AIR Chapter 84-86 The Misadventures of Nai

Chapter 84 The Misadventures of Nai Part 1

Change was a hard thing. 

Nai sat over a small hole, her face tight in concentration. 

Change was the thing that drove life and forced it to grow. Age was the medicine of ignorance and the flowerpot of wisdom. 

Yes, Nai thought. This was true. 

Her face scrunched a bit more.

Only those who clung tightly to this stallion called time could expect themselves to grow. To live was to stay. To stay with life, to stay with soul, and to stay your very being. 

But to live was also to change. The tree would stay, but it would grow, it would shed its leaves and grow stronger through the winds of time. Its roots would dig deep and force the ground apart, and in doing so, it would change. 

Nai’s face grew red. 

To live, to stay, to change, thus was the dichotomy of life. 

Truly, to live was to die in some ways and to grow in others. Bits of your past shedding away and falling to the ground to nurture your future. 

She pushed again, plop. 

“There you go, easy as could be right?” Medin asked. 

Nai nodded, her mission was complete. 

“Though I don’t know if a child this young should even be potty trained. You're barely a few months old. You’ve got years before you need to do such a thing.”

“Aye!” Nai protested. 

“Well alright,” Medin said with a smile. “If you say so. Now come here, let’s clean you up now.”

Nai nodded and let the woman pick her up. Unfortunately, cleanliness was not something she had mastered yet. But it was only a matter of time, Nai could feel it.

“Aye!” Nai yipped as cold water touched her back. 

“Hold still now,” Medin replied. “It’s a little muddy back there.”

Nai froze and let the woman help her. She had to be careful now. The headband on her head kept her relatively weak, but she was still capable of hurting the old woman even with its restrictions. 

A minute later she was clean, though her dignity was stained. 

Nai crawled. 

The floor was a very interesting place. The bugs, the dirt, the bark, and the rocks, were all very interesting. 

She wasn’t supposed to eat them, that’s what Medin said. 

She tried to tell the woman that she would be fine if she ate them. Nai could eat a sword and not feel a thing, but Medin wouldn’t have it. 

Anytime she ate anything strange, Medin would scold her and take her inside for the rest of the day. 

Nai could have opposed it. She could have easily freed herself or even run away, but she didn’t. 

She liked the old woman, loved even though Nai couldn’t say she knew the difference between the two. She cared and she didn’t want to see the old woman sad. 

Most days she played with Tob. He was an old herding dog belonging to one of Chin’s children. He lived here because he was too old to run in the fields and he was allowed inside because he was well trained. 

Medin didn’t want Nai sleeping with the old hound, but Nai rebelled. She liked Tob, and Tob liked her. 

The old dog talked a lot about all the things it had seen. 

That was to be understood, Nai was the first person who was willing to listen so of course it wouldn’t stop talking to her. 

He talked about sheep and herding, occasionally he’d talk about smells and mangy mutts who refused to groom themselves, but mostly he just talked.

Today was one of those days. 

Tob lay down and Nai worked herself to get on top of the old hound. Medin was inside busy with something, probably cooking and Nai was allowed to play by herself unsupervised. 

Even if Medin didn’t like it. 

Nai gripped the back of the old hound as he stood up. Her head rested on his shoulder and her feet and toes intertwined with his long hair. She was confident, even a whirlwind wouldn’t knock her off him now. 

Tob started forward, slowly at first but faster with each step. The dog was old and slow and shouldn’t have been as fast as it was, but Nai was helping with that. 

She didn’t quite understand how. It was instinct to her, like breathing. But she helped the dog and as her qi mixed with the old mutt’s it seemed to heal. 

The dog galloped, parading throughout the outskirts of town and running for a few good miles until it stopped next to a tree on a hilltop. 

She hopped off of the dog and crawled beneath the shade of an old tree. From here, Nai could make out an outline of the village along with the merchant’s outpost. 

They were like ants, Nai thought. Insects. 

And from here, she must have been the same to them, a dot beneath a tree. 

Tob scratched behind his ears, brushing off some hair and an old scab.

He looked better too. His old fur seemed to shine and his joints stood straighter than before.

He started barking, another ramble about acorns and squirrels. Tob did that, talking.

