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~ LIN LING, KUN JUNI AND HAN SHU – ??? ~

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Lin Ling pulled herself up and spent a few moments checking she was still whole, because she was pretty sure that the entire mountain they had been hiding under had just fallen down on them. Han Shu was still unconscious, as was Kun Juni. Squatting beside Juni, she gave her friend a careful poke and revelled in the fact that there were no voices other than her own in her head.

The anomaly experience as a whole was a bit of a blur to her. She still wasn’t completely sure how much of it had been 'real' either. That said, if it was not real, that raised even more questions.

-Yep, she thought to herself.

-It has been fate-thrashed weird… on many levels.

Setting aside the fact that Juni had somehow brought stuff out of it, just the fact that she had apparently been healed in there, as had Juni to an extent, was just… really fate-thrashed weird. Parts of the whole experience hurt her head a bit, especially when she looked back through her blurred memories of the battle, comparing what little she remembered of it to the battle damage she had seen inflicted.

Had they just been fellow travellers?

Had their presence… changed stuff?

Nobody had ever interacted with an anomaly on that level that she knew of, and she had read almost all of the stories about them that were available in the Bureau for perusal that her rank would allow.

And there were still no voices. Even after the mountain maybe falling on them twice, and then un-falling almost as oddly.

-I didn’t realise how messed up my psyche was until that Magister… Magus put it back together again…

“…”

She had to fight the instinctual expectation that a snarky or insidious utterance would appear, however… nothing spoke back to her. She waited, and waited… but there was just blessed silence.

Sitting back, she sighed in momentary contentment at the ‘peace’ in her own head.

That was, unfortunately, about as far as the ‘happy’ bits went though. The Magus… or maybe Magister? O’Brian something and a younger mage… a Psionomancer? Psychomancer? Something like that had explained to her roughly what her condition was before she was healed.

Her soul had been read and her memories and parts of her that made her… ‘her’, on a truly fundamental level, had been liberally rearranged by someone.

The Psionomancer, someone who specialised in soul magic, which O’Brian had assured her was not at all a heretical thing, had helped O’Brian put her memories back together and then used some special art to promote her soul to self-heal.

It was not a particularly pleasant memory, though few of the ones she had from below were. The horrible feeling of the constituent parts of ‘her’ returning to ‘her’ would stay with her for a very long time, she suspected.

They had, however, told her that it was to her advantage apparently that she was such a low realm with such a strong physical body. They had warned her to avoid significant soul shock for at least a week if at all possible, and to avoid overburdening herself, apparently, because her psyche was malleable due to her young age. She had, and still did find that a bit offensive, honestly, but probably they had a point. She knew the stories and warnings about advancing too fast to Nascent Soul, not that that would ever be a problem for her now, between her spirit root being so ill suited to her law and the lingering trauma of her ordeal below.

In any case, there was another problem that made her want to scream. It was why she really wanted Juni awake, to make it also someone else’s problem.

In short, they were no longer where they had been.

Well, they were in a very immediate sense, she had to acknowledge, looking around; however, that location changed very abruptly about twenty metres from their location in a broad circle. Behind them was still a bit of the sloping cavern wall, around them were scattered rocks and the cave floor, a small pool and two very unfortunate small shrubs and a few bits of vine and creeper. Beyond that, the chasm was now a ruined hall slowly being claimed by vegetation from the rent hole above. A smashed gouge that her – now unfortunately good – memory told her was identical in size and shape to the one that had been the open part of the chasm above them. One that looked very much like someone had slammed a gigantic sword into the mountain to open a hole into this place.

The teleport circle was also still there, with its pillars and gazebo structure. What was somewhat concerning, though, was that something had cleanly cleft it apart, scattering large chunks of column and arborundum-inlaid gazebo all over the hall.

“Oi! Juni! Stop sleeping!” she hissed and gave the older woman another, harder prod in the side.

“W-what?” Juni sat up with a groan, holding her head.

“…”

Juni stared around and then dully remarked. “Ah, we survived. Again.”

“…”

“What’s….wrong?” Juni asked, finally noticing her dubious expression.

Without comment, she moved to the side so Juni could see the rest of the chasm turned hall more clearly.

“Well, Fates curse our nine generations…” Juni groaned.

“I rather fear they already have at this point,” she sighed, casting a dark look at the strange ruins around them.

Turning to Han Shu, she gave him a sharp poke in the side with her foot. When he didn’t really respond, she gave him a sharper one. She was still annoyed with him, although now that she had her memories back and her emotions under control it was mostly just annoyance. He hadn’t meant badly by his words, but fates curse him, levity had not been the answer there.

He groaned as she gave him a proper push with her foot. Once he regained some semblance of coherence, he immediately snapped away and stared around wildly.

“What the—! Where are we?” he asked, then groaned and held his own head.

“You ask me, but who do I ask,” she grumbled.

-Well, I suppose I could ask your sword. It definitely spoke on the teleport platform, she added to herself.

...

In spite of her fears, the cavernous hall turned out to be far easier to get out of in the end than their circumstances had initially suggested. Her initial worry, that they would have to scale the sides or try to make their way out of the damaged portion of the ceiling, proved unfounded once they explored their immediate surroundings. While the large hall only had a few exits near their arrival point, mainly sealed doorways that led into the mountain behind them and none of them had the slightest inclination to attempt to go back inside, there was a clearly visible, open exit about 300 metres away beyond the ruined teleport platform.

Making their way down the central path towards that door, between carved-out pools the size of small lakes, dotted with ruined or overgrown statues, she had to acknowledge that the whole place would have been spectacular before it fell into ruin. Even overgrown as it was, the whole place had a majestic grandeur to it that you couldn’t help but acknowledge.

The walls on both sides rose in terraced gardens long overgrown into tangled briar patches and mysterious herbs and vines. All of them were a bizarre hodgepodge of species. Some she could even partially recognise, mixed together with other more mysterious plants in a decidedly artificial way that spoke to deliberate cultivation at some point.

-Not surprising given this whole place was artificial, she conceded.

The carved pools still held varieties of spirit lotus and aquatic plants. The water itself was spiritually charged with qi to the point where it glowed faintly under her normal vision. Under brief examination with her enhanced vision they rippled mysteriously, flowers danced with little qi emissions and the whole place was almost colourful.

With a soft sigh, she cut it off again and followed after the other two.

Even that momentary use had given her a sense of nauseous pressure in her temples and the beginnings of a headache that was probably related to the ‘complications’ that the Magus, O’Brian and the Psionomancer had warned her of regarding the temporary malleability of her recovered mental integrity.

Much like her, the others were also lost in their own thoughts it seemed, so they made their way onwards in edgy silence through the long hall, largely ignoring various access points on either side leading up and down. Many were sealed and most that weren’t showed evidence of being smashed open with brute force from either the inside or the outside. She looked in a few, but none of them had any appetite for exploring anymore.

Eventually, they passed through three large arched openings. Sixteen figures in total were carved into the pillars that supported the openings, facing in and out, wearing now somewhat familiar flowing robes and armour and holding weapons like those they had seen used below. Two even wielded hybrid swordstaves like the one Juni now had.

“Someone really didn’t like whoever these represent…” Juni mused, stopping to stare up at one of the swordstaff-wielding ones, a man whose face had been smashed clean off.

Looking around… and then checking back inside, she could see that all eight on the outside had been smashed or defaced. Faces were scoured out, details obscured. Someone had made a spirited attempt at melting two of them. Looking at the ground, she could see traces of glassy deformation that rippled as if it had punched through multiple intangible layers at a previous time. Out of curiosity, she checked the floor beyond them and found that there were indeed motifs in the floor that corresponded to those points. A giant half-circle radiating out from the gateway itself and connecting across the hall in sweeping arcs.

-Permanent barriers confirmed then, she mused inwardly.

Juni had speculated a bit about the motifs to her before now, but this was pretty damning now that she looked at them. Looking at this and quickly finding similar styles in her mind, she shivered. That made shaft two and those lower levels a veritable fortress – If every motif was some kind of formation line...

“Thank the fates they were defunct or inactive,” she muttered out loud, not really intending to.

“What is it, Lin?” Han Shu asked.

She eyed him dubiously, but his politeness was clearly intended towards reconciliation over his stupidity, so she let it pass without comment.

“The lines in the floor are part of some defensive formation,” she explained, waving to them to come and look.

“Oh…” Han Shu nodded and tightened the grip on his sword.

“Don’t worry!” she called back cheerily. “If they were active, we wouldn’t have gotten ten paces. They cover the whole hall in big sweeping arcs.”

“What a cheery thought…” Han Shu muttered grimly, just tightening the grip on his weapon as he looked around.

Without comment, Juni picked up a rock and rolled it across the floor, over the wardings.

Nothing untoward happened.

“…”

They threw a few bits of plant as well, just in case, but they were, it appeared, genuinely defunct.

The hall beyond the arches was smaller and circular. More vandalised statues and wall carvings. The entire place had either been smashed or turned to glass. Steps on the far side led downwards again towards a barely visible opening through which proper daylight streamed, not the misty, diffuse sunlight from the crack in the roof, or some artificial projection. They didn’t quite run for it, but certainly approached it with the speed of people who wish to be done with enclosed spaces and oppressive darkness in a very definitive way.

Making her way down them, she stepped out through the doorway where they flattened out and into…

To her left and right, the clouds flowed like rivers just above them, perpetually rolling across the wings of the valley and obscuring the heights above them. The daylight was thus not really all that bright, but the familiar humid shade of sub-tropical cloud forest.

