> ...The mystery of those ill-fated expeditions has long left a sour note on the history of our Western Continent. The rapid demise of the Heavenly Dawn Sect in particular following its unfortunate decapitation during those events was hailed as a great tragedy, and at the time, the loss of so many great figures who stood at the top of that era made all fear for the security of the Heavenly Dynasty and its Young Emperor. At the time few remarked on this change, for the Emperor was very much the man of the hour. But now, devoid of the veil of tragedy and fear for tomorrow that that time was shrouded in, and afforded the hindsight to see how this has all played out, this whole episode does seem to have been highly convenient for recently ascendant Emperor Azure Tyrant. Certainly in regards to the rapid dismissal of so many of those influences in the years that followed and the equally rampant consolidation of the Dun and Din Clans at the heart of the Imperial Court at the expense of so much tragedy.

  ~from the personal writings of Shu Tian, 3rd Generation Sect Master of the Shu Pavilion.

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~ HAN SHU, MYSTERIOUS CAVERNS ~

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Stuck underneath a rocky overhang, Han Shu reflected that this place was literally a never-ending parade of terrors that made anything he had dealt with up to now either in the shadow forests or the inner valleys pale in comparison. After escaping that corrosive hell, he had embarked upon a somewhat timeless and arduous trek back through the system of vestigial caverns that had been opened up by the colossal landslide. The source was unclear but whatever it was, it had exerted enough force to physically shear through a huge plane of the bedrock, making new paths and closing old ones seemingly at random.

It had also driven a lot of things underground. They had already disturbed a significant proportion of the most obnoxious, rabid, volatile or ferocious threats that lurked around the surface in their flight prior to being forced underground. Now he was almost certainly picking his way through the remnants of their desperate flight from the other direction, trying to find an exit that didn’t lead straight into a death zone or wasn’t already overrun with other things that were trying to avoid the aftermath of whatever had happened up above.

It was hard to credit exactly how much devastation their pursuers must have wrought, besieged by all those monsters. It seemed to involve a lot of fire and corrosion, based on the damage filtering down into some of these caverns. Even though it was making his life here hell and had nearly caused his death, part of him was actually somewhat impressed at the scale of the carnage being unleashed. It also hit home why the more experienced veterans of the local Hunter Pavilion stressed never exploding your way through the inner and high valleys, except as a last resort.

There was another howl in the distance, making the air shake and his body grow sluggish for a few seconds. Almost every threat over ten-star rank seemed to have been driven underground by the aftermath or been disturbed into outrage over it. Finally finishing counting backwards from 30, he triggered his decoy talisman again and a version of him darted towards another rocky ledge… only to get hit three times by corrosive rocks and scatter.

-So whatever that was, it was still out there.

He glanced up at the ledge above him. Fortunately, the slope above it was sheer, so he was confident that nothing would slink down it, but he definitely wasn’t going out there until he had worked out where it was. It was hard to say if he had been lucky or unlucky with the first ambushing shot by whatever it was. It had clipped his ear, missing him by less than a hair's breadth and then exploded right behind his head, in the wall behind him. As a result, he had been thrown off the ledge quite a ways above here which he had been trying to use to sneak past a colony of ‘flesh-tearing’ hook bats on the roof.

-Thank the fates I saved up for this gear. Those rocks being spat are as corrosive as the hellish pools I just scrambled out of, a voice in his mind, his own thankfully, muttered.

Speaking of the hook bats. He shifted his position slightly to see if they were still circling. Theirs was another ignominiously over-descriptive species determination from a herb hunter of many millennia past. Also annoyingly accurate, in that they had nasty claws, hunted like owls and the wounds they caused were always infected by all kinds of maladies. Their saving grace was they rarely hunted in packs unless—

-Unless aggravated…

He paused, but it was really just his own mind running commentary on his thoughts. Having experienced severe meridian strain once before, a few years ago, he was constantly wary now about mental voices getting a bit too personable.

Carefully making his way forward along the shallow overhang, he flinched as another rock smashed into the slope above where he would have been if he were still crouching there. A small hail of corrosive chunks of rock and mist scattered down into the sheltered area. Another rock scythed into the colony above, stirring them up and making them sweep down by the hundred, flocking through the rocky gullies and scree collapses interspersed with ferns and a lot of fungi.

Whatever it was, was cunning to the point where he just wanted to hit something.

Stealth talismans were no good. The thing had been able to find him unerringly when he briefly triggered one to try to spot it.

-It surely detects qi somehow, his subconscious helpfully added, considering the evidence on hand.

Grimacing he gave his mantra another nudge and the slight sense of cognitive dissociation that was building somewhere in the back of his mind was gently returned to the rest of his conscious thought. For good measure, he pushed the nervousness and fear building in him into the mantra.

The voice wasn’t wrong though, it surely detected qi somehow. And that made it a nuisance beyond measure because it was only through his perception that he stood a chance at dodging the projectiles.

That was the only bright bit of information to be gleaned from this. He wasn’t that far underground. He had been terrified that he was pulled down into the depths below the base of the first level, but between his perception extending a few metres and seeing daylight in the heights of some of these caverns, it was clear that the landslip had brought him up out of the depths of the first layer into somewhere at least manageable. Deeper down it would be worse. Reports of those who had ventured into the deep dark and managed to survive said it dropped down to less than a metre.

Belatedly, he moved on again. Staying in one spot was not good—

Thock.

Thunk, thwack—

He threw himself down into the gully and forwards as a rock bounced in and skipped twice before exploding into flame and emitting a huge quantity of corrosive mist that swept along the ledge.

-Fates it was really too smart by half.

Left with no other option he held his breath, pulled the Luss cloth hood over his face and scrambled frantically along the underhang. Corrosive mist ate into his skin, soaking through his clothes and leaving blistering welts in its wake.

Was it trying to force him to use his qi as armour? How intelligent was whatever was trying to stalk him out of here, anyway? -And why in the fates didn’t it come in here directly? It was clearly a higher realm qi beast or lifeform of some description.

Visibility was eliminated in the billowing mist. Even with the protection of the Luss cloth, his eyes were bleeding and his vision swam. There had been water nearby?

A voice in his head pointed out that the water was possibly more dangerous than the mist, but really there was no choice now. He scrambled in that direction. Two more rocks exploded speculatively behind him… and—

If there was luck, he spent it there, he was certain. The explosion of the mist swept him across the cavern floor like a skipping stone, dropping him off a small ridge onto the sandy beach right beside the water. Every part of his body hurt.

‘Bright, Iron, Beginning, Worldly, Gift’

He spun the whole mantra over in his mind, focusing on Iron and Gift. Purification and healing.

What he wouldn’t give for ‘Bright’ or ‘Beginning’ to be ‘Body’ right about now, he cursed inwardly. Then again, he wasn’t even meant to know much about mantras outside of his clan’s one. He only knew the common mantras because the Pavilion had a store of simple ones that were available to recruits. The best of those were currently being cultivated by Lin Ling, Kun Juni, and the Mu siblings. Sharing physical cultivation laws and methods outside of your family groups was a big taboo in its own right. Sharing mantra verses was an even bigger one, never mind secrets like emotion feeding or word stacking. People who shared those died, inexplicably. Rumours of a group of powerful physical cultivators, the tribal aspects who protected the Yin Eclipse peoples’ heritage from outsiders was…

He shook his head and forced his mind to stop deliberately wandering away from the problem at hand. There were two explosions behind him and another pall of the vapour swirled over the ridge followed by a spark of green-

Pressing his face into the sand, he groaned in pain as the heat seared the beach. It didn’t quite turn the sand to glass, but it made it crinkle and smoke oddly. There was still no qi in any of the attacks either.

-Really, the water is the only way, his mind supplied.

-Yes, thanks, I know that already! He almost snapped back, barely remembering that speaking out loud or even breathing right now would be very bad.

And there seemed no way out above water in the cavern, anyway. So, as his mind had rather annoyingly reminded him, all that was left was to risk the waters again. To try to dive through to the next cavern.

