> Every clan and sect has at least one tale of gross stupidity or greed that defines the perception of a generation. However none have quite managed to have the defining momentum on the course of a generation within recent memory as the reasons why Cang Di continues to sit like a gargoyle in the only participating slot of our Eastern Azure Great World in the Heavenly Hundred Ranking.

>

> The origin of this rather amusing circumstance, in fact, lies with a different scandal entirely. That which played out some eight millennia ago between Song Jia, a mortal girl of some means and personal good fortune and one Shu Bao, son of Shu Shen Bao, grandson of Lord Shu Fei Bao, of the Shu Heavenly clan, himself an eminent official and adjunct to the Heavenly Lord Shu Han, administrator and advisor to the Wise King of Shu.

>

> Song Jia was first noticed by Shu Bao during a tournament and after some persuasion agreed to travel with Shu Bao and some of his close friends within the younger generation. After some time, Shu Bao’s own teacher and guardian, a sworn brother of Shu Bao’s father, also became impressed enough with her manner and grounding influence on Shu Bao that, with the backing of some elders in the sect and clan, he offered her a place as a Core Disciple within Eastern Azure’s Shu Pavilion, while the elders of the sect saw, in her core, her talent and her lack of complicated politics, an opportunity to bind an influential scion like Shu Bao to Eastern Azure in some small way and pressed for her to be adopted into the Shu heavenly clan and betrothed to Shu Bao.

>

> To many, this opportunity to rise to the heavens in a single bound would be a chance only dreamed of. Song Jia, however, despite being flattered, apparently did not have much attraction to Shu Bao and had also grown to dislike many of those he associated with and trusted in their generation. In the end she tried to tactfully decline the offer, claiming that her status was not enough to match such an illustrious person.

>

> The Shu Heavenly clan, however, now appraised of the true depths of her talent and potentially seeing a ‘Good Fortune Core’ such as she had slipping through their grasp, leant heavily on Shu Bao, who in turn became more attentive of her and to some accounts changed his ways such that she eventually relented, won over by his willingness and perhaps because the offer levelled at her was effectively too good to refuse at that point.

>

> At this point, all looked good. Song Jia was well-liked, Shu Bao was well-connected and all appeared happy with the match. The problem, unfortunately, arose elsewhere, far from Eastern Azure. Lord Shu Fei Bao had long pushed for closer collaboration between the Shu and Kong heavenly clans and his good friend, Kong Bao had a granddaughter of good talent who was also a member of the younger generation on Eastern Azure. Kong Bao’s wife ensured that the girl was introduced to Shu Bao, who became smitten with her, despite being now tied to a marriage contract with Song Jia.

Excerpt from: ‘The Politics of the Heavenly Hundred. Volume 16 – Eastern Azure’

  ~ By Kung Quan

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~ RUO HAN – THE RIVERLANDS ~

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“I would never have thought I would be so happy to see the horrible heat of those grasslands back,” a disciple from the Four Peacocks Court standing below him grumbled, looking towards the distant shadow of rising ground that marked the ‘eastern’ edge of the river lands.

“Don’t hold your breath. We have a problem!” a third cultivator from the Four Peacocks Court called over.

“A problem?” the youth grunted, looking at their ruined, humid and insect-infested surroundings with palpable distaste.

“Senior Fusai wants to see us all,” the ‘messenger’ said.

“About fate-thrashed time! I am getting fed up of this,” the other member of that little group exclaimed, standing up from his block.

Ruo Han, sitting wearily on a slab of a fallen building, overlooking the site of their near disaster, could only sigh. Those words – ‘we have a problem’ – could have summed up the entire previous two weeks, which really did not feel like two weeks.

Fourteen days of slogging through reed beds by various means. First on foot, until they ran afoul of an armoured toad beast as big as a small house that ambushed them in the night. It had slain six and poisoned well over half the group.

That had been 8 days ago…

Five days ago, they had been attacked by a group of Ur’Vash riding on serpents, supported by a group on a boat. That had turned out to be the fortuitous turning point, because not only had it delivered them some convenient transportation, but the ‘captain’ of the vessel had actually possessed a looted storage ring and survivors had eventually directed them towards the now devastated river fortress they were now occupying, after learning that cultivators had been taken captive there.

Without that bit of luck, born out of others’ misfortune, the flood that came with the previous night’s terrifying tribulation, off to the north-west would likely have swept them all away.

“Another problem?” he interjected politely, noting as he did so that the last vestiges of ‘fighting’ on the far side of the fortress had also mostly died away.

“Faugh!” the speaker looked at him, spat in the muddy water and squelched off without comment, followed by the other four, more than happy to abandon their purported ‘role’ of keeping an eye on those sorting through the storehouse behind them.

Watching them depart, he could only shake his head. There was no point trying to ask them again, because there were still clear divisions within the wider group, and the whole set of circumstances surrounding their current location had, if anything, just driven those wedges even deeper.

“People do like to find excuses to blame others,” a weary male voice behind him said.

“Ah! Senior Quan,” he stood with a grimace because most of his body hurt and saluted.

“Nobody is anyone’s senior right now,” the other man chuckled bleakly, joining him on his perch, overlooking the settlement they had sacked… two days ago. “Don’t mind them. They are just deeply unhappy that several of their seniors bailed on them without a word.”

Given he had been there when several of those ‘Seniors’ left, he could in truth understand their anger, not that it made anything better, given they were determined to just spread it around and not really introspect on it.

“You say that, Senior Quan,” he pointed out, “but a not inconsiderable number of people here consider us to be part of the problem.”

“And they would consider you part of the solution or nothing at all, depending on how badly they got bit by bugs the night before,” Senior Quan said with a slightly vexed sigh. “None of them have any sense of foresight, interested only in their own circumstances.”

“So… um… do you need me for something?” he asked respectfully, changing the direction of the topic of conversation somewhat.

“Yes, actually. It relates to those we rescued,” Senior Quan mused.

“Oh…”

He was honestly surprised at that. They were a rather mixed bunch and while all of them were pleased to be rescued, the status of a few was already causing problems with the more discontented outliers of their own ‘group’, who really did not like that the Nine Auspicious Moons were still leading them.

“How are the ones we freed?” he asked.

“Shocked, enraged… very keen on bloody revenge.” Quan Dingxiang said, again sounding tired. “A few of the women are… ashamed, though nothing that has transpired is their fault and they do not appear to have been particularly mistreated. We have done what we can for the injured, for now… and we have bigger problems, it seems.”

“Their ‘problem’?” he guessed, gesturing off towards the group who had just stalked off.

“Yes,” Quan Dingxiang said, though he didn’t elaborate on it, instead turning to just look around the ruins from their slight vantage point for a moment.

“Anyway, you were a Junior Elder in your sect, apparently?” Quan asked, returning to the previous topic.

“I was,” he conceded, though that felt like a small lifetime ago. “Though only an ‘Outer Sect’ one. Not that there is much question of anything to do with the Argent Hall now.”

“Well, two of those unfortunates these Ur’Vash captured are female disciples from the Argent Hall,” he said.

“I… I will not be a lot of help there,” he pointed out, running a hand through his wet hair. “I was an outer sect disciple in a subsidiary influence. Liao Ying would…”

“She is still recuperating,” Quan Dingxiang said diplomatically, as he trailed off with a sigh.

If his own situation was marginally looking up and Jin Chen’s was not, thankfully, getting much worse, Liao Ying was suffering, it was fair to say. Setting aside the mental trauma of whatever had been done by those who had ‘controlled’ them while trying to flee two weeks prior, Liao Ying was also beset by a serious inner injury. Her cultivation was not… degrading, but her law was now unsuitable for her damaged spirit root, which had been robbed of its ‘Yin’ aspect entirely by Hao Tai. She was… well it was hard to know what to say to her really.

“At least she is showing signs of some change?” he asked, starting to follow Quan Dingxiang down the side of the ruined building.

“She is. Her realm is not high; however, unnatural remedies for ‘natural’ damage are not easy,” Quan Dingxiang mused. “We also don’t have a lot to work with, and the realm… whatever is going on there is not helping…”

“I see,” he nodded politely, although his frustration inside was palpable.

It was still strange to be conversing with such an eminent alchemist – and there was no mistake, Quan Dingxiang was an eminent alchemist – in such a casual manner, but these were strange times.

“What were they talking about earlier? Was it that… oddness?” he asked once they finished climbing back down into the courtyard where various disciples were sorting through boxes of herbs and other materials.

“Oh. Yeah…” Quan Dingxiang paused to spit into the water. “I’d say it was a once in a lifetime opportunity, before those fates-accursed demons and the flooding and the mist.”

“And the…” he trailed off, because she was still there, perched on the highest portion of the courtyard they were in, a lone, standing tower, looking out over the swamp.

“You can see her as well?” he asked, just to be sure.

“The girl in the mask with the bow who killed those phantasmal lizard things?” Quan Dingxiang said, looking up at the only standing tower. “Yes, and please don’t ask me. I have no idea… except that it reinforces that this realm is far more dangerous than anyone ever expected.”

-And what did they expect? he thought a bit nastily to himself and not for the first time either.

“As if that terrifying tribulation didn’t hammer that home,” he muttered instead.

“Hah! Yes,” Quan Dingxiang said with a wry bark of a laugh. “Quite… Though please don’t ask me about that either.

“How is your situation?” Quan Dingxiang asked.

The change in topic caught him slightly off-guard, truth be told. His cultivation strength was slowly recovering, the seals having finally collapsed two days ago for a lack of qi...

“I seem to have avoided dropping back to Soul Foundation,” he said after a moment. “However, my meridians are basically as they were – severely damaged – and with the drop off in efficacy of half of the pills we brought here… there isn’t much that can be done about that in the short term, I guess?”

“Hmm… you might be surprised,” Quan Dingxiang replied as they started to walk down the flooded street. “Though you are right: there is both a dearth of low-ranked pills and not much in the way of resources to make them. In any case, regarding what happened before, it appears that there was some likely rather deserved backlash against whatever was attempted. I have never heard of a tribulation being messed with to such a degree; nobody would be that insane among the ‘Junior Generation’ back home.”

Unbidden, he recalled what had happened with Han Shu, before they were captured.

“So… that means there are ‘Seniors’ here as well,” he said after a moment’s pause.

Quan Dingxiang nearly tripped.

“That is your takeaway?”

“Well, clearly people are messing with such things,” he pointed out. “Not to mention what happened to Han Shu…”

“This and that… those two things are not even in the same star field,” Quan Dingxiang muttered, looking at him.

“And yet, what even is this ‘trial’?” he countered, mostly because the frustration with that question had been brewing for a very long time indeed.

“…”

Quan Dingxiang stared at him, his expression nonplussed.

“I mean, we can be tracked by our talismans, they have something to do with fate… and are recording what we do? This is a trial, but there is no clearly defined end goal?” he continued. “I am only an outer disciple of a branch sect, a Nascent Soul cultivator… but even I can see this shit stinks so bad you don’t need a compass to tell that it disagreed with the dog that passed it—”

Quan Dingxiang stopped him, literally, putting his hand over his mouth.

“W-w…?” he tried to speak, confused as Quan Dingxiang stared up at the sky nervously.

“…”

“Huh,” Quan Dingxiang continued to look at the sky, confused.

“That hasn’t worked here, just like heavenly oaths don’t, not since… since we were all up in the mountains,” he said, understanding what Quan Dingxiang had been worried about now.

“It hasn’t?” Quan Dingxiang said dully.

“Nope, heavenly oaths were not binding properly, even up there,” he gestured vaguely in the direction of the mountains they had come from initially. “I was in a situation where that had to be checked.”

“…”

“And you…”

“There were pitched battles going on between cultivators in those valleys,” he muttered, wondering what experience Quan Dingxiang had had to not know. “I saw people using artefacts to lift the suppression, robbing at will. Probably they were impersonating others as well. It was the aftermath of that that led to us getting done for the Jade Gate Court’s greed.”

“And nobody thought to ask?” Quan Dingxiang said, suddenly sounding tired.

“No,” he shook his head, not sure whether to laugh or cry.

“Well, that is certainly something to be considered, and heavenly oaths not working would certainly explain a few things…” Quan Dingxiang said with a sigh, picking up the pace again.

…

Their trip through the ruin of the fort was fairly uneventful. They passed a few other groups, who mostly saluted to Quan Dingxiang or studiously pretended they hadn’t seen him as they worked to understand the various wards that had been put in place to protect this place, particularly the ‘Soul Sense’ restrictions, which were still in effect somehow.

“S-senior Quan!” a voice behind them made him turn.

Quan Dingxiang glanced back at the youth, a disciple in the robes of the Splendid Heavens Cauldron Sect, a subsidiary of the Pill Sovereigns, and just kept walking.

“Senior Quan!”

The disciple called a second time, before finally breaking out into an actual run to catch up.

“S-senior Quan!”

“What.” Quan Dingxiang stopped and eyed the disciple dubiously. “I am in the middle of something.”

“Senior, we have found something you should see…”

“…”

The disciple quailed slightly under his stare, then glanced at him, before he felt a veil of dissociation cover their surroundings as he relayed something to Senior Quan so that no one else could hear. Senior Quan eyed him dubiously, then looked across the fort, and sighed.

“It seems that we must make a detour,” he said, with a slightly apologetic shrug.

“It is fine, Senior Quan,” he said respectfully, not looking at the youth, who was clearly displeased that he was also coming along for some reason.

Turning from their original destination, Quan Dingxiang waved for the disciple to lead the way.

He followed along, as the disciple continued to talk to Quan Dingxiang, hiding his voice from him completely, which was a bit rude in the circumstances, but he had no standing to tell them not to. Instead, he took in the ruin of the fortified ‘town’… such as it was.

Its current condition was not really a result of them doing anything so organized as ‘sacking’ it, as most of the real damage had been done by the flood. In normal circumstances their group of about fifty would never have been in a fit state to consider touching what was effectively a military fortress with an attached trading hub and harbour.

However, it had transpired that some ten disciples from the Four Peacocks Court and a few others from various influences were being held here, captured by the ruler of this place, who, much like on the other side of the river, was quite taken with the idea of ‘enslaved’ cultivators.

Without Jia Ying agreeing, they would probably have seen a mutiny for control by those others brought along with that teleport, and so the plan had been hatched that led to this ‘fortress’ being ‘sacked’. The method itself, though, had largely been via subterfuge.

Rather than attack outright, they had instead snuck in, led by Senior Jia, with a fair number posing as ‘captured’ prisoners. Once inside, they had decapitated the leadership and seized control in a single move.

After that, though, upon seeing the situation within, many of those ‘hangers on’ disciples who had not left by the teleport ploy, had ‘become enraged on behalf of justice’ and massacred half the population in the aftermath, wilfully disobeying all the seniors’ orders to show restraint until they knew what they were dealing with and effectively looting everything in sight.

In other circumstances, that would not really have been a problem, he supposed, taking in the buildings and the floating bodies, now being cleared up street by street. They were also sulking, because Jia Ying basically made them divide up all spoils equally… at sword point, forcing them to empty out their storage rings to do so. That had been before the tribulation, and nobody’s mood had improved since, it seemed.

Shaking his head at that, he found they had arrived at the main courtyard of the river fortress, where the last embers of resistance to their occupation had resurged after the flood had turned everything upside down. Freshly slain bodies of Ur’Vash were drifting in the water, some being stacked up by a few disciples from the Shen clan. The ‘guards’ were all proper combatants as well, a group of Martial Archers from the Nine Auspicious Moons and three of the women from Verdant Flowers Valley, all of them looking sweaty and sullen because, he realised, the temperature was much higher than anywhere else.