Ruined buildings of grey and blue stone, collapsed and tumbled down, fused in drunken fashion almost at random were strewn through the misty forest that cloaked the slopes all around the clearing they had emerged into. Taking in the scene before her she was sure some were genuinely upside down. Others were on their side, while several appeared to be jammed or slid through the mountain slope in a decidedly unnatural manner. The impression given was that they had been swept down and deposited here somehow, or dropped out of the sky into the valley below, landing at random as if they were rocks into wet mud.

She turned to look back at where they had come from and immediately felt as if she had pressure on the brain. The surface she had thought flat when walking across, was actually slanted at almost forty degrees to her right.

“Ummm… look behind us,” she said, trying not to sound as nervous as she was at heart.

Both Juni and Han Shu turned and immediately took a few reflexive steps backwards.

“Well, that’s not at all odd…” Han Shu agreed, looking at the tilted doorway rather uneasily. “It wasn’t like that when we walked across it...?”

Juni said nothing, just looked with palpable unease at the seamless join of the hall, which was slanting diagonally down into the mountain in a completely unnatural manner.

“…”

Seeing that neither of them looked all that inclined to check, she decided to just… go check for herself. Carefully, she walked back, watching her surroundings, until at a certain point the entire hall just… realigned itself. Suddenly she was standing correctly aligned with the hall. She backed away and it stayed that way until she turned away. When she turned back it was distorted again, as it had been. The other two were looking at her oddly.

“What did you see?” she looked back at the outside to try to shift the weird sense of vertigo she got looking at the hall they had just left. “Because it certainly felt weird.”

“Nothing…” Juni said weakly. “You just shifted and became part of the hall as it is down there…”

“An anomaly,” she sighed, stepping clear of it, before stared at the other places scattered below them in the forest. “Do you reckon those are all the same?”

…

It took, by her estimation, almost an hour of scrambling down through the forest to reach the nearest building that was not a pile of rubble. A squat grey tower about the size of the Hunter Pavilion back in West Flower Picking which lay at a thirty degree angle to the mountain slope and jutted out amidst a sea of vegetation. The base of the tower was smoothly fused through a blocky outcropping of the bedrock, so they had to scale the outside to the second story to find an opening big enough to enter. The interior was a jumbled mess as far as she could see. Warily, Juni crossed the threshold inside and then immediately scrambled back, looking pale.

“What’s wrong?” Han Shu frowned.

“Uhhh… just look inside and see,” Juni said without further explanation and sat on the exterior breathing hard.

Cautiously, she stuck her head through the window and looked around at what was, well, a scene of carnage. Flayed and dismembered bodies were arrayed in bizarre poses, some at the point of dissolving into red mist, leaving illusions of bones of various patterns and colours floating behind. Frozen, floating in the air, the tableau was both there and not. A ghostly reality within the circular tower floor. There was, however, something odd about it that nagged at her weirdly—

The cool chill of the ‘Unclouded Mind’ art that had been cast on her, abruptly shifted into focus and the orientation righted itself.

Now she was standing amidst two places at once, or so it seemed, seeing two different scenes overlaid. There was a ruined tower room, golden and silver bones littering the floor – a weapon slammed into a wall here, an armoured torso with a skeleton inside it fused into a wall there. Overlaid with that was the scene of carnage itself – bodies disintegrating amid the chaos of two groups of people desperately fighting each other. She recognised the sides and the styles as the ones that had been in the anomaly below.

She carefully backed out and looked at it again from the outside. “That’s really odd,” was all she could muster in the end.

“Isn’t it just?” Juni muttered…

Han Shu also stuck his head in and shuddered before retreating. She frowned, wondering how best to explain what she was seeing.

“It’s not what you think somehow… The scene of slaughter feels more like an echo, something preserved from the point when these towers and buildings arrived here perhaps? There are bones and weapons in the room as well, the interior looks just like you might expect, if oddly timeless in some respects. Only bone, metal and stone seem to have survived along with some other materials that presumably have protections against decay on them?”

Han Shu entered again for a few moments but came out hurriedly… “How do you arrive at that? It looks plenty real to me?”

She collected her thoughts and started to explain: “I think it has to do with one of the arts that that Magus ‘O’Brian’ cast on me. ‘Unclouded Mind’ I think he called it. Had to use something he called a ‘spell scroll’. It’s used to differentiate between what is ‘real’ and ‘unreal’. They used it to help sort my memories out, but he explained the effects could linger for quite a while.”

Looking back into the tower, she decided against touching anything. “Shall we try the next level up? The doorway was sealed on the inside. Clearly, the attackers were caught as they were trying to attack it when whatever caused this place to arrive here happened. The trip appears to have been… err…”

“Catastrophically terminal for all concerned?” Juni supplied with a grimace.

“That’s a very good way of describing it, yes...” Han Shu remarked with a wince as he took in the two floors above them.

She nodded as well, but before she could say anything further, Han Shu spoke up again.

“The bones in the dispersing corpses looked a lot like the ones I saw in the pool inside the ruin now that I think about it…” he mused, staring back into the interior. “Although those had a tangible sense of power that I don’t get from these somehow.”

“Ummm…” Juni frowned again, looking around as well. “Does it feel like the qi here is really odd as well?

“…”

“Have you tried using your physical cultivation mantra or your spiritual law?” Juni asked looking back and forth between the two of them.

It was with some surprise that she realised she hadn’t. On the off chance that they were in the Deep Green somehow, she had been suppressing her qi use entirely up to this point using her mantra. There was no reason to risk it being drained from her body passively by the land after all.

“It’s not going to drain away, is it?” she asked warily. “If we are in the Depths of the Green Pit—”

“Ah, no,” Juni replied, frowning. “We don’t appear to be in the Deep Green—”

“And you know that, how? This sure feels a lot like it,” she pointed out.

“…”

Juni stared at her for a long moment then sighed. “Just look and see, there are aspects of qi here that are just refusing to settle in my body… and those that are… well, they are… Look, just try using them and see, i can’t really explain it.”

Frowning, she stared at Juni for several seconds, but really the only recourse was to do as she suggested. Steeling herself, she did as suggested and carefully cycled her mantra, watching how it interacted with the environmental qi that was slowly being drawn into her.

“…”

-Right…

Juni had not been wrong, as it turned out. The qi was… indeed... odd. Unsettling, even. As if there were parts to it she couldn’t quite grasp. She observed it dubiously as it completed its cycle and what she had managed to get from her surroundings touched her bones—

The knotting sense of discomfort in her body made her gasp. The qi she had just taken in forcibly displaced part of what was already within her body, expelling it as if it were an impurity, which should have been—

The Yang poison which had been a concern in her blood abruptly pounced, as if it were a predator awaiting its prey. It flowed through the chink in her cultivation cycle, opened up by that rejection of her body's existing qi and flowed into the absence, merging with the newly purified qi in a way that completely eluded her. The shockwave of that merger rippled through her, abruptly dislodging other bits of qi from bones where they were not quite in equilibrium with the rest of her reserves.

Her inhalation turned into a reflexive spasm as suddenly all the yang poison from the blood that had been building up in her body flooded towards those newly emergent weaknesses.

Panic gripped her as she tried to wield her mantra to fight against the poison. She was able to resist it marginally, but the recoil made her stomach knot. Reflexively she bent over and coughed, exhaling a mist of qi infused blood.

-Nononono! a panicked part of her screamed.

-I am not having a cultivation deviation because of the yang poison, absolutely fate-thrashed not! Not after all that! she screamed at her own body in her head.

She couldn’t have spoken out loud even if she wanted to. The twisting pain continued for several agonising seconds before everything calmed down and the pain subsided.

Sweating, she examined the energy that had contaminated her physical foundation and gawped. The filament of qi running through her body, slowly lighting up in bone after bone as it was carried there by her bloodstream, was familiar. It had a hue of the yang heat that was distinctly at odds with the normal attributes of her qi, yet it was clearly a part of her.

In fact, it felt just like the blood she had been using and carrying around. Which, now, was a problem. In the cavern, the monster's remains had held traces of earth, yang metal and yang water along with yang fire. The blood she had now was mostly Yang aligned, with minor fire and earth attributes and also some lingering yang water. Life qi had also started to appear in it as she replenished it. Her family’s spiritual art, on the other hand, was an unattributed thunder art and she was learning a variant that had synergy yin water as the base, because she was a girl, and conventional wisdom was that girls learned yin water arts. In the cave, this had allowed her to resist the poison because of the broad spectrum, but now it was mostly Yang and fire, with hints of life and earth emerging ominously, it was almost the complete opposite of the qi within her foundation.

With dawning horror she worked through the predicament she calculated she was now in. The main issue was her family’s cultivation law. Her mantra, like Juni’s, came from Old Ling at the Hunter Pavilion and was without a dominant attribute. Subsequently, the qi in her bones was yin water orientated with yang thunder. The yang thunder provided the vector, but the yin water was a direct competitor to half the energies within the remnants of the faint Yang blood in her body.

Nervously, she cycled her spiritual law to see exactly how big a problem this might be in the short term. It was suppressed almost to the point of uselessness here, but it still moved within her body, drawing qi into her dantian. There was a sense of hot discomfort that shifted as the faint Yang Qi in her blood met the water qi in her dantian and the poison tried to disperse it.

-Shit! Shit! Monkeyshit! Nameless… cursed—! she ran through curses in her head as she fought with the imbalance.

Her spiritual law recoiled and she cycled her mantra again to get it under control. The yang poison, rather than being expelled, slowly merged with something else, or a bit of it did—

-Eh!?!

She had never had a cultivation epiphany before, but in a moment of crystal clear elucidation, she was absolutely certain she had just experienced a minor one.