He had gotten smarter since Nai had first met him, and now, though he couldn’t quite speak, his woofs and barks sounded like speech. 

Nai didn’t like that idea. How could a dog learn to speak before she did?

She understood language in a way. Well, she understood auras and those were so much easier to understand. Why would she pay attention to weird sounds when she could just stare at the shadow of a person’s soul and know what they were thinking?

That was how the powerful spoke, she was sure of it.

They spoke with projections of will rather than projections of sound.

But… she didn’t want to speak to the powerful. She wanted to talk to Medin and Chin, and maybe that big fella who always lugged around poop with Xi Lu. 

It wasn’t that the mortals were more entertaining, but that they were always there. 

Nai had seen her older brother. The monkey king had visited her once when Bill was away, and Nai had seen ants, mindless insects beneath the earth. Nai had seen the weak deer that seemed to tower over her at once and the small insect-sized beasts that could devour her whole. 

All of these beings had done something to her, or rather seeing them had. She understood something, innately. She knew.

But She didn't know what she knew. She didn't have a name for it yet.

Nai looked back against the tree and eyes against the sky. It was a small thing to Nai. 

Her eyes could pierce through the daylight and see the galaxies beyond. She couldn’t make out the details of the moons and such, but the light couldn’t hide the stars from her. 

But that wasn’t what the mortals saw. The mortals just saw a big blue thing with clouds and specks floating above them. Nai could see that too, if she wanted. 

And sometimes she did, now was one of those times. 

Clouds, Nai found, were also interesting things. There were a lot of them lately, but the sky was clearer today, a brief reprieve from the rainy season. 

There will be more clouds tomorrow. Nai could sense that. 

But those would be boring ones, giant uniform masses of vapor. Scattered clouds were the way to go. 

Tob barked something about small rats in the meadows. 

Nai frowned, a habit she had picked up from a very particular farmer. 

Tob was saying the rats and wildlife were growing more disturbed over the days. He said that a rat had tried to fight him the other day and that they had even started using tactics of sorts. 

Tactics? Nai thought. What did the dog know of tactics?

She listened to the dog bark, grabbing meaning from both his aura and body language. She listened to him speak more and more and realized Tob was speaking. 

Not just talking or barking or expressing emotion, but communicating with intent and reason. He wasn’t using language or anything but he was talking. 

Her little brown eyes grew wide in realization. She had been playing with him for a couple of weeks now, riding him and aiding him every time he helped her. 

It was instinct to her, her mother was Beast and her father was The Tamer, how could it have been anything but?

She was raising the animal and caring for it. Controlling him and nurturing him, and now the dog had gained a spark of sentience. 

No, it was already sentient. 

Nai’s fingers stroked her chubby little chin. 

A conundrum, a great debacle. 

She had in her foolish ignorance started raising a spirit beast. 

She looked at the talkative dog up and down in assessment.

And not a very good one either. She had taken an old herding dog at the door of death and extended its life by what? At least a decade. His mind grew larger and that in turn churned his soul. 

What would Bill say about this? Probably nothing. He was a lazy old man after all. 

Beasts, she thought. And once again she let her instincts answer her. 

Beasts were inherently different from humans, as all the primordial archetypes were. While humans developed into intelligence and understanding, beasts grew into it. In fact, intelligence itself was a secondary trait, something they gained to aid them, not define them. 

All there was when they were created was their nature and that was all that grew. Intellect, wisdom, comprehension, all those things were aids, pathways to power for most beings, not an intrinsically defining thing. 

Now each beast’s nature was different of course. Dragons, for example, had a drive to be superior. They strived to know all things and horde because that was their nature, and at high enough ranks, any creature could free themselves of their archetypical limits. 

And there were many mixtures of beasts, varying from simple animals to God-Imperium creatures who created their own archetype that other creatures could be modeled after. 

But a dog was no such being. Nai didn’t know if her father was responsible for taming the first wolf or not. 

Probably not. There were definitely others before him but none got as powerful or spread their powers as wide, so their influence was limited. 

Regardless, a dog was a dog, not a dragon. And the nature of dogs was simple, companionship. 

Dogs worked with humans, aiding, helping, and protecting. 