“Why is it hot enough that it feels like the air is trying to boil?” he asked, pulling at his ragged robe.

The disciple shot him a ‘who are you to ask’ look, but Quan Dingxiang ignored him and shrugged. “It seems to be some kind of spirit herb, or maybe a beast core?”

“Blood, actually,” the Nine Moons disciple sitting by the door, who he vaguely recalled as being called Bai Zhilan, answered.

“Blood, Senior Bai?” he queried, as Quan Dingxiang also frowned.

“Yep, the one possessing it was one of their arts users. Apparently it was delivered post haste here, to them, from a battle with cultivators to the south,” she explained before glancing at the disciple witheringly. “He was the one who rallied the defenders to this place after the flood. Fortunately, he was not killed by these morons, or their ritual here might have killed people it would have been an actual imposition to lose.”

The disciple guiding them frowned, but said nothing.

“I take it you have the perimeter sealed?” Quan Dingxiang mused, looking around.

“We do,” Bai Zhilan passed Senior Quan a talisman, before glancing at him.

Quan Dingxiang passed it on to him and headed on into the interior hall.

There, they were met by several more guards and a group of disciples from various imperial aligned sects who were rather sulkily ‘watching’ the guards. Here, the temperature was even more obnoxious, to the point where even with the talisman helping him he would have struggled were he not now fully attuned. Several conspicuous blood spatters and four Ur’Vash corpses in masks and bloody robes lay there, marking the ferocity of the resistance.

The ‘Seal’ mentioned was around the door at the far side. Without any preamble, Quan Dingxiang walked over to it, with him in tow and passed through it, making it ripple, revealing a faint mirage of interlocking circles attuned to resist ‘Yang Energies’.

“I take it most of this is undisturbed?” Quan Dingxiang asked the three standing inside.

“Yes, we don’t want a repeat of the Star Water Lily fiasco from the other warehouse,” the youth, his teal robe stripped to the waist muttered, with a sour look at the doorway and the group ‘watching’ the guards beyond.

“It was a good thing too,” the woman in the robes of the Nine Moons added. “The group who holed up in here were definitely trying to do something.”

Following after Quan Dingxiang he stopped as soon as he crossed into the room. It was certainly not a ‘warehouse’, instead containing a circular pool, an altar and various carvings daubed in blood, depicting ferocious serpents. The strength of ‘Yang’ was cloying and oppressive… and also recognisable, because it was against all the odds almost identical to what he had felt in the valley, and on occasion from Lin Ling herself.

-Yang Blood? Did these Ur’Vash catch Lin Ling somehow?

At that thought, his heart immediately quickened; however, looking around again, he realised his first impression had been somewhat mistaken. The main source was a large bowl of blue-grey stone which, even from the edge of the room, he could see held a fist-sized fragment of bloody scab that was suffusing water, slowly dissolving into blood. It was familiar in that he had seen Lin Ling use something similar, decanting remnants of whoever she had gotten the blood from, he had supposed, into vials to use as weapons. They had not been given any, so he had no idea how it had arrived here.

“You recognise it?” Quan Dingxiang had also caught his reaction, which made him grimace inwardly, as he had so far avoided talking much about anything relating to Juni or Ling, and only volunteered the most basic things about Han Shu.

“I recognise the Yang strength,” he acknowledged, glad that soul sense was still restricted here, so nobody could see if he was concealing the truth somewhat. “It feels like the beast we observed at a distance in the mountains, which fought with various Ur’Vash while we fled from it… before we were captured.”

“Perhaps it came from the same species?” Quan Dingxiang mused.

“It certainly has a link to the Yang strength of that earth dragon that interfered with the battle,” the Nine Moons disciple observed.

“Perhaps,” he agreed, proud that he didn’t so much as hesitate there.

“It does remind me of that beast from the battle,” Quan Dingxiang mused, walking over to the bowl, wincing only a bit as the ferocious strength of the blood’s presence started to make his robes smoke.

“That isn’t everything either,” the Nine Moons disciple said with a dark look outside at the other disciples, sitting around outside.

“It isn’t?” Quan Dingxiang frowned.

The second woman, a rather stocky disciple who was an unusual example of a female cultivator who was not a flawless beauty, for all that she was a member of an influence renowned for it – the Dewdrop Sage Sect – nodded and passed Quan Dingxiang a wrapped bundle. Taking it, Quan Dingxiang unwrapped it, exposing three objects: a mask – made of the golden-copper metal, a talisman carved in the shape of a many-headed serpent and half a dagger.

“What is this, Sister Mingluo?” Quan Dingxiang asked the Nine Auspicious Moons disciple, picking up the dagger with a frown.

“A dagger… handle,” Mingluo deadpanned.

The dagger itself was fairly innocuous, and rather broken — its hilt was cracked in two places and made of a dull grey-black iron, twisted and shaped to look somewhere between flames and flowing water. The blade was broken, and clearly a later addition for it was made of the same copper-golden metal as many of the weapons and masks he had seen.

“Who had it?” Qing Dingxiang asked, turning it over in his hand for a moment before putting it on the nearby slab and turning to the pendant.

“The demon cultivator—” Mingluo started

“—Ur’Vash,” he absently corrected, then winced.

“Ur’Vash then,” Mingluo corrected with a sideways look at him.

“I apologise, Senior. I did not mean to interrupt,” he bowed hurriedly because that had been a stupid mistake to make.

“It’s fine,” she waved a hand. “Anyway, by the time we broke through their cordon, the one wearing the mask was trying to perform some kind of ritual with that blood and this dagger. They had three cultivators with fire and soul attribute spirit roots—”

“Wait… they were sacrificing cultivators?” Quan Dingxiang, looked around again, scowling.

“And a bunch of their own kin, all of them slaves,” the disciple from the Four Peacocks Court finally spoke up. “We got lucky. That group tried to do this all on their own, while we focused on subjugating those forces outside who tried to escape and didn’t tell anyone.”

“Do we know what the ritual intended to do, Seniors?” he asked, curious.

“Beyond that it involved a lot of Yang Blood and ritual sacrifice? I’m afraid not,” the stocky woman from the Verdant Flowers replied, looking a bit annoyed.

“Whatever it was, if my junior sister had not informed me, they would never have gotten in here in time for us to stop the ritual.” Mingluo said, casting a dirty look at the distant group.

“Why are they loitering around out there, Brother Yan?” Quan Dingxiang frowned.

“To ‘observe’ that we don’t ‘take their fair share’,” the Four Peacocks Court disciple, who was apparently ‘Brother Yan’ replied with a sigh. “They were quite bullish until Senior Jia came to mop things up. The leader is that Fu Wu from the Chrysanthemum Pagoda.”

“…”

Quan Dingxiang just shook his head. He knew of the Chrysanthemum Pagoda, if only by name. They were a sect from the northern edge of the Central Continent, closely associated with the Imperial School… and staunch imperial court loyalists, which probably explained why they were being so obdurate.

“Where is Senior Jia anyway?” Quan Dingxiang asked, looking around.

“Checking the rest of this part of the fort,” Mingluo answered. “She said to come get you to look at the blood. See if you could garner anything from it.”

“It’s powerful… I can sense an aura of Yang Laws about,” Quan Dingxiang mused. “Whatever it came from was, at the very least, a Dao Immortal realm qi beast. That at least rules out what interfered in our battle.”

“Could it be that beast’s parent? Or could this blood be why that beast was heading in this direction?” Senior Yan speculated.

“Perhaps?” Quan Dingxiang frowned, pensively. “I would need to do a divination to be sure, and as you know…”

“Those kinds of talismans are no longer working,” Mingluo finished, while the stocky woman and the Four Peacocks disciple both nodded.

“Indeed, though ones made in here do,” Quan Dingxiang said.

“They do?” Senior Yan sounded surprised.

“Yep,” he nodded. “It was the first thing I checked. What has been stopped is any talisman that has its roots in the strength of ‘worldly fate’ outside this place—”

“…”

Mingluo stared at him for a moment then burst into hysterics.

Senior Yan and the other woman looked a bit nonplussed as she collected herself.

“Do you mind sharing your epiphany?” the Verdant Flowers disciple muttered.

“Sorry, Sister Chang, it’s just that that is too rich… So, whoever it was who screwed with that tribulation did so so fundamentally that it crippled the connections of our Eastern Azure’s Worldly Fate in relation to this place?”

“It does appear to be the case,” Quan Dingxiang agreed.

“So… those protective talismans and artefacts made by various old seniors are all no longer working?” ‘Sister Chang’ asked, casting a look at the group beyond the barrier.

“Well, ones allowing you to mess with ‘Heavenly Fate’ I would imagine…” Mingluo mused.

“A bunch of divination-related ones also don’t,” Quan Dingxiang added. “Because they carry small seeds of their maker’s connection to their worldly fates, to prevent them bricking themselves on absolute alignments their juniors have no idea how to deal with.”

“If that is the case, then there is a whole sect armoury’s worth of artefacts that likely no longer work properly either,” Senior Yan sighed.

“It does explain why our sect’s mirror took a knock though,” Mingluo said with a scowl. “And I bet that cunning dog-molester Kong Bo knew it as well.”

“The Trial Talismans still work though,” Sister Chang noted.

“Yes, they probably still have the connection,” Quan Dingxiang added, walking slowly around the room, looking at the other contents. “However, that will just be the basic metrics on them, the parts of the array that read qi… intent and so on. It’s the divination aspects that will be interfered with… though that is easy to test.”

“…”

Mingluo nodded, then turned to the door.

“YOU LOT, GET IN HERE!”

Her words echoed through the hall, making his vision swim slightly, even though he was nowhere close to the focus of it. The group of disciples watching outside flinched, almost as one and over half of them stood up without even appearing to be aware that they had done so.

“You…” one of the disciples scowled, stalking over to the barrier.

Senior Yan jerked his head and they walked in, grimacing at the heat.

“What do you want?” one scowled.

“To test something,” Quan Dingxiang said, looking over them with a degree of amusement, before pointing fairly arbitrarily at a disciple, or so it seemed. “You, congratulations on your forthcoming contribution to knowledge. Get over here.”

“…”

The disciple, clearly a bit unnerved, walked over, as Quan Dingxiang pulled out a jar from nowhere and passed it to him.

“Project your contribution talisman’s uncompressed read-out for us to see, then use this to gather some of the blood in that bowl on the altar.”

“Uh… is that…?” the disciple asked.

“I would not be asking you to do it if it was a task that involved precision thinking,” Quan Dingxiang said drolly.

“I don’t think that’s his concern,” Mingluo giggled.

“What? He came here for treasures, and he is going to gather a treasure. I fail to see the problem,” Quan Dingxiang deadpanned, before turning back to the disciple in question who was now sweating, while the others suddenly looked a lot less certain of themselves.

“Disciple Fei Wen Po of the… Harmonious Judgement of Celestial Being sect, are you going to turn down your opportunity to make a significant contribution to our group's understanding?” Quan Dingxiang said, walking over and putting a companionable arm around the youth’s shoulders.

“…”

The disciple winced and took his talisman, projecting his score of some 200,000 and then displaying all the different aspects of it that made that up. Bowing awkwardly to the seniors, he took the jar from Quan Dingxiang and walked over to the bowl, wincing at the scorching heat which started to make holes appear in his robe after a few seconds, and pushed qi into it, drawing a bit of the liquid away.

The score on the talisman blurred, jumping to a rather shocking 492,100. Three of the numbers on it, however, remained static.

“That seems fairly empirical,” Mingluo mused, then pointed to the disciple who had spoken up before in a rather surly manner. “You, Ji Wentai, come and take it off him.”

“…”

The other disciples all looked awkward, while the unfortunate singled out could only stalk forward and snatch it away. The youth’s score dropped to 301,200 immediately.

“What did it jump to?” Mingluo asked the new possessor of the blood.

“…”

The youth scowled at her, clearly unwilling.

“Is big sister going to have to teach you to respect your seniors?” she smirked.

-This is just bullying people at this point, he thought with a shudder.

The whole exercise was a reminder that there were more ways to really make a person’s day bad than by beating the snot out of them.

“520,190,” he said sullenly.

“Now, give it to your friend,” Quan Dingxiang prompted.

The youth, Ji Wentai passed it over to Fei Wen Po, whose score bounced back to what it had been before.

“Huh…” Quan Dingxiang sounded surprised at that for some reason.

“So, the measure of fundamental potential still registers, but the accumulative aspects now don’t,” Senior Yan mused, staring at the breakdown of the numbers shimmering before them.

“So the scoring system for the trial has a hole in it,” Mingluo added with a frown.

“It does appear that way,” Quan Dingxiang agreed. “Still, that is a serious jump…”

“That’s because the blood is seriously dangerous,” Jia Ying’s voice cut through the muttering of the other disciples as she walked into the room.

Those there nodded and some saluted her arrival, himself included.

“It’s the blood of a quasi-dragon, for lack of a better term, but not any you would fancy trying to use,” she said. “They were trying to use it to divine a great opportunity for one of their rulers, a fellow called ‘Sharvasus’. The ritual itself seems to have been a last ditch attempt to corrupt the whole area with Yang Energies, to allow Sharvasus to hunt us down.”

“You got that from this prisoner?” Quan Dingxiang asked.

“No, I got that from the leader of this fort.”

Without much preamble, she walked over to the table and picked up the dagger hilt.

Behind her, two more disciples from the Nine Moons dragged three Ur’Vash prisoners into the room after her. All of them were fairly ragged-looking; however, yet again he was struck with how… similar they looked to them. They had narrow facial features, tanned skin and short hair, but the narrowness in the face aside, they could have passed for a cultivator who had undergone some minor physical modification.

“You… will regret messing with our plans,” the middle Ur’Vash said in flawless Easten.

“I wonder,” Jia Ying mused, not turning around and still looking at the ruined dagger.

Putting the dagger back on the cloth, she picked up the talisman and then simply stood there in silence for almost a minute, just looking at the room.

“What do we do now?” Quan Dingxiang asked at last.

“Let’s go,” Jia Ying said abruptly, gathering up the cloth and its contents then turning on her heel and walking towards the door.

“Go…?” Senior Yan asked, sounding as confused as everyone else was surprised.

“Yes, there is nothing to keep us here. Pack up that blood in a storage jar and grab everything else. We are not hanging about here now the chaos has settled,” Jia Ying said. “It is just inviting trouble from the locals.”

“What about them?” Mingluo gestured to the three prisoners.

“…”

Jia Ying paused, then pulled out a talisman and tossed it on the ground.

{Mengde’s Dao Cage}

A heartbeat later a shimmering barrier of shifting esoteric runes appeared around all three prisoners, locking them in place as the two disciples holding them stepped smartly back.

“Uh…”

Everyone else just stood there, confused. The Ur’Vash in the middle stood and gave the barrier a poke, and was repelled easily.

“Oh!” Jia Ying stopped and turned back, walking over to the altar.

While everyone else looked on, she wrapped up the bundle containing the dagger, mask and talisman and shoved it into her satchel and then drained all the blood into a blue-grey jar, before tossing the bowl to Quan Dingxiang, who caught it with a slight grunt.

“That will be useful for your alchemy,” she said absently, looking around.

“Yes… I suppose it will,” Quan Dingxiang agreed, giving himself a shake.