Closing her eyes, she stared at the deviations twisting through her body as the yang poison gnawed ominously at her spiritual law. With no supreme purification pills to try to rid herself of it, all she could do was gamble on this singular observation she had witnessed. The mysterious recombination of qi that had just happened in her bones. If it could get rid of the now entirely active yang poison that had been set off by something in the ambient qi here, she might survive this.

Overdrawing on her cultivation base, she converted vitality directly into qi to support herself while the mysterious qi from outside and the Yang Qi from her body recombined. At the point it touched her spiritual qi in her bones she felt the horrible sense of repelling… but also a minuscule sense of merging?

-Really, if they had let me learn the full chapter like my idiot older brothers and that waste of a cousin I’d have yang water qi in my bones rather than yin water, she snarled in her head.

-Then I wouldn’t even BE in this predicament, this would be a total blessing instead! Useless fate-thrashed morality scripture, useless monkeyshit family elders and their monkeyshit notions.

She let the moment flow, following the entire cycle as best she could. Watching the Yang Qi that her mantra had somehow drawn out of her blood and refined with the help of the other unusual qi in the world around them again flow into contact with the qi in her dantian that was trying to rage out of control and reject the yang poison fused with her blood. Now she felt the faintest twinges of that ephemeral suppressive, divisive dark qi from below in her dantian much more clearly. A different kind of poison chaining her cultivation inexplicably?

The harder she looked the more widespread it was, she realised. Voids, illuminated in the light of the yang poison, now actively trying to overcome her innate qi elements. Riddling her whole body like minuscule barbs.

In that moment of clarity, she watched the oppressive destabilizing darkness that tried to break down other types of qi, specifically the qi she already had in her body, as if rejecting it as impure somehow. The blood of the creature she had kept was now being forced to interact with it due to the mantra and the strange qi outside. Even weirder, the divisive dark qi wanted nothing to do with the yang poison, it was as if it was flat out ignoring it, and the yang poison was trying to gnaw at it to no avail. The only thing being worn down in this tug of war was her foundation and qi.

As a result, the four qi types were slowly fighting and recombining, trying to find a balance now and fuse it into a new, purer type of qi. A balance of Yin and Yang. Water and fire, light and dark qi. Oppression, Deconstruction and Recombination Release… Balance!

-I have to find ‘balance’ in them or I am dead! It was a singular, simple thought that surfaced in her head.

With it, it felt like something cracked in her mind. Her mantra shifted slightly at her singluar, desperate thought and in the process acquired something from the yang poison that was almost intangible. Without her even doing anything it went straight to the ‘darkness’ and something of that also connected with it. It even swirled in her mind’s eye and took something from her recently mended psyche breaks.

The nature of the mnemonics changed subtly, even though they didn’t actually change. Instead, they seemed to become more connected to her in some fundamental yet rather esoteric way. As she fought to keep her spiritual law from rebelling totally her mantra swirled again, much more confidently and started to move all on its own. She set it aside and focused on finding a rhythm between wrestling and coaxing the spiritual qi in her dantian to calm down. It almost felt like there was a fifth element in there that under no circumstances was interested in joining with anything from this new qi.

The talisman around her neck started to burn hot against her skin. Hissing she tore it off. The distraction was unneeded, but the heat remained. At the same time, her spiritual qi was fleeing from her mantra and also trying to force the Yang Qi out of her bones, uncaring about the cost to her own body.

It was hard to say if it was unfortunate or fortunate, but her spiritual qi was very much outmatched. All she needed was for it to calm down and just be refined for fates’ sakes. Sure, her spiritual cultivation might be totally wasted in the short term, but she would be alive and… she suspected that change in her mantra was her Physical Foundation…

For a brief moment, her spiritual qi wormed out of her control entirely, as if suddenly becoming a slippery eel fish. It flooded out through her body, striking everywhere to try and—

There was excruciating pain in her whole body as her spiritual qi was literally kicked out of her by every other force working in her body. She screamed as it also sank chains into the impure qi that was slowly being refined and took most of it with it. Her bones were on fire, her blood boiled as her spiritual law itself twisted and inexplicably deviated without her even doing anything.

She was dimly aware of someone moving, shouting, and her name? Had she fallen… that was dismissed amid all the other pain and stress because failing to concentrate now would be fatal, she understood intuitively.

Her cultivation base shifted, her dantian and whatever force was trying to induce her spiritual law to…

For a brief moment, she saw a shadowy symbol rooted deep within it, a familiar, sickening malevolence and a qi that was totally beyond her means to even touch, webbing through it. Someone had tampered with her law… that… was...

Horrified understanding dawned anew.

-Di Ji!

That was how he was ‘with her’. He had marked her; for a Golden Immortal to twist a Qi Condensation cultivator’s law was so easy as to be laughable. He hadn’t been able to touch her mantra though… but that didn’t explain why… why was he trying to kill her?

She had no time to worry further on it though, because the inertia that was building in her mantra was becoming unstoppable as it swirled around in that same cycle. It ripped through the constraints of her dantian and with it came the Yang Qi and the divisive darkness, dragged along as they continued to have their own fruitless battle.

-Shit! This is a proper deviation! part of her wailed.

What remained of the spiritual qi in her body that was somehow being leashed by the perversion to her cultivation law destabilised. Something tried to reach through it, to grasp for… her spirit root!?!

It was only a guess, but she was able to intuit what might be the goal of that seal. It wasn’t aimed at her spiritual cultivation at all, but at her spirit root, at her soul. The spirit root was where the body and the soul connected in all mortals. It was a common – if somewhat useless – bit of knowledge to a spiritual cultivator of her realm, except in cases like this. This was why she kept splintering. Even if she had been healed, without excising this curse, when the arts of the mages wore off she would have fallen under its control once again, never even sensing the qi that would have doomed her.

Except now, she had to reflect with a certain degree of irony, it was all rendered moot.

The principle subverting her body, which she presumed was Golden Immortal at the very least based on what she knew of that villain from the stories, was no match for the ‘intent’ lingering in the Yang Qi, never mind the divisive ‘darkness’. Between them, they shredded her dantian in seconds, even as the weird, reconstructive, transformative qi being incorporated from the landscape just kept merging with her body, subtly taming both rampaging forces in their own way through her mantra.

As she watched dully, all these forces slowly ground down the malignant intent making her cultivation law go weird. All she could do was cheer them along, letting her mantra do its thing while focusing as hard as she could on keeping the parts of her spiritual law still in her grasp from also running berserk. Adding to the weirdness, the barbed hook-like shards of that oppressive, divisive Yin Qi were now also helping in another way, making the spiritual qi that was still forming under the perversion’s intent sluggish and easy to snare.

In that instant she tasted a pungent sharp sensation in the air—

Something hit her between the breasts and excruciating pain surged through her, wracking her whole body. The yang poison — no, it was almost like an intent now – raged, devouring this new pain that was trying to consume her. All she could do was focus inwards and keep what little control she had, trusting to her mantra.

There was more pain and the taste of tingling sharpness.

Within four cycles, half the remaining qi in her body had been changed and there was an uneasy balance between the rising tide of transformative qi outside, the fiery yang poison from the blood that had contaminated her far more deeply than she realised it seemed, the original refined qi in her bones and the suppressed water spiritual qi created by the perversion of her law.

Within ten cycles that tainted qi had been totally expunged, and all that remained was the spiritual qi touched by the divisive yin darkness.

Within sixteen cycles her dantian was almost full to capacity even though the efficiency of her law, now reconstituted and properly under her ‘control’ once more, should be almost non-existent out here. Something told her that perhaps that ‘Greater Restoration’ art that had fixed her in the dream might be to blame for this, but it was fleeting in the focus on not allowing herself to explode.

By thirty-five cycles her body itself was almost at capacity, all of her feeling bloated and sluggish amid the tumult.

By sixty her bones were just molten holes in her body. At eighty her blood, already boiling, felt more like a vapour in her body searing everything.

By ninety cycles her dantian, already filled to capacity, was starting to deform and expand.

By one hundred cycles, the yang poison in her body was finally constrained and brought into balance with that transformative outside qi. By this point, it had wormed so deeply into her body that it was even intruding into her spirit root, following the channels of weakness left by that cursed bastard’s attempted subversion.

It wasn’t until 128 cycles that everything settled down again and the ‘darkness’ also found some lesser agreement and receded, its barbs vanishing as if they never were. By that point the Yang Intent within the qi was functionally a part of her whole body. Even her spirit root had been touched subtly by it.

Gasping for breath she opened her eyes and accepted the pain that was twisting every fibre of her being. Her whole body was soaked in sweat and every bone in her itched. She was lying on the ground, at the base of the tower. Part of her was surprised at how smooth the ground was until it registered that her surroundings were smoking, and still partially on fire. The ground beneath her was warm glass.

Juni and Han Shu were crouched almost a hundred metres away looking... well... terrified. Scorch marks were visible on both their clothes, she noted. She was also naked bar some residual tatters of luss cloth garment on her arms and her front that had rather remarkably survived this ordeal.

“A-are you okay!?” Han Shu shouted.

Sitting up, she pulled her knees up to her chest to preserve some of her modesty, Han Shu’s call reminding her of his presence.

Casting about, there was no answer regarding modesty, so she just stayed where she was.

“How long was… I—?” she asked staring at the sky which was still roughly as it had been as far as she could see.

“About two hours?” Juni called over. “You just went on fire within moments of using your mantra and then collapsed a few seconds later like a broken puppet. We managed to drag you down before the temperature got too high, so you didn’t fall—”

Juni looked up at the sky reflexively “—and then erm… well...”

