PART 2

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~ JUN SANA – A CERTAIN RUIN-COVERED RIDGELINE… ~

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The trip back up the cliff was… tiring. As it transpired, ascending it directly was basically impossible for them.

The first attempt saw them get about two hundred metres up, at which point they hit a cloud layer where the humidity made the rocks slippery enough that both of them nearly fell back down within minutes.

The second attempt, on a different part of the cliff got them a bit further, however they soon found that there was a substantial spring line that ran out of the cliffs. The springs were not really… waterfalls, but they put so much water out over the rocks that they again became impassable.

In the end, they considered what they recalled of the surrounding valleys and went west, tracking the cliff until it started to rise there. The journey still took almost half a day, though. The terrain was still atrocious to navigate, with steep cliffs, jungle-choked ravines and far, far too many waterfalls, however, no matter where they looked, there was no living presence visible… or audible, beyond the plants and the two of them.

Standing on the lip of one of the higher ravines, watching Arai make her way up, below her, the puppet slung behind her, she felt it was almost a challenge at this point. The landscape was so utterly unthreatening that she felt honour-bound to find something, anything really, which proved they were not in an anomaly.

“Nameless-monkey-molesting-fates!” Arai declared wearily as she pulled herself up the last bit with her help. “I hate waterfalls!”

Nodding in sympathy, she took the rope attached to her sister and looped it around a handy tree then started to lever the puppet’s body up.

They had decided to bring it, in the end, because leaving it there felt… wrong, somehow. It was a bit of an effort to haul up spots like this, but it also gave her a sort of extra feeling of purpose in this. It was also likely very valuable and neither of them, in the end, wanted to be accused by the Ha clan of having lost it. That was the kind of petty problem that would really suck to deal with… after.

“Still no sign of the mountains either,” she added, pushing that thought away as her sister sat down on a handy rock slab to catch her breath, trying to absorb a bit of qi from some of the spirit jades they had.

“Yeah…” Arai agreed, looking around, her tone conflicted.

The cloud blanketed everything now, swirling in grey and white gyres, obscuring any sight beyond ten to fifteen metres. They were properly within the cloud layer now and the forest was wet, dreary and humid. The only sound belonged to rain scattering off of millions of leaves, melding with the distant roar of waterfalls and the creak of the trees in the wind. In many ways it was perfectly normal for a cloud forest, bar the lack of any insects, animals, or birds, but that normality was… oppressive.

Unsettling, actually.

She could see no sign of the terrible thunder clouds of East Fury and Thunder Crest.

There was no shadow from the Great Mount either.

In fact, since they got out of the sink-hole, they had not seen any of the peaks amid the ever-present low cloud.

“The vegetation is just like down below as well,” her sister also noted as she nibbled speculatively on a bit of moss from the rock she was resting on.

Still focused on hauling up the puppet, she just nodded. She had confirmed that a few times for herself as well, as they climbed.

“—What I don’t quite get, though, is the moisture,” Arai added sourly, waving her hand through the thick, soup-like cloud drifting past them. It deformed and swirled gently. “There is yin water qi here,” her sister continued, watching the mist pass through her fingers “It's interacting with us on some level, but it’s also not affecting us in any beneficial way.”

She stared down into the humid, hazy shadows of the vegetation-choked gorge they had just ascended, pondering this.

There was indeed yin-attributed water qi up here… and yang wind, and yang earth; there was no difficulty in feeling their presence intuitively. There was also another type of qi in the air which defied her ability to identify. They had first started to encounter it on the ascent up this gorge, on the more exposed cliff-faces. It seemed to swirl past them like an ethereal, draining breeze and, if they stood too long in thicker eddies, the accompanying cloud made them both feel slightly short of breath, though besides that it appeared to have no other ill effect.

“Take that dumb waterfall below us,” her sister complained. “I’m cold and wet, my hands and back are rope-burnt, and my clothes chafe horribly, but I get no hydration from it at all?”

“…”

“Yeah…” she agreed, a little helplessly, dragging the puppet over the ledge at last and sitting down on a mossy rock with a sigh.

“Well, there is nothing we can actually do about it,” she remarked at last. That aspect was also bothering her, but she didn’t even know where to start with it. “How much further do you reckon we have to climb to get up?” she asked instead, changing the topic.

“Should be a few hundred more metres,” Arai replied, glancing at her scrip, before standing up with a grimace.

“…”

Hauling up the puppet, she slung it over her shoulder and let Arai tie it into place. It was heavy, but still manageable. When she considered that they had hauled it out of the sink hole, lugging it through sheer cloud forest was nothing in comparison in any case.

“Which way?” she asked, looking up the slope, through the moss-drenched trees.

“Keep going left, I think,” Arai replied, consulting her scrip again then looking up into the forest above them and pointing appropriately. “I have no idea as to our exact location, but that should keep us from having to blindly scale sheer, overhanging cliffs into the low cloud. Not that that wasn’t…”

“—Fun?” she added sarcastically.

“…”

Her sister gave her a flat-eyed look.

With a sigh, she started off, up the slope, through the knee-deep drifts of moss-covered leaves and tangled trees saying nothing further.

Neither of them were in the best mood anyway and there was a lot to worry about in their current circumstances. In a sort of masochistic way, she reflected, hauling herself over a half fallen tree, it was fortunate that the ascent was so challenging. Outside of their brief stops to catch their breath, there was no time for anything other than the present.

Arai’s estimation of a few hundred metres was, surprisingly, not that far out, although not in a way either of them expected.

They got to the top of the slope, but instead of an arduous scramble looking for another ravine, they instead walked right into an overgrown ruin cut into the sheer cliff, and beyond it, a stairway leading up into the swirling cloud. After the arduous exertions of the previous hours, the final ascent thus became almost depressingly straightforward. The most danger they encountered were a few springs and waterfalls scattering down the steps that made for treacherous footing.

“…”

“Huh…”

“What’s wrong?” she asked Arai, who was taking in the forest around them with a frown.

“I… don’t recall the top of the cliffs being this overgrown…” her sister replied, staring at the tangled, moss-cloaked trees.

Looking around at the positively ancient cloud forest, she had to agree.

“Are you still wondering if we were teleported some distance, after all?” she asked.

“…”

Arai stared back at the stairs they had climbed, her frown only deepening.

“The style of the ruins and the decorations, its more in keeping with the Jasmine Gate than where we were,” her sister replied, shrugging a bit helplessly. “It’s not… impossible? Though, we are the ones who have explored here the most. The standard Bureau map is basically our map.”

“True,” she mused.

Idly, she took a handful of moss off a tree and chewed a bit, grimacing, then spat it out. It was bitter and tasted of mud… and was entirely lacking in any beneficial nutrition. Arai raised a quizzical eyebrow.

“Just like below,” she answered with a grimace.

“Figures…” Arai muttered. “And I still can’t interact with the ambient qi here… same for you?”

“…”

Staring out into the swirling sea of cloud enveloping everything, she nodded.

Throughout the ascent, they had found three other ‘kinds’ of qi in the air that neither of them had ever sensed before, and with which they couldn’t directly interact.

Grasping any of them was as effective as trying to hold fog in her hands.

It wasn’t that their cultivation was sealed either – it was simply that almost nothing they did seemed able to replenish any qi they spent, or so it seemed. Not even her mantra could pull the qi types she could recognise into her body. They had only got this far by relying on the luckily copious supply of replenishment pills and spirit stones they had on them. Even those, though, were barely a tenth as efficient as they should have been, while somehow still retaining the same potential to build ‘resistance’.

Really, their circumstances made her want to hit something, but that would only waste more valuable qi. A realization that only made her want to punch something even more.

“So, first stop off where we were thrown off?” she suggested after a short pause, looking over to their left, along the cliff top path.

It was a slightly pointless question, really, because where else were they going to go, but at the same time, it did help to say it out loud.

“Mmmm…” Arai frowned, not really replying, staring off to their right instead, with pursed lips.

“There is some other problem?” she asked looking around.

“What? Oh… no,” Arai shook her head apologetically. “I just found a fourth type of weird qi in the plants over there.”

“Oh,” she stared in the direction of a small, gnarled tree growing out of a rock outcropping her sister pointed out.

Arai was right, there was another weird qi type mixed into it that was again subtly different, and somehow hard to focus on.

“…”

“Sorry,” Arai added, by way of apology. “Yes, let’s go look.”

Given there was not much else to say, they set off, along the surprisingly well-paved, if rather overgrown, path, given it was heading in roughly the right direction.

They walked in silence through the cloud forest for some thirty minutes before the path opened out and they started to encounter overgrown ruins.

“You know…” her sister trailed off, looking confused after they had passed the first few buildings.

“What?” she asked, looking around, because her sister was clearly worried.

“Don’t you think these ruins are a bit… odd?” Arai remarked, staring at the nearest complex.

She took in the squat, almost flat-roofed building, its walls covered with creepers, slowly being absorbed into the gnarled greenery of the cloud forest.

“Humour me and just explain,” she muttered, after staring blankly at it for a full ten seconds.

“They… don’t look like the ruins we were camped in,” Arai said. “The stone is… different and the style…”

“…”

“It’s a big settlement?” she suggested, a bit helplessly. “I mean, look at Misty Jasmine Inn, maybe someone rebuilt other bits of it?”

“It… could be,” her sister agreed. “However, if we are in an anomaly… that’s a bit weird. I want to say it’s like a facsimile of the outside world.”

“—But nothing here looks familiar?” she finished, with a helpless shrug.

“…”

Arai gave her another slightly flat-eyed stare and she just sighed.

There was not a lot she could say really, one way or the other. Thinking about it just made her head hurt and it was already taxing enough carrying the puppet and worrying about immediate problems, like their inability to touch qi in this place. Her sister was clearly trying to understand what was going on, but there came a point where you just had to hold up your hands and admit that things were just… weird.

They continued onwards in silence again, the path winding through unkempt, moss-carpeted cloud forest until finally, almost against her expectations, they reached ruins that she did, in fact, recognise.

“…”

“Huh…”

Arai stopped and looked behind them, her eyes narrowed.

“What now?” she asked, glancing over at her sister.

“I know why this didn’t look familiar,” Arai said after a long pause.

“Go on…” she prompted.

“Come on, you don’t see it?” Arai asked, sounding a bit exasperated.

“I see mist. I see low cloud. I see far too many trees. I see rain. I see fate-trashed qi types I’ve never seen before. I see my own incipient demise in a place I’ve no idea what the fates is going on with…” she retorted, before getting a grip on herself.

“…”

Arai just sighed.

“Sorry,” she apologized after a moment, sitting down on a handy stone-cut bench in the semi-circular plaza they were in.

“It’s fine, I’m the one who should apologize,” her sister muttered.

“…”

“Well, what is it?” she asked, before things got weird.

“Try to recall, in your mind, what this looked like, when we scouted it out… yesterday,” Arai said.

“…”

Something in her expression must have warned her sister, because she just sighed again and pointed at the forest.

“—Fine,” Arai sighed. “This wasn’t here. The cliff finished on the far side of this plaza.”

“…”

She looked over at where Arai was pointing, then back at the cloud forest they had just traversed. Arai was right, which in this instant didn’t help, because it made her feel unobservant, and that just fed back into the feeling of…

“So, where does that leave us?” she asked, quashing that unpleasant emotion as best she could.

“I dunno,” Arai muttered, dropping her arm and shrugging helplessly. “I guess it shows that this place isn’t an exact facsimile of where we were before?”

“…”

Rather than say anything, she just shrugged, because all she could do was agree.

Whether that was a good or a bad thing, was something she didn’t want to dwell on.

Walking on, one thing that was immediately clear, was that the condition of the buildings was much better in this place. That only opened up more questions though. The traces of those ruins she recalled were there, in the straight, fluted columns topped with carved vines and the broad, block foundations, but over the top was a coating of a much more… familiar style? It was that of Misty Jasmine Inn, though the most obvious example she could conjure in her mind was in fact the Jasmine Gate.

It was most visible in things like the doors and windows, which were the same. Also, in the carvings on the walls and alcoves, which had the same flat perspectives and a tendency towards geometric and abstract patterns. That said, there were some differences, such as the way the roofs were constructed, though a part of her wondered if that was just because the Jasmine Gate ruins were mostly cut out of cliffs or built into overhangs.

Such was the degree to which the buildings were now intact it actually came as something of a surprise to her when they turned a corner and scrambled through some overgrown bushes and found themselves on the edge of the plaza where they had spent the night.

Looking around, as they walked over to the pool, it was as she remembered it. Mostly, anyway. There were no attackers there, or at least no obvious ones. Standing beside the moon-shaped pool though, she found herself faced with another… oddity. Beyond the fact that among the twelve statues ringing the pool, there was a two-tailed squirrel.

“The buildings are not ruined…” she said at last, turning in a circle.

“I see that,” her sister agreed, drily.

“Noo… I mean…” she sighed, realizing that her sister was doing to her, what she had just done a short while ago. “The Blue Gate School rebuilt this place centuries ago…” she clarified. “It was the basis of one of their most substantial waystations, before falling out of use in favour of places like Misty Jasmine Inn and the Rainbow Gate, which are both more defensible and much more hospitable…”

“I recall those boring history lessons from our seven-star rank exam just as well as you…” her sister chuckled, starting towards the building where they had spent the night.

“…”

She resisted the urge to rub her temples and followed.

Inside the room, that thought, that was bugging her about the Blue Gate School sort of receded anyway, as they confronted a… difficult reality.

“There is nothing,” Arai said at last, as they stood in the building where they had spent the night. “No evidence any of us were even here…”

“No pots, no fires, but the building that was made later is still here,” she mused, kicking a foot against a repaired bit of stone wall.

The original interior decoration was actually quite fetching, if also a bit weird.

In particular her gaze kept getting drawn back to the door columns and lintels, which had been carved with vines of flowering jasmine. The lintels themselves were held up by squirrels, identical to the one outside, on the edge of the pool.

“Mmmmm…” Arai walked over to stare at the spot where the cook fire had been, frowning.

Looking across from the lintel, she paused, then squinted at the ceiling to confirm what she had just seen in passing.

“This is clearly the Blue Water School build, or at least the roof is,” she observed, scanning the undersides of the roof tiles, many of which were handily stamped with a maker’s emblem from Blue Water City, to prove their provenance.

The problem was that all the other buildings were also rebuilt, in that other slightly… off, style.

It was actually a little jarring, now she finally spotted it properly, because there were elements which were really quite familiar. The roofs and the carved doorways in particular reminded her of buildings from back home, and various waystations.

“But the one on the far side isn’t,” her sister noted, glancing back over at her, sounding a bit uneasy.

“You noticed it…” she sighed, fighting the slightly peeved feeling that had just blossomed in her heart for a second.

“…”

Arai gave her a sideways look.

That wasn’t what was bugging her though, she realised.

“But the alterations, like the rebuilding of some walls and the replacement of the roof in this building… are not here,” she pointed out. “This building was roofed in tiles from West Flower Picking Town…”

“Nothing from the recent renovations is here…” her sister mused. “Great, another odd thing, as if this place needs more of them.”

“…”

“You recall the stories about Drifting Cherry Valley?” she muttered, staring back at the ceiling, then at the older walls.

“I was trying not to dwell on the possibility that we have been time-shifted by an abortive teleportation,” her sister scowled. “Thanks…”

“Sorry…” she grimaced, feeling bad for some reason. “Though in fairness, there is only that one account. Nobody, as far as I recall from what I read, was ever able to find that anomaly a second time, after entering it.”

“And if we have somehow teleported to Snow Jade, I will be very impressed,” her sister added, running her hands through her wet hair.

“…”

There was something so incongruously absurdist about that idea that it was impossible for both of them not to laugh, albeit nervously at first. With that mirth, the odd tension which had been building vanished.

“Right,” she declared, after composing herself. “Shall we stop procrastinating?”

“…”

“I’m meant to be the one who says that,” Arai grumbled, but her sister did crack a rare smile.

Heading back out, into the rain, they took in the semi-circular plaza gouged out of the side of the rock outcropping in the ridge and then finally turned to look at the broad fissure that ran through it. She wasn’t sure why she felt so hesitant but as they made their way towards it, the unease in her heart only got worse and worse—

“Come on, there has been nothing remotely dangerous so far,” Arai muttered, giving her right shoulder which was not obscured by the puppet, a squeeze.

