A talisman.
It was a widespread concept with a collective meaning, from what Yun Jieshi remembered.
Typically, a talisman was an object imbued with religious powers to heal, protect, or harm. Indeed, that part was what most people could relate to where a talisman was concerned. But subtle and jarring differences alike existed because of differing interpretations influenced by culture and region.
What Yun Jieshi was looking at was also another interpretation of a talisman. The hag had created a talisman from an onion and a strip of cloth. The little monkey had never heard of talismans of that kind back on Earth.
'A talisman?' he thought. 'The art of Kuon? Does it mean to… expand?'
The answers the voice in his head had given led him to grab a slip of hemp lying on the floor.
"A strip of hemp cloth," said the old sagely voice.
Yun Jieshi hummed. He looked at the hag and considered what she had said before. Grabbing the scallion stem she'd used to write, he said, "You used this to write an… instruction, to make water. But…" He recalled when the hag had used the boar's blood to make even more water with a… richer taste. "…the effect can be stronger if you use better materials. Better blood?"
The hag nodded.
Yun Jieshi massaged his temple. So the juices from herbs, fruits and vegetables counted as blood too, only less valuable?
'That's not too bizarre, I guess.'
But the little monkey still felt like something was missing here. How could a scallion and a slip of hem make magic – this art of Kuon?
Qui Tian gave Yun Jieshi a new scallion stem and pointed at the dry slip of hemp in his hand.
"You want me to try?" he asked her. The hag nodded.
Yun Jieshi took the stem, and the old sagely voice needlessly identified it for him. The little monkey took a breath, and then he scribbled slowly:
"Eternal frost, hailing from beyond. Thaw and abide."
The instant he finished writing, Yun Jieshi's eyes widened. Something deep within gave a sharp tug of his being – his whole. No. No that wasn't it.
It was his pit – the object spinning deep within him. It didn't exist on its own. Something else orbited around it, Yun Jieshi recalled. It might have been wind, rather, a soft breeze, delightful, but scant. It had a perfect standard of clockwise rotation.
It was this breeze that was pulled sharply and drained completely, when Yun Jieshi finished writing the characters on the slip of hemp.
The cloth turned wet, and the old, sagely voice announced:
"A working talisman empowered by the art of Kuon with the basic instruction to supply water."
Yun Jieshi watched in awe as drops of water trickled from it. He had only managed to produce less than 10% of what Qui Tian had, and yet…
'Why do I suddenly feel so empty?' he thought, and sat up straight, scowling. 'Something inside me was used up to create this talisman.'
Twisting uncomfortably, the little monkey rubbed his little belly.
Qui Tian addressed his many questions. She tore the end of a scallion and placed it in front of Yun Jieshi on the floor.
"Pit," she said, pointing at it, and then she circled around it with her index finger in a clockwise motion. "Xun."
"Xun?" repeated Yun Jieshi.
"Xun… Kuon. Xun… talisman." Qui Tian pointed at the talismans.
Yun Jieshi frowned and nodded.
"I see. So that was Xun. It's what powers the talismans."
The hag pointed at his belly.
"Little Xun… little Kuon."
The meaning behind that was clear too.
Yun Jieshi had little of this Xun, a type of energy, and thus, he couldn't exercise the art of Kuon to its greatest extent and for long, it seemed.
The little monkey turned sullen. He didn't like the feeling of emptiness within him. It was like a hunger that couldn't be satiated with food.
"Xun," he repeated, dazed. "So… Feng Jie Hong didn't curse me?"
The hag didn't seem to care for whatever else the little monkey said or did. She wiped the water on the floor with another dry slip of hemp and cleared away the stems and roots. Yun Jieshi watched but he didn't see. He was thinking hard on the phantom, recontextualizing everything that'd happened over the Great Gap.
Feng Jie Hong had gone mad, recognized him as a Sage, and turned into a substance that fed into Yun Jieshi, creating within him a pit and… the Xun that stirred around it.
What did this mean?
"Little Sage…" Qui Tian's voice stole the little monkey from the depths of thought. He looked up and saw that she was standing by the door, waiting for him.
"Oh, we're leaving?!" he said, perking up. "I'll get my ruan!"
He rushed to his corner and grabbed his ruan, but before he ran back to the door, he took a moment to lament the fact that he wouldn't be getting a bit of exercise in today with the large bone bow.
A second later, he was standing by the door with the hag.
"Stay… close," Qui Tian said before opening the door. Yun Jieshi could have screamed, all his worries and questions forgotten. From today onward, he wouldn't have to endure hearing the command, 'Stay' every time he requested to leave the cabin.
'Will I be able to catch a glimpse of more of those golden lights though?' he asked himself.
The cold was as biting and mocking as always outside, riding the fierce wind and flakes of snow. Yun Jieshi shivered. His body, accustomed to the warmth from the coals, took a moment to remember that it had some resistance to the cold.
As the hag closed the door behind them, the little monkey's keen eyes dashed to the urn beside it. How could they not? It exerted a golden glow, tantalizing even to his peripheral vision. The voices from it were also as lively as ever. Well, Qui Tian's voice was.
The little monkey eyed the hag. Since she was fulfilling all the requests he made yesterday, wasn't it only right for him to get some answers about this Complete Dear Treasure? Indeed, that had been another one of the little monkey's requests.
'No. That's being too greedy. I'll probably learn about it eventually,' he thought against his flaring eagerness.
The hag also didn't seem committed to telling him about the urn today. Instead, she raised a slip of hemp she had prepared, and Yun Jieshi watched what she would write closely.
