> There is no one naughtier than Charisianus at Saturnalia. He walks around wearing a Toga!

>

> Epigrams, 6.24

>

> I send to you, eloquent Juvenal, these nuts from my little farm, as a present for Saturnalia. Alas, the libertine god who protects it, has given the rest of the fruits to amorous young ladies!

>

> Epigrams, 7.91

>

> The dish which you were wont to present to me, Sextilianus, at the Saturnalia, you have bestowed on your mistress: and with the price of my toga, which you used to give me on the first of March, you have bought her a green dinner robe. Your mistresses now begin to cost you nothing; you enjoy them at my expense.

>

> Epigrams, 10.29

>

> You stern brows and severe looks of rigid Catos, you daughters of rustic Fabricii, you mock-modest, you censors of morals, aye, and all you proprieties opposed to the joys of darkness, flee hence! Hark! my verses exclaim, "Io, Saturnalia!" we are at liberty, and, under your rule, Nerva, rejoice. Fastidious readers may con over the rugged verses of Santra. We have nothing in common; the book before you is mine.

>

> Epigrams, 11.2

~Curated opinions of Martial, on the ancient festival of Saturnalia.

> Fen: Saturnalia is about a lot of things. Sweets. Drinking. Wine. Icy Dunking. Naked Singing. Wearing Funny Hats. Hilarious amounts of clapping…

>

> Hong: —But truthfully, it only has one true purpose, doesn’t it?

>

> Fen: It does?

>

> Hong: Yep, it’s a great vehicle for the laundering of illicitly gambled nuts.

>

> Fen: …

>

> P--???: what in the name of Chronos’s misunderstood origin story are you two miscreants teaching people?

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

~ JUN SANA — CAILLEACH’S HOLD ~

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

The warren-like complex of dwellings in Cailleach’s hold had a bathhouse. It was also a rather nice one, Sana reflected, as she lay in the water, staring at the carved rock of the ceiling. It also had some surprising commonalities to the one at Misty Jasmine Inn, in terms of its layout, although mostly by coincidence, she suspected. There was a central pool, that fed a few smaller, side pools. Columns arranged around that central pool also provided opportunities to veil or curtain off the various side pools, though right now, there was no real need for that… or hadn’t been any need for it, as she had been the only occupant.

“—How is your arm, Jelas?” Rusula’s voice cut through the quiet silence of the baths.

“—better.” Jelas replied. “The mana flow is still a bit… well, I guess it will take time.”

Focusing her awareness softly on the rest of the room she felt the presence of all four Ur’Inan women staying in the hold, as Ragash and Rukuala followed those two in.

Sighing, she let her pseudo-meditative state fall away and stood up in the pool. She had taken to coming to the baths in between her stints at wrestling with the Alchemy Canon from the Pagoda because this was pretty much the best place for practicing qi-circulation in the entire hold. It was quiet, rarely used—in fact, so rarely used that normally it didn’t have water in it, according to Cailleach—and most importantly, a place where the ambient qi was rarely disturbed. The water actually helped, in that regard, because you could sink under it, and the sensory deprivation made it the perfect place for her to work on not just the methods the pagoda wanted her to master, but also to rehabilitate her mantra.

In fact, the only ones other than her who came here regularly were the four who had inadvertently disturbed her right now. It was for them, and particularly the rehabilitation and treatment of Ragash, Rukuala and Jelas, that the baths had first been refilled.

“Oh, Sana! Sorry, are we disturbing your meditation?” Rusula spotted her even as she gave the group a polite wave.

“…”

Checking her mental count of how long she had been in here, she sighed.

“No, it seems I just lost track of time,” she called back.

She had been staring at the ceiling, trying to think of nothing and just watching her qi cycles for five hours, as it turned out.

Rather than wade out, she put her palms on the gently lapping surface and pushed a little qi into the water and used the ‘handhold’ to pull herself directly up, until she was kneeling on the water. By the standards of back home, it was a party trick a seven-year-old could have done, but she was discovering it was exercises like this, done step by step, that were the most useful to her now. Walking across the surface, she stepped off, onto the smooth, slightly warm rock and claimed her towel from beside her clothes and started to rub herself down.

“That will never not seem weird to me, how your grasp of mana is so good…” Jelas murmured, shaking her head.

“It isn’t that hard,” Rusula replied drily. “You just have to focus a bit!”

To prove the point, Rusula stepped onto the water and did a slow, acrobatic cartwheel.

“Yes, but you are a shamaness,” Ragash observed drily. “For you, we should be asking you to fly or something!”

“…”

Rusula gave Ragash a scowl and muttered something about double standards under her breath.

“How is your recovery going?” she asked the group, diplomatically.

“Shouldn’t we be asking you that?” Jelas replied, rolling her eyes.

“As you can see, I am walking on water just fine,” she joked, already regretting the impulsive question in her heart.

Even if the three Ur women they had rescued were some of only ones who might truly grasp something of the horror of the Defilers, and their own ordeal in the city, talking about it, even with them, was awkward.

It didn’t help, that every time it came up—and like now, it had ways of just seeming to haunt your thoughts until it just snuck out somehow—she had to fight the temptation to just bury her psyche in her mantra.

Even now, weeks after, she had to treat it carefully.

The process of weaning themselves off the emotional suppression with which they had lived for so long was miserable, in that regard. It was an itch she could not scratch. A niggling whisper in the back of her mind she couldn’t engage with. A poison, sweet and alluring, calling to her.

The worst part was it came in waves. For the first few weeks it had actually been easier, as well. At the time she had just believed it was because the damage was only so much, but the unpleasant truth was that at the time the injury was bad enough that she had simply been unable to grasp the totality of the problem. Only once the primary effect had receded had they discovered that the real danger for the second phase of healing was relapse. Whatever the Fate-thrashed grey ape bastard had done, and even Cailleach had had to concede she was not totally sure, it had its hooks in so deep that she practically had to relearn how to manifest her mantra from scratch.

“My mana circulation is still iffy,” Jelas sighed. “I get pain in my limbs, and occasionally the mana just rebels, like it wants to warp parts of my body. It is getting better though, thanks to Rusula’s massages!”

“What did Cailleach say?” she asked.

“That we should exercise regularly, eat good food, not do anything emotionally taxing and that it would take time, but that it would heal,” Jelas replied with a grimace.

“Yeah,” Rusula agreed.

“The ‘Warped Sickness’ is worst because it lingers, even in thoughts,” Ragash added, with a grimace of her own. “Until I came here, I had no idea it could even be fully treated. Most who ‘survive’ such ordeals either go mad, or… their tribes take… steps before that, and the lucky few who escape either fate tend to be ostracized, regardless.”

Rukuala, who still didn’t speak, just slapped Ragash on the shoulder and signed to her not to say stupid things.

“Sorry…” Ragash sighed, giving the other Ur woman an apologetic half smile and patting her hand.

Rukuala was a bit of an enigma. It turned out she had been mute before her capture by the Defilers. She was also the oldest of the bunch, and while both Jelas and her had lost much of their original foundations, it seemed Rukuala had once been almost as strong, if not stronger than Pezvak.

“How is your alchemy going?” Rukuala signed to her.

She was also a quick study. Rukuala had her own sign-language, but she had very rapidly picked up the hunter-sign that she and Arai occasionally used and been very interested in the more intent-focused aspects of it, in particular. She had even joined Rusula for some of her slightly ill-fated lessons with her sister.

“I am setting good records for destroyed cauldrons!” she replied with a rueful shake of her head. “Probably we will have to go dig up more clay, soon, but what with the movement of these larger tribes it doesn’t seem the ideal time to go out too much.”

“No, it probably isn’t” Jelas agreed glumly. “I think some of them are going to send representatives to the feast tonight. A messenger from the Thunder Mountain certainly came the other day.”

“Oh, I missed that…” she coughed, not quite meeting their eyes.

One advantage of being sequestered away, working on advancing the Alchemy teachings of the Pagoda was, she had very easily been able to ignore all of those ‘visitors’. Quite a few had apparently wanted to see the now ‘famous’ Ur’Sar, and several, from what she had heard from Arai, had been quite pushy about it, even in front of Cailleach and Old Bones.

“Thunder Mountain are… uh… rather overbearing,” Rusula added, also not quite looking at the other three.

“It’s fine, you can say it, they like to bully others and dislike being told no,” Ragash sighed. “None of us are from the ‘core echelon’ in any case. My tribe was absorbed by them just over a thousand years ago, and even now they do not really let us integrate.”

“—Not quite that long, but we just fight their battles,” Jelas added.

Rukuala just shrugged, then nodded.

“Their old masters are very old. Older than the collapse.” Rusula informed her. “There are other, more… mysterious powers, like this… um, one…” she hesitated a little and then waved her hand generally around the bath house. “But the Thunder Mountain claim to be one of the Ur forces that breached Undergrove, back in the day, and actually freed captives from this place.”

“That is what the lore-speakers claim, anyway,” Ragash murmured, rolling her eyes.

“Do they now?” someone else muttered.

She found herself looking around, because the speaker was not one of the four women beside her… and yet there was nobody there.

“…”

“What’s wrong?” Jelas asked, as she stared into the dimly lit rear of the bath house.

“I swear I just heard someone else speak…” she muttered.

“I didn’t hear anyone,” Rusula mused. “Was it just an echo or something?”

It hadn’t felt like an echo, but there truly was nobody there—

“Problem, girls?”

Turning back, she flinched as she found Cailleach standing a few paces away… in her more… ‘Ur-like’ appearance, she supposed.

“I just thought I heard something odd, was all?” she remarked, sighing.

“It’s that time of year,” Cailleach murmured, rolling her eyes. “You can’t but expect a few old ghosts to be mouthing off, trying to remind people they exist.”

“…”

She stared at Cailleach, not quite sure what to say to that, until the other woman put her hand to her forehead.

“You don’t have a temperature,” Cailleach chuckled. “Why are you staring like that? Did you spend too long staring at the ceiling or something?”

