> My dearest friend,

>

> It is with a heavy heart that I write to you today. No doubt, by the time my correspondence reaches you, others will have already whispered in your ear, or taken you by the hand and told you how things ‘are’, however, in light of the long years of our friendship, I cannot, will not, deceive you with a less than honest—though perhaps more convenient and comfortable—account of what has transpired. You deserve to know the truth.

>

> It appears that Shu Bao and some of his ‘good friends’ went out drinking, and then had a banquet. For entertainment they invited various famous courtesans to dance and play music, and among them, your husband saw one that so reminded him of the Song Jia of decades past, that he later invited her to accompany him. What transpired after, alas, I cannot tell you, but the next morning, your husband was found in his room at the Shining Scholar Pavilion, naked, in his bed, barely alive thanks in no small part to the Aeon Enduring Ginseng your father gifted him at your wedding, with a crippled soul root and the remains of his immortal core left smashed on a plate by his bedside.

>

> Three of his ‘old friends’—Kong Din Hu, Kong Jiong Ran and Shu Jing Pei—who left the banquet with him are still missing as of the time of my writing this, as are both bodyguards he had with him. The other two, who were still in the room—Shu Wang and Feng Bohai, were simply drunk, to the point of recollective insensibility.

>

> Already, however, the usual old elders are working to save face, claiming your husband underwent a ‘cultivation deviation’, and are spreading rumours left and right that he will recover, but the informal prognosis of my own family physician, Sir Lao, whose capabilities need no assurance to your ears, I am sure, is that your husband’s foundation was destroyed through some method that has touched on the secrets of written and unwritten Destiny of all things! Thus, he has told me, even were the Shu clan to bring down a venerable medicinal master from the estate of Duke Shu, it is nigh impossible that he will ever recover enough to ride at the crest of the wave of this generation.

>

> Sadly, I could not detain the other courtesans who went with them, but neither, it seems, have any other interested parties. All the major influences who peddle in that sort of thing have been very quick to deny involvement, and unnervingly prompt in producing ironclad evidence, not that I expect it to save some of them. It is a cruel world.

>

> If I hear more on this, know that I will do my utmost to move Grandpa Shin, whose instruction was so beneficial to you in the past, to cast his expert eye over matters. He has mentioned in our regular correspondence of wanting to visit these Four Azures of late.

>

> Your eternal, and closest friend,

>

> Kong Changqing.

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

~ KUN JUNI – RIVER, NIGHT, ~

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

Leaning against the side of the vessel, listening to the water gently lapping against the timbers of the boat and the rustle of wind blowing through dark reeds, Juni found herself forgetting where she was. She could have been home, aboard a boat on the Blue River, or just sitting, listening to nature by some secluded pond. It was peaceful, to pretend the last chaotic weeks were a fantasy.

-Except, then I would probably be in the process of being bundled off as a marriage gift to some young lord… a malicious corner of her mind pointed out.

Exhaling, she banished the thought, but it had done its damage.

“Problem?” Ling, who was sitting nearby filleting some freshly caught fish, glanced up at her sigh.

“Just stray thoughts getting in the way,” she replied, tilting her head to look up at the dusk sky, with its strange stars and the eerie, almost aggressive orb of the rising moon shining down on them. “About home, and… possibilities.”

“Ah,” the younger woman nodded, also taking a moment to gaze out into the gloom of the passing marshlands.

In silence, both of them just watched the world slip silently by once again, taking in the sounds of the vessel—the quiet creak of the oars being used to punt them along, the murmur of hushed conversations, the water against the hull, the reeds rustling and the occasional, distant call of birds and other denizens of these dangerous wetlands.

“Do you want a hand with those?” she asked at last, gesturing towards the rest of the basket of fish.

Chunhua, Lashaan, and Kreva were currently taking the official watch, so all her observance was doing was adding an extra pair of eyes, while she mulled over ‘stuff’ in a rather general sense.

“Sure, why not,” Ling chuckled, pushing it over. “Put the guts and bones in the pot. It will feed it,” she added.

She glanced at the dark grey stoneware pot that Ling was using to propagate more Yang Blood, to the consternation of Uarz, and nodded slightly, before moving over to sit opposite the pot, so she would not be at risk of accidentally knocking it over.

Taking one of the fishes, she focused ‘Bright Heart Shifting Steps’ and spent a moment examining the fish. According to the talisman, the best way to train it, and by extension her mastery over it, was to do mundane and everyday tasks such as this while maintaining it. Not only would it help her stamina and focus with regard to it, but apparently, it would also make the art more useful in identifying that which stood out relative to such normality.

On the face of it, that might not have seemed that impressive, except her experience using the art to track down Han Shu was already showing just how ridiculous that could become. When she first started using the art, she had treated it just like any other divination art which, on the surface, dealt with ‘relative auspiciousness’. In that vein, it had already been doing a lot of heavy lifting, based on what they had to work with. Still, thinking about that now, she could only shake her head wryly at the ignorance of the ‘her’ from a week ago.

Had the aftermath of her advancement to Dao Seeking been a little less fraught, she might have realised her misconception earlier, but really, it was only since leaving the fate-thrashed village earlier on that she had finally had a chance to sit down and properly re-evaluate what she could do with it, and gotten a bit of a shock, albeit a pleasant one.

Putting the fish back, she grabbed another, turning it over in her hands, taking in the shape, size, weight, its colour, the quality of its qi and even how it had been stunned dead, all the while letting the art ‘sit’ in the back of her mind and just be part of what she was doing.

Ling watched her for a moment, then claimed a fish for herself and started gutting it, shaking her head slightly as if in response to something only she could hear.

-I guess the memories she has find what I am doing amusing, she chuckled, putting that fish back and taking another.

In that sense, she could understand somewhat, because while she had not been using ‘Bright Heart Shifting Steps’ wrong, her initial misconception had certainly led her to use it very inefficiently. Her hunch was that whoever had written the instructions the talisman presented for its use had expected her not to use it as she had, and certainly to take longer to advance from Soul Foundation to Dao Seeking than she had. There was a lot of additional instruction that opened up at Soul Foundation, which given she had the advantages of a Mantra, she really could have benefited from knowing before that point.

A case in point was how Bright Heart Shifting Steps should be ‘maintained’. She had been treating it like an active thing, like such divination arts tended to be: always focusing on it, interrogating its direction very specifically, which was apparently fine for very basic things, if you could not sustain its use. However, as she had been finding, that rapidly ran into issues regarding complexity and efficiency, and the strain it put on her mind was hideous.

Rather, she should have been passively maintaining it for extended periods of time, seeking a sort of equilibrium that more resembled a Wu Wei meditation technique than a divination art. It had been interesting to note that this was how the talisman would have led her to grasp Soul Intent, and by extension, the establishment of her Nascent Soul. Thankfully, the way she had done it didn’t seem to cause any complications, beyond discovering that her comprehension of a bunch of the ‘core methods’ the talisman placed importance on were now embarrassingly shallow.

Once she had looked over the remaining fish, pausing only to glance over at a minor kerfuffle over the oar being used to punt them along at the rear of the boat—which seemed to resolve itself with only some cursing, she took up her knife and, continuing to let the art just ‘sit’ in the back of her mind, slit it open—

Immediately, she got a sense that she had cut a little too deep, relative to the size of the fish and this species. Rather than dwell on that, she simply finished opening it up, scooped out the guts and put them in the pot, then used the flat of the knife to peel away the line of floating ribs and put the fish to one side.

The next three fish, she also cut too deep, at which point the intuition from Bright Heart Shifting Steps had shifted slightly, telling her that her knife was probably a bit blunt. It was weird to experience, because after a while it was like a quiet running commentary of intuitions in the back of her mind.

“—this crab?”

“Eh?” She glanced up to find Wei Chu crouching beside them, holding up a blue-green coloured crab the size of a plate by its claws.

“Yeah, we can,” Lin Ling replied, before adding to her, “She was asking if it’s edible.”

“Ah, was that the kerfuffle at the back of the boat?” she asked as Wei Chu held the crab down for Ling to stab with her own knife.

If there was a downside to training Bright Heart Shifting Steps like this, it was that. It tended to lead to her tuning out things happening around her, and on this boat, with this disparate collection of people, that wasn’t a good habit to get into.

“Yes,” Wei Chu nodded. “It crawled over the back of the boat while Ladrak was clearing the weed off the oar—”

A flare of light illuminated the horizon to their right, making everyone on the boat pause.

“One… two… three… four…” Ling counted under her breath to nine before the distant rumble washed over them.

Even as she was counting, three more flashes lit up the skyline.

“The Seizing Jaws,” one of the Ur’Vash crew sitting along from them muttered, making what she had come to recognise as a sign to ward off inauspicious events.

“Don’t be melodramatic,” Uarz called over, to the slightly nervous laughter of the other crew, while the cultivators all just looked confused. “Probably some idiots tried to raid Uldrav or Sokath and found out in time-honoured fashion.”

“Are we that far east?” Ladrak asked.

“According to those charts, Uldrav’s nearest watch towers are half a day’s sailing from their village,” Uarz shrugged. “I am more inclined to believe Uldrav is joyously targeting some idiots than that…”—he paused for effect and, rather depressingly, was rewarded by two further distant flares of light on the horizon—“than an old wives’ tale.”

“What are these?” she asked Lashaan, who had also moved up the boat to their side during the conversation.

Her own suspicion was that some cultivators might well be fighting it out, though she was not going to venture that opinion openly, at least for now.

“The… oh, a folk tale, superstition about the Eastern Reaches, south of the Isle of Mists,” Lashaan murmured. “Vessels vanish regularly down there, occasionally leaving behind a few traces that look like they got caught in the jaws of some great beast. In the tales of some, who have claimed to have had near misses, they say there were great flashes of light, or thunderous roars first—hence ‘The Seizing Jaws’.”

Involuntarily, she found herself glancing at Lin Ling, who just shrugged.

“It does happen,” the rower muttered sullenly. “You seen the shit that gone down the last few days.”

“Aye, I’ve seen plenty of powerful people doing stupid things that leave foul water for us poor folks to deal with, but I’ll hear no more talk of them—NOR ‘The Daughters’, you hear!?”

There was some sullen nodding from the rest of the crew around that rower, whom she made a mental note to keep an eye on.

“Tired, nervous people are what they are,” Lashaan sighed. “A good meal and some sleep is what most of them need.”

“What we all need,” she agreed. The day had been more than stressful, and everyone was still on edge about that fate-thrashed village, even though they had put many miles between them and it at this point.

“Speaking of meals,” Wei Chu muttered, eyeing the fish. “Is it river-soup for dinner again?”

“Unless you are sitting on a trove of delicacies, it is indeed delicious, spirit-food stew with fresh fish, beautiful greens and now, one deserving crab,” Lin Ling replied drily.

“If you like, I can help,” Lashaan murmured, giving Ling an encouraging smile. “We have a dish of this kind; I can show you how to prepare it.”

“Of course,” she nodded, dragging Wei Chu, architect of her own downfall, to sit beside them.

Up to this point, they had largely been preparing the food according to what they had learned from the Hunter Bureau, and in Ling’s case, from what she had picked up from Sana over the years. Expanding that repertoire so they could better blend in was only a good thing, in her eyes.

“Okay,” Lashaan smiled brightly. “So, first, we need a hot pot, and a shallow dish. As for the crab… it is unfortunately not a lot to go around—”

“More can probably be caught,” she observed.

“Maybe. These tend to be solitary and a bit territorial though,” Lashaan mused. “Ah well, in that case, we can shell the crab and just add the meat to the stock.”

“Here.” With a smirk, Ling handed the crab to Wei Chu, who stared at it like it was an alien creature.

“I’ll show you how,” she sighed, rolling her eyes and taking the crab from Wei Chu.

While Lashaan began inspecting the fish they had gutted, she flipped the crab over in her hands, letting ‘Bright Heart Shifting Steps’ do its thing. Next, she flexed the legs, to get a quick idea of how they articulated, and, as Wei Chu looked on, she held it out and slowly twisted one of the legs off, taking care to show where to break it, right on the joint with the body.