“Ummm… so… about the…” Han Shu was also a bit pale.

-Why are they both looking like they were the ones who went through whatever this ordeal was, she grumbled to herself.

Setting that aside, she took a shallow breath and winced.

-First things first, mantra.

Very, very cautiously she used her mantra—

‘Blessing, Path, Lotus, Body, Gift’

She blinked, confused for a second, because it was the same… until she realised that actually, it wasn’t. Intuitively, as she watched it do its thing, she could feel that it was no longer unattributed, rather it now had a Yang aspect. Remarkably her dantian was still there, and largely intact, however, the qi within it now didn’t respond to her family’s spiritual law at all.

“…”

It took her several moments of confused investigation to work out why that was.

Firstly, the law was a Qi Condensation manual, and secondly, her qi was no longer attuned to it at all. The gentle pressure within her and the sense of Yin and Yang Qi merging throughout her body was…

-‘Qi Refinement’...?

She eyed her dantian, tormented as it, was dubiously.

-What the fates? I jumped from mid Qi Condensation to what seems to be a good way into Qi Refinement?

That was kind of shocking, really. And, near as she could see, she had done so in a single bound no less – all in the process of trying to keep herself from becoming Lin Ling, Alchemical Bomb Edition.

That wasn’t what had her heart pounding though. The longer she examined herself, the more certain she became. She had broken through to Mantra Seed. Her mantra had fused with the vital core in her bones and in the process had attained the Yang attribute from the poison. It was unclear what the darkness had done other than affecting the innate makeup of her qi foundation itself, which was now a strange balance of Yin and Yang, Fire and Water… Dark… ah, water and fire and thunder had merged to become Light, so Fire, Light, Water and Darkness…. and Earth… and Life.

She stared blankly at the tower nearby. All five types of qi were in some capacity present in her body. She checked again and indeed she had Yang Fire, Yang Earth, minor Yang Thunder, Yin and Yang Water and unattributed Life. The ‘darkness’, rather weirdly, seemed to carry traces of divisive Yin aspects of all elements.

It was almost as an afterthought that she realised that all her twelve external meridian channels had also been fully opened and her eight gateway meridians were realigned subtly to better reflect her current physical condition. How that could even have happened was unclear on far too many levels.

Shaking her head in bewilderment, she again surveyed her surroundings. It was explicable that the ground was melted, but her eye caught the scorch patterns around her at the same time the strange sharpness in the air finally registered…. It almost looked like she had been…

Reflexively she looked upwards. Not that running would do any good, but the clouds, while a bit dark, were otherwise as they had been.

“How in the fates are you still alive, you were struck nine times by golden tribulation lightning. NINE TIMES—!” Han Shu finally exclaimed, still looking wide-eyed.

“—All I wanted to point out was that the qi here was… weird… and see if you had any idea why?” Juni interjected, still looking panicked.

“I—” she frowned and tried to piece the process back together. “I think the poison in my blood from...”

She had a moment of panic and then realised that her storage jade was still okay. The tie on it had been vaporised and it was a bit scorched and sunk into the glassy surface beside her though. She focused her qi in her hands and scooped it out easily.

-Yep, definitely Mantra Seed, a part of her cheered.

She froze because an inconsistency in events abruptly registered.

-I tore off my talisman… yet I don’t have my talisman?

This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

-My storage jade was on my wrist before the tribulation…

Absently, she reached up to touch where that burning sensation had been just above her breasts; there was no sign of it. It was awkward to look at her own chest but when she did she inhaled. A shadowy mark was ghosted against her flesh. It would have been about where her talisman usually hung around her neck. There was no intent in it now, or anything untoward. She wiped her hand across it warily and it vanished like dust beneath her fingers, leaving her none the wiser.

Memories pieced together that first registered impact between her breasts… she looked at the sky again.

-The lightning?

-But what in the fates would that have to do with my talisman or a ghostly version of it? She wondered, narrowing her eyes.

-Especially given my… Hunter Bureau talisman… isn’t with me?

Something about that circumstance seemed odd to her, but it came a pale second to the question of why the bolt had hit where it had. Staring up that the sky, she silently vowed never to use her cultivation art from the family again while in here. Not until she could work out whether or not the tampering or whatever it was had been undone.

“…”

Sighing, she shook her head. While that was worrying, it was not something she could deal with now… and it had also distracted her from another important thing she had been about to check. Warily, she pulled out a pot of the blood and considered it carefully. Before it would have made her skin blister and its heat had been beyond excessive. Now, it felt comfortable, like a bowl of hot soup in her hands, all but confirming in her mind that she had been attuned or had adapted to it in some way thanks to what had happened.

“Ummm?” Juni had finally made her way over, followed nervously by Han Shu.

“…”

Before she could say anything, Juni tore the sleeves off her robe and unpicked the seams, then took and draped them over her shoulders, tying them under her breasts and around her waist to keep it secure.

“Sorry, it’s the best we can do until we find some suitable vegetation,” Juni murmured apologetically, handing her a second piece to put around her waist.

It was pretty scandalous and left little to the imagination, she had to admit, but it was still better than nothing. Looking at Juni and Han Shu, she didn’t need Juni to tell her that the alternative was probably asking Han Shu to lose his trousers and walk around in just his undergarments and tempting as that was at this point, it would probably cause pointless friction.

“Do we really only have one full set of clothes between us?” she asked.

“Yeah,” Juni sighed.

“We can triage the cloth we are using as packs,” Han Shu added, gesturing to the two luss cloth sheets that were tied up into bundles.

“—but we need to find something else to put the contents in first, right?” she muttered.

“Probably wise,” Han Shu said, not quite looking at her. “Though it’s not treated for clothing… so it would be rather unpleasant to wear in any case.”

“—What’s with the pot?” Juni interjected.

Nodding at Han Shu’s words, because she really was not that enthused about wearing irritating luss cloth that was only crudely treated, she was caught slightly off guard by Juni’s question.

“Ah…” she stared at the pot for a moment, mustering her thoughts. “I think I was more badly poisoned by this than I realised, probably from when I was in the cave initially. It just took time to work its way deep and, because I wasn’t using my cultivation law at all and because of the suppression down there, it was kept in check.”

“How does… getting poisoned to that degree lead to this?” Han Shu frowned.

“The creature this came from should have been a very high ranked qi beast. Probably above thirteen stars if I was being objectively honest,” she replied.

Both of them took a step back at that.

“You’re walking around with law infused blood and just…” Han Shu sounded a bit strangled as he stared at it.

“Well, it got us out of all sorts of problems,” she sniffed, somewhat annoyed all of a sudden, by his reaction. “You would be dead a dozen times over if I hadn’t brought it.”

“That is—” he muttered.

“—Ling has a point,” Juni interrupted with a sight.

“There were some other oddities as well though, the… uh… he...” she eyed Juni, trying to decide how to phrase what she was about to say. “He did something to my law, it’s probably broken or compromised now. It tried to run out of control and put something in my spirit root when I advanced... I think that's why I was so...”

-It could have been worse, she added in her own head.

-Without the suppression and that fortuitous healing I would likely have never even known until it was too late, and even then, she thought with a grim sigh, I would probably have been his permanent puppet without ever understanding.

“Oh,” Juni’s face hardened and her voice took on a certain edge. “I see.”

To see her friend so obviously enraged on her behalf made her heart warm a bit, but she wasn’t done with the explanation, so let it pass unremarked. As it was she would have to worry about her spirit root later. While it had been above average, by lay standards, it was not that impressive and in the eyes of the Lin family unsuitable. Furthermore, she still couldn't really understand what the yang poison and the divisive darkness had done to it in their rampage.

Storing the jar once more, she continued her explanation as she understood it. “The healing I got in that place also… did something weird, I think. The energy in it reacted with the unusual qi in the environment around this tower and… well, I nearly had a cultivation deviation when my spiritual law tried to just go berserk for a variety of reasons. I think that’s when the lightning hit? It all gets a bit vague after that, I was so focused on trying not to explode or something… it took about 130 cycles of my mantra?... you said that only two hours passed? It felt like days…”

-It should have been days, she added in her own head.

A complete cycle of her mantra at the intensity she had been using it should have taken around thirty minutes. It was a very different kind of cycle to just using it for triage or moving qi about her body.

Puffing her cheeks, she gave her body a shake and looked at the tower.

-Is it also a subtle temporal anomaly?

-Is it making time run slower around it?

It was somehow the most obvious culprit, in her own heart, however at the same time, another part of her could only say that that hypothesis was somewhat ridiculous.

-I can talk about temporal anomalies, but the laws of time are something even those at the apex of the Immortal Step struggle to comprehend, and here I am guessing randomly about some fate-thrashed tower?

On the other hand, the weird sensation in her qi that Juni had actually pointed out was still there. Slowly she walked away from the tower, considering her qi. About twenty metres out there was a brief wave of oddness, and then the tone of the suppression shifted faintly. It became a touch less divisive and a touch more… inexorable?

She stepped back across that boundary and considered the change again, particularly in light of her opportunity to consider that dark qi from the depths. There was a certain similarity there, it had to be said.

Slowly she walked backwards and considered the change a final time. The strength didn’t change but it was oddly passive around the tower; out here, amid the trees it was… active in some subtle way.

Turning to Juni, she beckoned to her to come over. “Do you still get that odd feeling here, if you really focus on your qi?”

Both of them frowned and she felt the flicker of qi on them as they moved their own mantras... that was new.

-Is that a perk of being at Mantra Seed? she wondered.