If Tob had been a wolf she would have set him free. After all, what was one intelligent wolf? But Tob was a dog, and dogs wanted nothing more than to serve. 

Tob kept barking about annoying rodents as Nai sank back into the moment.

Well, then. That was it. 

Nai nodded firmly to no one in particular. 

She has a dog now. A dog she would feed and raise because she had made him hers. Her responsibility, her eternal burden. 

He would not die. He would follow her, from mortal beast to immortal hound. She would make sure of it. 

But she really had to be careful now. She couldn’t allow this to happen again. One animal companion was enough of a burden for a child like her. 

Nai turned, nodded to her subordinate, and listened. 

Chapter 85 The Misadventures of Nai Part 2

Smart rats. 

A simple concept, but possibly a terrifying one to most mortals. Rats, Nai knew, were already fairly intelligent, at least compared to most other mortal beasts. 

But these were different. Nai was perked on Tob’s back, and she was watching. 

Mice, rats, skunks, and raccoons gathered within the forest. They believed themselves to be hidden, but to Nai, they were anything but. 

She could easily see through the leaves and into the depths of the strange forest. It was Bill’s forest, something made vast and small at the same time. The forest to a mortal was a forest. Leaves were leaves and trees were trees. They could go in and harvest some wood, forage, even hunt and come out completely unbothered. 

But to cultivators, it was different. It was vast and contained, a realm all its own in a way, and Nai knew that was where the beasts lived.

Nai was a bit scared of that place. She could walk through it like a mortal of course, but when she had shrunk down and seen the true nature of the place, well, it had terrified her. Even animals seemed larger than gods from that perspective. 

But now she wasn’t looking for the small beasts or trying to enter the magical forest full of small beasts of wonder. Now, she was trying to spy on some rodents. 

Some strangely intelligent rodents. 

Nai watched as the animals started to collide with one another. One of them, the raccoon, was laying plans, pointing out lines of attacks and pointing vaguely toward the village. 

The bastard was waving excitedly and carried a plotters grin. Nai frowned. 

Intellect like Tob, except this was not her fault but rather that of the forests. The array had grown and even if the strange thing liked to zip around every now and then, its main body was still tied to the valley and it produced qi worthy of its rank, qi worthy of a demigod.

But it had been focusing on one spot for almost a week now, staring down at one singular child. She had asked Bill about it but apparently the array was… meditating, at least that was how Bill put it.

He had seemed a little uneasy about the whole thing but, he said it would be fine.

Nai watched the gathering with more attention. This was not her fault, but in the distance, she saw a great war brewing. A war between the critters of the forest and the fair people of the village. 

People have started to call it the Desert Village nowadays, or even the Oasis Village. Apparently, no one named it because it was such an isolated area. You could always say the village with the Great Desert Strip or the Village of the Desert Strip. 

But more visitors had come and eventually, a name had risen out of necessity. 

Oasis Village. Nai liked the way that sounded. 

Her home. Her people. The critters would attack soon. 

They were going after a grain shed that was holding a few bags of the village's grain supply.  

Nai breathed. The baby crawled to a stray stick and clutched it tightly in her hands. 

She smacked the stick against her open palm in contemplation, then immediately fell over. 

Walking was still not something she had figured out. 

She pushed herself up via the stick and crawled her way onto the overly energetic dog. 

Her companion. Her steed. 

“Aguah!” The baby yelled, pointing towards the shed. 

And the dog ran at her command, both ready for war. 

 ********

The raccoon had a plan. It had always had plans. Ideas came naturally to his mind, but they had grown over the last two months. Complexity had risen from his fevered little mind and now he knew. He thought. 

He wasn’t a genius by human standards. In truth, he would be a moron compared to any human child, but he was a genius among his kind. And if he was a moron, it was only due to his inability to comprehend things as they are, his inexperience. 

But he was a budding fellow, a growing flower. And he had yet to bloom. 

Under the guise of night, a motley mix of rodents, birds, and reptiles moved silently. Bushes shook and the forest ground suddenly found itself to be clear of mushrooms and berries. 

Smaller than them, the divine beasts walked unmoved by the strangeness. After all, these were normal beasts, creatures of the forest. They weren’t worth acknowledging and the regular animals couldn’t even see the small gods that walked beneath them. 

