> Oh gilded land, the azure gem that is passed from hand to hand, how thy suffering leads your people to sorrow, forever beholden, by the virtue of their bounty, to the grasping hands of others.

>

> Like a lovely maiden, you are cursed to dance for old villains, unable to have freedom of your own, as they dream of your riches and woo you with smiles, promising you their sons with flattering words, when really, in their eyes, you are only for them.

>

> Foremost, your virtues are extolled from shining world to starless sea. Ten Thousand eyes adore you, Supreme Lords court you, Celestial Queens are entranced by you, and yet your gifts are your sentence, your mysteries your prison and your virtues the chains, woven in flowers, which bind you.

>

> Oh, how you must lament, that you, who are so fair, can evoke such ugly shades in all you see.

Excerpt from ‘The Azure Portrait’

  By Ling Lingsheng, Lady Azure, Fairy Sovereign Sky Song

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~ JUN HAN – THE CELESTIAL BLOSSOM TEAHOUSE ~

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Despite his stated aim that he wanted to ‘get to know’ the others sitting with his daughters at their table, Jun Han found that that did not take all that long. The three of them were guests of the Kun clan, who had crossed paths with his younger daughter, Sana, courtesy of Kun Juni, while she was in Blue Water City, and the other was also associated with the Kun clan, from Nine Moons Province. Once food arrived, courtesy of Sana, he simply let them talk away while he posed the odd question about this or that and instead devoted his thoughts to the far more problematic issue of his older daughter, Arai.

In just the short time since he had arrived, she had drunk half a jar of wine on her own, and her mood, while outwardly… engaged, had a sort of flatness he had long since learned to associate with her using her mantra to dull the edges of her emotions. Given that she was usually very responsible with that, considering how well both of them had been instructed by his dear Ruliu… it was somewhat concerning.

-Ruliu…

Just thinking of her made him want to drink as well.

-Sometimes being a responsible parent sucks, he had to reflect, pouring some wine for himself and sipping it as he pondered how best to go about tactfully finding out what the problem was.

“Can I see the picture that won you such acclaim?” he asked after a moment’s consideration.

“It’s still in the hall,” Arai replied. “Lady Shi has agreed to… purchase it, though.”

“She has?” he blinked, wondering why one of the more aloof elders of the Ha clan would be interested in his daughter’s painting.

“She has,” Arai repeated, biting into a piece of roasted fish with just a hint more aggression than was probably necessary.

“…”

-I suppose I will have to go look at it myself… he mused, mulling her slightly taciturn response over. Is it just that she is unhappy being reminded of Ruliu? Or did someone say something stupid…

The exact nature of how she had gotten involved in the competition was still rather opaque as well. Even if a part of him did want her to be able to shine as brightly as her potential allowed, he knew all too well that the events around their mother’s death still haunted both his daughters in very real ways. Both had also taken very much to heart her teachings about remaining humble and centred in terms of what they possessed and how it should be used. It had not escaped his notice that while all those at the table had praised the somewhat mysterious painting, nobody had been especially clear on why his daughter had somewhat uncharacteristically put herself forward either.

“Father, you are brooding nearly as badly as sis is,” Sana said drily, pushing a second plate of roasted spirit herb and beef skewers over to him.

“…”

Perhaps it was just the fancy gown… which had apparently come from Ling Yu, something else he would have to ask about later, but the tone and her expression was far too reminiscent of her mother…

To hide his grimace, he finished the cup of wine and took a skewer to eat. That was the problem with two daughters… they could be beautiful and dutiful, but there were days when they were too astute for his comfort.

-They are too old for their years, Ruliu, he thought a bit glumly, looking from one to the other… the younger acting out to make up for the gloom of the older, yet both holding shadows in their manner that made his heart ache at times.

To distract himself slightly, he turned back to the combat stage, which was still being dominated by Kun Xian, the third prodigal child of the Kun clan’s juniors. The boy was talented and already on a winning streak of eight fights, not that that was hard really given the pool of talent involved and the teacher he had.

As he watched, the boy dodged two rather crude intent-infused strikes and kicked his opponent, a spiritual cultivator from the Ha clan in Blue Water City, in the knee, then the balls, before finally grabbing him by the hair and sending him stumbling across the stage, narrowly avoiding a ring out.

“What are the rules?” he asked the table at large as Kun Xian’s victim tried to keep his distance again.

“Arts, no treasures or talismans unless agreed,” Kun Baotan answered politely.

As if to put a mockery in that last bit, the youth on the stage did draw a talisman… and was promptly made to regret it. He watched as Kun Xian skilfully cut at his opponent’s hand with his sword, splitting the talisman in two. The qi within it discharged, exploding in the face of the youth who had tried to use it, making him spit blood and stumble backwards again.

“…”

Kun Baotan stared at the youth on the stage and shook his head, looking both amused and disdainful.

“—though probably Brother Xian will have to start agreeing their use if he wants to continue,” Feng Jinhai added with some amusement.

-Probably, yeah, he nodded, glancing around. Though his teacher, if it is Old Xian here with him, will likely haul him off before that happens.

It would be a bad look for Kun Xian, who looked, to his eye at least, to be a creditable inheritor of his grandfather Kun Xianfang’s legacy, to accidentally cripple or worse, kill, some angry opponent at a celebration like this.

“—Do you think there is anyone here that could best Brother Xian, Sir Jun?” Bai Jiang asked him, cutting through his thoughts on that.

“…”

Glancing around, he had to admit there were not many. Not who would lower themselves to fighting a fourteen-year-old boy for amusement. The risk of their wards losing or, perhaps worse, injuring Kun Xian and inspiring the wrath of a reclusive old expert was not something many of those supporting the more elite competitors would be willing to countenance. Doubly so, given these didn’t appear to be competition matches but just free ‘sparring’.

“There are a few,” he answered after a moment’s pause. “But I suspect they are saving themselves for the actual tournament that I assume will come in a bit?”

“It is to come, yes,” Bai Jiang nodded. “Brother Ying and Brother Feng here will both participate, as will Brother Baotan.”

He glanced at the three, playing card games, and felt a momentary flash of pity for them, especially Kun Baotan, because he was looking quite vexed now as Lin Ling and Sana continued to savage them at Gu Takes All.

Looking around the table, he sighed and finished his cup of wine, then turned to Arai. “I am going to go socialize for a bit,” he said. “Do you want to come take a walk, or are you happy to stay here?”

“I’ll stay here,” Arai shrugged, glancing over at the card game, then at Sana.

It was the response he expected, given she seemed to want to just be alone with her thoughts, but at the same time, seeing her mope in that way was… disheartening.

“Oh, if you see Grandmaster Li,” his daughter added, “I didn’t get a chance to talk about the house formations yet.”

“Noted,” he replied drily, standing up and waving for the others to remain seated, though only Bai Jiang had made any real move to stand. “In that case, I’ll be back in a bit…”

“We will still be here,” Arai said, giving him a smile that again didn’t quite reach her eyes.

“…”

Giving her an encouraging smile, he patted her shoulder, nodded to the others and then headed off through the crowd towards the Celestial Blossom Teahouse.

Her lack of interest in coming with him was… disappointing, he again found himself reflecting, given how vibrant the banquet was. He had somewhat hoped she would come with him to see her painting; however, it was also clear that Arai needed some space, and having your father hover over your shoulder was not how that occurred. It was a sad truth he recalled from his own youth, which felt even longer ago than it was right now, in the grand scheme of things.

The ceremonial guards on the doorway glanced at him once but didn’t bother to stop him or ask any questions. It was far enough into the evening that the ‘exclusivity’ of the party was not limited by access to the teahouse itself. The main hall was bustling with folk talking about the day, the celebrations in Blue Water City, the various competitions in honour of the youngest of the Ha clan Patriarchs and now, with some anticipation, the tournament to take place outside.

“—Sir Jun! What a pleasant surprise!”

Turning he found Kun Talshin had spotted him and was quickly making his way through the groups to him.

“Likewise, my friend. But why the formality?” he inquired with a raised eyebrow, as he accepted Talshin’s bow of greeting.

“Around here, if you don’t wave a title you just get empty-eyed looks,” Talshin, who was dressed in formal Kun clan robes, laughed. “Are you here looking for Arai and Sana?”

“I met them outside,” he replied, accepting a cup of wine from a passing servant. “They are watching the warm-up rounds for the tournament.”

“Ah, okay,” Talshin nodded amiably.

His association with the son of Kun Jiao, the current Lord of the Kun clan, was an odd one, he had to admit. They had first crossed paths almost two hundred years ago, when he was still just an Immortal and Kun Talshin was still the favoured scion of the Kun clan, much like Kun Xian now was. They were both about the same age… but divided by the status of Senior and Junior by a bit of what he had come to recognise as ‘signature bureaucratic buggery’ on behalf of the powers that continued to be in Yin Eclipse, though that had not stopped them becoming friends back then.

Now, he had gotten married, had three children and become a widower, while Kun Talshin, who had been the Kun clan envoy to the Blue Duke’s Court, much like Juni was now to the Hunter Bureau, had been crippled by an assassin during the Three Schools Conflict. Their friendship had endured, but it was hard, sometimes, not to see a reflection, or perhaps a reminder, of his younger, more carefree self in Talshin…

“Then I suppose you will be here to see Arai’s painting,” Talshin added, giving him a look that made his stomach sink, mostly because it was a statement rather than a question.

“Given how everyone seems to be talking so mysteriously about it…” he replied, “it does seem so.”

“Mmmmm…” Talshin stared into the middle distance, sighed and then nodded, which was again, he had to reflect, not an encouraging sign.

-What did she even paint?

-It wasn’t bad or something, was it? It shouldn’t be, given they were talking about it like it won, earlier…

“Let me show you then,” Talshin said, motioning for him to follow. “Even though I watched her paint it, I have been meaning to take a closer look at it anyway.”

Quashing his mild confusion and concern on Arai’s behalf, he nodded and followed as Talshin headed off through the hall towards the covered courtyard in the centre of the teahouse where the formal elements of the banquet had been held.

“So, how was your trip to… Blue Tree Town, I believe?” Talshin asked after a moment as they threaded their way through the groups of people. “It was to discuss cooperation between the guards for training in rural villages near the Shadow Forest, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, it was,” he replied. “And, actually, not bad really. Being away from home for that long is a bit of a chore and it is hard not to worry about Arai and Sana, but that aside, it was quite pleasant really…”

“—until the early rains?” Talshin remarked, sipping his own wine.

“Yeah,” he agreed. “The rain coming early led to meetings being postponed while the various villages there all scrambled to make sure their crops were secure, which developed into several ‘on the job’ exercises that I was asked to be part of the expert audience for. Otherwise I would have been back three days ago.”

“It seems to be like that everywhere. The severity has caught everyone off guard,” Talshin agreed as they stepped out into the covered courtyard proper.

Here, it was a little less crowded – mostly because the banquet had moved to the veranda on the second floor, he supposed, so that the dignitaries could watch the tournament without risk of being rained on. Now that courtyard was being used to display the various works from the scroll painting competition for others to admire.

The winner was immediately apparent: A vibrant diorama given pride of place in the courtyard, it depicted all the events that had occurred at the banquet prior to its painting, structured around everyone giving a toast of good fortune to Patriarch Ha Dongfei. It was absolutely the work of someone who had, for a junior anyway, remarkable comprehensions in Principles of Yin and Yang and a good grasp of feng shui and Martial Intent. The painter in question was also easy to pick out—

“The dark-haired young woman who is the centre of attention over there is Lu Meimei, whose painting there ‘won’, in the end,” Talshin remarked, pointing out a vibrant young woman wearing the gown of an inner disciple of the Pill Sovereign Sect standing around talking to several other youths some distance away, “and beside her is the second place winner, Deng Fuguai, of the Four Peacocks Court, here ‘incognito’ apparently but stirred to take part after seeing that Young Lady Lu was here. The third place is… over there,” Talshin added, picking out a third young woman with dark hair streaked with gold, dressed in a pale blue and gold gown, “Ha Ningmei, from Haijing City’.”

“All of them are from Nine Moons Province?” he observed, looking around for Arai’s. “And only one from the Ha clan? I imagine that’s a bitter pill to swallow for Ha Feiyuan and Ha Wentian? Given the Ha clan prides themselves on more scholarly arts.”

“They are, and it is,” Talshin said drily. “Though Lu Meimei’s mother hails from the Ha clan in Blue Water City, so most are claiming it as a spiritual first place…”

“I see,” he chuckled.

“Arai’s is over there,” Talshin added, pointing helpfully to the right though he had already found it, in any case, given his daughter’s style, influenced by Ruliu’s teaching as it was, was quite distinctive to his eyes.

Even at a short distance, as they walked over to it, his daughter’s talent was clear with every brush stroke. There was a faint painterly allure to the whole thing that, unlike all but the winning and second place pieces, drew you in gently to the scene, which was of fifty cultivators from all walks of life, walking across the Queen Mother’s Bridge in the town… led by sisterly forms of the Seven Stars to join the Queen Mother, who stood at the far side, her form almost merged with the painting as a whole.

There was a sense of sadness to the piece, of life lived and lost, that no junior Arai’s age should have been able to paint so vividly in a just and fair world.

Unlike the other highly rated pictures, few lingered before it in comparison to the more vibrant and joyous scenes of the others. Only a beautiful, dark-haired woman in a formal gown of the Ha clan – purple, with red and white foxes on the panels – was looking at it currently.

The painting to its left was a depiction of the ‘Star of Beauty’, which was in its own way quite excellent as well, if clearly lacking a certain sense of ‘holistic allure’ compared to his daughter’s.

He glanced sideways at the fifth and fourth place scenes, one of which was of Patriarch Dongfei vanquishing a qi beast, while the other was of a garden laid out in the style of the Ha clan. Both were technically better, but neither had the presence of his daughter’s painting…

-Had Arai’s not gotten sixth here, even the seventh place one would be better than these two?

Setting that oddity aside, he considered his daughter’s diorama further. If she had wanted to win and flatter like the other paintings ranked ahead of her, she could have painted a garden scene, or a flower themed for the Ha clan.

“It is still ranked sixth it seems, with Ha Lianmei’s at seventh,” Talshin mused after also considering them for a moment. “Most of those who could compete here and ‘win’ on our dear province’s behalf are currently in Blue Water City as I understand it, vying for the interest of the Imperial Princess Lian, while others, like your daughter, picked…”

“—difficult subject matter?” he remarked, clasping his hands behind his back so he wouldn’t be tempted to stroke his short beard.

“Yes… that is an excellent way of putting it,” Talshin agreed.

While the tone and the technique were very much Arai’s, the subject matter and the sense of hope and loss in it did not make it easy to look at. The scene was almost a challenge, a thesis on what the Queen Mother represented, especially when compared to the ‘Star of Beauty’ next to it. That was the vision of a young girl, enamoured of the beauty and the majesty of that mythical figure, of the lofty heights and the beautiful music.

In comparison, what his daughter had painted asked questions that few juniors would want to contemplate, let alone answer. There was hope there, but it was almost nihilistic, a lamentation of lives lived and lost, their final reward immortality of a different sort entirely as those figures gently guided them away.

That she had encapsulated it with aspects of the Eight Trigrams Manual he had taught her just made the whole picture all the more alluring in a haunting way. There was a completeness to the composition that took you by the hand and led you through each little scene, showed a little hint of their life, of the things they had left behind. To him, who had seen many things over the years, the only word for it was…

“It is cruel,” he sighed softly, because it was.

That this kind of statement had come from the brush of an eighteen-year-old girl, rather than someone who had lived centuries… left him with the complicated and rather unsettling feeling that he was a bad father. Whether it was cruel to him, or cruel generally was hard to say, but looking at it, it was hard not to feel a little accused.

‘You set me on the path to show me this…’ he could hear Arai’s accusatory voice within the painting itself.

-No wonder she was lauded for this and then won nothing, he reflected with a sad sigh.

“Cruel… She does indeed capture that essence very clearly…” the other woman murmured, glancing sideways at them, then doing a slight double take and turning to greet them properly.

“–Ah! Young… Lord Kun Talshin,” she said giving him a restrained, if proper, greeting and barely hesitating in calling him by his proper title, which given she was wearing a Ha clan gown was almost effusive praise.

“Young Lady Ha Shi Lian,” Talshin replied respectfully.

“…”

“And Sir Jun…” she added, focusing on him and giving him a polite bow, even as he placed who she was, with some surprise, because he had not actually crossed paths with her in quite a few years.

“Lady Ha Shi Lian,” he replied cordially, saluting her politely as befitted her station as the eldest daughter of Lady Ha Shi Miao, one of the more influential elders within the wider region of West Flower Picking Town.

Much like Kun Talshin, she was someone from the same ‘social generation’, in that they had all been at the crest of the so-called ‘wave’ some 150 years ago, around the time of the Year of the Blood Eclipse. However, while both he and Talshin had already been ‘Immortals’ at that point, she had just been a young girl, one of the precious few stars that managed to survive those turbulent times.

Perhaps because of that, she had resisted the usual fate of secondary daughters of the clans and not married young, instead joining the Green Fang Pagoda, rising to the rank of inner disciple if he recalled right, when she became an Immortal some fifty years ago.

She was also a cousin of… Ha Shi Qingfao, who was not someone he much wanted to think about in all honesty, though, perhaps proving that every family had its complications, Ha Lian had never liked Qingfao either as he recalled.

“To think that your daughter, young as she is… could have seen enough to paint this,” Ha Lian murmured, swirling her wine in the cup in her hand as she also considered the scene further.

“Indeed, though it is not a scene for a birthday celebration,” he agreed, sipping his own wine, which had been somewhat neglected since he claimed it earlier.

“No… it is not,” she agreed, after a short pause. “It is to the Patriarch’s credit that he is someone who appreciates talent. ‘Would that I had her eye at her age… perhaps I would have less regrets now…’ was what he said when he cast the tie-breaking vote in her favour.”

“—Yet, without your mother’s vote, it would be your niece Lianmei’s painting here in sixth, not Arai’s,” Talshin pointed out.

Ha Lian looked sideways at Talshin for a long moment, then nodded. “It is as you say. My mother also appreciates talent. In any case—”

“I suppose I should be pleased, that others appreciate my daughter’s talents,” he cut in, noting that there was a certain edge to their discourse for some reason. “But I do feel compelled to ask at this point, knowing her as well I as do… why did she paint this scene at all?”

“…”

Both Kun Talshin and Ha Shi Lian turned to look at him, and it was certainly not his imagination that both suddenly looked rather… uneasy.

“The ‘disappearances’ around Jade Willow Village…” Ha Lian replied, after the pause had grown awkward enough that he was starting to wonder if he didn’t need to go find Arai in person and just ask her. “Surely you have heard about the bandits up there at this point?”

“…”

It was not the answer he was expecting, nor the tone, given the last bit had been almost pleading.