“Take the legs off like that,” she instructed, passing the crab over to the younger girl, then looking around for the shallow dish that Lashaan had mentioned was needed.

In the end, she had to get up and go to the middle of the boat, because all the cooking kit from the other boat had just been dumped in a crate there. Recovering it, she returned to find Lashaan drawing an ‘X’ shape on the back of the crab for a rather glum looking Wei Chu.

“—Their mana-meridian runs into the claws; you either need to dissociate the core, or divert it,” Lashaan was saying, as she sat down again and began to root through the crate. “The key point is here.”—the Ur woman tapped the point just behind its head, where the cross would connect the crab’s claws and its paddle-like back legs—“They grab their prey and connect the front meridian between their claws and use the connection between the meridians to paralyze their prey. The bigger ones can actually shock you unconscious.”

“Ah, I see,” Wei Chu muttered, flushing a little as she took the right claw and then snapped it at a sharp angle to the crab’s shell, before twisting it counterclockwise to fully separate it from the body.

“Yep, you need to be quite forceful with it, but not carelessly so, just like Junee showed,” Lashaan nodded. “If you just work at it, even in death, the meridian is too durable. Overpowering it is also no good, because it will harm the integrity of the mana in the body; the viscera at the top of the shell is where much of its mana is stored, and that is not good to eat.”

“Such are the joys of preparing spirit-food,” Ling observed with a grin, glancing up from the fish she was skinning.

“Mmmm, but it is valuable; it teaches us a lot about the way things work,” Lashaan added.

“It does,” she agreed. “What stuff do you need, Lashaan?”

“Oh, uh, this shallow bowl,” Lashaan said as she peered into the crate and pulled out the grey stoneware bowl they had used in the old boat to fry fish. “Then we need to gently heat the soup.”

Nodding, she lifted out the other large stone pot—which in a past life had probably been a water jar—the smaller pot and frame that were currently stored inside it, and then the other larger, very shallow bowl that was filled with sand. The setting up of the ‘fire’ itself didn’t take very long, because it wasn’t actually a fire, in the formal sense. Instead, she put the large, grey stoneware bowl in the sand, and dumped a few fire-attribute cores from a second pot into it, giving each one a sharp ‘shock’ on the edge of the pot as she did so to destabilize them so that they released heat, followed by adding several jars’ worth of river water. Next, she placed the smaller, thinner pot back into the big one, and secured it with the frame so it was suspended freely in the hot water. Finally, she poured a little more water into the space between the two pots, until it was only a hand’s width from the top.

As far as cooking ovens went, it was as ingenious a solution as any she had seen used in Yin Eclipse, where often the last thing you wanted was a naked flame.

“How hot do you want it?” she asked Lashaan.

“Hmmm, bring it to a boil so that the pot heats through, along with some oil and sliver some lotus roots and other water tubers,” Lashaan replied after a moment’s thought. “If you can, try to make sure they are all of a similar mana quality, but not so strong that they overwhelm the fish.”

“Okay,” she nodded, looking in the crate for the jar of cooking oil.

Passing the tubers over to Wei Chu to deal with, she spent a few minutes sorting through the lotus roots, finding ones that fit Lashaan’s instructions. When she had enough that there was one for each person on the boat, she claimed a cutting board and quickly sliced them into long, thin strips, all the while letting Bright Heart Shifting Steps continue to sit in the back of her mind.

By the time she had cut enough, the water heating the pot was starting to steam, so without waiting she measured out enough oil to coat the bottom of the cooking vessel to a finger’s depth. Once that had started to smoke, she then tossed in the lotus roots a handful at a time, using a stick to move them around so they didn’t burn.

“Once those start to soften, you can add the tubers,” Lashann instructed, glancing up from where she and Ling were still working on the remaining fish.

“How are the others holding up?” she asked Wei Chu quietly, while continuing to occasionally stir the frying lotus roots.

“Mmmm…” Wei Chu glanced over at Feiwu Shen and Kai Manshu, who were listening to Naakos and several of the rowers’ converse about something, before replying surprisingly creditably in the local tongue, not Easten. “We are fine… a bit tired I guess, and my uh, mana is still a bit drained. Tengfei’s group seem to have found some sort of… um, stable after the village—”

“—stability,” she supplied the word with a faint smile.

“Yes, stability,” Wei Chu gave her a grateful nod and continued. “However, the three we… rescued—the one from ‘The Imperial School’”—she had to lapse into a faked attempt at ‘Imperial Common’ for the name—“has been asking Zhanfeng questions.”

“As expected,” she sighed.

She had been doing her best to keep half an eye on those three, but they had mostly been staying as far away from her, Ling and Chunhua as possible, though in the case of the latter it was difficult because she was currently at the back of the vessel with Qing Yao.

“I don’t suppose they volunteered any names?” she asked, more in hope than expectation, recalling their earlier reticence on that front.

“Actually…” Wei Chu sighed, her expression reflecting some seeming loss of faith in her ‘peers’. “I was going to get to that. He said they should call him ‘Brother Huang’. The woman from the Myriad Herb Group, who has been trying to talk to Ruli and Meicheng, told them to call her ‘Sister Meihua’. As far as things go, it’s been… well, innocuous, conversational stuff, but they are definitely trying to scope the groups out.”

“Innocuous?” she mused, filing the names away. Lan, Huang and Meihua, huh…

She had no expectation that those were their real names, but they had been wary enough about telling her fake ones to her face that she felt they should not be too far from reality. Interestingly, Bright Heart Shifting Steps gave her very little inclination beyond her own suspicions there.

“About… the tri… um, test?” Wei Chu elaborated.

“—Trial,” she added helpfully.

“Yes,” Wei Chu affirmed, after turning the word over in her mouth a few times. “What seniors do they know, names in common, that sort of thing, or trying to make a…”

“—rapport?” she finished for Wei Chu.

“Uh-huh,” the younger woman nodded, after repeating that word silently to herself. “Especially Meihua. She was asking questions, carefully… about their captivity.”

“Mmmm…” she looked back up the vessel to Chunhua and Qing Yao, using that as cover to also observe the woman, who was still chatting quietly to Meicheng, a hand sympathetically placed on her arm.

“You are worried someone will do something stupid?” Wei Chu muttered.

“What do you think?” she muttered. “If you were in their circumstances?”

“I…” Wei Chu didn’t reply, just grimaced. “In fairness, our meeting was… different.”

“It was,” she conceded. “We can put the tubers in now, by the way.”

“Ah, yes,” Wei Chu glanced into the pot, where the lotus roots were now turning golden brown, and then dumped in her sliced tubers in a few handfuls.

“You have picked it up quickly…” she remarked.

“Oh… um, the rowers are not good with soul sense,” Wei Chu muttered, not quite meeting her eyes. “Lashaan was also teaching us some, and then uh… I… picked a bit up when we were clearing the village as well.”

“It’s honestly better this way,” she reassured Wei Chu. “Using their version of Easten implies a lot of formality, and that can stand out occasionally.”

“I noticed,” Wei Chu grimaced. “As soon as I started chatting to the rowers in this… well, it was a lot easier.”

That it also made it easier to keep track of what others were saying, perhaps unguardedly, didn’t really need to be stated.

“Have the others made the same progress you have?” she asked, curious.

“More or less,” Wei Chu nodded. “I think Tengfei is also starting to pick up some common words. I know I said they gained some… stability, but I get the impression he is frustrated with his status as spokes… speaker?” Wei Chu added, rolling her eyes.

“—Spokesperson,” she supplied, sighing softly in agreement with that assessment. “If you see an opportunity, you could try to bring him more onside; being exclusionary will gain us nothing.”

It was good that that group were warming to them and starting to regain some trust after their ordeal, but she didn’t need Bright Heart Shifting Steps to tell her that taking that for granted would be dangerous.

“Fei has been taking the initiative there,” Wei Chu murmured, directing a surreptitious glance at Feiwu Shen, presumably in case she had not caught that that was the ‘local’ name he had adopted. “Especially with Tengfei and Feilong…”

-Who are his senior brothers, in the same sect… While that was very… enterprising, she could only hope that he didn’t somehow get recognised, at least for a bit.

“Apparently, Shu Feilong is part of some influential clan, the Shu,” Wei Chu continued, a little more carefully. “Just in case…”

“I got it,” she murmured softly, giving the other girl a grateful smile, appreciating her good intentions.

Wei Chu flushed slightly and busied herself with stirring what was in the pot for a few moments.

The whole conversation was a further reminder of how much of an unstable alchemical bomb they were currently sitting on. It was, of course, entirely possible that if the façade collapsed, the others would… just be fine with it. Certainly, their current foundations had next to no resemblance to their past selves.

The issue there, she felt, was that admitting they were cultivators set out an increasingly unpredictable web of deceit, wherein questions would probably lead to more questions and worse, assumptions, where she had no control over what others might think, or guess, or suspect.

She really didn’t want anything of their identities to creep out, even by association, because even a blind idiot would probably associate a Kun girl and a Lin girl travelling together with their names at the top of those Nameless-cursed rankings. Thus, keeping up the deception that they were Ur of some stripe was, of the realistically available options open to them, the best choice really.

After that, they continued with the cooking, just chatting away softly, with Lashaan interjecting occasionally to instruct as various supplementary ingredients were added to the pot.

By the time the fish and other meat went in, just the aroma of what was effectively a very elaborate hot pot was leading her to realise she was a lot hungrier than she had thought.

“Ohhh, that smells delicious…”

She glanced up to find Avarz had joined them, holding a basket with a dozen more decent size fish and two crayfish-looking critters with pale blue shells.

“Is it too late to add these to it?” he asked, passing the basket to her.

“Mmmm,” Lashaan looked over at them and then shook her head. “Not at all, pass them over.”

“It’s fine, I can gut them myself,” the old Ur warrior chuckled, sitting down in a space opposite her and Wei Chu, before adding in a lower, more conspiratorial voice. “Does the lads good to see others work every now and then…”

“Hah,” Lashaan snorted under her breath.

“—Also, later, Uarz wants to chat quietly about what we do next,” Avarz murmured to her. “Those maps we… ‘acquired’ at the village are, as expected, a bit hit and miss on the channels, but they do give us distances and a few star-paths.”

“Of course,” she nodded, picking up one of the crayfish and considering it, pensively. “I can swap with Khunua after dinner. We should rotate people around a bit anyway.”

“Aye, never does no harm in moments like this,” Avarz agreed, tossing the first of his fish— which she couldn’t help but note he had gutted flawlessly without even looking at—into the basket beside Lashaan. “The main thing, though, is the lads need a bit of a rest, like, a real one; ya know this week has been…”

“—Stressful?” Wei Chu suggested, rolling her eyes.

“Aye, stressful is the word all right,” Avarz chuckled.

“If it comes to it, we can find some open place to moor the boat for a few hours?” she suggested.

The area they were moving through appeared to have been flooded reed beds, before the water-surge raised the river. They had to have been tall reeds as well, because even now, they were sticking about a meter or more out of the water.

“Would be a good idea.” Avarz mused. “Somewhere with good visibility and fairly shallow water, so… some flooded fields?”

“Why shallow water?” Wei Chu asked curiously.

“So you can see anything big coming under the water,” Avarz chuckled. “—Or people; it’s hard to swim without rippling the surface somewhat when it’s like that.”

“—and a field will have had crops in, in this season, so doubly hard.” Lashaan agreed.

“Oh. Makes sense.” Wei Chu nodded, making a face.

“Alternatively, if we can find some secluded bit of land to set up on for half a day, that would be good,” Avarz mused. “Give folks a bit of space for a few hours.”

“Are we close to any other villages?” she asked, taking one of the crayfish and starting to de-shell it, while Wei Chu started much more hesitantly on the other.

“None will be much better than the…” Avarz frowned.

“—I know,” she nodded, cutting him off and smiling wryly. “I meant it in the sense of avoiding them.”

“Oh,” Avarz sighed. “Yeah, I get you. The charts show a few farming hamlets here-abouts, but with this flood they will be washed out entirely, I think. Nothing like Ruqu for… several miles, maybe? We avoided Chaqu and Rulam—that was the one that was entirely swept away, that we rowed around in the late afternoon.”

