~PART 3 ~

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~ HA KAI – HEART OF THE JASMINE GATE ~

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“Did nobody ever tell you it is rude to spy on others, 'old scholar'?” the Jasmine asked coolly.

“…”

Following her gaze, he found… an unassuming-looking old man, with black shoulder-length curly hair, and a grey robe in a style at least an aeonspan and a half out of fashion, more akin to what was worn on some of the old statues in some ruins, sitting on the flat top of one of them.

“Ah, my apologies, I did not mean to… disturb,” the old scholar murmured. “To interfere in the subject of one’s… observation, would be… unprofessional, eumh, unacademic? No. Hmmm… unscholarly, even. I merely wished to… observe and ponder?”

The Jasmine’s expression suggested she did not find that agreeable in the slightest, leaving him to wonder who the old man was—

Suddenly, the old scholar’s gaze slid sideways and found them—

He found himself staring into a pair of eyes that were like holes into a dark void, while the middle of his forehead was a black slit that opened fractionally—

“How… interesting…”

“Motherless Fates, it is that old villain!” his father hissed, his face turning pale as his hands blurred so fast he almost appeared to have three pairs of arms as he started drawing seals over the rift. “Nobody look at it! If it speaks to you, be polite but promise it nothing—”

“Intriguing even…”

The voice in his mind left his limbs cold and his throat dry. It was ancient, old, unknowable and totally… other. For a split second he had a vague impression of the old man’s shadow, which was not…

Not…

Not…

His eyes found the old man’s again, as somehow, he was unable to focus on anything else, even as his every instinct screamed at him to not look at it directly.

“You are her…?” the ancient thing murmured, almost pensively.

Gritting his teeth, he forced himself to look away, seeing Lan Huang already doing the same.

“W-w-w-what… i-i-is…” Ha Leng stammered, his face pale as Cranea held his head so he could not look at the old scholar at all.

“Is…” The otherness of that third eye, and the strangeness of the voice combined in his mind to form a disturbing conclusion. “Is that an outsider?”

“That,” his father said grimly, “Is probably the ‘Watcher’, though it has been so long since I heard even a rumour of it, it’s not impossible there is another.”

“The… ‘Watcher’?” he repeated after a long moment, trying to avoid looking at it… however, no matter where he turned or tried to… he found it…

“I… it’s no good,” Lan Huang gasped. “I… I just can’t!”

With a grimace, Cranea leant over and covered Lan Huang’s eyes.

“It’s safe to watch now… probably.” his father muttered after a further moment.

Looking up, he found that a complex golden seal hung in the middle of the area they were using for the viewing field, melding with the fish and the serpents. The woman had also gained a blindfold he noted. His father stared at his handiwork, then spat blood at that ward, linking it to the abode they were in.

With a sigh of relief, he accepted a cup of wine from Cranea and sort of looked sideways at…

Even with the seal, it was like staring at something that his mind just wanted to deny.

The old man looked normal, except for the eye in his forehead, yet... his instincts screamed at him that that the normality was just a thin veil he would not survive peering beyond.

Whatever it was, it didn’t even seem to be there, not truly; likely a thread of perception projected from elsewhere, not unlike Yushiki earlier. That just that thread was able to instil this kind of visceral reaction though… Only the Jasmine, of those around them, seemed unfazed, and even she was looking at it askance.

“Aiiii..." The old scholar produced a conical reed hat from somewhere and put it on, then pulled out a battered paper manual. “This is why you should not... Hmmm… Unless... Ahhh, a variation I pondered before? A very particular form, rare, curious, most curious... It seems patience has paid off.”

“...”

“What… what even is that?” Din Ouyeng echoed, gulping nervously as the scholar continued to thumb through his book, frowning.

“—Another spirit herb?” Di Yao muttered uneasily.

The scholar, who had started to flick through the manual once more, paused to stare at the four cultivators.

“Oh, don't mind me, please continue as you were, it was most... interesting,” the old scholar muttered, making a shooing motion with his hand at them. “I’ll just watch from here, Mmmm…”

None of the four looked away, in fact, his command simply made all of them turn deathly pale. A golden talisman appeared in front of Di Yao, burning with black fire for a few moments, before vanishing again.

“No…” Ji Tantai took a deep breath, stepping behind Meng Guanxi. “Something… unnatural.”

“Unnatural...me? Not you? Odd, very odd, vexatious.... curious. Have Mortals since lost grip on even their spoken word…?” the old scholar grumbled, his tone once more becoming ponderous as he returned to his notes. “—ever does my view on such matters prove themselves correct…”

The other spirit herbs, and even the Resurrection Lily, were staring at the old scholar as if he were an eldritch moon mushroom at this point.

The Jasmine, meanwhile, was sweeping her gaze across the various intruders into her sanctuary, her expression hardening.

“So, what do we do now?” Din Ouyeng asked, his gaze flitting nervously between the scholar, Morea and the other spirit herbs, the ghost of the monk and the Lily’s corpses.

“That totem of denunciation was intended to take out all three…” Di Yao added sourly. “Nor was it the plan to have that… whatever she was, wake the fate-thrashed jasmine.”

As he looked on, Ji Tantai stared around, frowning…

“Morea, Myrtoessa, Helice—” Cranea suddenly hissed.

All three spirit trees turned to her.

“—get to the Orcus-cursed island! This is a distraction!”

“A…” Morea stared at the group of cultivators, then snarled inarticulately and vanished in a blur of petals—

“No, I don’t think so!” the Dao weapon spirit declared grimly, lashing out with the ruler as it spoke—

Morea’s spear and orichalcum shield appeared out of the petals and she smashed into the Dao weapon spirit so hard the whole lake shook, sending him staggering backwards into the water.

The myrtle, Myrtoessa, took the opportunity to dash around the edge of their melee, even as Meng Guanxi sent tens, then hundreds of small phoenixes streaking after her.

Over a dozen reed arrows scythed through the blessed land, aiming for Meng Guanxi, though all of them burned up before they reached her or were blocked by more of the phoenixes.

“Allow me,” the old ghost of the monk, who had stopped his advance towards Meng Guanxi to shelter the other corpses once the pair guarding the island were slain, said softly, stepping forward again.

“Namaḥ samanta vajrānāṃ hāṃ”

The words he spoke this time echoed ominously in the air and, with each step forward, his golden skin started to darken.

He had to admit he was impressed, the old monk was perhaps the most singularly challenging element in the whole battlefield at this point, simply because nobody standing against him likely understood just how… obnoxious a Dao Step Arhat, let alone a ‘Mahayana Ascendant’, as the Dao Ascendant realm was called for Buddhists long ago, was.

Blazing fire and devouring vitality tore at the old monk, but with each step his skin got darker and darker, soon taking on a faintly blueish hue.

In a matter of a few steps, he arrived before Meng Guanxi, and simply pressed a hand to her chest, ignoring the bombardment of parasol qi.

Meng Guanxi’s body wavered and scattered into parasol flowers, followed by all four cultivators a moment later as the illusions vanished.

The Jasmine, who was watching from the far shore at this point, looked this way and that, her eyes narrowed.

The Resurrection Lily stared hard at the lake for a moment, then nodded to Hao Tianxun and the Xue clan cultivator. Both launched themselves out over the water, waves of flame and mist sweeping away the lake ahead of them, until, after a few seconds, the entire integrity of that place… shifted in some subtle way and the ruins were no longer submerged fully, but only under half a metre of muddy, vegetation-choked water.

“—There they are,” his father murmured, their viewpoint shifting to arrive near Ji Tantai and the others, who were scrambling out of the last of the ruins, cursing.

“I hoped that would last a bit longer at least,” Din Ouyeng complained.

“There are that many high-level herbs, it’s amazing we got this far unnoticed,” Ha Mangfan grunted. “We have to deal with them before we depart here, or this will be a nightmare.”

“Don’t worry,” Ji Tantai reassured them, reclaiming the silver-blue bladed sword from her. “I have a plan for that. Meng Guanxi, go up there and take the Jasmine out of the fight.”

They watched as Meng Guanxi’s body dashed forward, out of the flooded ruins towards the Jasmine—

Abruptly, all the qi in the corpse and the compass started to bleed out into her surroundings, as if it no longer had any connection to either host.

“That’s a neat trick,” Lan Huang muttered as they looked on.

“It is,” he agreed, wondering how the jasmine was doing it, because he could feel nothing from her at all.

A reed arrow smashed into Meng Guanxi’s body, sending her staggering, then another and another as the reed-spirit herb finally revealed something of her fangs. A moment later, Hao Tianxun and the Xue woman made it to the island as well.

“Close enough,” Ji Tantai sighed.

Meng Guanxi stopped and stared at the compass in her hands.

*K-k-kr-kr—krrrak*

The compass in her hand warped, emitting a wave of inauspicious, disruptive intent as it did so, which rolled out of it in every direction.

“I…” Meng Guanxi stared at it in horror, intelligence filtering back into her eyes, even as her hands holding it began to disintegrate—

“Be not afraid, child, your path does not end here,” the old monk murmured, closing his hand over the compass as he arrived before her and tearing her away from it.

“Oṃ amṛta teje hara hūṃ…”

The old monk murmured the words of his mantra one last time as his skin turned pitch black, then flaked away to reveal shining gold beneath…

“Amitabha…”

A swirling halo of golden qi appeared over the old monk’s head, which was the last part of him to fade away as the compass fell to the ground, a dead, broken thing.

“What… just happened?” Ha Leng asked, staring at the spot where the monk had been, looking confused. “Did… he die?”

“Kinda?” he muttered evasively, eyeing Meng Guanxi’s motionless form.

The Jasmine, who had been shifting her gaze between Ji Tantai, the compass and the body beside her, abruptly stood, seemingly coming to some sort of conclusion—

In the same instant, however, Ji Tantai produced a glittering, fist-sized sphere that visibly distorted the environment around it. The silver-blue bladed sword in his other hand seemed to draw in the mirage like effect, resonating with it.

“No way…” his father hissed, even as he realised what was in the youth’s hand as well.

“Is that a…?” he stared at the priceless object from the perspective of anyone on a Great World seeking a higher threshold, his skin clammy.

“Yes,” his father said. “That… explains a lot.”

The core of a Venerate realm phoenix. In fact, it appeared to be a quasi-celestial core, if he was not far off the mark. The quality of the Truth around it was not that amazing, actually, but that didn’t change the fact that it was one and that it held a phenomenal accumulation.

Off the top of his head, Meng Murali had two such phoenixes, a pair of siblings, one of which had fallen in battle some time before she herself did. The other had founded Meng Murali’s ‘burial shrine’ near Meng City, then carried her legacy back to Vast Obscurity Grove as far as he knew.

In the presence of such a formidable Yang body, the core trembled, ghostly rings fading in and out as it instinctually reacted to a compatible host.

“Why are you doing this?” the Jasmine asked at last, her eyes fixed on the core.

“Because… it is necessary,” Ji Tantai said simply, sheathing his sword and beckoning to Di Yao with his free hand.

Di Yao, his face a bit pale, produced a sealed golden scroll… and sent a pulse of qi into it, then broke it in half—

Myrtoessa grasped him a moment later, but it was already too late. The scroll dissolved into a swirl of light, becoming a ghostly golden scripture bearing the great Seals of the Imperial Court. A symbol blazed across the valley and a circle showing the Imperial Seal reflected into the sky as a pillar of light.

“Oh for fates’ sakes—!” Morea swore, pushing the Dao weapon’s spirit aside and then launching her spear into the air. It hit the primary seal, but even that was too late. The jasmine reached out a hand as well, and some of the other pieces scattered, but in the end some twenty runic symbols escaped and vanished over the horizon.

“That was a censure scroll?” Lan Huang asked, aghast.

He had to admit, he was shocked as well. Those definitely did not grow on trees, nor did they get given to juniors, or anyone basically.

Myrtoessa and Morea both charged towards Ji Tantai, only for a dense, roiling sphere of parasol qi to materialize around him, emanating from the core. Both their strikes hit it, only to be promptly devoured, such was the palpable difference in purity of the qi to that in the compass. The former, while it was a Venerate’s treasure, was only made with the spark; the core had the whole of the remnant foundation of its creator.

“That’s a hell of a loophole,” Lan Huang muttered, watching the suppression totally fail to do anything to counteract the purity of the qi.

The willow, Helice, struck a moment later, her hands actually making it through for a brief instant, before the core shimmered and a circle of qi blasted out of it, hitting her hard enough that her arms dissolved into smoking leaves.

“—I will go,” Cranea said abruptly, turning to his father. “Give me the armour from the vault. This boy must die, for the World.”

The jasmine who had gone back to staring at the body, shifted her gaze to watch the matters unfold and then, with a sigh, closed her eyes—

A dark wooden arrow passed right through the shield, but its trajectory shifted just enough that it missed Ji Tantai by a matter of a hand’s width, embedding itself in a rock. The reed woman set another wooden arrow to her bow and aimed a bit higher, at which point Ji Tantai gritted his teeth and the barrier expanded by a fifth.

“Ah, he can’t maintain that for very long,” his father scowled, glancing at Cranea. “Are you sure you want to?”

“If not me, then who?” Cranea said simply. “With this body and that armour, I can kill him at least.”

“—Unnecessary,” the Jasmine cut in, slowly standing up, as if she were a bit stiff. “I’ll do it.”

“That… what if he wakes?” Cranea asked her, sounding genuinely concerned now.

“Then he dies,” the Jasmine sighed softly. “Everything must end, even my dream, perhaps.”

“Who are you…?” Ji Tantai stared at the Jasmine, then looked around, his previous confusion now tinged with concern.

“I am sure you will find out, if I fail,” the Jasmine chuckled bleakly as she walked over to the barrier… and simply placed her hands against it.

He stared as it wavered… and then she stepped through it like it was nothing but vapor. Di Yao cursed and hurled an ancient, rolled up talisman at her—

Dark golden lightning, infused with an eerie, ominous, otherworldly pressure and a faint sensation of having tasted shit, struck the Jasmine directly in the forehead.

“…”

“A scroll of Venerate Step Heavenly Lightning,” his father remarked, shaking his head in disgust.

The Jasmine took a step back, then just put a hand to her forehead and grimaced, brushing a few stray strands out of her hair, as the rest of the lightning that swirled around her, forming a glowing cage of Yin lightning.

“Aiii…” the Jasmine considered the cage, and it unmade itself as he felt the suppression around them shift subtly upwards a step, from Immortal to Chosen Immortal, then Golden Immortal… then finally Ancient Immortal.

“W-what?” Di Yao, Din Ouyeng and Ji Tantai all gasped in unison, the colour draining from their faces as they found they were no longer suppressed.

Rather than explain, though, the Jasmine just stepped forward and grasped the core, grinning broadly as she used her now superior strength to pry it out of Ji Tantai’s fingers—Abruptly, the colours within the world around them desaturated, and the Jasmine’s arm vanished as the Dao Spirit of the Jade Ruler lashed out with an attack that effortlessly passed through the parasol barrier.

She merely shot it a sideways glare though, then the corrosion from its strike faded away and her arm reformed—

The core in Ji Tantai’s hand blazed, streams of white-gold fire manifesting into wings around it. A moment later, a ghostly white phoenix with brilliant gold and azure highlights appeared in the air above the lake and launched itself at the Jasmine—

Ji Tantai stared in shock as she caught the Dao manifestation by the neck, like it was a chicken, and wrung it, casting the broken form aside where it scattered into parasol petals.

“Do you want to know what realm I am, boy from the lowlands?” the Jasmine murmured, walking forwards as Ji Tantai and the others backed up, sheltering inside a second shell of qi now, focused on the silver-blue sword Ji Tantai had again drawn.

“Well, too bad, you can wonder about it in the afterlife,” she giggled, pointing her finger at the barrier around him.

“Peitho”

With a mysterious smile, she beckoned towards the barrier… which promptly wavered and then scattered fractionally in every direction, while the qi within it was pulled towards her, orphaning itself entirely from Ji Tantai’s control.

“What are—?” Ji Tantai exclaimed, his complexion paling, however, before he could do anything, the Jasmine took a single step and the perspective of the space between the pair shifted.

“My dear, valiant, young hero,” the Jasmine murmured, brushing her fingers gently against Ji Tantai’s chest, before cupping his chin in her hand and staring into his eyes, even as his sword dropped to the ground. “Won’t you tell me—”

Before she could finish speaking, however, the air around Ji Tantai wavered inauspiciously. In that exact same instant, he as an onlooker got a terrible sense of foreboding as—

A chiming, discordant sound hung in the air, like a bell that was almost inauspiciously out of tune.