The question of the steady disappearance of travellers in the Jade Willow region was something that had been quietly being investigated for some time by the relevant authorities at both a regional and provincial level. It was not something he had been personally involved with, in his role as a Civilian Official working with the Regional Guard Authority, but he knew several of those who were.

“I only got back to town this evening,” he replied, looking back at the painting.

-This relates to those disappearances?

He looked again at the painting, depicting what were certainly fifty people from all walks of life returning to the Queen Mother’s embrace, finding his eyes once more drawn to the flower sellers who were the central focus of the painting in many ways…

In his mind’s eye, he saw a young woman handing him a white chrysanthemum on a bridge, heard her soft words… saw her face within the Star of Guidance… leading two young girls across to that final, ethereal figure that was as much part of the whole painting as any single part of it.

It took… far less effort than a part of him liked to push away the feelings of fury, pain and loss that blossomed in his heart for a brief moment and take a mental step back from the picture.

“…”

“Brother Jun?”

Both Ha Lian and Talshin clearly caught something though, because Talshin looked slightly concerned now. Ha Lian, who was also an Immortal and actually not that much younger than either of them, was also looking sideways at him, but with an expression that was suddenly just a little bit more respectful.

“Sorry,” he murmured. “It is hard not to be drawn to the little things within it…”

“Yes,” Ha Lian agreed with a sigh of her own. “It does have that effect in parts…”

“As to how—” Talshin started to say.

“Ah–! Here you are, Lian!”

A melodious voice cut through the moment and Jiang Seong, the de-facto head of the Green Fang Pagoda, appeared out of the milling groups, dressed in a rather figure-hugging green and gold gown and carrying a cup of wine. With her, he noticed, came Kun Xianfang, who normally just went by the moniker of ‘Old Xian’, dressed in a Kun clan robe in deference to the occasion.

“Talshin,” she added, nodding to Kun Talshin politely, before turning to him with a smile. “And Sir Jun as well?”

“Teacher,” Ha Lian murmured, saluting her formally.

“Fairy Seong, you look as radiant as ever,” he said, quashing the brief flash of annoyance at the interruption and saluting her politely in return before also bowing to Old Xian and, recalling that the old expert abhorred titles, simply saying, “Sir Xian, you also look well.”

“…”

Talshin and Ha Lian both flinched slightly, neither having apparently realised the old man had come with Fairy Seong, which was fair he supposed, given his realm was greater than both theirs, and Fairy Seong had a certain… presence, that drew the eye.

“Lord Xianfang,” Kun Talshin saluted the old man quickly.

“Lord Xianfang,” Ha Shi Lian murmured, following suit.

“…”

“I must commend your daughter,” Fairy Seong said to him with a warm smile, before turning to look at the painting once again. “I did not expect that she could paint a scene like this.”

“Indeed,” Old Xian agreed, giving the picture an appraising look. “Your daughter is a young lady of many talents.”

“That is high praise,” he replied, gratified by the old man’s forthright words. “Though I have to ask: I was not aware she had crossed your path?”

“Oh, I bumped into her in Jade Willow Village last week,” Old Xian chuckled. “Quite by accident in fact. I was there seeing to some unrelated matters and training Little Xian a bit.”

“I see,” he nodded. “Thank you for taking an interest in her. It is tough sometimes.”

“I know… It is difficult to watch them fly out of the nest,” Old Xian agreed, giving him a sympathetic pat on the shoulder. “Though your daughter can actually fly, unlike some I’ve seen.”

Ha Shi Lian coughed into her wine. Talshin also stifled a laugh, which diffused the awkward tension somewhat.

“That said, I was just saying to Talshin and Young Lady Lian here, the scene she chose… is not really one for a birthday celebration…” he conceded. “If she had just painted a flower or something… normal, it would have been better received surely?”

“Perhaps, although this does make a striking statement,” Fairy Seong mused, sipping her own wine as she looked at the painting critically. “Even if it is a somewhat challenging one for most of the audience here. I must also praise your daughter in this regard. It was probably her choice of subject matter that was the decisive factor in the end…”

Recalling what Talshin and Ha Lian had just said, he could only nod at that, conceding that she was probably right. Something about it had apparently swayed Ha Shi Miao to pick it over her own niece’s effort after all.

Though that again returned him to the question he had asked before Jiang Seong and Kun Xianfang joined them – why had his daughter painted this at all?

“—Her achievement is all the more impressive, considering she is basically the ‘leader’ for our region in this competition,” Fairy Seong continued, giving him an encouraging smile. “As her father, you should be proud she has grasped this much of her mother’s talent.”

“That neither your daughter, nor Miss Lian’s niece, Lianmei, placed higher than this is just the sad reality of these kinds of competitions,” Old Xian added, with a more philosophical tone. “Our province has suffered much in the last century or so. To be behind the curve is only to be expected…”

“True,” Fairy Seong mused. “Though the Deng girl did not compete either, nor did Jing Sunhee…”

“—Regarding Senior Sunhee… that book came out a few days ago,” Ha Lian coughed, looking a bit awkward suddenly. “There was that incident as well, at Quibo’s Celestial Reading Hall…?”

“Oh… of course,” Fairy Seong sighed. “That would explain why she is not here. No doubt Young Lady Kun would also have done well, had she participated beyond playing the music to give both Jun Arai and Ha Lianmei their ‘inspiration’.”

-She painted this to Juni playing the flute? he mused, considering the painting again. That certainly explains the slightly dream-like setting.

“Perhaps,” Old Xian nodded. “However, just like Miss Jun, she is unfortunately limited.”

As much as he wanted to deny that, Old Xian did have a point. The art of scroll painting was, like formations, one in which you could, with talent and perseverance, excel well beyond your cultivation realm, but even so, there was little Arai could do to compete with Dao Seeking or quasi-Immortals with decades of experience, let alone actual Immortals. Even among those Immortal realm ‘juniors’ who did remain in the region, only a select few, like the aforementioned Jing Sunhee or Ha Shi Lian beside him, could genuinely compete against the likes of Lu Meimei.

“I suppose,” Fairy Seong agreed with a resigned sigh of her own. “Had I realised, I would have had Lian here compete, rather than supply the music in place of Young Lady Kun Juni and Miss Ha Qingluo.”

Ha Shi Lian didn’t look that enthused by that suggestion though, he noted.

The whole exchange was a reminder, really, that not everyone was as aloof as Kun Xianfang. As a leader of one of the province’s more famous sects, if not in the same league as the three schools, the fact that nobody from Blue Water Province, never mind the West Flower Picking region itself, placed among the top five of a competition like this, which played to her sect’s strengths, would not sit well with her.

Notwithstanding what Old Xian had said moments before about their region’s difficulties in the last few decades, to have disciples who came with the Patriarch’s associates win out so comprehensively, was, in a way, a slap in the face to the prosperity of their whole region – only compounded by Bai Jiang having won the alchemy competition, another provincial strength, as well.

“Well, it is what it is,” Old Xian sighed, staring around at the other paintings again with a slight grimace. “As disagreeable as it is, those with the Patriarch also have face to preserve and this kind of outcome was pretty much confirmed as soon as Ha Dongfei put forward an opportunity to view that painting of Lu Fu Tao’s up as a prize…”

“—As in the ‘Blue Water Sage’?” he asked a bit dully, wondering if he had heard right.

“Indeed,” Fairy Seong replied, folding her arms, “Ha Dongfei produced a scroll painting from the old Blue Star Hall. How he came by it I have no idea… but probably it was legitimately if he dares show it openly. They were a thing that the old sage drew to allow juniors an opportunity to learn a bit of the path he took.”

Looking over at the first place painting he could only sigh and shake his head, both for the opportunity his daughter had probably missed, and perhaps for the trouble she had dodged.

“So, if I can ask, given you are all so effusive about my daughter’s talents,” he murmured, looking at the four of them and wondering suddenly why his intuition was suggesting that the appearance of Kun Xianfang and Jiang Seong was a bit too timely… “Why did she paint this?”

“…”

Both Kun Talshin and Ha Shi Lian again looked… uneasy, embarrassed almost. That was the only way for him to describe their reticence, though had they been a century younger, he would probably have said ‘squirmed’ instead. Interestingly, Jiang Seong and Kun Xianfang seemed more interested in how they replied than in him asking the question…

“I do believe it was your cousin, was it not?” Ha Lian said at last, casting Talshin a sideways look.

“Xingjuan?” he asked, looking around with a frown.

“No, she is in Blue Water City,” Kun Talshin replied, glancing at Kun Xianfang for some reason. “Arai was with… Kun Xian.”

-Kun Xian… Old Xian’s grandson? His gaze flitted to Old Xian momentarily but the old man’s expression gave away nothing…

“His cousin got into an argument with my niece, Ha Lianmei,” Ha Lian said, clearly as embarrassed as Talshin was.

“My daughter got entangled in an argument between Kun Xian and Ha Lianmei?” He repeated, looking dully from one to the other, as the pieces slotted into place in his head.

-Well, that explains why they look like they are pulling teeth. This is certainly embarrassing for them, he reflected. Though for Arai to get embroiled in something like that?

“That seems somewhat—”

He was about to say ‘out of character,’ but thinking back to earlier, she had been quite put out over something…

“Well, yes,” Talshin started to say, looking embarrassed. “But—”

“It was Qingfao,” Ha Shi Lian said flatly, proving his memory right, that she really didn’t like her ‘cousin’, by throwing him decisively under the cart.

“…”

He closed his eyes for a moment, recalling a scholarly youth with an arrogant manner waving a sword at him and demanding to ‘duel’ him for the right to associate with Ruliu.

-Old rivals always appear when you least expect it, eh? he reflected sourly, opening them again.

Nowadays, Qingfao was a relatively influential official, but back then, over a century and a half ago, he had pursued Ruliu, trying to convince her to marry him instead. She, however, had never reciprocated his intentions in the slightest, always treating him gracefully but with a formal distance in turn. After they had married, Ha Qingfao had mostly set the matter aside, though there had always been an edge to their infrequent interactions.

After Ruliu died though, Qingfao had blamed him, in no uncertain terms, for the loss of his idol.

“What about Ha Qingfao?” he asked, noting that both Old Xian and Fairy Seong were still watching expressionlessly.

“Qingfao was among those who pulled your daughter up to paint in a competition with the seventh place painting…” Talshin muttered, ignoring Ha Lian’s look. “Ha Lianmei is his niece, so probably he was confident in her talents.”

“I see,” he said as diplomatically as he could muster, looking again at the picture of the ‘Star of Beauty’.

-That face… is it from the statue of the ‘beautiful strategist’ in the Grand Shrine? I suppose if she is from the Blue Gate School it makes sense she would be somewhat familiar with it, seeing as it is somewhat well-known, at least in Blue Water City itself.

Something in his tone must have crept out, however, because both Talshin and Ha Lian grimaced.

“I think that is enough,” Old Xian sighed, speaking up at last. “They are right. Your daughter was served badly by my idiot grandson. Little Xian was frustrated with the Ha clan’s juniors in regards to the official acknowledgement—”

“The root of this is certainly that Imperial Acknowledgement,” Fairy Seong added sourly.

“Acknowledgement?” he asked.

“Oh, you were not here for that part?” Fairy Seong replied. “That does explain a bit.”

“No, I just got here about twenty minutes ago,” he said.

“Well, in that case, to give you the context for all this: The Ha clan received an Imperial Acknowledgement, delivered by Qiao Cheng, that commended their role in thwarting a plot on the Princess’s auction in Blue Water City and also tidying up some bandits near Jade Willow Village, something the Kun clan also played a substantial role in, it seems…”

“Oh,” he frowned. “The Imperial Envoy is playing favourites…”

“Yes,” Fairy Seong agreed, giving him a brittle smile.

“Very much so,” Old Xian agreed. “Anyway, my grandson, who believed he knew a little something about this matter, decided to try and make a point. Insults were thrown and in the end it was your daughter who was singled out by others who should have known better.”

“That seems… uncharacteristically forward of her,” he noted. Especially if I consider what Ruliu taught them both…

“Your daughter had no part in it; she just happened to be who Kun Xian was talking to at the time,” Old Xian glowered, now finally looking at Ha Shi Lian, who was still looking embarrassed. “My grandson is a lucky boy. Your daughter is a genuine little talent.”

“Look… Qingfao did something stupid,” Ha Lian said with a formal bow. “I am sure my mother would apologize on our Shi family’s behalf, but because we have some acquaintance, please allow me to do so. Your daughter was caught up in something that was not her fault.”

“…”

“She is the one who should probably receive that apology,” he pointed out.

“I know…” Ha Lian sighed. “But you also deserve it. Qingfao should be ashamed of what he did.”

-Well, that explains why they are both behaving like they were caught stealing, he sighed to himself. And, perhaps, the 'timely arrival’ of Jiang Seong and Kun Xianfang… Did they think I would be properly angry with them?

Self-examining, he had to admit he was rather displeased, though that was tempered with the knowledge that there had been people giving Arai some consideration in these matters. Most of his anger was directed at the knowledge that it could have been a lot worse… given all she had had to do was paint a picture under duress.

-Though the question remains, he reflected a bit glumly to himself. Someone like Qingfao singling her out for this is one thing… but why did she pick a scene like that in the first place?

Staring at the painting, it was hard to shake the feeling that there was a subtle, shaded connection between the various disparate parts.

“You said she was in Jade Willow Village?” he asked Old Xian at last.

“She was,” the old man nodded. “Undertaking ‘clearance’ for the Bureau, though I didn’t cross paths with her until she was navigating the aftermath.”

“She got a search mission as part of the clearance requests,” Kun Talshin added, glancing at Ha Lian again for some reason. “And a teaching request for the village that became political very quickly, as they are wont to this time of year. Later, she got another request to look for a missing elder from the local Pavilion as I understand it.”

“A missing elder?” he asked, surprised at that.

“That’s unusual. Those rarely go out on clearance,” Fairy Seong observed.

“Indeed, they do not,” he agreed, mulling that over. “Even if our province is short-staffed since the Three Schools Conflict, that is not something that would usually end up with a junior.”

“I think that request came directly from our town’s authority,” Talshin muttered. “It asked her to find out what had happened to that elder, who was from the Ha clan’s Li family… before this banquet.”

“She found him?” he asked, still looking at the different faces in the painting, trying to piece together what was continuing to subtly bother him about this whole mess.

“Not… as such,” Talshin sighed, shaking his head. “Though the elder is here now… or was earlier,” he added, looking around, presumably for the elder in question.

“There are a few elements of this that are not good to talk about here,” Old Xian’s voice suddenly echoed in his head. “At least not openly.”

“I… see,” he replied, masking his frown.

Old Xian looked around for a long moment, then nodded subtly. “As Ha Lian alluded to earlier, your daughter is actually more involved in this matter of the Acknowledgement than it might initially appear. You are familiar with the ‘disappearances’ that have been occurring in the hinterlands of the Jade Willow region?”

“I am,” he murmured, suddenly feeling rather uneasy as he continued to look at the fifty figures in the painting…

The ‘question’ of the ongoing disappearances in the Jade Willow Region had first been marked after an unusual tetrid attack on Bolai Village, as far as he knew. The matter had been investigated locally, but all the leads had vanished, so in the end the Provincial Military Authority under the control of the Blue Duke, Cao Leyang, had passed the matter on to the Blue Gate School to look into. That collaboration had even extended to the Hunter Bureau in recent weeks, with various missions that were conveniently placed in the Jade Willow Region being suborned to investigate them.

“So how did my daughter get embroiled in that? Don’t tell me—?”

He had a momentary flash of panic that she might have been attacked or something, though clearly she was here, safe and well…

“No, well, probably you deserve to hear the whole tale from her,” Old Xian replied, assuaging his worries somewhat. “But basically, in the course of doing her clearance missions, she stumbled into the source of those disappearances—”

“A group of bandits operating near the Red Pit, using the disturbances of last season for cover,” Talshin added, also shifting to conversing with soul sense. “Those same bandits seem to be linked to both the disappearances that have been plaguing that region and the herb smuggling…”

“Ha Lian’s younger brother was among those who vanished,” Fairy Seong added softly.

His gaze found the figure in Ha clan robes buying a flower, in the middle of the painting, and the last pieces of the puzzle slotted into place; why Ha Lian was here, why her mother might have chosen Arai over her own niece in the competition…

“Yes, my little brother Shimo,” he blinked as Ha Lian actually spoke in their little soul sense conversation directly, her voice sounding a little forlorn, in contrast to the cool demeanour she had when speaking out loud. “He went up there with some others. They convinced him to go because he had some knowledge of those valleys… The others got captured, but when I asked Yuanfei, the boy who led them all up there, he had the gall to say my brother led them badly and then went missing in the Red Pit. They didn’t even look for him…”

Though there was clear emotion in her ‘soul voice’, Ha Lian herself just stood there looking at the painting in silence, though he noted she was holding her hands together in front of her now, hidden from view.

“I am sorry to hear that,” he murmured, looking at the teenager, who was laughing, perhaps at a joke that one of the flower sellers had made as he bought his flower. There was nothing more he could say really.

Ha Lian nodded sadly at his words, still staring at the picture.

“These fifty… She actually painted the disappeared individuals?” he finally realised, his gaze tracing the merchants, the young woman in a green dress with a Jade Willow Sect insignia, the spirit farmers on their way to market, the flower sellers…

“How were a bunch of flower sellers killed by bandits?” he asked dully.

“…”

“They, and many of those there, came from poor neighbourhoods in our town,” Talshin clarified. “They were lured north by promise of more lucrative jobs on estates in Jade Willow…”

“I… see,” he replied, suddenly feeling a bit cold. “And they were all ‘killed’, by these bandits?”

“Indeed, that is the official line,” Fairy Seong replied with a sigh.

“Though it differs rather significantly from the reality of it,” Old Xian added.

“That does not surprise me,” he murmured with a grimace, his gaze re-tracing the various figures and scenes.

“Your daughter was the one who recovered the bodies, very astutely taking the knowledge of them straight to my niece,” Old Xian continued.

“Juni went straight to me, and then Elder Lianmei,” Talshin added.

“That was when I also got involved, laterally,” Old Xian concluded. “Much as I said earlier.”

“And that’s how Kun Xian knew the Kun clan were involved?” he asked.

“Yes,” Old Xian sighed. “He is a good lad, but he has a teenager’s pride and lacks judgement.

“In any case, the evidence we gathered suggests that this and what occurred in Blue Water City are closely intertwined, and both have disturbing connections to the ‘Year of the Blood Eclipse’, though whether through happenstance or design is still unclear. Kun Lianmei is looking into that.”

“Oh…”

That was all he managed to say there, because that certainly put matters in a different perspective. It certainly explained Jiang Seong’s interest as well, given he recalled her sect had paid a heavy price in resisting the Blood Eclipse Cult back then.

“Why can that hellish year just not die its death?” he murmured. “Must it continue to propagate sorrow like this, just like those accursed trees in the Red Pit?”