“…”

“Never mind,” she replied, flushing a little.

“Maybe it’s the potion making,” Cailleach suggested, a faint smile on her lips now as she walked around the seat. “Too much time spent in poorly ventilated spaces isn’t good for you either, you know.”

“I know,” she replied, still not entirely sure why they were having this conversation.

“I won’t pry, but it seems any method that is that hard on cauldrons might have a few—”

Cailleach slipped, her foot skidding on the edge of the towel and nearly fell backwards into the water, only stopping herself with a comedic moment of windmilling arms.

“C-careful!” Rusula gasped, catching Cailleach’s right arm, while she grabbed her left hand.

“…”

Grimacing, Cailleach let them stabilize her, then shook her head, muttering something that sounded rather like a curse, under her breath.

“S-sorry,” she coughed, picking up the towel.

“…”

Cailleach stared at the towel, then around at the steamy haze of the bathhouse, then just sighed and shook her head.

“It’s fine,” Cailleach murmured, patting her on the shoulder. “As I said, it’s the time of year when old ghosts like to remind others they exist, nothing more.”

Even though she said that, none of the rest of them said anything for a good few seconds. Nothing else happened, however, except that Cailleach gave them a very level look in return, that the other four Ur women resolutely refused to meet.

“Anyway,” Cailleach sat down on the stone bench she had just put her towel on. “Bath aside, I came to forewarn you. Some idiots from various Ur tribes are going to be arriving in a while. They should… behave. They know the score about this place, and there are rules of hospitality, that if they break, I will take every delight in ensuring they cannot set foot within several tens of miles of here… but a lot of them want to at least lay eyes on the ‘Ur Sar’.”

“Ah.” she sighed.

“I would, honestly, suggest that you not show your face. You don’t need their crap, and what they want from you is nothing at all you want from them.” Cailleach added.

“Almost certainly not,” Ragash agreed with a grimace of her own. “Who is Thunder Mountain sending, Lady Cailleach?”

“No idea, but I suspect it will be one of that boastful idiot Timurezaxes’ younger, unmarried sons—assuming they are not dead from their own drama?”

“Urugarmaxes vanished, hunting one of the big serpents two years ago,” Jelas answered. “But, unless someone died since we were taken prisoner, most of them should be alive.”

“The old ancestor has many sons, of varying age. His daughters he marries to bind other tribes, like ours, to Thunder Mountain,” Ragash informed her. “Or, if they have no sons left, he will take their most promising daughter as a concubine.”

“I see…” she mused.

“Urugarmaxes, for example, was the third youngest. In terms of talent, he was someone that the old master and other elders of Thunder Mountain had a lot of hope for…” Ragash continued.

“Until he got eaten… probably, by one of the devouring serpent’s elder children,” Jelas observed. “If I was going to guess at who gets sent here, it will either be Urushamizrax or Uruvarasharaxes. Uruteshekumaz is another possibility.”

“Before you ask, all the sons of that brat are named like that, because he claims to be of the Ur’Sin,” Cailleach interjected. “Which is also, likely, why they are interested in you two.”

“If he can convince an Ur’Sar to become his newest wife, or the wife of one of his sons, that would be a big coup, for sure,” Jelas observed, shaking her head.

Rukuala made a hand sign that was… well, she was fairly sure it was rather pejorative, even if the exact meaning escaped her.

“Yeah… I don’t think so,” she muttered, agreeing with the sentiment, however it was expressed.

She had little interest in going to this feast anyway, but now, she had absolutely no intention of it.

“Does the fact that we were held captive by the defilers not bother them at all? Or the Eldritch Mushroom thing?” she asked, as that occurred to her.

“Likely that is also why some of these powers are sending larger parties,” Cailleach replied, drily. “To see both of you in person, or at least try to. Usually, the banquet we host is just a thing some bored fellows come to, when they feel like it, to reminisce and exchange gifts with my folk, if they care for it. However, elements of your ‘story’ as have been passed on to them though other sources, would certainly stretch credibility.

“Thunder Mountain has not bothered to come here in centuries,” Cailleach continued, shaking her head. “The issue is certainly that Timurezaxes and some of those others, like old Red Axe, or Varagosh, who have kept to themselves long enough to have survived since the fall of this place, think they know a few things, as a result of that good fortune. Between the showy arrival of that pair from the eastern continent, and the fact that your breakthroughs seem to have been spotted by a few folks, despite my best efforts, I doubt they will be content to put it down entirely to things having grown in the confused tale-telling of their subordinates.”

“Ah.”

“So, the stuff about our captivity they are suspicious of, but the breakthrough we made in the ruins of the city…?”

“—They have trustworthy information on, and know I was involved,” Cailleach agreed, nodding along to her question. “And seemingly know that the Cloud Arrows Tribe encountered two Ur’Sar convincing enough for your old shaman,” she added, to Rusula, who made an unhappy face in reply.

“So, what do you suggest?” she asked.

“It does depend rather on who comes for the actual gathering, but certainly, keeping a low profile for the next few days would be no bad thing,” Cailleach replied, rolling her eyes. “The ritual of these days is its own matter, apart from you. Which is not to say, that as guests, you cannot attend, if you wish; however, what those visiting here with ulterior motives want is entirely their own problem. No need for us to be accommodating. In that regard, you can pass for Ur’Inan just fine, and because of the nature of this place, the senses of the guests will be dulled accordingly.

“I would have offered to host it elsewhere, but the tradition of the season and the rituals of hospitality that tie our various powers together in this place would make it difficult for me to refuse without making them even more suspicious, at this point.”

The unspoken implication there seemed to be that the powers in question had left this matter to the last minute, exactly to facilitate such a circumstance, and leverage things for their own ends, accordingly.

“Propriety and Convention are weapons to be wielded without care for nicety or normalcy,” she reflected ruefully.

“…”

“There was a saying, back in the day, about cynical girls growing old before their time,” Cailleach chuckled.

“Was it usually espoused by bearded old men, who liked to sit around and drink a lot, while admiring the cleavage of the young ladies waiting on their cups?” she asked, putting as much scepticism into her tone as she could.

“Absolutely,” Cailleach replied, rolling her eyes. “And as I said, there is no onus on you to attend, formally.

“That said, this does give me an idea. If those nosy folk want to come here for a feast and to pry into others business, it is perfectly acceptable for you to feign ignorance and let the decidedly non-credible circumstances that brought you here do the heavy lifting when it comes to the assumptions of others. At the end of the day, this is my house, you are honoured guests here, and I set the rules. Not some scheming envoy from Thunder Mountain, Axe Cave, Grey Wolf Valley, or whatever else they want to call their little groups, these days.

“I know it is hard to accept, given how your recent experiences have been, but these rituals did not just sprout like last week’s mushrooms.”

For some reason, Cailleach was again looking not ‘at’ her, but ‘past’ her, for some reason, as she spoke. Her symbol also seemed ever so slightly… amused by this, which was a bit disconcerting? But after a moment, Cailleach just sighed a little ruefully and swept her gaze back past the rest of them.

“If they want to continue to live comfortably, they will observe a baseline of propriety for the gathering I host, out of sheer necessity, and not even the novelty of Ur’Sar will shake that. On that, you have my word.

“Now, enough about that,” Cailleach added, stepping past her and over to Jelas. “Apparently, your mana has been acting up again?”

“Uh… yes,” Jelas nodded, slightly caught out, as they all were, by the sudden change in topic. “It is um… getting better, I think, but…?”

“Lie down on the bench here—on your back—and let me take a look,” Cailleach instructed the Ur woman.

Jelas stared at her for a long second, then nodded. Rukuala scooted out of the way so she could do as instructed.

“Mmmmmm…” Cailleach critically eyed Jelas’s naked form for a few seconds, then gently pressed her pointing finger into her left shoulder. “Does that feel at all odd?”

“No…” Jelas replied after a short pause.

“What about here?” Cailleach asked, poking another point on what had to be the woman’s heart meridian, just below her armpit.

“No,” Jelas once again replied.

“Interesting. Try circulating your mana, gently, while…”

She watched with interest as Jelas did as instructed, while Cailleach slowly moved her fingers around and then down Jelas’ left arm.

“Ahhh!” Abruptly, Jelas gasped, and the qi she could sense flowing in the Ur woman’s body turned slightly chaotic.

However, it was only for a split second, akin to an involuntary muscle spasm, then everything was back to normal.

“Hmmmm.” Cailleach pursed her lips. “Can you circulate your mana again? Don’t try to repeat what you just did, just focus on keeping the flow as gentle as possible.”

This time, Jelas’s mana cycled for over two full cycles of her blood moving around her body—around forty seconds—before another irregularity presented itself, and she couldn’t help but notice, as did the others, that it wasn’t in the same spot, nor with quite the same severity.

“Again.” Cailleach instructed.

Understandably rather nervous at this point, Jelas continued what she had been doing, while Cailleach carefully moved her fingers down her arm once again—

“Uggh.” Jelas grimaced, her arm upper arm trembling after barely ten seconds had passed.

“Interesting,” Cailleach muttered. “So, it is indeed that. I assume you ate no food while in their captivity?”

“N-no.” Jelas replied, while the others also shook their heads. “No water? Drink?”

“Nope,” Ragash added. “And they didn’t make much effort to force us. Some did experience… other things, though.”

“They kept you in metal cages?” Cailleach asked. “While you were being transported?”

“Yes.” Ragash nodded.

Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed Rukuala make a face, as if some thought had just occurred to her.

“Is this ‘wierding’?” the mute woman signed, her expression darkening.

“It is,” Cailleach confirmed. “An early symptom of it. It passed unnoticed till now because none of you are particularly weak.”

“Wierding?” she asked, not familiar with the term at all.

“It’s the local term for a fairly broad category of maledictions,” Cailleach informed her. “Another term for it is ‘Deviation’.”

“Oh.”

