~ PART 3 ~

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~ JI MING – SEVEN SOVEREIGNS SCHOOL ~

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Darkness enveloped a tiny, spark-like flower and the glimmering leaf it lay on…

Timeless, formless, devouring darkness.

No matter how they struggled, the spark faded, and the leaf wilted.

Faded and wilted… as they drifted.

and drifted…

and drifted, until their radiance was gone, and only a sad, solitary flower and a slowly wilting leaf remained.

They drifted, in shadow, wondering silently, why they felt so… lost—

“Little Ji…

“Save… you…”

A voice found them.

A sense that something was reaching for them—searching for them—tugged, faintly at what might once have been… awareness.

“Let me…”

A light in the darkness.

Something they could be drawn to…

“—Save… you…”

“Little…”

“—Brother!”

“—Senior Brother!”

“—Brother!”

“—ah! Fates go get…”

“—are these?!”

Dulled, dissociated senses, broken and abused to a point where they had nearly forgotten what they were, tried to make sense of things, but there was only Darkness. Darkness that was somehow… noisy. With disorientating clamour.

“Look out—!”

“—Is he still alive?”

“Don’t die!”

“Don’t go…”

It came from everywhere, and nowhere, and yet, it… was almost like… confused… voices?

“Focus!”

“Shockingly, yes, though his cultivation…”

“Hey, open your eyes!”

“—Little Brother!”

The words were like hands, grasping for them—

“What is a hand?” the flower asked, perplexed—

“A… hand?” the leaf echoed, before pausing and wondering why the flower had even asked that. “Can you also feel…?”

“Feel?” the flower repeated, sounding small and lost, even as the leaf considered, or tried to, what… was.

The feeling that it was missing something was…

“—Ji Ming!”

A voice, tinged with concern, cut through the confused babble of the enveloping, all-consuming darkness—

“Ji Ming?” the flower whispered, hopefully. “I-Illuminating Wisdom?”

“Illuminating… Wisdom?” the leaf echoed them, wondering why they felt…

It didn’t even have words for it, it was such an… inarticulable…

The lack of ability to grasp the ‘thing’ that those two words evoked in it was almost as internally suffocating as the darkness was malignantly oppressive. Try as it might, it just could not find a… a…

It observed its form, as it realised an ephemeral trace of its lost radiance had returned, was returning, somehow, within itself.

With it, came a flood of confused, disorientating concepts. That the ‘leaf’ was a ‘he’ and the flower was a ‘she’, that ‘Illuminating Wisdom’, or rather ‘Ji Ming’, was his name, and that he was currently a— a—

Reality, and memory returned, like a bucket of icy water, darkness transforming into a sky that couldn’t decide if it was stars, swirling clouds, or a vaulted roof—

“We aren’t dead!”

The ‘flower’—Lian Erbei—whispered ecstatically as he found himself looking up, not at his teacher, but at his very senior brother Meng Tan, who was slowly dragging what remained of his broken body through… mud!?

For a brief, panicked moment, he was gripped with the certainty that he was somehow still in Yin Eclipse. That their escape had just been some dreadful illusion, spawned by the yang poison—

-The poison! Panic transformed into paralyzing horror as the deeper implications of Meng Tan dragging him finally registered.

“Taaaahn—” he tried to speak, to warn his senior brother, but the state of his body and the crippling dissociation afflicting him meant that his words were no more than a broken rasp.

“—Found him?” someone, another familiar voice, female this time, called from ahead of them.

“—Dao Soul damaged?” a second—male, and much nearer—asked.

“Yes,” Meng Tan confirmed grimly, as Cao Liang, his immediate senior as a personal disciple of Meng Fu, entered his limited vision, dressed in greyish blue armour and carrying a two-handed sword.

In fact, besides Liang, he realised, were another two of his senior brothers. Ancestor Fang Ren was bracing himself against a long-bladed glaive, while Ancestor Yun Quan, leaning on a sword of his own, was being supported by no less than the current headmistress of the Seven Sovereigns, Meng Yang Mei, and the Meng clan Envoy, Meng Li Xiaomei, both looking drained.

“F-fairy Yang… A-ancestors?” Lian Erbei whispered, sounding overjoyed at their appearance, though he himself just felt numb.

“Foundation still collapsing as well,” Meng Tan observed to Cao Liang as Meng Li Xiaomei also hurried over.

“Motherless,” Cao Liang cursed under his breath and sheathed his sword across his back before grabbing his other arm with a gauntleted hand— “Gah—! How is a Dao Eternal this fate-thrashed heavy,” Cao Liang muttered as they hauled him up.

As a comment, that surprised and concerned him, because by this point the Yang Metal Poison’s corruption of his body was so extensive that it should have been very obvious.

“What caused—?” Meng Li Xiaomei’s question was eaten up by a soundless, shrieking roar that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, all at once.

A wave of golden fire tinged with an eye-searing iridescence—an embodiment of Yang strength so pure and profound to almost defy his ability to perceive it as such—rolled in from every direction within the broken skies above them.

“—me your strength!” he was dimly aware of Meng Yang calling out as their surroundings distorted under its momentum—melding with the ruined, melted, yang-corrupted swamp he had just fled from, where—

Petrified, he could only watch helplessly as the golden fire coalesced into an eye-like fissure amidst the burning mists of the swamp. The allure of it, like he was staring into the void of a collapsed star, was utterly irresistible—

“Great—Vivid—Unsurpassed—Supreme!”

His senior brothers’ voices hung in the air, as a vast, mandala-esque formation, focused on moon runes representing those words, coalesced above them. Within it, the effect of the baleful eye seemed to lessen—

A terrible, familiar fissure of molten gold slid through it, as if the barrier itself was not even—

“I am One with the World—” Meng Yang’s voice cut through the chaos.

“—the World is with you…” the four ancestors and Meng Li Xiaomei whispered, as to his shock and immense relief, the golden fissure scattered into twisted, parasol-like flowers and a swirling, iridescent afterimage.

“I am One with the World!” Meng Yang repeated, more forcefully, spreading her arms wide—

The haze of their surroundings wavered, then the ground all around them bloomed with vibrant parasol flowers.

In the blink of an eye, all around them the flowers swirled up, transforming into shrubs, vines and finally fully formed parasol trees, their every surface inscribed with countless names.

“—the World is with you…” the refrain wasn’t just spoken by the four old ancestors, but by tens, if not hundreds, as the ancestral accumulation of the Seven Sovereigns started to focus on their location, giving birth to a dazzling celestial garden—

A vast, drifting haze of golden qi, like early morning mist, bled out of their surroundings, merging with the golden, eye-like fissure.

“What is this qi?” Meng Li Xiaomei asked, her voice becoming tinged with a fear that matched his own, as he watched it rapidly envelop the parasol grove, obliterating or distorting and subverting leaves, branches and names almost as fast as they manifested—

“—A folly,” a strange, grating, hauntingly familiar voice whispered, seemingly from every direction at once.

The ‘eye’ shook, its focus suddenly and rather erratically shifting, almost as if it were—

Abruptly, the nature of the mist and the haze around them shifted. The overwhelming Yang strength fading rapidly, losing much of its devouring, consuming Intent. Simultaneously, the aura of the grove Meng Yang had summoned also turned, its vibrant, timeless aura lessening. Leaves withered, branches aged and the space between the trees turned gloomy.

“Sister Yang!” Meng Li Xiaomei, who had been looking around with concern, gasped, catching Meng Yang as she slipped to her knees.

“Son of a Dun—”

“Heavenly Virgin—”

Yun Quan and Fang Ren’s curses were lost as the world around them rippled erratically, the edges of trees, rocks, pillars, even the misty haze and manifest qi, bleeding unfocused, eye-searing after-images.

“A malignant, blighted, mistake,” the voice continued, sounding almost amused.

A black line split the heart of the still wildly searching ‘eye’—which collapsed in a mind-numbing shriek—transforming into a fissure of fracturing nihility that stabbed down towards them—

“It didn’t die?” Cao Liang hissed.

