> While there is much that can be written about the storied endeavours and myriad accolades of the Courtly Flowers of the Azure Palace; of the heroics of Lady Jian, of the lavish soirees of Lady Bai, of the remarkable rebellion of Lady Kai, or even the utter failure of the Court to stop Lady Mo from simply being, it is perhaps unsurprisingly the enigma of Lady Xiao that still manages to exercise more febrile minds than this old scholar.

>

> The issue that pertains to the Lady Xiao in truth stems from the fact that she is, on official documentation, not a ‘Lady of the Court’ but instead an ‘Imperial Advisor’; the only one of that fair gender in fact. Even Imperial Ancestor Fu, despite her vaunted position in this world, has not been granted this honour. Subsequently, over the time since her elevation to that position there has emerged a vast body of conjecture and suspicion as for the reasons behind her appointment. I will not bore you with that here, except to say that almost all of what is written is not worth the paper wasted on it.

>

> There was never any chance of her being considered the 38th Concubine of the Emperor, a position that eventually went to the Saintess of Flowers, Tao Feishan Miao. Nor was there ever any possibility of her becoming a ‘Companion’ to either Empress, nor a ‘Favoured Lady’ of our esteemed Emperor, primarily on account of her superior cultivation. I understand that this is hard to take for those members of the junior generations who profess to live and die by their determination to untangle such webs and turn them to their own agendas, but reality, I am afraid, is cruel.

>

> No, the real reason for her elevation to that status is that she is too problematic to not be tied to the Imperial Court. Her talent for cultivation is beyond outstanding. Her beauty is praised across a dozen worlds. Her closest blood relative is a World Venerate and the Lu Clan appears to have no apparent political hold over her.

>

> In short, she is a shining example within this text of one of the great maxims of good governance – ‘Keep the most dangerous and unpredictable elements that might disrupt your rule, but which you cannot easily rid yourself of, where you can see them, at all times’.

Excerpt from ‘The Flowers of the Azure Palace’.

  ~By Eunuch Ji

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~ LU XIAO – BLUE WATER REGION, LING CLAN ESTATES ~

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Standing in the rain, watching a group of Ling clan experts dismantle the inner sections of the teleport formation, Lu Xiao found herself wondering, not for the first time that day, whether it had been a mistake to be so hands off with how Blue Water City functioned. Lu Ji had done a good job as headmaster of the Blue Gate School for the last few millennia, and it wasn’t that the Ling, Cao and even Ha were necessarily bad at what they did. It was just…

She glanced in the direction of the gardens, where Lu Ji was now leading Ling Jiang and the others off towards the public teleport and sighed, ruefully.

The problem really, was that they were too close to the ‘problem’.

Too attached.

It wasn’t even that that was a bad thing. Quite the contrary. The problem was that they were too set on that path. Too determined to ‘make it work’.

Attachment bred investment… and that led to a lack of perspective. A lack of perspective…

Well, that led to screw-ups like the auction.

Lu Ji, thankfully and despite some initial reluctance, did understand… Maybe not all of it, but certainly enough to know when the game had been changed to the point where the two sides were no longer competing for the same prize, or even playing by the same rules. For that she was thankful, it meant that the last few millennia had not been wasted effort on her part.

That was why he was now going to see the duke, though he would find that meeting… challenging, she was sure.

If there was a poster child for ‘over invested’, in the slow-burning shit-show that Blue Water Province had transformed into over the last century, it was Cao Leyang, the current Blue Duke.

As the only son of the former duke, Cao Hongjun, there was little to be gained by denying his talent – he was, after all, one of only a handful in this ‘generation’ who had become a Dao Lord within its constraints, which was to say, before turning 9000. A capable and respected military commander, he had even travelled to the worlds of Shan Lai and Western Azure before becoming a Dao Immortal.

Unfortunately for Blue Water Province, Cao Leyang, for all that he was his father’s talented son, he was also his father’s son when it came to his commitment to Cao Hongjun’s ‘legacy’ and reputation within the province.

Much like Lu Ji, he ‘wanted’ to be a good and just ruler, but unlike her nephew, he simply didn’t have the means… or perhaps the mentality.

On the one hand, she had to admit that that was not really his fault. He had ended up in a hopeless position from the start, a consensus candidate to a geopolitical headache nobody wanted to own. It was true he was talented, competent, well liked and upstanding in character, and had he been able to mature in years, matters might have been different… but, prescient of his talent, those powers who advised his father had quickly put him on the ducal throne while he was still harmless to their own vested interests. Someone who could be ‘advised’ by all parties, yet kept at arm’s length while other, ‘wiser’ heads got on with the important task of getting rich off Yin Eclipse.

The problem, though, was that sometimes, you just had to be a cruel bastard – or bitch – to do the ‘right thing’. This was, of course, known full well by those who were supporting the powers advising Cao Leyang. It just didn’t suit their own agendas to have a ruler able to take that kind of step. Thus, advised as he was, by those whose ongoing prosperity relied on him maintaining the status quo… Cao Leyang thoroughly invested in the ‘polite thing’.

It didn’t help someone of Cao Leyang’s character either, that the ‘right thing’ for the future prosperity of the province in this case involved quite a bit of mass murder and economic disruption.

Yet another reason why he had been installed as duke.

Looking at how matters were playing out, she had the sneaking suspicion that if she dug into the backgrounds of those supporting the duke, she would find facilitators of the Five Fans and other such influences among them.

“…”

-Fates curse that Cao Hongjun for scarpering as soon as he came back, she reflected sourly. I should have just straight-up taken the Ducal Seat off him during the Three Schools Conflict… or married Cao Leyang maybe.

-Certainly, it would be a suitable penalty for Cao Hongjun… to pay back the mess he caused sneaking in there like he did.

“—This fate-thrashed rain…”

“I heard that it’s even worse inland, the backlash is so bad my cousin’s family are moving down to Blue Cliff for the year…”

“Yeah, first the rain comes early, then the Imperial Court comes quickly…”

“Yeah, I wish the duke would do something about them…”

“You know that’s not how it works…”

Across the courtyard, three Ling clan disciples hurried past, sheltering under their umbrellas, avoiding the puddles. Their chatter was oddly prescient as well.

“At least it’s not raining in the city…”

“Yeah, I wonder why that is…”

Listening to their conversation, she considered her own sodden gown and found herself wondering, involuntarily, what would happen if she murdered Dun Fanshu.

In public.

In front of the ‘adoring’ masses.

Just appeared, ripped his arms and legs off, shattered his dantian… then maybe sealed his disbelieving soul into his body, turned him into something apt, a goose, perhaps, and teleported him into some random kitchen half the world away.

She considered that she could do it. Many problems could be solved by judicious application of gratuitous death, especially those relating to juniors. It would require revealing a few cards, but the embarrassment on the faces of the other so called ‘Imperial Advisors’ would likely make up for it.

The reason she didn’t do that – or obliterate every living person associated with the Five Fans – was, ironically, largely because of ‘attachment’ as well. That action was its own kind of attachment. Just as hate was the opposite of love and desire, however noble, a chain to bind, even the allure of that kind of slaughter was attachment. Just because you killed something, it didn’t mean that you had severed your links to it.

“…”

Also, the ‘right thing’ was usually a trap. Especially in this kind of circumstance, she was familiar with the villains playing their cards. Cards which were marked, cheated and double dealt, because they never moved unless every outcome suited them.

“Aiiii…” Sighing, she stared up at the rain-drenched sky.

Traps within traps within traps…

“You cannot hide from it, you cannot run to it, nor can you stand still…” she mused to herself. “It is inevitable… inescapable, indefatigable… inextinguishable.”

You could not escape the ‘game’, only change the way you played it, because just as being too attached was ‘dangerous’, being ‘unattached’ was also dangerous in its own way. So, for that matter, was ‘having no centre at all’, though that lesson was the cruellest of all. Usually one that high-realm cultivators died never understanding.

“Umm…”

Turning, she found one of the formations experts from the Ling clan standing awkwardly nearby.

“Sorry, I was just lost in my thoughts,” she remarked, rather theatrically giving her wet sleeve a tug and flashing him a ‘wry’ smile. “Something I read in a book once, seems kind of apt right now.”

“Ah… yes, the sayings of the old masters,” he agreed with an amused chuckle.

It was a famous quote, she supposed. relating to the inexorability of the momentum of heaven and how earthly concerns could not be divorced from them.

“It is indeed inescapable,” one of the other cultivators grumbled, wiping water out of his rather inadvisable beard while his compatriots groaned or laughed bitterly.

“So, what is it?” she asked, because the formations expert looked like he was about to say more and she, in her current guise as a reclusive core disciple of the Blue Gate School, had no interest in pretending to discuss it.

“We are done with this bit, Miss Xiao,” he informed her, holding out the telemetry jade.

Indeed, they had stripped out the upper layer with admirable haste, she had to admit, given the degree to which the formation was hardened. Her personal suspicion there was that it was less out of a desire to ‘help’ and more because the faster they did this, the less time they had to spend in the rain.

“Then start on the rest…” she replied, sweeping her gaze across the partially dismantled formation. “Were the instructions unclear?”

“No, but…”

“But what?” she repeated blithely, taking the telemetry jade from him without any preamble.

“It will… cause issues elsewhere,” the cultivator said at last, looking a bit embarrassed.

“Baisheng?” she asked, ignoring them for a moment.

“Yes?” he replied.

“I have the formation telemetry, the transmission link will be next.”

“…”

“Thank you…” Baisheng replied after a moment.

“—and?” she shrugged, turning her attention back to the formations expert.

“Well… it will—” he started to say, before she held up a hand.

“Consider it done,” Ling Tao’s voice, along with her personal seal, hung in the air. “Take out the transmission link and do what you need to.”

“Is some part of ‘Take out the transmission link’ unclear?” she asked sweetly.

“No, but…” the formation expert spluttered, looking around at his peers for help and getting nothing, because she was a ‘core disciple’ of the most influential sect in town.

“We already dumped the formation and decompiled the telemetry sub-formation at its heart,” one of the other cultivators spoke up at last. “If we also remove the stable jades it will take it out of the local network entirely…”

“Exactly,” she agreed, reflecting that this was also just another symptom of why everything was going to be rather painful. They were too focused on their own things, lacking perspective.

“…”

“The public circles will still work,” she pointed out. “Not that anyone can teleport anyway, due to Dun Fanshu and the weather. The only people this will inconvenience are juniors who are his friends, or lazy old men who don’t want to spend their own qi reserves.”

“…”

The formations expert sighed and crouched down, waving to the others. She watched with some amusement as they rather nervously counted down and then each lifted a jade disc about ten centimetres across out of the platform.

The hair on her arms stood on end as the qi in their surroundings once again turned chaotic. Colours most cultivators could not see bled from the array paths and strange patterns danced in the rain as esoteric qi discharged. Her senses told her that several teleports had just dropped their points, the links that they connected to flapping like intangible ropes in the wind, confirming what Ling Tao had no doubt suspected: that despite everything, this old network, which pre-dated the foundation of Blue Water City by some time, was not quite as secure as the Ling clan claimed.

“Uh…”

The formations expert nearest to her had also noticed that slight ‘delay’.

Puffing her cheeks, she hopped up onto the platform, walked over to the collection of formation cores currently exposed and crouched down by the transmission link. It was the work of a few moments to pull it out and send a thread of qi into it…

A faint, fleeting, creeping feeling of unease tugged at her.

“…”

Putting a hand to her breast, she looked up at the cloudy sky for a moment, ignoring the fat raindrops that scattered off her face. The feeling itself was already gone, almost as fast as it had appeared, but a phantasm of it lingered, like an unpleasant aftertaste in the roof of her mouth.

Glancing around, she noted that none of those told to help her appeared to have detected the attempted marking.

“…”

Shaking her head, she went to obliterate the inauspicious manipulation of intent and paused, because there was… nothing. The awareness was there, but the substance of whatever it was, was as if it had never been.

That meant that the person doing the marking was a higher realm than her, but lacked her comprehensions, or had used an object they themselves had imperfect control over.

It certainly played into the narrative that Lu Ji was eyeballing.

Di Ji had had a lot of support. To this day, there were people in the Imperial Court, influential, unscrupulous old experts, who privately believed that that waste of space had been ‘badly served’ and ‘did not deserve such punishment’. In the end, that was why the matter, despite his imprisonment… twice, had been resolved by death, dealt by a junior. It drew a convenient line under the whole matter and, much like the debacle with Song Jia, allowed the Jade Gate and the Imperial Court to wash their hands off it.

Hiding a scowl, she considered the head-sized formation core her palm was resting on, then the partially dismantled platform, and let her focus… shift.

The information held within it was abstract in the extreme. A quasi-random, sprawling entanglement of natural and founded laws, principles, transformations of intent, all bent by natural inertia and left in the core of the formation, like scraps of mud or blood on a doormat.

Extracting order out of it here and now was possible… for her, at least. The ‘cycles’ within it could be induced to return to their origins and see totality again. However, it would take time and someone had known enough to hide a trap in that, and the meddling…

She considered the shadow-like scars and exhaled softly, making her decision. Focusing on the ‘moment’, she began tracing the harmonies of the great formation centered upon Blue Water City. It was a bit risky, but her instinct told her that dragging matters out was not a good idea. Too much initiative had been lost to obscured actions by others already.

To the other formations experts, she was just crouching there, her eyes closed, focused on the core. Most didn’t even know there was a formation, and if they did, and chose to reflect on it, it was only in passing, believing it purely for ‘defence’. If they knew the reality…

A sardonic smile ghosting her lips, she let the core beneath her palm resonate with the great formation, its invisible paths now shimmering like a second skin in her mind’s eye, woven throughout the whole city.

They glistened in the wet stonework, melded with the gently swaying trees, in the lapping water of canals, and hustle and bustle of the damp streets, their cobbles steaming faintly in the warmth of the sun.

Around her, the breeze shifted faintly. The patter of rain on paving intensified. The fresh scents of greenery from the gardens in the Ling estate hung in the air… and then melded with the sharp tang of salt, carried on the onshore winds… while slowly, in her free hand, a ghostly talisman-like construction started to form.

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~ JUN HAN – MISTY JASMINE INN ~

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Taking a short break from sorting through scavenged weaponry, Jun Han found himself sitting on a stone block, watching the shattered survivors of the assault on the Inn with a heavy heart. The few juniors lucky enough, or useful enough, to have not been immediately killed were all familiar to him. Not in that he knew them, but in the faces and expressions they bore. Sad faces, blank faces, angry faces… all broken.

A youth from the Ha clan, half crippled and lucky to be alive was on his knees, weeping bitterly in the rain. The youth from the Qing clan just sat there in silence, on the steps, staring at the bodies of his friends, his face blank. A handful were sitting under the reconstructed awning, either receiving attention for injuries or waiting in silence.

The innocence of their world ruined, in various irreparable ways.

“—yours alone, is the face I see at night, my lonely azure flower…”

The words fit a sentiment that it was hard to express in any other way, but still sounded hollow to his ears as he whispered them.

The Yeng Brotherhood and the Five Fans had been nothing if not thorough. All of the survivors had sustained serious damage to their foundations. The bandits had stripped them of their storage rings, talismans, pills… their robes, everything in fact – even soul-bound weapons where they had been in possession of them. Bai Sheng was sitting cross-legged in the tent as well now, recovering from that, Esoteric Green Fan having escaped with that shield he had been using.

“Death is never beautiful…”

He looked up to find Priestess Ying had come over.

“Death is death,” he reflected, considering the lines of bodies.

“It comes and it goes, and yes, it is never beautiful. Anyone who claims otherwise is a moron who has never stared it in the face, a lunatic…”

“—Or someone with an agenda,” Priestess Ying concluded.

“An agenda, huh…” he pensively considered the captured ‘bandits’.

Despite several being quite infamous, none of them were really giving the vibes of wanted criminals captured by some seriously influential experts.

“…”

“Our group is a bit problematic as well,” Priestess Ying remarked, sitting down and taking out a peach from somewhere. “Want one?”

“Thanks,” he accepted the spirit fruit gratefully and bit into it, savouring the sweet taste and the refreshing buzz it gave. “And yes, our group is also…”

He hesitated to echo ‘problematic’, but in these circumstances, the composition was not ideal.

