> What terror the new day brings, we knew it not, having crawled out of that dark place, thinking that the war between the faith of our forebears and the faith of our rulers was the worst that this land could deliver us to.

>

> We endured the war between the Isla and the Eternal City. We survived the devastating return of those demons of the old world, the slave race of orcs, made by heretic sorcerers pretending to be gods in a bygone age. We overcame, through great tribulation, the curses of our own dark past, our hero Laurentius sealing away the defiled prophetess Cornelia, who even death had turned his face away from, such were the depths of her depravity. We repelled the assault of the Hibric Queens, our heroes even casting down two of their whore queens, Macha and Fea, forever sealing away the dark strength of their dread Phantom Queen.

>

> Why then, are we blighted so? To have been delivered from that era, to see a new dawn rise… and to find that those who brought it, blazing suns on their banners, are the synthesis of every dark thing we have yet encountered?

>

> Six duchies, six curses, six ruins we hope come to them whom we welcomed in, gave succour to, gave blood and stone to, and who, now that they have grown with our endeavour, have done as some base orc or debauched elf and wage only war, sending us to die on foreign shores while our daughters are made the playthings of their nobles and our livelihoods provide only gold to bring death.

>

> Had I not ventured to Solaneum myself, seen the seal, seen where poor, proud, noble Laurentius fell to deny her, Cornelia and the Darkness of Neron who she was besotted by, I would believe her living still, just as that witch Asuraerleth, corrupted Saintess that she is, still does, and that she was the root of all our evils still.

>

> Oh, Lord, your servants call out to you. Pray do not deny us. Answer us. Show us light in this darkness.

~Prayer to The Herald of Solace, first penned by Epikadrus, Archon of Jeris

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~ CHAPTER 100: HAN SHU – THRONE OF EXTINCTION~

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Like that, studying those tales and poems, time passed interminably. Dozens of ‘days’ of him studying texts, eating a meal, exercising and so on played out in that gloomy place, in an ever more fractionally distracting ‘game’ between him and the various things trying to draw him back, but the longer he dwelt on those texts, strangely, the less pull that those moments had.

He was poring over one such story: a tale of a woman with the gift of foresight, who was cursed to never be believed, and who was captured in that war for a great hegemonic city, when he was suddenly aware of a faint shift… in the space.

“…”

“What was that?” he frowned, looking up to find Origin was standing, staring at something in the middle distance he couldn’t…

“This is why you don’t meddle,” she sighed suddenly, walking over to stand beside him.

“What is…?” he frowned, because the sense of creeping shadow was getting ever more pronounced.

“Do not leave my side,” Origin said with a sideways look at him.

The world around them twisted, and he found he was standing, somewhat like a ghost, in the darkness, grass beneath his feet. The hall was still there, but vague and transient, but throughout it, was now the outside world — rocks, trees, grass… and people.

“This… is an abomination. It seems I must make good on my promise to you far sooner than I would have liked.”

{Sister, get out here.}

Before he could ask what she meant, or what promise, specifically, she was referring to, her words sank through the world, and Divide was also sitting there.

“What is it? I was just on my… oh,” Divide trailed off, looking around.

“We have run out of time. I hope you hauled those others up?” Origin said.

“We were on our way back,” Divide sighed. “It’s not that easy to wander as you like out there, you know?”

The other two, who clearly couldn’t see him, were both familiar: Cang Di and the woman who had used the mirror which had broken to try and ‘divine’ him.

“Wassup,” Divide, who was sitting on the rock, greeted the pair, which was sort of weird to see and gave him a very unpleasant sense of double vision, before she looked back up at the sky. “Is this another one? What are they, taxmen?”

“It is also the source of our damn leak,” Origin scowled.

“Should he really be out here?” Divide looked back at him, while also somehow speaking to the other pair.

“No… but it’s better than the alternative,” Origin said a bit tartly.

Above them, the vast tribulation gyre, which was to him no more than a vast, ominous haze through the misty unreality of the moment, was still surging upwards. It was already well advanced, from what little he could see… however…

“Whose—?”

A version of Divide put a finger to his lips, the misty grasslands bending around them slightly in a way that made his head hurt, shutting him up.

“Say nothing, do nothing, stand there silently, watch,” Divide said simply.

He could only nod, as the vast tribulation twisted upwards and then…

“The Heavenly Kong!” the woman with Cang Di blurted out, as the vast sky above formed into a shadowy hall, a terrible emperor seated at its head, dark elders bowing to it and saluting, holding what looked like strange scroll-like things.

Parts of it wavered in and out of his perception bizarrely. The seat was very real, the figure on it misty and indistinct, except for the face and the various regalia on the emperor. Similarly, the elders were fuzzy, seeming unreal or represented in mirage-like forms, yet at the heart of each one was a shining star that seemed to draw the eye. Above it, the hall itself was fading in and out of reality, the shadows cast by its occupants unnatural and… hungry.

A very familiar darkness, that spoke to him of those dark shadows falling, or rising from the abyss, long lizard-like heads, dark, devouring eyes…

“The Sar’Katus—”

“SUBMIT!”

The word, spoken by the emperor was not aimed at him, but at the whole world and everything encapsulated within the tribulation. It drew out the link, forcibly grasped his darkness, tried to push it at him, turn him back to it, to make him bow to it, acknowledge it… In that instant, he was aware, again, of his other body as the seal within it surged, trying to capitalize on some unseen link… while there was a cold, cruel pain in his chest that was trying to twist itself out of him.

As he looked on, the Emperor reached down and grasped something, a shining golden flower, familiar both as the one that he had seen Origin grasp… and also on the statue, while the person undergoing the tribulation was…

“J-Juni?” he stared blankly at her, even as the space around them twisted such that the scene was undeniable…

Undeniable…

Undeniable…

The words stuck like static in his mind, his awareness broken, as grasping hands bled out of his body, trying to drag him back to his…

“Sisters…”

Cetana appeared, like a ghost out of the darkness, three vaguely felt phantasmal forms appearing in the hall.

“Ah… you’re here as well, good,” Origin scowled, looking at her… and the three beyond her?

“Is that… the Envoy in Yellow?” Cetana asked, staring at the hall blankly. “Is this actually your garbage that crawled out of the pit, big sister?”

Origin shot her an uncharacteristically dark look. “It does appear that that evil has indeed found a way.”

“How?” Cetana frowned.

“I wonder as well. I thought you cut away that blight?” Origin said, turning to Divide.

“I did,” Divide’s tone was almost sulky and pouting as she idly twirled a curl of her hair between her fingers. “Perhaps this is unintentional?”

All three of them glanced at him…

“Wait… the black lightning, Juni said she was free of whatever touched us in… the…”

A shadow rose out of the void…

A Sar’Katush, its arms breaking through the mist, became terrifyingly corporeal as it reached for him, maw…

Divide stepped off her rock, vanishing from that place and dragging them into the unreality between where they were, looming over, grasping it by its arms, tearing it apart and leaving its broken form scattered into the firmament.

Around him, he was vaguely aware of other Sar’Katush sliding disturbingly out of the nihility between, grasping for Cang Di, for the other woman…

By the time he was able to focus again, Cetana had already slain one, while a new arrival, a girl wearing a mask, swirled out of the thin mist, flowing into another Sar’Katush and bloodily destroying it.

Gasping, he tried to stand, but found he had no real strength to do so as, unseen, the cold, clawing sensation was still there, trying to drag him back to his body directly, whispering now, obscuring everything, blurring his perception of reality in some strange way.

“Oh come on!” he thought that was Divide.

He felt hands pulling him up, his awareness of his surroundings filtering back, even as the bitter taste of being utterly helpless in these circumstances twisted his stomach. The hands holding him were cool, pleasant even. There was a sense of gentleness and drifting… calm. The ills of the world fading away…

“Shall we deal with this before it gets out of hand?” Cetana’s voice echoed in his ears.

“Yes,” Origin sounded rather annoyed as she agreed.

Reality returned like a slap in the face, even as he felt the stone floor again.

“Fucking squid-humpers!” Divide’s cursing fully brought him back to the moment, to find all six standing in the throne.

“You know this is very irregular,” one of those holding him said.

“…”

There was a sense of crushing foreboding, and then Origin, Divide, Cetana and one of the new arrivals vanished, leaving him standing beside the final two who had arrived with Cetana.

“Um… thank you for saving me,” he bowed to them.

“…”

Both of them stared at him for a long moment, then just went and sat down on the couch and the chair. Compared to Origin, Cetana and Divide, they were almost hazy, their robes obscuring much of their appearance.

“I am Han Shu,” he introduced himself politely, still trying to ignore the phantom chill that was slowly fading away at last.

The pair simply continued to consider him, like he were some exotic house pet or weird mushroom, so in the end, all he could do was go sit down himself, looking about warily for the black cracks, and worry about…

With a grimace, he crushed that thought—

One of the women stood before him, her beautiful face framed by tumbling dark hair, her eyes like shadows that held far too much life experience for any one person, his chin cupped in her hands.

“It seems she was not exaggerating. This isn’t simply on a level of being a superficial problem, is it?” the woman seated by on the couch mused.

“Mmm… I guess,” the woman standing there, keeping the shadows at bay around them both, murmured.

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~ TENG CHUNHUA – SWAMP SWAMP ~

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“Where, by the inauspicious fates, did I go wrong in life?”

Teng Chunhua lay drifting in the water, staring at both the dawn sky with its slowly dissipating dark clouds and her own inner condition… as she watched her foundation stabilize and tried to decide if her circumstances were a trauma or a blessing.

The scholarly council was somewhat out on it… because, on the one hand, she was now a Dao Seeking cultivator – firmly a Dao Seeking cultivator – with her own ‘Principle’, born of the unity of all the things that made up her path to this point… and a healthy dose of anger at the last day or two to top it off.

Her Qi Sea and Sea of Knowledge had been fully fused through her Nascent Soul under the brutal bombardment and desperate exertions of the shared tribulation, something which would have overjoyed her to achieve mere days, never mind weeks ago… and been seen as no more than a childish daydream months ago.

However, that was not even the half of it.

-I actually severed a mortal chain… or three.

She was sure that Juni had not realised the implications of what she was doing when she did it, at least not as it pertained to her and Lin Ling. Their breakthrough had been walking the line of a form of ‘Dual Cultivation’ or maybe even triple cultivation… if that was even a thing.

It was, she supposed, a fairly obscure bit of lore. People who severed a so-called ‘mortal chain’, a thread of the ties that their world’s fate held on them, before Immortal tribulation were usually only talked of in tales, or some far-relayed story of a prestigious scion of a great sect. She had only learned about that uncommon facet of ‘Dual Cultivation’ and its effect on ‘mortal chain’ severing when randomly browsing texts in the Teng School’s scripture library in the long days of tedium studying for her seven-star grade examination when she had been temporarily granted that more comprehensive access. The records had been frustratingly vague on the details, she recalled, but they did mention something about dual cultivation connecting people’s fates in some respects, mostly with regard to tribulations and incurring implication. Usually that was not a helpful thing, but severing mortal chains was an exception, the records noted.

-What would have happened if Lin Ling called down an Immortal Gate?

She stared at the pale, purple sky, trying to banish that terrifying thought – the recursions had been bad enough…

She was pretty sure she could write a serious treatise about the physique refinement experience if she really wanted to, however, this experience had been… traumatic.

Belatedly, she found she didn’t have words fit to carry the experience of it. Stepping back through the hell of her own circumstance thrice over. Fighting through nearly 20 years of desperate moments – except maybe just existential screaming into the void.

A disturbingly large number of those had been since the start of this trial as well, though she suspected that that was somewhat down to the nature of whatever had gone wrong with the tribulation. It had seemed very determined to draw out the absolute worst of her experiences associated with this place and break her with them.

-And somehow we did all that, while keeping that fates-accursed legless scaled rat involved.

Groaning, she curled up and searched for the bottom, which was about a metre below her, and found her footing, looking around for Lin Ling.

The younger woman was sitting nearby, sitting on the water, recovering from her own injuries, qi from the hydra still swirling around her. The silver fire arriving from two tribulations had pretty much done it for. The cores remained, but its consciousness was thoroughly scattered…

She was still trying to untangle the last bit in her head as it was because there had been her own hall, which had involved an Empress—

Involuntarily she shuddered, recalling that figure, a terrifying, regal and distant being…

—and a hint of Juni’s hall, which had seemed to feature the golden flowers, the two merging through each other disturbingly, linked to the hall of that cruel emperor wearing the colours of the Kong clan… and that shadow hall…

-What would have happened if I failed? Would Juni have failed as well?

Just thinking about it gave her a terrible headache.

Inhaling, she pushed out her new principle and started to use it to draw in some of the excess qi rolling off Lin Ling, focusing on the shattered soul power.

‘Western Chimes True Principle’.

Its name was… Well it wasn’t a puzzle, because she had successfully created it and it was the synthesis of ‘her’ attainments to this point. She had just expected it to be… more involved, truthfully. There was a sort of post-creation simplicity to it that unnerved her, right down to the name, which had just sort of emerged with it: ‘Western’ due to the connection with Luan and the Queen Mother, and ‘Chimes’ – because of the parasol tree?

-Do their ‘names’ just form, a bit like the physique’s one did, guided by my subconscious or something?

That was certainly the impression she got, but at the same time it left her oddly vexed, because there was an instinctuality to it that was a trifle… disconcerting, and rather at odds with how her understandings of what spiritual cultivation should be…

Still, it was impossible not to marvel at how… unified her principle, body and soul were in all the various aspects of her cultivation now.

It was hard to call them ‘various’ now, though. She was almost certain she had reached a point with her Physical Cultivation where she didn’t even know what the realm was called. The one above Mortal Boundary, a realm no one in her family had ever reached.

Her Mantra was etched into her body and the Physique so thoroughly she had no idea what to term it. She barely needed to nudge it directly now that it was so closely tied to her qi and soul and principle.

In truth, the more she considered her situation, the more she found herself turning to another, much more sparsely used term compared to ‘Dao Seeking’: ‘Quasi-Immortal’ – because just like Lin Ling, her intuition told her that getting an Immortal Gate to descend was just a matter of time.

Off to her right, it was easy to find Juni. She was standing, completely naked, waist-deep in the water, surrounded by a small sea of pale cream, red and yellow lotus flowers…

-And somehow Juni has surpassed us both, maybe…

That was the other slightly terrifying thing: Juni gave her a sense of pressure now, that she didn’t get, even from Lin Ling.

“Never again,” Lin Ling said exhaling, looking around.

“No argument there,” Juni muttered.

“This was your insane idea!” she pointed out, looking around for the others now.

“Believe me when I say I got to see that very clearly, through ever-recurring perspective several times more than I care to recall,” Juni shuddered, running a hand through her sodden hair.

“Yeah… However, I still don’t quite grasp what the hell happened,” Lin Ling sighed. “Well, the fundamentals of it are clear: something or someone tried to screw with this tribulation, like they did mine… but what was their goal?”

“To subvert my Golden Core,” Juni grimaced.

“They also tried to claim my physique, I think…” she agreed.

That bit was still hazy in her memory, mostly because she had been swept up in Juni’s problems and the recursion, but that had been the overwhelming sense, that someone or something was trying to grasp some essence of her and tie a very horrible thread through her that would have made her a living puppet of some kind.

“Except they screwed up,” Juni said bitterly. “They tried to drag me back to that moment… in the denial tribulation – with Di Ji in the stairwell.”

“Oh,” Lin Ling’s face went flat.

“Yes, quite. But they didn’t get Di Ji,” Juni grimaced. “They got the lizards… or more exactly, the thing that claimed the lizards.”

“…”

She rubbed her temples, because the denial tribulation had been deviantly abnormal, there was no doubt about that.

“You mean the four-armed things with five eyes that were…” she shuddered.

“Oh…” Lin Ling murmured with a weird expression. “I hope it ate them whole and didn’t spit out their bones.”

“What exactly was that?”

“You know how there have always been stories about the dark being, hungry, down below?” Lin Ling said sourly. “Well, let me show you something…”

She accepted the thread of soul sense, reckoning she had better know what just tried to do them all in. It was oddly muted and strongly caged in yang qi, she noted. Pushing a thread of her own soul sense into the image, she—

‘The creature stood there in the void, its 4 arms hanging. It was like a puppet, floating on invisible strings, and behind it was a maw that wanted to devour everything about her…

She tried to move, yet couldn’t…

Someone grabbed her and they tumbled through a dark doorway.

Someone was dragging her now… and Han Shu… insistently cursing – Juni, she thought…

Just as the grasping lizard claw with 4 arms reached for her face, they stumbled again and the darkness swallowed them up…’

—Gasping, she realised her body was wreathed in cold sweat, her qi faintly turbulent.

“What was that?” she hissed, horrified.

Even though the memory had been thoroughly sealed, barely more than a shadow portrait, it was at the level of a terrifying soul attack. Something like that, if it was weaponised…

Suddenly, she recalled the sight of Sheng Zhao, a Dao Seeking cultivator, screaming, being held by Juni, who had only been at Qi Refinement – She used that and mantra manifestation?

“Something that lurks down there, or is sealed there in the darkness somehow,” Juni said softly. “I saw the real thing. I think the thing we saw the second time – what Ling just showed you – was a shard of it. The real thing was… I only escaped because of the nature of the anomalies down there, and the shadow stayed with me far too long…”

“Will it not cause a problem, showing it like that?” she asked, worried now.

“No…” Juni shook her head, an odd look on her face. “At least not like that.”

Shaking her head, she wished there was something to sit down on… because that had been unpleasant.

“Anyway, it’s all in the past. We survived it… miraculously,” Juni said a bit more decisively.