“Seemingly not,” Meng Tan agreed grimly, as Fang Ren cut upwards at the rapidly expanding fissure with his glaive—

“I am… One with the… World,” Meng Yang gasped as Meng Li Xiaomei and Yun Quan pulled her back up.

Fang Ren’s blow, reinforced by the ancestral strength Meng Yang was calling upon, met the black line in a flash of black and white.

The golden qi and the ancestral grove around them distorted, then scattered into a hazy nova of yang qi and parasol tree-themed ephemera.

“You should have accepted your glorious death, child,” the voice sounded… not mocking, but almost disappointed, as his senior brother staggered back, his face pale. “Now, the price you will pay”—the ancestral accumulation of the school recoiled. The fissure distorted, its shape twisting in a profoundly unnatural way, as if it were not all quite in the same reality, before fracturing into six distinct limb-like holes in reality, which grasped for them, like a dreadful hand—“will be much, much—”

Abruptly, everything turned white. A vast, bright swirling sea formed of the natural energies of the world had arrived. Ephemeral depictions of a myriad mythical beasts danced around its edges, before dispersing back into the mists from which they were formed. The swamp, the hall, his seniors, all of them vanished. Obscured amidst that swirling sea of white on white. Only the now-distorting shadow-like fissures, the remnants of the formation and the scattering ‘eye’ of yang qi lingered, cast in strange, inverted and iridescent hues—

“Thank goodness,” The words were little more than a whisper as they slipped into his mind. “Sorry I took so long…”

“T-Teacher…” was all he managed to rasp in relief, as the hall slowly slid back into focus around him.

The rippling whiteness flowing inwards, coalescing as it did, into six, golden-haired, veiled young women, garbed in flowing red gowns emblazoned with rainbow-coloured flames and clouds. Each one held a sleek, two-handed, reddish-black wooden sword, carved with patterns of trefoil leaves and phoenix feathers, which they were using to pin down the fissures—

“Really…?” the ‘voice’ sounded almost bored, in spite of the way the six fissures were distorting and starting to break apart before their eyes. “Is that all you—?”

A serenely beautiful, white-haired woman with the appearance of an older sister to those already there, dressed in a red gown and a golden stole, appeared like a celestial fairy in the middle of the six swords, and landed lightly on the muddy ground—

“The World is With Me—” she murmured, fluidly removing a wooden hairpin in the shape of a parasol flower out of her hair. “—I am One with the World.”

The hairpin swiftly transformed into a long-bladed glaive with a parasol-wood blade that bled white petals from its edge as she took just a half step back and cut upwards with it—

Her blow met another shadowy appendage-like fissure as it arrived to bisect her, its path until then obscured by the searing haze—

Reality groaned and shrieked. A haunting, horrible sound akin to nails scratching across glass. Dimly, he was aware of a further layer of the vast, ancient wards built through the heart of the school’s superstructure triggering, transforming the middle-distance into a slowly shifting galaxy of archaic symbol-like constellations.

Meng Fu staggered back as the ‘fissure’ recoiled, then all seven bled together, transforming amid the fading spatial ripples, and the still-flowing veil of white energy turned into something between a squid and a spider crab akin to the horrific shadow he had fled from earlier, the heart of it twisting to become a maw where its face might have been—

The six figures behind the swords wavered, then scattered into multi-coloured parasol flowers.

He tried to scream, but even in his head, words were impossible as it focused on him.

It called to him, with a terrible, enchanting, alluring voice that promised salvation… atonement for this disaster, if he would but… accept the inevitability and the honour in his end—

“You are trying my patience,” Meng Fu’s tone was harsh and cold as she pointed the glaive at the thing and whatever it had just done faded away. “Get out, before I—”

“You… can you do it?” the creature interrupted her, sounding… curious, more than anything else, as it pulled itself up to its full height, which was easily three times her own. “Do you even know words with which to entreat me?”

Meng Fu didn’t reply, merely tilted her head to the side slightly as she stared up at it.

Abruptly, the swirling parasol blossoms and molten-white energy shifted, reforming into four more veiled young women, each one once again holding a two-handed sword. This time, however, they held the blades with their hands, the cross-pieces almost touching their slightly bowed foreheads—

“Great—Vivid—Unsurpassed—Supreme—”

The four spoke in unison, echoing the words his seniors had used earlier. This time, there was no great mandala, no resonance with the ancestral power of the sect, and yet, he couldn’t help but feel that there was something tangibly… more about them.

“Words that are your own?” the creature asked with an almost tired, if rather mocking, sigh, reaching out for the four with its reformed limbs—

“Words, huh…” Meng Fu murmured, abruptly spreading her arms, the glaive returning to her hair as an ornament.

“Svaha…”

It was barely a whisper, yet somehow the word she spoke hung in the air, like a soulful chime of a temple bell.

The creature staggered back, its form losing all sense of cohesion between one moment and the next, scattering into vision scarring shadows that bled strange, empty flames, before they too vanished. In fact, everything the aura of the ‘word’ touched, seemed to change subtly.

The swirling mists became less oppressive.

The clouds above lost something of their eerie gloom.

The yang oppression of the swamp no longer devouring and greedy.

“Not bad…”

His elation vanished, washed away as if it never was, as the dreadful old man, the ‘old scholar’ who had nearly killed them all, stepped out of the mists, his hands clasped behind his back.

“Not bad at all,” the old man chuckled, looking around at the rapidly reappearing hall with undisguised interest.

“An auspicious ending,” the old scholar mused, his gaze running over the central pillars for the transfer hall, now broken and warped, as they emerged from the chaos, before turning back to her. “Not bad at all…”

“Old Watcher,” Meng Fu’s tone turned guarded, “are you trying to make an enemy out of me?”

“You are certainly your mother’s greatest achievement,” the old man sighed, which wasn’t really an answer to her question, at least not one that made sense to him. “I trust you will not make a… mistake here.”

“A… mistake?” Meng Fu repeated, her tone turning pensive.

“Mmm…” the Old Scholar nodded, as if what he was saying was somehow very obvious.

Meng Fu stared at him for a long moment, then sighed as well.

“I am not sure if I should be insulted or pleased at your praise,” his teacher replied, her focus never leaving the old man, as the shift in their surroundings finally reached him.

“Consider that my gift to you,” the old scholar chuckled, his form rapidly turning translucent, merging with the mists into a space that almost looked like it was a mountainous river valley, rather than the hellish swamp they had just left. “An acknowledgement of how you have grown over these years.”

“Haa…” rather than reply, his teacher just sighed, as if that wasn’t quite the answer she had wanted.

“Good Luck, Little Chick.”

“…”

They stood there in silence amidst the ruins. The only sound was that of distant, falling masonry and the ‘plink’ of cooling rock, staring at the point where the old scholar had just been standing.

His teacher recovered first, looking around for a long moment, then reaching out with her hand. She stared at it for several seconds, before glancing up at the ceiling and sighing deeply.

“What a day,” Meng Tan finally muttered, running a hand through his pale hair.

“It is fortunate the outer wards held,” Meng Yang, her face still pale and drawn, agreed, as they took in the devastation that had been unleashed in the heart of their sect.

“Indeed,” Cao Liang agreed with a deep sigh, scuffing his foot in the mud, which was still there, along with rocks, a few ruined buildings… and a lot of corpses.

The dead lay everywhere.

Even though he was still unable to move, he could see the dead, everywhere.

“—How wretched. Not even young women were spared,” Lian Erbei’s voice echoed in his ears, sounding haunted as his gaze found the nearest—

They were a group of young women, not even that really, as Lian Erbei had observed. Teenagers, lying like discarded dolls, their eyes blank and uncomprehending at how their path had been cut short. Their only ‘crime’ in the eyes of a cruel and uncaring heaven that they were unlucky enough to be going about their daily business a few moments before… and for it, their souls were totally smashed, beyond any real hope of reincarnation.

“What even was that, anyway?” Meng Yang asked gloomily, as she took it all in.