Ling Tao and Lord Baisheng were over by the teleport platform, still seemingly talking to the Headmaster of the Blue Gate School. Bai Sheng and Shi Lian were over with the injured, while Shi Xiaolian was currently conferring with two of her own experts while they watched over the prisoners and the eastern perimeter. Old Xian was poking around in the storehouse he supposed, given there was no sign of him. The others, including the rest of his group, the Ling group and the Cherry Wine Pagoda group were also checking buildings and the perimeter, looking for survivors, traps and other surprises.

As a rapid reaction force, he was sure they could ruin any sect in three provinces in an afternoon. The issue in the back of his mind was this, though: here, you had several of the most famous senior experts in the province, all in one place, unable to leave for at least a few hours… and none of the captured bandits looked anything but unconcerned about their current circumstances, despite knowing clearly who all those people were.

“Defending this place will be a nightmare,” he mused. “They are going to re-group and attack again…”

“I would bet a Dao Jade on it,” Priestess Ying agreed.

The death or injury of any of those experts – Ling Tao, Shi Xiaolian, Kun Xianfang, the crippling of the ‘Little Dragon’ or the experts from the Cherry Wine Pagoda – would be a serious victory in the eyes of those like the Five Fans. Lord Baisheng was also certainly someone important in the Ling clan, presumably a previous generation Elder of some description. Even Kun Lianmei’s loss would be a massive blow to West Flower Picking Town. Almost a third of their active Beast Hunters were dead up here, along with most of its high-ranked Herb Hunters…

-And my daughters are among the missing…

That haunting thought resurfaced for a moment, only to be pushed back into its box.

Somehow, his gaze found Mu Shi, sitting at the edge of the covered area, hair dishevelled, in a borrowed robe, her face blank, unaware that tears were streaming down her cheeks. It was all too easy to see Arai and Sana sitting there instead…

-They were not here when the attack happened…

It was a selfish thought and he felt bad just for entertaining it as anything approaching an ‘upside’. Unlike Ruliu though, he found it was harder to just parcel all those ill thoughts away and turn them into something good. She had always been coy about that, just saying it was ‘mantra stuff’, but there were times, like now, when he dearly wished he could do the same.

“How are we for weapons?” Priestess Ying asked at last.

He glanced at the piles on the other side of his stone block and sighed.

“Not great… most of what the bandits were armed with was trash to begin with. A few were using looted Ling clan armaments – bows and arrows mainly – but there are few serviceable arrows,” he replied. “Frustratingly, they didn’t leave many shields either, which would have been—”

“—I… I’m sorry…”

He broke off what he was saying to find Kun Lianmei, looking like a walking corpse frankly, had made her way over and actually lowered her head to him.

“Arai and Sana… your daughters… I—” Kun Lianmei started to speak but he stopped her, instead standing up and simply embracing her.

“We cannot apologize for the actions of villains and madmen,” he said, again wishing he had his dear wife’s capacity and talent for emotional compartmentalisation.

Kun Lianmei looked a shell of the woman he recognised from a week earlier, and it left him feeling both helpless and angry to see.

The attackers had not quite voided her cultivation. That might actually have been less cruel. Instead, her foundation was badly fractured, and her Sea of Knowledge had been cruelly branded with a life-binding art, leaving her one mis-manipulation of qi away from being permanently crippled. Even with the best medicines, she would take years to recover what she had lost and would be useless in a practical capacity to the Hunter Bureau or the Kun clan in the interim.

“Indeed,” Priestess Ying agreed, giving a sideways look at the prisoners.

They were just sitting there, watching everything impassively from within the barrier that held them.

“Even so… I should have seen this coming,” Kun Lianmei mumbled, sounding much younger and less confident than her realm suggested.

She had been a teenager when the Blood Eclipse happened, so she had seen her share of horrors then and since, but even that was no shield against the effects of what she had suffered. The bandits had tried to break every person they captured and there was only so much you could harden your mind against. Kun Lianmei prided herself on looking after her people, people who were now either dead or missing for the most part, killed without her being able to do anything.

“They used resources most sects in this province do not have,” Priestess Ying murmured as he led Kun Lianmei to sit down beside him. “Even influences like the Blue Gate School, or the Orchid Pavilion.”

He passed her the flask he had at his belt. It only held water, but it was cool water, which in the current humidity helped.

She took a sip, then a much deeper gulp and just stared at the ground, saying nothing.

“They had talisman avatars,” Priestess Ying added. “Even the most formidable scions of major powers on the other continents cannot just produce those on a whim. This was done by those backing these bandits.”

She didn’t say ‘the Din clan’, because even Ling Tao didn’t quite seem to believe that they would be that brazen, but her implication was clear. Talisman avatars were usually things deployed by old experts who didn’t want to risk their bodies, or as final resorts to protect very important descendants or pupils. That the Yeng Brothers and the Green Fan had that many of them was concerning.

“What if the others also ran into trouble?” Kun Lianmei asked at last.

“Sir Huang is not simple…” Priestess Ying said, after a moment’s contemplation. “He had a good opinion of the Hunters, much more so than of the Ha clan’s bunch, and the Iron Hide monkeys are good at what they do…”

Her words were as much for him, he knew, as Kun Lianmei, and while he wanted to believe…

His gaze went back to the bandits, sitting there with expressionless, unrepentant looks fixed on their faces.

“Not to mention,” Priestess Ying added drily, “Ha Yun is surprisingly well protected, for a simple scion of a family of the Ha clan…”

“—Because he is not.”

He glanced up to see the auburn-haired woman from the Cherry Wine Pagoda, Fanqing Diaomei, had come over, a large bundle of scavenged weaponry under her arm. Unlike Kun Lianmei, she was not showing much trace of her ordeal now that she had changed into a new robe, and her inner injuries were already healing at a pace that would have shocked most juniors. The other Cherry Wine Pagoda disciple up here, Xiang Meilan, who was currently helping the survivors under the covered area, was also recovering at a remarkable rate.

-Nobody is simple, eh… he reflected.

“He is associated with the Cherry Wine Pagoda?” Priestess Ying half asked, half stated.

“Not much gets past you,” Diaomei murmured, dropping the bundle carelessly on the soggy ground and sitting down on another stone block, not seeming to care much about the rain.

Behind her, he saw that Han Ryong had also come out of the main building of the Inn, along with Kun Yunhee and Ling Fei Weng. Ling Fei Weng gave him a distant nod as the three went to sit down on the steps. Yunhee went to sit beside Mu Shi, talking to her quietly, while the other two stood in the rain, also talking quietly.

“I will admit I have been called observant on occasion,” Priestess Ying murmured with a hint of amusement, “What is the damage inside?”

“…”

“Bad,” Diaomei replied before shifting and holding her side with a grimace. “They hid a lot of traps amid the aftermath of casual violence and the feng shui of the inn has been badly subverted in quite a few places. The baths are starting to purify themselves, however—”

“The one in the shrine will be better for these kinds of injuries,” Priestess Ying interjected. “I will see to that once their conditions have stabilized a bit, assuming circumstances allow.”

“That would be good,” Diaomei agreed with a deeper sigh, then glanced at him. “You are Jun Han, right?”

“You know me?” he asked, a little surprised.

“Mmmm…” she nodded. “Your daughters did speak of you, a bit, and I can see the resemblance.”

“Ah…” he sighed.

“I… hope they are okay,” Diaomei added, sympathetically. “As you said, Senior Brother Huang has means…” Diaomei seemed like she was about to say more, but stopped herself.

“Thanks…” he murmured, grateful for the sentiment.

“Is… Han Ryong okay?” Kun Lianmei asked, looking nervously over at the terrace. “Han Shu is…”

“It’s… rough,” he replied after a pause. “None of us expected… this,” he waved his hand wearily at the lines of dead lying in the rain, blood still pooling under some of the bodies.

“This is a massive shock to most of them,” Diaomei agreed with a sigh. “The Five Fans understand this kind of combat all too well.”

“We should have,” Kun Lianmei reiterated. “I should have… As soon as the Yeng Brotherhood was linked to this, we should have…”

“If it were that straightforward, they would not have been the threat they were, and apparently still continue to be,” Priestess Ying murmured, giving Kun Lianmei’s shoulder a supportive squeeze.

Sighing, he nodded silently. Nothing about this was straightforward.

That was another reason why he suspected they were due a counter-attack sooner rather than later.

Ling Tao’s intervention here had certainly exposed the Five Fans to more scrutiny than their upper echelon would be comfortable with. It was one thing for a bunch of bandits to harass remote villages, kidnap people and raid the odd trade caravan. It was quite another for said group to have access to Dao Step formations, experts capable of wielding laws inside Yin Eclipse, and have tools like talisman avatars in their possession – and that didn’t even take into account the tetrid stalkers, or the links to the Din clan that Priestess Ying had suggested.

“Ah, Miss Ha…” Priestess Ying murmured.

Shifting around, he found that Shi Lian had come over to join them.

In bloody, mud-covered armour and wet hair she was a far cry from her usual stylish, yet aloof manner. Now, she just looked drained, much like he was sure he did.

“How are you holding up?” he asked her.

“I am having flashbacks to my teenage years—” Shi Lian started to say, then stopped, as she noticed Kun Lianmei flinch.

“Ah… sorry,” Shi Lian muttered.

“It’s…” Kun Lianmei grimaced, and tried to shrug it off… “I should…”

The way she shrank in on herself again made his blood boil.

Shi Lian came and sat down beside Kun Lianmei and simply gave her a hug. To anyone who only knew the politics of recent times, such an action would be deeply confusing, he suspected. There was, after all, no shortage of rivalry between the Ha and Kun clans. The reality, though, was that relationships from that time, 150 years ago, were… complicated.

Shi Lian had lost friends, even a fiancé in that year. Kun Lianmei had lost her whole family. According to Kun Talshin, she had been sixteen or seventeen at the time, barely a Golden Core cultivator, when a band associated with the Yeng Brotherhood raided her family estates and killed her father, uncle and brother before abducting her mother and older sister. Neither had ever been found as far as he knew.

-Will that also be me? a rebellious voice in the back of his head wondered. If Arai and Sana…?

He quietly banished that unpleasant thought again.

“This just sucks…” was all Shi Lian declared in the end.

“It does,” he agreed, his gaze finding Yunhee and the still silently sobbing Mu Shi.

“Indeed,” Priestess Ying murmured, while Kun Lianmei simply nodded silently.

Diaomei sighed, looking over at Xiang Meilan, who was helping the few other injured beneath the shelter of the tent. Han Ryong was helping move the bodies of dead bandits out of buildings. Everyone was keeping busy, keeping moving, so they would not have to think too hard about the ‘now’.

“Are there many survivors?” Shi Lian asked at last.

Diaomei paused and counted on her hands for a second. “Twelve… so far, counting myself—

Meilan, Faolian, Lianmei here, Mu Shi over there, and Duan Mu. That youth from the Ha clan over there and two soldiers, none of whom will likely ever cultivate again. Oh, and one of the Beast Hunters, Kun Ji. Of the others, so far we only have Qing Aofang… and two who just came yesterday; a girl from the Bai clan, Bai Shunhua, and her friend Shen Meimei.”

“That girl Meimei was from the Shen?” Priestess Ying asked, sounding surprised.

“She didn’t advertise herself,” Diaomei replied. “I can only say because Ling Fei Weng recognised her. Seems she was some ward or long-term guest of the Ling clan.”

“So Cousin Yunfei didn’t…” Shi Lian sighed, putting her head in her hands and scrunching her fingers in her wet hair for a moment.

“Sorry,” Diaomei replied sadly.

“…”

“Elder Diaomei, Lady Shi – Lady Ling Tao wants to see you both…”

He looked back over towards Ling Tao, to find that one of the two female archers from the ‘Little Dragon’ unit had come over.

“Just Diaomei is fine,” Diaomei said absently. “I don’t feel particularly responsible right now.”

“Of course,” the elite archer inclined her head in acknowledgement.

“Lianmei, Sir Jun, why don’t we go see to the injured,” Priestess Ying added, glancing back at the covered area.

“Yes… we should,” Lianmei agreed.

“Sure,” he nodded, helping Lianmei stand.

He had barely gotten up, though, when he noticed Shi Lian calling for him to come over.

“Ah, it seems you are needed elsewhere,” Priestess Ying remarked drily.

“So it seems,” he agreed, apologetically.

Heading over towards the teleport formation, he arrived beside it to find Shi Lian standing in the middle, pointing at—

Between one step and the next, the teleport formation slid in and out of focus, revealing a life-size projected scene of a group of cultivators. The focus of Shi Lian’s interest was a familiar brown-haired youth, wearing Ling clan robes, standing behind Ling Luo.

“Smiling Fan…” he muttered. “He came with the Ling clan?”

“You are sure?” Ling Tao asked both of them.

“He is…” he looked around and realised that the aforementioned youth was not, in fact, in the barrier with the other important prisoners.

“Where…” he turned, looking at the other group, and found ‘Smiling Fan’ with the other ‘normal bandits’.

“…”

Rather than waste time, he focused a bit of his own qi and covered the intervening distance in a few moments, grabbing the unprepared Smiling Fan by his hair.

“Ah, you—!” Smiling Fan managed to get about two words out before he moved back again, holding up the villain for Ling Tao to see, though taking care to stay outside the radius of the barrier.

Ling Tao eyed Smiling Fan for a moment, then nodded.

“I’ll take that rat and toss him in with the others,” the female archer said with a nasty grin.

He passed Smiling Fan over to her without comment and watched for a moment as she dragged him off, before heading back towards the edge of the teleport formation.

“—‘Smiling Fan’ came through with this group,” Ling Tao was saying as he came back into earshot, likely to whoever she was communicating with back at the Ling clan estate.

The three of them stood there in silence, considering the projected image of the group who had arrived, until after a minute or so, Lord Baisheng shifted and looked up from whatever it was he was doing.

“Although your concern is edifying, Ling Yu will be fine,” the old man said to someone on the other end of the link, with a really quite sinister half-smile. “See to the duke, leave my charge to Lingsheng.”

Ling Tao also nodded, then exhaled, looking a bit drained.

“Well, this is a right, fate-thrashed mess,” Ling Tao declared after a moment.

“It is, rather,” Lord Baisheng agreed.

“How long until you can plot those coordinates?” Ling Tao asked him.

“They are still transmitting,” the old man said. “The image resolution is improving as well, but it will take a while, even with there being less stress on the link.”

Ling Tao nodded, then looked at him for some reason, frowning.

“Do you believe what my teacher suggested?” Ling Tao added.

“…”

“This old man was elsewhere when those events happened,” Lord Baisheng murmured, sounding a bit jaded, he fancied. “I can only speak from conjecture, but Lu Ji’s supposition does not seem implausible. Just as the priestess' concerns also have an echo of truth in them, given who is in this group.”

“Great… just great,” Ling Tao groaned, sitting down on the edge of the teleport platform and surveying the devastation with the air of someone presented only with difficult problems.

Curious now, he considered the others who had come with Ling Luo, wondering what had them so on edge. He doubted it was the presence of ‘Smiling Fan’, or at least not that on its own. None of the others, those not among the wounded at any rate, were familiar to him, though.

“How are the injured?” Ling Tao asked at last, drawing his attention away from the projected image.

“Not great,” Diaomei answered, before he could. “We are trying our best, but this is a massive shock to most of them. The Five Fans understand this kind of combat all too well.”

“That they do,” Ling Tao agreed with a deeper sigh, her gaze travelling to where Priestess Ying was now checking the other injured. “That they do…”

“If there is a follow-up attack, we will have a real problem,” he added.

“Almost certainly,” the female archer, who had come back over by this point, agreed. “We can make up for some of it with expertise, but…”

“See what you can do,” Ling Tao said with a grimace. “We have experts at least.”

“That’s the problem,” the woman said, respectfully. “We are too reliant on experts. If any of you get injured, that is already—”

“I am aware,” Ling Tao muttered, cutting the woman off, who simply saluted respectfully.

“Even so,” the archer added after a moment. “I am bound to remind you, that if one of you were to be captured…”

Ling Tao just sighed and stared up at the swirling grey clouds for a long moment, then shifted her gaze to take in the bodies of the Ling clan soldiers and disciples.

“What is the Ling clan’s view?” Shi Lian politely interjected. “If you can say…”

“My brother and his wife are furious about Ling Luo,” Ling Tao replied. “The Bai clan and Qing clan are also seeking explanations, but…”

Ling Tao trailed off, her expression inscrutable. He found it telling that that was what she led with as well. No mention of the wider clan, or the Blue Gate School. Just an affirmation that the Ling clan were concerned about the whereabouts of Lord Jiang’s daughter.

