~ PART 2 ~

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~ HAN SHU – MONKEY VALLEY, YIN ECLIPSE ~

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The air above the teleport formation distorted, before resolving itself into the familiar silhouette of Senior Ying, much to Han Shu’s quiet relief, given he had been the one who set most of it up this time.

It had taken almost an hour, in the end, for the alignments to ‘fix’ themselves to a point where the entire formation could be relocated. It was now situated on the broad, flat slab that they had previously used to cook lunch on.

“Well, this explains a lot,” she remarked, taking in the new formation and the flooded gorge.

“Yeah,” Juni agreed, apologetically. “Sorry it took so long.”

“Not at all,” Senior Ying murmured, making her way out of the vicinity of the teleport station. “When you start playing with formations up here, this kind of thing is expected, honestly. Though a flash flood of this scale… maybe I have only seen one a handful of times in all the years I have been here.”

“That is… reassuring,” Juni mused.

“Well, it is not every year that an idiot Imperial Prince—”

*Hrumble…*

He froze, for about half a second, until it became clear that the very inopportunely timed rumble of thunder had just been the clouds above.

“…”

Senior Ying’s laughter cut through their collective moment of horror, making him suddenly feel very stupid.

Senior Ying looked around at them, then up at the sky, and put her hands on her hips with a sigh, shaking her head.

“As I was saying, it’s not every year an idiot Imperial Prince has his minders cancel the weather system of a whole province,” she repeated, putting actual emphasis on the ‘idiot’ this time. “Some things you just cannot account for.”

“You do hear stories,” he muttered defensively.

“I can tell you that you have to put a great deal more venom into a curse to attract those eyes,” Senior Ying remarked drily.

“…”

“Indeed,” Jiang Wushen agreed. “And up here you can curse quite freely; the eyes of heaven are somewhat short-sighted in this place.”

“…”

“In fairness,” Juni muttered, “when it comes to Dun Fanshu…”

They all nodded in agreement with that.

Dun Fanshu was not exactly unknown, even if Blue Water Province was not exactly a hub of imperial influence. To have one Imperial Scion show up, almost unannounced, in your province was exceptional – certainly none had visited before in his lifetime that he knew of. To have two, and the second be someone as infamous as Dun Fanshu… it was hard to know where to start.

“True, actually. He is a Huang,” Senior Ying sighed. “Even the best of them are a bunch of preening—”

*Hruuumble*

“…”

“Oh come on! Inauspicious weather and trials on my patience, be gone!” Senior Ying grumbled, making a fairly obscene gesture at the sky above as she uttered a variation on one of the more common ‘charms against misfortune’.

“Have you eaten?” Sana asked, changing the topic quickly.

“What…? Oh, yes, I did, thank you,” Senior Ying replied, finally stopping glaring at the sky.

*Hruuuuumble*

Another distant echo of thunder resonated through the gorge. This time, after several seconds, there was a skittering flash of lightning high in the sky, which cast strange shadows in the gorge before it dissipated.

“Now that I think about it,” Sana muttered, staring up at the sky, “this messing with the weather means that we are going to see Thunder Crest pushing back as well… aren’t we?”

“It’s almost like the heavens themselves want us to fail,” he murmured sourly, looking off in that general direction.

“Uhuh,” Lin Ling agreed.

The rains were already bad enough. A proper thunderstorm from Thunder Crest would be the end of exploration towards the Sky Chaser Massifs and the Jasmine Gate. Crossing ridgelines with active lightning was just as good a way to die without a grave as walking there through those valleys themselves in this season.

“Aii…. That would… ah, make matters difficult, yes,” Senior Ying agreed, shaking her head. “But likely it’s just the clouds building up. Speaking of such things, actually, what is the plan for the rest of the day, now that we are all up here?”

“Hmmm…” Juni frowned, looking around pensively.

“Well, apparently the valley beyond is a mess, courtesy of this flood…”

While Juni spent a minute explaining to Senior Ying what they had discussed over lunch, he went over and helped Sana clean up the cooking fire. The gist of it, anyway, was that they would split into two teams – one with him, Sana and Senior Ying, then a second with Juni, Arai, Wushen and Ling, then scout north up the valley, towards the distant massif, taking stock of their progress after about three hours or so. While he was still of the opinion that splitting up was not really ideal, it was undeniable that they needed to cover a lot of ground now, and do it quite quickly.

“—Are we tidied up?” Juni called over to them.

“Yes,” he confirmed, checking there were no packs left on rocks nearby.

“Uhuh!” Sana agreed.

“In that case, I suppose we can get moving?” Juni said, standing up. “Everyone has the kit they need?”

“Yep!” Lin Ling confirmed.

“Uhuh,” Arai nodded.

“Yes,” he finished, patting his chest where the second communication talisman of the group was now safely stashed in a pocket.

“Do you have supplies?” Sana asked Senior Ying.

“I do,” she replied with a half-smile, withdrawing a bow out of nowhere and quickly stringing it.

To illustrate the point, she then drew it, an arrow appearing on the string in a shimmer of light.

“That’s handy,” he murmured, admiring the craftsmanship.

“Yep, it’s one I made myself, up here,” she grinned. “The arrows as well.”

“Wait… you made that yourself?” Sana asked, looking at the bow with undisguised interest.

“It pays to be self-sufficient up here, and if you can make the artefacts yourself it’s even better,” Senior Ying said, passing the bow to Sana, who drew it a few times and shook her head admiringly.

“Don’t you run into issues with the suppression?” he asked.

“Yes, and no,” Senior Ying replied. “In terms of materials, you would be surprised… or, given you are Hunters who actually know your stuff, maybe not…”

“Ahaha…” Sana chuckled.

“True, true,” he agreed.

“In that case, Arai, the jade?” Juni said, looking over at her.

“Oh, yeah… right… here,” Arai looked a bit shifty and passed Juni a teleport talisman.

“The gorge ahead is navigable, but it will take more time than it’s worth,” he elaborated to Senior Ying as they made their way over to the formation.

“Yeah…” she mused, casting her eye towards the surging waters and tumbled rocks.

Casting one last look around where he had been sitting before, just to check he had not done something dumb like leave his talisman wallet there, he joined hands with Senior Ying and Lin Ling, in preparation for the teleport.

“Everyone ready?” Juni asked, looking around. “We have everything?”

There was a chorus of yeses.

“In that case…” Juni murmured. “Three, two… one—”

Space around them twisted and he immediately crouched as they all appeared about a metre above a half-submerged gravel bank.

Letting go of Senior Ying and Lin Ling, he landed with a splash, quickly looking around for danger, but seeing none.

“Sorry!” Arai apologised, looking annoyed.

“Uggh…” Lin Ling grimaced, sitting down on a rock and emptying water out of her shoes. “That was surprising.”

“Yeah…” Juni agreed, looking around. “That can happen when the structure of ridgelines takes knocks from this kind of thing…”

“Oh?” he frowned, wracking his brain for that and coming up with nothing.

“It’s not exactly common knowledge,” Senior Ying said, sitting down and starting to eat a spirit fruit. “My teacher explained it to me once, long ago. The ridges up here have a lot of compressed space in them. When they get damaged like this, with the collapses and such, they tend to twist the suppression in odd ways. If you think of this place like a massive formation, the ridges are the connections between the nodes, forming the majority of the ‘pattern’. Just like if you damage a formation pattern and it starts to become inefficient, so too if the ridges here get damaged, weird things will start to occur, like it taking a lot longer to cover relatively short distances, or odd distortions in teleports…”

“That’s the origin of the ‘valleys are all formations’ theory,” Juni agreed.

“How come I didn’t know that?” he grumbled, again trying to recall if he had ever been told that before either, and again drawing a blank.

“It only came up once, when Old Ling took me to South Grove Ruins, years ago,” Juni shrugged. “I think it was actually before you were even a seven-star Hunter…”

-Ah, that would be it, he supposed.

“Actually, it’s why teleports cost so much up here as well,” Senior Ying added. “That was the key bit of evidence to support that theory, apparently.”

“The ridges are compressed space?” Jiang Wushen asked, also looking interested now.

“Not just compressed space,” Senior Ying mused. “Upwelling compressed space. It’s also why the Great Mount can be seen from the coast, why the forbidden zone is thousands of miles in circumference, but you can get to the slopes in only 2-300 straight miles if you know the right routes and why no matter how much erosion occurs up here, very little changes.”

“…”

“How…?” he started to ask.

“My teacher told me about it once,” Senior Ying replied drily. “A long time ago. It’s not that there isn’t a lot known about Yin Eclipse; it’s mostly that some key bits of critical information about it have been tightly controlled over the years, by the Hunter Bureau… and others…”

“Yes, they do hoard a lot,” Juni sighed. “As do the various clans. Certainly, I have seen things in the Kun clan archives that the Bureau makes no mention of…”

“…”

“What’s wrong?” Sana asked, as Juni trailed off.

“—Shu what is… that…” he turned, briefly thinking Arai had spoken to him, and found her also looking around, confused.

“ALKYR!” Lin Ling yelled at the same time as a bush barely three metres from him became the very last thing any of them wanted to see and leapt straight at him.