Lin Ling nodded. “I agree. In any case, I’ll go get the others.”

Juni looking around at the ruin of the fort and the river that had overwhelmed it, nodded in agreement. “Probably not a bad idea.”

She also nodded, watching Lin Ling vanish off in the direction of the hall. Sending out her soul sense told her that they were still alive, but the sense of turbulence in their surroundings was such that it was a struggle to push it to the other side of the square…

Both trailed off at the same time she felt the strange, profound sense of ‘settling’ encompass everything.

The rippling water around them seemed to still.

The dawn-tinted clouds above, drifted.

The purple-blue of the sky intensified.

The grass reeds in the flooded marshland swayed.

Shadows cast by the buildings deepened.

Throughout all of it, a strange sense of out-of-place… pressure – focused on her, like a distant lingering eye – which she had never noticed up to that point, because, she realised, it had always been with her, even in Eastern Azure, disappeared, notable only to her awareness suddenly, for its vanishing.

“Did you just feel that?” she asked, staring up at the epicentre of the tribulation and trying not to sound too nervous now.

“Yes—” Juni confirmed, her eyes narrowed now.

The aspects of her own principle that related to the harmony of the world were telling her some deeply unsettling things by ‘omission’ as well…

-Just what kind of interference was there with that tribulation…?

“Is this the backlash finally manifesting somehow?” she realised she had asked that out loud. “It’s like prying eyes vanished…”

“Eyes… Eyes…” Juni pondered, staring back up at the sky. “It’s related to ‘Fate’ somehow…”

“Like those strange shadows during…” she trailed off as Juni beat her to it.

“Like fate severing, but much more profound?” she murmured at last.

Closing her eyes, she focused on the feeling, trying to get the measure of what had been done. Even though everything was back to normal now, even the memory of those shadows made her skin crawl. There had been such a prejudicial, dismissive, belittling greed to them.

“Yeah. It is the same,” Juni agreed, looking rather unnerved. “Seems to be related to the passing of the tribulation, according to my divination art. Though I can barely… it was so fleeting.”

Fleeting was an excellent way to describe it, she thought, looking around at their surroundings. Already the sense of it was nothing more than a slightly otherworldly memory. Without the experience of fate severing, she would never even have recognised it.

“Well, given we succeeded, there should have been some kind of backlash on whoever did this, then I want to just throw this in and go home now.” she muttered, unable to bring herself to consider the idea of ‘justice beneath heaven’ at this point.

They stared at the sky for a long moment then Juni shook herself.

“Perhaps Lin Ling can say more,” she guessed at last.

“Maybe…” Juni nodded, still staring at the sky.

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~ KAI MANSHU – RUINS OF THE FORT, WONDERING HOW THEY ARE STILL ALIVE ~

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“Where did I go wrong in life?”

“At a guess? When we won a special prize by not becoming slaves?” Feiwu Shen grimaced, pushing himself up out of the rubble strewn water.

Qing Yao, staring up at the now ceiling-less roof of the hall they were in, didn’t comment, and instead helped Wei Chu up.

“Smart answer,” he grimaced, checking himself over.

The array that they had set them up with was… terrifying. Also deeply impressive, both in how remarkable it was at what it had done and how he was sure it was the main reason they were still alive. That and the fact that the two bolts that had landed nearby had disintegrated more of the roof than they collapsed. Even now, ash was still drifting in the air.

-I know I should be pleased that we survived being basically on the doorstep of that terrifying… whatever it was, but it’s really unnerving, he mumbled inwardly.

“By honoured Mother of Sky, we survive,” Naakai, the older Ur’Inan, murmured, also staring up at the dawn light shining through the ruin of the roof, the moon still hanging eerily above the horizon.

“Is it over?” Wei Chu mumbled.

“What exactly happened?” Feiwu Shen asked.

“Do any of us look like we know more than you?” Qing Yao sniffed, looking around as well.

Standing up, he relinquished his part of the array, which had continued to be effective after a certain point, even without them actually maintaining positions. Merely being linked to it with qi had been enough…

Sitting down on a stone block, he exhaled again, and checked his condition. He had not broken through, thankfully… but having already been at Quasi-Immortal, his foundation had taken a notable step forward…

Exhaling, he stared at the sky.

“My… My attunement is…” Qing Yao muttered, staring at her hands.

“Same,” he agreed, noting that Feiwu Shen and Wei Chu were also nodding.

Nearly all the qi in his body had been devoted to refining what came through the link from Senior Ling and the result there was quite terrifying in its own way as well.

“I’ve made more progress in five days with my cultivation than I have in the last year…” Qing Yao said dully.

He wasn’t quite as extreme, but he suspected he was a fair bit older than Qing Yao, so had more reasonable expectations of progress before the Immortal threshold. Even so, he could see the shades of her Principle in her qi much more clearly than before.

Wei Chu’s progress was even more remarkable: she was nearly at Severing Origins, while Feiwu Shen now had a faint pressure to his qi that showed he had also made some steps towards Dao Seeking…

-What would have happened if we had a tribulation of our own during this? a worried voice wondered in his head, before he could kick it into the darkness. Died without corpses probably… assuming it was even possible for us to incur them when linked to that array?

Again, he found himself touching his chest where the array symbol was almost burned at this point, such was the intensity of qi that had flowed through it, into him.

Abruptly, there was a faint, if deeply profound sense of a ‘shift’ in the world, like everything ‘settling’ subtly.

The swirling water all around them stilled.

Shadows in the hall shifted, strangely, he realised, his heart skipping a beat—

The dawn-tinted clouds, the last remnants of the vanishing tribulation, drifted above, their colours deepening…

The grass reeds visible through the fissures in the wall swayed.

Within it, he was suddenly struck by a disconcerting oddness, like a faint weight within the world he had never noticed before, because, he realised, it had always accompanied him, only becoming noticeable through its abrupt vanishing.

“What was—?” his exclamation went unfinished, as everyone else was also staring around uneasily.

“—That?” Qing Yao finished for him, staring around her with a worried look.

“What just…?” Feiwu’s expression was thoroughly confused.

“Uhh…” Wei Chu also looked confused.

The other three all stared at him, with perplexed faces, because almost as soon as it was registered, it was gone, as if it never was, only that lingering awareness of ‘something’ having vanished remaining, and even it was curiously intangible.

“The price for poking things that shouldn’t be, I suspect,” Senior Ling’s voice cut through his reverie.

Looking around, he found her standing in the entrance to the hall, dressed in a loose smock, of the style many of the Ur’Vash had been wearing when they were captured.

“I see you’re all alive,” she added, looking around at the damage.

“Somehow…” Naakos muttered. “You have big momentum. Very big.”

“You can blame Juni for that… and the bastards who messed with the tribulation,” Senior Ling said with a half scowl.

“M-m-messed with?” Feiwu Shen nearly sat down again.

“You thought tribulations get like that normally?” Senior Ling asked a trifle dubiously.

“…”

When she put it like that, it was somewhat obvious…

“Is that what that… was?” Qing Yao asked at last.

“Senior Juni succeeded?” he asked.

“She did,” Senior Ling nodded.

“Who would dare mess with a tribulation?” Wei Chu mumbled.

“New to cultivation, are you?” Senior Ling muttered. “Not seen the Jade Gate Court, have you?”

“Jade Gate?” Feiwu Shen reiterated dully.

Senior Ling just shook her head and waved for them to follow her.

-Does she have some kind of grudge with them? he wondered, glancing at the others. Qing Yao looked pensive, but just shrugged when he caught her eye. And yet, that hall, and that strangeness…

He shook his head, banishing that thought…

“Anyway… it’s beyond our means to worry about it,” Senior Ling said with a grimace, “and the longer we stay here, the more we are tempting falling masonry upon our heads. That would be a very sad way to go, having survived to this point!”

That got some nervous laughs from the Ur’Inan, and he had to concede it made him smile as well.

“Yes, it would,” Qing Yao agreed, wrapping an arm around Wei Chu, who was still pale and shaking, though as much, he suspected, so she would not look quite so nervous in comparison.

-A shame I can’t do the same with Feiwu, though it would look amusing, he though gloomily, putting his hands behind his back so their shaking would not be quite so evident.

Senior Ling’s strength had taken a notable step upwards – or recovered – it was hard to say which. She was certainly a Quasi-Immortal, just like he was; however, when stood next to her, he was almost embarrassed to call himself such. She hid her principle well, but there was a sort of allure, subtle and mesmerising, that drew you in in a thousand little ways, like she was a walking demonstration of utmost confidence and forthrightness.

-Some sect elders could take notes from her, he thought with another inward shudder, following her out.

The courtyard outside was now a lake. He had expected that given how the hall, a metre above it, was half flooded as well… but the degree of outward devastation was almost mesmerising as he stared around. The fort itself looked like it had melted somewhat, its walls and towers still standing, but everything smoothed off and just a touch glassy.

-Not melted, he corrected after a moment’s consideration, eroded.

“They survived,” he turned to see the other two disciples and for a moment felt his mouth go dry, as he was unable to formulate coherent thoughts.

“…”

The one who had spoken was Teng Chunhua, who had also advanced to Quasi-Immortal, and who was now, if not as strong as Senior Ling, nearly exuding the same kind of effortless prestige. However, the one that made him wonder if he was just a failure at cultivation was Senior Juni, who was standing nearby, staring at the sky, wearing a similar loose gown to the others. The force of presence that reflected back at him when he looked at her was truly humbling.

-Is that actually the foundation of a Quasi-Immortal?

“Congratulations, on your advancement!” Qing Yao saluted deeply, as did Wei Chu, though both sounded a trifle strangled.

-Is this the difference between us and a disciple from a true hegemonic sect? If ever I needed confirmation that not all foundations are created equal, these three are it…

“Please,” Juni waved a hand, actually looking a bit awkward. “Because of me, you were nearly implicated. I can only apologise.”

“Uh…”

“We all made gains,” he managed to say, bowing as well. “Congratulations on turning misfortune into fortune.”

Juni stared at him for a moment, then laughed and for a moment he had to focus inwards, because the force of her principle, and the allure of her presence, was such that he nearly sat down.

“…”

Wei Chu actually did. Even the Ur’Inan looked taken aback.

Exhaling, he composed himself, to find that she had gotten her aura back under control.

“Sorry… it was just that your words are oddly fitting,” Juni said with a light sigh that…

He had to look away again, because he was sure she was not doing it deliberately, but her presence was… oppressive. She had already been beautiful, but somehow, now, that natural beauty was almost hypnotic. There was a harmony to everything about her that was intoxicating…

-Get. A. Grip!

He forced himself to focus inwards, suddenly very glad his attunement to this place had taken a solid leap forward. Without it, he would have been a glassy-eyed idiot at this point, he was sure. Feiwu was looking a bit dazed, and Wei Chu might as well have had stars in her eyes, it was unnerving to see.

-And when you put all three together…

Chunhua coughed, a trifle awkwardly, and the oppressive inability to focus lessened noticeably.

“So, what now?” Teng Chunhua asked, eyeing them and the Ur’Inan.

“Well, we made a huge impression on the local landscape, so if anyone doesn’t know where we are, they are probably dead,” Senior Ling observed. “Ideally though, we finish off these accursed cores while their soul strength is still splintered.”

“… I guess it is what it is,” Juni said after a short pause.

“Here, or somewhere else?” Chunhua added, looking around pensively.

“Well, here is already permeated with its qi and we can’t go far enough away for it to matter, so I guess we just finish that off here,” Ling mused, glancing at them. “It’s much more amenable to being refined by others now in any case.”

“Uh… some of us are fairly close to tribulations,” Qing Yao pointed out.

“You are actually turning down free qi?” Senior Ling said with a light laugh.

“Ummm…” Qing Yao looked embarrassed and shook her head. “We just thought you should know, so you were not inconvenienced.”

“…”

“Shouldn’t be a problem,” Juni said after a moment’s contemplation.

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

~ KUN JUNI – SWAMPED SWAMP FORT ~

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

Watching the four rather dazed cultivators, Juni wasn’t sure if she should fall into hysterics, or weep in a corner, because if she had had any lingering doubts about the magnitude of her gains, their reactions had swept them all away.

Her principle was…

Actually, she was rather unnerved, because it was exceeding her expectations in every category, to the point where it was almost hard to control. It didn’t help that she was still trying to unravel the mirage-like remnants of that strange occurrence with it…

It had almost felt like what she had done with her spirit root and ‘Good Fortune’, but even now, it slipped away like fog and resolutely refused to be engaged by ‘Bright Heart Shifting Steps’.

Sighing, she stopped trying to divine it and focused more concertedly on trying to control how her principle interacted with the world around her and everyone else.

-I can see why Ling had such issues with hers when she founded it so suddenly… and Chunhua is in the same boat as me. It’s possibly a crime to be standing near these four right now, even if the misunderstanding of our origins is being wilfully led on by Lin Ling at this point.

Focusing again on her ‘Kun Lotus’ principle along with ‘Bright Heart Shifting Steps’, she turned it away from thinking about the strange occurrence and towards the question of the cores and whether refining them here was a good idea.

The result was odd… and a bit ambiguous, but didn’t hint at any immediate problems.

The matter of specifically where to refine the rest of the qi took some consideration, mainly because the entire fort was flooded at the ground level and the water was continuing to rise. The source was unclear, but her guess was that it had something to do with the more… inexplicable aspects of the tribulation.

-Like Quazam…

That was still preying on her mind as she checked the ‘prisoners’ who had been sealed into another of the halls. Most of them were unconscious or stunned. The isolation formation on their containment was fairly robust, fuelled as it was by Lin Ling’s yang blood and the strange moon rune like symbols.

“Praise Quazam… Great Mother to the Masters…” she murmured the phrase, homily, prayer… whatever it was, thinking about the cadence.

It was hard to be sure, given she had no inclination to poke around… but the things that had been said by the creatures in the shadow hall lingered still in her head.

-Did they really plot all that from our encounter in the depths?

It was… concerning, and her divination arts gave her no peace of mind there either.

-And are we really done with them?

-Is that also part of whatever just transpired?

‘Bright Heart Shifting Steps’ gave her no inclination there either, one way or the other, which she wasn’t sure was a good or a bad thing. She had thought herself free of that shadowy, unspeakable horror back when she lost her old spiritual cultivation, and perhaps she had been, she supposed, given the nature of its re-emergence.

Thinking of that, she turned to look south-east. That had been the direction that their misfortune came from—

“What’s bothering you?” Chunhua had come over to stand beside her.

“Just wondering about that hellish experience,” she said with a grimace.

“You and me both,” Chunhua muttered. “Though it seems we are bound to each other at this point.”

“Is that a particular problem?” she asked with an eye roll.

“I have been wondering where my life went horribly wrong,” Chunhua said with a wan smile, “but at the same time, the situation I am in now is not something I could have imagined a month ago.”

“I’ve told myself that about once a day since we got caught up in this mess,” she replied, shaking her head with a wry smile.

“Only?” Chunhua said with an eye roll.

“Fair, I suppose,” she agreed. “The interference came from the south-east… but it was weird. That is what I was thinking about.”

“It came twice…” Chunhua mused.

“Twice?” she thought about that, then nodded. “It tried to really concertedly grasp my potential, my spirit root, everything actually, as soon as I hit Fate Tribulation for Soul Foundation.”

“And you didn’t have a tribulation for Core Formation,” Chunhua nodded. “Something tried, very briefly, to mess with my physique formation, I think, although I can only say that now, having seen what occurred with my Dao Seeking tribulation, truthfully.”

Looking at the river, with the reddish dawn light scattering of it, she had to admit that was likely, if rather disturbing.

-Just the act of forming a ‘Good Fortune Core’ got me targeted like that?

It made her gut twist a bit, mostly in anger, although there was a little bit of fear in there as well. What would my next tribulation be like?

“Bah!” she clapped her hands to her cheeks and then knocked her head gently off the wall, as much in annoyance at her thoughts as anything else, and to try to stop herself overthinking things…

Exhaling, she shoved those unpleasant and potentially rather unhelpful concerns at her mantra, focusing on having them turn that turmoil into something… then realised Chunhua was looking at her oddly.

“Sorry… stupid thoughts,” she said with a wry smile.

“A mantra’s best friend,” Chunhua noted with an amused giggle.

“Yeah,” she agreed.

“So, what did you come to get me for?” she asked.

“Oh, um, Ling has set up the array to allow the others to get some gains from what remains of the cores,” Chunhua replied.

“Ah—”

She froze, as a sense of absolute…

It was hard to say what it was. It was absolute everything.

Transfixed, she found herself… adrift in the moment, in some bizarre way, drawn to follow it as it washed over everything… flowing.

Above her, the dawn seemed to flow backwards, a shadow sweeping out of the sky, to the south-east, like the chill of clouds passing over, gathering at some distant, unseen point.

-It’s heading roughly in the direction I felt that the interference came from?

It was hard to say how she knew that, but intuitively, a part of her did. Above them, the night sky intensified faintly, ominously, the last, brightest of the stars picked out somehow, even as the vault of heaven dimmed—

There was a ripple, like shadow and light connecting, a distant crack in the world, the shadow like the wings of a great bird, descending from the vault of heaven, pulling the darkness with it to strike at that distant point…

Staring at the sky, she realised she was shaking, because that crack had certainly been lightning and her divination art was…

It put her in mind of the red dawn, of that strange sense of distant inauspicious doom, except this was far, far, more profound.

Above her, the first rays of sun peeked back across the sky, even as the last of that darkness faded, second by second, to purple, then to blue-ish red… and dawn returned, as if it had never left.

“What just…?” Chunhua was staring, pale, at the distant horizon.