-And likely only his daughter… a nasty thought tried to whisper in the back of his mind, before he banished it.

“Did Bai Luofan survive?” she asked after a moment.

“Bai Luofan…” Diaomei frowned, then shook her head.

“Bai Luofan is my sister-in-law’s nephew,” Ling Tao said at last. “His mother wants to know if he survived… She was very put out with the Bai clan elders for suggesting he take a leading role in their ‘acclimatization’ up here.”

“Her and a hundred others,” Diaomei murmured, not looking at the lines of dead.

“My teacher is currently transferring the relevant information, along with transmission records for the group who arrived with my niece,” Ling Tao added. “I am afraid that that group behind us only complicates matters though…”

“That seems to be a running theme,” he muttered under his breath.

“It does, yes,” Ling Tao agreed, somewhat sourly, before rubbing her temples with her fingertips. “I can only be honest as well and say that the circumstantial evidence is also… lending itself towards some thoroughly undesirable interpretations. The public optics of this are very much building towards the Meng clan being set up as scapegoats…”

“The… Meng clan?” he repeated, thinking he had misheard her for a second. “As in the Seven Sovereigns…?”

“Uh huh,” Ling Tao affirmed glumly. “At this point I can almost guarantee that the Imperial Court are going to name them as the ‘backers’ of the Five Fans and the behind-the-scenes perpetrators for all of… this…”

Ling Tao waved her hand around at the devastation.

“That seems…” Diaomei trailed off, apparently as lost for words as he was, before finally adding; “Didn’t Priestess Ying think it was the Din clan?”

“My teacher thinks so as well,” Ling Tao agreed, “The issue, though, is that the web of chaos that has been carefully nurtured around this is… nothing if not malleable. It can basically be interpreted however any individual party wishes it to be. Which is why they will blame the Meng, who are liked by basically nobody.”

“—and we have the hard evidence to disprove that, right here…” Shi Lian looked over at the prisoners.

“And the parties responsible know it?” he concluded.

“Kind of…” Ling Tao grimaced.

“Is there any good news?” Diaomei muttered, before catching herself and adding “—Lady Tao.”

“…”

“Well, this mess is enough to get the Blue Duke involved,” Ling Tao said. “Or at least my teacher hopes so. The Bai and Qing clans also have the Five Fans in their sights now…”

“I am sure they will be just as successful as anyone else,” Shi Lian murmured under her breath.

Diaomei just shook her head, clearly not considering that as ‘good news’ either.

It was hard to disagree really. If the Five Fans were that easy to root out, they would have collapsed during the Three Schools Conflict. That said, Ling Tao’s comment again made him wonder what she wasn’t saying. As far as he knew, most of the chaos surrounding this had so far avoided the Blue Duke’s estate and court. For them to suddenly take an interest now felt… odd, somehow, given how ‘at arm’s length’ their approach to most of this fiasco had been. He very much doubted it was due to pressure from the Ling clan over Ling Luo.

“…”

“Aii….” Ling Tao sighed deeply and stood up, turning back to the platform, where the projected image of the arriving group still shimmered, a life-sized mirage in the gentle rain.

“Diaomei, do you recognise the two others beside Smiling Fan?” Ling Tao asked pensively.

“I have some vague recollection, but they arrived in a hurry, went with Ling Luo’s entourage and then didn’t really appear again,” Diaomei replied, considering the pair wearing fairly standard robes in the Ling clan style.

“Huh…” he looked at the Ling group whose hats were pulled down, seemingly to shelter them from the rain, then at the other two in nondescript green robes, and the youth beside Ling Luo and Bai Shunhua wearing a purple one. All of them had broad hats on, ostensibly shielding them from the rain, but…

“What is it?” Ling Tao asked, turning to him.

“This… is taken from the moment of arrival?” he asked, considering the scene holistically.

“Uh huh,” Ling Tao confirmed.

“You can’t see any of their faces in this,” he observed. “Either their hats would be pulled down, they would be obscured by another, or looking the wrong way. It all looks so natural, but…”

“…”

“Now that you mention it,” Shi Lian mused, taking a few steps back.

“One or two is a coincidence, but all of them?” Diaomei shook her head. “Can you play it forward, Lady Tao?”

Ling Tao waved her hand and they watched the scene of the group arriving and shuffling off the platform play out for some fifteen seconds.

“Yeah, that’s way too much of a coincidence,” Shi Lian declared at last.

He had to agree. Even with the moving image, Smiling Fan, the two other youths in Ling clan robes, the one in light armour and the pair in green and purple, all managed to exit the platform without giving a clear view of their faces. Without the advantage of the full image cast, which would have rapidly degraded on further use of the teleport points, identifying any of them would be almost impossible. The youth in the purple robe with dark red trim laughing and smiling with Ling Luo and Bai Shunhua was the only male cultivator not hiding.

“Their mistake was not clearing and immediately disabling the formation here,” Ling Tao agreed, her lack of surprise suggesting that she had already noted the same thing.

“That and underestimating what old experts with a bit of motivation can pull from shadows in qi,” Lord Baisheng chuckled.

“And that,” Ling Tao murmured. “And that…”

“Their faces do not match any juniors in the Ling clan’s core estates around Blue Water City,” the female archer noted.

Ling Tao exhaled softly and nodded again.

“Can the three of you go through the bodies and see if any of the dead match up with those two?” she asked after a moment's further contemplation.

“…”

“Okay,” he agreed, giving her a polite salute which Shi Lian echoed.

Ling Tao nodded, then pulled out a handful of small jade talismans from a pouch at her waist. As they looked on, she imprinted each one in turn and then passed them over to the three of them. Accepting his, he found it contained the features of each of the unidentified arrivals.

“I’ll go ask the injured,” Diaomei said. “Both Bai Shunhua and Shen Meimei are conscious at least.”

He watched Diaomei walk back over to the covered area then turned back to the lines of the dead.

“I guess we go check the unfortunate dead then,” he murmured.

“If you find any of them, bring them over there,” Ling Tao pointed vaguely to the area next to the teleport circle.

“Okay,” Shi Lian nodded.

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

~ LU XIAO – BLUE WATER CITY ~

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

Lu Xiao opened her eyes and considered the jade-like slip, the link to the Ling clan’s formation, which now shimmered in her palm. She was now also leaning on a stone balcony at the peak of a tall pagoda, looking out over the grand gardens nestled in the heart of Blue Water City.

“…”

This close to the coast the rain had been abjured, thanks in part to the actions of the Imperial Advisors who had come with Dun Fanshu, delivering Blue Water City into the grip of a rather muggy, if sunny morning.

The gardens themselves were thronged with people, out enjoying the unseasonably good weather while it lasted. Streets around the docks bustled with life. Boats came and went, their sails creaking in the pacified onshore winds. On the piers, old-timers stood, looking out at the ocean, grumbling about the weather and politics or talking of strange things hauled from the depths. On the shoreline, children fished on the rocks by the western harbour, no doubt hoping to catch some small marine critter with a qi core—

Her gaze was caught by dancing fish as a school of them skipped energetically across the shoreline.

Children fishing on the rocks shrieked and shouted, chasing after them. Some hardy souls even leapt into the waters to chase after some bigger ones. There were a lot of people with water-aligned spirit roots in the city, so anyone who caught a fish would be set with pocket jade for a week or more. If you discounted the fact that the children were leaping like errant monkeys between the rocks, joined by a few actual monkeys, casting lines and small nets infused with their qi to catch them, it might have been a scene from a mortal city.

It was like time had skipped back a few weeks, returning Blue Water City to a kind of peaceful equilibrium, where time passed with idyllic slowness.

That was the point, though. The desire of the Imperial Advisors. Of their manipulation. To her eyes, the whole thing looked hollow, rotten even. It lacked harmony. An artificial imposition of idyll designed to promote the righteousness of the Imperial Court… A cruel, short-term trick to woo the gullible masses.

The ‘Rising Dragon Gale’ was still there, after all. A ghostly echo in the gyres of pacified wind qi. A repressed memory in the way wind and tide twisted and fought beyond the sea defences of the harbours. A hidden shadow in the droplets of moisture in the air around her, that longed to give birth to rain once again.

Turning to look back out across the city, towards the Ling estates, she found no trace whatsoever within the formation of the inauspicious shadow she had—

She managed to avoid flinching as she found Bright Dream lounging on a couch, sipping some tea, watching her. Today, the silvery-blonde-haired ‘young woman’ was dressed in a dark blue dress that flowed across her body like tamed water, embroidered with moons and silver stars. Her hair was haphazardly plaited and held in place with a hairpin in the shape of a golden crescent moon.

“Want a piece of fried mango?” Bright Dream asked her, pushing the platter, which was from the Myriad Blossoms Teahouse if her eye was not wrong, across the table. “It’s fresh.”

“Ah… I didn’t realise you were here,” she replied drily.

“Sometimes it’s nice to just watch the world go by,” Bright Dream mused, leaning beside her on the balcony of the pagoda and looking out over the city.

She shook her head wryly, accepting a cup of tea from the other woman.

She hadn’t seen the woman move. It was rare Bright Dream was that obvious, but sometimes she did forget. Forget that movement between places was as necessary as moving to places.

A long time ago she might have fretted, but frankly, Bright Dream was… basically her long-term house guest. Despite appearances, she was not the pagoda spirit, although ofttimes she pretended she was, for the sake of convenience. The only names she had ever given since they first met, deep within the western reaches of the Yin Eclipse mountains, during Lu Fu Tao’s explorations, were ‘Bright Dream’ and occasionally ‘Luminous Obscurity’. Later, when pressed for an actual ‘title’ after taking up residence in Blue Water City, she had generally proclaimed herself as ‘Dao Mother Bright Dream’.

“It is nice tea,” Bright Dream added, sipping her own cup.

“Just a mortal thing,” she replied.

The blend itself was made by an orphan girl, who sold it every second week beside the Dragons’ Blessing Pagoda within the Shore District Markets.

“Nothing wrong with that,” Bright Dream murmured, taking another sip. “Some of the most remarkable things have been ‘mortal’ things.”

She nodded at that, savouring another sip herself.

“Ah, they caught one,” Bright Dream remarked, clapping her hands together as her teacup just appeared on the balcony.

“It’s not a bad one,” she agreed.

A youth was struggling back out of the water, muscles rippling, as he wrestled a dancing fish almost half his size onto the beach. Onlookers nearby were applauding, some were sulking – competitors for the fish, probably. They were already sealing the fish up. It was only a Qi Refinement one, but the one who had hauled it out was only a Containment Realm physical cultivator. You wouldn’t see a Qi Condensation cultivator dragging a Qi Refinement fish out of the ocean like that.

“It is a very interesting blend, harmonious,” Bright Dream added, apparently back to talking about tea.

“It is curious how something so simple could be just as delicious as the finest Immortal teas, grown across the ocean,” she agreed.

Bright Dream looked at her sideways. “Oh. The tea? That as well. The young woman who made it has done well. These herbs are not easy to turn into a stable infusion.”

She blinked; the other woman wasn’t talking about the tea?

“The Harmony of the land is shifting,” Bright Dream mused. “It started weeks ago, but something has touched the Great Geometry, more closely than it has in a long time, in these past days. Things that would have passed, oblivious to each other, are being dragged together…”

Turning to look at the other woman more closely, she frowned, again thinking of that strange, inauspicious feeling she got from the scene of Di Yao and Ji Tantai teleporting into the mountains. “What do you mean?”

“—Ah?” Bright Dream glanced back at her, the distant expression on her face was back to normal. “Oh, erm… I guess it’s really good tea.”

“…”

Contemplating the telemetry data in her hand, she resisted the urge to grab the other woman and give her a good shake, not that it would do any good beyond providing an amusing scene.

Outwardly, Bright Dream held the appearance of a decidedly average Dao Ascendant. The reality though, was that that was a façade to make others, maybe even her, feel more at ease. If Bright Dream properly focused, she was fairly sure she would be far stronger than her in most aspects relating to the profundities of the Dao.

“The tea is good because it was made with care and love,” Bright Dream added absently. “That girl enjoys her craft - and wants others to enjoy it.”

“Mmmmm,” she nodded, agreeing.

In some ways it was a strange conversation, but the truth of it, she knew was about ‘power’.

It was easy to forget sometimes that such simple things had a very real power.

If she compared the tea in her hand with some of those enjoyed in a place like the Golden Dragon, for instance…

One was made with care and love, as Bright Dream said, ‘infused with the sincerity of its maker’. The young girl would have worked daily picking the herbs, drying them, matching them so they would have the right blends of auspicious energy and so on. Her love for her craft was tangible in every part of it.

The other? The other was steeped in ritual, obfuscation, mysticism, grand patronage and secret ‘arts’ that a bunch of ridiculous old money grubbers had branded and exported around the world for enormous fiscal gain. It was a ‘brand’, a statement even. ‘Imperial Tea’ was almost a kind of cultural diplomacy. To be seen to drink it was to be seen to partake in a piece of the Imperial Court.

"It is easy to get lost in shallow ideas of the Dao,” Bright Dream mused, swirling the tea in her own cup and considering it contemplatively.

“Take this city, for instance, this pavilion—” the other woman waved a hand expansively, taking in the panorama of the entire city below them. “How many know it is truly yours?”

She nodded again at that. Few did know. Probably only Lu Ji, and a few select old ghosts as ancient as she was.

Because the old heart of the city, on Little Harbour, was mostly a thing set out by her nephew, Lu Fu Tao, everyone just assumed that this pavilion and the great gardens around it were also his work. His reputation for that kind of thing was well known, and who was going to sidle up to a World Venerate and dare to ask if his defining work was really his? Nevermind that he had never claimed outward ownership of anything, beyond helping set up the Blue Water Province.

“Certainly not those fellows down below, who contort nature like it is a whore they bought and paid for,” Bright Dream continued, an amused smile ghosting her lips. “They believe it is the thing of your nephew, founded as part of his ‘grand inheritance’. None outside of your immediate circle know that this is a shallow interpretation. Yet it is not a great secret or a dark conspiracy.”

“It is not,” she agreed with an amused chuckle, taking another sip of her tea.

The truth was that most of what Lu Fu Tao had bequeathed to the city he founded were either treasures, like the statues and puzzles in the grand gardens, or compiled comprehensions, such as scroll paintings, intended to enrich the province and give opportunities to those living here who were just starting out on the heavenly path.

That idiots, tens, if not hundreds of thousands of years old, had spent the time since plotting over them excessively was just embarrassing.

With their focus on such things, the origin of this place was obscured simply because nobody had ever bothered to check whose name was on the foundation stele of the Supreme Array at the heart of this place.

“Sure, getting to it is not easy, but it is possible, with the right approach," Bright Dream added, rolling her eyes. “Yet the one time someone tried… well, not all things can be solved with force, fire and fury.”

“Very true,” she agreed drily.

That ‘attempt’ had been the sack during the second campaign of the Huang-Mo Wars, a thinly veiled effort by several greedy old men from the Imperial Court to claim compensation, as they saw it, for the disaster perpetrated in Yin Eclipse after Lu Fu Tao returned.

Staring back at the sky over the ocean, she sighed, tapping the jade in her hands on the edge of the balcony.

That was just like the way this world worked, but in microcosm. The Imperial Dynasties built the structure of the society, but nobody ever really thought to give much concern to the nature of the world itself.

“The world is just the world,” she mused. “Those who sit at the top dare not claim it by virtuous means, but will say nothing against those below who think it is owned on their behalf.”

“That is always the way,” Bright Dream murmured. “People forget that the divine can be as minuscule as the grains of sand on the beach, just as much as it can be the domain of those thie—”

They both paused to stare at the shimmering, blue lilac flowers that were sneakily drifting in the air just behind Bright Dream.

“Really?” Bright Dream murmured, narrowing her eyes. “Scram.”

The other woman didn’t even need to raise her voice. The flowers rippled and dissipated as if they had never been.

“Someone is staring at you. Twisting the Harmony of Heaven’s Grace,” Bright Dream mused, staring out over the rooftops of the city in the direction of the Golden Dragon Teahouse.

“…”

“Probably,” she agreed, tapping the ‘jade’ in her hand off the balcony absently. “It won’t do them any good though.”

“Mmm…” Bright Dream eyed the jade but said nothing further.

They continued to watch life pass by below them in contemplative silence for a few minutes. The tea never cooled. That would not be appropriate, after all.