The prodigious strength of yang energy was not really fading away, but he supposed that the contamination was sustained enough that that would take a few days at least before it became noticeable.

“Well, get moving, unless you want to stay here?” Jia Ying added, looking at the others.

Mingluo and Cheng both saluted, while Senior Yan nodded. The group of disciples looking on were just confused, as far as he could tell, their expressions blank as they stared at the presumably expensive barrier talisman locking away the three prisoners and then at her.

Shaking himself, Quan Dingxiang sighed and nodded, then stared at the bowl in his hands again and sighed more deeply.

“Senior Jia!” a woman dressed in travelling robes and a broad hat appeared at the door.

“We are ready?” Jia Ying asked.

“There was enough in the warehouses to fuel a short hop. We are divining now.”

“Good,” Jia Ying nodded. “I don’t want to stay here any longer than necessary. That is just inviting trouble.”

“Should we not be waiting for the others?” one of the disciples from the group by the door piped up.

“We worry about us; they worry about them. That’s not your concern,” Jia Ying replied, rather perfunctorily.

“But…”

“Senior Song and the others will rendezvous with us at the appointed place. Our job is to be there,” Jia Ying said flatly. “Your talismans don’t work, and your protecting treasures are hobbled by the Jade Gate Court’s silliness… in all likelihood. Do I need to draw you a picture as to what your role here is going forward?”

“…”

Several members of the group looked like they had been slapped in the face, which provided a certain amount of catharsis, given how annoying the ‘hangers on’ had been in the last two weeks.

“Your Nine—”

“—has a bunch of powerful seniors who know divination and geomancy and don’t need senior brother’s compass cheat sheet to get stuff done,” Mingluo cut them off with a half-smile.

“Quite,” Sister Chang grinned nastily. “Be thankful we allow you to continue along with us, rather than just leave you here in the swamp, sitting on your asses waiting for the locals to reclaim this place. That alone is us showing a lot of face to your senior’s status in your influences.”

Senior Yan nodded, adopting a somewhat more conciliatory tone. “We are all members of the righteous faction, so it is our task as seniors to see you all protected, for the future vitality of Eastern Azure…”

“Even if that means protecting you from yourselves,” Quan Dingxiang finished.

“…”

Jia Ying eyed them, then the other disciples and just shook her head. They stared blankly at her, until it became clear that she expected them to leave first.

-So still not trusting them as far as she can kick them? he mused inwardly.

With grumbles, they shuffled out, followed by the two guards then Mingluo, Chang and Yan, leaving just him, Quan Dingxiang and Jia Ying standing there.

“Is that wise?” Quan Dingxiang asked.

“Leaving the three alive?” Jia Ying asked, giving the room one last look around, then turning back to the three inside.

“Well… yes,” Quan Dingxiang frowned.

As they watched, the barrier rippled, turning opaque, and vanished from sight, leaving no trace that there were three Ur’Vash sitting there unless you walked into it, he supposed.

“Much wiser than killing them. That one on the left is a shard clone, a body possessed by a fragment of a Dao Seed,” Jia Ying explained, starting to walk towards the door.

“D…Dao Seed?” Quan Dingxiang sounded shocked, as he supposed he would, except that 90% of those here were higher realm than him so it was irrelevant to his ongoing survival whether what killed him was a Chosen Immortal or a Dao Immortal.

“The original body is at least a Dao Immortal, but the number they can make is not unlimited. The foolish idiots already killed one that I managed to identify. Leaving this one alive…”

“Is a serious handicap to such an expert, even if they are a Dao Lord,” Quan Dingxiang said grimly.

“Yep, and how they got that blood bothers me,” Jia Ying mused, passing back through the barrier ahead of them.

“It…?”

“Less questions, Brother Dingxiang,” Jia Ying cut Dingxiang off. “You are a smart person. You can draw connections between circumstances, personnel and the small cavalcade of problems we have been beset with as well as I.”

“You think we are still being stared at?” Dingxiang frowned.

“Oh, absolutely,” Jia Ying nodded. “That is not in doubt.”

“Senior Jia,” a Nine Moons disciple was stood by the doorway waiting for them.

“Yes… I know, let us get to the main plaza and get this teleport over with.”

“No… it’s that there are three groups delayed…” the disciple said, starting to walk briskly alongside them.

“Three?” Jia Ying frowned.

“Yes, the ones that were being escorted by Senior Sister Muli, Daoist Fushan and Daoist Erwei,” the woman said.

Jia Ying was silent as they walked across the courtyard and turned down through one of the ruined concourses towards the main plaza of the ‘fort’.

“You think there is more to this?” Mingluo asked.

“Definitely,” Jia Ying frowned. “I sent those three to keep an eye on those groups…”

Jia Ying pulled out a talisman and stared at it for a moment, then pushed qi into it.

“Fushan, what is the holdup?”

“Ah, Senior Ying!” a male voice, sounding a bit resigned, echoed in the air around them. “The group led by the Four Feathers bunch is determined to refine one of these wards and the groups have spread out to map the extremity.”

“Tell them there is no more time. We are leaving now.”

There was silence through the talisman for a moment, then Fushan’s voice echoed again. “Seems that three groups are not replying to the short range talismans… including one of the Verdant Flowers and one from the Shan clan…”

“Gather them up. Do it yourself if you have to,” Jia Ying replied.

“Understood, Senior Jia,” Fushan replied.

Jia Ying stared at the talisman for a moment, then sent qi into it again. “Muli?”

“We are on our way. Several of the group got caught by some leeches. It’s slowing our progress down,” a young woman’s voice sounded.

“Who?” Jia Ying asked.

“Shen Fei’s group and Deng Seong’s, they were tasked to check that outlying tower that got flooded.”

“I see…” Jia Ying mused. “In any case, move quicker.”

“Yes, Senior Sister Ying,” Muli muttered, before her talisman cut off.

“What do you think?” Jia Ying mused to Mingluo.

“This looks suspicious… is what I think,” Mingluo muttered.

“Erwei, what is the delay?” Jia Ying asked, speaking into the message talisman again.

“…”

There was silence for a moment then a man’s voice echoed back. “Sorry, there were some complications sorting out the things in the western warehouse.”

“Leave what you must, then. We are moving out now,” Jia Ying said.

“I understand. However, it’s not that easy… unless you want to leave people here.”

“I see… Who is slowing things down?” Jia Ying asked.

“We are trying to seal up a Star Water Lotus plant… the three groups locked into it are a Four Feathers group, an Imperial School Group and Shen Biyu’s group.”

“…”

“I see… I’ll send Quan Dingxiang,” Jia Ying grunted.

“Understood. Sorry, Senior Jia,” Erwei replied.

“Someone is attempting to delay us,” Senior Yan stated.

“Indeed,” Jia Ying agreed. “All these little mishaps, the slip up that let the toad attack, the running into the patrol, the fact that those prisoners’ presence here was openly told to the group before we got a grasp on things.”

“This delay here,” Quan Dingxiang frowned.

“And now this… all involving groups that we don’t want to leave behind,” Senior Yan mused.

“Well, Dingxiang, please go deal with that lotus, it’s a serious prize and we have a need of herbs that potent.”

Quan Dingxiang nodded and then turned off and hurried away without comment.

“You think it’s a repeat of what happened before?” Mingluo asked.

“Probably, we just took everyone who didn’t bail with that first teleport and others will have had ample time to coordinate,” Jia Ying mused.

“So what now?” Senior Yan frowned. “This is likely the fault of the Four Feathers Hall… but who is backing them it’s hard to say.”

“Well… let’s get back to the main plaza and take stock,” Jia Ying instructed, looking a bit jaded suddenly.

The others nodded, picking up the pace through the ruined buildings.

“It’s no coincidence that this is happening now though,” Mingluo frowned. “Whoever is doing this wants to make a problem for us before we can regroup and use these resources to replace some of what was lost… and make some new talismans?”

“Certainly,” Jia Ying agreed, “and the locals are hardly likely to give us time to just sit on our hands now either. Mingluo, Chang, go rendezvous with the perimeter scout group, support them.”

The pair nodded and turned to head the other direction at a brisk trot, drawing weapons.

Senior Yan walked on in silence, looking annoyed as they threaded through another street, blocked by half a collapsed building then quickly climbed over a halfway tumbled-down gate to arrive at the main plaza. The group working on the teleportation formation were in the middle, a few other groups sitting around the edge, including the various Herb Hunters and the Shen clan, though two were already coming over from the Shen bunch.

“Senior Jia, Miss Biyu is...”

“We cannot depart yet! Senior Fu is…!”

“Senior Shushang has not yet come!”

“Senior Jia, this is too rushed!”

Various people all spotted their arrival and started to clamour at once. The group who had left ahead of them was there he noted, standing, ‘ready to depart’ in effect, looking a bit annoyed.

-So, those who have been causing a problem are all keen to leave and ‘go with the flow’, while it is those who have been associated most closely with the Nine Moons who are having issues?

It was certainly not subtle, but at the same time it would, he suspected, be very hard to pin individual blame on anyone except those taking too long. The alternative, he guessed, would have been to leave those other groups to their own devices but based on how things had gone to this point, he could understand why Jia Ying and the other seniors wanted the more troublesome aspects split up, especially after a bunch tried to kidnap the three of them and Han Shu.

Leaving Jia Ying, he hurried over to Jin Chen and the others, who were helping sort out various herbs and other treasures from the looted fort.

“What is going on?” Liao Ying asked.

“In theory, we are about to leave,” he muttered. “However—”

*clack*

The arrow drifted lazily across the whole plaza and smashed into the wall behind their group, narrowly missing a recovering Herb Hunter who had happened to turn their head.

Three more arrows scythed through the courtyard, hitting two disciples from the group that had found the blood, who collapsed with screams while Senior Yan deflected the arrow aimed for his head.

“COVER!” someone yelled from the far side of the courtyard and immediately everyone was scrambling for the ruins, pushing others out of the way.

The only warning of the follow up attack was the hiss in the air as six more blue-painted arrows dropped almost vertically out of the sky, embedding themselves in the stones of the courtyard.

“Gah!”

Already seeing where this might lead, he grabbed Liao Ying and Jin Chen and bodily hauled them both back into the shadow of the colonnade.

Nothing happened.

Jia Ying, spun and pointed at three disciples from the Verdant Flowers Valley who immediately started forward, skirting around rubble and staying low—

-Wait… blue?

At the same time as that rather ominous thought about colours resurfaced from an almost forgotten conversation with Han Shu, an arrow ricocheted off a rock and hit an Imperial Sect disciple who had drawn a talisman from his storage device through the arm, pinning him to the column.

Three more blue painted arrows landed, utterly improbably, incapacitating two disciples who had been deploying barriers and narrowly missing a third who had been trying to sneak forward.

“What in the fates…?” Jin Chen muttered.

“Blue arrows,” he muttered, casting a look at Liao Ying, who grimaced.

Peering around the edge of the fallen column they were sheltering behind, he saw two more arrows land near the teleport circle, this time painted red—

A Herb Hunter beside him shoved him down as a bronze pointed arrow hissed across the top of the column, narrowly missing him—

“AAhhhhiiiigh!” one of the disciples from a small sect who had been sorting herbs in that group was hit in the leg by the arrow and shrieked horribly as they started to flail.

“Get the arrow out!” he snapped, as two others scrambled to drag them down—

Three more arrows arched down and smashed into the ground in front of the incapacitated disciple, making his compatriots flinch back.

“Where are they shooting from?” someone hissed.

“No idea, my talismans don’t—!”

A disciple near him, who had been poking at a divination talisman, gawked as an arrow took the talisman out directly, tearing it in half and then embedding itself two hands’ width into the wall. Another disciple tried to grab it to return fire; however, as soon as that disciple touched it, his body spasmed and a palpable wave of chaotic martial intent swirled over him, rendering them unconscious.

“Up there!” someone in the next group over yelled, pointing.

Turning he saw a female figure crouched on top of a ruined building, dressed in loose cut robes like he had seen those from this fort attired in, wearing a bronze mask and carrying a bow and a quiver of arrows. Three more female Ur’Vash appeared in rapid succession, all similarly dressed, carrying bows and armed with broad-bladed golden-bronze short spears and daggers.

“Oh Monkeyshit…” someone nearby groaned.

“What?” an imperial court disciple asked.

“Those two on the right are stronger than I am…” the disciple, who he noted was from the Lu clan, muttered.

“Where are our Ancient Immortals?” someone else moaned, as four more arrows, none of them fired by those visible, smashed into various hiding places, hitting two more disciples non-lethally and narrowly missing another.

“Why aren’t they shooting to kill people?” someone else hissed.

“Why do you think, moron!” a disciple from the Imperial School groaned. “Because they want to capture us!”

“So long as the seniors are—!”

The whole world went quiet, sound flowing away and along with it all the panicked cries and exclamations of those pinned down. Two of the Ur’Vash arrived beside the teleport circle like ghostly afterimages.

“SURRENDER! SUBMIT TO QUAZAM!”

The words, imbued with a vast Martial Intent, echoed through the whole courtyard, and probably much further. His qi turned turbulent and his vision blurred, while some of those who were weaker around them, including several recovering herb hunters, were rendered unconscious. He just about managed to avoid succumbing, tasting blood in his mouth. Liao Ying and Jin Chen were not so lucky, slumping down.

“A-Ancient Immortal!?!” someone nearby gasped.

“What Ancient Immortal? Only weak fools are collapsing!” a disciple from the Imperial School snarled, glancing at their group.

“SUBMIT—!”

This time, he did black out momentarily, the strength of the words impossible to resist. When he came around, it was because ‘Senior Weng’, the Bureau Official, had arrived beside him and had sent qi into him.

“H-how long…?” he gasped.

“A few seconds at most,” Weng, who looked pale and shaken, grimaced, casting a look to the right.

Following his gaze, he saw the next group over was entirely out cold, making him realise that they had been the direct target of the ‘attack’, not the group he was with.

Grimacing, he peeked over the collapsed column and saw that Jia Ying had at last made her move, now arriving before the rightmost Ur’Vash woman, sword targeting her neck. The Ur’Vash blurred back, spinning and drawing her spear, easily deflecting the blow and forcing Jia Ying back two steps—

A silver chakram hissed through the air, forcing the second woman to deflect it with her own spear, before Senior Yan appeared before her like a serpent, striking upwards with his blade.

{Fire Feather Strike}

The blow shed shimmering blue-green feathers that forced the Ur’Vash to retreat and then stab out with their spear in a move that twisted the world around them uncannily, making him unable to focus on anything at all. Shutting his eyes was not helpful either, as it turned out, as something about the attack refused to remain unseen. Struggling against the rising nausea, he looked around for Liao Ying and saw her curled up on the ground, moaning in pain, holding her head.

“Ohhh nameless fate… this is…” Weng groaned, holding his own head.

{Echo of Calm}

Jia Ying’s voice rang like a chime through the whole courtyard, and the distorting nausea and blurring triple vision faded away as her soothing voice sank into his mind.

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

{Five Elements Surge}

Quan Dingxiang’s voice echoed through the courtyard and a wave of turbulent qi made his skin prickle, while multi-coloured shadows blazed above where he lay. Phantasmal flames licked everywhere, making shadows bleed bizarrely for several more seconds before fading away.

Looking around, he saw everyone conscious lying on the ground in the shelter of fallen blocks of masonry or columns, nobody willing to be the first to get up.

“Is it over?” a young woman in a travelling robe whispered from nearby.