Qui Tian put her thumb to her lips, and with the teeth she had left, she bit hard into it. Drops of blood oozed from a small tear on the skin. She used them to write a set of characters on the hemp slip.
Yun Jieshi's pupils were glazed over with a whipping light for a moment, a passing magical highlight.
The characters the hag wrote over the hemp were much more complex, and it didn't help that she wrote especially messily. Yun Jieshi didn't bother to try and learn what they read.
But only a moment after the slip was turned into a talisman, it was suddenly ripped to shreds. A thousand tiny knives might have butchered it into pieces tinier than the eye could see.
Yun Jieshi reeled.
The sensation of cold vanished at once. The falling snow slid away from him and the hag as it fell; it was as though some electric fan was blowing the flakes away. Moderate temperatures prevailed in the invisible bubble of protection. Yun Jieshi might have been back home, enjoying a common afternoon in the Spring.
'Wow,' he thought and looked admiringly at the hag. 'I have some resistance to the cold and Honghuo is probably the equivalent of a blasting furnace with a brain, but even both these abilities combined can't do anything in the cold here – beyond the Gap. Just how powerful is the talisman she used? Or I guess, the instruction she gave the talisman?'
It suddenly made sense why Yun Jieshi had felt that halting calm when the hag had saved him from the cold days ago. She must have used this exact instruction on her talisman.
Qui Tian beckoned him towards an unknown destination, not bothering to give a lesson on what she had done. Yun Jieshi knew then that the talisman she had used really was as advanced as he thought. His pit probably didn't even have enough Xun to use it anyway.
The little monkey followed after the hag through the piles of snow, his little body half-buried in it. It wasn't really a hassle to push through despite having small limbs, but it grew annoying after a while. He wondered how the hag simply plowed through like a hunchbacked snow plough.
The journey soon brought the two to a series of curled, twisted trees. Having to weave between them in the unnerving silence was anxiety-inducing. The hag might have been fine with it, but Yun Jieshi wasn't.
He found every opportunity to mutter and whisper. He didn't really like keeping his thoughts restrained. He troubled himself and the hag with questions of clarification about Xun and Kuon and talismans at annoying intervals.
Qui Tian merely sighed at most of them, so much so that after a while Yun Jieshi stopped bugging her. He maintained a scowl of dissatisfaction though. It was bad enough that the hag wouldn't answer his questions, and even worse that in his scouring he didn't see any of the other golden lights he'd desperately hoped to see.
The two soon graduated from the lines of odd trees, but another odd obstacle appeared. They had to climb over a snow-covered mountain of hard ice. It was so wide that going around it would take a few hours at least. The hag showed Yun Jieshi the nooks he could use to climb. It wasn't as hard as he had imagined, though, he had wondered if she didn't have a talisman that could remove it; that would have been convenient.
Soon, they were over the mountain and traveling on its other side.
The view changed, much to Yun Jieshi's surprise. The blizzard didn't do so well masking his sight when Wei Fang was dominating the sky.
The first thing that greeted him was a large, black, frozen feather. It was broken in half, lying in a field of a dozen or so flowers. Before Yun Jieshi could even process the fact that these flowers were leaping up and down from the ground, snapping at the falling snowflakes with their petals, he shuddered.
'Those feathers…' he thought. He snapped to the hag before he could stop himself. She seemed to have been about to tell him something important before he interrupted her.
"That feather…" Yun Jieshi said, pointing. "It looks like others I've seen close to the Gap. What are they? I've heard some terrible monster lives here. Do they belong to it?"
The hag looked at the feather and then considered the little monkey for a while. It was as though Yun Jieshi's question was taking minutes to reach her ears.
The skin on her face suddenly turned more wrinkled than usual and her thin lips quaked. The slight tilt of her eyebrows suggested that she had turned furious.
The little monkey panicked.
Was he right then? Had he touched a nerve? Were both things true?
"Not… monster!" the hag hissed with a shaky finger pointed at the feather. "Show little Sage… monster!"
The hag grabbed Yun Jieshi's wrist in a flash, and she pulled him towards a different destination than the little monkey had assumed they were heading for.
"Qui Tian!" he cried, horrified. "What… where are we going?"
But the hag said nothing. She continued leading Yun Jieshi away, winding around the flowers and more of the great, black feathers when they appeared in their path.
"Qui Tian!" Yun Jieshi cried again, but the old woman did not respond. She didn't even seem to hear him. But the flowers continuing to grow in number around them did.
They were rather tall – almost as tall as the little monkey – with black stalks and thick purple-gold petals. It must have been a hobby of theirs, snapping at the falling snowflakes, and that must have meant that the cold wasn't a bother to them at all.
The lively flowers suddenly ceased their little activity when Qui Tian and Yun Jieshi passed. Their little petals and pistils turned to them, tracing their movement.
It was eerie.
Yun Jieshi wished they wouldn't act so… aware.
The fact that the blizzard seemed to grow stronger and stronger as he and the hag soldiered on, heading North, didn't make Yun Jieshi feel any better. Suddenly, the blowing wind had a deeper voice, and he could hardly hear his and Qui Tian's feet shuffling through the snow.
'Where are we going?' the little monkey thought, shaking.
Even now, he could still see the persistent flowers turning their petals, following them. The snow never mounted where they populated.
Just when it seemed as though the instruction Qui Tian had given through the talisman would be overpowered by the worsening blizzard, she stopped.
She pointed somewhere beyond them, where the blizzard thickened further, and shouted so Yun Jieshi could hear.
"There… real monster!"
The little monkey looked, but he didn't see a monster. What he saw might have been worse.