Chapter One hundred twenty (Start Book 3) (Patreon)

Kaz gently knocked on the door of Lianhua’s room, then pushed it open so he could peer inside. He knew she was there because he could see her dantians through the wall, but she had a tendency to become so engrossed in her work that she didn’t even hear him knock. She also forgot to eat, which was ostensibly the reason he was there.

As usual, she was seated behind the low table, pillows mounded around her as she pored over books and scrolls. He was glad to see a cup nearby, so she had at least had something to drink, but the only plate in sight was the one he had brought to her yesterday.

The human female had spent the last five days following the same routine. She sat here, reading the oldest records she could beg, borrow, or steal from the husede, until she fell asleep in her pillows. When Kaz or Chi Yincang brought her food or drink, she would take a few bites or a sip, and then return to work.

Her hair was far from its usual sleek style, with tangled strands dangling in her face and down her back, and there were shadows beneath her eyes. Kaz wasn’t sure what the dark circles meant, but she hadn’t been injured, and they seemed to get worse when she hadn’t slept, so he thought it was a sign of exhaustion rather than illness.

“Lianhua,” he said, setting the bowl he held on the table, ignoring the piles of parchment already there. Risking damage to her precious papers was the best way to get Lianhua’s attention.

Sure enough, even though she hadn’t seemed to notice Kaz’s presence, Lianhua’s hands darted out, and she picked up the bowl. Without even looking at it or him, she tried to shove it back at him.

Kaz folded his arms across his chest. On his shoulder, the little dragon, Li, hissed at the sudden movement, and then tried to dive into the bowl, as she’d been doing ever since Kaz picked it up. Kaz took a step back and shook his head.

“Lianhua, you need to eat,” he told her. “You lied when you told me Iron body cultivators only needed food once a day. Raff says you need more food right after a rank advancement, not less.”

Lianhua’s blurry amethyst eyes turned up to him, and she blinked, giving a soft click of her tongue. “Missing a meal or two won’t hurt me,” she told him, voice hoarse with disuse.

His eyes narrowed, and the fur on the back of his neck lifted slightly as Kaz glared back. “You’re only eating once a day, if that, and when you do, it’s not a full meal.” He pointed accusingly to the plate, which still held a mound of now-dry mushrooms.

Lianhua glanced at it, pink spots rising in her pale cheeks. “It’s disgusting,” she muttered. “The mosui only ever ate bugs and fungus.”

The mosui were the small but powerful creatures who had inhabited this city when Kaz, Li, and Lianhua had been captured and brought here against their wills. They had used ki-powered collars left behind by an ancient race to control their captives, and their leader, Zhangwo, had performed experiments on any being with a core that his minions brought in. He had intended to do the same to Li and Lianhua, though the human hadn’t yet cultivated a core of her own, but Kaz had managed to kill him first, through use of a powerful weapon created by the same race who had made the collars.

That race was the Diushi, and Lianhua and the other humans had come to Kaz’s mountain specifically in order to find proof of Lianhua’s wild theory that the last members of that lost empire had come here after vanishing from their vast domain practically overnight. After the husede, the descendants of enslaved members of a reclusive race, turned on their mosui masters, Lianhua had believed that such proof was nearly in her hands, and had arranged to be able to read the documents left behind by Zhangwo.

Unfortunately, that was where things had fallen apart. While Zhangwo had claimed he had once been ‘Pantu Lianren’, a wise and famous advisor to the Diushi Emperor, he had also been at least a little insane. Nothing in his documents claimed that this city had been built by the Diushi, and even if it had - which Lianhua said was likely, given the style of the ‘architecture’ - there was no way to know how old it was. Once something was several hundred years old, it was difficult to pinpoint its age precisely, and this place could just as easily have been built before the Diushi vanished from Lianhua’s country.

There was one person who might have been able to provide solid evidence one way or the other: Nucai, the self-proclaimed servant of the ‘Master’. He was at least as old as Zhangwo, who had to have been alive for at least a millenia, and each time Kaz had spoken to him, it was clear that he was extremely powerful. Much to Lianhua’s disappointment, this mysterious being refused to speak to her or anyone other than the new leaders of the city.

