> In the aftermath of the various punishments handed out to the associates of Shu Bao, it would be fair to say that large portions of the Shu clan on Eastern Azure were beset by what scholars can only call selective amnesia. The name ‘Song Jia’ became taboo in many quarters and the elders of the Shu Pavilion appear to have made a fairly concerted effort at this point to ensure that, once the punishments were dealt with, the matter was not reported to the upper echelons in any great detail.

>

> Song Jia, for her part, vanished into obscurity and soon all eyes turned away from those matters to the more prescient question of the trials organized to determine which scion of the younger generation would stand upon the steps of the Heavenly Hundred Celestial Ranking.

>

> The Shu Pavilion and clans’ hopes had been placed upon Shu Bao, but with him now on his honeymoon tour of Shu clan lands on Northern Azure they were forced to look elsewhere. In the meantime the Din and Dun clans of Eastern Azure rapidly became frontrunners in the various competitions over the next few years to take that lauded spot and while there were several aspersions thrown towards the Din clan regarding Song Jia’s core, the clan denied everything and painted all the allegations as slanderous geopolitical rumourmongering.

>

> Like that, almost thirty years passed in the end, during which the competitions continued, until at last the frontrunners were sorted out as one of the Imperial Crown Princes, Dun Sheng; a talented young disciple from the Din clan, Din Fulao; Huang Zhang, a ward of the Imperial Empress and Jiong Jiaying, an exceptionally talented disciple from the Jade Gate Court.

>

> It was at this point that Shu Bao returned, in rather impactful fashion, declaring his own intention to enter the competition. In the intervening three decades his cultivation had risen to that of an Immortal and he made an immediate scene by duelling Huang Zhang, defeating him comprehensively and claiming his spot in that matter.

>

> Shu Bao then went on to successfully challenge Jiong Jiayang to a memorable duel in which neither combatant was able to gain any advantage for three days. After that, he challenged Din Fulao; however, before that match could occur, Din Fulao apparently suffered a qi deviation as a result of an earlier match with another challenger and had to go into seclusion, withdrawing from the competition to be replaced by Kong Bao from the Jade Gate Court.

>

> Shu Bao and Kong Bao duelled in a grand occasion, before the assembled Imperial Court, for the right to challenge Dun Sheng. Kong Bao was narrowly defeated thanks, it appeared at the time, to advances Shu Bao had made in the extra time he had been afforded after Din Fulao withdrew from the contest. After his victory, Shu Bao was thrown a large celebration within the Imperial Court for his remarkable return to prominence and feted widely both within and outside the Shu clan, during which his father announced that Shu Bao would become a Core Disciple of the Wise Gate of Supreme Law, the sect of which his wife was already part.

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

  ~ By Kung Quan

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~ JUNI – NEW BOAT, SAME RIVER ~

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

“How goes it?”

Juni sat back and stared at the ceiling of the room that held Ruqu Village’s soul sense restricting array for a moment, before turning to look at Chunhua, who had just stuck her head through the open door.

“I… don’t know,” she answered truthfully. “The last hour has presented… challenges.”

“That sounds like the motto of this fates-accursed village,” Chunhua sighed.

“I take it the boat repairs are not going quite as expected?” she asked.

“It is not. We have no karma with rudders,” Chunhua answered, stepping in out of the sunlight.

“Damaged?”

“Sabotaged,” Chunhua grimaced. “It seems some villagers that fled the chaos tried to damage the boat so the pirates… couldn’t escape I guess?”

“Really?” she frowned, standing up and dusting some ash off her legs. “It didn’t sound that way when Naakos and Lashaan first commented on it?”

“Yeah…” Chunhua replied, sounding rather jaded. “They were very apologetic… but not particularly repentant. They also smashed all the oars and tried to do other bits of minor vandalism.”

“And where are these villagers?” she asked.

“According to Amvar—”

“Amvar?” she interjected, not familiar with the name.

“Oh, the new chief,” Chunhua said. “Didn’t he give his name earlier?”

She shook her head, not that that was particularly important.

“Anyway, he apparently asked about and there are a few unaccounted-for, so he supposes they fled into the swamp,” Chunhua elaborated. “As I said, apologetic but not particularly repentant.”

“Oh well, it is what it is,” she muttered. “I imagine it can be fixed, or you would be more annoyed.”

“Yes, Uarz is confident it can be. The boat is bigger than I thought, but nowhere near as… boat-like, if that makes sense.”

“I know about as much about vessels bigger than a river skiff as you,” she pointed out.

“Anyway—” Chunhua went on, walking over to the formation she had been investigating and giving it a dubious look “—they can repurpose the rudder from our old vessel and most of the surviving oars can apparently be shortened. It’s just a matter of bringing the two boats around and sorting that out, so that is what I left them doing.”

“How long is that likely to take?” she asked.

“Uarz thought an hour or so, they have hands and tools so it’s just a matter of making the adjustments,” Chunhua replied.

“A bit longer than I’d have liked,” she grimaced.

“Yeah,” Chunhua agreed. “Oh… the villagers also want us to have a meal and some kind of celebration.”

“They want to throw us a celebration?” she repeated, somewhat surprised at that.

“Yes, as I said, apologetic,” Chunhua sighed. “So… how is this… formation?”

She stared back at the slab on the floor and buried another, much deeper sigh.

“In theory, it’s the soul sense obfuscating ward for the village, but it’s… really weird.”

“It looks complex,” Chunhua mused, looking around again with a frown.

“It is,” she agreed, looking at the two metre wide slab with its inlaid pieces and carefully carved lines. “It’s actually more complex than the one that was in Ulmaz…”

“I see…” Chunhua frowned, crouching down and putting her hand on the top of the flat stone slab set into the floor.

“Don’t poke at it too much,” she said, putting a hand on Chunhua’s shoulder. “There are some very weird things in it that may or may not be broken.”

“Definitely seems sort of out of place in a rundown village like this,” Chunhua mused, standing up.

“Yep, it’s another entry on the growing list of reasons I want to leave here sooner rather than later,” she agreed again, with a yet deeper sigh. “Also, it’s not the only odd thing in this compound. Ling… found something, but she had no idea what it is… or was.”

“Oh?” Chunhua looked around a further time, frowning at the damage that had been done to the room.

“You’ll have to ask her, I’ve actually gone back and looked at it again, but got next to nothing,” she added, looking around the gloomy, ash coated room as well.

“That was the other reason I came over here, actually,” Chunhua frowned. “When they said you were poking around at this formation I assumed that was what it was, but now…”

“…”

“Wait…” she turned back to look at Chunhua. “Do you also have a nagging feeling that there is something oddly familiar with the… mana here?”

“Well… yes, actually,” Chunhua grimaced. “As I said, I assumed it was something relating to this… but while it’s in this area it’s not in this room.”

…

Five minutes later, she found herself once again standing in the scorched room that had belonged to the Ulquan Envoy looking on as Chunhua considered the room.

“It’s all around here, yep,” Chunhua said at last. “Can’t even tell what it is at this point, it’s so obfuscated by all the other mana signatures, but it feels strange. When I am here, looking at it, it’s barely there, but if I start to focus on other things it creeps back, like a nagging feeling that there is something familiar here, yet I can’t put my finger on it.”

She stared at Chunhua for a long moment, mulling her words over.

“I wonder, does anyone else notice?” she said at last.

“I can go ask quietly,” Chunhua frowned.

“Actually, when did you first start noticing?” she asked, thinking back over events.

“The square maybe? It was not at all obvious more than thirty metres away from here,” Chunhua shrugged. “Why, what are you thinking?”

“Not sure,” she mused. “It doesn’t seem to be related to the mages that the marauders had, which was my main concern…” while she said that, she also signed: “The chief did let slip that there was a boat that came here, before the flood, going up river.”

“Well, that’s okay, the other mage still hasn’t been found,” Chunhua agreed, also signing, “Before… so before your… our tribulation.”

“Yeah,” she agreed out loud, looking around again at the largely empty, scorched room. “In any case, let’s go find Lynn and Uarz and see how the others are progressing.”

Chunhua looked around the room again and nodded.

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

~ SHI TENGFEI – THIS VILLAGE… ~

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

“Well, this is weird,” Shu Feilong grumbled, kicking a mud brick into a nearby wall of the ruined complex of buildings they were searching on the edge of the village, looking for… well… arrows – and a missing slave mage as it transpired – but mostly arrows.

“Which part?” Ao Meicheng shot back, dumping down another armful of bricks from the room she was tearing apart.

“Yeah,” Bai Ruli muttered, appearing behind Ao Meicheng with more mud bricks. “I am all ears…”

“…”

“I…well…” Shu Feilong had to pause and stare at the two women for a long moment, before just waving his arms generally. “All of it?”

“…”

Grimacing, he sat down on a rather inexplicably undamaged chair and swept the interior courtyard of the building they were searching… again.

-To go from prisoner to… whatever we are to pulling strange exploding arrows out of ruined buildings…

Shu Feilong had a point, this whole mess was… weird. Awkward was another way to describe it, but weird fit as well.

“At least I finally understand why they have us looking for the arrows,” he cut in, looking at the basket of dye-coated, broken arrows they had already recovered.

“Oh… yeah,” Bai Ruli agreed, gingerly passing over half a shaft of another that was painted yellow.

He took it and put it with the other fragments of yellow arrows in their own bundle, equally gingerly. They hadn’t exploded yet, but…

“Indeed…” Ao Meicheng sighed, dumping her new armful down and dusting her hands off. “Though, can I just say, I hope the heavens curse whatever is responsible for our cultivation having no bearing whatsoever on our climate tolerance... I at least hoped that our improved attunement might have helped there.”

He could only nod his head at that. The climate was infernal. Heat and humidity in combination to the point where it was genuinely, physically, sapping, despite it only being mid-morning.

“So, none in that room I take it?” he asked Ao Meicheng.

“Nope, impact seems to have radiated through the wall rather than from above,” she replied. “These charms that we got are really something though, to think that they had things like those.”

“Just those two fragments of this yellow arrow,” Bai Ruli added. “Oh… and this bundle of stuff that was in the remains of the furniture by the wall.”

She tossed him several rolled up bits of parchment material and what appeared to be a book.

“Even so, it would be so much easier if we could use soul sense,” Shu Feilong added, looking around the rubble-strewn courtyard again with a disgusted expression.

“It would—” Ao Meicheng agreed, then paused to take a drink of water from their communal jar. “—however, the logic is… fairly undeniable.”

“Yeah, hardly anyone seems to have it, it seems to be a thing they associate with mages…” he pointed out. “Not to mention, the charms do work.”

“They do,” Ao Meicheng conceded, looking at the drawn pattern on her arm where it had been transposed off the reed-fibre talisman that had held it.

The charms were certainly impressive, even if they came a poor second-best to just using soul sense to look for the items. They were part divination talisman, part… feng shui compass as far as he could tell, basically providing you a faint idea of how auspicious or inauspicious an action was. In terms of searching, that translated roughly to a faint nudge, like something catching your eye, drawing you towards where you needed to go.

“What I really want to know is what that black bone-like material is,” Bai Ruli mused, casting her own gaze towards the jar as she also helped herself to some water.

That was one of several questions to be had about the arrows. There were apparently a total of thirty seven of the black bone tipped arrows scattered around the village. Lynn had been very explicit about that number and said that all of them had to be accounted for if possible. Their group had found nine so far… in the hour they had been looking for them.

“Scratch that,” he sighed, wiping the sweat off his own forehead, putting the bundle in the basket and picking up one of the yellow and blue arrow shafts, considering it with the help of the talisman mark on his forearm. “I want to know how they exploded. This is clearly very mundane dye, it has a bit of qi in it but that’s likely down to what was used to make it.”

The nudges he got off it were somewhat sympathetic, but he would be the first to admit that feng shui was not his forte.

“What makes you think it’s even the dye?” Shu Feilong asked.

“…”

“They dunked them in pots of yellow paint before shooting them?” Bai Ruli retorted, scrambling back into the ruined room next to the one Ao Meicheng had been clearing out. “Now, are the two of you going to help out?”

“We are not the ones with the fire attribute spirit roots,” Shu Feilong pointed out with a grimace.

“Boo hoo,” Ao Meicheng said, making a rude gesture as she also vaulted over the tumbled doorway into the room.

Shu Feilong winced and got up. “Still, I wish the villagers were helping out with this…”

“Help us clean up their village, which we largely exploded?” he pointed out.

“…”

Shu Feilong opened and shut his mouth for a moment, but in truth, he had to admit that his junior brother did have a point. The… villagers were certainly in a bad shape, but they were, somewhat oddly in his eyes, not very interested in putting their ruined village back together again. He had seen a few disaster relief missions back on Eastern Azure, usually to coastal villages near the Green Dawn Dragon Sect that were hit by seasonal typhoons or the occasional sea-beast… and invariably the villagers were all over the relief effort before any sect contribution seeking disciples started arriving to pick up the pieces.

Shaking his head he picked through bundle in the basket, passed one of the scrolls to Shu Feilong and took the book.

As it turned out, the book was written in a script that was entirely unintelligible to him, the only oddity being that the talisman on his arm told him that some element of it was vaguely auspicious. Sighing, he put it back in the basket, took one of the crumpled scrolls and unrolled it…

“This is a plan for a boat,” Shu Feilong grumbled, putting his down.

“This… is not…” he answered absently, turning it around so it was the right way up. “In fact…”

-Are they maps?

He stared at the slightly esoteric drawings, lines, arrows and various symbols.

He quickly flicked through the five other sheets which had been rolled up with it, which also turned out to be similar kinds of drawings with quite a significant overlap in terms of the symbols used.

“These appear to be maps,” he mused, rolling the first group back up.

“Could you go check out that room again, see if there is anything else?” he asked Shu Feilong.

“Sure…” Shu Feilong stood with a sigh and trudged off as he picked up the second roll.

He had gotten through three rolls, all of which contained either maps or sheets that looked like plans for boats and even a plan for the village they were in, showing fields or something, when the sound of dislodging masonry and some muffled cursing made him look up.

“—Ah hah! Got it!” Bai Ruli called out, dropping back down out of a gap in the wall of the room she had been clearing, holding half an arrow shaft with the eponymous black bone points.

“Wonderful, is that us done with this building?” Ao Meicheng sighed, running her hands through her hair and looking at the rubble scattered everywhere.

Glancing into the basket, which held eight black-tipped arrows, not counting the one in his hand, he focused on them and felt the nudge in the back of his mind point him towards the edge of the village now, rather than the right-hand side of their ruined courtyard.

“Seems so,” he replied. “My talisman is pointing me towards the edge of the village now.”

“—what’s the matter?” Shu Feilong asked, sticking his head out of the room he had been in.

“I have the last one,” Bai Ruli anwered, “and yes, my talisman is also nudging me to the edge of the village.”

“So, the last building is towards the end of the road?” Ao Meicheng mused, turning on the spot for a moment.

“Seems that way,” he agreed, rolling up the parchment and making it into a nondescript bundle in the basket. “According to Lynn they shot two arrows into this part of the village, though fates only know how she knows that without using soul sense.”

“Could be something like the talismans?” Bai Ruli shrugged, tossing the arrow into the basket. “There are more means than just soul sense for marking stuff, especially if you have actual skill with feng shui.”

“Good,” Shu Feilong sighed, scrambling out of the room. “Let’s hope the others are nearly done as well.”

“Anything else in there?” he asked.

“Here,” Shu Feilong tossed him a second book, which he flipped through, noting it contained drawings of fish and plants mainly.

“Ah! You’re done with this building?”

He put the book into the bundle and turned to find the last member of their ‘group’, the guard, Manshu, crouched on the wall above them with a bundle of arrows, mostly tipped in the golden-copper metal, gripped in his hand.

“Yes, we have both of the arrows,” he replied.

Manshu dropped down with a light grunt and tossed his bundle into the basket without any care, making Shu Feilong, who was standing next to it, flinch.

“They don’t explode like that…” Manshu said, sounding amused. “Probably…”

“What did he—?” Shu Feilong muttered.

“…”

He stared at his junior brother for a moment and fought back the urge to give him a kick.

“He said it won’t explode like that,” he repeated, trying not to let his emotional tiredness with being the group translator influence him unduly.

“Oh…” Shu Feilong looked at him and then at Manshu rather dubiously, but nodded.

-If only I had a jade slip, he thought, not for the first time, then I could at least imprint my knowledge of the Easten tongue onto it and not have this silly play every time we hold a conversation.

“In that case, let us get on with this,” Manshu said briskly. “I take it there was nothing else of interest in here?”

“Nothing much,” he answered, “Some food stores and a few rooms with beds but we didn’t poke too much… given people presumably live here…”

“I wonder how Brother Zhanfeng is getting on,” Shu Feilong mused behind him, picking up the basket.

The others went silent at that. In a way, he could understand why Zhanfeng had ended up with the other group, however it was a bit disheartening. Zhanfeng’s outspoken demeanour had certainly seen him be marked by Junee, though he also suspected she had not quite taken her eye off him since their initial meeting on the fates-accursed wreck. In her position he too would have split their ‘strongest’ member away and put them with a different group, but that didn’t make it any easier.

“Probably the same as us,” he said after a moment. “There is a lot of ground to cover and we did blow up this village pretty bad.”

Following Manshu back out into the street, he looked back towards the village centre for a moment, noting that a fair crowd of the villagers were still loitering around there, and then swept his gaze back along the rest of the buildings, trying not to sigh… and failing.

“Look, most of the damage was probably done by the flood,” Shu Feilong muttered, poking him in the back.

That was probably true, he had to admit.

Off to their right down one of the side ‘streets’, a group of villagers – mostly male youths – was crouching or standing around the doorway of one of the ruined buildings, smoking something. Seemingly noticing his gaze, they looked back, one very conspicuously spitting on the ground as they did so.

The crude feng shui compass connected to his intent courtesy of the talisman twinged.

“Uggh,” Bai Ruli scowled, looking in their direction.

One of the distant Ur’Vash pointed at them and said something which made the others laugh.

“…”

Manshu eyed them for a long moment as well, but just shook his head.

Ignoring the group of youths, he dismissed the faint, inauspicious nudge from the talisman regarding them and turned to get his bearings again.

The talisman again pushed at his awareness faintly, directing his focus towards the left-hand side of the rubble-strewn street.

“The next arrows seem like they are over… there?” he pronounced after a moment, once the direction of the nudge had stabilised, pointing in the direction of a second ruined set of buildings adjoining the collapsed wall.

“Yeah,” Ao Meicheng agreed, though her gaze was also lingering on the youths.

Bai Ruli shot a further glance at the group of youths, her eyes narrowed, but followed after him, as did Shu Feilong and Ao Meicheng a moment later. The last one to move was in fact Manshu, which was surprising.

“Problem?” he asked Bai Ruli as they picked their way around the scattered rubble.

“Just the way they were looking at us,” she muttered.

“…”

He looked at her for a moment, then nodded. There had been hostility there, though that was not that surprising in the context.

“Even if we did blow up a few roofs, you would think they might be a bit more grateful,” Shu Feilong grumbled, kicking a mud brick out of the street.

“Probably they think one lot on boats are as good as another,” he mused, peering through a doorway. “Just because the other shoe has not dropped already, doesn’t mean it won’t eventually.”

-Just like with our situation, he thought, though he didn’t say that out loud. They have been very… hospitable, but…

Several shouts brought him back from his thoughts, to see that six villagers, again mostly youths in ragged, muddy clothing, carrying a few scavenged tools, were filtering out of the building ahead of them.

“…”

“That’s where the arrows landed isn’t it?” Ao Meicheng remarked, biting her lip.

He didn’t need to grace that with a reply – this time, the talisman gave him a much more pronounced ‘that is kind of a problem’ feeling.

The group looked them over rather derisively and then all wandered off across the street, vanishing into another building talking in their own language.

“Ten spirit stones says they took the arrows,” Shu Feilong remarked with a resigned sigh.

“Seems a bit short-sighted though,” Ao Meicheng muttered. “They have to know we will point them out.”

“You know…” Bai Ruli frowned, looking at the building where the group had gone, then back up the street, “something about this is… odd.”

“Odd?” he asked, looking at her.

“Yeah,” she said. “It didn’t really strike me before because everything was a bit hectic… but isn’t the composition of villagers in this village a bit off?”

“Off?” Shu Feilong looked confused.

“Well, in the square… it was mostly a mix of folks, but there are next to no children… and here we have just seen two groups of them that are about the same age. This village has to have… what, a population of a hundred?”