“What do you make of the three we picked up in the village?” she asked Avarz, who blinked at the sudden change in topic.

She was curious how the old warrior viewed those three.

“What do I…?” Avarz frowned, staring at the bubbling hot pot, the fish he had been gutting forgotten for a few moments. “They hide it well, but they are shook. To be held like that, especially by a bastard like Mugvar, nevermind experiencing Udrasa, it takes each fellow differently if you follow my meaning. I don’t think we need to worry just yet about them trying something though. It feels to me like they are still at the stage of trying to make some sense of their circumstances.”

“I see,” she mused.

“It’s when they stop askin' questions and start lookin' out, silent-like, that you gotta worry,” the old warrior added with a mirthless grin.

“Well, if it comes to that, they will be left with regrets,” Ling murmured under her breath, not looking up from her own food preparation.

“Aye…” Avarz agreed, glancing at Ling with a complicated expression shadowing his face. “I don’t doubt that.”

“—What I do doubt, is the quality of this hot-pot if you keep talking about gloomy things!” Lashaan cut in archly as she started to add the crab.

“I can just—” Ling started to speak, only for Lashaan to round on her and with mock anger give her a knife-hand chop to the arm she was stretching out towards the cooking pot.

“Don’t you dare put that overpowering blood in my soup!” Lashaan pouted as Ling started to giggle at her reaction.

A moment later they were all laughing, even Avarz, to the point where Ling also started to puff out her cheeks, then threw her arms up in mock disgust of her own.

“—Can you even drink that stuff safely, if you are not her?” Wei Chu muttered under her breath as they all recomposed themselves.

“I wouldn’t advise it,” she replied drily. “It makes the mana from that core look utterly normal.”

“—So, I never got a chance to ask, Miss Junee, but whereabouts in plains do you originally hail from?”

It was her turn to blink now, at Avarz’s slightly left-of-field question.

“I thought I knew most of the regional accents hereabouts, but yours is…” Avarz added with a chuckle, putting the last of the fish into Lashaan’s basket and wiping his hands on a handy piece of cloth.

“Ah, we have been wandering about on our own, for a bit,” she replied smoothly, wondering suddenly if he was testing her. “Badlands mostly, beyond Moon Sickle tribe and Golden Grass—”

“—That isn’t a great place to be right now, though,” Lin Ling cut in. “What with the hordes of angry soldiers tearing up the jungle, screaming about Blood and Glory and whatnot.”

“No, I don’t imagine it is,” Avarz agreed, rolling his eyes.

“—One of our companions ran afoul of a band of these crazy mages, and in the process of trying to track him down, we crossed paths with Naakai’s group,” she continued. “And have been travelling together since then.

“As to my accent, my tribe is originally much farther…” she waved a hand vaguely in the direction of the distant mountain peaks they had emerged from, but south of them, towards where West Flower Picking town might actually be, if it were transposed into here. “And thanks to my family status, I had the opportunity to meet a lot of people, so I suppose that would be why you find it hard to place.”

“—What led you to end up here, then?” Avarz asked, his tone curious now.

“Tribal politics and life choices,” she replied as pithily as she could without veering into actual rudeness.

“—Definitely some life choices,” Lin Ling agreed with a grimace.

“I guess I hoped that if I came here, something might change,” she mused, before allowing herself a small sigh, because thinking about her family circumstances was still depressing, even out here. “And I suppose I found the change, at least,” she conceded after a short pause. “But it wasn’t what I expected.”

“It rarely is,” Lashaan agreed giving her arm a sympathetic squeeze.

“Indeed,” Ling agreed, sighing as well.

“My family originally came from near Caeracht,” Avarz mused, staring up at the night sky. “My grandmother married a river trader though and moved away. My father went back once, in his later years, to visit her old family, said it was a very grand place, comparable to Uldara, in its way—”

“—I don’t know that I would go that far,” Lashaan chuckled, adding the newly prepared fish into the pot. “Though I do concede, it is one of those places where you get the feeling you are a little bit closer to the ghosts of history than might be healthy.”

“Hah!” Avarz snorted back a laugh. “Based on some of the stories I’ve heard about that place over the years, I could believe it. Would still be nice to see it at least once though,” he mused with a sigh. “To stand on the field where our forebears reclaimed part of their heritage.”

“—I’d have thought an experienced lad like you would have smarter ideas than that,” Naakai, who had appeared behind Avarz while he was talking, remarked, giving the older Ur what she could only call a ‘very judgemental’ look. “Caeracht is indeed a grand place, with a heavy history, but it’s weighty like a quern-stone tied around your ankles, when you might need to swim real quick and unexpected like.”

“I didn’t mean it like that,” Avarz coughed, flushing slightly she thought, and definitely not meeting Naakai’s gaze.

“Aye, perhaps not,” Naakai conceded giving the old warrior a further ‘long look’. “But when it comes to Caeracht and its ghosts, this old lady thinks that it would have been better to let that pit of misery stay buried by the dirt of ages others shovelled onto it, rather than fetishize it like has been done.”

“Now, now, grandmother,” Lashaan cut in, coughing respectfully. “History is important to people…”

“I don’t need you to be saying that.” Naakai sniffed. “Ah, I guess it is just something about this night air that is putting my teeth on edge. I never did like these lands by night, especially not when the Angry Moon is rising.”

“—The Angry Moon?” Wei Chu, with admirable timing, managed to slip in a question of her own, glancing up from her own half prepared crayfish at the full, rising orb of the celestial body.

Considering it, she had to concede that somehow, that name ‘fit’, the moon tonight did feel oddly… oppressive, like it was somehow a bit closer.

“It’s what the last full moon of the ‘spring’ season is called in this part of the plains,” Lashaan confided to them. “Next will be the Judging Moon, then, at midsummer the Crowning Moon, followed by the Flaming Moon, then the Reaping Moon that heralds the harvest. Truthfully, they are not that consistent in their proper manifestation, as that has more to do with the shifting mana tides of the land and sky than the seasons—in particular the Flaming Moon, which comes with the wildfires of late summer, but names are names… and each one has its own story associated with it.”

“Ohh?” Wei Chu leant forward, clearly interested now.

“In Uldara, for instance, some still call this the season of the ‘Last Moon’,” Naakai grunted, nodding up at the rising orb. “As legend has it, that it was on the eve of the ‘Judging Moon’, that The Calamity occurred. The Crowning Moon, a name originating from Caeracht, they honour as the ‘Reed-Mother’s Moon’, but few care to call it that these days, and the tradition of raising new Tribal Leaders and City Masters has supplanted most of the old symbolism associated with it.

“That is also why they are so frantically fighting that stupid campaign in the mountains, seeking victory before midsummer.”

“Calling it a ‘stupid campaign’ would not see you welcomed with open arms into many of the tribes west of here,” Avarz remarked drily.

“Ur’Inan are not always made to feel welcome there anyway,” Naakai replied with a shrug. “Grimvak’s acolytes hold far too dear to grudges older than their own grandmothers and with less wit to them to boot. Besides, the tribes they are clashing with up there give little real thought for such conflict, except as a tool to whet their young bloods and weed out the unlucky or the unskilled before they turn their gaze back to what really exercises those entrenched old bastards.”

“Which is?” Lin Ling asked, raising an eyebrow.

On that point, she was also curious, due to their own brutal clash with those tribes.

“The Sunless Deeps,” Naakai replied sourly, before spitting over the side of the boat. Somewhat to her surprise, Avarz also made a sign to ward off inauspicious events.

“—Oh come on, grandmother!” Lashaan complained, puffing out her cheeks in annoyance. “Uarz was just complaining about people invoking The Daughters, and now you are bringing up that hellish place? I swear, you all want to eat rancid stew or something, because…”

A loud clap of thunder drowned everything out for a moment, reminding everyone that the lightshow on the distant horizon had not actually stopped while they were cooking, just lessened for a while.

“—hope the Moon turns their cooking rancid as well!” Lashaan added, making an obscene gesture towards the eastern horizon.

Naakai stared at the huffing Lashaan then shook her head wryly.

Lashaan for her part just sat back and stared up at the sky for a long moment, as if lost in thought, then just started to chuckle, as if she found something funny. The weird part was that the whole thing was… stupidly funny, she had to concede, as soon all of them were struggling not to laugh, for no real reason at all.

“Ahhh… I do think we all need a good meal and a break,” Lashaan muttered at last, wiping her eyes.

“We do,” Wei Chu agreed, sitting back and running a hand through her hair.

Glancing back down the boat, she could see the others were looking in their direction, with confusion for the most part, though the nearer rowers, who had presumably heard some of the actual discussion, were just shaking their heads.

After that, the conversation around the pot seemed to have talked itself out, at least for a while, so she finished off extracting the flesh from the crayfish. Wei Chu, seemingly remembering that she had also been doing that, stared at her hand, which she had just run through her hair and then sighed, deeply.

It took her some effort not to laugh, and in fact, Wei Chu still noticed her looking the other way, and pouted.

“Your hands were pretty clean,” she murmured drily. “Do you want me to help you finish it?”

Wei Chu rolled her eyes and picking up her knife again.

In truth, Wei Chu had been a fast enough study at watching her that it was mostly because she had been listening to Lashaan and Naakai that she had not finished it already, so it only took her about a minute to pry apart the rest of the crayfish and put the flesh on the plate.

“Do you want us to put this in now?” she asked Lashaan, holding up the bowl.

“Hmmmm,” Lashaan peered into the pot, then tasted it. “Yeah, you can add it in, then it just needs to simmer for a few minutes, and the amount of salt in it is still lacking. While it does that, we can make up some flat bread with the root flour.”

Nodding, she tipped the crayfish in, watching with interest how its qi melted elegantly into the swirling fusion that was the dish as a whole, without any sense of imbalance. For all that it looked ‘simple’, Lashaan’s control over the dish as a whole was spirit food cooking on a level that she rarely got to see first-hand back home.

“Where is the flour?” Wei Chu asked, casting about.

“Here,” Ling passed her a pot, followed by a second one that contained some pre-boiled, still warm water.

Taking the flour pot from Wei Chu, she considered how many they were, then took one of the larger bowls and poured about a quarter into it.

“Can you start heating that dish up,” she asked Wei Chu, gesturing to the other shallow dish Lashaan had indicated a while back, that was currently just the other side of Wei Chu.

“Sure,” Wei Chu nodded, putting her hands against the inside of the bowl.

Leaving her to it, she poured some of the hot water into the flour. There was nothing to make it rise, and no animal milk either, and the pressed juice of the lotus roots didn’t really work any better than water, so she just added a generous amount of salt and some mixed spices and oil and set to kneading it all together into a dough.

It was interesting that even here, Bright Heart Shifting Steps was happily just spooling along in the back of her mind, registering all the ‘normality’ of the ingredients, her actions and everything else that went into making the flat bread.

By the time she had finished, the bowl was smoking faintly in Wei Chu’s hands, so she set the dough to one side, tore off a bit, and after thinning it out to about a quarter of a finger’s depth and an oval about the size of both her open palms side by side, slapped it onto the curve of the bowl.

It sizzled, in part because of the oil, browning quickly, and cooking through almost by the time she had put a second one in. The bowl itself could fit six at once, so after doing a few more, she passed the bowl of dough over to Wei Chu, and got to her feet.

“I’m going to go consult with our captain, about where we might stop for a bit,” she informed them.

“Sounds good,” Lashaan agreed. “This is likely to take at least ten minutes to simmer.”

Leaving them, she moved back up the boat, to the rear, where Omurz and Uarz were, along with Ladrak, who was acting as Uarz’s helper in steering the boat, and Chunhua and Qing Yao, who were keeping watch on their surroundings.

“Dinner will be ready soon,” she informed them. “—And it’s not ‘river soup’.”

“…”

“I could not possibly comment,” Qing Yao murmured.

“That aside, I don’t imagine you came all the way back here just to tell us that… admittedly welcome news,” Omurz remarked drily.

