Last time, on A Thousand Years of Jade…
Jiaming, Human Draconic Sorcerer/Devotion Paladin, marginally less violent than the median Xianxia MC
Lynne, Drow Soulknife Rogue, whose player is winning an Oscar for this session
Scramble, Tabaxi Artillerist Artificer, Red Osmanthian & master of the Dao of SCIENCE!
Muyang’s player could not be with us this session so he was relegated to healbot, Sister Pingguo of the Beggars was also with us, as were the three peasants-turned-bandits-turned-rebels (Jin, Li, and Peng) we picked up on the road.
Once upon a time, in Nichiben-occupied Manzhu…
There are glimmers of light ever so faint on the eastward horizon as a patrol of soldiers begins to trickle out of an inconspicuous cave west of Shengyang. Above them, unseen, a slight, scaly young man in saffron robes floats motionless. In one hand, he holds a jian, with a slender blade pale like the full moon. In the other, a smoke grenade. He knows what must be done, and in this moment, he has no fear. Quietly, he whispers a mantra of protection, and his faith shields him.
He drops the grenade.
A very young dark elf girl with eyes like pink roses goes hungry for another night.
The grenade impacts the ground, and before the soldiers can react, a dark elf woman with eyes like pink roses throws a blade of solid fear behind them. In a blink, she takes the blade’s place and throws another towards them as a pillar of smoke 40 feet wide rises from the entrance to the bunker. A jet of flame spews forth from an eldritch cannon down onto three of the soldiers, cutting through the smoke for a moment. The remaining soldiers scatter, half heading west, the others heading south along the dirt path up to the caves.
The soldiers along the path spot Scramble and Muyang along the ridge and fire at them. A few fleeing west spot Jiaming, and take potshots at him; one even manages a grazing shot, but misses his vital meridians. As this is happening, Sister Pingguo slides down a steep, almost vertical hill and comes in swinging against them. Jiaming notices that she isn’t just a Beggar, but a cultivator, albeit a self-taught one. Specifically, Pingguo taught herself the zuiquan style: “drunken fist” boxing. Within a few moments, she dispatches them, qi flowing through her system like wine flowing from a cask. Scramble unloads with a burst of machine gun fire and bids his cannon to move into a more optimal firing position. As this occurs, Jiaming flies over to the southbound troops. His jaw unhinges as he exhales an orb of flame. It unfurls into a burning long, leaping from man to man, devouring each and dragging their souls straight to diyu. Within the span of a few chaotic seconds, our small band of partisans is able to secure the outside of the Nichiben base.
“This is for my brother.”
With those words and a final blow into a soldier’s skull, Pingguo collapses into the mud, her hands stained crimson. Jiaming knew very well what taking a life could do to one’s qi flow. These soldiers were her first.
After taking a few moments to collect ourselves, the rest of us joined Lynne inside the bunker.
At this point, Lynne would do anything for a few pieces of copper or a full belly.
At the entrance, anyway, the bunker was relatively spacious but roughly hewn. The entire party could spread out east-west with some room to spare. Everyone is on foot, save for Jiaming (who is hovering in a lotus position a few inches above his qilin). Electric lamps provided decent visibility, while “wholesome” (commanding officer-approved) propaganda music could be heard playing over a radio deeper in. On the north wall were two doors. Lynne crept over to the one on the left and opened it just a crack. Six soldiers, Manzhu collaborators, were standing around chattering.
“We got our asses whooped out there-”
“We fight for the Nichiben Empire, this can’t really be happening-”
“I saw it with my own eyes, they fought like Hachiman himself, it was crazy-”
Lynne interrupts them with a whisper straight into their minds.
“We have you surrounded. Everyone else is dead, but you don’t have to be; there’s been enough blood outside the cave.”
Intimidated, they march into the entrance chamber, begging for mercy with the manic energy of cornered rats. Jiaming rides behind the group to keep them from retreating. Lynne approaches them, calling forth a blade of shimmering fear. Jiaming, Lynne, and Scramble take the roles of good, bad, and ambivalent cop, respectively, in the ensuing interrogation. They claim General Sun (a name that Lynne visibly reacted to when she heard it) promised them that collaboration with Nichiben was a “third way” between the Central Government and the Reds, for the ultimate good of the nation, but Lynne points out that they’re fools if they “truly believe any of that ‘good of the nation’ talk applies to [them].” They claim that they went turncoat about a month ago, two weeks before Nichiben’s blitz across Manzhu, engaging in sabotage to ensure the blitz would succeed. Since Nichiben’s conquest of the region, however, they’ve mostly been rounding up civilians.
Jiaming begins calmly wiping blood from his jian the minute they mention rounding up civilians, while Scramble moves the eldritch cannon right up to their cheek, demanding that they elaborate. As this happens, some guards walk in and quickly run from the party back into the depths.
The light flickers again, and one of the soldiers mentions that he didn’t realize all drow had eyes like Lynne’s. At that moment, Lynne Sun froze in realization, her worst fears confirmed, her magenta blades flickering wildly. The soldiers being interrogated made a break for it, fleeing into the daylight beyond the cave, but Jiaming could fly faster, and eventually they had to stop, exhausted. Jiaming gave them an ultimatum: with their crimes, only one place under Heaven would be willing to offer them sanctuary; they were to lay down their arms and learn the ways of the Mt. Hua sect. He cautioned them against testing his mercy. The soldiers complied.
