Chapter Ninety-nine (Patreon)

Hoyi were stubborn creatures, but not irrationally so, like the zhiwu. Once Kaz was far enough up the stairs that there was no way he presented a threat to their queen any longer, one after another of the warriors began to give up. Which was good, because Kaz’s strength was flagging as well, but he didn’t dare slow for fear of encouraging the insects to continue their chase.

Only when Kaz could no longer hear the click of the enraged creature’s legs against the stairs did he finally reduce his speed. A good minute after that, he stopped, chest heaving as even his lungs struggled to take in enough air to feed muscles that had passed the endurance of a normal kobold at least two hundred steps ago. His ears swiveled as he strained to hear any hint that his pursuers might still be behind him. When only the sound of his own breathing reached them, he staggered up one last step, then turned and sat down with a thump.

How far had he come? He had thought some of the other staircases in the mid-levels were long, but this one seemed to cover a mountain in itself. He was fairly certain that he had gone up at least six hundred stairs, which at nine inches each was… a lot. Worse, there was no end in sight, just the carved stone walls and familiar red light gleaming from deep alcoves every ten or fifteen steps.

Kaz sat until his racing heart settled back into its usual rhythm, but though his body was still, his mind was anything but. Li was very unhappy that he had risked himself for the egg, and now that he was safe, she was letting him know in no uncertain terms. She sent him image after image of a blue kobold being splattered by bugs, while a golden dragon scratched and bit at the box that held her.

Kaz clutched his prizes and let the dragon rail at him until she finally slowed on her own. Only then did he respond.

“I know,” he murmured, staring up at the thread of ki that bound them. “I’m sorry. I needed to do it, and I believed I could.” He felt a slow grin stretch his mouth. “And I was right.”

A mental equivalent of muttering reached him, followed by reluctant curiosity. An image of blue kobold eating white egg followed by red crystal came to him, but he could almost see the way she cocked her head, and white swirled into her golden eyes when she was confused.

Kaz chuckled, unbuckling his little warrior’s pack and bringing it around to his lap. At some point, he must have caught it on something, maybe when he slid down the column, because the single remaining strap was partially cut through. He sighed, pushing the edges together, but they just fell limply apart again.

“The egg goes in here,” he said aloud, carefully rolling the egg in his old fur loincloth. It was ratty and matted, but would still cushion the orb from anything but a direct impact. His fingers lingered on it as he tucked it away, but he did so anyway.

Another picture of a kobold eating the egg, repeated insistently.

Kaz shook his head. “I will, but not now. We don’t know what will happen, and neither of us is safe yet. What if it’s as difficult for my core to take in the power of the egg as it is when a female eats another core? Even without the fulan complicating things, that’s not a risk I can take. Not until we’re together again.”

He sent her a picture of a kobold, curled up on the ground, as a great golden dragon stood over him, guarding.

Flustered agreement. Waiting was the best choice.  An image of the red crystal, which was too large to fit into his pack, along with renewed interest.

Kaz lifted it, then very, very carefully touched it to the metal collar that still bound his neck. Nothing happened. He sent a filament of ki into it, and fire lanced through him in return. He gasped, hand falling away, nearly dropping the crystal.

Li was unhappy again, but before she could proceed too far with her complaining, Kaz tried something else: black and white ki. Not through the crystal this time, but directly into the collar. It grew instantly frigid, at least as cold as it had been hot a moment before. Golden ki made it heavy, while his small trickle of blue actually sent a pleasant flush through him, making his abused neck feel slightly better.

“So it amplifies the effects of the various types of ki,” Kaz muttered, setting the crystal down and fingering the collar. The air was much warmer here than in the hoyi nest, and his fingers had finally returned to their normal sensitivity, apparently undamaged by their long exposure to the cold.

He wished he could have examined a collar on one of the other kobolds, but there hadn’t been anyone he trusted enough to ask. He had a feeling that the answer would have been an instantaneous ‘No’ anyway, since the kobolds only associated the things with pain, and were clearly afraid to mess with them. For all Kaz knew, the other kobolds had tried, and the collars had some kind of trap built into them to make them hurt or kill their wearer if someone attempted to remove them.

Kaz cycled through each color of ki, then each combination, all while trying to feel any changes in the collar as he did so. He found that several of the combinations were the same as one of their components, while white alone did nothing at all, so far as he could tell. Black was cool, but not cold, and oddly pleasant, though not as much as the blue. Lianhua’s combination of blue, black, and gold was the best of all, though, and when Kaz brushed against the raw skin of his neck after that one, he found that it was less painful than it had been before.