“No, I didn’t,” she conceded. “In conference with the others, it might be a good idea for us to stop and take stock, somewhere, for a few hours at least. Give everyone a good meal, some sleep and what not.”

“Ah, yes, that would be a good idea,” Uarz, who was doing most of the actual steering she noted, nodded. “The cracks are starting to show…”

“They are,” she agreed. “Is there anywhere suitable nearby?”

“Mmmm… what do those charts say about farmland, hereabouts?” Omurz asked Ladrak.

“We have mostly been avoiding it, to not go near any of the villages,” Ladrak replied. “But…”

Ladrak unrolled one of the scrolls of parchment in the basket next to him, holding it out so they could all see.

“Rulam, that is here.”—he pointed at one marking—“We passed by quite a few hours ago. Chaqu is a small fishing village and trade stop, up here. We followed these channels, roughly speaking”—he ran his finger across the features, so they could follow along—“to avoid it, given how we are, currently.”

“Uh-huh,” she nodded, considering the map. “So, we are about here?” She traced a little further on from where Ladrak had stopped his finger.

“Yes.” Uarz informed her, glancing over at the chart. “Thankfully they have star-paths marked, so even if the water channels are… changed, now that it is getting properly dark, we should be able to work out our position much more clearly.”

“As to places to stop, according to these charts there were quite a few smaller farms growing reeds and various similar crops in this region,” Omurz added. “We just have to keep an eye out for more open areas, probably to our starboard. We can moor in one for a few hours, and the water will be shallow enough and the view open enough for us to spot trouble coming some distance away.”

“It is a pity we don’t have a mast to climb up,” Ladrak added.

“We could always use three oars,” Omurz suggested blandly.

“I’ve seen the things swimming about, that is a hard pass,” Ladrak replied, rolling his eyes. “Captain.”

“It is indeed,” Chunhua confided to her. “There are some concerningly large fish drifting around.”

“What kind of strength are we talking?” she asked, curious.

“Strong enough and good enough at concealment that you might have to get in the water to be sure,” Qing Yao murmured.

“There are boat killers in these reed beds,” Uarz added seriously, glancing out at the swaying reeds. “Particularly some of the bigger amphibious lizards. They tend to leave vessels this big alone though, and that purple paint of yours… works.”

“—Of course it works,” she chuckled.

Positive reinforcement of the colour gestalt was… a weird thing, and something she still couldn’t fully wrap her head around, but every little bit helped, in her opinion, and she wasn’t going to risk undermining it either. The fact that that had worked so well, when going past Udrasa at night, in the eyes of the slightly jittery crew, seemingly keen to grasp anything that worked, had also done wonders for its efficacy, as it turned out. It wasn’t going to make them invisible during daytime, she suspected, but in low light conditions where they were already trying to be stealthy, it seemed to be working very nicely.

Stolen story; please report.

“Your crew have also risen above and beyond,” she continued to Omurz, giving the nearby rowers an appreciative nod. “In what has been a difficult few days in all our lives.”

“No arguments there,” Omurz agreed drily.

Uarz just rolled his eyes and said nothing.

In the end, it took them almost twenty minutes to reach a spot that fit most of their requirements. The broad stretch of open water covered about three square miles, between the reed beds. Before the flood, it had probably been a series of fields, farmed from a small walled estate that lay a few hundred meters away.

“Do we stop here, or look for somewhere else?” Uarz asked her pensively, eyeing the dark ruins of the estate.

“It looks pretty abandoned,” Okal, one of the Omurz’ crew nearby, volunteered.

“It does,” Munz, another of the crew, agreed.

“—Or whoever is there is staying out of sight,” Ladrak muttered.

“I assume it would have wards, like the village did?” Qing Yao asked, narrowing her eyes as she swept the open expanse of water.

The distant flashes of light on the horizon had still not let up, but as they were speaking, she felt the faint night breeze around them shift for a moment.

“It is just another shockwave,” she informed them generally as some of the other crew and Shi Tengfei’s bunch, who were sitting in the middle of the boat, looked about uneasily.

“Less a raid, more a pitched battle, it seems,” Okal muttered.

“Aye, well, so long as it stays well away from us,” Uarz sighed. “As to wards, yes, Miss Yao, it should have them.”

“Given it’s night, they would not be willingly leaving them unused, either,” Yao mused.

“Or they want to spring a trap,” Chunhua observed.

“—Or that,” she had to agree.

Closing her eyes, she let the ambience of the place drift over her, comparing it, in her memories, with how it had felt to encounter such wards before, both before they were activated, and in the presence of some of the broken ones. Bright Heart Shifting Steps stirred, faintly, giving her the subtle sense that the ward here had most likely been defunct since the flood, but it was by no means conclusive.

“We could send the small boat to check?” Okal suggested.

“And you are volunteering, are you?” Uarz chuckled.

Okal coughed, then, slightly to her surprise, squared his shoulders and nodded.

“If we are to send a group, I will… happily volunteer,” the Ur crewman replied, only hesitating a fraction, to his credit.

“In that case, I’ll go, with Okal here, Avarz…” she mused, thinking over whose expertise would be useful, and also not leave the boat short-handed. “—Manshu and Khunua,” she suggested.

“I’ll come too!” Teshek, the young Ur’Inan youth, added, almost before she had finished speaking.

“…”

“The lad has skills,” Naakos called over. “At least when it comes to watching things.”

Teshek coughed.

“Okay,” she nodded.

She had wanted to spare the Ur’Inan a little, as she had been relying on them a lot, but it also wouldn’t do any good to tell Teshek he couldn’t come. It wasn’t that she doubted his skills—he had come this far after all—but he was surely in part volunteering to be seen to fit in, and maybe prove himself a little. While keenness was nice, it was also a dangerous mentality to get caught up in, so she was inwardly relieved that Naakos had spoken up for him.

After sending word down the boat to Kai Manshu and Avarz, she pulled the smaller rowing boat alongside and, holding it, allowed the others to climb across, once by one. Teshek had just moved over, by the time Avarz and Manshu, with some weapons in hand, made their way to the rear.

“Sorry, there will be some exercise before dinner,” she apologized to the pair as Avarz passed the bundle of blades across to Okal.

“Let’s hope it’s just rowing,” Manshu remarked rolling his eyes.

“Yeah, let’s hope,” Chunhua agreed from where she was checking arrows in the quivers she had claimed.

Letting Ladrak take over from her in holding the rowboat, she climbed over after Avarz and Manshu had gotten seated, then pushed off gently from the bigger boat.

The journey across the flooded fields wasn’t quick, but it was uneventful. The only real hazard they encountered as they went was a submerged fence and accompanying embankment.

“It looks pretty deserted,” Manshu murmured to her as they finally brought the boat to a stop some twenty meters from the outer wall of the flooded estate.

“It does,” she agreed. “But that isn’t any reason to let our guard down.”

In her heart, she suspected they all thought she was being overly cautious, but in the back of her mind, she had a few thoughts about how she might ambush a boat like theirs, opportunistically, and skulking in the shadows waiting for a large group to let their guard down was a tried and tested strategy. The attitude of Ruqu was also still bothering her, as was the strange traces they had found there.

“I know,” Manshu replied giving her a reassuring grimace.

“How do we plan to go in?” Okal asked quietly, surveying their surroundings.

In the darkness, the only sounds were the lapping of water and the occasional calls of birds or amphibians.

“Let’s bring the boat up alongside the wall, over there,” Chunhua pointed to a spot about halfway along the outer wall, where a building roof was visible just beyond it. “One or two of us can go up onto the roof, scout, then direct the rest in, depending on what we find?”

“In that case, Khunua and I will go on the roof, as I think we are the best archers here,” she murmured.

She had a few reasons beyond that, but those were personal. It also hopefully showed the others that she was quite happy for them to work without her, Ling or Chunhua staring at them nonstop.

“Sounds good,” Avarz nodded, as did the others.

“That said, if anyone else has anything to add…?” she asked, glancing at the others, but everyone shook their heads.

In silence, they carefully manoeuvred the boat over to the wall, then pulled it along, taking care not to scrape or bump it. It helped that there was a ditch right by the wall, which made the water there a bit deeper. When they got there, she let Chunhua go first, slowly pulling herself up the wall, and peering over, carefully, before signalling the all clear.

Following her up, she accepted two of the three bows they had brought and three quivers for each of them, from Teshek, then took in the interior for herself.

It was a very normal-looking rural estate. The building before them, which was more of a roof covering a large rectangular plot, had likely been some sort of storage area. Opposite them, on the other side of the large open space between the walls, was a sprawling two-story building that had all the hallmarks of being the main house. Off to their right, three more smaller buildings hemmed in that side of the central open area. The flooding had begun to subside, but at its peak it had probably reached the ceiling of the first story, and the contents of the warehouse and storage areas below them were drifting slowly in the water.

“No boats,” Chunhua signed, pointing off to the riverside, where another building was orientated in such a way that it was probably a dock.

“Or dead livestock,” she observed, looking around.

She couldn’t smell, or sense any either in the ambient qi. There was decay here, but it was mostly vegetative, and there was little, if any, death qi.

The nearest way in for the boat that offered some manoeuvrability was probably a gate a bit further down the wall to their left, that had presumably given wagon access to the fields.

“You can bring the boat in, further down this wall,” she whispered back down. “It should be clear, just watch for submerged stuff.”

“Okay,” Manshu replied.

They watched as the boat slowly started moving again, then Chunhua carefully jumped across the gap to the roof of the warehouse, taking care to land on a jutting beam above the nearest wooden pillar, rather than the potentially treacherous tiles themselves.

She watched Chunhua carefully test the roof, then make her way onto it.

“Looks solid,” Chunhua signed after a moment. “Toss the bows and stuff over.”

Nodding, she did that, then let Chunhua move a little further along, before she made her own jump.

By the time they had made their way to the crest of the roof, the others had reached the gate and were manoeuvring their way through it. Sweeping her gaze across the rest of the estate, she still found nothing untoward.

“Even though there is seemingly nothing here, do you still feel on edge?” Chunhua signed to her.

“Yeah,” she replied, turning to look back out across the flooded fields.

The flicker of lights on the horizon and the occasional shift in the prevalent breeze from that distant conflict actually made things some distance away quite hard to spot, but in the distance, she could make out the shadow of their vessel, low in the water.

“It is reassuring that our boat is so hard to see, at least,” Chunhua observed.

“Yeah,” she agreed, turning to look at the reed beds to their west.

There were no lights, just darkness bleeding into faintly misty haze, and it was the same in the other direction.

Quietening her thoughts, she turned her attention Bright Heart Shifting Steps once again—

“Ah, there is one of those large lizards in the water below.” Before she had even worked out what she wanted to do, Chunhua quietly drew her attention to a faint outline, well hidden in the floating drifts of cut reeds.

From this distance a casual glance might have mistaken it for a cut tree trunk some three metres long, but as she watched, its tail was moving ever so slowly, propelling in the direction of their rowing boat.

It had next to no presence at all, though given that it was probably an ambush predator, that wasn’t too surprising. What was, though, was that bright Heart Shifting Steps did ‘get’—or maybe ‘lead’ was a better way to think of it, she mused—something off of it.

It wasn’t really ‘qi’, or soul sense, but a faint feeling of the lizard’s ‘place’ in within these surroundings, relative to her… and everything else. Alongside the initial impression, little bits of understanding from the whole day, about the water, the wind, the time of day, the fish she had dissected, the crabs… even things like the sense of qi in the reeds, all suddenly came together, quietly, in the back of her mind, as if painting in details that informed what she was looking at.

It wasn’t auspicious… or inauspicious, or at all like any prior divination she had done with the art. It simply came together… as something like a whisper, and actually a pretty faint one, at that, to her senses, of the interaction between the lizard, as it moved—and not even the water through which it was swimming, but rather—the normality of everything around it, in relation to it. In fact, out of that, almost belatedly now, came a further sense of clarity that the lizard was roughly at Nascent Soul.

“…”

While she considered what the art was showing her, she subtly drew the attention of those on the boat, and paused, because as she did so, she got a similar, but much more informed—presumably due to her familiarity with their qi and presences—sense of them, as well.