-Nameless fates go—!

With a silent curse, he rolled backwards off the rock he was on, landing in the waist-deep shallows beside them even as the metre-long mantis-like insectoid monstrosity landed where he had been, its chitin-edged, blade-like forelimbs screeching on the wet stone, snagging only cloth and a decent portion of his hat—

Two arrows slammed into it, even as he found his footing, drawing his own blade. However, the accursed thing deflected one arrow with a wing, twisted to avoid the other and scuttled sideways, lashing out at Lin Ling, who barely ducked underneath the sweep, drawing her own blade to execute a two-handed strike at its leg—

He winced with her as it deflected her blow at the last moment, her strike rebounding off its carapace, her arms visibly shaking.

-And there’s the reminder that suppression does not mean suppressed, he reflected grimly, wading out of the flood pool.

In those few moments, the alkyr flitted forward, aiming for Jiang Wushen, who now had a broad-bladed spear out and was circling it. Taking that opportunity, he hurled his own blade at it, aiming for the point where its wing carapaces joined. At the last minute it again twisted, narrowly avoiding having a wing critically injured—

In that opening, however, Arai and Sana had both also skipped backwards, hurling their own blades at it. Arai’s bounced off, but Sana’s found a segment in its neck and bit surprisingly deeply. In response, the creature hissed and leapt towards Sana—

A wooden arrow hit the alkyr in the eye socket, breaking its momentum and sending it tumbling to the ground, twitching.

In a flash, Jiang Wushen and Juni were both stabbing spears into segments of its body, breaking its qi foundation.

“…”

“Nice shot,” Jiang Wushen remarked, pulling Senior Ying’s arrow out of its eye socket.

Now dead, the alkyr looked… oddly frail, for the amount of havoc it had caused. The specimen in front of them was about a metre and a half long, counting its bladed forelimbs, with a long body covered in small beige and green chitinous scale-like plates that were artfully constructed and coloured to resemble leaves and twigs. Much like a razor crab, each and every ‘chitinous plate’ was also lethally sharp.

“Well, that was an auspicious start,” Lin Ling muttered.

“I dunno,” Sana replied. “In a way I feel slightly reassured.”

“—A hand?” Senior Ying asked, offering him one as he reached the edge, near where she was standing.

“Thanks,” he replied, gratefully accepting her gesture and clambering out.

Not relaxing his wariness, he scanned their surroundings, in case this was a rare example of a shifting alkyr not hunting alone. If there was one thing Yin Eclipse hammered home time and time again, it was that assumptive ‘rules’ existed to be broken, usually with lethal consequences for someone.

By this point, Juni and Wushen had skilfully detached its legs and pried open the underside, exposing its inner organs. Unlike tetrid stalkers and many spiders, alkyr were not entirely venomous, so there was little danger from butchering them. Even so, just looking on was fairly unpleasant, as they had to slice through its stomach to get to the core, situated safely above it, in the middle of its abdomen.

“Hmmm, this one’s actually an adult,” Senior Ying observed, watching as Jiang pulled out the fist-sized crystal, stretching out the flesh that held it for Juni to cut it away.

It had a golden-blue lustre, with hints of purple, suggesting a metal- and water-aligned foundation. In terms of quality, he put it at somewhere approaching five-star grade, maybe six – a Nascent Soul or Severing Origins qi beast.

“Metal and water is an odd one though,” Sana remarked.

“I guess?” he agreed, considering their ‘prize’ pensively.

The elements that comprised the cores of qi beasts tended to be governed as much by the valley they lived in as anything else. Many of the lesser herbs they had gathered up here previously had turned out to have minor metal or wood attributes as well.

“…”

“Nascent Soul…” Jiang Wushen pronounced as he was pondering that. “Quite close to the peak of it, actually. Probably it came down from higher up to look for easy prey to advance.”

“—Like the spiders in the river?” he suggested, looking back out across the flooded gravel beds that had almost entirely replaced the scrubby forest that had been here before.

“Yeah, probably quite a few dead things given the scale of this calamity,” Senior Ying agreed, looking around pensively.

“Want to store this away, Sana?” Juni called over, reminding him that Sana had taken the storage ring.

“Sure,” Sana nodded and walked over to the de-cored alkyr, storing the body away in the storage ring.

“What kind of arrow was that that you used?” he asked Ying, curious because, near as he could see, it had even had a sharpened wooden tip.

“Made from wood from the Life-Breaking Aspen,” Senior Ying said, holding it up for him to see. “Very handy for things like——”

*Hruuuuumble*

An ill-timed peal of thunder drowned out all noise for a few seconds, the accompanying lightning rippling through the clouds, high in the sky to the north-west.

“I swear it does that on purpose,” Senior Ying muttered, glaring up at the sky. “—Anyway, it’s not much use for things approaching the Dao Step. For a sub-Immortal beast like this though, a very easy solution… and if it doesn’t work—”

“—It means you just shot a qi manifestation?” he guessed.

“Likely, yes,” she agreed, before continuing with an amused smile: “—Or the thing you shot is not the realm you thought it was. That has saved me a few times. Nothing says ‘leave now’ quite like shooting a spider or some obscure insect with one of those and it just looking at you funny.”

“Been there a few times,” Arai, who was still standing nearby, looking around warily for more threats, muttered, to which he could only nod in agreement.

“That thing’s mimicry was good though,” he frowned, playing back its initial ambush and last minute distraction. “This can’t be the first time it heard people?”

“Yes, it was uncannily good,” Senior Ying agreed.

“The other question is, why didn’t we run into it the other day?” Lin Ling mused.

“Probably it was much further up,” he guessed, taking out a new hat and putting it on, for all the good it did at this point. “They do like higher places…”

“Yes, it might be something as simple as its original tree got swept over and it’s moved, looking for new territory,” Arai added.

“That doesn’t bode well for the rest of the afternoon though,” Lin Ling muttered. “What else has been displaced?”

“Well, that is why we are here,” Jiang Wushen pointed out.

“What? To get bitten, ambushed and poisoned so the Ha clan scions don’t have to suffer such indignities?” Arai muttered. “I suppose it is…”

“Aii… when you put it like that…” he agreed, recalling his run-in with the vetch-possessed spider with a grimace.

“Merciful heavens!” Lin Ling rather theatrically did a bit of a double-take. “When Han Shu is saying that, you—”

Juni actually bonked Lin Ling on the head, though lightly, and entirely for comedic effect.

“Hey!” Lin Ling pouted.

-I suppose it’s a reminder that she is just a teenager, for all that she is talented and has a terrible family, he mused, looking out over the water swirling through the gravel beds and boulders.

“Well, this is all very fun,” Juni said, looking around, “but if we stay here any longer, the alkyr might actually start coming to us…”

“…”

“I was joking,” Juni added, rolling her eyes, as Ling, Sana and Arai all made to sit down again. “We are not short of resources. If we take the groups we were before; Shu, Sana and Senior Ying, you can scout, and we can move behind, mapping and marking?”

“I take it we will just use talismans to get back, assuming we don’t find somewhere suitable?” Wushen mused.

“Yeah,” Juni replied. “We have them, so we might as well use them. In any case, let’s get moving again, same order as before.”

“Yes boss!” Sana and Lin Ling both declared.

“…”

They had only gone for about ten minutes, though, when Arai, who was at the lead now, held up her hand, calling for them to stop.

“What is it?” Juni asked, as they all arrived beside her.

“Another alkyr,” Arai murmured, pointing ahead of them.

It took him a moment to find it, but indeed, there was a second one, ripping apart a dead spider that had been washed down by the flood and tangled in its own web.

“Ai…” Senior Ying, beside her, unslung her bow without even passing comment and took aim at it.

He watched as she sent three arrows in rapid succession straight into its eye socket and the half-metre-long mantis-like insect crumpled to the ground, dead.

“I have got to get me one of those bows…” Sana, now standing beside him, muttered. “Do you think she would make me one if I asked?”

By the time they walked over, Jiang Wushen and Arai had cut it open and were looking at the core.

“Same brood,” Senior Ying mused.

“How can you tell so fast?” he asked, curious.

“Signatures in the core,” Senior Ying replied. “There is a resonance with the previous one.”

“Uggh, there better not be a whole pack of them,” Sana shuddered.

“Probably not, the resonance stays for a season or two,” Senior Ying reassured. “It is part of how they spread, that means these must only be young adults?”

“It does look like that,” Jiang Wushen agreed catching her comment. “This one is freshly moulted.”

Involuntarily, he found himself looking further up the valley, towards the distant massif, which was the kind of place an alkyr would love to live. Up high, where they could drop down from trees on prey near the river…

“Do alkyr do brood suppression?” Juni asked, frowning.

“Like tetrids?” Jiang Wushen frowned. “Actually, I am not sure; they are not common up here, certainly not in Western Falls Valley or further over, towards the Jasmine Gate. Too many narrow gorges and spiders.”

“What are you thinking?” he asked. “That there is a queen up there who just kicked out a bunch of juveniles to claim this whole valley?”

“It’s possible,” Juni sighed.