“I know…” she sighed. “But somehow, that doesn’t help.”

“It doesn’t, no…” her sister agreed softly.

Not quite sure what to expect, they made their way through the rock-cut fissure, watching their step because it was slippery and overgrown, and finally came out onto the raised platform overlooking the site of the disaster.

What was there was… as she expected, entirely anticlimactic.

It was not as overgrown as she expected either.

The first real thing that stood out, somewhat oddly, was the lack of the name-sake of the whole ruin, the ‘Keep Your Heart’ altar, which should have been where they were standing. There was an altar-like thing in front of them, but it was a metre wide stone bowl supported on two swirling fish.

“Is it strange that the fact that it is less over-grown than I expected is what actually jumps out at me?” her sister remarked at last, as they leant on the stone balustrade where the altar had previously been, taking it all in.

“…”

“I guess we have just seen too many fancy ruins…” she replied, rolling her eyes, knowing what her sister meant.

The semi-circular area was a lot grander than it had initially appeared, in its entirely ruined state, but somehow, with her current worries, she just struggled to be that impressed with it. Indeed, in a strange way, the fact that the ruins were barely overgrown at all was the most striking thing.

The open area had a couple of shrubs around the edge and a scattering of grass growing out between the paving, but that was about it really.

The whole plaza was dominated by the platform at the far side, which held a statue of a woman, robed from the waist down, sitting cross-legged, almost like a Buddha. Unlike most Buddha statues though, her hair was loose and she had six arms, not the usual two. She was carved of the same, snow-white marble as most of the other statues were, while her robe was picked out in blue and red, edged with gold in lotus-like patterns. Her hair was dark, almost black, and upon her head she had a crown of golden leaves.

Her ‘main’ arms were holding a crude-looking lantern, cradled in her lap, while her right middle arm held a chakram and her left was bound around with what looked almost like rope, which swirled into her robe and melded with the golden lotus-like patterns.

To either side, the buildings that flanked the plaza were now standing, intact up to their second stories. The open areas though, now also held statues, somewhat surprisingly. The whole place held much more of an aura of a temple complex than the meeting area she had originally assumed it was.

“—That said… look over there,” Arai nudged her in the side and pointed over to their left, near where Ling had been sitting. “That shrub cluster is…”

She turned from looking at the buildings and followed her sister’s pointing hand, to stare at the shrubs in question, superimposing her memories of the scene over this different place as best she could.

“Yes. That’s really fate-thrashed weird,” she agreed at last.

That was all you could say really – that it was weird. The place was clearly not a proper facsimile, the statues and the moved altar proved that, but, looking around, she spotted a few other longer-lived shrubs that were… as they had been.

“No sign of the attack either,” Arai observed, looking around again. “Though, I must say, it doesn’t look like what I expected… this is honestly kind of… odd?”

“Odd?” she turned back to look at her sister, raising an eyebrow.

“From the ruins… I expected them to be similar in style to Portam Rhanae,” Arai frowned.

“I mean, the statues are kind of…” she mused, considering them again. “And the ones in the square behind us were also a bit odd.”

“True, but actually, the rest of this… and the stuff in the plaza we just left, and quite a bit of the town… feel somehow closer to inner ruins I saw when I was in the Red Pit,” Arai declared at last.

“The ones the bandits were occupying?” she asked as they made their way down into the middle of the open area.

She had seen the recordings Arai made, so had some frame of reference for what her sister meant, at least. To her, the most unexpected thing was still the second stories, many half-ruined, over the gently-sloping, tiled roofs. The reddish stone, the windows with their gently tapering tops, and geometric, lattice coverings actually reminded her of the Jasmine Gate. Jasmine was an overriding theme in the carved flowers as well, she was starting to notice.

“Yeah,” Arai agreed.

“I would have said the Jasmine Gate, honestly,” she mused, eyeing the sleek curves in the windows and the geometric patterns. “Or the inner sanctuary of Misty Jasmine Inn…”

“Yeah, the similarities there are kind of uncanny as well, and to the ruins around the lake, in the Aspen…” her sister muttered.

“And yet, it still has the sleek columns with fluting from Portam Rhanae and other places,” she pointed out, gesturing to the right hand side of the plaza and the area around the statue… statues, on their platform.

“The roof-tiles look almost like they are from home,” Arai added, turning in a slow circle, eyeing the buildings behind them, against the edge of the outcropping. “Now that I think about it, the style is almost like the two got blended together… and doesn’t it kind of remind you of some of the waystations as well?”

“…”

“I was thinking that, yes,” she agreed, though now she was properly mulling it over in her mind, another comparison, even closer to home than Misty Jasmine Inn’s inner shrine, had just flitted back into her mind’s eye.

“Honestly though? It reminds me of foundations of the defunct Seng Buddhist temple in the Deng District. The ones that got turned into the central catchment for the new sewers, which keep getting stupid invasive contaminations because the Feng Shui is hot garbage?”

“That clearance mission, where they blamed it on unregulated dumping of alchemical waste?” Arai mused.

“Uhuh,” she nodded.

“Lack of Buddha stacks though,” her sister pointed out, considering the main statue once more.

“True,” she conceded.

There was a distinct lack of the ‘every surface must be covered with recursively tiny carvings of a Buddha’, thing that the Seng ruins tended to have.

“Though I do see what you mean. The roofs on that side are really stupa-like,” Arai added.

“Although what it means…” she shrugged helplessly.

Arai looked around again and sighed in agreement.

It was an interesting observation, but it was just that, frustratingly. Knowing and seeing something was ‘off’ or ‘odd’ didn’t really help with discerning why. They stood there in silence for a few more moments, then finally headed over to where they had been thrown off.

It was strange, standing at the edge, looking down into the swirling cloud. Her shoulders itched and she had to fight the urge to look over in the direction of where the others had been, the scene replaying, disturbingly, in her mind’s eye.

It was almost as if a part of her expected to be tossed off again.

Her recollection was… patchy still, but standing in this spot, it was a lot easier to quash the uncertainties that had plagued some of their earlier pondering about who was responsible.

“—I never thought that normal cloud and rain could actually be this oppressive,” her sister’s words made her flinch and she involuntarily took a step backwards, the sense of being drawn towards the edge vanishing as if it never was.

“…”

“Sorry,” Arai muttered.

“It’s fine,” she sighed, turning to look around again. “It’s so… depressingly opaque…”

“No sign of our stuff either,” she added, not that she expected it really, after her sister stayed silent.

Arai nodded and scuffed her foot on the ground, then kicked a small rock off the edge for good measure. They both watched it silently vanish into the misty white void. It was hard not to imagine herself falling like that.

“…”

Turning back again, to look at the plaza, she let the scene replay in her mind’s eye…

Again, the creepy feeling like she was about to fall returned.

Closing her eyes again, she really pushed herself to interrogate those final few moments before the disorientation became total. After that, they had been falling through cloud anyway.

“Brother Ji was absolutely the closest person to us…” she declared at last.

“Yeah,” Arai agreed, looking around grimly. “Juni and Ling Luo were over to our left. Lin Ling and Han Shu were back there, on the stone benches, and the Ha group were mostly by where the altar was. Nobody was to our right, because I was looking at those carvings before Sir Huang came over…

“I still can’t account for Ha Mangfan or Din Ouyeng though…” her sister added after a further pause.

Running back through those final moments once again, she had to agree. She could account for all the others, just not those two. No matter how she looked at it, it was hard to deny that they appeared most culpable. There had been her sister’s ‘issue’ with Ha Mangfan, and his terrible attitude.

The gnawing sense of unease regarding ‘Brother Ji’ was still there as well, though. The absence of evidence in those recollections and the way circumstances kept pushing her towards Ha Mangfan. Now she had marked it, it was also accompanied by that creepy feeling of just being about to fall. It almost drew her to step forward, to pre-emptively avoid the push—

“…”

She stared up at the dreary sky, frowning.

-Odd…

It made her want to pull her hair. In fact, after a few moments she did end up scrunching her fingers into her temples, because the attempt at recollecting gave her a terrible headache. It was like trying to recall a dream… a nightmare really. The broad brushstrokes were there, but the interpretation was so hazy as to be entirely subjective.

“He definitely didn’t go over the cliff with us,” Arai said at last, clearly referring to ‘Ji’.

“…”

“It almost feels like that creepy suggestive feeling you get with the shadows in the Red Pit,” she said at last.

“I was going to go with the Jasmine, actually,” her sister muttered. “But that is equally applicable. The whole thing just doesn’t… fit.”

“…”

“Well, it does,” she pointed out. “But it’s like a bad divination, it fits too neatly, I can almost feel my own inner bias twisting my perception of the Intent.”

“Spirit of my Heart become the bridge of Renewal within my Body and Soul for my memories,” she declared.

There was no one else where, so saying it out loud was not a problem.

“Huh…”

She stared at her mantra because while she had expected ‘Soul’ to not really connect, the fact that ‘Spirit’ had not either was… telling.

Curious, she again considered the moment—

The creepy feeling of wanting to evade being pushed by…

She exhaled and stared at her feet, which were a pace closer to the edge of the cliff than she had been aware of.

“That is insidious,” she hissed under her breath, hugging her arms. “Sis…”

“What?” Arai frowned.

“Try what I just did,” she suggested, taking a deliberate step back.

“Spirit of my Heart become the bridge of Renewal within my Body and Soul for my memories,” Arai muttered, closing her eyes.

“…”

“Well, that’s interesting,” Arai said, opening them again after a few seconds.

“Spirit also not really connecting?” she guessed, still mulling over the likelihood that both of them had been subtly compromised in relation to this moment.

“Uhuh,” her sister nodded, looking pensive.

“…”

They stood there, in silence for almost a minute, before Arai clapped her hands together.

“Okay, let’s try this a slightly different way,” her sister suggested. “Why don’t we use our mantras on each other?”

“…”

“Focus on the moment and see if we can’t get anything out of this that way?” she mused.

“Yep,” Arai nodded. “Do you want to try it on me, first? I was more focused on this direction.”

“Okay,” she nodded, shrugging the puppet off.

It hit the ground with a splash—

“Motherless Fate who curses the Heavenly Virgin!” she cursed, as she stared at the water pooling around her feet.

“What’s wrong?” Arai blinked, surprised at her outburst.

“Actually, you do it to me first. I want to try something,” she said, sitting down on the wet paving.

Somehow, she had been so caught up in the moment that she had somehow forgotten that it was raining when they went over… and that all the stonework around them was wet and thus reflective.

Arai nodded and walked over, sitting down opposite her. Wordlessly, her sister placed the fingers of her right hand against her third eye, in the middle of her forehead, and her left palm against her heart.

Inhaling, she focused again on her memories of that moment, but this time, ignored ‘herself’ and took in her surroundings. Her Mantra hummed gently in the background, resonating with her sister’s manifest Intent as she started her part.

As she expected, for a few moments nothing much happened. However, after maybe thirty seconds had passed, she started to dissociate slightly with ‘herself’, allowing her to better look at the minutiae of her surroundings in that memory. Sadly, there were no puddles on the ground and a depressing number of the rocks were covered in moss or obscured by plants…

“…”

She considered some of the plants, especially a broad-leafed one that was still there in her current ‘present’. The ghosts of reflections hung on it, barely visible in the fog as she tried to refocus her awareness onto them. In a way, it was like trying to stare at the back of her own head, and the effort nearly made her spit blood, even though no qi was involved.

Exhaling, she opened her eyes and wiped a thin trickle of blood away from her nose.

“You okay?” Arai asked her, looking concerned.

“Yeah…” she replied with a slight sniff, wiping it away. “Try to focus on other things in our surroundings that might have reflected those last few moments.”

“Ah… of course,” Arai nodded, settling herself.

“Spirit of my Heart become the bridge of Renewal within both of your Body and Soul for your memories,” she murmured, putting her palm over her sister’s heart and focusing her own mantra into her.

Somewhat annoyingly, that was not very effective, because only three of the five words were properly engaging.

“…”

Slightly perturbed, she tried to reframe the ‘meaning’ of ‘Spirit’ and ‘Soul’

“Spirit, within my Heart the bridge of Renewal is my Body within which my Soul—”

She practically coughed up blood as something within her surroundings recoiled. It was like getting hit in the face by a breaking rope, shattering her concentration.

“What happened?” Arai asked, looking concerned.

Silently, she wiped blood from her nose and stared at it.

“I need to think about my mantra for a moment,” she said apologetically. “Give me a minute to compose my thoughts?”

“…”

Arai stared at her, looking a bit concerned, but did nod.

“Okay, I’m gonna go over and look at where Juni was then, see if that helps.”

She watched as her sister headed over to the far side and then sat back and stared out at the swirling ocean of cloud with a soft sigh.

What she had just felt was… off.

A part of her knew she didn’t really have to do this, now—

“…”

She closed her eyes and considered her own ‘condition’, pensively.

‘Errant thoughts’, so conventional wisdom went, were an early warning sign associated with psyche breaks, particularly during stressful moments. Due to the close relationship between ‘Intent’ and ‘Awareness of Self’, it was really quite unusual to have a clear grasp of it before Golden Core. Even for Physical cultivators, it was not at all common, unless you devoted a lot of time to it… or, like her and Arai, had a mantra that leant itself towards it.

The fact that parts of her mind were gently trying to nudge her towards being ‘fine’ with events as they were, was, while subtle, also quite alien. It was subtle, but they were not… linked to ‘her’. For someone only eighteen years old, she had a remarkable amount of experience with that kind of interference as well. Not to mention the urge from before was…

-I have to applaud you, but you overstretched there, she mused to them.

-The problem is, I don’t get those kinds of thoughts…

-Nope, not ever, not even in the worst moments in the Red Pit.

-Not even that time in the God Bewitching Jasmine when I lost my arm.

-Not even when mother died.

-So yeah… I don’t think so, she sneered at those ‘errant’ thoughts.

“Spirit, within my Heart the bridge of Renewal is my Body within which my Soul is cleansed.”

This time her attempt fared a bit better, weirdly, though it was ‘Soul’ that engaged and not ‘Spirit’, which still drifted, uncontrollable, in a very disturbing way. Still, it was enough.

There was a sense of shock within the ‘thoughts’ even as her mantra shattered them, obliterating the errant trace of what she could only assume was soul-intent providing the seed of the manipulation.

“—Hey… come look at this!”

She opened her eyes to find Arai had come back over.

“Ah! Sis, your nose is bleeding… again,” Arai observed, looking both concerned and slightly disapproving. “You shouldn’t push yourself so hard…”

She put her hand over her mouth and found that she had a proper nosebleed this time and sighed.

“How long?” she asked, wiping away the blood and sniffing a few times.

“…”

“A couple of minutes?” her sister replied, offering her a hand.

Accepting it, she let herself be hauled to her feet.

“Sis… I think that they did something to us, when the suppression was lifted,” she said slowly.

“…”

It took Arai a few moments to replicate what she had found. She watched as Arai sat down on the ground and cycled her own mantra. Her sister was motionless for almost a minute before opening her eyes and wiping a thin trickle of bright red blood from her nose.

“How insidious,” was all she said, after staring out into the cloud for a few seconds.

“Yeah,” she agreed, giving her sister’s shoulder a squeeze. “Whoever did this really didn’t take any chances.”

“Indeed,” Arai agreed, glowering, accepting the hand up in turn.

“So, what was it you wanted to show me?” she asked.

“Oh… I found the altar, it’s over there,” Arai pointed over to the several-metres-tall statue of the woman on the platform, flanked by the other statues.

Following after Arai, she walked over to the raised platform and up the steps into the open-fronted… temple, she supposed.

Looking back over to where they had originally entered, the view was partially obscured by some tangled vines and the low angle, which explained how she had not really marked the others. The companion ones were only a little larger than life as well, compared to the much more impressive central one, which genuinely did draw the eye, so there was that as well.

“It’s certainly impressive,” she remarked, pausing to take them all in.

“Yeah,” Arai agreed.

This close, she could clearly look up into their faces. Standing in the middle of the taiji on the floor, it was almost like you were in an audience with the seated figures. On a clear day, with the towering Great Mount rising behind the woman…

Not for the first time, she was also struck by how… life-like they felt. Almost as if she were standing in the presence of real people, who were just, at this moment not quite focused on her.

All of them were striking in their own way as well.