She could almost feel the boat, in the water, and all of those on it, much like the lizard. Feel their focus and even something of some of their intent, albeit subdued, like a wary shroud over their surroundings. In fact, while they were being stealthy, it was a little disconcerting just how many signs there were, she reflected, as she carefully pointed out the large lizard, in the water—taking care not to use any actual intent herself so as not to spook it—and made a ‘watch out’ sign with her arms.

“Do we shoot it?” Chunhua signed to her.

“Are they edible?” she asked, without thinking, then shook her head wryly as Chunhua gave her a ‘really, how should I know?’ look.

Thinking back to Ruqu… there hadn’t been any remains of them there, but in fact, before that, when they had walked out of Udrasa, she found several smaller ones, in her mind’s eye, hanging up in stalls, being sold with other fish, in that sprawling market—and there again, Bright Heart Shifting Steps quietly worked.

“They were selling their meat in Udrasa,” she signed. “Its realm is pretty good as well, so the core might be useful—if it…”

In fact, as they were conversing and she was pondering that, the lizard had stopped its silent advance and was, instead…

With a sudden flurry of movement, it turned and shot off through the waters, leaving a choppy wake and some soft cursing from the distant boat as the only sign it had been there.

“Its instincts are good,” Chunhua signed. “It fled as soon as Avarz spotted it.”

Exhaling softly, she nodded in agreement. Her own awareness of where it was, thanks to Bright Heart Shifting Steps, had only diminished a little though, she realised, the art allowing her to feel that while it had fled, it had not fled that far, simply beyond the buildings to their right.

Signalling to the rowboat, she pointed off in the direction the lizard had fled and got a wave of ‘thanks’ back from Manshu and nods from the others, then let her focus step back from Bright Heart a little more, allowing it to return to its passive state.

What she had just done was surprisingly taxing on her concentration, as it turned out. Interestingly, though, even after letting the art return to its more passive, contemplative state, something of the whispered interaction between the lizard and everything else, including them… remained.

“So, why did you really bring us both out here?” Chunhua signed to her as those in the boat started forward again. “If it was just for this, nevermind Naakos, Qing Yao would have been sufficient.”

“Well, there are a few things I need to do without the prying eyes of some of our compatriots,” she replied, giving Chunhua a wry grin then taking her storage talisman out from where she kept it concealed in the pouch with the stealth talisman Ling had made.

Silently, her swordstaff appeared on the roof between them, and then she put the talisman away again.

“Ah,” Chunhua nodded, catching on.

“It was slightly awkward that I had it stored before,” she muttered. “I haven’t really had a chance to ask Naakai or Naakos about what the Ur do for storage devices.”

“Yes, it wasn’t quite the issue it has become,” Chunhua agreed, rolling her eyes, and swapping to speaking out loud, but very softly so their voices didn’t carry. “That said, I did get a chance to ask Naakos about it earlier, as it turns out. The short of it, is that they are rare.”

“Figures,” she murmured, nodding.

Thinking back, she had not seen much evidence of them at all in the warehouses they looted back in the plains, and artefacts had been sparse in Udrasa—not that they had been in any circumstance to be exposed to them.

“They do have methods to increase the ‘volume’ of containers, such as pottery jars,” Chunhua continued. “But they can only hold one material and screwing that up can be… dangerous, apparently.”

“Ah, that issue,” she nodded again, getting what Chunhua meant.

That was also a problem back home, for certain kinds of storage container, and even cheap storage rings. If you stored something in them that conflicted with or overpowered the formations used on that artefact, it could get very dangerous, very fast.

“They also degrade quite quickly,” Chunhua added. “Or at least that was what he said. So they use them for bulky, but non qi—mana—rich things, like grain and such.”

“Makes sense,” she mused.

“According to him, they can also manipulate the weight of things with symbols similar to the ones Ling uses. But again, it’s not common, and tends to be a thing worked by skilled artisans. The limiting issue is generally access to quality materials.”

That also made sense to her, thinking on it. Their home had an aeons-old established economy in supporting the manufacture of such things, whereas here, for all that the locals seemed strong, the resources of this land were clearly much harder to exploit.

“Apparently,” Chunhua continued, “smaller tribes and groups like theirs tend to acquire such things via trade from major powers in these lands: Udrasa, a great city state called Uldara, that is north…ish, from here. Katum, where that deranged bastard came from… Another settlement called Caeracht, far to the southeast.”

While they were conversing, the others had reached the main house and, after tying the boat up, were warily climbing onto the first-floor balcony that overlooked the open centre of the estate.

She waved to Manshu, to signal that they were still keeping an eye on them, and he waved back, pointing up to the roof, then into the building, and intimating that they were going to sweep it in pairs.

As they looked on, Manshu and Teshek quickly clambered up the outside of the building onto the flat, open top roof. Meanwhile, Avarz and Okal made their way quietly along the veranda, checking in windows, but not actually going inside.

Thinking on how she had perceived the lizard, she was suddenly tempted to see how well her art coped with following the others as they went through the building, but she still had a few questions in her own mind about whether someone else could detect what she had done. Spooking the others when they were trying to check the building for hidden threats wasn’t what she wanted to do for starters.

“Can you help me test something, about my divination art?” she signed to Chunhua, as they watched the two groups continue to carefully check the exterior of the building.

“Sure,” Chunhua nodded. “What do you need me to do?”

“Hmmm… can you go to the other end of the roof and try to hide your presence as thoroughly as you can?” she asked, after a moment of thought.

The first thing that stood out, as Chunhua moved away from her, was that the other woman was much better at hiding her presence than the lizard had been. In fact, there was no comparison. If it was just down to Qi and Intent, then if she had not been looking right at Chunhua in the gloom, she would have had next to no idea she was there, all of a sudden. The second thing was that that didn’t matter one bit to Bright Heart Shifting Steps. The sense of ‘interaction’ between Chunhua and her surroundings was… basically a magnitude less than that of the lizard, or any of those on the boat, but she was still there, and that seemed to be the important bit. It was just that Chunhua felt… different, and in that difference, as soon as she fixated on it even a little, with her art, Chunhua’s ‘neutral’ presence snapped into focus in a way that was almost a little jarring.

-Ah, is it because she is actively…? Oh, that’s going to be interesting.

She stared at Chunhua, not quite sure what to feel… then, to her surprise, felt Chunhua’s presence begin to fade again, even as she looked at her, the whispers almost entirely melting into the background, as if something was cancelling them out.

“What did you just do?” she signed.

“I stopped trying to hide and tried something else,” Chunhua signed back. “I should be asking you the same thing. That was very weird.”

-So, she did detect something? she mused.

“Stay there. When I turn around… come back towards me… but wait a bit?” she suggested.

Chunhua nodded and she turned back to look out at the marshlands. Not looking at her, Chunhua’s presence did recede even more, but there was that faint, whispering sense that she was still there… motionless.

Chunhua actually waited a good twenty seconds before moving, and when she did, the art’s sense of where she was immediately picked her up, simply through the shift in her sense of ‘being’ in the environment. She made no sound on the roof tiles, but the roof itself… she could actually gain a faint hint of the shifting of Chunhua’s weight through it, as she came forwards. In how the light breeze swirled around them both.

When she felt Chunhua was about ten paces away, she turned, and found she was, indeed there, a complex expression on her face.

“Well, that is interesting,” Chunhua signed, as her Nascent Soul slipped into focus, about ten paces away.

“What did you feel?” she asked, curious.

“Hmmmm, it was weird. Like I was being stared at, but my normal senses got nothing. It was only when I used my Mantra and my Principle that I got a clear sense that it was ‘you’.

“Ah…” she nodded, understanding where she had slipped up in the application—she had been too overt, or maybe specific, in the use of her Intent, she suspected.

Exhaling slightly, she stopped focusing on Chunhua, and instead… let Bright Heart Shifting Steps simply show her their surroundings—

Her sense of Chunhua didn’t change much, if at all, but immediately it was joined by… everything else. The breeze on the roof tiles, the sense of obstruction from the building they were on with regards to the water around them, the shifting of the reeds in the water, the ripples of fish and crabs beneath its surface… of insects, of other things, even smaller in the water…

She had to stop after a moment, because it was actually too much. She had felt like she was teetering on the edge of a great height, about to fall, or maybe be pulled down and smothered by all the myriad different interactions around her. What that might have led to, she wasn’t sure, but it would probably have brought an unpleasant backlash with it.

“Whatever you did there, I didn’t feel it… as such,” Chunhua signed, frowning. “But you are looking a bit pale, all of a sudden?”

“Yeah, I think I found the limits of my ability to use this in a certain way,” she replied wanly.

-So, clearly, I need to impose some kind of limit on it? she mused, taking in their surroundings again.

“Ah.” Chunhua nodded.

-Okay, attempt two…

Engaging with the art again, she let her perception slowly sink into their surroundings once again. This time, she didn’t let it just drop into the depths of all those myriad different interactions between everything around them but tried to sit on the surface… and almost immediately encountered a different problem. The art didn’t seem to know what to show her. Fish, crabs, the shape of the buildings, the way the breeze disturbed the water, Chunhua watching her, a bird taking flight on the far side of the compound, Manshu carefully checking the stairs down from the roof, Teshek looking back over at them, Avarz, Okal… the lizard from before—

For a split second it was like she, and her nascent soul, were watching the lizard, before, but for every one of those moments and a dozen more besides, and it was profoundly nauseating.

“Okay… that doesn’t work,” she muttered, having to resort to using her mantra in the end, to banish the queasy feeling.

-I guess it needs to be somewhere between the two? She sighed, glad she had decided to test this now, rather than risk relying on it in a critical moment.

The talisman’s texts didn’t have much of help either, it seemed as she set her Nascent Soul to re-checking them, just in case there was something she missed…

-Ah…

Feeling a little silly, she turned back to look at Chunhua, it occurring to her that she had entirely neglected the biggest gain of the last week—the fact that she now had a Principle.

“Are you okay?” Chunhua asked her.

“Yeah,” she sighed. “Just forgetting the breadth of tools I have at my disposal for a moment.”

Returning to the art a third time, she sank back into it, as she had initially tried, but rather than just… go with it, she instead reached out to her Principle.

She had read and re-read and re-re read everything the talisman had to say on it as well, but it, bizarrely, had very little on the topic, and what it did, distilled down to ‘practice it until it is not ‘of you’, but ‘is you’, and that she had to be ‘as one with it’ as ‘it was with her’. The significance of the ‘Mortal’ aspect, the talisman was also very coy on, but she did recall Ling’s explanations regarding her own physique, and so her working assumption was that a ‘Mortal Principle’ developed along the same lines, which just brought her right back to the original issue.

A part of her really wished she had paid more attention to those occasional lectures visiting experts had given to Juniors of the Kun clan, before that terrible day her whole future unravelled, because the nature and function of a ‘Principle’ had occasionally come up, and she had had all the access to such figures she could ask for back then. However, she had been too low a realm, and too young, with no way to know how her fortunes would change. Later, she had been considered a ‘Physical Cultivator’ to all intents, so unless she went out of her way, or her parents brought her explicitly, elders basically ignored her, even before the politics of things, and she had avoided most such gatherings simply due to the tendency for them to descend into ‘this is our former Inheriting Daughter, don’t be like her’ silliness.

That said, she had been around enough immortals since then to get some grasp of it, or at least how they talked about getting a handle on it. When it came to the metamorphosis of your Intent, your Spirit Root, your Innate Constitution and so on, the explanations tended to verge on metaphor—‘Breathing’, ‘Water’ and ‘Wind’. Unfortunately, that wasn’t especially helpful to her, now, as she had already moved well beyond the thresholds most commonly—or at least openly—discussed in Dao Discussions, or publicly available texts— namely, how to form one in the first place.

When it came to ‘wielding’ it, they were much more cagy, likely because those explanations would have been heavily influenced by their cultivation laws, or sect teachings, and those tended to be closely guarded in the specifics, or in the case of the Kun ones, basically forbidden to her thanks to her circumstances. Thus, she could only rely on those few voices close to her within in the Kun clan who were sympathetic to her circumstances. It was actually a piece of advice from her grandmother that was forefront in her mind now.