“…”

He stared at her, suddenly feeling very stupid, because she was right.

“I am not following,” Shu Feilong, who had much less experience with small villages he suspected, asked.

“Well, these buildings can hold a large family each,” Bai Ruli said, looking around. “These people are poor and I imagine life around here is pretty hard, but there are no old… women, basically no young women, no children at all, just old men, young men and a few middle-aged women keeping back in the main square?”

“It could be that these others did something,” he mused. “Killed some of them?”

“Or a lot could have died in the flood?” Shu Feilong suggested, “The water came up almost to the rooftops it looks like.”

“Yes, however you’re overlooking a second thing,” Ruli muttered.

“I am?” Shu Feilong frowned.

“This place runs on slavery and young men and women make for the most valuable slaves. They can work, fight…have sex…” Bai Ruli said quietly.

“So… the other group… oh…” Shu Feilong finally caught on.

“If it was slavers, they would kill the old men and prioritize the women and the men of working age. The largest casualties should be among the men of fighting age, because they would have tried to fight back, protect families, protect mothers, fathers, sisters, wives and so on…” Bai Ruli added.

“How do you know so much about—?” Shu Feilong frowned.

“—My father’s lands were plagued by an evil cult run by some young masters who were chased out of the Red Sovereigns,” Bai Ruli said shortly.

“Oh…”

“…”

In order to divert the talk away from that rather awkward topic, he turned to Manshu, who was standing there, arms crossed, looking at their surroundings, apparently unfazed by their quiet conversation.

“What should we do now?” he asked, gesturing in the direction of the ruins. “Do we go check or…?”

“…”

“Let’s head back,” Manshu replied after a moment’s silent thought. “We’ll let Junee or Lynn sort it out. The last thing we need is to be brawling with discontented villagers.”

He stared at the surrounding buildings, noting the sullen looks from several older villagers now standing in a ruined doorway back the way they had come, and nodded in agreement.

“Well?” Ao Meicheng asked him.

“Manshu thinks we should head back, let Junee or Lynn solve this,” he replied.

“Good,” Bai Ruli muttered.

Feilong also nodded, looking a bit less vexed at least.

“There might be an innocuous explanation for everything,” he mused to the others, ushering Shu Feilong ahead of him as Manshu started back up the street as well.

“…”

“It might simply be that they are just jumpy about us because we are a second group of heavily armed arrivals who smashed apart the last lot of pirates like they were bandits who barely had a qi manual between them,” he pointed out, which got an eye roll from Bai Ruli.

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

~ JUNI – RUQU VILLAGE HEADACHES ~

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

The ruined square of the village was much as they had left it, which was to say it was full of the dead bodies of Mugvar’s Marauders along with quite a lot of villagers milling around, looking vaguely busy but all giving the three cultivators and the captive mage sideways looks.

“Hunter Junee!” the village chief, Amvar, hurried over.

“Chief Amvar,” she replied with a slight edge on her tone.

The chief barely missed a step at her use of his name, but the two elders behind him did grimace for a second, though they too hid it well.

“How is the ward?” he asked earnestly.

“Free of the Marauders’ meddling,” she said, which as far as she could tell was the truth.

“How… reassuring,” the chief sighed. “If that is the case, we can re-activate it shortly and feel safe in our beds once again.”

“Of course,” she nodded. “There are any number of predators crawling out of the swamps since the flood, just last night we saw several Sixth Advancement serpents.”

“S-sixth Advancement?” one of the elders gawked.

“Yes,” she nodded, instilling a degree of seriousness in her voice.

-Not that you need to know they were being ridden by soldiers patrolling near Ulquan… she mused.

“And that toad,” Chunhua interjected. “That was unpleasant.”

“Don’t talk about that,” she grumbled.

“Toad?” the chief asked, now looking legitimately nervous.

“Oh, this was quite a long way from here, we ran into one yesterday that gave us some trouble,” she clarified.

The chief and the two elders coughed and nodded.

“We… wished to offer you and the crew of Ragvaz’s Pride some hospitality,” Chief Amvar said after a brief pause. “You have… well your timely arrival saved us from a terrible fate.”

“…”

Out of the corner of her eye she could see Chunhua very unobtrusively sign, “Not a good idea.”

-You don’t say, she thought drily.

“Your arrival here, portentous, an omen from the Great Mother Quazam,” one of the other village elders muttered.

-And that doesn’t help, not at all, she thought to herself.

“You have delivered us from the arms of these marauders, they would have sold us as slaves… in Uldara,” the other elder muttered. “My daughters… my son…”

“It was the Maker’s will,” she said diplomatically, glad she had made a point to learn a bunch about the ritual phrases of the Ur’Vash and Ur’Inan from Naakai. “So he spoke, so it is.”

“So it must be,” Chunhua murmured nearby.

“Yes, so it must be,” the two elders and the chief also muttered, without much hesitancy.

“However, while—”

“While we are a poor village, we can at least offer you a nice meal and our appreciation for what you have done for us,” Chief Amvar said, taking her hands directly and cutting her off, speaking in Easten… Lataan this time.

Looking around at the assembled villagers, Juni had to resist the urge to pinch the bridge of her nose.

On the face of it the chief’s request, that they share a meal and accept the best wishes of the village for saving them, was… not actually unreasonable based on what Naakai had explained to her before about Ur’Vash hospitality rituals. The problem was that the more she considered their current circumstances the less happy she was becoming about the sum of those collective parts. The various, vague senses from the talismans she had distributed to the groups scouring for arrows and anything else of interest did not help either.

“I would not want to impinge on the strained resources of your village, having suffered these disasters,” she replied at last, looking around at the other elders and attendant survivors.

“No, not at all,” the village chief countered almost immediately, “The damage looks bad but those pirates were mostly interested in our… people.”

-Now I understand why father had me do regular administration tours of the Kun clan’s vassal villages, she reflected glumly, looking at the earnest faces of the various surviving ‘village elders’. It is amazing how some things just do not change.

The problem she had was that she couldn’t put her finger on what was off, either.

At best, they were entirely honest and did just want to celebrate their survival… however, if she put herself in their position she knew she would want nothing more than to see the back of the second heavily armed group of dubious origin to explode her village in less than a day, especially with most of them being ‘barbarian savages’ from the dreadful and primitive southern plains.

-Unless this is them trying to fob us off with the barest minimum, hoping we don’t take offence at them wanting us gone so quickly?

“I understand your unease,” the village chief said, stepping forward. “However, your arrival here has been as a gift from Quazam, Honoured be She, Great Mother to the Masters.”

“Honoured is Quazam, Great Mother to the Masters…” many of the nearby villagers and even some of the crew checking the marauders’ bodies murmured respectfully.

“…”

“It was by Quazam’s grace that we survived the flood, and by Quazam’s grace that you arrived to prevent us being sold into slavery by that infamous devil Mugvar. Please, if we cannot repay you for your heroic actions in some way…” the chief bowed in supplication, as did a few of the other older folk.

“It’s fine, we checked your formation and found nothing sabotaged with it,” she said politely. “And we are sweeping the village to check that the raiders did nothing else untoward…” she reiterated, waving for the chief to stop bowing.

-And you spouting Quazam this and that is not helping, she complained inwardly.

“Your generosity does you credit,” the chief said with a smile. “So it is only right that we fulfil our part and provide suitable hospitality, it is just a meal and then you can depart tomorrow, well rested…”

“Typical savages, people not knowing civilized ways,” someone muttered from the back of the small crowd, before being shushed.

-And there we see the other problem, a small part of her mind pointed out. We already stick out a whole bunch… and refusing their hospitality is the kind of weird thing that almost certainly gets you remembered.

Listening, she heard a few other distant grumbles about their ‘attitude’ and ‘disrespecting Quazam’, not to mention several muttered remarks about the damage caused.

“I must confer with the others in any case,” she said diplomatically, pretending to ignore the mutters. “I speak for my group, Captain Omurz and Uarz speak for theirs.”

The chief looked at her a bit more dubiously but again recovered quickly and bowed again.

Turning away from the elders and the chief she walked over to Ling, Chunhua following behind her.

“They want to give us dinner?” Ling said matter-of-factly.

“They do,” she nodded.

“Hmmmmm….” Ling frowned, looking around at the other occupants of the square and at the ruined village.

“Yeah, that about sums up my thoughts as well,” Chunhua murmured quietly.

“Any advance on earlier?” she asked Ling via hand-sign.

“Nope, it’s like a faint itch I cannot scratch and the more I try to avoid it the more alluring it gets,” Ling signed back, adding out loud: “What can this lot cook us? Three day old fish and reed roots?”

“Same here,” Chunhua signed in agreement, before also saying out loud: “They are pitching it as a hospitality thing,”

“Really?” Ling answered with a frown.

“Anyone else?” she asked Ling, once again covertly.

“I made a few subtle hints to Yao and Manshu earlier but neither noticed anything, nor did Eruuna or Saruuna on the part of the Ur’Inan,” Ling signed in reply.

“So… it’s just the two of you?” she mused.

“What are you thinking?” Ling frowned.

“Well, you must have a better idea than me, but how far do you think we are from Umaja?” she signed.

“…”

“The boat in the night, before the flood?” Ling signed, her frown deepening. “You think we have actually walked right back into something Sharvasus was planning?”

“At this point, I don’t know,” she signed back.

“What does your… art say?” Ling asked after a moment’s pause.

She stared up at the dry reed sunshade above them for a moment, then looked at the three cultivators sat sullenly nearby with a jar of water and some food, trying not to look too obviously unhappy about sitting as close to Akuja as circumstances dictated they currently were.

‘Bright Heart Shifting Steps’ gave her nothing but subtle directionlessness.

“…”

“That informative huh?” Ling grunted, interpreting her probably somewhat vacant stare for the obvious answer.

She nodded, sucking her teeth in mild annoyance.

“My gut says we leave as soon as possible,” she signed.

“Speaking of odd things…” she swept the village again, then turned to Akuja.

“Come here,” she waved the slave mage over.

“What do you want, honoured hunter?” the Ur’Vash woman, said getting up quickly and not quite running towards them.

“When you got here… how many people were in the village?” she asked.

“Hard…. to say,” Akuja frowned. “It was just before dawn and the ancestral ward was up. Everything was in turmoil from the flood.”

“I see,” she said, beckoning for the mage to sit before them.

“The ward was active?” Ling frowned.

“Yeah, it was a bit damaged but it wasn’t deactivated fully until we took over the village,” Akuja answered.

“So it survived the flood?” she asked.

“Yes,” Akuja nodded.

“I see… so if they were planning to sell people as slaves… how many women and children are there in the village?” she asked.

“…”

Akuja, Ling and Chunhua all looked at her oddly and she sighed in her heart, lamenting the kind of things you learned when dealing with putting down bandits on behalf of the Bureau and the Kun clan.

“There were not many,” Akuja said after a moment. “When Mugvar took control a few groups fled, when the village was turned over they said that some of the women and children fled for Ulquan, they were already grouped together according to those who were interrogated later. Mugvar sent pursuers in some of the village’s remaining boats but they never came back. The village was not wealthy and he was very angry and… well there is a new chief now.”

“The chief told us the old chief died when Mugvar seized his daughters and he objected,” she mused.

“He did,” Akuja said matter-of-factly. “I don’t know what happened to them but they slew the Envoy, most of the guards of the watch post and anyone else who might be difficult to sell.”

“And the chief’s daughters?” she asked softly.

“Mugvar took them to his bed. They were alive when the fighting started,” Akuja shrugged, looking around. “I have not seen their bodies since, so perhaps they are holed up somewhere in the village, well away from Ragvaz’s crew.”

A part of her wanted to be more angry than she was with the Ur’Vash woman, but in her heart she suspected that her own tribulations at the hands of that crew and the mage, given she was a slave, had not been particularly pleasant.

“We could ask?” Chunhua mused.

“Did you loot anything?” she asked.

“Did we?” Akuja frowned. “Not much, but I would not know about that, I was mostly just ordered to throw some fire around while Xakvor and the others dealt with the guard compound and the chief’s house. After that Xakvor used us to replenish his mana and made us watch while Mugvar and his lieutenants took what they wanted.”

“…”

The matter-of-fact way that Akuja said that made her stomach twist a bit.

“Why did you come here?” she asked at last.

“It was convenient,” Akuja said with a grimace. “We had just departed Ulquan for Uldara when the flood came. As I said before, our main vessel was wrecked only a mile from here and so we were able to salvage some stuff and make it here in fairly short order using the remaining vessel which you now control.”

“The other group is back,” Chunhua remarked, pointing to Kai Manshu, Shi Tengfei and most of his group who were walking quickly out of the side street, not looking particularly happy.

“Wonder what has them bitten,” Ling mused.

She waved for Kai Manshu to bring the others over.

“Probably some of the villagers are less than enthused about us poking through their homes for the same arrows that we used to destroy many of them,” Chunhua pointed out.

She had to nod there. The chief and elders were being quite pleasant, but it was impossible to ignore the not particularly well-armed villagers ringing the square in a few scattered groups. Their gear was crude, much of it scavenged off Mugvar’s Marauders she suspected, given how little the bodies had had on them when they swept through the village afterwards.

“You recovered the arrows?” she asked Kai Manshu as they came over and sat down in the shade.

“Yes,” Shi Tengfei nodded.

“Well, most of them,” Kai Manshu clarified.

“Most of them?” she asked.

“Yeah… there are… we got the ones in the nearer buildings but by the time we got to the edge of the village, the last spot your talismans directed us to, a group of youths from the village was already there.”

“I… see,” she said with a frown, looking around, noting there were not that many young male Ur’Vash around, truth be told.

“So… they took the arrows?” Chunhua interjected.

“We think so,” Shi Tengfei said with a grimace.

“Figured coming back here and telling you was better than picking a fight with a bunch of villagers over them,” Manshu said carefully.

“Well… the group outnumbered us, and were fairly hostile-looking,” Shi Tengfei added in a guarded manner. “They also…”

“They also looked shady as anything,” Bai Ruli muttered behind him in Imperial Common.

“Yeah,” Ao Meicheng agreed.

“…”

“Chief Amvar!” she called over.

“How may I help?” the chief hurried over, leaving the two elders to discuss something with two old women and a younger man who looked a bit unhappy about something.

“It was very good of you to send some of your village youths out to help search the buildings,” she said diplomatically.

“Ah, yes, some of the younger villagers felt they could have done more,” Chief Amvar replied. “They have no doubt been checking their families’ houses… and seeing to it that no other marauders are present, that other slave mage is still unaccounted for…”

His gaze slid sideways to Akuja who just stared back at him impassively, before travelling to the three new cultivators sitting nearby.

-They are, she agreed.

“Can I help in any other way?” the chief asked.

“No,” she shook her head, letting him leave again.

“So, what do you think?” Chunhua signed.

“I think that this is a village that has lost a lot…” she trailed off as her ability to touch her soul sense faded away completely.

“Guess they put the ward back on,” Kai Manshu said.

“Yeah,” she said, looking at the two elders and three others exiting the guard compound.

The other cultivators did their best but all shifted uneasily.

“Where is Brother Zhanfeng?” she didn’t turn to look at Shu Feilong, who had asked the question. “I would have thought they would be done by now as well?”

“Yeah,” Shi Tengfei muttered.

“He went with Caanar, Feiwu Shen, Wei Chu and Teshek,” Ling signed.

“Should have sent him with this lot,” she signed back.

“…”

Ling made a face, hiding it by pushing her hair off her face.

“Is there a problem?” she asked Shi Tengfei, who started faintly in surprise at her interjection into their hushed conversation about what might be keeping the other groups.

“The other groups are not back yet… what with us… running into issues with that group?” Shi Tengfei muttered. “They are worried.”

“I can go check on the other two groups,” Ling said, standing up. “I want to stretch my legs a bit anyway.”

“Okay,” she agreed.

“Uh… if I might…?” Shi Tengfei spoke up again. “We noticed something else a bit weird.”

“You did?” she asked.

“Well… um… isn’t the make-up of the village a bit odd?” Shi Tengfei said, much more quietly. “All the youths we saw are fighting age… and there are next to no women and children here, and not many in later middle age except for those here…”

“—and the disaster,” Bai Ruli prompted him.

“Ah… yes, and, well, they are not really behaving like… this place matters to them?” Shi Tengfei added.

-Well, they do have eyes after all, she mused, looking at Shi Tengfei and the others.

“According to the villagers, many of the women and children escaped when the marauders first invaded,” she said.

“There was not much of a fight,” Akuja interjected. “Xakvor locked down the whole village with his spell once it became clear that some had recognised us and run.”

Shi Tengfei nodded and relayed that back to the others, but she could see he looked far from convinced by that explanation. Neither, it seemed was Bai Ruli.

“Here are the arrows by the way,” Shi Tengfei added, passing her a basket. “What else has happened while we were searching?”

“The village wants to throw us a party for saving them,” she said with aplomb.

“Do they,” Shi Tengfei grimaced slightly and then recovered himself.

-So, finally coming out of his shell a bit, or just too jaded in the heat to care, she thought wryly.

“They do,” she said. “It is the done thing.”

“You’re not thinking of agreeing?” Chunhua muttered.

“I need to speak to Naakai and Naakos first I think,” she signed, before adding out loud: “If we can leave before lunch I am all for it, however if we have to eat a bowl of fish stew for lunch in order to not stand out too much, that might just be what it takes.”

“I rather got the impression he was talking about an evening meal,” Chunhua pointed out.

“Well, he will be disappointed,” she retorted with an eye roll.

“So what now?” Kai Manshu asked.

“Swap with us, wait here and keep an eye on the prisoners with Chunhua,” she said, giving him a pat on the shoulder, before turning to the others. “The rest of you, get your breath, drink something, eat something, it’s necessary in these temperatures after everything you have been through.”

“Okay,” Shi Tengfei said, sitting down with a weary sigh on a bench.

“And if anything goes wrong?” Chunhua asked.

“As much as I am pleased to have saved them from a fate worse than death, I have no intention of being made an idiot of. This is not why we are here,” she said blandly.

There was no point in openly saying anything more than that, neither Chunhua nor Kai Manshu were inexperienced and from their nods clearly got her meaning. So, it seemed, did Shi Tengfei, who grimaced a bit but turned to relay what had just been said to the other three beside him.

Chunhua sat down with her back against the wall, surveying the square, leaving the others to sort themselves out. Giving Kai Manshu a final nod she turned and walked back across the courtyard, heading for the street where Kai Manshu and that group had originally gone.

“Is there a problem?”

She turned to find a rather sweaty Omurz had hurried to catch her up.

“People taking longer at things than they should is all,” she said.

“The villagers want to throw us a feast,” Omurz added.

“I heard,” she agreed non-committally.

“I… know we haven’t gotten off on the best foot, but I would advocate… not accepting,” Omurz muttered.

“…”

“Walk with me,” she said briskly, turning down the street, looking left and right.

“What has you spooked?” she asked after they had gone two doors down.

“I know villages like this and desperate times call for desperate measures,” Omurz muttered. “They saw that writ used and know that a bunch of people are susceptible to it. All it takes is some words and a fast canoe and one or two of them could be half-way to Ulquan already.”

“You think they will sell us out?” she mused. “That’s not very hospitable.”

“This is not your plains,” Omurz grunted.

“It is not,” she agreed. “And I agree, something is off. It could just be that they are unhappy we are taking a fancy boat and didn’t let them fillet the last of the marauders…”

“More like they are pissed we are going to take the four slaves they had,” Omurz muttered.

“Or that,” she conceded. “Either way, I have no intention of sticking around here longer than necessary, rest assured of that.”

“Those are worth a lot,” Omurz added, looking at her sideways.

“I am aware,” she murmured. “A Great Shamaness wanted to buy sixteen like them in Ulquan for 500 agrond ingots.”

“…”

Omurz almost tripped over a brick in the street before she caught his arm.

“Five…”

“So don’t get any silly ideas either,” she added with a half-smile, steadying him.

“N-no… of course not,” Omurz muttered.

“By the way, you are the only one in your crew who now knows that,” she added with a grin.

“…”

Omurz stared at her, visibly sweating in a way that had nothing to do with the humidity.

“Without your help we would be stuck in the middle of nowhere, probably eaten by beasts or worse,” Omurz muttered after a moment. “I dunno what you heard, but we are nothing like those bastards with Mugvar, we are just river merchants.”