“Did the seniors wi—?”

Proving that circumstances had a rather nasty sense of humour, two arrows slashed across the top of the column next to them. Both ricocheted randomly, one impaling an unfortunate disciple through the leg while the other landed quivering in the ground next to the young woman who had just spoken.

In the silence, it was possible to make out the sound of metal hitting metal—

Everything in the square drifted upwards, including them, as the natural alignments of the space shattered. Unable to do anything to resist, he could only watch in horror as the shattered column pieces spun idly in the air before him, even as he and everyone else were left immobile, drifting and exposed to the battle before them.

Jia Ying and two of the women were trading blows in a vicious melee while Liling Mei was battling with a male Ur’Vash wielding two golden-bronze daggers. Quan Dingxiang and another youth with a close-trimmed beard carrying a halberd were retreating from a female Ur’Vash who was kicking rocks infused with what was probably martial intent after them. A third group had arrived at the far side of the square he saw, retreating rapidly, dragging their wounded with them and cursing.

“This is what you get for not fate-thrashed leaving…”

“We… we just have to hold—Agggggghhhiiii—!” The disciple in travelling robes who had just spoken was hit by an arrow and impaled against the wall with a broken scream.

“Where are Mingluo and the others?” someone else screamed from the far side of the courtyard.

Struggling against the oppressive grip as they continued to slowly drift upwards, unable to resist, he was fairly sure that that advance group was… if not dead, incapacitated already. The casualties of those around the courtyard were already pushing a third from what he could see.

{Moon Shadow Dance}

Jia Ying twisted, her form blurring in different directions as she seemed to grow dozens of pairs of arms, forcing back the pair of Ur’Vash, who answered with coordinated flurries of spear thrusts—

The rippling chimes of the impacts made his vision swim and blur, reaching into him and twisting something within him that made him want to vomit. With every echo of those abominable chimes, everything bent unpleasantly around him, the qi turning even more chaotic, if that was at all possible.

Screams turned to sobs of pain… and then there was silence and a horrible sense of dissociation—

He hit the ground with a bone-shaking crunch, winded.

He tried to move, but that proved to be impossible, because he had no idea which way was… any way at all, as it turned out – the world spiralling unpleasantly around him for several seconds. The sense of utmost disorientation was not helped by the perpetual awareness that while this was going on, he was likely entirely helpless and a sitting target for any arrow that might seek him out…

Seconds stretched, the world spun… and somehow, miraculously, no arrow came.

Everything stabilized and he found he was being dragged forward.

“Count!” someone was calling.

“All here!” came a shout from one side.

“All here!” came a second, woman’s shout.

“Six injured, but all present!”

“Three injured…”

“Who are we missing?” that was Jia Ying.

“Mingluo’s group…”

“Liling, Quan Dingxiang, Yan Fei,” Jia Ying said briskly. “Go find them… it will be a short jump, stay in constant communication.”

“We are…”

“You want to stay and wait for them to come back with more?” Jia Ying’s voice cut through the hubbub. “Anyone who wants to stay is welcome to! It’s less qi I have to waste!”

You could have heard a pin drop in the silence from the various groups.

“That’s what I thought,” Jia Ying sounded more amused than concerned.

“You okay?” Weng was kneeling down beside him.

“I… feel as though I just took a very bad medicinal pill,” he grimaced, sitting up. “Where are…?”

He trailed off, because Jin Chen and Liao Ying were there, a few paces away, both still unconscious but otherwise okay.

“They are fine, just a bit stunned. It seems they wanted to either slow us down or capture us,” Weng said.

“Why did they retreat?” he asked.

“Probably ran out of arrows,” someone nearby answered.

Thinking about that, it made a lot of sense actually. The Ur’Vash didn’t seem to have storage devices, or if they did they were likely purloined off cultivators and not at all common.

“How long?” Jia Ying asked a woman who was bleeding from an arrow wound in her arm.

“Two minutes?” the Nine Moons disciple grimaced. “We got lucky they didn’t do much to disturb the fundamentals of the formation.”

The following two minutes were tense agony as people recovered consciousness and the injured were seen to. Two more small groups made it into the square, accounting for the last of those within the fort itself apart from those who had gone to look for the perimeter group.

“Do we wait for Senior Mingluo and the others?” another Nine Moons disciple asked.

“No,” Jia Ying shook her head, looking at the 60 odd disciples around them. “They will catch us up.”

“Okay, in that case…”

Jia Ying nodded and took a glittering spirit stone about the size of an apple out of her pouch and closed her eyes.

The teleport formation shifted, luminous lines of qi swirling through everyone, and then their surroundings spun through half a rotation and they were sitting on grass.

*Crack*

The spirit stone in Jia Ying’s hand grew dim and fractured with enough force to make the space around her distort slightly.

Grimacing, he didn’t try to stand, instead just taking in their new surroundings.

They had appeared, as far as he could see, on the top of a small rise. Ahead of him, the plains stretched away into a broken horizon of rolling hills, a sea of waist-high grass and the occasional tree, broken here and there by a rock outcropping. The river lands were visible when he turned his head to the left, a vast, rolling swathe of shimmering beige and sparkling water, reflected in the early morning sunlight. If he really squinted, he fancied he could make out the ruins of the fort they had left as well, a shadowy lump on the horizon maybe 10 miles away.

“We didn’t go very far at all then,” Weng grimaced.

“No,” he agreed.

“Okay, everyone up!” Jia Ying called. “Carry those who can’t walk. We are not staying here!”

There were groans and muttered complaints but nobody really objected. Pushing himself up, he gritted his teeth at how heavy his legs felt and walked over to Liao Ying. Kneeling down, he sent some qi into her and she opened her eyes with a gasp and then groaned in pain.

“I… I’m not dead…” she mumbled.

“Nope… we live another day,” he grimaced, helping her sit up and looking around for Jin Chen.

“You there, help carry Senior Ji on this—”

“Senior Hua is injured… We need a pill…”

“These arrows, what are they even made of?”

“Senior Ji, Senior Ji!”

“No carts!” Jia Ying’s voice cut through the hubbub. “We can’t leave that kind of trail, unless you want to be dodging those archers out here…”

That shut most of the remnant complaining up, he noted, as various disciples hefted the injured or entreated others to help them. Jin Chen was lying a few paces away, only half conscious.

“Xaoli, where is…?”

He stared at his friend, who was mumbling away and rubbed his temples. Liao Ying, who had followed him, pursed her lips, her characteristic upbeat façade flickering for a moment.

“I’ll carry him,” he sighed, reaching down and pushing a bit of qi into Jin Chen before pulling him up onto his shoulder.

“Here,” Weng passed him a twig of a spirit herb he recognised as the thing Juni had called ‘Persis Stick’.

He bit half of it off and passed the rest to Liao Ying, who took it without comment as they started after the other groups.

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

~ SHU TIAN – BLUE WATER CITY ~

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

“Lord Tian, the three envoys, Lord Shu Tenfei, Lord Shu Fu Shao and Lady Shu Mei Xaoli, will arrive soon!”

Shu Tian, seated in the estate garden overlooking the central district of Blue Water City, fought back a sigh, putting aside his cup of wine to glance over at Shu Shen as the servant bowed deeply, making his pronouncement.

The older man shrugged and rolled his eyes. “They want their people to have a piece of the pie. You know my views already.”

He did. Shu Shen was of the view, a view shared by Ancestor Iron who had arrived earlier in the afternoon, that they should just sit on their hands and do nothing. Unfortunately, that view was not shared by many of the committee of elders who held serious sway with the Shu clan. That that news was not coming to them, the Shu Pavilion, but rather to the leaders of the Wisdom Court, the Gold Dragon Pagoda and the Shu clan itself was not that surprising either, although it was a bit vexing.

Concerning the envoys themselves, he was familiar with Shu Fu Shao, who was really quite reasonable. Shu Mei Xaoli, however, was trouble… and Shu Tenfei was somewhat familiar, but he couldn’t quite place him.

“Shu Tenfei?” he asked, still skimming his memories of various dignitaries of the Shu clan at large in the Azure Astral star field.

“He is Shu Tenjin’s older brother,” Shu Shen said helpfully.

“Ah… him,” he sighed, recalling that scion who had managed to annoy Mo Xiao during the Huang-Mo wars.

“I already see the political hand moving this group,” he mused, taking a deeper sip, bordering on an actual swig of wine, and directing the comment for Shu Shen’s ears only. “Shu Fei Bao, of the Fei branch…”

“Quite,” Shu Shen nodded, reshuffling his pack of cards. “That spectre refuses to stop haunting our current generation, it seems.”

“Well, he did lose a lot of face. Shu Bao was meant to hold the seat that Cang Di currently does,” he observed, pouring himself a second cup of the wine. “Why is someone like Shu Tenfei here though?”

The servant shrugged apologetically, which he expected. The question had been rhetorical really, anyway. Shu Tenfei was fairly senior within the clan’s local hierarchy, given the acclaim his younger brother, Shu Tenjin, had earned and was still earning. That likely meant that he was here for the tidal pool—

“Probably the rift to the Star Ocean tidal pool,” Shu Shen observed, arriving at the same conclusion he had.

“And Shu Fei Bao saw an opportunity to stir the pot a bit in his continuing quest to make our lives here on Eastern Azure just a bit more annoying?” he added.

“That does sound eminently like the Lord Fei,” Shu Shen conceded, claiming his own cup of wine.

“Has there been any movement from other factions regarding that inexplicable pool, Enji?” he asked, turning to the other member of their little group, sitting quietly nearby, who was basically the estate factotum and also the Shu clan’s ‘representative’ in Blue Water City.

“The Ling clan’s off world representatives are moving,” Shu Chang Enji said. “I just received word that several of their young scions have arrived, though Lord Baisheng has left them cooling their heels for some reason.”

“Sounds like that old terror,” Shu Shen mused.

“The Lu clan… silent, the Huang are moving, as you might expect, as are the Cardinal Courts by all accounts. That interest seems to have tweaked a few noses…” Chang Enji glanced at them, clearly hoping they would shed some enlightenment on that.

“Holes into the Star Ocean do not open themselves,” he pointed out. “I may not have been born when the last one opened in this part of the cosmos, but I know as well as anyone who stopped calamity occurring in the end.”

-Which could be why Shu Tenfei is here. Could someone in the Shu clan be angling to redress grievances with the Mo clan over his brother?

He sincerely hoped not, because if they were, they would be in for a rude surprise and nobody here wanted Eastern Azure, or Azure Astral star field, to become the epicentre of a Mo-Shu war. The Shu clan did not really have a robust enough base in the region for starters.

“Thankfully, this is just an isolated tidal pool,” Shu Shen mused.

“That just means it was likely opened from this side,” he retorted.

That thought had been plaguing him all day, like an itch he could not scratch.

“True,” the Shu Shen sighed, putting aside his own wine.

“There have been rumours circulating, Lord Sect Master, Lord Gate Keeper, concerning what transpired earlier,” Chang Enji added respectfully.

“Mmmmm…”

Shu Shen nodded slowly, stroking his beard. There was more to that, but with servants around and Chang Enji, it was unfortunately not an easy topic to talk about, unless their final guest made his presence personally known to the others.

“Those rumours probably do have some credit,” he conceded. “It is hard to obfuscate half a city turning into farmyard animals for an hour.”

“They have more to do with rumours that the Kong Venerables and Dao Mother Black Jade personally repelled some evil that sought to exit the mountain…” Chang Enji muttered.

“Ah…”

He rolled his eyes and Shu Shen just nodded a bit more jovially. Others could talk, but the reality of what had transpired, what he had witnessed tangentially, what had drawn Ancestor Iron here in person now, did not need to be spread about carelessly.

That was also why he and Shu Shen were decidedly cool on the idea of poking around the rift. The chances were worryingly high in his estimation that it had been caused by something exiting the mountain with some haste or opportunity…

“The Envoys are here!”

“—Seeing Sir Envoy!”

“—Seeing Lady Shu!”

“—Seeing Lord Tenfei!”

Echoed salutes made him sigh and pour himself more wine, as the three Shu clan envoys swept into the garden courtyard in a flurry of greetings and salutes.

Standing along with Shu Shen and Chang Enji, who was already bowing deeply, he considered the group and tried not to sigh inwardly. The three envoys all cut rather grand figures, dressed in cut-down dragon robes of white and gold, patterned with auspicious symbols as they walked over to the tree-sheltered veranda, followed by several groups of other cultivators, all carrying umbrellas to protect them from the rain.

Setting aside the Shu clan proper, among their number were representatives from each of the clan’s other major influences on Eastern Azure. The Wise Gate of Supreme Law and the Wisdom Court were both somewhat more aligned in their desire to push for cooperation with the Kong and the Dun Dynasty. The Dusk Sky Pagoda was fairly neutral, but still sympathetic in its opposition to the influence of the Azure Astral Authority. The Golden Dragon Pagoda was a bit of a wild card really, but thankfully did not have a particularly robust crop of juniors in this generation so was keeping a low profile.

“Greetings, Lord Shu Shao, Young Lord Shu Tenfei, Lady Shu Mei,” he offered a formal salute, mirrored by Shu Shen to the old man, the youth with a close-trimmed beard and the peerless beauty, noting that Mei Xaoli was in fact leading the rest of them fractionally as he did so.

“Eastern Azure is honoured to receive you all.”

“Eastern Azure is honoured!” everyone else echoed.

“This weather clearly disagrees,” the stunningly beautiful Xaoli muttered, adjusting some non-existent problem with her dark golden hair, all the while considering him with piercing blue eyes.

Without any preamble or ceremony she sat down at the far side of the table without much care for the young woman holding her umbrella, who had to scurry around to ensure her mistress was not inconvenienced.

“You are welcome to take it up with the mountains,” he quipped, watching as she helped herself to the wine. “However, I suspect you might wait until scrutiny has moved away from current events.”

“Hah!” the old man, Shu Fu Shao, barked a laugh and nodded, sitting down mid-way between them. “They are certainly intractable.”

Shu Tenfei took his own seat without comment, whereupon he and Shu Shen also sat, leaving everyone else to remain standing in a circle. In this company, none of them were of standing sufficient to even speak when spoken to, unless specifically prompted.

“Your time here is suiting you well,” Shu Fu Shao said pleasantly, accepting a cup of wine from Chang Eiji, who then started to pour one for Shu Tenfei.

“It has not been without its tribulations,” he replied politely, looking between the three.

Xaoli was clearly in charge but letting Fu Shao, who was the ranking elder for the Shu clan present, talk away, presumably so she could get a better measure of circumstances.

“Hmm, yes,” Fu Shao mused. “Word of matters here is certainly travelling far and wide now.”

“The hole in the sky?” he murmured.

“Yes, the Shu clan is unwilling to let others monopolize such a thing,” Shu Tenfei said simply.

“I rather suspect they will need to send a Heavenly Venerate then,” he said, not bothering to conceal anything.

Shu Mei Xaoli just snorted under her breath and considered her wine cup.

“…”

“You’re not joking,” Shu Fu Shao frowned, sipping his wine.

“Sadly not,” he agreed, noting that the servants had mostly finished giving others cups of wine. “However, first, please everyone, join us in a toast.”

Everyone dutifully raised their cup as he stood.

“To the health of the Shu clan! May it prosper for ten thousand aeons!”

“May Shu prosper for ten thousand aeons!” the others all echoed, following his lead and toasting the envoys.