Now that she thought about it, for a moment, that made a lot of sense. That was also how the defilers had tried to subvert their cultivation foundations, while they had been imprisoned…

“The cages…” she realised, putting two and two together with their own experiences in captivity.

“It will almost certainly be.” Cailleach nodded once more. “What you experienced in your own imprisonment is the much more comprehensive method, but you are… not so susceptible to it, I suspect.”

“No, we are not,” she conceded. “So, the defilers forced deviations in all their captives?”

“Yes, well, kind of.” Cailleach replied. “They could absolutely force it, but that requires effort, and they are, as I am sure you noticed, quite lazy. Why expend effort for something that will occur anyway. Also, doing it the slow way is… dare I say it, much more effective.”

“Because you don’t notice the danger, or it doesn’t manifest for some time?” Rusula asked. “This… it isn’t because of the massages I was giving, is it?”

“No, that hasn’t exacerbated it,” Cailleach clarified. “As to your first question, yes, they do it that way because it is much harder to deal with when it does finally start to emerge. If you were cold, miserable and tormented, starved and abused, would you be worrying about a few muscle spasms and aching joints?”

“When you put it like that…” Jelas grimaced.

“What folk forget… well, actually, it’s sort of a feature, truth be told, is that ‘Lazy’ when it comes to Avaricious Greed isn’t contradictory.” Cailleach continued as she started checking Jelas’s other limbs. “The concepts of Defilement are in no way, shape, or form simple, straightforward or forgiving. If they were, they would not still be the problem that they are. They are a predatorial manifestation that first and foremost, is driven to pursue the most effective means of its expansion within their means—and if those means are lacking, they will aggressively take steps to ensure that those effective means are expanded upon.

“Nobody here will explain it to you, either,” Cailleach concluded, sighing as she put down Jelas’s left arm and moved to her legs. “Not even those old fellows in Thunder Mountain, or wherever, were they so inclined.”

“Because it is too dangerous?” Rusula asked, nervously.

“Hah. I guess they would say that,” Cailleach replied, shaking her head. “No, it is because they, themselves, do not understand it.”

“…”

“Really?” Ragash blurted out.

“Do you think a classical education in mana theory was something readily accessible to the average Ur warlord hiding out under the earth-silk skirts of the D’vari holds?” Cailleach asked, shaking her head in amusement. “Even your old ancestor, Timuraz, was just a precocious raid leader, attempting to impress a father with too many sons and not enough troubles to channel them into.

“Despite what he would claim now, it was no special achievement to break into this place, once Lucius Everkind took the throne. Undergrove was not even a valuable mine, by that point, and it wasn’t until Sanae Everkind and Roberta Belmont decided to set up their great academy of magic at Evergrove, that it became anything more than an awkward remnant of the worst excesses of the previous dynasty. Most believed it should have been filled in, its slave populations buried with it, and a line drawn over the whole thing.

“In fact, their ‘grand campaign’, while they would claim it was inspired by the vain-glorious dreams of ‘retribution’ and ‘reclamation’ for your ‘lost’ homelands of the Lashaan plain, espoused by the likes of Grimvak or Uruvarsaroth, was largely financed and facilitated by the Boyars of Risigrad and Viscount of Schlussvrad.

“Its real purpose, in the eyes of those powers, was to continue to keep the ‘Ur threat’ fresh in the minds of the northern populace, while they waged their profitable colonial wars on the southern continent, and also took the opportunity to try and gnaw a few bits off what they initially saw as a much weaker dynasty, and to act as a thorn in the side of Sanae Everkind’s efforts to rehabilitate this whole region as crown jewel of her husband’s dynastic house.

As far as that went, it lasted about ten years, as I recall; then the First Princess, Eleanor Everkind, got fed up with all of the village burning, and rape and pillaging, and returned the favour, sacking the capital of Schlussvrad and putting almost the entirety of its nobility to the sword. The most humiliating part was she didn’t even bother to hunt down Timuraz, or his compatriots, just left them penned in as yet another bunch of bandits in the mountains around Amudtakluth.”

“Why…?” she found herself wondering, casting her mind back to that scholarly young woman in the green gown, joking with her sister on the lake shore. She had to assume that was the person Cailleach was talking about.

“Why didn’t she hunt them down?” Cailleach mused. “Truthfully, she did kill quite a few. The D’vari didn’t suffer their presence easily either, but probably because she understood full well that if she did, they would just be replaced by a group more competent. Better the idiots you know, than those you do not. In any case, amusing historical anecdote aside, that isn’t the point I wanted to make.

“Regarding the nature of the defilement, even then, it was ancient history among your people. The Orcnéas are a taboo, but transmission of why had already been largely lost, outside of a few old voices, like Grimvak who experienced the implosion of the Eternal City’s influence on the Northern Continent, courtesy of Neron and the inception of the ‘pig demons’ you have all had the… displeasure of dealing with. That event also coloured a lot of later scholastic interpretation.

“What you have to remember, is that the basics of magic are… actually sort of hard.” Cailleach mused. “I don’t mean the simple matter of casting spells, I mean the theory of ‘why’ you can cast spells. The core understanding of what mana does to a body. Why its different types behave in specific ways. All of that. Once, if you wanted to do any sort of manifestation, you either needed to have innate magical talent, steal that talent from someone or something else, or find someone else who understood it well enough to have not exploded themselves or, and this is important for bringing this full circle, deviated themselves, and convince them to teach you their great wisdom.

“You can in fact age the Paths and Philosophies pretty well, based on that surprisingly simple measure. The really old ones put a lot of emphasis on teaching you this theory, and very solid basics, because it wasn’t a luxury, back then. You had to know how mana meridians developed, the rhythms of how your body stores energy, and the rules underpinning all the processes that facilitated that, or very bad things happened to you. At best, your fate would have been to go—” Cailleach paused to make a ‘woosh’ motion with her hands “—rather like those cauldrons of yours.”

“…”

“Rather understandably, as I am sure you can imagine, methods which lead to the unpredictable explosion, or worse, of nine-hundred and ninety nine out of every thousand people who try to use it, is unlikely to catch on, except in extremis. So, how did our ancient ancestors solve this… predicament, do you think?”

So caught up in her explanation were they all, that none of them actually replied, when she posed the question.

“They uh… looked to nature?” Rusula suggested.

“Exactly,” Cailleach nodded. “Nature is complicated, but spirit beasts are not usually in the habit of exploding randomly, and this was observed. That is basically the origin of two of the philosophies that emerged from that time, which were sometimes classed as Primalist and Spiritists. Primalist methods are… well, if you want to simplify it right down, they looked at spirit beasts and went ‘let have us some of that’, and kept at it, until they stopped dying horribly. Most of the older Ur tribes and early humans followed some aspect of the Primalist philosophy or merged it with Spiritists.

“Rather than just try to straight up steal or acquire the means of mana manipulation from older species, the Spiritists basically tamed them, and got them to teach or bestow as best they could, to a rather similar effect. Problems start to occur, though, when the Primalists in particular start looking beyond things that fly, or breathe fire, and, having had the realisation that you are, to a degree, what you eat, wonder if you can take the same approach to getting the obvious benefits of other elder beings in the same manner. Turns out you can, but they have strong opinions about it, and unlike the spirit beasts, whose time had already passed, to a greater degree, quite a few of those beings took steps to ensure that their methods made those not born to them, or otherwise naturally connected to them, have a very bad, no good last day, if you catch my drift.

“Which is not to say everyone took that approach. Some Spiritists were already looking to nature in other ways, seeking to understand not just the rhythms of life, but the processes of formation and destruction. The rules by which fire burns and lightning moves. Why rain falls and wind blows. Why water makes you sick sometimes, even if you are a Primalist, and not others. Cause and Consequence, transforming again and again. They became known as the Unitarians, and if you have never heard of them, you could be forgiven entirely, because their influence on mana-theory isn’t all that. They were Heaven’s Path Practitioners. Their great achievement was the paradigm of eight primordial transformations.”

“The I Ching?” she asked, surprised.

“Among other things, yes, but that would come a lot later,” Cailleach nodded. “Divination also arose in various groups around the same time. Those become another group you will never have heard of, by and large—the Classicists. About this time, the Primalist approach—of kill and eat the thing you want to get power from—hit a major stumbling block, and encountered its first, and most problematic opponent in the natural order—the various tribes of elder folk who have since become known as elves. Elves, as I am sure you all know, are notorious for their dislike of people killing and eating them, and to cut a long story very short, took some very drastic steps to make this undesirable. Culminating in the curse of blood that gave birth to the first manifestation of the Defiler, and the Orcnéas.

“Now, you are likely wondering how this gets us back to your current problem,” Cailleach added, brightly, to all of the Ur women. “Don’t worry, we will get there. Basically, the methods for mana manipulation in any given era have been graded on two things. Reliability and accessibility. It’s great to have a very reliable method, but it sucks if only one weird old man, or woman, in a cave with an eccentric personality teaches it. You get a very small number of very reliable people, and everyone else not lucky enough to be the particular, many-angled peg that fits the once in a generational cave-based opportunity, can’t wrap their head around that special brand of understanding, or is their own child—and not even that was a guarantee of success—are just shit out of luck. That is why half the human powers eventually imploded, incidentally. Nothing breeds salt on the wind, or the ground, like dissatisfied children.

“The answer, of course, was to develop a new philosophy, that allows you to give the masses broadly what they want—which is mana, sweet, sweet mana, and to do magic with a wave of their hand—pretty quickly, and accessibly, but not have them blow themselves up, or turn into… salt statues, that sort of thing, at random. That is how you got Wizards and Mages, or the precursors of them.”

“The two are different?” Ragash asked.