“Mmm…” Old Xian agreed, while Fairy Seong simply nodded.

“—It is indeed a pity,” another old voice mused. “This one is by far the most evocative of the bunch.”

He flinched slightly, as did Talshin and Ha Lian, all of them apparently having entirely failed to catch the arrival of the vaguely Confucian old man who was now standing beside them, arms clasped behind his back, examining the painting. He had no overt presence beyond that of a slightly travel-worn Confucian scholar wearing robes vaguely in the Ha clan style.

“—Ah, I did not mean to interrupt your contemplation,” the old scholar added wryly, stroking his beard.

“Not… at all, Old Kai,” Old Xian replied, actually saluting the old man as if he was a senior.

“Old Scholar Kai,” Fairy Seong also murmured, also bowing formally.

“Xianfang, you look more venerable every time we cross paths,” ‘Old Kai’ mused, as a faint twinkle in his eye took in their group. “And Fairy Seong, you look as lovely as ever.”

“I would not have thought this gathering interested you,” Old Xian remarked, while Fairy Seong actually blushed a little.

“I happened to be in town for my regular get together at the Cherry Wine Pagoda,” Old Kai shrugged. “Still, I must say, I do like this painting. The composition is excellent and it has a sense of belonging that really reflects the painter’s heart.”

“It was young Jun’s daughter who painted it,” Old Xian said, putting an arm around his shoulder and pushing him to the fore slightly, even as he tried to work out why the name ‘Old Kai’ sounded somewhat familiar.

“Indeed?” the old Confucian scholar mused, fixing him with an interested eye for a moment, again stroking his beard. “A talented child is a treasure. You should be proud of her…”

“Thank you,” he murmured respectfully.

“The style is somewhat familiar as well,” the old man mused, turning back to it. “Ah… ‘Cherry Trees in Wine Season’. I commissioned a talented young woman to paint the cherry trees in my father’s garden. Oh, it must have been a century or more ago? Jun Ruliu…”

“…”

“Ruliu is my late wife,” he replied, somewhat caught out and quietly gratified both by the fact that this old man had one of his wife’s works, and that he had recognised her style in Arai’s so quickly.

“She passed away?” Old Kai frowned, looking a bit distant, then sighed softly and gave him a formal bow. “Truly the years are cruel. I, Kai, am sorry for your loss.”

“Thank you, Honoured Scholar Kai, for your kind words,” he said, accepting the old man’s regards.

“Just Old Kai is fine,” the old scholar chuckled, waving him away. “We old fellows only get stooped and weary if we think on all the titles we must carry around.”

“…”

Off to the side, he noted that Fairy Seong was still looking a bit unnerved for some reason.

“Wisdom for the ages, Old Kai,” Old Xian nodded in agreement.

“—Hah! You really are shameless!”

The exclamation cut through their conversation rather crudely.

Turning with the others, he found that several rather inebriated youths, including a quasi-Immortal cultivator from the Pill Sovereign Sect, who had just spoken up, standing near Lu Meimei, had rounded on a pair who had been admiring the third place painting.

“Who is shameless, flaunting your empty interpretations!” one half of that pair, a pretty young woman with reddish-brown hair, dressed in a white and blue gown, snapped back with a flushed expression, folding her arms.

“S-senior sister…” The youth standing next to her, in a similarly coloured robe, looked a bit less certain he noticed, even though both of them were Dao Seeking, so not at that much of a disadvantage—

“Deng dogs!”

One of the drunken youths sent a wave of intent-infused soul sense at the pair, clearly intended to intimidate them with his declaration.

“H-hey!”

Both girl and boy blocked the worst of it, but the immediate clash between their soul-sense infused intent also washed over them, as well as everyone else within twenty-odd paces.

He didn’t even bother to pretend, just let it hit his own soul sense and vanish like fog. What hit the others also vanished like it was never there.

“…”

“Ah—!” the junior brother’s face went pale as he took in their group standing there, not more than ten paces away, staring at the two groups who had just interrupted their conversation like they were strange, somewhat offensive mushrooms.

“…”

The young woman went a bit green-faced, while the quasi-Immortal, who had just done the equivalent of pouring a drink over all their heads, opened and shut his mouth, the colour draining from his angry countenance as he took in Fairy Seong, Old Xian, Old Kai and then the rest of them in turn. Lu Meimei and the others were sidling away very slowly as well, with the looks of people trying to project that they had nothing to do with this.

Off to the side, he noted that two elders from the Pill Sovereign Sect and an old man in a blue and white robe were also now looking in their general direction, sweating visibly.

“…”

Neither Old Xian nor Old Kai said anything, simply transferring their dull looks to the two alchemists, who bowed apologetically to their group.

“That has happened a few times,” Fairy Seong murmured apologetically, dusting off her sleeve as she held the sweating perpetrators, including those trying to distance themselves from the youth, in place with her gaze alone. “The Patriarch’s ‘prize’ has kindled something of an aura of superiority.”

“S-s-sorry!” the youth in the blue and white robe stammered to them, just about managing to bow.

“I suppose it is good to be young, as they say,” Old Kai chuckled, shaking his head, then dismissing the whole scene and turning back to them. “In any event, I will continue to see what is what.”

“A pleasure,” Old Xian murmured, saluting the old scholar while the groups of youths exhaled in relief.

He, Fairy Seong, Kun Talshin and Ha Shi Lian all followed suit, then watched as the old man wandered off without any further ceremony, continuing to peruse the portraits.

“To think he would actually show up here…” Fairy Seong shivered, sounding awed as much as she did shocked.

“I must confess, I don’t really know him?” Kun Talshin grimaced apologetically, while Ha Lian was also looking rather nonplussed.

“Old Kai is a… character, of Blue Water City,” Old Xian mused. “He was around when I was a brat… very eccentric but an excellent old fellow. He invented that game all the kids are playing.”

“Gu Takes All?” Ha Lian gawked. “That was Gambler Kai?”

-Ah… that is why he seemed so familiar, he realised. Beside him, Talshin was also looking after the old scholar with a somewhat surprised expression.

“Mmm-hmm,” Fairy Seong nodded, brushing her hands down her skirts for a moment. “He tends to pick a millennium and follow a philosophy… He has been Confucian for a few hundred years now, but when I first encountered him, he was a Stoic.”

“…”

Looking after the figure of the old scholar, who had stopped to admire one of the flower paintings that had barely even ranked in the top twenty, he was about to turn back when he caught an absolute beauty wearing a gown in Kun clan colours that could only be described as ‘striking’ walking out of the crowd towards them with a purposeful manner.

“—Was that Old Gambler Kai?” she asked, glancing after the old scholar.

He stared dully at the veiled beauty for a moment, before registering that she was, in fact, Kun Juni, wearing a dress that had certainly been picked out for her by someone else, because he had never seen her in any garb that… forthright.

“Sister… I was just about to come look for you,” Talshin murmured, gesturing to him. “Jun Han was—”

“…”

“Young Lady Kun…” he murmured, saluting her as her position required—

He frowned, feeling something try to tug him towards openly admiring her for wearing the dress as well as she was.

-Is it enchanted?

It was only a matter of less than a second to break the lingering allure, thankfully, but it left a slightly unclean sensation in his head, given she was basically his daughter’s friend.

He noted that even Ha Lian was looking a touch flushed as Juni accepted his salute with a slight sigh…

Old Xian shook his head.

Juni turned to Ha Lian and took her hands: “May I offer my condolences to you and your mother from the Kun clan on behalf of your brother?”

“…”

“I will let my mother know,” Ha Shi Lian murmured, bowing, her expression somewhat complex.

At this point, looking around, he had to admit that their group had become something of the centre of attention. Nowhere else were two – three, he supposed, if he counted himself loosely among that rank in this context – seniors, standing around openly talking about a painting. Not to mention two striking beauties among the younger generation and Talshin.

Juni let go of Ha Lian’s hands and turned to him.

“Sorry about this,” she murmured apologetically, waving her fan at the painting.

He nodded, understanding why she didn’t bow in this context. Probably Old Xian would drag his grandson around at some point and make the boy apologise formally in any case.

“You will have questions about this,” Juni added, glancing at the painting.

“I am sure my daughters can supply most of the context,” he replied. “But if there is more to be said…”

“I rather fear there is,” Kun Juni sighed, not quite looking at Ha Lian for some reason. “Though here is probably not the place. Perhaps you might come to the Kun estates in the morning?”

“Of course,” he agreed.

“I have to say, you might actually wear that dress better than your grandmother,” Fairy Seong murmured, changing the topic of conversation.

“…”

Juni stared at the leader of the Green Fang Pagoda, who was herself, he now noted, wearing a dress that was fairly… figure-hugging, though not anywhere near as revealing, and put forth her best ‘polite smile’. Old Xian just laughed softly, shaking his head.

“Perhaps we might go outside in any case. We are becoming something of a focus of attention,” Fairy Seong added, rolling her eyes.

Glancing around again, he could only agree. The disturbance of a few moments ago had not been that subtle and quite a few others, including some from the Din clan, the Lu clan and even the group from the Ling clan, were all looking in their general direction now.

“Hmmm, yes,” Old Xian nodded. “The air will certainly be clearer out there, and I suppose I should check what my errant grandson is up to…”

“Fighting in the warm-up matches, Grand Uncle,” Juni replied drily. “He is on a fifteen-match winning streak, while Kun Baotan is on a nine-match one…”

“Well, at least they are making trouble for the deserving for once,” Old Xian grunted, starting to walk towards the exit.

He gave the painting one final look and then followed after Old Xian and the others, catching a youth asking “Why were all those elders staring at that painting?” behind him as he left.

Juni fell in beside him a moment later, her body language somewhat neutral, but her mood clearly embarrassed.

“I can only apologise for Kun Xian,” she muttered softly as they threaded their way through the crowd, back into the main hall of the teahouse. “I will make sure he makes it up to Arai somehow.”

“It’s… well I suppose no harm came of it in the end,” he replied. “I will let my daughter decide what she wants.”

“…”

Juni stared ahead for a moment as they walked on, then nodded in silence.

The atmosphere outside was, perhaps in an attempt to personally slight Old Xian, not ‘clearer’ in any sense. Fireworks were occasionally bursting overhead, showering down glittering cascades of flower petals and dancing animals, while the crowd around the square were cheering and booing the fight on the stage in equal measure. That spectacle turned out to be Kun Xian… now fighting three youths from the Pill Sovereign Sect, who were trying to use basic barrier talismans to box him in, without any real success.

Arriving back at the table, he found Arai, Sana and Lin Ling had been joined by Han Shu along with the group from the Kun clan and were now enjoying some wine and refreshments while watching the ‘melee’ with some amusement. Upon seeing them, they all stood and saluted with varying degrees of propriety.

Sitting back down beside Arai, who had not really moved from where she had been, he watched the fight on the stage before them for a moment, wondering how to even start the conversation, or if he should.

“So, how did it go? Did you find Grandmaster Li?” his daughter asked.

“I didn’t see him,” he answered apologetically, recalling her request.

“But you did see my painting, I suppose?” Arai remarked, not quite accusingly but there was certainly a slight edge to his daughter’s tone.

“I bumped into Talshin here,” he said in the end, as Talshin also took a seat across from them. “Yes, I did see it. It is very impressive… though not, I suspect, intended to win plaudits at a birthday celebration.”

“No… I suppose it is not,” Arai sighed. “But I was just… well, I suppose we can talk about it later?”

“I think we must,” he agreed softly, accepting the cup of wine she had poured for him. “I am sorry that my old baggage made trouble for you…”

“You mean Ha Qingfao?” his daughter asked.

“You… know about that?” he blinked, because as far as he knew he had never spoken about those days to either of his daughters, certainly not about people like Qingfao.

“…”

“I… am sorry about my cousin,” Ha Lian, who had also now seated herself nearby, cut in, actually making good on her apology much quicker than he had expected of her. “What he did was not proper, both today… and earlier.”

“Earlier?” he asked. There is more to this mess?

“Official Qingfao came by the house… with a bunch of officials, the morning after I got back. They tried to make a big deal of a summons, but in the process made such a ruckus that it disturbed half the neighbourhood,” Arai explained with a grimace. “Captain Li came in the end and sorted everything out.”

“Yes… it caused a lot of problems,” Ha Shi Lian grimaced, looking at him.

-He came by…?

He stared up at the sky for a moment, wondering suddenly if perhaps he could get away with calling Ha Shi Qingfao out for a friendly exchange of ‘views’.

“Qingfao did some stupid things of his own accord,” Ha Shi Lian muttered, not meeting his eyes for a moment, before bowing again. “His foolish actions do not reflect our Shi family’s view. I just want to make that clear.”

“So, that is why you are here,” he asked her.

“That… was inadvertent,” Ha Shi Lian said after a long pause. “I just wanted to see the painting, given I was stuck playing music for the whole competition. My apologies, I didn’t mean to make things awkward.”

“I see…” he nodded.

In the end, he could only accept her words, really. There was an element of ‘the Ha clan being the Ha clan’, he was certain, but among the various families that made it up, the Shi was certainly among the more genuinely upstanding, bar a few throwbacks like Ha Qingfao. A formal apology from Qingfao would never materialize, not unless he was forced at weapon point probably, so someone like Ha Lian taking the time to seek him out, even somewhat serendipitously, was probably as good as it would get for Arai in the context.

“If I could have recovered Ha Shi Shimo… I would have,” Arai said softly, staring into her own wine cup.

Seeing his daughter look like that, he felt another flush of personal shame that she was even having to say such things.

“…”

“Old Xian…” he sent quietly to the old man, as another, rather nasty thought occurred to him in that moment. “Lady Ha Shi has been advocating for a more unified strategy in dealing with outside influences within Blue Water Province, since the Three Schools Conflict, hasn’t she?”

“She has…” Old Xian agreed.

“It was not making her popular in certain quarters,” Fairy Seong added, a reminder that localized soul sense transmissions were not that secure a way to talk, given she was also halfway down the table, with Old Xian.

Ha Lian stared at Arai for a long moment and just nodded.

“Don’t mistake me for someone like Ha Yun, Ha Lianmei… or that boy Caolun,” Ha Lian said softly, pouring herself another cup of wine. “I was your age when the Year of the Blood Eclipse happened… Better than most, I understand just how terrifying that place is.”

His daughter considered Ha Lian, then also nodded slowly. “I… you can tell your mother I will try to paint her a portrait, Lady Lian.”

“And now her only son is dead by bandits with purported links to the local people and he was overlooked for a posthumous honour?” he observed, looking around at the joyful celebration and suddenly feeling even more out of sorts.

“Indeed,” Fairy Seong said with a sigh.

Old Xian agreed. “No matter where you look in the context of this picture, the politics is so rotten I am surprised that that boy Qiao Cheng could deliver that proclamation with a straight face,” Old Xian added, sounding disgusted. “Somewhat ironically though, it was probably the divisive Acknowledgement also overlooking her son which basically let your daughter win her ‘competition’ with Ha Lianmei as much as her displeasure at Qingfao for picking on your daughter.”

He could only sigh at that.

“Ah… there—” Talshin interjected, nudging him in the side and gesturing towards the far side of the combat stage where several youths from the Ha clan were standing around talking rather animatedly to some young women in rather revealing dresses. “Those three at the side were among those formally acknowledged by the Princess.”

Following where Talshin had briefly pointed, he spotted them fairly easily, for two reasons: firstly two of them had obvious inner injuries and secondly because both of them were familiar to him.

“Ha Caolun is the one by the table… The other two were, as I understand it, among those Arai was sent to locate,” Talshin narrated quietly as he considered them. “Ha Tang Lee—”

“—and Ha Yuanfei,” Ha Lian added with a grimace.

“…”

“You recognise them?” Fairy Seong asked, looking at him sideways.

“I do,” he agreed, grimly, before swapping back to soul sense. “There was a request from the Ha clan to look for them that was filed two weeks ago. The details of their original mission looked somewhat suspicious, so Captain Tai picked it out as being suitable for use in scouting out the disappearances as I recall. Those missions were not in general circulation though…”

“—So why did your daughter end up doing one… and on her own?” Old Xian finished for him, also considering the three pensively, from where he sat, further along the table.

Throughout all of the explanation given, that was one bit of information that was not forthcoming, but if it was what his darker fears thought, he was not sure how he would proceed really.

He had placed Arai and Sana within the Pavilion, which afforded anyone over the age of twelve the opportunity to undertake the training to become a Herb Hunter, under the watchful eye of Old Elder Ling and a few others there, who owed him favours, after their mother passed away to protect them from the Ruan clan, her clan. His decision then had been largely based on the Pavilion – who had very clear views on the abduction and disappearance of its members by outside influences – and their training providing them with a protected, if challenging environment outside of a sad home to grow up in and gain some life experience.

That either would rank up as swiftly as they had and rise to a proper rank within the Pavilion was rather unexpected, even to him, who had a very clear idea of his daughters’ talents. Though, since then, he had been pleased to see them both make the friendships they had, which also doubled up as further valuable societal protection against the interest of the Ruan clan, and slowly learn what it meant to be part of something bigger that did good for the region…

To see that Arai was now getting dragged into the cut-throat politics of the clans vying for influence in the province as a result…

“Probably if you want the unvarnished truth, you must ask your daughter,” Old Xian added, giving him a sideways look as his words cut off his guilty musings on his own culpability in his daughter’s problems. “Decide once you have spoken to her.”

Looking at his daughter, who had been making further polite conversation with Ha Lian while they talked away using soul sense, he could only sigh again—

“Father, if you sigh like that you will get grey hair,” Sana, who had come up behind him, remarked gently.

“That would be a terrible shame,” Fairy Seong, further down the table remarked with a smirk. “Wouldn’t it, Lian?”

Ha Lian, who had been about to drink her wine, coughed slightly and glared at her teacher, then looked apologetically at him.

Even Arai was looking at him with amusement now, he noticed, her gloomy countenance finally alleviated somewhat… by a simple, stupid observation.

“You are probably right,” he agreed, sighing a bit more theatrically for effect, given the tension of the previous moment was almost dissipated, thanks to Jiang Seong’s almost martial intervention, before pulling Sana down next to him. “Though all my grey hairs will be because of you two, I fear.”

“Get off!” Sana giggled, eliciting further laughter from around the table.

Shaking his head, he accepted the cup of wine she had poured for him and just about managed to prevent himself sighing a third time.

“To my beautiful daughters,” he declared with a smile, holding up his cup. “And Arai, congratulations on placing first out of all the talents in Blue Water Province,” he added to Arai, who first grimaced, then did actually smile slightly and raise her own cup up as the others echoed the second half of his toast more enthusiastically.

-Indeed, there will be time to worry about it later, he reflected, looking at the pair of them, and the renewed good humour of the table as a whole as Juni also congratulated his daughter again, and Fairy Seong complemented Sana on her robe.

