The planning was less a strategy session and more a chaotic briefing for a one-ghost parade.
"Your objective is not to fight," Bai drilled into the Drunken God's echo. "It is to be seen, to be confusing, and to run away badly. Radiate a low-level spiritual energy, the "leftover scent" of the Seed's integration, mixed with your own chaotic essence. Make them think a minor nature-spirit, addled by ancient power, has stumbled out of the mountain."
"Dizzy? I'm a maestro of Dizziness!" Zhao's spirit buzzed with nervous excitement. "But how do I… radiate? I'm a memory of footwork and bad decisions!"
"The Keeper will act as your anchor and your amplifier," Silken Death explained, her threads weaving a complex spiritual schematic in the air of the True Archive. "He will open a tiny channel to you, lending you a thread of his own vitality and the "flavor" of the Heartwood memory. You will wear it like a loud robe. But the moment you are out, the channel severs. You are on your own until you return to the entrance crack."
Li Ming's role was the most delicate. He had to maintain his deep root to the mountain, uphold his cloaking stillness over the Archives' main door, and simultaneously spin out a single, thin thread of active, misdirected spiritual energy to the Drunken Ghost. It was a test of his multi-layered harmony unlike any before.
He sat in the center of the psychic space, the Abbot and the Still Iron echo reinforcing his inner vessel. Bai stood guard over his roots. Silken Death supervised the thread-spinning.
"Ready?" Li Ming asked the Drunken God's echo.
"Ready as I'll ever be for a public spectacle! Let's give 'em a show!"
Li Ming took a breath. He plunged his awareness into the mountain's memory, finding the fault-line "back door" on the north face. He then, with exquisite care, separated a hair-thin strand of his own spirit. He imbued it with two things: a faint, fading emerald glimmer from the Heartwood Seed's aura, and the wobbly, off-kilter "signature" of the Drunken God.
He sent this thread snaking through the psychic equivalent of the mountain's veins, toward the northern landslide.
"Now," Silken Death commanded.
At the hidden crack beneath the boulders, the Drunken God's echo, fueled by Li Ming's thread, merged into a visible form, not a solid body, but a shimmering, translucent phantom of a one-armed man, glowing with a faint, sickly green and gold light. It stumbled out of the rocks, took a deep, exaggerated breath of "air" it didn't need, and bellowed into the twilight.
"OH, the mountain's wine is stout and fine! But it's left me in a bind! My head's a drum, my feet are numb, and I've left my wits behind! A-HA!"
Its voice was a discordant spiritual shout, carrying on the wind. It immediately began a lurching, impossibly complex stagger-dance through the scree, tripping over rocks, spinning in circles, and radiating pulses of confusing, low-level energy that tasted like old leaves and stale beer.
At the mountain's main base, the coiled, watchful presence of the Stone-Serpent Elder snapped to attention.
There. The thought was a hiss of triumph. A spirit-emanation. Weak. Disoriented. It carried the strange life-signature they'd detected. It must have been hiding and was now fleeing.
The Elder's presence uncoiled and shot toward the north face like a striking snake, three lesser seeker auras darting after him.
Back in the Archive, Li Ming felt the crushing pressure at the main door vanish as the watcher left his post. Now.
He severed the thread to the Drunken Ghost. The phantom's connection to the Heartwood "flavor" instantly faded, leaving only its own inherent, chaotic drunken aura. But the bait had been taken.
Li Ming didn't move. He held his position, maintaining the illusion of silent emptiness at the main Archives door. He listened with his mountain-root senses.
The chase was on.
It was the most glorious, terrifying few hours of the Drunken God's echo's long existence.
The Stone-Serpent Elder, a man named Kun with a face like a hatchet and a spirit as cold as deep water, materialized on the north slope. He saw the shimmering, staggering phantom and his lips peeled back in a disdainful smile. A minor spirit, drunk on stolen energy. An easy capture for interrogation.
"Surround it. Gently. I want it intact."
The three disciples fanned out. The phantom, spotting them, let out a theatrical gasp.
"Oh ho! Company! Come to join the party? You'll have to catch me first!"
It broke into a run that was a masterpiece of misdirection. It didn't go fast; it went wrong. It ran directly at a large pine, at the last minute seeming to trip and cartwheel sideways around the trunk, evading a disciple's grasping spiritual net. It fell into a bush, popped out the other side rolling, and came up holding a spiritual illusion of a wine gourd.