Everything for a hundred metres around the Jasmine turned luridly multi-coloured as an effervescent flare of… something surged out of Ji Tantai, trying to envelop her.

“This boy…” his father growled, incredulity creeping into his voice. “This... this…”

He stared, his mind momentarily blanking, as the shimmering core reappeared behind Ji Tantai. Around it, surrounded by six tiny golden flames, the roots of the flares of qi trying to bind the Jasmine, spun, like a…

“A venerable halo?” he blurted out, unable to tear his eyes from the six dancing lights which ‘demanded’ the attention of his whole being to a degree he had no real recourse to reject, even separated by such a distance and the protections of the scrying field.

“What a waste… such a waste,” his father was whispering, his hands clawing at his cheeks.

The Jasmine’s expression turned gloomy as she battled with the countless millennia of accumulated, compressed qi being ejected from the core that was trying to bind and subvert her. The nuance of the conflict was such that, even with his experience, he could see next to nothing of what either side was doing. The qi that came into contact with the Jasmine… just seemed to decide to become hers, while the venerate’s core Ji Tantai had somehow acquired contained within it a profound determination to escape the shackles of its demise.

Within seconds, black cracks had started to form all around the pair, radiating outwards around the flares and rapidly spreading across the vegetation within the field. Morea and the other herbs could only look on in concern, then mounting horror, as the dimensional shock waves crept around them in gruesome slow motion, the Jasmine’s efforts barely able to protect them—

Abruptly, a sense of profound, inauspicious, almost perverse wrongness suffused the world around them. It tried to demand that he tear out his eyes, whispered that he should abolish his cultivation, abandon his vile path and succumb to righteous ignorance for a few, agonizing seconds, before he forced it back.

Beside him, even though his father had grabbed Lan Huang, he was still bleeding from his eyes. Cranea had embraced Ha Leng, enveloping him in her aura, protecting him from—

The dimensional distortion twisted bizarrely, and he saw why Ji Tantai had just tried to obliviate all ‘comprehension’ beneath ‘worldly law’ of what had just transpired. Ji Tantai, who had recovered his sword, was leading the other three, all of them moving like ghosts, towards the body the Jasmine had been protecting. The Jasmine, meanwhile, was left contending with a temporal mirage sustained by the nigh-bottomless well of qi from the venerate’s core.

“What the fuck is going on!” Ji Tantai snarled suddenly, looking around, confused, his grip on his weapon tightening.

“What do you mean?” Din Ouyeng asked, as the four arrived at the corpse.

“It’s…” Ji Tantai stared at the shimmering orb in his hand, then up at the swirling mists, his expression perplexed, but with shades of anger.

“…”

Involuntarily, he turned to look at his father, who was vibrating quietly with anger at this point, even as he shielded Lan Huang. “Can he tell when it doesn’t work?” he wondered.

“Probably,” his father hissed. “I know that art, and this boy deserves to have this sent to every Dao Ascendant on the Four Azures!”

It took him a second to work out what his old man meant, then he sighed.

The manipulation of a core like this was akin to someone leveraging a future lifetime’s potential using an esoteric art. The Kong clan had a few ‘Sages of Wisdom’ as they styled themselves, and a phoenix core from the Meng clan was an exceptional tool to use for such a trick. The question was how Ji Tantai—or Di Ji, though he was still not sold on Ji Tantai personally being the latter—had gotten a hold of such a technique and persuaded one of those old villains to teach him how to use it.

Abruptly, the trees, plants and rocks inverted their colours for a split second. The wave of white-golden energy, he hesitated to call it qi because he could feel nothing other than existential terror from it, split the valley like a giant cross, centred on the Jasmine, before everything turned white.

When the rift stabilized, the island and the ruins in the lake around it were a smoking hell of charred trees, baked mud, bubbling water and drifting ash. The devastation had even reached the far shore, where patches of trees were burning still amid the remains of the reed beds.

The Jasmine was… reforming from scattered petals, having just about protected Morea and the others, though she looked pallid and drawn now.

She had also been joined by two other spirit trees; an oleander—which was unsurprising, given they were obnoxious sinks of damage to rival the old monkey—in the form of a tanned beauty with white blossoms woven in her curly, dark-blonde hair, and a stately, aloof woman, with her curly dark hair bound up by an orichalcum hair-comb in the form of twin crescent moons, surrounded by a crown of purple and gold briar flowers.

Both the Oleander, Daphane, and Blood Briar, Selene, were known to him, and much like Morea and Myrtoessa, were at least as old as he was, having already been established ‘experts’ in the heyday of Tai Shavaran. Both had largely retreated from the world outside during the Dun Dynasty, but he was fairly sure the brutal destruction of at least one Huang expeditionary force in the Huang-Mo Wars had been caused by Selene.

Meanwhile, Ji Tantai, still cursing under his breath as the other three followed him, had arrived beside the body, the core in his hand.

“Motherless Fates… there are more?” Ha Mangfan asked, aghast, half drawing his bow to aim at them, a golden arrow appearing in a shimmer of qi.

“Once we have this,” Ji Tantai muttered, focused on the body before them. “It won’t—”

Ji Tantai abruptly stopped speaking and pulled out three faded, decaying old talismans that prompted him to do a proper double-take.

Each one was marked with a moon-rune that could be read as ‘Boundless’, ‘Before’ and ‘Heaven’ respectively. Together, they formed a very specific kind of alignment disruption talisman.

“Unbinding Talisman?” Lan Huang gasped as even he recognised the style of the talisman, which was fairly infamous among experts from the era before Blue Water City was founded.

Ji Tantai’s were positively ancient examples as well; however, the important thing about them—well, two things—were that nobody aside from old fellows like himself should have any, and that they were fate-thrashed dangerous.

“Use it!” Ji Tantai snarled at the other three, who grabbed a talisman each and started to channel qi into them.

Even separated by that great distance he flinched as the environs around Ji Tantai and the body juddered inauspiciously—

“Oh, that’s not good—” Lan Huang muttered, as with a faint sense of tearing they watched the black cracks and effervescent colours bleeding off of all the vegetation… start to encroach into the air around them.

Morea and Hao Tianxun, along with the Xue woman and the Huang youth, Juhong, who had all dashed forward, slowed or stumbled, as if they had just hit a quagmire of invisible mud, which in a sense they had.

The original purpose of the talismans the three were using was to ‘disrupt’ the phenomenon of ‘spatial pooling’ that occurred in ancient valleys in Yin Eclipse. Through them, it was possible to leverage the ancient spatial qi sealed away in the rocks as an offensive feng shui tool.

Hao Tianxun’s strength and Heavenly Flame were enough to allow her to resist, while the Xue cultivator was able to shelter those right beside her, albeit via more sideways means, but everyone else was ensnared within moments.

Simultaneously, ghostly images of Morea, Helice and Myrtoessa bled behind them as they resisted the surging waves of spatial qi trying to force them back.

“Where did…” Lan Huang started to ask, as he too realised ‘Selene’ was nowhere to be seen, nor was the woman with reeds in her hair—

With a snarl of anger, the Dao weapon’s spirit suddenly manifested, cutting a reed arrow out of the air with the jade ruler before it could hit Ji Tantai.

Simultaneously, Selene re-appeared only a few metres from Ji Tantai, looking pale, the orichalcum twin-moons affixing her hair glimmering eerily—

The weapon spirit spun, lashing out at her with the follow-up attack.

Before his blow could connect, however, Selene caught the ruler with her bare hand, a ghostly, black-edged flame flickering around her palm. Without any sense of visible resistance, she pushed the ruler aside, leaving a charred handprint on it—

“So, it really is you!” the weapon spirit hissed, spinning the ruler in his hands and striking at her neck. “I thought Dun—!”

Before the weapon spirit could finish, she took a half step forward and, catching the ruler again, slammed her free palm into his chest.

With a miserable scream, the Dao spirit staggered backwards, the same black-edged flame burning into his spectral garments. Before she could further capitalize on the opening she had made, though, a black bolt of lightning enveloped her, cast from Din Ouyeng’s spear—

Above them, the sky suddenly rumbled, and the morning light dimmed, as if someone had just placed a hand across the hazy orb of the sun. With the draining colour came a profound sense of ‘having transgressed against heaven’.

Even Ji Tantai seemed a bit shocked as the shadowy spear formed, like it was spun out of a spider’s web, the natural laws of the world warping before it.

“Unfortunately… I have seen the real thing,” Selene murmured, staring up at the sky.

“Seen the…?” Din Ouyeng repeated dully.

Selene didn’t elaborate. Instead, her form wavered and two other versions of her stepped out from her shadow.

“Great Mother, Mother of the Mysteries!” both of them declared, raising their hands, speaking in a thoroughly ancient spoken form of ‘Wind Script’.

“STOP HER!” the Dao Spirit roared, grasping the ruler with both hands as around Selene, a faint corona started to manifest, like myriad glittering stars.

“What is she saying?” Di Yao, who had already produced a silver-bladed sword with a blue tassel on the hilt, asked, looking shocked and confused.

“If you don’t, this is done!” the Dao spirit snarled, shifting his posture as he continued to try and break her grip on the weapon.

Ji Tantai glanced up, grimaced and the three talismans flared brighter. The black cracks manifesting scouring tendrils of fate-lightning that clawed at Selene. They turned her garments to ash and left burning lesions on her skin, which flaked away into wilting briar petals, but still the spirit failed to break her grip on his weapon. If anything, Selene’s form became more alluring as she weathered the barrage.

“D-done!?!” Ha Mangfan reiterated, looking equally concerned as he tried to aim a golden arrow at her.

“Mother of Eternal Law, Mother of the Masters!” the pair continued, dancing forward as golden motes merged with Selene’s body, restoring the damage dealt to it as all three versions of her seemed to become more… vivid, somehow.

In response, Din Ouyeng grimaced, spun his spear and lunged forward, a piercing bolt of silver lightning surging out of it, transforming into a raging dragon as it targeted her—

“Your disciple opens her heart to you!” the pair murmured, both elegantly sidestepping the lightning bolt as if it were moving in slow motion, the motion of their arms almost looking like they were catching it in a net—

The silver dragon scattered, like it was an illusion, the qi within it losing all sense of intent and cohesion.

“It’s not working…” Ha Mangfan yelled, unleashing a flurried barrage of golden arrows at her.

“No shit, Dao Father Obvious!” Di Yao retorted sarcastically under his breath, producing a dark-coloured talisman.

“No barriers!” the Dao spirit snarled, glaring back at the group. “Sealing will—”

Before the spirit could finish, Selene stepped inside his guard again, slamming another burning palm into the spirit’s chest, leaving a smoking print on his armour.

“Just…” the spirit tried to headbutt her, but she swayed backwards, easily evading him.

“—I ask of thee,” the other two versions of her continued, blocking more arrows from Ha Mangfan as they advanced on Din Ouyeng and Di Yao.

“—Focus on the talisman!” the Dao Spirit growled, ceding ground again, so that the other two Selenes didn’t flank him properly. “Let me—!”

Before he could finish, Selene landed another blow to his chest, forcing him another step back.

“We are!” Ha Mangfan snarled as Di Yao and Din Ouyeng both retreated in the face of the advancing pair.

“—It’s not doing anything!” Din Ouyeng added grimly, trying to ward Selene off with another white lightning bolt.

“See!” even Di Yao looked worried now as he sent a wave of blue fire from his sword at the other Selene. “Somehow, she is—!”

Selene didn’t even bother to brush the flames aside, simply stepped through them and caught his sword and the hand wielding it before slipping behind him and grasping his other arm, almost leaving him trapped in her embrace. Di Yao cut off with a scream as the black-edged flames rapidly spread across his robes, evaporating his qi armour as if it wasn’t even there.

Selene also ignored the lightning Din Ouyeng had cast, easily slipping inside the range of his spear as he tried to stab her with it, trapping his hands and grasping the spear in return.

“Not for Kingdom,” the one spinning Di Yao murmured, even as two separate talismans on his body flared, the protective intent within them failing catastrophically.

A luminous white-jade charm in the shape of a regal emperor holding a fan that read ‘Dun’ shimmered in the air behind him a moment longer, then turned dull and cracked.

“Nor Power,” the one attacking Din Ouyeng echoed, as black flames enveloped him as well, a similar protective talisman on him exploding into ash while he struggled to retreat from her.

“Nor Glory—” Selene continued, taking another step forward, forcing the Dao Spirit back again.

In the same instant, the talismans above all three started to char at the edges, the symbols fading as their qi turned chaotic.

Di Yao and Din Ouyeng both coughed up blood.

“Motherless fates…” Ha Mangfan cursed, his aim wavering and his mantra manifestation faltering. The golden arrows he had just unleashed exploded in the air as he detonated them prematurely so as to avoid hitting his compatriots. “Do something!”

Ji Tantai, who was making surprisingly fast progress in setting up a complex procedure for someone of his realm—no doubt making good use of his divination art—glanced up and glowered at Selene, then at the group as a whole, clearly unimpressed.

He had to admit, he was somewhat relieved to finally see the cracks starting to show in the group.

While whoever was behind this had clearly prepared them well, given the amount of refined tribulation lightning they had at their disposal, among the many questions he had about this, the one rapidly moving to the forefront of his mind was how… calculated Ji Tantai had been throughout the whole thing.

Clearly, he had some formidable divination art, but even accounting for the suppression’s quirks, there was no way a Golden Immortal should have been able to get anywhere with some of the Lily’s corpses, never mind the likes of Morea or Myrtoessa, and Selene and the Jasmine were in a different league again, never mind the ‘outsider’ which seemed to have retreated, thankfully.

“Shit… this is not...” Ji Tantai bit his lip, looking agonizingly conflicted, as he continued to work on the formation he was setting up on the body. “You have to hold her off for a…!”

“Stop hesitating!” the Dao Spirit roared.

Their surroundings trembled, wavering as if caught in a mirage as the Dao spirit’s strength clashed with Selene’s own domain, and to his mild surprise was not found that wanting.

“We will be dead if you do!” the spirit added grimly, warding off another strike which still left another splash of nigh-invisible blackish flames on his robe. “You don’t understand what this mendacious bitch is—”

“The armament of your great achievement—” Selene started to say, her already gloomy expression darkening further.

In the same instant the qi in their surroundings stagnated. For a moment he thought it was something Selene had done, until the body of the dark-haired youth went from lying on the ground to standing before Ji Tantai, its hands clasped imperiously behind its back, in a single, truncated instant. A faint halo of parasol qi surged around it, focused on the five tattoo-like seals visible on its chest.

Even though its eyes were vacant, the profound, primal yang intent, which had been sluggish and stagnant before, now felt… dangerously oppressive.

Everywhere, vegetation was starting to smoke, and in fact, the spirit herbs and bodies caught up in the shifting quagmire of upwelling spatial qi were all looking wan and tired now, their flowers faded and their energy sluggish.

“You succeeded!” Ha Mangfan gasped, sounding relieved as the hazy mist started to burn away, revealing the low cloud above them.

The Selene grasping the trembling Di Yao frowned, then closed her hand on his neck—

Simultaneously, the Selene grasping Din Ouyeng’s spear spun it over in her hands, throwing Din Ouyeng into the smoking mud. Rather than stab him, however, she immediately bent the weapon, trying to break it in half, ignoring the scouring white lightning that crackled off it once Din Ouyeng let go.

Meanwhile, the ‘original’ Selene, who was pressuring the Dao spirit, tried to grasp it by the neck, murmured “Ratriastra—”

At that point, three things all happened, basically at the same time.

Before Selene could grab Di Yao, her arm froze, then she staggered, gasping as if she had just been punched in the side. The Selene who had tried to break Din Ouyeng’s spear was bodily thrown backwards, still holding the spear, while the original suddenly dodged to the side.

“W-what?” Lan Huang stared at the twisting distortions, sweating—

The world seemed to stagnate as the body of the dark-haired youth, radiating a profound yang strength, stepped forward and grasped the jade ruler with both hands, executing a vicious upward slash to free it from Selene’s grasp as the Dao spirit evaded.

He then spun and sent a lashing overhead blow at the Selene holding the spear, forcing her to use it to block a shockwave of absolute yang intent, before spinning away and grasping the arm of the Selene who had tried to kill Di Yao, hitting her in the side with the flat of the ruler, blocking her from severing her own arm with Di Yao’s sword in the process.