“Yes… it’s still there,” Juni mused. “But the constraints on my qi feel more… solid further away from the tower?”

All three looked at the low cloud boiling above them and flowing down like rivers off of the mountain itself as they considered that point. An obscured shadow piercing the clouds, some parts of it visible between gaps. It flowed past them down across the valleys, merging with the cloud level below. Sunlight occasionally broke through in rays, giving areas of brighter illumination.

Staring up at it, she was struck with another weird thought…

-Isn’t that a bit small for the Great Mount?

----------------------------------------

~ KUN JUNI – ??? ~

----------------------------------------

Juni found that the tower turned out to be rather anticlimactic beyond the first eerie layer and the unexpected tribulation of Lin Ling’s breakthrough. The two layers above the first one were sealed somehow. They were able to enter through the damage on the fourth layer above that, but all it led to was a walkway around the exterior circumference and a sealed stairwell up.

Much of the next day was spent slowly working their way down the valley. Most of the ruins were simply smashed stone shells but many had bones in them, which by general agreement they left well alone. Others had similar mirages of carnage and destruction.

A plaza that was very out of place in the jungle, all dulled white marble and sleek lines, had a pit in the middle that was once probably a beautiful fountain according to Lin Ling. Its illusionary reality in the present was a burnt pile of bodies surrounding a macabre tree-like construction of hung and flayed corpses. Many had been branded in Easten with words like ‘Heretic’ and ‘Sinner’. She could even see children among the piled dead.

Other ruins they started to encounter had similar, grim demonstrations. A building with eviscerated corpses hung from its eaves. Drifts of dead piled up like dried leaves against the wall of what was apparently an inn now tilted on its side. They even passed by the palatial ruins of a vast boulevard, dumped in the forest, its buildings skewed and truncated, the trees festooned with corpses and the courtyards filled with mounds of bodies.

They explored none of those places and moved on at almost a run, determined not to be anywhere near one in the dark.

She was very, very glad indeed to finally leave the valley. It was late afternoon by that point and the whole place gave her vibes akin to the deep darkness where the Sar’Katush had performed their acts of probable abomination. That it was corpses of people, rather than mysterious lizards from the deep, just made the whole thing a hundred times worse. Leaving those ruins behind, they descended through a cloud layer, past the scattered ruins of a great wall and small forts, finally entering the cloud forest proper.

Soon, however, she started to re-evaluate that estimation, because even the mists were strange, cloying and humid. The temperature was akin to the worst places in the High Valleys, and her cultivation and physical foundation did even less to ward it off where they currently were than it had anywhere she had been before. Only Lin Ling seemed to be less affected.

The forest itself was even odder, in its own way. Not like the valley above, that they had left behind, but in its almost aggressive normality. There were a few spiritual plants, but nothing particularly dangerous or difficult to evade. Trees were familiar, although with a bizarre mix of evergreen sub-tropical flora and deciduous montane forest.

Eventually, once dusk started to truly fall, they found a nice rocky outcrop on the edge of a shallow cliff and made camp. As a location, it provided shelter and good visibility while not affording any potential predator’s easy means to sneak up on them. None of them felt up to the idea of making a fire in the dusk, largely because the humidity was still vile, and while there were a lot of insects, none of them was in any way spiritual so all it would do would draw unwanted attention. A mortal mosquito might as well try to suck blood from granite as try any of them.

Once that was all sorted though, she was left with little else to do, beyond keep a wary eye on their surroundings, so she turned to the small stack of spirit fruits she had gathered on the way down. Picking one she could identify comfortably as a ‘Spirit Mango’ variant, she tested it to check that it wasn’t poisonous and then took a bite to check how dense the qi in it was… and further see what was going on with her qi-absorption.

“…”

It was an effort not to spit it out. It was a bit too bitter for a mango and had a rather lingering aftertaste that put her in mind of rancid milk. Grimacing, however, she persevered, chewing on it for as long as she could tolerate before swallowing it down and examining herself as the qi diffused out of it.

Somewhat as she had expected really, the qi in it failed to bond with her body at all, even when she…

-no… that’s not quite right, she thought, narrowing her eyes as she watched not just her qi cycle but her mantra.

Her mantra got something, barely. Her spiritual law, though, might as well have not existed, and the energy claimed didn’t even replenish the effort spent to extract it.

Sighing, she took a second bite and grimaced, checking again.

“These are a bit weird,” she remarked at last, turning to Lin Ling, who was sitting nearby plaiting leaf fibres into some slightly more robust garments. A grass cape and a better skirt.

Taking one, the younger girl took a bite and grimaced.

“What is up with them?” Ling asked after she had rather distastefully swallowed the mouthful.

“It’s the same deal as with the qi,” she said. “The nutrition from the fruit isn’t actually entering my body at anywhere near the rate it should... It just disperses away as qi I can’t refine. I can grasp the barest fraction with my mantra… but even then it’s barely worth the effort?”

Lin Ling considered her words and took a bite out of another one with a faint grimace.

“It seems really repressed… but it kind of works okay?” Ling took a further mouthful of the fruit. “—I see what you mean about these though. The energy just kind of fizzles away mostly, I can acquire a tiny bit, but it probably makes my body burn qi just to digest it. I probably wouldn’t have noticed for a good while unless you pointed it out though.”

“Does that mean that the suppression here is so great it’s actually forcing qi out of our bodies in some way?” Han Shu stopped and looked around with concern. “Are we actually in the Deep Green after all?”

“Maybe…” Lin Ling said, frowning.

She stared at her own body again, following the path of her qi… she had first noticed it when they were making their way in and out of the odd zones of suppression around the ruins. Down here it was much more consistent. A gentle tug on any bit of unattributed qi in her body and also a firm pressure all around them. Nothing she did to her qi would stop that which was unrefined from bleeding away. Even refined qi only lingered tenuously. It really did remind her of the Deep Green, but it lacked the ominous hunger of that place.

They sat there in pensive silence, watching the sunset.

“What if—?” she started to say.

“—Please don’t say it,” Ling murmured with a weary sigh.

“It kind of has to be though?” she said, suddenly tired.

“Has to be what?” Han Shu asked with a frown looking between them.

“…”

“Is it possible we ended up in another anomaly somehow?” she said at last.

“How do you come to that conclusion?” Han Shu asked.

“—Well, the fact that the chasm changed because the mountain collapsed, then remade itself twice, right above us no less, was a pretty big hint,” Lin Ling interjected rather sourly.

“Not to mention the entire valley full of creepy ruins. The Great Mount slopes are dangerous, but they are not totally blank spaces. Ruins of that size would have been noted somewhere,” she added.

“What do our talismans say?” Lin Ling asked after another moment.

She grunted, having actually forgotten about them in everything else that had been going on. They had tried to destroy them in the calamity that unfolded but they had, against all the odds survived. None of the anomalies they had encountered had looked anywhere close to ‘anomalous’ enough that she trusted them to do their bit either. Left with no other means to destroy them and with the knowledge that even severing the soul-bound link would only marginally obfuscate the link she had through it to the core loci in Blue Water City, she had just stashed hers in her storage talisman and vowed to look for the right opportunity.

She pulled out her talisman and gave it a nudge with her qi.

“Okay... Now that’s just plain weird.” She poked the talisman to show them the ‘leader board’

Place

last shift

Name

Influence

Score

1

+0

Lin Ling

Hunter Bureau

920,021

2

X/?

Han Shu

Hunter Bureau

~ODR

3

X/?

Kun Juni

Hunter Bureau

~ODR

4

X/?

Tian Cang Di

Shu Pavilion

~ODR

5

X/?

Huang JiLao

Huang Clan

~ODR

6

X/?

Lian Jing

19th Imperial Court palace

~ODR

7

X/?

Shu Erwei

Wise Gate of Supreme Law

~ODR

8

X/?

Tuo Hai

Heavens Justice Sect

~ODR

9

X/?

Gan Jiao

Red Sovereign Sect

~ODR

10

X/?

Gan Renshu

Red Sovereign Sect

~ODR

“They are all ODR apart from Lin Ling?” Han Shu said incredulously.

“Well that’s not at all ominous,” she remarked, eyeing Lin Ling’s rapid drop in score, and the fact that it was the only one still showing a score at all.

“List score,” she commanded.

The projected table twisted and showed a list of maybe 500 names, all of them in the range of ~60,000 up to Lin Ling’s score of 920,021. Still an insane score by any measure, but not in the tens of millions at least.

“What is with that score? It was what, 15 million before?” Han Shu muttered.

She shook the talisman speculatively as if that might actually help.

“Uhhhh… I did have a weird experience in my tribulation,” Lin Ling said, looking nervous.

“Right?” she said, eyeing the younger woman.

“Well I thought I had my talisman for a moment, so I tore it off, but it still left a strange mark on my breast… that’s also where I was struck with the lightning?”

“That’s...” Han Shu eyed her dubiously.

“That’s very weird,” she agreed, looking at Lin Ling more closely.

-Did her talisman unbind… or did something else happen? she mused inwardly. She still has a score, or is it that whatever was forcing her score so high is no longer associated with her talisman?

“As to why everything else is now ‘Out of Detection Range’, could it be because of whatever made the Great Mount do what it did, and the tribulation thunder?” Lin Ling suggested. “It’s wild speculation, but there was nothing else that obvious to pin all this on.”

“Who knows...” Han Shu said, staring pensively at his talisman. “So long as we don’t get those weird scores back again that make us a target for every competitor in this insane trial, I’m all for it,”

Thinking about what Lin Ling had said, about the talisman, something tugged at the corner of her memory. It took her a moment of reflection as the other two sat in silence considering what might actually be done, to work out why that sounded familiar.