“Yes. A Wizard is a high-functioning idiot. A savant who sees the laws of reality as something more than just squiggles on a rock and learn how to get something remarkable from that. Contrast to a sorcerer, who is also a sort of high-functioning idiot, but of an entirely different stripe, because they are born with the innate grasp of how that law works, but could probably not explain it, if their life depended on it. A mage, meanwhile, is what you get when one of those wizards, or a sorcerer, sets down a template of their understanding into something all of their followers can just pick up and, well, follow. This is also how, a few thousand years later, you can get some special people in the twelfth circle who do not fully understand why mana cycles in your meridians, or what processes lead to the formation of a heart-core, because they just got to that point by following, without iteration or innovation, the method set down by the previous generation.”

“What about warlocks?” she asked, recalling the little spear’s derision regarding them.

“Warlocks? Pfft.” For some reason she felt like Cailleach was looking past her, at someone else, for a moment, then she just rolled her eyes. “They are their own little enclave of madness.

“The pertinent point here though, is that most later methods saw little practical need to dig into the deep theory of why things work the way they do. That knowledge was hoarded by a new generation of old eccentrics in their own ivory caves, whose main takeaway from the ruin of their own parents and grandparents by their hands, was that they should thoroughly pull the ladder up after them. They kept the masses happy by making mana-manipulation, that is ’magic’, accessible through the means to become mages, predominantly. “Occasionally a wizard emerged in the wild, and sorcerers tend to run in families. You can give the former a lot of money, or kill them if they become a nuisance, and the latter tended to become regional hegemonies anyway, and engaged in their own game of ladder kicking.

“Among the Ur tribes, this was a particular problem, because the humans and elves both had their own reasons for stamping out your people’s autonomy. The elves have never stopped holding a grudge over the whole Orcnéas, Primalist thing, and every time, it seems to them, they let their attention slip on that matter, a new aspect of the defiler pops up. First Akalaraltis, born of Elvish Pride, then Neron of Human Avarice, but the root is the same cancerous ideology of trying to recapture some sublimity of the lost, golden era that came ‘before’.

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

“As for the human powers, truthfully, there is not a great deal of ‘difference’ between your people and them, at this point… it’s largely ideological. Their ancestors were influenced by elvish ideas, and then they slowly rejected the ‘old gods’, in favour of ones much more in their image—and before any of you ask, the question of Divine bestowal—Chosen and their like— would broadly come under Primalism or Spiritism. The various shamanistic methods like you learned, Rusula, has its roots there.”

“Mmmm,” Rusula nodded at Cailleach’s observation.

“In that regard, the Ur-folk lost their connection to that older era. Whether that is a blessing or a curse, depends on who you ask. Undeniably, it has made many see you as a means to regain some aspect of it. This tends to be why, historically, great efforts have always been made by both elves and humans, for their own reasons, to prevent your people regaining a serious foothold in any of their ancestral homelands on the northern or southern continents of the old world. It is also why any group who got too strong, suddenly tended to find itself having a real problem, usually courtesy of some powerful human mage seeking to make their mark, or wanna-be princeling or Archduke bringing an army and claiming everything for themselves—before a bunch of elves show up and murder everyone.”

“So, we lost much of the knowledge that would have been passed down,” Rusula sighed, softly.

“—And were pushed into the fringes of the most inhospitable lands and the world below.” Ragash muttered.

“Yes,” Cailleach agreed, inclining her head in agreement. “Even your great tribes in this place started with very little—As I said, Timurz and Uruvarsaroth, while charismatic in their own ways, were both martialists, who are a whole other matter, and the likes of Grimvak, who stood above them, ideologically speaking, were already engaged in their own game of ivory-caves before the collapse in any case. You don’t need to teach a disposable bandit or a mercenary more than is necessary, after all. Their goal was never nation building, just to sow discord and exact a blood price.

“While your people have regained a lot, in this place, that flawed foundation still remains. Most of the fundamental knowledge of your path, these theories, was never available to you. Some has been reinvented, painstakingly, but much is simply beyond you. The perspective to reacquire it impossible to gain in a place like this, and so it remains only in the eyes of people like me, and my folk.”

“But we do learn how to follow the movement of mana in our own bodies?” Ragash mused.

“Indeed, but it is the most simplistic aspect of it,” Cailleach replied. “You can point at a part of your mana and follow it, wherever it goes, in your body, tracking the paths it takes. Now, don’t get me wrong, from the purposes of starting from nothing, this is already a supremely difficult achievement. Many lesser worlds never even reach this point with any sense of true reliability. However… hmmm, let me put this a different way.” Cailleach stopped speaking and instead pointed at Jelas’s arm. “You can follow the flow of your own mana, and understand the path of the meridians formed in your body, over time and use by it, yes?”

“Yes…?” Jelas replied.

“But can you tell me why the meridians in your left arm go through the particular part of your muscles that they do?”

“Uhh… because that is how I—Oh.” Jelas grimaced.

“Because you were taught that was the correct method, yes,” Cailleach agreed.

“Take another aspect of this. Do you understand why the constructions that make up your body can even store and refine mana? Have you ever had cause to look at the minutiae of a part of your body to that resolution?”

“You tend not to do that, because it is incredibly dangerous,” Sana mused, recalling her own parents’ warnings when they were first starting out with learning their Mantras and how Intent worked. “You start out with the big patterns, the natural rhythms, breathing, blood, how your body processes food—nerves… these give you the pattern of the base meridians of your body. From there, you have to work deeper and deeper, because the complexity as you go down is… exponential, and with every little thing. The body has a natural structure, and the goal isn’t to replace it… usually, but to optimize it in some particular way.”

“Exactly. This knowledge is undoubtedly valuable, but it takes time to impart; and is best done when you are young. The complexity of the body… any living being, even things much simpler than you, is not necessarily a fixed thing, either. It requires a very special blend of hard knowledge and acquired wisdom to work on it outside of what you might consider ‘established pathways’. In the past, that wisdom came from observing the cycles of the natural world, from living in tune with them. This is how the Unitarians and the Classicists found their paths. This is how the Heaven’s Path emerged. The ‘Words in the Heart’ are a similar vehicle, actually. They seek to provide a different means to anchor that understanding on, and affix the wisdom into you, through a point of clear focus. This is where the importance of the symbol alphabets you have been working to learn also emerge.”

“So, um, what is wrong with me… is occurring at a much smaller resolution within my mana meridians?” Jelas asked, nervously.

“Indeed,” Cailleach replied. “Deviations in mana flow are a thing of cause and consequence. Push in one place, and another will be pulled. However, the system of your body is so complex that it can be very difficult to determine exactly what is being pushed, and what is pulled. It need not even be a physical thing.”

“—Heart Demons,” she muttered, connecting that dot up even as Cailleach explained.

“Yes,” Cailleach agreed.

“Can… it be cured?” Rusula asked, voicing the worry all of them were surely holding right now.

“Yes,” Cailleach replied, without any hesitation at all, then shook her head ruefully as all four Ur women exhaled in relief. “This was caught early, and I do understand the theories involved, and their practical application. There are a few ways to do it, but the simplest, and most beneficial in the long term, is a ‘full foundation mana transfusion’, or put another way, you have to replace every last bit of mana in your body with uncontaminated mana.”

“…”

“You even have someone here, who is ideally suited to help,” Cailleach added, turning to her with an amused twinkle in her eye.

“…”

“Isn’t my mana a bit too pure for this?” she asked, considering Jelas and trying not to let her scepticism show on her face.

It wasn’t that she was unwilling, not in the slightest, but rather that she had quite bit of experience with how uncompromising the qi in her body could be, and really didn’t want to injure Jelas, or the others.

“It could stand to be purer, to be honest,” Cailleach remarked, rolling her eyes. “But you have not yet solidified your foundation at your current circle, so it is only to be expected.”

“Purer?” she couldn’t help but echo.

“Yes, purity is more important than potency, for this,” Cailleach replied. “I could use my mana, but there are other factors to consider, and it wouldn’t actually be much advantage. I will be the one actually doing the transfusion, you just need to provide your mana, keep it nicely regulated and stable, and let nature take care of the rest. We will also need something to transfer the displaced qi into, hmmmm…”

Cailleach trailed off, looking around critically, before fixing her gaze on a bowl of palm-sized crystals sitting, ignored, next to the door.

“Go grab me that collection of light-crystals, would you please?” she asked Rusula.

“Will they be enough?” Ragash asked as Rusula scurried off to pick them up.

“Materia theory is also something that the Ur tribes have never had an opportunity learn much about,” Cailleach replied, sounding amused as she turned back to examining Jelas. “While strength is important for containment, structure matters more. Your mana is fairly impure and none of you have grasped worldly laws. While capacity might be a problem if you were just picking river cobbles up, those are Arbacite Crystals.”

“Arbacite?” Rusula, who had just come back over, with the bowl in her arms, gawked. “Isn’t that super rare?”

“Only if you don’t know where to look,” Cailleach sighed. “There is a literal spoil heap, about thirty metres high of discards about a valley over from here. You do know they used to mine basically all the component materia for Watch Tower Matrices on this landmass?”

All of them shook their heads.

“Ah well, that’s a story for another time. Let me look at these…” Cailleach sighed, taking the bowl and putting it on the ground. “Cracked, cracked… slightly coloured, cracked—uggh, don’t tell me… ah, whew, this one is good!”

Cailleach passed one of the regularly faceted, palm-sized stones to hold.

“How do these form?” she asked, curious. The nearly clear crystal was faintly cool in her hand and in fact, rather reminded her of the crystallizations that had manifested from their five elements pool.

“They precipitate on the edge of mana veins as they bleed out natural impurities in the rock as they expand,” Cailleach replied absently. “They are occasionally called Fools Arborundum, because they can come in lots of colours, though the clear ones are best for actual mana storage.”

“Why did they discard them?” Ragash mused, as Rukuala picked another of the crystals up and inspected it admiringly.