It took him a moment to realise that it wasn’t ‘speed’ he was seeing but a total dissociation with ‘time’. The blows hitting Selene were landing before they had been thrown as the pure strength of Yang oppressed, then unravelled the structural constraints of reality in their immediate surroundings.

Selene’s three bodies wavered under the savage onslaught as the dark-haired youth unleashed a torrent of blows at them with the ruler, simultaneously controlling the one who had grasped Di Yao, using her to keep the ‘original’ body at arm’s length, while he battered the one with the spear.

That all three didn’t immediately scatter was largely down to the sheer quantity of qi they possessed, rather than any ability to resist, such that even the absolute strength of the pure yang qi still had to work to disrupt it.

Even so, the one wielding the spear only lasted a few seconds, managing to land two hits in spite of the white lightning that continued to ensnare her. The youth remained undeterred in the face of her resistance, however, unleashing a barrage of blows and tyrannical Pure Yang strength projected through them that quickly overwhelmed her. Only a few twisting sparks of black fire remained of her, drifting in the air amid the vortex of Pure Yang qi that had ripped her apart.

At that point, the dark-haired youth turned on the one he was grasping, but despite holding her arm, she was still able to evade him. Using the flowing folds of her gown to tie up his movement, while the original Selene used her own veil to try and snare the ruler.

Thanks to that strategy, they were able to endure for long enough that Daphane, Morea, Helice and Myrtoessa managed to conjure their own armaments, before the oppressive Pure Yang intent he was projecting at them incinerated their gowns and they too scattered into burning briar petals.

The dark-haired youth paused, looking between the other spirit herbs and the Lily’s bodies—

He took half a step towards Daphane and the others, raising the ruler—

A shockwave of yang-infused golden fire and chaotic spatial qi enveloped the herbs, transforming into dozens of grasping ‘clones’ of the dark-haired youth.

In the same instant, the ‘real’ one appeared beside the already staggering Huang Juhong, tearing off his arm and hurling the orichalcum blade at Hao Tianxun. Given her realm, she managed to avoid it, but only barely.

Of the others, only the Sun and Moon Saintesses reacted fast enough to launch an attack, joining hands and casting a chakram-like mirage of black and gold, infused with a deeply inauspicious yin intent, not at the body, but at Ji Tantai and the others—

The dark-haired youth appeared in front of the Saintesses combined attack, scattering it with an upward sweep of the ruler. Behind him, Juhong’s body was already gone, only drifting ash and a collapsing skeleton remaining. The elder from the Moon Tomb cult was also crumbling to ash, his qi dispersed.

The dark-haired youth stared at the Saintesses, the Xue, Shan and Lotus-tattooed women, as Hao Tianxun appeared in front of them… and then simply made a beckoning gesture with his hand—

He watched, horrified as the avaricious absolute yang intent enveloped them and all, bar Hao Tianxun, collapsed to their knees, the qi in their bodies rebelling as their foundations simply… surrendered to the youth’s command, flowing out of their bodies and into his.

It was known that there were certain Yang physiques, much like Yin ones that were… dangerous in unexpected ways, but that was the first time he had ever witnessed such an overwhelming manifestation of… devouring greed. It was all too easy to see why his father had called it a weapon best left to sleep here, forgotten.

Hao Tianxun resisted, trying to retreat, even as the others slumped, lifeless, in the water, their bodies already dissolving into ash, but even she seemed… sluggish, unable to move properly. In a single step, he arrived before her, snatching her out of the veil of silver white fire and literally ripping her body in half, scattering her in a bloody mist across the water, before grasping the embers of her flame and swallowing them as well.

The dark-haired youth took a deep breath, then bent down and picked up the dark-bladed parasol wood sword where it had fallen before turning to look at the spirit herbs—

He winced as the blow from the ruler landed on Daphane’s shield, which rang like a bell amid the scattering inferno of golden yang fire, forcing her back, even as Morea, Myrtoessa and Helice tried to push through the undying clones to flank him—

“—Not yet,” Cranea murmured.

He tore his eyes away from their melee to find she had her hand on his father’s arm, stopping him from activating a talisman he recognised as the one that would directly contact his mother.

“You were worried before,” his father hissed.

“Yes, and I still am,” Cranea replied, tersely. “If it comes to it, I will need that armour. She is playing a dangerous strategy out and it could yet collapse on her…”

“A dangerous…” his father turned to Cranea, looking… afraid, which did nothing for his own confidence. “You know as well as I, that if that…”

“—Yes,” Cranea agreed, cutting his father off. “If that occurs, it will change matters—”

His gaze drawn back to the fighting, he watched, the hair on the back of his neck standing up as the dark-haired youth’s furious blows finally shattered Daphane’s shield—

In the same instant, all the golden clones blurred and focused on her, abandoning their melee with Morea, Helice, Myrtoessa and harassment of the Jasmine. Daphane and her surroundings wavered as she became the focus of an absolutely suffocating manifestation of Absolute Yang strength that made what had just been done to the Lily’s bodies feel like a cheap teahouse trick. It left him feeling physically unclean, as the spirit herbs recoiled—

Swatting Daphane’s spear away with the ruler, he stabbed her between the breasts with the dark blade—

Morea, Helice and Myrtoessa all slammed their spears into the body… only for it to scatter, like a bizarre mirage—

The golden clones wavered, even as the three scattered them furiously, then all four were ensnared in a cage of grasping golden forms, their spears shattered, their armaments torn away as the dark-haired youth unleashed a frenzy of blows with the Absolute Yang infused dark-wood blade.

“In the end, spirit herbs are just that,” Di Yao, sneered, wiping blood from his mouth.

While the words sounded… dismissive, he could feel the hollowness in them. As if, by deriding what he had just seen, Di Yao, and the others for that matter, wanted to reaffirm their own abilities, meagre as they were, as they watched the dark-haired youth pull the sword out of Helice’s body, half a dozen other spectral versions of it fading away into parasol blossoms as he did so.

“Yeah,” Ha Mangfan started to agree as the dark-haired youth, having left behind the dispersing forms of the herbs, arrived before the Jasmine, blurring into the temporal phantasm that Ji Tantai had left. “Just—”

“My dear, valiant, young hero,” the Jasmine murmured, her words silencing them as she brushed her fingers gently against the dark-haired youth’s chest, before cupping his chin in her hand and staring into his eyes. “Won’t you tell me, who is responsible for this?”

“…”

The dark-haired youth… paused, staring at the Jasmine with blank eyes, the ruler and the dark-bladed sword falling from his grasp—

For the briefest moment, he had a truly disorientating sense of seeing double, then the effervescence of the temporal distortion wavered, then slid into focus, swirling around the dark-haired youth, as he stepped forward and grasped her by the neck, the dark-bladed sword once again in his hand.

In the same instant, the dark-haired youth manifested the same venerable halo he had briefly seen behind Ji Tantai mere minutes earlier.

Their surroundings groaned, the inauspicious black cracks deepening everywhere he looked, spidering out from plants, rocks, even the flames on burning vegetation and the steaming water, giving the impression that reality was a mirror, a breath away from smashing into a million pieces—

He flinched as the old, grey-robed scholar ‘appeared’ once again, still sitting on the same rock, a few paces from Ji Tantai and his group, looking on at the whole scene with interest.

Ha Mangfan, who happened to be closest to the old scholar flinched, while Di Yao and Din Ouyeng, who had been in the process of recovering their weapons, both spun to face the new threat, looking alarmed.

The dark-haired youth also turned to stare at the scholar, his head tilting to the side, even as the Jasmine struggled weakly in his grip.

“No!” Wait!” Ji Tantai, suddenly yelled, sounding panicked, but the dark-haired youth had already closed his fist through the Jasmine’s neck. “Don’t—!”

The grey-robed old scholar half looked up, seemingly realising he was visible, then almost comedically went sprawling from his rock, landing in the dirt with a grunt.

“Uhh…” he glanced at Cranea, who had a look somewhere between shock and disbelief on her face as well, suggesting that this was not, perhaps, part of whatever strategy the Jasmine had been trying.

Before the Jasmine’s abruptly decapitated body had even fully scattered into burning petals, the dark-haired youth had arrived beside the scholar, who was picking himself up, groaning, holding his face.

“Shit, motherfucking… stop! STOP!”

The dark-haired youth ignored Ji Tantai’s enraged command and kicked the rock at the scholar.

“Owwww… that hurt!” the grey-robed old man complained, ducking out of the way, leaving blurred afterimages as he did so, still holding the right side of his face where he had been hit, red blood so dark it was almost black tricking between his fingers.

The rock, meanwhile, hit the nearest of the three massive upright stones in the lake, exploding with enough force to shake masonry from nearby ruined buildings.

“Look—” the scholar tried to speak further, only to get hit again, this time on the shoulder, the dark-bladed sword leaving a shallow cut.

“I. Said. Stop!” Ji Tantai yelled again, but the dark-haired youth continued to ignore Ji Tantai and instead redoubled his assault, directing a barrage of sweeping cuts at the stumbling old scholar.

“Why should it stop?” Di Yao asked, confused as the scholar just about avoided getting cut a third time.

“Yeah?” Di Yao and Ha Mangfan both looked confused, more than concerned, amusingly. “—Why?”

“Because—!”

Before Ji Tantai could finish, the old scholar abruptly found his footing and, slipping inside one of the dark-haired youths strikes, caught the sword on its downward sweep, trapping both his attacker’s hands in the process. The dark-haired youth took half a step back, clearly trying to free himself with an upward strike… only for the old scholar to follow him and plant a brutal palm strike straight into his diaphragm.

The dark-haired youth tried to evade, however, the old scholar, who was still controlling the sword, simply twisted his body and threw the youth over his hip, slamming him into the ground and bending his hand viciously to try and disarm him—

In the same instant, the youth let go of the sword and the Dao spirit appeared beside him, already striking at the scholar’s arm with the ruler—

{Azure Current}

The old scholar became the core of a vast blue chrysanthemum, conjured by the Dao Spirit as the youth rolled away. Just like before, the flower bloomed to become the heart of a swirling pillar of blue fire. Unlike when Din Ouyeng had attempted it, though, where the impact had been fairly superficial, now the presence of the art had an overwhelming prestige, and rather than a roc, a Bi Fang, a crane-like bird symbolizing the majesty of the Grandfather of Heaven appeared—

“Heinous criminal!” Bi Fang howled. “Sinner against the—”

“—Righteous Path?” the old scholar murmured, shaking his wrist and staring up at the descending bird, ignoring the blue fire as it ate into his robes and hair and made his skin blister. “Hoo… what a nostalgic scene…”

“N-nostalgic?” the Dao spirit, who was still holding the ruler in the burning heart of the flower, repeated dumbfounded.

“Mmm…” the old scholar actually smiled, though there was nothing remotely pleasant in the expression. “Someday you will—”

Abruptly, he stopped speaking and reached out, grasping at something—

The dark-haired youth, who had slipped free in the moment Azure Current was used appeared like a ghost, stabbing at the old scholar with the sword again.

“Gah!” the old scholar’s expression twisted with annoyance as the sword blade pierced through his hand, dark blood welling up around the wound. “It is—”

Before he could speak further, though, the same searing golden fire which had done such damage to the spirit herbs exploded out of the sword. It ate into the flesh of the old scholar’s arm, scattering it into shadow-like mist, exposing bones that were black as a starless night, yet held a disturbing sense of depth that defied even his eyes. It also confirmed that the entity before them was not a simple projection of perception, like he had earlier thought.

“—Rude…” the scholar growled, his hand, which was nothing but bones at this point, closing around the sword blade as he took a step towards the youth— “to interrupt—” the ancient wooden blade began to splinter beneath his grasp, the fire guttering as the old scholar’s disintegrating arm slowly started to pull itself back together. “—your elders…”

With his free hand, the scholar grasped the dark-haired youth by the neck—

The explosion of Absolute Yang infused golden fire turned the upper half of his robe to ash and burnt away enough of the old scholar’s flesh that his ribs were briefly exposed. The dark-haired youth, meanwhile, had appeared beside Din Ouyeng’s spear—

Before the scholar could react, an iridescent bolt of white lightning surged out of the spear blade, unlike anything Din Ouyeng had managed to conjure. It hit the old scholar in the chest, casting him backwards several metres, while the azure chrysanthemum expanded in a shockwave of golden fire, its petals enveloping the whole area around the scholar as he hit a wall on the edge of the ruins with enough force to demolish it.

The dark-haired youth half-crouched, then launched himself high into the air, stabbing down with the spear towards the old scholar—

A sky-splitting howl of silence enveloped the whole valley, as the sky above them collapsed downward scattering into shadowy clouds that swirled around a silver bolt of lightning, descending, like a divine spear of execution.

“Old villain!” the Bi Fang’s furious cries turned triumphant as its wings flared silver and its form merged with the descending spear. “Repent your path—!”

In the instant that the two arts merged, an unspeakable yang radiance enveloped everything.

“—Accept the virtues of the Grandfather of Heaven!”

Serenaded by the Bi Fang’s jubilant shriek, the descending spear of lightning enveloped the dark-haired youth, silver fire fanning off him in a searing corona, giving the momentary illusion that he was some kind of winged, avenging spirit—

Stones that had stood for aeons in the once flooded ruins cracked and shattered, their surfaces turning glassy. The remaining spirit vegetation collapsed into phantasms of drifting ash and swirls of multi-coloured qi. Even the vast spirit tree in the middle of the island burst into flames, its red leaves withering under the punishing onslaught.

Only Ji Tantai and the area around him were immune. An island of calm, sheltered by a swirling curtain of parasol blossoms, amid the vortex of purifying yang now focused on the old scholar.

“Receive Judgement—!”

The blade of the spectral spear slammed down on the edge of the ruins, its impact leaving a searing hole in his vision. Beside him, Lan Huang had actually covered Ha Leng’s eyes, while even his father and Cranea were squinting, as the viewing rift grew dark around the edges—

“—ENOUGH!”

The dark-haired youth was suddenly hurled backwards through the air, while the yang oppression weighing down on the valley recoiled then distorted under the influence of that terrible word. It lost none of the absoluteness of its ‘Yang’ attribute, but the greed and majesty within it was profoundly warped.

The spear of silver lightning wavered, then twisted bizarrely, shattering along its length into thousands of orphaned bolts of lightning that shredded the surrounding landscape. The shimmering blue chrysanthemum trembled, then scattered outwards in a shockwave of blazing petals that obliterated the ruins for hundreds of metres in every direction.

When the light faded away and he could clearly see again, he found that where the old scholar had been was now a smoking crater over a hundred metres wide. The ruins in the lake on their side of the island were basically gone, except for where they had been sheltered by the three great uprights, bits of burning, half-melted stonework, some of it still sizzling with silver lighting or blue fire, dropping out of the sky like hail across half the valley.

In the distance, a piece of cliff collapsed with an echoing rumble off the ridge line.

“I doubt that’s a seal of approval on his weapons Kong Jurai wants,” his father muttered grimly, eyeing the crater.

“What, ‘Can anger but not incapacitate outsiders, use with caution'?” Cranea replied drily.

In the middle of the impact crater, amid the swirling smoke, the old scholar was slowly pulling himself up, his flesh reforming on his smoking black bones like a cloak of shadows.

“An…” Lan Huang turned to them, his face paling, as the old scholar got to his knees.

“What’s… an ‘outsi—’?” Ha Leng started to ask, uneasily, seeing their reactions.

“—Heinous Devil!” a furious screech from the Bi Fang resounded through the clearing, cutting them both off. “—Demon, abandoned by True Felicity!”

At its words, the silver and white lightning, along with the blue fire still scattering through the valley wavered, trembled and then transformed into hundreds of spectral Bi Fangs. Almost as one, the birds checked their random trajectories then flocked back towards the old scholar, merging as they did so, until there were only thirty-three radiant birds.

Meanwhile, the dark-haired youth had also gotten to his feet and levelled Din Ouyeng’s spear at the old scholar.

“—Acknowledge your Crime before the Most August Seat!”

The Bi Fang’s denunciation, echoed by all the flying birds as they flocked inwards, rang through the valley, rallying the faltering momentum of the Absolute Yang radiance against the scholar’s influence.

Simultaneously, white lightning and a shadow of Hao Tianxun’s silver fire shimmered through the spear in the dark-haired youth’s hands. A vast peel of thunder echoed from the still twisting dark clouds above the valley and a second vast, spectral spear appeared. It descended towards the scholar, scattering shockwaves of Heavenly Yang intent—

“Is this the limit of your ability?” the old scholar asked, looking up at the descending spear, sounding… tired, almost. “Flowery fists and stolen gifts…”

The descending spear of white lightning froze, black cracks spidering out from around it.