Of the older women, the veiled one on the right had dark hair and a dark gown, embroidered with silver birds that looked almost like swans. She was holding the hand of the golden-haired girl to her right, dressed in a shorter robe who was herself embracing a small deer of all things.

The other woman, on the left, whose golden-white hair hung loose, also had a dark robe, but it was draped much more… alluringly, patterned with what she realised were ghostly constellations, again picked out in silver. Her left hand rested on the shoulder of the young, golden-haired girl beside her, also robed in dark colours, patterned with flowers and leaves, who held a pair of torches.

Curiously, the odd one out in many ways was the golden-haired youth, who sat at the feet of the statue, beside a shallow, three-legged bowl, playing a harp-like instrument. It took her a moment to realise that the woman holding the hand of the girl with the deer also had a hand on his shoulder.

All of them had crowns of gold and assuming that it was not just some stylistic choice, quite similar features, to the point where, without his… maleness visible, it would have been difficult for her to tell if the harp-playing youth was a boy or girl.

Below him, the focal point of the whole diorama was a circular, metre-wide taiji, set into the lower level of the main statue’s throne, ringed, somehow, by the gold hem of the woman’s robe, yet still carved in red and blue stone, ‘held up’ by carvings of…

“—Squirrels?” she blurted out loud, staring at the pair of squirrels, one white and one black, holding up a circular, Taiji-like symbol.

“Not quite, look at them again,” Arai remarked drily. “It caught me out the first time as well.”

She stared at the ‘squirrels’ and realised that their tails were almost swirling flames and that their heads were animal masks, worn by two youths. If she squinted hard, she could differentiate the ‘figure within the squirrel’, but it took some real effort, such was the remarkable way the relief of the carving was shown.

“…”

She stepped back and stared at the floor design, then at the disc held by the two ‘squirrels’, realising that they were… identical.

Tracking it back up, she saw that the inner taiji fed the triskelion swirls of the middle ring, which was formed from the merged colours of the seated figures’ robes, even the seated youth’s, whose was more a drape and quite visibly refused to give him any modesty at all.

The columns splitting the various scenes were in fact carved into their trains, unmerging all the way back to the main statue as well. The holistic attention to detail, right down to how the patterns combined was… remarkable really.

“And the whole inscription is there as well,” her sister noted, pointing at the bottom half of the stele.

Looking where Arai pointed, she blinked, because she had somehow managed to miss the neat inscription below the Taiji.

“If you go chasing squirrels and you know where to fall through the shadows on the path where the eye becomes the wall just remember what the bright moon said keep your heart.”

She read it out loud, then read it back to herself in her own head, because the lack of punctuation made it quite odd. Not least because somehow, it seemed to be in Imperial Common. When she considered the words, they were kind of… uncanny, honestly.

‘Chasing Squirrels’ was an old Easten phrase that meant ‘on a fool’s errand’, much like trying to chase a squirrel in a forest. However, ‘someone who was chased by squirrels’ was also someone who was being messed about with by good fortune.

The second part was also… in their current circumstances, somewhat odd, given that they had arrived at their current circumstance by being ‘chased by squirrels’ both figuratively and actually, rather literally. They had also fallen off the cliff right beside this point and landed in an anomaly… somehow.

The shadow of the Great Mount had been moving as well, before everything went to shit. This place was also in full view of the Great Mount, at least in good weather. Furthermore, the Taiji was also sometimes known, in older or more advanced divination texts, as the ‘Eye of the Chronogram’ as well.

The enigmatic final two lines were… well, she wasn’t sure what to make of them really, but put together, the whole thing almost felt like a warning.

“It’s written in I don’t know what…” Arai muttered, tracing her fingers over the inscription. “The physical letters don’t match anything I recognise, but it translates itself into Imperial Common just fine. Given there is no qi involved, the feng shui comprehensions that went into making this are beyond remarkable.”

“Yeah,” she nodded, looking up at the principal figure of the reclining, six-armed woman.

“…”

At this distance, a lot of detail she had missed before was starting to stand out. The back of her crown held what looked like a crescent moon, similar in style to the chakram she was wielding. The woman’s flawless white skin was also covered in a ghostly, eternally repeating triskelion, while the lotus flowers on her gown were actually a subtly different stone.

The similarities in ‘style’ to the ‘Beautiful Schemer’ statue in the Queen Mother’s shrine in Blue Water City were somewhat uncanny in that regard.

That comparison also made her realise she had been looking in the wrong place for the name.

Given the propensity for ornamentation on all the statues and the details, it was easy to get lost wherever you looked. The stele with the seated figure’s name was actually above the taiji, on a stele resting against the base of the throne that had seemed part of the general decoration. The top line of text was unintelligible to her, looking a bit like wind script, but with a lot of verticals on the letters, and the whole thing joined in a solid line across the top.

Thankfully, below it, the same thing seemed to be written in the same Easten script used in Portam Rhanae, though it was still eye-wateringly hard for her to decipher thanks to the stylistic way it was carved.

The best she could manage from the strange script was ‘Di’ which translated to ‘Heaven’ or ‘Sky’ and was commonly used to signify eminent experts. The Dun Emperor, in the rare instances the Imperial Court issued documents in Easten, used ‘Di’ to preface his status as ‘Emperor of the World’.

“What do you make of that?” she asked Arai, pointing it out.

Arai stared at it for a few seconds, her mouth moving silently.

“Di-wi-ja?” her sister declared at last, “Great Sky or maybe Bright Sky? Empress of Great Sky? Assuming they use ‘Di’ in the same way we do now. It’s kind of strange though, because it also reminds me of the inscription mother had on her short blades, you know the pair that father never lets leave his sight?”

“Oh… uh… yeah,” she nodded, feeling a bit awkward, because while she did recall them, she had never been that interested in them, back when they were younger.

“I think it’s an old Proto-Easten name? What’s above it looks like some strange variant of Wind Script as well…” her sister trailed off, sounding a bit embarrassed suddenly. “I am sure Mother showed me the various old scripts at one point, but in fairness, I was like… six at the time?”

“…”

“That’s still better than me,” she muttered, looking sideways.

That was the problem, really. What you remembered at that age, even with the help of hindsight and the benefits from cultivation, was kind of patchy. Easten, and a bit of the old Yin language, they had learned because it was useful. Stuff like Wind Script or Drifting Sky Script, however, or Proto-Easten was only useful if you wanted to study old texts or make talismans… neither an activity that was gripping to a six-year-old girl with the cultivation world at the end of her wooden sword.

“The youth is also called something very similar,” her sister added after a moment’s further contemplation. “Radiant One or something like it? Though it could also be ‘Entangling One’, or ‘Excellent One’.”

“He certainly has the looks to pull off a name like that,” she conceded, scrupulously not looking at the youth’s manhood, which didn’t pull many punches either.

Looking back at the other statues, a bit more carefully, showed that they also had inscriptions a bit higher up than she had been looking. The dark-haired, veiled woman again had ‘Potnia’, or ‘Mistress’ in her name, paired with ‘Hidden One’, which with the veil obscuring her clear good looks was sort of apt. The girl beside her, holding the deer, was ‘Pure Daughter’, literally the female case of ‘Radiant Son’, used for the youth holding the harp.

The woman with stars on her robe, another ‘Mistress’, was also, somewhat aptly, ‘Starry One’, or ‘Spiritual One’. Up close, she was actually the most ‘beautiful’ of the group, as well and easily the most sensual of the group. She also shared the crescent moon crown, though hers was garlanded with Jasmine Blossoms of all things. She also had more than a passing resemblance to the ‘seductive’ woman, of the trio of statues they had found in the herb garden in Portam Rhanae.

The girl beside her, holding the torches, though, completely defeated her. The best she could intuit was ‘Female Coloured Quince’, which was absolutely not right. Arai, after some consideration, suggested ‘Far Gazing Daughter’, which was somewhat better.

“You know… it would take a huge amount of effort to deconstruct this…” she said at last.

“…”

“Yeah,” her sister agreed.

Considering the ‘altar’, which was really only quite a minor piece of the whole thing, she drew a line across it in her mind, where it had been ‘split’, then considered the rest of it.

“Why would someone go to that much effort and not take the whole thing?” she added.

“You ask me, but who am I meant to ask?” Arai replied with a helpless shrug. “Maybe it relates to divinations in some way?”

“How do you arrive at that?” she asked, curious, as only the girl with the torches really stood out in that regard.

“I just have a feeling,” her sister deadpanned.

“…”

“There is something slightly ironic there,” she pointed out drily.

“Yes, that is not lost on me,” her sister agreed with a wry smile.

“…”

“—Actually, you are standing on the answer,” her sister added, before she could say anything further. “The lunar mansions are visible on the floor in the outer ring of the taiji… where it does that eye-watering ‘three becomes two’ thing. And the twelve constellations encompassed in the golden rope of stars that border the robe where it spills across the floor look like a Zodiac.”

“The Lunar mansions…”

Glancing down, she saw that Arai was right.

Feeling a bit silly, she stepped to the side, intending to get a better look at the constellation beside her, and froze in shock.

“…”

“What?” her sister asked, frowning.

Shaking her head, she moved back to where she had been and sure enough the taiji on the altar before her shifted, subtly. Looking down, she realised she was standing in the ‘auspicious’ mansion within the larger circle.

“…”

For the briefest moment, the taiji shifted—

Unbidden, she reached out and flinched as her fingers somehow brushed the surface, which was much closer than she recalled—

She found herself… staring at… well, her own sodden, bedraggled reflection.

The incongruous thing, though, was that the ‘reflected’ version of her, and Arai for that matter, who was standing beside her, were naked, standing up to their waists in a large, shallow lake, edged in the distance with shrubs and a few trees, with her holding a large lump of what appeared to be burnt rock, looking confused. A large block of the same rock was visible in the water, in the background.

After a few seconds, the image faded away and ‘normality’ re-established itself, as if the mirage-like scene had never been.

“…”

“Whut?” Arai, standing beside her gawked, her own hand trailing beside hers.

She stared down at the taiji, at the point where they were standing, in the ‘auspicious’ lunar mansion.

“That… That was clearly us… right?” her sister said after a long moment.

“Uhuh,” she nodded, still not quite sure what to make of what she had just seen.

“Why… were we naked, in the middle of a lake, holding a burnt rock?” her sister added.

“I… You ask me, but who do I ask?” she repeated absently.

“…”

“I guess we know why they took the taiji away though, and broke the altar…” she added, almost as an afterthought.

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

~ HAN SHU – THE JASMINE GATE ~

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

“You can’t run!”

Han Shu gritted his teeth as the shout clawed at him, trying to make the slightly facetious yell a palpable reality. The last half an hour… though it felt far, far, longer, had been like this. Their pursuers, or at least Ha Mangfan, had somehow managed to get around the monkeys, and though they had not caught up to them, yet, they kept…

“Just accept your fate!”

The words, mocking and arrogant, resonated subversively with the mist of the gorge they were trying to move down. Every few minutes, Mangfan did this. Infusing the words he was shouting with… well, it was certainly Martial Intent, maybe even Soul Strength as well, although he was less sure about that. In any case, each sentence, simple and crude, was almost an art in its own right… trying to impress its strength on him, on all of them.

“You think that running will make any difference?!”

“Motherless Maiden, I hate this…” Juni, just behind him, had come to a stop, looking pale.

“Fates, don’t they shut up?” Lin Ling also groaned, glancing back into the mist.

Grimacing, he grabbed both of them by their hands and sent a pulse of his own mantra-infused intent through them, transforming the compounding malaise into something approaching re-invigoration.

“T-thanks…” Juni muttered, waving for them to start moving again.

“YOU LITTLE VERMIN! —BE JUDGED!”

The blood ran from his nose and ears and his qi turned chaotic. The mist around them recoiled and the ubiquitous flowering jasmine plants that crowned every tree retracted their flowers—

*Krrrrrrrrrraaaaaa—*

The whole gorge quaked, and his vision blurred.

Before he had even properly stumbled to his knees, a greenish-blue bolt of lightning rampaged through the misty gorge, skittering off the cliffs, turning trees into burning candles—

Juni grabbed both him and Ling and dragged them off the path they were on. A moment later, a goat-sized, many legged critter crashed down where Lin Ling had been standing.

“Oh come on!” Lin Ling groaned as they scrambled away from the tetrid stalker, which was already rounding on them.

Juni grabbed a rock and hurled it at the monstrosity, which easily skipped out of the way, moving so fast it was nearly after-images.

-Ah, that’s not—

He couldn’t even finish the thought. A second stalker danced sideways out of the foliage and landed on him as if he was moving in slow motion—

There was a noiseless flash of light and a sense of heat and pain.

When sound flowed back into the world, he was lying on the edge of a smoking crater. Lin Ling, now protected by a barrier talisman, had detonated two blaze pine cones right beside them, obliterating one stalker and—

Three more scuttled out of the burning shrubbery, all already massing qi in such a way that made it abundantly clear they were about to spit venom everywhere. Pushing himself into the smoking loam, he palmed a lightning talisman and triggered it, trusting that Juni and Ling were far enough away.

A sizzling, serpentine bolt of lightning bisected three of the stalkers and stunned a further two he had not even seen.

“Come on!” Juni gasped, grabbing him by the back of his robe and dragging him up.

Shaking his head to clear it, he tried to get his bearings—

“Oh no—!”

Lin Ling’s strangled shout was cut off in a wall of noise.

His footing vanished as the ground beneath him, already a rather sheer slope, rolled.

Surging water rose to meet him.

Instinct screamed at him to curl up into a ball, but his body, still affected by whatever it was had just occurred, resolutely refused to obey him, not even his mantra—

He connected with the surface hard enough that his whole body felt like he had just been hit by a hammer.

Water enveloped him.

Plant stems snared his limbs, grasping him almost immediately, dragging him down in a turbulent swirl of mud and river-weed.

Struggling against the vegetation, he tried to find something, anything to stop himself being caught in the current—

His hand grasped an outcropping rock… and found its surface became slimy in his grip…

-Oh may your…

Before he could even finish his curse the algru growing on the surface bloomed like a thousand miniature blades. Excruciating pain enveloped his arm as his skin was practically flayed off him, tendrils gouging into his flesh and up his arm, leaving a bloody cloud in the water.

Tearing his arm free, he tried to kick for the surface, fighting against the vicious drag of the current… and found his legs snared in pond weed. Straining, he just managed to grasp a trailing lily-stem—

The stem he grabbed actually exploded, sloughing off its outer skin in a cloud of corrosive qi, while the pads above shed spines like a hail of arrows through the water at the disturbance.

-Motherless-accursed-worthless-bastard-I-hope-your-nine-generations-get-ravaged-by-plague!

“…”

Snarling, he focused on his mantra—

“Just accept your fate!”

The words clawed at him, like a phantom echo, reverberating through the world.

“—accept your fate…”

“—your fate…”

“—fate…”

-That’s not how mantras work, you… you…

Fighting the attempted inducement of a qi deviation, even insults in his mind failed to find words to describe his current feelings regarding Ha Mangfan.

-Wait… why I am…

That stray thought, about mantras ‘working’ was incongruously odd.

“You think that… will make… any difference?!”

The words, cut up by the water and his physical disorientation, gnawed at him. They toyed with his perception, tugging parts of his faculties away, like he was a child being robbed by adults.

-This… this is a mantra manifestation!?!

The understanding made his stomach drop.

-Ha Mangfan has a Mantra… and can use it like an inheritor?

“Just accept your fate!”

Those mocking, arrogant words came back, even as he struggled to keep some awareness of his surroundings.

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

“SHUT UP!”

He screamed, out loud, under water, which was not a smart idea really. Surging water flooded his lungs, even as the current continued to pull him viciously on, the stems of plants tangling around him. He managed to avoid another jutting rock, on the principle that where there was one colony of algru, there was surely more, and instead tried to grasp the bottom—

His hand clawed mud and then smooth, water-worn, qi-repelling stone, finding no purchase—

His surroundings spun, abruptly, and the water current sweeping him along was suddenly no longer flowing forwards but dropping away beneath him.

“Oh Monkey—”

His muffled, rather pointless curse, was lost in the silent roar of surging water as he was swept over what was certainly a waterfall and crashed into a pool below.