“These came out as whole crystals and were probably the wrong weight for what they wanted,” Cailleach shrugged as she continued to inspect the other crystals. “These are certainly not useless, by any means, but back then this place produced such a glut of high-quality materials that it just wasn’t economically necessary to waste time moving them elsewhere. These are good up to the seventh, maybe eighth circle, which sounds impressive, I give you, but those veins were producing crystals suitable for mana circuits rated for twelve circles or more. Probably they would have just stashed them there at the initial refinement site, until the pile got big enough, then ground them down to dust and used them to cast some synthetic ones, or for things like polishing and abrading other materials, or for formations circuits. And now, we are going to make some rather cursed mana-stones, so…” Cailleach trailed off with a chuckle as she put the last one aside and grouped up the further six she had deemed suitable.

“Seven is a nice number, but we shouldn’t need more than one apiece,” Cailleach mused, taking the last crystal back from her. “You were never held captive, Rusula, but you have been around this lot, so it is better to be safe than sorry. For the others, we can get more as required.”

“How will this work, then?” she asked.

“You know the basics of mana-meridian theory, I assume,” Cailleach asked. “You can’t feed it into her heart directly, and a limb…”

“Isn’t symmetrical…” she mused, quickly running back through things as she understood it, regarding Qi. “So one possibility is the spirit gate… here?” she pointed to where Jelas’s navel was.

The Ur woman didn’t have a dantian and seemed to have a foundation rather similar to some martial cultivators, from what she had seen so far, or maybe a body cultivator.

“—Otherwise, I need to feed it in, here,” she moved her other hand to indicate a point just above Jelas’s sternum, between her breasts. “Given she doesn’t collect mana in her navel, I will have to pass it into her core meridians via her lungs, and then let it spread out from there?”

“Because she is a woman, you can still pass it into her navel, through that point,” Cailleach informed her. “It will be much easier on her body, as well. Given your own strength, the initial input of qi will take about a minute, I calculate, and probably the first cycle of the transfusion will be finished in two or three. Her qi is much less robust than yours, so it will be displaced quickly. Your task is to ensure that you feed it into her as placidly as possible. You can use your principle and mantra to guide it, but I need you to think of it like pouring oil into a jar of water. The goal is not to turn her mana chaotic, just to slowly and gently push it out, without mixing the two. Do you understand?”

“I think so,” she nodded.

That was about what she expected, though it was a relief to get detailed instructions.

“What about men?” Rusula asked.

“You would have to feed it through their back, over the chest. Unless you want to chance castrating the person you are trying to save,” Cailleach replied, with an amused shake of her head.

“Now, for you…” Cailleach turned her attention back to the rather nervous Jelas. “I am sure your pain tolerance is pretty high, but this is going to hurt. It will feel like the worst case of losing blood circulation to a limb you never experienced, but in your very bones.”

“Wonderful,” Jelas muttered, swallowing.

“While I run through the basic process with Sana once, could you go get a bit of spirit wood for her to bite on?” Cailleach asked Ragash.

“Of course,” Ragash nodded, quickly getting up and hurrying off.

“Okay, just use your intent, no mana, this time,” Cailleach took her hands and placed them over Jelas’s navel. “Familiarize yourself with how the circulation in her body is.”

Doing as instructed, she sank her awareness into Jelas’s body and slowly spread her senses out. The Ur woman didn’t have a nascent soul, but she could sense the strength of her soul fusing into her flesh and bones clearly. Her heartbeat was fast, understandably, given how nervous she was feeling. Her breathing was shallow and she was a bit tense, but that was also entirely expected. To her relief, as she reached the next layer of her delving into Jelas’s body, she found the layout of her meridians were pretty close to what she was familiar with. There were differences— particularly with the eight principle ones, but from what she recalled her father saying, and later, Old Ling, that was almost always the case, as those eight most closely related to your method of practice, while the others had to work from your body as the basis.

“It is basically what I know,” she confirmed at last, after spending a few minutes carefully considering the three layers.

The biggest difference that she could see, was actually that Jelas’s eight principle meridians were much more in harmony with the twelve basic ones and the five core ones than you might have expected in a cultivator.

“Is increased harmony between the three meridian groups because she doesn’t practice a set method?” she mused out loud.

There was very little evidence of a cultivation method, from what she could see, unless it was hidden in some way, like her own symbol tended to.

“Yes, the favoured approach is to let the meridians develop their connections naturally until you reach adulthood,” Rusula, who had clearly picked up a few things from her sessions with Arai, replied.

“Thunder Mountain, unless you are a special talent, you don’t get any special treatment, except a one-time bit of guidance at your coming-of-age ritual,” Jelas muttered. “So yeah, I just had to let my advancements progress naturally. That is why most of us become hunters or warriors, it at least gives you access to resources and a framework.”

“Pretty much,” Cailleach agreed. “If someone is talented enough to shine through after that, they then get taken in and nurtured, but it’s a rather wasteful method, in my opinion. In that regard, smaller tribes honestly have it better, because every person has to count.”

“I see,” she nodded.

That sounded rather like home. If Thunder Mountain were a sect, Jelas, Ragash and Rukuala would be outer disciples, or maybe not even that, by the sounds of it.

“I have some wood…” Ragash had returned by this point, with a handful of short, smooth lengths of wood that in another life were probably pegs for something.

“That will do,” Cailleach confirmed, taking one and passing it to Jelas, who bit down on it with a grimace.

“Okay, are you ready?” Cailleach asked her.

Nodding again, she shifted around so she could kneel a little more comfortably beside Jelas.

Cailleach, meanwhile, knelt down by Jelas and passed her one of the stones.

“Hold the stone with both hands,” Cailleach instructed her.

“Just breath in through your nose, exhale as best you can around the stick and try to breath normally as best you can.”

Jelas gave them a grimace then nodded slightly.

Cailleach watched her breath in and out for a few seconds, then turned to Rusula.

“Tie a strip of cloth around her hands and the stone so she can’t drop it.”

Rusula did as instructed, then gave Jelas’s hands a sympathetic squeeze.

“Now…” Cailleach put her fingers gently to Jelas’s temples and over her face, then nodded to her.

Exhaling slightly, she directed her qi to flow through her hands, into Jelas’s body, in the manner Cailleach had said.

The immediate response she had was one of profound pressure pushing back from within Jelas’s body. Because she wasn’t letting the myriad elements qi mix at all, it was directly displacing what was in her body.

She could feel Jelas’s body trembling beneath her. Focusing on her mantra, she didn’t do anything fancy—in fact, she doubted she should, even if she could—and started to use the words in turn, starting with ‘Spirit’, to support what she was doing.

Cailleach, meanwhile, just started to hum, a long, low tone that she could feel resonating through Jelas’s whole body. Jelas groaned, biting down on the stick as after a second or two, faintly iridescent sweat began to bead on her bare skin.

After ten seconds, the crystal in Jelas’s hands had started to take on a faintly reddish hue.

After twenty, she could feel the woman’s muscles knotting and twisting as mana fused deep within them started to bleed out, drawing in the Myriad Elements Qi after it. At that point, the question of control became the real challenge, because literally between one second and the next, she went from pushing her qi into Jelas to having to almost pull it back, keeping its flow at that same, steady gentle rate, when all it wanted to do was rampage into the fractional void being created between it and what it was displacing.

At forty seconds, her qi had almost entirely subsumed Jelas’s body, leaving only her bones and the deepest parts of her organs untouched.

At fifty, the crystal had turned a pale, pinkish red, and Jelas was groaning in agony as even the qi in her marrow finally succumbed and began to be drawn out.

That final bit took almost another thirty seconds, before Cailleach finally stopped maintaining the low, steady hum.

“Now comes the hard bit for you,” Cailleach instructed her. “You need to very… very gently set down all the mana that you have been pushing around Jelas’s body. Try to do it so it flows into her breathing as naturally as possible, while you pull all your own intent back from it, but don’t take your hands away, you may need to add more mana in a moment.

Nodding, she slowly called upon her mantra.

“Blessed, Heart, Renewal, Bestow, Body,” she whispered under her breath, focused on each mnemonic in turn, as she slowly fed her qi into the natural momentum of Jelas’s rather pained, shallow breathing.

For an agonizing second nothing seemed to happen, but she sort of expected that, if only because of the inertia involved, then, to her relief, the orphaned qi naturally began to meld, little by little into the natural qi cycle of Jelas’s body.

That whole process probably only took forty seconds, but it felt like forty hours for her, and she had no idea what it probably felt like for Jelas.

Sweat was dripping off her body as she finally withdrew the last bit of ‘her’ from the qi remaining within Jelas, then took her hands away.

Jelas took a ragged shallow breath, then another, and another, grinding her teeth against the wood. The crystal in her hands shimmered… then abruptly pulsed darker, before returning to how it had been.

“Push more mana into her,” Cailleach instructed her, starting to hum again.

Doing as instructed, she slowly fed more qi into Jelas, letting her body slowly absorb it. The crystal remained resolutely pale pink for almost twenty seconds, before flickering again… and then again. Only after it had flickered six times did Cailleach carefully reach over and disentangle it from Jelas’s hands and placed it in the empty bowl.

“Okay, that will do for now,” Cailleach declared, taking her other hand away.

“How do you feel, Jelas?”

“Like I am high on shit,” Jelas groaned. “And my bones are on fire. This mana is… you have this… stuff… inside you… Sana?”

“Next, you need to cycle your mana naturally for about an hour, then push almost all of your qi into another stone, then Sana will transfuse you again,” Cailleach informed the wincing Jelas. “You will likely have to do it a few more times over the next week or two, those won’t be as painful as this one, though.”

“G-good,” Jelas gasped, slowly sitting up—

“—Just keep lying down, you might faint,” Cailleach warned her, gently pushing her back down, before turning to the other three with a faint smile on her lips. “Now, who wants to go next?”

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~ JUN ARAI — CAILLEACH’S HOLD ~

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

Step—open guard, breath in. Spirit.

Cut down with sidestep. Bestow. Breath out.

Recover guard. Heart. Breath in.

Cut up with pivot to avoid counter. Blessed. Breath out.

Reset guard, thrust. Soul. To upper body—

Arai exhaled a fourth time and refocused on her training partner—Pezvak—who, grimacing slightly was picking himself up from his backwards roll to avoid her final strike.