“These are not the way,” the old scholar sighed, laboriously pushing himself to his feet as the surging gyre of dark clouds above him turned sluggish.

“It is said that a Glorious Death is its own reward—” the old scholar added, starting to slowly walk out of the crater as the momentum of the Absolute Yang strength pushing down on him faltered.

Din Ouyeng and the others, who had been watching with concern, turned pale as with every footstep, the space around him twisted and thrummed eerily, like a resonant drum.

Above, the vast spear which was still frozen, began to tremble, splinter and crack, sending strange shadows scattering, as if something was trying to unwind its previous rotation against phenomenal resistance.

“And I have made a lifetime of studying the nature of that Glory—”

The old scholar paused, grasping in front of him and catching the mirage of Din Ouyeng’s spear with one hand. The youth barely managed to avoid a similar fate by hastily relinquishing the spear—

An eye-searing cage of white lightning enveloped the scholar, as the shimmering figure of Kong Jurai appeared in the haze above the crater, just as it had when the white-furred old monkey tried to grasp the spear.

“—But what reward can there be?” the scholar asked, mirthlessly, grasping the forming lattice, which bent and sizzled ominously.

Up to this point, everything had happened so fast, that it was only thanks to his father’s scrying array that they could ‘observe’ matters coherently. Now, though, Ji Tantai and his group had finally collected themselves enough to react, somewhat, he noted.

“R-reward…?” Ha Mangfan stammered.

“Nature of—?” the kneeling Din Ouyeng muttered, wiping blood from his mouth.

“—Glory…?” Di Yao echoed; his hands white on his sword as he used it to support himself.

A part of him did find it darkly amusing the two had managed to zero in on the singularly most problematic topic within what the scholar was saying, pondering too deeply on ‘Kingdom’, ‘Power’ and ‘Glory’ was an especially pernicious pit to fall in if you were a junior with aspirations on the Dao step.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

“Don’t,” Ji Tantai, his expression grim, started to say, cutting off both of them tersely. “It—”

The group flinched, as the old scholar, ignoring how the lightning was flaying the ‘flesh’ from his hands, simply ripped a section out—

As they watched, thirty-three white bolts crackled off it, each one transformed into a spectral spear, grasped by a mirage of Kong Jurai.

The dark-haired youth, meanwhile, took the opening and in a single step instantly covered all the ground between him and the place where the dark-bladed sword had fallen.

The flock of Bi Fang meanwhile shifted their trajectories from the old scholar to the mirages, landing on their shoulders as they fanned out to surround him, their robes turned-blue green, edged in silver, imbued with a profound aura of ‘manifest righteousness’.

“Uh… why did the spear react like that?” Ha Leng asked, watching the merging ephemera with wide eyes. “Before, it…?”

He had to admit, that was an excellent observation. The spear had reacted violently to attempts by both that old monkey and the scholar to grasp it, and yet Selene, with a purely spiritual body had barely seemed to care about the ‘judgement lightning’ from it. Or at least, it had not summoned the same cage…

-Is it because of the invocation? No… he dismissed that, almost as quickly as the thought occurred.

For starters, she had grabbed the spear, and used it, before the invocation finished. It wasn’t even that it was because Din Ouyeng was wielding it then, rather than the ‘body’ now, because the monkey had spawned a cage.

“—How is it resisting… that?” Din Ouyeng finally managed to ask, his face pale as the old scholar continued to resist the white chains of lightning the phantasms were now directing from their own spears, which they had planted butt-down on the ground.

A ghostly form of Kong Jurai descended, wreathed in the celestial ephemera of a Kong Venerable, hands folded like an erudite sage to block the scholar’s path.

“Encompassing the Truth of thirty-three Heavens—”

The words, like dolorous peals of thunder, shook rocks off the distant cliffs—

“As if, beneath a single spear—”

They resonated with the unravelling of the spear above, overwhelming whatever hold the old scholar had exerted over it. In the blink of an eye, it stabilised, the black cracks bleeding through themselves to somehow become… more white lightning, that surged through the maelstrom of dark clouds above, illuminating the peaks of the high ridges around them.

He couldn’t help but notice that the ‘scale’ of the valley was breaking down as well. The valley walls seemed further away and higher, as the ‘compression’ of space finally started to succumb to the sustained assault it was suffering.

Amidst it all, however, the old scholar was an island of eerie calm, as he contemplated first Kong Jurai’s form, then the chains coiling around his arms, legs and body, tearing into him, trying to bind him with a new cage.

“What justification, this, for your struggle?” the old man asked, with an almost disappointed sigh, as Kong Jurai continued speaking—

“Judgem—”

In the same instant, the ‘third eye’ on the scholar’s forehead, which had been nothing more than a barely visible black line, snapped open fully—

The world around them stilled in a way that was profoundly… unsettling.

Shadows darkened, while the burning yang flames took on a decidedly inauspicious cast.

The vast spear of white lightning hung, motionless, powerless almost, as if it were no more than a painting and not a terrible, fundamental, primal force of the world around them.

Ji Tantai and the others were frozen, their expressions caught between incomprehension and finally, profound dread.

“—What worth in your Achievement?” the scholar continued, even as he stepped forward, leaving an afterimage of his own form amidst the cage of lightning—

The dark-haired youth, the only other thing not seemingly caught in what the scholar had done, charged forward, swinging his recovered blade at the scholar’s neck, only for the strike to fall right in the scholar’s open palm—

The youth exploded into golden yang fire, becoming a dozen mirage-like forms, wreathed in coronas of parasol blossoms, each striking viciously at the scholar—

“What Glory, in your end?” the old scholar asked, a deep, near timeless resignation conveyed through his tone even as his hands moved, like a series of shadows to brush away the strikes. “If all you display—” the scholar stepped through the swirling yang fire, leaving another frozen shadow there, and with one hand, blocked the follow up thrust from the dark-haired youth, answering it with a powerful palm strike to the arrow-wound in the dark-haired youth’s side. “—are the things of others, not your own?”

The dark-haired youth coughed up golden blood and stumbled backwards, though he was still controlled by the scholar, in almost a mirror of his previous disarming of the body.

The old scholar glanced at the blood on his hand, which was already eating into his flesh, exposing the bone and grimaced, not so much with pain, but almost, he thought, with disgust. Like the old man had just put his hand on monkey shit.

“On a certain level, it is hilarious that they are in this position, largely because they wasted a treasure like that whisk on that old Buddhist,” his father chuckled, shaking his head wryly as they watched, the scholar twisted the sword away from his body, effortlessly snapping the dark-hair youth’s arm as he did so.

“There are few experts more adept at de-fanging ‘young heroes’ than my sisters,” Cranea murmured.

“—That I will give you,” his father agreed.

“Would… they have worked?” he asked, sceptically, not entirely convinced it would have based on what he was seeing before him.

“I know Kong Jurai’s reputation is somewhat… overblown,” —Kong Jurai was lauded as the ‘Refiner God’, but his acclaim came in no small part from the Kong clan’s propagandizing. Jurai himself was still only a ‘Dao Venerate. “And that whisk certainly exceeded this spear… given its origins within the Righteous Gate of the Early Yuan, but…”

“—Probably not,” his father conceded, as the old scholar landed another brutal blow on the youth “But it, or that denunciation that those two spirit herbs cancelled out would certainly have served them better than—”

Suddenly, his father’s expression twisted and their ‘vantage’ within the melee shifted abruptly to the other side of the scholar.

A fraction of a second later, the dark-haired youth opened his mouth and screamed.

In the same instant, his forehead split, in a fashion oddly similar to the scholars, forming a searing, golden ‘third eye’ that emitted a beam of what almost looked like slightly scummy, molten, golden metal. The old scholar almost evaded, but it still hit him in the shoulder, where his clothes, then flesh, simply vanished in a white mist, before it sheared the bones beneath clean in two.

With a silent snarl, the youth turned left and right, the ‘beam’ bisecting ruins and rocks effortlessly as it chased after the old scholar, who he noticed, was not healing the injury—

“Is that… Yang Extinction Law?” he asked, his hands clammy.

‘Extinction’ Laws were among some of the most esoteric variations there were. Even in all his years of cultivation, he didn’t think he had ever seen a physical manifestation of a supreme law like Yin or Yang, wielded through their prism to this degree, though.

“It is,” his father agreed, tersely, even as the golden eye on the youth’s forehead blazed again—

Their vantage shifted once more, as a moment later, the ‘beam’ doubled in thickness—

“It can hit us?” Lan Huang asked, gulping nervously, eyeing the shadow-like ‘hole’ in their surroundings it left as it passed almost through where they had been.

“Yeah… maybe… I don’t want to test that,” his father muttered, shifting them to be beside Ji Tantai’s group, as the beam continued to track after the scholar.

“That would be wise,” Cranea agreed, grimly. “It seems like it has finally started—”

Her words were lost as the entire surroundings twisted, bleeding bizarre colours. The scholars third eye seemed to expand, becoming the focal point of an ethereal corona of misty darkness that shrouded him in something that made him physically unable to look at the old man.

“Well…” his father hissed, even as the old scholar somehow ‘split’ the beam-like manifestation of Yang Extinction with the strange eye warping law.

Even after he looked away, he was still left with a ‘scholar shaped’ hole in his vision, like a disturbing after-image that refused to shift.

“What just…” Lan Huang groaned, holding his own head.

“—My eyes!” Ha Leng sobbed, grasping his face with his hands.

“—Yeah, that was expected,” Cranea muttered, putting a hand on Ha Leng’s shoulder.

“—Division Law?” he gasped out loud, fighting against the after-effects—a lingering feeling like he had just had his eyeballs ripped out by the shadows—as that was all he could think it could be.

‘Laws’ relating to the conceptual idea of ‘Division’ were almost as esoteric as those relating to ‘Extinction’, frankly, though in comparison to the latter, its comprehension up here was actually quite doable. So long as you were crazy enough to want to go to the underworld and managed not to die horribly in the centuries of continual residence there it would take to grasp it.

Still, if you could grasp something of it…

He watched, impressed, as whatever the scholar had done, enveloped the dark-haired youth with enough momentum that he was sent sprawling backwards, yang qi bleeding chaotically from his whole body.

The dark-haired youth grasped his face with his un-injured hand and howled, inarticulately—

Their vantage on the scene shifted again, as searing, amorphous corona of molten-looking death exploded out of the dark-haired youth’s body, forcing the scholar back as well.

Ji Tantai and the others all flinched, as it enveloped their surroundings, which was about the extent of their ability to react, really.

Rather depressingly, they were not obliterated, as the sword in Ji Tantai’s hand seemed to protect them, offering them an island of calm amid the wavering shadows of ancient buildings that drifted eerily in the broken moment.

Water slid in and out of focus, bleeding unnatural colours.

Trees burned, like garish void-fire candles… and yet… did not.

The shadows of the herbs, the Lily’s bodies, the combat before, shimmered like mirages—

The ghostly decimation blazing above—

The whole thing smashed into a nova of… nihility as something else finally pushed back, a shadow rolling over the whole valley… and then the broken moment snapped back into focus, as the attempt at literally burning the moment out of the present failed emphatically.

The dark-haired youth grasped his face with his un-injured hand and screamed again, drawing all vestiges of that orphaned chaos into him—

Three pairs of golden wings swirled out of his back, formed of flame-like feathers akin to those of a phoenix, but with the azure iridescence of the Bi Fang and the green of a Luan also present, not to mention the silvery death of extermination.

In the same instant, three ‘beams’ of the scummy molten-metal-like manifestation appeared from the youth’s eyes and forehead.

Converging, they cut through the scholar’s defences, bisecting him before he could even move, leaving a strange, half molten afterimage—

The ‘beam’ hit the nearest of the three great uprights in the remnants of the lake—

“M—”

His father’s curse was lost as the ‘beams’ scattered, becoming a horizon obscuring fan of golden-white death.

A vast thunderclap shook their surroundings as air rushed in to replace that which had presumably been obliterated.

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~ HAN MURAI – GRANDMASTER LI’S ESTATE, WEST FLOWER PICKING TOWN ~

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Still mulling over Master Liwen’s words concerning the Dong family, Han Murai sat on a bench in the hall before Grandmaster Li’s workshop, observing as the eminent formations master put the final touches on a formation to suppress the marks placed on them. The focal point was a set of eight small altars, burning special mixes of spirit herbs. Those were in turn linked by a series of small formations constrained by talismans, and then supported by a further set of arrays on the floor itself.

For its small scale, it was, perhaps one of the most complex pieces of formations work he had ever witnessed be set up, and also, remarkably unassuming for it.

“I think this is the most complex formation I have ever seen,” murmured Misty Camelia, who was sitting next to him sipping on a cup of tea, as Grandmaster Li continued to poke at one of the altars with narrowed eyes. “And to think the Grandmaster is doing this personally?”

“Indeed,” Blue Jasmine, who was on the far side of her, agreed. “Master Sergeant Mei is, indeed, a man of influence.”

“All the good men are taken,” Misty Camelia sighed, a touch theatrically he felt, giving him a wink.

“Your wife is very lucky,” Blue Jasmine added with a half-smile.

“Please,” he muttered wryly, resisting the urge to rub his temples.

They had been ‘teasing’ him like this for a while now, though in an entirely good-natured way, once it became clear that Grandmaster Li was not only going to help them, but do it without a fee.

“Right,” Grandmaster Li declared, abruptly, standing up at last. “That is done, all that…”

The grandmaster trailed off as dull rumble shook the hall, making the lanterns on the ceiling sway.

“That was a big one, Teacher” Master Liwen muttered, eyeing the rain-drenched garden outside the hall for a moment.

“Maybe one of the alchemy warehouses finally cooked off in its entirety,” Grandmaster Li sighed, staring at the slightly chaotic flames over the nearest altars. “I would dearly love to know what has set this off, if only so I can blacklist the perpetrator.”

“You and me both,” he agreed, as Grandmaster Li started to poke at a second altar.

“Apologies, Sir Mei,” Grandmaster Li added, giving him an apologetic grimace. “This is a formation that requires a lot of fine tuning, and the disturbances to the ambient feng shui from whatever is going on out there are not helping.”

“It’s fine,” he replied quickly. “Take—”

A flash of purple light travelled through the room, followed by a sense of his ears popping.

“Fates!” Master Liwen cursed as the talisman he had nearly finished inscribing flashed inauspiciously in his hands then burst into pink flames.

“W-what was that?” Blue Jasmine asked, shaking her head.

“Big explosion?” Misty Camelia suggested, rubbing her eyes unhappily.

“Something just hit the estate wards…” Grandmaster Li replied, looking around with a frown.

“With some force as well,” Master Liwen muttered, before adding more reassuringly, “However, the barriers we have are among the strongest in the district, so don’t worry.”

“G-grandma-master!” Qing, who had served them tea before, came scrambling into the hall looking terrified. “It was a… well, I don’t know, it hit the south side—!”

“It’s okay,” Grandmaster Li said, waving for her to calm down. “The barrier held.” Turning to Qing, who was still looking shaken, the grandmaster gave her an encouraging smile. “Qing, go find Oujin and Hanfa, get them to check that side, then go reassure our guests, assuming Madam Liwen has not already done so, and ask them to come here.”

“G-grandmaster!” Qing took a deep breath, then saluted Grandmaster Li and hurried off.

They watched her leave, then Grandmaster Li sighed, rather tiredly.

“How are the talismans coming?” the old man asked Liwen.

“Apart from that last one, almost done,” Master Liwen replied, not looking up from the talisman he was already nearly done redrawing.

“Good, good,” Grandmaster Li nodded, giving the altars, whose flames had now stabilized, a sweeping look.

The two formations masters worked in silence for almost a minute, until, in the distance, another dull rumble echoed in the air. Thunder this time, likely from some high-grade talisman. The odd thing was…

“That came from the north side of the river,” Misty Camelia muttered, glancing sideways at him. “From the docks.”

“It did,” he agreed.

A moment later, two more distant booms rumbled, from the same direction.

“So, the chaos is spreading,” Blue Jasmine remarked grimly.

“So it would seem,” Misty Camelia agreed.

“—Sir,” a young man, wearing light body armour, appeared at the door to the hall.

“What is it, Luquan?” Master Liwen asked, glancing up at the intrusion.

“There is a young noble—” Luquan started to say, before Grandmaster Li held up a hand to cut him off.

“Now is not a good time, tell them to come back later.”