“Of course,” she agreed diplomatically, scanning the street and the buildings. “Just river merchants.”

They walked on in silence after that. The odd villager stuck their head out of a building to watch them pass or stopped work on the salvage of their former home, but nobody called out or made any real attempt to engage them as they made their way through the narrow collection of streets.

In her head she recalled shooting three arrows into this region that were valuable enough to be worth recovering. The first location had been thoroughly cleared, as had the second, which was now being patched up by three surly-looking villagers taking orders from an old woman who glared at them both as they looked into the courtyard.

“Hey, HEY!”

They had barely walked a few steps further on when raised voices caught her attention from the general direction of her last destination.

“Fate-thrashed dogshit idiot!”

With a sigh, she caught the echoes of Imperial Common being used to curse someone out.

“Yes, back off, we aren’t causing any issues!” Caanar’s raised voice added.

“Problem?” she asked a middle-aged woman who was stacking up various salvaged plates and bowls outside a doorway as they passed by.

“They go poking in Vulmur’s house, not surprising you hear shouting,” she shrugged, giving them a lot of side-eye.

Shaking her head, she picked up the pace, just in time to see a youth be sent sprawling out of a gateway, followed by Feiwu Shen who had an angry expression on his face.

“This not yours!” the youth snapped. “It my father’s trophy!”

Feiwu Shen caught her eye just as two more youths pushed their way forward and another scrambled over the wall.

“What is the problem here?” she asked.

“Fucking barbarian, first you blow up our house, now you want to claim our family’s stuff as yours?” the youth spat, pushing himself up.

“Show me the arrow,” she said blandly.

Before he was even aware of what he was doing, the youth, who she assumed was Vulmur or someone closely related to whoever that was, had half offered her the arrow head. Snarling, he snatched his hand back at the last moment, his friends clustering around him.

“What you trying to do, you think you are so big?” he scowled.

Feiwu Shen and Caanar had both come out now, followed by Kei Zhanfeng who had a sour look on his face and Wei Chu, who was…

“What happened?” she asked Wei Chu, looking at her torn clothing.

“One of them tried to grab me,” she sniffed. “He won’t wake up for a while.”

“Is this true?” she turned on the villagers with narrowed eyes, exerting her principle a bit more directly.

“She… we just made a joke…” one of the youths stammered.

“A joke…” she repeated.

All of the Ur’Vash before her were Fourth or Fifth Advancement and wilted appropriately. Out of the corner of her eye, though, she could see other villagers appearing in nearby doorways or damaged windows, watching on in silence.

Without any preamble, she stepped forward and took the youth’s hand, opening it easily and considering the arrow. It was indeed one of hers, which was about what she had expected. The blue dye was what gave it away.

“Here,” she took the pot of dye out of her satchel and upended it, pouring it out on the ground.

“…”

The youth opened and shut his mouth, unable to say anything really, because any idiot with the slightest bit of qi… or mana sense could tell immediately that the signature of the blue dye on the bone arrowhead and the dye she had just tipped out were identical.

“Here,” she tossed him the core of a Soul Foundation fish that they had caught the previous day. “Consider that a token of my thanks for finding it. I will be sure to let your chief, Amvar, know you were a big help.”

“Sorry for making a mess,” Caanar said, looking at the cultivators with mild resignation.

“What happened to you?” she asked Wei Chu, who had come over to stand beside her.

“Two of them tried to get me to… well… they wanted to trade for the arrow… I may have broken a few things on the one still inside,” Wei Chu muttered.

“How… merciful,” she replied, giving the other girl a brief hug around the shoulders and sweeping her eye over the Ur’Vash who were looking rather uneasy now.

“Back to the square with the rest of you,” she ordered, nodding towards Caanar and Omurz.

“Of course,” Omurz said with a faintly ingratiating smile.

“What about you?” Caanar asked her, casting a further look at the group of Ur’Vash who had backed off and were looking somewhat put out.

“I’ll walk around, meet Lynn and see you in a few minutes,” she said.

Watching the five of them walk back up the street, she sighed deeply and then looked back at the Ur’Vash youths. They all glared sullenly at her, clearly not satisfied with the outcome, even if the ringleader was holding the core rather tightly in his hand.

Shaking her head, she looked around the street and started walking again, ignoring the other watchers and heading for the next spot where they had blown up a rooftop.

As it turned out, her walk was a short one, because she met Naakai coming the other way, having barely gotten half-way down the street that ran parallel to the largely ruined wall.

“Your patience has run out with this shithole?” the older Ur’Inan woman chuckled, looking around.

“It has,” she nodded. “The village chief wants us to have a party, but I am all for getting out of here.”

“Lynn said as much and I agree with your sentiments, however skipping out on something like that will get us remembered,” Naakai said, looking both ways down the street.

“So what do you suggest?” she asked, turning back down the next alley to head back towards the village centre.

“Make it lunch, just take the bare minimum,” Naakai mused.

“You think they might actually try something?” she murmured a bit more softly as they passed by a building where several villagers were tipping rubble from a collapsed roof outside.

“Half the survivors saw that ‘Masters’ Proclamation’ of the mage’s work,” Naakai said softly. “There is big money in returning runaway slaves.”

“Especially when you need to rebuild a whole village in the face of a freak natural disaster?” she mused.

“It’s something to consider,” Naakai agreed.

It didn’t take long to get back to the square, where everyone else was congregated near as she could tell, bar those overseeing the repairs to the vessel. Almost as soon as they arrived, the village chief and the elders started to hurry in her direction, hopeful looks on their faces.

“Hunter Junee, have you had some time to think—?”

“I have, Chief Amvar,” she replied, holding up a hand to cut off the chief. “I do not think we can impinge on your hospitality overlong, however, perhaps we might share our mutual joy at your village’s changed circumstances over some lunch?”

“Lunch?” the right hand elder repeated.

“Captain Omurz is very keen to be on his way, time is money and this chaos is very disruptive, you understand, Chief Amvar,” she said with a bright smile. “We do not want to overly forestall the very important repairs your village is making to its security against all manner of dangerous beasts this flood might have stirred up for something as trivial as a celebratory feast.”

“Ah… erm… yes…” the chief nodded, not quite looking at the two elders.

“However, I have spoken to him and I think that while the rest of them get on with fixing the boat, a number of us would be very happy to share a meal with you before we depart this afternoon,” she continued.

“I… that would be agreeable,” the chief said with a smile, cutting off the elders smoothly before they could say anything, she noted.

“There are rituals that must be observed,” she added.

“Of course, of course,” the left-hand elder nodded, recovering very well.

“I must see to a few matters, but after that?” she added.

“It will just be you and…?” the chief asked, looking at Naakai with a slight frown.

“Captain Omurz, Naakos of course, given he killed that villain Mugvar, myself and my two companions,” she said smoothly, drawing his attention back to her.

“We shall set to preparing a feast worthy of this occasion,” the left-hand elder said with a similarly broad smile.

“I look forward to it,” she murmured, reflecting his own smile back at him. “I am sure you will have much to prepare, Chief Amvar.”

“…”

Chief Amvar stared at her for a long moment, then nodded.

“It shall be no problem, no problem,” the left-hand elder muttered, quietly enough that she wondered if she had actually been meant to hear the words.

“In that case, I shall let you get on with the preparations,” she added, smiling again at them and giving all three an extra, subtle nudge with her own principle.

Watching them hurry away, Naakai sighed and shot her a sideways glance.

Schooling her own expression, because certainly they were always under scrutiny, she turned on her heel and walked with Naakai back over to the rest of the group, who were now milling around at the edge of the village square for the most part.

“So what is happening?” Ling asked, looking over at the chief who was now in deep conversation with two older-looking Ur’Vash women.

“We get the boat fixed and we leave,” she said blandly. “A few of us will go to lunch with the village chief and a bunch of their important people and allow them to congratulate us on the slaughter of Mugvar’s Marauders while that happens.”

“And what about everyone else?” Omurz frowned.

“They all go help with the boat,” she replied. “If it’s not fixed by the time the sun shifts past noon we can fix it on the way.”

“So, who goes to the meal?” Chunhua asked.

“You, me, Lynn, Omurz… Naakos and… Manshu,” she said after a moment’s reflection on who was there and who might best resist any potential shenanigans.

“Me?” Manshu looked surprised.

“You can represent the refugees from Ulmaz,” she said blandly.

“Ah, yes,” Manshu nodded, earning himself an elbow poke from Wei Chu for appearing to forget.

In truth, she could have picked Qing Yao as easily, but she was still helping Naakos and Uarz with the boat and Kai Manshu, in playing the role of a Sixth Advancement soldier from Ulmaz would hopefully cause the villagers to think a bit more carefully about any potential subterfuge, if they were planning something.

“Right, gather up all the others, let’s go see how this boat is sorting itself out,” Ling added, standing up and looking pointedly at Akuja and the three cultivators.

…

The boat was… not what she expected, she had to admit, when she finally got to see it. The previous vessel had had two floors and the area beneath and been fairly… well… boat-like, in so far as she knew about trading vessels on the rivers back home. The vessel that they were now fixing up was like a large rowing boat, but close to twenty metres long. It was broad, with a fairly sharp, pointed prow, maybe 4 metres across at its widest point and was clearly suited to moving through reed beds and shallow water.

It also looked cramped.

“This is going to be cramped,” she pointed out after a few moments of staring at it as Uarz directed various crew about.

“Yep, however, it’s much better than nothing at all,” Naakos said, coming over.

“How long until the damage is fixed?” she asked, looking around at the villagers – and even some of the crew – who were sitting around doing other things, and the small numbers actually working.

“An hour?” Naakos said with a grimace. “We have been cutting the rudder from the old ship down to size and also salvaging what we could from it to put in the smaller rowboat.”

“That takes this long?” Feiwu Shen asked from nearby, also casting an eye across the not that productive-looking onlookers.

“We had to properly salvage the other vessel,” Qing Yao remarked, also hopping off the boat into the shallow water and splashing over. “It turns out it’s not a job for a lot of people, apparently you have to know something about boats to rip them apart productively.”

“How… surprising,” Ling remarked drolly off to the side.

“It’s fine,” she interjected, waving a hand. “It is what it is. Is it just the damage to the rudder that’s been a nuisance?”

“Well, they ruined half the minor fittings on it,” Naakos sighed. “I am sorry for sounding so optimistic before. That is what has taken the time: finding bits of the old vessel that will do and adjusting them.”

“Yes,” Uarz agreed, also splashing over from where he had been supervising the work at the rear of the boat. “Whoever did the damage knew what they were at, a lot of it is non-obvious stuff and we have found three sections of the hull that were nearly cracked through from the outside with no sign on the inside of any damage.”

“As you say, it is what it is,” Naakos grumbled. “How is the village?”

“Fractious,” she replied. “The higher-ups seem quite eager to fete us, but the actual villagers are really not a happy bunch.”

“Unsurprising,” Naakos said. “They were enacting what I can only call bloody, if opportunistic vengeance when we were clearing the village. The longer we stay here, the more likely it is that someone whose roof you exploded decides to get in a fast canoe and go to tell their brother in the next village over that there’s a bunch of slaves and foreigners here who might be worth a pretty penny to someone in Ulquan.”

“Yeah,” Uarz grimaced. “The boat alone is enough in that regard.”

“Well, the good news is that I want us gone as soon as you can steer that thing in a line and have enough oars to make it work without it sinking after a mile,” she said.

“And the bad news?” Qing Yao muttered.

“Naakos, you’re coming to lunch with the chief,” she said with a grin that never made it to her eyes. “He wants to celebrate our achievement and I managed to talk him down to lunch rather than a full-blown evening feast.”

“Who else?” Naakos asked, frowning.

“Me, you, Lynn, Khunua, Omurz, Manshu,” she replied listing them off. “The rest stay here, keep an eye on things and be ready to leave when we get back.”

“That’s all the ‘leaders’ in one basket except Uarz and Yao here,” Naakos murmured.

“It was that or everyone have a sit-down meal with them, which would you prefer?” she pointed out.

Naakos gave her a long look and nodded.

“In any case, grab who you need, the rest of them can rest,” she said looking around at the cultivators, Ur’Inan and other crew.

Uarz nodded and walked onto the muddy beach to start directing the other rowers back to the boat. Kai Manshu, Feiwu Shen and Wei Chu all went to help Qing Yao, while the rest of the newer cultivators had sort of gravitated to their own little groups she noticed. Shi Tengfei’s group was talking with Kei Zhanfeng on the shore about what they had experienced and the three others were just looking warily at everything.

“So, what now?” Ling asked.

“Is that the phrase of the day for the pair of you?” she grumbled to the younger woman.

“Hah!” Ling shook her head in amusement and looked around.

“Do you have any good quality purification pills left?” she signed to them.

“In what sense?” Chunhua signed back.

“If you wanted to capture a whole bunch of people easily and didn’t have arts or illusions to rely on, how would you do it?” she mused via sign, watching two villagers return from the village with some water for the workers.

“Poison everyone,” Ling signed promptly. “Have something in the water and then have something else to trigger it, either food or a different compound in some other beverage.”

“Occasionally I think I should be surprised at how good you are at this,” Chunhua signed, “Then I recall you’re the Kun clan heiress.”

“Hah…” she laughed softly under her breath but could only agree.

“All of us are probably immune to most conventional poisons,” she added, “but Naakos and Omurz may not be.”

“Well, I don’t have much, but there are some Nascent Soul and Dao Seeking nullification pills left,” Chunhua signed. “It might be better to just dump a bunch of herbs in some spirit alcohol though.”

“Sadly, that takes time,” she grumbled, thinking through what she had left from their looting of the various Ur’Vash warehouses.

“Depends on the quality of the herb,” Ling pointed out. “All it has to do is take any potential edge off and not have everyone keel over foaming at the mouth or turning red.”

“There does come a point where I feel it would be a lot easier to just do what you did to Ulmaz,” Chunhua grumbled, sitting down and pulling various dry herbs out of her own ‘satchel’.

“Well, you start a thing…” she said drily.

“I know, I know…” Chunhua sighed, before signing: “Though a part of me does mourn for the innocent young woman who was angry at people for being idiots over teleport formations.”

…

In the end, it was pushing into early afternoon before the village sent a runner to invite them to ‘lunch’, which she had somewhat expected, truth be told.

If there was an upside, it was the delay provided them more time and a very reasonable bit of cover in preparing food for the others, to ensure that everyone ate food they had laced with various herbs that promoted general resistance to toxins. For Naakos and Omurz, she could probably have given them the medicine openly but, as Ling rightly pointed out, having them ignorant of the fact that they were dosed with such medicines was probably better in the short term, so in the end, they laced a jar of spirit alcohol with some of the last of Chunhua’s medicines and ensured that Omurz and Naakos both toasted everyone’s good health and hard work over the lunch from that jar.

The final element of their preparation was simply to smarten themselves up somewhat. Manshu got some of the armour that the elite soldiers in Ulmaz had worn, while the three of them changed quickly into some higher status robes looted from Ulmaz and even put on a few pieces of jewellery, such as she had seen very minor nobles wearing during their trip up the river.

The venue for lunch turned out to be the main courtyard of one of the few relatively undamaged buildings off the central square, now spruced up with some fresh awnings to keep the sun off. Several womenfolk were roasting fish and other meats over an open fire and various plates of food had already been set out on a low table for them.

“Greetings, apologies for the delay!” Chief Amvar said with a broad smile, meeting them at the entrance to the courtyard, flanked by three other elders and the two old women. “Please, allow me to introduce the surviving village elders, Hazi, Sharash and Mulaz, my wife Namlu and her sister, Gitra.”

“May the Maker watch over our first meeting,” she replied respectfully, her response echoed by the others to varying degrees.

“Of course, of course,” Amvar agreed, sweeping his eyes over them and largely managing not to look too surprised. “By Quazam’s will, it is our good fortune that you step across our hearth, my home is yours, please, come and be seated.”

“…”

“Please,” she bowed again politely, waving Manshu to step forward. “Allow us to provide you a small token of our esteem for this meal.”

Manshu, dressed as an elite soldier from Ulmaz, did as arranged and smartly handed Amvar a jar of spirit alcohol.

“Ah, you are a soldier?” Elder Hazi asked from the side with a slight frown.

“From Ulmaz, one of the few survivors,” Manshu answered respectfully, only letting a little bit of emotion creep into his voice.

-He is surprisingly good at this, she thought wryly.

“From… Ulmaz?” the other elder, Sharash frowned.

She could see that a few of the expressions of the others looking on had slipped slightly, no doubt thrown off kilter by their more formal appearance. Their war paint was still somewhat extant but, according to Naakai, they now looked and dressed as if invited to some kind of nobles’ get-together in Ulquan or elsewhere.

“Let us not talk about such dour things now,” she said smoothly, cutting off their questioning. “We are here to celebrate the liberation of your Ruqu Village from that devil Mugvar, are we not?”

“Ah… yes of course,” Elder Sharash said with a faint grimace, his eyes flickering across her dress and then the others again.

-That’s right, let the uncertainty gnaw at you, she sneered inwardly.

“This is my second daughter, Avara,” the chief added, gesturing to a young woman who looked a bit drawn, standing respectfully a bit further back.

“T-thank you for… for what you did, honoured… Junee,” the younger woman mumbled, bowing to her, then to the others.

“…”

Eyeing the girl, she could not help but sigh inwardly, because the bruises and the scars of her ordeal were subtly visible if you knew where to look. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Manshu’s expression twist slightly, though Omurz just looked appropriately ‘sorry’. Naakos looked unfazed.

“Please, there is no need for that, you also resisted Mugvar as best you were able, such a person is a plague wherever they go,” she said, stopping the girl’s second bow.

The chief had a faintly conflicted expression on his face for a second, but hid it very quickly.

-Though probably others did not… she finished inwardly.

“Please, come, sit, we will bring drinks,” Chief Amvar interjected, taking her by the arm and gesturing to the right-hand side of the low table where some slightly dusty cushions had been set.

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“Why don’t you sit beside me,” she said to the girl, ushering her over by the arm and sitting her down ahead of all the others.

The chief looked like he was about to say something, but Avara just followed her quietly and sat down where she directed, in the middle seat on that side of the table, which was, according to Naakai, the place where the most important person usually sat.

In the back of her mind, ‘Bright Heart Shifting Steps’ rippled faintly, telling her that her action had disturbed the equilibrium of events slightly, which she found somewhat amusing, in truth.

The others took their seats and the chief clapped his hands and two more young women, barely adults, appeared a moment later carrying two jars of alcohol, pouring it out into cups for each of them in turn.

“Before we eat, I would like to offer up a toast to you all,” the chief said, raising his cup. “You have saved our village, for this we give thanks to Quazam, Great Mother to the Masters.”

“Thanks to Quazam, Great Mother to the Masters,” the others echoed, accepting their own cups.

“Thanks to Quazam…” she reiterated, feeling slightly odd as she did so, having met Quazam and seen some aspect of the truth of her existence, which was certainly more than any of these villagers likely had.

Downing the wine in one she grimaced faintly as her principle immediately snagged faint traces of inauspicious intent within it, though it was barely at a level where she would have needed an antidote or tonic even had she not had the foundation she did. Focusing on the inauspicious intent, she got a faint resonance with the last remnants of the hydra qi in her dantian, which was somewhat…

“Bracing,” Naakos exclaimed, putting his cup down with a clack.

“It has a certain kick,” she agreed, sucking air through her teeth as she considered her own cup.

“It is a local speciality, we ferment and then steep it with various river serpents,” Elder Hazi said. “Perhaps you might like to take a few jars with you on your voyage, Captain Omurz?”

-Ah, she sighed inwardly, one of those beverages.

“Well, in that case, might I propose a toast in kind?” she added, holding her cup out for a refill.

“Of course, of course,” Amvar nodded, watching as all their cups were promptly refilled from the various jars by the two young women.

“To Ruqu Village, may Quazam bless its rapid recovery and future prospects!” she declared, looking around at the assembled Ur’Vash with a broad grin.

“To Ruqu Village!” the others all agreed, again downing the drinks in one.

After that, they went through a total of seven more toasts to various aspects of the deliverance of the village and its occupants from terrible calamity at the hands of Mugvar’s Marauders before food was finally served from the fire in the form of various river crustaceans and roasted fish.

For the most part, she just let Naakos and Omurz do the talking, occasionally interjecting to clarify a point or two as Omurz – broadly speaking – related his ship’s misfortune south of Ulquan, arriving at Ulmaz and then rescuing the survivors of there.