…

Thankfully, the fall was not high, and the plunge pool he landed in not very deep. Although that did mean he nearly hit the bottom with the force of the drop. It was quite hard to drown cultivators. Most deaths from falling in water in Yin Eclipse occurred predominantly in caves and sink holes, where yin-rich water could settle.

Struggling against the twisting turbulence of the water thundering down above him, he tried to force his way towards the surface, and found he had just landed in more of the same.

River weed bit into his flesh.

Lily stems shed their outer layers in clouds of yin poison.

His hand brushed the underside of a metre-wide pad and the spines lacerated his skin.

“—accept your fate…”

“—your fate…”

“—fate…”

Not for the first time, he cursed that his own mantra’s ‘long form’ was a headache to use. It was great for analysing problems after the fact and getting gains in meditation, when he had time to think about the structure, but at the same time it really sucked…

He fed that anger to the mantra, or tried to, linking the problem with ‘Bright’, the intractability with ‘Iron’ and then focusing on ‘Beginning’, ‘Worldly’ and ‘Gift’ to try and get something from it.

It kind of worked…

The poison savaging his body from the plants and the algru up above was mostly neutralized, but his state of mind still refused to mesh with the full mnemonic. The reality, simply put, was that Ha Mangfan, or whoever Ha Mangfan really was, was a much stronger Physical Cultivator than he was. With the suppression lifted, he had to be at least Soul Meridians, but this strength was certainly greater than his uncle Ryong, maybe even his grandfather.

-If I am this badly affected…

-JUNI!

-Ling!

In that moment, an even more genuine fear grasped at him, made him flail for the surface even harder—

No matter how he fought, he was still dragged under by the roiling gyre of water and the twisting nets of pond weed and lily stems…

“Just accept your fate!”

The words, like a whispered curse, slunk up on him in his mind once again like a shadowy predator.

In that moment, he realized that his predicament was… worse than he realised. His intuition was that ‘Accept’ had to be one of the perpetrator’s mnemonics, which if so, was just…

-Wait… that’s weird.

He self-examined that it was really not at all easy to grasp another’s mnemonics like that. If you could do it, mantras would not be anywhere near as tricky as they were. That told him that either Mangfan was somehow able to use mantra manifestation without being bound by the same kind of oaths he was in regards to disclosing it, or… that something else was going on.

Focusing on ‘Bright’, he tried to clear his head, ignoring that he was in ‘water’ for now. The mnemonic spun, oddly, as if he couldn’t quite gain traction on its use. It felt almost like he was…

‘Mantras are not infallible, you cannot steal them, but you can compromise the body of the person…’

The words Uncle Ryong had spoken on occasion drifted back to him.

‘You can trap someone, like this… especially someone who doesn’t have an inherited mantra, by basically dissociating their ability to wield their mantra and their awareness of their body…’

The issue there was that he did have an inherited mantra. Grimacing, he looked around at the dark water with its swirling currents. He was still being dragged down, caught up in the chaos of the vegetation choking everything. For a disturbing moment he wondered if this was, in fact, a sinkhole, and the drifting weed pulling him down into darkness was disguising a terrifying death-trap…

-That’s not right… I nearly hit the bottom of the pool a moment ago…

‘Bright…’

Again he tried to clear his head, and this time, a modicum of reality did re-assert itself, as the yin poison fogging the water started to clear, diluted by the swirling currents.

Pain flooded his body, like an indescribable itch.

Struggling, he found that he was actually half bound into the mud, spiky roots tearing at his flesh, working their way into his legs, side and right arm, aiming for his meridians and his… bones.

-A spirit herb!

Whether it was awakened or not, he was unclear, but clearly he had been grasped by something, and it had the strength to obfuscate his awareness to a terrifying degree. That thought promoted him to struggle even harder, fighting directly against the yin qi that was now thoroughly suffusing his body.

He managed to grasp some of the root-like tendrils and tear them away from his leg, aware that the surface above him, a swirling curtain of shadows and giant lily pads, seemed to be getting further and further away…

His other hand flailed, trying to find some purchase to pull himself up—

“Got you…”

A haunting, distracting voice echoed in his mind.

A hand grasped his.

Suddenly, he was roughly hauled upwards, towards the surface, a creeping, inauspicious intent sinking into him. Focusing on ‘Gift’ he grasped the arm and sent his mantra-infused qi into the attacker, who snarled and dropped him again.

Pushing himself up, he groaned as spiky undersides of lily-pads tore at his clothing and quickly took in his surroundings.

The water which he had fallen into was not very deep at all, as it turned out.

Barely up to his chest, though his feet were rapidly sinking into the mud. The waterfall he had been thrown over was off to his right, pouring down through rocks into this broad, lily-choked lake. Here and there trees stuck up out of it, however, with the mist, it was impossible to make out the edges, beyond the cliff he had just come down, which was cloaked in creepers and tangled shrubbery. There was no sign at all of whoever had just grabbed him either—

The blow sent him spinning across the lily-choked water surface like a skipping stone.

A tetrid stalker the size of a goat appeared like a ghost, balancing lightly on a lily pad beside him, forelimbs already lashing out at him—

“Got you…”

The words transfixed him, slipping through his own mantra, neutralizing the ability to do anything. In the same instant, a youth in green robes, wearing a featureless, white wooden mask and a broad-brimmed hat appeared beside him, half kneeling on a second lily pad, ignoring the stalker, a fancy white and gold talisman already in his hand—

Gritting his teeth, he grasped the lily pad and sent a vicious pulse of chaotic qi into it. It reacted predictably, its outer layer shedding spines in a cloud of poisonous yin qi. His attacker skipped backwards, moving… in a way that he could only call bizarre, as if they were unanchored from the reality they found themselves in.

Already in the middle of the mess, he staggered away—

Between one footfall and the next, he found himself abruptly grasped around the legs again and yanked under water—

“Got you…” the same, haunting words whispered in his ear.

Bulbous pods, submerged in the water, exploded like alchemical bombs as he was dragged through them, sending spines, clouds of yin poison, and disorientating ripples out around him.

Doing his best to protect himself as he was dragged down, he managed to get enough of a grasp on his mantra that ‘Iron’, ‘Gift’ and ‘Beginning’ could work, even in their suppressed state, in concert.

Unfortunately, all that told him, though, was that the qi in the possession of the awakened herb was preposterously pure and largely untouchable.

-Don’t tell me I am going to actually die…

“Just accept your fate!”

That nasty thought was caught by the distorted refrain from the shout from before, melding with him in a truly disturbing way. It even drew on aspects of his own mantra to reinforce itself, like an ‘Iron’ weight in his psyche, intent on delivering him, like a ‘Gift’, into the embrace of…

Unable to articulate his own anger into words at this point, he sent a pulse of mantra-infused qi into the spiky tendrils trying to drag him down. The plant recoiled—

The blow from above bent the water around him and slammed him into the bottom of the waterway. In the same instant, everywhere, lotus stems unfurled in the blossoming explosion of silt, binding his arms and legs, dragging him directly into the mud.

-Remember, you have that talisman!

Finally, belatedly, a part of him remembered that he had the ‘skitterleap’ talisman.

His body exploded into butterflies and his awareness became oddly dissociated…

“Ah… Ah! Ah!… None of that… none of that…”

The lake exploded outwards, even as the cheeky, arrogant utterance echoed in his head.

His surroundings reformed out of the mist and the swirling vegetation and he smashed into the ground hard enough that he left a crater in the exposed mud, every bone in his body feeling bruised.

“It makes no difference how far you run…” the green-robed figure murmured, somehow already standing over him, despite him never having seen him move.

In vain, he looked around for some kind of weapon, a rock, a branch, an errant piece of spirit vegetation – anything – but remarkably, there was nothing within reach. Everything had been thrown away by the impact of his landing.

The impact had dissipated almost all the qi in his body and his mantra was still not behaving itself either. The skitterleap talisman did have enough qi in it that he could trigger it though…

“A little thing like you, who has no idea how vast the sky is?” his attacker mused. “Do you really think your actions here will amount to anything?”

“My… actions?” he repeated dully, trying to buy a few seconds for it to recharge further.

“…”

Somehow, he got the impression that the figure was amused by his words.

“Ah well, I suppose it is… just your time.”

The figure reached down and dragged him up, revealing that he was wearing a white mask obscuring his features, underneath the hat.

{Mang’s Multifarious Skitterleap}

The skitterleap talisman’s symbol shimmered in his mind’s eye. His attacker’s grasp closed on a cloud of iridescent butterflies as his surroundings wavered and vanished, the talisman finally triggering, though through no action he had made.

“That son of a monkey, does he actually have a life-bound one?”

The words, almost in his face, made his blood run cold as his pursuer drifted after him, their hand reaching out, almost welcomingly—

The flooded forest twisted around him—

The mist, already strange and obfuscating, clawed at him—

The trees seemed to move into his way, sapping the talisman of qi at a frightening rate as it transported him—

They moved, in that strange, frozen moment for several seconds, until his qi ran out—

His surroundings resolved themselves—

He slammed down into shallow, vegetation choked water and spat blood—

-Not again, he groaned as spiky lily pads lacerated his back and scattered a nebulous cloud of yin poison through the water around him.

“—Die already!” Lin Ling’s truncated scream snapped into focus as she landed on a lily pad and struggled up, looking enraged, half cutting at something with her blade.

“…now—!” Juni landed, almost in the same instant, what she had been saying cut off in a splash of water and ruined plants.

Both scrambled up, grimacing in pain, warily taking in their surroundings.

Standing up in waist-deep water, he found they might as well have been where they were. Trees dotted a flooded landscape, and between them, drifts of metre-wide, spiky lily pads extended in every direction. Here and there another plant, or shrub, jutted out – or a rock; but everything quickly bled into mist and rain, such that he had no idea which direction was which.

“What just—?” he started to ask—

“YOU WORTHLESS LITTLE REBEL, I WILL TEAR OUT YOUR BONES ONE BY ONE AND CARVE THEM INTO SHIT STICKS!”

The words echoed through… everything.

The mist swirled, disturbingly.

The trees around them shivered, the jasmine blooms twined through them shivering and shedding petals.

The water rippled, lily pads actually rolled up on themselves as the ambient qi in their surroundings trembled.

“You think that running will make any difference?!” a distant, second voice called out.

-Wait, that is Mangfan…

-Then who was shouting before?

Groaning, he put a hand to his head, because the events that had just transpired were… nightmarish, and yet also oddly dreamlike. They slipped away from him, even when he tried to draw on his mantra to stop that fading of recollection.

“Fates curse you…” Lin Ling gasped, her face pale, tossing away bits of ruined lily pad, its poison already blistering her skin.

“Are you okay?” Juni asked her.

“I nearly had a cultivation deviation!” the younger girl panted pressing a hand to her diaphragm. “My qi is…”

Indeed, he could see her qi was almost exhausted, while Juni was not much better than he was.

“Shu… you are also here…” Juni gasped, noticing him at last. “What… happened?”

“…”

He stared at her, dully, because his memory of the last few minutes was both… clear in his own mind, and yet oddly… inexplicable. Every time he opened his mouth to try and explain that they had just fallen off a cliff, been washed over a waterfall and attacked by spirit herbs and a tetrid stalker… he found he didn’t know where to start.

“…”

“Well, its fine,” Juni sighed, sounding… vexed. “This place has that effect… the real question is where are we?”

“Has… that effect?” he repeated, still trying to focus on the last few moments.

-There was… an attack? Someone… tried to grasp me?

“Yeah, the Jasmine blossoms can totally mess with your head,” Juni replied. “Mantras help, but…” she trailed off, looking around. “There is no record of a place like this within the Jasmine Gate… it should be a tree-choked ravine full of ruins that leads into an open area around a massif where the Jasmine dwells…”

He nodded absently, looking around again.

His own mantra was… still sluggish. Focusing on the long form, he tried to force his dream-like recollection of the last few minutes to stabilize so he could explain, and again got nothing.

-This is not right… a part of him muttered.

Checking the mark for his skitterleap talisman, he found it was empty, so it had absolutely just used its charge as well.

“Come on…” Juni sighed, pulling out a compass. “Let’s get a move on…”

All he could do was nod, still frustrated.

They started wading through the water, skirting the giant, spiny lily pads where possible, but it was torturously slow going. The water was deep enough that moving quickly was impossible, and the lack of visibility with the mist, the rain and the vegetation cover only made it worse.

Compounding that, walking on the water was also impossible. They tried a few times, over the first few metres, but every time they failed abjectly. After trying a few times, Juni actually punched the water with a gloomy expression. Lin Ling, for her part, just sighed.

They soon found the trees thinning out… revealing vast tracts of the spiky lily pads, extending off into the mist and the rain, interrupted only by the occasional rock outcropping with a few trees and trailing coronets and tresses of jasmine flowers, drifting in and out of focus. The only signs of life not of the plant variety were a few distant bird calls, angry and territorial at the disruption visited on their idyll.

“At least we seem to have left our pursuers behind,” he observed, not at all liking the look of the water ahead of them for some reason. “Suddenly, I find myself wishing we brought the boat…”

“Yeah…” Juni agreed, looking around nervously as well.

“We could run across the water lilies?” Lin Ling suggested.

“…”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea, somehow,” Juni muttered.

Scanning the swathes of huge, spine-edged lily pads, he had to agree. He had landed on three now, and still had the scars and far too much yin qi in his body, even with purification pills, for his liking. There was also no telling how deep the water out there actually was. Usually, water lilies and lotuses lived in shallow, slow-moving water, but he had no idea what species this was.

“Then what… do you want to swim?” Lin Ling retorted, bouncing slightly on her feet, because the water almost came up to her armpits.

“Which way is the edge of the valley?” he asked, not fancying that either.

Juni looked to their left and right, her expression becoming gloomy again, before glancing at her compass. He didn’t need to see her grimace to know that it told her nothing of value either.

“Do you reckon we could hit that rock outcropping with a talisman arrow?” Lin Ling asked after a further moment’s contemplation, pointing to one about thirty metres away.

“…”

“Then where?” Juni mused, squinting out into the swirling mist.

Lin Ling stared at the distant rock outcropping, covered in trees and jasmine flowers, itself barely visible, and sighed more deeply.

“Then what? It’s swim, run? Or go back?” Lin Ling declared, more obviously annoyed now.

Glancing behind them into the misty, flooded trees, he shook his head even before Juni did. Going back was impossible. They had somehow lost the pursuit, or appeared to have, but he wasn’t sure he believed that. Ling Luo had had a Jade Loci attuned to their talismans. That alone made hiding impossible unless they actually went underground… and in a valley as flooded as this, that was suicidal.

“…”

“Let’s go along the edge,” he suggested at last, given the other two both seemed devoid of ideas. “If it comes to it, we can always lash a few trees together or put something together from the timber we have, such as it is.”

Juni looked around again and nodded in agreement, taking out her bow and starting off in the lead.

Starting off again, he swallowed a few replenishment pills and tried to draw a bit of qi from a spirit jade, but neither gave any real benefit at all, which was perturbing. Lin Ling had also just tried to restore some of her qi as well, he noted, likely with the same result given her disgusted glare at the jade in her hand.

“Are your… mantras also not working right?” he asked Ling, and by extension Juni.

“Uhuh,” Ling agreed with a grimace, shoving the jade back into her pack, which was now basically floating at her shoulder.

“It’s… disconcerting,” Juni added, looking around at the misty lake again with a frown. “The faster we get out of here, the better.”

“Uh-huh,” he agreed, warily scanning the flooded forest behind them.

The sense of unease he was stuck with was like an itch he couldn’t scratch. It only got worse, as well, as they continued on.

The edge of the vast swathe of water lilies was deeply unpleasant to navigate in its own right. Twice, they tried to go back into the trees, but the tangles of dense branches, knotted roots and treacherous tangles of jasmine and vines rebuffed them.

“Accck, —Owww!”

Lin Ling, who was ahead of him, finally stopped and hauled herself up on a convenient branch to tear a fistful of spines out of her leg.

“A juvenile…” she explained, gesturing sourly at the spikey pads to their right where a few curled up leaves were now bobbing and in the water, swaying back and forth.

“…”

Juni, who was still leading, stared around balefully, likely wondering how she missed it.

“You know what’s… odd, though,” Lin Ling added, as they waited for her to patch herself up.