“With… respect, grandmaster, you may still need to meet him,” Luquan murmured, bowing apologetically. “He is from…”

“—I am aware of who he represents,” Grandmaster Li replied, a little more coolly. “What of the estate formation?”

“It is… intact, Grandmaster,” Luquan replied. “The disruption was apparently caused by an alchemy cauldron landing in the Fei estate, to the rear—”

“I see, thank you,” Grandmaster Li sighed, before waving for Luquan to depart. “You may go.”

“Grandmaster,” Luquan bowed deeply and retreated, though he still looked a little unhappy.

For some reason, though, both Liwen and Grandmaster Li just stood in silence, as if lost in thought, for almost a minute once the youth had left.

“Keen, but overeager to please,” Master Liwen muttered.

“Mmmmm…” Grandmaster Li just hummed under his breath for a moment, somewhat noncommittally.

He remained like that for what felt like a small eternity, before turning to them.

“Sir Mei, it seems trouble has finally found us,” Grandmaster Li said at last with an apologetic sigh.

“Trouble?” Blue Jasmine asked, uneasily, glancing at the hall doorway.

“Mmmm…” Grandmaster Li nodded.

“Shall I go…?” Liwen started to ask, glancing after Luquan, but Grandmaster Li just held up a hand.

“Let us focus on getting the formation finished, having our guard friends not inconvenienced will be a great help, if this blows up.”

-Well, that’s not at all ominous, he sighed to himself.

“Sir Mei, if I might trouble you?” Grandmaster Li added, waving for him to come over.

Getting up, he carefully made his way to the heart of the formation, where the Grandmaster was standing.

“We have intruders,” Grandmaster Li said very softly, as he directed him to transfer some qi into one of the altars. “That distortion earlier was a breaching pulse, and Luquan… well he is someone who is easily led.

“—This one, next,” Grandmaster Li added, slightly more loudly, pointing to another altar. “Feed qi into the top node.”

“I see,” he replied quietly, moving over to it and doing as instructed. “Numbers… Realm? Do you think they are related to us, or the wider instability?”

“Hard to say,” Grandmaster Li replied. “The intruders were Nascent Soul talisman clones, both of which are sealed. Likely, their purpose was intended to scope out what kind of barriers I have. The main intrusion is likely to be elsewhere…”

“Hmmm…” he frowned, mulling that over. Talisman clones suggested it might be Dong and his compatriots, but even if they had chased after them, attacking Grandmaster Li’s estate was a whole other matter compared to a teahouse. “Could it be the ‘young nobles’?”

“Perhaps,” Grandmaster Li conceded with a sigh. “Though if trouble is coming under the auspice of the one who is trying to use his status to demand a meeting with me from Liwen’s wife, this is going to get ugly. Their realms are such that none of you will be able to do anything to them, even if you wanted the trouble, which you won’t.”

“Which sect?” he asked, uneasily, as that implied…

“Not a sect, as such. The young noble is a companion of a guest of Imperial Envoy Quan,” Grandmaster Li clarified.

“Ah,” he grimaced, immediately understanding why Luquan had pressed the issue as he had. “Why is someone like that here?”

“Believe it or not, I am passingly famous, within the province,” Grandmaster Li remarked with a wry chuckle, as he crouched down beside the last of the altars and finished scribing a formation on its activation plate “They came for the Patriarch’s banquet—”

“I am done here, teacher,” Liwen called over.

“—Right,” Grandmaster Li said, straightening up. “This is done, let us get it going, before something…”

Almost on cue, another distant rumble shook the air within the hall. This time, however, the altars’ flames barely rippled.

“—something else messes with the ambient feng shui,” Grandmaster Li grumbled, eyeing the altars sourly. “—Qing?”

His speaking of the girl’s name triggered a small formation in the air beside him, which shifted to become a small version of Qing.

“S-sorry Grandmaster, I’m coming now!” Qing’s voice quavered a little as she replied.

After a minute or so of waiting, Qing appeared in person, leading Danshu, Lotus Blossom and the others, while two servants carried the healed, but still comatose Deng youth, who was now devoid of most of his armour.

“Apologies, Grandmaster, Young Noble Ha was…” Qing started to say.

“I am aware, it is fine,” Grandmaster Li sighed. “I assume Linhua is placating his group?”

“Madam Liwen is indeed,” Qing replied. “However, your nephew also seems acquainted with them…”

“Ugh. That boy,” Liwen murmured, shaking his head as he inspected the remaining talismans quickly.

“It is the nature of youth to be easily impressed,” Grandmaster Li noted, as the last of the group filed into the hall, looking around with interest.

“Thank you, for this, Grandmaster!” Lotus Blossom murmured, giving Grandmaster Li a deep bow after she had taken in the large formation.

“Y-yes…” Guanbo, who was still fairly badly injured, rasped, managing half a bow of his own, as Singing Lily helped him to a seat at the side.

“Not at all,” Grandmaster Li replied magnanimously. “This is also a part of my responsibilities to the town…”

“Everyone, please sit in the middle of the formation,” Liwen called out, indicating the circle of spots at the heart, inside the eight altars, where people could sit. “Oh, and please pass me any soul-bound or life-bound objects you might have.”

Silently, those they had escorted from the teahouse carefully stepped through the formation and, once those who had them had passed Liwen their artefacts, picked spots to sit.

“Put the Deng boy in the middle for now,” Grandmaster Li instructed the servants carrying him.

The two saluted respectfully and placed the youth down beside Danshu, Kun Yu and Hong. Walking over, he handed his own talisman and storage artefact to Liwen, then sat down beside Danshu, with Misty Camelia and Blue Jasmine on his far side.

“This looks complicated,” Kun Yu muttered, taking in the formation, as Grandmaster Li set down a final altar in the middle and started to connect various nodes up to it.

“Right, everyone, all you have to do is sit there, and keep your qi flow neutral, I will lead the formation,” Grandmaster Li instructed them, as he accepted the collection of artefacts, mostly from the guards it had to be said, from Liwen and placed them within a node on the main altar.

That done, Grandmaster Li stood there watching them until he was satisfied that their qi cycles were indeed neutral enough, then took out a dark coloured orb and placed it on the altar at the central point—

Black lightning sizzled across the orb’s surface for a few moments, then the eight flames on the altars flared with an eerie iridescence.

“W-what!” Caoxi’s gasp was the loudest of several as a series of barely visible glyphs, revealed as if by some trick of perspective and the light from the flames on the altars, appeared on all of them.

“—It can even mess with mantras?”

Glancing over, he saw Misty Camelia staring down at her chest and hands, her expression as concerned as his own. Blue Jasmine was also looking decidedly unhappy.

Checking his own body, he found that its influence touched not only his cultivation foundation—the spiritual law he practiced, his dantian and his golden core—but also his meridian gates and his Nascent Soul through the connections with soul bound tools like his storage device and status talisman. The most disturbing thing, though, was that even though he could ‘see’ the mark and its reach, he was entirely unable to sense anything of it, either in terms of qi or intent. It was as if it was nothing more than a painted image before his eyes.

“Please keep your qi flow neutral…” Grandmaster Li reminded them patiently. Observing the glyphs, he could see now that they were subtly different for each person, and starting to shift in shape. “As you can see, this mark is not straightforward.”

There were a few embarrassed coughs and some shifting from the others, though he could hardly blame them. This kind of mark was…

“Huh… interesting,” Master Liwen observed, from the side.

“Yes,” Grandmaster Li murmured, glancing over at two of the altars behind Guanbo. “It’s been activated previously, and not everyone who was touched by it is here—note the diffused links on the sixth and seventh altars…”

“I see it,” Liwen murmured. “Do you want me to adjust for it?”

“Hmmmm…” Grandmaster Li tapped his fingers together for moment, then nodded. “If you can isolate the links, do so, otherwise, we will mitigate the influence here, at least to the point where those marked do not have to be concerned for a while.”

“When you say… it was activated previously?” Lotus Blossom asked, uneasily, glancing around at the others from the Green Moon Teahouse.

“Everyone who worked at your Inn has been touched by the basic ‘mark’ and had some prior exposure to it…” Grandmaster Li replied blandly.

“How—?” Singing Lily started to ask, raising her hand.

“A week for most,” Grandmaster Li clarified. “And interestingly, the… ah—”

The grandmaster stopped speaking as the orb on the altar shimmered.

“So, those targeted directly have been affected more,” Misty Camellia observed, looking around unhappily, as the ‘focus’ of the glyphs shifted, quite radically, and to varying degrees.

Indeed, those on him and the others who had been the focus of the attack, were complex and multi-faceted, while those on the workmen, for instance, who had just been in the vicinity, were much less complex. However, as he took a second look…

“It seems to be both,” he sighed, his gaze flitting between the marks of those who worked in the teahouse, who had irrespective of their ‘complexity’, had noticeably more vivid marks, once you knew what you were looking for.

“Yes,” Grandmaster Li agreed, after a short pause. “Likely, the older marks are a result of it being tested. The good news, at any rate, is that the mark itself is part of the original formation.”

“And the bad news?” Lotus Blossom asked, a bit uneasily.

“It was part of the original formation, which was made by the Ling clan, a very long time ago,” Grandmaster Li muttered. “And intended to stop people who might raid a Ling clan estate, which the Green Moon Teahouse was, until several centuries ago…”

“Oh…” Master Jifang looked like he had just swallowed shit, which was not an unreasonable reaction to have.

“As such,” Grandmaster Li continued, “The expectation was that they would have resources to deal with more… straightforward methods.”

“Does… that mean you can’t—?” Guanbo started to ask, before Lotus Blossom gave him a poke.

If Grandmaster Li took offense at that suggestion, he didn’t register it outwardly. Rather, he just continued to consider the central formation altar with a now rather pensive expression.

“While it is true, that the late Grandmaster Shuntao’s methods are renowned, they are also notoriously expensive to maintain,” Master Liwen interjected. “As such, this is one of the more basic marks—”

“—And I am familiar with the Ling clan’s formation theory,” Grandmaster Li concluded. “So, while there may be some… discomfort involved, I can say with confidence that this is solvable.”

“We understand,” Lotus Blossom replied respectfully, before any of the others could speak up. “Please do what you can, Grandmaster.”

Grandmaster Li nodded, then the qi around him… shifted, oddly, as if there was some component in it, that was hidden from his senses.

“Principle?” Hong muttered beside him, as the others looked impressed.

“Okay…” Grandmaster Li murmured. “Please bear with…”

He gasped, as a sensation of painful numbness, akin to having lost the flow of blood to his limbs, enveloped him.

There were various gasps from around the room, as tiny sparks of black lightning sizzled across their clothing, emanating from the formation, rapidly seeking out and eating into the lesser marks—

Eyeing the shadows that were now flickering around the various marks on his body, he carefully focused on keeping his qi flow neutral, as Grandmaster Li instructed. The unsettling sensation lasted for some twenty seconds, by which point, several of the lesser glyphs on most of them markedly lessened in their intensity—

“Haaaah!” one of the workmen, Oufan, gasped with pain as one the smaller glyphs marking him vanished in a flash of iridescence.

“Ahh!” Yuli bit her lip, shuddering, as moment later the first of hers also faded away.

“—Unpleasant,” Master Jifang grunted.

In quick succession, lesser marks on Qing, Singing Lily, the other workman—Kwai, Hong and then Kun Yu also faded away, leaving only those who had been directly associated with the fighting.

Forcing himself to take a breath, he watched as the formation slowly ate into the one associated with his meridian gates, until, at last, it dissolved—

The recoil left him light-headed and nauseous as something within the fading mark seemed to twist in on itself.

Taking a further, deeper breath, to try and relax his body a bit, he watched nervously as the formation turned towards his dantian. That endured for a few moments, then also collapsed, leaving him feeling like someone had stabbed him with a blunt sword. Next to crumble was the one on his spiritual law. The ones associated with his golden core, nascent soul, and soul-bound items, however, appeared much more deeply rooted, resisting the devouring sparks to a concerning degree—

“—Teacher…” Liwen’s voice, sounding very concerned, pulled a small part of him back to the present.

Refocusing on the room, he found the eight flames on the altars were starting to destabilize.

Abruptly, the terrifying black lightning, simply… lost all sense of direction, and yet didn’t dissipate. Instead, the sense of numbness in his body rapidly became an unspeakable itch, that burrowed into every corner of his being, body and soul.

“—Ohh-Motherless-Fates!” Singing Lily bit off a curse and clenched her fists in her lap.

Glancing at the others, he saw that the injured Lotus Blossom and Guanbo both looked in a decidedly bad way, as did Lieutenant Xuong, who was pale as a ghost and sweating copiously.

“I see it…” Grandmaster Li, now sitting cross legged at the heart of the formation, muttered, making a rapid series of hand seals—

At the same time, the ‘confused’ black lightning, shimmered, and then started to docilely fade away. However, as it did so, he was also beset by…

Something gave the qi in his body a sharp, unpleasant, and decidedly unsubtle nudge towards the terminally chaotic, focused on the links between his golden core and his nascent soul.

“Oh… Mother of Heaven—” someone, Caoxi, he thought, sobbed, but he wasn’t sure, because he had no attention to spare for anyone other than him, because in that same moment, all the qi remaining in his body revolted.

-It’s a soul attack? fighting the overwhelming nausea, he tried to work out what had just happened. No… that isn’t right…

His body, slicked in icy sweat, felt heavy, while the qi inside him couldn’t even qualify as ‘chaotic’. It was utterly anarchic. Without any direction and trying to both devour and flee his body in equal measure, as if divorced completely from his cultivation foundation—

-This is too directionless? Alignment disruption?

At that chilling thought, he focused his intent on his core meridian gates and found, to his horror, his meridians were already little more than freezing cracks within his body, working their way towards his dantian and his inner gates.

-Is the mark trying to collapse my foundation?

Pushing that terrifying thought away, he grasped for stability, and a different perspective on what was causing this, shifting the focus of his perception to his Nascent Soul, which was desperately holding onto the link with his golden core.

With a slightly jarring ‘shift’, he found himself standing in a broken, multi-coloured maelstrom of chaotic qi, punctuated by flashes of black lightning—

A smothering, oppressive intent enveloped him, even as he found that the disorientating nausea wracking his body was somehow worse, here, as was the all-encompassing numbness.

“Accept Your Fate!” the words were almost whispered in his ear—

Before he could react, piercing pain blossomed in his chest, accompanied by a disorientating, clamour of voices screaming in his head.

-Qing!

-I don’t want to die!

-Help me!

“It is futile,” the voice sneered, as, his vision blurring, he tried to resist the agonizing feeling that he was being ripped apart from the inside out. “You cannot escape this—”

‘Keep your qi flow neutral…’ the words were Grandmaster Li’s, but the intent that came with them felt… very different, as it cut through the chaos around him.

Seizing the opening, he tried to recentre his mental state, to distance himself from the pain and fear, reaching for a calming memory that might—

Pain seared through his right hand. Looking down at it, he found that his storage ring, a gift from Qing, many years ago, was gone. In its place, was a misty, wound, bleeding soul-infused qi—

“Missing this?” the voice giggled. He couldn’t help but flinch, as a shimmering, iridescent figure, sort of resembling him, but with the ‘glyph’, on his brow, stepped out of the mist, holding the ring in its right hand. In its left, was his soul-bound blade. “It’s a nice ring—

“Give it back!” almost reflexively, he felt the words drawn out of him, anger rising to replace fear.

“—or what?” the figure asked, mockingly, abruptly appearing right in his face—

He dodged back, barely evading its attempt to grasp him by the neck—

“You’ll fight me?” the shadowy figure laughed, derisively, as pain exploded in his chest, and opened its hand, revealing it now held his town guard’s rank talisman. “You should just—”

Abruptly, the qi roiling around him became stagnant and heavy.

“Tcch!” the figure shifted, as grasping, black lightning, in what appeared to be the form of a veiled woman, suddenly manifested out of the chaos—

The figure sneered, closing its hand around the precious ring even as the woman of lightning appeared before it—

For a brief moment, his surroundings warped, becoming a quiet pagoda in the gardens in Blue Water City. Before him, he saw Qing, sitting, chatting with one of her friends, watching the rain—

“—She seems nice…” the haunting words clawed at him, even as a jarring feeling of emptiness, washed through him, like he had just been plunged into icy water.