Some of the prelude to his tale she had heard already, in rather more factual form, from Uarz, especially the bit about the wreck of their ship and the loss of a third of the crew to the flood, including the captain, Ragvaz.

Given her earlier conversation with him and the suspicions he had voiced, it was somewhat interesting to discover that contrary to her earlier thoughts on him as a ‘leader’, Omurz did indeed have a fundamental trait of leadership — he was excellent at spewing vaguely believable monkeyshit.

“He would make an excellent used alchemical furnace salesman back home,” Ling signed unobtrusively as they listened to Omurz recount the fixing of their boat under the ever-present threat of terrible crabs, the ghostly shadow of serpents and fears of some lingering elements of a hydra.

“How did this hydra die?” Elder Hazi interjected at last, as Omurz finally ran out of momentum for his tale.

“Messily,” Manshu said with a practiced grimace.

“And with great resentment,” she agreed diplomatically.

“—It was badly injured,” Naakos added.

“—Likely, Ulmaz was targeted because of the circumstances surrounding the flood,” Ling interjected as well.

“I would have thought the wards on a fortress as great as Ulmaz would repel such a beast…” Elder Hazi sighed.

“I suspect it suffered so much because their wards were damaged,” she replied, wincing inwardly at the awkward nudges ‘Bright Heart Shifting Steps’ was giving her now. “Most of the damage was done by the creature’s mana and the strength of its manifestation… to fight its physical form is one thing, to endure such an onslaught as we did…”

“Terrible things,” the chief’s wife, Namlu, murmured from the side. “Would you all like more wine?”

“Of course, of course!” Omurz agreed, clacking his cup down on the table. “This wine is truly excellent, I must say.”

“As I said,” Elder Hazi chuckled, “It is our village’s speciality.”

“There was another battle with a hydra recently, was there not?” she added, accepting her refill, glad that the inauspicious nudges had dissipated with her last explanation.

“Another?” Chief Amarz asked, caught off guard for a moment.

“It was spoken of in Ulquan, that one of the Great Masters had a battle with the Daughters of the Mist… near ah… what was that fort on the river…”

“There are many forts on the river,” Naakos deadpanned. “You might say that every fort here is on the river.”

She waved a hand idly at him, playing a bit tipsy as well.

“Ubaja… Ukaja?”

“—Ohhh, you mean what happened at Umaja,” the chief’s daughter Avara interrupted from beside her.

“Yes, that’s it, Umaja!” she said giving her a smile of thanks.

“Ah yes, what with the flood and all, and the fact that those accursed mists have vanished for a while, that almost seems like a lifetime ago,” Elder Sharash muttered.

“A time before that terrifying wall of water does seem oddly distant,” she agreed with a grimace.

-I suppose, what with the mists, they might not have known, she mused.

Omurz laughed in agreement and launched back into his tale of a somewhat edited version of their trip back up river, rescuing various unfortunates wrecked by the flood while Elder Hazi continued to plug the economic possibilities of the village selling some wine…

For her part, she shared a few tales of hunting things on the savannah and the dangerous nights, along with what it was like to explore in the Badlands and jungle, supported in that by Ling and Chunhua.

She had just finished relating a largely true rendition of their experience with the ruined city and the slaughtering formation for Elder Mulaz and two other youths who had come to join him a short way into the meal, when the strains of a familiar voice reached her ears, barely audible over the hubbub of conversation around the table and the gentle music being played by the sister of the chief’s wife in the corner.

“What do you mean they are still busy?”

“Your leaders are with the chief, do not disturb them—”

“Then just pass on a message, tell them that the matters are dealt with as they instructed…” that was Feiwu Shen, near as she could tell.

Looking up at the sky, she saw that the sun was heading properly towards late afternoon and sighed, sitting back and draining her wine cup.

“About time we wrapped this up?” Ling, who had probably heard the conversation as well, signed unobtrusively.

“Yeah, okay.”

“You’re not going to go right now?”

“Are you doubting us, barbarian boy?”

“…”

-Please don’t provoke a scene, she grumbled inwardly.

“We are eating, when we are done we will relay your message, either wait or go back, it makes no difference,” a different villager said.

“Or you can bring some of the others up and join us,” someone else cut in.

“The stuff sent before was perfectly good,” Feiwu Shen replied, making her sigh inwardly with relief. “I’ll wait.”

“Suit yourself…” someone else added.

“Would you like some wine?” another, new, woman’s voice added. “This is a village speciality…”

Chunhua caught her eye very unobtrusively as well.

“Ah, Chief Amvar, I think perhaps we are starting to overstay our welcome,” she said with a broad smile. “Our dear captain’s tale is starting to repeat, and if we eat any more we will have to roll sideways back to our boat.”

That got quite a few laughs from the others around the courtyard, who were not as immune to the effects of strong alcohol as they were.

“Hey, hey!” Omurz grumbled.

“Yes, the wind is changing and while we have no sail… or mast, it will help with the currents,” Naakos added.

“Yes, indeed,” Chunhua said, standing with a smile. “Your hospitality has been truly wonderful, in the circumstances you have out-done yourselves.”

The chief and the elders traded a quick look, which was, she had to admit, disguised quite well, before the chief sighed reluctantly and nodded.

-So they did do something? she mused mentally.

“A final toast then?” Chief Amvar said, waving for a new jar to be brought forward, this one looking a bit more ornate she noted.

“Of course,” she agreed pleasantly.

“This wine is something we normally provided only for the late Envoy,” he said with a sigh, pouring it out into all of their cups in turn.

“A toast, to what has been achieved today!” Elder Hazi said grandly, holding his cup up.

“To luck, unsought for, the providence of the Mother of Blue Skies,” Naakos added with a toothy grin.

“To the ruin of that villain Mugvar!” Elder Sharash added with fair amount of venom laced in his tone.

“To your timely arrival,” the chief added, raising his own cup.

“To killing Mugvar…” Avara murmured much more quietly beside her, holding her own cup with two hands, looking sideways at her and then Naakos as she did so.

Nodding, she raised her own cup and accepted their salute, drinking it down.

The alcohol was like fire, swirling through her and carrying with it a faint hint of yin strength that absolutely would have made it very hard for her to control her qi, had she not undergone the gains she had.

“Yeesh!” Ling gasped, with a degree of mock amazement. “What serpent fang did you squeeze that out of?”

“Exceptional, very big impact!” Naakos gasped, pounding on his chest, his eyes watering.

“Yes,” she agreed, also coughing slightly and putting a hand between her breasts as her mantra took the edge of it.

“I could take another of those,” Chunhua chuckled, eyeing the slightly watering eyes of the other Ur’Vash around the table.

“Potent, some of my brothers would really have liked that,” Manshu agreed, his eyes also watering.

“…”

Standing, she helped Omurz up, who was the worst affected by far, looking a bit glassy-eyed. “Indeed,” he chuckled. “If you have a spare jar of that, I can guarantee I know someone who would… love… to purchase a few samples!”

“…”

Those doing the serving had slightly interesting expressions on their faces, all but confirming in her heart that them walking away from that alcohol was not what was meant to happen.

“I think we might have a spare jar,” Chief Amvar said quickly. “Avara, dear, why don’t you go get it?”

“Ah… y-yes, father,” Avara, who had mostly listened raptly and downed every cup of wine put in front of her, replied with a quick nod and hurried off, mostly managing to walk in a straight line as she did so.

“You have a good daughter,” she said to the chief with a pleasant smile. “You should treasure your good fortune.”

“Absolutely,” Naakos agreed.

“Right,” she said, ‘helping’ Chunhua stand. “Again, Chief Amvar, our thanks for a delightful meal, the hospitality of Ruqu Village will long live in our hearts!”

“Indeed,” Naakos chuckled.

Avara appeared a moment later with a second jar, passing it to Omurz who nodded ‘gratefully’.

The other elders had all also stood at this point, looking a bit nonplussed.

-Presumably they are not confident trying anything if we can actually walk away, a part of her chuckled darkly.

Without any further preamble, she bowed politely again and walked out through the courtyard, into the square, followed by the others with Manshu helping Omurz.

Feiwu Shen, who was sitting nearby with several villagers trying not to look nervous, saw them and immediately made his apologies, walking over.

“The boat is fixed…” Feiwu Shen said.

“Good,” she nodded, waving to the chief and then starting to walk again.

“However…” Feiwu Shen looked a bit awkward.

“What?” she asked, expecting where this was going.

“Well the villagers came and brought the crew wine and food, and it was quite strong wine…”

“They are drunk…” she said dully, though again, she had expected as such so it was mostly to keep up appearances for those looking on as they walked out of the village.

“Well… kind of but they brought music and some of the village women finally appeared and well… it’s kind of a party,” Feiwu Shen grimaced.

“Well, so long as nobody is comatose it’s dealable with,” Naakos grunted, looking at Omurz who just grimaced.

Feiwu Shen calling it a ‘party’ turned out to be a bit of an understatement, because you could hear the music from the edge of the village, along with the singing of the crew.

“The crew should be savvier than that?” she signed to Chunhua and the others.

“Yeah,” Ling nodded as they walked down the slope to take in the scene below them.

The crew and the villagers were mostly having a feast, singing and dancing and cheering on some kind of dance-off competition between a village youth and… Ladrak she thought. A good half of them were clearly too sozzled to do more than clap along in time and join in with the chorus. The villagers were mostly the ones who had been helping with the boat she noted, along with a few other womenfolk who had emerged from somewhere.

The Ur’Inan were seated on the boat, having their own quiet discussion, keeping an eye on the cultivator groups, who were also staying aloof, which was really what she wanted to see, however they still had food and alcohol that they had been clearly consuming. Uarz had a slightly annoyed look as he sat on the edge of the vessel watching as well, though he brightened up considerably when he spotted them.

“I think I see how this went,” she sighed, looking at the scene.

Omurz had the good grace to look a bit awkward.

“OKAY! PARTY’S OVER!” she called out loudly… if jovially, cutting through the music and singing to make their presence obvious.

There were various groans from the crew, however the villagers looked thoroughly nonplussed for a few seconds, as if this was again… not how this was meant to go.

Ling sighed deeply behind her, clearly noticing that as well.

“Almost any other bunch of cultivators would have this lot dreaming in death already,” Chunhua signed with a sigh.

“As I said, today is a day full of good fortune for Ruqu Village,” she signed back, which got a snort of laughter from Ling and an eye roll from Chunhua.

“What’s so funny?” Manshu asked.

“This day,” she grunted. “Can you imagine what would happen if it wasn’t us here?”

“Ah…” Manshu stared at the party, then at the village and shook his head. “How lucky for them.”

“Luck unsought-for is the providence of the Mother of Blue Sky,” Naakos added with a chuckle and a sideways look at her.

Behind them, she saw the chief, elders and a small crowd of villagers had arrived. None of them looked particularly threatening, but actually, they didn’t need to. She gave them a cheery wave which Ling mirrored, then they both started briskly down the slope, the others hurrying behind them.

“Can you round up the drunk crew with Naakos?” she asked Manshu.

He nodded and started in that direction, Feiwu Shen following as well.

“You took your time,” Uarz muttered.

“These things take time,” she said with a further smile. “What happened here anyway?”

“It’s hard to tell a dozen people who have rowed through the night and had a few very stressful days that they can’t go have drink and food with the folks who have been helping them salvage their boat,” Uarz pointed out. “Or at least do it without having a fight, especially when the pretty village women all appeared with the alcohol to show their appreciation for us saving them from a terrible fate of slavery in Uldara.”

“…”

“They are rowers for a reason,” Omurz grunted, scrambling into the boat.

It took only a few minutes of cursing and grumbling for the remainder of the crew to get on board, at which point she found the chief and the elders had come down to the waterline.

“Are you sure we cannot convince you to stay? The night is dangerous, especially in this chaos.” Avara asked, a little sadly she thought, having been escorted forward by her mother and the chief.

-Fates take you, you are a bunch of shameless old villains, she complained in her heart, looking at Amvar and the other elders, who were acting as if nothing untoward had happened and they were not shamelessly using the one person who had been at all deserving of sympathy in her eyes in the end to try and get them to stay.

“Sorry,” she said to Avara, who near as she could tell was just a damaged, lonely young woman at this point, grappling with horrible trauma. “We have already delayed our departure far past what was optimal.”

“In that case,” Amvar sighed, “We can only pray to Quazam for you a safe onward travel.”

“Praise to Quazam, Great Mother to the Masters…”

The others bowed as well, the murmured, familiar refrain whispering off many lips.

Shaking her head, she considered the beached boat, wondering if she should just push it off herself, before thinking better of it.

“Ready?” she called up, watching Ling, Chunhua, Yao, Manshu, Feiwu Shen and… somewhat surprisingly Kei Zhanfeng all grab oars and start to push against the ground.

“Yep,” Ling called back down.

Focusing a bit of her qi into her hands she pushed against the prow, slowly working with the others to slide the heavily laden vessel backwards, out of the shallows and into the channel proper. As far as feats of strength went, she could have done it all by herself at this point, but she didn’t need to use her divination art to know showing off now was probably a bad idea.

“…”

Even so, Uarz looked slightly shocked at how easily they moved, never mind those standing on the shore as she repelled herself off the water to get purchase for a few moments and get the boat moving while the others continued pushing it onwards. After a few paces she felt it shift in the water and properly break contact with the mud beneath, at which point she gave it one further decent shove, watching as the smaller boat from the Ragvaz’s Pride was tugged around and pulled after it.

Casting a last look at the other wrecked boat, now largely torn apart to get at the pieces needed, she turned back to the group on the shoreline and gave them a final polite salute of farewell, before splashing out after the smaller boat and hopping on board. She could probably have landed on the big one directly, but again showing off too much was probably a bad thing.

It didn’t take long to get herself alongside just by pulling the tether to the larger boat, whereupon they had already cut into the reeds, Ling and the others setting the oars to start rowing given how out of it half the rowers were.

“Well, that went a lot better than I anticipated,” she said, having vaulted back up onto the larger boat.

“I have to agree there,” Naakos said, tossing her a cloth to dry herself off. “I was starting to wonder at the end.”

“We have good alcohol tolerance—” Ling deadpanned, before nearly slipping her oar. “Maker’s Cock, this is harder than it looks!”

“Language,” she scoffed, looking back in the direction of the receding village as they wove slightly awkwardly up the channel.

Ling shot her a rude gesture which she pretended not to see.

“Okay!” Uarz called, cutting through the hubbub of conversation. “First lesson – how to turn this vessel. You lot on the right, hold your oars in the water… on the left start to row forward gently—”

The boat lurched slightly as Ling and Manshu got their timings slightly off and caught each other’s oars.

“I said gently!” Uarz hissed at the left-hand rowers.

“…”

“It’s a shame, I hate being right,” she said after a moment, watching the villagers filter away.

Shading her eyes, she could see that one of the last ones still standing there watching them depart was Avara, who looked… small.

“I am sure not all of them are bad people,” she mused a bit sadly.

“Just desperate,” Naakai said, picking her way down the middle of the boat.

She took a deep breath and sighed, because Naakai was right. What made her angry inside all of a sudden was that there was so little she could do about it beyond feel sorry for people like Avara or the youth she had taken the arrow off. One mercenary crew shows up at your village, rapes and kills and wants to sell you and all your friends as slaves, the next crew that shows up chases them off and your village elders want to drug them and sell them as slaves or something because they are exotic or they think they are also run-away slaves…

“It is hard to help the circumstances in which you find yourself sometimes,” Naakai added, giving her arm a pat.

“It is,” she agreed, staring at the distant form of Avara, who was almost alone on the shore now, for a moment longer before closing her eyes and turning away.

Taking the tether for the rowing boat, she let it out and slowly walked it down the length of the vessel to the rear, taking care not to drag it close enough to catch the still rather mismatched oar strokes.

“What is the plan now?” Uarz asked her.

“We get away from here, first and foremost,” she frowned, looking around. “Then we get this lot sobered up and get some real distance on this place before nightfall.”

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~ CANG DI – ULDARA, MASTER’S ESTATE ~

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

“Well, that was all very mundane…”

Cang Di nodded politely at the complaint from one of the ‘beauties’ lounging nearby, watching the final item of the auction below – a pure-white specimen of the horned jaguars – be bestowed to a rather eager noble.

“Don’t worry, this is just the first part,” Quaruna, who was sitting… reclining, next to him, giggled, holding out her wine cup to be refilled by a waiting slave.

“Oh?” another youth, lounging on the divan opposite them being openly massaged by two more servants asked.

“My father has something special planned for this evening,” Quaruna explained, stretching languorously along the other half of the divan, giving him an excellent view of most of her barely concealed body, should he have wished it.

-It is undeniable, she is a beauty, even if her features are sharp, he had to concede.

A less experienced cultivator would probably have caved to her flirtation long ago; unfortunately for her, his age and life experience was again very much playing in his favour there.

“You will attend? Hunter Kang?” another young woman nearby asked, leaning forward eagerly.

“Undoubtedly, Lady Nisa,” he replied, meeting her gaze with a pleasant smile that made her pout in mock annoyance as she realised her attempt at being alluring had bounced off him… again. “The Esteemed Sorceress will certainly be interested in such items, especially as what was on display here was, as Lady Kurra said, somewhat mundane.”

“Ah… for a valiant hunter such as yourself, these beasts must certainly seem tame, held here like they are,” Quaruna purred, scooting over to sit right beside him as she helped herself to some spirit fruits from his tray rather than hers.

“They do lack a certain impact,” he agreed, pushing the tray closer to her.

“THIS BRINGS THE FIRST HALF OF OUR LITTLE GATHERING TO A CLOSE!” the announcer for the auction declared rather grandly. “LET US ALL THANK THOSE WHO PRESENTED SUCH TREASURES FOR OUR ENJOYMENT AND DELIGHT!”

“Thank fuck for that,” another of the young women remarked, sitting up and stretching as various other groups applauded.

He clapped politely, along with a few other nobles, which got him an amused eye roll from Quaruna.

“You do not have to clap, it is just the common folk showing their appreciation for things,” she giggled.

“On the contrary,” he said with a faint smile. “The beasts were certainly rare, even if their style was lacking. By clapping do I not show appreciation for those who caught them and delivered them to this spectacle?”

“Hah!” another youth laughed. “Great Hunter Kang, your perspective is indeed that of a great man! Indeed we must applaud the efforts of those folk who have delivered these things to us, to admire.”

“Oh, certainly,” Lady Nisa exclaimed, clapping a bit more vigorously.

“…”

Quaruna laughed lightly, making sure he got an eyeful of her alluring breasts as she did so.

-Really, she is… incorrigible, he sighed inwardly.

Quaruna had stuck to him like a rather disturbing cat, leading him from group to group, introducing him to various nobles of influence in between continually flirting with him and making him regale her and several of her equally ‘interested’ friends with various tales of ‘hunts’ and ‘adventures’ for the whole auction up to this point.

The whole situation put him in mind, rather preposterously, of those tales about demonesses trying to seduce virtuous monks... not that he was a monk, nor considered himself especially virtuous, except in an everyday, moralistic kind of way. The noblewomen were absolutely demonesses though, and clearly determined to gain something from him.

That Shatterpoint was fairly clear on any route leading to a potential ‘dalliance’ being really quite inauspicious, did not help matters at all.

The ‘presentation of treasures’… had gone largely as he expected such things to, though the bidding was mostly done through aids or servants near as he could see. Most of what was on display were rare beasts and various odd treasures, though none of the metals Origin had identified that she required. The closest was a sort of yang qi rich iron that he was sure he had seen the odd vein of back in the Badlands that they called Askhal.

“Ah, here you are…”

He turned to find Qing Dongmei standing at the edge of the ‘private’ area that Quaruna had claimed on the upper level, looking around with amused disinterest.

“Ah, Sorceress Meyla,” one of the male youths, whose name he thought was Garesh and who was very naked gestured to her to come and sit beside him. “Please, come have a seat with us, your companion Kang here has been regaling us with all sorts of interesting tales.”

“Has he now…” Qing Dongmei said with a raised eyebrow, casting her gaze across the largely unattired or negligently clothed young nobles of Uldara on their couches.

“…”

“Erishkira wants to speak to you,” Dongmei said her gaze returning to him. “Come with me.”

“It seems I must bid you farewell,” he said to the various nobles who either just nodded or, in the case of a few of the women, pouted or rolled their eyes.