“—No spirit herbs…” Juni remarked. “It’s all high-rank spirit vegetation, except, maybe, for the jasmine…”

They stared at the silvery-blue flowers high in the trees to their left. Without going and sticking your face in them, a borderline suicidal act, frankly, it was next to impossible in this environment to tell if they were spirit herb or just seeded spirit vegetation.

“Yeah…” Lin Ling agreed. “Certainly there is nothing in the water… not even any water bugs…”

Considering their surroundings, he found that her observation… was indeed entirely correct. Scooping up a handful of muddy water, it was… yin rich, with a lot of detritus from the forest floor, but there was no pond life. Bar the distant bird calls there was, in fact, nothing much at all. On one level, that was actually good, because water-spiders, razor crabs or hordes of biting insects and the like were utterly vile to deal with, but on the other, the lack of ‘threat’ made his skin crawl, and the most disturbing part was that he was struggling to justify that creeping unease.

“Not to mention, how big is this valley?” he asked at last. “I feel like we have been walking for a good few minutes and yet…”

Juni returned a helpless shrug. “As I said before, this is… not what I expected. That said, the records of the eastern side of the Jasmine Gate are… really bad. Only Arai and Sana have been through here recently, and I doubt they went this side of the gate.”

At that mention of Arai and Sana, he felt his stomach twist. As Juni had said earlier, the links to the skitterleap talisman that the pair had were still there, and the life-bound talisman they had from her was still apparently ‘bound’ to them, but…

-It was still a long fall off that cliff, and the ambush by…

He stared at his hands, his unease transforming into something much more profound.

-Ambush by…

“What’s wrong?” Juni asked him.

“…”

He closed his eye for a moment, and again failed to find words to articulate it.

“Well, let’s get going…” Lin Ling grimaced, dropping back into the water and warily stepping past the barely visible, reddish, spikey heads of the water lilies.

Exhaling, he nodded and followed after her, pushing those thoughts away with some relief.

Like that, they made their way on, along the margins of the lilies… for several hundred more metres, until Juni again came to a stop, staring around with a dark expression.

“What’s wrong?” he asked her as they took in their surroundings, which, bar a few less trees, were markedly similar to where they had last stopped.

“I… don’t know…” Juni groaned. “It feels… something just feels off.”

“You don’t say,” Lin Ling muttered.

It was hard to disagree with her. The tension from the lack of an obvious ‘threat’ was like a weight bearing down on his shoulders. The worst part was that it was so… hard to justify. A part of him wanted to just… let go.

A part of him wanted to just accept that they had, indeed… gotten away.

To be relieved that they had escaped, that this place was not as dangerous as it seemed…

The longer he resisted it, and he wasn’t even sure why he was resisting it, given that there was no obvious threat and they had seemingly outrun their pursuit at last, or at least lost them in this misty, water-logged valley, the more… tense, he felt himself becoming. Holding onto it was… suffocating.

Juni closed her eyes for a moment and shook her head. “It feels like we have been walking for too long—”

“—swimming, this is swimming,” Lin Ling grumbled, treading water for emphasis. “Anyway, this valley is clearly big, and it’s not like our progress has been that fast.”

“I…” Juni looked like she wanted to say that that ‘didn’t help’, but managed not to.

“Could it be related to the Jasmine?” he said at last.

“…”

Juni looked at the flowers above them, in the nearest trees, then out at the lily-choked water, her expression twisting into an unhappy grimace.

“Maybe…” she conceded.

He again tried to focus on his mantra, specifically on ‘Bright’ and ‘Iron’ as they set off again, but it changed nothing… nothing obvious anyway.

Listening, all he heard was the lapping of water on large lily pads and reed-beds, the creak of trees and the occasional distant bird-call.

“…”

Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted something move, in a nearby tree—

Juni had already aimed and loosed an arrow, though, which just sailed into nothing. There was an angry ‘squawk’ a moment later and the sound of flapping wings, but no visible sign of the bird itself in the drifting mist.

“…”

Frowning, he shifted, moving so his back was to Lin Ling, listening to the lapping of the water against the lily pads as they started moving again. Visibility was atrocious, so all they could do was listen to their surroundings and hope that any threat made more noise than they did.

“Something isn’t right,” Juni mouthed, nocking a new arrow.

All he could do was nod, having been beset by that uneasy, inexplicable feeling ever since they regrouped. It was too quiet—, and tetrid stalkers were excellent mimics.

“Do you think its tetrid stalkers?” he signed.

Juni and Ling kept neutral expressions, but both signed in agreement.

“…”

“How long until your talisman marks recharge?” he added, considering the previous encounter, that giant one that had barely been delayed by Ling throwing a whole blaze pine at it.

Both Ling and Juni just grimaced again.

“Do we take our chances running over the lily pads then?” he suggested, feeling not a little helpless all of a sudden. Making a raft was the alternative, but that would take time, which intuition suggested they didn’t have.

Juni nodded in agreement.

Ling just sighed and hopped onto the nearest one… which promptly folded in on her like it was no more than a cloth sheet on the water. She still managed to make it to the next one though, because that only required the barest bit of stable resistance. Following suit, he landed on one and it also, immediately, turned to nothing.

Grimacing, he leapt for another, followed by Juni. Within moments, they had left a trail of ruined pads in their wake as they raced away from the trees and the reed beds—

Risking a glance over his shoulder, he cursed as dozens of tetrid stalkers were streaming out of the trees, larger ones supporting tens of smaller ones in a rolling wave of death.

“Good call,” Juni signed.

“Left!” Ling pointed towards an outcropping of rock about thirty metres distant in the swirling mist.

Nodding, he glanced back again as he leapt to a new lily pad, and nearly stumbled, because four of the stalkers had already closed the gap to them.

“ACCEPT YOUR FATE!”

The snarled exclamation literally stunned him, as the green-robed figure appeared, like a ghost, right beside him, grasping for him.

The water surface deformed around them as a second youth, garbed in nondescript green robes, his features also hidden by a simple wooden mask, dropped out of the sky in a flash of light, a few metres ahead of them. The new arrival immediately darted towards Juni.

Fighting against the after-effects of the words, he tried to twist away from his masked assailant, who wasn’t Ha Mangfan, only to find them still standing in front of him, even as he turned. Before he could even begin to complain about how unfair that was, the green-robed youth pressed a palm against his chest—

The blow should have sent him sprawling, yet instead he seemed to hang, helpless, in the air while the world twisted around him—

He connected with water hard enough that he bounced twice, scattering ruined lily-pads in his wake before landing with a huge splash.

Water closed over him as the momentum of his landing plunged him metres beneath the water’s surface. His awareness of his surroundings, already rather patchy, vanished amid a fog of tangled underwater greenery. Dark, yin qis, the product of decomposition and still water within the lake, clawed at him, trying to invade his body.

Desperately, he tried to make his arms move, but the trauma of the blow he had just received fought him at every turn.

“Accept your fate!”

Those vile words, which he was sure would give him nightmares for the rest of his life, echoed in his head, even as he sank further into the water.

“—accept your fate…”

“—your fate…”

“—fate…”

-Come on! Stupid mantra!

His mantra refused to behave as it usually did, and he continued to sink, drawn down—

A hand, a woman’s hand, to his relief, grasped his and he was hauled up, against the pull of the shadowy depths.

-Juni?

For a moment, he thought it was her, then he broke the surface and found that his ‘rescuer’, while… similar in her general appearance and physique, was entirely unknown to him. Her dark, almost black hair, which was unusually curly, was bound up in an ornate style that reminded him somewhat of the statues in the ruins, held in place by a lotus flower. She was also entirely naked, as she knelt on the edge of a giant water lily, looking at him as if he were an errant cat.

The woman who had grabbed him, dropped him into the water… which turned out to be barely up to his waist—

A moment later, their tormenter appeared, followed by three more youths wearing featureless white masks; one in a green robe with black and red trim, the second in a purple robe with red flames on its hem, and the last wearing a blue robe with white clouds on its panels.

-Who?

He stared dully at the group

He had expected…

-Who did I expect?

He stared at the group, suddenly not sure who he had expected, beyond knowing that none of the four looked like them. Whoever they were.

The new arrivals stared at him for few seconds, then seemed to dismiss him in favour of the young woman who had hauled him out of the pool.

“…”

“An awakened spirit herb…” the one who had been chasing him originally observed, alighting on a nearby lily pad as if it were solid ground.

“Ah, that’s manageable…” the blue-robed youth remarked, sounding amused.

“I don’t see the Lin girl.”

“With this one, she will be easy enough to reel in,” the purple-robed youth observed, looking around more pensively.

-Why are they only talking about Lin Ling? he wondered, worried suddenly. Don’t tell me they have already…

He tried to look around, but the mist had returned and all he could see in front of him beyond the group was the shadow of a rock outcropping obscured in the rain and a lot of giant lily pads.

“As I said… it makes no difference, how far you run… or where, this is just… your fate…” the green-robed youth remarked drily, walking effortlessly across the lily pads towards them. “Having rebelled, you can only accept the inevitable. This is your fate.”

“—And we get another awakened spirit herb for our trouble,” the blue-robed one chuckled, glancing at his ‘rescuer’ who was motionless, crouched on her lily pad, her head tilted slightly to one side.

“…”

“I dunno,” the other youth, in the black-edged green robe interjected. “He seems… unconvinced.”

“Mmmm….” the original youth nodded, as if this was somehow amusing. “How about this… you accept your allotted fate… and I…” the youth trailed off for a moment. “Well, how about this, accept, and you can have what was denied to you, back then.”

“Denied… to me?” he asked, thoroughly confused, though quite happy to stall for time.

“Your brother… and Kun Juni,” the blue-robed youth mused, grasping the front of his ruined robe and dragging him up again, like he was a small child. “I know you always wished she was promised to you…”

He couldn’t even find words. The way the youth said that made his skin crawl.

Certainly, he had somewhat felt drawn towards Juni, back when he was younger, but he was fairly sure everyone she had taught had at least had some… regard for her. Given her temperament, good looks and talent it would have been stranger if they had not, really. Nothing had ever come of that teenage infatuation though. She had only ever seen him as a junior… and then a friend… and that was enough, really, given how his brother Bao had behaved.

That engagement to his brother Bao had, thanks to the links between his grandmother and the Kun clan… Well, in many respects, the Han clan had been lucky that Juni was so ill-favoured in the wider Kun clan at that point.

“A… friend,” the blue-robed youth sighed appearing in front of him like a ghost. “Well, I suppose that is you… weak, without ambition.”

“It is not weakness to have good character,” he spat.

“…”

“Oh… that is funny…” the youth in the green and black robe chuckled. “You think you have the qualifications to judge what it required to step forward in this world?”

“And you do?” he retorted.

“I wonder…” the purple-robed youth remarked, sounding both amused and wistful—

“—So, you are the reason I awoke from my slumber.”

The melodious words caught them all off guard. Him all the more so, because the speaker, the spirit form of the herb, even sounded vaguely like Juni.

Abruptly, he was aware of three other ‘young women’ standing in the water, all with similar white lotus flowers in their hair.

“How covetous…” one murmured.

“Desirous of that which you cannot attain,” the second added, sounding almost regretful.

“The empty curse that leaves men ruined…” the third added, with an almost mocking smile.

Looking at the new arrivals, each one of whom could be considered a beauty beyond compare, he found his gaze wandering to the hundreds of lily pads, his blood running cold. Running into one awakened spirit herb that had a body manifestation like this was rare. One awakened spirit herb had nearly murdered all of them with the teleport formation. To run into four… all with adult-looking spirit bodies, who spoke flawlessly…

“More than one it seems,” the blue-robed youth remarked, looking disturbingly unconcerned.

The four ‘young women’ all also looked equally nonplussed, as if something was meant to be happening, that wasn’t.

“You are confused?” the purple-robed youth remarked with a wry grin, after the awkward silence had stretched for several long seconds. “Certainly, the suppression has been relieved somewhat, but that doesn’t mean you now have some advantage… you are merely spirit herbs after all.”

The lotus woman who had hauled him up looked pensively at the purple-robed youth, then at him—

Every lily pad on the water surface exploded, simultaneously, scattering a miasma of yin qi into the mist—

A golden orb appeared in the purple-robed youth’s hand and the exploded lily pads flowed backwards, but the qi they had dispersed did not.

-What the fates?

“As I said… you are merely spirit herbs,” the purple-robed youth said drily.

“…”

“The fates have little to do with it,” the green-robed one who had pursued him initially added, sounding amused. “This is just how things are.”

“Aiiiii…”

The woman beside him sighed, and then the lily pad she was on collapsed into the water, vanishing like it had been drawn down into the deeps. Every other lily pad collapsed in the same instant and he suddenly found himself floundering as his footing—

The masked, purple robed youth stared at the orb in his hand, somehow seeming confused—

He plunged into the water, which almost seemed to draw him down, the bottom collapsing away beneath him, dissolving into a clawing net of pond weed and scattered silt. Spiny tendrils clawed at him, twisting around his legs. Dimly, he was aware of other figures in the water, but had no time to worry about his attackers, because his qi was being torn away from his body at a remarkable rate.

Fighting the instinct to gasp in pain, he wrestled with his mantra—

“Accept your fate!”

Those vile words, which he was sure would give him nightmares for the rest of his life, echoed in his head, again giving him an incongruous sense of having experienced this moment, in a slightly different way, just a short time ago…

“—accept your fate…”

“—your fate…”

“—fate…”

“NO!”

“You think that running will make any difference?!”

The words existed within and without him, clawing at him, echoing out of his memories, even as they sought him out from the shadows….

His vision blurred, and he was lying in the mud of the lake bed, half buried, his body slowly being constricted by the roots.

-Don’t tell me I am going to actually die…

“Just accept your fate!”

That nasty thought, again caught by the distorted refrain from the shout from before, continued to meld with him in a profoundly disturbing way. Again, he saw it even manage to draw on the way his own mantra worked, using ‘Iron’ to weigh down his body and mind, intent on delivering him, like a ‘Gift’ into the embrace of…

The two moments overlapped in his mind’s eye, almost seeming to taunt him, showing him his own anger, and how it would all just lead back to here.

“This is inevitable…”

The ghostly beauty, the white lotus in her hair now shining gently in the water, murmured, floating above him.

“You cannot escape them…

“You cannot escape their chains… I see it…

“Not alone… However, I can give you everything you need…

“If you become mine… I might save them… your friends…”

His surroundings twisted and he saw Juni and Ling struggling out of the pool, looking terrified. Hundreds of tetrid stalkers were surging after them, clawing their way through the water, racing through the trees, even scrambling down the cliffs from above. And yet, there was something… odd, about them. Something slightly… unreal?

“Now do you see?” the beauty knelt beside him, her hand gently caressing his brow.

“A tetrid stalker…?” he replied, somehow, without even seeming to think about it.

“Is that what they call them in this era…” the beauty mused.

A large shadow exploded out of the trees, scattering jasmine petals everywhere, the purple-robed youth on its back holding a golden orb in one hand and a very fancy spear in the other. A moment later, a blue and then a green-robed youth appeared, followed by two more, older men in non-descript robes.

“I could crush them. All of them, they are just bugs and monkeys, for all that they have soul awareness. I could save your friends…”

“If… I…”

“If you join me,” she agreed, smiling beatifically at him.

“Why… me?” he gasped, trying, in vain, to resist whatever it was she…

He tried to formulate the thought, but it slipped away from him, his mantra again rebelling, giving him ignorance as a ‘Gift’, somehow.

“Why… hmmm…” the beauty looked back at him with a decidedly unsettling expression.

“What you call mantras… are power up here. I desire eyes and ears… Your path, your future is… pitiable. Become mine, and well… you would save a lot of people a lot of pain… isn’t that something worthy?”

“…”

He stared dully at the beauty, not even sure what to say to that.

“Do you not want your existence to have… worth?” she asked, looking slightly confused.

“I…”

He fought to focus as she drifted closer, her hand cupping his chin.

“I… I have worth,” he gasped.

“Of course you do,” she replied, her tone almost… condescending. “I just told you, your worth is that you can save your friends… by submitting to me.”

“No…”

There was something in her words that clawed at him. It was disturbing, like a dark resonance of the desire to ‘accept’, and yet…

“NO!”

“That’s it… focus…”

The whispered voice seemed incongruously calming, and yet something about it just grated the wrong way—

The woman grasping him recoiled, as if slapped, the qi trying to envelop his flesh and seep his bones dispersing like a badly woven net. In that instance, her figure… changed, subtly as well.