Apparently, the city had been created to mine the ki-crystals that naturally developed here, and his only concern was that that effort continued. Thabil and the other members of the new ‘council’ had left their meeting with him looking very grim, and had immediately set about making sure that mining resumed in the abandoned level below. The miners weren’t slaves any longer, of course, and they received plenty of food, comfortable housing, and much honor for their service.

Kaz pointed to the bowl in Lianhua’s hands. “Now that the mosui aren’t spreading fresh fulan to keep everyone out, the kobolds have been able to burn most of it. Thabil even suggested we go to the upper levels and gather fresh plants and live animals like fuergar in order to grow them here.”

And that was very strange indeed. Food and water were limited resources almost everywhere in the mountain, and when an area ran out of those resources, kobolds simply moved. Over time, the plants, animals, and pools of water that formed naturally replenished, and in a generation or two, another kobold tribe settled into the space again. The idea of bringing food in or intentionally spreading spores to grow new patches of lichen and mushrooms was entirely outside of any kobold’s experience.

Here, however, the Diushi had created a system which drew fresh water up from the rivers that ran far beneath the Deep. That, along with the many caverns of extremely versatile yumi reeds and the all-important mines, meant that this city had and could continue to exist for centuries. They never needed to worry about running out of clean water, and in the tower, the building where Zhangwo and many of the mosui had lived, water could actually be drawn from a basin in many rooms, so the residents didn’t have to go fetch it when they needed some.

Lianhua eyed the bowl suspiciously, then lifted it to her nose and sniffed. Pleasure swept over her face, and Kaz heard her stomach rumble loudly. It was echoed by Li’s, though he doubted the human female could hear it.

In Kaz’s mind, an image formed of the dragon eating Lianhua’s meal. When the golden lizard finished swallowing the contents, she simply opened her mouth a bit wider, and ate the bowl as well.

Kaz shook his head. Like most of the mosui’s possessions, the metal bowl was encrusted with gems and a few chips of ki-crystal. Li actually seemed to get more nourishment from the little crystals than she did the food itself, though she enjoyed them equally.

Lianhua echoed the sigh, then pushed aside a stack of scrolls with none of the reverence she usually showed for anything with runes carved, written, or painted on it. She noted his look of shock as she settled the bowl back in front of her and laughed.

“Those are records of the crystals taken from the mine several hundred years ago. Weights, impurities, quantity of each type. Other than the fact that red crystals are by far the most common, while blue is the least, it’s not interesting, even to me.”

Lifting a bite of stew to her mouth with a utensil carved from a large yumi reed, she blew on it gently and said, “I should feel guilty for abusing them, since some scholar after me might find value in them, but I just can’t.”

She ate two large bites, chewing each one thoroughly before swallowing, then burst out, “Kaz, it’s ridiculous! I know the Diushi came here after leaving Sheng, but there isn’t a single shred of evidence to prove it! The Diushi could just as easily have developed this city before the fall, and abandoned it like everything else. The mosui might have been here at the time, or they might have moved in soon after, and all I can tell is that the earliest records are from around a thousand years ago. The Diushi are never directly mentioned, and there’s certainly not anything that says, ‘We left our homeland because of a plague, or famine, or whatever, and came to Shengsheng mountain in order to…’.”

Kaz looked at her. Raff was the human her group had hired after they arrived in Raff’s country only to find that the kobold city in the mountain could no longer be reached. Since Lianhua had closed herself up in this room, Kaz and Raff had spent a great deal of time together, and Raff had told the kobold a bit more about his land and his people. Raff said no one had even had an inkling that these ‘Diushi’ had been here at all, and it seemed to both of them that that should be enough for Lianhua.

“Can’t you just go home with what you’ve already learned? Raff says that-”

Lianhua’s gaze slid away, and she puffed a strand of hair away from her lips. “Not good enough,” she muttered. “I said I would prove the Diushi came here. That’s what my final project is based on, and it’s what I promised my grandfather I would do.”

Kaz sighed again and scratched his muzzle. Absently, he reached out and picked up one of the wrinkled mushrooms left over from her previous meal and gave it to the dragon on his shoulder. After seeing his friend eat rocks, even ki-filled ones, he was no longer worried that something like a day-old mushroom would hurt her.

“What about Yingtao? Raff says she should have recovered by now.”