He scrambled the few metres in the smoking ruin of the beach and rolled into the water, wincing at the cold. Here it was tolerable so long as you were fit and well. Then again, at this point, he felt he was neither of those. It also sapped your energy fast. Maybe a hundred times faster than normal swimming. He swam as swiftly as he dared. Behind him, there was the worrying *thwack* and *splash* of the exploding corrosive rock and hook bat combo again.

It took far longer than he would have liked to find an opening where there was enough algru to make it likely that there was a periodic current flowing. Only the mutated algae and a few really formidable crustaceans tended to live in the water this deep. Why there were no fish almost anywhere in the cave systems was a bit of a mystery, really.

-Not one to dwell on now, though.

He grimaced as the algru grasped at him as he swam past its cordon and down the fissure. It was a lot narrower than he would have liked as well. Swimming as close to the top as he could, he was still forced downwards occasionally by tendrils of algru and jutting rocks. Fortunately never to the point where he had to dip into the dark yin water swirling in its own ominous layer a few metres down. It was with a sense of deep relief that he finally emerged into a new cavern, breaking the water surface as slowly as he dared near the cave wall where the water lapped and disturbed the calm enough he might go unnoticed.

It was much the same as the last. Dim, rocky and full of a rather complex combination of cave-dwelling vegetation and fungus. This time, however, the light didn’t come from openings far above and the fires still burning in them, but from a colony of ‘Eldritch Moon Mushrooms’ high on the wall to his left. Those would be avoided.

It was a small colony thankfully, the field it was projecting outwards barely reaching ten metres from what he could see. Where they colonized nothing else, that wasn't a mushroom, would willingly live or survive long if it was already resident. The species’ proclivity towards territory denial and the impenetrable nature of their miasma fields effectively made them the apex predator throughout much of the Yin Eclipse Forbidden Zone as a result.

Nothing else would mess with them, ever, and pretty much anything that got caught in their miasma field died horribly, subsumed into the colony as biomass parasitized for defensive purposes. Large colonies also attracted other unpleasantly exotic mushroom species such as ‘Soul Setting Mushrooms’, ‘Boom ‘Shrooms’ and ‘Dead Man’s Lanterns’ like iron dust to a lightning needle.

The light from this particular bunch was supporting what, at this distance, appeared to be a mix of Soul Setting species based on the variations in their lurid and greasy green-white and purple colours. On the far shoreline, he could also see the glimmering red of ‘Blood Worm Fungus’ as well.

-So that way was out, he quietly judged.

-In fact, the whole cavern is probably out, his second thoughts added nervously.

He dove again, seeking a continuation of the fissure which had a faintly flowing current now trying to drag him back the way he had come.

It took quite a bit of poking around, but eventually, he found it. A lateral fissure through the bedding plane about twice his height at the base of the far wall of the cavern pool amidst several fields of algru. The stuff was key to navigating underwater according to Juni, so long as you didn’t actually swim into it. The other oddity was a flat rectangular section of carved wall. Swimming close to it he was surprised to see that it had a strange motif around the edge. Flowering vines of some description interspersed with what appeared to be plum blossoms and the occasional small animal. Rabbits, Squirrels, Mice, Ferrets and other weirder, less obvious things were visible. The ferrets in particular struck him as somewhat odd – as far as he knew they were only endemic to the northern part of the Easten Continent.

The knowledge of the name itself came from an ancient record in a ruin near South Grove Town. A series of carvings had been unearthed there detailing a whole bunch of mysterious flora and fauna along with text in a variant of ancient 'Easten'. It was a treasure of the Teng School now and hidden away, but some discerning scholar had apparently seen it before that point and shared much of its contents with the Azure Astral Authority Hunter Bureau.

His pondering was cut short as he finally ran out of air. Rather than burn qi or precious pills to sustain his presence, he went back to the surface and cycled his physical cultivation mantra a few times before diving again.

Returning to the stele, he tried to make sense of the characters. They were odd. Familiar yet not. He had seen things like them in the old shrine out in the family village, only unveiled for special circumstances like when he entered it for his name day. He touched it carefully. But it seemed just to be graven stone. It was just before he removed his hand that a sense of information suddenly entered his mind. Not words, so much as sensations and instinctual guidance.

‘Up and right is a Big Danger.’

‘Up and beyond cavern is forbidden path, closed off.’

‘Across two caverns and through fissure west is path to depths, huge danger.’

‘Path through fissure to left, danger but less.’

Taking his hand away, he pondered that. The information imparted seemed to match the four bits of text. As he watches, the edges of the stele shifted faintly and arrows leading from each text showed ‘directions’ for a short moment before fading away. So back the way he came was really dangerous, and the path ahead was also dangerous but less seemed to be the takeaway.

Before he went down that fissure though, he would have to make some safeguards. He carried two large clay jars for water in his spatial storage, both now painfully devoid of anything much of worth beyond the paltry medicines, pills, some food and water. –Oh, and some miscellaneous Five Star herbs they had gathered.

Some reshuffling got most of the valuable bits re-stored in his storage talisman in other containers that wouldn’t confuse him later on and an empty clay jar. Then he got a square of oiled cloth and covered the jar. It was hard work to lift it out of the water and flip it over. It was large enough that he could probably curl up inside it, but that wasn’t the point. The point was air. Once he set it on the water surface holding it level, he sent it back into his storage. He dropped under the water and then extracted the jar. This was the tricky bit.

It appeared upside down over his head. With a mental sigh, he found he was able to peel back the edge of the cloth.

-As expected, not level, he thought with a resigned sigh.

He sent it back into the storage and grimaced. He didn’t do this very often. It was something Old Ling and a few of the Beast Cadre had taught them. Originally it was a technique used by mortals fishing for clams and other such things. In this context, however, with the aid of a storage talisman, it became a surprisingly low maintenance solution to dealing with long stretches of underwater swimming.

-Anyway, he stared at the jar for a few minutes before realising what he was missing. Weights to provide it with ballast.

In the end, he took four of the smaller clay jars with stoppers and dove down to the underwater floor and filled them to the brim with sand before corking them shut. Returning to the surface, it took a few moments to tie them to the edge with some strips of plaited Luss fibre. He then tried again to summon the jar underwater. This time it sat properly after a little adjustment of the jars. He was able to pull aside the cover and stick his head inside to get air. Pull it back out and seal it over. Then put it back in his storage without losing any precious air. Now that was sorted he considered the directions again. Best to check how close he was to the purported ‘death’ exit.

He squinted right but could see nothing but shadows beneath the water. He cautiously moved that direction along the wall and finally saw a hole in the floor. An eight sided depression. Each wall was about 30 metres long. A lower level was visible, with some ruined accoutrements in the silt and a square shaft dropping into the gloom – that was a hard nope.

Returning to the surface, he swam back to the cavern edge. The cold was starting to seep in again, forcing him to eat another soul-warming pill. He was down to two of those now, which wasn’t great.

Diving once more, he swam into the fissure. Stairs snaked below him as it descended and ascended intermittently for several hundred metres. It took a while longer before he realised he was now well above the level of the cavern he had just been in and yet the fissure was still flooded from floor to ceiling without anything more than a small current pushing against him. He hadn’t thought the pressure differential was that strong. The puzzle at least gave him something to occupy the more independently minded parts of his mental space, still given unnatural impetus from the qi poisoning born of the caverns far behind him. In the end, he guessed it was due to either a unique property of the rocks or maybe a feature of the atmosphere elsewhere in the cave system he had made his way out of.

Finally, he found openness again in the water. This cavern was completely flooded. Taking his bearings, he cursed a little inside and swam upwards until he found the cavern roof, searching its contours as he went for pockets of air or fissures. There were none, of course, but he did see fields of algru glimmering to the left on the ceiling. Turning that direction he eventually found the vertical plane of the wall and another fissure, this one splitting the bedding plane from floor to ceiling.