“That would certainly put a dent in exploiting it,” Sana muttered.

“It would,” he agreed.

That second encounter rather set the tone for the next two hours, as it turned out. Rather than split properly, in the end they just spread out into a scout group, comprising him, Sana and Ying, and a main group, of the others. By the time they had crossed the river and started along the north side of the valley, they had killed two more alkyr, both young adults scavenging along the river, and a further, injured Soul Foundation tree snake that had finished off a third one.

Beyond that, however, it was hard to call the afternoon productive. The northern side of the gorge did not have many herbs in it, compared to across the river, or at least not easily discernible ones. The few they did find were largely in trees – epiphytes and vines for the most part. A major factor for that was probably, in his view, the lack of soils here; most of the area between the cliff and the river was overgrown rockfall.

“—What do you reckon?” Sana asked as they stood, considering one of those few, rare spirit herbs – a blue-green orchid, nestled in a rather enticing ‘open’ spot, half way up the low cliff on the far side of a narrow, boggy lake.

“Mark it? I dunno about you, but that pool does not look like a happy place to poke around in…” he replied.

They both considered the vegetation-clogged ‘lake’, about thirty metres across and several hundred long, which vanished in several places into a half-metre-tall fissure that ran part-way along the base of the ‘cliff’. The cliff itself was the narrow edge of a vast slab that had slumped, or toppled down, from the ridge hidden in mist and greenery above them.

The flow of water suggested that the origin of the spring feeding the lake was also somewhere in that fissure, or at least buried beneath the slab.

If ever there was a place some errant, amphibious qi beast with a Yin affinity was going to lurk, it was a pool like that.

“Yeah, mark,” she agreed.

They spent the next few minutes moving along the edge of the water, warily clambering over rocks and past ferns, until Senior Ying, who had gone to check what the terrain was like on top of the cliff-like slab, reappeared, descending the cliff to their right where several slabs had fallen off it, splitting the long pool in half.

“We are clear on this side,” she declared, landing lightly on a rock in front of them.

“How does it look up the top?” he asked.

“Unstable,” Senior Ying grimaced. “A lot of water has come down from above. You can see slabs have moved, recently as well, and not little ones either. Mostly it’s the tree cover keeping the avalanche here. This pool has basically formed where two slabs are at an angle to each other, on the slope.”

Unbidden, he looked at the top of the cliff, where there were a few other broad slabs, just about visible in the misty rain.

“So the whole thing is being flooded from the top and undercut from the bottom,” Sana muttered.

“Yep, basically,” Ying agreed. “This whole thing is being held together by trees and some wedged slabs, is my guess.”

“How are we for the scan, Sana?” he asked, reflecting that that knowledge was not reassuring, especially in this weather.

“Done,” Sana replied glancing at her arm, “and the herb is marked.”

“In that case, no reason to linger,” he decided, giving the pool a final look.

Nothing left it, and there was no sign they were even being watched, but it was hard not to feel a little bit uneasy about it for some reason.

Setting off again, Sana took the lead from Senior Ying, who fell back to bring up the rear.

However, they had barely made it fifty metres further on, down a tangle of slabs and into a second depression in the forest, through which a marshy, boggy stream of water was coalescing, when Sana held up her hand, looking around warily.

“What?” he signed, looking cautiously at the greenery.

“My divination talisman just tripped…” Sana signed, taking a few careful steps to her right, heading for the nearest path through, between two tangled slabs.

Looking up at the forest above them, he grimaced and glanced at Senior Ying.

She shook her head slightly, but was also frowning now.

Nodding, Sana warily continued on, while he drew his blade from where he was keeping it at his waist, watching the ferns and mossy crevices as they went onwards.

They passed through one almost cavernous crevice, and out into another, following the flow of the stream, at which point Sana paused again.

Senior Ying poked him gently in the back, indicating for him to move away from the path they had just taken.

“What is it?” he signed, considering the broken-up terrain with its angular, mossy slabs, ferns and gnarled trees, thick with vines.

“I dunno,” Sana signed back, warily turning in a circle, surveying the rocks above them. “I swear I saw something on that slab over there…”

He followed her gaze, examining the mossy, water-worn face of the three-metre-tall slab which was almost tall enough to act as a miniature cliff in its own right.

Almost in the same instant, the divination talisman on his arm twinged slightly. It was hard to call it inauspicious, but…

“My talisman just triggered,” he signed, backing away, making sure Senior Ying and Sana were positioned to protect his back.

“…”

“Another alkyr?” Senior Ying signed, looking around with narrowed eyes.

“Maybe?” Sana frowned. “It’s…”

Senior Ying drew her bow and sent an arrow streaking into the air between them, past Sana, before he could react.

Sana ducked a moment later as something erupted out of the ferns to her right, passing over her as she spun away—

All the warning he got was a faint distortion in his peripheral vision as raindrops scattered off… something… as it descended through the air towards him with worrying speed—

Rolling away, he saw the forelimbs of a head-sized spider with a muddy grey carapace and a flat, spikey abdomen hit the rock, a moment before another darted out from under some ferns to his right, barely visible amid the rain and the broken-up silhouettes of the rocks littering the depression they were in—

Something hit him in the back, making him gasp in pain as claws tried to dig into his flesh. Gritting his teeth, he rolled again, feeling wetness and the pressure of chitin against his skin, following by a cracking feeling as it was squashed.

His barrier talisman had not so much as triggered, which was really not a good sign.

-Oh come on! he groaned, lashing out at the one chasing after him from the now thoroughly agitated water ferns, splitting its head open.

Scrambling up, he saw Senior Ying effortlessly crush two more as they appeared almost out of nowhere, leaping for her. Sana had caught another one jumping for her, smashing it into a handy rock.

“Watch out—!” he gasped, seeing the faint shimmering lines in the rain, trailing after another as it descended from a rock to Sana’s left.

Sana ducked, the threads getting caught on her hat, dragging it away, even as two more drifting lines descended towards them.

Senior Ying caught another spider, crushing it… only for two more to erupt out of the shadows of the path between the rock slabs they had just skirted under.

“Gaagh!” she spat—

The air around them twisted faintly.

The water ferns which had been emitting halos of mist seemed to shudder.

The sound of rain on leaves and rocks seemed to intensify, as did the hiss of the wind…

With a series of deeply unpleasant popping and cracking sounds, a dozen more spiders died, turning into broken smears of ichor and chitin on the mossy rocks.

Not lowering his blade, he scanned their surroundings warily, but no more appeared.

“Is your back okay?” Senior Ying asked him, glancing in his direction.

Grimacing, he rolled his shoulders, feeling the skin tightening. Thanks to his physical cultivation, it was already healing, without him even having to do anything actively with his mantra. The poison from the ichor seemed quite mild, thankfully.

“Yes,” he replied. “It was not a very big one that bit me…”

“Take one of these anyway,” she added, tossing him a paper-wrapped packet of purification pills.

Nodding gratefully, he took one and swallowed it, then took his flask of water from his belt and washed it down. It was bitter, but almost immediately he felt the itchiness of the lingering poison from the spider’s ichor receding.

“Keep them,” she added, as he made to hand them back.

“…”

“You okay?” he asked Sana, noting she was also bleeding on her arm as she looked uneasily around at the rocks.

“Just a scratch,” Sana replied.

“Here—” he tossed her the pills, then cast around for a spider, having not managed to get a good look at the fate-cursed things.

“Mmm…. Thanks,” Sana murmured, accepting them.

“This one is Golden Core,” Senior Ying, who had now gone over and recovered the one she shot with an arrow, announced, holding up a spiky, cat-sized spider with a rather flat, armoured abdomen.

-Dragon spider? he blinked, recognising the sub-species as one of the more annoying variants.

Their carapaces made them hard to spot, as they usually hid on cave ceilings and liked to leave trailing threads that snared their prey up. They didn’t possess venom, though their bodies were naturally poisonous. Instead, they killed their prey with ambush swarm tactics and powerful bites.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

“Dragon spiders,” Sana sighed, staring at it. “—the Ha bunch are gonna hate this so much…”

“Yeah,” he agreed, looking around again with unease.

Finding one of the first spiders he had killed, he cut it in half with the blade and poked around for the core, which turned out to be barely formed and the size of a peach pit. “They are only Qi Condensation, it seems? Can’t be more than a day or two old at most?”

“Uhuh,” Sana agreed, picking up the mangled remains of another, carefully, and picking its core out to roll between her fingers. “Aren’t they a cave species?”

“…”

Looking around, he was suddenly aware that there were a lot of crevices when you started looking closely. Walking over to the nearest one, he warily swept aside some ferns to get a better look at a fissure, but it narrowed into darkness almost immediately.

-Not from that one then…

“I bet they came out of there,” Senior Ying said, pointing to a dark shadow beneath a rock slab beyond where Sana had been.

“There must be voids in here, almost akin to a small cave system,” Sana agreed, looking about warily.

“…”

“On the bright side, if this lot were here, there will be very little else to bother us,” Senior Ying mused, passing the spider carefully to Sana, who stored it away in the ring. “Though I don’t think lingering here is a good idea.”