“I am sure we will cross paths sooner rather than later,” Quaruna giggled, running her hand suggestively across her breasts. “You will find me a lot more fun than my mother.”

“…”

He smiled apologetically at Quaruna and the others and, hurrying after Qing Dongmei, released Shatterpoint with a quiet sigh of relief, wiping away the various ominous intuitions in the back of his mind that he had been tacitly avoiding. If he was honest, the annoyance of having to use the art in its low-key form, continually, minute by minute for several hours of interactions with others had been by far the largest detriment to ‘enjoying’ the ambience.

“Well, you seem like you were having fun,” Qing Dongmei muttered after they had gone out of obvious earshot.

“While I am sure there are many who would sell their souls to play in that garden, I am not one of them,” he grumbled, triggering ‘Shatterpoint’ once again, ignoring the faintly spiky headache which was his perpetual companion at this point.

They passed by the next curtain-draped area, where two young noblewomen were watching a well-endowed male slave… or servant, it was impossible to tell half the time, dance erotically while they drank.

“All those thirsty young noble ladies,” Qing Dongmei snickered, looking at him sideways.

“Are you enjoying this?” he grumbled.

“Honestly, I’d probably trade,” she sighed, suppressing a shudder. “Being near those old ‘experts’ with Erishkira is… unpleasant.”

He could only nod at that. None of them had looked at either of them like they were anything other than a ‘thing’. That it was an attitude all too common to such experts didn’t help either, really. While you could train your mind to deal with people flashing their breasts at you and generally sighing in a provocative manner, unless they had actual realms on you, dealing with inscrutable old freaks was… not so simple.

“Anyway,” Qing Dongmei went on, “did you learn anything interesting?”

“You mean beyond the three sizes of half of the young nobility of Uldara?” he retorted with an amused laugh.

“…”

Qing Dongmei gave him a sideways look and rolled her eyes.

“Yes, actually, a few things did come up in passing that will be of interest to Sorceress Erishkira,” he murmured, more softly, as they passed by several chatting nobles.

“That’s something at least,” Dongmei said, sounding quietly relieved. “She was a bit miffed at how unenticing the treasures shown were.”

Judging from her body language, there was probably more to it than that, but just like him, she knew enough about the ways and means of genuine experts to know not to talk about anything like that openly in a place like this. Just because soul sense was sealed didn’t mean there were no other, even more insidious, ways of learning things. His own divination art was a prime example of that.

“I imagine that very much depends on what you want to buy,” he remarked with a grimace as they passed by another private area where several women were erotically massaging two Uldara noblemen.

Qing Dongmei opened her mouth to complain about that, but he stopped her and just quickened the pace with a quiet shake of his head.

In that regard, Shatterpoint was remarkably useful for avoiding minor quandaries as much as major ones, for if she had spoken up there, the two would have noticed them and they would have had to spend however long it was talking to the two vacuously as they tried to entice Qing Dongmei to accept their patronage.

She gave him a slightly odd look, by which point the pair had noticed them, which was inevitable given the direction they were facing, but now that their pace was quicker they had already passed by and it was harder for the two to chase after them.

-Such an inane use of an art, he complained in his heart, though in a sense it was all to the good, because every use of it was improving his grasp over the subtleties of manipulating Severing Law.

Heading back up the stairs to the ‘main box’, he found Alalia sitting where she had been, sipping wine and half holding a conversation with a rotund, sweating Ur’Vash noble who was being fanned by a rather bored-looking servant.

“As I was saying, I do have a certain quantity of Soul Gold… however—”

“Ah, good, I was worried that Kang had been actually dragged off the premises by those thirsty brats,” Alalia said to the two of them, cutting off the noble mid-sentence.

“No fear there, Lady Erishkira,” he said politely.

“Good, good,” she nodded, then turned back to the noble. “Look, Lord Maroz, that is my price, I will not throw in any extras for it. Have someone bring it to my quarters here at Master Kazdrad’s estate later and if it is good enough for my purposes it is good enough.”

“…”

The noble, Lord Maroz, opened and shut his mouth a few times but then bowed politely and retreated as Master Kazdrad walked over.

“I am sorry that the items you sought were not in this part of our little showing,” Kazdrad said with a half-smile.

“I expected as much, if half of those things were easily available I would have them already,” Alalia said with a shrug.

“Of course,” Quaruna’s mother murmured, arriving beside Kazdrad and giving him a slight, hungry smile that made his skin crawl. “This aspect of our little gathering is mostly for the common folk, they do love to come and be amazed at the wealth and prestige of Uldara.”

“This evening’s auction will certainly be more to your liking, I am sure, Esteemed Erishkira,” Kazdrad added with a smile.

“…”

“I do hope I will not be disappointed.” Alalia chuckled. “To have talked such a big game, I would hate to see your aspirations choked like a Belthorne before some Heaven’s Path Acolytes.”

The bejewelled woman burst out laughing at her comment, making a few others talking by the balcony turn to look at them.

“You certainly know your history, Sorceress Erishkira,” Kazdrad shook his head in amusement, clearly not taking her comment, the context of which eluded him, as more than a joke.

“It is a tale that only gets more amusing with each retelling,” Alalia said, rolling her eyes.

“Perhaps we might hear your recounting of it later,” the Master said with a further faint smile.

“Perhaps,” Alalia shrugged, looking very non-committal about the whole thing, he had to say.

“Great Hunter Kang, I do trust you found my daughter as company to be to your liking?”

It took real effort not to flinch as he found Quaruna’s mother now standing right beside him. Bowing to her politely he found, somewhat unnervingly, that she was actually slightly taller than he was, so that when he looked at her he almost found himself oppressed just by her presence, and could percieve next to nothing of her actual strength.

-She has to be at least a formidable Dao Immortal, he thought, putting on his best smile. If not a Dao Lord

“She has indeed been a very attentive host,” he said diplomatically, scouring his memories of the last few hours to recall if he had ever been told the name of the woman before him.

“I am glad to hear that,” she purred, putting a hand on his shoulder and almost forcing him to sit down on the other end of the couch from Alalia.

“Before, we did not get a chance to talk properly,” she said with a smile.

-Do I risk Shatterpoint on her or not… he thought, rapidly weighing up his options before deciding it was not worth the risk on the slightest chance she was indeed a Dao Lord.

“Please, do not bully my guest, Asherida,” Alalia sighed, leaning back on the couch and staring at his tormentor.

“I have barely exchanged greetings with him,” Asherida retorted with an eye roll.

“Ah, here you are, mother…”

He resisted turning as Quaruna appeared like a ghost, with Nisa and Garesh following after her, to lean on the back of the couch right beside him.

“What are you, a vulture?” Asherida sighed, snapping her fingers.

“Refill all our cups,” Asherida commanded the female cultivator who had stepped forward.

He watched the young woman, who was a Chosen Immortal, pick up the nearest wine jar and pour the beverage into the various empty cups, her hands barely shaking as she did so.

“I do not recognise where these slaves have come from, Lady Asherida,” he mused, turning back to her. “She bears no obvious tribal markings and cannot be said to be particularly striking.”

“True, true,” Asherida agreed, accepting her cup of wine and sipping it, considering the woman.

“Tell Great Hunter Kang where you are from,” Quaruna commanded in Easten.

“…”

The girl remained silent, staring at the ground respectfully in a manner she thought looked ‘blank’, as she poured wine, but he had still caught the faint flicker of understanding in her downturned gaze.

-Stupid, he thought with a sigh, though he understood her desire to try and resist her circumstances. Refusing to tell her something like that will just make her…

“Do It.” Quaruna commanded.

“I… am from Blue Water City, I am an Inner Disciple of the Orchid Pavilion,” the girl said dully, the words almost pried out of her in rather bad Easten.

“Mostly they speak a language few here understand, but some do also speak a crude form of Lataan,” Asherida said with some amusement, taking a second sip of her wine.

Her slight emphasis on ‘few’ in that sentence did not escape his notice.

“As to why they are valuable… well, that is a matter of some small history,” Asherida added, turning back to him.

“Udrasa has a number of them… well, Quazam does, to be exact. Several quite remarkable specimens in fact, something which has always been a source of some vexation, especially to the Ten Masters, because while they like to project that they exercise control over this bug-infested settling pool as they please, our cities are hardly their lapdogs.”

“You could have fooled me,” Alalia snickered, glancing over at the yellow-robed old Ur’Vash who was talking quietly about something to the Master of Uldara, who for his part was listening attentively.

“…”

“Not all of us can live such free and idle lives as you do, Erishkira,” Asherida sighed, for the first time sounding a bit… jaded?

“Your choice, not mine,” Alalia said with an eye roll, helping herself to one of the roast meat snacks on the tray before her.

“Anyway,” Asherida said, turning back to him, recovering her previous good mood. “Quite a few of them are surprisingly powerful, not to mention their origin is a bit mysterious, so rarity breeds interest.”

“You said few speak that language?” he mused, leaning forward slightly. “I am widely travelled and wonder if I might not recognise it?”

“Speak your own tongue,” Asherida commanded the girl in Easten.

“Yes,” the servant girl muttered in Imperial Common. “Monkey her blue laughing day see.”

“…”

He eyed her again, ‘considering’ the utter gibberish she had managed to utter before shaking his head.

“I am sorry, it seems even I am not that widely travelled,” he sighed, feigning ignorance, slightly amused at how her determination to say absolutely nothing worthwhile was actually allowing him to tell the truth.

“It is amusing,” Asherida chuckled. “Mostly they communicate in it, believing it cannot be understood, but not all of those we have captured are as considered as this girl is… Some have been much more willing to inform than others.”

-I’ll bet, he shuddered inwardly.

“Knowledge is power,” Alalia remarked drolly.

“Indeed,” Asherida smirked. “Which makes all their little plots and schemes just that bit more amusing really.”

-Yep, had we tried to sneak in here on our own we would have absolutely been caught like thieving monkeys in a spirit herb field, he thought glumly.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Qing Dongmei take a deep drink of her wine to cover her own slight sigh.

“Great Master, Master, Lady Asherida, Sorceress Erishkira, esteemed guests!”

He glanced sideways to see that the ‘announcer’ had arrived, still dressed in his flamboyant robe.

“Before the second half of our gathering commences, the Master of Uldara hopes you feast and make merry upon the refreshments on offer. There will also be some entertainment that I hope is to your satisfaction.”

The announcer clapped his hands and half a dozen beautiful, mostly naked women attired in blue-silver and golden-copper jewellery appeared a moment later from beyond the diaphanous curtains behind the broad balcony, bowing to Kazdrad and then to the others before approaching them.

Behind them, several more slaves carried out large platters of proper food: soups, cooked meats, various unusual spirit fruit and a large roast fish, its shimmering, multi-coloured core displayed prominently in its mouth.

The six women, who were not cultivators he noted, started to dance in the middle of the open floor while over in the corner several musicians started playing a flowing melody on hand-held harp and zither-like instruments, accompanied by a drummer and a flutist.

“As to where they come from,” Quaruna said, plopping herself down right next to him rendering him effectively stuck between her and her mother. “These ones were given to father as a gift from a merchant hoping to present some goods in the second half of this gathering.”

“All that is kind of boring though…” Nisa added from the couch across from them. “I’d much rather hear more about your battle with the serpent in the jungle…”

“Oh… yes,” Quaruna giggled, grabbing a piece of cooked fish and pushing it towards him.

“…”

“Oh, thank you,” he said with aplomb, taking the morsel off her before she could actually attempt to feed it to him.

Off to the side, Qing Dongmei just shot him a look that was full of hidden ridicule.

With a sigh, he tried to recall what ‘battle with a serpent’ Nisa had been referring to, but after a moment decided that it really didn’t matter. Instead, he started to talk about the ruins near – but not immediately around the vicinity of – Valinkar, which got him immediate interest from several of the other… less junior nobles as well.

Like that, the dinner crawled on for almost an hour, with various courses being brought in while the dancers entertained various groups of nobles.

He had just gotten to talking about some of the rock-cut tombs in the cliffs below their main camp when the announcer stood up at the edge of the balcony and waved to get everyone’s attention.

“While we await the preparation of the second half…” the announcer coughed lightly and spread his arms wide, addressing not just their area, overlooking the courtyard below but everyone else around the courtyard’s upper level.

“GREAT MASTER, MASTERS, ESTEEMED AND HONOURED GUESTS ALL!”

With this shout, most of the remaining discussion and conversation around the courtyard fell away.

“I INVITE YOU ALL TO TURN YOUR EYES BACK… TO HALLOWED ANTIQUITY!”

At the far side of the courtyard, the guards pulled open the double doors and twenty more heavily armed elites trotted out, taking up positions along the wall.

The courtyard below, he could see, had been transformed while he was barely paying attention; the paving stones were now covered in sand and several artful rocks and a bunch of plants had been scattered around the edge to give the vague appearance of the grasslands, illuminated in the early evening light.

“BEHOLD! FROM DARKEST ANTIQUITY! I PRESENT TO YOU, A TALE OF VALOUR AND HEROISM!”

“HERE, UPON THE BARREN EXPANSE OF THE LASHAAN PLAIN, I PRESENT TO YOU, IN THE SERVICE OF THE ROBBER KINGS OF THE SAVAGE EAST – FEROCIOUS MERCENARIES, WARRIORS FROM DARK, BRUTE TRIBES, HELLBENT ON MERCILESS DESTRUCTION AND CONQUEST IN THE NAME OF THEIR CRUEL, DEPRAVED LORDS AND THEIR MAD GOD!”

He was not quite sure what to expect; however… what came out of the gate was… not it.

Half the audience were on their feet now as some thirty cultivators, all of them dressed in scrappy armour as he had seen various mercenaries in the city attired in, given spears and swords and the odd shield – though no bows – were ushered out into the courtyard to stand in a rather disorganised huddle, looking up at the mass of Uldrasa nobility and other guests watching on from the upper level of the courtyard.

“THE MASTER OF ULDARA IS PLEASED TO GIVE YOU… THE CARROLAN HORDE!”

“This…” sweeping the group he sighed grimly, because there were faces out there he recognised.

“A grand spectacle is it not?” Quaruna exclaimed, holding his arm.

“AND STANDING IN OPPOSITION!”

The announcer, who was disturbingly into the whole thing he felt, stood up on the edge of his balcony and raised his arms to the sky.

“VALIANT WARRIORS!”

From the doorway on their side of the courtyard emerged twenty figures, all of them heavily tattooed and dressed in a manner somewhat resembling the elites from the plains settlements who had chased them down. All of them were armed with spears and shields and maybe a third of them had bows. Several also had golden flowers marked over their hearts…

-So… they captured slaves from both sides?

The twenty Ur’Vash prisoners looked around rather… unenthusiastically, however after them came seven other figures, these ones very much properly armed and armoured, each one with a unique motif – eagle, jaguar, serpent, spider, a red hand, a white disc and a blue star.

“SCIONS ONE AND ALL OF OUR GREAT TRIBES!”

All seven raised up their weapons, all made of Orichalcum, to the now-cheering groups thronging the balconies around the courtyard.

“REVERED HEROES WHO ANSWERED THE CALL OF OUR GLORIOUS ANCESTORS TO DEFEND OUR HOMELANDS…!” the announcer actually screamed, before pointing down at the group dramatically. “THE SEVEN HEROES OF VASHADA!”

The seven made no overt move other than to yell some orders at the twenty or so Ur’Vash, directing them to move forward.

“This seems a bit uneven,” he remarked to Quaruna, who was watching the scene below with interest.

“The youths are just there for show, the main fighting will be done by the war-slaves,” Quaruna pointed out.

“I was speaking as much for the Ajara tribesmen,” he clarified. “While they are elites, there are a few among that other group who are not at all simple.”

“Oh, do you want to have a wager on any of them?” she smirked.

“A wager...” he replied dubiously, watching the cultivators trying to organise themselves.

“Pick one, if they excel… you can have them to do as you like,” Quaruna said with a sly smile.

“And if they do… not excel?” he asked.

“Then you have to do one thing I ask,” she purred. “I hardly see this as a bad wager for you at all.”

Nearby Nisa pouted, even as he sighed in his heart at how utterly incorrigible she was. In other circumstances… it might have been somewhat funny, but in this place nothing was remotely funny about this circumstance.

“Would you also care for a gamble? Sorceress Meyla?” Garesh asked. “I heard that Lady Erishkira is looking for Soul Gold… my father happens to have a pure, unadulterated ingot.”

Qing Dongmei eyed him blandly, saying nothing for a moment before replying: “And am I to assume that your wager is similar to hers?”

“Ahaha…” Garesh laughed a bit nervously, glancing at Erishkira, who had long since gotten up and was talking to the inscrutable woman in the diaphanous red robe and silver mask about something at the far end of the balcony. Asherida had also left during the meal to talk to others, so now it was mostly just junior nobles and the two of them seated at the edge of the balcony.

“Only if you wish it…” Garesh said with what he clearly hoped was a winning smile.

-That is oddly… passive of him… he mused, before realising that probably, this lot knew things about ‘Erishkira’ that would make them wary of anyone labelled openly as her apprentice.

“So, I select one of the prisoners, if they excel, you give me the Soul Gold ingot, if they do not… I have to do one thing you ask?”

Garesh nodded while Nisa just continued to pout.

“How do we define ‘excel’?” he asked after some consideration, looking at the rather dubious condition of the cultivators. “If they have been kept prisoner and their strength restrained, then this could be little more than a massacre.”

“Have no fear of that!” Quaruna replied, running her hand down his arm. “My father is not interested in such a tame spectacle… and you cannot sell corpses.”

“Actually, you could,” he pointed out. “There are all sorts of uses for good corpses.”

Quaruna looked at him a bit oddly for a second, making him curse that he was not able to use ‘Shatterpoint’ at all easily in this circumstance without potentially attracting notice from some of the inscrutables, before nodding.

“You are right, however that is not the objective here.”

“It is to show off rare goods and give others a spectacle,” he suggested, bringing their conversation back to its original conclusion for her.

“Of course,” Quaruna agreed.

“The warband of crazy mages made a big splash and mages are quite rare… and they are this new tribe that emerged in the aftermath of the battle…”

“You know of that?” Garesh asked, sounding surprised.

“You hear things, news of that battle flew on wings,” he shrugged. “Talk of a golden flower and the Mother of Blue Skies is not something folk near the plains will keep quiet—”

“AND SO! WE BEGIN!”

The announcer roared and the twenty Ur’Vash started to advance towards the milling cultivators.

“So, will you take me up on this wager?” Quaruna asked again.

He swept the cultivators, looking for anyone he recognised… there were a few from powers on the Western Continent, including several from the Nine Moons… however all of them were Immortals or Quasi Immortals. In fact, most of the cultivators in the group were around that strength and were rather well balanced against their opponents.

“Him,” Qing Dongmei pointed abruptly at one of the men, who he finally recognised as one of the very small number of male senior disciples from the Nine Auspicious Moons – Shirong Pei, who was also a Peerless Golden Immortal.

“And how shall he excel?” Garesh asked with a grin.

“Defeat one of the seven heroes,” Qing Dongmei said after a moment’s thought.

-Don’t mess this up, he grimaced inwardly, making sure not to look outwardly worried for her.

“Great Hunter Kang?” Quaruna purred, sliding an arm around his waist.

He watched the Ur’Vash charge into the cultivators, immediately sending two to the ground screaming. The problem really was that this was exceptionally well balanced. It was all very well for Qing Dongmei to pick one of her own sect’s elites, but even that was no sure thing he was sure. This was certainly designed to show off the ‘worth’ of the cultivators, who would presumably be Uldara’s showpiece of the second act of this auction, but at the same time, he doubted truly that the organisers of the whole thing were willing to see their ‘Heroes’ humiliated.

-The real question is, are the seven nobles from here or elite slaves… or soldiers…

Again, he cast an eye across the battle… mulling over the words of her wager. The obvious choice was to pick someone who he could haul out of here, which truthfully narrowed the choices dramatically…

One of the female cultivators caught an attacker’s weapon and disarmed the luckless warrior, stabbing them, only to see her blow narrowly miss as another cultivator stumbled into her.

-Yellow and blue brings strange luck…

The dark-haired young woman dressed, perhaps deliberately, in rather revealing light armour spun again and he watched the moves she was using, because they were familiar… ‘Fire Petal Palm’, if his memory served, which meant she was a Golden Immortal from the Fire Orchid Branch of the Verdant Flowers Valley.