“I rather suspect that whoever tried to mess with our tribulation has had a terminally bad day,” she said, aware that her voice was quavering.

“Was it some kind of bird?” Chunhua mumbled.

“Moros,” she found Lin Ling standing nearby, looking pale, her jaw clenched.

“Moros?” she asked.

“Yes, a judgement of… of a force never to be crossed,” Lin Ling’s pupils were dilated, she realised, the other girl clearly fighting the memories or some aspect of them. “It means ‘Doom’ in one of the old tongues of this land.”

Chunhua just shuddered, making her wonder what the other woman had ‘perceived’.

Looking across, she could see the others were slack-jawed and shaking. Even the Ur’Inan were looking rather disconcerted.

“What was that?” Senior’s Qing Yao asked, seeing the two of them arrive back beside them.

“Someone else having a very bad day,” she said, with a bit more levity than she felt, still unnerved by the feeling of creeping, inauspicious judgement she had felt.

“So, that was the rest of the backlash?” Kai Manshu frowned.

“Almost certainly,” she agreed, deciding to just leave the explanation at that. “You can’t mess with those kinds of forces without consequences.”

The others all nodded and didn’t press further, which was a relief, because she wasn’t sure she wanted to or even could explain whatever it was had happened with Quazam, that shrine… and the rivers.

-Not to mention, there was that other figure who interfered… or was implicated, and there was definitely a feeling that whatever the Sar’Katush did was far wider-ranging than me, she mused. Did it affect everyone who was touched by the golden flowers?

Shaking her head again, she fed the sense of uncertainty back into her mantra once more, if she could even call it just that anymore. The synergy between it, her Principle, her physique and her cultivation was… profound. Not to mention, there was what her mantra was doing in and of itself, that was far odder, because it wasn’t just turning all those emotional disturbances and her worries into a sort of reinforcement for her cultivation… or was it?

“…”

She watched what it was doing and again found herself confused. What was occurring was almost like the imbuement of ‘Intent’, but she could not really touch that ‘Intent’, even though it was part of her. It just was, and it made its presence known in lots of different, subtle ways.

“You look spaced out,” Chunhua muttered.

“And you are not?” she shot back.

“Fair,” Chunhua agreed with an eye roll.

“I guess I am just slightly overwhelmed,” she sat down on the ruined wall, which had fallen off the top of the building behind them and looked around at the flooded fort.

Inhaling, she drew in a bit more of the qi, and considered how it flowed around her body. The three sets of meridian channels that were the architecture of the qi cycle in her body had nearly merged into one immense network at this point. Her Nascent Soul, sat in her dantian, mirrored this new network – her ‘soul meridians’ – while the physique symbol was the link that bound everything together, her ‘mystic meridian’ as Lin Ling had termed it.

-And then there is my spirit root…

Turning her attention back to her dantian, she considered it pensively, because her Qi Sea was nearly unrecognisable. Not only was it vast, compared to what it had been before, but it was also like a placid mirror-like lake, the vast tidal forces within it hidden, almost like an illusion within the gently shimmering vista. Her Nascent Soul, currently sat in the middle, at the focal point of the qi cycle in her body, surrounded the faint spectral ephemera of her Golden Core and spirit root.

There was a link, and she saw it, and understood it, yet it was a kind of instinctual understanding, because if she actually ‘looked’ it was rather disorientating if she tried to map it out in her own mind, as if not meant to be thought about in purely physical terms.

Her Core was sort of the link between her dantian, her body and her qi circulation and her spirit root.

Her Nascent Soul was also a link; her Sea of Knowledge merged into her dantian such that they were like mirrors of the same space, while within the soul’s opaque form she had an awareness that all her meridians, along with her bones and her mantra’s connection to them, were also reflected.

Her Physique was… everything, near as she could tell, or the ‘Kun Lotus’ symbol, much like her ‘Kun Lotus’ principle, was a synthesis of everything she was.

The last part, her Mantra, was thus, again, much like the Physique, associated with everything. The longer she stared at those two parts, the weirder and weirder it got, almost like the ‘four’ parts were in fact, two pairs: ‘Physique’ and ‘Cultivation Foundation’, ‘Nascent Soul’ and ‘Mantra’.

The talisman now sat in her Sea of Knowledge, which was the ‘dantian’ of her Nascent Soul and yet...

And yet, that was where things started to get a bit odd.

She focused on it and the talisman appeared in her dantian, in the hand of her Nascent Soul, and standing there, on that mirror-like water plain, with ghostly lotus flowers drifting in the water, she could ‘see’ it and ‘hold’ it. It couldn’t leave her body though, she noted, not that she felt she even wanted to try, such was its value.

There was a lot of extra information in the talisman now, presumably perceivable now she was a Dao Seeking cultivator.

The talisman’s explanation of the realm itself was a bit odd – there were three sort of states to it, ‘Unity Realm’ was like the back half of ‘Severing Origins’, and then when you ‘achieved’ that ‘Unity’ you formed a Principle, at which point you could be considered as being ‘Seeking Principle’… except for her. She didn’t need to seek her principle; it was already made, and that was where she now found herself with a new headache, because the ‘path’ she was now on was, in the talisman’s terms, a little different – ‘Gate Seeking’.

‘Gate Seeking’ was seeking the path to the Immortal Gate, which in terms of ‘Eastern Azure’ made her a Quasi-Immortal rather than a Dao Seeking cultivator. The difference there hinged on the possession of a principle, though it was rarely acknowledged back home. Quasi Immortals were just Dao Seeking experts who had advanced that realm to the point where Immortality was certain.

Looking at the talisman again, she could only sigh. There was a lot more there, but unpicking it would take a while. The main thing that would be immediately useful, was a text about talismans and formations that presented a few things that were remarkably like what Lin Ling had been doing with her blood, she couldn’t help but feel.

There were was also a more advanced chapter of the ‘Eighteen Lotus Earthly Palms’ which a cursory glance told her would give her some headaches… and most intriguingly, some mentions about soul-binding weapons; however, that would apparently require both a suitable weapon and for her to get some comprehensions with the talismans and formations…

There were a few different types of those, including several that helped others use a basic version of ‘Heart Shifting Steps’, either with her qi, or as a framework for their own comprehensions. There were also ones relating to attacks that synergised with the ‘Eighteen Lotus Earthly Palms’.

What was certain was that the talismans that allowed others to draw upon ‘Heart Shifting Steps’ would be undeniably helpful to everyone else when it came to refining what remained of the Hydra’s cores and getting some gains out of them.

Exhaling, she stopped trying to follow the circular headache that was her ‘dantian’ and her ‘Sea of Knowledge’, because, when viewed from either her body or her Nascent Soul, they seemed to fundamentally mirror each other… yet were somehow the same thing, with the Symbol’s ‘Mystic Meridian’ shifted through everything.

“What am I? A block of wood?” Chunhua, who was sitting nearby, sighed a bit theatrically.

“…”

She coughed awkwardly.

“Sorry,” she apologised.

“It’s fine, you were only staring into the middle distance for 30 seconds,” Chunhua giggled.

“I was distracted by how… changed… my foundation is,” she said.

“Oh, yeah… I stopped looking at it. It was making my head hurt, probably the downside of such a rapid yet intuitive advancement,” Chunhua agreed.

“It is rather like that,” she agreed. “Nothing is wrong. In fact, it’s remarkably harmonious in my case. It’s just…”

“That your intuitive understanding of what you are seeing is exceeding your personal knowledge?” Chunhua supplied.

“Yes, it’s weird,” she agreed. “It’s very… physical cultivation, I suppose?”

“I guess you could see it like that,” Chunhua agreed. “It is certainly very atypical of the regimented way in which you approach advancements under spiritual cultivation.”

“It is—”

“Are you two just going to stand there all day?” Lin Ling called up.

“Sorry,” she waved and hopped off the rock, walking across the water, which, while draining, was now possible to a degree she could never have achieved before.

The others had scattered under Lin Ling’s directions to get some suitable blocks for her array, while the Ur’Inan were watching the perimeter.

“I want to try something with you,” she said, coming over to Lin Ling.

“Uhuh?” the younger woman frowned.

“Well, there is a talisman, which should be able to radically help with qi refinement, like a simplified version of what I was doing before, that doesn’t require my continual maintenance,” she said.

“Ah,” Lin Ling nodded.

“However, before I try it on anyone else, I figured I’d see how it worked for you?”

“Fair. What do you need to do?” Ling asked.

It only took her a few minutes to sketch out the diagram and determine its limitations. The main one, as it turned out, was that it required her Intent-infused qi and was linked to her comprehensions and her Principle in ways she had not quite expected. It also required a physical medium from her body – her blood in the end – which, for a spiritual cultivator, would have posed problems but, with her foundation’s roots in physical cultivation, turned out to be surprisingly risk-free, as use of vital blood was much less harmful to her overall prospects given her recovery abilities.

Thankfully, it did appear that it would work as she had hoped and, somewhat surprisingly, seemed to have something in common with what Lashaan had done to them back before the feast.

“We also need to find something to remunerate the Ur’Inan with,” she observed, watching Lin Ling try to cycle her qi after she painted the talisman on her with her own blood.

“Yes,” Ling sighed. “Thanks to us, they have suffered quite a—”

“You two really are amusing,” she didn’t quite climb into the air at Naakai’s utterance, but it was a near thing.

“Yes, we have suffered, but to live is to endure trials. Only in death does one find final respite from their long path,” Naakai said with a rather kindly smile.

“Even so—” Naakai held up a hand and cut her off before she could really add anything.

“At this point, you can nearly be considered sworn members of our group. You have fought with us, bled with us, eaten food with us, slept beneath the same roof. Hospitality is important. These are the rituals that keep us safe in lands where all else is strange and alien.”

“It is,” she agreed, not as surprised as she might have expected that a culture like the Ur’Inan had a version of that sagacious homily. “That is why we must provide some redress.”

“…”

Naakai sighed again, and shook her head. “I do understand your desire; however, it was we who invited you to stay, we who embroiled you in the mess with Uaazar. True, if we had passed like boats in the mist, things might have differed… or perhaps they would not, and Uaazar and Azuum still plotted some ill deed by a different means. We cannot turn back the clock. We are not the gods of old, nor should we aspire to be.

“What you promised before – the formations – was eminently suitable. These kinds of things have applicability beyond their immediate function and such threads of knowledge are… rare here. However, and I will be blunt here, you three are young women, lost in a foreign land where the currents of blood and fury run far deeper than you necessarily realise. You made a dangerous enemy in Sharvasus, and I would be a poor old woman if I left you to shoulder it alone.”

“But what of the others?” she pressed.

“We looked on the way here, and perhaps the others were swept away on the other boat,” Naakai added.

“They were not with me,” she added, apologetically. “I was grasped by… Ashaal?”

“If they are lost in the swamps, they know how to get out and nobody will be looking for a few scattered Ur’Inan,” Naakai sighed. “If they are dead, then I can only say that they will be avenged, and take solace that their deaths have cost Udrasa greatly…”

She paused and stared at the sky for a moment

“Call it an old woman’s hunch, but I suspect that in sticking with you three, I am more likely to run into them than by any other means,” Naakai chuckled, turning back to her and giving her a pat on the shoulder.

“She has us there,” Lin Ling sighed.

“Indeed I do,” Naakai said with a laugh. “You are wise beyond your years, but years do still count for something…”

“If you want another avenue of redress, contribute by helping us refine the rest of this wayward mana,” Naakos grunted, walking over.

“That, we can do,” Lin Ling nodded. “Did you make any gains? Our compatriots were worried they were close to breaking through.”

“These old bones will make gains when they die,” Naakos chuckled. “However, Lashaan in particular will benefit, as will Saruuna. She was already close to the threshold of the 5th advancement.”

“Maker preserve they don’t have such momentum,” Naakos chuckled.

Kai Manshu, who had been pushing over a slab, shuddered at that and nodded vehemently.

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

~ CANG DI – EDGE OF THE RIVER LANDS ~

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

“…”

Still smarting from the sensory disruption of the bolt and its strange passage over the horizon, Cang Di could only stare after it as the dawn above them seemed to roll backwards, the stars above shining once again through the dimming vault of heaven.

There was a shift on the distant horizon, like the connection between land and sky had just skipped slightly, like shadow and light connecting, pulling the darkness with it to strike at that distant point…

“Boom!” Divide giggled, clapping her hands together and the sense of terrifying oppression vanished.

“…”

Unable to find words, he watched as the dawn rolled back, even as ‘Shatterpoint’, dissociated in his Sea of Knowledge as it was, told him in no uncertain terms that whatever had just transpired was singularly and utterly inauspicious in a way so fundamental as to practically be coming back to the point of being ‘auspicious’ again by sideways means.

Whoever it had just hit was undoubtedly in for a very bad day, especially if all talismans with high level connections to outside fate were now no longer working. He rather suspected that there was no treasure in the starfield that could resist that bolt of lightning.

“Right,” Origin said briskly.

“Um… W-what about the Great Mother’s b-blessing?” Alalia mumbled.

“Restored. It was never seized, because we severed the three primordial states of the envoy and resolved the karma of the tribulation appropriately,” she mused. “With everything having been done in the shadow of that event, nobody will have noticed anything untoward unless we wanted them to.”

“…”

Both he and Dongmei stared at her, sweating in a way that had nothing to do with the now rising humidity of the early morning.

“Well, except for those caught up in that mess to the east,” Cetana frowned.

“Hmmm…” Origin frowned. “That pair do know how to cause headaches; however, that is very minor compared to this.”

“It is still—”

Origin just cut her off with a wave of her hand. “Now that this problem is dealt with, we have our concerns to deal with.”

“…”

The fourth woman opened and shut her mouth a few times.

“Now you care?” Divide scowled faintly.

“We do have our responsibilities…” she sniffed.

“Yes, starting with making sure the roof isn’t filled with tap dancing vermin,” Divide said a bit more forcefully. “Which, if you had—”

“Enough, you two!” Origin said a bit aburptly, waving them both back to silence and turning to Cetana. “What do you think?”

“They have invoked an aspect of my power, but now that we have cut off the root of the rot, what remains is no more problematic than any number of other things here. There comes a point when we are just lifting rocks to drop them meaninglessly.”

“Quite,” Origin nodded, then looked first at the old man, who was still bowing and shivering and Alalia, who was still pale and a bit shocked.

“You,”—she pointed at Alalia—“there are some matters that need be dealt with. If you wish to make amends for your part in this silliness, you can do so by helping these two for a bit.”

“You want me to guide these mortals?” Alalia asked, rather dubiously he felt.

“Yes,” Origin said simply. “Help them, and I will perhaps reconsider a few matters pertaining to your lot’s own circumstances in here, depending on your performance.”

“…”

Alalia opened and shut her mouth a few times then nodded, seeming rather resigned.

“As for you…” Origin turned to the old man again.

“Oh great and glorious queen of all heavens—”

“…”

“Just stand, I am getting a crick in my neck looking at you,” Origin muttered.

The old man hurriedly stood, his arms barely shaking as he bowed again once he had done so.

“You are clear on your message to Lianshu?” Origin said, walking over to stand before him.

The old man nodded effusively and saluted again, very deeply.

She considered him for a moment, then tapped a figure to his forehead.

“I trust you know what that is? It won’t vanish until you fulfil all those commitments to the letter and spirit.”

“Of course, most august and revered seniors…” the old man bowed deeply, though if anything he looked even more terrified now. “Um…”

“Yes?” Origin asked, frowning.

“You said you would give this humble and unlettered miscreant a token to make Ancestral Empress—”

“Oh. Less reclusive,” Origin nodded, as if she had forgotten that.

Wordlessly, she stared up at the sky for a moment, then picked up a random rock from the ground, and started to shape it in her hands as if it were clay, moulding it into the form of a bird carrying a crescent moon in its talons, before drawing something on it and passing that to the old man.

“This will do. When you seek her out, put this in a bowl of cold water beneath the night sky and it will lead you to her.”

The old man accepted the token with bowed head and stashed it in a sleeve.

“If most esteemed and radiant goddesses require anything else from this unlettered villain, he shall move heaven and earth to intercede on your behalf…”

Origin shook her head and made a waving motion with her hand. The area around the old man wavered faintly and then he vanished as if he were never there.

“You can just send him out?” he asked dully, before realising he had spoken without any honorifics – again – in his shock.

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Qing Dongmei, while trying resolutely to look composed, was also staring.

She looked at them both like they were children and sighed. “That was just a Star Soul of that old man. His consciousness was chained to it when we caught him prying. All I did was release it and send it back through the path it entered here.”

-Star…soul?

He had expected as much, that the old man had to be a powerful expert, given the names being thrown about earlier and because he was acquainted with his own teacher somehow, but it was still an effort to keep his composure. To think that he had been in the presence of such a figure when he was basically bowing and scraping like some influence-less junior disciple caught standing on the hem of a young mistress’s veil?

-Do I just swear an oath to the Three Pure Ones at this point that I heard nothing, saw nothing and know nothing about that?

Qing Dongmei looked at him a bit wild-eyed, not that he could blame her, given the thoughts rattling around his own head.

The old man had seemed very reasonable, called them good seedlings and the like… but he was not fooled. The pair of them were nothing but dust in the eye of such an expert like that and their good treatment and ability to talk with him at all were entirely down to the awe and fear he clearly held for the four before him now.

“Um… Celestial Fairies?” he finally managed to find words to speak and didn’t squeak.

“If it is regarding that idiot, you are overthinking things,” Origin said blandly, as if she could see right through him.

It was hard to know whether to be relieved or not at that.

