There was something that her father used to say to her, long ago, when she was but an ignorant child stumbling clumsily down the corridors of power, breathing an air so rich in essence that the mere location of her bedchambers brought her closer to godhood than most scholars would ever be:
'A hive must be harmonious.'
She had wondered about harmony, back then, and she kept doing so. Her hive, her city, her realm, should all be aligned. Every piece should have a place to belong, a mission to carry out, a dream to reach for.
That was what she had decided that harmony would be.
So, she had strived to reach it, to nudge the world around her toward her inherited ideal. To fulfill the mission afforded to her own piece, high above the playing board.
But she hadn't imposed it.
Adaptability was necessary. Unforeseen accidents, the Will of the Heavens, new discoveries… No plan crafted by mortal mind would ever survive long enough to account for all the variables. Not even a plan born of her own mind and the avenues it had dived into decades ago, away from what a commoner or even fellow cultivator could even begin to conceive.
Thus, she knew that rigid plans were doomed to failure.
Flexible guidelines, though?
"Most August Empress, it is not my place to dictate how our generosity is parceled, but I fear that, were we to take in any more refugees, the sprawling camps will overtake even the capacity of our crops," the unctuous representative of the Jinyan clan said with a smile ill-suited for discussing the fate of displaced citizens of the Empire.
Citizens of the Empire. The mere thought fought to bring a sardonic smile to the mature woman's lips.
She took a moment to peer across the room, at the rows of pillars wrought of lapis lazuli reaching to the vaulted ceiling, every trace of fool's gold in the blue stone polished into a mirror angled to cast brilliant motes across the meeting hall, to turn the sunlight refracted through the crystal ceiling into stars wavering underwater, swimming across the multicolored robes of all the nobles and wise men sitting at the table set beneath her dais.
At each corner of the square room, bronze dragons coiled around smooth poles exhaled plumes of rich incense, a careful mix of dried herbs meant to bring about harmony and serenity as well as obfuscate the noxious scents of alchemy clinging to some of her advisors.
She made a mental note to switch to regular incense from now on. The results so far did not warrant the expense.
Usually, she would've kept her aloof contemplation, waiting for another of the attendant nobles and administrators to refute the point being made, allowing at most an enigmatic gaze to peer over the crimson feathers of her fan, but, as the last daughter of the Wusheng line looked not at the familiar room, but at the people in it, as she threw her severe stare from her gold and black throne at the gathered representatives of her capital, she found little opposition to the statement.
Harmony. Flexibility. Fate.
They all could do with a guiding hand.
"Our esteemed Zimo," she said, allowing him the illusion of her full attention as she demeaned him by avoiding the name of the clan into which he'd been adopted, "it is indeed your place to tell us of your concerns. Whyever would we have this council of trusted advisors if not to listen to your sage words?"
Some mirth made it into her tone when she spoke, and her eyes conveyed a hidden smile when she looked at nervous men and women pretending to take her words in good humor.
Pretending.
Everything was pretense.
The world froze as the Empress dove into her thousand streams of thought. A man unaware of his place in her swarm looked around, telling her of the hidden gambling den built under the house of a fallen noble still struggling to keep up the appearance of the wealth he had squandered. A woman's sigh turned into a suggestive purr as her robes parted and she allowed her client to feel desired now that the time for confidences was over. The future heir of Shaolin in Exile kicked around a leather ball, happily playing with other children, unaware of the destiny that would claim him once the delayed natal charts made it to the hands of the current abbot.
The incense proved once again inadequate as a cold hand on her wrist and burning flesh in her nostrils tainted it all.
As they always did.
It took her a while, an almost imperceptible lapse, to focus on the strand of cultivated intent that connected her to the Rouha clan's representative.
The Alchemists of Outward Flesh. The Spies of a Thousand Faces. One of the most feared families in the Jade Hive, not because of their feats of might or mastery of obscure arts, but because…
Her mind brushed the eyes of the androgynous man in jade robes that sat at the farthest reach of the oblong table, an unsubtle reminder of Imperial wealth made out of slabs of sapphire held in place by curlicues of red and white gold meant to evoke twilight flickering on capricious clouds.