She was still a beauty, but her face was pallid and her body somehow… empty. She was still naked, but now, in the gloom of the water he could see lotus roots bound into her flesh… and a wound next to her heart, from which a strange, lotus like pattern radiated.

He tore at the roots, but they still bound him, like ‘Iron’ chains, then stopped as he saw, clearly at last, the world beneath the water, beneath the giant lily pads.

Bodies drifted as far as he could see, not one or two… but dozens, maybe even hundreds. Men and women, young and old, bound in weed and the spiky stems of the lilies—

The water rippled, ominously.

“…”

The woman in the water frowned, looking slightly distracted, all of a sudden.

Gritting his teeth, he focused on the skitter leap talisman, preparing to sacrifice several of the core bones in his body to trigger it—

“Damn, it really ‘is’ a life bound talisman…”

He froze, unable to move as the haunting, naggingly familiar voice sank into his mind. His control over his qi, already tenuous, even with what help his mantra was giving, crumbled away entirely. In the same instant, the water around him shook under the impact of a second ripple… and then turned into obscuring mist for a few seconds.

“It makes no difference how far you run,” the blue-robed youth remarked, landing with a light splash a few metres away as the water level rapidly dropped. “Nobody will come to save you… The other two are already within our grasp.”

“No they aren’t,” he refuted, not quite sure where his conviction came from, he just knew it, intuitively.

“Oh?” his blue-robed tormenter asked, sounding amused.

“If they were, you wouldn’t be playing around with me…” he replied, still working to free himself.

“…”

“Ah… you have me there,” the youth conceded. “Though, I hardly call this playing around,” he added, waving a hand at the still draining lake, where the temperature was starting to rise beyond ‘unpleasantly humid’.

Nearby, he saw several of the large waterlilies shrivelling up, smoking at the edges. Of the bodies he had seen though, there was no sign.

“…”

A moment later, the purple-robed youth appeared, followed by another in red and purple, carrying a weirdly-familiar, shimmering, golden orb, its interlocking rings flowing through each other. A part of him felt he should know what that was, but again… his memory was just…

“Do you understand now, how futile this all is?” the red and purple-robed youth remarked, sounding rather resigned, as if this was all a bit… annoying, somehow? “Having chosen to rebel, and attack us, this is the inevitable end your choice has delivered you to—”

“—Hmmmmm…”

All three paused as a white-furred old monkey, his fur quite badly singed, appeared like a phantom out of the reforming mists on a half-submerged tree, his black staff resting over his shoulder.

“Me thinks you lot like to talk, is what I think,” the old monkey remarked, rather urbanely, brushing a few singed hairs off his arm.

“You’re not dead,” the green-robed youth observed, a slight edge of accusation entering his voice for the first time.

“You think that trick work twice on real expert? Very funny, very funny,” the monkey replied with a toothy grin.

“For a monkey you certainly know some long words,” the other green-robed youth sneered. “I bet your core would fetch a pretty price once we rip it out.”

The old monkey just grinned beneath his hat and bared his narrow, slightly singed chest—

A silvery-white lightning bolt crashed down from the sky, smashing into the monkey, or at least it tried to. In the very last instant, the monkey opened his mouth and inhaled, drawing the bolt into his body in a single motion.

He stared dully at the old monkey as he shivered, his fur sparking for a few moments.

The three youths also finally seemed to lose a bit of their confidence at the old monkey’s improbable action.

“You is killing me, me has to ask, why you wasting time playing with little children in backwater land, instead of challenging old ghosts and scheming villains for big throne that very chilly on buttocks and promotes with a congenital itch on back of neck,” the monkey grinned.

“…”

The purple-robed youth stared at the golden orb in his hand—

The old monkey appeared in front of the youth. In the same instant, the remaining water in the lake turned into mist, filled with silvery lightning and a sweltering, humid heat. It enveloped him, suffocating his ability to think, never mind move.

The dense carpet of shrivelled lily pads bled qi as strange flames gnawed at them. The half-submerged trees exploded into flame before vanishing into drifting shadows of ash. The monkey vanished into mist, which swirled crazily around them, then split into three monkeys—

“YAAAAAAAAAAHHOOOOOOOoooooooo…”

His vision swam as the three monkeys all howled in unison, striking at the purple-robed youth. A radiant shield of golden fire appeared around the group of four, repelling the attack—

His surroundings wavered and he found himself lying in steaming water, tangled in weeds and some lotus stems.

-What…?

Gasping, he tried to stand—

“JUNI!” he called out, then cursed, realising that that was a really stupid idea.

Excruciating pain exploded through his side. Looking down, he found a claw of a tetrid stalker stabbed into him. Gritting his teeth, he tried to pull it off, and then stared, dully, wondering why he was not using a talisman, or a weapon—

White shadows flashed in the mist—

*Krrooooom*

The water he was lying in shook. Dimly, he was aware of silvery-white rain drifting down all around him, even as the shrivelled, desiccated lily pads around him started to shift.

Clawing for his talisman, he found, to his shock, he still had it. Withdrawing his short blade, he tried to stab the twisting tetrid—

It moved with enough evasive alacrity that he wanted to scream.

A moment later, a second landed nearby, then a third, skittering out of the ruined forest, dropping from trees.

Pulling out a talisman, he tried to activate it… and stared, as his qi… did nothing. The talisman in his hand might as well have been a piece of wet paper for all the good it did.

“My offer still stands, you know…”

He turned to find the woman… the older Juni look-alike with darker, slightly curly hair adorned with a white lotus flower, walking across the water surface towards him. All around him, the lily pads were… revivifying themselves as well, which was certainly not good.

“BASTARD THING! FUCK OFF!”

The curse made his ears ring, but that was about it. Something about the valley as it was now… made the exclamation seem muted. The woman glanced back behind her, looking amused.

“Foolish children, they have no idea what they have bitten off,” she mused. “That idiot monkey is the iron brick that just keeps on dropping.”

The last bit seemed more her muttering to herself than him though.

One of the tetrid stalkers charged at her and he watched as she caught the bug out of the air with contemptuous ease and stared at it, watching its limbs… fail to injure her arm in the slightest—

Without a comment, she tossed the goat-sized insectoid monstrosity over her shoulder, back into the swirling mist, not even bothering to kill it, near as he could see.

The one that was trying to attack him was still doing its best to gouge a hole in his side, while the other…

The dog sized insect twitched twice as he stared blankly at it, wondering what—

He never even heard the explosion that sent him spinning through the air, to land with a muddy splash in the shallows, feeling like every bone in his body had just been jarred. Strange, sinister qi was already invading his tormented body, trying to merge with his meridians. The tetrid that had been attacking him was nowhere to be seen, though its limb was still wedged into his robe, cutting into his side.

Stifling a groan, he swallowed a healing pill and tore the last remains of the vile thing away. Qi poison aside, the injury was not actually that bad, which was… surprising.

Trying to get his bearings, he rolled over and managed to haul himself to his knees, coughing blood into the water.

Listening, everything was…

Staring around, he saw the drifting jasmine blossoms start to fall as, within mere moments, the tumult faded away and the roiling mists calmed. A faint chime drifted through everything, swelling into a strange, resonant chord of something like flute music, melding with the patter of rain and the faint lapping sounds of the still rippling water.

Out of the moment, kneeling in the water, a beautiful woman appeared. At first, he thought it was the white-lotus woman, but her hair, while also somewhat curly and twisted, was a paler, lighter brown, and there was something more… elegant about her. The resemblance to Juni really was uncanny… though now he looked more closely, she was also daubed in strange red and black spiral symbols, accented with flashes of yellow and purple in the shape of flowers.

Sorrow and suffering hung about her like a veil, and even as he recognised that, the mist around them became leaden and dreary. In her arms, she was holding a body, a dark-haired, oddly familiar youth, his face pale, washing blood out of his clothes.

“Tho’ all the world betrays thee…”

It took him a second to realise that the words were spoken by her, and that she was, in fact, singing, sadly, somewhat in tune to the music.

“One sword, at least, thy right shall guard—”

“One faithful heart shall praise thee.”

The words still hanging in the air, she leant down and pressed her forehead against the youth’s, then kissed his forehead gently.

As he looked on, the ache and pain she evoked made him feel as if it was his own stomach that had been ripped out. The woman slowly relinquished the body into the water and watched it drift away, only tattered scraps of bloody clothing remaining in her hands.

Silently, she looked up at the now gently swirling mist—

The mist scattered, revealing three monolithic, rugged stones, their every visible surface carved with eye-watering designs, jutting out of the water. A further ring of twelve, also immense, but somehow… lesser, seemed to melt out of the surroundings, each carved and painted with figures or symbols.

In the middle of the watery circle, behind the woman, a great tree rose, its trunk twisted with age, its bark dark and mossy, leaves the colour of dried blood. Here and there, golden flowers shimmered, though in the mist it was impossible to see what species they resembled.

Thousands of red rags hug from its thorny branches, tattered and lost, each one, he suspected, representing a life lived and lost, like some macabre shrine. More shocking, though, were the hundreds of severed heads, all staring down, balefully, their eyes tracking the woman as she walked back to the tree and placed the rag on a low branch…

The woman turned… her gaze finding him, her eyes like shadows of the eclipsing moon as if she were… pondering something—

In the blink of an eye, she knelt beside him. Involuntarily, he flinched away, and gasped as he found excruciating pain flowing out from his midriff, trying to subsume his body as the muddy water slowly rose around him.

“Focus…”

The words, both soothing and at the same time, incongruously grating, in just the wrong way.

Other shadowed figures had appeared now, at the edge of the great circle. Young and old, hidden, somehow, by the luminescence of the flowers – jasmine, lotus, lily, orchid, chrysanthemum and many more in their hair, but each one possessing a presence that was… haunting, otherworldly even.

“Thou soul of love and bravery…”

Up close, her hair seemed darker now, edged with shadows that bled red, the irises of her eyes burning like eclipsed moons, even as his awareness of the world around him started to waver. She was so beautiful it hurt to look upon her—

“It is not your time…”

The words of the woman were like a cold slap to his face, forcing him back to consciousness and the realisation that he was basically bleeding out in the muddy shallows.

Gasping, he tried to move… and froze, as he found himself looking at two young girls, who were standing knee-deep in the water nearby. Both had green and purple lotus flowers in their curly, dark hair, and were holding wooden spears topped with dull, blue-grey stone. A third, crouching nearby, was ripping a tetrid stalker apart with her bare hands, looking annoyed.

Behind her was a crude stone monolith. What he could see of the surface of the rock was dominated by a stylized figure of a young woman, with dark hair and rather desirable curves, holding a broad-bladed spear in one hand and a raven in the other. Her whole body was covered in black and red triskelion-like designs that made his eyes water as badly as the stones had.

“It has been a long time since vermin or that weed dared to come this far in…” the nearest observed.

“Yes, there is a sign and everything…” a fourth, naked young girl, standing with her arms folded in the shallows on his far side, remarked.

-Ah… sign?

He managed to look about and realised that there was.

Someone had driven a wooden pole into the shallows, next to a crude stone monolith, and hung a sign board off it which read:

‘No Bathing, No Shenanigans, No Stealing, Don’t Litter, No Birds. NO MONKEYS!’

The first four were written in neat, consistent script. The ‘No Birds’ seemed to be a later addition, however, as it was scratched into the wood then painted, and the calligraphy was much more cramped. The ‘No Monkeys’, line had been written with some venom.

“I even added a no-monkeys warning, after the mess with that emperor and his six dancing morons…” the girl in the water muttered.

“That was a long time ago,” one of the others remarked.

“Perhaps they have devolved to the point where they can’t read?” an older woman who had just dropped out of a tree, her hair bound up in a garland of mulberry flowers, suggested.

“It is possible,” another beauty agreed, slipping out of the reeds to his left, a bundle of arrows and a bow in her hand. “They are ever this way…”

“Oh…”

Looking around, he saw some awkward shuffling among the younger girls. The one in the shallows face-palmed and then the text shifted to be a series of very simple pictograms that even a two year old could probably decipher. The Intent bleeding off the ‘No Monkeys’ pictogram was genuinely murderous as well.

“Someone is—”

The mist and the lake ahead of them deformed and a wall of greenish-gold fire exploded through everything. He didn’t even have a chance to attempt seeking cover as it rolled over the bank—

The qi in the attack dissipated and it bled away as if it had never been. Even so, he found himself struggling to breathe and his skin blistering, while the leaves on trees nearby burned and the water started to smoke.

The ‘young girl’ in the water made an obscene hand gesture and, in the same instance, a profound sense of ‘wet’ obfuscated everything and the misty haze and rain redoubled itself—

“I can’t believe that that actually worked…” the green-robed youth appeared, walking out of the mist, which swirled inauspiciously.

“Mmmmm…” the purple-robed youth following behind considered the orb in his hand with a frown, then looked at the bank.

“There really is a grove of awakened spirit herbs in this place…” the blue-robed youth added, landing nearby with a splash in the water, sounding… disturbingly pleased.

“What happened to the monkey?” the green-robed youth asked.

“What monkey?” the purple-robed youth frowned.

“…”

“The…”

The green-robed youth trailed off, sounding confused, which for some reason made him unreasonably happy.

The young women stared at his tormenters, their expressions warring between pity, confusion and amusement.

He stared as well, because while he also ‘knew’ about the white-furred old monkey, he somehow wasn’t able to articulate that he was a white-furred old monkey or that said monkey, looking somewhat singed it had to be said, was there, crouched on a smoking log a few metres away, watching with a gloomy expression, munching on a spirit fruit.

He flinched as a young woman with blonde hair and a pale blueish-white lotus in her curly hair crouched down beside him. He tried to speak, but she put a hand over his mouth, then very slowly started to move him backwards—

The dark-haired woman with mulberry flowers in her hair turned to stare at him, and the girl who was next to him.

“…”

The girl froze, but rather than do anything, the woman just looked pensive for a moment, then sighed and then looked back at the youths, who were… arguing about what type of spirit herbs they had encountered.

The young woman exhaled softly and continued to drag him back, through the flooded forest until the mist swirled around them again and they were alone in the shallow, lily-carpeted waters. Even there, though, he saw a few clusters of the large, spiky lily pads.

“You is very lucky…” the girl muttered… in what it took him a moment to recognize was an older dialect of Easten. “Stupid idiots making a big mess, then that wretched weed make an even bigger one…”

“Why… are you saving me?” he asked at last. “And where are…”

“—the others?” the girl frowned, glancing around. “This place… not place you think. It is very—”

A very naked, peerlessly beautiful woman with lustrous dark hair and lotus-like tattoos enveloping half her body appeared, like a ghost, next to his ‘rescuer’.

“You actually think you can run from me?” she murmured, sounding amused.

For a few seconds, he actually found himself wondering if he was finally going mad, as unable to move in the slightest, he watched her twining her hands in the girl’s hair, her smile disturbingly ecstatic—

{Hao Tianxuan’s Generation Caging Purgatorial Chains}

Silvery chains coiled around them both—

The young woman made a *tcch* sound and a second version of her stood out of the water, grasped him by the hand and dragged him down into the water. For a moment he flailed, then—

“Calm down… this is not good…”

“Trigger the talisman… Han Shu…”

Her words sank into his mind and the connection to the skitterleap talisman resonated in his minds-eye—

His surroundings wavered and then he landed, with a hard splash, scattering pond weed and lily-pads everywhere.

“—what the fates!”

Lin Ling landed next to him with a shocked yelp.

Juni appeared a moment later, struggling with a tetrid stalker.

Gritting his teeth, he lunged for it and grabbed two of its legs, trying his best to stop it from attacking her... and failed miserably as the wound in his side sent him sprawling.

“You’re… okay!” Juni gasped, finally stabbing the critter in the face with one of its own limbs.

“Y-yeah…” he managed, fumbling for a healing pill.

“What happened?” Lin Ling asked, struggling up and finding that the water was… not as deep.

“There… was a spirit herb,” he explained, then frowned, because their surroundings were…

They were still in a lake, but there were no giant water lilies there, just normal, if slightly oversized ones. The jasmine flowers were still everywhere though.