But one phoenix saw them, and she had grown curious. The small phoenix of the House of Wisdom. That was what the divine beasts called her. 

She was one of the few chosen to have power over the last ruling body of the beasts, and her story was a curious one. But today, she would remain a witness watching from a distance. 

The animals gathered together on the small shed, crows perched on the roofs as lookouts. Squirrels waiting with empty cheeks ready to be stuffed. Skunks hung around as last-minute sentinels. Mole rats and groundhogs waited for a small distance away, having created tunnels for transport, which large badgers guarded either side.

And a line of rats and squirrels stood ready to raid. They would function as the main transport along with the tunnels close by for quick cover. 

The skunk's spray would function as the alarm sound but the raccoon doubted they would need to do that. He’d been planning this heist for days, gathering different species and plotting different routes of attack. 

The crows had helped admittedly. They had helped a lot, and the raccoon wasn’t even sure if they were changed like the other beasts or if they were always this smart. A bit of both he thought. One of them could even speak, with words like humans. 

They were strange creatures. 

The raccoon shook his head, throwing off those thoughts and coming back to the moment. Then they moved. 

Out of all of them, only he had the ability to lead. For some reason, only he had thoughts that could spread. 

His tail swished and his peers listened. Instantly they knew. 

A small ladder of raccoons waited for him, and he quickly climbed onto his people’s backs, climbing them like stairs. His small hands finally reached the locks and with a twist, the door was opened and--

His head went up. 

What! No! The skunks had sprayed already? How? How could they fail so quickly?

A crow squawked and just as they were about to scatter, he got the message. Dogs, four of them. The skunk had used a preemptive spray and both had been run off before they could see the scene. 

The skunk was fine but depleted and his kin would have to stretch their perimeters to cover for him. 

The raccoon swished his tail and they all calmed down. It drained the raccoon but the reassurance made its way around to everyone eventually. 

He dropped. But he had planned for this, at least that was what he told himself. In truth he had given himself the easiest job of opening the door, because he was lazy. But in retrospect, keeping himself from working and just supervising the plan was probably the best approach. 

The door creaked slowly and all the animals listened in both hope and horror. 

But eventually the door opened, and no one came. 

The raccoon smiled as he jammed the doorstop into the door. Finally, Victory. After days of plotting and conniving. He was just seconds away from-

Thunk. 

The raccoon’s head swiveled in fright. He looked, he stared into the empty room and then… he sniffed. 

A dog. A dog was here. 

He called forward the badgers and the skunks. And they shuffled forward quickly behind him. They all bore their fangs as they looked. The smell of wheat had dulled it but now everyone could smell the dog in the room. 

Behind a crate, a beast walked out. He was old, but his eyes sparkled with light. The moonlight danced upon his dusty brown fur. It gleamed. 

On his back was a sack, no- a human. No- something that looked like a human. 

Thunk. 

She smacked the side of the crate with a stick, and fear devoured the rodents still. 

From the crows, to the skunks, to the badgers and rats a distance away. They all felt it. Something superior was among them and they could not move. 

Nai looked at them with a face full of power, and they could only stare back. None of them moved simply for one reason. 

She didn’t want them to move. 

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Chapter 86 The Misadventures of Nai Part 3

Instinct was a superior thing. It guided everything before knowledge and in a way, it was the truest knowledge of all, written into your very being. Before a baby knew anything, it knew how to breathe. It knew how to cry. 

Instinct, the type you were born with, not the one you developed, was one of the hardest things to overcome. Put a newborn next to a teet and it would suckle instantly, rooting. All without ever knowing why or how. 

It was a fact of life, and one few had to address. 

But the raccoon had to address it now, as did every animal within a mile’s radius. Nai was superior, something in them told them that and they could not dare to deny it. Instincts normally help you survive. The wolf paddling against the depths of a lake, the deer fleeing from any slight noise, 

Fear held them. Fear and something more. 

Respect.

It was a strange idea to animals. 

Respect. 

They liked things and they could even love each other, but respect?

No, that was a human thing. 

Tob walked with Nai on his back, standing like a giant relative to the rodents beneath. 