At this point, Lu Ji had made it to the duke’s palace, and was now wrangling entry. Even without prying, she could guess what the issue was. The duke was certainly with his advisors and would have precious little time to deal with the Ling clan’s personal problems. Not when places like Misty Vale were conveniently being turned over by a problem most had been avoiding for political reasons since well before the Three Schools Conflict.

As her nephew had observed, the whole thing was quite total. No matter which way you turned in the maze of events, a problem appeared, that without fail was disadvantageous in some way, big or small.

“I thought it was related to those two brats,” she mused at last.

Since the agent of imperial chaos formally known as Dun Fanshu appeared, Dun Lian Jing and Huang JiLao had basically slipped out of the ‘lantern light’. JiLao’s father appearing was likely one reason, though that was a tightly guarded secret in its own right. Dun Jian skulking over was certainly a factor as well. What interested her there, though, was that that pair were not really dancing to that serpentine brat’s tune.

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

“—but actually, they are more akin to crows before the storm...”

“Mmmmm…” Bright Dream nodded. “That pair are part of the cycle it brings, but the change is elsewhere. Even I cannot see but a faint sense of it from this perspective. It may not even have occurred yet, and all we are seeing are the beginnings of its upheaval…”

“…”

She stared out across Blue Water City once again and sipped the tea. The bit left unsaid there was that even if she could, she was certain Bright Dream would not speak of it.

The woman had… esoteric views about prophetic geomancy and the way it worked and they differed rather from her own. While she saw it as something akin to cycles, integrally linked to the passage of things through the world, Bright Dream viewed it as a kind of geometry.

In fact, that was why, much to her own chagrin at the time, Lu Fu Tao originally sought her out, spurred on by the very guarded recommendation of the old elders of the Yin People, who had revered her as their ‘Siobulla’, a title akin to a Priestess of Divination, and seen her as eccentric, even by their rather lofty standards. It was a bit embarrassing for her to admit, now, but she had been sceptical at the time.

Geomancy had been her thing and Ha Tai Wen was already a headache of an individual to interact with. Their party had, she felt, not needed three diviners. Now, she would freely admit, to herself at least, that events since had proven her ‘perspective’ there lacking; certainly, in all the years since that first, rather awkward meeting, she had never known Bright Dream to be genuinely wrong in any judgement she made, once the facts were known.

“You are certain it will be upheaval?” she asked eventually.

It was undeniable that she had started to get an uneasy feeling herself of late: it had begun even before Lu Ji came to see her with his poor, ruined little orchid. It was one reason why she had given him such a sympathetic ear. In that regard, the placidity of the city put her in mind of the waters slipping silently away before a tsunami, the quake that caused it still racing through the earth, preparing to herald its intent.

“All changes in the Great Geometry and the Aeon Web are upheaval,” Bright Dream pointed out drily. “That is the wrong way to look at it.”

Frowning, she turned to look at the other woman, because that was as close to a direct criticism or rebuttal of a point of view as she had heard in a very long time. Then again, Bright Dream was being remarkably talkative today.

“…”

Bright Dream, however, said nothing further, just went back to looking out over the city.

“…”

“The wrong way to look at it… huh…” shaking her head, she turned the words over in her mind.

All around her, the city bustled. People went about their daily lives, talked about the weather, about the current situation… about the auction, about the prince and princess, about the trial… on and on, round and round.

Blue Water City was a kind of cycle in itself.

She was still subtly poking and prodding her ‘nephew’ to arrive at this comprehension a bit more clearly. As Bright Dream said, it was hard to see such things when you were part of them. That took a special kind of perspective only two people she knew of had: Bright Dream and Meng Fu… maybe Ha Tai Wen as well, when he was not being an idiot.

Still, Lu Ji was at a stage where he had to be thinking about that kind of realm. If he managed to acquire something… an understanding or comprehension of that kind of perspective, he would take a huge step forward in his personal growth. His future beyond this world would be all but assured, and he would owe nothing to the current Lu clan as an added bonus.

In this instance, though, Lu Ji was… just another part of the cycle. A piece of the pattern, albeit somewhat more aware of its role in moving events forward.

She stood there with her eyes closed, leaning on the veranda of the Blue Water Pavilion… standing in the rain of the courtyard, listening to the rain, just doing nothing, for a full minute, letting it all wash over her. Once again, she was struck by how… hollow, the harmonies felt. The whole place, calm as it appeared on the surface, had the air of a spinning plate that was just starting to teeter.

That, in and of itself, was nothing new though. There had always been a lot of influences here that skulked just under the surface.

Dun Fanshu, Dun Lian Jing, Huang JiLao, the arrival of the Imperial Advisors, the seizure of the Blue Gate School, the politics surrounding Cao Leyang, the auction… the grand trial...the ‘gift’ for the Emperor on Shan Lai, even the attack on Misty Jasmine Inn and the spectre of Di Ji.

It was tempting to see different cycles there, but in reality all those had one critical thing in common.

Blue Water City.

Both the Azure Authority and Imperial Court had been interested in Lu Fu Tao and this strategic location, the western gateway to Blue Water Province, even before his ‘triumphant return’.

It would come as a shock to those of younger generations, fed on awe-inspiring tales of her nephew’s grand achievement, but people and influences had been poking around the Yin Eclipse sub-continent and its ruins long before Lu Fu Tao.

Its arrival had left an… impression that echoed through uncounted generations in more than a few ways. Greed for its secrets, though, largely originated from those who had not been there, had not seen what she and a few others had seen…

On the other hand, her own interest in the mountain was still here, working its way towards a sort of conclusion, deep in the heart of this pagoda. She had tried her utmost to keep that utterly apart from everything else, and yet...

At the heart of all of it was control over, or insight into…

In her mind’s eye, she stood in a ruin of stone and wood, burning buildings lighting up a night riven by thunder from heaven, beyond heaven as the sky collapsed upwards, stars dimming as the chasm of the Star Ocean descended in a howling wave of nihility.

Saw the laughing, child-faced, golden demon who had appeared, proclaiming a new era had begun.

Saw her brother, uncle… old Meigun who sold fish, and a dozen others, succumb to whispering shadows and bright, eyeless death as the demon laughed.

Her friends…

Fellow villagers...

Saw her father’s sword falling to the ground as his life ended.

Heard her mother’s last, whispered words, her still-warm embrace around her, trying to protect her…

Everyone dead, while she, alone, was somehow, inexplicably, alive. The only daughter of Xiao that witnessed the day that their azure world changed forever.

Saw the strange girl who would become her sister, screaming as she triggered a talisman—

Saw the Saintess of Binary Ruin – the woman who would become her teacher, her adoptive mother, when the chaos ended – appear like a thunderbolt, her blade obliterating the laughing, child-faced demon who had done such evil to her land, even as it walked towards her…

Helpless, she saw the horizon bend and shatter, twisting apart before her disbelieving, teenage eyes… while above it, she saw the heroes of her age… falter.

Saw the Legions of the Emperor perish in golden fire, burned away like last year’s leaves in a summer inferno.

Saw the Scholar of Unseen Symbols and the Herald of the Emperor fall, screaming as hundreds of those golden, winged children ripped them limb from limb.

Saw the Moon Dragon of Tang rage, casting mountains like meteors into the void above them.

Saw the Princess of Meng, Granddaughter of Heaven, wield stars as swords, screaming her father’s name.

Saw a vast train of ten thousand celestial monkeys wielding rods of thunder summoned from beyond the sky.

Saw winged shadows of black and gold, symbols of a myth greater even than the Heavenly Meng, waging war at the edge of understanding itself… Saw Nihility, wielded as a spear, impale a golden god… the very vault of heaven itself transforming into a vast, shadowy symbol…

With a great effort, she opened her eyes and stared out over the city, not at that dreadful mountain that had landed amid that moment of calamity, but at the ocean, calm and placid…

“…”

Exhaling, she realised that she was grasping the balcony so hard she was in danger of breaking her fingers from her own physical strength. Letting go, she flexed her hand and looked at the jade. Thankfully it was okay as well.

There was no damage to the pavilion either, though that was entirely unsurprising to her. It was a Connate Star Venerate’s Treasure, made by her adoptive mother, from materials that were largely unworkable within this world. At her realm, she might as well have tried to damage Sovereign Stellar Jade by licking it, for all the good it would do.

“Has someone set eyes on this pavilion?” she said softly, taking utmost care to control her emotional state and her inner anger.

Bright Dream was just looking at her, her expression neutral, thoughts unknowable.

Even as she said it, though, she knew that that obvious, intuitive conclusion was a misinterpretation.

“…”

“It’s a regression divination,” she said with a soft sigh, reflexively clenching her fists again as anger flared anew in her breast.

Unlike a moment ago, though, it was mostly directed at herself now, for being so easily entangled and provoked. A Dao Ascendant having a ‘moment’ was not the kind of additional dose of indiscriminate chaos that the province needed right now, as cathartic as it might be for her.

“…”

“Chaos is the means, not the motive…” she mused, which was interesting as stability was very much the agenda of many of those involved.

“Mmmmm,” Bright Dream nodded. “Your gaze has gotten better. As has your ability to make intuitive leaps that land where they should.”

“As has your ability to talk in cycles,” she retorted, a bit more pointedly than she intended.

“Ha!” Bright Dream snorted, spitting out a mouthful of her tea.

Being quite familiar with the other's sense of humour, she could only shake her head.

“That said… their pattern is flawed,” she mused. “Whoever is setting this net doesn’t know a lot about the Huang clan in this world, nor about me… and still, I nearly bit, when Lu Ji came to me with my gift broken and his grandfather’s great achievement robbed from under him.”

Her gaze drifted briefly towards the spires and pagodas of the Blue Duke’s Palace. Lu Ji was still negotiating getting access to the duke there.

Someone was certainly trying hard to have happenstance align to frame Meng Fu for that, or at least some faction in the Seven Sovereigns was playing puppet master here.

Their problem there, was that she knew Meng Fu, and she was very clear about her views on Yin Eclipse. They had, after all, witnessed the same apocalypse. Probably Meng Fu would get involved eventually, but likely her participation would involve a lot of murder and then awkward geopolitical silence as everyone tried to work out what the fates had just happened.

The Shu Pavilion had also been nosing around this land subtly in recent years. The attempt to link rumours of ‘Demoness Song’ to the Blood Eclipse and the Yeng Brotherhood were certainly aimed at the hotheads over there.

However, the Shu clan’s investigation was not regarding recent matters, but a tragedy that went all the way back to the foundation of the current Dynasty. That was also a sorry tale that would eventually drop on someone like Mount Tai. It wasn’t in their style to pry like this though, and again, she had something of an understanding with their old ancestors.

“…”

Ha Tai Kai was involved on her side of this anyway, as was the Ling clan, so that also ruled out a bunch of other possibilities that led to difficult geopolitical shadows regarding the Qing, Bai and Shen…

That basically left the Imperial Court factions like the Jade Gate Court, Four Peacocks Court or the Red Sovereigns… and none of them were simple.

The Red Sovereigns and the Four Peacocks Court were… well Huang clan politics was stressful at the best of times and now was far from their shining hour. Just thinking about them brought her back to contemplating the mass murder of juniors. There was another case of Mount Tai stalking a bunch of fools who thought themselves smart for their opportunism in the aftermath of the Blood Eclipse.

As for the Jade Gate Court, that group of heaven-sent meddlers had a lot of karma with this part of the world. Be it with the recent set of events, or somewhat less recent, with Song Jia. Even the same ancient tales surrounding the founding of the Dun Dynasty that the Shu Pavilion was poking around at…

“Aiii…”

“Mmmm?” Bright Dream turned to her as she sighed deeply.

That was another gnarled bit of old history capable of giving anyone a headache.

“It also keeps coming back to the fate-thrashed princess, somehow,” she muttered, massaging her temples.

“She does have a lot of strings on her,” Bright Dream agreed, sounding pensive. “Certainly, her presence is entangling, if nothing else.”

“…”

“Entangling, huh,” she looked sideways at Bright Dream, wondering suddenly if the other woman was just messing with her and had already worked ‘this’, whatever it was, out.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Bright Dream chuckled. “I only see things a slightly different way. That said, sometimes forcing things in moments like this can be oddly self-defeating.”

“…”

She resisted the urge to stick her tongue out at the other woman, or make some similar action of ridicule. Though again, rather annoyingly, she was right.

With a sigh, she checked the progress the pagoda had made… and found that while they had been chatting away, it had nearly finished. It would only take a minute or two more and she could send it back to Ling Tao.

“Lord Baisheng…”

Without any preamble, she sent a thread of qi into Lu Ji’s talisman and a moment later the bearded figure of Ling Baisheng appeared, looking around with interest for a moment before focusing on them. Even though he had never been into the Blue Pavilion before, he was entirely unperturbed by appearing here, not that she expected an expert of his age and experience to be shocked by such a little thing anyway.

“…”

“Lord Baisheng,” Bright Dream inclined her head politely to the old man… well, young man in her eyes.

“Lady Xiao,” Baisheng nodded to her politely, though not with any great formality.

That was expected, simply because he was a higher realm than she was, and as far as he knew, a lot older as well. To him, she was just ‘Lu Xiao’, the infamous imperial advisor, having been ‘awarded’ the position after Lu Fu Tao turned it down, choosing instead to style himself Blue Water Sage, famous mostly for being a Dao Ascendant at a fairly young age, and also because Lu Fu Tao was her nephew.

She wondered what face he would make, if he discovered he had actually received pointers from her. Back when he was still challenging for the crown of the era of his birth, she had been bored enough to hold a trial for promising juniors, posing as a ‘reclusive’ and ‘mysterious’ saintess with 'rumoured’ links to the Ancient Xiao..

“Lady… Bright Dream,” Baisheng barely hesitated in that greeting, which was interesting in its own right.

The two had never met, in her presence at any rate. Ling Baisheng had only returned to Blue Water City some twenty years ago after many millennia spent elsewhere, but it was not impossible they had crossed paths before, she supposed.

“In light of some… developments, here is a bit more secure to talk,” she explained with a shrug, hiding her amusement at the situation in an apologetic smile. “I hope it is not inconvenient.”

“Understandable…” Baisheng nodded. “I assume your disciple’s suspicions are borne out then.”

“Almost certainly,” she agreed, passing him the jade which was the link to the still compiling information. “It will finish compiling in a minute or two.”

He took it and turned it over in his hands, shadowy images flickering in the air around him as he considered it, then sighed and nodded.

“On our side, we expect some problems,” he said, putting it on the table beside him while it finished. “Misty Jasmine Inn is secured, for now, but the casualties are catastrophic and the hands twitching the curtain are likely going for an absolute stratagem.”

“That is surprisingly naive of them,” she remarked, keeping her tone as neutral as possible, because now he said it like that, it really did fit – a recursive divination in the form of an absolute stratagem.

Baisheng stared out over the city and nodded silently—

A gentle chime rang through the air and a neutral-sounding voice in a language only she and a very small number of other people on this world would recognise murmured “ANALYSIS COMPLETE.”

The innocuous pronouncement in the back of her mind made her drop the teacup over the edge of the pavilion.

“… RETURNING SIMULACRUM.”

The voice continued as she stared dully into space. While she had a healthy respect for ‘Good Fortune’ this was…

“Is there a problem?” Baisheng asked her, raising an eyebrow.

“Ah… no,” she shook her head. “Just a formation within the pagoda.”

It wasn’t a lie at least.

Quickly, she checked the progress on the jade for the link telemetry for the teleport and found it still hadn’t finished.

Abruptly, she was standing in three places, rather than two, as was Bright Dream. Before her, in a different hall right in the heart of the pagoda, stood a grey stone stele about half a metre high. Its normally dull face was currently a swirling current of strange symbols.

“ARRAY: AxECY-2019-AD996JG14578 IS STABLE.”

There was a very faint sense of settling energy in the hall she was in. A manifestation of Truth. Thankfully, it didn’t go beyond there, because there was no guarantee Baisheng would not also be able to perceive it.

Involuntarily, both versions of her that could see it looked up at the sky, but it remained clear. A testament to the nature of this place and the talent of her mother.

“Sorry about this,” she apologized quickly to Baisheng. “Please help yourself to some of the tea and pastries while I see to this.”

“Not at all,” Baisheng murmured politely, sitting down on the couch Bright Dream had been lounging on previously and helping himself to some tea.

Sipping her own tea, she refocused on the stele hall and strained her senses, looking for something, anything untoward. However, all she felt was the same sense of unease that had been quietly plaguing her for days – which, she was fairly sure now, was the fate-thrashed regression divination.

“… CATEGORY CLASSIFICATION: CLASS FOUR.”