“Likely not, no,” he agreed, looking around.

“Give me a moment,” Sana added. “I’ll just record… this…”

Nodding in agreement with that, he went back to surveying their surroundings, in case more spiders were lurking, not that they would spot them any quicker than they had before, really. He briefly tried to use qi sense on their surroundings but the rain alone made it pointless. The water ferns on the trees above them had also started to rain again, adding to it.

“—Han Shu?”

The unexpected communication through the talisman made him flinch, visibly.

“What is it?” Sana, who was also looking around nervously, asked him.

“A very badly timed talisman communication,” he replied, taking a deep breath.

“Haaa…” Sana sighed and shook her head.

“Is everything okay—?” Juni’s voice sounded slightly concerned, likely at not getting an immediate reply back.

“Yes, Juni. Sorry, your timing is quite good,” he replied. “We just got ambushed by Dragon spiders.”

“Dragon spiders…” Juni replied dully. “You are all okay?”

“Yes, we are fine,” he sent back. “What is it?”

“Old rendezvous point is a lake,” Juni said.

“Ah, one moment,” he murmured, adjusting the talisman so Ying and Sana could hear what Juni, now a shimmering, illusory image floating in front of him, was saying.

“Okay,” Juni replied, her voice melodious in the rain.

“Hi!” Sana said.

“Hi…” Senior Ying added with a half-smile.

“Ah, Sana, Senior Ying, hi,” Juni replied.

“Well, as I was saying,” Juni said, to all of them now, “the old rendezvous point is a lake now, so we have arrived at the river that runs north of the massif. There look to be waterfalls further up. If you keep going parallel to the cliff, you will reach that tributary.”

“Okay,” he mused, waving for Sana to bring up the map, though she was already starting on that anyway. “We meet below these waterfalls?”

“Yes,” Juni confirmed. “I take it that is not too much of a detour?”

“Just checking now,” he said as Sana projected the image for him to see.

“We are about a mile from the rendezvous point, roughly. South-west of the massif. We should hit the main tributary down from the north of it… in half a mile?”

“Okay, I have a fair idea of where you are,” Juni replied after a pause. “The waterfalls are north-east of you?”

Sana flipped the map and poked at a point where the landscape was rather vaguely defined.

“Okay, we will see you there, then,” he confirmed.

“Good luck,” Juni sent back.

“Likewise,” he replied before the communication ended.

It took Sana a few rather nervous minutes to map the whole area and mark it, then they set off again. Thankfully, they didn’t encounter any further ambushes in the twenty minutes it took to warily path their way towards their new destination, finally coming out on a rock shelf on the edge of a tumultuous torrent in the shadow of the tall massif.

This close, it was fair to say that the massif, half obscured by the low cloud rolling by overhead and the ever-present rain, wreathed in a curtain of greenery, appeared much more imposing than it had from lower in the valley.

In the end, the path to the waterfalls was not as bothersome as he anticipated. While overhanging water ferns did hamper visibility, and the rock shelves they were traversing were frequently treacherously slippery, they were largely devoid of vegetation themselves, even moss and algae.

As such, it barely took them a further twenty minutes of walking along the rock shelves to reach the plunge pools… and the ruins that Juni had mentioned: what looked like two or three small blocks of buildings nestled into the cliffs and across the open ground beside the waterfall, with the remnants of more jutting out of the pool itself.

Of the group, only Jiang Wushen was visible, and he spotted them about the same time they marked him, sitting on the top of one of the more intact buildings.

“That was quick,” Jiang Wushen remarked as they made their way down some handily-placed steps and into a small plaza on the edge of the rock-cut complex.

“That said, the three of you look pretty knocked about?” Jiang Wushen added, looking from him to Sana and Senior Ying.

“Well, we did just have a run-in with Dragon spiders,” Sana muttered, “in the broken forest south-west of here.”

“Ah,” Jiang Wushen grimaced, looking in the direction they had come from.

“They were not very strong,” he added. “It was mostly the surprise as anything that caught us out.”

“Yep,” Senior Ying agreed. “Even without me, Shu and Sana here would have dealt with them with a talisman or three.”

“I will say, though, that the trip along this side has been a several-hours-long reminder of Old Ling’s comment about never being more than a stone’s throw from something nasty up here,” he added.

“That does rather sum this place up,” Sana agreed, looking around curiously. “So, where are the others?”

“Ah… well, yes,” Jiang Wushen sighed, hopping down from his vantage point. “We found some stuff…”

Not saying more, Jiang Wushen led them down the broken, rubble-strewn path between the buildings and out into a plaza that was basically knee-deep in water. Arai, Lin Ling and Juni were all standing in an area between some ruined walls, watching Juni poke at something under the water.

“Oh, you made it!” Lin Ling called over to them.

“—Don’t go there, by the way!” Arai called, pointing off to their left. “This place is knee-deep… then it steps down again about a metre to the old edge of the plunge pool.”

“Okay!” Sana called back cheerfully.

Looking at the swirling water to their left amid ruined buildings, he nodded.

“So, what have you found?” Sana asked as they waded over to the trio.

“A teleport formation,” Juni said, standing up. “Or at least I think it is… Perhaps you might know, Senior Ying?”

“…”

Senior Ying walked over and crouched down as well to consider it, while Arai walked over to join them, as did Ling Ling.

“It seems like you guys really did get all the fun,” Arai said, taking in their slightly ragged appearance. “We shot arrows at a few spiders, ran into one other small alkyr and then chased after another shadow claw vine for a while, but that was about it.”

“You found another shadow claw vine?” he asked, surprised.

“Yeah, we were surprised as well,” Juni remarked, glancing up. “We know where it is though, so it can be gotten easily enough at a later date.”

“—Well, I can certainly confirm it’s part of a teleport formation,” Senior Ying mused, standing up again with an octagonal jade talisman in her hand. “But this is just an anchor. The main bit is elsewhere, near here.”

“The Deng group?” he suggested, looking around at the flooded buildings and recalling what the Beast Hunters had said.

“Given there were pill bottles in the gorge, maybe?” Jiang Wushen agreed. “It might explain why they had nothing on them, certainly. They teleported it out, but couldn’t, or didn’t want to, risk that themselves?”

“Could be,” Juni agreed. “Though we need to find it, first.”

“Well, that should be easy enough…” Senior Ying mused. “Give me a moment.”

“…”

He watched with interest as she looked around, then scooped up a handful of water and watched it scatter. She repeated that half a dozen times, before wading over to another point and repeating the same process.

“It’s a Seven Stars Formation,” she declared after a moment. “That means the core will be either… there”—she paused to point in the direction of one building off to their right—“or over there,” she finished, pointing to an open area to their left between their current building and the next.

“We will take this one then,” Juni said, heading right with Arai and Sana.

Senior Ying nodded, waving for him and Lin Ling to follow her left.

Jiang Wushen, meanwhile, clambered up on the wall beside them, to keep a lookout.

However, they had barely gotten half-way to the point Senior Ying pointed out when Sana waved at them from where she was crouching on a collapsed wall.

“IT’S OVER HERE!”

“…”

“I should have seen that coming,” Senior Ying sighed, shaking her head wryly.

Wading over, they found the core in the middle of a large open room in the building, conspicuously clear of rubble.

“Indeed, they put it down in a very orthodox arrangement…” Senior Ying observed as they all stood on the wall, considering the jade-green formation plate shimmering in the knee-deep water.

“What does that mean?” Lin Ling asked, before he could.

“It means they didn’t know how to adjust it; they just divined the alignments and set it out as the manual dictates. Whoever did this was not really a formations expert…” Senior Ying mused, hopping down off the wall and wading over to it, followed by Juni.

“This is totally dead, isn’t it?” Juni noted as Senior Ying crouched down beside the plate.

“It is,” Senior Ying acknowledged, looking around pensively. “It’s been here long enough to gain a faint coat of algae; you can see the discolouration with the floor. However, if it had qi infused into it, that could occur in weeks… or it could have been here years…”

“…”

“Seven Stars Formation is an orthodox imperial one, isn’t it?” Juni mused.

“Yes, and the anchor is a really good quality one,” Senior Ying agreed, standing up again. “You could force a connection from the other side…”

“Could you now…?” Juni muttered, frowning, as she looked around.

“What are you thinking?” Arai asked, also frowning.

“That having teleport anchors up here from others doesn’t make me feel at ease,” Juni muttered, folding her arms. “It already bothers me that the Ha clan are getting involved in this.”

“…”

“Well, we are not here for ruins anyway,” Juni said. “Disable that, use an alignment disruption talisman on it and then… see if you can move one of those old blocks of masonry over onto it.”

“You want to disable it totally?” he asked, eyeing the fallen block at the far end of the room sceptically.

“Ha…” Arai sighed, then nodded, waving for Sana and Lin Ling to come with her.

“I do,” Juni confirmed. “There has been entirely too much scheming about all this. It might just be some old formation from decades ago… or it might not; either way, whoever used it is nothing to do with us and I want it to stay that way. You disagree?”

“No, not at all,” he shook his head. “I was just wondering if it was worth trying to reclaim it?”

