth accounting for, and I could feel through the connection to the tail that the toxin delivery system at the tip was charged and ready to work as designed.

"The integration is stable," Azure reported after running through his assessment.

"No signs of rejection or any conflict between energy types. The toxin production is consuming more energy than the baseline estimate had suggested though, so that will need to be factored into how you manage your reserves during combat." With a nod, I retracted the tail back into my lower back, watching the segments fold and compress until it had disappeared, and then extended it again to confirm the transition speed, which came in at under one second in both directions.

"Good work," I told Yggy, and the vine creature's reaction to the praise was enthusiastic enough that it nearly knocked over my father's stack of accounting books. The second rune was next. The Shockwave Rune was simpler in terms of its visual design compared to what had been completed, a set of concentric circles radiating out from a central point in a pattern that was straightforward to look at even if the mathematical precision required to make it function was anything but simple.

I chose my left palm as the placement location, partly because the palm was the practical surface for aiming a force projection effect, and partly because I was thinking about the eventual second rune of this type on the right hand and wanted to establish a symmetrical arrangement from the start. I looked over at Yggy, who was watching my preparation process with interest.

"Do you see anything to work with here the way you did with the last one?" The vine creature gave a slow sideways movement that meant no, and its tendrils drooped in an apology for not having something useful to offer.

"The two runes operate on different underlying principles," Azure explained.

"The Scorpion Rune works by creating a physical structure that extends from your body, which means its material composition and design can be modified to produce different results. The Shockwave Rune is a pure energy manipulation effect with no physical component to it and adding any elemental characteristic to that type of rune transforms it into a different rune with different function and properties." I had expected that answer but asking had cost nothing. I got to work on this one by myself.

The cuts for this rune were shallow compared to those for the previous one, closer to scoring than actual cutting, and I built the pattern outward one ring at a time from the center point.

The technical challenge of this rune was in the spacing relationships between the rings, each concentric circle had to sit at a distance from its neighboring circles that followed a mathematical progression with little tolerance for deviation because the wave effect the rune produced depended on those proportional relationships being correct.

Rings spaced too closely to each other would produce a wave that was too tightly focused for practical use and rings spaced too far apart would cause the energy to disperse before it could deliver any impact.

"The spacing ratios here are the functional basis of the rune," Azure noted as I worked through the outer rings.

"The difference between a controlled directional shockwave and an uncontrolled energy release in all directions is a question of whether those proportions are right." The full pattern eventually covered most of my palm and I sat back to look at it, the design was less visually elaborate than the scorpion work but the level of attention it had required throughout was more demanding because there was no room to compensate for any measurement that was off.

"Should we test it now?" Azure asked. I looked around the room I was in, taking in my mother's decorative pieces and the furniture that had been placed and maintained with care over many years, and I made a quick decision.

"I'll test it outside," I said, getting to my feet.

"I don't want to have a conversation with my mother about why her belongings are in pieces when she comes home." Before I could move toward the door to go outside and before I had any chance to begin thinking about the third rune, the Tracker, Azure gave out a warning.

"Master. The spiritual pressure coming from the north has shifted. The beast wave is here."