There was a rectangular flat bit on the wall near the cavern floor but he doubted he had the stamina to dive, read it and then swim on through. The waters below him were darker and swirled as if with a mind of their own. ‘Dark water qi’. Going down would be almost as arduous as the entire swim so far, never mind coming up.

Nine minutes he reckoned he had been holding his breath until now, cycling his physique scripture as he swam. It helped a bit, catalysing the qi in his blood to supplement the vital minute yang aspects of the air that breathing would otherwise provide to keep his body active. This passage was also long, well the cavern was long and snaking…

When he spotted glimmering light on the surface at the thirteen-minute mark, he couldn’t help but given a mental exhalation as he swam toward it.

Ghosting under the surface towards the cavern edge, he took care not to break the surface. It wouldn’t do to get plucked from the water like a fish by some predator above.

The cavern wasn’t big, vertically at least. Tangled masses of stalagmites and stalactites, the ubiquitous fungi and algru, also algae, were visible in every direction until the gloom swallowed the sight. Much of the visibility that was afforded came from what appeared to be a mineral vein in the ceiling that swept across the cavern and vanished down through the floor.

The vertical fault line in the rock above seemed at odds with what he had observed so far in the caverns, which were largely rectilinear and had sheer planes along, edges and joining fissures. To see one in the roof suggested a different bedding plane entirely. So either there was a ridge overhead, or he was under one of the mountains. It would be awkward if he was going under Thunder Crest rather than away from it.

Arriving at the wide area of shallows near the cavern wall where there was a quasi-shoreline, he pulled himself slowly out of the water and gasped, feeling woozy. For a few panic-ridden seconds it felt like all his blood was being pulled up through his body and out the top of his head. Shocked, he fell back into the water as his nervous system gave out. Wincing at the splash he had just made, he realised the feeling of nausea and having his stomach pulled up through his ears was subsiding again as he sank down, the current pushing him away.

Slowly breaking surface again, he stared up at the ceiling expecting some weird mushroom. There was only the mineral vein that arced around above the water. He looked around carefully to see what else could be causing something so dangerous. The stalagmites flowed upward as well, he noted. That wasn’t odd…

“…”

-No, wait… Their layering was flowing upwards?

He stared at the nearest ones suspiciously. Didn’t they normally form via dripping water from the ceiling of caves? This kind of thing was taught in the scholarly pavilion in South Herb Picking, and also in the myriad volumes on weird stuff that the Hunter Pavilion demanded you read and be tested on before star upgrades. Anything about the landscape might kill you after all, so the theory was you’d fate-thrashed better learn to read it as fluently as your dinner menu, or your household accounts, otherwise it would cheat you like a miserly merchant at every turn.

-That was also why Ha Yun and his ilk had been so useless even for three and four-star hunters, his mind supplied as a stress-related aside.

Odd that Ha Yun had resurfaced in his mind again, he thought, as he made his way around the cavern under the water. The Ha family didn’t care for the mandatory education and had forced Old Ling to waive as much as they could.

-And what he couldn’t they had been fairly reluctant scholars of. After all their goal was to learn spiritual cultivation and go join a school not die young in a gully because you tripped over a god bewitching jasmine… Or get iced by a ‘meek’ Yin Ginseng for that matter, his subconscious added.

Stopping under the water he focused for a short moment on ‘Iron’, clearly whatever had just happened had exacerbated the lingering remnants of toxic qi in his system. No doubt aided by the residue from all the pills and medicinal compounds he had eaten… and the forbidden pill.

He looked uneasily around and swam upwards to the surface… above the floor level?

The beach was below him about thirty metres to his left… and his head was starting to feel… heavy?

-Ah. Of course, he grimaced, understanding what was going on now.

The stalagmite islands didn’t extend to this part of the cavern for some reason. Was the water too deep? They were dimly visible through the rippling water in the shallows.

Dropping back under the water, he considered matters. It was clearly the mineral vein that was overhead, causing the issue somehow. Did it draw qi from the surroundings to refine? The current was also still flowing against him slightly. So it wasn’t that the ore vein was pulling water out of this level. But nowhere near as strong as on the other side of the vein. It was just acting like a dam, only letting a minute amount through. Was that why the water was higher in this part of the cave system?

He swam on, eating another soul-warming pill to forestall the insidious water qi poisoning he was gradually accruing. Eventually, the cavern gave way to another, again entirely flooded with no obvious exit point. Sighing, he swam on again.

It was almost 19 minutes this time before he found another stele.

This one seemed to suggest ‘Danger: Death. Right >, Central Level. Straight On.’ That was fairly easy, except there was no way to tell in the gloom—

-Oh.

This time the stele gave his mind a clear nudge that that way was right. He looked along the cavern wall and found what it considered straight on. The stairs that soon emerged below him as he swam also helped guide his path somewhat as well. More concerning was the rising chill within the water as he swam on. The gloom was also becoming more oppressive. The pressure of the water and the echoing sensations that passed through it were definitely starting to get to him. A combination of the overall ambience, the imbalance between yin qi in his body and out and fighting against the poor visibility, all working towards the same goal. He had been swimming on and off for nearly 40 minutes with few breaks.

Pushing himself dangerously, he managed to prolong eating his last soul-warming pill until he had been swimming for almost 70 minutes. He had to eat a fasting pill as well, in order to keep over exchanging his vitality a bit longer. There were a few other lesser pills left that could help a bit with the poisoning, but none were suited to water qi, dark qi or cold yin qi.

He was going to need to breathe again in the next twenty minutes as well. The jar still had a lot of mileage, but it wasn’t going to last forever. The fabric covering it was already sucked half inside when he summoned it last. In better circumstances, it would last a lot longer, but he was also having to use it to exhale Yin poison from his body via his lungs. Soon what remained in there would be dangerously concentrated, even for him.

Outside this underworld, a Qi Condensation or Physical Foundation cultivator could swim in the ocean as fast as a mortal could run flat out. Breath was the only limiting factor, but even then one shallow breath could last you almost an hour and a lung full of air would last you several. With Qi Replenishment pills you could extend that even further. This was why Juni was better at exploring these underwater worlds. Her dantian combined with the benefits of a mantra helping to extend her energy reserves exponentially compared to what he was currently working with. Even with his peak Physical Foundation, he was barely able to hang on as he passed the 90-minute mark.

The next place he could surface, some ten minutes later, finally made him pause for consideration. It was a large shallow cavern that contained another bit of that ore that pulled all moisture to it and exchanged it with a bubble of air. The outer edges of the last one were barely tolerable, but he still tested it cautiously, risking a hand to see what the effect would be of entering the edges. It seemed the same as the last, so he took the opportunity to refill his air reserve.

While he waited for the qi vapours inside it to dissipate, he considered the merits of getting a ‘Bag of Containment’ or a ‘Jar of Reservation’. Those were hideously expensive for the relative use they provided to someone of his realm under normal circumstances. But, and this was rather critical here, even the most basic one could hold a vast reserve of a single non-solid material, including air. Among their current group, only Lin Ling had a Jar of Reservation as far as he was aware. A gift from someone in Blue Water City.

Grandmaster Li was probably the person to ask. His wife was a military veteran who retired to the town after doing her military service with the duke as he recalled. Someone like that was bound to know someone who would understand what he needed for a scenario like this. Even then, it would likely cost dozens of eight or nine-star herbs to convince someone with the skills to make one. That said, it would be worth it just to forestall the problems he was starting to encounter here.

Time slowly blurred as he made his way through cave after cave.

Soon he also started encountering migratory algru. Drifts in the water that were somewhere between a plant mass and a jellyfish, lurking along the boundary between the dark yin waters in the depths of these flooded worlds and the somewhat more ‘normal’ water. After evading the third such clump, drifting like a spectral net in the water currents he was tracking through the gloom, he found himself thinking he really shouldn’t be that deep. Then again, depth was relative to the surface, and he had almost no way of knowing which direction this was really leading him down here. The surface could be a few hundred metres above or a mile above.

He found himself wishing he still had the divination talisman. That might have allowed him to really get somewhere. Oh well. It had already saved his life. He couldn’t ask for more than that, really.