“Did you… also…”

A deeply disorientating flash of silver… light left him seeing green and blue splotches in the mist—

*Krooooooom*

A vast, muffled explosion echoed through the mist a moment later, followed by a hot, humid flash of air that made him flinch. The jasmine flowers in nearby trees shimmered faintly, and in the distance he heard something… like laughter?

“Did you hear that?” he asked, poking his side. The wound was still healing, but his qi was recovering again, at least.

“…”

Juni and Ling both looked at him as if he was an idiot.

“Not the explosion, the… laughter?” he clarified.

“…”

“Let’s get out of here, anyway,” Ling muttered. “That was too close, the way they managed to catch up to us…”

“You think that running will make any difference?!”

The words clawed at him, seeming to come from within and without. The water rippled and a few lotus flowers bloomed.

“Do they only know that one motherless phrase?” Lin Ling grimaced.

“Having chosen to rebel, and attack us, this is the inevitable end your choice has delivered you to!”

The follow up was no less…

He put a hand to his head, feeling that that was… oddly familiar.

“Let’s go,” Juni grimaced.

“Yeah,” he nodded…

“Then… why are we not going?” Lin Ling asked, looking confused.

“…”

Juni closed her eyes, taking a few deep breaths.

“Soul attacks…” she said at last. “This is a soul attack, isn’t it?”

Focusing on his mantra, he tried to force himself to take a few steps… and failed. It was like his legs just refused to work. Even standing was hard, and his mantra was still…

The helplessness made him want to scream or weep and just curl up in a ball.

*KUUAAAAASSSSK!*

The roar of a tetrid stalker reverberated through the misty forest.

His already rebelling qi trembled and the water grew sluggish and turbid around him. The mist also seemed to close in, becoming muggier and more oppressive.

“Not again…” Juni gasped, staggering up and grabbing Ling, who was barely able to move.

“Fate-thrashed…” his curse was cut off, as a wagon-sized behemoth, easily double the size of the largest specimen of a tetrid stalker he had ever laid eyes on, materialized out of the trees to their right.

Unable to so much as move, they could only look helplessly on as it spotted them and started forward, across the open water—

A strange, eerie, flute-like chord, that resonated through the ruins. Everywhere, flowers started to bloom. The stalker shifted from side to side and then moved in a blur—

Not quite believing what he was seeing, they watched the monstrosity, which was absolutely a powerful, immortal realm qi-beast, land in the water with a massive splash… and vanish without a trace amid swirling lily pads.

They looked on, blankly, as a limb managed to break the surface, flailing, caught in pond weed and lotus roots… and was then drawn back under the water, leaving only ripples and swirling arcs of flowering lotus pads and yellow, snap-dragon-like flowers he suspected might be gourd-wort—

With an explosion of water, and a shockwave of deeply inauspicious qi the corpse surfaced, drifting in several pieces as the lilies and gourd-wort flowed away from it.

It took him a moment to realise what the problem was, then saw that the nearest lily pads were starting to acquire red veins.

“Blood Ling contamination?” Juni scowled.

“Uh…” Ling tugged his sleeve, though he didn’t need her input to see.

“They are all…” Lin Ling stared, wide-eyed, at the water they had just waded through as the lotus plants, reeds and even a few irises, a mulberry and gourd-wort all evacuated the area around the dead stalker.

He watched as dozens of flowers from their surroundings basically stood up, rising out of the water to reveal childlike girls with similar, curly hair in various shades. Most appeared to be barely six or seven years old, though a few were older, in their early teens.

Some carried wood spears tipped in bone, others daggers of corroded metal. A few even wielded stone weapons, while off to the side, one had a bow and a bunch of arrows made out of reeds, and he swore another was hauling what for all the world looked like a reed basket of clam shells. All of them were scowling and making obscene gestures.

Within moments they had all retreated to the edge of the pool, leaving only a few contaminated leaves behind.

“—Sup…”

He flinched backwards as the girl holding the basket of various clams was suddenly standing in front of him.

“Wanna clam?”

The three of them stared, uncomprehendingly, at the girl with a pink lotus flower in her hair, who was holding out the broad, shallow basket of clams for them to look at. Amidst the mix of muddy clams, some red and spiky, others white and ribbed, there were also a few crayfish, and even a razor crab in there, he saw, caught in pond-weed.

“A…”

“Now is not the time…” an older ‘girl’ with several beautiful whitish-blue iris flowers arranged in her hair, appeared right beside the younger one, grabbing her and pulling her back.

“Um… we… don’t mean any—”

“Evidently,” the older girl sniffed, looking them over. “We are not savages, you can go that way. Don’t pick the plants.”

She pointed towards the right hand side of the ‘wall’.

“I can show em the way!” the girl with the clams volunteered, cheerfully.

“You…”

“Might as well,” the girl with the bow, who had purplish-brown grass flowers affixed in her hair like a pair of wings, remarked drily. “This looks like it’s going to get messy. There are other contacts to the west, and the roof has been raised.”

“Don’t go far, we will relocate to the plaza of the Gentle Mistress,” the iris-girl admonished the clam-carrying lotus, who had now put the basket on her head.

“Uh huh, uh-huh,” the girl nodded, then waved for them to follow her.

“Are we… actually?” Ling signed.

“Do you want to try running?” Juni signed back.

Looking at the dozens of awakened spirit herbs now quietly observing them, he shuddered, agreeing fully with her sentiment. There was no way they escaped this lot if they decided they were a threat, somehow. A single awakened herb was a terrifying thing. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, with manifest spirit bodies and weapons…

Unbidden, the memory of Senior Ying shooting arrows made from Life-breaking Aspen wood at alkyr surfaced in his mind as he eyed the girl wielding the reed arrows, wondering what their trick was—

*Kuaaaaaaaaaassssh*

Another cry echoed through the misty swamp.

The young girl gave them a pointed look, then again waved for them to follow her. Several of the weapon-wielding plants were already moving off, in the direction of the tetrid stalker cry, he noted.

Left with no other choice, they could only follow after the girl, who set off through the water, humming a jaunty tune, effortlessly balancing her basket on her head.

“So, you’re cultivators?” she asked after a while.

“Uh… yes,” Juni confirmed.

“Seem kinda weak,” the girl deadpanned. “Wanna misty moon clam? They will help…”

“…”

He stared at the clam, about the size of his fist with a pale, faintly ribbed shell, that she was offering, not sure what to say.

Wordlessly, Juni took it and turned it over in her hands.

“We will take three,” she said at last.

“Three spirit jades,” the girl replied with aplomb, holding out her small hand.

“…”

Juni nodded and passed her three. The girl just plonked the jades in her basket and passed Juni two more of the white clams in return.

“Are we just…” Lin Ling started to say, then trailed off as Juni pressed a clam into her hand. “Oh.”

Taking one, he realised immediately why as well. Their environments were still oppressive, humid and deeply unnerving, but the subtle weight he had never realised was dragging at him faded away. Taking a deep breath, he felt like he could breathe freely again.

“What do they do?” Lin Ling asked, as they started off again.

“Hide you from prying idiots,” the girl replied drily. “At that price is a steal, but—”

“—VILLAINS! HEAVEN HAS EYES AND FOLLOWS YOUR EVERY MOVE!”

Din Ouyeng’s voice boomed out from a different direction, making all of them stumble. The most surprising thing, though, was that he recognised it as Din…

Again, he was struck by being fundamentally unable to articulate… the things in his head, and then it passed as the little clam expelled a large puff of faintly multi-coloured mist into their surroundings.

“What the…” Lin Ling put a hand to her temple and grimacing.

“Persistent,” was all the girl muttered, waving for them to continue walking, which to his surprise, he found he could do with ease compared to before.

-They were using soul attacks to… mess with our perception?

It was so obvious that it was…

He wanted to say ‘embarrassing’ but suspected that the disruptive projection of whatever was done ran quite deep. All of them did have what amounted to Martial Intent, despite not being at Golden Core, but that only really gave them a bit of parity with unprepared Golden Core experts. He probably could incapacitate a Soul Foundation cultivator with a surprise attack using mantra manifestation… once, maybe?

A Nascent Soul or above expert, which Mangfan, Din Ouyeng and the rest likely were, was a whole other matter, especially with whatever they had done to raise the suppression.

They waded on in silence, Juni and Ling both probably preoccupied with that ominous thought, holding the clams, which continued to exhale little swirls of misty vapour. Everywhere he looked, there were flowering water plants – lotuses and gourd-wort were the predominant ones, along with drifts of flowering reeds. The jasmine was also there, if anything seemingly more pronounced than it had been before, winding around submerged trees and over the occasional ruins that drifted in and out of the mist like ghostly shadows.

What was also noticeable, as they walked past one of those ruins, was that the style was… different. The sleek curves and pointed arches were there, yes, but with the roofs intact the style reminded him more of ancient stupas or old temples, not in the Easten style, but the more subtle, refined Yin style. That said, it was hard to muster much interest in them given their current circumstances.

“How… do we get out of here?” Juni asked at last as they passed by another cluster of flooded ruins half overgrown by jasmine-crowned trees.

“Hmm…” the clam-carrying spirit herb pondered for a moment, looking out into the mists. “Your best chance is probably to hide in the heart of the grove, or in some of the caves. They will catch you like crayfish in a pot beyond here.”

“…”

It was hard to deny that assessment.

“Your worry is that your kind rarely come back from here, isn’t it?” she added after they had waded on in silence for a few more metres.

“Well, yes…” he conceded.

“Fair,” she nodded. “However, mostly death here is self-inflicted. What happens if you rob and steal in the world below? Kill a powerful person, an influential person… rob their house.”

“Ah…”

When the spirit herb put it like that, it was… obvious. That the thought had not occurred before was also rather chilling.

He glanced involuntarily at the nearest ruin, with the familiar geometric, flower-like carvings and pointed arches, trying not to shudder as his gaze was drawn to the jasmine flowers in the trees growing out of it.

“Your awareness is quite good, yes, this place dulls the senses, the big sister doesn’t like monkeys and their ilk coming in. Only if they pass quietly and don’t make a fuss is their presence tolerated.”

“…”

Involuntarily, he glanced behind them.

“Anyway, we should talk less, this place is not without its dangers, even with…”

They all flinched as a further flash of white fire swirled through the mist, flickering like lightning shadow in cloud. Their surroundings shimmered and the water surface seemed to bleed multi-coloured. Buildings wavered, their outlines shifting and trees seemed to shuttle back and forth for a few seconds before everything went back to normal.

“With me guiding you,” the herb added, grimacing.

They waded on, through the waist-deep water for several more minutes, pausing occasionally when further shockwaves and the odd angry exclamation washed over them, but the din of combat did progressively fade away, until at last, they arrived at a monolithic stone, maybe fifteen metres high, jutting out of the water.

“That’s…”

“Uh…”

Juni and Ling both stopped to stare at it, as did he, because it was familiar. It was one of the outer ‘stele’ from the vision he had seen.

“This is…?” he tried to find words to describe it, but failed.

The stele itself was already impressive, but unlike in his vision, the vast, constellation-like figure, in this case had been picked out in paint. The figure on it was a woman, her hair painted in white and gold, wearing a stylized dark robe, draped as alluringly as the crude art style would allow, across her voluptuous form. The robe and her feminine aspects were picked out with white and blue stars. In one hand, she held a lantern, the other a harp-like instrument, while the lower hands held a… jasmine flower and in the other, a small bird. Behind her head was a crown of golden leaves, crested with a crescent moon.

Before it, a crude block platform, about a metre clear of the water had been raised up, on which were arranged two statues and an altar.

The older one, with her golden-white hair loose, and her robe draped in such a way as to give the idea of being clothed, while not actually concealing much of anything, was certainly of the woman on the massive stele, based on the identical crown. The other statue, placed beside it, was of a younger girl, also golden-haired with a similar face, carrying a pair of torches. Her robe was patterned with flowers and leaves that greatly resembled the geometric designs daubed around the monolith behind them. Both wore fresh garlands of jasmine flowers.

“The Mistress of Starry Sky, and the Far Seeing Daughter,” the spirit herb said absently. “They are the protectors of this land… what remains of it, anyway.”

Another dull rumble, the first in a while, echoed from behind them. In response, the mist shivered and the visibility actually improved for a few seconds—

A blue-green lightning bolt arced down, incinerating a swathe of vegetation. The jasmine flowers trembled on all the nearby trees and a few lilies and flowering herbs shifted in decidedly ‘aware’ ways.

“…”

“Yeah, taking cover might be a good idea,” the spirit herb muttered. “The big sisters rarely wake up, but all of them are eccentric. They dislike your kind quite a lot, though with fair reason. Oft has it been said that our songs are only for the pure and free… Your people tend to excel at a very special kind of slavery that they dislike a great deal.”

“And yet, you are helping us…” he pointed out, as the herb looked around pensively.

“Hmm… well, we are a broad…pagoda, here, and you bought some clams, that counts for something,” she replied blandly, before pointing off to one side. “This way… there are old caves and the flooding is deceptive. The shrines further in are also not so easily violated.”

Another shuddering tremor scattered rainbows in the mist as the herb set off again, more purposefully—

A shadow-like hand exploded out of the mist, grasping for her. With a yelp, the herb dropped her basket into the water, the clams inside it scattering thick, iridescent mist everywhere.

Cursing, he grabbed Juni and Ling’s hands and started to race, as fast as he could, through the water, in the direction the herb had talked about. Behind them, there were multiple impacts—

The water around them surged and he was swept off his feet. Everything turned chaotic for a few seconds as they spun, crazily in the flood, until a black shadow exploded out of nowhere and hit him—

…

“Oh, fates, I hate you, and this place…” Lin Ling’s groaning voice right beside him pulled him back to the moment.

“Easy, we smacked into that rock hard…” Juni added.

He tried to sit up and found she was actually dragging him through the muddy shallows, with Ling’s help. Touching his head where it hurt, he looked at his fingers and found them red with blood. Seeing he had recovered, she stopped and took a few deep breaths. Blood was running down her face, he couldn’t help but note, and her robe was badly torn.

“Here…” Ling helped him up.

Taking a few breaths, trying not to wince, he looked around and found that what they had hit was likely one of a number of rock outcroppings—

“You think you can actually run!?!”

The words tugged at him, but failed to penetrate the pounding headache he currently had, or the pain in his hand. Holding it up, he found the clam clenched in his fist tightly enough to draw blood, a swirl of hazy mist around them.

“Oh shut up, please!” Juni snarled, kicking the water angrily.

“Over there,” Ling pointed to their left, where there was a fairly large cave entrance visible amid tangled vegetation and some tumbled walls.

“…”

There was another flash of silver fire, matched a second later with gold—

Everything jumped, nearly sending him sprawling. His qi tried to take a standing deviation into uncontrollable for a few seconds, before his mantra re-asserted some modicum of control. Trees shed leaves like it was autumn and the jasmine flowers tumbling over everything seemed to ripple faintly.

“The rocks in the caves make navigation atrocious,” Juni said, after a moment’s thought. “If there is water as well, it will help… our goal is to hide from them and recover a bit. The longer this goes on, the more likely it is, that something is noticed.”

“That’s… true,” he conceded.

“The herb was right, though, if we keep running like this, we will run out of things before they do. If it wasn’t for the monkeys’ intervention…” Juni bit her lip, looking angry now…

They stared at the dark, overgrown entrance again.

“Ah… isn’t that?” Ling pointed to the tangled, thorny vines growing down over the rocks and snaring up the trees to its left.

“…”

“I guess the fates are watching,” Juni muttered as they took in vast tangle of blood briar vine.

As a plant, it was utterly vile, making brown-thorn look like it was an ornamental plant for gardens. Encountering it anywhere was usually a clear sign that you wanted to go a different way. In the current circumstances, however, it was actually useful because it was almost impervious to soul attacks. Throwing them at it just made the plant stronger and more vivacious.

“What if it’s a dead end?” he asked, feeling sort of compelled to suggest that.

“…”

Juni stared behind them again, and he couldn’t help but feel sorry for her. He certainly had no real solution either…

“Shit…”

He slapped himself in the face, realising what was happening.

“Oh…” Ling and Juni, realising the same thing, grimaced.

“Anything is better than nothing,” he grimaced, taking a step towards the cave, and finding it much harder than when the spirit herb had been with them.

“It is,” Juni agreed.

Compared to before, walking was like trying to wade through sticky mud.

“It. Is. Inevitable! As rebels, you can only accept that you will be delivered unto justice!”