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~ HA KAI – HEART OF THE JASMINE GATE ~

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When Ha Kai found he was able to look at their surroundings again, without seeing a broken white scar of nihility, like a burning shadow in his mind’s eye, he found that the ridgeline behind the upright was… gone. In its place was a twisted, implausible mess of collapsing rock, slowly sliding down the edges of a new valley. The only thing remaining, was half of a white, crumbling statue, depicting Selene, he thought, based on the golden, crescent moon-crown on her head—

“…”

Turning, he found the perpetrator staggering backwards, golden blood dribbling from his mouth, his skin pale and drawn as he continued to claw at his head. Though the tyrannical splendour was still there… something was clearly wrong with the dark-haired youth’s qi, because the Yang Intent bleeding off him was chaotic and uncontrollable, as if at war with itself…

-Of course, the ‘division laws’ that that outsider used…

“H-how is it not… dead!” Di Yao gasped, horrified.

“Motherfucking…” Ji Tantai, his face white as a sheet was staring as well.

Din Ouyeng and Ha Mangfan were just speechless, frozen where they had been sheltering.

Out of the chaos of the annihilated valley, a broken, twisted shadow was pulling itself up. As it stood, he found its body resembled an extremely inauspicious and mind-bending amalgamation of a squid and spider crab.

Several searing, white scars were scoured across its ‘shell’ and over half the ‘limbs’ were missing. The wounds, he couldn’t help but notice, were not healing, and in fact, were actually slowly getting bigger. The only resemblance to the old scholar was the slit like ‘eye’ where its face was, focused, mercifully on the dark-haired youth.

“Burn!” the dark-haired youth gasped, grasping the right side of his face again—

Another beam-like manifestation of Yang Extinction hit the scholar, leaving a further white scar, and cutting its left ‘legs’, making it stagger into the remnant of a ruined building.

“Burn!” the youth snarled again, more forcefully, the Yang Extermination Intent scourging the outsider’s form.

“Burn—!” The dark-haired youth roared, golden fire flickering like a crown around his head, as he stabbed the black-bladed sword into the ground—

He flinched as a coruscating pillar of golden-white light split the valley. It obliterated the ‘ground’ around the scholar, as it enveloped him, briefly exposing a broad flat surface which held some kind of taiji-pattern, at which point it exploded outwards turning walls into iridescent afterimages—

The ‘pillar’ of molten metal… distorted, flowing backwards, as the scholar’s form seemed to bend in on itself, the ‘eye’ briefly becoming the whole body, then the eye, as the grey-robed old man appeared, once more, grimacing faintly.

“If this is… all you have,” the scholar’s ‘voice’ was haunting, hypnotic almost, continuing to evoke a sense of profound disappointment, as he landed on the exposed floor, which was, in fact, an oddly familiar blue and red taiji, surrounded by an ancient version of the celestial zodiac. “You are not prepared for this fight…”

The scholar trailed off, starting into the middle distance, ignoring how the fire burned away his ‘clothes’ and seared his flesh to white mist, turning exposed dark bones to shining crystal.

“…”

“Aiiih… I said those words before,” the old scholar suddenly threw back his head and laughed—an eerie, echoing sound that made the world around them turn… drab.

Their surroundings shifted, amid the roiling mists, light fading away until the only real illumination came the burning tree on the island behind them. Even the searing molten pillar was oddly muted as it rippled around him, barely moving within the frozen moment.

“I may not be prepared—” the words were soft, their speaker, a beautiful young woman with tanned skin and reddish-blonde hair, plaited in a simple yet functional style. She stood knee-deep in the smoking mud of the island’s shoreline, between the scholar and the youth. She was garbed in a dark green, knee-length, tunic, its panels slashed with silver vine leaves and golden flowers, over which was a coat of battered, bloody orichalcum scale armour. “—but I will still fight…”

“This…” his father, who was staring at the woman’s back, sounded uneasy.

Frowning, he glanced at his father, wondering what was bothering him. In terms of ‘strength’, while her foundation was exceptional, for her realm, and her age, she was still only an early-stage Dao Ascendant. Nevermind someone like Hao Tianxun, even…

Abruptly, she turned from the old scholar, to stare at the dark-haired youth with piercing green eyes—

For a half second, he was left speechless as her ‘presence’ enveloped him. Despite her realm, there was just something… he hesitated to say ‘alluring’, but…

“Peerless…” Lan Huang sighed in admiration, shaking his head.

“This old villain actually met her?” his father hissed, as the young woman swept her gaze across the whole scene.

“You… know her?” he asked, wondering who she was.

All he could say for sure was that she was not a cultivator, and not from Eastern Azure. In that regard, her ‘presence’ put him more in mind of his own mother, or experts like Selene, Morea and Cranea…

And yet, they were all experts of uncounted years, whilst the woman before him was not even two hundred. Among the junior generation, he could only compare her to the Saintesses of the Cardinal Courts, and he was fairly sure he would have remembered hearing about someone like this among their number. The closest comparison was Saintess Wusheng, of the Turquoise Pond, when she was young, but even she was somehow… lacking in comparison, a part of him felt.

“Wide is the world; who can say what dreadful shadows exist in the hearts and minds of those who have walked long beneath starless skies,” Cranea replied, rather cryptically, not meeting his eyes.

“So, this is your trial…” the young woman murmured, tightening her grip on her sword, which she held in her left hand—a simple iron blade inscribed with a word he half saw as ‘Calad—’ amid the black blood on it. Her right, which had been obscured by her body, was badly injured, exposed to above her elbow, burned and bloody “—a dark truth to a question I dared not ask.”

Though he could not see the dark-haired youth’s expression, the intent around the body had turned from seething fury to… something approaching avariciousness.

“Very well,” she declared, with a mirthless grin, pressing her injured right hand against her face, leaving a bloody, red palm print across it. “Witness me—”

A searing molten-gold, winged afterimage appeared before the young woman, scattering eerie reflections through the swirling smoke and mist, grasping for her. Her reply, a rising underarm-slash, was so fast he never saw her move. It simply arrived, her sword bisecting it—

The manifestation of Yang Extinction exploded in a blinding flare of molten death, bright enough that he instinctively raised a hand to shield his eyes. When the distortion faded, though, the young woman was rather surprisingly, unharmed, a mandala-like shield forming around her, focused on a moon-rune-looking symbol for ‘Moon’ that was already shifting towards ‘Torch’—

The young woman’s movement slowed suddenly as space itself bent around her, pushing her and the dark-haired youth apart, such that he barely avoided the tip of her sword as it scythed back down—

Eight shining trigram runes appeared in the air, surrounding the whole space around the island, accompanied by a profound and concerningly familiar sense of auspicious repression.

-This is a…? A very unpleasant thought surfaced in his mind as he watched the three talismans Di Yao, Ha Mangfan and Din Ouyeng had been using shimmer with iridescent void-fire, now joined by a fourth, that Ji Tantai was focusing on, which read ‘Cauldron’.

-Wait, wait, wait… The Eastern Mansion…The parasol qi… The spatial upwelling…

Even as a certain art, a really, really problematic art, a signature of the Meng Clan’s core influence, in fact, shifted into focus in his recollection, the dark-haired youth snarled and spread his arms. The blazing pillar of manifest Yang Extinction focused on the scholar regaining its lost momentum and expanding as it intensified to envelop his new attacker as well—

-Could a manifestation of ‘Absolute Yang Extinction’ replace samadhi fire?

Before he could ask his father that rather critical question, his fears became moot as eight identical mirages of scholarly old man with a wispy beard and drooping eyebrows, wearing Meng clan robes appeared. They took up positions, sitting at each of the cardinal points of the supreme trigram, making an auspicious hand seal.

“So, someone did prepare them for dealing with the Jasmine Gate,” he muttered, watching as the eight trigrams’ shifted and some of the yang-infused vibrancy returned to their surroundings.

“For spirit herbs, certainly,” Cranea agreed, biting her lip. “However, this old villain is really playing with fire now.”

“The… girl?” Lan Huang guessed, eyeing her with an understandable degree of interest.

“Uh-huh,” his father agreed, grimly.

Meanwhile, the dark-haired youth snarled again, thrusting out with his own blade towards the red-gold-haired woman, ignoring how Ji Tantai was clearly trying to open up space between them. In reply, she executed a fairly simple rising cut—

The movement seemed to skip, before his eyes, the dark-haired youth’s Absolute Yang Intent warping the moment, allowing his thrust to slip through her guard, piercing her body, even as the dark-haired youth grasped her by her hair with his left hand—

‘Meditation of the All Giving Heart’

The words hung in the air like an eerie chime, manifested by their resonance with the surroundings as she screamed. With it, yang and parasol qi started to bleed chaotically from the arm the youth was holding her with, his left eye and the third eye on his forehead—

-Qi deviation—!?

A searing plane of molten extermination split the valley in two, obscuring the youth and the woman completely.

He flinched as it barely missed them and Ji Tantai’s shocked group, obliterating a huge swathe of ruins either side of them, before hitting the left-most of the large uprights—

Recalling vividly what had happened the last time the extermination intent hit one of those uprights, he barely managed to avert his eyes, not that it did much good.

For an agonizing moment, it was like a sun had ignited not two hundred metres away from them. The mere awareness of that blinding white hole in the world left a scar in his ability to perceive his surroundings for several torturous seconds.

When it faded, somewhat, he found that the scholar was reforming his body, again, scowling, while the young woman…

He blinked, confused, wondering if he had missed something, because the dark-haired youth, who should have been suffering a qi deviation, was still holding the young woman, what remained of her, by her hair, watching as she disintegrated into an iridescent mirage.

The youth, meanwhile, showed next to no trace of the deviation of a moment prior as he pulled the sword out of her body…

“…”

Both Ha Leng and Lan Huang turned to him, looking confused.

“The fucking extermination qi burned the deviation out of the moment,” Cranea explained, her tone dripping with disgust.

“That… you can do that?” Ha Leng asked, dully.

Not sure quite how to reply to that, he watched scowling as the youth simply… closed his fist. The ephemeral remnants of her form scattered, swirling in the air, and then flowed towards his forehead and were absorbed into the golden third eye.

The scholar, who had just about managed to stand up, his flesh mostly reformed, sighed, staring at where the young woman had been. “I told you—” he said, shifting his gaze from her to the dark-haired youth, who was now pointing the parasol blade at him. “You are not prepared for this fight—”

He flinched as he found the young woman was… still standing where she had been, her right eye shining with the symbol for ‘Bright’, still holding her injured right hand over that side of her face.

“…”

Before anyone could react, the dark-haired youth moved, like a ghost, stabbing the blade between her breasts—

“—Witness me,” the young woman murmured, removing her injured right hand from that side of her face, her left eye now shining with the symbol for ‘Moon’.

With the exposure of her right eye, which held the symbol for ‘Bright’ their surroundings distorted, leaving him seeing double. ‘Bright’, ‘Moon’ and the symbol for ‘Torch’ on her brow all shimmered—

He stared, shocked as the past and present moment seemed to slip through each other.

The blade in the youth’s hand distorted, as it hit her, splintering like it was rotten, the formation inside of it imploding in a chaotic flare of parasol qi almost as bright as the eruption that had just occurred—

The youth was hurled backwards, iridescent flames shimmering across the front of his body as he dropped the remains of the sword. The young woman, in contrast, just stood there, unscathed, on the edge of the newly formed crater looking somewhat amused. It took him a moment to realise that it was the same ‘Meditation of the All Giving Heart’ that was protecting her once again.

“Yep, that’s the way to deal with them,” she sighed with a shake of her head, before transferring her gaze to Ji Tantai and the others, tightening her grip on her sword. “Now,” she purred, her tone and gaze holding a sense of deep disdain, bordering on outright hatred, “What to do about you. To think that the Long—”

A calamitous thunderclap of compressing space warped their surroundings, as reality abruptly bent itself inwards, focused on the old scholar.

{Venerable Master’s Punishment Cauldron}

What view he had of the valley juddered as the spatial integrity of their surroundings fought against the constriction of the formation. The young woman narrowed her eyes and pointed her sword at Ji Tantai.

“Exodia, Exse—”

Before she finished speaking, however, she simply vanished, her form dispersing like a scattered reflection.

*—Clonk!*

*Krrrrrrr*

A small pill cauldron, about two feet across, formed from burnt earth and engraved with four phoenixes landed near the centre of the red and blue Taiji. It teetered for a moment, before settling on its three legs, which flowed up the side to flat areas that held the ‘Boundless’, ‘Before’ and ‘Heaven’ runes previously seen on the talismans.

The dark-haired youth, meanwhile, was lying stunned on the near side of the crater formed when the sword imploded. It’s remains still lingered, visible as a twisted, smeared afterimage at its epicentre, slowly dispersing as the cauldron continued to twist space in on itself.

Din Ouyeng and the others just looked relieved it was ‘over’. In fact, the only one who was not was Ji Tantai, who had the expression of someone who had just swallowed shit as he glared at the faintly juddering pill furnace and the crater where the sword had exploded.

If there was a hint of ‘good fortune’ within the whole thing, it was that whatever the young woman had done, it had clearly stuck. The youth was still injured; he could see smears of golden blood on the arm that had been holding the sword, and almost invisible, iridescent flames flickering across most of its body.

The eight ghostly ‘Sages of Meng’, who were still sitting in their circle with the trigrams’ runes shining before them, shifted their hand-seals yet again. One after another, eight trigram seals appeared around the auspicious axis of the exterior melding with the burnt earth.

Cranea just put a hand to her face and sighed. Both Ha Leng and Lan Huang’s expressions were simply sort of frozen between shock and surprise.

“This will be interesting,” his father muttered, folding his arms as he looked around, his words sounding more like a curse than an observation.

Following his father’s gaze, he saw that the ruined valley floor around them was still distorting, subtly, seeming to move and yet… not, as if depicted within an illusory scroll painting.

In truth, the billowing mist and smoke hid most of the real carnage. The only obvious traces nearby, came from the fading flares of Absolute Yang Extinction Qi from the dark-haired youth’s aborted deviation. They drifted, like spectral flags, unaffected in themselves, due to their nature, yet leaving blurred, iridescent afterimages of ruins, trees, even pieces of grassland, as they obliterated any and all of the twisting space that passed through them.

“Is… that it?” Ha Leng asked, his tone dull, as they watched the cauldron shudder again, leaving faint ripples in the air around it.

Rather than reply, he looked up at the sky above them, watching the clouds, which were flowing backwards swirling unnaturally as they did so.

A part of him wanted to agree, that that was really anticlimactic, but the truth was, he had chills just looking at the ‘cauldron’ as it sat there. Space was deeply, deeply broken in this place and while the cauldron looked disarmingly mundane, its outward appearance was basically just a shell around a seething sphere of looted spatial accumulation, infused with natural laws, from this valley, layered with Yang Extinction and Parasol Qi for fuel.

What was really bothering him, though, were the young woman’s words, just before she vanished.

-Long, long…

There was a ‘Long’ clan, but the words she had spoken had not been eastern, or even Imperial, translating themselves through pure intent.

-Not to mention, the cadence was wrong for it to be such a short word… she was about to say ‘the Long…’

‘Longevity’?

He had to work hard not look over his shoulder, as that word resurfaced in his mind.

‘We do not forgive… We do not forget… Find those responsible, Child of the Tai… or we will…’

Even now, those eerie, whispered words from the shrine guardian in the Red Pit were far too easy to recall. As was the feel of her hand gripping his neck, the hate and the fury, loss and longing in its tone unpleasantly vivid.

-Could she be referring to the same thing? What does ‘Longevity’ represent?

That such a similar, visceral reaction and that word had come from the young woman before she vanished… was a concerning coincidence.

-Father didn’t show much recognition of it, though…? when I shared the memories of that moment…

“—It… got sealed?” Ha Leng added, turning to look at them.

The look of outright betrayal on Leng’s face, as the cruel reality of the world was exposed before his eyes, was… depressing, to the point where it hurt his soul a little bit. He wished he could comfort the lad, and tell him that justice would be served, how even the heavens themselves couldn’t continue to shelter cultivators like these four, who took and harmed and ruined others in the name of their greed. However, he couldn’t bring himself to tell that barefaced lie.

After everything Leng had been subjected to today, he deserved better than that, he reflected. So instead, he continued to watch as the ‘intent’ within the eight trigram runes shifted again, continuing its search for the optimal, auspicious configuration to suppress what was within the furnace.

“Not for long, I suspect,” Cranea muttered, her gaze fixed on the stunned form of the dark-haired youth, who had not yet managed to pick himself up, out of the smoking crater.

“Can… we do something about that?” Lan Huang asked, sounding understandably aggrieved as well. “You—”

“—Et Beee Gwwooo!” a somewhat muffled, furious shriek echoed through the surroundings.