“… CATEGORY DETERMINATION IN PROGRESS.”

“… CATEGORY: UNFOUNDED... Earthly > Mortal.”

“… CATEGORY: DERIVED CATEGORY FOUR, CANON CATEGORY TWO, SYMBOL CATEGORY FIVE.”

“… SCRIPTURE: ECLIPSE SCRIPTURE - YIN ARCHETYPE.”

“… CHAPTER VALIDATION: IN PROGRESS….”

“PENDING….”

Her heart was thumping loud enough that anyone standing beside her might have actually heard it. In all the untold years of trying, the formation had never, ever, gotten to this stage before.

“… SCRIPTURE MODEL HAS VALIDATED IN THE SIMULACRUM WITH A REDUCTION RATE OF P<0.0000003 AND A STABILITY CONSISTENCY OF P<0.0000003.”

“SIGMA THRESHOLD: FIVE.”

“STABILITY: EXCELLENT.”

“STRENGTH: CATEGORY FOUR.”

“UNITY: CATEGORY THREE.”

“NATURE: MAJOR – AURIC, TOTEMIC… MINOR — THAUMIC, ETHERIC.”

“STRUCTURE SUCCESSFULLY FINALIZED.”

“It finished?” she said blankly. “It always ended in failure before.”

“Mmmmm,” Bright Dream nodded. “I finished the last of the reconstruction this morning.”

“… RENDERING MODEL.”

“It finished this morning?” she turned to look at Bright Dream, who just nodded.

“Then why is it doing this now?” she asked, turning back to the stele.

“Because the method you are using is… unorthodox,” Bright Dream replied drily. “I needed to be certain…”

“Right…” she couldn’t even bring herself to be angry at this point.

“I certainly wasn’t anticipating that it would finish quite this fast though…” Bright Dream added apologetically.

“…”

Shaking her head, she turned her attention back to the stele. Runic symbols were now shifting in a circle on its dominant face, filling in a taiji-like pattern as they did so, and doing so much faster than she had anticipated.

“10…20… 30…”

As she looked on, the golden runes flowing mesmerizingly across the surface of the tablet and began to twist oddly through space, projecting the beginnings of a three-dimensional image from within the taiji.

“…70…80…”

In a matter of only a few seconds a strange, elegant, yet superficially simple-looking symbol shimmered in the air before her, cast in silver and black. Rather disconcertingly, it somehow seemed to have far too few edges and she found her gaze sliding off parts of it in decidedly unnatural ways when she tried to take the whole thing in at once…

“90…100—”

The stele rippled, the constellations of golden runes orbiting the taiji losing their radiance—

“MODEL COMPLETE.”

“It’s… complete?” she repeated, not quite believing her eyes or ears.

A moon-rune-like symbol faded into focus on the stele, taking up most of the area previously occupied by the taiji. Staring at it, she had to fight the urge to tilt her head this way and that, because if anything, the completed symbol was even harder to parse than when it was forming.

At first glance, it looked like a moon rune, albeit one drawn by an insane Rune Master on some kind of hallucinogenic spirit pill trip. The longer she looked, however, the more…

It almost sang in her ears… Words she couldn’t quite grasp the meaning of unless she—

Bright Dream’s hand closed over her own, stopping her centimetres from the symbol.

Somehow, she had walked over to it without even realizing and been about to touch it…

“The allure of dreams can be dangerous…” Bright Dream murmured. “Even for you…

“These symbols have power,” Bright Dream added, her tone turning serious.

“…”

Grimacing, she pulled her hand back.

“They are not a thing of this aeonspan, or even of these cultivation worlds,” the other woman continued, staring at the shimmering symbol with a slightly… sad look, she thought. “They have their origins in that era of old, when great titans first walked through unexplored lands, pondering the wonders of the earth, sea and sky.

“Before them, even your adoptive mother… grandfather even, let alone you, is no more than a mote, a curiosity to consider or entertain, or move according to their whim. They are not divine: they are what those so-called Divine Sages and God-Kings dream of becoming. Never forget that. Even that lunatic who supports your ancestral side would bow to them thrice in their presence.”

“…”

The cup of tea mirrored itself from the version of her still looking out over Blue Water City and she took a sip to calm her nerves, rather pleased that her hands were not shaking visibly. On several levels, she was still struggling to grasp that the whole thing had actually… worked.

“Do you think this... was worth the effort?” she asked eventually, staring at the symbol on the stele.

“—For you to soar beyond the heavens from this world?” Bright Dream mused. “Absolutely. With this, you will be unmatched beneath the sky of this world. However!”

Her tone shifted abruptly, becoming properly serious.

“You cannot advance it out here. MUST not advance it out here. It will be the death of the 'you' from all those years ago if you reveal it before you cross over the Dao Immortal threshold.”

“I am aware of the risks,” she muttered, relinquishing the tea back to the ‘other’ her and folding her arms. “You say that, like I don’t have almost as big a target on me, in these heavens, as that wandering idiot, or Tai Wen for that matter.”

“How unlike you, to claim second place,” Bright Dream said, laughing lightly as her serious expression vanished.

“It’s a seat I shall live with,” she said wryly, moving away from the stele. “In any case, I know you said this ran earlier, but isn’t this a bit too coincidental?”

The fact that all of this was happening now was enough to make the hair on the back of her arms stand on end. One such chaotic event in a day… happened. Three? Four…? And it wasn’t even late-morning yet?

Her hand didn’t tremble as she eyed the symbol from the corner of her eye. It looked so simple. Thankfully the protections afforded by the pagoda and her own realm and comprehensions made it fairly unlikely that the regression divination could grasp this, but even so…

“It is the curse of random chance to make us see things that are not there.” Bright Dream replied with an eye-roll, seeming to pre-empt her concerns. “That great stratagem is… avaricious, certainly, but it is still constrained by the limits of those who set it up.”

“How come it didn’t work before?” she asked, changing the topic before she found herself dwelling too much on the symbol itself.

“The eye of harmony, for starters…” Bright Dream replied with another eye-roll.

“Uggh…”

Involuntarily, all three iterations of her massaged their temples. The lengths to which the Dun Imperial Court and its various influences went to try and control matters was a bit ridiculous really.

“—Also, mantras are strange things at the best of times,” Bright Dream added wryly.

That was indeed true, she had to concede. It was part of the reason the whole thing had taken so long. The groundwork to get to this point was…

“…”

“—And this era cannot be said to be their ‘best’ time by a long shot,” she observed.

“Indeed,” Bright Dream agreed with a further eye-roll, smiling at her joke. “In any case, would you credit that it is actually the girl who sold you that tea who was the fundamental piece?”

“The tea seller?”

Unbidden, the picture of the girl appeared in her mind’s eye. Pretty in a homely way, a member of the Yin People with curly dark hair, tanned skin and deep green eyes. She was only in her late teens, but her talent for physical cultivation meant she would already live to be over six hundred years, probably longer. She had inherited her family’s mantra, which was an above-average one by her understanding of physical cultivation, through her genes rath—

She winced as several small pink cherry blossoms condensed around them with a hiss of static. In fact, after a second, they appeared around all three versions of her, forcing her to step away entirely from the stele and focus on the veranda—

“Fate—less!” Baisheng, who had been sitting there, enjoying his tea, swore and swatted one, while she took out two others using her own Truth.

Bright Dream cancelled the rest, but not before they succeeded in melting some holes in the stonework of the veranda. Another took a corner off the table and a further one Baisheng was too slow to reach obliterated a rather nice cushion on the couch.

“Impressive… did you think about something that contravenes their views?” Bright Dream chuckled, dusting off her hands.

“It’s truly childish,” she grumbled, still eyeing the ashen absence of a cushion. “Sorry about that,” she added to Baisheng.

“What happened?” he asked, frowning, as Bright Dream walked over and swept the dust of the cushion off the couch onto the floor before sitting down and pouring herself more tea.

“I thought about something stupid,” she replied, with a resigned sigh.

“Such a wasteful enforcement,” Bright Dream agreed, sipping her tea with a sigh of her own.

“I don’t make the rules,” she grumbled, checking the damage.

In truth, she could have had the pagoda resist things like that, but then it would have attracted notice. The problem with judgemental ephemera was that they were both fishing hook and bait in one. Swatting them was… expected, but a treasure repelling them would be marked. Their purpose was basically to do just that – detect things ‘that might be of interest’. As Bright Dream said, though, it was a serious waste of heaven’s riches.

Fortunately, the pagoda would fix itself with the ambient qi in short and subtle order, however…

“Tch…”

She clicked her tongue in annoyance as she spotted several points where that bit of manifestation had tried to infiltrate into the inner workings and leave some lingering ‘Intent’ there. The intent probably wasn’t to spy on her, specifically, but the association to Lu Fu Tao meant it was probably in someone's eye.

Baisheng raised an eyebrow at her reaction.

“Celestial black mould trying to spread spores,” she replied blandly, running her hand across the balcony.

Now that it was no longer focusing on deciphering and reconstructing the symbol though, it dealt with its new task of deciphering the chaotic traces left at the heart of the Ling clan’s teleport formation, much faster than she expected, to the point where she was genuinely surprised. She had to admit she had no idea how her mother, Mo Zhao, had made this pagoda. Its outward abilities to hide in plain sight and not really behave like a treasure to things that came prying were remarkable, even to her, having lived here for so long.

“That is a great way of describing it!” Baisheng chuckled, accepting more tea from Bright Dream. “It is not a side of being an eminent senior that any junior would expect.”

“What? Lifting up all your belongings periodically to check that the fungus and damp aren’t damaging them?” she murmured, eliciting a snort from Baisheng and a laugh from Bright Dream. “I suppose it is. Though fates know what they want to achieve with an old pagoda like this. It’s frankly embarrassing to watch, seeing those old men prying after the things of my nephew all these millennia, without a shred of self-awareness between them.”

“Who can say what goes on in their heads,” Baisheng agreed with a less amused sigh.

As an old expert of the Ling clan, she was sure he had to deal with his fair share of ‘plausibly deniable’ prying as well. Doubly so, given his own charge, Ling Yu, was a seedling worth nurturing.

“The Blue Morality Scripture is not a good thing for this world,” Bright Dream agreed with a grimace, putting her tea aside for a moment. “If you use Fate and Destiny as a club to beat the weak, and do not give face to the Harmony of Causality while preaching your own superiority on every street corner, the foundation of the world you build, the Fundamental Truth of its Great Geometry, will be fundamentally flawed.”

As far as observations went, it was a reminder, not that she needed one, that Bright Dream had views on certain things. The ‘Blue Morality Heavens’ was very high up on that list of things she disapproved of, as well.

“It is just how those forces operate,” she agreed, swirling the tea in her own cup. “I do agree though, it certainly is not.”

In her own view, what Dun Fang had perpetuated with the help of his seniors in the Kong clan was nothing short of a cancer, slowly eating into the fabric of this world… her world.

“That we can drink to,” Baisheng nodded, holding up his own teacup.

“That we can,” Bright Dream agreed, as she also raised her own teacup.

It amused her to see Baisheng glance out at the unnaturally clear morning sky as Bright Dream said that, but this time there was no censure, no obvious ephemera.

On that note, she glanced again at the talisman and, seeing that it was still not done, found herself considering whether or not it was worth trying to use the pagoda’s divination formation on it. The problem, near as she could tell though, was that the location of the estate itself was messing with things.

Ling Tao’s estate was, in truth, one of the original strongholds of the Ling clan, back when they had ruled the whole province as its grand dukes. Located strategically on the Blue River, it had hardened defensive formations capable of repelling multiple aggressive Dao Ascendants, a greater teleport formation, shielded training complexes and warehouses… and all of it was anchored into a massive feng shui arrangement that encompassed most of the core estate, built into the very buildings, gardens and lakes themselves. It was a major factor in the Ling clan’s continued dominance in the province and even had its own small ancestral ground, though probably only Baisheng and a few others knew that.

In the more peaceful times post foundation of Blue Water City, it had mostly been given over to storage and resource manufacture. Then, when even that moved into Blue Water City, or elsewhere in the province, it had ended up with Ling Tao, thanks in part to her great grandfather, Ling Shuntao, being one of its original architects. It was, in many respects, an excellent place to headquarter the procurement of spirit herbs for the Shan Lai gift.

Unfortunately though, the Ling clan of today had nowhere close to the resources of the clan of 50,000 years ago. Likely it had been hard to justify spending several Dao Jade a month on supporting the full range of active formations, especially with the main focus shifting to their estates within the city.

Subsequently, Ling Tao’s estate, while secure from traditional threats like an angry Dao Ascendant coming over and hitting you with a handful of mountains, was actually not great for dealing with soft infiltration in a time of peace.

“…”

“How is it progressing?” Baisheng asked her, noticing her checking.

“Slower than I would like, given the circumstances,” she replied at last. “Stupid inconveniences causing difficulties seem to be a running theme here. The Ling estates’ passive defences are… working against me it seems.”

“Ah…” Baisheng sighed, staring at his cup of tea gloomily. “The—”

He cut off, mid-sentence, his expression flickering for a split second—

In that same instant, her own instincts for the subtle changes in the fundamental geomancy of the world screamed at her. Though the feeling of profound unease vanished as quickly as it arrived, she was still left with an unpleasant knot in her stomach and a sense that something had been twisted, unpleasantly.

“You felt—?” she turned to speak to Bright Dream—

With a surprised yelp, she nearly fell flat on her face, arms flailing as she found herself back in the courtyard in the Ling clan estate with no warning whatsoever.

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

JUN HAN— MISTY JASMINE INN ~

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

In the end, the search for the others who had come with Ling Luo’s group proved frustrating. After some twenty minutes of going back and forth, the best he and Shi Lian could determine was that the pair allegedly from the Ling clan were probably not among the dead, but there was no way to be entirely certain.

While the disciples from the Ha clan had mostly died with intact corpses, the same could not really be said for the Ling clan soldiers. Quite a few had perished to talismans – many missing limbs or heads or burnt beyond immediate recognition. The rain helped a bit, mostly with the blood and the smell, but, by the time they had got to the end, he still wanted a bath, if only so he could scrub down his mental state.

“It is far too easy to forget that death is vile to be around,” Shi Lian sighed, putting a final head back on its half-ruined corpse and straightening up.

“It is,” he agreed, looking around. “Where do we look next?”

“Probably among the dead bandits. My instinct is, though, that we won’t find them there, either,” Shi Lian replied.

“Yeah,” he agreed, sighing as well.

“The obvious path, really, is to try to get it out of Smiling Fan,” Shi Lian added, glancing back over to where the prisoners were sitting.

“It will be hard to make him talk, even if he does seem to have been pushed aside by Esoteric Green Fan,” he pointed out.

“Do you believe that?” Shi Lian asked, with a derisive snort.

“What, that he was actually discarded here by Green Fan?” he asked, then shrugged. “Maybe?”

“The more I look at this, the more I see headaches, half-truths and foetid monkey-shit,” Shi Lian replied. “It's not outside the realms of possibility that even that is a stratagem.”

“To make them think he is less important?” he mused.

“Or just to protect him,” Shi Lian suggested, wiping her hands off on her sodden robe.

“From what though,” he muttered. “Remember, Smiling Fan is a criminal who would probably be sentenced to death by exposure for what he has already done.”

“Having his cultivation sealed and his body strung up for target practice in a public square is probably a bit… lenient,” Shi Lian noted with a bleak chuckle. “The Ha clan are likely to brand his bones with molten spirit-stones and feed him peaches of immortality for a few decades, until his jailors get bored of him.”

“Assuming the Ling clan doesn’t pull rank,” he sighed.

“I’d vote for them binding him down with some blood briar, ass-naked, on top of a pot of seven seasons bamboo, personally,” Kun Yunhee, who had just come out of the building behind them added.

“—And as a plus, you can sell the cursed bamboo for a few Spirit Jades afterwards,” Shi Lian remarked with an amused grin.

“Gotta get some benefits,” Yunhee chuckled nastily.

“Have you seen either of these two?” he asked Yunhee, showing her the images of the pair they were looking for,

Yunhee looked at them for a long moment, then shook her head apologetically.

“Maybe you could check the unidentified dead, but they are… unidentified for a reason…” she suggested, waving a hand towards the other, much smaller, but far more grisly pile of corpses and bowls of remains accruing near the inn.

“Aiii…” he put his hands on his hips and sighed.

“Yeah, sorry, it was just a thought,” Yunhee grimaced.

“It’s fine,” he replied absently. “You are right, we should check there next.”