“His karma has enough issues without adding you two to it, so you can rest easy. However, I would show some decorum regarding his effusive praise of our glorious selves,” Divide chuckled. “Maybe wait until you are the same realm as him before badmouthing his taste in footwear and such.”

“…”

Involuntarily, he felt his left eyelid twitch slightly before he managed to get control over himself.

“Celestial fairy’s’ advice is very wise,” he muttered.

“Of course it is,” Divide almost preened.

“Right! Now that this is all dealt with, we have to actually capitalise on it.” Origin said a bit more briskly.

He opened his mouth to speak again, but before he could, Origin had actually turned back to him.

“You want to know how to get out of here?”

“…”

He could only nod, as did Dongmei.

“Hmm… I suppose I can give you some advice there,” Origin mused. “Redress your mistakes, both of you. However, as my little sister here said, do not be so hasty to wish to escape here. This land may be cruel, and its paths harsh… but there is greater fortune to be won here than most would believe, though few who have come here seeking treasures in this mausoleum to another world’s insanity would see them, understand.”

“T-thank you, celestial fairies,” he bowed, as did Dongmei, even though the advice given was a bit…

-Redress our mistakes?

Between one second and the next, all four of them were gone, leaving Alalia staring at where they had been a bit blankly.

“If you need me to spell them out, you are not as smart as I thought,” Origin’s voice echoed coolly in his mind.

“…”

Gulping, he could only assume she meant not saving Han Shu from being made a cripple, which was… probably a justified accusation, he had to acknowledge. He could have just saved Han Shu directly, although it would have put him in open hostility to the Jade Gate Court, which, in hindsight, really wasn’t worth attempting to avoid. He supposed that Qing Dongmei’s fault was similar.

“So you do have some capacity for self-acknowledgement,” Origin’s voice mused.

-Celestial Senior…

“Han Shu was someone who I had an attachment to. You are not so inexperienced as to fail to understand my point, are you?” she added. “As for your friend, her damn mirror contributed significantly.”

-Oh…

“You can also make yourself useful by getting some materials for this pendant, starting with the nearest Ur’Vash settlement and acquiring some Orichalcum…” her voice echoed in his head, as the talisman, or pendant, reappeared around his neck.

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

~ HAN SHU – THRONE OF EXTINCTION ~

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

How long he stood there, unable to look away from the slightly ethereal woman holding him, keeping the shadows at bay, he could not say. The experience was almost existentially painful, as he was unable to really focus on anything other than here, yet was still keenly aware that the black cracks were creeping ever closer…

Abruptly, there was a sense of lessening, like a creeping eye that had always been lingering on him vanished abruptly. There was still the sense of chill in his chest, but the black cracks of lightning in the world around all wavered and collapsed into shadowy sparks that danced like embers cast from a bonfire for several moments before melting away.

Before he could really ask what was going on, Origin and Cetana appeared, at which point the woman holding his attention and forcing him to stare at her, was suddenly sitting back where she had been before.

“Um… What just happened?” he asked, bowing politely to them.

“We started to rectify the problem,” Origin mused, walking over to the table and pouring herself a cup of wine.

Even as she did so, Cetana reached out and plucked a shadowy, serpentine, vine-like thread of pitch darkness out of the air, a mere hand’s width from him.

“Sneaky things…” Origin scowled, observing as Cetana yanked it hard.

There was a shivering sense of distortion and the vine exploded into a shadowy lightning bolt of a serpent that shot towards him with a final, furious and faintly desperate snarl—

Origin caught its tail somehow, and smashed it against the floor, where it shattered like glass and then melted away, bleeding colour into the world bizarrely as it did so.

“It is what they do,” Cetana shrugged. “To steal from others is a compunction, and they have no sense of rectitude.”

“Yes. Shameless people are the most annoying to deal with,” Origin sighed, leaning back on the table.

“So we are just waiting for… Divide?” Cetana frowned.

“Wait no longer, the most awesome goddess is here!” Divide’s cheery tone split the surroundings as she appeared, kneeling, and then stood, holding a white coloured stone dagger in her hands, that rippled suddenly and became a second version of her.

“Oh fucking hell!” the woman who had stopped the lightning getting to him groaned.

“THIS GODDESS IS ONCE AGAIN HER TRUE SELF!” Divide cackled.

Her twin, who was dressed in white, stared around, looking bemused. “Why is this place built like a depressed teenager's idea of what should be a temple to the chthonic powers?”

“Harmonia,” the other woman said, with an inclination of her head.

“Because these luddites don’t live here. Only we do.”

“Nope, I refuse,” Harmonia turned and half vanished, before Divide caught her.

“You want to go back?”

“Aphrodite is far better company and at least that place is a legitimate tomb, not some emotional child’s memorial to a bygone era they barely remember. There, there was at least water to bathe in and a view. This is just their second generation idea of mourning, filtered through several generations of human projection…”

“That’s unfair,” the other dark-haired woman who had appeared with them muttered, before fixing her eyes on him.

“So, you are the new houseguest.”

Her words were faint and ethereal, much like her form. Standing, he saluted the pale-skinned, dark-haired woman politely. She was dressed much as Origin was, in a dark, flowing gown, her stole pulled up as a hood. Probably, she was also a great beauty, but her overall appearance was oddly hard to discern, as if he was always just seeing her from the corner of his eye, even when she was right there in front of him, which made her rather disconcerting to look at.

“I am Han Shu, Lady…”

“You can call her Sister Impermanence,” Divide’s voice cheerfully cut through his attempt at formality, to which the new arrival just shrugged as if she didn’t much care.

“In any case, I am glad to—”

“If we are picking stupid names, I will be Flow,” she said blandly.

“…” Han Shu paused uncertainly, not knowing what to say to that.

“Well, um, pleased to meet you, Lady Flow,” he settled on at last.

Divide burst out in laughter.

Flow’s eye twitched.

“On second thought, maybe Impermanence is not so bad after all…”

“Too late! You’re keeping it!” Divide cackled.

Flow groaned.

“…”

“Boo…” Divide pouted, and ‘Harmonia’ just rolled her eyes. “In any case, I am glad you are okay. The one scowling like she just sat on a scorpion is Sufferance, and the one over there is—”

“I refuse to be called Sufferance. You can call me Duhkha,” the woman who was seated scowled.

This brought immediate giggles from all the other five spirits, even Origin, who stated that Sufferance was better, much to the apparent annoyance of ‘Sister Sufference’.

“I suppose that makes me Anata then, to keep with the theme,” the woman who had held him said.

“Bah, you lot are no fun…” Divide muttered, stalking over and drinking wine straight from the jar.

In his head at least, that all but confirming that the three, Cetana, Duhkha, Anata and… if the other one called Flow was also identified as ‘Impermanence’ that would give her some association with Annika? That meant four fundamental aspects of the Samsara were potentially personified before him, which was ever so slightly terrifying.

All three new arrivals seemed a bit… intangible, to him as well, now that he had the opportunity to actually look at them, which was possibly because their main forms were somehow otherwise occupied.

“…”

“Enough, you lot,” Origin said, a bit more forcefully. “Our guest will be overwhelmed by your joyous demeanours, and we do not want a repeat of before, do we?”

Cetana coughed awkwardly and glared at the others.

“Is it okay to leave that other little bit of carnage over to the east?” Sister Flow asked.

“Hmm…” Origin stared at her cup for a long moment, before nodding.

“It’s more than a bit…” Divide giggled.

“Regarding which, I am shocked I tell you, shocked,” Origin said, in a tone that left it very clear that she was not, although it did make him wonder who these other two were, unless it was referring to the others Divide had been sent to get?

“So, what about them?” Duhka scowled.

“Suddenly you care? Have you grown bored of talking philosophy with your fellow jail warden?” Divide smirked.

“…”

Origin didn’t say anything this time, she just put the cup down with an audible *clack*.

“Family get togethers are always the worst,” Divide stage whispered to him, having somehow appeared beside him, the white gowned clone of her now wandering around the hall looking at things. “It’s all the feminine aura in one place, nearly as bad as male hubris.”

“Enough, you.” Origin said with a sideways look.

Trying not to look as nervous as he felt, he smiled at her wanly and said nothing.

“As to the aftermath, that will just play out how it plays out. Our goal here was to evict the vermin that crept in, not worry about the vermin already here, though I have to admit, there are a remarkable number of them,” Origin went on. “Hong and Fen can have their fun. They are responsible adults…”

“Probably…” Cetana observed.

“…”

“Probably,” Origin agreed, after a moment’s reflection.

“So, anyway, shall we get on with this?” Divide said with a bright smile, waving for ‘Harmonia’ to also come back over.

“Yes, let’s,” Anata nodded.

After that, he rather abruptly found himself left to his own devices, because, having all sat down around the table, they just sat there in silence, or much more likely talking in some way that he couldn’t perceive.

In the end, he just left them to it and went to sit nearby, enjoying the feeling of not having some terrible fundamental judgement peering at him out of the darkness… hopefully.

How long their talk went on, he struggled to guess; however, eventually the other three all seemed to agree to whatever was being proposed, and after standing, walked back to three of the shadowed plinths where they vanished into shadow, as if they had never been.

“Well that was… a rather trickier sell than I’d have hoped” Divide sighed, staring after them.

“It’s sorted anyway, and we can resolve this issue,” Origin said, pouring herself a drink. “Not to mention, make this place a bit more sightly in the process. I understand the black as a statement theme is kind of built into this place, and it really does go with almost anything with enough thought… but an eternity as a mausoleum is a bit much.”

“It’s the hazards of having a group gestalt,” Cetana said blandly.

“True, the advantages do just about outweigh the atrocious choice of interior décor. But only just,” Divide said with another sigh, taking the wine jar and pouring from it, only to find it empty.

“It did serve its purpose,” Cetana said with a shrug, producing another jar from somewhere.

“Yes… Except that purpose was voided how many millions of years ago and that’s out there? And who has been stuck here for most of it?” Divide shot back sourly.

“Everyone has valid points… but we can move on now. Be happy in your victory,” Origin concluded dryly. “And our guest has been stuck here like a monkey on a rock for almost 2 months while you tried to convince those three that a redesign was better than just exterminating the source and moving on.”

He quietly decided he hadn’t heard that.

-As much as I agree with the sentiment—

The hair on the back of his neck stood up, almost at the same time that the thunderclouds slid back into focus, the black lightning clawing down…

All four looked up at the same time, and he was treated to the bizarre scene of the claw of black lightning, edged in grey, sneaking backwards into the rolling void and vanishing as the ‘tribulation’ backed out of the metaphorical room and quietly shut the ‘door’ behind it. If he had not felt the terrifying ‘Intent’ that came with the bolt, and the promise of an eternity of non-death as it dragged him back into his other body, it would have been funny, except he had, and it wasn’t.

“Um… wasn’t that fixed?” he asked, trying not to let his hands tremble too much.

“Sadly, Rome was not built in a day,” Origin mused, staring at him. “The worst of the routes the vermin took to get in have been cut off, thanks to that rather opportune alignment of people overreaching, but there are still a few bits that need to be sorted out, it seems…”

“My former body?” he guessed.

“Chief among them, yes,” Origin sighed.

“Although the main issue is still that there are so many heaven’s path practitioners running about,” Divide added. “Only time and exposure to this place will solve that.”

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~ HA YUN – AMID VALINKAR’S FIELDS ~

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The dagger and those two skeletons turned out to be just the first in a procession of finds. Exploration of the rest of the clump of shrubbery on this side of the probable field revealed close to a dozen more skeletons: adults and children, many of a similar condition, with bones that veered between dull silver-grey and matte golden-bronze. Jia Ying also found a few personal goods: a pot, a few broaches carved in the shape of flowers and bits of metal that were likely part of their clothing, and a few more utilitarian daggers and some other defensive weapons such as a normal citizens of a village might carry on their person.

“Did they die fleeing the town?” he asked at last, looking around at what was effectively a mass grave that they were sitting right in the middle of.

“It does look that way,” she nodded in agreement. “Though, equally, they could have been fleeing to it, but the former does seem more likely.”

He could only nod there, trying not to think about how they were going to divide up what was here. Quite a few of the pots had designs like he had seen in the various outposts… of which one was only half a mile away, he noted.

-Was there a road near here?

He wished he could climb up on something to look, because with the tumbled-down walls and the scrub everywhere, and the way the landscape faintly undulated, it was impossible to be sure. Unfortunately, another group of cultivators was moving in the middle distance, and the last thing they needed right now was for this haul to get noticed by someone else.

The likely reason nobody had noticed was because the feng shui of the landscape was…

“You’re an idiot,” he clapped his hands to his head. “Idiot, idiot, idiot.”

Jia Ying, who was looking at the various metal ornaments, looked over with raised eyebrows.

Looking around, thinking back on the various things he knew now, pieces clicked. He had been wondering why the skeletons had survived, for the town had been long abandoned, as best he could tell, for centuries maybe. They had likely lain here unnoticed because the harmony, the vitality of the land, was totally broken.

It wasn’t that surprising that nobody had obviously commented on the feng shui itself being off. Bai Meifen had made no mention of it and there was a chronic shortage of diviners anyway, such that only proper seniors…

He looked at her, wanly. Even with his very crude understanding, he could sense that there was a profound stability to what had been done to the land here. Eradicating the natural geomancy of an area permanently, or at least for this length of time, was a feat that probably nobody in the whole Yin Eclipse sub-continent could achieve. Maybe some of the Ha clan’s most ancient and mysterious Elders or some reclusive old freak of the Military Authority, but that was about it.

“What?” Jia Ying asked.

“This place… Someone deliberately did this, broke the alignments for some reason, didn’t they?” he said at last.

“Hmm… your intuition is pretty good to arrive at that understanding,” Jia Ying nodded. “No wonder Bai Meifen pulled you over to our side.”

“…”

He tensed, figuring she was finally going to ask him why he was here, and not out surveying for the root cause of this phenomenon, but she just shook her head and said nothing.

“So, what do we do about them?” he asked at last, gesturing to the skeletons that were lying about.

“Hmmm…” she stared at them, then at the three pots full of oddments they had gathered up and the stack of spear heads and several daggers, contemplative.

“I am sure it was around here,” a voice echoed nearby.

-Shit!

He groaned, warily peeking over the wall. A dozen cultivators in travelling robes, were standing around about 40 metres away, with one pointing vaguely in their direction.

“…”

Jia Ying looked around, then at him and looked conflicted for a moment.

“You want to go poking around after everything that’s happened today already?” another said as they started to make their way closer.

“Look, you venture nothing… and Senior Din was very interested in some of those artefacts that were presented yesterday,” the first added. “Especially that carved green stoneware that was found near here.”

“Well, I suppose there is no harm in it. Today is an auspicious day apparently, and it was already fortuitous that we got what we need off those idiots in the chaos…”

-Din, they are from the Jade Gate Court?

Looking at them, he grimaced, because they were not dressed like they were from the Jade Gate Court, in fact they were dressed like half the others out here at this point, in loose beige travelling robes with broad hats to keep the sun off and weapons openly displayed.

-We can’t fight that many cultivators… Well, I certainly can’t, he thought grimly.

His current condition was… stable, but the wound in his neck was barely healing and the trauma he had sustained was starting to take its toll elsewhere. Jia Ying was still looking rather beaten up as well, and had taken several solid blows from that Ur’Vash.

Exhaling, he looked up at the setting sun, wincing.

“Disturbing remains is rarely a good idea, but the idea of leaving this lot for the Din clan certainly doesn’t appeal,” Jia Ying muttered, clearly having drawn the same conclusions as to their origins as he had, as she rapidly starting to store skeletons away.

It was hard to disagree there, so he pulled the ring out of his satchel then grimaced and put it back, because as it was, he had no idea how if he couldn’t sense his cultivation, which was kind of embarrassing. Instead, he took a few of the spear heads and a dagger while she stored the rest away somehow. He was about to offer her the fancy dagger, when she pulled him down, because, as he realised, the trio from the main group who had come to look were barely ten metres away.

“Ah, here, this is what was described,” the lead disciple muttered, his footsteps coming ever closer. “See, this is the wall! They said it ran towards the plains…”

Wordlessly, Jia Ying took a spear blade and placed it on the wall along from here, where it might have caught the light.

He frowned at her, wondering what exactly she was doing because surely it would be better to just hide and try and sneak away?

“Ah! See?” the disciple said a moment later, their footsteps rapidly approaching.

Holding his breath, he wondered what her plan was, as they both pressed into the wall, hiding in the shadow and the scrub.

“A spear blade?” the second speaker said, sounding amused.

“Just sat out here as well…”

“Yeah… Like that’s not at all odd.”

“Well, it looks okay…”

There was a clink of metal on rock as it was lifted.

“Looks like there was some disturbance around here… You think someone else got here earlier?” the third disciple muttered.

“And left this… or ran away… possibly,” the first chuckled.

“Ai! Everyone, they want us back. Apparently the other group are done, so we are heading back…” the second called.

“Well, now that we found it, we can come back tomorrow.”

“Yeah, don’t wanna be poking around here at night…”

They listened as the footsteps receded through the dry grass.

He was about to move, when Jia Ying just shook her head very slowly, unstoring a spear blade.

Wondering what she was at, he nearly got the fright of his life, when a beige-robed disciple silently vaulted over the wall not four paces from them and grinned broadly, at which point Jia Ying arrived beside him like a ghost and cracked him hard in the side of the head, dragging his body silently down.

“Wenlao!” a voice hissed and he heard the sound of rustling vegetation—

She grabbed a rock and tossed it hard into the dry brush along the wall then pointed the other direction.

“Hey, where did Wenlao go?”

“He said he went back to check something?”

Moving in the direction she pointed, he saw Jia Ying rummaging on the body for a moment, then grab a storage ring and several pouches before following after him.