As he moved through this ever darker and more oppressive underwater world, he encountered a few of the other weirder bits of subterranean water fauna. The bed of ‘Lash Limpets’ was a particular lowlight there. About the size of a half melon, with a hole in the top, they camouflaged to the rocks almost flawlessly. Mostly they just filtered qi from the water and were essentially harmless, but their defence mechanism was to launch venomous spines from the openings across their shell. With their algru-looking tendrils, they could also detect predators from metres away, even down here. So he took two spines to the leg when he swam near one of their beds before he was even sure what it was that was hitting him.

Their venom was a mild paralytic to a physical cultivator, lethal to mortals and probably very nasty to spiritual cultivators as well if they didn’t train their body somehow. Their spines also repelled qi, so blocking them with qi was almost impossible. Fortunately, his mantra was very good at that kind of detoxification and he was only hit twice.

The ‘Myriad Shell Crabs’ had been a nice surprise at least. He managed to snag six of the basically harmless little beasts and put them in a jar in his pack with an aquatic spirit herb for sustenance. They made excellent pets and were almost at the bottom of the ecosystem in here. He only found the ones he did while seeking a way around a particularly vexing and extensive algru field that seemed to be a major mutate with at least three different elements and also contained several ‘Blue Yin Razor Clams’. Passing through that was a hard nope, the clams being a ten-star active threat and seriously aggressive. The crabs on the other hand were highly valued by anyone who wanted to set up some kind of water cultivation spring with gentle elemental aspects. Setting them to live in a pond basically guaranteed it some seriously auspicious spirituality for as long as the colony endured.

There was no stele obvious beyond the first few as he had progressed through the caverns. Presumably, they were down on the cavern floors, lost somewhere in the depths below. He had no idea how deep those later caverns were and at the time had had no inclination to find out. It hadn't helped anyways that they stepped both up and down at random. When he had been forced to go down, he had always stayed as close to the top as possible, even backtracking once to take an alternate route when the water below that obscured an exit became qi plateaued. Just entering for a few minutes would have been as draining as all the previous days’ exertions.

The waters finally ended in a series of smaller rising caverns and he was beyond glad to be done with it. The cold and dark aspected yin qi had been so oppressive in the last few caverns prior to that point that his skin started to dissolve on contact with the water as he swam through it. He expended all of his remaining resistance medicines and much of his internal qi reserves to push through it. Forcing all of his external meridians as much as he dared to circulate qi out to his extremities to protect his hands and feet, eyes, ears, etc...

He sat on the shoreline, taking in the inky darkness and the echoes of water.

The first thing to notice was the humidity in the air. It was noticeably hotter here, which spoke to the depth of rock overhead. It was hot and humid enough to be truly unpleasant, even when compared to the cloud forest above.

The second thing that soon became apparent was that the suppression felt heavier outside the water than in it. That was a worrying first he had never experienced before. After giving it some consideration he supposed it was because the qi in the air of the caves was thinner, or different somehow – or maybe the water somehow spread it around equally and resisted the devouring and suppressing properties of the rock.

What was certain was that he was presenting proper symptoms of meridian damage at last. He had, however, been forcing qi through his ocular, vascular and respiratory meridians for at least two days now.

-Keeping that in mind the chill, sluggish feeling settling around my lungs and nose and the headache that coming with it is probably the least I should expect, he thought wryly.

Idle thoughts on this vein kept him going for about half a day while he recuperated quietly in the humid darkness. The scar on his chest where the talisman had exploded had started to tug at him as well. On the trip through the underwater realm, he had thought it down to residual damage from the talisman's weird fire. By the final few caverns, he was just an entire collection of different types of pain wearing the skin of Han Shu in any event.

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-When you put it in the context of our trip so far, that nagging feeling is rightly suspicious, a voice murmured in the back of his head.

“Oh for fates sakes,” he groaned and got the mantra on that task again.

Sadly, it wasn’t wrong. In the comparative calm of this cavern, and in spite of the occasional interjections from his pressured psyche, he was starting to think there was more to it. Something else had seemingly happened when the talisman exploded. Setting aside that it shouldn’t have exploded like that, his memory of the moments both before and after it were very weird. Concerningly, his mantra also kept trying to poke at them when he set it to suppressing deviations in his psyche. Clearly, it currently was and maybe always had been subtly pulling him in this direction faintly.

Reviewing his trip through the gloom, it did feel like it had been guided subtly since he encountered the first stele. Something about that also felt right in a way that was oddly inexplicable, yet comforting at the same time. Then again, he wondered if he should be more sceptical. The number of things with mendacious or downright maleficent intent down here far outstripped anything that was likely to be a friend. In fact, apart from a few odd semi-sentient spirit plants and that weird squirrel – or squirrels…

His thoughts lingered on that for a moment. It was never clear if there was really just one. That there might be a colony of immortal earth shifting squirrels that had a fascination with stealing food pills in these mountains was not even in the top 20 most insane things to be found out here if anyone actually cared to compile a comprehensive list.

Shaking his head, he dragged his thought process back from that tangential thought. Then again, if a squirrel showed up right now, he would probably hug it and call it grandfather if it got him out of here.

-Anyway, he considered glumly, checking his surroundings again. Most things in this land both above and below tend to want nothing more than to take most of your skin away with them as a gift bag if you actually try to engage with them on any serious level.

Yes… squirrel or squirrels. They were gladly accepted in that context. Probably he was thinking about them as much because any kind of greenery or the open sky would be lovely at this point.

…

In the end, he did several more cycles of his physical cultivation. Keeping at it until he was totally certain he had gotten on top of the qi poisoning and meridian strain from the long dive. Subsequently, it was almost a day before he moved on from that shoreline and the small fissure cave he was currently in.

This time he endeavoured to pay more attention to the dull throbbing of the burn scar on his chest. However, as if to spite his sudden interest, it didn’t so much as shift beyond painful twinges in his chest muscles as he made his way through the caverns. And, it had to be said, these caverns were hard work. Most were vertical fissures, formed within the sheer planes of the underlying rock and then opened out further by periodic inundation by qi rich waters. He could see the tell-tale wear and tear of water passage in quite a few places. In the rounded edges, the treacherous holes, usually containing algru and the drifts of sand and rounded pebbles cascading down through caverns.

Exacerbating this, there wasn’t an un-slanted rock in the place, with hidden chasms and loose scree at every turn. The fact that the fungi were back, and bringing their peculiar brand of passive vengeance with them, was just flavour to the overall hostility the environment was presenting. The lack of ferns or similar types of plants suggested this was a very closed off place. A bit more concerning was the observation of a few species of fungi that had adapted to fill their niche. That suggested that it had been closed off for a very long time. It would truly suck to go all this way only to find himself facing a flat wall and have to backtrack to the water systems and seek another route.

He spent half a day working his way through the system, climbing precariously, avoiding the vegetation as much as the terrain allowed. Most faces had sneaky fields of algru. He had two brushes with them early on, while making his way through a shallow fissure filled with waist-deep water too large to jump safely, that flayed the skin off his legs. After that chastening experience, he got savvy to the tell-tale signs of their growth mats in the rock surfaces.

The particular lowlights, if they could be called that, came in the form of a close encounter with an explosive leaf fungus he didn’t see while moving through some particularly sight obscuring rocks and a patch of ‘Life-Shifting Loam’ in one crevice. The former left him deafened and half-blind for a full hour and made him so dizzy he couldn’t walk for half that again. The latter was hidden in a crevice underneath some shifting sand and probably cost him ten years of longevity before he extricated himself from its vicinity, leaving him to wonder what unfortunate thing had died there with such resentment to form the rare and dangerous phenomenon and not have it absorbed by the rocks. Hopefully, he wouldn’t be forming another such patch somewhere else…

The pitch darkness stubbornly resisted any kind of synthetic darkvision, just to add to his woes. The prevalence of ‘Wick Mushrooms’ in several caverns made the darkvision pills he had, which relied on stable levels of low light, useless. Eventually, he resorted to the much more dangerous strategy of using his mantra to boost his qi enhanced vision. He was also left on more than one occasion, given the number of oblique twists and crevices he had to traverse, wishing he had proper qi based perception like Kun Juni or Lin Ling.