It was one of her uncle’s war stories. Well, not really a war story, more a story about trying to destroy an evil cult. They had used talismans handed out to poor beggars, pretending they were mendicant preachers. Those talismans had been designed so that they could manipulate fate to steal away ‘Good Fortune’ from Ma Vung City on the Northern Tang continent. When it was discovered and the plot outed, the Military Authority had tried to assault their strongholds but met with misfortune after misfortune.

Mostly she had remembered it because her uncle had been rather vivid about how vile this cult was, both in their intentions and the misfortunes visited. It had given her nightmares about fate when she was young and got him a lengthy telling off from her mother. In the end, the general had petitioned Shan Lai to smite the evildoers, and the Authority Seat had broken their Good Fortune directly and directed a bolt of black tribulation lightning to smite their fortress, removing its protections so it could be assaulted. It was a famous story in many rights, for all that it had happened a millennia or so ago. The means by which they had directed that bolt…

She stared at her own talisman.

-There’s no way, right?

-Yes, that kind of art exists, she told herself.

-But...

But fate and its workings was a thing for those who sat at the very apex to ponder. Things that related to fate, especially its perversion or subversion were all proscribed. You just didn’t go there. A link between their souls and their talismans and the Blue Water City Bureau was just that, nothing particularly mysterious about it from the wider perspective of their world, except…

Another niggling doubt emerged. A curse of her being rather well-read for her age and her cultivation realm and having a tutor that liked to explore ancient ruins.

-There are talismans that can measure the worth of a person’s deeds, they are used in trials in the central continent.

-But that still doesn’t explain how our talismans are on there unless the organisers have gotten the support of the Hunter Bureau somehow? That seems… unlikely.

-If it was a Hunter Bureau trial, the notifications would be different, the structure much more controlled, and – and this is important – it wouldn’t be open to anyone not a Junior Official in the Bureau—

“Bah!” Han Shu abruptly stood with a disgusted sigh, shaking her out of her musings.

He took his talisman, put it down on a rock and drew the black sword. “Let’s do an experiment, tell me what it says if I destroy my talisman with the sword.”

“You think that will actually do it?” she asked, eyeing the sword and trying not to sound too dubious for all that it was clearly a powerful artefact. “I know the sword is powerful and all…”

“If there is anything that can do it, it’s probably this,” Han Shu said decisively. “It injured the lizards… and whatever the spider demons I encountered were… and it chopped up people in the anomaly like they were rotten kindling…”

“It’s not that I want to doubt,” she pointed out, “but these talismans are made by skilled craftsmen from the Blue Water City Bureau, remember.”

“Short of finding something like the Stopping Pit out here, it’s still probably the best bet though,” Han Shu said, lining up the strike. “Not to mention the old ancestor who was with it was very clear that it was something not to be treated lightly. I dunno what realm that guy was, but he was willing to curse the Emperor of his era and someone from the Kong clan by name.”

-As arguments in favour of this working go… that’s not terrible logic, she conceded to herself. Even if there are some big holes in it.

Still, she said nothing as Han Shu cut the talisman cleanly in two with the blade. Pulling up the table of names and refreshing it she watched Han Shu’s name fade off the list completely. At the same time, he put a hand to his chest and grimaced.

Place

last shift

Name

Influence

Score

1

+0

Lin Ling

Hunter Bureau

920,021

2

X/?

Kun Juni

Hunter Bureau

~ODR

3

X/?

Tian Cang Di

Shu Pavilion

~ODR

4

X/?

Huang JiLao

Huang Clan

~ODR

5

X/?

Lian Jing

19th Imperial Court Palace

~ODR

6

X/?

Shu Erwei

Wise Gate of Supreme Law

~ODR

7

X/?

Tuo Hai

Heavens Justice Sect

~ODR

8

X/?

Gan Jiao

Red Sovereign Sect

~ODR

9

X/?

Gan Renshu

Red Sovereign Sect

~ODR

10

X/?

Jiang Ruo

Jade Gate Court

~ODR

“Well, that’s pretty conclusive…” Lin Ling said with a sad sigh.

“…”

They both stared at the cut talisman, nodding glumly.

“Ah!” Ling suddenly clapped her hand to her head. “How stupid! Hey, Juni, what does it say about losing your talisman in the additional information that came with the proclamation? You know, the stuff we just ignored back then?”

“...”

She stared at Lin Ling for a moment, then exhaled softly, feeling a bit depressed. There she had been looking for all kinds of reasons and probably it would just say outright what means were available if you ‘lost’ your talisman.

Flicking back through the messages sent to her talisman, she found the original communication and accessed the additional information. A lot of it was pointless; there was to be a big event in Blue Water City… yada yada, various old elders, even a benediction of good fortune from an Imperial Prince? That made her raise an eyebrow. Finally, though, she found what she was after.

“Here we go, it says that if you are killed by someone, your score will be added to theirs, but if someone just steals it, or you lose it for whatever reason, or it’s damaged, you can petition the Imperial Astrology Bureau for a divination in relation to your role in the trial. They will then re-affirm your rank directly pending a short investigation.”

“It makes no mention of others divining you…”

“The Imperial Astrology Bureau are a bunch of self-serving crooks,” Lin Ling scowled. “It’s absolutely within their means to be that corrupt.”

-Yes, she mused. They certainly are.

Never mind her own experiences dealing with them through the Kun clan and the Bureau, Lin Ling certainly had perspective on their ways and means, given her family background. The hand of the Astrology Bureau and the Second Imperial Prince in what happened to the Lin School was something of an open secret. Nobody was going to bad-mouth the culpable parties, and the Lin School and Lin clan was basically abandoned apart from a few remnants lucky enough to escape into the umbrella of places like Blue Water Province where the Imperial Writ was a little less authoritarian. History was written by the winners, after all.

“Well, if anyone should be confident of getting through these valleys and out of the mountains in one piece, it should be us,” she said with a sigh. “—And this thing is functionally useless in here, given we still have our scrips and some storage talismans.”

She tossed it over to Han Shu. “Break away.”

He dropped it down and gave it a poke with the sword. She had no means to check if her name vanished from the list as well, but it assuredly did.

“What about Arai and Sana’s talismans?” Han Shu said.

“No.” Lin Ling said flatly.

“But…”

“They are already listed as ODR-S and with reconstructed scores to boot,” Lin Ling countered.

“But their locations can still be divined,” Han Shu said pointedly.

She rubbed her temples and sighed. Those two talismans were indeed… the only reason to keep them was to return them to Jun Han. That and the fact that they were not pavilion issue, in a strict sense, but provided directly by him, and then linked to the Pavilion. Old Ling had been remarkably okay with that irregularity, and it had never passed any comment since. It made sense that neither Lin Ling nor Han Shu would know. Probably only she, Old Ling, Old Fang, Arai, Sana and their father along with Grandmaster Li were aware of it.

She took Arai’s out and pushed some qi into it. As expected, it did nothing. She considered it, and then on a whim pushed her qi into the restriction to see if she could see…

{CAO HONGJUN}

The signature of the person who had created the talisman hung in her mind’s eye for a long moment, and she put it back quietly in her storage talisman. How Jun Han had a talisman for his daughters created by such a figure was… not hers to question, but throwing them away was probably not a good idea.

“Well?” Han Shu said, looking at her.

“There won’t be a problem with their talismans, I think. They should be returned to Jun Han—”

Han Shu gave her a dubious look but said nothing, wisely noting the finality in her tone.

“—As to those? The first properly weird ruin we come across, we chuck them inside,” she added, glancing at the two talismans on the rock.

----------------------------------------

~ MYSTERIOUS SWORD LADY – ??? ~

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Unbidden and unnoticed by them or the world at large, the mysterious aspect of the sword – which had been making a crown out of the severed visual imprints of snapdragon flowers – sighed softly and reached out, plucking the invisible threads that were still twisting around the ruined talisman, seeking out their former owners incrementally and properly extinguished the links, in a manner akin to pinching out a candle, glad they had allowed her the opportunity to do that. The manipulation trying to twist them from afar, as it was so many others, had come ominously close to touching her a few times. That was not a score they would like to see on their talismans, she was pretty sure. It would make that of the girl now finally reaping the rewards for her accumulation’s brush with a 'Ridkul's Miraculous Cube' look positively mundane.

She again considered that for a moment as the intention hung in the air, chasing back down the lines of karma around the two talismans, removing them entirely for good measure. Away from the greedy eyes of stolen fate, what had happened to that poor child was starting to balance itself out. Before, she might have been tempted to see to it that the cube was returned to someone responsible, but for now... It was somewhat related to the reason for those outside eyes seeking to get into this place, but if they thought the passage that cube could open for them would land them anywhere good they were in for a very rude awakening indeed.

Shaking her head drily at that, she shot half an eye in a distant, impossible direction and sighed again, before turning back to her crown of flowers.

That was a bit more concerning. They were still unclear why the Damnation had rolled up like it had. Such intent didn't come out just for social purposes, not in Heavens like these, and this place was abandoned to reality, held lost in the abyss in all likelihood. More concerningly, its arrival also related to the actuality, rather than the reality, of the heart of the hyper-dimensional rat-warren that made up much of this remnant, adrift on the edge of reality.

The reality of the Perilous Realm actually lay within this place, albeit in a somewhat older iteration. Reality twisted momentarily and was forced to consider in a slightly abstract way on her behalf that the actuality of its current circumstances was not somewhere that even a being like her could, or would easily seek to peer on a whim. A place gripped in the feverish harmony between memory, dream and nightmare. Frozen, between three absolute forces of an ancient era; 'The Gate of the Uncreated Time', 'Bright Fortune’s Peony Tree' and one of the great seals of the 'Labyrinth of Chronominthian', the latter of which had been so stupidly broken open by the apostles of her maker's brother in the name of their petty greed and fear.