-Ao Qingcheng, she should be the only Golden Immortal from that branch who was part of our group.

As he watched, she deflected two more blows, yelling commands to those near her to not scatter.

“Her,” he pointed at the distant, dark-haired young woman. “She will also manage to defeat one of the heroes.”

“Do you know something I don’t?” Quaruna pouted.

“Do you accept or not?” he said with a challenging look that did not reflect his own thoughts on his chances.

-I could have just refused… a small voice in the back of his head grumbled.

“I wonder, what will you do with her,” Quaruna added, giving him a playful poke in the side. “And yes, I accept. I look forward to the outcome!”

“…”

Sighing, he again hoped he was not making a terrible mistake with this gamble as he watched the chaos below unfolding.

The cultivators were split into three groups now, resisting the Ur’Vash combatants fairly well for the most part. Shirong Pei had rallied some of the disciples and had incapacitated two of the remarkably durable Ur’Vash. Ao Qingcheng was still being forced back, having stunned one, allowing the cultivators to hammer at him with their weapons in an attempt to wear him down. The third group, however, was… weird.

It was impossible to tell what influences most of those below belonged to… except, as he watched them rapidly sorting out something, he could see eight of the Immortals setting up a remarkably coordinated formation that worked purely off Martial Intent.

As he looked on, the archers at the back had already noticed and moved forward, sending searching arrows looking for the weak points, however—

He put a hand up instinctively, even as a shimmering veil rippled around the courtyard, dampening the shockwave. Thankfully he wasn’t the only one, though, as quite a few nobles jumped back or spilled drinks as the shimmering, phantasmal azure sword smashed into the archers, also catching half of Pei Shirong’s group in the aftermath.

“Hah… typical, they really cannot work together!” someone nearby laughed derisively. “I win our wager!”

-Sheng clan?

He stared at the group, somewhat surprised at their now rather obvious origin. The martial formation used had been a minor variant of the fairly famous ‘Fivefold Dragon Sword of Sheng’.

As the dust cleared he saw that three of the Ur’Vash had been incapacitated while most of the cultivators close to the impact were suffering from qi shock to varying degrees.

Pei Shirong and a few of the others who had nearly been hit by it were cursing the perpetrators... who were entirely unmoved, as might be expected. The Sheng clan had a long history of opposition with the Qing clan in particular and did not have a particularly good relationship with the Bai or the Shen for that matter.

-Even here, they cannot put aside their differences, how stupid… he sighed, watching them cycle the formation a second time as the Ur’Vash scattered.

-Except… how are there a bunch from the Sheng clan here?

-Were they just caught up accidentally in the trial?

Watching the Ur’Vash start picking off individual cultivators, shooting orichalcum arrows into their arms or legs to cripple them, he tried to work that one out, though not with any real success. The Military Bureau were largely controlled by the Cao clan on Eastern Azure, with the Ling and Fei clans providing the economic links.

*Crack—!*

A lightning bolt hit the barrier around the courtyard, sending flashes of blue effervescence everywhere, but otherwise failing to do any damage to the Ur’Vash in the immediate vicinity of its impact all of whom had managed to avoid it in a rather inexplicable, if rather familiar manner.

Off to the side, he saw Ao Qingcheng, who was still trying to protect the few lower-realm disciples around her, dispatch another of the warriors with a well-placed palm strike to their heart that set their qi on fire.

“You have a good eye,” Quaruna murmured, watching Ao Qingcheng proactively move towards another of the isolated Ur’Vash warriors.

As he watched, she took that one down with ease as well, however, her decisive attack also revealed a bigger problem as one of the archers put an arrow through the shoulder of one of the juniors she was trying to protect, sending them screaming to the floor. The arrow itself, he noted had punched clean through the shield provided to the luckless Nascent Soul disciple and managed to hit the main meridian in her shoulder, effectively crippling her in the short term.

From a tactical perspective, he could see the problem emerging very easily as well. The remaining Ur’Vash were outnumbered nearly two to one, but with bows, mobility and a lack of concern for their own compatriots for the most part, they could employ distancing tactics and pick off the stragglers or draw the groups through each other. The cultivators, for their part, were effectively still three groups; the Sheng bunch numbering nine, the Verdant Flower and Nine Moons groups numbering four and five now respectively and everyone else mostly rallying around a bearded male cultivator who had picked up a second sword.

If they worked together this would already have been over, but the Sheng clan were now just defending, letting the others soak up all the damage and offering little in return.

“They are inexperienced at fighting in groups,” one of the other younger nobles nearby said. “No wonder all they could do was give those savage barbarians a bloody nose.”

He was just wondering how the stalemate might be broken, when the elite fighter wearing the eagle crouched and leapt straight for Ao Qingcheng’s group, swinging their two-handed sword in a vicious arc.

-Please don’t let me have judged wrongly, he sighed, watching Ao Qingcheng dart forwards…

She shot past the surprised elite and the four remaining disciples she was protecting suddenly scattered, a symbol shimmering on the ground between them that manifested into a beautiful, ghostly peony blossom—

The armoured attacker screamed as the blossoms passed straight through all his armour, scattered three different protective runes on his body and bound him completely to the control of the formation.

In the same instant, Ao Qingcheng pushed her palm against the chest of the elite wearing the snake symbol, sending them stumbling back coughing blood.

-Well, that’s them dead, he mused, watching as the qi in their body destabilised rapidly under the brutal and insidious effects of yin fire poisoning.

The unfortunate Ur’Vash screamed, clawing at his chest and then at his head as ghostly vapours swirled off them for a moment before he collapsed, twitching, to the floor.

“Apprentice, get down there,” he turned to Alalia, who was now speaking to Qing Dongmei.

“But this is meant to be a recreation of the Seven—!” a noble called over.

“Eh?” Qing Dongmei was equally surprised.

“Yes, this is a recreation of the first battle of the Lashaan plain—!” the announcer protested.

“And yet I do not see Naakara, Grimvak, Azama, Ashandra or Fen Elcmar represented among those fighting down there,” Alalia remarked, leaning on the balcony. “Could it be that Uldara only recalls the seven heroes and not the five Sorceresses and Shamanesses who held at bay the might of the Mad God’s priest mages and the old villains from the First Conclave?”

“…”

There was some awkward shuffling from a few quarters around the upper layer.

-Really, he thought, watching their reactions, it is remarkable how universal some things are.

“What are you waiting for, get down there and show them how it is done, Meyla.” Alalia said drolly to Qing Dongmei.

“As you command, Erishkira,” Qing Dongmei said with a sigh, walking over to the edge of the balcony.

“You can jump, it’s not a barrier that restricts access inwards,” Alalia added.

“…”

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a few nobles unobtrusively looking… annoyed at that remark?

Gerash looked a bit put out as well, he noted with some amusement, because certainly Dongmei was going to take some steps down there to ensure that she didn’t end up losing her wager.

“It seems I should have worn something blue today,” Quaruna said with a wry smile, getting up to lean on the balcony and watch now.

Gerash sighed and shook his head. “This is also luck I suppose.”

“She might throw you a bone,” Nisa snickered.

Below, Qing Dongmei landed in the middle of the arena and immediately got targeted by the Sheng group’s formation. Unlike before, however, it barely got half-way through its activation cycle before she raised a hand and the qi within the arena turned faintly sluggish, as if it was being stared at by a malevolent celestial eye. The sky above seemed to dim faintly for a few seconds and then the cultivator acting as the formation controller spat blood and the whole formation collapsed like a badly constructed scaffolding.

-So I am not the only one who got some interesting gains… he thought with a faint smile.

The two Chosen Immortals charged for her followed by a third, forming a smaller version of the same formation with much more practised ease.

This time, as everyone looked on, she waited for them to complete it, however when the sword smashed down where she had been, Qing Dongmei vanished like a moonlit reflection in water, arriving beside the other members of the collapsed formation and stunning all of them effortlessly before tossing two at Pei Shirong’s group, who were retreating rapidly around the courtyard to get away from her and the Sheng group.

He watched with a degree of amusement as both luckless cultivators narrowly missed Pei Shirong, forcing him to do a very ungainly dodge and interrupting his attack, but also interrupted the jaguar elite who had just arrived in the chaos beside the other disciples with Pei Shirong.

Pei Shirong managed to move marginally quicker, disarming the horned jaguar hide-attired Ur’Vash and running them through with their own orichalcum weapon.

The three Sheng clan Chosen Immortals all dashed after Qing Dongmei again and he could hear them cursing her roundly as he took in the devastation again. Of the Ur’Vash, four of the ‘valiant warriors’ were still standing, along with the spider, red hand, blue star and white disc elites. The cultivators were not much better off, however Qing Dongmei’s abrupt arrival had effectively forced the dozen or so still on their feet to work together and also bought time for others to recover themselves.

Abruptly, all three Chosen Immortals’ auras shifted and they became peak Golden Immortals, drawing appreciative cheers from the crowd mainly, he suspected, because they wanted to see more of what they were capable of.

The ghostly sword reformed above them and slashed outwards, not at Qing Dongmei, but at the elites who were moving on the other cultivators. The four scattered and the sword slid past them, hitting the barrier with enough force to make it shimmer.

“Hah!” Garesh laughed, looking amused. “If they think something like that can break the barrier I—”

The secondary shockwave made the whole arena shake as the ‘single’ sword scattered into three, scything around half the arena, sending everyone bar Qing Dongmei and the blue star elite diving for cover.

Qing Dongmei caught a sword easily and deflected it with her qi.

The blue star elite on the other hand just threw back his head and laughed, his tattoos shining in a deeply inauspicious manner as he let the blue blade hit him square on, scattering it as his aura rapidly deepened.

“You keep some very interesting gladiator slaves,” Alalia remarked to the Master of Uldara.

“That, sadly, is not one of mine,” Kazdrad sighed. “Though I do occasionally try to convince Master Kadam to part with him. Mortal Physiques rarely survive long if left to their own devices.”

He watched as the Ur’Vash simply reached for the nearest cultivator from the Sheng clan, effortlessly grasping the cultivator and tossing them into the barrier, stunning them. The other two backed off but at this point it was a forgone conclusion, because he could sense a sort of innate strength akin to that of a ‘natural law’ bleeding out of the blue star elite…

“Seems a bit cheap though,” Alalia sighed.

“You sent your disciple down there,” Kazdrad pointed out.

“To make things more interesting,” Alalia sniffed. “This is just toying with people.”

Looking around at the cheering, chanting onlookers, who didn’t much seem to care, he found he could only agree with Alalia, even if the rationale made sense.

“And to have them be War Master Blue Star… your Uldara has about as much shame as I recall,” Alalia added with a derisive grin.

“…”

A few of the nearby nobles looked a bit annoyed at that, but clearly nobody wanted to complain to Alalia’s face, not even the Master who just grimaced slightly and went back to watching the scene below.

In a sense, it was mostly a forgone conclusion, the only real variable was Pei Shirong at this point. The ‘grades’ of Immortal were not a thing widely discussed or much considered outside some elite techniques and the periodic bragging that went on at Dao discussions. To most, a Chosen or a Golden Immortal was just that. If Pei Shirong decided to risk showing off a Peerless Principle before the assembled collection of old villains, he could probably get a draw with the help of the others, though he would still lose to Qing Dongmei in the end, just because of the realm difference involved, and the fact that she knew all his tricks and arts.

The eagle elite, still being puppeted by the formation, was finally incapacitated by the combined efforts of the spider and red hand elites.

Looking drained, the four cultivators tried to back up, but one was hit immediately in the leg with an orichalcum arrow. Ao Qingcheng blocked two more arrows and tried to close down the remaining two archers, however the blue star elite simply reached for her, easily grabbing her in the same way he had the Sheng clan youth.

A haze of shimmering reddish-purple fire swirled around Ao Qingcheng for a moment and then the blue star elite took two steps and staggered, collapsing to his knees gasping for breath and clawing at his chest.

“…”

He realised that his own mouth was hanging open, just like everyone else’s. It wasn’t that he didn’t know what had likely happened, it was just that the casual nature of the fatality was totally unexpected. Most of the elite scions of the Dewdrop Sage Sect and Verdant Flowers Valley had serious ancestral protection now, none of the old recluses there wanting a repeat of what had occurred with Di Ji. If anyone wanted to complain, their formal position now was that matters of decorum could be discussed over the return of the coffin rather than seeing the perpetrator slink off to a few hundred years’ exile in a sect’s ancestral ground.

“AHAHAhahaahha!”

Alalia’s laughter cut through the stunned silence like a dulcet knife.

Down below, the remaining cultivators shook off their surprise and charged for the remaining elites and Qing Dongmei.

The white moon elite dashed over, heading off the efforts by the three cultivators with Ao Qingcheng to finish off the blue star elite, however, that didn’t go to plan as Pei Shirong managed to evade Qing Dongmei and in the confusion some of the remaining cultivators managed to pull down the remaining ‘valiant warriors’, stabbing them repeatedly.

Qing Dongmei traded a few blows with the Sheng clan cultivator before knocking them down, at which point only her, the white moon and the red hand elite were still standing.

The last phase of the battle was short, sharp and fairly brutal after that point, the spider elite having been caught by a smaller group using arts he recognised from the Imperial School.

That left some nine cultivators in four scattered groups including Pei Shirong and the pale and shaking Ao Qingcheng, who had basically been incapacitated by what she had used to take out the blue star elite, facing down Qing Dongmei and the remaining two.

“Well, that is somewhat different…” Alalia said, wiping her eyes.

“…”

Nearby, various nobles were all scowling at her, clearly unhappy with the not very veiled mockery in her tone.

“Ah… Master, Great Masters…” the announcer also looked a bit green.

Below, the cultivators had scavenged one of the bows and a quiver of orichalcum arrows and were slowly fanning out around Qing Dongmei and the other two elites.

Qing Dongmei glanced up at the balcony where they were, looking questioningly at Alalia.

“It is not over yet,” the bearded noble muttered.

“Care to make another wager?” Quaruna purred, putting an arm through his and leaning over the balcony to watch in such a way that she was pressed closely against him.

“Oh?” he asked, just having to accept her action for now. “And what do you have in mind?”

“I think she will wipe the floor with them entirely,” Nisa interjected

“…”

Quaruna shot the other woman a slightly sour glance but Nisa just giggled.

“I think she will let them live,” Quaruna countered.

“You are both trying to put me at a disadvantage here,” he sighed, trying hard not to roll his eyes.

Below, the cultivators at last made their move, the Sheng clan cultivator finally deciding to cooperate with the others and rushing for Qing Dongmei along with Pei Shirong and the leader of the Imperial School group, who had mostly managed to stay in the shadows despite also being a Golden Immortal.

Dongmei deflected their blows quite easily and was about to retreat when a fourth figure appeared like a ghost beside her, cutting for her neck.

“Ohhh!” there was a gasp from the onlookers as the blow seemed to hit home, however Qing Dongmei spun at the last moment, leaving strands of dark hair drifting in the hot haze of the courtyard.

The shadow vanished into the dust as rapidly as it had arrived—

She stamped her foot and the air again grew thick and the qi sluggish. The shadows stumbled into view, revealing themselves to be the defeated spider and eagle Ur’Vash.

“Ah! So that is how the Hero of the Spider Seizing tribe was defeated,” one of the nobles nearby said with a laugh.

Qing Dongmei put a hand to her neck, grimacing at the wound that had just been inflicted by the orichalcum weapon that had grazed her, and then swept her gaze across the circling attackers who had capitalised on the moment to besiege the remaining two elites, pulling them down and stabbing them with scavenged orichalcum weapons.

“Forgive my lack of history but don’t the seven valiant heroes overcome the first army of mercenaries fairly emphatically?” Alalia said with a half-smile, looking over at the announcer and then around at the cheering nobles on the other balconies who were rather enjoying the unexpected upset, it appeared.

“Ah… yes…” the announcer muttered, not looking at Kazdrad or Alalia. “Forgive me, Master.”

Qing Dongmei looked again at the balcony, briefly, then at the cheering, chanting onlookers.

“Your apprentice did go down there on your instruction,” the yellow-robed old Ur’Vash smirked.

“She did, now the question is, do you want her to kill all of them or shall we consider this grand spectacle to have suitably and rather unorthodoxly achieved its purpose?” Alalia grinned.

Kazdrad gave a long look at the yellow- robed old Ur’Vash and then at Alalia.

“Meyla, you may do as you wish!” Alalia called down.

Qing Dongmei cast a look across the determined cultivators and then stamped her foot on the ground.

The dull boom echoed through the courtyard, sending them all sprawling. In that moment of confusion, Qing Dongmei retreated to the edge of the colonnade.

The guards below glanced up at Kazdrad and Alalia, the former just waving his hand in response. As he and everyone else looked on, the barrier vanished in a faint shimmer of light and Qing Dongmei jumped back up to the balcony in one smooth motion, departing the courtyard entirely.

“Aww…” Nisa pouted.

“It seems I have won this one,” Quaruna said with a laugh, accepting another cup of wine from a slave.

The cultivators had scrambled up, looking around warily at the cheering groups above them now.

Master Kazdrad sighed and waved his hand in a circular motion a few times to the announcer, who coughed awkwardly and took a deep drink from his cup.

It would be fair to say that not everyone was cheering, but he suspected that enough of those here had made money or saw opportunities in what had been shown that they were not going to complain unduly.

Below them, the heavily armoured soldiers walked back out of the lower colonnade from where they had been watching. A few of the cultivators made to attack, but most looked around and realised how thoroughly outmatched they were by the mass of powerful U’Vash arraigned everywhere watching them.

Pei Shirong spat on the ground and tossed his sword down, as did the Sheng cultivator. Ao Qingcheng just looked… blank, as did a few of the other female cultivators.

“Ah, Father, might we not see some of those who fought exceptionally brought up here?” Quaruna called over.

“Ah, yes, an excellent idea!” Someone else seconded.

“Have them cleaned up and let us get a closer look at these remarkable individuals!” one of the noblewomen agreed.

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

~ AO QINGCHENG – AFTER THE BATTLE ~

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

“What the fates do we do now?” Ao Qingcheng found herself muttering as they watched the formation of inscrutable guards make their way back into the makeshift arena while the mob of demons above chanted and cheered.

“Be glad we survived,” Pei Shirong replied with a grimace. “If we had fought together from the start perhaps more would still be standing.”

The cultivator from the Sheng clan scowled at them and said nothing.

-Even here, some people cannot let go of their grudges, she thought wearily. What does it even matter in this context?

Behind her, one of the female cultivators from the Shen clan started to sob quietly.

“There is no way we can fight that…” another youth, one of those from the Imperial School, said emptily, looking up at the main balcony.

That was also true, the ‘leaders’ of this terrible place who were standing there all gave her the sort of subtle pressure she associated with sect elders or old ancestors, especially the pale-haired one who had sent down the demoness who had just retreated and the bejewelled demoness. Her gut told her both of those were well above the Dao Step.

Grimacing, she tried to get her qi back under control, but the impact of having to trigger the curse mark her teacher had given her was still interfering with the fundamental harmony of her meridians. Yin fire and Soul Law energies melded into her dantian and bones made for a potent last resort but the strain on her body from unleashing it in the circumstances had nearly been too much.

“Are you okay, Senior Sister?” Bai Feifei, the only other disciple from the Verdant Flowers Valley still standing, asked, sounding… stressed.

“Yes,” she nodded. It was a lie, but they didn’t need more worries. “How are the others?”

“Those arrows have done… I don’t know, soul sense being restricted means we can’t see the extent of the injuries…”

“Clearly they were not trying to kill us…” the second Imperial School disciple muttered.

“Didn’t help Brother Erlai,” his companion spat.

Nodding, she looked around at the ring of guards. The injured and dead on both sides were being grabbed by slaves and dragged away.

“To think these savages had experts like that demoness though…” Pei Shiong sounded… dejected. “I tried all I could and my principle might as well have scattered off her as if it was raindrops on a rock.”

“Fuck this trial and everything about it,” another disciple, one of the others from the Sheng group, spat.

-And fates knows where they came from, she sighed, looking around again. There were no Sheng clan taking part when the trial started, did they just get caught up in this by accident or something?

“You, come!” she looked up to find one of the red-robed servants standing before her.

His command, in Easten, which a surprising number of them seemed to speak, tried to drag her to stand but her body was just unwilling to respond.

The servant barked something and four slaves walked over and grabbed her bodily, dragging her upright.