“Not really,” Senior Ying replied. “Seven Stars Formations are favoured because they provide excellent end-to-end transmission that is hard to disrupt. To link this to the Misty Jasmine Inn would also provide whoever set this up with the means to teleport there, and tell them it was in use…”

“Which would not be desirable…” he noted, following her reasoning.

“Indeed,” Juni agreed. “It would not.”

“In that case, I’ll go lug rocks,” he sighed, moving over to help Arai, Sana and Ling.

By the time they had hauled it back over, Senior Ying and Juni had thoroughly broken the alignments on that location, setting up an inauspicious feng shui formation with some of the lesser beast cores they had acquired over the course of the day. With some relief, because it was very heavy, they deposited the block on top of the original core of the formation with a splash and then scattered to put down some alignment disruption talismans.

The whole act of sabotaging the rest of the formation took about ten minutes in the end, then they fanned out and quickly checked the rest of the ruins around the pool, in case there were more traces of past exploration. Somewhat against the odds, it turned out there were. In one of the rock-cut rooms, set into the cliff, they found a few more pill bottles that had been discarded, along with signs of a fire and fragments of a broken pill furnace.

“They are the same pill bottles,” Wushen observed. “A standard design sold in Misty Vale.”

“That just means that whoever this was came through there, though,” he pointed out. “This design has been in circulation since I was a kid.”

“They have been like this since before I was a kid,” Jiang Wushen remarked drily. “Though…”—he opened the top of one and sniffed it—“Standard replenishment pills. Whoever this was, they were likely spiritual cultivators.”

“—Scans are done!” Sana called from outside.

“Did you find anything?” Juni called over to him and Jiang as they exited the building.

“Yes, we did…” he called back, wading back into the plaza to where Juni and the others were now preparing anchor arrows.

“Huh… more pill bottles, and is that a bit of a furnace?” Juni asked, accepting what they found.

“Seems that way,” Jiang Wushen nodded.

Senior Ying took it and then nodded as well, before passing it back to Juni.

“Well, we are going to go up to the top, in any event,” Juni said, gesturing to the rope arrows Arai and Ling were preparing.

“I take it we are not going by the stairs then,” he joked, gesturing to the ‘proper’ way up, at the far end of the plaza, which was basically a second waterfall, complete with its own rapids where blocks had fallen down from the wall.

“Yeah… no,” Juni agreed, rolling her eyes. “We will go up the cliff.”

…

The task of getting to the top of the cliff only took them a few minutes; however, what awaited them at the top… was not what he expected.

“That is a big ruin…” Jiang Wushen said at last, as they looked out at what was, in effect, a small town within the gorge, now largely overtaken by the cloud forest. Off to their right, against the massif, he could see the peaked roofs of buildings on a higher outcropping, while off to the left there were river bridges in at least two places, leading to another large complex of buildings with peaked roofs, surrounded by a wall.

“It is,” he agreed, dropping down onto the top of the wall from the tree they were in. “Does this wall block off the whole cliff?”

“It does look that way,” Senior Ying agreed, landing a few metres away. “This is a really defensible settlement.”

Staring at the ruins pensively, he pulled out a divination compass, intending to check whether this was, in fact, part of the ridgeline.

“It’s not part of the ridgeline,” Senior Ying added, even before the compass gave him a reading that said as much.

“How can you tell?” Lin Ling asked.

Senior Ying, who now had her bow out, pointed wordlessly at the nearest building, across the square, where there was an open doorway…

He stared at it for a good ten seconds before realising that it was staring back at him.

“Cave centipede,” Arai said with a grimace, identifying it for all of them, not that that was necessary, her bow also now in her hand with an arrow half drawn.

“Wonderful,” he groaned, following suit as the two-metre-long black and blue insectoid monstrosity, all legs and feelers, scuttled out into the rain, swaying erratically as it looked at them.

*Ksssssssssssshhh!*

The hiss it emitted was not from its mouth, but rather from rubbing its legs together. Even though it was expected and he had the support of a mantra, it still made his vision waver—

A wooden arrow embedded itself into the creature’s face, making it recoil. Two more Intent-infused ones slammed into it a moment later, from Juni and Wushen. Finally loosing his own, he watched it get deflected by a flailing leg.

“Sealing formation!” Juni called over to him.

Nodding, he pulled out a high-grade core and started on that, while Juni and Wushen both drew spears and closed on it warily. In the intervening time, it had gained three more wooden arrows.

“What realm is that?” he asked Senior Ying, surprised it had not gone down.

“It’s only an Immortal realm beast. It’s just that it’s a bad match for Life-Breaking arrows,” she said drily. “Yin life foundation with a minor in yin fire and yin earth. Don’t get bitten.”

-Only an Immortal realm one… riiiight…

“Triple Yin?” Lin Ling spat, the disgust in her tone clear.

-A yang metal formation then, he concluded, transferring an imprint of ‘Fu Kan’s Storm Lock’ from his own tablet into the core.

The imprinting took a moment, by which point both Juni and Wushen were working to keep the qi beast back, supported by strategically placed arrows from Senior Ying, which broke up its momentum.

“Formation is ready!” he called over.

Without comment Juni danced back, catching it as he threw it to her. He watched as she rolled it across the ground…

{Fu Kan’s Storm Lock}

Six golden, lightning-like chains sizzled out of the core, twining around the centipede and rapidly propagating as the yang metal energies overwhelmed the yin life attributes of the centipede’s foundation. Within a matter of moments it had slumped down, twitching erratically. Even so, Senior Ying still kept shooting arrows at it until it finally stopped twitching.

“Well, that’s a not at all auspicious first introduction to this place,” he muttered, eyeing the other buildings with suspicion.

“In theory, a centipede that big should be an apex predator here,” Jiang Wushen said, carefully picking his way over to it and drawing a blade. “Given that they eat spiders primarily, and tetrids, it’s a bit unfortunate to have to kill it, but… at least in the short term, it means that there should be little else to bother us here.”

Senior Ying, who had also walked over to it now, nodded in agreement as she started to recover the arrows from the body.

“I am aware,” he sighed, considering the many-legged thing. “Still doesn’t make it any less horrifying…”

“…”

It didn’t take them long to butcher the centipede and recover its core, in the end. The building it had been living in had a basement which turned out to be its nest, which they also cleared out, not that it held anything of value to them. As Wushen had said though, their sweep through the other buildings turned up basically nothing, beyond some lingzhi, some slightly less beneficial fungi and a few life-catch vines.

By the time they arrived at the centre of the ‘town’, a broad plaza partially flooded by the raging torrent running through the area, it was clear that there was nothing living in it larger than a fist-sized spider. Or at least, nothing willing to make itself known to them.

Rather than stand around in the water, waiting for the main scan of the whole area to finish, they took refuge on the only dry location in the plaza: a raised area in front of the largest of the buildings adjacent to it, immediately opposite the river.

“I wonder, did the alkyr come from here as well?” Sana mused as she sat, perched on a piece of fallen column, taking in the ruined buildings around them while they waited for her tablet to sort itself out.

“They might have done,” Senior Ying agreed from where she was investigating the inscription on a fallen stele nearby. “They would not have fared well against that centipede.”

“True,” Sana mused.

“What does the inscription say?” he asked, walking over to join Senior Ying.

“Hard to say,” she mused. “It’s ancient though, and in a form of Easten I have barely ever seen. Near as I can make out, however, this town is called ‘Por…tam, Rh-ha-nae’, which means ‘Gate’, or maybe ‘Door of the Rain Bringer’.”

“Rain Bringer, huh…” Lin Ling muttered, staring up at the swirling clouds barely a hundred metres above them at this altitude. “That’s kind of apt.”

“It is, rather,” he agreed.

“This is basically an inscription detailing the founding of the town…” Senior Ying went on, running her fingers along the barely visible text. “Most of it is damaged, but it looks like it was founded around a special spring that fell out of the clouds, which they believed was blessed by… I am going to say that it is called ‘Rhanis’. They carved a statue to her, by the spring, and laid offerings, and every ten years a young girl would appear and… something with the children, and then one of them would be given a white mask… *tcch*, typical…”

Senior Ying trailed off as she got to the end of the text.

“They are always incomplete,” she sighed, shaking her head.

“Shall we put a formation down here and call it a day?” Juni said, coming over to join them.

“You plan to put a defensive one up overnight?” Senior Ying asked, looking around.

“Yeah,” Juni nodded. “Any suggestions?”

“Something that disguises rather than bars. A feng shui one,” Senior Ying mused. “Barriers tend to draw attention and be seen as a challenge, whereas something hiding away can be ignored, especially in a place like this. That centipede was close to a Chosen Immortal qi beast and clearly the apex predator here, so likely there isn’t much going to trouble a formation beyond that. I can set it up, if you like?”

“That would be good, yes,” Juni agreed.

“What should we do, then?” he asked.

“Set the teleport formation up and attune it?” Juni said with a shrug. “Here on this raised area is as good a place as any.”