‘Akin to a piece of music, but only for you. Others can play it, but only you can bring out its full potential’ was how she had described it, several years ago when she had asked about something related to it.

Yunhee had once described it to her as ‘Always like having a spare ‘thought’ that could direct the burden of your qi, and intent and all the other things in a way that was in tune with you.’ Her brother had given her a similar sort of explanation, but she had hated to pester him about it, given his own issues. Both were guided by Elder Xianfang’s teachings, she was pretty sure, but she had never had a suitable opportunity to ask him directly about Principles.

Her Father, meanwhile, had laughed, then told her that the best solution would always be one she found for herself, which had made her sulk and flounce at the time, to a degree that was embarrassing to look back on. However, he had shown her some exquisitely basic examples of the difference his principle made to basic qi manipulation, that she, a teenager at the time, could gain some small thing from.

Indeed, rather like what Yunhee had said, it was there, as soon as she looked for it, drifting in her awareness. If she just treated it like ‘Intent’, but better, it did just that. It was far superior as well, in every functional way.

It was her, and she was it, and she could at least understand what her grandmother meant now, with a degree of certainty, because it had emerged from her suffering, and her endeavour, and her tribulations to this point. It was a pure distillation of all that, distinctly ‘her’ in any and every way she looked at it, to the point where it was hard to explain.

-I guess I can only try and see, she reflected wryly. Just as you suggested, Father.

Once more, she let her perception of her surroundings slowly merge with Bright Heart Shifting Steps. Cognisant of what had gone wrong last time, she tried to take everything that made up her principle and…

For the briefest moment she got something, then it collapsed apart, like oil and water trying to mix, leaving her lightheaded and feeling like she had just stared into the sun, except without the blind-ness bit.

“That clearly didn’t work,” Chunhua observed.

“You felt that?” she asked.

It felt like it should be straightforward, and yet for some reason, something about it just felt off.

“Yeah, for a moment,” Chunhua nodded.

Taking a breath to settle herself once more, she pondered what she had just tried, and realised she had might have stepped a bit too far back, so to speak. She had intended to put her Principle between her and the art, but in the process, had not really engaged her principle directly, but all the component elements—what she had done before, with intent, but more, and it had failed because it was too much.

“…”

“Again, then,” she muttered, mostly to herself.

Inhaling and exhaling softly a few more times, she repeated what she had just done, but this time, as she settled back into the art, she didn’t try to use her Principle on the art… but on her… and… found herself back at the start, so to speak, in the weirdest sort of way.

Her perception of her surroundings was basically what she had, when she was looking at the lizard, in the water. As soon as she tried to broaden it out, the same hints of overload began to slip in, the water, the wind, the interactions—her Principle was a filter… actually, it wasn’t even that, she, herself, and her knowledge, or lack of, was the filter, because her Principle was… her. She could tone down what was shown, but then it was… strange—disorientating, in fact, because it was only picking out what she knew, and immediately, she could tell that was a dangerous pit to fall into. Everything else was just sort of ‘there’, but the art felt like it was…

As soon as she went towards that, she saw Chunhua shake her head slightly, telling her that she could feel ‘something’, or at least detect something in that instance.

“What did you just feel?” she asked.

“Same as before, like I was being stared at, but it was much more obvious,” Chunhua replied, with an apologetic grimace. “I think I might know what your problem is, though.”

“You… do?” she asked, a little surprised.

“Yeah, well, maybe,” Chunhua nodded, though she suddenly looked a bit embarrassed for some reason. “I think so. It’s… well, there are a few things you encounter, with Mantra Seed—particularly about intent, and learning how to conceal it. Don’t get me wrong, you are very good at that, maybe even better than I am… but, it makes sense nobody told you.” Chunhua continued. “I’ve never heard it talked about with regards to intent among spiritual cultivators. It uh… feels like you are, on some level, maybe second guessing your own intent?”

“Second guessing my…?”

Chunhua grimaced, looking a bit awkward.

“No… I think you might be right,” she agreed, with a soft sigh.

In one respect, it was an embarrassing admission. On the other, as she reflected again on what she had just been trying to do, the more certain she became that Chunhua was right. The first failure had been because she tried to go too far back—basically to the parts of her Principle. The second was because she had been too rigid in its application, as Chunhua said, not trusting its interaction with the art on some level.

If she had been swinging a sword, or shooting an arrow…

At that, she had to shake her head.

“I guess it’s just a sign of how stressful things have been,” she mused wryly. “The basics of the basics… My Grandmother would laugh at me, and then probably toss me in the lake for being an idiot.”

Chunhua just rolled her eyes.

“Well, let’s go again,” she declared.

At this point, the group on the house had mostly finished with the exterior, and Manshu had made his way down the stairs and into the interior.

Inhaling and exhaling, she once more engaged Bright Heart Shifting Steps, and again, let it show her their surroundings. Rather than deliberately put her principle in the way of it, though, she just let it… be. It was her, in theory, and she was it. Her intent was a part of it, as was her lived experience… It made sense that forcing it would not work, because the inner aspect was just as important as the mechanical bits that made it up. The wind whispered around her, and the water lapped. She felt Chunhua, opposite her, and the lizard… lizards, actually, there was a second, she realised. And the fish, and the smaller fish… and the insects dancing on the water surface… a snake swimming, crabs, there were small birds hiding in the eaves of the building they were on…

It all blurred together, whispering to her, and she floated in the middle of it, almost. Not drawn to it, but part of it. A Lotus on the water, except the surface was not the water, but everything the art was showing her—

Carefully, she reached out, further and further, until the rest of the estate was mostly within the scope of the art. In the building opposite, she could sense Manshu moving slowly through a room, stepping around shadows of furniture, his qi rubbing against the surroundings. Sense the others, on the floor below, carefully making their way through what could be a dining room, based on the rough layout of the furniture. Feel spiders… something that might be a large scorpion thing in a floor cavity near Teshek. More birds… crabs and fish in the flooded ground story…

The other buildings were also deserted, save for more crabs, fish and the like. The one near the dock had a half-constructed boat, and all of them had scattered goods, abandoned to the flood waters—the larger of the out-houses on the left side of the compound had several crates with somewhat richer qi signatures… and a third lizard thing, carefully prying at one, but that was about it.

At that point, she had to stop anyway, because her own focus was beginning to blur at the edges, despite how vibrant and crisp everything felt. It was like she was suddenly tired, and about to drift off to sleep, or maybe had a few drinks too many. Relaxing her grasp of the art before it could collapse and likely spook everything and everyone for quite some distance, she exhaled softly.

“Did you feel anything?” she asked Chunhua, who was watching her with a frown now.

“No, not until just at the end, there.” Chunhua shook her head. “But you look like you are about to faint.”

Touching her hands to her arms, they were clammy with cool sweat. Her head still felt a little heavy as well, though the fuzzy feeling was rapidly fading.

“I… uh, may have found a sort of limit,” she conceded. It hadn’t cost her any qi, or anything like that, but the strain it put on her body was still surprising, as she checked herself. “I think there is something vaguely valuable, or at least with an abnormal qi purity in the building over there”—she pointed to the larger of the buildings off to their left—“and there may be stuff we can scavenge for the boat over there”—she indicated the building with the boat, near what was probably the estate wharf, before the flooding consumed it all.

“No real threats?” Chunhua mused.

“Just two more of those lizards,” she replied. “One trying to get at whatever is the source of the purer qi in that warehouse. No corpses either, unless some dead crabs and the like count.”

“So, they abandoned and took most of the valuables?” Chunhua suggested, looking around at the estate.

“That would seem to be the case,” she agreed. “I couldn’t check the reed-beds beyond, though.”

Just the thought of how chaotic that would be on her senses made her shudder involuntarily. With how much sensory stress the art caused, she could understand much more clearly now why the talisman placed a lot of emphasis on ongoing ‘passive use’. The things she had been exposed to most since doing that—like the crabs and fish from gutting them for dinner—were much clearer. Complex things—cultivators, for example—were easy to pick out as well, but things she had little awareness of, like the furniture inside the building, were little more than vague shadows. They also highlighted, literally, several ‘issues’ of sorts. The key ones being ‘Noise’ and that recurring trap of ‘Intent’.

Even bigger things, like the furniture in the house, never mind the living things within its scope, had not reacted very cleanly to that ‘abnormal or not’ element of the art that time, and it struck her a great way to get inadvertently detected using it, if she was drawn into attempting to compensate for that in a more active manner. She suspected she could tune out noise in a useful way, with practice, but that struck her as risky with her current comprehensions and would rely a lot on her grasp of the natural ‘normality’ of the world around her.

She could also see a lot of scope for improvement in how she wielded her Principle. The dual aspects of the Lotus and the Kun both fit her, and how she defined her experiences up to this point, but the way it had translated, almost subconsciously, into the art was… not quite what she expected.

“Well, it is what it is,” Chunhua remarked. “I guess we just wait for them to finish checking the building, then?”

“Yeah,” she agreed.

Certainly, she needed a break from using the art for a few minutes, she suspected. She also had another task, related to the talisman, that she needed to do while out here, and that would also require a fair bit of focus: Soul binding her swordstaff, or at least determining if it could be soul bound.

The talisman had a surprisingly comprehensive text regarding the topic, at least compared to anything it said about principles that was currently available to her. What it provided covered not just spiritual treasures and soul-bound ones, but even life-bound, and blood-bound physical treasures. The latter two required a lot of effort, but the instructions on spiritual treasures were already very alluring, particularly as they set out a method to transform physical items into spiritual treasures and improve your inner harmony in the process.

It did warn that you could not bind many such treasures, and that they should have exceptional compatibility with you, but on the face of it, attempting to try with the swordstaff was a no-brainer. It was, as far as she could tell, entirely unenchanted, which was a key prerequisite. It was made of top-quality materials, and its origin was… well, since she acquired it in that anomaly, they had been through a lot together.

According to the talisman text, preparing such an artefact was also something she should have been working on from Nascent Soul, which given she had blown right past that in one tribulation, was a touch awkward.

Thankfully, the main reason it suggested that seemed to be so you could spend time imbuing the object with qi attuned to your intent. For the actual binding, two methods were suggested. The first, and seemingly preferred approach, was to leverage a breakthrough to bind the object. That tallied with her own knowledge of how treasures were usually soul bound if you were creating them from scratch. The common approach was to try to fuse it with your soul when you first comprehended it, when crossing Soul Foundation, or when entering Nascent Soul proper.

That wasn’t an option right now, so she could only go with the second, which was to put a piece of her already extant spiritual strength directly into an object that had sufficient compatibility with her, allowing it, in turn to become part of her inner, spiritual strength and thus be taken into her body that way. It didn’t talk a lot about the role of her Principle in this, but she could read between the lines well enough to see that it was likely an element of it. The other optional element that was more stressed in this second approach was her ‘Innate Art’, which was another thing she had barely touched since her breakthrough.

The texts actually spent quite a bit more time talking about that, and its various applications, and several of them seemed to have some overlap with her principle—this being one such example.

As part of the binding process, if she could associate her Innate Art with the object, it would apparently allow her to gain extra benefits based on the properties and its compatibility, and also allow her innate art to reinforce the treasure itself.

Thus, while they settled down to wait, and continued to keep an eye on the surrounding reed beds, she slowly began to circulate her qi through the swordstaff.

Back before she had reached golden core—which was also when she had been actively wielding it, for the most part—this had been onerous enough that she had not really bothered. Instead, she had relied on the superior materials and her experience to carry its utility in combat. Now, though, she found that with her sustained advancement, her ability to move qi through it, while still hard work, was good enough that she could probably do so in combat. It also gave her a newfound appreciation for just how well made the weapon was.

She was no stranger to high quality weapons, so she felt somewhat qualified to judge that the mastery of craft that had gone into making the swordstaff was breathtaking, really, for its elegance, and simplicity and utility. It was a creation without ego, designed to maximise everything about its role with as little ostentation and compromise as possible.