The devastation around them wavered oddly, as if the perspective he was looking at was not quite… as it should be, and then he found himself looking at a young girl, a teenager, really, who had incongruously been standing nearby, completely unnoticed.

Selene wore a loose-fitting, knee-length, sleeveless black gown and dark stole, her now rather tanned skin covered in somewhat eye-bending patterns painted in dark red and purple pigment. Rather jarringly, under her arm, she held a struggling Bi Fang, about the size of a large crane, wrapped up in a net of blood-briar and reed fibres.

“You will not be—!” the Bi Fang, who had managed to work its beak free and squawk furiously for a moment, finally fell silent as Selene grabbed its beak with her free hand.

“Enough from you,” she scowled. “The only reason I have not plucked you for a headdress is because that old fellow holds bizarre grudges…”

“Eeee dwss!” the Bi Fang nodded vigorously, its gaze turning to Ji Tantai and the others, who were all standing, frozen, staring at it. “Leb mee gwooo…”

“—Yeah, I think not.”

He flinched as he realised that Selene was not the only one standing there.

All of the other sprit herbs were back, dressed in the same dark, knee-length, sleeveless gowns and stoles, their appearances now somewhat more youthful—teenagers—rather than grown adults they had been before.

Daphane, who had just spoken, was standing near Selene, holding the ruler, while the Jasmine on the other side of the crater, had Din Ouyeng’s spear in her hands, neither weapon showing any sign of revolt. Morea, Myrtoessa, Helice, and the reed, all armed with bow and arrows, were examining the cauldron with gloomy expressions.

“—So, what do we do about that?” Daphane added, before glancing at the spear the Jasmine was holding. “These brats have enough treasures that I am starting to get flashbacks to those days.”

“They do rather have that vibe, yes,” Myrtoessa agreed sourly, while the others either nodded or sighed.

“I was kind of hoping the ‘Moon Scholar’ would do a bit more than give it a bloody nose and some broken bones,” the Jasmine remarked with a vexed sigh, shooting the cauldron a sideways look of her own.

“Yeesh, that stupid idiot,” Morea grumbled, also glaring at the cauldron, which had just juddered again, sending inauspicious ripples through its surroundings.

“—Rather than slag him off, we should probably help him,” Myrtoessa interjected. “That cursed fucking thing was meant for us.”

“Yeah…” Daphane agreed, her baleful gaze transferring back to the four cultivators, who were still just staring at them, as if not quite able to grasp what they were seeing.

“It won’t… return to the others, though, will it?” Helice asked, biting her lip and suddenly looking uneasy.

“Are you preternaturally disposed to finding bigger problems or something?” Morea retorted, scowling.

“—No, it won’t” the Jasmine shook her head. “At worst, the original will properly wake up.”

“Uggh, its always so Orcus-cursed argumentative,” Selene spat.

“—So, what about that?” Daphane asked, changing the topic, with a nod towards the dark-haired youth.

“I guess I can deal with it,” Selene sighed. “Really—”

She stepped to the side as a beam of golden fire flashed right in her face originating from…

Daphane swayed backwards as the dark-haired youth, showing no sign of his previous injuries, appeared like a ghost in front of her, trying grasp her neck.

Time seemed to… slow, as she spun on the spot, grabbing him by his right arm and the left side of his face before hurling him into…

He stared, dully, as he collided with a second, ‘dark-haired youth’ who had appeared out of thin air behind her. As near as he could tell the two were completely identical, and unlike the previous ‘golden afterimages’ this duplicate not only embodied the terrifying primordial yang intent of the ‘original’, but had a rather unsettling ‘physicality’ that had previously been lacking—

The pair slammed into the edge of the crater in a cloud of debris, even as Daphane took a step back… and ducked under the strike of a third, barely avoiding the searing molten beam of light that slashed above her, before landing a blow to his chest with enough momentum that space distorted around her.

Abruptly, time seemed to catch up with all three, the body she had just hit spitting out a mouthful of golden blood as it stumbled back—

“Wh—!”

“Seri—?”

A molten white hole in his vision appeared where Daphane, Selene and the bodies had been, obscuring the near side of the crater and his view of much of the valley for a brief, eye-tormenting moment.

When it faded, however, he found that Selene was basically unharmed, an almost invisible corona of her black flames shrouding her, a familiar symbol for ‘Torch’ shimmering on her brow. Daphane was a bit worse off, molten qi smoking on her exposed skin, but also seemed otherwise okay, despite having just been in the middle of it.

“Oh for…” Selene, groaned, as in the same instant, dozens of ‘copies’ of the dark-haired youth simply appeared, seeming to spring fully formed out of the ground on the near side of the crater, half encircling the pair.

“That stupid, easy-going—!” Daphane bit off her words as she dodged backwards, half a dozen of them appearing around her, their blows overlaying themselves in a flickering onslaught of extinction imbued intent.

Simultaneously, others appeared like ghosts around Selene, Morea, the Jasmine and the others, as all around them the Yang Extinction Qi, which had been previously orphaned, starting to drift inwards.

“Something’s not…” his father started to say, as with it, came an eerie, lingering, discordant echo—

A vision-warping white… distortion, it’s edges molten scars in reality itself appeared, forming a coruscating pillar-like nexus within the gathering maelstrom of extinction qi. With it, came a horrible befouling sense of inauspicious wrongness focused on…

His gaze found the reed spirit herb; so innocuous, so… uninvolved, up to this point, and yet… and yet…

Fighting back against the part of his mind that just… refused to engage with her presence, especially now she had actually revealed something of it, he stared, skin pricking with instinctual cold sweat as she raised her bow, now shining a dark mysterious gold, above her veiled head—

A thunderous rumble shook the valley, accompanied by flashes of multi-coloured lightning that danced across the roiling clouds.

The seething pillar of molten death recoiled before the bow, unravelling chaotically under its own disturbed momentum.

The valley around them shivered eerily. The groaning wail of tortured reality fading away as a soft, ethereal sigh, born of the searing mists and roiling clouds, the ruined, turbid waters and blasted trees, reaching a haunting melodious crescendo as it washed over them… and within it little more than a whisper, was a word… a name… a promise—

“—Syrinx…”

In the same instant every single spark of scattering molten qi became the tip of a golden arrow, imbued with a peerless, haunting, martial presence, like death itself was standing right behind him, embodied within the ‘Truth’ of the ‘Arrow’, seeking its prey—

The clones, arriving a fraction too late around her, seemed to distort, then explode into a haze of golden gore and iridescent afterimages, followed in quick succession by the nearest of those encircling the other spirit herbs.

“What kind of bow is that?” Ha Leng asked, staring with wide-eyed awe at the dark-golden bow with its twisted bowstring in Syrinx’s hands.

“It’s just a facsimile,” Cranea replied, not taking her gaze away from Syrinx’s steady obliteration of the clones assailing the other spirit herbs. “Similar in a way, to what that old scholar just pulled, albeit in a lesser manner. If that was the real thing, umm… we would not have this problem.”

“No, you would not,” his father agreed, drily, before glancing at them. “They are very cursed, basically,” he clarified. “And the strength of that curse exceeds… well, it’s difficult to shift through any realistic means… If it were merely a matter of ‘killing’ it, something like that it would…—oh for fuck’s sake, why am I not surprised they have one of those.”

His fathers abrupt change in topic drew his attention back to the four cultivators sheltering in the strange barrier… specifically Di Yao, who was, he saw with a sinking feeling, holding a ‘Preordained Moment’ talisman in the style of the Kong clan. A runic formation marked in the shape of a white eye and black and gold pupil, which to his gaze held an unsettling sense of subversion.

“A treasure seizing talisman,” Lan Huang muttered, for Ha Leng’s benefit mainly, his tone echoing his father’s disgust.

“Makes sense,” he mused, watching as Di Yao, who was likely using it to get the best out of it, given his Ancient Immortal cultivation, pushed qi into it, his gaze fixed on Syrinx—

“Indeed,” Cranea agreed. “Which makes it hilarious that he is going to…”

—the dark gold bow in Syrinx’s hands vanished, appearing in Di Yao’s outstretched hand, changing back into a much more mundane looking weapon as it did so.

“—Waste it on what is nothing more than a really good spirit-reed bow?” his father concluded drily, as Syrinx stared at her now empty hands, the unending barrage of arrows already dissipating, leaving only scattered constellations of Yang Extinction Qi, which immediately started to gravitate back towards the remaining dozen-or-so clones.

“Yes,” Cranea agreed, with a somewhat nostalgic sigh he felt, as Syrinx, who he could now ‘think about’ without any issue he found, put on an excellent show of glaring furiously at Di Yao. “Though in our defence, when it comes to this stuff, we learned from the best—” she added, her tone turning derisive.

As she spoke, they watched Di Yao pass the bow to a somewhat nervous Ha Mangfan and sweep his eyes across the other herbs—

“Oh for…” Syrinx grasped at thin air, as the bow Myrtoessa had been handing her vanished as well, appearing before Di Yao.

“Orcus take you—!” Helice added, dodging another beam of yang qi as her bow and quiver, along with Morea’s were also stolen away.

A moment later, the spear in the Jasmine’s hands and the ruler Daphane was still holding as she fended off her attackers, also started to slip slightly out of focus, as rather surprisingly did their dark garments—

“…”

“—Just pull out that Hera-blessed vermin’s tail feathers already, grudges be damned!” the Jasmine interjected, tightening her own grip on the spear and jerking her head towards the Bi Fang, who had been silently glaring at them this whole time.

“Eeeeeey!” the Bi Fang, flinched at her words and started to struggle once more under Selene’s arm.

Selene, who had also been looking around with narrowed eyes, as she evaded the two clones still targeting her just sighed and nodded. Turning her attention back to the Bi Fang, she grabbed the squirming crane’s lustrous silver-green feathers and decisively yanked out a large handful. Most of them, she stuck in her hair, at the back of her crescent moon crown, keeping only three in her hand.

“Nuooo!” the Bi Fang suddenly shrieked, as the torch symbol on her brow glimmered mysteriously. “Aey didn’t—!”

The feathers in her hand burst into flame as she held them up, as if they were a torch—

Immediately, it’s light cast their surroundings in a strange, otherworldly hue… revealing several dark-golden chains, etched with sinister red symbols, emanating an unsettling aura of ‘control’ wrapped around Selene’s arms.

“Kunop—!” Daphane bit off some kind of curse as they also slid into focus around her, wrapped around her hands, the ruler, attached to her shoulder, and piercing her right thigh.

“A Heaven Seizing talisman?” Lan Huang sighed, shaking his head as yet more chains appeared, connected to the other herbs, originating from a talisman covered with red and gold symbols in the shape of an ill-omened, eight-pointed star that hung in the air before Di Yao. “So that’s how…?”

“Indeed,” his father agreed, rolling his eyes, which was a fairly accurate assessment of Di Yao’s chances now, he felt.

In truth, their strategy was not that lacking. To maximise its effectiveness, something like that really did need to be used stealthily, in support, where it could create openings, buy time, and indeed help them recover and rob things like treasures. It might even have bought them time to flee, or stabilize the seal on the cauldron. However, for the kind of head-to-head clash this had just become, Di Yao’s realm was simply too low.

Immediately validating that assessment, Selene simply waved her ‘torch’ of Bi Fang feathers through two of the chains binding her wrists, obliterating them in flashes of deeply inauspicious qi with her dark fire.

Daphane, meanwhile easily caught another that was aiming for her third eye.

The dark-haired youth’s ‘original’ self was once again revealed by Selene’s act. It had been unobtrusively dragging itself out of the near side of the crater, covering half his face, clearly struggling to suppress the iridescent fire shimmering up his arm. Half a dozen clones that had escaped obliteration moving towards Daphane and Selene.

“—Idiot scholar,” Daphane spat, pushing back one of them, using her stole as a secondary weapon. The chain, meanwhile, was visibly warping in her hand, affected by a dark, devouring haze that was now shrouding her, evoking not only the crushing oblivion of yang water, but also the endless accumulation of yang earth.

Looking around, it wasn’t just her either.

Myrtoessa—who was also glaring at Di Yao—broke both chains on her left arm as she sent another clone sprawling, its momentum ensnared by a dark, cold, sense of oppression within which he again briefly recognised the primal strength of yang water.

“Ah, that’s funny,” Lan Huang sighed wryly, putting a hand to his face. “To have their strategy backfire like this.”

“—because of the destabilization,” he mused, nodding in agreement, certain in his mind that this was why Syrinx had finally intervened when she had.

From a tactical point of view, the whole thing was really quite masterfully done from the herb’s perspective. They had delayed and obfuscated, forcing Ji Tantai and the others to waste the ‘golden’ period when the suppression was still largely working for them. Now, though, the events of the last few moments had finally pushed the suppression to a degree that allowed the herbs to at last leverage strength approaching that of a Quasi-Dao Immortal. Namely, touch their own laws, that were part of them, rather than be forced to work with intent and principles to manipulate natural ones. In one step, that allowed them with their spiritual bodies to close the gap with the dark-haired youth’s physical and innate strength, and, it seemed, exceed it in some ways.

Indeed, profound, otherworldly yang intent, evoking the dark shadows of forest glades, the timeless depths of bottomless pools, the beguiling grasp of mists and the endless accumulation of earth and rock now enshrouded all of the spirit herbs, oppressing the manifestations of extinction intent, the absolute yang qi, the greedy, grasping intent of the youth and even to an extent the chaotic, spatial qi.

“Really?” Selene grumbled, turning to look at the four shocked cultivators, two more chains flaring eerily into nothing before they reached her. “It’s like only you can use laws and others are inexperienced or something?”

Even as she spoke, she used the torch to blind the clone that had made a lunge for the Bi Fang.

“Yeah… like you think we have never had others turn their eyes on us?” Morea asked, sounding rather jaded all of a sudden as she effortlessly broke her own ‘bonds’ in a ripple of mulberry petals and yang water.

“—Been hunted by ‘heroes’?” Syrinx sneered challengingly, as a profoundly unsettling aura of yang wood and water visibly corroded the chains binding her as she started to walk across the crater, her stole scattering the beams of molten qi snapping into focus around her from the clones screening the dark-haired youth.

-And this is why nobody uses them like this, he reflected wryly, watching the Heaven Seizing talisman start visibly to degrade with each revealed ‘chain’ that was broken.

Truthfully, as soon as it was exposed, Di Yao should have cancelled it. It was a child’s daydream to believe that a single talisman, even one of the calibre Di Yao had, could seize the paths of those able to wield their own laws, when cast by someone not in the Dao Step.

“—Or that Parasol Qi is some new-fangled thing?” Helice added with an eyeroll, as she walked over to Morea, the ones snaring her limbs also crumbling into ash, unable to resist the timeless strength of Yang Wood now emanating from her.

“—Or that we don’t know exactly what this malignant thing is capable of?” Daphane snickered mirthlessly, slipping through the attacks of the remaining clones around her, all now mired up in her own shroud of yang-infused qi, as she stalked towards the kneeling youth.

The Jasmine, meanwhile, had somehow grabbed all the ones that came for her, but hadn’t scattered them, he noted, seeming more focused on the spear in her other hand, which was still shimmering inauspiciously as the destined day talisman tried to wrest it away from her.

“How ironic,” Morea—who had used her stole to blind and bind the one attacking her— murmured to Helice, as she joined her. “They use the thing to seal us on the outsider, and a tool best used to seal it, on us…”

“You sure have a lot of treasures,” Selene added blandly. “Anything else you wanna pull out? Maybe an Oscillating Monkey Cage—”

“Isn’t that one, though?” Helice interjected, pointing at the pill furnace, and it’s continually shifting ring of trigram runes, which had been largely ignored through the last few moments of chaos.

“—Is what?” Selene frowned, glancing sideways at her.

“A monkey cage…” Helice deadpanned.

“…”

Daphane and Morea both turned to stare at her, before sighing in exasperation, their gazes flickering to the pill cauldron as they did so. Syrinx just shook her head in amusement.

“Don’t tempt fate.” the Jasmine, who had just spent the last few moments considering the chains she was holding, murmured, before simply yanking them.

Di Yao flinched as the heaven seizing talisman vanished and appeared in her grasp, the remaining chains flowing back into it. She contemplated it for a moment, then a flash of molten fire appeared in her hand, enveloping the talisman. Di Yao, already pale, coughed up a mouthful of black blood as his link to the talisman was broken, but rather than incinerate the talisman, instead the design within it began to shift. The golden fire encircled the eight-pointed star, imbuing it with a terrible sense of allure as it did so.