That process took them very little time, in the end, having now had a fair amount of practice with it, so in the end they got to sit around and watch Senior Ying pace around with a compass, muttering to herself, for about fifteen minutes, occasionally pausing to place a talisman on a fallen column or one of the walls, before finally declaring that it was sorted.

Standing around the node, they waited in silence while the formation charged up, the space around them shimmering slightly in the now slowly fading light and reforming as the familiar environs of Misty Jasmine Inn.

“—Welcome back…”

Mo Shunfei, who was waiting for them, trailed off as they traipsed off the formation in tired silence, their boots squelching audibly.

“You all look like you have had a fairly rough day…” he remarked.

Without comment, Sana waved her hand and half a dozen corpses appeared from the storage ring – the three alkyr they had killed, the dead spiders from the river and the centipede. A moment later, the smaller spiders, including the adult Dragon spider, also appeared, in a different pile.

“…”

“Yeah… it does feel like that,” he agreed, sitting down on a rock as Mo Shunfei eyed the day’s efforts with a frown.

The only other people out there were two guards, an expert he didn’t recognise, Kun Ji and two Ha clan disciples who had now stopped their butchering of a rather large serpent to watch their arrival.

“Ha Yun eh…” Lin Ling remarked.

Staring at one of the two youths butchering, he realised it was indeed Ha Yun.

“Adult alkyr… and a cave centipede…” Mo Shunfei sighed. “This is from the ‘monkey valley’?”

“Yep,” he nodded wearily. “Though we have a second teleport formation up there, so there should not be a repeat of today.”

“Fates willing,” Lin Ling, who had sat down on the other end of his block to empty water out of her boots, agreed.

“—This is what you have been encountering?”

The expert he didn’t recognise had come over and was eyeing the qi beasts critically.

“Yep,” Juni nodded.

“Ah, this is Sir Huang,” Mo Shunfei said, by way of introduction. “Like Diaomei and Meilan, he is from the Cherry Wine Pagoda.”

“Ha Huang,” he said with a polite nod to all of them.

“…”

“—Ah, good, you are back!” he turned around, as did Lin Ling, to find Elder Lianmei walking over, holding an umbrella.

Standing, he saluted her politely, then sat back down as she waved for him to stop.

“Today has been difficult,” Lianmei mused, looking at the monsters. “I take it you didn’t get many herbs?”

“We scavenged, but in the end it became a matter of prioritizing covering ground. There are quite a few marked on the maps we made,” Juni said, and passed Elder Lianmei her tablet, as did Sana.

“Probably wise,” Lianmei nodded, taking both. “Tell you what, I’ll let you go get cleaned up, then we can discuss it in a bit more comfort.”

“Thanks…” Juni nodded. “I’d kill for a bath right now.”

“Ah… There are a bunch of our Ha clan’s best who have sort of claimed it…” Sir Huang said apologetically, as Lianmei just sighed. “Once they discovered it helped with acclimatizing… I had intended to go turf them out before you came back, but…”

“…”

“I’ll go do that now,” Sir Huang continued blandly.

“Ah, no need. You can use the one in the shrine, if you like,” Senior Ying chuckled.

“There… is one in the shrine?” Juni asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Yep. I’ll show you. It’s a bit smaller, but… much more private,” Senior Ying added.

All four women actually saluted her, then moved with remarkable alacrity towards the shrine.

“I think I will still go kick them out,” Sir Huang said drily. “They have been wasting time in there for half the afternoon.”

“Yun, Qwan! Both of you finish that up under the instruction of Sir Shun!” Sir Huang called over to the two youths, who both groaned, even as the other figure, who turned out to be Ling Shun, just laughed.

“How do you reckon they will fare up there?” Elder Lianmei asked him, as they made their way back inside, clearly meaning the Ha clan youths.

“…”

He started to answer that, then stopped, because actually it was hard to answer honestly in front of actual experts from the Ha clan.

“That well, huh,” Sir Huang sighed, pausing outside the inn’s door.

“If they go up there with Beast Hunters or a squad of guards… it will probably be okay?” he said at last, hoping that struck the right balance between reality and plausibility.

Sir Huang gave him a sideways look, then nodded pensively, pushing open the door.

Inside, it was fair to say that there was a small party going on. Half a dozen youths were sitting around two tables, drinking wine, playing music from a jade tablet and watching a projection of a beauty he vaguely recognised as being one of the ‘faces’ of a teahouse in the Red Blossom District, wearing not a lot of clothing, dance, while they exchanged bets on a dice game.

“…”

Some of them glanced up as they came in, then a few did an amusing double-take as they realised he was there as well, though their expressions were mostly dismissive or calculating—

“—Brother Han!”

The first person to speak up, rather jovially, was who he expected, actually: Ha Cao Caolun.

“Come join us!”

-Who is your brother? he groaned.

The only reason Ha Caolun even knew his name was because he was ‘friends’ with Han Chen Bei – proving, if nothing else, that idiots of a feather flocked together. Likely Ha Caolun wanted to draw him onside for that reason as well.

“Regretfully, Brother Caolun, I must go file jadework,” he called back over, lying through his teeth.

“…”

One of the other youths next to Caolun muttered something about ‘disrespecting the Ha clan’s hospitality’.

To his surprise, it was actually Sir Huang who stepped in, even before Lianmei.

“Hunter Han, I would indeed be most grateful if you could also recount to me matters about these alkyr, once you are made civilized again,” Sir Huang said, just loud enough to be heard, giving him a slight wink.

“Of course, Sir Huang,” he replied blandly. “I will see you shortly.”

Taking that as his cue, he hurried off upstairs, not stopping until he got to his room. Once there, he sealed the door, stripped off his damp robe and quickly towelled himself off as best he could, before just flopping down on his bed and staring at the ceiling.

“What a day…” he groaned.

He lay like that for a few minutes, until there was a polite knock on the door.

“Who is it?” he called.

“Me!” Duan Mu replied.

“Uggh…” groaning, he sat up, using his mantra to banish a bit of the fatigue, and opened the door.

Duan Mu came inside holding a bowl of steaming soup and a jar of wine.

“Courtesy of the fairies in the kitchen,” Duan Mu grinned.

“…”

“Thanks…” he sighed, withdrawing two cups from his talisman. “How bad has it been?”

“Weird, mostly,” Duan Mu answered after a moment. “We went out earlier, sweeping the other valley, not Western Falls, and came back to find this place turned into an actual teahouse. How that lot will cope out there I dunno, but I really hope I am not one of those expected to make them ‘do’ anything.”

“That bad, huh,” he grimaced, sipping the wine and then sighing as the icy, refreshing coolness flowed through his body, briefly reminding him that temperatures other than ‘not quite in the sauna’ existed.

“Yeah, half of them think we are here to serve them, the other half just don’t want to be here, and half think this is all a prelude to them getting rich in this trial,” Duan Mu grumbled, downing his own wine. “So, how was your day?”

“Tiring,” he said. “You will probably hear about it over dinner, in any case. I wouldn’t want to spoil the suspense.”

“I saw the beasts outside; hopefully nobody got injured?” Duan Mu asked.

“Nope, the only thing damaged is our mental state,” he replied drily, pouring a second cup. “Anyway, how come Ha Yun is butchering a snake?”

“Hah… that is a funny story,” Duan Mu snickered. “So we actually have like twenty Ha clan morons here. They got told they had a day off, but then they all saw Sana’s arboretum, and got caught loafing off while claiming to be making themselves useful, so one thing led to another and most of them ended up having to do proper work of some form or another. The few that are down there drinking are the shameless ones who even shit won’t stick to.”

“Ha Caolun does have that special constitution, yes,” he agreed, reflecting on what he knew of him, which was mostly tales of trouble in teahouses, notable for their lack of consequences in regards to the perpetrators.

“Ha Yun isn’t much better,” Duan Mu grumbled, “But the Cherry Wine fairies appear to have their eye on him for some reason, as does Sir Huang… That said, his entire bunch of cronies is here.”

“Oh…” he groaned. “What joy…”

Ha Yun’s coterie of cronies were a group he was somewhat familiar with as well. Partly because they were a bunch who shamelessly took far too many missions using Ha Yun’s influence, but mostly because some of them, like Ha Ding and Ha Mun, frequented the same teahouses as his brothers.

“If you want a bright spark, they also sent Ha Leng and Ha Yufan,” Duan Mu added.

“…”

In the end, he chatted away to Duan Mu for a good twenty minutes, before the other Hunter departed again, leaving him alone with his thoughts.

…

*Chime*

The unexpected cooling of the Hunter Bureau talisman around his neck nearly made him curse out loud as he was drawn back out of his reverie, into the darkened room, night having now fallen.

Sitting up, he put some qi into it, but all it said was that the ‘registration parametres had been updated’.

“The fates?” he grumbled, taking it off and putting it on the table beside his bed, then lighting the lantern there for good measure.

-Maybe they had some issue with one of the loci?

The ‘registration parametres’ being updated was almost always because there was some tracking issue with the talismans themselves, or the security measures enacted on them to prevent theft. Focusing on the talisman’s secondary functions, he checked the update log on it, but there was nothing there, just the same note about ‘registration parametres’.