The dominant metal that made up most of the blade and haft had been exquisitely folded with other softer, qi-conductive minerals to best utilize the properties of each element. The end result was a weapon able to both maximize the strength and durability of that core metal, while barely compromising its qi-conductivity, imbuing it with a degree of qi-memory and reducing what would have otherwise been an incredibly dense and unwieldy weapon to something even a strong mortal without any cultivation at all might have been able to wield with training. It was little wonder, in that chaotic moment, that she had been handed it, because it was the perfect weapon for someone like her to wield.

With her improved sense for qi, she could also see much more clearly, now, why it had been a struggle for her to push qi through it since. Her qi before she broke through to golden core had been significantly inferior to the remnants of the intent-infused qi lingering from its previous owner, which had themselves been directed as much as possible, with that remnant intent, to support her wielding of the weapon without actually interfering with her in any way.

It made her lament in her heart that such a selfless act by that soldier in that anomalous place, whose name, ‘Jessa’, she had only learned after she perished, had gone unnoticed by her for so long.

“Is there a problem?” Chunhua asked her softly.

“Oh… no.” she replied with sigh, considering the now rather depleted store of qi within the core matrix of the weapon.

What remained was… well, actually it was still significantly superior in purity to her own qi but there was enough capacity freed up by how diffuse what remained now was, to allow her own principle-infused qi to spread properly through weapon’s qi conduits. In fact, as she watched, she saw that her principle-infused qi was, in fact, slowly absorbing what was there, with remarkably little loss of efficiency.

“—I was just reminded of a traumatic memory from a while ago.”

“Ah.” Chunhua flashed her a sympathetic smile.

Exhaling softly, she finished the cycle of pushing qi through the weapon, then focused on the sense of resonance between her and it.

There was a temptation to actively include Bright Heart Shifting Steps as well, however, the talisman’s instructions were explicit in not using it in that manner for the initial binding, but to just let it work passively in the background. According to the steps laid out, the connection she had to make needed to be pure in its essence. If she had to rely on a divination art, even this one, the talisman stressed, it would only damage the long-term viability of the link, for the sake of some short-term gains.

Fortunately, she had been training with weapons almost since she had first learned to sense qi, and she had fond childhood memories of copying her father and brother as they ran through martial forms. The swordstaff was also a core weapon of the Kun clan’s style, favoured because there was a profound duality within it, drawing on sword and spear arts in equal measure, that evoked something of their mythological namesake.

Those childhood martial forms had also been something that carried her… rather aggressively, she had to admit, through her much darker teenage years, when her position at its heart had vanished. Similarly, the weapon now in her hand, had also travelled with her, through some of the toughest, harshest tests in her life up to this point. Its story and hers were intertwined in a way that was hard to articulate.

It felt comfortable for her to wield it, and now, as she started a second cycle of her qi through it, she worked to imbue that intent, through her principle, her mantra, and with the support of her nascent soul, into formalising that connection between her and it, and even, as much as it was possible with the remnant intent Jessa had left in it.

The feeling of the swordstaff’s weight in her hand abruptly shifted, and she stared at it, or rather, her Nascent Soul did, as it appeared in her hands, within her inner world.

“…”

She stared at her empty hands, as did Chunhua… and focused on producing the weapon, a little surprised that it was that straight forward—

It reappeared in her grasp, but now, a ghostly version remained with her Nascent Soul.

In fact, she could tell, almost instantly, as she shifted the swordstaff back into her inner world once more, and its ethereal version turned vivid, that it was not quite that easy.

-Ah, so this is why it warned me not to use Bright Heart Shifting Steps directly? She mused.

The weapon was indeed linked to her soul, but the link was currently very fragile. She supposed that if she had directly called upon it, or some other art, the link might well erroneously appear stronger than it actually was. It would also no doubt have negatively influenced her perception of the actual time she would need to spend nurturing it in her inner world according to the method set out by the talisman to truly imprint it.

“Can you summon it from a distance?” Chunhua asked, curious.

“Mmmmmm.”

Curious on that point as well, she re-materialized it and passed the staff to Chunhua, who slowly started to move away from her, along the ridge of the roof.

Reaching out, she found she could still feel the swordstaff, even when Chunhua had made it all the way to the other end of the roof, but when it came to pulling it back into her inner world, there was a huge amount of resistance. She probably could have forced it, but there was no reason to risk the connection developing some aberration.

“Can you stay there?” she signed to Chunhua, as she slowly started to back away as well now, further increasing the distance.

She only had to go three more paces, as it transpired, find a point where she was absolutely certain that if she tried to pull the weapon back, the connection would break, and she would suffer a nasty backlash.

“Come back towards me…” she signed to Chunhua.

Chunhua nodded and slowly, pace by pace made her way back along the roof ridge, while she counted out the decreasing distance in her head and how the link felt. It was only when Chunhua was about ten paces from her, that the sense of fragility in the connection vanished entirely, at which point the weapon flew out of Chunhua’s grasp and back into her own.

“So, it doesn’t dematerialize, that’s interesting,” Chunhua observed.

“It might,” she mused. “I probably have to refine it properly first.”

“Ah, that would make sense,” Chunhua nodded.

Thankfully, the steps the talisman laid out for refinement were pretty straightforward. The optimal route now, was to leave it in her inner world, integrated into her natural qi cycle as much as possible, until the ethereal ‘imprint’ had gained the same vivid sense of tangibility her Nascent Soul currently had, and there was no real shortcut to that process. In fact, the talisman explicitly warned her against trying to force the deepening of the connection, stressing steady accumulation over pretty much everything else.

“—I wish I had a weapon that was actually worth binding, though,” Chunhua added ruefully, sitting back down on the roof beside her.

“We should look for something suitable,” she agreed. “For you and Ling.”

Ling did have the Yang Blood, but that, or just spitting a mouthful of it at someone was… a bit lacking in nuance. As for Chunhua… most of what she had displayed since they joined up was either unarmed combat or martial archery.

“My family had a few arts, but I only really learned Martial Archery and some unarmed stuff,” Chunhua mused, patting the bow sitting beside her on the roof. “This bow I have is… decent, in that regard, but certainly not worth binding unless there is no other alternative. I do have a machete and an axe—”

“Herb hunter tools?” she queried.

“Yeah,” Chunhua nodded. “So not really suitable. I never really learned sword arts, either. Not a lot of call for them as a herb hunter.”

“No, there isn’t,” she agreed drily.

“—not to mention, both are very obviously weapons from back home,” Chunhua added, shaking her head ruefully. “I should have snatched a few weapons back at the battlefield.”

“Hindsight is invariably cruel,” she agreed, even as she spotted Manshu’s signal from one of the lower windows of the main building, indicating to them that they had completed their sweep.

“Seems they are done,” Chunhua mused, nodding along to her comment.

It didn’t take the others long to get back in the boat and make their way back over to their location.

“Find anything?” she asked Manshu, as the boat pulled up at their building.

“A few records about the estate itself, but beyond that, nothing notable,” he replied with a grimace. “Looks like they left in a hurry. Not much usable food or other supplies. There were traces of some larger animal poking around—probably one of those lizards you spotted.”

“Makes sense,” Chunhua mused. “We spotted a few crabs and traces of two more lizards.”

“—lurking around the outbuildings,” she added, gesturing in the direction her use of Bright Heart had indicated they were hiding. “I don’t think it’s worth trying to track them down though.”

“No, probably not,” Manshu agreed.

“Aye, they are nasty for their realm if you provoke them,” Avarz interjected.

“What did the estate records say?” Chunhua asked.

“They trade various types of reeds, basically, and have some fish and crab farms,” Manshu replied drily.

“Reeds, you say,” she chuckled, eyeing the wetlands stretching away in every direction.

“I know,” Manshu agreed, rolling his eyes.

“In any case, we should probably check the other buildings?” she suggested. “While keeping an eye out for more lizards, of course. What do you think, Avarz?”

“Sounds like a plan,” the older Ur’Vash agreed.

The exploration of the rest of the estate could only be called routine. It took Avarz, Manshu, Teshek and Okal just a little over thirty minutes to carefully sweep the remainder of the buildings, while she and Chunhua continued to keep a wider lookout. The only eventful thing was another barrage of light on the distant horizon, about ten minutes after they started, which sent a faint shockwave through everything and dislodged a few roof tiles here and there, and sent the lizards and crabs skulking deeper into their cover.

The half-built boat and the boat house had a few things that Avarz thought they could salvage, but after some consideration once they regrouped, and under Avarz’s advice, it was concluded that it would be better to return later, in daylight, with Uarz and a few more of the crew who were familiar with the more practical aspects of boat salvage.

The crate with a higher qi purity that she had sensed turned out to be a collection of beast cores, likely harvested from the crab and fish farming enterprise the estate had operated. Along with it, Manshu also discovered a second crate that had materials Avarz informed them were related to maintaining the suppression formations they had occasionally encountered. Thankfully, the lizard didn’t contest them for it, and just slunk away when they approached. It did lurk under the water near the main building, watching from amidst the floating debris, but made no move to follow them, then or after.

The exploration of the remaining outbuildings also turned up two sacks of lotus roots, another of edible reed roots, a large stoneware pot half-full of some sort of grain, and a few other cooking sundries, including two small, sealed pots of animal fat and one of plant oil.

Given the size of the grain pot, they ended up having to make two trips back to the main vessel, and all in all, as she finally climbed back on board, she could not help but feel that the whole excursion had been quite profitable.

“It seems you got a good haul,” Omurz commented as they carefully moved the unwieldly pot of grain over into the vessel.

“Yeah, we will have to go back in daylight to check out what, if anything, can be salvaged from the boatshed they have there,” Avarz commented.

“Oh, they have spare parts?” Urluz, the drummer turned First Mate asked.

“Aye,” Avarz nodded, stepping out of her way as she climbed across, leaving Chunhua to take the boat to the rear and tie it off so it drifted.

“There might be a short mast we can salvage, and a sail… of sorts,” Okal added.

“Speed, versus being awkwardly visible,” Uarz remarked pensively, from where he was looking through the box of formations materials.

“That is the trade-off, yes,” Avarz agreed.

“Oh, is that actual grain?” Lashaan, who had come back down the boat to check out what they had brought back, clapped her hands together brightly.

“It is,” she confirmed.

“Porridge with lotus roots and some fried fish on the side will be a much better breakfast,” Lashaan murmured. “Much better.”

“Oh, if you have a moment, after you have eaten, it would be good to confer about those maps,” Uarz added to her, more softly.

“Sure,” she nodded. “We can talk while I eat, if you like?”

She had been expecting this conversation for a while, in any case, and now that she was back on the boat, she found she was surprisingly hungry. The soul-binding of her swordstaff and the testing of Bright Heart Shifting Steps had taken more out of her than she realised.

“—Or afterwards,” Uarz suggested, helpfully.

“It’s fine,” she shook her head.

A few minutes later found her sitting, bowl of stew in hand, at the rear of the boat, with Uarz, Omurz and Naakos. Manshu was also sitting nearby, along with Qing Yao, but neither were doing more than half listening in, as Uarz gave her a basic run-down of the geography of the riverlands into which they were heading, and also the various issues with navigating it.

There were four major powers in the vicinity of where they were. Udrasa, whom they had already had the “pleasure” of. Katum, who had also not showered themselves in glory during her brief meeting with their representative. Uldara, the strongest, and perhaps oldest, according to Uarz, in the entire Riverlands, and a confederation of independent towns run by a group of petty warlords too powerful or inconveniently placed to have been absorbed by those three.

Rather than using the cardinal directions, however, the charts all worked via constellation maps.

The sun provided a standard point of reference during daytime, it seemed, but accurate navigation required star-maps if you consistently wanted to get to locations, especially when crossing the Riverlands. She could recall Lashaan talking about navigating on the plains by constellation, particularly because the day-time heat tended to get extreme, but the ones used in the star-charts they had taken had totally different names.