“Why are you looking for those two, specifically anyway?” Yunhee asked as the three of them made their way up the steps towards the other bodies.

“They came with Young Lady Ling Luo,” Shi Lian replied. “The suspicion is that they are not Ling clan experts at all.”

“Ah.” Yunhee nodded, understanding.

Taking in the ruined remnants of cultivators, death qi already palling around them, it was hard not to sigh.

Dead people never looked ‘good’, but at the same time, burnt, half-exploded and partially defleshed remains could never look anything but abjectly horrible. It was the surrealism of it as much as anything. A forearm and a left leg, both totally unblemished. Someone’s… buttocks, and a portion of an attached spine. The back of a head and upper torso, the front exploded like a rotten egg.

“Is that burnt skin?” Shi Lian asked, disgusted, pointing at a large stone bowl.

“Yeah, someone used some kind of flaying talisman on one of the rooms of Ling clan guards,” Yunhee said softly, as they considered the horrid thing. “Then set them on fire.”

“Fates…” Shi Lian shook her head in disgust. “Bandits.”

“Yeah… something like that,” he agreed, poking a different shattered torso that was leaking things nobody really wanted to consider with his boot.

That was the problem with this kind of horror. It was one thing to be in the midst of a battle and be surrounded by it. Quite another to be confronted with it in the quieter moments between. In any case, it only took him a moment to tell that there was no way to confirm whether the two they sought were among the pitiful remains lying in the rain. Not for them, anyway.

“I guess we go back to Ling Tao, unless there are more in the buildings,” Shi Lian mused, looking into the building ruins of the former warehouse.

“Not as many as you would think,” Yunhee muttered. “Apparently we are missing almost thirty people, according to the survivors.”

“That’s… a lot,” he noted.

“Well, some of them may be like this,” Yunhee jerked her head towards the miserable bowl of remains. “Some are likely closer to the perimeter as well. There were soldiers on patrol and such, and those who were in the watchtowers have not been found.”

“Tetrids will do that,” he added.

“Yes, they will,” Yunhee agreed. “That, and them deliberately trying to muddy the waters in regards to who is dead and who was a turncoat.”

“Uh-huh,” Shi Lian just shook her head in resignation.

Abruptly, there was a change in the air. Within a few seconds, the direction of the wind in the gorge changed and the rainfall intensified.

“…”

“Well, that’s not good,” Yunhee remarked, turning in a quick circle as the tempo of the falling rain rapidly increased, bringing with it the faint scents of jasmine and lilies.

“No, it is not…” he agreed, noting that the vegetation growing nearby seemed lusher as well.

Shi Lian just sighed and stared up at the misty haze above them.

Over by the teleport, Lord Baisheng had stood up, while Ling Tao, and in fact everyone else within his field of view was also looking around uneasily. Even the fate-thrashed elite prisoners looked somewhat concerned, which made a change for once.

Waving for the other two to follow him, he headed back down the steps towards the teleport circle, where Ling Tao was standing with Lord Baisheng, Shi Xiaolian and Old Xian.

“—No, I have no idea either,” Shi Xiaolian was saying as they came into ear-shot.

“The area affected extends all the way to Blue Water City as well,” Baisheng interjected.

“Reached Blue Water City?” Meilan repeated incredulously.

“That’s quite a distance,” Shi Lian muttered beside him.

“Based on the rain now smelling like the world's most terrifying perfume, I rather suspect someone has poked the God Bewitching Jasmine in a way it found… disagreeable,” Baisheng added, with far more aplomb than that statement warranted, he couldn’t help but feel.

“The…” Shi Xiaolian put a hand to her forehead, rather like a mother who had just seen her children perpetuate some deeply aggrieving act of interior redecoration.

“Oh Fates…” Ling Tao groaned, putting her hands on her hips and staring into the distance.

“Everything, everywhere, all at once,” Old Xian added sourly.

“It’s a bit like that,” Baisheng agreed.

“Any luck restoring a link?” Ling Tao asked after a moment.

“Not on this side, I am not made of qi,” Baisheng replied with a grimace. “It will require some action on the other side.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed that the bandit elites were now looking at them again, with… well, the unease was still there, but it had been ameliorated in one or two cases with more calculating looks. Especially among the Five Fan’s ‘experts’.

“How convenient, that we are now even more cut off,” Shi Lian muttered.

Yunhee just puffed out her cheeks at Shi Lian’s comment.

“I take it you had no luck?” Ling Tao asked him.

“Eh… ah, sorry, no,” he shook his head, caught off guard by Ling Tao changing the topic so suddenly. “Nothing among the dead, unless they are among those with incomplete corpses.”

“Mmmmm…” Ling Tao stared along the lines of bodies then looked back at the bandits and shook her head again. “And I assume there are no leads on the stolen herbs either?”

“Nope,” Yunhee replied with a helpless shrug. “They covered their tracks well.”

“It was done quickly, no evidence of teleportations on the spot, the doors were all sealed after the fact,” Old Xian added.

“And there were no survivors beyond Duan Mu, and his mental state is not good,” Yunhee concluded.

“What is interesting is that the ambient alignments are… as cancelled as you can get up here,” Old Xian added.

“So they covered the path competently,” Ling Tao added drily. “No post-mortem scrying for us.”

“Indeed,” Old Xian agreed, “But it does also give us a further thread to pull—”

“—Unless the talismans are stolen ones, like the one used to seal up Lianmei and the others,” Ling Tao pointed out. “A lot of things went missing at that time.”

“…”

“How is Mu Shi?” he asked Yunhee quietly as Ling Tao, Shi Xiaolian and Old Xian started talking more about the specifics of that.

“Shaken,” Yunhee replied. “Though she doesn’t seem in danger of any permanent damage.”

“That’s something, at least,” he murmured. Even beyond the mental trauma of the ordeal, losing an arm and having to regenerate it with a medicinal pill was no laughing matter at her realm.

“Yeah,” Yunhee agreed. “Have you spoken to Ryong yet?”

To that, he could only sigh. Han Ryong was still helping check the rooms of the inn with Ling Fei Weng.

“Oh yeah,” Shi Lian turned to Yunhee. “Did you see anything remotely usable in terms of shields while clearing out the buildings?”

“…”

“What,” Shi Lian asked, noting him staring at her. “Can only others regret not having shields?”

“No, I didn’t mean it like that,” he started to say. “I was just...”

“Just…” she asked, archly.

“Oh… nevermind,” he muttered, giving up, because she was right and he wasn’t even sure what she was objecting to on his part.

“Shields…” Yunhee frowned, then shook her head. “No… all the military equipment is gone or destroyed, just what you have stacked over there at this point.”

“A pity,” Shi Lian murmured under her breath.

They stood around in silence after that. Personally, he felt a bit at a loss, though he knew that some of that was the renewed effects of the rain at this point. He had only been to the Jasmine Gate once, over a century ago, with Ruliu, and it was not a place he had ever intended to return to.

Even the periphery of that hell was a terrifying and disorientating place. Ruliu had compared it to the Red Pit, as a place that did not play entirely within the common ‘rules’ of Yin Eclipse.

Thankfully, the rain only seemed to be bringing the sense of… dissociation with it, at least in an obvious sense.

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

~ LU XIAO — LING TAO’S ESTATE, AGAIN. ~

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

Fortunately for her image, Lu Xiao just about managed to avoid face planting off the teleport formation in front of the whole plaza.

“Great,” she muttered to the world at large, stabilizing herself in the rain using the edge of the teleport. “Just… great.”

“Um… is there a problem?”

She turned to find the formations experts looking at her with concern. Even the overseer for the whole court had come out, looking around with an uneasy expression.

“Your… er… nose, Miss Xiao?” One of them pointed at her.

“Ah.” Wiping her nose, she considered the bright red blood, shimmering with a faint golden hue in the morning sun. “Thanks,” she murmured pinching the bridge of her nose.

“…”

Sniffing a few times, she turned to look in the direction of the mountains and focused on the talisman. Whatever had just happened, had cut off the connection to Baisheng as well , Lu Ji too, by way of the immediate backlash.

“That was singularly unpleasant—” she found a scowling Bright Dream standing beside her, her arms folded.

“Ah—!”

“Hey!”

“What the—!”

The formations experts nearest her actually climbed into the air at the woman’s sudden arrival.

“What just—” before she could even finish wondering out loud what had occurred, a second, much more ominous feeling tugged at her.

This time, the draw was… palpable. There was no qi, no intent, no… soul strength, nor principle. Not even a Truth. It was just… presence. Sweat slicked her body and the suppression of the rain intensified.

Lingsheng had also come outside now, and was standing a little way away, accompanied by a rather confused looking Ling Yu, sheltering under an umbrella.

“What is going on?” Ling Yu asked.

“Seems like something best left alone just got poked,” Lingsheng muttered.

“Yeah,” she agreed, looking sideways at Bright Dream. “If you tell me that this is also just coincidence, I will take your geometry and—”

Before she could finish, something tried to attract, no… demand, her attention. Overhead, the swirling rain clouds darkened. The mist seemed to cling to buildings, making strange shapes in the shadows. In the distance, the obscured mountains became visible shadows in the rain. The world almost seemed to call out to her…

“Be careful,” Bright Dream’s voice murmured in warning, for her ears only. “Don’t get lured.”

“I am aware,” she replied grimly, pushing the creepy, ‘urgent’ feeling away and scouring her memories for what could have triggered this fresh escalation.

“Er… the rain is?” one of the formations experts trailed off, staring up at the sky.

“This is why you don’t mess with the fate-thrashed weather,” another grumbled.

“Is that jasmine blossom I can smell?” Ling Yu asked dully, taking a deep breath.

“…”

“Yes,” she confirmed, smelling it now as well.

It had come with the mist, as much as the rain, and it wasn’t just jasmine she could smell either. There was myrtle, lotus, mulberry, chrysanthemum, lilies… The effect was practically soporific in terms of the latent oppression within it, and no amount of qi-defence was able to do anything about it either.

The vitality of the gardens in the estate was already surging. Grass growing at the edge of the plaza was a bit greener, and the qi in the ornamental spirit vegetation along the far side of the courtyard was shifting as well.

Lingsheng and Bright Dream were both looking at her now, their eyes telling her they were arriving at the same, concerning conclusion.

“Did someone just try to force their way into the Jasmine Gate?” she guessed at last, because that was about the only thing she could think of… and it was a place which had powerful, ancient spirit herbs that should never be annoyed.

“—the what…” one of the other formations experts squeaked.

“Isn’t that like, deep in the mountains though?” someone else asked disbelievingly.

“—And the suppression…” another trailed off sceptically.

“Indeed, it shouldn’t be perceivable out here,” she agreed, frowning. “However, the records are clear that it’s basically a Dao Ascendant Realm Spirit Herb.”

The formations experts all turned to stare at her blankly.

“The current rankings only go up to thirteen stars…” Bright Dream’s voice echoed in her head.

“The Blue Gate School has some records,” she shrugged. “From the Blue Water Sage.”

“Ah right…” the formations experts all nodded sagely, as if that cleared everything up.

The cult of reputation was depressing at times.

“It will pass in an hour or so, this is just a trace,” Bright Dream added, by way of reassurance, using a bit of her own strength to calm their nerves. “This is just an unfortunate by-product of so much screwing around with the weather.”

The other cultivators all looked a bit more relieved at her words.

“Even so, this changes matters,” she muttered, staring into the rain in the direction of the once again invisible mountains.

“Uh-huh,” Bright Dream agreed quietly, while Lingsheng just grimaced.

While circumstances were not being helped by the repeated skulduggery with regards to the Rising Dragon Gale and the Rains from the East, the truth was a bit more… worrying. It was something of a misconception that the suppression of the ‘forbidden zone’ was an immutable thing. The only way you could get ephemera from the High Valleys right out here on the coast was if someone had lifted the suppression over the threshold to Soul Foundation, making comprehensions relating to the soul utilizable in some fashion.

That someone had been ignorant enough, or mendacious enough, to do it near the passage into hell that was now known as the Jasmine Gate was bad enough. That they had demonstrably crossed either the Jasmine itself, or some other inhabitant of that place, to the point where the clash of powers scattered some of its strength all the way to the coast… was… not a good thing.

The Jasmine Gate had a few secrets lost, largely beneath the outsized reputation of its most ‘famous’ inhabitant, the ‘God Bewitching Jasmine’.

The ‘Watcher’ and the ‘Old Gate’ were ancient tales, barely given credence outside of Yin Folklore. Most ‘modern scholars’, ignorant of earlier records, considered them a bastardisation of the myths of Celestial Kun Lun and the Peach Grove Temple, where a lucky soul would wander into a certain place and achieve a rare opportunity of enlightenment.

Somewhere along the way, the ‘God Bewitching Jasmine’ had also become divorced from those old tales, and most ‘scholars’ now believed the ‘Old Gate’ to be within the ‘Green Pit’ or the East Fury Ruins. Misconceptions those who did remember, like her, were in no hurry to correct, because the thing that the Watcher, the Old Gate and the Jasmine were keeping sealed up was a relict monstrosity from the days when the mountain fell. If that got out, never mind Yin Eclipse, Eastern Azure would be so deep in shit, so fast nobody would know what hit them.

“—Umm… Miss Xiao, what do we do about the formation…?” the formations expert started to ask, slightly deaf to the circumstances, pointing at the partially dismantled teleport platform.

“Leave it,” she said absently. “We will need to do more work on it, though first I will need to go see Headmaster Ji.”

The formations experts all nodded rather glumly, even as she spun on her heel and walked off towards the nearest hall, followed by Bright Dream, Lingsheng and the still-confused Ling Yu.

Only when they were inside a side hall and out of sight of prying eyes did she stop.

“Lingsheng, can you keep an eye out there?” she asked the young woman. “The Ling clan seems to have a loyalty issue, so please ensure that nobody takes the opportunity to do something they will be made to regret later?”

“The Ling clan has a what issue?” Ling Yu asked with disbelief.

“Of course,” Lingsheng agreed, cutting off Ling Yu. “You can leave that with me.”

Nodding, she focused on the Blue Water Pavilion, and with a flicker of shifting space teleported directly to the upper-most floor. Bright Dream appeared a moment later. To her mild amusement, she noted that the weather manipulation of the Imperial Envoys had also collapsed, and Blue Water City was also now being rained upon. There was barely any trace of the Jasmine here, though. Just a faint hint of the scents of the forest if you really focused.

“So, what now?” Bright Dream asked.

“Take this, plug it into the pagoda and start it synchronizing,” she said, tossing the formation core to her. “I’m going to see what the cost of re-establishing the link to Baisheng is.”

Bright Dream caught the core, eyed it for a moment, then sighed softly and put it on the table and sat down, cross-legged on the couch beside it.

For her part, she sat down cross-legged on another couch and focused on both the core functions of the pagoda and the parent talisman for Lu Ji and Ling Tao’s ones—

“Baisheng…”

“Ah, you… managed to… re-establish it…” Baisheng replied, his image glitching a bit around the edges as he reappeared.

“Yeah… I had to use the Blue Pavilion’s Array,” she replied with a grimace. “Did you also feel that disturbance?”

“Some…what,” Baisheng replied. “Something has… disturbed— God Bewitching… Jasmine. It’s— that bad, but... there is some…” Baisheng wavered a bit as the words started breaking up, before falling silent so the transmission could cope better.

“Is the suppression raised?” she asked, because that was the critical thing really.

“Suppression?” Baisheng frowned, then sighed. “Ah… I see, that is what—. Did someone… try to break into the Jasmine— scatter it?”

“That’s something at least,” she replied, getting the gist of his reply even with the few lost words. “The aftershock reached all the way here, and was obvious enough that even folk in the Ling estate could smell the jasmine in the humidity.”

“Ah…” Baisheng grimaced.

“Ji… how are you getting on?” she asked Lu Ji, shifting to him for a moment.

“I am on my way to see the duke now,” Lu Ji replied. “What just happened?”

“We are working that out. Someone seems to have picked a fight in the Jasmine Gate,” she murmured.

“…”

“Fates save us from idiots and juniors,” Lu Ji groaned.

“Yeah, I wouldn’t hold my breath on that one,” she sighed.

“—So, what do we do?” Baisheng asked her, cutting back into the conversation.

“I still need to sort out the core,” she replied apologetically. “That is going to require a slightly… different approach, now, I think.”

“Because of… the feng shui alignment in Ling Tao’s estate,” Baisheng mused.