Xaoli finally took a sip of her wine and nodded, allowing him to sit again; however for the moment he remained standing.

“I would also like to offer my congratulations to you and your family, Shu Tenfei. I was pleased to hear that not only has your younger brother re-found his confidence, but that his recent achievements in the Star Dragon Grave of Mun have resounded widely. He has overcome adversity and risen to even greater heights.”

“He… has achieved a certain success, yes,” Shu Tenfei acknowledged politely, accepting his salute. “My father was pleased for him and it has opened up several important opportunities.”

“Yes, congratulations,” Xaoli nodded, clearly not that interested in these matters. “Anyway, returning to the matter of this fissure, I understand it leads to an isolated pool?”

“Yes, and someone or something tore a hole straight into or out of it,” he replied, barely having had time to sit down.

-She definitely is here to grind Fei Bao’s axe, he grumbled inwardly, studiously not looking at those watching from the surrounding garden.

“Ah,” Shu Fu Shao, who was what was commonly referred to as ‘a worldly old geezer’, saw what he was getting at immediately. “You are worried that this rift is not that simple?”

“It isn’t,” Shu Shen interjected politely. “The Azure Astral Authority had a crayfish qi-beast that mauled three Celestial Venerates after following them half way back home demanding payment…”

“A crayfish?” Shu Tenfei frowned.

“Really?” Shu Fu Shao chuckled, raising an eyebrow.

“A crayfish,” he nodded. “It is a tidal pool. If it had been a lobster though, they might have all died.”

“…”

“If that was meant to be a joke, it was hardly funny,” Shu Mei Xaoli frowned.

“In any case,” he went on, “it is profoundly unclear what led to the fissure forming—”

“—and yet,” Shu Tenfei cut him off, albeit politely, “to just let it fall into the hands of others entirely is deemed unacceptable by those in the clan who care about such things.”

“Then, as I said, at the very least we must present a Heavenly Venerate,” he reiterated.

“Sadly, that is unlikely to happen…” Shu Fu Shao sighed.

“Until there is blood in the water,” he sighed, sitting back.

“…”

“Are you implying…?” Shu Mei Xaoli frowned, again, making him wonder if she was just trying to be difficult at this point.

“I am merely considering matters from the perspective of recent circumstances,” he said diplomatically. “If you wish to make an impact here, the Shu clan should be decisive and not rely on agreements with the Kong and Huang.”

Shu Mei Xaoli narrowed her eyes, but truthfully there was little to gainsay in that.

“It is true that our local elements have not been as decisive at times as is desirable,” Shu Fu Shao diplomatically agreed.

“Indeed…” Shu Mei Xaoli nodded, looking at him again.

“In truth, the more pressing matter is a personal request from Lord Shu Fei Bao on a slightly different matter,” Shu Tenfei interjected.

-Oh please don’t tell me this is still about Shu Bao…

“Lord Fei has expressed a personal interest in the rumoured emergence of this ‘Wisdom Scripture’… a Seven Star River Chart?”

He stared at the wine jar, wondering if he could just drink from it directly. A part of him was quietly impressed, truth be told, even if this now suggested a serious headache for them on the horizon. The matter of the rift might be solved with diplomacy, but Shu Fei Bao’s desire for this scripture was certainly all for the sake of Shu Bao and those thwarted ambitions.

“This old man has considered the alignments and found nothing good will come of being involved in that,” Shu Shen said smoothly.

“Unfortunately, Lord Fei Bao is quite engaged and while I am sure Gateway Ancestor Shen is well versed, Lord Fei Bao is unlikely to be dissuaded,” Shu Tenfei had the good grace to look a bit awkward, knowing full well what kind of hot gourd such a thing would be.

The problem here was that others of a status with Shu Fei Bao were also eyeing that ‘scripture’. In the aftermath of the devastation of the former ducal palace he had felt half a dozen different presences arrive, including several from off world.

“Indeed, the Pavilion should not forget—”

“—Okay, Lord–” he quickly cut off Shu Mei Xaoli before she could do something awkward like paint circumstances as the Pavilion ‘again’ refusing to fall in with Lord Fei’s wishes.

For the juniors here, the matters around Song Jia, Shu Bao, the Shu clan and the Kong clan were either a salacious tale of near mythological status or a bit of ancient history that served as an occasional reminder that before ‘Di Ji’ there were other assholes that spoke words. Unfortunately, for the seniors involved in the aftermath, 8000 odd years was not that long, and those backing Shu Bao had held the grudge over what occurred back then ever since, starting with the boy’s grandfather, who had doted on Shu Bao… and was none other than Shu Fei Bao.

“You dare—!” Shu Mei Xaoli, however, apparently deciding to take slight at his interruption before he could even formulate his agreement, slapped the table hard enough to make the nearby trees shiver slightly

*Ahem*

Shu Fu Shao coughed lightly, catching the wine jar before it could shatter. “Lady Mei…”

She scowled at him, but the tactful interruption did, thankfully, give him a chance to finish speaking, before she could force her views in some way.

“…”

“—Lord Fei has commanded, so we can only acquiesce. However, given this involves the potential vitality of the Shu Pavilion, I will have to consult the four Peak Ancestors. Gateway Ancestor Shen?”

Shu Mei Xaoli’s expression flickered, clearly caught off guard by his apparent willingness to just go along with it. Shu Tenfei was also somewhat surprised, he noted, which just made him want to roll his eyes.

He had been managing the Shu Pavilion for some 150,000 years and the various ructions caused by the whole fiasco with Shu Bao had occupied a not inconsiderable portion of the sect’s behind the scenes politicking for the last seven of those millennia.

Shu Mei Xaoli’s agenda was fairly clear in that regard. As the daughter-in-law of Lord Fei Bao, who was a leading advocate for closer ties with the Kong, she had certainly been made ‘leader’ of the envoy group purely for Lord Fei to push for matters regarding her nephew, Shu Bao. Presenting her an opportunity to paint circumstances in such a way that it looked like Lord Fei Bao was openly displeased with the current leadership of the ‘Shu Pavilion’ was very emphatically not part of his plan for today.

For starters it would give all the other factions more freedom to push against them, and allowing her to frame it as such in front of a bunch of juniors would only exacerbate that issue.

Thankfully, Shu Fu Shao, who was not part of that faction, was glaring at her, because likely that was not part of whatever this meeting was intended to be. Shu Tenfei was not looking particularly pleased either... for a variety of reasons.

Setting aside the personal humiliation his younger brother had suffered at the hands of Mo Xiao some 20,000 years prior, the aftermath of that mess had caused a great deal of trouble with the Kong clan as well. Shu Bao’s ‘wife’, who was also from the Kong clan had not been particularly impressed with her husband’s actions regarding the pitiable Song Jia either.

Those shifting political tides were something which he had mostly kept the Shu Pavilion out of, chiefly by aiding Ancestor Bronze in his desire to have his own disciple sit like a toad on their world’s only ‘Heavenly Hundred’ ranking spot, giving them a bit of merit with those in the wider clan who didn’t want to see the Dun, Kong, Huang or Teng take that spot.

“If Lord Fei Bao wishes to seek this Wisdom Scripture, does he intend to compete with the Kong and Teng openly for it?” he asked, keeping matters moving along quickly.

“Fei Bao has seen that an opportunity will arise, and from it will come great fortune for the Shu clan,” Shu Mei Xaoli said, before adding a bit more forcefully. “He has divined that this is related to this Wisdom Scripture and the trial, so… you are to act on his wishes. Is that clear?”

“…”

“Perfectly,” he saluted politely, as did Shu Shen. “If we are to send in a group, I will prepare a list of juniors. I personally feel that Shu Aofu should lead the whole expedition, perhaps with Shu Yueli and Shu Guang as his deputies.”

“Hmmm, a worthy idea,” Shu Shen agreed, immediately seeing where he was going.

Shu Mei Xaoli opened and shut her mouth, which he found rather amusing.

“We must send the Shu Pavilion’s best and brightest, if this is Lord Fei’s express command,” he mused, turning to Shu Fu Bao and Shu Tenfei.

“What about Cang Di…” Shu Mei Xaoli asked, clearly not willing to let this progress without some ‘gains’, it seemed, as she now turned a shadow of her personal strength on him.

“He is already in the trial,” he replied respectfully, keeping his composure. “As are Shu Erwei and Shu Fanshu…”

The Sect Masters of the Wise Gate of Supreme Law and the more junior representative of the Shu clan standing nearby both grimaced.

That was clearly not what Shu Mei Xaoli wanted to hear, based on her faint scowl. “Lord Fei has provided a list of those best suited to enter for events to proceed in a suitably auspicious manner to his goals.”

“…”

She passed him the jade scroll, which he glanced over, fighting back a sigh, because its contents were… shameless really.

Most of those on the list were influential to the Pavilion or on Eastern Azure but nothing in the eyes of the heavenly clan… or in a few cases members of branches in open disfavour with Lord Fei. Clearly, the intelligence regarding how utterly dangerous the interior appeared to be had made it to her already… The intermediaries in the overall composition of the list were certainly those elders who held grudges over the fallout from the Shu Bao fiasco as well.

A faint sensation touched the edge of his mind. “Agree to it,” the words, spoken by Ancestor Iron, echoed in his head.

“Is this wise?” he sent back, not looking around to see where the old man was.

“It is easier to just give them enough rope to hang themselves,” Ancestor Iron mused. “Your initial instinct there was right. That is why she has tried to dull your sense of the flow of this moment. A disgraceful child, who got her status through fluttering her eyelashes.”

“It is a stratagem that works,” he complained.

“As Lord Fei commands,” he agreed, saluting her again politely before putting the jade back down on the table.

“…”

Shu Mei Xaoli frowned, clearly sensing that there was something in his agreement.

“Lord Fei commands it and so we are all his humble servants, to do his will as he commands,” he added, looking around at the other sect leaders, who had somewhat complex expressions. “I will have to go meet with the Kong and Huang envoys… unless esteemed Lady Envoy and Lords Envoy wish to do so themselves?”

“…”

Shu Mei Xaoli stood immediately, forcing everyone else to stand, then walked off towards the exit, her maid hurrying after her. Shu Tenfei grimaced and shook his head, then went after her. The others from the various Shu clan affiliated influences were looking a bit nonplussed, but also just left, following her after a few seconds’ brief internal consideration. That left him, Shu Shen and Shu Fu Shao still standing there.

“Won’t she get mad if you don’t follow?” he muttered.

Shu Fu Shao snorted and then turned to the verdant balcony overlooking the rain-drenched city and bowed respectfully.

“Honoured Respects, Ancestor Iron.”

The Pavilion’s ‘youngest’ Ancestor, a burly man who was built like a blacksmith and wearing loose-fitting beige and yellow robes, appeared like a ghost out of the shadows beneath one of the trees built into the edge of the balcony, where he appeared to have been admiring the view over the city. He had arrived shortly after the insanity with the sheep and Ha Tai’s personal abode, but largely kept to himself after initially exchanging greetings.

He, Shu Shen and Chang Eiji also bowed respectfully, while the Ancestor acknowledged all of them with a slight nod, slipping off the balcony and, ignoring the rain, came over to sit by the table.

“That Tenfei lad may go far, but it is beyond time someone did something about that boy Fei Bao,” Ancestor Iron grumbled, putting a new jar of wine down.

“That list is almost an attack on the neutrality of the Pavilion,” Shu Shen sighed.

“Let Kai Bo handle it,” Ancestor Iron said airily. “You should delegate more to him, truthfully.”

“Probably,” he agreed, with a slight grimace. “However, the clannish streak that runs through our sect is not to be underestimated, despite the advances made in recent millennia.”

“Tell me about it,” Ancestor Iron grumbled, pouring wine for all of them. “So, boy, why are you really here? Shu Fei Bao cannot order you around this easily.”

Shu Fu Shao coughed and accepted the wine, saluting the ancestor before drinking.

“Heavenly Lord Shu Han is concerned about the opening of this tidal pool,” he said at last. “It is not within the auspice of this region for such a thing to open.”

“Indeed…” Ancestor Iron mused as both he and Shu Shen nodded in agreement there.

“I am also here to stop Shu Mei Xaoli from pissing off someone who might just strip her and give her a beating for bad attitude,” Shu Fu Shao sighed. “There are elements of the Mo clan in this starfield… and the last thing we need is for her to decide to go all ‘this righteous seat’ on someone.”

“How remarkably forward thinking of the Lords of the Western Supreme Pavilion,” he observed drolly.

“Despite her terrible attitude, Shu Mei Xaoli is easy on the eyes for those old geezers,” Shu Fu Shao muttered, swirling his wine in his cup. “So they forgive a lot and keep an eye on her. You could almost consider her official title to be ‘Beautiful Daughter-in-Law to the Pavilion’ at this point.”

It took a great deal of effort to resist sighing at that, even if it was intended as a joke. It was not that far from the reality of the situation.

“So, your concern and that of Lord Han is that someone… or something has gotten in or out?” Ancestor Iron mused.

“That is the concern, yes,” Shu Fu Shao agreed. “There have been several moves played elsewhere that have worried Lord Han as well… and the emergence of a Wisdom Scripture here, when seen in the larger perspective, tallies with that.”

“It was not a Wisdom Scripture, but yes,” Ancestor Iron nodded affirmatively.

“Not a…?” Shu Fu Shao frowned.

“It’s a derivative River Chart. I got a good enough glimpse at it to say that whoever made it is well above the realm you want to go annoying.”

“A ‘River Chart’…” Shu Fu Shao looked pensive.

“Don’t get any ideas on it. You’re old enough to know that none of those things are simple. Our Shu clan can put out at least three if they want to,” Ancestor Iron frowned.

“Oh, I am aware,” Shu Fu Shao chuckled a trifle bleakly. “However, therein also lies the allure. To possess one, even if it was just to trade it to one of the Grand Dukes of the Wise Court of Shu, is a powerful motivator.”

“Except having gotten it, you have to keep it,” he pointed out.

“Yes, you do,” Ancestor Iron agreed. “You need look no further than the insanity surrounding the Heaven Breaking Empress’s Supreme Trial to see how that might go.”

That was well before his time, but he had met with enough people who evoked the aftermath of that ‘grand event’ as the epitome of chaos incarnate that it was impossible not to shudder, recalling some of the accounts of war over the various ‘talismans’.

“You said it was made?” he asked instead, picking up on that.

He had been witness to much of the day’s events, and just about managed to avoid becoming a sheep for an hour, but the number of World Venerate realm experts involved had been a formidable motivator not to get too closely involved… and many of those at the edges had been obfuscating things almost as soon as they went wrong in any event.

“It showed remarkable independence of spirit for a ‘conventional’ scripture,” Ancestor Iron mused, swirling the wine around in his cup. “Those present from the Kong and the Huang both tried to grab it and it even gave the Old Venerable Blue Heaven a kick in the teeth.”

“…”

“Did it now?” Shu Fu Shao muttered. “That didn’t get out.”

“Well, this old man has better eyes than most,” Ancestor Iron chuckled.

“You suspect that there is a connection between what occurred here and the opening up of this rift?” Shu Fu Shao added.

“To get here, Ancestor Blue Heaven certainly had to bridge the gulf from Shan Lai. It is not impossible that in attempting to do so, the backlash from these events contributed to the emergence of that rift. A potential destabilisation in a spatial channel of that calibre would just about fulfil the base criteria for such a thing,” Ancestor Iron went on. “If I was to hazard a likely guess, Shan Lai endeavoured to capture the scripture and it had other ideas...”