Because she had been relying on divinations to chase after Han Shu up to this point, however, she had to concede she had never really given the question of how Ur-folk normally navigated much thought. It turned out the usage of the cardinals—North, South, East and West… could be esoteric. They were still used as geographical terms, relative to fixed points—Udrasa, the territory of the Ten Masters, for example controlled a large swathe of the ‘Northern’ and ‘Eastern’ reaches of the Riverlands, but you couldn’t use a compass to reliably locate, say ‘North’, in isolation for any extended period of time.

She couldn’t really ask why, either, as that was apparently common knowledge, so had to settle for Uarz’s somewhat off-hand explanation about seasonal irregularities in the Mana tides that ran through the central plains, as he took her through the charts.

This also brought up a further problem, more specific to her, or their group, maybe, which she had to admit, was low-key hilarious, if only for how she had managed to entirely overlook it up to this point. She—and probably all of the other cultivators—despite speaking the local language fluently, by this point, were in fact functionally illiterate, when it came to any of the common scripts the various influences used in day-to-day communication. Communication which included the charts they had on hand. Thankfully, that didn’t seem to surprise Uarz, who was quite happy to save her blushes by complaining how awkward and ‘archaic’ the language used on the charts was while explaining them.

“As I see it, it’s really a question of whether we keep this bearing, with ‘The Great Hunter’ and ‘The Goat’—” Uarz helpfully gestured past her, at the night sky to the right side of their ship, between where the prow and the light show on the horizon kept recurring. “And risk running into ships patrolling out from Samatz or Ulanuma, or veer a bit further towards ‘The Crown’—the ‘Old King’ as you call it,” Uarz nodded to Naakos. “And the ‘Golden Path’—” the navigator then helpfully gestured to the two constellations rising into the night sky on the left side of their prow. “In the direction of Uldara and take stock in Suenjar or Ulmeuan,” Uarz mused.

“Suenjar is here, for reference,” Omurz added helpfully, pointing one of the four nearest towns currently picked out by a small pebble, on the map they had looted, relative to where they currently seemed to be.

“I would suggest not Suenjar,” Naakos interjected.

“Oh?” she turned to Naakos.

“It’s a military outpost primarily. To stop raiders from Udrasa and Samatz, depending on which way the wind blows,” Naakos replied. “I would bet that Mugvar’s lot came from Samatz, and the soldiers at Suenjar will be on edge.”

“—Not directly,” Akuja, the captured mage, who had also been sitting silently a little way from them, interjected suddenly. “But you are not wrong to be wary of Suenjar. I was party to… negotiating—no, I guess I can just say robbing—two ships from there with Mugvar. There is a possibility they will have my mana registered.”

“Okay, so not Suenjar,” Uarz sighed. “Or Samatz, but that was never really on the cards.”

“That bad, huh?” she asked trying not to sound sarcastic.

“Samatz is a town run by a gang,” Naakos clarified.

“A powerful gang, with enough martial prowess that it is easier for their neighbours to pay them off,” Uarz agreed. “There is only one rule in Samatz. Be strong. Avoid those stronger than you. Don’t stand out to Xerses or that sorceress of his.”

“That’s definitely out,” she agreed.

The last thing they needed right now was another chaotic fight with a local power.

“Aye, the issue is that its also the closest town, about forty miles east—” Uarz added drily.

“So, what about the other two,” Qing Yao asked, before she could. “Ulanuma and Ul…meuan?”

“They hate each other, but both are largely ‘okay’ so long as you don’t play politics,” Omurz informed them.

“The names are kind of similar,” she observed.

“They are,” Uarz nodded. “And not by accident. Both were part of a vassal power of Uldara until… it was about two centuries ago, I think?” he added, glancing at Naakos, seemingly looking for clarification on that.

“Yep, around then,” Naakos agreed, stroking his beard. “It was when the current master took over in Uldara. The King of Katum, may scorpions be found in his bed, paid them a bunch of money to make a mess. In fact, what happened was that the families controlling them had a… difference of views on Katum’s actions. Ulmeuan stayed with Uldara, and was rewarded for their loyalty, and Ulanuma ended up going it alone. The issue there is that Ulanuma has most of the region’s resources, including an orichalcum delve, and a war platform from before the collapse, so…”

“They remain strong enough to be independent, but Ulmeuan holds a grudge?” she guessed.

“Aye,” Omurz agreed with a grimace.

“What is this ‘war platform’?” Qing Yao asked.

“Oh, that—” Naakos bit off a swearword she didn’t quite catch, then shook his head wryly. “It’s a right shit crock all right. It doesn’t look like much, honestly, but looks are the great deceiver of pride when it comes to artefacts from back then—”

“—The most dangerous octagonal slab of blue-grey rock not in Uldara,” Uarz added.

“Aye, and it’s the main reason that town is still independent,” Naakos continued. “The spirit controlling it has some sort of promise with the ancestor of the town founder… it’s all a bit histrionic, honestly, but the end result is that the weapon will only respond to pleas from his descendants—and attempts to take it away have always ended… with big holes in the landscape.

“As to what it looks like,” Naakos added, before she could do more than open her mouth. “It’s a forty-metre-wide plaza of featureless blue-grey rock, all in one piece, with a small raised dais and octagonal altar at the centre. Around that, you have six, four-metre-tall stele arranged in a broken crescent about halfway out from that central altar. It should have twelve, I was once told, but even with six, it’s a terror when activated. You can only commune with it from the raised dais and if the spirit doesn’t like you—”

Naakos snapped his fingers and gave a mirthless grin.

“Zaap. As far as I know, nobody has survived getting struck by it. Or being in the vicinity of it targeting something.”

To her, that sounded remarkably like a large ritual platform for a military fortress. The eight-sided thing was interesting as well—

“Why eight sides?” Qing Yao asked, frowning, clearly wondering the same thing she was.

“I am not a mage,” Naakos chuckled. “I imagine it has something to do with mana theory.”

“Thaumic exchange, I think,” Akuja supplied. “Though I never learned theory beyond the necessary being forcibly imprinted into my mind when I was induced to learn evocation spells. Xayak was the one who…” she trailed off for a moment, then gave herself a shake. “Anyway, from what I remember, Seven is the Sequence of Mystery. Eight of Transformation, building on Four, being the Axis of Providence. Etheric and Thaumic balance are closely tied to the shifts between the two sequences—and informed by Five of Attunement and the Ten of Actuality.”

“I see…” listening, that sounded… interesting, actually, but now wasn’t the time to ask the mage detailed questions about it, so she filed it away to ask later.

Knowing more about what passed for cultivation theory—mana theory, in local parlance—would only be a good thing for them going forward.

“What kind of stupidity was that bastard Mugvar getting involved with, that his mage was talking about the Eight of Transformation or the Ten of Actuality?” Naakai, who had come down the boat to join them while Akuja was speaking, asked. “Neither are things bright young minds want to be messing with.”

“Ah,” Akuja grimaced. “Xakvor had some piece of an old tablet that talked about a Cardinal Key Spell. He—”

“That lunatic!” Naakos coughed.

“Cardinal Key?” Yao asked, leaning in.

“Another thing best left un-inquired about,” Naakai remarked archly. “What happened to the tablet?”

“I dunno,” Akuja grimaced. “He kept it on his person, but I don’t recall seeing him study it in a few weeks, honestly... I assumed he just stashed it somewhere?”

“—mages,” Naakai grumbled under her breath. “Anyway, regarding that ancient weapon in Ulanuma, I recall there was a tale talking about its use against that old scorpion the Hundred Ghosts goes around with. Notable, because he survived it, and so did she, somehow. Apparently, one of its abilities is to turn what was ‘inside’ an area it targets into a zone that is briefly ‘outside’ everything.”

“Leaving a big hole in the ground,” Naakos muttered. “And nothing else.”

“Outside… everything?” Omurz asked, frowning. “I thought it zapped people with lightning?”

“Yes, outside.” Naakai pointed up at the night sky. “That outside.”

“Ah.” Qing Yao gulped, and Manshu grimaced, both reading the same thing she did from that description—a weapon capable of cracking space, and thus nothing any of them wanted anything to do with at their current realm.

“It can also just zap people with lightning,” Naakos added with a more amused grin.

“—In any case, it sounds like that isn’t necessarily a place to go to lightly, either,” she suggested to steer the conversation back on track.

“No, not with the way Katum seems to be at the moment,” Naakai mused, eyeing the charts. “Ulmeuan is probably our best bet, it should take us two to three days to get there?”

“Oh?” she asked Naakai.

“Its decently ruled, not prone to stupidity unless you get involved in the politics of its circumstances with its immediate neighbours,” Naakai replied. “—and will be a good place to ask for information without drawing too much suspicion, thanks to the chaos of the last week.”

“Also, it's likely to be one of the few places we can gain supplies without being robbed blind, even in this current time of trials,” Uarz added, nodding.

“Yes,” Naakos agreed.

“Incidentally, the need to potentially avoid Suenjar was why you were frowning over the suggestion we salvage this mast?” she asked Uarz.

“Nothing gets past you, does it?” Uarz chuckled ruefully. “Yes, that is a consideration, though I think getting it would still be helpful.”

“So, thinking about tomorrow, after we are nicely rested,” she mused. “If you take some of your crew, and maybe Manshu and Yao, here, first thing, to see what can be salvaged in daylight, I’ll see about getting the hull camouflaged?”

Painting the hull purple, at least in part, would not take that long, but there was no point in trying to splash about in the water in the dark. That was just asking for someone to get attacked by a lizard or a crab or some of the large fish. In the light of day, and with a night to think about it and confer with Ling, she was fairly sure they could further refine the concealment talismans as well.

“That would certainly help,” Omurz agreed.

“Okay,” Uarz nodded. “We should be able to bring the vessel a lot closer as well.”

“Yeah,” she agreed. “I presume there isn’t much else in those charts that we need to think about now?”

“Most of their detailed annotations were for the area around Ruqu,” Uarz informed her. “None of the channel routes are worth anything at this point. Their main value to us is the detailed breakdown of distances between local settlements. I’ll draw us up a course and run it past all of you in a few hours?”

Not for the first time, she found herself quietly impressed at how good Uarz was at navigating complex politics and the expectations others had on his role. She had been wondering if she would need to actually say she wanted to check his chart—mostly because she wanted to try Bright Heart Shifting Steps on it—and how to do that without sounding sceptical of his abilities. Instead, he had opened the door for her to be involved without either of them looking silly, and ensured that Naakos and Naakai were included as well.

“We can discuss it before you head out to salvage,” she agreed.

“Sounds good,” Naakos nodded. “That just leaves the questions of watches?”

“Mmmmm, yes,” she turned to consider the occupants of the boat pensively. “We can rotate in threes, maybe, every two hours, with someone at the front, rear and middle?”

The main thing she was concerned with still, were the newly liberated trio.

“One of each of our groups, respectively?” Naakos mused. “That works. Who goes first?”

“I can,” she shrugged. “Then Lynn can swap with me, then Khunua? Maybe Naakos, you take the middle and Kreva takes the front? I am happy to let you sort the order out, you know your folks best.”

“Kreva, Avarz and Okal,” Omurz decided after a moment’s consideration.

“Having been volunteered, how could I refuse,” Naakos chuckled. “Cannar can take the second watch—”

“I’ll take the third,” Naakai added. “I always like watching the sun rise—makes me feel young.”

“I was going to say I’d happily to take a watch,” Manshu added drily, playing into his role as a ‘soldier’ a bit. “But I will not say no to a proper rest!”

“If you want a fourth, actually, it might be a good idea to involve their group,” Yao suggested, nodding towards Shi Tengfei and the others where they were seated in the middle of the boat.

“That is a really good idea,” she agreed, sighing inwardly at having not spotted that. Half the battle here was trying to ensure the other groups were invested enough not to cause problems, and making a point of trusting Tengfei, at the very least, to stand a watch would hopefully go a ways towards that. “How about Tengfei takes the first watch, with me, and then—”

“—I’ll take the middle one,” Yao added, giving Manshu a slightly supercilious smirk. “Give our good soldier here his sleep.”

“Hey!” Manshu shook his head as the others chuckled. “I’ll take the dawn watch then.”