His eyes, of an unremarkable dark shade that could've been green, brown, or black whenever circumstances demanded it, flitted down to hands set misleadingly calmly in front of him.
For a single moment, through those unremarkable eyes, the Empress was able to catch one spidery vein moving underneath pale skin, changing one angled, harsh pattern into a more rounded one that almost suggested a written message.
Out of the corner of the spy's eyes, she saw the nervous representative of the Jinyan peering at that very same vein, as if in search of direction.
And, just like that, her main goal for that day's meeting was accomplished.
There was something brewing between two of her advisors. Something she hadn't been informed of, despite one of them having been unwittingly turned into one of her Eyes years ago.
It wasn't often that she pondered on her possible mistakes, but the idea of killing Gui Rouha and discarding her hard-earned ear in the clan of intrigue seemed to be the more sensible path to take with every day that her suspicions grew.
"Of course, your Imperial Majesty, your wisdom shows in how you are always alert to catch another pearl to add to your—" the Jinyan resumed, testing more than her patience.
"How greedy we are in your eyes, Zimo," she said, between caress and cut.
The widower shuddered as the intent lacing her words brought back memories of all that he had lost. A cruel and frivolous expense of her mental prowess. Maybe an unnecessary one.
Not as cruel as suggesting she made her subjects starve, though.
"Greedy? Far be it from me to even suggest the notion. Is a dragon greedy for claiming the skies? Is a tiger greedy for taking the jungle? Is—"
"You will forgive us if we stop you before you labor to find something to claim for every single one of the Twelve Earthly Branches, advisor. Now, going back to the matter at hand, there's something that we want each and every one of you to keep firmly in those prodigious minds of yours: Suppose we heeded your advice. Suppose we closed the gates of Yaozhu to any of our subjects seeking refuge. Suppose that, added to the failure of our vassals to protect our borders from the incursions of barbarians and beasts, we admitted to the victims of those failures that we cannot afford to feed them.
"Suppose that word of that catastrophic failure carried. That some petty noble decided that their lands and subjects would be more secure under the yoke of conquerors than under the guidance of the Jade Hive. Suppose that we are forced to war."
The hall she was in, the very throne she sat on, had been built centuries ago, as far back as the records of the Spirited Scribes showed. It was on the last floor of the porcelain pagoda set in the middle of the Imperial compound, atop the tallest mount that watched over the expansive valleys that seemed to reach all the way to the four sacred peaks guarding the corners of the world.
A throne surrounded by the rest of her city, her subjects, and the ever-increasing rice paddies skirting the foot of Xin Songshang.
But, most importantly, it was right above the spring that burbled all the way from the deepest aquifer in the land, up the cyclopean channel of rock that split under the palace to birth the four great rivers quartering her realm.
It was the center of the world. The center of her power. The guardian of her shame.
And, at that moment, the Empress spoke with the Voice of the World.
"Suppose," she said for the last time, her glare becoming prismatic and diving into each and every one of her advisors at once with the precise hue of their nightmares, "that our armies march. That our fields burn. That our young die. Tell us, oh noble lords, how empty will our granaries become?"
She kept the accusing stare, the careless display of power and mastery, as she used Rouha's eyes to understand the reactions of those she was cowing. Her spirit reached for the pathways that led to more thoughts, to more Minds rather than Eyes, as she shut down everything but her own gaze and that of the spy too busy doing his own analysis to realize how instrumental he was in these circumstances.
There was actual fear in some of them, but most were too trained in keeping their composure. A few couldn't hide the signs of intrigue as they looked back at her, pondering if her reasons were truly those she had told them. If she was as monstrously selfish and pragmatic as she privately showed herself to be, given how suspiciously often her practicality and charity seemed to overlap.
They knew not about the times where… they didn't.