This was a low blow. Lianhua was almost as worried about the servant who had fallen sick and had to be left behind in Raff’s homeland as she was about finding the proof she needed. Raff said the two females were friends, rather than simply bound by tribe and history, and Kaz believed it.

Lianhua’s lips flattened. “Yingtao understands how important this is to me. If I don’t… We can’t… No, I need to do this, for both of us. Did Song Zexian let Guo Lin turn him from his task? No! Did Fan Qing give up when-”

Kaz cut her off. Once Lianhua started referring to people from the history of her race, she wouldn’t stop until the subject was changed.

“You originally came here because you believed you might find your proof in the Deep,” he reminded her. “You only came down through the mountain because the portal from Raff’s land was closed.”

That, too, was strange. Kaz had been born in the Deep, the center of the kobold civilization, but his mother, Oda, hadn’t allowed him to go to the city. Instead, she had kept him and his sister, Katri, in their tribe’s den, and Kaz had only seen the wonders of the Deep from a distance. He had still been a puppy, not quite old enough to begin gathering plants with the older pups, when something had happened, and the tribe was split, part remaining behind, and part traveling upward through the mountain with Oda as their chief.

Even as a puppy, Kaz had heard stories of humans. In fact, his den mother at the time - who was someone other than his aunt Rega, who took over after they fled the Deep - had often told the pups stories about the hairless, flat-faced beings who entered the Deep and traded with the kobolds. Occasionally, they would explore deeper into the mountain, and those stories were invariably the most fascinating as well as the most violent of them all. Kobolds who became entangled with humans usually died a horrible death, but if they didn’t, the humans would sometimes leave them with great riches when they departed.

Of course, these were just stories to Kaz, because the den mother, Aunt Rega, and his father, Ghazt, all told him that humans didn’t come to the mountain any more. There was never any explanation of why this was true, just that it was, and Kaz had gotten the impression that whatever caused the change had happened so long ago that it was only a distant memory of a whispered story.

Instead, according to the humans, the mountain had been closed to humans less than twenty years before. Not many humans, even among Raff’s people, had been interested in visiting what they considered a grim and primitive place inhabited by lesser beings, so it had taken some time for the change to be noticed, and even longer for the knowledge to become widespread.

Lianhua, Chi Yincang, and their former companion, Gaoda, had come from a distant land, and had no idea that they wouldn’t be able to simply enter the mountain and leave again within a few days or weeks. By the time they found out, they had already traveled for nearly a month, and Lianhua’s friend, Yingtao was very ill. They couldn’t leave her behind, but they also couldn’t help her recover any more quickly, so Lianhua had insisted upon hiring someone - who turned out to be Raff - to guide them to an entrance near the peak of the mountain.

There, they met Kaz, who had recently acquired Li’s egg, and after negotiating with Kaz’s sister, Katri, Kaz led the humans down through the mountain toward the Deep. During their journey, Li hatched, and Kaz learned more about the peculiar power that dwelt in his belly, accidentally opening his middle dantian and nearly killing himself at the same time. He met Nucai for the first time when that being somehow reached out to him while he was trying to repair his damaged core, and Nucai fixed it for him, saving Kaz’s life and allowing him to begin the process of refining his body like the humans.

Lianhua, who had been eating slowly in order to avoid answering Kaz, finally set down her utensil and sighed deeply. “Yes,” she admitted, “I meant to go to the Deep, but now I have a whole city to go through. Surely the proof I need is somewhere here. I just need to keep looking until I find it.”

Kaz shrugged, but his ears twitched, and he couldn’t meet her eyes. The truth was, he longed to be out of this place. The mosui were almost all gone, with only a few of the young ones remaining, and that only because Lianhua had begged for the husede to spare them, but there were grim reminders of their existence everywhere, and it made him uncomfortable. Plus, so long as he stayed here-

“Kaz!” A sweet little yip of excitement came from behind him, and he flinched as he turned, already knowing what he would see.

Sure enough, there in the doorway was a pretty little kobold female, her pure white fur dyed with the red patterns of the Redmanes, and her bright blue eyes fixed on him. On his shoulder, Li mantled, stretching out her neck and hissing at the female. He might have imagined it, but he almost thought a tiny wisp of smoke swirled up from one nostril as she did so.

Kaz bowed slightly, ears flat and tail tucked, as he said, “Oh. Fair howls, Elvi.”