Jiaming returns to the bunker, and Lynne is still motionless, her eyes unblinking. Jiaming tells Lynne what he bid the soldiers to do, and Lynne was furious since they deserved to die. Jiaming didn’t disagree, but before they could get into a dialogue on moral philosophy, another group of soldiers entered the entrance chamber, preparing to fight. And with the voice of a long, Jiaming commands them to grovel, and they comply. Humiliated, they disembowel themselves rather than face further shame.
Scramble, naturally, realizes that he can take their cerebrospinal fluid for spell components, and for the first time since his draconic blood began manifesting as a child, Jiaming blinks in disgust as he witnesses it. The lights flicker again. Jiaming leaves the qilin with Jin, Li, and Peng at the entrance as the party goes north down the right hallway, and eventually comes to a fork to the east and west, and there’s a group of soldiers to the east. Jiaming leaps into combat, flying over to cut them down with his blade, and Pingguo joins. The soldiers try to swing at them, but apparently Nichiben’s swordsmanship isn’t what it used to be.
A blast of flame from Scramble’s technological terrors goes off in the corridor, and Lynne throws shards of burning psychic noise at the soldiers, Jiaming and Pingguo dodging them before they get hit themselves. Dispatching grunts of the Empire is trivial; the eastern hallway turns south, then back west, opening onto office space to the north, and, as before, we quickly dispatch the guards before rummaging through the documents within.
Lynne finds friendly correspondence between Sun Jiashi and Wu Jingwei, a prominent politician banished by Jiang Jieshi. The gist of it is that Nichiben has been collaborating with the Tangle Sutra cult (remnants of the Five Flowers) for experiments in the forbidden occult art of blood alchemy (hemocraft). Not all blood is equally suitable or potent. The Western nations have largely ignored qi cultivation, so the quality of their citizens’ blood for hemocraft is all over the place. Nichiben, which has recently westernized, is starting to face similar problems. But in Osmanthia, the flow of qi has not been ignored, and even regular people can passively cultivate without realizing it. Accordingly, Osmanthian blood is a very potent medium.
A great and terrible engine is being constructed, fueled by alchemically-enriched blood, which is to cast the most powerful spell in the history of the world over Osmanthia.
Jiaming looks over the bookshelf in the study, but he’s not a man of much learning, so he relies on Scramble to sift through them. Most are medical journals and the like. There’s a popular novel on the thrilling adventures of cultivators, which Jiaming scoffs at, given his expertise. There’s a copy of Dante Lorenz’s “Beginner’s Guide to Hemocraft”, which Jiaming confiscates. The remaining books are logistics-related, with captives euphemistically referred to as “logs”. Jiaming pokes his head out to see if anyone’s coming towards them.
General Sun is walking by, flanked by some guards. Jiaming roars at them that they’ve been condemned to the lowest depths of diyu for their crimes, and one grunt drops dead on the spot from fear. The party retreats into a chamber of mutilated “logs”, with the last one alive quickly expiring as we enter.
Lynne prays that when she wakes, her father will have come home and her mother will stop weeping, and they can be a family again.
Lynne’s blades crackle with psychic lightning in a million different shades, her hatred for this bastard piercing her skin and instantly cauterizing the wounds. Drawing a dao from its sheath, the General calls Lynne’s mother a whore, and Lynne retorts that he needs to die. Scramble moves forward and blasts a fireball so intense that the main lights shatter in the chamber, the flesh of the guards hit by it beginning to melt to the bone. Lynne throws her hatred at her father and hits him in the shoulder twice; he stumbles back. He leaps onto the ceiling, running along it and striking Jiaming twice as he passes before leaping back down to strike at Lynne twice. The qi being channeled through the blade feels rancid, and the flow of Jiaming’s own qi is disrupted.
Pingguo tries to distract the General, but he’s focused on his daughter. The guards try to attack Jiaming, but as the flames consume them, they miss, and one perishes on the spot. Scramble unleashes his flamethrower, directly hitting the General and Jiaming, but the General pushes most of the pain to cleave at nearby Jiaming. At this point, Jiaming is drenched in his own golden blood. Pingguo lets loose a flurry of blows at the General, and Lynne is able to strike the general in the back, hitting his vitals directly.
“You and your cheap tricks…”
The blade disappears as Lynne removes it from her father’s back.
“I waited for you, every day and every night! I waited for you to save me, to protect me; I hoped beyond hope that if I said the right words, and prayed, and waited every day, it’d all be worth it. The worst thing that happened to me wasn’t you getting exiled, it’s that they didn’t kill you instead!”
“You were never my flesh and blood; clearly, you were much stronger than that. I will never know what it means to be your father, Lynne. Perhaps this was my destiny. I am happy, for the last time, because I could see you in your rightful place: strong and powerful. Maybe now you can do what I could not: Live.”
He falls over, face-first, onto the floor. Lynne turns him over.
“Perhaps now my soul can rest-” His voice trails off, and his red eyes glaze over.
“Don’t leave me again, you don’t get to leave me again, you don’t get to–“ Lynne begins screaming, speech quickly failing her.
A dark elf woman wipes smudged makeup from her face as she slinks away into the night; the loose-lipped gentleman may have been anything but, but his secrets would fetch a tidy price among those in the know.
Most are standing- battered, bloodied- but standing nonetheless. The lights of this charnel house flicker; they stand knee deep in the dead. Near the entrance, a lifetime of tears flows from the rose-pink eyes of a dark elf, and, cradled in her arms, the same eyes stare back, unblinking.
Well, this was a while in the making, and I may have gotten some of the finer details wrong, given how much time has passed, but at least I got it done before tonight’s reunion session with the other half of the party from before the time skip.
Sierpinski Tetrahedron 