The raccoon watched as the large figure with a stick approached him, and he was quivering. Something told him to bow. The same part of him that told him to eat, to sleep, to hunger, to run, and to hunt, told him to bow.

How could he possibly deny it?

The animals all lowered themselves, heads looking straight at the ground and one by one, began to expose their belly. 

Submission. 

Even the crows had come down and lowered their heads to the ground. It wasn’t just pure qi or strength, no if that was all they would run.

Nai hadn’t released her fifth rank aura upon the beasts. As far as they knew she was just a first rank.

It was her nature that had brought them down. Her mother howled from beyond and her father… Well, that part had been corrupted by Wukong and the damn sword. 

She still had his nature, but it had mingled with Wukong’s qi. The Monkey King had told her that it was so her father wouldn’t find her. When she asked about her mother, Wukong only laughed. 

“That old monster wouldn’t pay attention to you even if you became my equal,” Wukong had stated. 

And he was right. But still, the shadow of her was on Nai, and had any cultivator been close enough, they would have sensed it too, though she doubted any would recognize her aura. 

And she was right, none had. 

Except for a bird in the distance. A small phoenix fell out of the sky and chirped widely to no one in particular. The beasts had known the child was special, part animal in some way, but not this. 

An annoyed Bill grabbed the bird before she could go off and tell her kin and watched the shed in silence.

He gave the phoenix a very stern set of instructions, and the poor bird nodded before heading off to the distance. 

Nai looked at the animals slightly disappointed. She had come here to defend the shed and the food of the people… but she had also come here to fight. 

She was looking for an adventure, a challenge, yet all the opponents had given up immediately.

Her club itched for blood and justice and her mind demanded vengeance and--

Nai sighed. She had thirsted for rage but found herself spitting out the sour taste of politics instead. 

“Augh!” She spoke, putting her meaning into the word. 

Humans wouldn’t make any sense of that, but to the beasts that was as good as words.  

Why are you trying to steal the village’s food? 

Nai immediately regretted the question. They were animals, why else would they be trying to steal the village’s food. 

The raccoon looked in her direction with confusion. 

We were hungry, it replied. 

But why here? Isn’t there food in the forest?

Yes,  it replied once more. 

Then why not eat that?

This is easier.

He looked at her with confusion and she looked at him with annoyance. 

That’s not right! Nai replied. 

It’s not?

No. The food belongs to the people. They worked hard to make it. You shouldn’t steal things!

The raccoon frowned. What a stupid thing to say. Food was food. It fed. The more you ate the better, and if these humans couldn’t hide their food well enough, then that was they’re fault. 

Nai smacked him with the stick. 

No, she reiterated. 

The raccoon sat there quietly clutching his head. 

It’s. Not. Yours. Nai repeated. 

Then she sighed. Of course an animal wouldn’t understand the concept of private property, much less respect it. 

But they had to learn somehow. Nai knew Chin, and there was no way he’d let something like this happen again. 

The beasts were smart, but they weren’t smart enough. They might get away with this a few more times, but eventually, Chin would send hunters. 

Nai could see one of the hunters reporting back their intellect and Chin questioning Bill on the matter. Even if the animals managed to outwit the hunters, they’d be dust in front of the cultivators.

Death. That was what awaited them unless Nai did something. 

Nai thought for a second, stroking her non-existent beard in concentration. 

In a way, these animals were the first. Eventually more and more would grow intelligent, and soon, the forest would grow unsafe. 

What could she do? How could she fix this?

Nai thought and thought but the problem seemed too large for her young mind. There were too many variables. Too many possibilities. 

Nai nodded and Tob marched.

“Arg!” She yelled. 

And the animals followed her from behind. 

On the hill, Bill and a very skittish phoenix were watching curiously. 

“Uh oh,” Bill muttered, watching the small horde of animals walk silently through the streets. 

Some of the maidens looked curiously but once they found no threat, they ignored it. 

Rin Wi almost came with her cleavers but Bill stopped her just in time. 

But the night had just started for an elderly old couple. 

Chin woke up that night to find a horde of animals at his front door with a very stern looking baby staring up at him. 

He frowned and turned to Bill who was standing next to her. 