“Which one?” Meng Tan asked, as Meng Li Xiaomei knelt down beside him and pulled out a medicine box.

“Fair,” Meng Yang sighed, rubbing her temples. “The—”

With a start, he realised Meng Fu was standing beside him, holding Meng Li Xiaomei’s hand, preventing her from taking his pulse.

“Teacher,” all four murmured, saluting her.

“T-teacher,” he echoed silently, as Lian Erbei also whispered ‘Honoured Ancestor’.

“Your arrival has saved the school,” Meng Yang added softly, giving her a much more formal salute that was echoed by Meng Li Xiaomei.

“Not for the first time,” Meng Fu replied, with more of her usual dry manner, wiping a trickle of blood from her nose as she ushered Meng Li Xiaomei to the side and knelt down beside him. “Did any of you touch him?” she asked, giving him a pensive look over.

“I hauled him over here,” Meng Tan replied, “And Liang helped a bit of the way. Do you recognise the poison? It seems somewhat familiar, but I didn’t dare probe, just kept it from spreading as best I could.”

“To think there was something like this hidden away in those valleys, even after all this time,” Meng Fu stated with an unhappy sigh, sitting back and staring into nothing for a long moment.

“What is it?” Cao Liang asked, uneasily, moving over to stand beside Meng Li Xiaomei.

“Superficially… well, actually, I guess, it’s a form of Yang Poison,” Meng Fu replied with a faint grimace. “An ‘Enforced’ Path, if you want a technical term for it, though it would be simpler to just call it a ‘curse’.”

“A Yang Curse?” Meng Li Xiaomei’s expression turned ugly.

“Yes,” Meng Fu confirmed, as she finally put a hand to his neck to take his pulse.

“Can… you heal him?” Meng Yang asked after several seconds.

“Yes,” Meng Fu sighed. “Him and Erbei.”

“Erbei?” Meng Yang repeated, surprised.

“Indeed,” Meng Fu nodded, pulling out a small doll made of white stone. “Sorry about this, Ji,” she muttered and placed it on his chest—

His meridians abruptly turned into fissures of fire. The sensation persisted for almost thirty agonizing seconds, then, to his surprise and immense relief, he felt the normal faculties of his Dao Soul return, albeit much more limited by the ruined state of his body and his crippled foundation.

“Can you speak?” Meng Fu asked him, withdrawing her hand from his neck.

“Y-yes,” he managed to rasp, finding that he could with some effort, properly project his voice out of his ruined body once more.

“Good, that’s something,” his teacher murmured.

“Um, what… was that, anyway?” Meng Yang asked at last, glancing over at where the spider-squid thing had vanished.

“Something from beyond the realm wall,” Meng Tan replied, his expression turning dark.

“An Outsider?” Meng Li Xiaomei’s expression also twisted with disgust.

“—It has a commonality with them, but it isn’t a thing from beyond the realm wall,” Meng Fu clarified, following their gazes to that location. “I suppose it’s a minion, or maybe a clone or facet of that old fellow.”

“He… attacked us,” he added. “Was talking about an ‘honourable death’.”

The whole experience felt like a nightmare at this point.

“Yep, sounds about right,” his teacher nodded. “That is one way to deal with the curse. Perhaps the simplest and most effective.”

“What was something like that doing in Yin Eclipse?” Fang Ren asked her, frowning.

“—It somehow survived a direct hit from the grand formation,” Yun Quan muttered.

“Existing,” Meng Fu grunted, clearly not that keen to talk about it. “The less you think about that old fellow and anything he said, the better. It really would have been better if you hadn’t sent those swords after it, though.”

“A-apologies, Imperial Ancestor…”

Shifting his head, he saw that Meng Kan Wen, one of the Dao Ascendant Elders who was part of the hall protector group, was standing nearby, bowing apologetically.

“H-hadn’t?” Cao Liang asked, looking around at the devastation with palpable scepticism.

“Teacher,” Fang Ren protested. “Without the formation your mother—err… her August, Saintly Majesty, the Third Princess—bestowed, we could not have repelled that horrific thing—”

“Or defended this gateway until you got here!” Cao Liang agreed unhappily.

“—You cannot fault Elder Wen and the others,” Yun Quan added hurriedly.

Though his own memory of that was very patchy, given how he had arrived, he could only agree wholeheartedly. Without the intervention of Kan Wen and the other eleven Dao Ascension Guardians specially trained to use that formation, he was pretty sure they would be in deep, deep trouble right now.

The central transfer hall was the main gate and permanent point of contact with the Meng Clan’s core worlds. In the worst-case outcome, this place might have been totally destroyed, and them with it, before his teacher got here, doing irreparable damage to the vitality and lineage of the Seven Sovereigns.

“Aiii…” Meng Fu looked at them in turn, and then just sighed, shaking her head. “I suppose we can only hope it doesn’t provoke something utterly ungodly,” she muttered. “Though given how things are going…”

“There is… something worse than that?” he managed to ask, his own voice sounding shaky in his ears.

“In Yin Eclipse?” Meng Fu snorted. “Yes, there are worse things than that old fellow. Much, much worse…”

She trailed off, staring at the place where the ‘rift’ had been, looking as vexed as he had ever seen her.

“Erm… Teacher?” Yun Quan spoke up a touch hesitantly, after they had stood there for almost a minute, listening to the patter of falling masonry and the distant shouts of those hurrying over to help with the aftermath.

“Yes?” Meng Fu replied, turning to him.

“Did that— he… erm… really call you little—?” Yun Quan started to ask.

“Let me be perfectly clear,” Meng Fu gave his senior brother a sideways look that was very cool. “If any of you ever bring that up ever again, I will see to it that you spend the rest of eternity as outer disciples feeding spirit fowl. With cultivations to match your status and life enough to reflect on it.”

He silently praised his senior martial brother for being brazen enough, or perhaps clueless enough, to actually ask about that right here and now, though it was very ‘him’.

“Now, Little Ji…”

“Ah…” he flinched, as she turned her attention back to him.

Now that the immediate threat seemed over, the fact that he had survived, even if it was with a crippled foundation and a broken body, he supposed that the accounting would have to begin.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Meng Fu sighed, shaking her head. “You are alive.”

“That’s debatable,” Fang Ren remarked drily, giving Yun Quan a cheeky elbow to the side. “I’ve seen healthier corpses.”

“Haa… Y-yes,” he managed to reply.

Meng Fu shifted, taking in the death and destruction all around them for several long seconds, then sighed again and turned back to him.

“...Would you mind explaining to me what exactly has happened to cause all this?”

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~ JUN ARAI – INTO THE CLOUD FOREST ~

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It was a stupid rhyme, but it did help to fill up the eerie absence of normal forest noises as they walked on through the dripping greenery. When that got boring, they shifted to other silly songs, like ‘Three Monkeys in a Mulberry Tree’ and ‘Seven Young Masters came to Tea’, trading verses until at last, after about a mile or so, they arrived at the base of a water-eroded, overhanging cliff with a shallow, slow-moving river flowing beneath it.

The compass, rather ‘helpfully’, pointed straight across and into the cliff.

“I don’t feel like trying to go straight up there,” Sana remarked, dumping the puppet down by the shore and stretching. “And I see that the talismans hit here as well…”

“Yeah,” she agreed, eyeing the verdant yet aggressively flowerless water vegetation and then the awkwardly inclined face rising above them as her sister took a deep drink from her water jar, before passing it to her.

Savouring the mouthful of lukewarm water, she considered their options, such as they were.

“I guess I’ll climb a tree to get a view of the land, then we go left”—she pointed along the riverbank—“until we see somewhere we can ascend?”

“A plan is a plan,” Sana grunted, splashing some river water on her face.

Leaving her sister, who still seemed rather jaded by circumstances to her thoughts, she picked out a viable looking tree and, pulling out some of the rope, walked over to it and looped it around the trunk. The hardest part was getting to the first branches, really, which somewhat surprised her, because she had thought she had recovered fairly well from the descent.