For a brief moment, it was like the talisman was a blazing sun in the Jasmine’s hand, drawing everything around it, as a shimmering eight-pointed star appeared in the air above her—

With a soundless howl, two of the clones not yet fully occupied by resisting the slowly encroaching auras of the various herbs dashed towards her. Before they could reach her, however, they were intercepted by Syrinx and Daphane, who threw both back with enough force that they almost collided with the strange barrier sheltering Ji Tantai’s group.

Meanwhile, the connection between each ‘point’ of the star and the circle became a shining chain that lanced out at the eight sages, sealing the cauldron—

In the same instant, the Destined Day talisman finally relinquished its tug of war with the other treasures, its focus snapping onto the Heaven Seizing Talisman, however, that was simply too little, too late.

By the time it had triggered, the chains had already reached the sages, aiming for their third eyes. It’s intervention barely bought time for the four nearest to Di Yao to repel the chains, preventing outright failure of the seal then and there, but the four nearer the herbs were immediately subverted by the talisman, their trigram runes shifting rapidly into opposing configurations.

“By—!” Daphane hissed something inarticulate as the two bodies picked themselves up, orphaned yang qi already swirling ominously around them. “Its instincts are good.”

“What do you expect,” Syrinx grunted, dusting golden fire off her arms where it was already starting to leave burn-marks on her skin.

“Enough…” Din Ouyeng gasped, producing a Kong clan ‘command’ talisman and gesturing with it towards the Jasmine. “In your maker’s name, ‘Cage Her’.”

The spear in the Jasmine’s hand distorted and scattered in a swirling cloud of silver white and gold reforming into a youthful facsimile of Kong Jurai, dressed in white and gold scholar’s robes, embroidered with the same motif that had been on the spear’s haft.

In the same instant, Din Ouyeng turned white as a sheet, the talisman in his hand crumbling into dust.

“This one greets Benefactor,” the spirit murmured, bowing deeply to the Jasmine, as they all stared in shock, apart from Din Ouyeng, who was now holding his chest with one hand, breathing hard. “I beseech thee,” the spirit continued earnestly. “Let this one bear any penance necessary, that my maker not be shamed.”

“Uh… it didn’t have a spirit… right?” Di Yao asked weakly, as the spirit turned to look at the four. The Bi Fang had an expression as close to that of someone having ‘eaten shit’ that a bird could have, he noticed.

“Did she… just awaken it?” Lan Huang asked, turning to him in disbelief, before he could actually ask his father that very question. It had certainly not had a spirit before.

His father didn’t reply, just sighed, sharing a worried glance with Cranea.

“…”

“No, it did not,” Din Ouyeng gasped, wiping a trickle of blood from his mouth and staring in horror at the Jasmine. “That… whatever she is, just awakened it.”

“Using the talisman?” Di Yao groaned.

“—The same maker that gave a brat like that a tool to control you to the point of your death?” Syrinx asked with a strange smile.

The spirit’s expression turned… complex, but it didn’t stop bowing. “Shall I end that abomination against the Heavenly Path these ignorant children have unwittingly—”

“No.” Daphane shook her head, eyeing the clones who were slowly advancing towards them again, past the kneeling dark-haired youth, the brutal yang strength within their forms continuing to intensify.

Ji Tantai, who had been watching in silence to this point, grimaced unhappily.

“What… is wrong with it?” Ha Mangfan asked, uneasily, his gaze lingering on the youth, whose condition had not improved noticeably in the last minute or so. “I mean—”

“It is rejecting the core,” Ji Tantai replied, biting his lip nervously. “This is why I didn’t want to rush the integration. Whatever it is doing with those… clones, is putting immense strain on the core, and whatever that evil old thing did has not helped.”

“It’s all that is keeping them at bay…” Ha Mangfan added, nervously, glancing at the injured Di Yao and Din Ouyeng, then rubbing his own side. “Without it, this is gonna go…”

“—Bad?” Ji Tantai growled unhappily. “You don’t say.”

“How long?” Di Yao asked, wiping blood from his nose. “Those clones—”

“Time isn’t the problem,” Ji Tantai replied shortly.

“…”

“That decimation would be really useful right about now,” Din Ouyeng muttered.

“—Fly-whisk,” Di Yao retorted sourly, pointedly not looking at Din Ouyeng.

“Ruler,” Din Ouyeng spat, glaring at Daphane who still had it.

Watching them bicker, he was again struck by how oddly accommodating Selene and the others were now being in regard to the group.

He was fairly sure, that if they really wanted to, they could probably pressure the dark-haired youth at this point. Instead, Syrinx, Daphane and Helice seemed content to basically just… let the remaining bodies be, while Selene flanked the Jasmine and Morea and Myrtoessa kept an eye on the cauldron.

Even the spirit of the spear seemed a bit… confused, he had to admit, looking on with a frown, while pointedly ignoring the now thoroughly gagged Bi Fang sulking under Selene’s arm.

“—Enough! Both of you,” Ji Tantai cut in, “I don’t suppose you can recover the ruler?” he asked Di Yao.

“Unless you have another, better talisman?” Di Yao muttered.

“—One that can’t get stolen by the talisman she already stole,” Din Ouyeng added acerbically.

“…”

“And it was only a few more shifts off the key ‘lock’ as well… fucking—!” Ji Tantai muttered, pressing his fingers to his temples and eyeing the four sages near them still working on behalf of the seal. “Is this what it—?”

Ji Tantai suddenly flinched, and then slowly turned to look over to his left.

“My… what a clever boy you are,” the Resurrection Lily purred, from where she was now… sitting on a stone block right beside them, sipping from her lotus cup.

-Did… she plant a bit of her qi with them back before she revealed herself? He found himself wondering. Thinking on it, that seemed eminently like her.

Di Yao, who was closest to her tried to move… and then froze as, between one moment and the next, she appeared right beside him, gently running her hands through his hair.

“I have to admit, you’re not my type, but I just can’t overlook a treasure, it’s a personal failing, I know,” she sighed, almost regretfully. “Eye Seizing Artefacts…”

“Eye-seizing?” Ha Mangfan stammered, trying to move back.

“Do you know just how useful those things are—?” abruptly, she flitted to the side, as one of the golden clones appeared right beside her, grasping for her—

“For fucks sake!” Ji Tantai snarled, suddenly, as the previously stable space around the clone within the protected barrier turned chaotic—

“So that was their escape plan,” Lan Huang murmured, even as a final piece of the ‘puzzle’ settled into place in his own mind.

He had no idea what specific barrier they were using, courtesy of the sword, but likely among its effects was to keep space… intact within its borders. With the help of the Devouring Eyes talisman and the controlling influence on the local feng shui courtesy of the punishment sages to obfuscate matters as—

The space within the barrier and without abruptly seemed to flow in two different directions, before snapping back into place… with the Resurrection Lily standing outside it, looking a trifle surprised.

“—a Sanctuary Totem?” Daphane exclaimed.

“Why am I not surprised,” Morea sighed.

“Mmmmm…” the Resurrection Lily glared at the shimmering barrier of parasol qi that had just evicted her, then vanished to reappear on a nearby rock as a searing beam of Yang Extinction Qi flashed through where she had been standing, a jade talisman in the form of three interlocking eyes clutched in her free hand.

“—And that kids, is why you don’t give out treasures like that to idiots,” his father groaned as the Lily happily twirled the Devouring Eyes talisman she had just stolen between her fingers.

“She… wait what!?” Di Yao, who had recovered the movement of his body again, gasped, staring at the Devouring Eyes talisman in horror, his hand involuntarily going to his chest.

“What,” the Lily smirked, as Ji Tantai glared balefully at her. “You could have used the totem to stop it, but I guess you had other priorities, —huh…?”

The talisman in her hand flashed with profoundly inauspicious fire and then crumbled into ash, leaving a golden seal, in the form of three staring eyes, on her hand. Di Yao, meanwhile, breathed a sigh of relief, his previous concern vanishing—

“Burn the Dream,” the Lily murmured, and her form… faded out of focus, leaving an inauspicious shadowy afterimage of yang flames in the world for a few moments.

The lily herself, meanwhile, reappeared on the spot where she had just moments before been expelled from the barrier, her previously happy expression replaced by one of disgusted anger.

In the same moment, the golden clone that had attacked her, warped back to where it had been. With a nasty smirk, she shifted to stand beside Selene, plucking a Bi Fang feather from her crown—

The beam bisected the talisman, that had been left hanging in the air—

A grasping three-eyed shadow appeared behind the clone… then both it and the talisman exploded into ash and orphaned yang qi…

“Wha…” Di Yao spluttered, as a moment later, first the clones advancing on Daphane and Syrinx, then the ones screening the dark-haired youth collapsed like stringless puppets, their yang strength entirely invalidated, leaving him unprotected—

With a ripple, the sanctuary barrier around Ji Tantai and the others suddenly shifted, expanding in size to encompass the injured form of the dark-haired youth. Ji Tantai, cursing under his breath and his expression pale with fury, raced over to him and grimacing pulled out a compass similar to the one he had been using before—

Before he got there, however, Selene appeared beside the barrier holding up her torch… and simply walked through it, as if it wasn’t there.

“W-what?” Ji Tantai flinched as the sword, a few metres behind him shook faintly.

“See, this is the problem,” Selene mused, conversationally, as she picked her way over to Ji Tantai, entirely ignored by the remaining golden clones. “That scholar was not wrong. If this is the limit of what you have… You are not prepared for this fight…”

“Perhaps,” Ji Tantai growled, standing up, his features setting with grim resignation.

The collapsed bodies lying around them all flared with qi, golden, venerate’s halos appearing around each one, manifesting ephemeral pairs of wings. Above the dark-haired youth, meanwhile, an androgynous figure wreathed in parasol flames and yang qi slid into focus, looking down at them with empty eyes, a strange, deeply creepy red symbol on its brow.

“But that doesn’t mean you are, either—”

The halos on the collapsed bodies suddenly warped, as the androgynous figure of the phoenix spirit grasped its head and started to scream soundlessly, iridescent green flames appearing on its arm and face, to mirror those of the dark-haired youth.

“Long…evity—?” Syrinx mumbled, staring at the phoenix spirit with something approaching revulsion.

“That crazy—!” his father turned white as a sheet, as, in the same instant, the ground around the rapidly shrinking sanctuary shook, then recoiled, black cracks spidering through everything—

“Oh shi—”

He barely managed to cover his face as their surroundings became an iridescent maelstrom of shattering space and chaotic, destabilizing qi. Even with its magnitude suppressed to the Dao Step, it was quite unlike anything he had ever witnessed. His father fell to his knees, coughing up blood as their view of the surroundings suddenly turned… opaque. Even Cranea, who was sheltering Ha Leng, winced.

Unable to find words, he stared blankly at a haunting afterimage of the Jasmine, a symbol that had manifested a terrifying sense of ‘allure’ on her brow, lingering like a hole in his vision, until the shifting shadows around them dissipated, to reveal…

For a moment, he wondered if the explosion of the core had shifted their observation coordinates in some way, because they were just standing in a world of billowing dust and chaotic qi. However, after a moment, his gaze adjusted enough to pick out the shadow of the nearest of the three great upright stones within the swirling haze.

“What… j-just?” Ha Leng groaned, holding his head.

“He… he forced the bodies to have a deviation… of some kind,” he replied, rubbing his eyes as he looked around.

There was no sign of Morea and the others, but that didn’t necessarily mean much. Likely they had just hidden, and he was fairly sure the Jasmine had done something to mitigate the worst of the actual explosion.

The fact that they were not standing in a half-mile-wide crater meant that the core itself had not completely collapsed at least.

“Did they… die?” Ha Leng asked, rather hopefully, he thought, squinting around.

“…”

“Nope,” Lan Huang sighed, jerking his head to the side.

Turning, he found Ji Tantai and the body were, against all the odds, within the shelter of the much-diminished sanctuary barrier. The other three cultivators were still at its heart, frozen like startled rabbits, presumably sheltered from the blast by it.

“How does that thing even work?”

He realised the words were his own, as he glared at the sword at its heart.

“It’s also a form of ‘division’ Law,” Cranea muttered, looking around with concern. “But they are a pain to make. That one came out of a tomb, likely in Portam Rhanae based on the design.”

“Wait… what?” Lan Huang blinked, turning to her. “There was a tomb complex we found in the massif… that had been raided?”

“Really now…” Cranea frowned, the look she gave Lan Huang suggesting he would be recounting that discovery in detail.

“Get us the fuck out of here, ten minutes ago!” Ji Tantai gasped, pushing himself up and starting to drag the body of the dark-haired youth over to the sword.

“Yeah, no shit!” Ha Mangfan, groaned, pulling out the jade disc of a Seven Stars teleport anchor and placing it on the ground—

The ground around the talisman abruptly exploded into loam as a young girl hauled herself up out of it, a wilting lamium on her head.

For a moment, he wondered why Ha Mangfan had made such a mistake, before recalling that the four had been under the influence of the apple tree’s art when arguing, and likely were still under the influence of Daphane’s qi, so their recollections might be… compromised. Not to mention, quite a bit had happened since then to distract from it.

“Now, that is Karma,” Lan Huang observed with grim satisfaction.

“Get him!” Ha Leng snarled, clearly willing her on.

“I hope you rot to death!” she screamed, grasping Ha Mangfan’s leg, turning half his robe to ash in the process and leaving a vicious, black palm print on his upper thigh, before the barrier evicted her and the jade talisman.

“Heavenly Virgin’s blood!” Di Yao snarled, pointing his silver-blue sword in the direction the herb had been sent.

“Forget it. Use the… sword,” Ji Tantai gasped, dropping the dark-haired youth’s original body beside the sword with a grunt.

“Is that still… usable?” Din Ouyeng asked sceptically, eyeing the ugly burns, like desiccated wood on its arm and face. “—And what happened with the core?”

“Nevermind… that, get us… out of here!” Ha Mangfan sobbed, trying to heal where the palm-print was slowly spreading across his thigh towards his waist and down his inner leg.

“…”

Ji Tantai stared around with concern, then eyed the sword. “Censure force…”

“Really?” Ha Mangfan groaned.

Ji Tantai just glared at him, then at Di Yao, until the latter stopped glowering at the jade disc lying in the dirt outside the barrier and produced a jade pendant set with what appeared to be a Dao Jade. With a wince, he unrolled a second golden scroll and set the pendant on it.

“Can’t… you stop them?” Ha Leng asked him, as Di Yao, pale-faced, focused his qi on the pendant and the scroll.

“That has set the coordinates,” Di Yao groaned, wiping a trickle of blood from his nose. “Now… are you going to—”

“They are…” Ha Leng fell silent as space around the four rippled and they vanished like reflections on water as the barrier was drawn into the sword, which itself became nothing more than a shimmering fissure in the world, before it too, faded away.

“Well… that’s not good,” Lan Huang groaned, staring at the point where it had vanished.

“No, it probably isn’t,” he agreed, glancing at Cranea. “—And they got away with the body?”

“They… got away?” Ha Leng reiterated, staring blankly at the point where they had vanished with a haunted expression.

Turning to the young lad, he could only put a hand on his shoulder in sympathy, given the circumstances.

“Thankfully its crippled,” Cranea muttered, “And they won’t…”

She trailed off, as a twisted flare of void fire, almost fifty metres wide, bloomed into a vast parasol flower almost on the point where the sword had been. In a matter of moments, it faded away, revealing…

“That’s a bit…” Lan Huang said at last, as they took in the forty-eight Dao step cultivators spreading out around them.

Glancing at Lan Huang, he supposed that having spent much of his 'senior' career in Western Shu, he had never had the opportunity to see a full censure deployment by the Seven Sovereigns before.

To call the force arrayed around them… ‘over the top’, was possibly an understatement, by the usual standard of censure deployments, at least. There were thirty-three Dao Immortals and Seven Dao Lords, wearing armour and robes in the style of the of the Seven Sovereigns decorated in the red, white and gold, most armed with Dao Weapons. Leading them, were two Dao Sovereigns wearing the marks of formations grandmasters, and a Martial Sovereign. What was unusual here though, was that the force was accompanied by a further three Dao Sovereign Elders, escorting no less than Sect Enforcement Elder Tuo Kankai himself and Meng Fu’s youngest disciple, Ji Ming.

At its heart, though, it did conform to the pattern of an elite censure force, deployed in accordance with the Meng clan’s military doctrine—overwhelming force. Even so, as he looked on, he could only find pity in his heart.

“Poor buggers,” his father sighed. “They are so screwed...”