Without needing any prompting, he slid under one of the thicker shrubs and, taking as much care as he could to remain silent, retreated hurriedly.

A moment later, a second figure appeared at the wall, saw the unconscious ‘Wenlao’ and cursed.

“Fates-accursed idiot! Junpei, get over here!”

There was the sound of more crackling vegetation and a second grass-hatted cultivator dressed in the same way appeared as the first hopped onto the wall, looking around.

“Did he slip and fall?” ‘Junpei’ asked him.

“Idiot, he got hit in the head. A cultivator is hardly going to slip and fall out here,” the scouting cultivator hissed, looking around. “And they are likely not far away.”

The other looked around, at the tumbled down walls, scrub and tall grass in the late afternoon light, their ‘enthusiasm’ for trying to hunt an ambusher in this place clearly visible on their face.

“He’s breathing anyway,” Junpei observed, crouching down beside ‘Wenlao’. “We should go back after the others.”

The scouting one nodded and hopped off the wall, looking annoyed.

Crouched in the shadows of the shrubbery some ten metres away, holding his breath, Ha Yun watched them vanish back the way they came, carrying the unconscious ‘Wenlao’ and looking around very warily, with weapons drawn.

Only when they were visibly well away did he sigh softly with relief.

“That was risky,” he murmured. Grimacing, he touched the wound on his neck, which had stained the bandage red now, the blood coagulating and sticking to it.

-That will be horrible to get off if I don’t get out of this field and start to heal with my cultivation foundation, he grimaced.

“But necessary,” Jia Ying mused, “and it allowed me to learn something really useful.”

“It did?” he frowned.

“Yep,” she passed him the token, which read ‘Feather’.

“Aside from telling me that that youth is from the Four Peacocks Court and not someone I ever want to offend, what does this tell us?” he grumbled, still waiting for his heart rate to sort itself out.

“It’s a fake token,” Jia Ying smirked.

He took it, turning it over in his hands. It read ‘Wenlao Jian’ on the back and was marked with the seal of the Four Peacocks Court, looking genuine enough to him.

“I am not following?” he frowned.

“…”

She looked at him for a long moment, then took the token and shoved it in her pouch.

“It has to do with the feng shui auspice on the token. If there was qi here, it would not be so obvious, actually. I’ll explain more later in any case. Probably we don’t want to linger here.”

“Yes, it would be bad to be caught by another of those demons,” he agreed, turning that over in his head.

She paused, looking at him.

Her gaze lingered on him for long enough that he was glad he was already pale, hurt and sweating, before she moved on to looking around at the grasslands, with their slightly rugged hills, the meandering river that cut through it ahead of them, with a small settlement bridging it and the rising crag of the valley head, where their camp was then across to the other camp, visible as columns of smoke on the far side, before the cliffs on that north western side.

“Hmm… Yes,” she nodded.

With a final, lingering look at the area they had stumbled across, he followed after her as they rapidly made their way around the edges of the ancient fields, keeping low and sticking to the obscuring scrub and tumbled walls. The going was hard, and even in the late afternoon heat, it felt like he had weights on his legs by the time they finally found one of the tracks heading towards the main road out of the town.

“So, do we try to go back to the main camp?” he asked at last after they had walked slowly in silence for some ten minutes through the broken ground, watching warily for any sign of others.

“Possibly. However, I think we will run into difficulties,” Jia Ying mused.

“Because of the demons behind us… and that group,” he mused.

“Yeah,” Jia Ying sighed, looking across at him. “And neither of us is going to easily cross the river running out of the valley.”

Looking at his own condition, that was true. The river was wide and fairly shallow, however it was also fast, very rocky, had numerous rapids and treacherous currents. To cross it, they would either have to go straight back towards those threats they had just evaded, or back towards the city and across the bridge to the north-east.

In other circumstances, he would have happily headed back towards the northern bridge and the road that crossed it then wound back up towards the quarries and eventually the escarpment where their camp was; however, with several kilos of unusual bronze spear heads and a pouch full of jewellery, he really didn’t feel like he wanted to be around other cultivators.

“Get down!” Jia Ying tugged him down, pointing off the track to the north.

Keeping low, he followed her, ducking behind a wall and following it quickly as he tried not to make any noise until he saw what she had just glimpsed.

Ahead of them, he could just make out a large group of some twenty or so cultivators, all armed, walking in a few wary groups down the main road. In the dipping sun, with the heat and the haze, he had not even noticed them.

Those leading the group all carried weapons, bows and swords mainly, escorting two hand carts, one on which four injured disciples were sitting, while the other had what appeared to be a bunch of pottery and various other oddments, piled up under some covers. Along with them, there were a bunch whose teal robes clearly marked them as being from the Myriad Herb association, armed with bows and blades, a group dressed in loose travelling robes wearing broad straw hats, two walking with the aid of spears.

They both watched the group move by, making sure they kept well out of sight. There was no question of going down to them in any case – such a heavily armed group, looking that nervous, might let them tag along, but might equally decide that they had to provide some remuneration or similar, or start pressing as to what influence they belonged to. Even if he claimed to be from the Ha clan, he suspected that they would not buy it, and there was also the risk that someone might actually know Jia Ying, he supposed.

In the end, they waited until they were almost out of sight before continuing on, parallel to the road. It was hard work, and his injury was not getting any easier, but it was preferable to being caught in the open, and the scrubby slope of the gently rolling hillsides gave them both cover and vantage.

Over the next hour as they tracked the course of the river, back towards the ridge at the end of the valley, as the sun started to properly dip, they saw two more groups of indeterminate influence, one cutting towards the road, who they waited to let pass then another moving parallel to it on the far side, across the much flatter, open grassland between the road and the distant river. Both groups looked like they had been in fights and were staring at every shadow.

Finally, though, they reached the outskirts of the small, mostly walled settlement that had once protected the bridge crossing the river north east of Valinkar. On this side, it was dominated by the complex of half-ruined buildings on a rocky rise beside the river, below which several streets and a large plaza were still mostly extant. Even at their current distance he could make out some rising columns of smoke from across the ruins and a few watchers armed with bows standing on vantage points around the ruined gate, scanning the rolling hills.

“Do we go in openly or try to sneak in at nightfall?” he asked, thinking of what they had on them.

“They don’t appear to be searching anyone or trying to extract any toll,” Jia Ying observed.

“This side, anyway,” he pointed out, because it was always possible that someone was controlling the bridge itself.

“True,” she conceded, rolling her eyes.

There were other crossings further upstream, but this was the only one really suitable for carts of any kind, giving it further strategic value.

“Openly, then?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she nodded, turning and heading back down the reverse of the hill. “There is something to be said for just going with the flow to avoid notice.”

Behind them, another group was already visible as a distant shadow in the haze, so they didn’t hang about and set off briskly down the road. It didn’t take long to get back to the road, which they then followed at a reasonably brisk pace back towards the town.

Approaching under the shadow of the ruined walls, he saw that among those guarding the walls several wore the green robes of the Jade Gate Court; however, nobody hailed them or even came to interact with them as they passed into the town.

The semi-circular plaza beyond held about 30 cultivators, scattered around in different groups, seated around fires or on the steps of some of the less ruined buildings. A few other columns of smoke from cooking fires rose from buildings nearby as well. Most of those waiting around looked tired and hot, several groups looked like they had been in difficult fights as well. The large group from earlier was visible on the east side by one of the larger buildings fronted by columns thanks to their cart, which was being guarded by four cultivators in dirty robes, their weapons drawn.

“Wonder what they found,” he mused as they took stock, having fallen in behind a rag tag group.

“You really want to go find out?” Jia Ying said with some amusement.

“Nope,” he said drily, surveying the rest of the groups.

“Hey! HEY!”

He turned, to find that those coming behind them, a rather scrappy group, had actually caught up and were now also passing through the gate at a slow trot, mostly keeping a somewhat wary distance from each other, except for the one who had shouted, who turned out to be Deng Fei.

“Someone you recognise?” Jia Ying asked him, noting his surprised reaction.

“That group at the side is with us,” he murmured, pointing out Deng Fei’s bunch. “They also fell in with Young Lady Bai. The one inadvisably shouting is Deng Fei.”

“Mmmmm…” Jia Ying looked back at them, then just kept walking into the town.

He fell in beside her, as the other group rapidly caught up. They were a rather mismatched collection, truthfully: two youths in dirty orange robes carrying a sack of what appeared to be floor tiles between them, four in purple and white robes that marked them as from the Pill Sovereigns, a woman wearing a broad brimmed grass hat and greenish robe, who looked vaguely familiar, and a youth in dusty travelling robes, again wearing a broad hat that had become rather common in style, a sword belted at his waist.

The rest were made up of two aligned groups. One was Deng Fei’s, however the other, to his surprise was a group of three: two men and a woman; a woman with dark hair, hiding her face with a strip of tied cloth for the dust and wearing a loose fitting tunic and a scavenged grass hat. She was, however, rather easily recognisable to him.

-Bai Meifen? He stared dully at her. Are others of our group here?

He double-checked the rest of the group, but there was no one there he recognised, beyond the fact that her companions wore Shen clan robes.

-Were they not yet captured?

Not for the first time, he felt his head hurt and not because of the wound on his neck. His haziness about how long he was out and what exactly had happened was only vexing him more and more now.

-We were captured in the morning, by Ur’Vash apparently, and the restrictions failed… except I’ve seen nothing of the ‘restrictions’ against cultivation failing here, and while there has been fighting and disturbance, it doesn’t seem like it was as comprehensive as presented by Ganlan and the others?

“You’re okay!” Deng Fei said, their group catching up as they hit the far side of the smaller square.

“No thanks to whatever insanity is going on here,” he said a bit vaguely. “There was quite a bit of fighting in the town.”

“We were lucky. We just took refuge in a building and eventually it passed,” one of the guards with Deng Fei said, glancing at Jia Ying. “Who is she?”

“Ying,” she shrugged, flashing a token for the ‘Nine Auspicious Moons’.

“…”

Several of Deng Fei’s group eyed it dubiously, likely wondering if it was genuine, but perhaps wisely none said anything.

“Let’s not linger here,” the leader of Deng Fei’s group said. “The sooner we get to cover, the happier I’ll be.”

“Yes, yes…” another nodded, again with a glance at Jia Ying.

“Mmm… Yes,” Jia Ying nodded, again rather noncommittally.

“What happened to your neck?” Deng Fei muttered, falling in beside him.

“I had a disagreement with a cultivator in the town,” he grimaced, giving it a gentle massage and adjusting the second layer of bandages.

“Looks nasty,” Deng Fei commiserated. “We should get Brother Kai to look at it; he has some skill with base medicines.”

“It is,” he acknowledged, adjusting the second bandage he had tied around it and trying not to wince. “Do you know anything about what happened?”

“Not much,” Deng Fei grimaced. “It happened soon after we parted ways. We were surveying along that line… and then there was a group who ran by, looking like they got mauled by a wild beast, so we just took cover in a ruin until the chaos stopped.”

“Did… you notice anything go weird with the restriction on this place?” he asked, more quietly.

“Hmmm…” Deng Fei shot him a sideways look. “Maybe?”

“Ohh?” he frowned.

“Well, it was weird, I suppose. My cultivation hasn’t come back or anything, but the compasses are much easier to use since late morning…”

“…”

It was such an obvious thing, that he nearly tripped over a rock in the road.

-Could it be that?

“Has it just been cultivators fighting?” he asked.

“Yes… Why do you ask?” Deng Fei frowned.

He shot a sideways glance at Jia Ying, who was also frowning at that offhand comment.

Turning over matters in his head, he supposed he had to ask.

“Well, when we tried to leave the town, it was by this gate and there were some… well, we saw a bunch of cultivators who were flayed…” he settled upon that, rather than outright saying there was a ‘demon’, in the first instance.

“Didn’t see anything like that,” Deng Fei frowned, looking a bit uneasy.

“Who would flay a bunch of people? Killing, maybe… but that’s just…” the cultivator next to Deng Fei muttered, looking at him a bit disbelievingly.

Nodding, they walked on in silence mostly. The few snippets of hushed conversation were mostly just people complaining about the heat, or their injuries. Nobody was talking about the attacks, or demons, or anything much, which he found really odd.

-Perhaps nobody who encountered them survived… apart from us?

“I saw some stuff,” the woman in green, who had caught up with a few brisk paces to walk on the other side of Deng Fei, muttered.

“You did?” he frowned.

“Yeah… A… I think it was some kind of qi beast, like a tiger, on the plains-ward side of the town.”

“Oh, that might explain a bit,” the guard nodded.

-There has not been a beast bigger than a dog that I’ve seen here… except for those armoured spiders on the treeline.

“Perhaps that was what was responsible?” Deng Fei mused, sounding rather to hopeful.

“Perhaps,” he shrugged, thinking back over what Meixiu had said of her explanation.

His other self should be somewhere to the north-west, still held by the Ten Tigers tribe if he recalled what Meixiu had said.

An elbow poked him in the side, making him realise Deng Fei had said something.

“What?” he asked.

“Behind us,” Deng Fei said, moving out of the middle of the street.

“Great, more,” one of the guards grumbled.

Coming up behind them, he saw another group of some ten disciples, looking rather ragged, weapons drawn, looking very warily this way and that, carrying four other bodies between them on a cart. All the cultivators were wearing dusty, beige travelling garments, various ad-hoc sunshades and had packs, which was not uncommon now that most were aware of how few storage rings worked out here.

Passing on, they left them behind fairly rapidly, glaring as they went. There was something about them that didn’t seem quite… right; however, it was hard for him to pin down exactly what it was.

“Definitely a lot of nervous people around,” Deng Fei noted, looking at how most groups in the square before the bridge had weapons visible to hand.

“Hard to blame them,” he conceded as they also entered that plaza which was dominated on the one side by a large building fronted by a broad colonnade, and to his right, by a complex built into and around a large rock outcropping, prominently overshadowed by a large reddish-bronze leafed tree growing within it.

He had never been inside, having only passed through this town twice with groups before falling in with Bai Meifen’s lot and then not returning to the camps; however, the buildings on and around the rocky outcrop by the river and the tree were something of an orienteering landmark.

“Indeed,” Jia Ying nodded. “There was a lot of chaos caused earlier, and there will be people looking for blame to go around.”

“Aye,” the cultivator next to them, who he had finally learned was called Hua Wen Shi, muttered as they all came to a stop to take stock.

“Already happening,” one of the orange-robed youths interjected. “I heard talk earlier that it was being blamed on the Hunter Bureau. Some bandits selling people out who crept in. What with what happened to that Ha clan scion and the lady from the Ling clan…”

“…”

Hearing his own circumstances tossed back in his face again almost made him sigh. There was a certain irony there, and, out of the corner of his eye, he saw Jia Ying looking in his direction as they stood there, taking in the square.

-And she has to know, given I introduced myself as Ha Yun… and she seemingly has some association with Bai Meifen.

“Why are you all out here?” the leader of Deng Fei’s group asked the nearest bunch of cultivators, sitting on the steps of the red tree building.

“’Coz there is nowhere left on the other side, and we are like you,” a youth said, spitting on the ground.

“Like… us?” Deng Fei looked confused.

“Not from some big fancy influence,” a young women in dusty grey robes complained.

-Ah…

He had a bad premonition, even before Jia Ying spoke up. “So one of the big sects is trying to control the crossing?”

“Not trying, succeeding,” another scowled.

“When did this happen?” he asked.

“About an hour ago?” the woman sighed again. “We just got here when they stopped people crossing and started searching everyone. Apparently there are some 50 odd in the camp on the far side and with most of those out here not exactly being powerful cultivators, they are just using superior treasures and armour to control the crossing now.”

“Which influences?” one of the guards frowned.

“Hard to say, think there was the Shi clan mostly,” another sitting nearby interjected.

“A clan? Not sects?” Jia Ying mused.

“Dunno, but crossing the bridge is out unless you know someone or wanna let them take the pick of what you got on you,” the youth who had originally spoken supplied. “Two tried to fight that we saw. Both just got beaten up and then dragged away.”

“That seems rather… unsustainable,” he noted, thinking about what might happen when the major powers back in the camp got involved. Unless they were in on it? The clans and the influences have strange relationships at times.

He knew that from the Ha clan and his own family, who had associations with half a dozen regional sects including the Blue Gate School, not to mention older historical links to great powers like Four Peacocks Court, and the Pill Sovereigns.

“They only have to hold it for a while, I guess, and get some easy pickings in the turmoil while offering people safety,” the other woman, who he still felt was a bit familiar, mused.

“Yeah, probably,” the youth spat.

“…”

“The Shi are not a clan associated with the major imperial powers though,” one of the orange-robed youths noted.

“They are not,” another shrugged. “But they got pointy sticks and numbers, so most folks are just waiting it out on this side.”

“Brothers, might we have some water?”

Turning, he found three more disciples from a minor imperial-aligned sect – the Celestial Star Pavilion – had filtered in, two supporting a third, who had a nasty gash on his leg that was rather inelegantly bound.

The youth who had just been speaking to them pointed towards a bowl on a slab of fallen masonry nearby beside which were several stone cups, clearly looted from the ruins.

"—Have you seen Senior Brother Yan?" another disciple, in teal robes had ambled up.

"He should be on the far side of the rock," a woman from the Myriad Herb Association replied.

“Thank you,” the youth saluted as his compatriots sat down and started to attend their injured fellow, also asking, “Why are you all standing around here?”

As the others began to re-explain, he sighed and started to walk up the steps, leaving them to it.

“Where are you going?” Jia Ying murmured.

“I’ve not looked inside this place,” he replied, looking up at the columns of the building. “I figured I should at least take a look, and odds are we will be spending the night here.”

