Chapter 34: Sect Trial – Part 2
She wore the Winter Sprite dress again.
On purpose.
She knew exactly what would happen the second she suppressed her qi. She had weighed the pros and cons in the time it took her to blink.
Pros: fifteen essence well spent and currently the best thing she owned. Cons: everything else.
She adjusted the hem, then grabbed Serenya's wooden comb from the shelf and worked through her tail... habit more than need, now.
The frost-scent was gone. She pressed the wood to her nose anyway. Nothing.
She set it down and stepped out into the snow anyway.
The morning was colder than yesterday.
Ice had formed along the terrace railings overnight, and the bridges between cliffs glittered with frost that would make the footing treacherous for anyone wearing sensible boots.
Tharia was not wearing sensible boots.
She was wearing the same lacquered red high heels Serenya had "helped" her pick out, which she had been wearing since her first day in the sect.
Click. Click. Click.
Around her, outer disciples moved in tight clusters, voices low. Everyone was bruised somewhere from yesterday. A few were limping. The mood had the specific texture of people who had survived one hard thing and were now being asked to survive another.
Tharia's tail swished. Her qi was still warm from the second vein, the new channels buzzing with the slightly-too-alive feeling of something recently opened.
She'd woken up at three in the morning to the sensation of qi moving through places she hadn't known existed, which was either exhilarating or unsettling depending on how awake she was.
Currently she was not very awake.
'Hot tea would be nice.'
She had no idea where that thought came from and blamed it entirely on her meridians still throwing a party from yesterday.
Maren's dry voice arrived before his body did, carrying across the frost-heavy air.
"Today begins the second half of the trial. You will face spirit beasts within controlled grounds. Survival determines ranking. Ranking determines reward."
He shuffled to the front of the terrace, sleeves their usual uneven state, and gestured toward the arena entrance carved into the mountain's flank. Formation runes glowed along the walls, amber in the grey morning light.
"Three rewards. First place chooses first. A weapon from the sect treasury, fifty spirit stones, or one hour of access to the library's second floor."
The crowd's reaction was immediate and specific: weapon said in the hopeful way, spirit stones said in the practical way, library said in the dismissive way. She heard all three within five seconds.
Her ears perked forward.
'Library.'
"Spirit beasts carry qi-enhanced hides. Mortal steel will not cut efficiently. Adapt." Maren looked at them all with the expression of a man who suspected adaptation was beyond most of them.
"Begin."
The arena was wide, open to the grey sky above the barrier arrays, snow coming down in slow drifts that melted against the formation seals. The stone floor was scored with old claw marks.
Gates opened along the far wall and the beasts came through.
A frost wolf. An ember-maned lion. A tusked boar trailing steam. A coiling serpent in river-mist. Bears, hawks, red-eyed hounds — enough for every disciple, each creature moving with the specific weight of something that had qi threaded through its bones.
The crowd went quiet in the way crowds did when something real arrived.
Joren was called first.
He walked forward with the ease of someone who had already decided how this ended.
The frost wolf that padded out to meet him was substantial — shoulder height on a grown man, frost clinging to its coat, breath coming in visible plumes. Its eyes were pale blue and very calm.
Joren's spear came up in the guard stance Tharia had watched him drill a hundred times and she noted, with interest, that it wasn't quite Kaela's guard. Slightly wider. His own adjustment.
The wolf lunged. He stepped into it — not away, into it — and the spear drove through the beast's shoulder before the claws could find purchase. The wolf hit the ground hard, formation runes flaring along the barrier to contain it, and the whole exchange had taken maybe twenty seconds.
The crowd erupted. Tharia was already watching the next gate.
Yingying went next, quick and light against a tusked boar that nearly gored her twice before her dagger found the gap behind the shoulder blade.
A disciple she didn't know well fought a serpent and won slowly, at the cost of what looked like a dislocated shoulder. Another lost his footing on the icy stone and spent the first thirty seconds of his match on his back, which was its own kind of education.
Then her name.
The lion came through the gate like it owned the arena.
It was big — bigger than she'd seen from the side of the ring, the qi-shimmer in its mane making it look like heat rising from stone in summer. Gold eyes. Heavy paws that left deep impressions in the snow. It didn't rush. It walked to the center of the arena, stopped, and looked at her.
Tharia stood at the other end, fan closed, tail still, and grinned at it with all her teeth.