Despite steady, if paranoid progress, most of the rest of that 'day' passed him by without significant events. As an added bonus, if it could be considered as such, the route through the caverns even kept leading him upwards, until he arrived at a broad ledge overlooking a cavern so immense that it probably qualified as a 'subterranean field' rather than a cave. Looking along the edge, he found a few other fissures that led off it, but all had rather unpleasant auras or large fungi colonies, so he had passed them by.

It was with some relief, then, that he finally heard the dull roar of a waterfall through one of the fissures on his right. Flowing water from above suggested a certain degree of vertical access which he could follow upstream and hopefully bypass the gloom of this huge space entirely. As such, it was almost predictable, he felt upon arriving at a vantage point into that fissure, that passage beyond it was blocked off by an expansive colony of Moon Mushrooms. After some fruitless probing of the other fissures, which all ended in Moon Mushroom colonies, he could only return to the edge of the immense cavern he appeared to be on the edge of and consider his options.

It was in searching for a better vantage point to see into its interior that he finally found the holy talisman of almost all independent explorers of the Yin Eclipse Mountains. A proper relict vestige. He hadn’t really counted the stele as such, they seemed to be a bit like the moon runes the beast cadre used outside in their intention and could have been a few tens of thousands of years old or a few hundred for all he knew. Certainly, they were written in what appeared to be crude 'Easten' script, so that suggested they were known to someone outside.

-The Bureau probably has records if you knew where to look, a voice chirped up.

-And what questions to ask.

Rubbing his temples, he considered the vestige that was probably a sign he needed to take another break in any event. He would indeed be checking if…

-No, when.

He shook his head at that.

-No negative thoughts.

The vestige was itself carved out of a large rock outcropping. It took the form of a small tower about three levels high, in a somewhat alien style. All flat angles and battlements.

-It could just be that they didn’t want to be bothered carving roofs, the inner voice added helpfully.

Really, he did need to take a break. He grimaced; no matter how helpful sounding it was, voices in your head, speaking to you were bad.

To either side and in front of the entrance were several stele. The two in the walls were, unfortunately, damaged beyond recognition. In fact, in the gloom, he could make out that the tower's entrance and quite a bit of its exterior also showed evidence of serious damage.

The third, situated nearby, had merely been knocked over. It stated: ‘West Zone [unintelligible] Pagoda Tower [unintelligible]’.

-So not very useful, he reflected, except that this clearly wasn’t a pagoda.

Considering it carefully at a distance, it seemed that whatever had torn it open and blasted bits off it had thoroughly disabled whatever defences the place might have once had. It was clearly by the same influence that carved the stele through the caverns. Inside the ground floor was a large open room, with several branch rooms, a corridor stretching around the outer edge and a stairwell up and down in the middle. The furniture mainly consisted of some smashed tables, chairs and a wall rack in the same stone that the tower was carved from. As his eyes adjusted to the more enclosed gloom of the space he also made out destroyed lamps on the walls, more chairs and a bench.

The floor was littered with smashed stone pots, plates and even a few bits of cutlery. Picking up a nearby knife, it was made of an odd, flat grey material he couldn’t identify. The grain on it made it look almost like fine pottery. It still held an edge, but that edge didn’t so much as scratch any of the stone, so he set it aside for now.

The inner walls were all exquisitely carved with scenes of what appeared to be daily life for this place. Who or whatever had attacked this place had certainly not spared them. Many of them had been attacked, either with scoring or slash marks. Still, they were largely decipherable. The majority depicted men and women in robes with swords and spears, laughing, drinking and fighting. The fighting scenes predominantly focused on what appeared to be four-armed lizards, though other things were also present – bipedal rodent-like creatures, large serpents, a spider thing he never wanted to meet and some sort of scorpion with two tails. One wall had them all kneeling before a robed figure carrying a huge sword with long hair flowing out of the hood. A later scene had them mourning a figure on a pyre who lay there, clasping a similar sword.

He traced the story back and found that a panel in the middle was missing where the wall had been torn down. Stepping through it he found fragments of that scene still visible. Unfortunately, it was impossible to re-arrange any but the smallest pieces. The rock was so dense he could barely shift a piece the size of his fist with both hands. The fragments he did find were all defaced with claw marks, but one of them seemed to show a sword impaling a four-armed figure. Another showed what appeared to be a flame in a bowl? Or a fragment of the cloaked figure. It was hard to tell.

Now that he looked around much of the furniture damage was similar. He also revised his earlier opinion on them being slash marks. The damage seemed more akin to claw marks than anything else. Whatever had done it had even, for some reason, tried to score out parts of the motif on the floor.

There was nothing left in the other side rooms. Everything that could be smashed had been it seemed and what couldn’t be smashed had been defaced. There were chests that were all broken apart, tables and shelves broken. Making his way up to the second floor and it was all more of the same. The rooms here appeared to be bedrooms and a shared living space from what he could see. More carvings of daily life; those depicting men and women hunting in the mountains were largely less destroyed, however one of some kind of battle was so ruined he couldn’t make out more than ‘fighting occurred between robes and armour’. The floor had a similar layout but no outer corridor. Looking at it and comparing the exterior view, it seemed that whoever had made this place had hollowed out the whole rock and shaped the outside accordingly.

In the bedrooms, the only other thing of note were some scattered flat grey stone slates. It seemed like some sort of jade. They accepted qi when he tried to probe one, but nothing much seemed to happen to it. Merely some designs appeared on the surface, similar to the motifs that decorated the room but more geometric, followed shortly after by a strange symbol that ghosted on the surface of the slab but did nothing else. The only other strange property they held was their refusal to go into his storage device. Exploration of a few of the non-bedroom rooms found a few more, and in the end, he was left with a sheaf of seven slabs, that when placed together formed a block about three fingers thick.

He wavered back and forth about taking them with him as he continued to poke carefully around the rooms. Usually, places associated with unjust death acquired a certain kind of qi over time. It was very easy to acquire what the moralists described as 'an evil fate' from disturbing the dead. Only idiots, bandits or the truly desperate would ignore such things and try to steal from mausoleums with intact alignments and such. You did hear of sect tomb lands being raided and robbed by opportunists, but even if sects themselves fell unless the looters were exceptionally powerful the cost wasn’t worth the effort to rob their graves. Certainly not in this land, though he understood it was more common on the central, Imperial Continent. Some sects and schools also apparently used these grounds as trial sites to test their emerging generations.

Keeping this in mind, he felt no such tell-tale oddness here that suggested taking them might be a bad idea. If anything the aura of the place felt diffuse and dispersed, despite the gloom being quite intense, even under his darkvision. So in the end he tied them up and put them in his pack.

Making his way up to the third, presumed top level, he was surprised to see a set of stairs going up still further. Confused he looked around. This floor was about the same size as the previous, but with windows. It took looking out of one of them to realise that he had somewhat misjudged the geometry and perspective of the tower with his mantra forced vision. Yes, it had seemed big outside, but he had just gone by the ‘windows’, which were not in fact windows, but carved sections of the rock face about ten times bigger than the windows themselves, which nestled inside them. Thus while the external geometry was on three levels, he was only at the top of the first exterior ‘level’ on this third floor. So not three floors but eight or nine, not counting potential basements.

This floor was the same size as the last, laid out in what seemed to be a gathering hall. There was a large fireplace against one wall. Rooms that led off it were for food preparation and storage he guessed based on the ruined containers and fires. The fireplace still had coal in it. Which was… unexpected? There was also a large pile of it in one of the side rooms.

The fourth and fifth floors were all sealed doors he couldn’t open. Several had been badly clawed, but it seemed they had resisted whatever had stormed the tower.