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~ LU JI – BLUE WATER CITY ~

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*Kraaaaaaaakkoooom*

*~oooooooooom*

*~ooooooom*

Sitting on a stone bench at an appropriately safe distance, Lu Ji watched the last of twelve surging pulses of golden lightning, edged with white, strike down out of the overcast night sky into a secluded courtyard of his estates on the heights of Little Harbour, and hit the pill furnace he had set up in the middle of a blue-jade fountain.

-Only twelve strikes… again, he complained with a sigh, glaring up at the dark sky which was still just a little darker than natural as the last vestiges of the pill-induced tribulation faded away.

*Cra—aaaack!*

A moment later, the unfortunate furnace, unable to withstand the bombardment of heavenly grade tribulation lightning any further, fragmented through the courtyard, shattering off formation-reinforced walls and sending small sparks of golden lightning dancing everywhere.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“…”

Kicking a piece of the cauldron away with his foot, he stood up and walked over to the remnants sizzling in the now-empty pool of the fountain and considered what remained… which was not much. Thankfully, among what was still there was a crystal, about size of the palm of his hand, which was now shimmering with a whitish-gold inner light as it cooked the mud around it.

Picking it up carefully, he turned the Heavenly Jade, now infused with proper, gold and white heavenly tribulation lightning – Heavenly Yang True Qi in effect – over in his hands, checking the jade for potential flaws.

-Well, I suppose I should be happy that at least it’s consistent, he reflected at last, having found none that were discernible to his eyes at least.

“It just took a pill furnace worth ten Heavenly Jades to make one of these…” he grumbled out loud, putting the crystal aside on the edge of the fountain and picking up a plate-sized piece of the cauldron that had acted as the vessel for its refinement.

With very little effort, he scrunched it up between his hands, watching the compromised metal twist and then ping into a dozen pieces, scattering across the courtyard.

“Truly alchemy is a profession ordained by heaven to turn riches into dust,” he reflected wryly, dropping the remains to the ground.

Turning back to the crystal, he picked it up again, walked back over to the bench where he had been sitting and added it to the others he had successfully created – five, six now, whitish-golden crystals, two blueish-golden ones that were low grade heavenly lightning from early failures and one solitary dark-golden crystal that was what he was actually trying to make.

Opening the scroll, he reviewed the instructions on setting out the formation and furnace again, then pulled out another pill furnace, identical to the one he had just destroyed, from a storage cube on the bench and started to sort through the various materials he would need.

“—What in the nameless fates are you doing? Teacher?”

“Eh?”

Having not expected to be disturbed, he blinked and straightened up to find his disciple, Ling Tao, standing there, looking very stylish with her golden hair bunched up behind her, wearing a sleek, figure-hugging, shoulderless gown of emerald green and gold, embroidered with red, azure and gold dragons dancing through misty clouds.

“Ah, Tao,” he replied, giving her a bright smile. “I am refining Heavenly Jades.”

“I can see that…” she replied drily, picking her way over to the bench and surveying the ruin of the courtyard, with its smoking craters occasionally discharging small novas of multi-coloured lightning.

“But why are you trapping Heavenly Yang True Qi in them?” she added, picking up the darkest one with interest. “And isn’t this lightning from a top-tier heavenly tribulation?”

“It is,” he nodded. “And I am doing it to neutralize a tribulation…”

In truth, his plan was a bit more than that. The goal, plan, end-game of his work over the last three days was, if he got all the materials he needed, to attempt to resurrect his orchid companion, ‘Xiaoling’.

Her physical form had been almost obliterated and her spiritual vitality scattered by the Dao Ascendant guard given to Princess Lian by Qiao Honghui. While some trace of her qi and soul remained within the remnants of a flower and a ruined leaf, her high realm and esoteric foundation had basically meant that he could only watch what little remained of her slip away, unless he sealed her up in a torturous half-life, or gambled on taking the little orchid into the dangerous hidden territory his Aunt watched over and attempting to revive the flower there…

Then, with the new year, he had realised that the ‘Eye of Worldly Fortune’ was, once again, temporarily shifting back to Yin Eclipse from its usual nexus in Jade Gate City on the Imperial Continent.

Setting aside all the other ominous portents that might bring, that shift, and the knowledge he had of what might be effected in those atypical years when that event occurred, had renewed his hope somewhat, that something might be achieved by less than miraculous methods. As the foremost alchemist in the entire Yin Eclipse sub-continent, and probably one of the best even on the Imperial Continent, he was not someone without means, so he had returned to the archive of his grandfather’s notes on alchemy, which were not in the school, but in this estate, and somewhat to his surprise, had actually found a method… though it was not without its difficulties, as he was discovering.

“…”

Ling Tao considered the crystals, then him, her smouldering green eyes boring into his face for a moment before just shaking her head.

“If you don’t want to explain…” she sighed.

“Here,” he picked up the scroll with the majority of the method, which he had just been consulting, and passed it to her, curious what she might make of it.

His disciple took it, opened it, skimmed it with a frown, and then looked back at him with raised eyebrows.

“You want to trap lightning from something called the ‘Mirror of the Fates’ and use it to subvert the samsara to resurrect your orchid, Xiaoling…?” Ling Tao asked.

“…”

-Not bad, he mused, quietly pleased at her quick deduction, given it was not a straightforward scroll.

He was still expecting her to tell him to wise up, or, like his Aunt, to go seek solace in other arms, but after a long moment, she just shrugged and handed it back to him.

“Some of these are down in that auction they nearly lost to sabotage,” she said.

“Auction?” he frowned, running back through matters in his head, but recalling nothing about any special auction. “What auction? And also… sabotage?”

“Have you just been holed up here for the last four days just exploding pill furnaces?” Ling Tao asked dubiously.

“…”

His expression must have answered for him, because she just sighed again and leant on the back of the bench, staring at the ruin of the courtyard behind him with the air of someone with too many worries.

“Well, I am here about the auction anyway,” Ling Tao said, skimming the scroll a second time before passing it back to him. “Or more precisely, the sabotage that nearly derailed it catastrophically.”

“I suppose you might as well start at the beginning then,” he conceded, given she would certainly not have bothered him for anything minor in the context. “You can tell me about it while I set up my next cauldron?”

“Sure,” Ling Tao nodded, sitting down on the bench as he went ahead and started to use his qi-infused intent to clean up the courtyard. “So, the Imperial Envoy and some other smart fellows—”

“So this is going to be one of those stories is it?” he remarked drily.

“Yes, I rather fear it is,” his disciple murmured, taking out a pot of wine and pouring herself some. “Anyway, because of the Princess’s visit, they decided to set up an auction, at the Golden Dragon Teahouse, which is less of an ‘auction’ really and more of a thesis on the roots of ‘imperial-aligned power’ in Yin Eclipse stretching back well into the last aeonspan, coupled with a few bits of ‘fancy’ for good measure. Ostensibly it seems to have been to show off the wealth of our province and impress on the neophytes and hangers-on who came with the Princess, along with those who came after because a princess or a prince visiting a province always brings ‘interesting’ opportunities—”

“Ohh… please tell me,” he interjected a bit sourly.

Ling Tao rolled her eyes and just continued as if he had said nothing. “As the centrepiece, they put together a huge diorama of Yin Eclipse, recreating the valleys with various signature and special spirit herbs, and various treasures from everyone’s vaults in pagodas throughout it, to show off how amazing our little slice of verdant hell is to those who don’t know better…”

“…”

“I… see,” he frowned. “When you say treasures?”

“Well, setting aside the usual smattering of pots and statuary, they trotted out that terrifying mask, for starters…”

“The one from Golden Promise?”

“That’s the one,” Ling Tao sighed. “The armour of snowy death, from Snow Jade… a few of the more impressive wall carvings and such.”

“So they convinced some of the old ancestors to show off their fancy possessions,” he mused, pausing by a crater with a sparking piece of metal cauldron that had somehow held its Heavenly Yang True Qi.

“Yes… your Aunt even put a few in,” Ling Tao said drily.

“She did?” he blinked, turning to look at her.

“Well, someone from the Blue Pagoda anyway,” Ling Tao corrected. “The wall of illusions, that gives you double vision if you stare at it for too long…”

“Oh, the feng shui puzzle,” he nodded, knowing the piece she meant.

“Yep, and I can’t swear to it, but I think at least one of the old Ha ancestors put stuff in as well, possibly the Kun as well,” she added, sipping her wine, “given there were various things from East Fury’s old ruins there.”

“Could be,” he conceded.

“There were quite a few from our school vaults as well,” Ling Tao went on, her tone suggesting that their presence there was not her doing. “And a few of the other influences dotted around the province who have deeper roots than most suspect. The Cherry Wine Pagoda even put in one of their cherry trees.”

“Did they now?” he mused, pondering how to store the bit so it could be used, because some refiner would certainly pay handsomely for it if it could be preserved.

“Probably they are having a lean year and want to get a higher price than usual for what they have,” his disciple added. “But they put a whole diorama of the best spirit trees in there. The Ha clan’s cherry trees, a few of the immortal peach variants… the Deng clan old ancestor’s plum tree, one of that reclusive old asshole Ling Mansheng’s mango saplings—”

“The golden soul mangoes?” he queried, turning to look at her again. That old rogue actually decided to sell some, he noted with disbelief. Is he in debt or something?

“Yep, you need those,” Ling Tao nodded, gesturing to the scroll. “Or something with a goodly number of their properties. And probably the plums as well. ‘Spring and Autumn’ plums are closely linked to the obfuscation of worldly fate. A few of those will speed your progress along enormously.”

“Indeed. It’s that or try to convince Yuan Renfei to part with one of her precious peaches,” he sighed, impressed at how quickly she had seen the gist of the method.

-Truly it was a smart idea to agree to become her teacher, he reflected, praising his past self—

“You are thinking something strange again, aren’t you?” Ling Tao remarked with some amusement from where she was seated.

“…”

Shaking his head, he went back to considering the piece of metal, then pulled out a blank talisman and a few spirit wood blocks. It was a matter of a few moments to imprint formation symbols onto the blocks and then put them down around the metal fragment in an auspicious constellation. Next, he drew a thin thread of blood out of his index finger and drew a moon rune for ‘seal’ on the talisman and carefully placed it onto the piece of metal. Finally, he focused his qi on the blocks and quickly made five formations seals with his hand, guiding the flow of qi into them in the appropriate, auspicious ways—

The blocks blazed into miniature stars and the space around the talisman twisted, forming a ghostly cube into which the different blocks of wood were drawn, successfully sealing up the piece of metal.

“That will pay for one of the cauldrons,” she joked, considering the cauldron on the bench beside her. “Isn’t this one of the immortal bronze cauldrons from the school, in any case?”

“It is,” he nodded absently.

“Have you not considered trying to imbue them with Yang Lightning first?” she mused.

“Destruction is required to balance the feng shui associated with the sealing,” he grimaced. “In any case, I have eleven more…”

“Did you take all the cauldrons from the School?” his disciple asked dully, proving that she knew him far too well.

“It is my school,” he pointed out with a smirk, as he started around the courtyard again, filling in craters and sweeping away bits of rubble that would harm the feng shui of the area around the pond. “Better that I use them for something worthwhile, than some brat from Myriad Herb Association or Pill Sovereign Sect wastes them brewing a crappy pill to help them cross over one of their Immortal Tribulations.”

“That is fair,” Ling Tao conceded. “They have certainly been making most freely with the resources that are available.”

“So, what is this about sabotage?” he asked, pausing to consider another sparking piece of metal embedded into the paving.

“Well… I guess I can only start at the beginning there,” Ling Tao sighed, sipping her wine.

“Honestly, I was going to explain the whole auction thing, but really, I suppose I should just start with the salient point,” Ling Tao sighed sipping her wine again. “Someone, or several someones, slipped a whole batch of blood ling contaminated herbs into the auction and then did their level best to ensure that those herbs had as good a chance as was possible in the circumstances of contaminating every herb there…”

“…”

He paused from setting up a formation around it to stare at her.

“Blood ling tree contamination… did some moron try and sell a sapling?”

“Hah!” Ling Tao laughed, rather bitterly. “If only it were that easy!”

“Before we go any further, I have to ask,” he added, starting to set up the formation again, “Because blood ling trees and anything to do with them are right up there with eldritch moon mushrooms on the ‘not to be kept anywhere near civilisation’ list of spirit herbs… what were the Duke, your brother Yusheng and the Hunter Bureau doing while someone brought a blood ling contaminated herb into the city?”

“Nothing,” Ling Tao replied, sighing rather more deeply, “In part because the auction was something set up entirely by the Imperial Envoy’s Palace and the various noble clans. Individual bureau elders were certainly ‘in’ on it, to a degree, because half of them are from those various clans and too deep-rooted for the Azure Astral Authority to displace—”

“And the opportunity to sell herbs to people at Imperial Continent prices was too good an opportunity to pass up?” he guessed, stepping back from the finished formation.

“That was a major draw, yes,” Ling Tao agreed, pouring herself another cup of wine, then one for him as well. “All the more so because only ‘juniors’ were allowed to participate in the auction in an active capacity. The Imperial Envoy and the Princess’s party have made a big show of this not being a visit which involves the ‘politics of seniors’ and so on…”

“…”

“I have to bow down to Qiao Honghui. I did not think that he could be quite this shameless,” he murmured, shaking his head with incredulity while watching the formation take effect.

“Qiao has reached attainments in that ‘Dao’ that are nothing short of spectacular,” Ling Tao agreed. “The damage that it has done to the standard price of herbs alone is going to take years to undo. Anyway, we are going off on a tangent…”

“Quite,” he conceded, collecting up the bit of metal and coming back over to the bench and depositing it on the ground. “So, I assume that the contamination was tidied up, or are you here because it has put down roots?”

“Honestly, I hope it is tidied up,” Ling Tao sighed, which was not at all ominous. “It was noticed by Quan Dingxiang, who was there for the auction. It will be a phoenix feather in his hat for some time. The Princess also got involved because it was uncovered just before the grand opening.”

“Don’t tell me she had a hand in solving it,” he replied dully. “How incompetent can they be?”

“Ha… no,” Ling Tao cracked a brief smile and shook her head. “She contacted Huang JiLao, who was having dinner with me and Weng, ostensibly so I could give him that book on your behalf,” Ling Tao clarified. “I then went there with JiLao and oversaw the rest of the clean-up with him and Quan Dingxiang. Most of the damage done was through secondary contamination it seems.”

“I see,” he mused. “So I suppose your husband already…”

“Told the Duke?” she asked. “Indeed. Cao Leyang was livid of course. The auction went ahead, because there was no question of ‘cancelling’ it, or the banquet to salute the previous year, in the eyes of the Envoy’s palace, so all we could do was triage matters by moving all the badly contaminated herbs out and quarantining them. That said, nobody who was walking around the auction was quarantined at all in the aftermath.”

Recalling how rapidly things had spiralled 150 years ago, he winced as he gulped down his wine. “How bad is it?”

“…”

“That remains to be seen,” Ling Tao replied, while pouring them another cup of wine apiece, because the last one had been very quickly drunk. “That night was… not quite a festival of violence, but four teahouses got demolished, there was a small riot at a private auction, quite a lot of street fights. A few tribulations failed yesterday…”

“I noticed those,” he nodded, sipping the wine. “That is probably related as well if the exposure was at all sustained.”

“It was. They were exposed for most of a day,” Ling Tao grimaced. “The lingering issues are enough that the guard are still out on the streets and have checkpoints on the river bridges, but there is only so much that can be done given the status of half the people there.”

“And the provincial Hunter Bureau?” he asked, though he expected he knew the answer there.

“Sanguine, and smug,” Ling Tao remarked drily. “Their line is that the organizers should have known better, and that this is, of course, why the Hunter Bureau is in the position it is. And that upstarts like the Myriad Herb Association, who were overseeing the auction for the Envoy, cannot be relied upon. The parties who are most aggrieved are, it is no surprise, those who went along with the Envoy and put in spirit trees, or valuable herbs for the grand diorama, or the odd sect whose scion got rebuked for violence in the town.”

“Understandable,” he mused. “The last thing anyone with the slightest bit of awareness wants is some carefully curated Dao-ranked spirit herb awakening spiritual wisdom thanks to some stray exposure to blood ling intent.”

“Yes,” Ling Tao nodded again, agreeing with his rather obvious statement readily. “There was enough of that during the Blood Eclipse.”

“There was,” he agreed, touching cups with her and drinking the remains as a shot.

-However, there has to be more to this, he mused, looking at his rather vexed disciple. She would not be here if this had basically been resolved.

“So, what is the catch?” he asked after she had refilled the wine. “If this is not some unintended accident or act of gross stupidity, you believe this was deliberate sabotage?”

“Certainly, it is being taken as deliberate,” Ling Tao sighed. “And while the Envoy’s Palace seems content to accept that the immediate ‘matter’ has been resolved, it has, in my eyes at least, some disturbing connections to the events of 150 years ago.”

“Oh…” he had expected that, as soon as she mentioned ‘blood ling trees’ but to have it confirmed was depressing. That blot on his otherwise fairly good resume of regional stability in the last few millennia was one of his bigger regrets.

“In regards to the ‘Year of the Blood Eclipse’ itself… or the various messes that it has spawned since then?” he added, because her statement was rather broad.

The aftermath of the ‘Year of the Blood Eclipse’ had harmed the vitality of a previously quite prosperous province rather spectacularly and set off a slow spiral into political intransigence and anarchic small-scale aggressions between the major clans to the west of the mountains, culminating in the fiasco some hundred years ago, when the Iron Crown Duke’s heirs had led a punitive expedition to ‘root out’ the indigenous malcontents who were purportedly interfering with trade across the straits.

Even after that had settled down, the tensions had not gone away, and the Imperial Court, especially the Prince Fanshu and Princess Miao, had only expanded their own personal fiefs to the east in Eastern Gate Province and the eastern edges of Blue Water Province. That had reached its own bloody conclusion with the Three Schools Conflict of thirty years ago, the death of the Lin school and the dispersal of the Lin clan.

-And all those occurred or had pivotal moments around when the ‘Eye of Worldly Fortune’ shifted back to Yin Eclipse, he reflected sourly, glancing back at the pond for a moment before mulling over the broader implications of what his disciple was tangentially suggesting.

“…”

“You said the Envoy’s Palace was ‘content that the immediate matter was resolved’?” he asked.

Ling Tao leant back on the bench and stared up at the dark, swirling clouds as they flowed out towards the ocean for a long moment, then sighed again.

“You recall the group who were operating in rather clandestine circles, enticing the various scions of local clans and various other well-connected or influential juniors into black market auctions to dispose of high value herbs, like that batch of yin fire red ginseng, without paying dues to the Hunter Bureau?” she asked him at last.

“I do,” he confirmed. “The ringleaders of that scheme are still in the wind, aren’t they?”

“They are, yes,” Ling Tao grimaced. “The trail on that went somewhat cold in the Jade Willow region. You recall we sent a disciple, Ha Li Wei, to go and poke around, because he had links to both the Hunter Bureau and the Ha clan who exert most of the influence up there?”

