Abi d'Ilga assembled her troops in the Seance Room of her family's villa. It was time for an Astral adventure. Hermes was a ghost, and Nhao was a mythical kirin puppy who could move between planes of reality at will, so it was only Abi, Richan, and Edrus who needed a spell to get out of their own bodies. It was an extremely rare spell. Maybe only one living person knew it.
Fortunately, Abi was that person.
Just like that, she, Richan, and Edrus slipped out of their heavy material forms and into a realm of flickering thoughts and crystalized dreams. In that place, the world looked like something a billion people might imagine all at once. It was fantastic, celestial, beautiful, and maybe a bit frightening.
In this realm, the Imperial Mound went up forever, down forever, and to the sides forever.
Back in the mundane world, the Mound was a lump of granite miles in diameter. It rested in the center of an extinct caldera cut in half by the Feng River. Over the course of twenty thousand years, giant sorcerers, elven sorcerers, and Abi's half-elven ancestors used magic to shape the Mound into a breathtaking wedding cake of pillars, plazas, palaces, balconies, balustrades, stained-glass windows, gothic arches, columns (which were really just thick pillars), and commemorative statues.
In the Astral Realm, all that turned into an infinite fantasy.
Fortunately, infinity wasn't infinity to someone who was good at moving through crystalized thoughts and fluid dreams. Abi went up until she was above infinity and beneath a dome of something else. Her friends tumbled along behind her. Except for Nhao. The kirin puppy circled around them.
Being above infinity and under a dome of something else was like being a fish in a bowl. A lot of shapes flopped around on the other side of infinity. Sometimes, big eyes pressed up against what wasn't really glass and distorted.
Those poor eyes couldn't blink.
Hermes waved at them cheerfully.
"Hello Always-Seeing Eyes!" he said.
Abi also waved, but hadn't really gone up there for the Always-Seeing Eyes. It was just a convenient reference point. She turned the trajectory of her group's adventure back down. In a blink, the fishbowl and its always-seeing eyes were replaced by a version of Tianming Town that expanded to infinity in all directions. Except it wasn't really infinite. It wasn't really Tianming Town either. It was the flickering thought of Tianming Town as imagined by a billion people all at once.
Giants and elves never needed an imperial city other than the Mound itself. Humans liked to reproduce, however, and consequently there were an awful lot of them. The Mound wasn't a good place to house an awful lot of people, so Tianming Town evolved to fill that need.
The Feng River came down from the Jormusilgar Mountains far to the west. Over a really long time, it had eroded a canyon, thereby splitting the vast Central Plateau into two (some counted three) Central Plateaus. In a time of great antiquity, the Feng breached the caldera surrounding the Mound, slammed into what would become the Ancient Bailey, and turned south to flow around the Mound before exiting the caldera and continuing east.
For whatever geomantic reason, the caldera's ridges north of the Feng were more amenable to erosion than those to the south. The north had therefore become a wetland (which belonged to the Emperor); and the south became a series of rocky ridges covered by Tianming Town.
Even in the mundane world, the city was picturesque and charming. A shocking number of bougainvillea bushes kept it colorful. Cedar trees kept it fragrant. Somewhere near the river was a haunted mansion flophouse run by an Ogre Queen. Fortunately, Nhao could follow the pungent trail of Maurice Lupin even on the astral plane.
When Abi and her party of adventurers reached their objective, they simultaneously saw the mansion at its peak, its worst, and in a time when there was only a rocky river bank and no mansion at all. Richan and Hermes thought the spooky mansion looked amazing. If pressed, Abi would also admit it looked pretty cool. Edrus called it a whimsical amalgamation of gingerbread house decorations and nonsensical turrets.
"Finding anything in there will be a pain," he concluded.
Abi stretched her chubby arms as wide as they could reach and pretended to grab onto something solid. When she pulled her hands together, all the mansion's reflections collapsed into one. It remained a whimsical amalgamation of gingerbread house decorations and turrets, but Edrus conceded that their odds of finding anything interesting had improved.
"What are we looking for?" asked Richan.
"We'll know when we find it," said Abi.
"That's my favorite thing to look for!" said Richan.
Hermes agreed.
They entered the mansion. It had become an overcrowded boys dormitory full of starving, half-naked students aspiring to powerful clerkships in the bureaucracy.
"Scandalous!" said Abi. "I feel a miasma of anxious defeatism and doubt over there…."
"Be careful!" cautioned a small voice.
A little girl stepped out from behind a big post covered in bad calligraphy samples. She wore pretty, but also pretty archaic, clothes — and looked about the same age as Richan. She was a ghost, but had not elected to manifest any scary abnormalities. About kitten-size, Nhao flew over and orbited the girl's head.
"Hello!" she said. "There are ghost wires. They'll shock you if you touch them."
"Ghost wires?" asked Abi.
The little girl nodded earnestly.
"The Ogre Queen made them," she said.
"Is this a ghost wire?" asked Hermes.
The yellow-haired imp scampered to a line of force stretched between old timbers. The line was nearly impossible to see until Hermes pointed it out. Once seen, it was easy to use its example to spot more glistening dangers. Hermes stretched out his pointer finger and electrocuted himself.
"Oh no!" cried the little girl.
"Quit playing around, Hermes," said Iba Algi. "You're frightening her."
Hermes stopped being electrocuted and bounced to the little girl's side. He insisted that he hadn't meant to be frightening — he had meant to be funny. Abi introduced herself and her companions. The little girl identified herself as Nin Yue. Nin was surprised the wires didn't hurt Hermes. They hurt her whenever she touched them.
"But for most ghosts," she said ominously, "it's much worse than a little shock."
"How much worse?" asked Edrus.
"They freeze in place," said Nin, "and a shinigami comes to collect them."
"That's amazing!" said Richan.
"I think it's pretty scary!" said Nin.
Richan hugged her — and promised to protect her from any shinigami who might show up.
"There weren't always ghost wires here," said Nin. "But some other ghosts picked on these people, and the lady giant cast a spell to create the wires. Now it's hard for me to look for Countess Niwa."
"That's terrible!" said Hermes. "Bad wires! Nhao?"
"Yes, boss?" asked Nhao.
"Make the wires go away."
Nhao bit down on a wire. Nin worried for his safety. Lightning flickered along the wire away from Nhao's bite. The lightning continued flickering onto more and more wires — and finally the wires burnt to ash.
"Did you make them all go away just like that?" asked Nin.
Nhao nodded.
"Do you want us to help you find Countess Niwa?" asked Abi.
Nin's already large eyes got huge and sparkled.
"Would you?" she asked, skipping forward. "Would you really?"
"Of course we will!" insisted Abi. "Kids have to stick together in this terrible world."
"Hooray!" cheered Richan. "We're looking for Countess Niwa!"