'Okay.’
The dress was opaque right now because she was moving and her qi was cycling properly. The second she used Shimmer or let her reserves drop, it would become everyone’s problem.
She was going to have to fight a spirit lion without her main technique.
‘Excellent. Perfect morning.’
She snapped the fan open and the lion's ears came forward, tracking the sound.
Then, it lunged.
She went sideways, fan coming up to deflect the first swipe, the claws caught the reinforced ribs and she felt it down her arms, the weight behind the strike genuinely shocking.
Spirit beast. Right. The hide was like hitting packed earth and the strength behind it was nothing like a training dummy or even a cultivator.
She reset, putting distance between them, shaking out her arms. Her cheeks puffed once — the involuntary kind — then she breathed it out.
The lion circled. She circled with it. Her heels found the snow-dusted stone and she adjusted her weight without changing her stance, the way Kaela had drilled into her until it was reflex.
'Don't use the shimmer,' she told herself. 'Think around it.'
She threw a straight qi-laced fan gust at the lion's face, the kind she'd used on the phantom beasts in the obstacle course. The lion flinched back, shaking its head — not hurt, but startled. She used the half-second to close ground and jab the fan edge at its foreleg.
The reinforced tip skidded off the hide.
"Damn you Cat!"
The lion's tail lashed and it came in low this time, quicker than the first lunge, and she barely got out of the way. One paw clipped her hip and she stumbled, one heel sliding, and went down on one knee in the snow.
Cold through her thigh. The hem doing what it did. The crowd was very loud suddenly.
She got up.
The lion was already turning for another pass.
'Hell...'
She didn't have time to plan anything, just move, and she moved toward it instead of away — the thing Kaela had done to her in every sparring session — got inside the arc of the paw and drove the fan up under the lion's jaw.
Not the reinforced tip. The spread ribs, all the qi she had in the fan at once, released in a single hard pulse.
The lion's head snapped back. It roared, shaking its mane, and she threw herself sideways before it could recover, rolled, came up, and her dress—
'Oh no.'
The impact had spiked her qi hard enough to surge everything in the wrong direction. The dress, which had been very politely opaque for four whole minutes, chose that exact second to become transparent.
The crowd made a sound that wasn't quite any one thing — part alarm, part something else entirely, nobody sure which reaction was appropriate.
The lion hesitated.
Its qi-enhanced instincts had been about to end her, and then her signature changed. What its eyes saw no longer matched what it could sense.
Tharia had approximately two seconds of lion hesitation and one transparent dress.
She used both.
The fan snapped open, full suppression active — yes, worse for the dress, she had committed — and the Shimmer blazed out from it in layers she'd never quite managed before, the new vein contributing something she hadn't planned for, phantom images of her scattering across the arena in six directions.
The lion lunged at the wrong one.
She was already at its flank, one precise strike with the fan edge at the base of the skull where the qi-weave was thinnest, and the lion hit the stone with a sound that shook the barrier arrays.
Formation runes flared. The beast was contained.
She stood in the middle of the arena, chest heaving, dress completely transparent, and snow falling around her.
The crowd was beyond words.
"Kyaa—!" The sound escaped before she could stop it.
System:
[SYSTEM NOTICE]
Chaos Essence: +2 (Won a Spirit Beast Fight. Nude.)
Note: The dress created a three-second opening.
The System is choosing to classify this as tactical.
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'Your head!'
She willed the dress back to opaque. Walked to the lion's contained form. Crouched down and looked at it for a moment. Stood up and walked off.
Her tail was puffed to approximately twice its normal volume.
She kept her chin up anyway.
Maren announced the results with his usual warmth, which was none.
"First place, Joren. Second, Yingying. Third, Tharia. Rankings by time."
Joren chose without hesitation. The sect treasury produced a mid-spirit spear, the qi-lines along the shaft already responding to his cultivation.
Spirit-grade weapons started where mortal steel stopped — they channeled qi through the strike rather than around it, held an edge that qi reinforcement couldn't dull. Most outer disciples wouldn't see one until their third or fourth year.
Yingying chose fifty spirit stones and walked away with the practical satisfaction of someone who had a plan.
'Fifty stones... five private lessons with Kaela.'
Tharia stepped forward and took the library token.
Scoffs from the crowd. She’d expected them. She let it wash over her and closed her hand around the token.