“She wants to negotiate about adding new residents of the village.”

Chin looked at the baby, then back at Bill. That day, he started taking cultivation more seriously, if only so he could one day truly beat up the grinning old man at his door. 

********

Medin walked over with tea and honey, giving a bit of both to the men and giving a bit of milk and honey to Nai. 

All three sat there in silence. 

“Well?” I asked. 

“Well what?” Chin replied. 

“What do you think about Nai’s plan?”

“Ha,” Chin grumbled.

“It sounds like a good deal to me,” I replied. 

Chin just frowned harder. I didn’t realize that was possible. 

Then he sighed, taking a sip of his tea. 

“I have nothing against the idea, but there are a few things,” he mumbled. “First, what do the animals have to offer. I wouldn’t mind adding them to the village as…aids of some sort but I have no idea as to what they would even do. And then there’s the problem of a growing population. Animals, rodents, reproduce much faster than humans. Two rats in year will have fifty. What then? Do I feed ten thousand useless mouths that just keep growing year by year till the village is out of food and land?”

Chin looked at me with those questions and I shrugged, turning towards Nai instead. 

The little child looked teary eyed, but she still stared firmly at the old man. 

“Aue! Argh, ab, dou!” She replied, smacking her hands against the table in reply.

“She says that qi beasts reproduce much more slowly than their lame counter parts and that if these beasts were allowed to become spirit beasts, that their reproduction would compare to that of humans.”

Medin for her part was smiling silently. The horde of animals had given her quite a fright, but after hearing out Nai’s situation and proposal, her heart had grown soft. 

She was now petting a badger while offering it some sliced fruit. Several crows had also snuck their way into the building and Medin had given them some old bread and seeds. 

The main leader, the raccoon, sat nervously besides Nai. Medin had apparently given him some tea and cookies and while he occasionally munched on them, his main focus was the conversation between the baby and the old man. 

“What about new qi beasts?” Chin asked. “How many more will grow out from that forest? It already has those other things, how much more will come from it?”

Now that was a good concern. In truth, the small amount of aware qi beasts hadn’t been born from the forest’s qi. I had fixed that little leak a while back. The trees would grow and so would some of the plants, but I made it so that most of that growth only happens on the other side of the forest, the divine beast’s side. 

These little fellas had came from the new influx of qi within the Great Desert Strip. It was natural. Most of the qi flooded into the desert ground, nourishing the dead land beneath, but of the qi that made it into the valley, some would flood into the village and most into the forests. But the forest was already lush with qi, so it had gone to the small animals instead. 

But before I could say anything on the matter, Nai already had a response. 

“She says they’ll be brought into the fold. That the animals will scour the forest for signs of new intelligence and that they’ll bring every new qi beasts to them.”

“What if they don’t want to join?” Chin asked. 

“Emph,” Nai breathed. 

“Death. Death or exile,” I translated. 

Chin looked a little shocked. 

“Arg abd ab fo,” Nai blabbered. 

“She says as long as they don’t hurt the village or the qi beasts, they would be allowed to live, but if they should choose to rebel against her rule, then they would die.”

Chin looked at Nai with wide eyes. 

“She said that?” He asked. 

“Yup.”

“Well… I suppose if it guarantees a complete lack of rodents and rat infestations then its already a good enough bargain. I’ll see what we can do in terms of them earning their keep. Foraging maybe? And they can live off raw vegetables and such. Maybe the dog trainer would know what to do with them? Or maybe…”

Chin trailed off in a head full of ideas and I sat there filled with slight surprise and amusement. 

I hadn’t expected this to go well. In fact, I had suspected that I would need to warn off the animals and shove them back into the forest, using the array to keep them from coming back out.

That or relocation. 

I hadn’t expected Chin to say yes or for Nai to bargain. 

The most peaceful resolution had come to be, and I wondered for an instance if I had anything to do with it. 

But no, I hadn’t done a thing except translate. This was all Nai’s doing.

I looked closely at the little girl’s soul. Something had compelled her to lead these animals, to dominate them. That wasn’t surprising given her heritage. But something else had also compelled her to care for them, to move them towards peace.

Her choice. 

Her reasoning.

Her dao.