The fact that her shoulders and thighs felt noticeably sore by the time she reached the canopy didn’t bode well for any further, serious rock climbing, she reflected grimly, wiping water from her eyes as she affixed the rope as a safety line.

The canopy layer was almost like a different world. Cloying mist obscured everything at this height. She could barely hear herself think, such was the noise of the rain on leaves and the rustle of branches. Every surface was slick beneath her hands and feet, dripping with moss, ferns and flowerless epiphytes. Treacherous rulers of their little kingdoms, nestled between hidden chasms.

After carefully checking what she was using for handholds—because falling out of trees sucked—she started to explore the upper canopy, looking for a route higher. It helped a lot that the plants up here were just plants. Trying to climb like a monkey in trees like these when they were garlanded with toxic creepers and water ferns, with the ever-present threat of algru on every branch, or of being eyeballed by some sneaky orchid was beyond miserable.

What she also noticed, as she went higher, was that the qi from the scattered talismans was… clearer up here as well. It wasn’t to the point of being dangerous, but she could literally taste the diffusing yang qi in the damp air—a sharpness that left her feeling slightly on edge.

-Does that mean that what we were seeing on the ground is just scatter?

Thinking it over, as she carefully sought a route to the emergent layer above, that made sense. Those pursuing Juni and the rest probably targeted them from the ridge they had just crossed. The unnerving thing was the sheer scale of it—

She grabbed a branch, and it gave beneath her grip, dragging a small avalanche of plants towards the forest floor with it, the ferns above dislodging a cascade of water in the process.

“Oh, come on,” she muttered angrily to herself, steadying herself and staring into the misty chasm in front of her. “Stupid, stupid…”

Shaking her head, she was about to pull herself up onto a different, hopefully less treacherous branch, when another, slightly disturbing thought occurred to her: what if the qi here’s actually affecting me somewhat?

The local qi was weird, but so far had seemed fairly aloof in how it interacted with them. The talisman qi, however… Yang qi poisoning did make you jittery, and prone to distraction in its early stages.

Focusing on her mantra, she let it do its thing; however, nothing really changed.

-Or is it like sis, and this is a lingering effect of…?

“Forty metres up in a tree is not the place for this,” she declared.

Taking a deep breath, she sat there for several seconds, focusing on stilling her mind and looking around.

“Hey! Sis! You Okay?”

Sana’s voice drifted up from below.

Exhaling again, she looked down. In spite of the mist, she could just make out her sister, standing below amidst the scatter of fallen greenery, shading her hands.

“Yeah, it’s just a stupid tree!” she called back, before adding under her breath, “Just a stupid tree…”

Puffing out her cheeks, she picked another branch—which was thankfully sound—and started climbing again.

Despite the slip—and the stupid thoughts—she had actually picked her tree pretty well, so after a few minutes further careful clambering, she reached its crown without further incident.

Unfortunately, the low cloud was still thick enough that she could sweep her hand through it and watch it visibly deform. Still, having gone to the effort to get this far, she pulled herself up the final few feet, and feeling rather like a monkey, braced herself on a swaying branch and pushed her head out to look around.

-As expected, all but the nearest treetops are obscured, she mused, eyeing the hazy shadows amidst the swirling low cloud and drifting rain. That said…

Doing her best to push the discomforting feeling that she was inhaling cold steam, she let her vision just focus on one part of the treetops across from her, and found that, just as she had thought a moment before, something weird was going on with the cloud.

There was a bizarre kind of reverse luminescence about it, but only in places she didn’t quite look at. Not only did it thoroughly mess with her perception of depth, she quickly realised, but it also seemed to draw in the ambience of the surroundings in disconcerting ways.

Curious, she lightly shifted her weight on her branch, making it sway against the natural movement of the treetop, watching pensively as the shadows they cast blurred with a faintly reddish-blue tint that lingered just a fraction longer than felt natural after she looked away.

“Well, that’s not at all concerning,” she remarked, out loud, listening to how the foliage effortlessly ate up the sound of her voice. She couldn’t pick out any discordance or strange echoing though.

-That said, what can I do about it, I guess it’s just another weird thing, she reflected. I should just be thankful the cloud is visibly ebbing and flowing.

Indeed, the blanket of depth-deceiving white gloom around her was slowly shifting, swirling in near invisible currents through the sheets of rain.

Shifting her position on the branch, so she had a better, if somewhat less stable vantage point of where the cliff should be, she only had to wait another cold, damp minute before the clouds shifted enough and she got a proper view of the mid-portion of the cliff rising above them.

“…”

A coruscating, inverted gyre of reddish gold… lightning—that was all she could think to compare it to as she pondered what she was actually seeing—twisted slowly on the heights of the cliff.

Whether it was one bolt or a dozen also defied her observation, because… well, the longer she stared at it, the less like a conventional afterimage it seemed. It kept fading in and out of focus and the bizarre, inverse nature of it was flat out disorientating if she tried to engage with it directly.

Her first thought was that it was a talisman residue, if only because it also seemed to be the source of the strange reddish blue ‘afterimage’ distorting the depth of the foliage around her.

It took her several eye-watering attempts, frequently frustrated by the ever-shifting cloud, of staring into the heart of the chaos to work out what it was even hitting, or originating from, which turned out to be a rather warped tree, wreathed in…

-Shadows?

Trying not to squint at it, because that did not help, she found herself tilting her head a bit, trying to isolate some of the shapes, because the longer she stared at it, the more it felt like…

What she thought she had just seen slipped away like fog, leaving her only with spots in her vision until after a few seconds she had to look away—

-Was that a monkey?

“Yo,”

She nearly fell out of the tree as Sana unexpectedly appeared on the branch below her.

For a moment, she found herself wondering if she was hallucinating, somehow, having stared at the strange lightning-like thing for too long—

“It doesn’t take that long to climb a tree,” Sana muttered, giving her a slightly accusatory look. “I was worried.”

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“…”

She opened her mouth to remind her sister that with both of them up a tree, there was nobody on the ground, in case something happened while she was climbing, then shut it again and swallowed her words.

“Well, now that you’re here”—instead, she pointed up at the distortion in the misty cloud swirling up the cliff face above them—“what do you make of that?”

“Is it… drawing the cloud with it?” Frowning, Sana tilted her head to the side as she stared up into the drifting mists. “Weird… Could it be some kind of talisman residue?”

“I thought that,” she agreed, gnawing at her lip. “But it feels kind of—”

She was about to say ‘off’, when something else caught her eye about it—not one shadow, but two, meeting at the tree… and then it was gone, lost in the blurry haze.

“—It’s somehow there, yet not, and yet also… able to avoid—Ohhh…” her sister trailed off rubbing her eyes hard. “That’s really unpleasant.”

“It is,” she agreed, biting her lip as she tried to re-find what she thought she had glimpsed, while striving to ignore the rapidly growing and deeply unpleasant feeling that she had grit under her eyelids.

“—Huh.” Sana cut in, squinting up at the cliff again. “Look, in the middle of the bolt—where it’s rising out of that rather warped tree.”

Even as Sana spoke, she caught the same thing, a shadow within the shadows, slowly scattering, arms outstretched as it, she, fell.

“J-Juni?”

Her mind blanked for a moment, as she stared at the ghostly, falling figure, then she was gone, blurring back into the shifting effervescence and the mists still drifting inwards.

Fighting down a terrible, instinctual surge of panic at the thought she might be witnessing the final moments of her friend, she took a deep breath to collect herself—

“Is that a…? Wait a moment,” Beside her, Sana was poking at her scrip while squinting up at the tree.

“Did you also…?” she turned to her sister, who was now staring at the scrip with deep frown. “What are you doing?”

“—Did you stare into the light too long?” Sana asked, raising her eyebrows. “I am trying to freeze some of that distortion… Ah, look! There!”

Before she could bite back at what Sana had just said, her sister poked the scrip and a shimmering image slowly appeared between them… focused on a monkey of all things, slowly blurring out of a bolt of reddish-gold lightning, its hand reaching down.