Renji appeared at her elbow, voice low. "You could have lobbied harder for second. Fifty stones would have—"
"I know what fifty stones buys," she said.
He went quiet. She could feel him doing the math — missions, payments, Kaela's name on every receipt.
"...You always do, don't you," he said. Not quite a question.
She closed her hand around the token.
"I prefer it when people underestimate me," she said, to the crowd that was already moving on.
Nobody replied. She hadn’t expected them to.
She went straight to the library.
The library's second floor smelled different from the first — older, drier, the scrolls here housed in lacquered cases with qi-seals rather than plain wooden shelves.
The attendant who led her up stood by the stair with a jade timer and the expression of someone who was going to announce when her hour ended whether she was in the middle of a sentence or not.
She moved fast — she'd seen the reference two weeks ago, a footnote in a Transparent Illusion fragment: see also Applied Transformation, Second Floor, Eastern Cases.
She'd been waiting for an excuse to get up here ever since.
She moved fast — she'd been waiting for this for two weeks and she had exactly one hour.
"Applied Transformation, Eastern Cases," she told the shelf, like a threat. "I know you're here."
The shelf did not confirm this. She found it anyway.
Phantom Guise.
She read it once, then again. The mechanics were simple enough: veiling inward instead of outward. Same foundational channel, different direction. She could already feel how it would sit.
'Okay. Okay, this is good.'
She still had time left, so she grabbed the formation notes on Disrupted Node Patterns she'd spotted on the way in. The title had snagged on something; the fragment she'd overheard on the terrace stairs days ago.
Formation nodes. South ridge. Third time running short.
She opened it.
Formation nodes degrading in consistent geometric patterns indicate external interference rather than natural qi dispersal.
Deliberate suppression.
She read until the attendant said "Time."
She set the scroll down and walked down the stairs with the unhurried pace of someone who had gotten exactly what they came for and intended to use all of it.
That night, after the lanterns dimmed and the cave was quiet, she sat in front of the water basin and tried it.
The qi moved differently than she expected — instead of building outward it pulled inward, folding the illusion back against her own surface. She felt it settle across her face like a second skin. Cold. Strange.
She looked into the water.
A different face looked back. Broader jaw. Darker hair. The ears were still there. The tail was still there. Of course they were. But the face — the face was wrong. Genuinely, convincingly wrong.
Her pupils snapped to pinpoints.
"...Huh," she said, out loud, to the cave. Then, after a moment: "That's extremely unsettling."
She held it for ten seconds.
Then she let it drop and her own face stared back at her from the water.
She sat there longer than she meant to.
System:
[SYSTEM NOTICE]
Art Acquired: Phantom Guise (Rank F)
Illusion Proficiency: 49.1% (+0.1%)
Chaos Essence: +1 (Acquired Under Time Pressure. As Always.)
Note: Gain rate has decreased.
Secondary Note: This is not a malfunction.
Tertiary Note: Surface mastery is complete. What remains is not technique.
[collapse]
She fell asleep thinking about formation nodes and geometric degradation patterns and a supply route running short for the third consecutive month.
System Status:
Host: Tharia | Age: 18
Status: Healthy (Battered. Recurring).
[TECHNIQUE ANALYSIS]
Illusion Proficiency: 49.1%
Chaos Stability: Fragile (Holding).
Stage: Foundation Veins: Second Vein Opened.
Achievement: {Style Over Substance: Passed evaluation wearing absolutely nothing. Technically.} - {Fought in Public Naked and Won Anyway (Advanced): Illusion failed. Dignity failed. Victory did not. Again} - {Naked Field Researcher: Turned a failure into very thorough, extremely hands-on field research. Technically.}
Traits: 'The Reluctant Royal' (Passive). ‘Willing Exposure’ (Passive)
Passive Techniques: 'Shame-Guard' (Passive)
Module: 'Path of the Unseen'
Art: Transparent Illusion (Rank: F), Hold: 14 breaths (record) | Phantom Guise (Rank F)
Active Techniques: Illusory Raiment (Rank: C), Shimmer (Rank: F).
Weapon Affinity: Illusory Fan.
Chaos Essence: 57.
Wardrobe: Lucky Charm Hakama (Shelf.) Winter Sprite Dress (Worn.) Mesh Set (Backup.)
Status: Duskwind Sect - Outer Disciple.
Active Quests: Open the Third Vein.
SHOP.
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