“Hmmm… True enough,” she nodded, starting to follow after him.

He was about to tell her that it was unnecessary for her to follow him, but caught himself in time before he offended her. Even so, she gave him a look, under her hat, like he was an idiot, to which he could only sigh softly.

“…”

“Don’t overthink things,” she chuckled, clearly reading his expression as they walked into the interior. “I am not going to wrong you now; however, I don’t trust most of that lot out there as far as I could kick them.”

“Fair,” he conceded.

The main set of buildings were set around a second courtyard, dominated by a large, red-leafed thorn tree, growing out of a raised platform that was flanked by steps that wound up the rocky outcropping to the second ruined building at its summit.

The whole rock face was carved beautifully to merge with the buildings that flanked it, dominated by the seated figure of a woman, naked from the waist up, carved directly out of reddish stone, her hair falling down across her shoulders. In a way, she was stylistically similar to those statues he had seen in the tombs, but much bigger.

The carvings on both sides depicted the tree, a woman – presumably the one in the statue – and various supplicants praying to her, shown how to farm, looking after animals watched over by her and even with her hand placed on the head of an old man, who became young again in her other palm, while people danced and played strange instruments.

There was a block that might have been an altar before her, made of white marble, that was clearly a later addition. The larger inscription on it, in Ancient Easten, was barely decipherable as something like ‘Saintess Cloac—’ with the last part of the name missing.

More surprisingly, underneath the statue itself and mostly obscured by the altar was a further inscription in the flowing script he had seen painted on the stones on the scorpion’s back. He stared at the woman again and realised that barely visible on her skin were carved ghostly flower-like patterns, similar to what he had seen on the war paint of some of the Grass Scorpions…

‘…It’s what they deserve for forgetting this place is our land, not theirs…’ – that had been what one of those minding the fires when he first awoke had said?

“Huh.” Jia Ying was also staring at the carvings and figure, he realised, or more exactly, the writing below it.

“You can read that?” he asked, curious.

Jia Ying stared at it for a long moment, then back at the inscriptions.

“Indeed. It reads something like ‘Mistress of Fertile Garden, Sovereign of Arms, Shapely Daughter Who Postpones Old Age’,” she said at last. “The language is known in some old ruins on the western continent, so I learned a bit of it at one point.”

“This place is some kind of shrine?” he mused, looking around at the other buildings.

“Probably,” Jia Ying agreed, staring at the carved woman with a pensive expression.

The temple at the top was fairly ruined, so instead they made their way on, in the shadow of the small cliff, down a column lined walkway, to the second courtyard, almost looking onto the river directly. Here, the courtyard itself was dominated by a second large pool, fed by the river itself, with the cliffside dominated by a shrine carved into it, flanked by two more platforms that might have once held trees or other plants he supposed.

This shrine was also to a woman, but carved of a large block of white stone, the alterations much more obvious. The woman herself was sitting, holding a flower between both hands, while water, perhaps a small spring, ran out of the jar beside her into the pool; however, the text below her, on the altar, which was carved of the reddish rock, had been obviously replaced by a later inscription that read ‘Theotokos – Mai Ri’.

“Benevolent Fortune, She Who Protects the City,” he read, considering what was on the altar itself, which was also in ‘Easten’ this time. Below it, in much larger text, was also carved ‘Mother of God’.

Even with that change, he was fairly sure he recognised who she was. The flower alone was a big clue to match her to the…

*Crack*

He flinched, but the noise turned out to be the green-robed woman, who had also walked into this place, he realised, descending a set of stairs from the ruin up above, and in the process dislodged an errant roof tile that was lying on the steps.

“We meet again,” the woman said with a faint smile, pushing her hat back to reveal piercing blue eyes and a tanned face framed with deep golden hair plaited back in a loose style.

“…”

-No way? he stared at Ganlan Meixiu, his mind briefly frozen.

“I am Ganlan,” she said with a polite salute to Jia Ying.

“Jia,” Jia Ying replied, looking at him consideringly.

“It has only been a few days and you have already forgotten this sister, how sad,” Ganlan said with a faint smile.

“Sorry, Senior,” he saluted her. “I… didn’t expect to see you here.”

“Nor I you, and yet we keep meeting in unusual places,” Ganlan said with an eye roll.

His first thought was that Ganlan Meixiu had also been caught up in this; however, on reflection, and rather against the odds, he suspected, this could well be the ‘clone’ of her she had had dispersed.

Trying to calm his beating heart, because that perhaps meant that that group who had chased after her was also somewhere nearby…

“Ah, Brother Yun,” he found that Deng Fei had also come through, by the same route he had.

Deng Fei eyed both Ganlan and Jia Ying, then gave him a faint wink that made both women roll their eyes again.

“Sorry to disturb you, we were planning to cross over the bridge. Apparently it’s not as problematic as they made out.”

“Oh?”

“Well… Ummm, the ones controlling it are the Shi clan mostly,” Deng Fei said. “Those sat around on this side are all mostly minor Imperial Court aligned influences.”

“Oh,” he had to shake his head in amusement, because that was quite funny. “It at least explains why they are all sat here: presumably, they are waiting for some powerhouse from the Jade Gate Court or Four Peacocks Court.”

“Yeah,” Deng Fei agreed. “So Brother Dewan thought we should head across before someone decides to cause more problems.”

“Fei, come on!” a voice called from further out.

“I’ll be right along,” he said, offering Deng Fei a polite salute.

Deng Fei nodded and hurried off, with the guard casting a further long look at Jia and Meixiu.

“…”

Jia Ying watched them leave, with a frown on her face.

“What?” he asked.

“The Shi clan doesn’t have the manpower to hold up this many people,” Jia Ying said. “There are more from the Shu Pavilion here than the Shi clan.”

“Shouldn’t we stop them crossing?” he frowned. “If someone is planning something?”

Jia Ying didn’t immediately reply. Instead, she looked again at Meixiu, who had not really gotten involved in the discussion at all.

*Clack— Crack*

He glanced up and saw another roof tile had slid off the far side, accompanied by a flap of wings.

“If it’s a matter of crossing the river…” Meixiu started to speak, then trailed off, her eyes narrowing.

“You are observant,” a male voice spoke, making him turn to look for the speaker’s echoing voice.

“Huh.”

The youth, leaning against the balustrade of the bridge over the channel to the river, wore a dark green robe, slashed with some red, the hems embroidered with swirling leaves picked out in black and gold. His face, framed with golden hair, was hidden by a white mask on which was written the word ‘Huan’.

-How did he get that close? he hissed inwardly, looking around. Or was he here already and we just never noticed?

Jia Ying sighed. “So, the Din clan really did send a powerhouse.”

“You know some things,” the youth chuckled. “I wonder how…”

“…”

Jia Ying didn’t draw a sword, but her stance absolutely screamed that she was ready to fight now.

“Aren’t you worried someone will recognise you and take a cheap shot?” she smirked. “To think a disciple of the Din clan’s 3rd old ancestor might die in this place, wouldn’t that be too funny?”

The youth stared at her for a moment then just laughed.

“There is no need to be uncivilized,” the youth said, offering a hand towards the exit.

“…”

Jia Ying eyed the youth, then rather to his surprise, just shrugged and waved for him to follow her. Meixiu followed after, with a frown on her face.

He made to follow her, hurriedly, before someone thought to poke around and find he was the ‘Ha Yun’ who had been with ‘Din Ouyeng’, Deng Fei had just called him ‘Yun’ as far as he recalled, which was not that unusual a name, thankfully.

Outside, rather to his surprise, it was much as it had been before, and there was no particular tension. In fact, it was rather the opposite. The various groups were now standing up, looking invigorated, with two new groups present, both about twenty strong.

One lot, clustered around the wagon, were dressed in the robes of the Jade Gate Court, while the others in silver and grey were the Argent Hall. Also present, he could see the Pill Sovereign Sect and some of the disciples from the Ha clan who had come from the central continent to take part.

He had had next to nothing to do with them, mostly, except to be told by one of them that it was his great enjoyment to be of service to Din Ouyeng, and he should be grateful his life had been so saved.

“Take off your hats,” one of the Jade Gate Court disciples said, pointing a sword at both Meixiu and Jia Ying. “What influences do you belong to?”

Jia Ying said nothing, so the youth grabbed her hat, tearing it off.

“…”

Contrary to what he was expecting, nobody actually recognised her, though her status was somewhat aloof, so it would be no surprise if only her direct juniors would know her. Certainly, he had never noted her before today, not that his observation skills likely counted for much, he supposed.

The youth patted her down rapidly, at which point he noted she had no pouch.

-Fates get thrashed… I still have mine! he groaned inwardly.

“She has no token either, so probably she is a rogue cultivator,” the searcher said, shoving her forward and now looking at him.

“Which influence are you from?”

“Ha clan,” he held up the token.

“Is it genuine?” the youth glanced at the Ha clan group.

One of them, a Golden Immortal, trotted over and took it, looking it over.

The disciple grunted, passing it back to him. “Yes, it’s genuine. He’s from the Ha clan in Blue Water province though, so just a backwater hick, nobody particularly important.”

He bowed to the senior, accepting the talisman back, before adding deferentially. “Both the ladies are with me.”

The Golden Immortal looked both Jia Ying and Ganlan Meixiu over, glanced again at his token and just shrugged at the quizzical look from the other disciple. “Probably his maids or something. It is a status token.”

He winced inwardly, but that response was met with a polite salute from both of them. The others from the Ha clan looked at him for a moment and then just dismissed him.

From the bridge, he saw a group of ten or so disciples in Imperial School colours, looking a bit dishevelled, approaching.

“We have seized the other side,” one reported to the group standing around them. “Just some jumped up disciples who were looking to capitalize on circumstances. They robbed a few who crossed and ran away at the slightest hint of proper organisation.”

“Good,” one of the Jade Gate Court disciples nodded.

“Any word from the main camp?” an older disciple in the Imperial School robes frowned.

“None, Senior Tao,” a disciple said, with an apologetic half-bow. “Nobody sent up river has come back and with those bandits blocking news from this side for a few hours, it may yet take some time.”

“They are late. It doesn’t take that long to go up there,” the disciple from the Jade Gate Court next to them frowned.

“There may yet be others preying on the chaos of earlier,” another from the Imperial School volunteered. “We should just go back en masse.”

“There have been credible rumours of wild beasts,” the youth he had spoken to earlier pointed out.

“Two sightings of those large horned tigers down by the river, near those ruined docks…” the youth with the injured leg added with a grimace.

“…”

The ‘leaders’ eyed him, but said nothing, merely nodded.

“Our instructions were to safeguard those here,” Senior Tao said.

“That was what Senior Bo and Senior Jiong wanted,” a disciple from the Jade Gate Court wearing a dusty green robe trimmed in gold added.

“So, we are free to leave?” a leader from one of the groups looking a bit less happy at their present circumstances spoke up.

“Of course,” the ‘Huan’ youth, who they had met a moment earlier, had finally arrived.

“Here, however, we can at least attempt to guarantee your safety against whatever chaos was wrought earlier and may still be ongoing…”

“Not to mention it will be night soon,” someone off to the side added.

“Right… because your Jade Gate Court is so altruistic?” a disciple in a bronze and red robe scowled.

“And your Burning Mountain God Sect is so upstanding?” an Imperial School disciple retorted.

“Enough,” Senior Huan said. “We are all fellow cultivators of the righteous path. Let others engage in petty banditry for personal gain. We are here to understand these ruins, not stab each other over cracked ceramics.”

“…”

Jia Ying eyed him sideways but said nothing. Looking across, he could see Deng Fei’s group among those coming back over, looking a bit angry now. Two were nursing injuries which were being tended to but they didn’t appear to be prisoners. Some two dozen others from various sects were also following after, many looked embarrassed or frustrated.

-Bandits posing as others? he frowned.

“Very well, we thank you for getting rid of those bandits, but we will take our leave,” the leader of the Burning Mountain God sect said.

They watched as his group got up and shouldered their packs, before setting off at a brisk trot over the bridge, glaring this way and that.

“Is it wise to let them go?” a nearby cultivator asked.

“If they want to strike out on their own, that’s their problem,” a disciple from the Jade Gate Court shrugged. “As it stands we are much safer in numbers.”

“Especially if we meet another of those fates-accursed tigers!” the injured youth complained.

“Please don’t invoke misfortune,” a young woman standing nearby in a dusty dress holding a bow muttered.

“Tigers?” he asked, again thinking of the name of that tribe – ‘Ten Tigers Tribe’ sounded like a group that would have qi beasts. Before he had seen the Grass Scorpions he might have scoffed, but knowing what he did now, about the powers in these lands, he could only pity those here.

“Yeah,” a youth grimaced. “We had one jump on us beyond the town when we were exploring one of the ruins by the docks beyond the city. It mauled four people, dragging them off into the scrub before we managed to escape from it.”

“If we had our cultivation, it would have been okay,” another scowled.

Involuntarily, he glanced at Ganlan, who just rolled her eyes, telling him all he needed to know about that.

“Anyone else who wants to depart for the camp is free to,” Senior Tao added, looking around.

“…”

There were two other groups who stood; however, Jia Ying just sighed and walked back into the hall behind them, where the tree was. Frowning, he was about to follow her, when he spotted Bai Meifen standing a bit further away, talking quietly to a youth from the Shen clan.

Walking over to them, he coughed politely.

“Uhh… nice tunic,” he muttered in Easten.

“…”

Both of them stared at him dubiously, the Shen youth clearly not pleased to have his conversation with her interrupted.

-Please don’t let me be wrong. They were definitely captured when I awoke…

It had been night then, admittedly, and fairly late into the night as well. Looking around, he saw that the others were scattering back to their previous stations, looking much more relaxed now their side was the one calling the shots.

“I was given my cloak by the same bunch,” he murmured.

Bai Meifen stared at him, at his garments then at his hat, then grabbed his arm and pulled him away into the shadow of the building. The youth didn’t quite follow after her, leaning against the wall.

“What, by the fates, happened?!” Bai Meifen hissed.

“You ask me, but who do I ask?” he grumbled. “There was a flash of white and I was lying in the middle of the town.”

“I ended up in the quarry tomb we were in,” Bai Meifen frowned. “Did all of us end up back here?”

“I dunno,” he shrugged. “This doesn’t appear to be some weird hallucination, as much as I wish it was. Did you also get attacked?”

“I had to run away from some cultivators,” Bai Meifen scowled, “I was lucky to bump into Shen Cui on the way to try and see if I was where I was…”

“And?” he asked.

“I didn’t get there before I was ‘captured’,” she muttered. “I did see them though. Ten of those Ur’Vash, riding tigers with deer antlers on their heads.”

“So what do we do now?” he asked.

“You ask me, but who do I ask?” she shot back with a mocking scowl. “By the way, was that Meixiu with you?”

“…”

He nodded.

“If she is here, then it’s—” Bai Meifen sighed in relief.

He shook his head, cutting her off. “Sorry, that’s not that her,” he muttered.

“Not… that her?” Bai Meifen frowned. “Like she has a clone? How?”

“You can try asking her. It might not go well,” he sighed.

“Also,” Bai Meifen pulled him in a bit closer and asked much more softly. “Why are you with Senior Jia?”

“You know her?” he asked.

“Know her… know her?” Bai Meifen spluttered. “Do you not know who she is?”

“She’s part of our group?” he supplied.

Bai Meifen looked around warily, but nobody was really paying them any attention. “She is—”

He cut her off, with a nod. “It’s fine then, no need to say it, given we are surrounded by people from the Imperial Court. How did they not cause a problem for you?”

“I don’t have any identification tokens,” Bai Meifen chuckled wryly. “No storage rings either, so it’s an easy sell to say we were robbed and ran away.”

That… made sense, when he thought about it. He only had his Ha clan talisman because he had been allowed to keep it by Ganlan Meixiu, along with the blade.

“Well, let’s go find Jia Ying,” he said. “Why didn’t you approach her before?”

“No opportunity,” she sighed. “And Fairy Jia was not recognised by anyone, nor was I.”

“Fair enough,” he conceded as she stepped away and led him out of the shadow of the building.

“Miss Bai?” Shen Cui frowned.

“Come, we have actual allies at last,” Bai Meifen chuckled, heading back towards the shrine.

The square had returned to some semblance of normality, people back at their fires, but much less glumly. A few disciples were even kicking a ball about, which just made him shudder. How you could find energy for that in this heat he had no idea.

Back in the first large courtyard of the shrine, he found Jia Ying sat on a collapsed column, staring pensively at the statue.

“Ah! There you are,” she nodded, eyeing him, then the other two.

Neither saluted, merely nodding politely and going to sit down nearby.

Meixiu also appeared a moment later, sitting down with a half-smile.

“Thanks to you, I have to at least stick near you…” she murmured.

“Sorry,” he apologised.

“It’s fine,” she said with an amused smile, before looking at his clothing pensively, then at him, then at Bai Meifen.

Clearly she recognised the stuff he was wearing, even if she wasn’t going to comment on it outwardly.

“So, what do you suggest?”

“Well, you won’t get far out there,” Meixiu said after a moment’s thought.

“Too many tigers?” he guessed.

“Among other things,” she agreed, a bit cryptically.

He considered her, then decided to take a gamble.

“I saw… a naked figure wearing a cloak of fur with a fox’s head? He captured people with a net?”

“Ah… Fuck,” Meixiu rubbed her temples suddenly.

“You know what that was?” he asked, because her reaction was… not inspiring confidence.

“Yes,” she said, giving him a deep look. “You are… lucky.”

“It chased off a…” remembering not to call it Ur’Vash where others might hear, he settled for ‘demon’. “A… demon. It preferred to chase it, rather than us. What was it?”