It was still blurry, but the hunched figure amidst the flurry of lightning bolts had a comparable size and frame to that of the Ochre monkeys.

“Huh,” Sana stared dully as a flailing half-shadow, just about resembling Juni in figure, outlined faintly with the qi signature of the skitterleap talisman, was grasped by the monkey.

-So I didn’t hallucinate that.

She stared blankly at the image as it continued to stabilize further.

-Don’t tell me that is somehow Juni, and a… monkey? Or a lightning shaped monkey?

“…”

-Or a monkey getting hit by lightning… while holding Juni?

“—Trembling orchids?”

“—Eh?” she turned back to her sister, who had just poked her in the side, hard.

“We picked up some Trembling Shadow Orchids, didn’t we?” Sana asked, her expression concerned. “Are you sure you are okay, sis you look a bit pale?”

“I… yes, I am fine,” she muttered, trying again to push away the disturbing thoughts that were bleeding into her mind about what they were—might be—looking at.

-It just looks like a shadow of Juni falling off a cliff…

-They are all fine. she informed herself firmly. “We do, yes, why?”

“…”

Sana gave her such a look, until she realised the question was embarrassingly obvious.

-Uggh, I should have thought of that, she sighed, producing a small pot that held the tiny orchid from the small pouch on her belt. It was one of a handful such herbs that had miraculously survived the drop off the cliff.

Trembling Orchids had a few uses, but the primary one was as a formation focus that was incredibly sensitive to auspicious changes in spatial qi. The more inauspicious, the more they shook.

She exhaled, quietly relieved, as the small, teal-flowered orchid swayed a little, but largely showed no signs of excessive agitation.

“So-so,” Sana mused, eyeing the little plant with a pensive expression. “Then…”

They both blinked as the orchid-flowers slowly started to lean towards the lightning.

“It’s… auspicious?” she exclaimed, not quite believing it.

Sana just gave her a helpless shrug—

*Chime*

They both started as Sana’s scrip emitted a faint tone.

“What is it?” she asked as Sana stared at whatever it was telling her.

“The capture formation is configured to allow image matching,” Sana informed her a little archly. “From when we were cataloguing herbs last night, before all this…?”

“Ah,” she nodded.

-Uggh, come on, pull yourself together, Arai, she grumbled mentally, resisting the urge to rub her eyes. “So, what did it match?”

“A monkey,” Sana replied drily, as a second image flickered into being between them. “And then some…”

The image itself was familiar—Misty Jasmine Inn, with the Iron Hide monkeys standing next to the entrance to the shrine courtyard.

“You captured an image of them?” she blinked.

“I mean, it’s not often you meet them,” her sister replied giving her a sideways look that she opted to ignore.

“True,” she conceded. “So?”

“The um…” Sana hesitated, then the image shifted, enlarging itself—

“—The one in red ochre,” she murmured, even as Sana pointed and focused on him, with his fur daubed painted with lightning bolt and cloud-like designs.

A moment later, a third image, a composite of that monkey and the spectral monkey reaching down to grasp Juni by the arm overlaid themselves, revealing the two to be a near-perfect match. More surprisingly, a moment later, dozens of other ‘matches’ flickered up as the lightning patterns on the monkey’s fur overlaid with frozen images of the distortions bleeding out from the frozen pair. It also matched the falling shadow to Juni a moment later.

“All this… was caused by that monkey?” she asked at last, gazing around at the reddish-blue shadows and the twisted distortions on the cliff.

While they had been conversing, the misty cloud itself had flowed back to partially obscure the actual ‘bolt’, if that was indeed what it was, but the after-effects of it were still mostly visible.

“This must have caused an utterly inauspicious ruckus,” Sana mused. “And this is their territory… I think?”

“It should be?” she hazarded, though the question of what construed a monkey-band like the Iron-hides’ ‘territory’ was rather fluid.

“If that was Juni, what about the others?” Sana asked, more quietly.

“There doesn’t seem to be any evidence of them in that image, and the skitterleap talisman was still registering three signatures with the compass,” she mused, just relieved that this seemed to point, however inexplicably, to Juni at least having run into one of the monkeys. “The bolt looked like it arced up to the cliff top; it could be she slipped racing up the edge?”

“So, I guess we do get to climb up there after all,” Sana sighed, squinting up through the mists and the drifting rain at the sheer rockface above them.

“Climbing, hyo,” she agreed with a resigned groan of her own, running her hands through her matted hair.

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

~ HAN SHU – ANCIENT CAVERNS ~

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

Desperately trying not to dwell on the groaning rock above them or get pulled off his path by the uneven ripples of distant displacement affecting the chest deep water they were wading through, Han Shu focused on where Juni and Ling were forging a path ahead of him, through the eerily luminescent water of the flooded cavern system.

“More algru ahead,” Juni, who was currently in the lead, signed abruptly, her motions large and obvious, though Ling also relayed the instruction on to him in case he hadn’t caught it.

Hearing anything was impossible currently. The combination of natural echoes, chaotically lapping water and the perpetual sounds of warping rock all around them were a constant onslaught against the senses.

Without his mantra, he doubted he—or any of them actually—would be able to endure this place for as long as they had.

“Passable?” he signed back to them.

“No,” both Juni and Ling replied at once.

Exhaling, he braced against the nearest wall as the pair slowly waded the short distance back to him.

“This is a nightmare,” Ling, who was the shortest amongst them, signed unhappily. “I am practically swimming here.”

“It isn’t ideal,” Juni agreed apologetically, pulling up the crude map her scrip was recording for them as they went. “I guess we go back to the previous cavern and look on the left side?”

“The ruins?” Ling’s pale face scrunched up in distaste.

“How bad is it?” he asked, peering past them into the swirling, almost mistily luminescent passage ahead of them.

“Whatever is going on up there is—” Juni stopped signing as a wave of wrongness bled through their surroundings, leaving him clammy and provoking a new surge of shimmering luminescence in the waters around them for several seconds. Gritting his teeth, he braced—

The whole cavern jumped, the water around them warping such that it almost swept Ling off her feet entirely, before Juni grabbed her.

Aftershocks rippled through their surroundings, accompanied by the unnerving splashes of what he had to assume were stalactites falling off the cavern roof ahead of them.

“That was bad,” he signed, helping Ling and Juni find their footing.

“Yes,” Juni agreed, her own expression as strained as his probably was.

“Fungi, algru, rockfall, drowning,” Ling unhappily signed off a list of hazards they had had narrow brushes with in the last… however long it had been.

“—Cave centipede…” Juni signed urgently.

Both of them turned to look at her, before realising she wasn’t adding to Ling’s list, but pointing off in the direction they had just retreated from. The dog-sized critter, missing quite a few of its disturbingly long legs, was slowly hauling its way along the far wall, trying to stay above the choppy water, yet bleeding ichor into the water as it went. Before they could retreat further, back the way they came, it finally reached the edge of the submerged, fluorescing algru—

He winced as the ubiquitous plant bloomed frenetically up the wall, snaring most of the leggy monstrosity’s left side. The centipede thrashed, trying to lunge towards them, and escape the ambushing threat, but it was no use. Tendrils bit deep into its carapace, seeking out the injuries already crippling it, and within moments its movement turned chaotic and uncoordinated.

“—That bad,” Juni added wryly, in reply to his initial query as they slowly edged backwards while watching the centipede’s broken body twitch in the shimmering water, as the algru mat finished entrapping it—

Abruptly, Lin Ling grabbed both him and Juni by the arm, and frantically pulled them back more hurriedly through the turbulent water.

As she dragged them both, he caught a glimpse of a faint shadow bleeding slowly across the wet rock beside them, the surface flaking in places. A heartbeat later, thousands of tendrils unfurled from the rapidly expanding bloom, flowing across the walls in a wave of vision-gouging luminescence—

Juni grasped his hand, even as he fought to recover his ruined vision.

Gratefully, he let her guide both of them back in rapid retreat through the water, away from the algru bloom, until at last he could make out more than blurry shapes once again.