Off to the side, she could see Pei Shirong and the Sheng youth also being escorted towards the near side of the courtyard rather than back to the cells.

“Senior Sister!”

“Senior!”

The other female disciples she had been helping in the battle called after her, all looking worried now.

“Be strong!” she yelled back.

The servant looked at her dismissively and the two walking her forward gave her a bit of a shove. Probably they didn’t know what she had said, but clearly the intent of it had annoyed them.

The three of them were led in silence out of the courtyard after that and into a rather opulent hall, unlike anything she had previously witnessed during her captivity up to this point.

Six female slaves, three of them cultivators, including two she vaguely recognised as being from the Argent Hall and Myriad Herb Association, stepped forward and bowed with varying degrees of skill.

“Strip them, wash them and make them beautiful. Do it quickly, the Master wishes to meet with them!” the servant commanded in Easten before turning to the young sandy-haired woman from the Myriad Herb Association. “If they do not understand, explain to them what is required.”

All the slaves bowed in response to his instruction.

“Strip,” one of the guards behind her commanded in harsh Easten.

“They say to take off your armour. We are to wash you and make you… pretty,” the young woman from the Myriad Herb Association repeated to the three of them in Imperial Common

Sighing, she pulled off the armour she had been made to put on before – which didn’t take very long, truth be told, given how little of it there was, and tossed it in a heap to one side.

The youth from the Sheng clan shook off his captors and stalked over to the fountain without comment. Pei Shirong sighed and followed.

Gritting her teeth, she staggered over and sat down on the stone edge of the shallow pool.

Once she would have been scandalized by having to bathe in front of a bunch of strangers, a lot of them men who made no effort to disguise their gaze.

-That was only a few weeks ago… a part of her wept.

-We should have just died… better than this…

-Death... death... DEATH!

-And that is why we don’t mess with yin fire laws… she sighed, banishing the little voices trying to tug at her mental wellbeing.

The sad part was that while they were not wrong, their captors were not stupid. Two cultivators had tried to kill themselves and inexplicably failed. She still had no idea how that had happened, given she had been there and watched the woman from the Imperial School collapse her own meridians. She had been alive and well the next day, pale and shaking and totally unable to explain what had happened either.

“Hurry up!” one of the demon women snapped at her in Easten. “You do not keep the Masters waiting, slave!”

-Well, modesty is usually the first casualty of adversity, she reflected glumly, slipping into the water and rapidly washing off the dust and grime of the courtyard.

The water was cool, almost painfully so after the hot, humid heat of this place. She lay, submerged in it for a few seconds before sitting up again and squeezing the water out of her hair.

“Bah!”

One of the other servants roughly grabbed her and used a rag to wipe off the worst of the blood, totally ignoring her modesty again as they pushed her this way and that for a few seconds, covering her bare skin in some kind of herbal oil that itched faintly.

“Sorry,” the Myriad Herb disciple said to her as she started to rub the substance in, which turned out to be something between soap and perfume.

“What is your name?” she asked, doing her best to ignore the indignity of the situation.

Pei Shirong and the Sheng youth were being similarly washed by the two demonesses and a third female cultivator who had arrived.

“Mei Miao,” the woman said quietly.

“How long have you been captive?”

“A few weeks,” the woman answered “I was—”

“Less chatter!” the servant barked in Easten, cutting her off.

“We should be quick,” Mei Miao sighed under her breath.

She nodded, helped the younger woman to wash off the excess oil and stepped back out of the pool with a grimace, fighting the pain in her limbs.

“We don’t get clothes?” the Sheng youth asked as a servant directed the other two to step out of the pool.

She half expected that they would indeed be forced to go wherever they were going naked like this, but the red-robed servant waved a hand and three almost sheer gowns were provided.

She stood there, looking as impassive as she could as it was draped over her head and tied around her waist. It hid basically nothing, but she supposed she should be glad for the small mercies.

“Put this on her as well,” the red-robed servant commanded Mei Miao in Easten as a second servant brought several pieces of jewellery in reddish-gold metal.

Mei Miao nodded and clasped the bracelets around her arms and feet and put the necklace around her neck. To her surprise they were just normal jewellery, near as she could tell, and nothing at all sinister.

“It is enough, come!” the red-robed servant commanded, looking them over.

Mei Miao gave her a wan smile, which she tried her best to return, and they were escorted out of the room and into the next hall, where a sweating, oily-haired Ur’Vash wearing a deep purple robe edged in white and gold was waiting for them.

She stood there in silence as he said something in their language to the red-robed servant, looking over all three of them – especially her – with a degree of satisfaction that made her skin crawl.

“None of them seem to speak Lataan, Master Odraz,” the red-robed servant remarked respectfully in Easten.

“I doubt that will trouble the esteemed guests,” Master Odraz mused.

“However, if they offer some insult?” the red-robed servant asked.

“Ah, always you make excellent points Azul.”

“This is why you keep me around, Honoured Master,” the red-robed servant murmured.

“You, bring one of the ones through… the pretty one who washed her,” Azul ordered.

“What the fates is going to happen now?” Pei Shirong hissed to her.

“You ask me, but who do I ask?” she grimaced. “Presumably they want to show us off because we didn’t die like rats in a barrel.”

“Vile place,” the Sheng clan youth scowled.

“It is certainly not as advertised by those who sent us in here,” Pei Shirong scowled, looking around uneasily. “No juniors could make a dent on this place.”

“Well, the fate-thrashed Jade Gate Court’s talisman silk pants might,” she pointed out a bit sourly.

“Yeah, talismans did little when we were captured,” the Sheng youth sighed, some of his anger draining away. “We were about 100 strong, including three Ancient Immortals, and didn’t even know what hit us. We sacked a fort and were retreating with supplies and then… I woke up in a fate-thrashed box on a boat. First what happened in that hellish town and now this…”

She waved them to silence as Mei Miao was ushered in, looking about as nervous as she felt inside.

The demons talked about something for a few more moments then they were again escorted out of the room and up some stairs to a second hall where various nobles were milling about chatting.

“LORDS AND LADIES! I GIVE YOU, THE STARS OF OUR EVENING’S ENTERTAINMENT!”

The proclamation, again in Easten, or Lataan as they seemed to have referred to it earlier, made her ears ring slightly but the nobles all applauded, staring at them with undisguised interest.

Without any preamble they were escorted through the hall and out onto what she realised was the upper balcony overlooking the courtyard they had been in.

They were ushered forward, followed closely by Master Odraz with Mei Miao hovering behind him.

-Thank the fates I have a lot of experience dealing with eccentric old bastards, she thought glumly, looking around at those awaiting them.

Well over half of them were utterly inscrutable to her eyes, and the degree of undisguised interest from some of them made her skin crawl.

“This way,” one of the guards who had moved aside the curtain said perfunctorily, leading them around the edge, away from the older Ur’Vash, towards the balcony at the right-hand side of the hall.

“Lady Quaruna, Lady Quaruna, it is such an honour that you have seen fit to grant my unworthy self this audience,” Master Odraz gushed obsequiously, hurrying forward to stand before a basically naked young woman who was draped across a rather stoic looking demon with a well-trimmed beard dressed more like a soldier…

“It is not I, it is my dear friend Great Hunter Kang to whom you must speak,” the woman, Quaruna giggled, running her hand down Kang’s arm in a way that implied that the friendship should be quite… physical.

“Ah, Great Hunter Kang, your name has resounded already,” Master Odraz nodded to the bearded youth. “I had hoped to make your acquaintance already but my time has been devoted to this great spectacle!”

“So, according to our wager, you can do as you wish with her,” Quaruna smirked, waving at her.

-Wait… what?

Her heart dropped like a lead brick at the woman’s words, such that it was a struggle to keep her expression clear and keep feigning her ignorance of Easten.

“I can… hmmm…” the youth stared at her pensively, looking her over… not with a particularly desirous gaze, she realised, but more as if he were evaluating her more generally.

“In that case, I will claim her as my property,” the Great Hunter said with a half-smile.

“…”

“Ah, Great Hunter Kang…” one of the nobles, a bearded man who had been eyeing her with undisguised interest, looked a bit unhappy.

“The term of our wager was that, was it not?” he said to the woman draped over him.

“Indeed it was,” Quaruna giggled. “Very well, she is yours, to do with as you wish.”

She stood there, dully, just trying to find a fixed point to stare at somewhere where there was nobody in her line of view.

“And what of our bargain, Sorceress Meyla?” another youth who was sprawled on a nearby couch interjected.

“You are reminding me of the bargain you lost?”

She turned a bit mechanically to see the source of their final defeat was also standing there, holding a cup of wine, looking completely immaculate.

“You can purchase him for me, a warrior of that calibre is useful and that way I will owe you a personal favour…” Meyla said with a throaty chuckle, patting the youth on the head.

The youth coughed, looking a bit surprised.

“Unless you cannot afford a favour from me, Gerash?” Meyla added with a smile that made her heart race involuntarily, even through the fog her her own panic.

-She was holding back… a part of her mumbled.

The youth, Gerash stared at her and then started to laugh.

“You want him, rather than the Soul Gold?”

“Why can I not have both?” she chuckled, running her hand across his shoulder and up the side of his face.

“This way you will really be in my good books...”

“That seems like a very good deal,” Quaruna interjected.

“You get to impress the apprentice of our Esteemed Sorceress and make your name known to her…”

Gerash gave her a sideways look and sighed somewhat theatrically.

“Very well, Odraz, name your price.”

“My… price?” Odraz gawked, looking at Gerash a bit askance.

“Is there a problem with me purchasing these two here and now?” Gerash grinned.

“Ah… no… not at all Young Master Gerash, not at all…” Odraz said. “Some minor, unimportant people may be disappointed later but… If the Esteemed Sorceress has an interest in my humble wares I can only hope that she holds my name in her heart.”

She stared at Odraz, as did Pei Shirong and the Sheng youth.

“Are you literally scalping the showpieces of this evening’s gathering, dear daughter?”

The bejewelled woman and the pale-haired woman both appeared, almost like ghosts, out of the crowd, quite a few of whom nodded to them.

“Ah… Esteemed Sorceress Erishkira, Priestess Asherida, this humble Master is unworthy,” Odraz bowed down.

-Daughter? She glanced at Quaruna, connecting things up and trying hard to make sure her knees didn’t tremble. She is the daughter of this ancestor… that explains a lot.

“Hey, why do you get both of them?” another beautiful woman pouted at Gerash.

“Lady Nisa, do I not owe you a gambling stake from before?” he replied with a broad grin.

“Oh… yes, you do,” she said with a laugh, eyeing the Sheng youth, who was also sweating nervously now as all this group were stronger than they were.

“…”

Asherida cast a look at Great Hunter Kang that nearly made her blush just to see it and then looked back at the three of them with an half-smile.

“You, come sit with me,” Nisa pointed imperiously at the Sheng youth, who just looked confused at this point.

-In another world this would be like the punchline of some bad joke, she thought dully.

“She says… you um… belong to her now,” Mei Miao supplied in a small voice from the side in Imperial Common.

“I… what?” the Sheng youth gawked.

“She… well the youth there just bought you as a favour to that sorceress… and uh… well gave you to Lady Nisa to repay some previous debt…” Mei Miao mumbled.

“…”

“It could be worse,” Mei Miao muttered, looking at the floor “A lot worse.”

She could only nod at that.

“And us?” she asked, trying to ignore the amused stares of the onlookers, which just made everything even more disturbing in a way.

“You… well Great Hunter Kang here made a… wager… and won you… you excelled in the battle I think and Lady Quaruna offered to give him a favour.”

-And that favour was me? she stared dully at ‘Kang’, trying not show openly how mortifying that was.

“Same for you… Senior Pei… S-sorceress Meyla just claimed you,” Mei Miao said, not looking at Pei Shirong, who she had clearly recognised it seemed.

“What are you called?” Kang asked her in flawless Easten.

“He asked your name,” Mei Miao murmured.

“Ao,” she replied carefully, deciding just to use her clan name.

“Ao…” he repeated pensively, staring hard at her again.

Pei Shirong was shoved over towards the Sorceress, who looked him over and then nodded as if satisfied with something.

-Well, at least they both get grabbed by beauties, she sighed mentally.

Based on what she had seen, a female slave in this place was… looking at the attire… in fact she didn’t have to look very far at all to see one of the dancing girls massaging a watching noble on a nearby couch.

She wanted to say that this was cruel and barbarous…

Hunter Kang was still staring at her, looking like someone trying to solve a slightly difficult problem, truth be told.

“Shall I escort them away and properly prepare them?” Master Odurz said unctuously.

“Unnecessary,” Meyla waved a hand in direct refusal. “This effort is already suitable. He can just accompany me here and serve me.”

“Likewise,” Kang said.

“The… uh… language may be an issue?” Master Odurz asked deferentially.

“It will be fine,” Great Hunter Kang waved a hand at Mei Miao. “Just leave her as a translator, she was serving up here before in any case.”

Master Odurz bowed respectfully and departed, backing away.

The woman, Nisa, had gotten up and walked over to the Sheng youth, leading him by the arm back to her couch and practically sitting down in his lap.

-A part of me would have found this scene really funny a month ago, she lamented. Some high and mighty young master forced to be some demoness’s pet.

Pei Shirong walked a bit woodenly over to stand beside Meyla, who was talking to Garesh about something in the common language of the demons.

“You really are quite a specimen,” she didn’t quite flinch at the remark from Quaruna, realising that she had somehow gotten from the couch to stand beside her in a matter of a few moments without her so much as noticing.

“You can fool that fat merchant, but I know you understand Easten,” Quaruna purred, running her hand down her back.

She exhaled, trying to keep her focus, because the woman was absolutely an Ancient Immortal and based on the little she could feel, her strength should be very close to some of the proper seniors of their own group, people like Liling Mei or Bai Tuli.

-Or even Qing Dongmei…

She was unable to do much to resist as the woman guided her over to the couch and basically pushed her down on it.

“You wonder how I know?” Quaruna smirked.

“…”

“You reacted to their calls in the battle below, reading what the war-slaves were shouting to each other. They use Lataan because their dialects are different enough that it hinders conversation,” Quaruna said, even as she resolutely remained silent, trying to feign ignorance.

“Stop tormenting her, she is my servant, not yours,” Hunter Kang chuckled, looking her over again. “Relax, I will not mistreat you, just stand there and keep our wine full.”

-What do you mean, relax! A part of her spat. I am a slave here, and a woman.

-Not to mention five minutes ago I was fighting for my life, now here I am being traded away for favours?

Exhaling, she pushed away the chaotic influence of the yin fire qi again, though the thoughts it was dredging up were not wrong. The powerlessness of her situation was the worst bit, really. She was not even restrained now, there was nothing on her to stop her using qi in any way she wished… and… she knew she could do nothing. At the slightest motion of something untoward or inauspicious she was fairly sure she would be made to know exactly what had hit her and how hard before it was done with.

Mei Miao sidled over to her and passed her a wine jar.

“Trust me, this can get a lot worse,” Miao muttered very quietly in Imperial Common.

“I know,” she sighed softly, accepting the jar and pouring wine smoothly into Quaruna’s cup.

“GREAT MASTER, MASTERS, ESTEEMED AND HONOURED GUESTS ALL!” the announcer’s voice nearly made her drop the wine jar, given how unexpected it was. “THE SECOND PART OF OUR LITTLE EXCHANGE SHALL BEGIN SOON!”

“He doesn’t half like the sound of his own voice,” Quaruna chuckled.

“Indeed…” Kang mused, casting a sideways look at the announcer.

“What will happen to the others…?” she asked Mei Miao.

“The… other fighters?” Mei Miao frowned. “Probably they will be patched up and either sold here, or more likely purchased through informal agreements, that seems to be what happens.”

“How… can you be so… prosaic about it?” she sighed, looking around at the decadence and oppressive power on display.

“What good does being terrified do?” the woman sighed. “Also, I am fairly sure at least some of these old experts know Imperial Common already.”

“…”

She looked around again and nodded grimly.

“Never mind the question of soul sense, you see… how they are?” Mei Miao waved her hand around at the decadent nobles engaged in their conversation. “If someone really sets their eyes on you there is next to nothing… you can do. Just look at Lady Nisa there… that Sheng clan youth is surely someone influential but against an Ancient Immortal what is he going to be able to do, even assuming she doesn’t just force him outright.”

“Yeah…”

She shuddered mentally, again trying not to think about it too hard.

“And if you have real old ancestors here…” Mei Miao cast her gaze towards the wizened old demon in the yellow robe.

Again, she could only nod. There came a point when even your own thoughts were not necessarily safe in your head. The question of whether the restrictions on this place hampered external manifestation of Soul Law were still opaque to her, given that her teacher’s last resort worked somewhat… esoterically.

To distract herself from Nisa tormenting the Sheng youth in her peripheral vision, she turned to watch what was, apparently, an actual treasure auction.

“Another on the list of things I didn’t expect to find when we arrived here,” Mei Miao sighed softly, watching as well.

“EVERYONE, PLEASE, THE FIRST ITEM ON OUR EVENING’S LIST OF ITEMS FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION, COURTESY OF MASTER ODURZ, AN ARTEFACT OF SPATIAL STORAGE!

“…”

“That’s my fate-thrashed storage ring,” she gawked, staring at the object being held up, its appearance magnified somehow so everyone could see it, resting on a silken cloth.

“THIS REMARKABLE ARTEFACT CAN HOLD— Ah, please stand back…”

The guards on the platform retreated slightly and she watched as a demon held up her ring and then emptied about twenty tonnes of random building rubble out of it into a pile for everyone to see.

“IT IS UNLIMITED BY MATERIAL, WITH ONLY A FEW RESTRAINTS ON IT IN REGARDS TO MANA DENSITY!”

“THIRTY ORICHALCUM INGOTS!” someone yelled almost immediately from the far side.

“TWO HUNDRED WAR-SLAVES!” a second noble called from along the balcony from her.

“…”

She watched as the bidding turned frenetic within a matter of a few moments, the quantities being exchanged moving to actual land, with fishing villages, spirit herb fields, even a mine being offered in exchange for it.

“They don’t seem to have many items—” Mei Miao mused.

“You there, more wine!” a noble who had wandered down the balcony cut her off, holding out his cup.

With a sigh, Mei Miao filled it up, ignoring his leer.

He opened his mouth again, then caught sight of Kang, who had turned to see what the commotion was she presumed.

“Ah, Great Hunter Kang… I have heard much of you…”

She tuned out the conversation with a quiet sigh as the potential danger passed.

Mei Miao also exhaled and looked back at the auction. “As I said… a lot worse.”

“Have you…” she didn’t know how to actually ask that question she realised.

The younger woman just looked at her with slightly dead eyes and said nothing.

“…”

-Fates, I hope the heavens flatten this place to the ground, she swore in her heart.

Despite her worst fears however, the rest of the evening was… actually rather boring.

Most of what was auctioned off was the possessions of various cultivators which, given she had been to any number of auctions back home and even administered the odd one for the Fire Orchid Pavilion’s Outer Disciples and the local influences who supported their sect, was not particularly engaging.

The important nobles didn’t really engage directly with the auction itself she came to realise, most of their bidding done via proxies or servants on the lower level, except for ‘spectacular’ items like some of the better storage rings.

That hers had been the first one auctioned off was a bit galling, but in truth, it was not that great a ring, just one she had gotten when she was made an Inner Disciple of the Fire Orchid Pavilion. A few others were put up as well, of similar capacity or less, with some of the sub-Immortal realm rings being sold in lots of three or five, however, she didn’t see the rings of anyone properly influential. Pei Shirong, for example, should have had a ring that was several times better than hers and incorporated elements of a conventional jade scrip into it as well as a sect talisman.

“I am surprised that the gladiators are not part of this?” one of the younger nobles sighed, casting a look in her direction. “I saw several of the female ones that really caught my eye… Hunter Kang is certainly lucky…”

She risked a sideways glance at her ‘owner’, however, he was recounting some tale about fighting a centipede or something in a jungle and basically not openly paying attention to her at all.

-What do we do now…?

-I thought I could protect the others… but like this… will they just be snapped up by vultures and have as sad and cruel an end as my senior sister did with Di Ji?”

She had to grit her teeth and push the bad thoughts back down.

-The backlash from that charm is… uggh…

-At the very least… I have to think of a way to save my junior sisters…

Staring at the wine jar she was holding, almost like a statue, she was half tempted to try and sneak a gulp, just to see if it would help her nerves, but resisted on the grounds that she had to just be… unobtrusive… for now.