The sixth held a hall, what appeared to be a side-complex of rooms with a master bedroom, reception room and maybe living room. There was also a bath or pool cut into the floor. It gave him a sense of danger and it seemed to absorb all qi that went near it like some kind of hole in the world when he looked at it with his qi sense. When he stopped reinforcing his vision with qi and looked at it again to try to get a better sense of what it might be he saw why.

The pool dimly lit the room, casting weird shadows that didn’t quite match the geometry. The liquid within was millpond still. Within it were the bones of what looked to be at least thirty skeletons. They filled the three-by-threemetre octagonal pool up to just below the liquid's surface.

The eerie shadows were by no means the weirdest thing either. The bones themselves were nothing short of bizarre. Rather than appearing bleached or rotted, they were varicoloured hues; mixing reds, blues and greens, silver and even gold. Many had designs on them. Patterns like moon runes and symbols like those on the stele he couldn’t decipher. Some even had motif-like patterns, many unrecognisable but some reminded him of clouds, lightning bolts, vines or waves.

This room confirmed in his mind that while he had been able to safely take the slabs below, taking stuff from ‘here’ would be a very bad idea. His people had careful views about the dead. Such things as the stele were not usually of memorial importance, but places of death like this were to be respected and avoided lest you incur ill intent. Not the ‘fate’ of the moralists from the central continent who wielded their doctrine as a club. But something more ephemeral. Taking of the dead who were not willing brought the attention of the dead in ways the perpetrator would be equally unwilling to experience.

He sat quietly by the pool and recited his mantra out loud as a gesture of respect to the dead before speaking his born name and the name of his family’s lineage to them as way of apology for intruding on their place of final rest. As a final act, he bowed to the four directions and offered a prayer that their souls would find peace, before quietly departing, leaving the rest of the rooms on this side of the tower untouched.

The other side was much less… spectacular, mercifully. A series of rooms that looked like offices with some tables, chairs and smashed shelves. The few grey slates here were also broken, split cleanly across their midsections.

The carvings were of landscapes and skies. Remarkably lifelike for all that they were graven from stone. When he ran his hand across one he realised that they were in fact inlaid in many different kinds of stone, the grains carefully matched and coordinated to give the impression to a viewer of a single entity. In the light, they would certainly be colourful and exuberant expressions of the scenes they portrayed. The artisans who made them had been remarkable by his personal estimation. Each carving touched something fundamental. A joy of beauty, friendship, companions, moments of respite, venerating your elders, honour in war, truth in learning. All the classical ‘moments’ and ‘aspects’ were represented on the carvings throughout the tower.

The final floor held a single room right at the peak of the tower. Promontories ran off to the outcroppings, which held smaller towers that were single rooms one floor higher. Probably intended as defence points for casting arts from or signalling throughout the cavern. Two were smashed and precarious enough he didn’t bother investigating them. It would be a long fall down and if bits of them fell on him, he would be dead. The third contained nothing of note beyond a table, some pots, a ruined lamp carved from stone and a flipped over chair too heavy for him to move.

He mused on the weight of the furniture as he made his way down. It made sense that it was carved from the sturdy rock, but its weight suggested that either the occupants of this place had all been well above him in physical strength or cultivation realm… or that the suppression of this place was somehow less, however long ago this place was manned. The bones held in the pool were absolutely not those of normal people, although they did appear to be of their race. Looking at them, with their glittering metallic hues and swirling patterns, he was reminded of the tales regarding the holy remains of famous sages who, upon death, left their bones to their clan or students. Those were frequently held to have auspicious properties or contain traces of Dao Comprehensions. Spirit Beast bones from monsters who had started to comprehend the ‘laws of the world’ were equally miraculous and much sought after.

Returning to the ground floor, he considered the stairway down. Aside from the grave pond, as he decided he would call it, there had been nothing remotely dangerous here. Not that that meant the place still might not somehow be a death-trap in some hitherto unforeseen way. He was only in his early twenties but he was hardly inexperienced in places that pretended to be normal, yet were not.

After the death of all West Flower Picking Town’s previous herb hunters at or above the rank of nine stars in the Three Schools Conflict, and the evisceration of the province’s wider population of high ranked hunters, the Hunter Bureau had had to practically rebuild their entire roster in the west and south regions around Yin Eclipse.

Today, Kun Juni was probably the most experienced hunter still in the junior ranks of their local pavilion. Himself, Arai and Sana were the highest-ranked individuals of that new generation. Ren, the Mu brothers and Lin were all close behind in many respects but there was still a clear gap in capability between them and an even bigger gulf after that, where there were only maybe a hundred mid-ranked hunters and around a thousand one to three star ranked recruits in the various villages around West Flower Picking, many of which were wracked by political issues and slowly being taken over by clans and other influences.

The situation was better elsewhere, especially in places like South Grove, where the Teng School was much more supportive of their local pavilion compared to the current Town Master of West Flower Picking town… or the Blue Gate School who backed him.

Sighing, he gathered his thoughts. The glooming dark here seemed to make it easier to let them drift. That was part of its danger. He knew that, both from the records and all the time in the western reaches of the shadow forest. A place where the darkness and gloom was a feature as dangerous as the qi suppression was in the valleys themselves.

Despite his wariness upon first descending, the first basement turned out to be just as boring as everything above. A series of storerooms and a large hall. There were even mannequins, smashed and cast into one corner.

He went over to look at them and felt his skin abruptly go clammy. The darkness suddenly felt that bit deeper, the aura of this place a touch more like a mausoleum.

Not mannequins, corpses. Petrified, smashed corpses.

Only when he was certain that there was nothing untoward other than… well… the pile of probably five smashed corpse statues swept to the back wall, did he turn his attention back to them properly.

Under the lines of his qi vision, he could see that most of the bodies had been smashed apart, or maybe cut apart in order to get their bones. One looked like it had been melted on the back for just that purpose, while on two others the faces were disturbingly deformed, as if…

He turned one over, warily, and yes, the skull was entirely missing somehow.

Looking around, that revelation gave new meaning to what was assuredly a grave of terrible tragedy. There were only 4 or 5 fallen here, and many more bones in the pond above. Looking back around, the battle had been fierce. Even here. He had grown so used to the base level of ruin in this place that he stopped paying attention to it, but here he could see, as he moved around inspecting the walls and floor, evidence of corrosion, fire and explosions. Slashes, what looked like genuine sword cuts that bit deep into walls? Claw marks all over everything. At least two different sets now that he looked even more closely. The sword cuts seemed newer than a lot of the original battle damage.

There were none of the dead attackers, but he supposed it was unlikely the victors left their dead. Unbidden, he finally remembered where he had seen a description of four-armed lizards before. The creatures that attacked the previous Duke’s expedition during the Three Schools Conflict. That raised another bunch of awkward questions in his mind, starting with: ‘If those lizards are that old that they show up in carvings in this place, how old is this place?’ closely followed by; ‘and why don’t we know more about those lizards given how strong they were purported to be?’

-More than them is likely down here and in possession of claws, another little voice in his head added surreptitiously.

The second basement, down the stairs at the end of the ruined hall, was another large space with orderly offshoot rooms and a few corridors sealed off by collapse with a large hole in the ceiling of the central room. Investigating it carefully, as there were several fungi blooms on the rubble around it, it was apparent that the hole originated from the slab falling off the cave roof. It had punched into the ground, opening up the basement. The rubble was mostly comprised of a combination of roof-fall and places where the bedrock itself had been being broken up some time previous.

Thinking about the damage up above, he went back and checked them again, curiously. Indeed, the damage seemed to be pushing inwards from the second basement. The doors were all ruined from that side. Presumably, the falling of the slab had provided a weak point enabling opportunistic attackers to storm the tower via the basement before breaking open the entrance shortly afterwards.

Returning to the basement levels, he noted that there was one level below this. He made his way down and found the second shock of this place after the pool. On the wall was propped one of the larger quarried fragments of the stone that had caved in the second layer. Upon it, written with what looked like sword strokes in the elegant calligraphy of the Authority Script of the central continent, was;

'I, Mu Shansu, Founder of the Heavenly Dawn Sect, leave this message as our final testament.