"A toast to your health! Or lack of it!" It "threw" the illusion, which burst into a spray of disorienting, tickling energy that made one disciple sneeze violently.
Elder Kun's eyes narrowed. This was more annoying than expected. He fired a binding cord of serpent-qi. The phantom, in the middle of a seemingly uncontrollable stumble, somehow placed its foot on a loose rock that shot out, hitting another disciple in the shin. The stumble turned into a low dive that carried it under the binding cord.
"Missed me!" it sang, scrambling up and breaking into a zig-zag path down the slope toward the denser forest.
The chase plunged into the trees. It became a farce. The phantom led them through thickets of thorns it seemed to blunder into but emerged unscathed from. It crossed streams by slipping on wet stones and surfing on its back to the other side. It left a trail of chaotic spiritual "footprints" that led in circles, overlapped, and occasionally just vanished.
Elder Kun's patience, never plentiful, evaporated. "Enough games!" He unleashed a wider-area suppression technique, a wave of crushing spiritual pressure meant to pin the phantom to the forest floor.
The Drunken Ghost, feeling the deadly serious weight descend, didn't try to resist. It embraced it. It let the pressure slam it down… into a steep, hidden animal slide of soft mud. The suppression technique glued it to the mudslide, and it rode the ooze down a ravine and out of the technique's range, whooping with glee.
"Wheeeee! Best slide in a century!"
Elder Kun was now livid. He was an Elder of the Stone-Serpent Sect, being made a fool by a drunken ghost. He signaled his disciples to flank wide. He would corner it against the cliffs of the Black Gorge.
The phantom, sensing the net tightening, felt a pinch of real fear. This wasn't fun anymore. The man was angry. It remembered the plan, lead them away, then double back.
It put on a final burst of chaotic speed, heading straight for the roaring sound of the gorge river. The disciples closed in from the sides. Elder Kun descended from above, a cage of gleaming serpent-qi forming in his hands.
At the very edge of the cliff, overlooking the crashing rapids, the phantom skidded to a halt. It turned, looked at the three approaching disciples and the furious Elder, and gave a wobbly, cheerful bow.
"Thanks for the dance, you stiff-legged lot! But this party's over for me. The drinks here are watered down!"
And with that, it threw itself backward over the cliff.
Elder Kun rushed to the edge. He saw the shimmering form fall, dissolve into a shower of harmless, fading sparks just before it hit the raging water, its spiritual signature scattering on the violent river qi and vanishing completely.
He stood there, boiling. A minor spirit had self-destructed rather than be captured. It had wasted his entire evening. And the strange life-energy signature was gone, dispersed. The trail was cold.
He cast one last, furious look back toward the silent, dark mountain that had birthed the frustrating phantom, and then turned away. "Return to the sect. There is nothing more here but tricks and dead ends."
Deep in the mountain, Li Ming felt the Drunken God's echo return. It streamed back through the fault-line crack, not as a formed phantom, but as a exhausted, giddy, chattering rush of consciousness.
"…did you see that? The look on his face! Priceless! I haven't had that much fun since I lost my arm! Whew! I need a nap for a decade…'
It collapsed back into its place in the Archive, its essence dimmed but thrumming with satisfaction.
The pressure was gone. The watcher had left. The back door was unknown and secure.
Li Ming released the deep root and let out a long, shuddering breath. He was drenched in sweat. The harmony held, but it felt strained.
"It worked," Bai said, a grudging respect in his tone. "The drunkard played his part.'
"Better than played," Silken Death purred. "He performed. The Serpents will write it off as a minor anomaly. They will not be back soon."
The Abbot sent a wave of restorative calm through Li Ming's spirit. "You held three disciplines at once. You are growing, Keeper.'
Li Ming nodded, too tired to speak. He had done it. He had protected the Archive. He had used his ghosts not just as advisors, but as tools, as partners. The line between using them and honoring them felt thin, but he had walked it.
He walked to the outer library and drank deeply from his water skin. He looked toward the Last Door, behind which slept a forest's memory and the spirits of ten thousand dead arts.
He was no longer just hiding. He was managing a kingdom of the dead. And today, his kingdom had won its first, small, unseen victory.
The mountain was quiet again. But Li Ming knew the quiet wouldn't last. The world was full of endings, and they all seemed to have his address. He ate some food, wrapped himself in his blanket, and slept, dreaming of stumbling dances and deep, green, dreaming trees.