“ACCEPT. YOUR—”

Gasping, he clapped his hands to his ears, hard enough to burst his eardrums. The pain was excruciating as he stumbled, his balance destroyed for a few seconds. His whole world just rang with the distorted noise of his own heartbeat.

“Accept. Your. Fate.”

The words hung in his mind, like a dark curse, trying to drag him back. Nearby, Juni was holding her head, staggering, while Ling had dropped to her knees, vomiting…

Fighting his own mantra, he tried to focus on the feeling he had had…

“It is not your time…”

The words were not the ones he sought, but he grasped at them and tried to associate them with ‘Beginning’. To his shock, they kind of worked, and the crippling sense of indecision and hopelessness receded. Grabbing Juni, he tried to send a pulse of his own intent into her.

She said something… ‘Thanks’, to which he signed, clumsily, in reply—

“Accept…”

“NO!” he snarled, silently, because he was still deaf, and instead managed to take the few steps over to Ling, using his mantra, just that word, on her.

Off to his right, in the direction they were heading, he saw several tetrid stalkers appear… and then almost as quickly vanish into the swirling water with very ominous *plops* and a few ripples.

Juni hauled Ling up and between them, they staggered towards the cavern, which at this point, was really the only place offering shelter.

The trip, only a few dozen metres, seemed like it took an eternity until they slumped down against the ruins of a wall, beneath the tangled stems of the blood briar, gasping like winded cripples.

“Fates, I hate them so much…” Ling groaned.

All he could do was nod.

Taking out a replenishment pill, he ate it and grimaced at how little it did. The few cuts and scrapes he had on him, that had already healed were marked by faintly green-tinted smears of blood that made him wince.

“You are also overdosed,” Juni signed, eyeing his forearms.

“Yeah,” he replied, barely managing a tired grimaced.

Biting his lip he spat a little bit of blood into his hand and considered it. Unstable qi, yin poison and purification residue meant that it was actually smoking slightly.

“At least anything that bites us will poison itself before we die,” Ling joked wearily, looking up at the spiky vine above them almost challengingly.

“True,” he conceded. “Though it should hide our trail.”

“There is that,” Ling agreed. “Let’s hope it’s not also awakened.”

“…”

He considered the leafy vine with its millions of finger-length spines gloomily, wishing Ling had not suggested that.

“The interior is much bigger than it looks…” Juni signed, turning to look behind them.

Pushing himself up, he saw that she was right. The ruins went into the cave, which was much more extensive than it first appeared, seemingly focused around a large, temple-like structure built into the rock itself. Some of it was flooded, but it was possible to make out passages further in.

“Did you see the… stalkers?” he gasped, pointing to where they had vanished.

“Uhuh…” Juni nodded grimly.

“We still need to recover,” Ling groaned. “At least to the point where the talisman recharges… we have all over-burdened it at this point.”

“…”

Considering their condition, Ling was also right on that count. Gritting his teeth, he got up, then helped Ling up, because standing in the entrance was just asking for trouble.

Somewhat to his surprise, though, the cavern was even bigger than the secondary impression had given. The roof was tall enough to fit a small pagoda inside, and even had a few fissures open to the sky above, visible as glimmering white scars. The main cavern was a sort of plaza, with buildings arranged on both sides, leading to a further, smaller cavern beyond it. That also held some ruined buildings, genuinely in the style he had seen in Portam Rhanae, rather than the strange halfway style of the outer hall.

The second hall also held another shrine – to the ‘Far Seeing Daughter’ near as he could tell. The statue certainly had the same hair and dress as her, though here she wore the crescent-moon crown of the older woman and was sitting, cross-legged, almost like a Buddha.

Before her was an old altar, flanked on both sides by a shallow pool, which to his surprise held all kinds of objects – bowls, metal daggers, jewellery, stone talismans and more ominously, what looked like bones.

“Where now?” he asked, as they sat on a handy bench near the edge of the pool, nibbling on some of Sana’s ration-cakes. His hearing had mostly recovered at this point, but his qi control was still misbehaving.

“There is a path to the right,” Juni murmured. “I think all we can do is keep going on and hope that our pursuers get hopelessly gnarled up in the chaos they have unleashed.”

“…”

“And before you say ‘it’s not a great plan’, or something, I challenge either of you to come up with a better one,” Juni added with a scowl.

“…”

Ling just sighed.

He could only nod. It was not a good circumstance at all, a conclusion punctuated by another ominous rumble in the distance. This far in, the mist was only really visible where it crossed through the areas illuminated by the fissure of the roof, however, everywhere he looked, the edges of things shimmered oddly for several uneasy seconds.

“I really don’t like that,” Juni grimaced, eyeing their bench, which had also bled its edges for a second or two.

“Yeah,” he agreed.

He had no idea what it was, but just looking at it gave him a queasy feeling.

“The issue will be if they are tracking us with our talismans,” Ling muttered as last.

“…”

That was another problem, but not one that was easily solvable, short of throwing them away. That was a last-ditch effort though, because all of their talismans were bound to them anyway, and if soul-sense was usable… there was no guarantee they had not been marked in some other way. Mangfan and the others had had a good amount of time to prepare…

“Accept…”

“Oh for fates sakes!”

He rubbed his fingers into his temples, focusing on banishing the malignant, almost mocking echo.

“What’s wrong”? Juni asked him.

“The echo of what they are shouting,” he grimaced. “It’s like a curse… The slightest thought.”

“Oh, yeah…” Juni nodded, spitting on the ground. Ling just made a rude gesture in the direction of the cavern entrance.

They rested for another short while, then got up and set off again. The route Juni had picked did go on for some distance, as it turned out, however it soon dropped below the water table, leading to them wading through waist-deep, icy water. His blood toxicity was so high from the number of pills they had been eating for replenishment that he didn’t dare eat any high-grade purification pills either, so all he could do was accept the icy pain and feed it back into something positive with his mantra.

“It goes underwater…” Juni muttered at last, bringing them to a stop.

“Monkey-shit…” Ling groaned.

“Do we go back?” he suggested.

“…”

Juni looked behind them, her now perpetually stressed expression turning even gloomier.

“Give me a minute…” she muttered, taking out a rope and tying it around her waist. “If I don’t give it one good jerk every ten seconds, pull me back, immediately.”

“Shouldn’t we all go?” Ling asked, uneasily.

“No,” Juni shook her head. “I have the most experience with caves of all of us, but if we all go and something happens, we will be in an even worse situation. This way, at least I can be rescued.”

“…”

Ling grimaced, but he just nodded, familiar with her thinking. It was better for one person to scout and be rescued than for all of them to get into difficulties.

“While I go, get used to being submerged in colder water,” Juni added, crouching down herself. “One at a time.”

“Of course,” he confirmed.

They stood there in silence for a few seconds, then Juni passed the rope to Ling and slipped under the surface with barely a ripple. He watched as Ling paid out the knotted rope, which twitched regularly every ten seconds, for almost a minute, before sitting down in the tunnel with a grimace.

Even though the water was not that cold, no worse than the water in a cold spring in the mountains by the coast, it was impossible not to gasp, as icy cold shot through his upper body. The issue really, was the temperature difference and acclimatization to the humidity outside, which made it feel like his lungs had just been stabbed. He remained there, waiting, fighting the discomfort, until he was able to breath easily again, then accepted the rope from Ling, so she could adjust as well.

Like that, they sat there for almost three minutes, with Juni regularly giving the rope a sharp jerk, until she re-appeared.

“It’s doable,” she concluded, after catching her breath. “The tunnel extends for about thirty metres, with a few side rooms. There seems to be another hall beyond, but I spent most of my time checking the side rooms for threats—”

“I take it there is nothing dangerous then?” Ling asked.

“Nothing I could see,” Juni grimaced. “Our best bet seems to be to go to the hall, wait there for our talismans to replenish and then see about escaping or trying to make contact with Misty Jasmine Inn.”

Following after Juni, he took a few deep breaths and then submerged himself. She had left the rope, so they had that as a guide to pull themselves through the dark tunnel, which took about a minute in total, until they came to a stop.

“Hall beyond here,” Juni signed for him, drawing the words on his arm.

He tapped her hand twice for agreement, while she repeated the same for Ling.

Drifting in the water, they both swam carefully after her, for a further twenty metres, until they encountered a small hall and a staircase upwards, which exited into what was less a hall, and more a small underground cavern carved to slightly resemble one. It was entirely devoid of natural light, so the only sense he had of space was the surrounding noise; lapping water, drips from above, the crunch of small ripples on some nearby shore, the clop of water rippling gently against rock from every direction, the deep cold of the water itself.

Rising to the surface he swiftly ate a ‘Dark Sight’ pill. There was a short period of disorientation as his ocular meridians reacted to the stimuli of the pill, and then the cavern drifted into focus. Black gave way to greys and a bit of white and he could see Juni crouched beside him in the water.

Beyond the stairwell, he found that the hall was maybe flooded to a depth of about a metre, circular in shape, with finely graven columns at regular intervals. The middle had… something, a raised platform maybe with what looked a bit like an altar, but it was hard to see, because even that was barely above the surface of the water. There was no sign of any statue or anything—

Juni poked him and pointed up.

He looked upwards…. And then sank back into the deeper pool of the stairwell until just his nose and face were above the surface. Lin Ling, who had surfaced beside him a moment earlier, had just done the same.

Juni, suppressing her presence entirely, slipped away from them, keeping to the shallows.

He watched with bated breath as she quickly scouted the hall and then slipped back into the deeper water to drift back over to them.

“Well?” he asked.

“A tunnel, far side, heading west,” she signed.

“Back the way we came,” Ling replied, her pale face radiating unhappiness.

“It is what it—

*Krrrrrrrroooommm———*

An almighty crash reverberated through their surroundings.

The shockwave passed, consumed by the colossal qi saturation in the rocks above them.

Nothing joined them in the water.

“YOU CANNOT HIDE, VILLAINS! ACCEPT YOUR PENALTY AND COME OUT, WE WILL DENOUNCE YOUR FAMILIES FOR IMPERIAL CENSURE!”

“…”

“Charming,” Juni signed, adding a few signed symbols of invective after.

Ling just grimaced.

They waited for the aftershocks to fade away, then Juni pointed to the far side of the hall.

He nodded and took a few deep breaths, grimacing at the amount of yin qi present. Juni silently submerged herself and they started to swim, not breaking the surface, until they reached a passage between two columns. They swam down the passage for a good twenty metres before finally surfacing in silence.

The next hall, which was not much further on, was much like the larger ones they had come through to get to that strange… circular room. Ruined buildings hugged the walls and side passages cut deep shadows in his dark-vision.

Eventually, after they had caught their breath, Juni pointed to the right.

They both nodded and slowly started to make their way through the cavern, walking slowly and smoothly making as few ripples as possible.

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

~ ??? – THE JASMINE GATE ~

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

In the chamber they had just left, the ancient thing watched the three mortal primates go deeper into the ruins of the ancient shrine complex. They had been smart enough not to bother it, which demonstrated surprising intelligence amongst their kind, it mused. They also hadn’t made a fuss or a mess, and departed promptly.

Such wisdom was uncommon in their Order, so fascinated with suicide and, in its eminently considered opinion, well on track to raising it to an art form.

It was a touch disappointed, though, that they had no Words. Perhaps, it considered, that was why they had immediately departed without giving a first greeting, uncouth as it was. Staying silent when you had no means for an intellectual discussion was a sign of incipient wisdom.

That was why it had let them pass unhindered, they had just been doing their own thing and not been a nuisance. Its peers would have called that soft… but manners were important. If you didn’t observe them, people would never take you seriously when you spoke up.

As an afterthought, it offered them a little bit of onwards good fortune for their trip ahead.

Perhaps it would allow them to seek an appropriate suicide.

Nobody would be able to say that it was not an understanding scholar of such higher matters.

It pondered for a moment if its blessing would make a difference? There was a conflicting school of thought there. Should the young be left to seek their own path? Normally it would agree, teachers were just a burden beyond a certain point after all. On the other hand, good behaviour should be rewarded. It had observed over the years, as a scholar of the matter of reality, that those who didn’t observe such niceties were inevitably nagged. Some thrived on that… for itself? It preferred a certain solitude.

It cast its senses upwards…

In any case, it had been awoken from its gentle slumber by whatever was going on out there. It had been a long time since it had gone outside, it mused.

-How many years?

-Ahh...

That didn’t matter. Years, those were something mortals invented to give themselves a purchase on the unrelenting forward tread towards that final shore.

Since it had managed to get out of that place it hadn’t given years much thought. In its considered opinion, they were a bit of a philosophical dead end in any case. It had made its views on that clear in the past. No need to revisit such old discussions.

In any event… here it was no longer bound by the chains of suffering like its brethren had been. They still raged below, or hungered, or dreamed. It was all the same. They had been foolish.

-Like mortals…

It considered that line of thought. Was it because they ate so many? If one ate too much of a thing, it was possible to become sick after all. It wasn’t above possibility that the mortal condition was chronic if acquired. Those ones were like that. Excellent scholars in their own right, but so… so…

Its mind wandered for a second, an eternity, to the chasm of its memory, looking for the correct thought, but that way led to some discussions that were still ongoing. Better to let them alone for now. It would be a waste to miss such opportunities to advance its own understanding. It was sad that it had missed the chance to talk with her before the fall. She was something of an idol to it. To walk so far beyond the final shore... that took so many words. It could learn so much if it met her. It was good to have dreams, it thought contentedly.

The whole cavern rocked as an explosion shook the cavern above. The contented moment it had just achieved was ruptured, so...

-So…

-So vexatious.

Its thoughts returned to its brethren as it checked its reflection in the pool which stood vertically opposite it, like a mirror.

They had been foolish. It was certainly because they ate so many that they had been corrupted so. The primates’ fascination with suicide had nearly been their undoing. Those… unscholarly ones had nearly dragged all species with them in their obsession.

Another explosion. The water rippled.

It quashed a flash of genuine irritation as it stretched a limb down to stroke the water, stilling it so it could continue to ponder its being.

A few moments later another shockwave pulsed through the mountain. To the east. Mortal squealing echoed into its cave. Something about villainy? Such insipid language. Very uninspiring, it judged. Almost… dare it say it… primitive? An amusing mortal concept, spoken language. Another dead-end philosophy.

It stared at the mirror for a while longer.

On the other hand, now it was awake. It seemed there was no prospect of any peaceful repose either until the ruckus above subsided.

It closed its senses and—

More squawking. A different primate. Something about judgement and accepting, apparently.

It contemplated.

It was one thing to be noisy, but there was such a thing as a bottom line... respect. It considered itself a very tolerant and reasonable being, but even so—

It moved to the floor. The pool of water above it was still rippling gently from whatever was happening outside. It stared up for a moment, and then the water was where it should be. Below. Like all correct things.

If these squawking primates were not going to depart, perhaps it would go and see if they were interested in having a discussion on philosophy. One of them seemed to have words, unlike the previous three. It pondered for a moment longer. The clincher, in the end, was Suicide. It still had questions about the mortal primate’s fascination with it. You could find wisdom in any circumstance, in any event. Perhaps those outside would have some new knowledge for it to mull over. It had been a long time since it discussed the finer points of its theories with anyone… maybe the field had moved in some remarkable new direction?

How long had it been sleeping? It tried to remember… but the abyss of its memory was so vast; the memory was dull…

-Dull…? What if its debating skills had also dulled?

It shivered. That was an ugly thought. It prided itself in being a very erudite speaker.

Part of it skittered off on that tangent.

-Who was the last person it had discussed?

-No, had it had preached to one?

-Before it had slept, that much was clear, but had it awoken since?

~Ahhh…

The cave shivered faintly as it shook its concept of self in annoyance. Suddenly it felt that it might have taken a bit too long of a nap.

Finally, its memory supplied the information. That mortal had been a good debater. Composed, very focused on her point as well. She had been lacking in words, but her earnest nature had convinced it. Thinking back, that one had never left a name with any meaning.

A further detonation shuddered through the valley beyond the confines of its retreat.

It stared outwards. Now, this was just getting to the point of being rude. Maybe it would go find that mortal after it had a short chat with those outside. Perhaps she would no longer be a mortal by now. That would be nice. It might even make up for all this ruckus. Discussing suicide with one of them was always much more stimulating. Perhaps it would even leave a name this time.