Even then, they still kept moving until at last they were back at the entrance to the previous sprawling cavern.

“That was… close,” he gasped, focusing on his mantra to help with his recovery, and also to try and regain some of his lost dark vision, finding as he did so that they were back at the entrance to the previous, sprawling, flooded cavern.

“Fate-thrashed algru,” Juni spat, slapping a hand against the water with uncharacteristic anger, before signing, “Well spotted, Ling.”

A pale-faced Lin Ling just nodded as she adjusted the piece of cloth she was using to hold her hair back so it was more tightly affixed.

“You okay?” Juni added, turning to him.

“Yes, I—” he barely managed to give her an affirmative sign before another sound-devouring tremor shook their surroundings.

“Oh for…” Determined not to feel like a complete passenger, he grabbed Juni and Lin Ling by the arms as the water around them surged, accompanied by the disturbingly clear and crisp sound of cracking rock echoing through the caverns—

They were washed into the cavern wall hard enough to leave all of them gasping and cursing. Flailing for any kind of grip, he raked his hand blindly along the wall until his fingers found a fissure. Leveraging ‘Iron’, ‘Worldly’ and ‘Gift’, and feeding the pain in his arm back into his mantra to support himself, he barely managed to keep the handhold against the recoiling swell of the water.

“Thanks…” Ling gasped, also finding a handhold a moment later—

Before he could reply though, luminescence once again flooded into their surroundings, as the algru bloom rolled along the wall, like an expanding forest of tiny fern-like fronds. His luss cloth clothing saved him from losing all the skin on his arm, but it still found openings at his wrist, sending a wave of hot, itchy pain along the inside of his arm.

‘Bright mind and Iron flesh—’ his attempt at using his long-form mantra faltered as he stupidly had to think about how best to utilize ‘Beginning’ for just a fraction too long.

Still, it gave him enough to repel some of the poisonous qi the algru was sending into his arm. For once, it helped that his spirit root had something of a Yang Water affinity, because the yang strength within the algru’s invasive qi was unable to gain purchase in his arm meridians.

{Li Changye’s Dream Flare}

*Fsssssssak—!*

A nova of blueish-purple yin fire from the talisman Juni had just used washed back along the wall, enveloping them and forcing the algru to retreat somewhat.

“How is your skitterleap talisman?” Ling mouthed hopefully to him, rubbing her neck and hand where a nasty mark was also spreading.

Focusing on the bound talisman, he found to his frustration that it was still… not fully recovered from the heavy use it had seen earlier. At the very least, his would take minutes more… probably, to become even remotely useful.

“Still replenishing,” he mouthed back, her grimace conveying to him all he needed to know about the likely similar state of hers.

“Same,” Juni, who was channelling into the talisman barrier, somehow managing to juggle a supporting spirit jade and keep her footing at the same time, added.

“I’d ask how we—” Lin Ling flinched as a massive slab of the roof on the far side of the chaotically illuminated cavern sheered away from the fissure ceiling and crumbled down into the water.

This time, they saw the wave coming, allowing them to duck beneath the water as the waves surged across the cavern, rolling over fallen rocks and breaking against stalagmites and around larger outcroppings.

“What Nameless going on up top?” Lin Ling signed crudely as they clung on for dear life amidst the now rapidly diminishing field of Juni’s talisman.

“Clearly, spirit herbs not happy,” Juni mouthed back grimly, her words just visible through the churning water.

Thinking back to the numbers they had seen as they fled their pursuers, he felt that was, if anything, an understatement. There had been hundreds, if not thousands, of awakened spirt herbs in that place. Not to mention, the kind of realm or treasures required to sustain this kind of devastation up here was… he didn’t even know where to start with that…

-Gah! Don’t get distracted! Cursing his momentary lapse in focus as the waters tried to wrest him away from the cavern wall, he fed all those conflicting emotions to his mantra, focusing on ‘Iron’ this time, to try and share some of the support to Juni and Ling via ‘Worldly’ and ‘Gift’.

Both looked to him in surprise as the stress being placed on their qi use lessened somewhat. Juni’s barrier still continued to shrink, but noticeably slower.

Another slab crashed down into the flooded cavern.

“Water level up!” Lin Ling signed at them both rather urgently.

Looking around, he realised she was right. The displacement was increasing the depth of the water around them. It was also likely that waters from elsewhere were being forced into this cavern.

Concerningly, the momentum of the algru bloom wasn’t lessening either. If anything, it was growing, even as they tried to resist being swept into the wall by the surging waters. He could now make out shimmering patches of waving fronds emerging across the murky silt of the submerged cavern floor.

“Risk swim?” he signed to Juni, who just grimaced, as she continued to struggle with maintaining her talisman.

“Throw?” Lin Ling managed to sign, before producing one of the teleport anchor arrows… which he had, to his embarrassment, forgotten they still had several of.

“…”

Juni stared at the arrow, then at their very unfriendly surroundings, then nodded grimly.

“Wait…” he signed to Lin Ling, his own mind racing now.

Teleporting blind down here was a bad idea, especially in this kind of chaos. Even with those arrows, which were a very simple area displacement and worked purely by line of sight, there were all sorts of things that could go wrong.

Focusing more forcefully on ‘Iron’, to give himself some stability, he quickly went through the talismans his family had given him before heading off and was relieved to find he did have the one he needed.

Over the years, the Han family had developed several talismans that their inherited mantra could support, and one was a fairly potent personal feng shui compass and divination talisman. A sort of stripped-down version of the one guards used in their armour, if he understood its technical elements right. The main reason he had not used it up until now, was… mostly because of the pace of their flight, he supposed, then there had been little point in the Jasmine Gate. Down here, where everything was a danger, it was also hard to tune out the ‘background’ signature.

Still, at this point there was no point in holding it in reserve. Especially as it would still be useful for tossing arrows, even if he had to mute most of the ‘danger awareness’. Focusing on ‘Beginning’ he palmed the talisman and slid it inside his robe, placing it over his heart. Immediately, all sorts of ‘bad’ vibes intruded into his awareness, which he promptly fed back into his mantra, aware that Lin Ling was giving him a very ‘well, get on with whatever it is!’ glare.

“Pass arrow,” he hurriedly signed to her.

She stared at him for a moment, then passed it over and took out an anchor talisman jade and started to focus on that instead.

Doing his best to recall where Juni’s map had had their previous path through the cavern, he waited for a brief lull in the surging waves, then stood up and, focusing on the divination talisman with ‘Worldly’ and ‘Gift’, hurled the arrow into the gloomy cavern, aiming for the nearest of the large fallen slabs—

A moment later, Ling completed the formation for the anchor talisman, and once Juni had nodded, triggered the teleport.

The waters around them distorted, colours bleeding in very unnerving ways, accompanied by his divination talisman giving him all sorts of unpleasant… intuitions. For a split second, it felt like the bottom had fallen out of his stomach, then all three of them appeared, within a large sphere of scattering water and swirling field of yin fire on a slick, sloping rock surface—

Throwing out his hand, he grasped at the wet rock and managed to gain a foothold—

Snarling, Juni fed what he swore was almost half a cube of spirit stones to her talisman, as almost in the same instant, algru exploded out of the water, spreading like a luminescent blaze across the rock around them.

For several agonizing, eye-searing seconds, the fire and the toxic plant warred, then the algru’s unnerving vitality faltered, the emergent bloom turning to drifting ash—

His divination talisman suddenly screamed at him, warning him in no uncertain terms that the place they were in had just become very, very inauspicious.

Hoping that the secondary intuition to head over the slab to their left was not playing him false, he drew on his mantra and, grabbing the surprised Ling and Juni, practically jumped away from where they had just landed—

He had barely carried them clear, when the drifting ash of the algru shimmered an eerie greenish-yellow, then exploded back into life with a speed and strength he had never before witnessed.

It flowed across the rock like a sea of golden-green fronds, visibly consuming the rock surface as it went.

“Motherless…” Juni’s mouthed curse echoed his own as they skidded across the slab, barely avoiding pitching into the water through their combined effort to slow their travel.