Stretching, he stood up and ran a hand through his hair, grimacing at how matted it felt, and then grimacing even more at how stiff his body was. He debated using his mantra to bury the fatigue, but in the end didn’t. That worked, but it didn’t help his body get used to this kind of environment, which was what was actually needed, really.

-Maybe I can get a quiet moment in the bath after dinner… or maybe Senior Ying might let me use the one in the shrine? he mused.

He had had no idea that even existed, until she said so earlier.

*Knock Knock*

“Who is it?” he asked.

“Me,” Mu Shi said quietly. “Did your talisman also just update?”

Getting up, he went to the door and found her standing there in a light robe, her hair tied up.

“Yes, it did,” he confirmed. “Any idea why?”

“Nope, I was on my way down to ask Lianmei, given dinner is basically done.”

“Uggh… okay, I’ll come down with you,” he said.

“Long day in that valley?” she asked sympathetically as he pulled on an over-robe and came back out, closing the door behind him.

“Yep,” he agreed, rolling his shoulders experimentally, trying to shift the stiffness there at least. “If the lot downstairs have to work there for a full day like we just did, as spiritual cultivators they will be pill addicts in three days…”

“Three days?” Mu Shi giggled. “I’d say lunchtime on the first day!”

“I was trying to be charitable,” he muttered.

“You don’t work with them a lot,” she sighed. “I am quite familiar with several of them. Someone in the Ha clan has a real sense of humour sending that lot up here, and apparently we are set to get a group from the Ling clan tomorrow as well.”

“…”

“Honestly? I’ll be happy if we get through this without any of them dying,” Mu Shi muttered. “Especially if there are things like those alkyrs out there.”

“I am starting to think we should have chucked them in a chasm somewhere,” he said drily.

“—GET THAT VERMIN OUT OF HERE!”

The outraged yell cut through their conversation, followed by the sound of someone kicking a door and hurried footsteps.

Hurrying down to the ground floor, he found Ha Ji Wufan looking around furiously.

“You, Hunter, why is there a monkey here?” a youth next to Wufan demanded, seeing them both.

“I dunno,” Mu Shi shrugged. “Why are you here, Ha Ji Kufei?”

The other youth who had come up behind snorted, then covered his mouth as Kufei rounded on him.

“Shut it, brat. If I want to break your leg, do you think Ha Yun will really stand up for you?”

“What is the commotion?” Meilan, who had also appeared at this point, accompanied by another woman he didn’t recognise, asked.

“The little monkey, apparently,” Mu Shi said blandly.

“Ah, it’s in the kitchen now. What did they do?” the other woman asked, eyeing the three who were looking defensive now, except for Kufei, who was still outraged.

“No idea, we just heard shouting,” he replied.

“What happened, Wufan?” the unnamed woman asked, narrowing her eyes.

“It was in the baths,” Kufei snapped, his tone making her frown. “Poking around.”

“Oh, is that all,” Meilan sighed, shaking her head before gesturing towards them. “Oh, these two are Mu Shi and Han Shu, two of the Herb Hunters,”

“Ha Faolian,” the other woman said with a polite smile. “I am a junior sister of Xiang Meilan and Fanqing Diaomei.”

“A pleasure,” he replied politely, saluting her.

“Faolian will be helping with logistics here,” Meilan added.

“—Shall we go chat somewhere other than a stairwell?” Faolian interjected, gesturing for them to come with the pair of them.

“Sure,” Mu Shi agreed.

He followed after, leaving the three Ha clan scions in the corridor like they were blocks of chopped wood, though only the two at the front looked outraged. The youth behind them just looked amused.

Back in the common room, the group who had been there earlier had expanded in number somewhat, to two other tables. Of those in his group, only Duan Mu and the Beast Hunters were there, eating soup and conversing with Ling Shun and Ling Wentai at one table. Diaomei and Sir Huang were chatting away at another, sharing some wine.

“Where are the others?” he asked Mu Shi.

“Arai and Sana said they would eat in their rooms,” Mu Shi said with a grimace.

“Juni is checking on things in the storehouse, and Lin Ling is helping in the kitchen,” Meilan added.

-All of them avoiding here, he sighed.

“Hey, Little Sister Mu!”

“Little Sister, come join us for a drink!”

“Sister Mei, won’t you come sit with us?”

-Can’t say I blame them, he mused, looking at the Ha clan group’s raucous attitude.

His sigh must have communicated that, because Mu Shi just nodded, ignoring the calls.

They made their way to the kitchen, where Lin Ling was tossing small spirit fruits to the monkey, who was, in turn, grabbing them acrobatically and eating them. Both froze when they entered, looking like criminals at the scene of a crime, which was probably not inaccurate in a sense.

“Did your talisman also update?” he asked Lin Ling.

“No idea, it’s up in my room,” Lin Ling replied, while the monkey projected an ‘I have no talisman’ kind of attitude.

“…”

“Why do you ask?” she added, making no move to actually go check.

“Because both of ours did,” Mu Shi said. “Just a few moments ago.”

“Hmmm…”

Ha Faolian took out a Hunter Bureau talisman of her own, which he was surprised to see was in the old style, from before the Three Schools Conflict.

“Mine also updated… Odd, did they do something to the loci…?”

Mu Shi frowned and trotted outside, returning a moment later with an even more bemused expression.

“Duan Mu’s also updated, though none of us can see what was done. There is no log relating to it…”

“All mine says is ‘registration parametres updated’,” he said.

“Huh… that’s more than mine,” Mu Shi murmured, then narrowed her eyes. “Wait... who here is a nine-star ranked Recovery Hunter?”

Only he put his hand up.

“Your talismans are different. You have the official’s functions unlocked, don’t you?”

“We do,” he confirmed.“I suppose we can only ask…”

He trailed off as the person in question, Elder Lianmei, came into the kitchen followed by Juni, who was now dressed in a loose robe with her hair tied up. Both looked… annoyed.

“You are here, good,” Lianmei said, putting her hands on a table and then sighing deeply.

“Uh… is this about the talismans updating?”

“Uhuh,” Juni nodded grimly.

“So, what’s happened?” he asked, looking from one to the other.

“Well, they have updated the parametres for the talismans,” Lianmei answered. “It relates to the Trial of Exploration.”

“Okay…?” he asked.

“Oh… they did not…” Faolian hissed, her eyes narrowing. “Those old geezers, do they want to die and take us all with them?”

“Maybe,” Lianmei sneered. “Maybe.”

“What’s going on?” he asked, confused.

“So, to take part in this trial, apparently you will need an authorized contribution talisman. This joyful news has not yet dropped for the starry-eyed seekers of glory outside,” Lianmei said sourly. “It was just announced at a grand banquet in Blue Water City, and the Imperial Astrology Bureau is overseeing their issuing… The problem is that Hunter Bureau talismans will also count as authorized talismans, and every talisman was just updated to reflect that.”

“Wait… so everyone bound to a Hunter Bureau talisman is now taking part in this trial whether they like it or not?” Mu Shi said dully.

“Yes, basically. Though it is only in Blue Water, North Fissure and South Grove provinces,” Lianmei said.

“Basically, the Imperial-aligned elements within the Hunter Bureau have agreed to take part in the trial, and probably enough of the neutrals also agreed,” Juni added.

“…”

“Doesn’t this paint a massive target on us?” he said softly.

“It does,” Lianmei sighed. “Unless you stop taking your talismans. It is not like we can even issue you with new ones. This is done at the top level. Any talisman linked to that system and afforded legitimacy as a status token is affected, so long as it belongs to a ‘junior’.”

“Great…” Faolian growled. “I dunno if I should be happy or sad that the Bureau still considers me a junior.”

“I mean, you are… technically?” Meilan chuckled. “Given you made it to ‘Immortal’ before one hundred.”

“So, how does it work?” Mu Shi asked, staring at her own talisman.

“To be determined,” Lianmei scowled. “But if it’s anything like the way the trials work on the Imperial Continent, it’s not a good deed.”

“No... No it is not,” Faolian agreed.

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

~ HA YUN – MISTY JASMINE INN ~

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

“Did I really offend an ancestor in my past life?” Ha Ding groaned, sitting back on his haunches and staring in disgust at the corpse of the serpent they were cutting up.

“Given the number of beauties you have ogled, I don’t think we need to go to your past lives for the root of our predicament!” Ha Leng retorted from nearby, where he was gutting a large fish.

Looking around the makeshift outdoors work area near the teleport formation, lit by lanterns and sheltered by a large canvas tent, it was hard not to agree with Leng, really. There were four of them now, currently working on the various corpses that the Hunters had brought back, all of which were fairly obnoxious in their own ways.

The fish, which he and Leng were working on, had a gland that ran along their spine, which, if you ruptured it, basically poisoned the whole fish with a nasty, stinking, yin-rich liquid that was also a mild paralytic. The serpent that Ding and Ha Pei Quan, a cultivator who had come with Ha Cao Caolun, were cutting up had scales on it that were razor sharp, and its blood was yang-rich to the point where splattering it on your skin left smoking red marks.