“Vaguely, yes,” he answered, before adding. “Did that finally turn up something, he has been gone for months now?”

“Yes… well, Ha Li Wei and two disciples who accompanied him went missing.”

“…”

“Recently,” Ling Tao clarified, seeing his look. “Just over a week ago—”

“How did I—?”

“Not know that?” she replied drily. “News of that arrived with us on the morning of the imperial visit and you have been… distracted, since then.”

-I suppose that is fair, he conceded, choosing to ignore her slightly judging look.

“Anyway, if I might finish this explanation,” Ling Tao continued, a bit testily now, he thought.

“Sorry, go on,” he murmured apologetically, aware that his constant questions were probably disrupting her flow somewhat. Perhaps I have been leaving too much to her these past few days…

“So, that morning, when we found out about it, rather than bother you, I got Ha Feirong to look into it, because what is the point in having a competent Inner Disciple that you helped to a position of power within the Ha clan run a town, if they can’t occasionally come through for you,” Ling Tao said with a smirk. “I even introduced him to his wife for fate’s sakes.”

“…”

“Anyway,” she coughed, “he filed the mission and it was sent out as a last minute clearance request, almost within the hour… and that is where it gets complicated.”

“I see,” he murmured, watching her as she stared pensively at the still smoking fountain basin.

“So, the day before the auction opened, a group of bandits up near the Red Pit got uncovered, purportedly after some prisoners they had taken for ransom – mostly Ha clan scions, it seems – escaped.

“The base was cleared out and evidence linking those bandits back to the sabotage of the auction was found. The Imperial Envoy issued an Imperial Acknowledgement to the Ha clan, today in fact, to be read out by his nephew, at Patriarch Dongfei’s banquet, which is also today, incidentally—”

“It is?” he frowned, having rather forgotten about that. “Did we send anyone?”

“Ha Feirong,” Ling Tao replied drily, “given he lives there. Though I suspect the Patriarch was disappointed that you or I did not attend.”

“…”

He shook his head and returned to the critical point… “So, it was this group who were responsible for the earlier smuggling, and now they sabotage the Imperial Princess’s Auction?”

“Well, the narrative established, and accepted by the Imperial Envoy’s palace, is that these ‘bandits’ are responsible,” Ling Tao replied, frowning. “The evidence that the Ha clan found, and the testimony of the survivors, points to ‘indigenous’ cultivators being responsible. They were mutating herbs using blood ling intent as well, so it’s all very pat in the eyes of those who were ‘looking into it’.”

“…”

“How… convenient,” he grimaced. “Presumably you don’t buy that, or we would not be having this conversation…”

“Indeed, the matter is much more complex than it first appears,” Ling Tao agreed, looking pensive.

“There’s a surprise,” he muttered. “Who has actually looked into this? I assume they didn’t just take the word of a bunch of Ha clan juniors before handing out a shiny medal? Though given this is Qiao Honghui…”

“The Imperial Envoy’s side,” Ling Tao replied with an eye roll. “It was ‘their’ princess who was targeted after all, and they are casting their net of aspersion quite widely. While they have accepted that it was the route the herbs took to get to the auction, they do not believe it was simple bandits. Mere bandits could not have impinged the security of their auction, so ‘clearly’ could not have been working alone, and the ringleaders—”

“Escaped?” he guessed, seeing a familiar theme there.

“Indeed. According to the eyewitness accounts of the Ha group, they used a rampaging tetrid queen as a distraction and fled deeper into Yin Eclipse. That queen was eventually killed by a scion from the Din clan who was travelling with that group…”

“A Din clan scion…” he repeated dully, wondering if there was a list he should be checking off at this point.

“Yes, Din Kongfei,” Ling Tao clarified. “Before you ask, I checked and he is actually no one that important, and his presence there is not even that suspicious, remarkably. He is just one of several juniors here with Din Huan as part of their ongoing negotiations with elements within the Ha clan… They struck up an acquaintance with Ha Caolun and he took them to ‘see the sights’, which included a quick and easy foray to Jade Willow Village due to its proximity to the mountains.”

“So, all the evidence is being sat on by the Imperial Envoy… and it looks quite pat…” he mused. “I assume there is a huge catch in this somewhere?”

“Hah! Yes,” Ling Tao said, laughing bitterly. “Well, you recall that I said Ha Li Wei went missing?”

“Uhuh,” he nodded.

“Well, he was among those ‘rescued’, along with Ha Jiao and Ha Mun, two of our inner disciples,” she remarked sourly, downing the rest of her current cup of wine.

“…”

“Ha Li Wei is yet to get in meaningful contact with us, beyond a brief communication to say he was still alive. Instead, he is in West Flower Picking Town, being feted by Ha Dongfei and his bunch,” Ling Tao continued. “However, proving that heaven does work in mysterious ways, the Hunter who ended up doing that request at the last minute… did in fact come through… only she went to the Kun clan, not the Ha clan.”

“…”

“Let me guess, the Imperial Acknowledgement made no mention of the Kun clan?” he remarked, pouring her more wine and also producing some snacks of his own to share.

“You know Qiao Honghui so well,” Ling Tao murmured, taking a lotus leaf wrapped rice ball. “Indeed, that has put a nice wedge into the middle of politics in West Flower Picking Town, but it gets better. You know Lady Ha Shi Miao?”

“I do,” he nodded. “She is a peer of yours, isn’t she?”

“Yes,” Ling Tao murmured. “Anyway, her son was blamed by some of the Ha scions for leading them astray and into the Red Pit… laterally leading to them getting captured by those bandits.”

“Oh… and what does he have to say?” he asked.

“Nothing,” Ling Tao replied drily. “He is dead, and he was not mentioned in the Acknowledgement either.”

“Given that his mother was pushing actively for a more unified approach to outside influence in the province, that does not surprise me,” he mused, making a mental note to send Lady Ha Shi Miao a note of condolence and an appropriate funerary gift.

“Returning to the Kun clan,” Ling Tao said, taking out a jade tablet, “I learned all this, because Kun Lianmei sought me out earlier today… and Old Elder Ling of the West Flower Picking Town Pavilion came with her.

“It turns out the Hunter who landed our request did so because she had already been sent out to look for Ha Yuanfei and company a few days earlier and had to remain in the village to do a teaching request regarding ginseng harvesting. Anyway, she was quite a bit more competent than anyone might reasonably expect, certainly the bandits… or the Ha clan, which is really why I am here.

“I want you to look at what is on here,” she murmured, passing the tablet over to him. “Because it changes the perspective on everything I just told you.”

“Before, you had my interest,” he remarked drily. “But with a claim like that, now you have my attention.”

“Why, thank you Teacher,” she replied a bit mockingly, smoothing out her skirt.

“Probably we will want to look at it inside, in a large hall,” she added.

“Oh, if it’s security—?” he started to say as he sent his sense into the tablet and saw that it contained a bunch of visual imprints of various rooms within what appeared to be a ruin complex.

“No, it’s just that this courtyard is not that big, or well-lit, and I don’t think you want the auspicious feng shui here damaged?” she clarified drily, looking around at the courtyard they were in for emphasis.

“…”

Focusing on one of the scenes, he saw what she meant. The scans of the different rooms of the ruin had been preserved with enough fidelity that the traces of Yin Eclipse’s alignments were still extant within them.

“So I see,” he agreed, looking at the rest of the contents quickly.

The rest of it was a list of names, some forty-nine in total, who were victims of the bandits, the remains of which had been recovered by the enterprising Hunter, Jun Arai. The rest of it was detailed notes on the current state of the Red Pit and the Ha clan’s ginseng valleys immediately below it – the latter of which did not make for pretty viewing in regards to the Ha clan’s profit margins in that region for the coming season.

“The martial hall off the courtyard behind us is probably okay,” he declared after a moment’s further contemplation of the different scenes, all of which were certainly interesting in their own ways.

It took him only a few moments to tidy away the items he had been using, then he led her out of the courtyard, up some steps, and along a short hall, while he pondered the ancillary information in the tablet.

“So, the Imperial Acknowledgement, the Ha clan rushing in at the last moment… They stole all the glory from this Hunter’s work?” he mused as they headed out of the courtyard and into the small reception hall, repurposed as a library, that joined it to the next one.

“Yes, although according to Kun Lianmei, she was quite happy to let the Kun clan shoulder the forward-facing elements of the discovery in the first instance,” Ling Tao confirmed as she followed after him. “When she came back, she went straight to the Kun clan envoy, Kun Jiao’s daughter, Kun Juni.”

“So, do you know her at all?” he added, as they walked on.

“The Hunter?” Ling Tao asked.

“Yes,” he clarified.

“I do have some passing acquaintance with her, yes,” Ling Tao replied. “Her sister is a close personal friend of Ling Yu… and she is also part of the group that Kun Juni is slowly pulling around herself in the Hunter Bureau.”

“So, one of the up-and-coming seedlings who have started to blossom after the evisceration done during the Three Schools Conflict,” he mused, leading her across the next courtyard, towards a much grander, larger hall built into the massif pillar itself.

“Yes,” Ling Tao agreed. “If you are asking about her reliability in the context of this document? Kun Lianmei speaks highly of her and her mission record is on the jade.”

“…”

He skimmed that, and had to admit he was quietly impressed, given she was only at the peak of Qi Refinement…

“She is a physical cultivator?” he noted.

“Yes, a pure physical cultivator, and I would bet spirit stones that she is also an ‘inheritor’ along with her sister,” Ling Tao answered. “Certainly it is why she was able to do so well in places like the Red Pit. I had the opportunity to see her sister, Sana, spar with Ling Yu just yesterday. She can actually land blows on Baisheng’s little terror.”

“She can? That is high praise indeed,” he mused, pushing the door to the hall open and snapping his fingers to light the lamps throughout it.

“Honestly, I cannot help but feel both sisters are a bit wasted in the Hunter Bureau,” Ling Tao sighed, following him into the cavernous interior. “Their father, Jun Han, certainly is, in his current position as a civilian official for the Guard Commanderie in West Flower Picking Town.”

“…”

-She must think highly of them indeed, he mused, walking over to the middle of the hall, which was close to a hundred metres long and fifty wide, built and reinforced for sparring between Dao Step martial experts. Some of our disciples can’t get that much praise out of her…

“Which scene first?” he asked, putting the jade down on the floor.

“Workshop,” Ling Tao answered. “It has what you will be most interested in, I think.”

Focusing on that ‘scene’, he poured his qi into it, through the tablet…

The hall around them twisted, like a pond that had just had a rock dropped into it. When everything stabilized again, both of them were standing in a rock-carved room about ten by ten metres across. The suffocating grasp of Yin Eclipse’s suppression was there, like a musty echo within it, as he looked around its interior. The fidelity was truly excellent, far in excess of the kind of tool a ‘junior’ would usually have on hand to record a scene like this. The antiquity of the ruin itself was etched into the alignments preserved within the image in a way that its recorder had probably not anticipated.

“It is almost like being there,” Ling Tao murmured, running her hand down the damp wall, feeling the rock surface with her fingers.

“Indeed,” he agreed, taking it all in.

“They were binding tetrid stalkers?” he noted, walking over to the main table, where a dozen hatched eggs had been set out in small formations.

Reaching out, he touched one of the eggs… running his hands across the surface. The ‘manifestation’ was vivid enough to provide him with touch, confirming that the egg had been freshly hatched not long before the scan was taken.

“Yes, Hunter Jun reported a lot of tetrids. There is another room to show you in regards to that, but I thought starting with this is probably best,” Ling Tao mused, coming over to join him by the table.

“Yeah,” he agreed, looking around again.

His eye caught a stoneware jar, which had been tipped over and had spilled qi-rich liquid over the floor. Walking over to it, he squatted down and peered inside.

“Moon runes,” he remarked, pointing out a set of symbols carefully carved on the interior to her.

“Mmmmm…” Ling Tao nodded in agreement, crouching down beside him and peering over his arm. “Kun Lianmei was of the opinion, professionally speaking, that this is the method for binding that was popularized by Yeng Illhan.”

“This, right here, is why you brought this to me,” he stated, looking around the workshop again.

“Yes. This is fairly conclusive as a link between this and the events of the ‘Year of the Blood Eclipse’,” Ling Tao concluded.

“Mmm…” He stared around again, not entirely sure he bought that.

“You don’t buy it?” Ling Tao asked quizzically, glancing at him. “Would it help if I said that the Hunter in question apparently ‘saw’ a ‘Yeng’ – about medium build, scrawny beard, very nondescript-looking – who was controlling various tetrids as part of a group taking contaminated herbs out the valleys to an undisclosed location?”

“Oh, I don’t doubt that bit,” he shook his head. “The stories that Yeng Illhan died in the Three Schools Conflict were never as credible as anyone might have liked. It was simply that the bastard never showed up again after the razing of Mu Fan Town, so it was largely assumed he was dead in a ditch somewhere.”

-I guess I will have to try and look at this from a slightly different perspective? he reflected as he considered the projection around them.

Putting a hand to the ‘floor’ of the illusionary room, he closed his eyes and extended his senses, carefully interrogating the preserved feng shui, the natural intent and the shadows of the qi that lingered in the room. The girl had done everything she could to hide her own presence as well, which helped quite a bit, so it was easy to picture himself within that place and experience a little piece of it…

He opened his eyes again, and stared around the dark room, at the pots, at the tables… the empty eggs… and then back at the spilt pots of medicinal liquid. Going back over to the pot, he looked a second time at the runes, and found, to his pleasant surprise, that traces of the intent were still there… albeit barely, the decay within them suggesting they had been there for years, decades probably. It was the same with the table, which was fashioned from spirit wood of the valley outside in all likelihood.

Elsewhere in the room, his senses, able to leverage the advantages of not being within the suppression…

“…”

“Huh…” he frowned, narrowing his eyes. “Interesting…”

“What is?” Ling Tao, who was still standing nearby, asked, looking around with a slightly slack expression.

“There are defences preserved in this, subtle ones, to ward against outside prying,” he observed. “I nearly tripped one and damaged the recording irreparably.”

“There are?” Ling Tao looked uneasily at the recording. “I… may have looked at it before, as did Kun Lianmei…”

“It’s fine,” he shook his head, assuaging her concerns. “This degree of paranoia is not aimed at a Chosen Immortal like her, or even a Dao Lord, like you. This is intended to stop someone like me prying.”

“A… Sovereign?” Ling Tao stared around at the workshop again.

“It’s a subtle thing, a trap to lure the unwary, a suggestion that more might be gained because we are outside the suppression. It is not aimed at a recording like this, but probably in case someone who had seen the room had their memory interrogated,” he mused. “It is probably not just for this room either, but for much of the complex, part of a defensive formation in all likelihood.”

He exhaled softly and watched the alignments ripple. The ability to ‘see’ feng shui alignments was not a common one, even among alchemists, who had more cause than most to need to be concerned over them. It was something his aunt had hammered into him when he was young, forced him to learn, without the crutch of an art or a scripture to guide him, so, as she had put it all those thousands of years ago, ‘his own sight would not be tainted by the biases of others’.

It took a few breaths, but in his mind’s eye, he found the ‘formation’, a scattered constellation of little twists within the ambient feng shui anchored and propagated within a greater whole.

“Hah—!” he shook his head, not sure if he should be amused or offended really.

“What is it?” Ling Tao asked nervously, still sounding concerned.

“I nearly got punked by what is barely an Immortal grade formation,” he replied, standing up with a sigh. “And it’s not even anything hugely impressive, or at least the comprehensions of whoever set it up were non-existent.”

“Oh… it’s a standard formation?” Ling Tao asked. “How did I miss that?”

“Easily. It’s still a formation built entirely out of the manipulation of the ambient feng shui,” he explained, getting up and walking back over to the bench. “And calling it ‘standard’ is a bit disingenuous. It’s a variation on ‘Gossamer Threads in the Moonlight’, from the Deng clan’s ‘Shadowless Eye’ manual. Whoever created the formation in the first place had genuine skill, but it can be set up by a bunch of monkeys if you tell them where to place the formation nodes. That is the marginally difficult bit, but then again, you can just make a compass for it.”

“So, they have resources, but not necessarily in the people who set up this camp,” Ling Tao mused.

“Indeed,” he nodded. “Although even that manual is not exceptional. Remember that the Deng clan took several significant losses during the instability around the Blood Eclipse and the ‘Yeng Martial Brothers’ worked pretty widely across the northern part of the continent as a mercenary band before then.”

“So, it could be someone affiliated with them, or this was a base of theirs that was rediscovered?” Ling Tao mused.

“It could be either, or even someone who knows enough about them, or those events, to put up a credible façade,” he added, waving a hand and dismissing the scene for now. “Let’s look at one of these other images…”

Considering the three, which were named ‘Tetrid Nest’, ‘Unusual Bodies’ and ‘Associate Official’ respectively, he picked the latter first, mostly because it was another small scene.

The hall twisted and they were standing in another room, a rest area, with a few hammocks slung up for sleeping in and some low benches and tables for work and storage. One table held a stack of manuals on dangerous flora and fauna of Yin Eclipse, which was somewhat prescient in a way. The other held a few common manuals on formations and basic martial arts. There was a cold hearth in the form of a broad stone bowl in the middle of the room, and a few boxes of supplies as well.

His eye was immediately drawn to the unconscious youth and the torn remnants of a hammock, but also, in the second instance, to a freshly butchered tetrid stalker that was lying near the door.

“Golden Core,” Ling Tao, who had also seen it, because she happened to be right next to where it was located when the scene was projected, said. “Freshly hatched too… Days old at most.”

“Uhuh,” he agreed, crouching down to squint at it, taking in what he could from the preserved essence within the image. “She killed it; presumably it ambushed her when she entered.”

The shadow of the ‘Hunter’ was just about visible in the scan, crouched by the unconscious youth. Going back to her, he saw that the focus of the scan itself was four talismans, one from the Jade Gate School, the second a ‘guest expert’ talisman for the Deng clan, the third a good luck charm in the local fashion, carved of a piece of qi-repelling pot, and the fourth…was as advertised, an Associate Official’s talisman for the Hunter Bureau. Given that those talismans tended to get handed out for money to cronies of various elders, it was certainly odd to find one in the possession of a bandit here.

“Mu Banlu Pavilion?” he murmured, reading out what was on it, recalling that Mu Banlu was a village on the coast about a hundred miles south of Blue Water City, notable only for being a moderately prosperous fishing settlement.

“It seems to be genuine, that was Kun Lianmei’s opinion,” Ling Tao added.

“…”

“It probably belonged to Ha Li Wei, or one of his companions,” he mused. “it is probably worth checking that, if it has not been done already…”

“…”

“I will see to it once we are done here,” Ling Tao grimaced.

“So I take it the Hunter didn’t recover any of the talismans,” he noted, watching her shadow complete its circuit of the room and the recorded image seamlessly start its loop again.