“That really is a sharp sword form,” the Ur hunter muttered, rolling his shoulders. “And to merge it with Heart-Manifestation…”

Nodding, she considered her wooden sword and the movements she had just attempted. Superficially, it had looked good, she supposed, and she had landed two blows on Pezvak, who was certainly impressed, but she could practically hear her father’s voice in her head, pointing out what was ‘wrong’.

Her strikes had been too ‘flat’.

The moments of ‘stillness’ too snatched.

Her awareness too narrow.

Her intent was too rigid, focused as she had been on the specific movements.

She hadn’t even tried to merge her principle with it.

And then there was her mantra. She was still easing herself back into using it. The sideways means of reordering words into the semblance of something more than their singular initializations took time and effort, and her use of the manifestations, had been accordingly stilted. It did not help that she dearly wanted to recapture some of that remarkable sublimity that she had felt with how her mother’s mantra interacted with her own. That was, in a way, the biggest disservice that that accursed influence that had tried to break their mantras had done, she felt. That method of doubling up words was something the two of them should have been using, or trying to use all this time, and instead, the best period to practice it had been robbed from them.

“You want to try again?” Pezvak asked, after she had stood in silence for a long moment, mulling over what she could, or even should, try to adjust.

She was also consciously trying not to feed her frustration into her mantra. That was a crutch she was still too attuned to, and it also interfered with using her mantra in other ways.

“Sure,” she nodded, puffing out her cheeks. “Let’s try again.”

They exchanged moves for another twenty-odd minutes after that, until their practice was interrupted by two of the Huldre-folk, who even now, she only knew as Thol and Mhol, both weighed down by large bales of evergreen vegetation.

“Got sum surprise visitors,” Thol informed her, as Mhol, who she was pretty sure was his brother, deposited his bundle down with a grunt. “Reckon ‘er Ladyship was to inform you, but she is busy, so Auld fella said ta come let you know.”

“Oh, thanks,” she saluted both. “Can I ask why that would be an issue?”

“Ur-folk,” Mhol replied with a shrug.

“Fram Thunder Hold,” Thol added, also dropping his own bundle. “And sum ‘uthers. Here fer that feast, Ahh it turn out, but they also probably here because O’ ya and all.”

“Ah.” she couldn’t hide her sigh, getting the point of what he was saying.

“Thunder Mountain are a big influence,” Pezvak informed her. “It is where Ragash and the others are from, but their clan groups within it are not especially important.”

“I remember now,” she murmured, giving him a nod of thanks for the explanation.

The Ur women they had rescued had not talked… a lot about their homes, and she got the impression that they were not especially keen on the idea of returning, but they had said enough that she had the gist of the major Ur’Inan powers in this part of the underground world of Undergrove.

Rusula’s Cloud Arrow Tribe were a regional power, with roots in this region, but they were basically like a small sect, in terms of the power they could project. They had a few hundred warriors, and some subsidiary settlements and what not, and that was about it. In comparison, Thunder Mountain was a small city, to hear of it, controlled by a core echelon that was akin to a first-rate sect, she supposed, back home, if not a Hegemonic one. They had a lot of lesser tribes under their banner and had some very old ancestors, who Old Bones had been quite disparaging of, both of which suggested to her that it was not a place to get too involved in, given their circumstances.

“Who else is with them, Master Thol?” Pezvak asked, respectfully.

“Sum frum Gra Wulf Valleh, who joined em fer to travel more safely,” Thol mused. “An sum fer lesser lot, with the Wulf bunch.”

“Reckon there will be sum more, Yhul said were lot down near yon river earlier,” Mhol added.

“Normal sum auld fella’s cum,” Thol continued. “Like a drink, mebee trad sum stuff, ya know? Na werd get oot, the wuns wi legacy on er dreams sending folk as well. Gunna be a bother.”

“Aye, a bother,” Mhol grunted.

“So Auld Bones thought you should keep the Sar stuff, Ubrikhund bastards and what quiet, yeah,” Thol suggested. “Could just go avoid, but guests, rituals, ah, ya know, gonna be a nuisance, so just keep ken, aye?”

“I understand,” she replied, giving him a grateful smile. “Thank you for the warning, we will keep our wits about us.”

“Aye, they ken stupid ideas, not letting the past flow off,” Mhol sighed. “Like fools who cannae let off first luv, now every luv gotta look like her.”

“Destructive like, don’t care much about the bones they leave, so long as not theirs,” Thol muttered.

“Auld Bones gonna receive em, do ritual guest stuff, probably good to not show auld blade forms in fron’ O’em, either,” Thol suggested, eyeing her sword. “No saying what some O’em recall, especially if they thinkin’ bout Uru’Sar an Ashinna.”

“Probably you gotta show fer feast, just keep to self,” Mhol suggested, as he started to pull the bundle apart and inspect the various bits of spikey greenery.

“I will be circumspect,” she reassured them. “Can we help with that, by the way?”

“Eh, it fine, just fer some décor,” Thol replied.

“If there is anything we can help with, she mused.

“Cud git sum wine, heat up—not explode cauldron?” Thol suggested after a moment of thought.

“…”

“It seems your sister has a reputation,” Pezvak murmured, shaking his head in amusement.

“So it seems,” she agreed ruefully.

“The wine from the left side storehouse?” she asked, to clarify, as there were a few places where they had it stashed that she had seen.

“Aye, take frum near front,” Thol replied. “Nah reason ta waste gud stuff, eh?”

“Understood,” she replied, giving the Huldre a grin.

“I’ll go get Luz and give you a hand with that,” Pezvak informed her.

“See you there then,” she agreed, nodding.

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

~ RUO HAN — SOUTHERN RIVERLANDS ~

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

Ruo Han opened his eyes. He hadn’t really been sleeping, just sitting against a flat rock with his eyes shut, trying not to dwell on anything in particular. However, he had managed to find a moment of quiet before a rumbling thrum rolled through their surroundings, pulling him back out of it.

-Thunder?

He shivered as the skin-tingling sensation washed over him.

“Wha…?”

“What is going on?”

“Fates go—!”

“Are we under attack?” Liao Ying asked him nervously as various curses and exclamations rippled through their ad-hoc camp on the rocky outcrop, as the horizon in the direction they had been heading lit up, once, twice—

They watched in silence as, in a matter of moments, the singular reverberating boom became dozens, like distant fireworks, each accompanied by a flash of iridescent light.

They both flinched as the shriek of something moving at great speed split the air over them—

The wave of heat from its impact, which had to be over a mile away to their right, left him clammy even as the sound of the impact caught up.

“Was that aimed at us?” one of the others in the rocks to their left called out.

“My word, these people…” he turned to find Official Weng had arrived behind them.

“What is going on?” he asked, because this was… unnerving, and he had no frame of reference for it at all.

“You ask me…” Weng bit off his own rhetorical reply with a frustrated sigh and shrugged a bit helplessly. “No idea, honestly, but it does remind me of the kinds of barrages a formation of martial archers can mete out…”

“Archers…” Liao Ying repeated, turning to look in the direction of that stray impact, where flames looked to be reflected over the far hill, and shuddered.

“Yep,” Ming Hua, who had also appeared out of the darkness slightly up slope from them, confirmed. “Don’t know who or what is doing the fighting, but…”

She stopped speaking as further cacophonous waves shook the night sky ahead of them.

“—It’s not anything we want to get involved in…” she concluded.

Official Weng nodded grimly. On that, he had no trouble agreeing. The problem, however, was that this was happening in the direction they would have been heading.

“This is going to force some rethinking, isn’t it?” Weng asked her.

“Further rethinking,” Ming Hua muttered, looking at the various groups now properly roused from their wary respite in the rock outcropping, nervously watching the lightshow. “But probably, y—”

The explosion, less than a hundred meters away from them, and some thirty off the ground, picked up and slammed him into the rock he had just been reclining against. Ears ringing, his vision blurred, and he could only lie stunned as a dozen lesser explosions erupted around them, scattering rock fragments and burning bits of ground everywhere.

“—less son of a monkey!” Ming Hua pushed herself up, spitting blood and venom in equal measure. “What ABSOLUTE M—”

Her words vanished in a second thunderous detonation in the air on the opposite side of the outcropping. All he could do was cower in the shelter of the rock as a blizzard of rock shrapnel and ruined vegetation scattered everywhere.

“No soul sense!” Ming Hua’s voice hissed furiously through their surroundings as everything settled back into silence. “No—”

Before she finished her warning, he felt that a creepy eye had opened up in the darkness around them, searching everything.

“Nameless…” Official Weng bit back a curse as the sense of ‘being sought’ intensified.

-No…no, no, no…

It was an untouchable itch, to the point where he felt almost compelled to reveal his presence, so that it might lessen in some way—

It vanished, and he found he could breathe again.

Looking around, he was relieved to find that Liao Ying was okay. Official Weng was sheltering her.

“W-what was that…” one of the Nine Moons disciples nearby gasped.

“Quiet!” Ming Hua hissed angrily. “No soul sense, no intent, no nothing!”

There was a somewhat awkward silence from their immediate surroundings.

Abruptly, the sense of ‘being sought’ snapped back into focus, even more aggressively than it had a moment before.

His skin crawled as the shadows around them intensified, evoking the sense of things lurking just beyond his vision.

With a gasp, he opened his eyes and found himself staring up at the night sky.

-A dream?

The whole experience had felt so lucid, and yet even as he stared at the sky, the unreality within it, tugged at him.

Also, his body just hurt. It was almost as if everything inside him, was slowly draining away, taking ‘him’ with him as it did, leaving simply… unpleasantness.

“We should not have stopped here… I agree…”

Sitting up, he glanced over at Jin Chen, who was sitting on his own… taking to himself.

Liao Ying was off to his right, wrapped in her own blanket. Her gaze found his, like a haunted mask—

A flash of light, then a distant rumble of the thunder of his dreams bled over everything.