We entered here at the Command of Azure Tyrant Heavenly Emperor.

All we have found here is unsleeping death. A terror unbound from the aeonspan that gnaws on the bones of worlds.

It has sealed all the ways and the Eyes of Heaven are blinded by darkness and betrayal.

We will make our stand in this place. Its people fell with honour an aeonspan past when the heavens turned and a new fate became law. We will join them before the hour is out.'

There was a slight gap at that point, a long score underneath, as if whoever had carved it had made a decisive attempt to split that upper section from what followed below it.

'I am the last of our great folly. My students have fallen, my beloved consumed by the darkness, my sworn companions perish even now in battle above so that I may write these words to immortalize our Fate.

To you, future hero who reads our testament—Tell my 9 generations that the Blue Morality Cult is a blight upon our heavens and will bring about our doom.

I will fall here, among these heroes of another sky.

May our last breaths be worthy of their memory.

Ha Tianji, Ju Tianji, Ruo Tian, Lu Shang, Tang Biyu, Han Lian, Shu Liang, Mu Shansu.'

Below that, in a much less florid style, had been scored a final, brutal statement.

'Kong Din Hao ~ I curse you. You and all your line.'

Those words made his soul shake with fear and reverence. Even though it was certainly ancient, such a declaration carried a terrifying sense of resolve within it.

Looking around, he could see the traces of that last stand clearly now. The room itself was marred with sword cuts that bit deep into the stone. On one wall was a shadowed outline of a 4 armed creature with a long head imprinted for all eternity as a ghost in the stone. Was that one of what the soul-shaking declaration called a ‘horror unbound from the aeonspan’ – whatever that meant?

-It could be related to what killed the original occupants, his mental commentary added.

The rooms on the left were utterly ruined, torn to pieces and warped. The centre of the main hall had a crater-like indentation, the stone pushed out of the way somehow. In the ruins of that crater sat a sword, a uniform dull black in colour with a broad blade just over a metre long and a handle that suggested it could be wielded with one hand or two. It looked remarkably plain, all things considered. He skirted it cautiously, not about to risk anything about it for now.

The rooms at the far end were also seared beyond recognition. Returning to the main hall, he offered a silent prayer to the sword and the stele and committed the words to memory. He bowed three times to honour this forgotten founder of a presumably grand sect and his companions who had been powerful enough to enter here at the command of an Emperor before starting to head back up the stairs.

“Boy…”

The kindly old voice whispered as if it were right behind him.

Frozen mid-step, he turned slowly, trying not to panic. In contravention of everything he wanted to see currently, sitting in front of the sword was a shadow. That was the only way to describe it. It didn’t feel ominous as such but it twisted space slightly.

“It is rare to see a child with such respect for their elders, even those unknown and forgotten to the world above…”

Various disparate thoughts rolled through his mind all at once. Was this the ‘unbound horror’, trying to trick him? The artefact spirit of the sword? If it was an ancient artefact, it might have one… or was it the ghost of the man who wrote the stele…

-Better to be polite at least. That way if it does kill me, maybe the fates will seek justice for its inappropriate greeting, a worried voice in his head suggested.

“…”

Part of him wanted to yell at it to go away, but most of him agreed that yes, politeness was probably the best defence against potentially unspeakable power.

“Erm…” fighting back a gulp and realising that his throat was suddenly awfully dry, he bowed and replied. “Sir Revered Ancestor of Great Renown, it is right that we honour places of death like this. To forget them is to forget the sacrifice of our past generations, and we would be less for it.”

The shadow grew a bit more real. It seemed to be a simple old man with a thin beard and drooping eyebrows. He wore tattered battle armour in a remarkably utilitarian style – for a presumed sect founder – and had two broad bladed swords in scabbards at his side.

The old man chuckled and stroked his beard. “So respectful for one so young. Truly a great seedling. And to be this far in at your age and at your realm. By your address, are you one of the Yin Eclipse People?"

“Yes, Honoured Spirit,” he replied, trying to calculate how many seconds it would take him to flee here at the slightest sign of something untoward.

-Not that that will help much, his now properly established mental commentator added.

Talk about stress bringing unfortunate complications. He grimaced inwardly.

“So cautious,” the old man sighed. “I cannot blame you. This place twists everything and the darkness…

“The darkness hides many things.”

He waited, and the old man continued after a considered pause, gesturing to the stele behind him. “I am just an echo of a lingering hope – perhaps I am held here because my end was unresolved... or perhaps my calligraphy was so atrocious that Heaven considered it unreadable and took pity, giving me a chance be remembered.”

The old ghost looked a bit sad and shook his head wryly.

“I don’t think the calligraphy is that bad? It’s very striking…” His mental voice managed to speak on his behalf even as the rest of him grabbed it around the neck and dragged it into darkness, cursing with regrets.

The old ghost, if that was what it truly was, didn’t seem perturbed by his comment. Rather it threw back its head and howled in laughter, pounding his thigh.

“Do you hear that, you old cynics?! This young lad says my calligraphy is ‘very striking’ and ‘not that bad’ –this is the soul of a real critic! A real critic! You hear me, you Heaven Cursed Old Thieves of Hope!”

At that last utterance, he flinched and retreated a few steps, tripping on the lowest step and sitting down. However, the expected fury from on high for cursing ‘Tian’ didn’t arrive.

“Levity is a gift the sages cannot grant,” the old man said wryly. “I see in your eyes you have touched something ancient in this place, even if it eludes your understanding now… and you have found this old man’s tomb.”

The ghost stared around at the hall before sighing softly.

“I would ask a boon of you, Young Benefactor. A great thing, perhaps, or maybe it is a simple thing. Perhaps whether you will agree depends on how weighty your morality really is….”

Before he could collect himself and flee, the old ghost bowed down. “Please, Young Benefactor, take our names from this place and light an incense for each of us. Write our names upon a stone and place it in a quiet field someplace where the common folk pass by– where sun shines, and rain falls, the Land sings and the Heavens smile.”

Frozen, he blinked twice at the bowing figure. He had been expecting quite a few things at this point, that the old man would ask him to carry him out, or swear vengeance for his disciples, or just try to seize his soul…

But for this…?

He didn’t know whether to laugh, cry or bow himself.

“Hah,” The old man sat up and gave a wry laugh.

“Once I might have held your actions discourteous, but you are alive and I am just a fragment of intent, preserved here as a dying wish, or a lingering hope. I have seen this place. And the horror it can wield. It is a place of death and trial. A terrible trap to snare Sages and crush Conquerors. I cannot blame your fear or caution. It has kept you alive in these deeps somehow. What influence do you belong to, Young Benefactor?”

“Err…” he pondered a moment, “I am a member of the Hunters House in West Flower Picking Town. I guess by that I work to the Hunter Bureau?”

“Hooo…” the old man whistled. “Truly?”

“I know not of this ‘West Flower Picking Town’, but who knows how long has passed since our deaths. Certainly, several members of that Bureau of the Azure Astral Authority entered here with us. All were low of realm but high of worth, masters of this landscape where the power we claw from Heaven means little in the face of… well this…”

The old ghost gestured around and the ruin, but perhaps he also meant more generally.

“I must admit I was also less to them than I should have been, but they kept us alive long beyond what we deserved and fought to the end.”

Staring up at the ceiling, the old ghost looked distant for a moment, and… sad.

“Lu Shang… their leader, survived to the end and stood with us against that darkness. Though he was barely a [Primordial Spirit] Cultivator he fought here and fell for our folly so I can only consider him and his brothers and sisters who guided our path, my companions, as true as any sworn to me.”

He tried not to look nervous even as he phrased the next question of sorts. “The pool upstairs…?”

“—Does it contain our bones?” the old ghost shook his head.

“No. it was here when we arrived. We found other such places like this tower in the caverns as we explored, although none quite so intact. Most appeared merely abandoned. But others, like this place, were cracked open. The bones are precious in and of themselves. Perhaps they would cause a storm among the septs and clans were they to emerge above…"

With a start, he closed his mouth, which he realised had been hanging open. Ignoring his surprised reaction, the old ghost just looked wistful and continued with his explanation.