“She did not. Kun Lianmei explained to me that she was concerned a stolen talisman might mark her,” Ling Tao remarked.

“Understandable,” he mused, standing up. “What of the other talismans?”

“The Deng one appears genuine, but there will be difficulties verifying it, given the circumstances,” Ling Tao noted.

“Hmmm, quite,” he agreed.

“The Jade Willow one is genuine as well, but is not associated with the Jade Willow disciple on the list of bodies. Kun Lianmei was of the view that this group had backing. You cannot operate a gang of forty or fifty bandits that close to the heart of the Ha clan’s most lucrative ginseng field in that region and not have anyone know about it.”

“Which rules out the Deng clan,” he mused. “Is this actually someone local to the Ha clan trying to dodge taxes?”

“That… thought has occurred, yes,” Ling Tao replied drily. “Even Hunter Jun thought that…”

He trailed off as he caught a faint… shift, in the alignments of the picture.

“Does this have sound?” he asked.

“It should,” Ling Tao replied, going over to the jade—

*Krrrrrooooooom*

The sound of an explosion rippled through the image as Ling Tao skipped it back a few seconds.

Turning to the doorway, he stared at the image there, which was not really well captured, given Hunter Jun had presumably been trying to be both quick and stealthy about the matter.

“—Again please,” he said to Ling Tao, focusing more carefully on that portion, taking care not to trip the annoying little trap baked into the scene.

Ling Tao repeated the skip back and this time, he got a faint echo of the scene outside, carried through the sound and the distortions of the qi preserved within the image. Feeding his own qi back to it, he watched as the image slowly expanded itself, colouring in vague shades of a rocky cavern outside, bit by bit.

“I… did not know you could do that…” Ling Tao muttered, watching the image slowly expand.

“It requires a bit of ability,” he said drily.

-And uncounted years of my Aunt’s miserable training regarding ‘seeing’ feng shui alignments to pull off, he added to himself.

It took a dozen more repeats of the scene, and about five minutes of hard work on his part, before he had a slightly distorted, frozen image of a battle unfolding.

“That… is indeed a tetrid queen,” Ling Tao murmured, coming to stand beside him as they looked up at the creature, which was the height of three men and thoroughly enraged within its slightly glitchy, looping few seconds of visibility.

“It is,” he agreed, considering it. “And it’s at least Immortal Realm… but this poses an interesting question.”

“It does?” Ling Tao frowned.

Not immediately answering, he walked back over to the jade and pulled up the workshop. Repeating the process, he was just about able to get a bit of the corridor outside it, then he did similarly for the tetrid nest, positioning it as well, at which point, after further thirty minutes of prodding and quite a bit of qi expended on both their parts, they had recreated a fairly good representation of the cave, the rooms and even a few parts that the Hunter had not scanned, courtesy of him letting his qi ‘fill in’ the echoes of lingering distortions.

“Oh…” Ling Tao said at last, staring at the queen, and then the ephemeral traces of the cavernous cave filling up the martial hall. “How did it get out of the nest?”

“Indeed,” he remarked, eyeing the nest, because there was only one obvious exit.

“Can it transform its shape?” Ling Tao guessed. “Or it was teleported?”

“Doubtful,” he replied, shaking his head as he looked around at the loosely connected scenes. “Neither of those abilities is common in qi beasts that have not started to grasp the transformative aspects of qi. While this is a peak Immortal Realm tetrid stalker, and a very powerful one at that, it’s not at that stage just yet.”

“…”

Looking at Ling Tao’s slightly helpless shrug in response to his musings, he supposed she had not thought to ask Kun Lianmei much about the tetrid queen.

“In any case,” he said at last, looking at the various bits of the projection, “this becomes more interesting, because now we actually have culprits.”

“We do…” Ling Tao agreed, appraising the various bandits cast in flickering shadows from their qi arts, the talismans they were using and various other tell-tale ephemera that had been preserved in the ambience of the recordings with a degree of appreciation.

He was sure this was not the first time she had seen something like this achieved, but it was a reminder that there was an absolute chasm in capability between any Dao Lord and a Sovereign, let alone someone like him, who was a good deal stronger than that. His comprehensions, Laws, and millennia of practice with alchemy at the highest level also helped, of course.

“So… this leaves the last two bits,” he mused, turning to the far projection, which was barely linked at all, given it was inside a different complex some distance from any of the other bits, and the other storage room off to the side, which the Hunter had not scanned, likely because the opportunity had not arisen, but which was actually produced in fairly good fidelity anyway due to the way qi dispersed and the connections afforded by the formations.

“I bet they didn’t think that their defensive formations would be the glue that allows someone to piece together whole swathes of how this looked,” Ling Tao remarked with a light laugh, looking around at the various lanterns.

“Indeed,” he agreed. “Feng shui and formations are a powerful tool, but they do have drawbacks. They clearly underestimated what is and isn’t possible under the impetus of the suppression. This is actually why the bureau of old trained its acolytes in feng shui and formations so thoroughly.”

“It is?” Ling Tao blinked.

“Yes. They were a different beast back in the days of my grandfather, let alone before that. This rot that has beset them is a thing gestating within the rule of the current emperor,” he mused, looking around at the cavern again. “The rank talismans, for example, have a few more uses than are openly known… including facilitating this kind of thing.”

“…”

Ling Tao looked around again and sighed softly.

“In any case, if we want to get more out of this, we must pester my Aunt,” he said, contemplating the scenes at hand. “And probably track down someone who was in this place, the Hunter perhaps?”

“Kun Lianmei said she visited it, though it was cleaned out and there was no sign of the workshop side room,” Ling Tao replied.

Nodding, he walked over to the ruined storage area, that had not been scanned directly, and entered it, Ling Tao following after him.

As a reconstruction it was little more than a ghostly mirage, given the short time devoted to reading the alignments and the limitations of what he was working with.

-This definitely needs a more skilled hand than mine, or a lot more time, he reflected, finally admitting defeat there. I can only bother Aunt Xiao about this, it seems. Hopefully the ruins will be enough to perk her interest.

“Huh…” Ling Tao frowned, looking around.

“What is it?” he asked, glancing up from contemplating the freshly slain cave centipede, just caught in the refraction of the reconstruction through the door.

“The aura of this room has faint traces of blood ling intent,” she murmured, looking around with narrowed eyes for a moment before alighting on some of the pots. “They stored the herbs, or some contaminated herbs in here?”

“Hmmm…” he crouched down beside one that had been tumbled over in the fight with the centipede presumably and looked for a crafter’s mark, finding none.

“Not marked by a workshop either,” his disciple added, having checked herself. “Were they making their own?”

“Possibly. This is not an amateur operation,” he noted, looking around the room again.

“It is not,” Ling Tao murmured. “Though I think that was clear from how slippery their upper echelon has been so far.”

“I can see why Qiao Honghui is ‘happy’ with the conclusions that were drawn by the Ha clan,” he mused, looking around one final time then starting off towards the ‘other’ scene, which was at least a large cavern away, near as he could tell from his failed attempt to link it.

“Yeah,” Ling Tao agreed with a grimace as she kept pace with him. “And it doesn’t require them to acknowledge the true extent of the calamity avoided either, especially in the context of the rains from the east. I don’t think that too many realise just how dangerous it was. Had we not caught it, it would have proliferated blood ling mutated herbs to three continents and touched dozens of influential powers with hidden tendrils.”

“Because, fortuitously for them, it was mostly, your presence aside, juniors who solved their problem, and only those with Qiao Honghui who were there to… observe…” he trailed off, frowning as they arrived at the ‘edge’ of the last ‘scene’.

The hall within it was long, carved exquisitely from the rock into a style he recognised from some of the oldest and most traditional temples in the province, such as the Queen Mother’s Shrine’s sanctuary here in the city.

A colonnade ran around the outer edge of the hall, each pillar again carved into the form of a woman, most naked, though some were robed from the waist down, garlands of flowers nestled in their wild hair. Many of them had animal skins on their person, while a decent proportion were strangling dragon-like serpents or playing various musical instruments.

The wall panels, where the image had picked them out, depicted the same women, either revelling wildly or, in several cases, quite graphically tearing men limb from limb, or turning their victims into trees with faces that screamed, or hanging severed heads like lanterns from those same trees.

The whole hall was illuminated in dim reddish lanterns and, disturbing decorations aside, was entirely deserted, except for six bodies laid out at the far end, garbed only in simple loincloths.

He was about to step inside, when he stopped as he became aware of a faint, insidiously subtle, sense of something trying to touch him in an inauspicious manner. It was very, very similar to what blood ling trees could perpetuate, but, if anything, even more insidious. It tugged at his psyche in a way that gave no consideration to realm or status, almost whispering to him in ways that made his skin crawl.

“Have you looked at this before?” he asked softly, staring at the scene again, more carefully.

“No… actually, though Kun Lianmei did say this recording was odd—” Ling Tao said, then stopped as he put a hand on her arm, preventing her from going closer.

“…”

Ling Tao looked at him, puzzled.

-Does she not feel it? he wondered, looking at his disciple carefully.

She looked a little on edge, certainly, tired, but just as beautiful as…

“…”

“You… do not feel anything?” he asked her.

“I…” Ling Tao stared at the hall, then at him, her expression slowly becoming more confused. “It is strange. I can feel that there is something odd, alluring almost… welcoming?”

When she turned to look at him, he was glad that he was someone who usually had a strong composure, because the subtle hooks that the place was trying to put into him were… unsettling.

-Dangerous feng shui, he shivered, getting control over his emotions and taking a step back.

“Red is the path to ruin, the world’s ending, turning unjust war to peace and unjust peace to slaughter,” he murmured, something his aunt had said once springing to mind again as he eyed the carvings with a great deal more appreciation than he had on his first glance a moment earlier.

“What was that you said?” Ling Tao asked, looking at him with confusion and worry in her eyes.

“It is a thing my aunt said once,” he mused, relieved that the momentary sense of emotional disruption had passed. “It seems that this place has more secrets… This should be a genuine ruin. It has powerful feng shui alignments etched into it that seem to have fused with the natural suppression of Yin Eclipse if I were to guess.”

“Yet Hunter Jun was able to enter just fine,” Ling Tao frowned, “And whoever put those bodies in there was also able to enter?”

“Mmm-hmm…” he nodded.

His suspicion was that Jun Arai, the Hunter, had been able to use the tricks afforded her as a mantra inheritor to do so. Those included being able to pacify your own emotional state to a remarkable degree, and also transform positive and negative psychological elements in some cases, turning pain into strength, or confusion into certainty. You could do something similar with some Heart Force arts, although rarely as intuitively, not at that kind of realm. As to how the bandits had entered, it was possible that there was some other element at play, that the suppression made the scenes behave differently, or they had had some treasure or other that helped. They had been exploiting the Red Pit as well and there were ways around its tricks, if you had resources to burn.

-Which begs the question, he thought, staring at the six bodies and the telling gap that suggested a seventh had been there at one point, why did they put these six in here?

“The middle one is Ha Li Wei,” Ling Tao said helpfully, pointing to the bodies and stirring him out of his own musings.

He took in the young man, in his late twenties in appearance, with a short beard and a thin face, who looked somewhere between life and death with a frown, noting the emerald-green compass resting on his dantian and a high rank talisman he had that he didn’t recognise, placed over his forehead.

“This… does not look like a person who could have helped with an escape,” he noted, recalling what she said earlier.

“No, it is not,” Ling Tao agreed. “And Hunter Jun said she teleported clear of here some minutes after taking this recording… which should be some time around or just after dawn, and contacted Kun Juni within a matter of moments afterwards.”

“So, who is here?” he asked, taking in the figures as best he could.

“Ha Li Wei, Ha Jiao and Ha Mun are our disciples,” Ling Tao said, pointing them out in turn. “Then you have Ha Yuanfei, Ha Tang Lee and a Ha Quan, who are all scions of the Ha clan. Lianmei told me that Hunter Jun postulated that there was a seventh, a girl who was a flower seller, Ha Fen Fang, but for some reason her body is missing and the talisman associated with her was broken.”

“A flower seller seems somewhat at odds with the others,” he noted, annoyed that he could not go closer to inspect them.

“Yes,” Ling Tao agreed. “The others are all fairly important or talented scions. Ha Yuanfei is the son of Ha Guangfei. Ha Tang Lee is the disciple of the Ha clan’s Elder Ha Fuyang Weng…”

“Both of whom are notably in the confidence of Envoy Qiao,” he mused. “And Ha Quan?”

“Third son of an estate manager near Jade Willow, he is moderately talented. There is another ‘scandal’ there, by the way,” Ling Tao added.

“…”

“Well, it’s a rather minor one in the grand scheme of things,” Ling Tao murmured, apparently noting his slightly judging look. “Though it supports the idea that this”—she waved a hand at everything in sight—“is all connected to the Ha clan in ways that may need careful investigation.”

“…”

He nodded, then waved a hand and the whole scene collapsed around them as he dismissed it.

“Is there a problem?” Ling Tao asked him, noting his action.

“No, but we cannot take this any further here,” he sighed. “This will require a proper reconstruction, and a consultation with Kun Lianmei, probably the Hunter involved, and certainly my Aunt, if this last room is anything to go by.”

“Oh,” she nodded. “That makes sense. So what next?”

“First, I do need to go see to another cauldron,” he pointed out drily. “Because that, unfortunately, will not wait.”

“…”

Ling Tao stared at him, then nodded, though she looked a bit put out, he noticed as she walked over to pick up the jade tablet from the floor.

“Look,” he said, feeling bad for her, as he started off towards the entrance of the hall. “This will not be solved in a day.”

“I know…” she sighed, following after him. “But… the Duke Cao wants the Ling clan to look into it… and I told my brother that I would look into it quietly…” she added, looking both annoyed and slightly pleading now.

He sighed inwardly and grimaced. He could understand her position in any case.

“Time is of the essence, I am aware, and this week is actually quite good for moving on this kind of thing, because interfering people like Qiao Honghui are all distracted by the Princess and being ‘concerned’ about how the root causes of this might be this bit of politics or that?” he mused, exiting the hall—

“Oh may the big monkey go bugger the heavens with his stick!” he cursed, making an obscene gesture at the uncaring sky as he was greeted by the sight of the rain falling down softly into the courtyard outside.

“…”

“Ah…” Ling Tao grimaced, looking awkward now.

Sighing deeply, he shook his head.

“It’s fine. This would have interfered with my next attempt anyway,” he consoled her. “Where are Lianmei and Old Ling?”

“Staying at my estates,” Ling Tao replied.

“…”

He stared up at the dark, rain-slashed sky again, for a long moment, listening to the rain dance off the roof tiles and the paving of the courtyard. Off in the distance, a few belated fireworks exploded from some minor festivity, their light shimmering across the city skyline before being drowned by the deluge.

“Aunt, are you free for a few hours?” he sent through the talisman at his waist.

“Depends,” came her familiar tone back.

“Ling Tao has brought me a problem, regarding blood ling trees…”

“The auction,” Lu Xiao replied succinctly.

“So, it seems everyone knows about it,” he remarked drily.

“…”

Abruptly, his aunt Lu Xiao stood there, not ten feet away, dressed in a plain blue gown reminiscent of the uniform of an inner disciple of the Blue Gate School, holding an umbrella.

“Lady Xiao,” Ling Tao said, saluting her.

Lu Xiao waved a hand in acknowledgement and walked over to them.

“So, what seems to be the problem?” she asked.

He was about to start explaining, when she just held up a hand again.

“I can see it just fine,” she replied drily. “You don’t need to explain it to me, just show me the bits of the ruin.”

“We were going to go get those who had seen it,” he pointed out.

“Ah… that would help, I suppose,” she nodded. “Where are they?”

“My estates, Lady Xiao,” Ling Tao replied.

“Hmmmmm.”

Lu Xiao nodded, then turned on her heel and started off through the estate without a word. Taking out a broad umbrella, he followed after her.

“How is your attempt at summoning black lightning going?” she asked after they had walked through dark corridors for a few minutes and arrived at a covered pathway, climbing up the massif.

“Poorly, and now somewhat derailed by the weather,” he answered with a grimace, glancing down at the city across from them.

“Heaven giveth, heaven taketh, this is how heaven playeth,” Lu Xiao reflected, somewhat dourly herself. “With a rigged deck and marked cards.”

“…”

Knowing better than to ask her how her own personal business was going at this point, he just walked on after her, in silence, with Ling Tao. Soon they arrived at the top of the stairway and went through a gorge in the rock that had been carved into guest rooms that were never used nowadays, finally arriving at a broad plaza between two minor peaks of the massif that held a teleport formation he was fairly sure next to nobody outside of his Aunt’s immediate circle, which was very, very small, even knew about.

“You have a teleport formation here?” Ling Tao said dully. “How did I not know about this?”

“This estate is older than the city,” Lu Xiao chuckled, leading them to it without stopping as he opened the umbrella to provide both him and Ling Tao shelter. “Your estates, you said?”

“Yes,” Ling Tao nodded.

“Okay,” Lu Xiao murmured, standing in the middle.

There was next to no warning as space occluded around them in a shifting sphere, then they were standing on a much grander teleportation circle in Ling Tao’s personal estates.

“Lady Ling!” a female servant said, hurrying forward with an umbrella, not that one was needed, as it was barely raining here.

“Headmaster!” the servant added, seeing him, then Lu Xiao, who she marked as one of the school’s disciples presumably, so just saluted slightly.

“Are Elders Lianmei and Ling around?” Ling Tao asked.

“Ah, yes, they are receiving an unexpected message in the western reception hall,” the female servant said. “Please follow me.”

Ling Tao nodded, leading them off with only the barest of hesitations as Lu Xiao now fell in beside him, like a good sect disciple waiting on the Headmaster of her sect.

“Does this amuse you?” he asked her drily.

“Why, whatever do you mean?” his aunt smirked. “I am just acting my age.”

“…”

Shaking his head, he recalled at last that Ling Tao had been about to tell him there was some ‘other’ scandal tied up in all this.

“So, what was the other thing?” he asked her.

“Other…?” Ling Tao asked, glancing sideways at him.

“The other scandal?” he reminded her.

“Oh… that,” Ling Tao nodded. “Well, the Ha clan were recruiting people from West Flower Picking Town and a few other distant areas and having them work in the Jade Willow region. They were supplanting locals who were doing semi-skilled tasks in spirit farming on some of the estates, to the point where it was becoming a bit of a ‘problem’.

“Ha Li Wei infiltrated one of those estates, as I understand it, using his links to us and the Hunter Bureau to be a ‘person of use’… to gain their trust, believing that this might be part of the cover for the smuggling operations that were causing such concern in Blue Water City and getting us across the Azure Astral Authority.”

“They have featured very little in this so far,” he noted.

“Yeah,” Ling Tao agreed. “There is a school of thought in the city at the moment that the sabotage was facilitated by them to humiliate the Princess and show why the Hunter Bureau is ‘necessary’.”