“And escaped?” he suggested.

That deduction certainly made sense when you considered how much interest was now focused on that bit of space. If something like that had torn the rift open and then just ended up cornering itself, it was a prize most would sell their grandmothers to get a hold of, if only for the aforementioned capital they could curry with higher powers in their backing influences.

“Perhaps,” Ancestor Iron mused. “In any case, it is a futile pursuit comparable to a wild luan chase and a waste of our time, except when it comes to considering the wider consequences. This, at a guess, will be why the Tang and Meng in particular have not moved beyond the bare minimum expected of them by others.”

“They do not want to move out of position?” Shu Fu Shao remarked, half asking, half musing, as he poured himself a further cup of wine.

“Indeed, and they do not need such a thing. Both Meng Fu and that ‘Old Turtle’ Tang Jiao can produce things to make your hair turn white in comparison to a Seven Star River Chart,” Ancestor Iron chuckled, eyeing Shu Fu Shao’s dark hair. “And they have a much firmer grasp of their subordinates.”

“Speaking of such things, there is a rather suppressed rumour swirling that Cao Hongjun was slain for hiding a piece of a River Chart Scripture from the Emperor of Shan Lai,” Shu Fu Shao added.

“Yes…” Ancestor Iron sighed, sitting back and staring out at the rain. “Secrets are hard to keep once greedy old eyes start prying at what was and what might be.”

“So he is dead?” Shu Fu Shao pressed.

“Near as anyone is able to say,” he interjected, speaking up. “The remnants of the Cao clan have thoroughly ditched the Azure Astral Authority at any rate.”

“Oh?” Shu Fu Shao said, turning to fix him with a piercing gaze.

“Cao Liang is – was – Cao Hongjun’s half-brother. They share the same father,” he explained.

That wasn’t exactly hidden knowledge, but it was not the kind of thing many would have been interested in knowing. He had mainly investigated Cao Liang back when it looked like he would take over the Seven Sovereigns School, before it became clear that Meng Yang was such an exceptional candidate. It paid to know who your geopolitical rivals could be after all, though since then Cao Liang had kept a rather low profile.

“Cao Liang?” Shu Fu Shao just stared at him blankly, making him realise he had not answered the question as expected.

“Oh, he is an inheritance disciple of Meng Fu,” he supplied helpfully. “He was one of a very short list who could have become the Seven Sovereigns School’s current leader.”

“Ah, I see,” Shu Fu Shao sighed. “So what remains of the Cao clan has fallen in with the Grove?”

“I would imagine so,” he conceded.

That whole saga was somewhat annoying, from his perspective. The Cao clan, had they not been so aligned with the Azure Astral Authority, would have made a convenient ally with the Shu Pavilion given their territories on the Northern Continent. The cynic in him suspected though that that, as much as anything, was why they had been purged. Shan Lai had a very pragmatic attitude to keeping their house in order, which he sometimes suspected the current leaders of the Imperial Dynasty didn’t really respect or recall.

“A pity, but that likely means they will just become more targeted in the long run,” Shu Fu Shao mused.

Personally, he doubted that, given how Meng Fu treated allies who earned her respect, but there was no point in pressing the point here and now.

“Something else has been bugging me though,” Shu Fu Shao added, pouring himself some more wine and turning back to him. “I have looked over matters of what has led up to this point and Lu Xiao has been very quiet… The Huang and the Imperial Court have grasped her nephew’s influence and the Blue Pavilion that Lu Fu Tao founded is basically squatted in by the Huang Teng faction and yet…”

“Ah, yes…” Ancestor Iron frowned deeply as well. “I am none the wiser there, truth be told, and that bothers me far more than most of the rest of these machinations.”

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

~ HUANG JILAO – THE DEPTHS ~

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

“You know how I was all positive about your ‘map’?” Mo Xiao remarked, as they stood in an empty hall, in pitch darkness.

“Believe me when I say I am far more vexed than you,” Lu Xiao grumbled.

Sitting on the floor nearby, Huang JiLao found himself watching the pair bicker in a manner quite unlike the ancient experts they certainly were, pondering at what point he should actually start to panic. They had been walking through dark ruins and monster-infested tunnels for what felt like weeks and were, as far as he could see, nowhere near being anywhere at all.

“If there is an upside to this, it’s that this obfuscating darkness clearly means we are getting close,” Lu Xiao added, staring again at the tablet in her hands.

“You said that before…”

Both of them turned to him and he groaned, because he had said that out loud… forgetting that this darkness had a few quirks.

“I did… didn’t I?” Lu Xiao sighed, shaking her head ruefully.

“That said, I am pretty sure there is more to this than just this place,” Mo Xiao muttered, pulling out a compass from her storage bracelet.

“Isn’t that mother’s…?” Lu Xiao frowned.

“It is… and it doesn’t get any connection…”

“It doesn’t?” Lu Xiao walked over and looked at the compass.

Curious, he stood up and came over as well to look at the compass. It was a jade disc inlaid with various auspicious symbols reflecting the twelve animals of the celestial zodiac that would realign themselves, he supposed, to give readings. As far as he could see there was nothing wrong with it.

“Curious… that is a new development,” Lu Xiao said, taking the disc and turning it around in her hands a few times.

“…”

She stood there, contemplating silently as seconds stretched to minutes, until at last he could no longer take the strange pressure that was building and could only ask.

“What is wrong with it?”

“Ah… you can actually be useful!” Lu Xiao said, turning to him abruptly. “Talismans! Show me everything you have on you.”

“T-talismans?” he was caught off-guard by her question

“Yes, talismans!” Lu Xiao said, holding out her hand.

Frowning, he could only do as she asked, pulling out a stack of them and then adding a few more that were separate.

“Is this all of them?” she frowned.

“…”

“Uh…”

“Not just your attack talismans… the 'sneaky bastard' talismans, I know you have some, you’re from the Huang clan, and Huang Leng is not going to let you walk in here completely helpless.”

“Sneaky bastard…?” he stared back at her, before realizing, with a slightly sinking heart, what she meant.

“Fate manipulation and inauspicious divination talismans…”

“Yep!” Lu Xiao said with a broad grin.

With a sigh, he pulled out two more sheaves of talismans, more irregular in appearance… and stared at them dully.

“They are…”

“Interesting, quite a few of them are busted,” Mo Xiao observed, taking a rather tattered one from the top which should have been a Dao Lord grade ‘Fateful Eye’ talisman, something he had never gotten a chance to use before when they were ambushed and he first ‘met’ Mo and Lu Xiao.

“It seems that anything with comprehensions not rooted in the fundamentals of this place is disjuncted?” Lu Xiao asked Mo Xiao.

“Yep!” Mo Xiao agreed, taking two more; a ‘Moonlit Dream-dance’ divination talisman and a ‘Red Eye of Huang’ talisman designed to do very unpleasant things to an attacker’s ‘fate with fire qi’ and looking them over pensively.

“Definitely a new thing,” Lu Xiao frowned, pulling out a handful of her own talismans.

“How did you not notice before?” Mo Xiao frowned.

“How did you not notice?” Lu Xiao shot back.

“I make a point of not relying on those kind of things,” Mo Xiao sniffed.

“Well, there is your answer,” Lu Xiao shrugged, sorting a few out. “Though these all work.”

“So… it’s things rooted in ‘worldly fate’ beyond this shard?” Mo Xiao mused, turning in a circle to take in the rather boring cavern with its odd collection of fungi and some tumbled slabs.

“It does seem that way?” Lu Xiao agreed.

“Uh…” Listening to those words, Huang JiLao found he was slightly adrift from the context of what they were saying, because while they made sense, what they implied was a bit…“How could that just… happen?”

“At a guess? Someone did something very stupid,” Lu Xiao shrugged. “Though it does suggest that the heavens here are not quite as inert as they first appeared.”

“Yeah…” Mo Xiao trailed off, completing her circle of the cavern.

“Anyway, we should not linger here. I am starting to get a bad feeling about those two left passages.”

Lu Xiao nodded, passing him back the bundles of talismans.

“…”

He opened his mouth to ask again, then stopped and sighed. The pair were already walking purposefully towards the far exit on the right side of the cavern, so all he could do was hurry after them—

He nearly walked into the back of Lu Xiao, who stopped dead right in front of him.

“What?” Mo Xiao asked, turning back to look at them.

“If worldly fate associated with outside this place is cut off… that just gave me a thought,” Lu Xiao said, frowning, looking back at the other two exit fissures.

“Go on?” Mo Xiao frowned.

“Kingdom, Power, Glory, Eternity…” Lu Xiao mused. “If those prying eyes peering after their juniors have been blinded… and this is the shard of a world not of this facet of the primordial cosmos… then isn’t this an unparalleled opportunity?”

“…”

Mo Xiao just stared at Lu Xiao; rather dubiously, he thought. He himself was also confused as well, wondering what she was getting at.

“That’s a dangerous gamble. You don’t know what the real fundamentals of this shard are like…” Mo Xiao remarked, sounding… uneasy?

“They are certainly better than anything I will see this side of going to God Slaughtering Hall,” Lu Xiao frowned.

“That is likely true, but surely it is better to—” Mo Xiao was cut off by Lu Xiao holding up a hand.

“True, but at the same time there is a sense to this place that Eastern Azure does not have,” Lu Xiao frowned. “That passing… the weight of the eye of others’ greed has vanished thoroughly. Even God Slaughtering Hall does not have such a feeling.”

“That is not to say that some power here will not turn its eyes on you if you try what I think you are suggesting?” Mo Xiao frowned. “As your big sister I have to tell you it’s a very stupid idea. If you must, do it…”

“Do it in God Slaughtering Hall? Yes, that would be safer… probably, but that would not be…” Lu Xiao trailed off, staring at the darkness before speaking again. “If I do that, what does it say about me…? I lived all this time, yet in the end I ran to my mother’s house and built a castle in her back garden?”

“We are talking about forces of nature and prying old bastards who would sooner throw aside all decorum than see new challengers really rise,” Mo Xiao scowled. “You know as well as I—”

“—And yet…” Lu Xiao cut her off with a wave of the hand. “And yet, even mother’s compass doesn’t work here, in this moment. That compass was not refined with just her comprehensions. That means that even a Divine Sage’s writ has no purchase here!”

“That means that something in this place exceeds the realm of a divine sage!” Mo Xiao snapped back.

“Exceeds a Divine Sage?” he gawked.

That was a realm at the very apex of the Venerable Step. While it was possible she was exaggerating for effect, this was a supreme world’s shard, so it should have at least one such figure in its history.

Both turned and looked at him, apparently remembering that he was there. Mo Xiao just shook her head, though Lu Xiao looked more amused than anything.

“It’s only a lower step tribulation,” Lu Xiao said, after a moment’s pause. “While those clowns on Eastern Azure would meddle, supreme worlds are made of tougher firmament, and the penalties for meddling from a great height are much harsher. At the very least I’ll be able to make gains compared to what I would outside… and with this map no longer working, presumably because I divined it outside this place, I need some purchase on the source of what I seek. This is the easiest way to get it… to provide resonance.”

“Fine!” Mo Xiao scowled. “But if it looks like something dodgy is happening, I will disperse the tribulation.”

Listening to their exchange, he finally realised what they were arguing about: the issues of breaking through in worlds that had overly controlled ‘fates’. Heavenly clans managed their descendants’ potential carefully in that regard. He had not been born on Eastern Azure, a choice his father had made precisely so he would not need to break through the threshold to Dao Immortal here, though it was something he had given little thought to given how far into the future that potentially was.

-Assuming I survive here… he thought with a shudder.

“Not here though,” Mo Xiao said, glancing at the fissures again. “Those lead down and the sense of unease I get from them is not…”

“I feel nothing from them?” he noted, curious as to what she meant.

“Your attainments in geomancy are shit,” Mo Xiao said flatly. “Let’s go.”

Lu Xiao shook her head and walked after Mo Xiao, who was now briskly making her way onwards, scrawling something on a flat stone she had picked up from somewhere without him even noticing.

He had no idea what was down the other passages, but reading the mood, Mo Xiao was clearly annoyed so he said nothing and just walked beside Lu Xiao, who was now looking pensive and not really focusing on anything obvious.

Like that, they walked for quite a while, making their way through several fissure-like passages and climbing up a rocky slab that was slick with water to arrive in another cavern that held evidence of a ruin on its left side.

“That way,” Mo Xiao pointed perfunctorily in the direction opposite to the ruin.

Looking at the carved stonework in the gloom, he could understand that decision at least. The lines were sharp and angular, but the prevalence of spiky oddness to the carvings themselves was a bit unsettling, and they didn’t have anything like the antiquity he had observed in other places.

They had just gotten to the far side of the cavern, when a distant sound, like shifting chains, echoed through the darkness from the direction of the ruins over to their left.

“…”

Mo Xiao stared back in that direction and sighed, waving for Lu Xiao to take the lead.

“More of those… orcs?” he asked, drawing his own sword, recalling that was what Mo Xiao had called the ‘demons’.

“Probably,” Mo Xiao said. “Let’s keep moving.”

Their pace sped up to a brisk trot, the fissure they were moving down a diagonal rent through the rock that would have been very difficult for a mortal to traverse, but with the aid of qi and superior endurance was not that challenging.

“More water ahead,” Lu Xiao warned him after they had gone some 200 metres down it.

He nodded, though he had already started to feel the increased humidity in any case. The problem with water was that it tended to mean other things, like fungi. If nothing else, this horror trip into darkness would ensure he never looked at a humble mushroom the same way… again…

His thoughts trailed off as four figures skidded down the slab ahead of them, bulky, misshapen forms wielding crude metal weapons that were already fixated on them from what he could see.

“Ahead,” Lu Xiao had marked them as well… then cursed under her breath.

The source of her annoyance was clear even without her saying, because, even as he went to pull out a talisman from his storage ring, he found that it was unusable.

Picking a target ahead of them, he prepared to engage—

The first attacker leapt over a slab of rock, travelling much farther than he had expected it would and crashed down before them, revealing itself to be one of the demons, but misshapen and twisted, their skin broken and pale red, riddled with veins and… leaf-like scales of fungus.

“Oh shi—”

Whatever Lu Xiao had been about to say was cut off when the first one exploded, forcing him to take refuge behind a rock, while a billowing cloud of fungal spores and gore coated their surroundings.

The three other Ur’Vash charged for them, their bodies already warping; however, none of them got close as three fists manifested of pure intent from Mo Xiao caught them and hurled them deep into the passage where they exploded a second later with distant thuds.

“How obnoxious,” Mo Xiao grumbled, looking around.

“Quite,” Lu Xiao agreed, standing up and dusting herself off, looking none the worse for wear.

He quickly checked himself over and grimaced, because despite being further away he was nowhere near as fortunate. Several smears of spores were already making his skin itch, and when he focused on them with his own qi, it just melted right through them, unable to touch the invader.

It took him two attempts to actually expel the ‘spores’, which turned out to be able to draw some subtle strength of ‘qi’ while being untouchable directly. His Huang Myriad Blaze Principle made some headway, but in the end it required him to draw on some of the Martial Intent of the feather to properly isolate the spores while he ejected them from his body. It took only moments, but the strain of it beneath the obnoxious suppression still left him sweating and out of breath.

“I see you managed to get rid of them as well,” Mo Xiao noted with a sigh, sending a wave of skin tingling intent washing across him.

“Thankfully,” he grimaced.