Unfortunately, no combination of ki, with or without using the red crystal as a conduit, convinced the collar to release him. Which, honestly, wasn’t particularly surprising. The mosui were filled with mana after all, not ki. Without a core or lower dantian, they had to use the crystals to refine that mana into ki, which meant that a collar that could be opened only with ki was useless to them, though why they hadn’t created the horrible devices to work only with mana made no particular sense, either. Perhaps the qualities of the different colors of ki were so useful that they made the effort of using a power that didn’t come naturally to the mosui worthwhile?

In the end, it didn’t really matter how or why the mosui had made the collars the way they were, only that Kaz couldn’t get his off alone. He was fairly certain by now that mana was simply the result of mixing all the colors of ki together until they became something like a gas, and, in fact, that ‘gas’ was in the air around him all the time.

He was, however, realizing that the different kinds of ki interacted with each other to create all kinds of effects. For example, the freezing effect of the combination of black and white ki only occurred when red ki was nearby. Once Kaz put down the red crystal, black and white ki only created what would have been an almost refreshing coolness if Kaz hadn’t just spent so much time almost frozen, much like black ki alone. Red and white ki, on the other hand, produced a similarly comforting warmth, not as focused as the fierce heat created by red ki alone.

Kaz huffed a frustrated breath, and for once, even Li was out of ideas. He could almost feel her sifting through her memories, trying to find anything that might help him, but all she found was image after image of Raff using mana, the other humans refining mana into ki, and even a few of weaker kobold females who also seemed to have some mana inside them, though they only used the sparks of ki that lit up the gray fog.

Kaz pulled up the image of his core, looking at the iron-gray lumps of hardened mana that had become part of the second layer of his core. At some point, during his desperate frenzy to repair his core immediately after it was broken, he had forced his ki to merge together into mana, which then mingled again with the ki from which it had come, forming the shell that had held his core together and kept him alive until he did… whatever he did.

He still wasn’t sure if he had managed to break that shell, or if the splinter he’d been trying to pull out had come loose, causing a cascade of failures. Either way, his core had been forever changed by everything he had put it through, and there, encased inside of it, lay all the proof he needed that he could form mana, even if he didn’t yet know how to manipulate it.

Kaz groaned, rubbing his snout as he returned to the matter at hand. He had, of course, tried pushing all five types of ki into his collar at once, but that had had even less apparent effect than using metal alone. It almost seemed like his ki was canceling itself out, which was…

Enough. Maybe. If he couldn’t take the collar off, could he at least render it useless? If he filled it with the opposite of red ki, would that be enough to prevent a mosui or husede from using it against him? Quickly, he ran though each color of ki, sending it to the collar directly as he pushed a thread of red into it via the crystal. Red plus white actually made the burning worse, but red plus black was better. Because the crystal strengthened the red ki, it took more black ki to balance it, which quickly drained that portion of Kaz’s reserves.

Still, if he pulled the black ki from his cycle and stored it in his central dantian, much as he had been storing red, maybe he would have enough to allow him to ignore the pain. Kaz’s knife was certainly sharp enough to end the life of one of the mosui, so long as the little being wasn’t able to use the collar against him.

Baring his teeth in satisfaction, Kaz stood, already beginning to cycle his core more quickly in order to build up a greater cache of black ki. He wasn’t going to seek out a conflict with one of the mosui, but he wasn’t going to let the possibility keep him from finding his friend, either. If Li was on the fifth level of the mosui-controlled Nine, and Kaz was on the bottom, then Kaz had four levels to climb. Even if that meant he had to climb a thousand steps between each of them, he didn’t care.

Kaz took a step, promptly wincing at the pain that ran through his muscles as he did so. Perhaps he cared a little, but that wasn’t going to stop him. He drew in a deep breath and began to climb again.

Fifty steps.

One hundred.

Two hundred, with no sign that the end was near, or that there was an end at all. How far had he come since the hoyi nest? Seven hundred steps, surely. Eight? Nine? Was it possible that this single staircase would bring him to the same level as Li, or perhaps even past? He thought the angle at which their ki-bond rose had flattened by a few degrees at least.

In his mind, Li grew sleepy again, and closed her eyes. He could feel hunger tearing at her, and her throat was even drier than his own, but she ignored it, curling up in a ball, with her wings wrapped around her slender body as she tried to rest.

Kaz tried to entertain her, sending her images of her favorite story, the time he had found and stolen her egg. Usually, she lingered over each picture of her parent and siblings, but today even that wasn’t enough, and soon enough his mind returned to counting.

Three hundred steps. Three hundred and one-

Someone opened Li’s box.