“Like you have not admired your fair share...” Ding muttered, glaring at them both. “Like, don’t you have a video of Fairy Xiang dancing, Leng?”

Leng, who did in fact have several such recordings, glared back.

“Look, Fairy Xiang’s performances are all thematic dances… entirely respectable—”

“—Well, this is all very jovial, how are we getting on?”

He turned to find Ling Shun, who had taken over ‘supervising’ them after Sir Huang had departed when the ‘Hunters’ came back, had come back into the cover of the awning.

“…”

“We are making progress,” Leng replied quickly, before Ding, who had been grabbed by him on the way past as revenge for landing him with a day’s work in the first place, could say something stupid.

“Good, good,” Ling Shun mused, looking around at their work. “Once you finish the fish, we can finish up for now and you can get freshened up for dinner.”

His gaze drifted over to the dozen arm-length fish hanging from a frame nearby, then back to the five he had done so far, since finishing up the other serpent, and he fought back a sigh.

“…”

“Okay, we will do that,” Leng said, much to his relief, allowing him to just nod in agreement.

“—Sir, can you bring out the other blade!” one of the other guards outside, butchering a spider, called over.

“Okay!” Ling Shun called back, turning and going over to the other table, which held various tools and boxes of materials, and grabbing a curved blade.

Ling Shun gave their work one final look…

“What about us?” Ding asked.

“…”

Shun looked around again at the butchered qi beasts, and sighed.

“Finish up the middle bit, then help Yun and Leng here with the fish,” he said after a short pause.

“…”

“Keep up the good work,” he added to them, before heading out into the rain.

“Did he expect us to salute him or something?” Ding muttered, though not very loud.

“Look on the bright side: you could be chopping up those spiders for alchemy parts,” he pointed out to Ding, who groaned and nodded.

Ling Shu and two of the guards outside were doing that task, something he was very thankful for.

“Don’t say that too loudly,” Leng muttered.

“—Oh, hey Brother Quan, this is where you ended up?” Ha Mugan, another of the disciples who had come with Ha Caolun, walked into the covered area, putting his umbrella down and looking around with mild interest. “Caolun wants to know if you have a Hunter talisman…”

“…”

“Nope,” Ha Quan shook his head. “I don’t have a Bureau talisman.”

“How about the rest of you?” Mugan asked, looking around at them.

“—Mine is back in my room,” Ding interjected with a shrug. “I didn’t see any reason to carry it.”

Leng put his own knife aside, walked over to where he had put his over-robe and grass hat on a handy block, and started to riffle though it.

“What does Caolun want, anyway?” he asked, as he patted himself down, then sighed as he realised it was probably in his room, in the robe he had hung up to dry.

“Has your talisman updated?” Mugan asked Leng, who had now found his…

“…”

“Yes,” Leng nodded, staring at it with a frown. “About twenty minutes ago?”

“Updated?” he asked, putting his own knife down as Leng came back to the table and passed it over to him.

Indeed, he could see that it had ‘updated’, based on the record of connections to their parent loci, but there was no log of what that update was for, or why.

“Any idea why?” he asked Mugan, passing it back to Leng.

“We are just trying to work that out, ‘Brother’ Yun,” Mugan replied. “Not that many people have them, as it turns out. Some didn’t even bring theirs with them, if they did have one.”

“It’s not like any of our talismans are actually… you know, useful, up here,” Ding added, trying to wipe his nose on his sleeve carefully and failing somewhat. “What am I gonna do, try and impress people with it?”

“He does have a point there,” he reminded Mugan.

Being a five-star ranked Hunter got you some privileges back home, but here, the Bureau talisman was basically useless, never mind a lower-ranked one. It was their status as Ha clan members that was the important thing.

“…”

“What about yours?” Mugan asked him.

“Dunno,” he replied, “Mine is back in my room, I think.”

“Can you go check, Caolun…”

A bit annoyed that Mugan was behaving like Caolun outranked him, which he did not, he shook his head.

“I’ll check later, when it’s convenient,” he replied, before gesturing around at the fish and the snake. “We are busy with this at the moment.”

“…”

“Is this what they brought in today?” Mugan asked, looking around at the fish, and the half of the snake that remained unskinned, and grimacing in disgust.

“Yep,” Ding sighed. “And then just left to us to sort out…”

“—What grade is it?” Mugan asked, poking the head of the snake with his foot.

“Not sure,” Quan said, sitting back with a sigh and carefully starting to detach another half-metre-long section of the hide.

“Soul Foundation tree snake,” Leng answered.

“Something certainly had a good go at tearing it up,” Mugan remarked, eyeing the injuries around the head. “Unless that’s just your talent at butchery, ‘Brother Ding’?”

“Do you plan to help or just say pointless things?” Ding muttered.

“Might have been the Hunters when they killed it,” Quan pointed out.

“That’s true,” Mugan nodded, looking around again, ignoring Ding’s comment as if he had never spoken.

“—It was an alkyr,” a woman’s voice said, nearly making him stick the knife right through the back of the fish he had just started cutting into again.

Leng had to put his knife aside as well, while even Mugan and Quan flinched slightly.

Turning, he found the speaker was Priestess Ying, who was now wearing a smarter robe and standing under an umbrella, holding a lantern, at the edge of the awning, looking around with interest.

“—Sorry, I didn’t mean to surprise you,” she added, coming underneath the awning and putting her umbrella away.

“Not… at all, Fairy Ying… An… alkyr?”” Mugan replied, recovering quickly and giving her an ‘understanding’ smile. “Those things they are butchering out there?”

“No, those are cloud orb spiders,” Senior Ying said blandly. “The six-legged mantis-like things lined up over there”—she paused to gesture at the three metre-long insectoid monstrosities laid out on a large canvas by the awning, which he had been studiously ignoring this whole time—“are alkyrs. They are an ambush predator that is fairly common up here.”

“Fairly common…” he repeated with distaste, recalling being told about them, among other threats, when he was taking the mandatory ‘seminars’ for his five-star rank exam.

Just those stories had been enough to convince him that missions like that were far too much trouble and best left to others.

“Like tetrid hunters?” Mugan mused. “But aren’t those basically eradicated?”

“—stalkers,” Leng absently corrected him.

“Not up here,” Senior Ying chuckled, walking over to the table to look at what they were doing, “Ash fish huh?”

“Yeah,” Leng nodded.

“How come they are called that?” he asked, mostly to make polite conversation with her and to stop Mugan saying more things that made them all look stupid.

“—Because if you catch them wrong, or prepare them wrong, or basically look at them wrong, they might as well be ashes in your mouth,” she replied drily.

“…”

“Huh… that’s quite apt,” he mused, staring at the one he was preparing.

“That said, may I—?” she asked, holding out a hand for the knife.

“Be my guest, Fairy Ying,” he replied, happy to let someone else take a stab at it if they wanted to.

She took the knife, considered it pensively, then flipped the fish around and put her finger against the fin on its back. He was just about to ask what she was doing, when she slid the blade smoothly in, at that finger’s breadth, and then in one smooth motion sliced down the whole length of the fish. Putting the knife to one side, she ran her finger down the edge of the fillet, stopping about halfway between the head and the middle of the fish, and then simply peeled the fillet back.

He watched dully as the poisonous gland peeled away, the long fibrous veins running out from it detaching from the flesh along with the rib bones to leave an arm-long slab of fresh fish. Flipping the fish over, she repeated the same process for the other half, then put the knife down.

“Filleting them is best,” she said with an encouraging smile. “The fish is best when it retains a lot of its qi. If you make too many cuts, it harms the integrity of what remains and the quality of spirit food it can make is less.”

“…”

“I can show you again, if you like?” she added.

He glanced at the ten other fish hanging up by their gills.

“Yes please,” Leng nodded quickly.

Priestess Ying repeated the process, more slowly, actually explaining what she did this time.

His own first attempt at it was not terrible either. It wasn’t that the method shown before was wrong; it was just that nobody had told either of them that the gland was surprisingly hard to rupture if you cut directly along the bone. The ‘finger-width’ guide was to find the edge of the vertebrae, at which point, so long as your hand was remotely steady, you could take off a fillet that was at worst eighty percent of the meat.

It did make him wonder, though, if the guards and Beast Hunters had not shown them that to see how big a mess they would make of it.

“—Do you have any advice for us, Fairy Ying?” Ha Ding called over with a hopeful smile.

Priestess Ying glanced over from watching him and Leng slice up their next fish, with marginally more competence than the last, and sighed. “Get a bigger knife?”

“…”

Leng just about managed to stifle a laugh. Mugan had no such foibles snickering audibly.

“Either help or bog off back inside,” Ding grumbled at Mugan, finishing cutting away another bit of the snake and tossing it into one of the stone bowls between him and Quan.

“—Thank you for the instruction, Priestess Ying,” Leng interjected, having just finished his second fish in about a tenth of the time it had previously taken.

He finished making the cut on his own and carefully peeled back the side, trying not to wince inwardly at the worrying resistance the veins extending off the gland gave as he separated them from the flesh.

“Not at all,” Priestess Ying said with a faint smile. “This way we can at least have something for dinner that is not crab stew…”

“…”