Lin Ling almost stabbed him with the arrow she thrust at him, before scrabbling with the anchor talisman once more.

This time, he had a bit of a better view of the cavern, enabling him to aim the arrow more productively towards some raised ground between them and the side of the cavern where the ruins were.

“Ready?” Ling signed.

Both of them nodded—

Their surroundings wavered and then they landed in shallow, if still choppy, knee-deep water. Immediately, the algru bloom around them reacted, fronds trying to snare at their legs as they started to wade towards the nearest of the partly submerged ruins—a large, blocky, wall-like structure.

Gritting his teeth, he grasped both their hands and again focused on his mantra. Manifestation was… hard, especially in their current circumstances, but he was able to again provide them some support— ‘Bright’ and ‘Iron’ reinforcing all their physical durability, while ‘Beginning’, ‘Worldly’ and ‘Gift’, worked to make sharing that effect easier and also expand some small measure of his divination talisman to them.

“Thanks,” Juni signed, as Ling also nodded.

Hand in hand, they waded forward hurriedly, doing their best to avoid the deep water, while keeping an eye out for both algru and things falling from the ceiling above. After the last slab had come down, the chaos above seemed to have abated for a moment. However, the aura of ‘inauspicious dread’ that his divination talisman was constantly feeding him was only intensifying at this point.

-Please don’t be the ruins… he prayed as, kicking away persistently ensnaring, grassy fronds of algru, they finally reached the nearest part of the fallen wall. Please…

Bracing himself, he jumped, as did the others, landing on one of the lower, slumped blocks.

On the far side, was what appeared to be a large plaza, now flooded, its waters a-glow with iridescent swathes of blooming algru. Beyond that, he could just make out what looked like the facades of rock-cut buildings, similar in style to those they had seen in earlier caverns.

“Right?” Juni signed, after quickly looking this way and that, then pointing along the raised expanse of the block wall.

Indeed, the wall to their left was not only rather broken up, but also would take them back towards the worst of the algru bloom. The right-hand section, where Juni was indicating, they could at least run along without going back into the water. His divination talisman gave him very little to work with beyond ‘It’s Bad and getting Worse’ as well, so he just nodded in agreement—

Out of the corner of his eye, he swore he saw something… a shadow within a shadow in one of the gloomy, half-submerged entrances on the far side of the plaza.

“What is it?” Juni asked, noticing his pause.

“I…” he studied the doorway, trying to dissociate his focus slightly while leaning on ‘Bright’ and ‘Worldly’ to augment his eyesight a little. “Thought I saw something?”

“Could be a centipede?” Juni suggested, her gaze scouring the area he was looking.

“Mmmmm,” he nodded in agreement.

No matter how he looked, though, there was no sign of anything especially off, and with the constantly rippling water and the strange shadows the luminescence from the algru and occasional patches of fungi were radiating it was, he had to concede entirely possible he had just seen a weird shadow at just the wrong angle.

“Let’s go…” Lin Ling actually used her Intent and mantra’s ‘Gift’ mnemonic to convey her words, while tugged both their arms, rather urgently. “The longer we stay here…” Ling added, pointedly, jerking her head towards the still expanding swathes of algru bloom.

“Yeah,” Juni agreed, giving the dark entryways on the far side of the plaza a concerned final look.

Taking a deep breath, he nodded.

“Your manifestation needs physical contact?” Juni asked him, copying what Ling had just done with her own mantra to converse more easily as they started to move forward together.

“It helps,” he conceded, releasing her hand and instead putting his left hand on her right shoulder to maintain the link. Ling shifted her grip a moment later to just rest her hand on his left in a similar fashion.

The main advantage of physical contact with the manifestation was that qi didn’t diffuse. Outside the mountains that would not be a problem, but down here, where recovery was already terrible and all sorts of dangers lurked that hunted by qi-sense or worse, was another matter entirely.

“—Especially with this divination talisman.”

“—Ah, got it,” Juni replied with a nod.

“How long does it last?” Ling chimed in.

“An hour or two, right?” Juni asked, as she continued to guide them forward—

“Uh-huh,” he nodded, not surprised by that being her question.

Even though they rarely took missions together, he was fairly sure she knew most of the basic capabilities and unique talismans the various clans and families in West Flower Picking manufactured and used. Certainly, she had seen Han clan ones like the divination charm previously, when mentoring him when he first started out in the Bureau.

“As is… just under two hours,” he confirmed. In theory, it could last twice that, but with heavy use and his low realm it was better to be conservative.

“Longer than I thought,” she mused. “—Ah, careful!” Juni added, holding up a hand to stop them as she tapped her foot lightly on the next block, just before he and Ling could step onto it. “This one is unstable.”

Putting an experimental foot on it he grimaced as the massive block gave ever so slightly.

Squinting through the shifting gloom at the next few ahead of them they also had the look of deceptive instability.

Shifting his focus on his mantra manifestation slightly, he attempted to provide all of them a bit of support from the talisman so that they could more intuitively grasp where would be more inauspicious to stand.

“…”

Juni gave him a slight nod, then stared intently at the massive block for a long moment, before exhaling softly and taking a light, yet carefully deliberate step onto it—

To his relief, nothing gave and after a moment she took a second, then a third. Stepping where she stepped as deftly and light-footedly as possible, he followed in exactly footsteps, Lin Ling copying him in turn—

His divination talisman chimed inauspiciously in his mind. In the same instant, the waters either side of them juddered alarmingly, accompanied by the grinding sound of shifting rocks all around them.

“Son of a—!” Juni’s curse was lost to him as his vision blurred and his limbs turned leaden.

Struggling even to breath, he was dimly aware of the block beneath all three of them shifting—

The next thing he knew, he was floating in choppy water, his ears ringing, as dreadful, grinding thunder reverberated around the cavern. Trying to get to his feet, feeding the sensations of physical disorientation into his mantra, he found, in a moment of panic that something was dragging him down—

That ‘something’, thankfully turned out to be a coughing Lin Ling, who was clinging to his back.

“—Juni!”

Ling’s terrified shout, imbued with her mantra, made his head hurt even more, even as he realised, he really couldn’t find any…

To his relief, his trailing foot found something solid. Smooth stone—

Before he could orientate himself further, however, the choppy water surface distorted around them. With that distortion came a sensation like he had been punched in the back of the head and just had his chest forcibly compressed from below.

-S-shockwave?

Struggling to think straight, even with the help of his mantra, he tried to get a barrier talisman—

{Grandmaster Mang’s Resilient Sphere}

A shimmering, spherical blue-green barrier appeared around both him and Lin Ling.

“T-thanks…” he gasped to Ling, who was holding a shimmering talisman in her free hand, finally able to draw breath.

“It… won’t last long,” she mumbled, sounding even more stunned than he was. “What… about Juni?”

The tumult outside was lessened to the point where they could actually hear each other speak.

“I…” He wanted to say Juni was okay. She had been right in front of them, before whatever happened… happened. Heart suddenly pounding, he checked the skitterleap mark and was relieved to find it was still intact. Exhaling, he focused on the divination talisman, which also indicated that there was still a residual link, no doubt due to his mantra manifestation to someone not right beside him. “The talisman seems to suggest she is okay…” he replied.

“Even I can tell that!” Ling shot back, a bit more snarkily than she perhaps intended. “I meant, where is she?”

Tactfully ignoring her tone of voice, he fed as much as he could of his pain and discomfort—of which there was a lot—into his mantra, and focused on Juni, the moment before and then his ‘Bright’, ‘Worldly’ and ‘Gift’ mnemonics. For several long moments he grew concerned that the talisman would not work inside the barrier, which was one of the stronger ones they possessed, but thankfully he did eventually get a bit of a tug to their right, and a suggestion that she was near-ish, in that general direction.

“To our right, somewhere,” he informed Ling. “Unfortunately…”

Before he could tell her that the barrier prevented their movement, it rippled and vanished anyway as she cancelled its activation—

The water that had been displaced surged back, almost submerging both of them entirely in the choppy swell before he could grasp her.