“…”

“A demon?” she frowned.

-Ah… does she not know?

“You know? An Ur’—”

“I know what you meant,” she cut him off, still frowning.

“Oh, sorry,” he grimaced. “Anyway, he was flaying cultivators in the eastern gate, yet nobody seems to know anything. As for the fox… person, I saw him on the wall, then it chased after both of us. It must have been in the city?”

Meixiu stared at him for a long moment, then sat back against her pillar and stared up at the tree and the building on the top of the rock.

“Well, with numbers, and being here, we should be okay. Come daybreak… we will see what we shall see.”

*Crack*

He flinched, looking around for the source of distant shifting stone, then realised it was someone out in the square, presumably doing something, and relaxed.

Grimacing, he lifted his hand and checked his neck wound, then slowly started to unwind the bandage. Meixiu watched him for a moment, then pushed his hand away and did it herself, unwinding it carefully and eyeing the injury dubiously. He fumbled in his pack, feeling a bit light-headed, looking for the ointment.

It took a moment to get it as he forgot he had put it in one of the smaller pouches.

“…”

She eyed the ointment, then looked at him again, her brow even more furrowed; however, she said nothing and just took it, helping him apply some more. Even after she had replaced the bandage, she said nothing, and just let him recover in peace, which in a way was even more unnerving. Jia Ying was also looking at him in a rather pensive manner again. She certainly had to suspect something by now, even if she wasn’t saying anything.

Like that, they just sat there, recuperating in near silence pretty much, as the sky shifted to dusk. Occasionally other cultivators would wander in, but nobody was really that interested in disturbing any other group. Jia Ying had just gone back to contemplating the statue and the tree, while Meifen had wandered up the steps to look at the building up top, he supposed.

He wasn’t sure what he was expecting, really, but it was almost anticlimactic that nothing much happened for the following few hours, until he became aware of quite a bit of clamour from outside.

Getting up, he made his way through to the large square by the bridge. By the time he had done so, the noise had mostly died down again. However, quite a few groups were standing around now, talking quietly but urgently.

“What’s going on?” he asked one of the cultivators from the Myriad Herbs Association sitting on the steps nearby.

“No idea,” the youth shrugged. “All I can say is what you can see.”

The ‘leaders’ – Senior Huan, Senior Tao and a few others – were all standing around in the middle of the square, conversing in hurried tones. Occasionally one…

He stared into the distance as two flares of familiar white light lit up the sky on the distant ridge line, then another… and another.

-Four large teleportations in rapid succession?

“Teleportation?” Deng Fei had appeared beside him.

“It appears that way. Something must have happened,” he grimaced, looking at his friend. “I see you ran into trouble over the bridge.”

“But how?” Deng Fei frowned. “It was tried before and it was impossible to get an anchor by divination.”

“Perhaps someone found another route out,” the Myriad Herbs Association disciple interjected.

“Possibly. That would require talismans to have started working though,” another disciple nearby added, pulling one out of a pouch at his waist, which was as expected, inert.

“We won’t know unless we leave here,” another nearby disciple grumbled as a fifth flash of light and twisting space lit up the distant skyline, this time from the west.

“The other camp is getting involved as well.”

“If groups are moving out… will we be stuck here?” someone else muttered.

“Yeah… what—”

Everyone froze, because the change was fundamental and abrupt. Between one moment and the next, amid the deepening shadows of the night, the suppression lessened. His cultivation snapped back into focus, his qi surging as it suddenly sought to heal the wound at his neck.

It wasn’t much, barely putting him back at Qi Condensation, truthfully, but after having nothing at all it was like a blessing from heaven.

“F-foundations are back!” someone yelled, entirely pointlessly.

“What just happened?” someone else asked.

“This is bad,” Meixiu hissed, appearing beside him.

“Bad?” he repeated.

“Bad?” Deng Fei gulped, looking at her warily.

“Yes, if you don’t want to die horribly, follow me.”

The few cultivators within earshot looked confused as she turned on her heel and hurried back into the temple. Confused himself, he followed after her. The two from the Myriad Herb Association, a young woman from the Four Peacocks Court and two other cultivators from a small sect did actually follow, which was surprising in its own way; however, her voice carried with it a hint of command that had not been there before, he realised on reflection.

Inside the courtyard, Meixiu walked up and jumped onto the platform below the tree with effortless grace.

“All of you, get up here, take a leaf from the tree, place it in your mouths and cycle your qi and don’t leave this spot until daybreak.”

“Why?” the Myriad Herb cultivator next to him frowned.

“Because this place was sealed away for a reason, and when its occupants find a bunch of humans on their front lawn, you are only going to end up two ways… horribly dead or horrifically dead.”

“And you know this how?” the woman queried.

“Are you in the habit of questioning everything your seniors say?” Meixiu murmured, putting a bit of force of Intent into her voice.

“…”

There was some awkward shuffling but the few who had followed him all hopped up. Grimacing, he jumped as well, as did Bai Meifen, Deng Fei and Jia Ying.

“How curious,” Jia Ying frowned, putting a hand to the tree, which, now that he could sense qi again, was exerting a faint pressure. “Isn’t this a Sacred Tree?”

“It is,” Meixiu agreed. “Sacred to a power that even the crazy bastards who slumber here can only respect.”

“How?” one of the others who had picked a leaf asked.

“How do I know this?” Meixiu snickered. “While you lot were skipping about doing as you pleased and not paying attention, this sister actually went and read things and explored the things that needed exploring. Just because you don’t appreciate that knowledge is power doesn’t mean others cannot. Be thankful, because of me you may actually survive to see the sun rise.”

“Shouldn’t we tell the others?” someone else asked.

“They will find out soon enough,” Meixiu shrugged. “What am I, their mother?”

“Uh… she is not really your maid, is she?” the other Myriad Herb disciple muttered to him.

“She is a travelling companion,” he said with a diplomatic shrug while Deng Fei rolled his eyes.

The disciple eyed her then him, clearly taking in his low cultivation and her presumably inscrutable foundation and reaching the conclusion that probably she was some bodyguard from his family, along to ensure that the young master didn’t suffer an ignominious fate. In a way, this was a fortunate thing, because his cultivation had advanced somewhat compared to the Ha Yun anyone here would know, so unless he came face to face with Din Ouyeng or someone else who knew him personally, it was unlikely anyone would make the connection even if his name was revealed.

-At least it didn’t lift a lot, though now I suppose it is clear who at least is a senior… or is it?

“Do Principles work?” he hissed to Meifen, who had sat down beside him.

“Somewhat,” she muttered, sitting down beside him. “But the seal on this place is barely shifted.”

“Which is a good thing,” Meixiu added with some emphasis, though she didn’t elaborate how.

As they sat there, with a few qi crystals for light, beneath the tree, there was little evidence of anything untoward, it had to be said.

“What exactly are we meant to be afraid of?” one of the disciples mumbled around their leaf after a few minutes.

“If we sit here and just stay quiet? Nothing much,” Meixiu said, closing her eyes and starting to murmur something under her breath.

Beyond the confines of the courtyard, he could hear the hustle and bustle as people wandered around and the distant sound of voices; however, as time went on, he did start to notice a sort of creeping… oddness. It was hard to pin down, but it was like the shadows were slightly more shadowy, and the lines of the buildings around them were a bit off.

Soon, those doubting something was up were thoroughly silenced, because even a drunken mortal would have known that there was something ‘wrong’ about their surroundings.

“Hey, hey... What is that?” Deng Fei who was staring at the shadows, which were now… darker, elbowed him in the side with a hiss.

Following Fei’s wary gesture, he stared at the colonnade and suddenly started to perspire, because in the gloom there were several shadowy figures, dressed in tunics, cloaks and dresses, their faces barely visible, like shades, staring hungrily at them from the misty shadows.

“Those… Are those yin spectres?” the Myriad Herb Association disciple next to them mumbled, their voice quavering slightly.

Nobody else had words to comment, because the oppression was stifling.

“What are they?” Bai Meifen mumbled.

“The cursed occupants of this land,” Meixiu murmured.

Recalling what she had said of this place, and how she had called it a ‘graveyard’, he shuddered. The ‘Death Watch’ of those ancient occupants had seemed somewhat hard to believe when she first explained it, but here and now, seeing it with his own eyes, the reality was far worse than any imagining.

“What would happen… if we walked out there?” Deng Fei asked in a quavering, hushed tone.

“Try it and I will light incense for you,” Meixiu chuckled.

“…”

That got a nervous ripple of laughter from the rest of them, except for him, because his throat still hurt, the wound not fully healed.

Like that, they sat for almost three hours he reckoned by the moon rising slowly in the sky.

“How have they not noticed?” the Myriad Herb disciple next to him asked at last.

Meixiu didn’t answer, not because she didn’t know, he suspected, but because it was not knowledge that someone from ‘their’ world should have.

“Do they just vanish at daybreak?” the other rogue cultivator mumbled.

“I would suspect that the Yang strength of the land is still too much for them,” Jia Ying finally said.

“Let’s hope,” Bai Meifen agreed.

“What kind of—?!”

“AAHHhhhhhhhhhhhh—!”

There was a sort of horrified, wretched sigh that wavered through the whole complex and beyond… and the night sky turned into a thing of terror. The darkness above seemed to swirl, the brightness of the stars starting to shift into disturbing focus, patterns threading throughout them in strange and inauspicious ways, as if the constellations were moving. The moon, already full and hanging low in the sky, seemed to take on the manner of a dread eye, peering through the world.

The spirits, who were the source of the wail, all recoiled, shying backwards as if slapped by whatever had just occurred.

“W-what is going on?” the cultivator beside him sobbed. “My cultivation is…”

Jia Ying, sat nearby, exhaled. In the gloom, he could see the perspiration on her face.

“This oppression, has someone angered some genuine expert?” she hissed.

“That’s… underselling it,” Meixiu muttered, also seeming unnerved, which was certainly not a good thing.

Strangely, he found he was less affected, simply because he had been exposed to it for so long, perhaps. That said, what little of his cultivation he could touch was still feeling pressured, his qi hard to control and his awareness of his dantian lessening somewhat.

Like that, they sat in unnerved silence, until several more cultivators, barriers shimmering around them, scrambled through the door, led by a pale-faced youth holding a compass.

“Ah! Over here! There is safety here!”

The diviner trailed off, seeing them all sat under the tree.

Around them, the wavering spirits, which had grown in numbers, twisted, sensing new prey.

A few spectres made it to the barriers which wavered and repelled them somehow; however, the group were marginally too fast for them, rushing out into the moonlight and scrambling up under the tree.

“How are you all here?” one of the disciples from the Imperial School hissed.

“Keeping out of trouble,” Jia Ying shot back.

The spirits around were moving forward now, some of the braver ones pushing out, hiding their heads beneath their cloaks as if afraid of the sky somehow, muttering in a language he knew nothing off.

“Take a leaf,” one of the Myriad Herb Association hunters hissed to one of his compatriots, opening his mouth to show the one under his tongue.

The others eyed them, then did that, scrambling up to sit down.

“What happened to the others?” Deng Fei asked one.

“…”

The pale, drawn diviner looked at him then at Meixiu and Jia Ying, then just shook his head. The slightly haunted silence of the others said everything else. Listening now, he could still make out some distant clamour, from across the river, but everything on this side had just been swallowed up by the oppressive shadow of the night, the only sounds the ragged breathing of those nearby.

…

Like that, they stayed in terrified silence until the night sky started to fade away, and with it the spectres. By the time the first rays of dawn were peeking over the horizon, the shadows had all but vanished, replaced by grey half-light. The repression was also returning, he noted. He could feel it settling back onto him, dulling his awareness of his dantian.

Nobody, however, made any serious moves to leave the shadow of the tree, until voices echoed in the courtyard outside.

“Where is everyone?”

“Dunno… I was expecting there to be like forty people here?”

“There are fires and stuff. Did they all go hide or something?”

“Hey! Through here!”

There were footsteps and several youths in deep blue travelling robes, wearing broad-brimmed hats stepped into the courtyard.

“Here are some!” the leader called.

“Ah, Senior Chu! — Of the Four Peacocks Court.”

A masked youth in a drab, loose-fitting robe, holding a sword, arrived and took them all in before stopping on the diviner.

“…”

Jia Ying eyed them dubiously; however, he needed no warning concerning them, because he recognised the robes of the youth who had just spoken as ‘Senior Pei’ of the Din clan, who had come after them. Thinking back, that had been just after dawn… even if his awareness of time then was a bit lacking.

“What happened here?” the masked youth asked.

“This place is haunted is what!” one of the Imperial School disciples snarled.

“It is,” Chu conceded. “Quite dangerously so. We would have been overcome, were it not for some treasures and the fortuitous discovery of this tree.”

“I don’t recognise the other brothers and sisters,” one mused, looking at them in turn, before finally landing on him, then Jia Ying.

“Well, the dark-haired beauty is the Nine Auspicious Moons’ Jia Ying,” one of the blue-robed youths said. “While the ragged one to her left is Bai Meifen.”

“…”

The others all turned to stare at them, with varying degrees of appraisal and trepidation as his heart sank.

“Jia Ying huh…” another disciple in travelling robes spoke up.

“Senior Jio…”

“Sees Senior Jio!”

“Seeing Senior Jio!”

Various disciples bowed to a masked youth, dressed in a dark green robe, edged with red and detailed with black and gold leaves very similar to that which ‘Huan’ had worn, who now made his way through the short hall, flanked by two other disciples in travelling robes.

“Jia Ying is here,” Pei spoke.

“Hmmm… Yes,” Senior Jio looked across them all, then at Jia Ying, who was frowning at the newcomer. Meixiu was also looking at him and his robes with narrowed eyes.

-Isn’t that that Huan? Or is there another? He thought, confused, looking at the newcomer.

“Are these bastards growing on a tree somewhere?” Jia Ying muttered softly behind him, effectively confirming that it was not Huan.

Behind him, even more cultivators had come into the courtyard, fanning out down the colonnades, now outnumbering them about two to one. Had they been suppressed fully he might have fancied their chances, but with any kind of qi available, likely treasures and talismans would work.

“A valuable card in hand, Senior Jio?” another of the masked youths suggested.

“Potentially, yes,” Jio mused.

The other disciples around the tree were sitting there in silence, clearly not sure how to act. He had no idea regarding their cultivations, but he was pretty sure they were no match for the force before them, and certainly they knew it as well.

“Take your disciples and go, Brother Chu,” Senior Jio said to the pale youth.

“…”

Senior Chu looked at the group, then at Jia Ying, his expression torn for a moment, before waving a hand to the others. Everyone bar Bai Meifen, Jia Ying and Meixiu scrambled off, until he grabbed Deng Fei by the arm at the last minute to stop him.

Deng Fei looked at him and the remaining group in momentary confusion, then glanced at Senior Jio’s group again before electing to continue taking refuge under the tree after all.

-Yeah. If you’re already moving under Bai Meifen’s group, you really don’t want to get off this platform right now, he thought.

“I would not expect much, but I suppose it was too much to expect anything,” Jia Ying sighed, standing up.

“I am sorry, Senior Jia, but I have my own disciples to consider. Your politics with others cannot inconvenience my juniors,” Senior Chu muttered.

The others walked forward, the various disciples stepping out of the way.

‘Pei’ glanced back at him and the green pupils of his eyes sank into its mind—

Involuntarily, he felt his awareness of his surroundings go dull: the wound in his neck throbbed, the aches in his bones were more prominent, the fatigue of the day sweeping over him, making him slump back.

Everyone else, except for Senior Chu, also crumpled, whereupon the blue-robed disciples shot forward, rapidly stabbing everyone. Two fought back; however, Senior Chu was struck by four swords, including one from ‘Pei’. The ambush took less than a breath, and when it was done, there was nobody living other than those beneath the tree.

“The Nine Auspicious Moons working with the Azure Astral Authority,” Senior Pei mused. “This kind of thing can work well in our favour, especially based on what was relayed.”

“We arrived too late to save the unfortunate Senior Chu, but we did apprehend several villains in the act, including one who turned out to be Jia Ying…” another mused, looking at the rest of them with a smirk. “And Bai Meifen, who has been notably leading the exploration of the ruins, trying to find what makes it tick.”

“Mmmmm,” Senior Jio nodded.

Gasping, he pushed himself up, surprised he was able to move as well as he could. The leaf in his mouth was tingling now, as if providing some benefit in support of what had happened.

Meixiu looked at him, then at the others, then at Jia Ying.

“Au… Feck,” Meixiu cursed in a rather odd language.

He was confused for a moment, until he saw the faintest haze of something, almost like a lingering hand, drift out of the shadows to touch Senior Chu’s body. Even then, he only ‘saw’ it because he was looking right at it, he was sure.

Jia Ying frowned, then suddenly shot backwards, towards the other hall, dragging Bai Meifen after her. Meixiu followed, grabbing his arm. He had the presence of mind to grab Deng Fei as well.

“AFTER THEM!” one of the masked youths snapped.

In that same instant, all the ‘dead’ surged up, attacking indiscriminately.

*Crack*

There was a sound of shattering stone behind him, and then he was sent sprawling as what he assumed was a talisman exploding knocked both him and Deng Fei off their feet.

Scrambling up, he broke line of sight with a column, only to find a masked youth already there, grasping for him. With a grimace, he cut upwards with his blade, only to find the youth already parrying—

His blade met the treasure weapon and smashed it like glass, taking the youth’s arm off with it.

The repression was still pushing down on him, slowly, moment by moment, obscuring his awareness of qi, he realised. Probably, it would only take a few minutes before it was back to how it had been, which was odd in its own way, but it did make sense that whatever was keeping the spirits in check was not that easily overcome.