“Thankfully, by the Blessing of Heaven, such a desecration is impossible. The water in that pool is a thing of the supreme cosmos. A treasure that far exceeds the worth of the bones within it. I think none in the world as I knew it could safely remove it as it is now. Not even that old ancestor of the Shu, or the Dun brat who left under the skirts of the Kong Sages.

“While it is probably safe to look at, do not touch it or enter it. For a little child like you, just stepping onto the path, it would be a death beyond dying. Merely the act of touching it would likely sever you from reincarnation and disperse your three spiritual souls directly…”

“…”

The old ghost trailed off... perhaps sensing that he had lost his audience slightly. What the old man was saying was certainly terrifying, however death was death down here, as far as he could see… and the words he was speaking, about the Samsara and ‘Reincarnation’ and ‘Great Sages’ was all completely over his head.

“Young Benefactor, just take an old man’s word,” The old ghost sighed. “It is a thing you should not touch, or covet. As to their realms, I cannot say with certainty. Some were at least as mighty as I and my beloved, others... maybe greater still.”

-Well so far he seems on the level, his own inner ghost piped up again.

It had to be said, the whole experience was currently erring towards being somewhat surreal. It was also rather subverting his expectations of the ‘meeting old ghost’ stories that people sometimes shared when a bit drunk in the teahouses.

-I don’t think we have much of a choice though. He seems okay, but if you refuse… will things get awkward? the voice in his head sounded conflicted.

Oddly enough, he realised he wasn’t actually that conflicted. Or maybe all the dissension was taken by that rather overactive piece of his consciousness. If you took out the; ‘is he trying to steal my soul so should I double guess this’, doublethink simply agreeing to the old man’s request should basically be a good merit without any demerit from what he could see.

He stood and bowed as one might towards a revered ancestor’s talisman towards the old ghost.

“I will take your name, your companions and your students out of this place as you request.”

The old man stared at him for a second, then bowed deeply in response.

Sitting back up, the old man looked… more contented...

After a pause, he looked over his shoulder at the sword. “One last thing, Young Benefactor. This sword behind me. You may take it if you wish."

A flicker of sadness washed over the old ghost's face as if recalling an unhappy memory.

“It was a thing we found in the deep places. Even though we took it unheeded from its place of repose, at the last it consented to fight the thing that assailed us. Because of its mercy at the last, some part of us yet remains. Alas, I had not the fate to truly wield it or...” he trailed off.

“—Aaiii. Such thoughts are why I could not... I guess. Mayhap you do not have fate with it either. But you may ask it and see. At worst, it will just ignore you. In which case you should probably leave it here for a future generation. Perhaps some chance will appear for it.”

With a final sad sigh, the old ghost dissolved into motes of light. As he watched, spellbound, other motes of light drifted in from elsewhere. From behind him, from above, from outside, through the hole in the roof. Twenty-six in total, condensing into a simple stone jade slip. Before his qi vision, the thing looked totally normal, not that that meant much. Names slowly emerged on it one after another, in alphabetical order, some of which he recognised from the testament carved on the wall.

Speaking of that, he looked at the stone itself, wondering if he should take it as well.

-Given the nature of the message and the fact that it’s cursing the Kong Heavenly clan in all likelihood, I’d suggest not? an inner voice supplied nervously.

Rubbing the bridge of his nose and circulating his mantra, he nodded resignedly. There were a few things on there that were a bit troublesome, although the old ghost had made no mention of them. The Betrayal of the Eyes of Heaven and cursing a member of the Kong clan for starters. And also the implication that their trip had led to this eminent group getting planted. It should all be ancient history… but still.

Its presence here also spoke to this place as a memorial in its own right. Furthermore, he didn’t know who this Azure Tyrant Heavenly Emperor was, but the odds were he or she... or their descendants wouldn’t take kindly to its emergence out of this place.

As he considered this, the soul jade finally completed forming the names and dropped to the ground with a faint clink. Cautiously picking it up, he found it was slightly warm in his hand and had a calming effect when he held it. The inner voice sighed and receded without him having to even do anything further with his mantra. It also had a strange interaction with his qi vision. Now that he held it the lines on it wavered faintly and seemed to diffuse outwards subtly.

Curious, he stopped using his qi vision and could only gasp as colour filtered back into his world. The room was bathed in a gentle radiance from the jade. That was the problem with forcing his vision in that way. The mantra changed the way his eyes perceived the energy of the world, so it was no good with stuff he didn’t have some innate comprehension of. That included the ‘Laws’ of Light and exotic qi.

Turning it over in his hands, it seemed that simply holding it was enough to push away the oppressive darkness a little bit. He checked to see if it could be stored and was pleased to find that it could. Walking around like a faintly holy lantern out there was, he was sure, not a smart life choice somehow. On the other hand, even stashed in his talisman, the warmth it had given him still lingered.

-That just leaves the sword, he thought pensively.

He considered the old ghost's words carefully. He hadn’t said it was dangerous exactly. But he had said that if it didn’t react to him he should just leave it here. If he was reading between the lines correctly, that suggested that moving the sword against its wishes was likely dangerous.

Now that he looked at it a little more closely he wasn’t convinced it was made of metal. Instead, it seemed to be a material somewhere between stone and wood and metal, with visual aspects of all three. The wooden handle was bound with rough-textured cloth, presumably so it wouldn’t slip. The hilt was in an odd style, but not so alien that he didn’t think he could use it. It was long and straight, stylistically rather similar to a broad bladed Jian, designed to be wielded with either one or two hands.

Now he thought about it, it was also very similar to the style that the figures in the carvings wielded.

“Nothing ventured, nothing gained,” He muttered out loud.

-And please don’t smite me to death, he added in his own head afterwards.

Cautiously, he reached out and touched the hilt. Slowly grasping the sword, he tried to draw it from where it was stabbed. A faint warmth flowed out from the handle through his body bef—

He was frozen in place as the energy flowed through every part of his body. Such was its strength that even with the 'warmth' that was suffusing him he felt cold to his bones with terror. No part of him was left unexamined, mind or body, even his mantra was considered. The whole process made him feel like he was some weird frog seen on the side of the road.

Just as abruptly it flowed back out of him and into the sword.

Surprised, he sat back as the strength left his legs. The sword came away in his hand without any kind of resistance. He stood up, holding it.

“Er… Thank you for letting me pick you up?” he said out loud, trying not to feel silly that he was talking to a possibly inanimate object.

There was a faint flicker of warmth again, which he guessed counted as acceptance?

Staring at it in his hand, it felt just like a normal sword. There was nothing particularly odd about it, except…

*Shuffft*

He cut experimentally with it and eyed it again suspiciously. It had to be the best balanced and weighted sword he had ever held, possibly also the sharpest.

Curious, he executed the shortest form of a sword art he knew – one of the ones from his family’s shrine.

{Swallow Swoops over Water}

The move flowed like water, the beautifully balanced weapon feeling like it was an extension of his own arm as he finished up the move. The only issue, really, was it had no scabbard—

Right on cue, a scabbard appeared around it, as if it had always been there. The scabbard was made of simple leather and had two ties to allow him to either sling it across his back or presumably by his side like the men and woman in the carvings had. Given the scabbard seemed to come and go as he willed it, drawing it wouldn’t be an issue, so he slung it across his back for now.

Walking back out of the basement was a curious experience in its own right. Maybe it was the sword on his back or the tablet in his talisman, but the darkness seemed… not less oppressive… but less unfriendly? Something unquantifiable about the native ambience had certainly adjusted itself subtly. The tower, however, now had an extra sense of weighty solemnity as he stood in its ground floor, again staring around.

Even though he had acquired a weapon and some kind of fated obligation to a sect he had never heard of from a time before, in his heart he was more than happy to leave such a place, a tomb to at least two different eras of heroes, to its silent rest once more.