The fake problem obscuring the real, a part of him considered, bitterly. None of them were getting any better. If there was something positive to say, it was at least that his injury had not seemed to be getting worse, nor was Liao’s, but Jin Chen… well, he clearly had problems.

“No, Xaoli, I know… it’s not right…” Jin Chen’s mumbled words, made him grimace, and he caught the tightening of Xaoli’s expression as well in the gloom. “But what can I do? what can I…?”

“Everything okay here?”

He glanced up as Ming Hua, recently of that strange dream, appeared just up slope of them.

Their current camp was in the lee of a large outcropping of rock, selected because it offered a reasonably un-obstructed view in every direction for some distance. Most of their group were clustered on this side, in several campsites.

There was a camp watch, now much more strictly enforced than it had started to become, but most of the groups, and they were starting to really fracture into groups, were keeping their own guards as well—not that things attacked them anymore. Not really. The group trying to ‘reassert’ control for the Imperial Continent contingent claimed it was because of their superior arrangements, but he doubted even they bought the talismans they were selling. The real experts among them, whose instincts he trusted, like Quan Dingxiang and Ming Hua had been looking at shadows for almost three days now.

“Same as usual,” he replied softly, realising as he did so, that he was thirsty, very thirsty, in fact, and had a throbbing headache.

The dream was weird, but he had suffered a significant soul injury. Lucid projection of his own concerns into feverish unreality was not at all unlikely.

“We shouldn’t be here…” Jin Chen growled, focusing on Ming Hua.

“No, probably not,” she agreed, somewhat to his surprise. “There is little to like about these rocks…”

“—I know he refused before, but I can make him take some soul-suppressing pills, if you want…”

Ming Hua’s voice whispered in his ear.

“It’s fine,” he thought, softly.

“It isn’t” she replied. “But…”

Alchemist Quan had already tried the previous day, only for Jin Chen to basically toss the pills in his face. Fortunately, Quan Dingxiang had been very understanding. Unfortunately, several of his juniors… were not, and he had noticed several of them giving Jin Chen gloomy looks since that incident, despite Quan Dingxiang assuring him that it would amount to nothing.

“As a trauma, it is... complicated,” he reiterated, not that she didn’t already know that as well. Jin Chen was hardly the only walking wounded manifesting hard-to-explain symptoms.

“Well, if he looks to take a turn for the worse…” Ming Hua gave him a long look.

“Then you can act,” he informed her.

She gave him a long look, then sighed and nodded, before slipping away into the shadows.

“What did Senior Hua want?” Ying asked him quietly.

She had no ability to perceive soul-based conversations now, so had missed the entirety of the exchange.

“Just asking how we all are,” he replied, trying not to grimace.

“Here,” she moved over to sit beside him and passed him a jar of water.

Drinking from it, he tried to moderate his gulps. It was tepid, but that was fine.

“Are you sure you are okay, Han?” she asked quietly.

It hurt that she was asking that, given everything that had happened.

“…”

“No—no I am not,” he replied at last, after turning a few possible replies over in his mind. “How are you doing?”

“No worse,” she replied wanly, taking the jar back and also taking a drink from it. “The spirit herb tonic Quan Dingxiang has been making for me has finally started to stabilize a lot of the… damage.”

“—whose is this… camp? This spot is pretty good, senior brother?” a young woman’s voice remarked, before either of them could converse further.

“…”

Both of them looked up to find one of the Imperial School cultivators, Jin Fanxing if he recalled, and four others—a scholarly man, a more travel-worn, older one wearing a battered set of actual light tactical armour and two young women, none of whom he had never seen before, had stepped out of the gloom at the edge of their little sheltered area.

“Just some injured outer cultivators? Give them some pills and tell them to find somewhere else…” the taller of the two women cut in, haughtily.

“Really?” the grizzled, armoured man grumbled. “Your friends give the Tao a bad name, little brother.”

The scholarly youth grimaced and the taller woman pretended not to notice.

“We should… find another spot for you all, Senior Brother Cui,” Jin Fanxing suggested, with a studious expression, while not meeting their eyes. “I know you wanted some seclusion to recover from your harsh journey, but Alchemist Quan will also be eager to meet you…”

“…”

The scholarly youth didn’t say anything, however. Instead, he just looked from him, to Liao, then finally to Jin Chen, who being nearest their small cooking oven—pot construction cribbed from their time with Juni and the rest, was also nearest the group of new arrivals.

“Your junior is right,” the older, armoured man agreed. “Please forgive our companion’s outburst—”

“—Fanxing, you are aware that we agreed new arrivals would wait at the edge of the camp to be welcomed, right?”

Ming Hua remarked, hopping down off the rock above them, to land lightly on the far side of their cooking pot from Jin Chen. A moment later, Official Weng followed after her.

“…”

The older, grizzled cultivator gave the youth beside him, then Fanxing an even longer look, that neither of them quite met, then sighed.

“Please accept my apologies for their flouting of the rules you set up for the security of your camp,” he stated, saluting Ming Hua. “I am Ha Cao Heizhang, this is my younger brother, Ha Cao Kongshin. The young ladies are Jing Changmei and Jing Faolian.”

“I see,” Ming Hua nodded ever so slightly. “I can handle this, Weng, if you like?”

“Ah, its fine,” Official Weng replied with a relaxed wave of his hand. “I was actually coming over for them—” before gesturing to the three of them to his surprise, “—I can escort our newest arrivals to see Dingxiang at the same time.”

“Is there a problem?” he asked, because the way that had been phrased…

“Oh, not in that sense,” Weng replied, realising how his comment had sounded. “It’s just about the divinations we have been trying.”

“Oh.”

Now that he thought about it, that made sense. The three of them were the only ones in the wider group, at least in theory, tied to Han Shu by… auspicious, rather than inauspicious circumstances. Considering the cloudless sky above, he supposed it had to be close to midnight as well, which was one of those hours favoured for certain types of divination.

Getting to his feet, and trying not to wince at how weak his arms and legs felt in the cold night air, he offered a hand to Liao. Taking it, she pulled herself up, while Jin Chen just shook his head and picked up the pot-furnace by the cloth bindings.

“You don’t have to bring that…” Official Weng remarked, shaking his head a little ruefully as Ming Hua walked off into the gloom between the rocks once more, on her patrol circuit through the camps encircling the rocky slopes of the hillock.

“Things walk,” Jin Chen grunted. “Especially when they can be gained by the effort of others.”

“Now now…” Liao chided Chen as she collected up her own bag.

“What… its true,” Jin Chen sneered. “Why make excuses for them?”

“…”

“Your friend seems to have style to spare,” Jing Faolian—the younger-seeming of the two women—observed a little archly. “I wonder what family the Young Master hails from?”

“Nevermind him,” Fanxing sighed. “He insults everything, from the rocks to the sky to whatever person is beside him. He isn’t quite right in the head, thanks to a soul injury.”

“Says you,” Jin Chen muttered under his breath. “The blind should not pass judgement on the sighted, as you say, Xiaoli.”

“…”

Liao gave him a sideways look that that he returned with a grimace.

“He isn’t getting better, is he?” Official Weng murmured.

“My hearing certainly isn’t any worse,” Jin Chen added swinging the pot just enough as he passed Weng that he had to move to the side a little to avoid getting shinned by it.

“Shall we?” Weng gestured, tactfully ignoring Jin Chen’s snarky retort.

Giving their resting spot a final look around, he nodded in agreement. The path up, through the rocks to where the ‘focal point’ of their camps were, on the more sheltered side of the summit of the hill was pretty narrow unless you went over the rocks, so he was happy to let Ha Cao Heizhang and his compatriots follow right behind Weng while they brought up the rear. Kongshi asked a few questions of Weng as they went, but the distance was not more than thirty metres, threading between boulders and camp wards, so the conversation had barely been struck up, before they reached their destination.

The focal point itself had been picked not just because it offered a good view and some shelter from the incessant, quite chilly winds swirling off the riverlands to their right, but because it was also the remains of some sort of building complex. There was nothing much left of the walls beyond a few foundation blocks, but even those were big enough to provide something of a controlled enclosure. The alchemists had claimed one corner of it, and the herb stockpile was also there. So was the last of the game killed that day, along with the main cooking fire, now mostly covered with earth. The rest was taken up by a covered area, which held other materials and was where Han Shu, along with two other badly injured cultivators were.

Discounting the two injured and Han Shu, there were seven cultivators there, currently. Quan Dingxiang was listening as Deng Seong, one of his ‘junior brothers’ in the Pill Sovereign Sect complained about something. Muli, the leader of the Nine Moon’s group in Qing Dongmei’s absence was sitting on the wall, checking arrows. Ji Fushan, of the Four Peacock’s Court, Jin Fu, from the Imperial School and Shen Fan Jingfa, of the Myriad Herb Association were crouching by the fire, pouring over a manual of some description.

“More strays, huh…” Muli observed, eyeing the group dubiously as they made their way into the enclosed area.

Quan Dingxiang said something to Deng Seong, then turned and walked over to meet them. Deng Seong, meanwhile, grimaced and went back over to the alchemy ‘corner’ and started to look through boxes stashed against the rear wall. Jin Fu also got up and came over to join them

“—Yes, they just arrived,” Official Weng replied, before Fanxing could step forward. “This is Sir Heizhang, his younger brother Kongshin, both from the Cao branch of the Ha clan, and their two friends… both surnamed Jing, also from the Imperial School.”

“—If it isn’t junior brother Kongshin!” Jin Fu cut in, beaming. “Wonderful, I am glad to see you are fit and hale in this harsh land.”

“Senior Jin!” Kongshin and the two Jing… sisters? He guessed, saluted Jin Fu formally by way of greeting.

“Not just strays, but strays with threads that tangle and trip others,” Muli snorted.

“Be nice, Muli, everyone has to survive as best they can out here,” Dingxiang murmured.