“…”

“This disciple thinks that, while plausible, that is a bit unlikely?” Lu Xiao murmured, rolling her eyes.

“Indeed,” Ling Tao nodded, as did he.

-Trust Qiao to look at a disaster of his own making and immediately ask himself how to profit off of it while trying to make it become someone else’s fault, he mused, not doubting that the Imperial Envoy had a strong hand in the spreading of that ‘theory’.

In a sense, it was plausible. The Azure Astral Authority was engaged in a slow cold war to freeze out anyone who they didn’t like from the Hunter Bureau and cripple the regional Pavilions who had turned away from them during and after the Three Schools Conflict, but that was still them playing in their own sand pit. They rarely, if ever, struck outside it, being more than content to just ‘persist’ at this point, biding their time, ensuring they did not lose ground. That kind of sabotage, and the damage it would cause, would be far too much risk for too little gain.

“Anyway,” Ling Tao went on, returning to the thread of her explanation, “over half the dead bodies in the tetrid nest back there are people from West Flower Picking Town, who came to Jade Willow as part of those ‘employment’ opportunities.”

“…”

“Oh, it gets better,” Ling Tao scowled, noting his expression. “The ‘bodies’ being found was leaked to the West Flower Picking Hunter Pavilion before that side of things had ever been filed by Kun Lianmei. She got back to find that another Hunter had already been sent on a well-meaning trip around the town, on the first day of the new year, telling people in the Blue River and Seng neighbourhoods that their nearest and dearest had been slain by bandits, giving ample warning to the parties who might have facilitated it in the town that the game was up and to clear out, which they appear to have done.”

“So, they have an in, into the bureau,” he mused, stowing his umbrella away as they finally entered the main estate.

“Yes, actually, I should have said that earlier,” Ling Tao agreed with an apologetic look. “There is so much to this…”

“It’s fine,” he murmured.

“So, that body, Ha Quan? He was apparently recovered by Hunter Jun, very dead, killed by a meek yin ginseng which also killed two flower sellers and another youth… Do you want to guess where she found their bodies?” Ling Tao added.

“Surprise me,” he murmured drolly as Lu Xiao just continued to listen like a respectful disciple would.

“About halfway across the Red Pit,” Ling Tao said softly.

“Now that is a surprise,” he hissed.

“Hunter Jun thought so too, according to Kun Lianmei,” Ling Tao sighed.

“What do you think, Disciple Lu?” he asked, glancing sideways at his aunt, who just rolled her eyes.

“This disciple thinks it fits, Headmaster,” Lu Xiao replied cutely. “If they were trying to get mutates out, isn’t the best way to do that to use people who are not emotionally… complex?”

“Children,” Ling Tao sighed.

“That is a method that the Blood Eclipse used.”

“And the Deng before them,” he noted.

“Was it not also used in the Huang-Mo Wars?” Lu Xiao added. “This disciple recalls hearing somewhere that that was the last time blood ling trees were seriously weaponized prior to the Year of the Blood Eclipse, though it didn’t work out too well then, either.”

Both of them glanced at her for a long moment, but Lu Xiao just smiled respectfully.

“In any case, the whole thing is rotten,” Ling Tao declared.

“We are here, Lady Ling, Headmaster, Miss,” the servant leading them said politely, gesturing to the doors ahead.

“Ah, thank you, Wenmei,” Ling Tao said. “Is my husband back yet, by the way?”

“Oh, yes, he is, Lady Ling,” Wenmei said. “I… he is with Elder Lianmei and Elder Ling. Apologies, I did not say before.”

“It’s fine,” Ling Tao replied, smoothing her skirt and fixing her hair slightly, he noted with some amusement.

Wenmei bowed, then opened the doors, ushering them into the room.

Inside, seated around the small hall, were Kun Lianmei, dressed in her elder’s robes for the Beast Cadre, Old Ling, looking like an old scholar with his white beard and drooping brows, and a tall, statuesque man of martial bearing wearing Ling clan robes, Ling Bai Weng, who was his disciple’s devoted husband and a senior official within the Governing Authority of Blue Water City Region.

The last occupant was a tall woman with dark hair wearing the robes of the Sheng Martial Hall, sitting on a couch opposite the others.

“Lady Envoy,” Ling Tao murmured, saluting Sheng Jiang Mei.

“Lady Ling, Lord Lu,” Sheng Jiang Mei replied, standing to salute them both. “This is… fortuitous, I suppose.”

“This is Disciple Lu,” he said politely, introducing her. “Please do not mind her presence.”

The others glanced at Lu Xiao, who looked very nondescript, with her dark brown hair, tanned complexion, charmingly severe eyebrows and short scar on her left temple, and nodded politely.

“Please, be seated,” Ling Bai Weng added, walking over and leading Ling Tao by the hand to a couch where they sat down together.

He went over and sat on a chair opposite Sheng Jiang Mei.

“So, what do we owe this visit to, Lady Envoy?” Ling Tao asked.

“Well… erm…” Sheng Jiang Mei looked a bit awkward he thought as she composed herself. “I have… various messages from Shan Lai… and your husband very generously invited me to stay at your wonderful estate, given the town is a little fractious at the moment.”

-Town, huh… he reflected drily. Only someone from Shan Lai could call Blue Water City a ‘town’, though for a city it is quite small.

“I see,” Ling Tao nodded graciously.

“In regards to the messages, actually, your presence is quite timely… I was just discussing the problem with Official Bai, Elder Ling and Elder Lianmei here,” Sheng Jiang Mei added.

“It seems this is the week for problems,” Ling Weng sighed, accepting a cup of tea that Wenmei had been preparing over to the side.

“It does seem like it,” Elder Ling agreed sagaciously.

“Well?” Ling Tao asked.

“Here,” Sheng Jiang Mei passed a scroll that had been sitting on a table near her over to Ling Weng, who passed it to Ling Tao in turn.

She skimmed it, her face twisted slightly, then she swept it over to him without a word.

He opened the golden scroll and considered what was written on it.

“A personal gift, from the province, to the Azure Astral Emperor,” he said at last, noting the seal which was every bit as impressive as the one that Princess Lian had used to grasp the Blue Gate School.

“The Emperor and Empress hope that Blue Water Province will join the many other loyal and subservient subjects of the Azure Astral Authority in congratulating the Crown Prince Sheng Feihuang in advance of him becoming a Dao Sovereign at the age of seventy,” Sheng Jiang Mei murmured.

“…”

“The Empress has long heard that Blue Water Province is the most miraculous herb garden in ten starfields and hopes that those loyal clans here can prepare ingredients for a most miraculous pill that will greatly improve the auspicious omens for the Crown Prince, when he begins preparation for his attempt, on the first day of the new year on Shan Lai, which I believe is the end of this week?”

“…”

“On three days’ notice?” he said softly, accepting the cup of tea Wenmei had just brought.

“Well, that is the Azure Astral Authority’s little bit of revenge,” Lu Xiao’s voice echoed drily in his head. “I bet the rumour peddlers didn’t see that coming.”

“It was my understanding that most of the ingredients would be ones held by the various signatories to the treaty,” Sheng Jiang Mei replied, grimacing.

He glanced down the list, which covered every major clan in Blue Water Province pretty much, with a sinking feeling, taking in the list of ingredients.

“What pill?” he asked.

“Myriad Elements Supreme Soul Pill,” Sheng Jiang Mei replied.

“I don’t suppose you have one?” he asked Lu Xiao.

“You want me to bail out the morons hugging the Imperial Court’s leg?” Lu Xiao replied blandly. “But yes, I can get one… If nothing else, Bright Dream can probably refine you one if I ask nicely.”

The reminder of his aunt’s perpetual houseguest caught him off guard slightly.

“That is not all…” Sheng Jiang Mei added, looking apologetically at him. “I know we have had a good relationship over the years, so it gives me no pleasure to say it, but the Emperor has asked for a personal gift from the province and all its loyal servants.”

“It amounts to another half again on top of the yearly levy,” Kun Lianmei said, before he could even ask anyone else how much it might come to. “In a normal year, it would be fine, but there are a lot of herbs tied up in that fates-accursed auction and their status with this blood ling contamination is such that… well…”

“In this regard, the Emperor is willing to be understanding,” Sheng Jiang Mei added, before they could say anything. “As I explained to Duke Cao, he is not unreasonable, given how rampant and uncaring the Imperial Court had been in inconveniencing the citizens of the province… so the levy is just from the clans and the Bureau, and you have the whole month to prepare the gift, with it being presented on the ‘Celebration of the Rising Dragon’ thirty-three days from now, rather than it being delivered by the end of this week on the ‘Celebration of the Celestial Dragon Gate’, to welcome in the New Year.”

That was actually, he had to admit, somewhat surprising, given that it was a serious step back in some respects. That it exempted the civil authorities was giving the province and its lay people a lot of face. However, it also dumped all that responsibility on to the noble clans and the Hunter Bureau, which was, he was sure, very deliberately judged to send a message of a different kind.

“The proclamation will be formally announced to every clan and authority within the province at the dawn hour of the first day of your new year,” Sheng Jiang Mei added.

-Circumventing neatly any politicking that could be done and making everyone very aware that the clans, when they come raiding their subsidiary influences’ storehouses, are doing it to save their own reputations, he mused, quietly impressed. It was a simple gesture, but one with real teeth.

“Thank you for telling us this in advance,” he replied politely.

“I know four days warning is not much,” Sheng Jiang Mei murmured, standing again and bowing apologetically to him then to Ling Tao. “But with the renegotiated terms, this does give you a little bit of an edge given our long and fruitful cooperation.”

Ling Tao nodded politely, though he could see faint traces of anger and worry now marring her beautiful face.

“Perhaps I will retire for the night,” Sheng Jiang Mei added, bowing again.

“Of course,” Ling Tao, who was the hostess in effect, agreed amicably. “Wenmei, please escort Lady Sheng as she wishes.”

Wenmei, who had been standing to the side, bowed politely.

They all stood and saluted the Envoy as she left, following Wenmei. Once she was safely departed though, Ling Tao slumped back down on the sofa, rubbing her temples.

“What is it about this week?” she groaned.

“When the Eye of Worldly Fortune moves, everyone sweats,” Old Ling grumbled, chugging down his cup of tea and then pouring himself another cup.

“Heaven giveth, heaven taketh, this is how heaven playeth,” he muttered, repeating what Lu Xiao had said earlier. “With rigged decks and marked cards.”

Ling Tao, who had produced her jar of wine again, nodded and passed it to her husband, who sniffed it, eyed her, and frowned slightly, before looking at him with another faintly accusing expression. Lu Xiao, who was sitting off to the side, just rolled her eyes at his comment.

“So, how badly in the shit are you?” Ling Tao asked Kun Lianmei and Old Ling once she had poured a few cups and circulated them.

“Not as bad as it could be,” Old Ling sighed, “but this is going to get ugly when word gets out, given that the clans plundered all of West Flower Picking Town’s storehouses for that auction, and now…”

“Those herbs might all be touched by blood ling contamination,” Kun Lianmei concluded.

“I can supply the pill. I suppose it is the least I can do for this province,” Lu Xiao said, her presence snapping into subtle focus, making both Old Ling and Kun Lianmei flinch and jump up. “I came because of the blood ling stuff, because my nephew here asked me, but it seems that this week will just keep on giving.”

“Lady Xiao!” Old Ling murmured, saluting her deeply. “You look as lovely as ever!”

“Lady Xiao,” Kun Lianmei echoed.

Lu Xiao accepted their salutes and walked over to sit in a more central spot, on the other end of his couch.

Looking at the old elder as he sat down again, he had a flash of sympathy for the old man.

Old Elder Ling was someone who had known his grandfather… and his grand uncle for that matter, having originally been an old expert who lived reclusively in Blue Water Province back when the area was still in steep decline, and had even travelled with his grand uncle a bit. Since then he had become the ‘leader’ of the West Flower Picking region’s Hunter Bureau upon that town’s foundation, largely due to being a wise, level-headed old expert who was fairly neutral.

“So, there is no question of any herb that went anywhere near the auction going to Shan Lai,” Ling Bai Weng said, sitting down beside his wife. “The Duke will deploy soldiers in the streets before that happens, on the off chance that it gets taken as a direct slight against them.”

“Understandable,” he nodded, sipping his tea.

“The optics of this are going to be an absolute shit show,” Ling Tao sighed. “This is certainly what that disquiet was a few days ago, isn’t it?”

“It is,” Ling Weng agreed. “We should have had forewarning a few days ago, but various parties have managed to stymie the news just long enough that it was a nasty surprise when Sheng Jiang Mei showed up earlier today, expecting us to already be making progress on it.”

“When you say ‘various parties’?” he asked, frowning.

“There are enough Imperial Court loyalists in the Provincial Bureaucracy that all it took was a few people being ‘otherwise engaged’ with important official duties and their deputies being left no clear instructions that the forewarning through the usual channels was a bit muted,” Ling Weng replied.

“—Official Duties?” Lu Xiao interjected with some amusement.

“The imperial visit, and then, rather conveniently, the fallout from the auction. It was very easy for a messenger from Shan Lai to not be seen immediately, and then their message to not be looked at by someone senior and so on…” Ling Weng grimaced. “Certainly, seems like the Ha clan has known for days… though so have the Deng.”

“…”

“One of whom is pushing for closer ties to the Din clan, and the other is ingratiating themselves to the Imperial Princess,” Ling Tao murmured.

“SHIT!” Kun Lianmei swore under her breath.

“What’s wrong?” Ling Tao asked as they all turned to look at her.

“The obnoxious requests this clearance season, the little ‘problems’ and ‘difficulties’ so many of the Hunters have been having with their requests,” Kun Lianmei growled.

“If the Ha and the Deng knew about this, even vaguely… Both of them have been attempting to undercut the Kun clan’s hegemony in herb brokerage for years, almost since the regional reorganization a century ago, after the Iron Crown Duke’s ‘campaign’. Not to mention they have both been vying for control over the Provincial Hunter Bureau’s apparatus for almost as long.”

“Indeed,” Old Ling sighed. “And matters are tight enough logistically that only a few high-ranked Hunters need to be removed from the equation for a short period for it to seriously hinder any attempt by our regional bureau to deliver our part of this ‘gift’.”

“The fallout from the Year of the Blood Eclipse is the rotten gift that just keeps on giving,” his disciple muttered.

“Not to mention, now that the majority of our province’s stores have just been plundered by elders from the Ha, Kun and Deng clans, as well as by the Imperial Envoy and a number of others, for this auction… we are still left with substantial problem,” Lianmei added.

“Which is what they are likely aiming for,” Old Ling remarked with a degree of resigned annoyance. “It weakens the Bureau leadership, causes trouble with the Azure Astral Authority, damages the rival herb brokerages, and positions them to capitalize on a moment of weakness…”

“With the Imperial Court quietly helping them along, no doubt,” Ling Tao agreed.

“Presumably they reached that conclusion before it was anticipated that the burden would fall harder on the clans,” he mused, wondering suddenly if Sheng Jiang Mei or someone with her had not also drawn that conclusion and taken steps appropriately.

“You think so?” Lu Xiao casually remarked, sipping a cup of tea and sighing with satisfaction.

“The Ha and the Deng both have enough stockpiles saved up that they are confident they can strike a deal that gets them more control?” Ling Weng mused, beating him to actually giving voice to it. “Or just fill the levy in a way that makes the rest look incompetent.”

“…”

His aunt stared around the room with the look of someone wondering if she was the only smart person in the room.

“You are suggesting that the Ha or the Deng have actually stolen some of the provincial stockpiles, under the cover of the auction, just for this purpose?” he added.

Lu Xiao nodded. “It is what I would do, were I poor and without shame, like them.”

“…”

“Well then. At any rate, the sects are also conspicuously absent on that list,” Ling Tao added, looking at the list and the announcement that Sheng Jiang Mei had left.

“Yes, but half of them are bound closely to clans anyway, dear,” Ling Weng murmured. “And were it not for Lady Xiao here most generously agreeing to supply the pill in question, or the ingredients, that would be a serious headache.”

“True,” Ling Tao sighed, still staring at the list. “The Ling clan has decent stockpiles, though a vexatious amount of them have been plundered by people who should know better for the grand diorama in the auction.”

“The Kun clan is the same,” Lianmei agreed, just about managing not to grind her teeth. “Some regions will fare better than others, but the Supreme Elder has been rather invested in getting his daughter into the good graces of the Princess’s group, so much of what we have is now associated with that and it will take weeks to be certain there are no problems.”

“It seems we will have to cut our visit with you short after all, Lady Ling,” Old Ling sighed, stroking his beard.

“There is still the matter of the bandits,” he reminded Ling Tao.

“…”

His disciple sighed, rubbing her temples again.

“Dear…” Ling Weng murmured, putting a hand on her arm, then shooting him another slightly accusing look.

-I suppose I have left Tao a lot to do, he reflected a bit awkwardly.

“It’s fine,” Ling Tao murmured, patting his hand.

“The matter we came to you about originally?” Kun Lianmei asked Ling Tao.

“Yes,” his disciple nodded. “Teacher Ji was able to work with what you provided and shed some new light on the matter, but we needed to speak to someone who had been in there.”

“I see,” Kun Lianmei nodded. “I have certainly been into the ruin, or some of it anyway, because two areas Hunter Jun recorded are no longer accessible.”

“In that case,” Lu Xiao said brightly, cutting in, “why don’t we make a start on that first, and you can handle the ‘gift giving’ crisis after?”

“Do you have anywhere large and enclosed?” he asked Ling Tao.

“Hmmm. My grandfather’s old martial hall is probably the largest in the estate,” Ling Tao mused. “It was built for combat training. Otherwise it’s one of the warehouses.”

“Let’s go look at the hall then,” Lu Xiao said brightly, standing up. “If you would, Lady Ling?”

Without any real ceremony, they all followed Ling Tao and Ling Weng as they led his aunt through the estate to finally arrive at a large hall that, at nearly twice the size of the one he had originally used in his estates, was big enough to marshal military formations in for training purposes.

“Jade please,” Lu Xiao murmured, holding out her hand.

Ling Tao passed her the jade and they watched as his aunt considered it pensively, then vanished in a blur and appeared some twenty metres away. She materialized a squat stone pedestal from somewhere and put it down, then put the jade on top and, after putting a hand on it, just closed her eyes for a moment—

The hall shifted, much as it had for him, when he had done this, and the different rooms appeared again one after another.

“Hmmm… good fidelity,” his aunt mused staring at them critically. “You want to recreate the missing bits and link them up?”

“Yes,” he agreed. “It is possible to see some of the fight with the queen stalker…”

“I see, I see…” she mused, walking from the living hall to the workshop, then at the distant hall…

“Huh…” she narrowed her eyes.

“What is it?” he asked.

“This ruin… did you go in that far hall?” Lu Xiao asked Lianmei.

“No,” Lianmei shook her head, walking over to point near the workshop. “That was inaccessible. There was a collapse… here?” she said, pointing out a location.