*Crack*

*KRUMP*

A second explosion tore through the enclosed space, knocking him off his feet and dislodging roof tiles in a clatter.

Gasping for breath, he hefted his blade, fighting back the brief spurt of dizziness—

A second youth attacked him from the side, trying to knock him to the ground. Instinctually, he slashed at the youth and this time, his attacker swatted his blade back, taking care not to hit the edge.

There was a scream to his right as Jia Ying cut an arm off one disciple, then decapitated a second. Meixiu appeared beside him, ducking between the pillars to kick one who was flanking him into the pool with a splash.

“Guah!” Struggling as he was, he saw Deng Fei, who had bravely moved to engage two of the disciples, trying to flank him go flying and hit the wall far too hard for comfort.

“F–Fei?” he yelled, the pit of his stomach dropping.

“Shit! They are no good dead!” someone yelled nearby.

-They are not trying to kill us?

Something about that statement made his blood boil. He wanted nothing more than to run over to Deng Fei and check on him, but those two who had knocked Fei down were already on top of him. He ducked away from one, then pulled out a spear blade to use as an offhand weapon, hoping that it was actually good metal. Parrying the blow, he was surprised to hear it ring strangely, his vision blurring.

“W-w—!”

His attacker was equally shocked, staggering back, shaking his head.

Bai Meifen appeared like a ghost, grabbing the youth by the scruff of his neck and slamming him into a pillar. Channelling his own rage, he pushed aside the confusion and lashed out at the stunned youth with the spear blade, managing to cut his attackers arm—

“AHAAAAAIIIIIGGGH!”

His victim shrieked as if he had just been run through with white hot metal, grasping his arm.

Unfortunately, his attacker’s companion managed to recover fast enough to block his follow up, back-handed strike with the spear blade, arm to arm, sending him sprawling.

“Fates dammit, is that some artefact?!” someone else yelled as the spear blade clattered away, falling from his nerveless grasp.

They kicked him in the back, hard enough for him to spit blood, while a wave of qi-infused tore at his injuries.

Rolling over, trying to use his own qi, vainly, to dispel the leaden feeling in his limbs, he was greeted with a brief snapshot of the chaotic melee.

To his relief, Deng Fei had just been badly stunned because he was now struggling up, backing away from one of the blue-robed youths.

Jia Ying had killed two more, that he could see, but the pool was starting to cloud with dark liquid, suggesting at least one more had landed there.

Meixiu had caught another, he saw, punching her attacker with enough force to make the man cough up blood from beneath his mask as he crumpled back.

Meifen—

He realised he couldn’t see Meifen, even as his attacker picked up the spear blade.

“What in the fates is that blade!?!”

Ignoring their question, he frantically looked around for his blade, only to find, much to his horror, that it had tumbled quite far away.

“Fates-accursed bastards!” All he could do was draw another spear blade, which he duly did – however, his hand instead closed around the dagger, which was also stashed in that satchel.

*Clack*

*Clatter*

Scattering roof tiles warned him a moment before three more figures in masks wearing blue robes dropped off the roof to land behind them. He tried to cut at the nearest one, but the figure swatted the blade away—

Meifen shoulder charged one straight into the pool behind them, then spun, snatching his blade up off the ground and smashing the weapon of a second—

The kick to his midriff sent him crashing into the wall, the taste of warm iron blooming in his mouth.

-Idiot, he groaned inwardly, knowing what a stupid mistake he had made there. That’s twice I’d be dead now…

*Crack*… *Crack*

Gasping, he fought off disorientating white splotches in his vision and pushed himself up and nearly vomited as he experienced a sense of extreme double vision.

In one scene, he struggled up and parried the follow-up blow. In the other, he struggled up and watched as the tall upright stele holding the painting of the woman with the golden flower in her hands cracked, disturbing golden shadows flaking off it along with a deeply disturbing sense of fading vitality that mirrored his own…

“No!”

He focused, forcefully, and managed to parry a third blow, even as Meifen threw another cultivator away.

Dimly, he was aware of her stabbing a blue-robed cultivator who had appeared from somewhere, trying to reach him, even as the cultivator before him grasped him and pulled him up.

“Be thankful we need you alive, Ha brat, otherwise I’d gut you like a—”

“Dog-sired bastard!” he cursed, fighting back the nausea as he managed to grab the dagger and stab it into his attacker’s side, twisting it viciously.

*Guaaaghhhhrlk*

His attacker recoiled, making a horrible, inhuman rasping shriek, blood foaming out of his mouth.

“YOU—!” a youth in a travelling robe, wearing a mask, appeared before him, clearly enraged, lashing out at him with the flat of a blade.

Reflexively, he blocked with the dagger and stared dully as his assailant’s weapon warped on impact then shattered into a blizzard of orphaned metal shards, sending them both flying backwards as the artefact died in a small blaze of golden fire.

The dagger – well, short blade, really – in his hand rang faintly, but was none the worse for wear—

Suddenly, one of the masked youths in travelling robes was right in front of him, grabbing him by the arm, grasping the pouch at his waist. He had the presence of mind to slam the full force of his own weight into his assailant, sending them both sprawling, even as he desperately tried to avoid being disarmed.

*Crack*

Again, the two scenes wavered through each other again, dawn and dusk disturbingly overlapping for a second time.

*Crack*

*Crack*

It was hard to say where the crack actually came from, from him smashing his assailant’s weapon-hand off the stonework as hard as he could, or if the stele in his vision had just manifested a second crack.

-That is not good! What exactly happened?! he sobbed in his heart, trying to look around in the swirling broken half-light as the two scenes again tried to split apart in his mind’s eye.

Jia Ying appeared like a ghost, cutting down another of the blue-robed figures and stabbed the masked figure trying to grab him in the side of the head.

“Get up!” she snapped. “Something is—”

“Look out—!” he rasped, still fighting against his swirling vision as two more of the masked figures appeared like phantoms behind her, cutting for her arms, clearly trying to cripple her.

She blocked easily, kicking them back, and the scene resolved itself into one attacker. Their surroundings, however, were still hazy, he realised, the water in the pond now drifting up as the whole scene overlaid itself. There was a terrible, cold feeling in his chest, while the statue of the woman in the middle started to manifest black cracks, emanating out from the flower.

“W-what?” That exclamation came from Meixiu… and was directed at him, he realised.

Everything returned to normal after a second; however, he saw Bai Meifen also pressing a hand between her breasts, trying to ward off her attacker. Deng Fei had somehow managed to tackle one of those heading for her, sending both of them sprawling in a ball of flailing limbs—

Grimacing, he focused on himself, finding that two more blue-robed disciples were now rushing at him, weapons drawn.

*Crack*

*Clack*

Reflexively, he managed to stab the masked figure in travelling robes who had just grasped his arm, the dagger scraping off metal armour for a moment before finding purchase and gouging deep into their side—

“UAAAAAAEEHHHHAAAAaaaaaa….”

With a horrific, gasping, sighing scream, his attacker crumpled backwards, spasming like he had just had a fit.

“That dagger…”

He had no time to react, as a figure, which resolved itself into ‘Senior Huan’, was suddenly standing over him, sword pointed straight at his neck, his right foot having just stamped hard on his arm, grinding it into the floor, stopping him from moving.

Meixiu, who had been intercepted by the youth called ‘Jio’, shifted like a ghost, dashing towards him.

Deng Fei, who had just managed to push away his own attacker, was nearer, drawing a treasure spear and casting it towards Huan.

The spear nearly hit the ‘Senior Disciple’ from the Din clan, arriving within a hand’s width of him, before Huan just grunted and caught it out of the air without even looking.

“No…!” he rasped, as Huan stared at it with narrowed eyes.

“You are useful… but your friend…”

Deng Fei stumbled as the bond between him and the weapon, presumably some special treasure bequeathed by his family if it was soul bound, was broken.

Before Meixiu could reach him, he cast the spear at her, forcing her to dodge backwards—

Jia Ying, however, who had shaken off ‘Brother Pei’, now arrived beside him, her blow seeming to twist the world around them both.

“Tcch.”

Huan sounded annoyed as much as anything, as he somehow twisted away from her blow, evading it. The move did, however, give him an opportunity. Fighting pain, he twisted over, grabbed the dagger with his other hand and cut at Huan’s leg—

Huan’s leg vanished like a mirage, and he was aware he hit the wall so hard he bounced off it, the dagger lost from his grip, spinning in the air. Huan grasped for it, his eyes, visible in his mask, lit up by greed—

“The dagger—! DON’T LET HIM!” Meixiu’s shout, which had a clear edge to it, drew his attention. Jia Ying nearly got to it, only to have to dance away from ‘Pei’, who also nearly got it, and then found that it had landed right in front of Deng Fei, who snatched it up and lunged at Pei… who backhanded Deng Fei into a pillar where he crumpled, unmoving, blood running from his mouth that was smoking black faintly, the dagger spinning back through the air.

“I have—”

“You have shit,” Jia Ying snarled, her hands twisting in front of her as she collided with ‘Pei’, twisting the space around him and sending him into a pillar with enough force to dislodge roof tiles, and then snatched the dagger out of the air before it fell, grasping the hilt and spinning to strike straight at Huan’s throat, forcing him to evade backwards at last.

“No!” he gasped again, even as he forced himself up, trying to ignore that his forearm was certainly broken, based on the terrible needling pain twisting through it and the way his fingers tingled very disturbingly.

Meixiu and Jia Ying both struck at ‘Senior Huan’ who managed to evade both of them, buying him breathing room to finally get to Deng Fei.

“Fei…” Stumbling over, he pressed a hand to his friend’s chest, trying to feel for a heartbeat, but there was… nothing.

Stomach sinking, he put a hand to Fei’s neck and tried to send some qi into his friend’s body, but there was no vitality there, just turbulent qi dispersing.

One of the blue-robed youths charged, trying to grasp him. Snarling, he tackled them back, then drew a spear blade out of his pouch and stabbed them in the stomach…

Then the chest…

Then the head…

*Crrrraaaaack*

The world wavered around them, and he tasted blood in his mouth as his ears rang. That detonation had come from the far courtyard, by the tree, where presumably there was also still a battle going on.

Jia Ying arrived beside him, her expression pale, and dragged him up, glancing at Deng Fei.

“He’s…” he couldn’t bring himself to say it really. He had not been that close to Deng Fei, but Fei had been a peer… and a friend. Someone familiar in all this mess and now he was…

“He’s dead,” she said, somewhat compassionately, putting a hand on his shoulder.

Before he could say anything, she put a hand on his body and it vanished, likely placed in her storage ring.

“Here—” Jia Ying cut off whatever she had been about to say, as two of the blue-robed ‘corpses’ next to him both stood up, explaining why Huan was not fighting her – he was also now being assailed by three more blue-robed cultivators, seized by the spectres. Jio had gone to help Pei, while Bai Meifen a few metres away by the next column had dispatched another of the blue-robed youths, but was now backing up two more who were crowding towards her. Meixiu had been stalled by two masked youths in travelling robes, who had managed to get through from the other courtyard.

Jia Ying grabbed him by the arm, dashing over to Bai Meifen, opening the throat of one of Meifen’s assailants and kicking the second hard enough to send them spinning across the water with a splash in the process.

“T-thanks…” Meifen grimaced.

“Don’t thank me just—” Jia Ying broke off, as ‘Huan’ once again appeared before her, like a mirage.

He stumbled back, and saw three more masked figures, in the same nondescript robes as those he had seen in the town, on the roof opposite them, crouching down, holding talismans.

“That’s… not good,” Meifen agreed, also noticing them.

“Nothing about this is good,” he rasped, desperately trying to quash his chaotic state of mind.

“I’ll deal with you first,” Huan said urbanely, easily avoiding Jia Ying’s twin strike.

“Can you?” she sneered, dancing backwards and suddenly blurring strangely, seeming to grow a second set of arms.

“This—!” Huan, caught off guard, was hit in the side with the dagger—

*CRACK*

The world wavered around them and he hit the ground, hard, his breath vanishing. The source of the shockwave had been Jia Ying, managing to strike Huan’s armour which had just exploded outwards, sending everyone sprawling.

Shaking his head, he was dragged up by Jia Ying. Meixiu had arrived beside them, snatching up his blade, which Bai Meifen had just dropped. Without any pre-amble, she lashed out at Huan, forcing the stumbling youth, whose robes were now in smoking disarray, to block hurriedly and go sprawling backwards.

“Yours, I believe,” Jia Ying grimaced, holding out the dagger—

He was about to suggest that in the current circumstances, she keep it, when Bai Meifen’s yell from behind him made him spin, to find a talisman, cast by one of the trio of masked youths who just arrived, was now shimmering in the air, qi already turning sluggish—

Meixiu, who happened to be closest, darted back, lashing out as she did so with his borrowed blade, slicing the talisman in two – which promptly destabilized.

Meifen dragged him down; however, she was a fraction too late, as the shockwave sent everyone sprawling—

He expected to hit water, but instead landed on solid paving slabs with a lung-emptying thud, aware of a hand grabbing at his shoulder, his qi no longer responding to his command.

“This is really getting tiresome!” Pei snarled. “If you were not—”

Meixiu and Jia Ying both arrived before Pei and the masked figure who had just landed beside them—

The masked man cut at Meixiu; however, she swatted his blade away and decapitated the other youth, continuing to travel in a bloody arc towards ‘Pei’.

In the same instant, Jia Ying appeared beside him and Bai Meifen, lashing at Pei, who was forced to relinquish his grip on him or be cut with the dagger, and dodge away into the water to avoid also being struck by Meixiu.

“I have to admit, I am impressed,” Huan, who had stood up on the far side, looking a bit pale, called over. “However, you should just accept that this is played out. Give me the blade and I am sure we can reach an accommodation.”

“We need to get out of here…” Jia Ying scowled, pulling out an aged, yellow talisman covered in ornate white symbols like interlocking moons and passing him back the dagger. “If they get that Dao Cage up, we will be in a world of trouble!”

“D-Dao Cage?” Bai Meifen sounded worried, which was not a good thing.

There were ten masked figures now arrayed around the courtyard, four on the roof, holding talismans, the barrier they were conjuring nearly complete based on the iridescent shimmer.

Meixiu grabbed him and leapt onto the roof, charging for the nearest corner. Jia Ying, holding the talisman, followed after them with Meifen…

“Shit!” Huan vanished with a blur, appearing right before them, grasping for him, even as he struck at Meixiu.

Jia Ying triggered the talisman.

The world wavered as the first rays of dawn rose over the horizon, briefly casting everything into strange red hues—

*Crack*

*Crack*

*Crack*

*Crack*

The barrier shattered like glass, making all four figures on the corners split blood as Meixiu blocked Huan’s blow, sending them crashing back down into the courtyard, through the ruined edge of the roof.

They hit the ground hard enough to make his bones rattle, the scene around them wavering bizarrely.

Jia Ying and Meifen arrived beside them, forcing Huan to distract himself from his attempt to grasp for him and the dagger—

He fought the return of the horrible double vision, the painting of the golden-haired woman and the statue both seeming to split straight through the flower, the courtyard wavering disturbingly, bleeding all kinds of wrong colours from the edges of things.

“Fucking idiots! Children should never be trusted with complex machinery!”

The words, coming from nearby, spoken in Easten, made him wonder if he was hallucinating again, until his double vision cleared and he found himself staring up at a sky touched by the first rays of sunlight and the distinct lack of their previous surroundings.

“Good gods… what the hell?” Meixiu, who he was still holding onto as well, was looking around, confused.

Hands trembling, he managed to touch his neck. The wound was still there… and his arm felt like it had had a rock dropped on it.

“It was real?” was all he managed to rasp, staring at the cloudless sky.

“What the nameless fates just happened?” Bai Meifen groaned from beside him.

Sitting up, he found two Grass Scorpions were sprawled nearby shaking their heads.

Turning, he saw the carving of the woman, the upright stele intact, showing no signs of cracking; however, the paint was faded and the flower itself did have a conspicuous gap through it.

Reaching out, he held up the dagger, staring at it, then looked around for his blade, before realising that Meixiu was holding it.

“Where is the dagger?!” Meixiu was staring around wildly.

“Uh, I…” he trailed off, looking around for Jia Ying.

“Senior Jia?” he called out, before Meixiu actually grabbed him by the front of his ragged robe.

“Where. IS. IT!”

“The… dagger?” he asked confused. “Here?”

She plucked it out of his hand without any preamble, turning it over several times staring at it.

“How? How did you find this?”

“Uh… we found it, by accident, running away from the net-casting demon.”

“You… found it?” she said dully.

“It was by a skeleton, under a bush, by a road,” he added weakly.

“By a skeleton… under a bush?” she repeated dully.

“Um… Meixiu?” a voice in Easten, nearby, sounded confused.

“Oh… Kojiro,” Meixiu acknowledged him absently.

“…”

“What just happened?” he managed to ask Kojiro.

“There was a teleport anomaly,” Kojiro said. “Half of you got sent fates know where.”

“Teleport… anomaly?” he echoed.

“Isn’t this Merovin?” Meixiu asked, looking around.

“It is,” Kojiro nodded. “Mayumi… and you went to scout it out with the boss, but…”

“Ah, good, the world hasn’t… ended.”

He looked up to find Mayumi and the Old Grass Scorpion were standing on the edge of the ruin, Mayumi basically helping the old man walk, while several Grass Scorpions, looking a bit battered, dragged several cultivators after them.

“Meixiu?” Mayumi asked dully.

The old Grass Scorpion stared dully at her as well.

“Okay, would someone please explain what is going on?” Meifen wailed.