But all those were the expected reactions. She was learning nothing new other than the confirmation that she needed to keep a better eye on Rouha and Jinyan. That the Alchemists of the Outer Flesh were once again in the middle of a conspiracy, and that the former commoner holding the reins of the Golden Swallow seemed all too eager to follow the lead of Gui Rouha.
The man through whose eyes she could see whenever she pleased.
The man she hadn't caught doing anything out of the ordinary, despite what logic would dictate.
She held the technique to split her gaze for a single moment more, the strands of mind added to her own rushing to memorize reactions and interactions to be further catalogued at her leisure, and then she allowed the atmosphere of power to diffuse back into pillars of lapis lazuli, motes of pyrite, and bronze censers anchored to the veins of metal twinned around the mouth of four rivers.
The youngest in attendance deflated at the lack of tension, the powerful and experienced failed to react, and the truly cunning leaned into the emotion they thought she expected to see.
Pretense.
All of it was pretense.
"We will not hear another word of food shortages. You will expand your fields, tax your own lands justly, send your armies to hunt spirit beasts, and make sure that the Jade Hive remains famously welcoming to any of those displaced by your failure to protect them. Dismissed."
Her crimson fan closed with a final snap of reinforced wood, and her advisors rushed to stand and bow, vacating the room as quickly as courtesy would allow.
She breathed deeply, then, trying to find in the incense and its aroma the peace her alchemists claimed it should bring.
It didn't.
So she remained still, tense, and patterns made out of silk, wood, and feather came alive in her fan, the cry of the phoenix she slew to craft her weapon and emblem once again echoing in her mind as she opened it and swung it, bringing the flaming outline of the sacred beast out to spread her beautiful wings until they reached the walls of the room before the bird dove down and, with the passage of nostalgically burning feathers, incinerated every remnant of techniques or enchantments left behind by her oh so loyal advisors.
She missed it, the beautiful phoenix that she had killed.
She missed a lot of things. She had killed even more.
So she allowed herself very few kindnesses. Even scarcer luxuries.
One of them was to slump back on her throne, throw her mind, her own mind, down the central, hidden stairs of her pagoda, and, with vehement reverence, enter the one room that would always smell of burning flesh to her.
Surrounded by the burbling spring racing up her mountain before being split into rivers, she felt on the shell of her intent how refracted light, carefully guided down sacred waters, came through the crystal walls of the submerged chamber.
How dots of errant sun mimicked the patterns cast from lapis lazuli pillars in the throneroom up above.
How, amidst the embrace of the water birthed at the center of the world, men, women, and children lay in funeral robes, their hands crossed over their chests.
And how none of those hands covered the spot where silk had burned and flesh had split and bubbled.
The eyes of her body unnecessarily opened, looking at the blurry sky offered by the cut quartz above her.
The ghost of her mind caressed a still face.
"Harmony, Father? Couldn't you have left me an easier goal to strive for?" she whispered, both above and below.
Her mind twinned with her Minds, noting how the technique was already unraveling under her ever-increasing demands.
Soon, it would be time to renew it.
All for the sake of harmony.
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Hi, everyone, sorry this took so long. I hit a bit of a snag with my writing schedule, but, also, Chapter 6 (https://www.patreon.com/collection/2019062?view=expanded) turned out to be way harder to push past than I anticipated, for reasons that will likely become quite clear once I share it over here.
As to today's chapter…
…
Well, Xia is so insistent on becoming a hero of justice for actual reasons. Reasons other than having Wu panic in that way she finds so endearing.
I hope you enjoyed this little look behind the curtain at what the Jade Hive truly holds. See ya soon!
As always, I'd like to thank my credited supporters on Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/Agrippa?fan_landing=true): aj0413, Crimson Grave, LearningDiscord, Niklarus, Tinkerware, Varosch, Vergil1989 Crossover King, and Xanah. If you feel like maybe giving them a hand with keeping me in the writing business (and getting an early peek at my chapters before they go public, among other perks), consider joining them or buying one of my books on https://www.amazon.com/stores/Terry-Lavere/author/B0BL7LSX2S. Thank you for reading!