“More from behind,” Lu Xiao noted.

“What is stopping us using our storage rings?” he asked, looking back the way they had come to see several dozen figures rapidly closing in the gloom.

“A projected domain,” Mo Xiao muttered.

“…”

“A… domain?” he repeated, not quite sure he had heard her right.

“Yes… as in a Sovereign’s Domain.” Mo Xiao said, looking ahead of them again. “There is clearly one down here. Let’s get up this slope…”

Before he could ask anything further, she grabbed both of them and leapt some 60 metres straight up in the air, crashing down at the top of the next slab in the fissure with a slight grunt of exertion.

“I know what a Sovereign’s Domain is,” he pointed out, a bit winded from the force of the landing. “What I was asking was…”

“I know what you were asking… however this place is not like that town we obliterated. The ‘depth’ is more extreme and the darkness here is interfering with anything not ‘of here’,” Mo Xiao elaborated as she looked along the ledge. “Now, less talking, more running, because this opponent is a much stiffer prospect than those orcs we fought before.”

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

~ ARAI – CAILLEACH’S HOLD, SINKHOLE ~

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

‘There is nothing like a bad day to kill your enthusiasm for a thing.’

This was something she recalled her father saying on occasion, usually after having endured some function of his role as a civil envoy for the Military Bureau, but standing in the evening light, staring at the stele around her, Arai felt that it was eminently applicable to her circumstances right now.

“More like ‘There is nothing like a bad week to kill your enthusiasm for a thing’,” she muttered, looking around again, not that it changed anything.

Symbols… she had been staring at them long enough to make her head hurt, and actually made some progress teaching a few to Rusula, although mostly thanks to Cailleach’s occasional intervention. However, she had hit a wall in her own advancement at a similar point and it was… like an itch she couldn’t scratch.

Turning on the spot a third time, she picked up a random slate and hurled it at another, watching them bounce off each other. The stone was too tough to easily break just like that, more was the pity.

The problem wasn’t just the symbols, really. She knew that. The problem was her, or well… the circumstances she found herself in. Sana had the little pagoda and while her sister had her frustrations, mostly with alchemy, she at least had something to go back to, to poke at, to stare at and refer to.

A goal of sorts.

She, on the other hand, had her own intuition and the thread. The thread, almost a sash at this point, around her Nascent Soul’s waist was, objectively speaking, a perfectly good thing to work with. There was no trouble there and that was what made it so annoying.

The problem was her… and the fact that she was stuck here.

Scowling, she picked up another slate and kicked it, watching it hiss through the air and crash into one of the larger slabs. It wasn’t very cathartic, just a loud noise and some dirt.

It didn’t help.

-I could bury the anger with my mantra…

She itched to do that, but she could not, because she was having to ween her body off feeling nothing. It was the price paid for weeks, months maybe, of just burying everything, and also for what had been done to her mantra. Sana was in the same position there, and here was a perfectly good place, a safe place, to let all the side effects drain away… which just made it worse in a way.

The frustration was illogical, ill-conceived, and very real, and it blossomed with everything.

There was also only so much time you could spend hitting things, before it became anti-social, which again, did not help.

-I was never this angry before… she sighed, sitting back down on the stack of slabs feeling frustrated.

“…”

“Who am I kidding?” she sighed, again. “I’ve been angry since the day mother died; I just never showed it openly.”

“You find out important lesson,” she turned her head to find Old Bones standing nearby, smoking his pipe.

“That I have a problem with emotional stability all of a sudden?” she said a bit more bitterly than she intended. “I didn’t last week.”

“Mind is a funny thing. Also very complex thing. We go to great lengths to become powerful, but at the same time, we forget the heart sometimes, cast aside what makes us… us,” Old Bones mused. “Principle, as you call it, is all about you. Many things, all things… but always you. It does not stop growing once you find it. It is like a seed. You plant it, nurture it, it grows into a big tree, or you accept it, put it on a string and smack people with it, which is very good, but eventually people start having harder heads.”

“…”

“Honestly? That just makes me want to hit something,” she muttered.

“Good, because people like stupid words, makes them feel smart, when sometimes you just have to go with gut,” the old Ghoblan chuckled.

“Doesn’t help that I am sure I didn’t use to be this angry?”

“Before, you didn’t know your anger,” the old Ghoblan said, a bit more seriously. “Now, you look into eyes of unspeakable thing… and saw a bit of yourself in it. Nobody is unchanged by that.”

That was true. She had stared into the eyes of a lot of terrible things… and was still here.

“I don’t suppose you have any more of that really strong alcohol?” she asked with a weak smile.

“Hah, there always strong alcohol for when is necessary,” Old Bones cackled. “However, getting blind drunk is not the answer to your problem.”

That was also true, and that did not help.

“It funny, most people not reach your problem for a long time… not Heaven’s Path people anyway,” Old Bones chuckled.

“I have seen people like this,” she said, recalling their previous talk… weeks ago about this. “Old men who laughed and just drank themselves insensible after they got crippled fighting for the Military Authority against bandits or beasts for a long time.”

“Those are soldiers,” Old Bones nodded. “That slightly different.”

He walked over and poked her in the chest. “I mean it not a problem Heaven’s Path practitioners your age encounter for long time.”

“Ohh?” she was somewhat surprised at that.

“How many do this thing? Come to place like this, kill for days, weeks, months, fight on edge of life from very first steps, again and again?”

“…”

“How many live week by week, one cut, one kill, one life, one blade, one path…?” Old Bones paced back and forth. “Week, month, year. Every evil you meet you cut, you kill. This is not the Heavens’ Path. This is not the ‘Heavens’ Throne’. This is the ‘Killing Throne’, the ‘Slaughter Throne’.”

Listening to him, his words somehow drew her in. She saw… something old, shadows walking across a plain of bones, meeting, and only one ever moving on… one and one… forever, moving down various paths of life.

“This the path of red dust. To see its start when barely twenty years old,” the Old Ghoblan chuckled bleakly. “They call you Ur’Sar, but they just speak words. You see the path to the Throne of Sar, though I do not think you want to walk it.”

“You say throne…” she frowned, latching onto a somewhat random part of that, truthfully.

“Different term, different world, same destination,” the Ghoblan shrugged. “You are not helped by this place either.”

“The hold?” she asked, frowning again.

“No… Undergrove,” the Ghoblan sighed. “Undergrove is rotten, built on death and decay, even before it became this place. The clue is in the name, even if the origins of it are lost to translation after translation.”

“Under Grove?” she repeated back, thinking about that, then clapped her hand to her forehead.

“This place, was literally under a grove?”

“The roots of a grove sacred to one of the titans of an ancient era grew here, before Aertha Majoris was reborn,” the old Ghoblan nodded. “That shard you carry is a fractional part of it. A dead thing, but everything here was dead, the roots all that remained by the time this land was reformed and it became the heart of the mana vein that ran through here. They called the land above Evergrove, the Evergarden, for it, but it was just a name…

“Later, people came and carved out its corpse, took its glittering bones and made treasures of it, hewed its earth into dark pits and let their greed corrupt them. They found the relics of its origination and then delved deeper still, drawn inexorably into the mire of its decay, turning a mine into a prison, more death, then into a thing of horrors… more death… sowed the very seeds of the death of this place here…

“Death. Death. Death. Now do you see?”

She listened, nearly seeing images of those days as he spoke, and in truth, she did understand a bit.

“And we… We have been growing strong on this qi… or mana as you call it, building our foundation out of it?”

“Exactly,” the Ghoblan nodded.

“But… the means we used should have…” she trailed off, looking inwards, wondering, however the symbol gave her nothing – either way.

“It’s not about the qi,” she realised.

“You are smarter than most your age there, but then your experiences are more wide-ranging,” Old Bones nodded. “It is not about the qi as such but everything that comes with it and for months you have killed and survived, striven and been pushed to the brink.”

“Because of our mortal physiques?”

“Because you exist here,” Old Bones said more firmly, starting to pace again. “This place has been twisted by tens of millennia of suffering. You know geomancy, do you not?”

“Somewhat,” she conceded.

“I have seen the compasses you make,” Old Bones grinned. “If I say you know Geomancy, you know it.”

She could only nod at that acknowledgement.

“Compasses not work well down here and you wisely stay clear of aspects of it that cleave too close to the question of ‘nature’,” Old Bones continued, “but this whole place is one bad omen: from the way its roots were torn up, to the way it was flooded, to the way it was sealed to the Defilers and the Ur’Vash and the D’varad, and the Ghoblan and the beasts. Everything is shit, and shit stains everything…”

“…”

He looked at her, then laughed again, as she was sure her eyes had gone a bit glassy trying to keep up with what he had been saying and process it.

“Sorry, it rare I get to rant to someone who does not already know all this. You are not the only one who has issues with the mind,” he cackled, tapping a long finger to his temple.

“So what do you suggest?” she asked, turning it back to the original topic, because knowing the problem more clearly wasn’t actually providing much in the way of a real solution... that she could see at any rate.

“There is no easy answer,” the Old Ghoblan sighed, sitting down opposite her. “I told you before: you think it is bad being here for a year, try being here for 30,000 years. You get bleary eyes after a while, start dreaming of darkness, which in this place is not good.”

“Yes, you said that was why there is the night sky here,” she recalled.

“Yes, it is important to keep touch with the little things,” Old Bones nodded. “Hunger, sleep, the night sky, talking to others…”

She could see what he meant, even if, yet again, it didn’t really seem to provide an obvious answer to her problem… because Sana was still here.

“You bury anger, pain, fear, sadness, loss, trauma for a year…” the old Ghoblan said simply.

“…”

She stared back at him. She knew that, but it did…

“You still burying it…” Old Bones said more softly, poking her in the forehead with a long finger. “You see yourself, but you cannot bring yourself to be yourself.”

“I…”

She started to speak, but realised she could not. When he put it like that, it was true. She saw the problem, but she was not…

‘Accept what is given, receive what is due.’

It was what their mother had always told her, mostly regarding mantras and how to use them, but now, that phrase drifted back into her mind with a slightly more sinister bent. She had always treated her mantra as part of her, which it was, but she was suddenly unable to quite articulate why she thought there was a problem there.

“It is not an easy answer to find,” the Ghoblan sighed. “Some may go their whole life without ever finding what they lost. You, perhaps, are lucky. The things you have, have just about carried you to this point—”

“They have,” she agreed, feeling a little lost inside.

“It is also hard, because no matter what we say, you know you are a guest here,” Old Bones mused. “There are rules, hospitality, your rules, our rules. These are the shield by which we help ourselves. Help others, interact with the world, but also protect against it. This is not your home. You cannot relinquish that final piece…”

When he put it like that, she realised he was correct. If she were home… with father, she could have just gone and lain in the garden, or gotten drunk in the bath, or picked a stupid fight with Sana, gone to play Gu Takes All with Juni – or simply gone for a walk along the river.

There were any number of means to just… step back.

“…”

“I don’t suppose you have paint here?” she asked after a moment’s reflection, because drawing flowers was a thing she had always enjoyed, even if she was nowhere near as good as their mother had been at it.

“Paint?” the old Ghoblan frowned.

“Yes,” she nodded decisively.

“Probably, or if not you can make up pigment easily enough,” Old Bones mused, stroking his thin beard. “We can go check in the warehouse—”

“Ah, you don’t have to…” she suddenly felt a bit awkward for some reason.

“I have nothing else to do though,” the Old Ghoblan chuckled, starting off towards the nearest of the caves in the side of the sinkhole and waving for her to follow.

“…”

Staring after his retreating back, she closed her mouth, burying the further objection and hurried after him.

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

~ SANA – CAILLEACH’S HOLD, THEIR ABODE ~

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

A sister’s intuition was a terrible thing, Sana had to reflect, as she stared at the crude pill furnace, watching the flow of qi around it. She knew her sister well enough to know that she was suffering. However, she also knew Arai well enough to know that her getting involved would lead to a stupid argument over something, probably the pagoda, although that would just be a shadow of the problem.

Her gut instinct was that this was related to their captivity.

The explanation given about the ‘Defilers’ and how they ‘worked’ all but confirmed that. Once the thorns were in, they were hard to get out, because they were inextricably linked to the living condition. They had had weeks of relative peace, time to settle, time to get used to people again… and weeks for the events of the last months to gnaw at them, exacerbated by the fact that she had to be assiduously careful with her mantra and its use.

Those problems were also merging with new ones, namely her own inability to make any real progress with the ‘Myriad Maelstrom Primordial Cauldron’ refinement art.

It was complex, profound and, not for the first time, suggested to her that the teachings within the little pagoda were oddly complementary, but not all necessarily from the same source. It was also resource-intensive and a branch of cultivation that she had never really delved into in any serious depth—

*EXPLOSION*

The pill she was trying to create in the furnace manifested a flaw, although not the one that it had done for the previous furnace. She managed to duck as one side of the construction hit the far wall of the room with enough force to turn the pieces of qi-reinforced baked earth the furnace was made from into a cloud of dust.

The twisted remains of the pill, what should have been a simple Qi Replenishment pill for Golden Core cultivators, spun in the ruins then vanished in a bubbling hiss of multi-coloured fire and a pall of smoke.

“Attempt seventy three failed during pill coalescence. The right-hand side of the pill furnace fractured, probably from an unstable rotation,” she reflected, for the benefit of her scrip which was nearby, recording everything.

Sixty one exploded pill furnaces – several had survived more than one attempt – was the kind of expense that would have had her tearing her hair out anywhere else; however, thankfully, the ‘Primordial Cauldron’ had quite detailed instructions on making such things. The problem was she had nobody at hand who was actually ‘good’ with alchemy or anything like it, to help her investigate if the problem was her, her qi, the materials or the fact that she wasn’t making them right.

With a sigh, she got up and tossed the remains of the furnace over into the corner of the room, where it landed with a crash beside the rest of the pile of broken ones. Thankfully, you could re-use them, although it was a bit laborious to smash them to dust, ensure that their alignments were scrubbed clean and remix them into clay again.

Walking over to the other side of the room, she picked up another furnace and dragged it over to the centre of the room. Next, she re-anchored the divination formation and inserted new beast cores into the relevant apertures around it. The whole thing was less than elegant. She still occasionally hesitated to think of them as ‘Pill Furnaces’, because in her mind that was a very specific type of thing, but it was a furnace in which she had made an alchemical pill, so perhaps it was warranted, even if they looked less like the elegant many-faced cauldrons of home and more a sort of misshapen gourd.

That had bothered her initially, but turned out to be just her misconception, the key thing was how the interior was.

Taking several large handfuls of spirit vegetation from the piles she had sorted out, she tossed them in, then poured in half a litre of water and replaced the lid over the aperture at the top of the furnace, and settled down to focus her qi into it.

The method the ‘Primordial Cauldron’ used was, on first look, rather weird. It didn’t really rely on a ‘flame’ or anything like that. Instead, it told her to focus on the harmonious merging of the qi within the materials. That meant that it didn’t so much matter what she threw in, although it did help if they were broadly in some kind of harmony at the start.

The first step of the process was basically just to turn the contents into soup. The ‘Primordial Cauldron’s’ method was not that different from what her dantian did, she had come to realise, but that also meant that while it was powerful, it was also twitchy and she had to work out the qi cycle for the pill she was making almost by intuition, as the pagoda didn’t provide any easy means for that.