“Yes, among other things,” she agreed. “Though that hasn’t stopped several someones from creating links to that formation. You might mention to Ling Yusheng and Ling Jiang that this could all have been largely avoided if they just maintained the persons-of-interest lists on the estate formations…”

“Hmmm…”

The slight hardening in Baisheng’s expression made her mentally light an incense stick for the plotting of the Five Fans. The Ling clan was probably going to have some personnel adjustments in the near future.

“Well, it’s not insurmountable,” she added a bit more brightly, glancing over at Bright Dream. “How is the core coming along?”

“Oh?” Baisheng raised an eyebrow.

“Ready when you need it,” the other woman replied drily.

Rather than reply immediately to Baisheng, she sank her focus into the Blue Water Pagoda in earnest.

In a sense, the solution was fairly simple – she just had to seek answers by other means. Divination was a dead end, at least focused on the Ling estate, but Ling Luo had not spent all her time there, and those who had come with her had also, almost certainly, spent time in Blue Water City at some point in the last week or so. The difficulty, and the reason why she was going to use the pagoda, was that getting those answers was not easy.

Thankfully, ignorance was on her side, in a way it would not have been… say 50-60,000 years ago. Peoples’ memories were short and the rather fortuitous hollowing out of a whole generation in the last ill-fated trip into Yin Eclipse had only furthered that. The Huang-Mo Wars’ three campaigns had also led to a significant loss of experienced experts. Thus, general understanding of what a peak Dao Ascendant was genuinely capable of when pushed was close to a historic low in the last few hundred thousand years.

It didn’t help wider understanding, either, that there were not actually that many Dao Ascension experts who were genuinely at the ‘peak’ of the realm. At most, there were maybe two dozen – on the whole of Eastern Azure – though it was hard to be sure, even for her. In comparison, there were something north of seventy suppressed World Venerates.

In part, this surprising imbalance was mostly down to people being more focused on the ‘greater horizon’ at that point. Much like with Dao Seeking, transitioning into the Immortal Realm, the ‘norm’ was to only do what was necessary to pass through Dao Ascendant and then consolidate your gains as a Venerate. The main reason there was, somewhat amusingly, the tribulation. Worldly connections were important and the fewer of them you had, the easier the crossing. Thus, the longer you stayed at Dao Ascendant, the harder the tribulation became.

As a counterargument to rapid advancement though, there were massive advantages to be gained from the ‘long path’ as it was sometimes called, so long as you were patient. Once you reached Dao Ascendant the whole arsenal of worldly comprehensions were your plaything and horizontal progression in power was only as limited as your own mentality. Certainly, she lacked in pure combat power, compared to even a very mediocre World Venerate, but her personal knowledge of formations, divination, feng shui, treasure refinement and more was easily comparable to some Celestial Venerates. Most importantly, though, she had perspective.

With the aid of the grand formation, her awareness blended gently with the presence of the city and its occupants.

At first, it was like a gentle sigh, akin to the rustle of a vast bamboo forest shifting gently in autumn winds. To find an individual in that chaos was a feat in its own right, but thankfully she had a bit of a head start in that she knew roughly where to look. The city blurred around her as she walked through it, arriving, like a ghost, at the Golden Dragon Teahouse.

The auction was a scar of chaos, a twisted, tangled thicket within the forest of her mind’s eye. For now, she ignored it and instead wandered back through the moment, just looking at faces, an unmarked female disciple in the crowd. Much as she expected, though, she found Ling Luo, chatting with Bai Shunhua, a young woman from the Nine Auspicious Moons.

“Sorry to disturb you, Young Lady Luo…”

Her words made the other girl turn.

“Yes, uh… how can I help you…” Ling Luo stared at her, taking in her Blue Gate School core disciple’s robe, no doubt wondering why a core disciple was even here.

“—Mo Xiao,” she murmured politely. “I have a talisman for you. From Lady Tao.”

Ling Luo looked at her for a moment, then nodded. Rolling her eyes mentally, she passed the girl a talisman jade she had basically made on the spot.

“What is it meant to do?” Ling Luo asked, taking it and turning the token, which was in the Ling clan style, over in her hands, looking confused.

“It’s an updated security token for Lady Tao’s estate,” she said blandly. “That’s all I know, sorry. She simply said she would talk to you about it later and that you are to keep it with you.”

“Ah… no problem,” Ling Luo replied, putting the jade in a hidden pocket with a soft sigh. “Thanks for bringing it.”

“Not at all,” she murmured, saluting Ling Luo. “I had a task here anyway, with regards to the… well, that…” she jerked her head in the general direction of the facsimile of Yin Eclipse, which was still, at this point, being ripped apart by exuberant alchemists under the direction of the Pill Sovereign Sect’s Quan Dingxiang.

The whole exchange had taken a minute at most and, looking around, the harmony of the moment was barely disturbed. Ironically, the chaotic snarl of the auction actually helped her there.

Taking her leave, she watched the world around her pass, as the moment drifted back towards the present… until, abruptly, the talisman mark became divorced from her in a subtle, yet curiously profound way.

“…”

“Huh…”

Focusing on that vanishing sensation, she found herself in the entrance courtyard of a small estate-turned-teahouse in the Harbour District, where swing—

“—Your invite…”

A man put his hand on her arm, and she found herself turning face to face with a ‘guard’, who she immediately marked as an Ancient Immortal disciple of the Jade Gate Court, trying to be nondescript. His visual disguise was not bad, she supposed, but the whole thing was rather let down because his law comprehensions held clear traces that he practiced the ‘Golden Jade Chrysanthemum’ manual, a common method provided to the Jade Gate Court’s inner disciples.

“…”

“You just asked me a moment ago,” she sniffed, withdrawing her arm and glaring at him.

“I…” the disciple stared at her, then nodded apologetically. “I just asked you a moment ago, sorry.”

Shaking her head, she watched him go, then set off through the crowd, noting everyone who was there, including several Ling and Ha clan juniors from concerningly influential families. Ling Luo was with a group of her friends on the second floor, chatting away exuberantly.

Standing at a distance, she considered the group, who were all fairly drunk, until she found a nondescript green-robed youth sitting unobtrusively to one side—

He looked up, almost as soon as she spotted him, but saw nothing…

“…”

She nearly looked away, then sighed softly and didn’t.

The suggestion had been subtle and insidious, directed at her, but not really at her. In his hand, she saw he held Ling Luo’s storage ring.

“Huh…” he stared at the spot where she was, then at the ring again. “I guess they put some means on the ring after all… that will be tedious.”

As she looked on, he leant over and patted Ling Luo on the shoulder and gave her a pleasant smile. She returned it and accepted the ring back.

“It’s indeed an impressively old ring,” the youth said brightly.

“Thank you,” Ling Luo replied, blushing slightly. “It’s just something my aunt gave me… I always thought it was a bit ugly frankly.”

“…”

At that point, the impetus to just go on her way almost redoubled itself.

She shrugged off the effect of ‘Favour with a Smile’ and frowned. The person before her was certainly not Di Ji, nor Di Yao…

-Ah, it’s not him doing it, he is as affected as she is… she realised after a moment.

Once she worked that out, it was a matter of mere moments to narrow down the genuine perpetrator, a dark-haired Golden Immortal in a grey and brown robe on the far side of the second floor.

Walking over, she gave him a winsome smile and took in the card game he was playing.

“What do you… want…” he trailed off, confused as she sat down in his lap and gave him a very dreamy smile, turning on a fractional bit of charm.

“Haah… Brother Fu, you have an admirer!” one of the others laughed.

“Uh… yea…yeah,” the youth agreed, unable to look away from her as she lazily ran her fingers down his arm until they rested over his hand.

“Your smile… it’s just so enchanting,” she murmured, looking into his eyes.

His mental defences, such as they were, didn’t even perceive the intrusion as she gazed into the core of his being. Within a heartbeat, she had Fu Dengbei’s whole life story… which told her a few things.

Firstly, that he was an enemy of all women.

Second, that the ‘association’ Fu Dengbei ran in Blue Water City had a bastardized manual for that art and had been putting it to good use cornering the market in a certain kind of entertainment.

Third, that his backer was indeed the Five Fans.

And finally, that they had almost a third of the underground influences in Blue Water City either under their control or on their payroll, not to mention a few more ‘legitimate’ ones.

She played along for a few minutes, listening to the chatter and gauging the comings and goings of the tea house, then, after Fu Dengbei had won a few hands of the card game, thanks largely to her cheating, slipped away, promising to seek him out later.

Once she was clear of the teahouse, she concentrated on Ling Luo and confirmed that the mark still worked outside of that teahouse, then refocused on the Blue Water Pagoda.

Her surroundings twisted back together and she was once again looking out over the city, except now, she had a plain jade talisman in her hand.

“Here,” she passed the mark to Baisheng. “This should direct you to Ling Luo, or at least allow you to track her down.”

“…”

“Did you just use Time Laws?” Baisheng asked, raising an eyebrow.

“A lady does not spill her secrets,” she deadpanned, mostly just for the sake of it, because Baisheng was no idiot and she wasn’t really disguising what she had done.

Checking the core, she found that the pagoda had automatically found enough points within the chaotic traces from her little jaunt to resolve the obfuscated telemetry as well.

“The onward destination for your teleport formation landed somewhere… east of Mahavaran, though I am sure they call it something else now,” she added.

“Mahavaran…” Baisheng frowned. “I can’t say I am familiar with it.”

“Uh…” she frowned, then waved a hand and a rough map, formed from her own memories for the region between East Fury and Thunder Crest, appeared and she pointed to an area on the north-eastern edge. “It’s… south-west of the Aspen’s usual territory. East of the Jasmine Gate as well, which is a bit more inconvenient. Particularly now someone has kicked that nest of vipers.”

“I see…” Baisheng stared at the map for a long moment then nodded slightly.

“So what is our next step?” Bright Dream asked.

“Start transferring the reconstructed core and the information within it to Baisheng and my nephew,” she replied, standing up and stretching. “This daughter, meanwhile, is going to pick out a dress.”

“…”

“A dress?” Baisheng repeated, looking at her oddly.

“Uh-huh,” she smirked. “I have a boy to meet and a promise to keep.”

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

~ LU JI – BLUE WATER CITY, DUCAL PALACE ~

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

“I am sorry, Lord Jiang, Lady Jiang, Headmaster… But the Duke—”

Lu Ji stared at the official, a former elder of the Deng clan, now resolutely blocking their passage and tried not to sigh audibly.

“—Will want to speak to me, urgently, I suspect, in light of what I have to tell him,” he said with as much patience as he could muster, which at this point was… not much.

For an Immortal Realm cultivator, the ‘official’ was doing quite well, he had to concede, though mostly that was down to the treasure robe and seal of office he wore. Both treasures associated with the ‘post’ he held, intended to give a modicum of resistance and protection from oppressive intent and soul-sense.

Historically, it was a neat innovation, but presently, both were fate-thrashed annoying.

The latter in particular, was why he didn’t just swat the official from the Deng clan out of the way, and he knew it. Any qi signature that ‘transgressed’ against such a seal would, at best, be either sealed in a spatial cage, or directly evicted from the palace compound and any future attempts to enter blocked directly.

“As I told you,” the official said, barely missing a beat. “The Duke, His Excellency, is in a meeting with General Lei, General Weng, the Lord Astrologer—

“The duke will want to hear what we have to say,” Lord Jiang interrupted, sounding exasperated, while his wife - Ling Bai Lanying - just glared at the official and the guards behind him.

If looks could kill, by this point her body-count of court officials would be worthy of a provincial award.

—and several other, very eminent persons,” the official continued, though he was sweating visibly now. “Who I assure you, it is not in your interest, or your families’ interests to offend!”

“…”

“Not in my…” Ling Bai Lanying nearly spat blood.

“—If you tell me what is so important,” the official said smoothly, totally ignoring her outrage. “Perhaps I can intercede and he will agree to meet you once this meeting is concluded.”

To emphasise that point, the four guards standing watching at the door behind all straightened a bit.

That, in a nutshell, explained everything: ‘Tell me, so my master can act on whatever has drawn you here, and yes, you might get your meeting, but not before we have decided if we need to care about the reasons’.

Every official around the duke was like that. Especially the gatekeepers. All of them served different masters and none of them were Cao Leyang at the first time of asking.

“Unfortunately, I must insist,” he said at last, having played out the ‘we ask, you refuse, we ask again, you fob us off’ ritual as far as he cared to.

“In—?” the official puffed up, then turned pale as he produced his own talisman.

He had almost never used his status as an ‘Advisor’ to the Ducal Throne to get access to Cao Leyang. There was no need. The hat of ‘Headmaster’ of the most influential school in three provinces was generally enough. It also helped that he was one of the few voices who wasn’t usually trying to tug the young duke in some self-serving direction.

“Move aside please, I wish to ‘advise’ his Excellency. Or will you accept the charge, after this is done, that you deliberately and knowingly impeded an advisor of the duke in the execution of his official duties?”

“That’s an offence that will see most officials stripped of their rank,” Ling Jiang added with a nasty smile.

“And it doesn’t require a unanimous vote, just for the duke and another of his inner council to agree,” he murmured, patting the now shaking official on the shoulder.

Leaving the trembling official behind, he walked towards the guards at the door. Thankfully, they didn’t interfere, but they didn’t look especially pleased either as they saluted and opened the door for them.

“Aren’t you their boss, dear?” Ling Lanying muttered to Ling Jiang as they walked through.

“Yes, but here, that counts for little unless they are from my Bureau,” Ling Jiang muttered.

“Uh…”

The official on the other side, whose job was likely to announce arrivals, was completely caught off guard by their sudden, unannounced, entrance.

Taking in the strategy hall, he found it largely unchanged from the last time he had been there. The centre was dominated by a round table with a special formation set into it, that displayed a three-dimensional map of the whole province and its many forces and influences. The walls were covered with scroll paintings and calligraphy scrolls, largely by Cao Leyang, who took great pride in accomplishments in the ‘five arts’ – poetry, music, philosophy, painting and strategy.

The ‘eminent person’ that the obnoxious official had tried to use to intimidate Ling Jiang with was, to his mild surprise, Huang Wuli Jinfang. The tall, scholarly man with a close-cropped beard and a commanding demeanour was currently dressed in a rather everyday robe of blue and red, and standing admiring one of the paintings by Cao Hongjun. The only nod to his eminent position, as Huang Wuli Leng’s spokesperson in mundane matters on Eastern Azure, was the Huang clan crest embroidered on the breast.

Aside from him, a girl standing by the wall, also dressed in Huang clan colours, and three youths in expensive robes, all Golden Immortals, sitting by a window sipping wine, the others were as expected.

General Ha Cao Lei and General Cao Weng were leaning on the backs of chairs by the table, looking at him with frowns. The Chief of the Provincial Astrology Bureau, Qiao Tao Feng, was glaring at him, clearly unable to decide if he was a dog to kick or a snake to strike. Deng Kong was standing next to Qiao Tao Feng, also looking at him with a sour expression.

Cao Leyang, leaning on the table, just looked stressed, his golden-blonde hair tied back in a loose military knot.

“My apologies for our intrusion, Your Graces,” he said, saluting Huang Jinfang and Cao Leyang formally.

“Headmaster Lu,” Cao Leyang remarked, looking up from the map he was studying. “This is an… unexpected surprise. I was led to believe you were in some kind of seclusion, focusing on your alchemy?”

“What can I say, it’s hard to focus with all the interruptions of late,” he deadpanned, as Ling Jiang and Ling Bai Lanying echoed his salute.

“—and Lord Jiang, I was about to send for you,” Cao Leyang added. “I presume you are here about the disturbances in the West Flower Picking Region’s northern border?”

“It is related,” Ling Jiang replied.

“You gave orders that Misty Vale not be reinforced,” Deng Kong said flatly to Ling Jiang. “How foolish, to think the Ling clan would play politics at a time like this—”

“Lord Jiang?” Cao Leyang asked, though the duke actually looked at him, as he failed to hide a grimace at Deng Kong’s accusation. He had expected that hotter heads would countermand that eventually, but with luck he had introduced something of an unpredictable element into whatever was going on up there.

“In my experience, as someone who has seen a lot in this province, this goes beyond a simple bandit attack on a rich town,” he replied. "The early reports suggest that the garrison fell without any raised alarm and that the attackers were already in the town before any alarm was raised."

“That alone is hardly—” Deng Kong started to say, before Cao Leyang held up a hand and cut him off.

“Please continue, Advisor Lu,” the duke said.