The scar damage itself was still resonating from the actions of those outside... but...

As first impressions went it was rather inconclusive, but her intuition for these things considered that whatever had brought down the Damnation, while it had caused inconvenience for them and a lot of stress for their erstwhile landlord, wasn't malicious. To them or their views at least.

The moment rejoined itself, cohesion was restored and she pursed her lips, wondering idly if the flower garland also needed a bit of white in there.

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~ DUN LIAN JING – ??? ~

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Lian Jing hauled herself over the slippery rocks and hissed with pain.

-This is definitely not how this was meant to go, she thought grimly.

-Definitely not the plan.

An actual plan would involve more strategy and a lot less aimless running on her part. There were also far too many fate-thrashed questions. Starting with why, in all the nameless cursed problems they might encounter, would they be ambushed by the ‘Red Sovereign Sect’ within five minutes of getting out of that damn sinkhole. The only thing she was certain of really was that they picked that moment very deliberately. Most likely because it was outside of divination range and everyone’s communication talismans were out of order. Except for JiLao’s, but nobody other than them knew that. There was no other reason they would be that overt, even with that kind of firepower.

-Also, how did they manage to teleport in like that?

She knew the answer already in her gut. They had some formidable ancestral artefact that could overcome the turbulence of whatever that had been. She was hesitant to call it a tribulation, it had felt more like a censure.

-Rather than that, shouldn’t you be wondering how they managed to crack open the valley like it was a rotten egg? Her mind treacherously added.

-Shit, shit, fate-thrashed virgin’s blood in a cup, she swore at her own mind.

That fate-thrashed mushroom was certainly responsible for her psyche acting out in this way.

She skidded around another tangle of dense vegetation and turned down the gully that led away from them and downslope as fast as she dared. This new place had significantly less landscape threat compared to the valleys they had been in before, but it had another bigger problem. To make it worse, she wasn’t entirely certain what was causing the full extent of it either. It could be the mushrooms – she had barely been clipped by their weird field and it had done all kinds of nasty things to her soul power. Things that the pills she had were inexplicably not capable of fixing. That those effects were extending to her qi as well... wasn’t unreasonable. It could also be caused by the fundamental devouring law that permeated this whole place. It was strange and also held a hint of some other power, a vast dividing intent that was always lingering like knives in the dark. She could barely resist it at full strength, even with her refined principle, and it was making her flight all the harder as a result.

There was a *thwack* behind her and something smashed the rock behind her to smithereens. Not a lethal blow but debilitating certainly, which seemed to be their strategy so far.

And… of course, that was the other other problem.

Her pursuers, and their ambushers for that matter, had a means to lift the suppression to a degree that made resistance at short range impossible. Even that might not have been too bad, they had a lot of talismans, but their ambushers had led with a front line of over a dozen Dao Immortals. Against three Ancient Immortals and a weary bunch of Golden Immortals, Chosen Immortals and the odd Immortal. Laughable, really. The Blue Gate disciples had been massacred in a matter of moments or fallen to their doom with much of the Ran clan’s group into the maw of that terrible mushroom colony.

Another distant laugh echoed and a scything wave of nihility tore apart the vegetation ahead of her, forcing her to divert or run straight into it.

She threw another talisman and hurled herself over the edge of the ridge. She had already wasted several powerful talismans and one of the lifesaving treasures that the Emperor bestowed on all his children on them, finding out that punching through these attacks was pointless. Her pursuers had as many talismans as she did, and several of them were Dao Immortals as well, she was sure of it.

She slid down another rock and narrowly avoided falling into a chasm. Nameless fates. She threw herself across the void and sank her fingers into the rock a little for enough purchase to vault over. Again she had cause to curse this qi devouring malaise, it was almost like gravity dragging her down, restricting the very way her qi flowed. Even exerting the full strength of her refined principle, resisting it was like grabbing fog and it was making her flight even harder – never mind trying to use her spiritual law or the body art her teacher had given her.

Ahead of her, she caught a flicker of a person appearing. She cursed.

-Fates go suck the nameless cock, how can they keep teleporting like this. Are they all using Dao Sovereign talismans or something?

She was half sure that Ran Hao and Huang JiLao had survived. She hadn’t seen either die, anyway. Most of the mercenaries had managed to evade falling into the damn pit... and then sided with the Red Sovereign Sect. Their strength was also concealed by precious artefacts they had failed to notice, all of them either Golden Immortals or Ancient Immortals.

Most of the Blue Gate disciples that hadn’t succumbed to the mushrooms had died in short order, which was expected, the leader of the Red Sovereign Sect disciples had killed Tan Fang. She hadn’t seen whatever happened with the rest of the White Storm Sect disciples. She supposed they were dead. Yan Ju had been captured, she thought. She had seen him be forcibly teleported somewhere else – using a shift talisman of all the fate-accursed things – by one of the Dao Immortals.

Ahead of her, she got an ominous premonition – again.

They were trying to stop her gaining ground, forcing her away from the lower parts of the valley, over rough ground, while they skirted below or hopped ridges. It was perplexing, they could easily catch her with Space Shift Talismans or Sky Lock Talismans. She risked attempting a short-ranged teleport and felt the art break like it was water skittering off a solid wall. The stability of this place was ridiculous.

-How!? She screamed in her own mind.

Her own teleport talismans were completely useless in this place, it seemed.

There was another flicker ahead of her which she immediately turned away from.

They were forcing her to climb. Again. What was the point in even trying to wear her down? She couldn’t understand it at all. She had almost no soul force left as it was. The only reason her psyche wasn’t fragmenting was her own mental fortitude at this point. Never mind that between the mushrooms and this place, her Immortal Soul’s foundation was actually starting to suffer real damage.

She ate another soul reconstruction pill which helped a bit, but before she could get any benefit from it there was a *shufft* and she was forced to use her principle again to dodge a scything blade of pseudo-wind law.

-Every. Fate-thrashed. Time.

She groaned again and swallowed the blood back down. The degradation was still slow but given time and this persistent pressure, if left unchecked it would cause a problem in its own right.

She risked cycling her cultivation law, which burnt more qi than it actually used but did allow her to stimulate her principle fully in the process. Ignoring the damage it caused her as best she could by eating another meridian reinforcement spiritual Dan, she sprinted up the slope as fast as she could, flitting from rock outcrop to rock outcrop. There was mocking laughter from behind her, amplified by qi.

-How amateurish, she hissed.

With a *crack*, a whole section of the cliff above her just shifted. She flitted through the falling fragments, deflecting the few bits that were too close. There was no realistic possibility that that could actually slow her...

-No… it really is all about draining my reserves for some reason. If they keep this up, it is almost like they are treating me as some kind of demon beast. Bleeding it out so they could surround it and…

She pushed that demeaning thought out of her head and started to climb into the mist. Unless they had some kind of serious divination talismans, it would slow them down a bit, it was rife with dimensional shifting distortions.

Someone fired a fire art that would inflict mild damage to her soul through its principle into the mist above, letting the embers spark down randomly into the vegetation where they burnt inky purple holes through trees and even corroded the rocks slightly.

-Shit… that’s a law comprehension relating to soul power! She cursed. Fate-thrashed Dao Immortals!

That made two at least that were chasing her, along with several Ancient Immortals and over a dozen Golden Immortals…

-Fates cursed bastards, isn’t the Red Sovereign Sect affiliated with the Huang clan, anyway?

“…”

-Are they trying to target JiLao? But if that is the case, why bother with me now I am separated from the rest? Do they just want treasures or something?

Cursing them in her heart, she reached the ridge top and, remembering some of the advice from their now dead Beast Cadre guides, sprinted along the ridgetop following the rising contours. Going up was dangerous for everyone apparently, and the higher your cultivation the stronger the push back from the suppression apparently was.

-Let’s see if I can get high enough that the Dao Immortals no longer have an advantage, she hissed mentally.

As far as plans went, it was not the best, but it really was her only one, as far as she could see.

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~ SANA & ARAI – THE PERILOUS REALM ~

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Six hours later they were stood on the hill overlooking the river, feeling… confused. The village that lay beyond it was now a smoking ruin. The degree to which it had been demolished was… remarkable.

"So clearly there was a shift of some kind earlier today," she said eventually.

“Well, this certainly explains why so many of those ruins were so ephemeral,” Arai remarked grimly.

“It does,” she agreed.

In the distance, she could see what looked like corpses. More palls of smoke rose beyond distant hills. They hadn’t been noticeable to them before because they had both assumed that the hazy, misty darkness was low-hanging cloud – the wind was also blowing the wrong direction. The biggest plumes, merging into a vast, acrid, misty smog came from beyond the head of the valley, where the fortress and, she guessed, a city had been. Behind them, the mists and low cloud obscured the great school, but the darker shadows shifting within the mist spoke ominously to more smoke and devastation.

“Well, as far as choices go… this is not—” Arai started to say.

“OVER THERE!” someone yelled, drawing their attention back to their immediate surroundings.

Surprised, she turned to see a group of armoured figures had crossed the river from the town and were hurrying up the rising slope in their general direction.

-How did we not notice them…?

She looked around to see who they were talking about, but there was no one... else… there?

Her vision snapped into focus on the group. Their weapons were drawn… and had fresh blood on them?

“Uhhhh?” Arai said dully.

“They can see us,” she said simply.