“I see… hmm… interesting,” his aunt turned on the indicated spot, her eyes still narrowed. “Interesting.”

She stood there and closed her eyes for a moment and… the ruins grew. That was the only way to describe it. The scene he had picked out in glitchy loops rapidly filled in with each cycle of ‘roars’, far, far faster than he could have achieved it.

Within thirty seconds a sketchy outline of much of the main ‘cavern’ was visible, then within only five minutes of them all watching with rapt interest, because it was not every day you got to see someone of his aunt’s pedigree play with feng shui, a version of the battle, a rough two minute loop, was there playing out for them to see.

The tetrid queen was certainly formidable, easily holding her own against multiple cultivators who were dashing back and forth, trying to stay in cover or restrain it.

Soon, the room he was most interested in at the front, where they had been storing the herbs, was nearly complete as well, and the corridor to the workshop and the nest, lined with statues, was also slowly sliding into focus.

“This will take a while,” she declared after a looking at the hallway critically for a moment. “Let’s go look at this far room; it is certainly interesting.”

“Yeah,” he grimaced. “It has some strange feng shui that resembled the blood ling trees. I couldn’t enter, but Ling Tao didn’t notice much, did you?”

“No… just that it was oddly enticing,” Ling Tao murmured as they followed Lu Xiao over to it.

His aunt stopped on the edge and stared at it pensively for a long moment, taking in the carvings…

“Well…” Lu Xiao murmured appraisingly at last. “Well, well, well.”

“It certainly has a most… unsettling aura,” Ling Weng remarked.

“It does,” Old Ling agreed.

“Wait… do only men get bad vibes from this place?” he asked.

“Uhuh,” Lu Xiao nodded, looking at the statue at the far end. “You are familiar with the statue in the Queen Mother’s Shrine?”

“This is like that?” Ling Tao murmured looking around.

“Oh yes, but much, much more dangerous,” Lu Xiao mused. “If you want me to reconstruct this, it will not be done so quickly. It will take a day or two at least. It might almost be easier to go to the original source.”

“The key thing is the bodies,” he reminded her.

“Hah… they are easily the least interesting thing about this hall,” Lu Xiao chuckled, walking into it and staring at them in turn.

“I must say, this reminds me a bit of some other ruins,” Old Ling mused.

“The ones in Thunder Crest?” Lu Xiao remarked.

“Yes,” Old Ling nodded. “They are dangerous as well; the old tribes used to go there. It was a holy place for their coming of age rituals, before the eastern barbarians forced everyone out and their culture mostly vanished.”

“Do you know what they are trying to do with those compasses?” he asked her.

“Hmmm… I have a few ideas, but the alignments in this place are not exactly easy to deal with,” Lu Xiao mused, walking around. “You said this place had associations with the Blood Eclipse?”

“Yes,” Kun Lianmei nodded.

“Hmmm,” Lu Xiao frowned, looking at the bodies again, then at the talismans and then at the exit of the hall. “Well, first I will see if I can fix the area outside. It seems like there is running water outside, so the sound will help… but it will take hours at least, maybe a day depending on the complexity.”

“Ah…” Old Ling pulled out a talisman and stared at it.

“News is travelling,” Ling Weng frowned, taking out one of his own.

“Yes, it seems I will have to go back to West Flower Picking Town,” Old Ling sighed.

“You said that this Hunter… Jun, was someone well known to you?” he asked Kun Lianmei.

“Yes, she is a good girl,” Lianmei nodded. “Someone worth nurturing, unlike half the idiots clogging up the Pavilion.”

“Hmmm…” he frowned, mulling over what to do next.

“If you want to continue your alchemy, here is as good a place as any,” Ling Tao remarked to him. “We are a good way from the city and it’s not raining.”

“We will have to return to West Flower Picking Town,” Lianmei added, glancing at her own talisman as well with a grimace.

“Of course,” Ling Tao nodded. “I can see you off. We also have to talk about Miss Jun.”

“Yes, you can all leave this to me,” Lu Xiao interjected drily, ushering them away from the edge of the scene. “Go solve the province’s tax crisis over tea or something, before there is a run on storage warehouses from the Straits to the Shadow Forest by greedy old ancestors… for the second time in a week.”

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

~ JUN ARAI – WEST FLOWER PICKING TOWN ~

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

“GET HIM!”

“ANOTHER BLOW!”

“DON’T USE TALISMANS!”

“AHHH! HOW STUPID!”

“FIVE SPIRIT STONES ON CAO TO TAKE IT!”

“AGAIN! USE YOUR SPECIAL ART!”

{Seven Tigers Leaping Fists}

“Well, this is more interesting than it shaped up to be,” Lin Ling remarked laughingly to her as they sat at the table, beneath the shelter of an umbrella, watching the last fight of the Golden Core tier of the martial tournament.

“It is,” she agreed, watching the two combatants fight it out in fairly brutal fashion amid the drifting rain.

The ostensible favourite going into the final fight had been a youth from Patriarch Dongfei’s extended party, Ha Cao Wenfei. His opponent, rather unfancied, was in fact Ha Yun, the youngest son of Ha Feirong, the town governor and current head of the Ha clan in West Flower Picking region.

“Regretting not entering?” Juni remarked with a certain degree of amusement to Sana, who was sitting nearby.

“Mmmmm…”

Her sister shook her head, though she could detect a faint hint of regret there anyway.

The hilarious part about this battle was not even that Ha Yun was actually winning; it was, to her, that he was winning while being abjectly terrible. His sole advantage, really, was that he had better intent, and was used to fighting in this kind of rain.

“Does this Ha Yun not actually have any ‘martial’ arts?” Kun Baotan, who had won the ‘Dao Seeking’ competition quite handily, even with his cultivation suppressed, asked with clear amusement and also quite a bit of disdain.

“As a matter of fact, he does not,” she replied cheerfully, “not truly.” Then she added, feeling that perhaps she should stand up for him slightly, for some reason, “Flashy arts like Wenfei is using are not at all useful up in the mountains, use a lot of qi, and are quite taxing on your body as well when it comes to using intent… Ha Yun’s sole advantage here is that he has some experience with the suppression in Yin Eclipse.”

{Dashing Tiger Slash}

Ha Cao Wenfei tried another martial attack, which Ha Yun just about dodged as his opponent shot over to the other side of the platform—

{Jade Fox Blade}

To her surprise, Ha Yun did, in fact, use a martial art at last, a rising slash that caught Ha Cao Wenfei awkwardly in the thigh, even as he dodged—

{Shadowless Tiger St—

Ha Yun kicked his opponent in the crotch and everyone watched dully as Ha Cao Wenfei, caught mid movement art, tumbled off the stage with an agonised yell, losing the last short bout by dint of leaving the combat area.

“Well, there is another scion who can certainly fly,” Lin Ling remarked to her sister, who burst out laughing for some reason.

“Winner, by two matches to one, HA YUN!”

The local contingent stood all around the stage, applauding wildly as Ha Yun stared around looking rather bedraggled, wiping blood from his nose, clearly somewhat dazed at the unexpected victory.

A volley of fireworks in Ha clan colours exploded over the courtyard a moment later, drowning out the cheers and sending small purple and gold dragons dancing through the rain, casting strange rainbows before the weather devoured them.

“Congratulations!” the Patriarch declared from the sheltered balcony of the Teahouse overlooking the veranda. “Your son… has definitely exceeded expectations, Clan Lord Feirong!”

“Certainly he has,” Juni, who had also stood to applaud, though only politely, murmured.

Ha Shi Lian, who was sitting next to Fairy Seong, didn’t quite give the less enthusiastic elements of their table a sideways glare as she applauded much more vigorously before adding. “At least have some civic pride. If you dislike it, you could have entered yourselves.”

“True,” Juni conceded, “it is worth celebrating that someone local won the showpiece tournament of the day’s celebrations.”

“Yep,” Han Shu, who was sitting beyond Juni, talking to Ying Ji about something or other, agreed.

Sighing, she stood as well and applauded, as did Sana and Lin Ling, albeit somewhat reluctantly.

“Indeed, a win is a win,” Old Xian remarked with a philosophical air to the table at large. “And yes, while you may dislike the boy for his background, he fought well and exceeded his limits to gain a good victory, as my grand niece says, given it’s the showpiece tournament.”

-You say that, she reflected unhappily, but the problem isn’t that he is from the Ha clan. It’s that he is a spoiled scion who obtained his status as a quasi-six-star ranked Herb Hunter through preferential treatment arranged by his clan, receiving the safe and easy jobs and rarely, if ever, setting foot in Yin Eclipse for any serious missions despite his rank.

That was the sticking point, really. Ha Yun was something of a focal point for a whole bunch of other Hunters who used him and his status to monopolize many of the easier and safer high-ranked and better-paying jobs, forcing Hunters like her towards more dangerous, political or just outright unprofitable missions.

On top of that, he was also a troublemaker who, along with his friends, frequently leant on his status as the son of the governor and the Clan Lord to do as he liked.

“Indeed,” Fairy Seong, sitting along from Old Xian, agreed as she sat back down from applauding. “Even if you dislike the Ha clan, as my disciple says, there is no harm in some civic pride in a local lad winning… As I recall, he was instrumental in uncovering that mess with Ha Xin Changmei the other year as well.”

“Wasn’t she the one who got in trouble for setting up a ‘social gathering’ to entertain visiting young nobles that turned out to be an unlicensed brothel drawing on young orphan girls supported by the Town Authority’s Bureau of Civil Pensions?” her father, who was sitting near Han Shu and one of his uncles, Han Murai, interjected.

“Yes… she was,” Ha Lian murmured, her expression darkening.

“…Yes,” she echoed glumly, recalling that several of the flower sellers had been embroiled in that mess, including… Ha Fen Fang and Ha Tenli, though as far as she knew, they had just been servants and never done anything inappropriate.

-Well, I suppose it is at least to his favour that he isn’t stupid, or like those scions who were willing to prey on orphan girls, she begrudgingly acknowledged as he continued to receive plaudits from the crowd.

That Ha Yun and his friends had been the ones who uncovered that and reported it… well, she had to applaud him for that at least.

“It’s basically the only bit of good credit he has with the Guard Commanderie, that he helped uncover that,” the off-duty master sergeant, Han Murai, remarked drily. “He’s been waving it under our noses ever since.”

“Mmm,” Fairy Seong cast him a sideways look, but in her view his comment was also quite fair.

Ha Yun was, in her experience, more than willing to play up his ‘adventures’ and ‘achievements’ for the crowd when it suited him, as well as carrying the occasional small bit of politics for his clan elders.

“From what I saw in the Lady Ling’s estate, you would have defeated either of them handily, Miss Sana,” Bai Jiang added sympathetically to her sister as he also politely applauded Ha Yun, who had now made it off the stage and was being escorted through the crowd, back to the teahouse, smoothly changing the topic of conversation. “As would you, Lady Juni.”

“I suppose so,” Juni conceded, though somewhat neutrally, sitting down again.

“Probably,” her sister nodded, before glancing at her. “But I have no interest in it… To be marked as someone who beat up the governor’s son, in front of a home crowd, with his friends looking on, is not how I wish to end the day. Now, if Kun Xian here had competed…”

-As opposed to me, who out-painted a Blue Gate School disciple whose uncle hates our father, she reflected wryly. Even if I had little choice in the matter.

Kun Xian, who had just sat back down next to Old Xian, winced.

“Look, I said I am sorry,” he protested, looking hurt, “—and Miss Arai won!”

“Good thing for you, too,” Juni remarked, giving him a sideways look.

“Give it a rest, Sis,” she signed.

Her sister just stuck her tongue out, then signed back: “I shall not!”

“He is much better than you think,” she signed back. “I fought him in the rain and only won because of my age basically. Unless you plan to just mantra stun him…”

Sana rolled her eyes, confirming that she absolutely did want to attempt to teach Kun Xian a lesson if she got the opportunity.

“Well, I do think we should consider heading home soon,” their father declared from further up the table.

It was getting quite late, she had to concede, glancing up at the clock on the front of the Celestial Blossom Teahouse, which now read three hours after midnight. They had only decided to stay to the end of the martial tournament once it became clear it would be a martial tournament, as the weather forced everyone to use fewer qi arts and rely more on their intent. In that regard, it had been quite informative to watch, even if most of those competing were not that different in skill to her with ‘intent’, or so much better that all she could get were slight glimpses as they wielded their martial forms in flickering blurs, scattering rain with every move.

“Okay,” Sana agreed, standing up. “Lin Ling, are you also still coming back with us?”

“Uhuh,” Ling, who had been sitting next to her, nodded as she also stood.

“In that case, let us bid you farewell for now!” Bai Jiang said with a bright smile, saluting her sister, Lin Ling and then her.

“Indeed,” Han Shu added, standing as well. “Sorry we didn’t get more of a chance to chat.”

“It’s fine,” she said, taking her umbrella out of the storage device in her hair. “I am sure we will cross paths again fairly soon.”

“Undoubtedly,” Han Shu agreed with a friendly smile.

“Tomorrow we will be doing a tour of the town,” Feng Jihan added. “Perhaps you might all join us?”

“Possibly,” her sister agreed. “I’ll let Juni know.”

Juni, who had also stood, nodded at that, then signed to her. “We will probably need to talk about your missions as well.”

“I know,” she replied with a grimace. “I need to talk to Lianmei or Old Ling as well.”

“I’ll try to get in contact with Lianmei,” Juni sent back.

Glancing over, she saw that Han Murai had stood up with her father, suggesting that he would likely come back with them, so she instead turned to Old Xian and Fairy Seong and bowed politely to them.

Both returned her bow, as did Kun Xian, who she did feel a bit sorry for at this point, despite him landing her in a pile of steaming monkey shit, earlier.

“Again, I am really sorry,” he muttered.

“It’s fine,” she replied. “I know you didn’t intend it. It was just one of those things…”

Old Xian, standing next to his grandson, made a face that suggested that perhaps it was ‘not’, but she studiously ignored it, because there was no point in cultivating a silly grudge with the more amenable of Juni’s cousins when he was clearly remorseful over the whole thing.

Giving the table a final polite bow, she walked over to their father, who smiled warmly.

“I take it you have nothing else you want to do?” he asked them as Sana and Lin Ling joined him.

“Nope,” she shook her head. “Lead on, father dearest!”

Her father gave her a slightly odd look, but she had to admit, she had been moping somewhat excessively earlier.

Han Murai, standing to the side, just shook his head in amusement.

“We can talk more about this later…?” her father added to him.

“It’s fine. I need to head to the Western District Guard Pavilion anyway,” Han Shu’s uncle remarked.

“Okay,” Jun Han conceded, then started off at a brisk pace, Han Murai falling in beside him.

The trip back did not take all that long really. They walked after their father and Han Murai, mostly in silence, taking in the rain-drenched streets of the central markets and then the Western District.

The square before their estate was holding a small night market, which they mostly ignored beyond stopping to buy a few snacks from the stall of a grand niece of Old Fang while their father asked her father about some matters.

Arriving back at the estate, Han Murai came in with them, and he and their father went to the veranda to continue whatever it was they were talking about, which she could only presume was related to the Guard Commanderie in some way, so the three of them went to the kitchen and put a pot of water on for tea.

“This… has been a very strange day,” Lin Ling declared at last, after they had sat there in silence, watching the pot slowly heat up for a few minutes.

“It has,” her sister agreed, not quite looking at her.

“Look, I am not a broken thing,” she replied reprovingly, a bit annoyed suddenly at how both of them were being so… ‘tactful’.

“Anyway, those three from over the ocean sure have taken a shine to both of you,” she retorted.

“…”

Her sister and Lin Ling both glared back at her, trying to do their best ‘get stuffed’ expressions, but, dressed in pretty gowns as they were, even that just came across as slightly coy and a bit flustered.

“They are Juni’s guests. We can hardly be rude to them,” Sana remarked after a moment.

“And they are actually quite good company,” Lin Ling agreed. “It’s nice to chat about Yin Eclipse and not have to either talk up or down to people.”

Shaking her head, she got up and went over to the pot, which was now boiling, and decanted it into a proper teapot, adding a fistful of tea-leaves into it.

“So, you show them around town tomorrow with Juni?”

“If it passes for a day off, certainly,” Sana nodded eagerly. “You should come too. You do need a day off, Sis.”

“I…” she stared at the window, which in the darkness was doubling as a mirror, showing a tired face staring back at her, her brown hair a bit bedraggled despite the umbrella and her best efforts.

“You do,” her sister said, coming over and giving her a hug. “I know mantra overuse when I see it, and you, Sister, are in need of a day or two doing nothing.”

“I know,” she sighed softly, staring at the reflection of the both of them, not quite identical, but both suddenly looking rather like their mother.

“…”

“Look, this is all well and good,” Lin Ling, still sitting at the table, coughed.

Unhooking Sana’s arms, she nodded, giving her sister a friendly shove towards the cupboard where there were tea cups.

Her sister pouted at her and went over to the cupboard as she took the teapot and put it on the table, sitting down with a sigh on a chair.

“Thank the fates this clearance season is nearly over,” she declared at last.

“That, I can certainly drink to,” her sister agreed, pouring tea into cups.

“To new days,” Lin Ling agreed, rolling her eyes.

“May they be better than the old ones!” her sister added, sitting down and sipping her own tea.

“Quite,” she agreed, managing a wry smile after a moment of savouring the liquid. “While today was… mostly fun, I am not sorry to see it over—”

“It was kind of fun to watch the tournament and the alchemy,” Lin Ling agreed. “And wearing these gowns…”

“Welcome to my people!” Sana giggled, doing a very good impression of Ling Yu, while waving her arms in a rather spooky manner.

Shaking her head, she had to laugh at that. It was true, in any case. If she made a concerted effort and divorced the painting from proceedings… and even with that, she had basically come first in the province, so it was something, they had had a fair amount of fun. It had been interesting to chat to the group who Juni was entertaining, and aside from the serious blot of springing the painting on her, Kun Xian had also been good, then rather contrite company.

“Regarding Kun Xian—” she started.

“Boo… don’t talk about that!” Sana declared, pushing another cup of tea over to her.

“I was just going to say that you don’t need to hold a grudge on my behalf. He’s not so bad. Better to go look up that Ha clan idiot, Ha Caofat.”

“Bleugh,” Sana made a face at her for a moment, looking annoyed. “You had a terrible week, allow me that at least.”

“…”

“Fine…” her sister sighed after a long pause. “I suppose he was suitably apologetic, and did beat up all those Ha brats!”

“That was fun to watch,” Lin Ling agreed.

“That said, I dunno about you two, but after this I am going to go to my bed and very aggressively not wake up with the sunrise for once,” she declared.

“That… is a rather good plan,” Sana agreed, sipping her own tea. “Shall we go put these gowns away?”

“After tea,” she murmured, helping herself to a snack that Lin Ling had produced from her storage device.

“Yes,” Lin Ling agreed. “After.”