“Looking at events that have occurred recently, we have been three or four steps behind every problem that has cropped up; from this, to that idiotic auction and the shortages it has caused, the arrival of Dun Fanshu as well..."

“You believe there is common ground between these events and this?” Huang Jinfang asked, raising an eyebrow

“Yes, Your Grace,” he replied politely. “Although it’s… complicated—”

“—yes, I imagine such matters are,” Deng Kong agreed with a snort. “For an alchemist—”

“Complicated, how?” Huang Jinfang mused, stroking his beard.

“It's not that they are related directly, but that they all follow a same pattern, that of emergent chaos, and it runs through everything,” he said matter-of-factly, coming over to the table to look at the map of the province set into it. “It has been slowly building for weeks, since the events that led to the arrival of the princess and your own clan’s scion. Since then, though, there has been a notable... intensification, well above what is typica—”

“Pffft!” the Astrology Bureau Chief snorted and just shook his head in ridicule. “Please, Headmaster Lu, do not insult our intelligence. Did you barge into this meeting just to tell us that ‘the province is a bit chaotic’? I must applaud you, your divination skills are truly profound.”

Ignoring the Lord Astrologer’s snarky tone, he stared at the map for a long moment, refreshing his memory of the geography around Misty Vale from a strategic perspective.

“It can be argued that there is co-incidence in there,” he mused, addressing Huang Jinfang and Cao Leyang, whose opinions were the only ones that really mattered here. “Yet all things have a pattern, it is just a matter of determining its significance.”

“Very true,” Huang Jinfang agreed, nodding pensively, giving little away.

“For example, the pacification of the weather here on the coast has seriously hindered efforts to ensure the security of that border of the mountains in the last few days. Not to mention caused significant issues with attempts to go about assembling the gift for the Shan Emperor.

“This is interesting, because the attack on Misty Vale began within moments of the latest ‘pacification’ of the Rising Dragon Gale—”

“Are you implying that the Imperial Advisors are behind this?” Qiao Tao scoffed.

“Not at all,” he replied, levelly. “But this was a well-planned and professionally executed strike at a critical point in the regional infrastructure central to the assembly of the gift for the Shan Emperor.”

“Congratulations, Headmaster Lu, you know strategy,” Deng Kong replied, with a dismissive chuckle. “The only flaw in your argument is we have a well-established timeline for the Misty Vale attack and it doesn’t match your ‘hypothesis’—”

“Do you have contact with Misty Vale?” he asked Deng Kong rather pointedly.

“General Lei?” Deng Kong said, turning to Ha Cao Lei.

“We received a request for urgent reinforcements through the appropriate channels—” the general replied.

“—Have you had visual contact with someone on the ground there?” he reiterated.

“We are hardly going to discuss—” General Lei replied with a haughty sniff.

“Hundreds of Ling, Ha and even Kun talismans went dark this morning," he said, cutting off the general. “Misty Jasmine Inn was attacked from within and without, in a catastrophic raid."

“—that was the centre for Lady Tao's efforts regarding the gift,” Cao Leyang frowned.

“It was,” he confirmed. “I can also confirm that a strike force has successfully liberated it from that attack. Misty Vale went dark at the same time as that attack and it is the route that most would expect any survivors of Misty Jasmine Inn to retreat towards."

“Then why give the order to not reinforce it?” one of the youths behind the Qiao Tao interjected.

He glanced at the speaker, but none of the three were at all familiar to him. All he could say for sure was that they were not local to the province, based off their Golden Immortal foundations and young ages.

“Because Misty Vale already had a significant garrison,” he said, before Deng Kong or Ha Cao Lei could cut in. “Larger than any other nearby, thanks to the strategic value of the spirit soil quarries. Additionally, if you want to reinforce it significantly, the weather would force you to move out troops from the garrisons at Hanshing and Jubei Crossing, on the main road to—"

“And in your ‘opinion’ what will happen next, Headmaster?” General Weng asked, contemplating the map with narrowed eyes and a deepening frown.

“If forces are moved to reinforce Misty Vale, both are at risk,” he replied. “If they are not under attack already expect them to be very shortly. Has there been word from either?”

“There was official confirmation before the communication network went down that Jubei Crossing was sending troops towards Misty Vale,” General Weng mused, staring at the map with a frown. “They said they levied auxiliary forces to make up the shortfall...”

“No visual confirmation?” he asked.

“No...” General Weng replied, his frown deepening as he glanced at Deng Kong, then General Ha Lei, who did not look happy now.

“Then I would expect bad news there, and soon,” he said with a slightly frustrated sigh. “West Flower Picking Town is also likely to come under some kind of attack.”

“That is something of a leap,” General Lei observed sourly.

“How can you be sure of that?” Cao Leyang asked, looking up from his own intense study of the map and the forces shown on it. “Because that strike force that liberated Misty Jasmine Inn was led by my sister,” Ling Jiang said gloomily.

“A capable young woman,” Huang Jinfang mused. “JiLao said she was instrumental in dealing with the chaos caused by the auction, yet also happy to let young hero Dingxiang take most of the plaudits...”

“That is her character,” he agreed. “As her teacher I can only cheer her on.”

“She is your disciple, hmmm?” Huang Jingfang gave him a rather searching look.

“Thats one way to put it,” Deng Kong muttered under his breath, while Qiao Tao, who had been a one-time suitor of his disciple, nodded in agreement.

“Indeed,” he nodded, ignoring Deng Kong. “In any case, that strike force, which thanks to the weather and sabotage to the teleport formation up there is now stranded, also counted Lady Shi Xiaolian, Lord Kun Xianfang and a Ling clan old Ancestor among its members. Supporting them was one of the claws of the Ling clan’s 'Little Dragon’, several members of the Cherry Wine Pagoda and a further group of elite experts from West Flower Picking Town."

“That’s... quite the force," General Weng frowned.

“Sounds like she—”

Before Deng Kong could say something that made him want to hit the man, he produced a copy of the image Ling Tao had sent him onto the table.

“…”

“They arrived about twenty minutes after the initial assault, and found a dozen survivors."

“This was well done, I see laws used… I assume the attackers?” Huang Jinfang mused, peering at the image.

“Who?” Cao Leyang asked, staring at the lines of bodies.

“The Five Fans,” he replied, tactfully deciding to leave the revelation about the Yeng Brotherhood and rumours of Di Ji as cards he could yet play in this. “Esoteric Green Fan is confirmed to have taken part in the attack.”

“That old villain,” General Weng sighed. “So, the attack on Misty Vale is also them?”

“The Five—?” Deng Kong asked incredulously.

“That would be the logical assumption,” he agreed, cutting Deng Kong off before he could embarrass himself. “The strike force repelled them but there were barely a dozen survivors—”

“Among the bandits?” the girl in Huang clan robes asked, looking at the scene before them with a grimace.

“No, among the cultivators who were in the Inn, when they attacked,” he clarified, grimly.

“A dozen...” Cao Leyang sighed, shaking his head.

“That...” the girl stared at the dead, her expression paling slightly.

“Women and valuable juniors mostly," he said, “you know how the Five Fans operate, Your Grace.”

Cao Leyang just nodded gloomily. Before he had become duke, Cao Hongjun’s son had spent much of his military career for the previous few centuries fighting various bandit forces around Blue Water Province. First the Jung Fang rebels in the north, then the Yeng Brotherhood, and most recently the Five Fans in the east. His other great achievement, rather helpfully, was as the person who finally dragged Di Ji in in chains a century ago.

“Lord Jiang’s niece was also caught up in this,” he added. “As well as disciples from the Din, Bai and Qing clan’s too.”

“Young Lady Luo...” Cao Leyang sighed, glancing at Ling Jiang and then his wife and bowing politely to both of them. “My... I can only offer you my deepest sympathies, Lord Jiang, Lady Jiang.”

“Thank you, Your Grace,” Ling Jiang murmured, accepting the bow.

“It gets better,” he added. “The disruption just now?”

“Yes… some new weather, or so they are saying,” Cao Leyang said, turning back to him. “Rather awkwardly timed as well, but as you so astutely noted, that seems to be a theme of late.”

“No, not new; very old weather,” he said grimly. "Not seen since the time before this city was established. Someone has attacked the Jasmine Gate,” he said grimly. “With enough force that some of the forces within have begun to move.”

“The… Jasmine Gate?” Cao Leyang looked confused, before looking over at Qiao Tao. “Could it be related to the trial?”

“Rather, I imagine some desperate, inexperienced Herb Hunters perhaps went where they should not,” Deng Kong remarked, nodding knowingly.

“...”

“If you believe herb hunters, and juniors at that, have the capability to annoy the God Bewitching Jasmine to this degree, I can only say that your perceptive abilities have transcended... Perhaps they will soon rival that of our Lord Astrologer, Qiao Tao,” he replied drily, not willing to let Qiao Tao off the hook either for his agreement with Deng Kong’s comment earlier about Ling Tao.

“You...” Qiao Tao, who had something of a reputation as a diviner who... to put it politely, ‘specialized’ in divinations of the rich and famous', glared at him balefully.

“So, what do you counsel, Advisor Lu?” Cao Leyang asked, a little pointedly, still taking in the ruin shown in the image.

“—First, I assume you have evidence beyond one image,” Qiao Tao cut in rather archly.

“We should avoid being hasty, Your Grace,” General Ha Lei agreed.

“I assume, by your words, that this attack was successfully beaten back,” General Weng observed, giving both General Lei and Astrologer Qiao some serious side-eye. “Were there prisoners?”

“Some,” he confirmed.

“We have means, Your Grace. Even with this accursed weather,” General Weng mused. “It would be expensive, but it should be possible to speak to Lady Tao or Lord Xianfang, to confirm some of this in the first instance? Especially where it relates to the attack on Misty Vale.”

“I can certainly provide means,” Huang Jinfang said. “I must admit to having my horizons broadened that you can provide an image this good, in these circumstances.”

“The Ling clan has its means, Your Grace,” Lord Jiang said respectfully. “And Headmaster Lu was able to call on certain… ancestral resources.”

“Ancestral, hmmmm,” Huang Jinfang glanced at him, raising a quizzical eyebrow.

“Lady Xiao gave my disciple a talisman some years ago,” he said blandly, fairly sure the old man was just seeing if he would admit it was his aunt. “I cannot speak to her means, but it has always worked when required.”

“Lady Xiao hmmm… I must admit, I had half expected her to have made her presence felt already,” Lord Huang Jinfang mused.

Off to the side, General Weng made an auspicious sign to ward off evil, while General Lei, Deng Kong and the Astrologer all scowled. Even Cao Leyang looked a little uneasy at the invocation of their city’s most infamous expert.

“I am sure she is around, somewhere,” he replied respectfully, inwardly amused at how much they didn’t want her to show up. “She usually shows up when it is most beneficial, yet least anticipated.”

“That is very her,” Huang Jinfang agreed, ignoring the unease of the others. “Anyway, with your permission, Brother Leyang?”

“Of course,” Cao Leyang nodded, straightening up a little bit at the old man’s address of him as an equal, even if it was only in spirit, then turning to him. “Advisor Lu?”

“Be my guest,” he said, putting the jade on the table. “Before, we used the Ling clan’s teleport formation as the locus for the link, but to get these images and some further elucidation about what transpired leading up to the attack, we had to tear it apart somewhat.”

“To get the shift core?” Huang Jinfang asked, raising another eyebrow at him.

“Yes, to see who went up there. The forces at the inn were thoroughly infiltrated, as you will see,” he said.

“Infiltrated?” Cao Leyang frowned as Huang Jinfang started to set up a focusing formation on the table.

General Weng went over to the door, presumably to summon someone, while General Lei and the Lord Astrologer both stood talking quietly, their words hidden, as far as they believed anyway.

“Yes,” he said more quietly, shrouding their conversation as best he was able. “There is compelling evidence that the Yeng Brotherhood are involved in this."

“The...” Cao Leyang turned to stare at him, his eyes narrowed.

“The evidence is still being investigated, but their methods were on clear display in the attack, and likely in Misty Vale, given how fast it fell. You recall how matters were in the Blood Eclipse and later the Three Schools Conflict?”

“I do,” Cao Leyang said, his tone turning gloomy.

In some ways, that was his great bit of good fortune here. For all the strings on Cao Leyang, the ‘duke’; Cao Leyang, the military leader, had taken his lack of success in obliterating entirely that scourge of the Blood Eclipse as a deeply personal failing.

“When you say those cursed words, I start to see this ‘chaos’ you spoke of in a new light,” Cao Leyang muttered. “Especially that auction. That young alchemist and Young Lord Huang did this city a service, but… it has rather taken second string to chaos surrounding this declaration from Shan Lai.”

“It has,” he agreed. “I have, however, spoken to Sheng Jiang Mei and she is reasonable. There are also some insurances in place. The bigger problem is this attack on Misty Jasmine Inn.”

“The attack was aimed at the resources Lady Tao’s endeavour there was gathering?” Cao Leyang guessed.

“Successfully,” he said quietly. “Someone walked off with everything in the chaos.”

“…”

Cao Leyang gave him a ‘look’ that said more than most curses could.

“—Ah, Headmaster Lu, could I ask you for a hand?” Huang Jinfang interjected.

Looking over at the table, he saw that the formation had been largely set up, it just required him to input coordinates and such.

“Excuse me,” he said apologetically to Cao Leyang, before making his way around the table to stand beside Huang Jinfang.

“Young Lord JiLao will be joining us presently with the relevant jade, unfortunately I do not carry it on me,” Huang Jinfang said apologetically. “Could I ask you to link up what is required while we wait?”

“Of course,” he nodded, watching out of the corner of his eye as Ling Jiang took his wife over to sit on a couch, waving for a servant to bring her some wine.

“She seems rather… overwrought,” Huang Jinfang remarked.

“Yes, her daughter was caught up in this,” he nodded towards the image of the devastation at Misty Jasmine Inn. “Her status is… unknown.”

“Aiii…” Huang Jinfang nodded. “It is difficult, very difficult. I lost my own son in the Huang-Mo wars."

“My condolences,” he replied diplomatically. “I was a junior then… it was a challenging time.”

“It was,” the old man sighed. “It was…”

“—YOUR GRACE!”

An out of breath official hurried into the hall.

“Y-your Grace, General’s, A lifetime’s apology for the… intrusion. An update from West Flower… Picking Town," the messenger panted, moving towards General Lei to hand it over, he couldn’t help but notice.

-Even here, the grift is real.

Before General Lei could get it, however, Ling Jiang stepped forward and claimed it instead. He took one look at the message though, and his face twisted into a grimace.

“It seems your words were right, Headmaster,” Ling Jiang said, passing it to the duke, who read the message and then put a hand to his temple.

“This day just keeps getting better and better,” Cao Leyang muttered after reading it a second time.

“What does it say?” he asked, ignoring the glare from General Ha Lei.

Taking a cup of wine from the table, Cao Leyang downed it, then passed him the jade.

The message inside was fairly straightforward. It confirmed that the Auxiliary forces of West Flower Picking Region had been mobilized by the Ha clan’s authority and were moving to suppress rebels who had colluded in the assassination of multiple officials and heirs from the Cao, Ji, Ha and Shi families. A further note added at the bottom said it was rumoured there were casualties among the Din and Bai clans a well, including a scion, Din Kongfei.

“Is this all of it, Captain Jingxuan?” Cao Leyang asked the messenger. “They promised a connection…”

“We tried, Your Grace,” the messenger, who had recovered his breath now, said, standing to attention. “The uh… weather means even teleportation is out. Long-form messages are failing their encryption as well due to the rain and whatever this strange ‘jasmine wind’ is. Nobody has seen anything like it before.”

“Well, send someone with a flying vessel,” General Lei interjected sourly. “They can make it up the river in an hour if they burn spirit stones.”

“Already done, sir,” the messenger said smartly.

“In that case, go back and await their communication, let us know when something changes,” Cao Leyang said, waving for the messenger to leave.

“What does it say?” General Weng asked, as the messenger saluted and departed as quickly as propriety allowed him.

He passed the message back to Cao Leyang, who just sighed and passed it to the General. For his part, General Weng scanned it twice then just shook his head before finally passing it to the scowling General Lei.

“Well, that is going to really make a mess of today,” General Weng sighed. “And if that is confirmed, the Din clan are going to go to Envoy Qiao before us.”

“Yes, that is going to cause some problems, isn’t it?” Cao Leyang agreed.

“That might be the understatement of the year so far,” Ling Jiang, who was still standing beside him muttered under his breath.