“So it seems,” her sister agreed grimly. “And they do not look pleased about that…”

“We… aren't responsible for this, are we?” she asked nervously, looking back towards the distant village.

“I don’t think so somehow…”

Arai trailed off, even as her hair abruptly stood on end.

The smoke in the distance split and a shadow… In the distance, she could see several more vast shadows floating high in the sky in the direction of the fortress. Something twisted one and suddenly a vast flying boat of metal and wood was spiralling across the middle of the valley like a thrown stick. It hit the ground, flipped, and its various pieces scattered across the far mountainside—

There was a stomach-dropping hiccup and then they were both thrown down by the shockwave as it exploded.

Gasping, she spat blood onto the grass, her body screaming at her, trying to see where Arai had fallen.

“—DIE!”

A woman’s voice laden with a truly heaven-shaking fury echoed like a thunderclap and they stared open-mouthed as a nearby mountain peak was demolished by… something, half of it simply vanishing like a street magician’s trick amid a haze of ash and dust that scattered away to the north in a frozen smear across the sky, accented only by the occasional flicker of lightning in the dust cloud.

Shaking her head, she pushed herself up, finding Arai sprawled near her, wiping blood from her face where her nose was bleeding.

“What ju—”

Her sisters words ‘just happened?’ were lost as the sky above them turned dark as night and a sword suddenly descended from the firmament. It was as big as a mountain, pitch-black as it cleft apart reality. All along the blade, golden-red symbols were swirling that read ‘Arch Magister Magus, Elaria Vesperina Everkind – Sword of Extinction’s Origin’

{EDGE OF EXTINCTION}

The prestige of the art… if that was what it was, sank through the world, dragging everything down in some fundamental, stomach twisting way as the sword fell. She had no words to scream, even as the symbol rose in her mind’s eye and did something. The creepy feeling of imminent mortality that had just crept up on her didn’t fade entirely, but it did somehow stop feeling quite so imminent.

{KINGDOM OF BLADES: ETERNAL END}

The immense blade bearing down on the whole world blurred and became thousands of blades. Each one was still immense. They swirled out like black wings through the sky, tearing through distant ships with cracks of distant light. The rolling distortion from the impacts flowed out, making the entire world quiver around them like it was some kind of jelly.

“What… it…?” she managed to force out, fighting against her own perception of the world around her as her vision went woozy.

{OH LORD! YOUR WORLD TO TURNING!}

A man’s voice, grand-sounding and profoundly regal, thundered across the sky. With it, a vast corona arose in the horizon, pushing back the night from the descending sword and bringing with it the echoes of other terrible voices.

{DAY OF JUDGEMENT!}

{CALL OF GOD}

{HAND OF GOD, TO STRIKE OUT THIS MORTAL HOUR}

{OH LORD! THY KINGDOM COME!)

Five red-robed figures, all old men, descended from a great golden gate in the sky, armed and armoured in glittering gold and silver, carrying swords and staffs.

The golden light above twisted and became winged figures that swept down like a tide.

{A thread of gold, unable to be sold, the promise of our kind.}

Golden threads, like flowering vines swirled out from the great pagoda, everything they passed through shearing apart in waves of searing fire and shrieking wind.

Two more figures stalked out of the ruins of the academy. A man and a woman dressed in shimmering robes of gold. The old man had the aura of a terrible sage, while the hooded woman had one of ominous slaughter, carrying a shimmering bow engraved with similar designs to the ones the threads had just formed. She was clearly the origin of the threads.

The old man raised his hands up above him and roared—

{THOU SHALT NOT ENTER IN}

The golden tide descending from above was scattered by the cataclysmic roar. The five red-robed figures fell back momentarily in the face of the attack, before recovering and summoning a barrier in the shape of a vast, five-pointed star surrounded by symbols similar to those they had been learning to shelter them—

Space twisted, bent, and a shadow stepped through the world. A vaguely female figure clad in a robe of star-drenched midnight. Her features were indiscernible beyond her hair, which burned like starfire. Over her shoulder she carried a great black blade that was so dark it was impossible to look at, even as it simultaneously demanded that she have eyes only for it, forcing her acknowledgement in some deeply unsettling way.

The starfire-haired woman stepped forward, swinging the blade effortlessly through the constellation-like barrier of symbols and arrived before one of the red-robed figures, who was hurled high into the sky in a red blur. A second of the red-robed figures attacked from the side only to be catapulted away to hit a distant mountain, which recoiled and then exploded outwards like it had been hit by a meteor. The remaining three old men fell back, all displaying various personal arts – barriers mostly, either around themselves or to slow their attacker – as the woman ploughed forward.

The remaining flying vessels that had been bombarding the mountain slopes were shattered, their remains scattering across the sky above them, raining thousands upon thousands of figures down like rain amid their wrath and ruin—

With a thunderclap, everything shifted and the world flowed backwards.

Distortion roiled out of the ground and seemed to pull a second iteration of the whole valley out with it. There was no time to react as the entire world seemed to split along far too many axes for a healthy reality to have.

There is no point in even screaming, she thought as the land rose to hit them both. The river was above them somehow, the other figures screaming as they fell into shattered nihility. Everything settled back in place…

There was a stomach-dropping hiccup and then they were both thrown down by the shockwave as it exploded.

“—DIE!”

The moment reset and the ship spiralled out of the sky once more. It hit the valley floor, but this time, rather than pinwheel left, it flipped over and arched over them to hit a nearby mountain behind them, which bent inwards and then exploded like someone had hit it with a primordial hammer. She was so far adrift from events that she barely had any time to register that the symbol was blazing in her mind, doing something… the mountain warped and twisted outwards, revealing a black crack in reality at its heart.

There was a stomach-dropping hiccup and then they were both thrown down by the shockwave as it exploded.

“—DIE!”

This time there was no explosion, instead, she smashed into the grassy sward. The valley was a haze of mist and cacophonous silence. Across the river, in the village, the dead were rising, screaming in existential fury even as the village itself started to sink into the world. The mountains groaned above them bending like trees in a gale. The world of the valley twisted as the smoke pall was cleft apart. The five red-robed figures had some strange scroll out and a great totem-like standard… chanting something…

{We Decry Thee, Spawn of Elder Greed, Deceiver's Disciple, Be Cast Out!}

{~VOID BAR~}

The mountains recoiled again, the slopes far above the great school split, the great clock tower twisted bizarrely…

An immense attractive force suddenly twisted into the world. Above them, above everything, centred around the broken, scattering remains of the great tower was another starry sky – a dreadful place that whispered in unspeakable tongues and held a deeply unsettling aura within it.

The five red-robed figures screamed even as three more arrived to grasp two of them from the nihility. The starfire-haired woman and the survivors and everything else was drawn away into it with a reverse explosion.

Black cracks were flowing across the entire valley now, emanating from where the rift had been. Every grass stem seemed to be shifting through a few too many dimensions.

“The stable points!” a rational thought emerged, desperately, out of her mind’s eye.

As one they hurtled towards the distant golden-leafed thorn tree with its piles of artistically arranged rocks on the next hill, dark lines chasing them across the hillside.

The soldiers who had spotted them were too close to the river, which was also manifesting its own cracks. It washed over them, drawing them away into the nihility beyond those cracks. Everything was sinking now, the mist flowing back through the world around them carrying with it ominous intents that—

She tensed, terrified, as the mist rolled over them, however it passed right through her as if she simply wasn’t there.

“Don’t stop!” Arai screamed soundlessly at her, not that she had, in truth, grabbing her arm and hauling her onwards, across the hill-top, past the carved stones…

They made it to the tree and clambered into its low branches, ignoring the scratching thorns just as the cascading avalanche of horrifying unreality caught up with them. The ground around the tree tore apart in unnatural fragments, like cracks spidering across a glass mirror. There was no sound, just pressure and dissociation, leaving only the ancient stone bath, the tree, the cairn of stones and a few of the other carved stones floating in nihility, with them seated in the branches staring at ‘reality’ as it now existed around them.

Deepening darkness hung like drifting veils across shattered shapes. A bit of a mountain, a piece of a black spike she dimly recognised as one of the towers from a mountain above… walls, towers, parts of a city, parts of other buildings, ruins of villages… the other circles of stones. Bit by bit they faded out, until only the tree and the contents of their hill were visible amid a pitch-black void. Dimly, she got a glimpse of another world through the veil. Remnants anchored to each other in precarious, improbable ways, buried in—

There was a gut-wrenching sense of spatial obliviation all around them.

She screamed, soundlessly, holding onto Arai for dear life. In her mind’s eye, the symbol was now resonating with every fibre of her being, even as she realised, to her ever deepening terror that the tree itself was starting to scatter as well. In the instant before the tree itself faded away, everything seemed to slide out of every direction at once—

—she blinked, staring around at their surroundings in mute confusion, her scream strangled by inarticulate shock.

“Uh….” Arai exclaimed blankly.

They were both still sitting in the branches of the tree, on a hill, looking out at the valley that was once again populated by smoking ruins. Above them, the school rose in the near distance, wreathed in mist and low cloud.

They stared in stunned silence for a small eternity, unwilling to drop off the tree…

A bird chirped somewhere nearby.

A leaf fell off the tree onto her head.

Reality remained resolutely intact.

“OH COME ON!” she screamed, finally giving voice to the building frustration that was now a white-hot fire in the core of her very being.

“What beneath the fates do we have to survive to actually get OUT OF THIS FATE-CURSED PLACE?”

Her yell echoed around the forest vale they were in, disturbing a bunch of birds from the treetops, but elicited no other response from the once again stable landscape.