“Odd, that its always to the benefit of certain groups though?” Muli retorted, giving Jin Fu a look that the other cultivator affected not to notice. “I am Qing Muli,” she added brusquely, to the group. “Daughter of General Qing Chen. I lead the Nine Moons disciples here.”

“So it is General Chen’s esteemed daughter,” Ha Cao Heizhang saluted her in the military style.

“By your armour, you are an auxiliary? Which unit do you muster with?” Muli asked, entirely ignoring the other three.

“My father commands a unit under General Fan, I was actually a Lieutenant in his command, until I got injured during the Blood Eclipse,” Heizhang replied politely. “I took some injuries and was put into the Auxiliary Corp to recuperate as a Brevet Captain, training the Auxiliary intakes in combined tactics… which became a full-time job.”

“Our own Official Weng has a similar background,” Muli chuckled.

“I was a Command Sergeant in the Sixth Scout Battalion under General Ling,” Weng replied with a shrug.

“Ah, a fellow Blood Eclipse veteran, my commiserations,” Heizhang replied, sympathetically.

“Aye, at least I can say it prepared me well for times like these,” Weng replied drily. “I was sent home to North Fissure to recuperate, and got attached to the Beast Cadre Office there as their ‘Military Official—Three Star, Silver, you know the score. It became a full-time job, as those postings tend to…”

“—Well, this military love-in is all very nice…” Jin Fu interjected. “But we do have some matters to deal with, as I see you brought the three of them.”

“Do you have your own weapons?” Muli asked Heizhang, ignoring Jin Fu.

“…”

“Ahem,” Quan Dingxiang, who had been listening in silence, finally coughed and stepped forward, before things got more awkward. “Weng, would you take Brother Han and the others over to the fire and bring them up to speed? The formalities of bringing our new arrivals up to speed will not take long.”

“Of course,” Weng gestured for the three of them to follow him, over the fire. “Basically, we want to try an astral—that is a Mansion divination—"

“Those require twelve diviners, don’t they?” Liao asked.

“Indeed, you see it clearly,” Weng chuckled, as they reached the fire, where Ji Fushan and Shen Fan Jingfa were now drawing on the rock floor with a piece of chalk.

“—If we drop this node… we should be able to consolidate…?” Jingfa was muttering.

“Mmmm, maybe, but this one will still be unstable…” Ji Fushan sighed, sitting back and giving the four of them a welcoming grimace.

“Still trying to solve the manpower problem?” Weng observed, eyeing the formation they were sketching out.

“I mean, we can do it with fewer, but the control will be suspect,” Ji Fushan replied. “Most of us dabble with divination, to the point where we can do assignments in our relative sects, but Mansion Divination isn’t street corner fortune telling.”

“Really?” Jin Chen remarked, rolling his eyes a bit dismissively.

“…”

“So, what do you need of us?” he asked quickly, before his friend’s attitude won him yet more ‘admirers’. “None of us can do more than make some very crude compasses.”

“Which is admittedly more than most,” Weng chuckled. “No, we actually need the three of you to help us see if we can’t counterbalance some of the—”

“—Profoundly Bad Vibes Han Shu exerts on any divination that tries to touch him,” Fan Jingfa ruefully informed them.

“Yeah,” Weng nodded.

“Oh, on a probably unrelated note…” Ji Fushan added. “Have any of you experienced weird… lucid dream-like phenomena tonight?”

“…”

“I… had a pretty strange dream,” he conceded carefully.

“Interesting, that makes nine, so far,” Weng mused.

-So, others did experience something similar? He reflected, inwardly relieved to hear that, after a fashion.

“Can I ask what you experienced?” Ji Fushan asked. “Just generally—nobody who was awake seems to have felt anything, but Seong over there, was on his break and woke up screaming, and two of my junior sisters were also taking their sleep shift and woke up looking like they had just come face to face with a Dao Immortal.”

“Sure…” he nodded.

It didn’t take long to give a short summary of what he had experienced.

“So, not much commonality in the ‘experiences’ they had, but the oppression ran through all of them… and nobody who was awake noticed a thing,” Weng muttered after he had finished.

“Seems that way,” Ji Fushan agreed, grimacing. “Anyway, if it occurs again, please let me know? It may turn out to be nothing, but—”

As Ji Fushan was speaking, the horizon to their right manifested several flashes of light that spread, like new-years fireworks for several seconds.

-One… two… three… four… five… he found himself counting in his head, until at eight, a rippling boom reached their location.

“That is still ongoing as well, huh…” Weng muttered as the other group also turned to look off in that direction.

“Seems so,” Shen Fan Jingfa agreed. “I can’t say I envy whoever is the unlucky enough to be in the middle of it.”

“With any luck, its some assholes from the Jade Gate Court.” Weng added.

“With our luck, its perpetuated by them,” Jin Chen muttered.

“…”

“Well, so long as it stays a long way away, and not like in your dream, it’s not our problem, hopefully,” Ji Fushan mused. “As I was saying, if any of you have another odd experience like that…?”

“We will let you know,” he agreed, drily as Liao rolled her eyes.

“Better safe than weeping tears of blood, eh?” Ji Fushan nodded, giving him a pat on the shoulder.

“Yeah…” he sighed.

“So,” Ji Fushan continued. “Regarding this divination, as I am sure you are aware, we have tried a few other things, over the last few days… with little notable success, to narrow down what is tracking us—or maybe just Han Shu, its near impossible to say—and we want to try and draw up a Mansion Chart that can encompass the totality of influence upon him.”

“—But you don’t have twelve diviners,” Liao Ying murmured, echoing her earlier observation. “So whatever method is used, has to account for that…”

“Indeed, we do not,” Ji Fushan nodded, giving her slightly surprised look. “You know something of Mansion Divination?”

“Only in the sense that I did the performative ritual at midnight on the New Year a few times before I went to the Argent Hall,” Liao replied with a shrug.

“Well, we have six—the three of us,” Ji Fushan informed them, nodding to Weng and Jingfa. “Plus Dingxiang, Muli and Jin Fu—if he can stop adding to his flock of stray cats for thirty seconds and focus on matters at hand.”

“So our role is to be…?” he pushed, still not entirely sure what was in store for them.

“In theory, we can redefine the parameters of the Mansion divination in such a way that the information it gives out is parsed into a representation of the three great enclosures…” Jin Fushan started to explain, before Weng coughed and cut him off.

“In simpler terms,” Weng continued. “If there are only six of us, we want to see if we can limit the amount of diviners required and keep things stable by having the three of you, who have a good, that is auspicious connection, to Han Shu, over there, act as gateway points… if each of you is placed as a proxy for a respective enclosure, that allows two of us to deal with one enclosure, to parse the positive and negative outcomes without causing any cross contamination within the divination.”

Listening to both explanations, neither was especially informative, truth be told. Explaining complex things like this straightforwardly was an art unto itself, in many ways. Especially for jargon termed topics like divination.

“So we just sit in a circle around Han Shu, holding hands, keeping our minds empty, as much as we can, while the six of you do your divination?” he asked.

“A painful oversimplification, but yes, basically,” Ji Fushan replied after a moment’s silence.

“Do we need to purify ourselves?” Liao asked.

“For our purposes, it’s not actually that beneficial,” Shen Fan Jingfa observed. “Given we are trying to infer intent, both positive and negative.”

The three explained things a bit more… which wasn’t really that helpful, truth be told, then took them over to see Han Shu… or his body, at least.

Had it not been for the faintly unsettling ambience that clung to his surroundings, it would have been easy to think he was just asleep on the stretcher his body lay on. Han Shu’s body was still ‘alive’ as he understood it, it was just that, for whatever reason, his soul was… not discernible.

“It isn’t ideal that we have to do this at night,” Weng conceded as they stood there. “Whatever has taken his soul… sealed it or obscures it, beyond that accursed talisman gets stronger at night. The connection is markedly more vibrant during the day, but all those divinations snarl anyway…”

“So, there isn’t much to lose,” he suggested. “In trying this?”

“No, there is not,” Shen Fan Jingfa agreed with a sigh, kneeling down by one end of the stretcher.

Weng took the other and between them, they carried Han Shu out to the middle of the ruined building.

By this point, Jin Fu had seen off the new arrivals and was just talking with Quan Dingxiang about something.

“Shall we get on with this?” Ji Fushan called over to the pair and Muli, who had gone back to making arrows.

“You have explained what they have to do? So they don’t mess it up?” Jin Fu asked, giving them a look.

“They have to sit there, think of nothing and hold hands,” Muli muttered. “If they cannot do that… actually, never mind, I am pretty sure there are a lot in the Imperial School for whom that task would prove insurmountable.”

“…”

“We know what to do,” he replied levelly before Jin Chen could say anything to add fuel to Muli’s words.

“…”

The ‘look’ Jin Fu gave him was heavy with scepticism, but there was nothing much to be done about his attitude. Rather than dwell on it, he sat down at Han Shu’s head, and gestured for Liao to sit on his right, and Jin Chen on his left.

The six considered the manual that Ji Fushan had been looking at, conversing in low tones for a minute or so, and occasionally pointing off in different directions, then Weng sighed and shook his head.

“Can you rotate Han Shu’s body thirty degrees to your left?” Weng asked him.

Nodding, they did as instructed, as the six spread out to sit in a circle around them. Quan Dingxiang and Muli took positions either side of Han Shu’s head, with him. Ji Fushan and Weng sat on the left, with Jin Chen, and Jin Fu and Shen Fan Jingfa took the right, with Liao.

“Sit and hold hands, please…” Ji Fushan instructed them.

Sitting down, he took Liao’s hand and then Jin Chen’s, while they reached across Han Shu’s body to complete the triangle.

“Okay… lets give this a first try…” Quan Dingxiang said. “Whenever you are ready, Brother Fushan…”

Ji Fushan nodded and setting a jade slip on the ground before where he was sitting, put his hands together to form a strange seal, which the others, after placing their own jade slips matched. A moment later all six of them started to chant the litanies of the twenty-eight mansions under their breath, in perfect unison.