For a while now, she had rather suspected that that, rather than ‘alchemical pills’, might actually be the point of this exercise – to make her think more carefully about qi cycles and how the different parts of her interacted, with the aim of forming a principle. The problem, again, there was that she had torn past that state of her cultivation, formed her ‘Formless Permutation’ principle with a moment of epiphany and largely not really focused on this aspect of what the pagoda was teaching when she was at Nascent Soul because of their circumstances.

Watching her qi and the ambient qi meld within the cauldron, tracing it with her principle, she counted down the minutes – 27 this time – until the first step of the refinement was done.

The second step was to stimulate the somewhat steeped material, cycling it within the furnace to separate out any impurities which would settle to the bottom. This required some fairly deft means to manipulate qi, which thankfully she was becoming rather good at. Her ‘Formless Permutation’ principle was built on the foundations of ‘Maelstrom Intent’, so really it was a matter of promoting that and drawing out the transformative nature of the Myriad Elements Qi within her and merging it with what was in the cauldron.

That process took 32 minutes in the end. There was no obvious ‘sign’ that it was done, beyond a faint shift in the qi swirling around the cauldron. That had been one of the most persistent points of failure up to this point, not seeing those subtle shifts in the harmony of the qi and moving to the next step at the correct moment.

Inhaling, she put a deliberate spin upwards into the qi rotating within the cauldron, gently pulling all of the purified materials upwards, focusing them towards one point.

This was the hardest part by a massive margin.

The basic method was very easy, almost like cooking. You just had to get the quantities, timings and temperature right and then basically mould what remained into a pill and fire it at the right temperature. That got you perfectly serviceable basic pills, good for Qi Condensation or Refinement, maybe even Golden Core, but to step above that, you had to form the pill without breaking the sequence of refinement…

There were similarities there to Core Formation, in that she had to recognise all the different parts now, and find the way they harmoniously slotted together. Even with the help of her Formless Permutations principle and the divination formation, that was not easy. No pill was identical in its composition in this method, and while she could understand how that was a boon to versatility, it was also a massive headache.

After ten revolutions, she exhaled, watching the different threads of qi, born of all five elements with a broadly yang attribute, finally all connect together.

After fifteen revolutions, the thread-like ball had become tightly enmeshed.

After twenty, it was solid enough that she could probably pick it up without it collapsing into mush.

She twisted it a twenty-first time, watching it solidify amid the tempering maelstrom of qi.

The twenty-second time, faint, lingering impurities were squeezed out.

The twenty-third time… she felt the threads starting to harden.

The twenty-fourth revolution came and went, which was the point where it had blown the side off the last cauldron, when the maelstrom destabilized slightly due to a minor blemish in the form of the pill.

The twenty-fifth rotation… succeeded, and she stopped feeding it qi, watching it all get drawn into the pill as she gently relinquished the control over the maelstrom.

She had gotten two to this point so far; however, both had exploded rather catastrophically. This time, she kept the flow of qi constant, with barely a forward nudge, just feeding it in and making sure it was stable.

The last of the qi went in, and she stared at the cauldron, pensively, waiting.

There was no explosion, no cracking, no twisting or irregularity.

Wordlessly, she took the top off the furnace and considered the pill inside – it was about the size of a peach pit, a bit charred as well and with a decadently middling spiritual aura at best. Picking it out, she wiped the ash off it, revealing a dull green lustre with a subtle patterning of grasses on it.

“Now I understand why alchemists don’t take on apprentices who aren’t already inherently gifted,” Arai chuckled, sticking her head around the door, presumably drawn by the lack of explosions.

“May a monkey poop on your head!” she shot back.

“Denied!” Arai made a sign warding off misfortune with a mocking smile. “So what did you succeed in making?”

“A qi replenishment pill… I hope,” she mused, turning it over in her hand. “In theory, it should incorporate a small strand of the harmonious aspects of Maelstrom Intent to promote recovery of qi within the body and temper your meridians slightly in the process.”

“That sounds like the kind of thing you shouldn’t market as involving ‘Maelstrom’ Intent,” her sister replied with a chuckle, coming to sit beside her and consider the pill more closely.

“…”

She shoved her over, scowling playfully.

“Aren’t I meant to be the one who acts all whimsical?” she sniffed.

“What are you? A wild Lin Ling?” Arai snickered back.

“…”

She shook her head and pondered the pill, choosing the high road, which would be to throw stones at her sister the next time they sparred. The batch should have made several, but this was the only one that succeeded. The other few were malformed smears on the platform in the middle of the furnace.

“So how do we test if it actually worked? Feeding it to someone is likely to not go down well if it’s not good…” Arai mused.

“Are you just going to keep saying terribly obvious things?” she asked a bit archly, still turning the pill over in her hand.

“…”

“We have been cooped up in here for too long,” Arai noted, rolling her eyes, before adding with a giggle, “I can try it if you like.”

“…”

“I really hate alchemy,” she muttered, staring at the pill again.

“Uhh…” her sister’s mocking attitude slipped slightly.

She sighed and closed her eyes for a moment, focusing on her qi flow until it was no longer misbehaving, then opened them again to consider the pill, with its slightly off-putting lustre in her hand more carefully. The spiritual aura that came off it was also a touch warped.

“ARAI?!” she yelled.

There was silence, as she expected.

Their ‘mental link’ via the symbol was… less, in the hold, a by-product, according to Old Bones, of the nature of the place itself. That said, focusing on it faintly, she could tell that Arai was in a direction that broadly related to the area beyond the terraces and fields at the back of the hold.

Considering the pill again, she sent another thread of qi into it and watched slightly dispassionately from her Nascent Soul this time as it made another attempt to escape. This time it was the Ghoblan Bright Fungi-Seeker who came in to tell her that it was dinner time.

“Why does a basic pill, one meant to have ‘qi restorative aspects’… make you hallucinate just by sending your qi into it?” she pondered, holding it up so that the scrip could ‘record it’ more clearly while she skimmed back over the various recipes and other bits that the pagoda had provided with the first ‘chapter’ of the art.

The most interesting part of that was that the things it was drawing on were in fact largely accurate in little things – it should, for example, be around dinner time. She found herself wondering what would happen if she gave the pill to one of the phantasms ‘willingly’.

“…”

With a further sigh, she stared at the pill again, then put it in a handy jar, sealing it up for now.

Considering her piles of ingredients critically, she re-consulted the recipe. In effect, the pill was meant to be a base-building pill for a Core Formation expert.

“Oh.”

She sat back and bopped herself on the head. It was such a dumbly obvious thing she really had to laugh.

“Although that raises another issue…” she muttered, staring at the wall while her tablet recorded everything. “Qi quality doesn’t seem to have much bearing other than to reduce the requirements on material synergy – so does that mean my comprehensions of my own ‘Intent’ are the problem? Is my view that inward-looking?”

Considering her ‘Intent’… or disparate ‘Intents’ as it were, of which she had quite a few at this point: ‘Soul Intent’, ‘Maelstrom Intent’, ‘Formless Permutations Intent’ – the symbol’s intent, and the ‘Martial Intent’ from the sword form she had practised which was somewhat akin to the ‘Severing’ or ‘Sundering’ Intents that her sister was using rather interchangeably. There were also the various aspects of Intent that came through her Mantra, but those were just other elements of her various comprehensions of Martial and Spiritual Intent. Some, usually those who acquired Mantras outside their usual frameworks, liked to call them ‘Mantra Intent’, but she recalled her mother, and in fact even people like Old Ling, being very dismissive of that. ‘A thing termed by people who want to ascribe as special that which is not,’ was how Old Ling had once described it to Juni.

Taking the pill back out of its container, she pondered it some more.

The more she considered it, the more the problem with the hallucinations was likely because she had started with, as the recipe instructed, the Intent with which she was ‘most familiar’. It did raise some other interesting problems as well though – the ‘Principle’ was hers, which was clear from the way it had come about – but the longer she stared at the ‘Formless Permutation’ Intent, the more of a headache she got.

“Uggh,” she tossed the pill back in its box and closed the lid with a casual manipulation of qi, then flopped back to stare at the flowing curves of the stone ceiling.

“I just wanted to make some simple pills, to make a change from trying to dance across grass blades, but all this is doing is making me want to set the whole world on fire so it can scream along with my frustrations!”

“I see you are meeting with great success,” Arai appeared, standing over her, looking a bit dusty, holding several jars of what appeared to be paint.

“I made a pill!” she exclaimed drolly, sitting up.

“And where is it?” her sister asked, looking around.

“In that pot… box… thing over there,” she sighed, her good mood vanishing like summer mist.

“Huh,” Arai put down her jars and picked it up for a long moment and then put it back. “What was its ‘intended’ purpose?”

“A base-building pill,” she grumbled.

“I guess you could use it as a weapon?” Arai giggled, making her way over to the stack of crates and other stuff in a small ward at the side of the room.

“I could, I suppose,” she agreed, at least in principle. “However, I suspect it would be more trouble than its worth.”

“Probably,” her sister mused, starting to rifle through the various crates with a pensive expression now. “As I recall, various pills like this did show up at auction on occasion.”

“Whatcha lookin’ for?” she asked, standing up and walking over to stand beside her.

“Beast cores,” Arai frowned, setting aside another box. “I want to try a repeat of our earlier attempts at making formation cores – I think I know why it didn’t work before.”

Everything was a bit jumbled up in truth. The pill recipes were rather uncritical of what they required; so long as the component materials were ‘balanced’, which her Myriad Elements Qi made quite straightforward, there was no need to be particularly concerned about what she used for each attempt.

Running back through what she had used, she recalled she had wasted a fair few of the low grade ones they had picked up setting up the furnaces themselves, or using them as fuel substitutes.

“I think I ran through most of them quite quickly. What we have left are in the other room, the ones for cultivation,” she remarked at last.

Arai sighed in mock disgust, sitting down on another crate.

“So, why the sudden interest in formations?” she asked, turning back to look at the room.

“A change in pace, mainly,” Arai mused. “I was going to paint flowers, but while they have lots of paint, it turns out that this place and water paper have a very passing acquaintance. You are also running low on various herbs, I see.”

“They are less important than I anticipated, for this at least,” she shrugged. “Spirit vegetation is, in fact, nearly as good, not to mention there is no shortage of it. It’s also easier to get, replant and mutate via grafting from the plants they have here.”

“Ah, so that explains why the room across the hall is transitioning into a small arboretum,” her sister chuckled.

“…”

She shook her head, amused. Arai had not spent much time in this ‘cave’ abode that Cailleach had given them since she started forcing her eyes to bleed staring at the symbols all day. She had engaged in a bit of that as well, but in… moderation, because the little pagoda provided her plenty of opportunities to weep tears of blood in and of itself, without getting started on the symbol sets.

“It can’t just be a change of pace though?” she asked.

Arai finished searching through the last box and sighed, setting it aside. “I dunno… we have been sat here for… five weeks now, recovering… Part of me is just…”

“Restless,” she supplied, staring at the wall. “It is hard to adjust.”

“You have it easy. You can just bury yourself in this,” Arai sighed. “I… I dunno, I guess I am just getting a bit fed up with the lack of progress over the symbols.”

“You did succeed in getting Rusula to master one,” she pointed out, recalling the younger Ur’Vash girl nearly floating around like she was on a cloud.

“I did… however, this is this… and that is that…”

Her sister sounded resigned.

“…”

“Well, regarding formations, they can do a few things more easily than arrays can, it seems, so I figured I should revisit them, given we are now both at the realms we are and we have a rather large body of knowledge regarding them on the scrips.”

“Like barriers?” she agreed.

“Yes, barriers,” Arai agreed. “Although in this instance, it’s more about seeing how Myriad Elements Qi and my Intent behave with them…”

Arai trailed off, and they both sat there in silence for a few moments.

“It is close to dinner, isn’t it?” she remarked at last, recalling.

“…”

“It is. We can go see what’s what,” Arai agreed, looking around again.

…

Dinner turned out to be some strange dumplings stuffed with meat in a thick soup made of a root spirit herb that was a deep purple. It was not one she was at all familiar with, having never seen it before she arrived at the hold, but it was hardy and favoured by the folk who lived here because it could store for a long time.

The majority of the inhabitants did not eat with them, so it was mostly just them, the Ur’Inan, the Ghoblan and occasionally Old Bones. Today, it was just them, Rusula, Ragash and Jelas, with Jelas having apparently done most of the cooking.

“How is your potion-making going?” Rusula asked her eventually, after they had demolished most of the first course.

“I am not making potions,” she corrected absently, looking around for more of the dumplings, which were very tasty. “It’s alchemy, making potions is compounding usually.

“How is your work with that book going?”

Rusula shot a sideways look at Arai, who was just staring into space chewing slowly on a dumpling and mostly managed to conceal a grimace.

-That well huh…

“Your sister is a good teacher. I am just…”

“It’s hard, adjusting to ‘normality’ after so long,” she said diplomatically.

Arai probably was a good teacher… usually, but her sister was also stressed and annoyed.

“It is difficult to see a new way to use ‘Intent’,” Rusula mused, before dropping her tone fractionally “It is very educational, but I fear she is disappointed I cannot take to the methods more smoothly.”

“It is not easy,” she murmured, supportively.

“It is interesting, your tribe has a very different way of approaching it,” Rusula went on. “However, it is just not the one I have grown up using.”

She nodded understandingly again and nibbled another dumpling.

“The difficulty is in sharing the methods,” she said at last, swallowing the last of it.

“They are the special methods of your tribe, not easily shareable,” Ragash agreed.

It had come as something of a surprise, to her anyway, to learn that the Ur’Inan did have sealed inheritances. She supposed it should not have, really, but it had. The method of sealing was a bit different, but it still restricted you from passing secrets on, on pain of all sorts of unpleasant curses or outright death. As such, their explanation of why they could not just ‘give’ Rusula a method to cultivate ‘Martial Intent’, easily solving that problem, had gone down without any real complaint on Rusula’s part.

“What you have already shared is more than I could ask.”

“It’s fine,” she shrugged. “It is good for us to think about some of these things in a different way as well. Teaching them to others provides that opportunity.”

“Perhaps tomorrow I can take over from you, sis?” she asked Arai across the table.

“Sure,” Arai shrugged, putting her soup down. “If that’s fine with you, Rusula?”

“Of course,” Rusula nodded.

“What will you do then?” she asked Arai.

“Hmm…” her sister stared off into the distance for a moment. “Probably spend more time thinking about what Cailleach said concerning arrays and practising that stuff… Do we need more clay?”

“I am probably okay,” she mused.

“I might go looking for some basic beast cores then,” her sister added. “It’s hard to practice some of those things here.”

“We can come as well if you like?” Rusula added.

“It’s fine,” her sister said, shaking her head. “I won’t be going far anyway.”

“…”

Rusula nodded but still looked a bit concerned. “There has been talk of several groups converging, an alliance to push out the Defilers and try to reclaim some ground.”

“There has,” Ragash agreed, joining the conversation. “Gloomy Crag have been leading that initiative.”

She was about to ask how they knew that, before recalling that Pezvak and Luz had been going back and forth a fair bit and that several groups of Ur’Inan had come to offer greetings outside the hold, even if none had come in. Mostly, she had ignored it all, focused as she was on the alchemy and mastering the nuance of the martial forms. The more recent distraction had been Cailleach’s teaching about using arrays without focusing on using her hands or feet.

“Some of them have asked to see the Ur’Sar,” Rusula added, glancing at Arai again. “If you go out, you should probably avoid them.”

Arai just nodded, helping herself to more dumplings.