-Drinking the wine I am meant to be serving is probably not a smart idea…

“AND NOW, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, A DIFFERENT ITEM FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION!” the announcer called out grandly.

“Gladiators, Gladiators!” someone in the next balcony called, which got a smattering of laughter and applause.

“Alas, not our combatants, they must recover somewhat, but bids are being accepted ahead of that!” the announcer called out. “however, you will not be disappointed with this artefact, for it is an echo of an era long gone, delivered up to us here, for you to marvel at…

“I present to you… AN ‘ARC DE LUNE’ PERSONAL ATLAN!”

With a grand flourish, the announcer’s aides swept aside the cloth covering what turned out to be something looking remarkably like a longbow but without a string.

“What?”

She, along with everyone else, turned to see the Sorceress, Erishkira staring at the bow with undisguised interest.

“This object was part of a fabled cache of pre-collapse weaponry recovered from the ruins near ancient Vashada, a relic of our ancestral cities’ ancient occupiers.”

All around, she could hear shocked whispers in the local tongue of the demons as people craned to see the bow.

Taking it in, she had to admit that it looked like a weapon worthy of myth, decorated with swirling patterns of clouds, wind and lightning, the grip and arrow shelf fashioned into the shape of a crescent moon in a dull silver metal that caught the light in very strange ways. The details across much of it were picked out in dusky gold, while the limb of the weapon itself seemed to be made of a kind of fossilized spirit wood, darkened with age.

“OPENING BIDS WILL START AT—”

“A GRIMOIRE OF TIME!” Erishkira called, cutting off the announcer.

“A… Grimoire of…?” the announcer repeated dully.

“Yes.” The pale-haired sorceress said flatly.

“A STORM HAMMER!” an old voice called from the far side of the hall.

“Ah… many old faces are appearing today,” the announcer said respectfully. “Master Yomvar.”

“You think a paltry storm hammer compares to a Ninth Circle grimoire?” Erishkira sneered.

“What kind of artefact…” Mei Miao murmured, staring at it.

“AN AGROND FURNACE!” another voice, a woman’s this time, called out from further down their balcony, beyond where she could see. “—and the means to operate it.”

“Lady Temeria…” the announcer actually gulped.

“Fine, I’ll raise my offer,” Erishkira said bluntly. “A Minor Codex of Translation…”

“…”

“Uh… the seller is actually after a specific item for trade…” the announcer said a bit lamely. “If you would…”

The announcer trailed off for a moment…

“Lady Temeria—”

“A scroll of ‘minor miracle’,” the speaker was the old Ur’Vash who had offered the Storm Hammer before. “—and the storm hammer, and a shield of the winds.”

“…”

The announcer stared this way and that, finally looking at Erishkira who stared at the bow for a long moment then just shook her head.

“Lady Temeria’s offer is acceptable to the seller,” the announcer said, rather nervously she thought.

“That old hoarder, she never gives others a chance,” Quaruna remarked from behind them.

“I wonder who would part with such an object though?” Gerash mused.

“Someone who isn’t confident they can hold onto it, I imagine,” another young noble, a woman with reddish hair and very impressive curves, interjected, leaning over the back of Gerash’s couch.

“Ah, Priestess Amanali,” he smiled. “Please, join us… have you been introduced to Great Hunter Kang and Sorceress Meyla yet?”

“I have not…” the young woman said with a very interested look at the Great Hunter, who simply returned it with a level smile, clearly not drawn.

-Why the fates are they all staring at him like bitches in heat? A small part of her wondered, not a little bit nervously it had to be said.

-He seems reasonable enough, at least in comparison to the others around here…

“He must have been a monk in a past life,” Pei Shirong muttered, arriving beside her.

“Ah… Senior Pei,” she grimaced, glad she had not spilt any wine when she flinched.

“Well, if you see enough ‘beauties’ like this every day I am sure you gain a certain tolerance after a while,” Mei Miao remarked a trifle sourly.

“What do we do now?” she murmured more quietly as the next item for the auction was brought out in a covered box.

“I… I honestly don’t know,” Pei Shirong muttered. “I hoped that Senior Dongmei or Senior Jia… or someone else might track us down… but what can any of them do against a place like this… and what happens if we are scattered here and there? Some of those with us died in that arena today…”

She nodded glumly at that. The six fatalities, or presumed fatalities – that she had seen anyway – had all been from the Sheng clan or the Jade Gate Court, but it gave her no joy at all to think about their fate. In the face of their current circumstances petty rivalries should have been second to just trying to survive.

Idly, she cast her gaze towards the youth from the Sheng clan, who was basically Nisa’s toy as near as she could tell, being forced to massage her shoulders while she asked Kang some question in their local language. He had not been the leader in that group, she was fairly sure, but she wondered if he had the same regrets she did or whether being able to massage a beauty’s breasts and feed her spirit fruits was already enough to fog the horror of their circumstances.

Giving herself a shake, she tried to get a grip on herself, if only so she didn’t look nervous or afraid even if she just wanted to puke up in the wine jar. If you looked afraid, it drew attention and attention was bad, basically, as far as she was concerned.

“No junior is getting anywhere near a place like this,” Pei Shirong sighed. “I don’t know what realm those old… experts are, but some of the people here have ages and realms to make Eastern Azure’s greatest sects sweat nervously.”

That was also true, and another thing she had been trying to ignore. Quaruna for example, was only in her early twenties near as she could tell, maybe thirties, and was certainly an Ancient Immortal or whatever the local equivalent was. She was not weak either. The other young nobles lounging around varied from late Immortal to inscrutable as well, but Garesh was among the oldest she could see and he was barely 30.

“They mostly appear to be body cultivators…” she murmured. “Some of it must be the superior resources available to them here, but it could just be that they advance more like qi beasts or something?”

“If we were born here, properly attuned… what realm do you think we could be?” Mei Miao added.

That was also an excellent point, one she had to admit in all the other stressful circumstances she had neglected. The consensus had been that this was a shard of a Supreme World. Everything she was seeing and experiencing was only reinforcing that as well.

The next item turned out to be a two-handed sabre, forged of a dull grey metal, swirling leaf patterns and sunburst-like flowers picked out on its blade in coppery-gold.

They watched in silence as its properties were tested on various unfortunate qi beasts. Sorceress Erishkira purchased it after some heated bidding from various quarters.

The object after it was a broad bowl of blue-grey stone with three legs, decorated in sun and moon motifs, that the yellow-robed old demon acquired almost unopposed in the end.

She was pouring out more wine and taking around food for the circle of young nobles when the announcer hopped up on the balcony again. This time, thankfully, she caught his movement out of the corner of her eye, so the loud announcement didn’t come as a total shock.

“GREAT MASTER, MASTERS, ESTEEMED SORCERESSES AND PRIESTESSES, LORDS AND LADIES, GUESTS ALL! PLEASE LEND ME YOUR EARS!”

Most of the louder conversation and music faded away after a moment, allowing the announcer to continue in a slightly less loud manner.

“This is not the end of our exchange, as was stated earlier, bids are being taken on various special items… and yes, the ‘valiant’ gladiators of today’s extravaganza. I invite you all to socialize and make merry on behalf of the Master of Uldara, enjoy his hospitality to the fullest, his home is yours for this night of celebration and tomorrow we shall show you wonders to make today pale in comparison! STARTING WITH THE DISPLAY OF THE GLADIATORS WHO HAVE BEEN THE TALK OF THIS DAY!”

There was a lot of cheering and clapping from the various balconies. At some point, she realised the lower level had also been opened back out and quite a lot of slightly less opulently attired demons had started to arrive.

“Oh… great,” Mei Miao sighed, her expression taut as she looked this way and that.

“I suppose that is us done with matters here…”

She glanced around to see that Meyla had come over, along with the Sorceress Erishkira.

“It is, unless you wish to see idiots molesting each other like drunken monkeys,” Erishkira remarked.

“My father has generously offered you apartments within our palace, Esteemed Sorceress,” Quaruna said, standing and offering the sorceress a slight bow.

“I am aware,” the Sorceress remarked, rather drolly. “I take it you are to show us to them?”

Quaruna, entirely shamelessly, grabbed Kang’s arm and smiled winsomely. “Hunter Kang has many tales yet to share with us, so…”

“I am sure,” Meyla remarked rather drily, looking around the small circle of nobles.

-So, they are basically moving their party to a more private place?

The others all stood up and started to follow after Quaruna and Erishkira.

“Come on,” Kang added, beckoning for her to follow.

She took a step, then turned to Mei Miao, who was still holding her jar of wine, with a grimace, trying to ignore the gazes cast by another group of young nobles further along the balcony.

“I…”

“It’s okay,” Mei Miao said sadly. “I—”

“You as well,” Kang pointed at her.

“Eh?” Mei Miao blinked.

“I still need you to translate things,” Kang said blandly. “And I am interested in learning a bit of your language, call it… the curiosity of someone who travels widely.”

“…”

“As Great Hunter Kang commands,” Mei Miao said, bowing quickly and almost throwing the wine jar away as she hurried forward.

Watching how relieved the other woman looked, she felt only pain in her own breast and tried not to look at the other two female cultivators who were down the other end of the hall, nowhere near as lucky.

-Such is the cruel reality of this horrible place, a small voice in her mind muttered on her behalf.

Shaking her head, she took a deep breath and hurried after Mei Miao, so as not to lag inappropriately far behind the others.

As she had observed before, the living quarters of the place they were held, wherever it was, were nothing like the dark prison cells and plain high-storied courtyards she had mostly been held in before.

The walls were beautifully carved and painted and everywhere treasures were openly on display – beautiful vases, statues, stele and even the odd ancient weapon, spaced tastefully between beautiful plants in stone pots that doubled as scene dividers for some of the friezes they passed.

Most of them depicted scenes of triumph, various battles, ‘great’ or ‘grand’ occasions… processions, festivals and even the odd landscape. There was some text with a few, but little of it was understandable and in any case, her mind was still slowly fighting the effects of the yin fire charm, trying to keep her twisting emotions under control.

Miao walked in silence, as did Pei. The youth from the Sheng clan was basically dragged along by Nisa, who was humming an annoyingly happy tune.

Kang, who had barely given her three looks the whole time, talked mostly with Meyla. Quaruna, Amanali, Garesh and another noblewoman whose name she didn’t know all walked with Sorceress Erishkira, clearly trying to curry favour with her as they talked about something in their common tongue.

The ‘quarters’, as it turned out, were every bit as opulent as the ones around the courtyard they had just left. Walking into them, she had to admit they would not have looked out of place in a sect on the southern continent.

Everything was built with the sleek, warm-coloured carved stone, diaphanous drapes, and a multitude of plants, presumably to help with the temperature control. The central area had a small fountain that ran into a bathing pool probably deep enough to actually swim in, while the various private rooms extended off to either side, the bedrooms at the far end, likely also with balconies that mirrored the one in the main room.

The view outside was no less impressive, a part of her had to admit, even if it was also a further, cruel, crushing blow to her hopes of escaping her ordeal. Before her, the roofs of hundreds of buildings shone in the last light of the early evening. In the distance a river wound, stretching into reed beds and the occasional distant settlement picked out by glittering lights.

“It is certainly a spectacular view,” Pei Shirong muttered.

“If nothing else, they do style well,” Mei Miao agreed, looking around carefully.

“I’ll take that one,” Erishkira said, walking over to the right-hand balcony room at the far end. “Don’t disturb me unless that idiot comes with my gold, in which case I hope for his sake it is as pure as he claimed.”

“Of course,” Meyla said with a slight bow.

“You,” Quaruna pointed at Mei Miao, who bowed deeply. “Go instruct others to bring food and refreshment. Do not get side-tracked.”

“Some musicians would be nice,” Nisa added.

Mei Miao bowed again and hurried off.

“Please, make yourselves comfortable,” Kang said to the other nobles, heading towards the room on the left side. “I will re-join you in a moment.”

She stood there in silence, not quite sure what she was meant to be doing, along with Pei Shirong and the Sheng youth, until Quaruna turned to look at her directly.

“I know you do understand Lataan,” Quaruna said drily, “There is no point pretending here.”

“…”

“While you are my dear friend Kang’s property, this is my house,” Quaruna said blandly.

“I… understand,” she sighed, speaking in Easten.

“Hah!” Garesh clapped his hands and stuck one out to Nisa who sighed and slapped it.

“What do you want for winning?” Nisa asked, sitting back.

“I think you know what I want,” Garesh replied with a suggestive smirk.

“Bleugh, okay, later,” Nisa said with an eye roll.

“…”

She didn’t quite manage to not look sideways at the Sheng youth, who had the expression of someone who wanted to wake up from their nightmare already.

“I am Ao,” she murmured, figuring she should eventually introduce herself, though still making sure not to give her full name.

“Huan,” he muttered, not meeting her eyes.

“Look, the battle was one thing, but now we are really in it,” Pei Shirong muttered.

“Sorry,” Huan mumbled, looking awkward. “Senior Sheng Cheng…”

“—and the spirit talisman for most ironic name of the day goes to…” she muttered under her breath, which got a sad half-laugh from Sheng Huan.

“I feel ashamed for all the times I flirted with serving women in tea houses at this point,” Sheng Huan sighed.

“This is the reality of power, grow a vagina and see how life on our side is,” she grumbled, finally letting some of her annoyance slip out.

“…”

Both men just nodded, not commenting.

Quaruna was about to say something further, she realised, when Mei Miao hurried back into the room accompanied by three musicians, two of whom were also cultivators she realised with a start, and three other slaves carrying platters of food and wine between them.

“Ah, that was fast, you are much more efficient than some of the others,” the other noblewoman giggled.

Kang appeared a moment later, having discarded his armour, she realised, which must have been something of a minor nuisance in this horrid heat, even if he had barely seemed to be affected by it.

“Your prize does speak a civilized tongue,” Quaruna remarked.

“I know,” Kang chuckled, glancing at her. “It was obvious in the battle.”

“…”

Miao, standing nearby, looked a bit uneasy again, but nobody so much as glanced at her.

“My grasp not good,” she added, deliberately botching the grammar. “I only know words to read, rarely speak. Just to understand.”

“Right, let us continue hearing of your exploration of those ruins… I cannot believe you actually went to Valinkar, that place is horrible,” the other noblewoman said.

“It is not among my favourite places,” Kang agreed.

-Valinkar… isn’t that the ruin we were exploring?

She glanced sideways at Pei Shirong, then realised they were back to talking fluent Easten… Lataan and of the three of them, only she and Miao were at all fluent so he had probably missed what was said.

Much as before, in truth, the whole thing was… boring, which in a weird way only made it more stressful if anything. All she had to do was stand there, look pretty and pour wine on command. Mei Miao eventually got told to dance to the music, which she did with the fervor of someone presumably fearing potential alternatives.

The tales Kang and to an extent Meyla told were kind of interesting, but it was hard to take any satisfaction from them because she had far too much time alone with her thoughts. Those resolutely refused to move on from pondering her circumstances and how implausible it would be for them to escape. It didn’t help that deep down she was also concerned for the other female juniors in their group, wondering if they would just have been thrown back in those featureless cells, or if they were now being paraded for various lecherous demons. The question of what she could do… or try to do there was also gnawing away at her.

Eventually, the group did consume enough wine that inhibitions started to seriously drop, starting with Garesh and Nisa. At that point, Kang did, finally, beg his absence, saying that he had to meditate on certain things and that if he drank any more he would be unable to get up in the morning, servants or no.

That only seemed to make the others more determined to make him stay, however after a few more drinks he at last got up, somewhat decisively, or as decisively as you could after drinking a small barrel of spirit wine.

“Why… why don’t I help you to… your room, dear Kang,” Quaruna declared, just about managing to stand up without falling over.

“I cannot believe you can drink that much…” glancing at the other noblewoman, who turned out to be called Kurra, and who was currently half asleep. “I thought we were good at this, Kang, but you have really opened my eyes!”

“You get a lot of practice in rural parts, every meal has like ten toasts!” Kang chuckled, waving to her to follow as well.

Not sure… what to make of matters, she couldn’t help but glance at the others, but Mei Miao was still dancing for Garesh, Huan was unable to fully escape Nisa and Kurra, and Pei Shirong was just serving wine.

He caught her gaze and grimaced.

“…”

Sighing, she steeled herself as best she could and followed Kang and Quaruna to Kang’s room in silence.

The room itself was fairly dimly lit, with again, a spectacular view from the balcony if she had cared for such things as she tried to decide what, if anything she was going to or could do.

Quaruna staggered over to the bed and flopped suggestively onto it, nearly dragging Kang down with her.

-Am I going to have to just stand here and watch? She worried… Or…

Her mind almost refused to countenance the idea of being forced to join in…

Kang carefully disentangled the demon woman and pulled her onto the bed properly, before again disentangling himself from her grasp and just sitting on the edge of the bed with a sigh.

“…”

“She is out cold,” he said after a moment, in Easten.

“Uh…”

She wasn’t sure what to say to that.

“I…” she stared at him, then at the ceiling for a moment, then exhaled.

“You saw the battle… you were impressed with how I fought… so you decided you… wanted me?” she asked.

“That seems to be how it has turned out,” he conceded.

“I have four… sisters…”

“The women you were fighting with…” he nodded. “They were equally impressive.”

“I… don’t know what you want from me…” she grimaced… “But if you could… tomorrow… if you save them… I…”

She tried to put it into words, and the fact that she couldn’t despite being nearly a hundred years old was… infuriating.

-There are women who have grown up, had three generations of children and died before they get to my age… a part of her sobbed, feeling weirdly pathetic.

“If you save them… I will do anything you ask,” she murmured, trying to sound enticing as she stepped forward again.

“…”

He stared at her, then at Quaruna.

She steeled herself, because really, all she had at this point was ‘charm’. Verdant Flowers was a sect that prided itself on the skill and charm of its disciples, their talent with the arts, poetry, song and dance. That led others to think the sect had a certain reputation, but really it did not.

“Anything…” she re-iterated, coming to stand in front of him. “So long as you swear that you will do all that you can to save them from being thrown to some vultures.”

“And why me?” he asked, staring at her impassively.

-Because there is no one else! A part of her wailed in her head.

-Because I have to do something.

-Because I am their senior.

-Because I am meant to look after them…

“Because…” she trailed off, then sighed and shrugged off her robe to step in front of him.

“Because I am their big sister and I have to do the best I can… will you swear… or will you just push me down there and treat me like the slave this place believes I should be?”

“…”

He stared up at her for so long that she actually started to sweat, not looking at her body, just into her eyes.

“You… will not?” she exhaled.

“I did not say that,” he said softly. “To treasure one’s kith and kin, sisters and brothers by blood or bond so dearly is a precious thing.”

He again turned to look at Quaruna for some reason and sighed a second time.

“I swear, I will do all within my power to save your sisters, Ao, I swear upon…” He trailed off and she wondered for a second if he had decided not to, however a moment later she saw a shimmering black and white flower appear between them.

In that same instant, she felt a faint sense of connection to some other, strange power. It was not like a heavenly oath, though she realised in that moment it was probably foolish to expect the demons of this place to swear oaths like that.

“In that case…” she sighed and put her hands on his shoulders.

He stopped her, and gently made her step back and sit on the bed beside him.

“That is unnecessary,” he said simply, glancing at Quaruna.

“You…?” she stared at him... Torn between anger suddenly and… embarrassment.

“Ah, you misunderstand,” Kang sighed. “Meyla would literally kill me. Sleep, recover how you can, she will not wake for a while.”

“You…” she still found she couldn’t quite process this turn of events… a part of her that had been properly psyching herself up for something like this almost since she got hauled out of the pool and escorted upstairs was just incapable of changing course.

“If you cannot rest because of her, I can take her to another room,” Kang added, gesturing towards Quaruna.

“N-no…” she said quietly… “It’s not that.”

He stared at her and grimaced slightly, instead just putting an arm around her shoulders… and of all things giving her a hug.

“I do not mistreat those that follow me, this, above all other things you should understand. Uldara is a place with certain rules, a certain understanding. Nor will I let those who follow me be mistreated by others,” he said quietly.

She stared at him dully as he stood, walked over to the couch and sat down on it cross legged.

“If you need anything, I shall be here, the wine is surprisingly strong so it will take a while to shake off its effects.”

“…”

She stared at him blankly for a full thirty seconds then just flopped back on the bed, staring at the carved ceiling.