7 Walking the Tightrope

After thinking for a while about the puzzle, Yun decided to take it out and see if her thoughts were right about the missing part. As she grabbed onto the token and started to focus her spirit again she felt the sharp pain in her head and felt a little dizzy. Remembering her thoughts from earlier that she had already exhausted her Spiritual Qi, Yun sighed and looked for a good place to lay down and rest until morning. Near the market she found a small alley with a few barrels of goods set aside and lay down her sleeping mat behind them, out of sight of the road. After laying down she closed her eyes and swiftly fell into a fitful, paranoid slumber. She had never had to sleep somewhere where she was worried for her safety, and it really affected her ability to sleep. Every little noise woke her up with a start, even the creaking of a sign or the fluttering of fabrics on the nearby market stalls. By the time the sun started to rise into the sky she had already long given up on trying to really sleep and had sat up to try and meditate instead. Focusing on her meridians she began to draw in Heavenly Qi and compress it against the next gates in her meridians. As she kept compressing Qi she suddenly had a thought occur to her and lost focus, grunting slightly at the pain as the Qi rushed out of her meridians when she lost control of it. Thinking of the puzzle she considered that maybe the images weren't separate at all, but all intertwined like a body's meridians. She thought about her own meridians and the number of gates, then realized that the number of images was a perfect match. Quickly she began to use what little spirit she had recovered to access the token reorganize the images according to the body's meridians. As she was getting close to succeeding she started to feel like things still weren't quite right, like they were out of order, but she knew that her Spiritual Qi would run out very soon and withdrew her mind from the token to contemplate some more. Having had a breakthrough in solving the puzzle Yun pulled out another dried ration from her pack and munching on it while she rolled her sleeping mat back up and attached it back onto her pack. After finishing her ration she began to walk again, thinking all the time about the puzzle and how to line the pictures up with the body's meridian gates correctly. After most of the day passed beneath her feet in contemplation she yet again returned to the alley she had tried to sleep in the previous night and sat down with her token to try what she had come up with. After a while she managed to get the images lined up in what felt like the right way, but something was still missing. As she thought about it again she realized that the concepts still needed integrated somehow and began trying to figure out how something so abstract could become part of this puzzle. Retracting her spiritual energy again, she thought about the concepts and the map of the body's meridians that she had been working with until she fell asleep sitting on her mat.

That night, while sleeping sitting on her mat, Yun had strange dreams plague her of being chased not by the thug group, but by some strange construct of the concepts she was failing to integrate into the puzzle. After managing to sleep for nearly half the night she woke up and sighed in relief that the dream was over. It had felt interminable, and she was grateful that she was no longer fleeing in terror. Thinking about everything, she realized that she only had one day left, and if she couldn't solve the puzzle today she might as well return home in defeat. Thinking about the puzzle again, something began to nag at her mind, like she was missing something about it. She quickly recalled the image of the pictures lined up and started to feel like it was familiar somehow, but she couldn't figure out how. Shaking her head in frustration again she decided to look at things from a new perspective and began to climb the buildings around her, looking out across the city from the roof of the largest buildings near the center. Standing on the roof, feeling the cool night breeze on her face, Yun finally began to feel relaxed again and started to travel across the rooftops that were close enough to cross safely. After a while of adventuring the city in a new way she came to a stop on a certain roof near the rough area of the city she was chased out of. Here, from this roof, she saw what she had been trying to decipher all this time. Something about this area reminded her of the puzzle in her token, and now she just needed to figure out what it was.

After spending some time on the roof and watching the sun come up she began to notice that even the main roads in this area seemed to be following the body's main meridian paths. Thinking back to her puzzle again she started thinking about what images were in the most important locations, then drew up a map of the streets around her and marked those locations to check into. After spending the morning this way she finally climbed down from the rooftops and started walking along the roads to find the marked locations. At each of these marked locations there was a similar building with an identical stone marker on the corner. After inspecting the building she began to wonder about it and tried to run her spiritual energy over the marker on the corner of the building. As she did, she felt a familiar concept in her mind and quickly checked her map to make sure she knew which location she was at before she interfaced with her token and pushed the corresponding concept towards that spot. As she felt the concept land on that position she felt a qualitative change to the area of the puzzle that it corresponded to, causing a great deal of excitement for Yun. At last she knew how to complete the puzzle!

After spending the majority of the day finding the buildings and locating the markers on each building she was pushing the last concept in place when she felt something dangerous and withdrew her consciousness from the token again. In front of her were three Canis boys, the first among them being the one who nearly hit her with the club two days ago. "What do you want? I'm about to leave." she said hoping these boys would leave her alone long enough for her to finish what she was working on. "Oh I don't think so, little girl. You embarrassed me enough last time I saw you. This time I think we'll break those little legs and pay you back for it." sneered the club holding leader. As soon as he finished saying this he reached out and swung his club directly at her thigh, hoping to harm her enough to keep her from running away again. Seeing the club coming at her she did the only thing she could think of to protect herself, turning her back and taking the hit with her pack to soften the blow, she then turned around again and hit the boy's wrist hard to knock the club out of his grasp. With a yelp the club flew out of his hand and nearly hit one of his companions in the head before it hit the wall behind them. While they were distracted she once again lashed out and kicked the two companions in the ribs as hard as she could manage with the height difference between them. After she incapacitated his two friends she stood with her hands on her hips looking up at the last one angrily, "Now look, I have no wish to quarrel with you, but you keep coming looking for trouble with me. Take your friends and leave me alone." The leader glared at her petit frame for a few moments before he had a horrified thought, "I heard about a little girl who was extremely strong in the sect tests this year... you couldn't be..." "I don't know about that, but if you don't get out of my way I'll make you regret it like your friends do." After saying this she began to walk away, heading back towards the center of the city at a brisk pace to finish the puzzle and hopefully find what she needed to get into the sect before her time ran out.