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January 5 - January 28, 2024
Power is always borrowed, never created. — Dào’zǐ, Book of the Way (Classic of Virtues), 1.1
But in rare moments like this, when the sun hung ripe and swollen as a mandarin over the glittering sea, there was still a shattered-glass beauty to be found in the remnants of a conquered land.
“There are old gods and new gods, kind gods and fickle gods—and most powerful of them all are the Four Demon Gods.”
Yā’tou. Girl.
Angels was short for White Angels, the colloquialism that Elantian soldiers used to refer to themselves.
dǒu’lì.
Saku (?)
In life, qì blazes and moves as yáng; in death, qì cools and stills as yīn. A body with a restless qì is indicative of a restless soul. — Chó Yún, Imperial Spirit Summoner, Classic of Death
Yīn and yáng: two halves of all qì, two sides of a coin constantly shifting, one into the other in a continuous cycle of balance. Warmth to cold, light to dark…and life to death. It was when the balance was thrown off that there was a problem.
Elantian magic smelled of burnt metal from the way magicians harnessed the alchemical power within metals to craft their spells,
The Hin burned incense for their dead, yet the roots of this custom had long been forgotten, wiped from the pages of history.
Long before the era of the Last Kingdom, when the Dragon Emperor had limited practitioning to the confines of his court and eradicated the rest, practitioners had used incense to parse between yīn and yáng energies.
Yáng, the energy of sun, of heat, of light and life, attracted smoke. Yīn, the energy of the moon, of cold, of da...
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Most corpses held a neutrality to the makeup of their qì—yet Old Wei’s body held the...
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It was a necessity, the other side of the coin constituting qì. It was when yīn energy was left unbalanced that the issues arose. For yīn was also the energy of the supernatural.
Mó was Zen’s first thought. Demon. A soul that held insurmountable wrath or hatred—an excess of yīn energy—coupled with the strength of an unfinished will would not dissipate into the natural qì in the world in death. Instead, it would fester into something evil. Something demonic.
To know the future, one must first understand the past. —Kontencian Analects (Classic of Society), 3:9
qípáo,
Cheongsam
Peace be upon your soul, and may you find the Path home. —Hin funerary rites
Kind lies can kill kingdoms. —General Yeshin Noro Surgen of the Jorshen Steel clan, Classic of War
Meditation is the practice of complete detachment from the physical world, becoming one with the external and internal flow of qì and the constant harmony of yīn and yáng. —The Way of the Practitioner, Section Two: “On Meditation”
Lián’ér. Sòng Lián. It means “lotus,”
Yes, flowers. I, too, am named after a flower—méi, a plum blossom.