Finding his bearings, he realised with a mental groan that they were now treading water.

-That’s not good, he reflected, looking around to try and get some bearings.

“The water got deeper,” Ling spat, still surprisingly audible over the reverberating sound of water on rock as he finally orientated them as being in the open area between the wall they had been running along and the bulk of the rock cut ruins at cavern’s edge.

“It did,” he agreed, starting to swim laboriously in the direction the talisman was suggesting, hauling Ling with him for a few strokes until she found her own rhythm.

His hunch was that the shockwave that had sent them flying was caused by the entire cavern shifting, or something forcing the water up. In any event, it was not a good thing, especially if it occurred—

…

“Get Up!”

The next thing he knew, he was floating in a bed of ensnaring algru, his ears ringing painfully.

-Nameless take you, stupid fate-thrashed cavern! He groaned, trying to get his bearings again, while feeding the nauseating sensations of physical disorientation into his mantra, he found something was dragging him down, hands around his neck—

“Why don’t you just—!”

For a moment, he swore that he was hearing those cursed words from before, but in fact, the hands were Lin Ling’s and the words were… actually, they weren’t her’s…

“—Accept…”

“—Ling! Shu!”

—but, but before he could dwell on that, Juni’s voice somehow found him.

Coughing, he pushed himself up and tried to wave a hand to try and get her attention.

The algru tugged at his limbs, not in a particularly active sense, as he realised, belatedly, he was still out of his depth. A moment later, a familiar hand grasped his—

Juni hauled him—both of them—out of the water, onto the now tilted block of the ancient wall. She was bleeding from multiple lacerations on her arms.

“You both okay?” she asked as Ling clambered up beside him, looking around with slightly unfocused eyes.

“Uhhh… maybe?” Ling groaned.

“Not really,” he replied honestly.

Every bone in his body hurt… albeit in a sort of dull, diffuse way, thanks to his mantra. His qi was in a state of chaos, though surprisingly, being in the middle of the algru field wasn’t the cause, near as he could tell. Rather, it was a sort of jittery, impossible-to-grasp ‘wrongness’ that was still clinging to his meridians.

“Yang Qi…” Juni’s voice cut through his moment of further disorientation.

“Ah…”

-I should have known that… we really took a hard hit there, a dispassionate part of him judged grimly.

Exhaling, he doubled down on his mantra, focusing on ‘Iron’, especially, to temper his physical resilience a bit more, and also settle his qi a little.

All around them, frothy luminescence was… dancing. That was the only way to describe it, really. Spray from thrown waves was swirling like mist through the cavern, wreathing everything in a pearly iridescence that hurt his eyes if he stared into its depths for too long, where strange shadows seemed to shift—

“—Don’t look at the middle distance,” Juni warned him softly. “Also, we can’t…”

“—Stay here… yes.” he agreed, grimly.

Both Juni and Ling gave him a funny look, and he suddenly found himself replaying the last bit of their conversation and grimaced.

“Sorry, I am using my mantra,” he sighed, acknowledging that his replies had been… flat.

“Its fine,” Juni sighed, as she looked around.

Everywhere, waves were splashing still, as if the entire cavern had been shaken vigorously, yet in a manner nature had not quite intended. The ceiling was a lot closer, and…

“Are we on those ruins?” he asked, uneasily, realising it wasn’t a wall Juni had hauled them onto, but the rooftop of one of the ruined buildings they had seen before in the gloom.

“Yes, we got washed to the side,” Ling affirmed, wiping blood from her nose sniffing with a painful wince.

“I’ll take it—”

A creaking, grinding roar of rock grinding on rock rumbled the entire cavern, swallowing up Juni’s reply, and forcing her to swap back to sign-language.

“—over being swept into the middle of the cavern,” she continued, with a grimace.

On that it was impossible to disagree, really.

“Over there?”

Even before he had really started looking around properly, to see if there was a safer location, Ling tugged both their arms and pointed behind them and to their left. Before, he had presumed that they just lined this side of the cavern, but in fact there was a passage-gallery like opening above and behind the buildings, concealed from the wider cavern by a jutting spur of rock and the curvature of the cavern wall about a hundred metres away.

Focusing on his talisman, he got nothing especially bad from it in terms of vibes, once he dissociated the ever-increasingly ominous sense of foreboding it was once again giving him.

Juni glanced at him, and all he could do was return a helpless shrug.

“I don’t feel like we are walking into anything more or less dangerous than here.” he signed hurriedly.

“Figures.” She mouthed back.

Ling silently passed him another arrow with a teleport seal on it.

-Please, please, please don’t have another stupid shockwave happen… he prayed as he took aim and, letting the talisman guide him a little, launched the arrow towards the distant gallery with as much power as he could.

Mercifully, there was no further shockwave. The arrow fell a little short, but didn’t land in the water, but on the roof of a building some ten paces below the gallery.

Ling didn’t wait for more confirmation than that, triggering the teleport.

Again, their surroundings shimmered, like a water surface that had just been slapped. The rock beneath them shifted subtly. The texture changing and then everything settled back to normal, as they moved to the new rooftop.

Quickly taking in their surroundings, he was relieved to see no new further threats materialize. The nearby algru was already blooming, but that was expected at this point. Juni, who had also been glancing about warily pointed up to the balcony.

“Boost?” he signed to Ling.

She stared at him for a half second, then rolled her eyes and produced a length of rope with a grapple hook on it.

-Ah, of course she had it, he sighed ruefully, as she launched it up and snared it on the lip of the balcony above them, before gesturing for him to climb first.

Nodding, he tested that it would hold his weight, then quickly walked himself up. There was nothing in the gallery other than a few broken pots scattered about, so he hauled himself over, waved for them to climb up after him and considered which route they should take.

To his left, it looked like it ran straight, beyond the rock spur, but his hunch there was that it just stayed in this cavern. Almost immediately to the right of where he was, it opened out into a sort of larger semi-circular gallery, lined with alcoves that held algru encrusted statues, interspersed with some kind of carved scenes. The important point though, was that at the rear was a large passage some five metres wide, and three high, that looked like it passed into a further hall.

“The water is rising still,” Ling remarked to him as she reached the top.

Glancing back down as he helped her over, he saw that Juni was already halfway up the rope. The roof below was indeed already covered by the waves breaking against the wall.

Almost in the same instant, his talisman twinged, uneasily, the sense of foreboding it was feeding him, which was already smothering, deepening rapidly.

Reaching down, he grabbed Juni by the arm and bodily hauled her the last bit.

“Talisman,” he mouthed at her as she rolled over the balcony edge.

Nodding, she got to her feet and taking Ling by the hand immediately started to run in the direction of the semi-circular gallery. Following behind, he found himself straining his tormented senses to try and get some… any forewarning of what the talisman was trying to alert him to, but there was… nothing. Well, nothing beyond the slow, eerie grinding of rock on rock and the cacophony of surging water reverberating all around them.

Crossing the gallery, they went straight down the passage, which wasn’t very long, as it turned out. After only twenty metres it opened out into a similar sort of semi-circular gallery to the one they had just departed, just it was maybe twice the size. A slightly larger-than-life statue of a woman reclining on a low dais dominated the middle, while beyond her… hazy mist and a familiar sort of iridescent gloom swirled.

-Another flooded cavern, great…

His heart sank as he glanced behind them. The water level in the cavern they had just left didn’t seem to have risen enough to follow them, but it felt like it was only a matter of time. The sense of foreboding was only getting stronger as well—

For a split second he swore he saw something. His sense for ‘odd’ shapes, honed in Yin Eclipse, picking out a shadowy oddness in the passageway behind them that didn’t quite ‘fit’… and yet, when he tried to focus on it, there was nothing. Just misty haze and the slightly flat gloom that the dark-vision pill gave everything. The memory of the centipede that the algru had consumed before flitted to the front of his mind.

-Is it something like that, forced out by the flooding? He found himself wondering, trying to unfocus his gaze a little.

“What’s wrong?”

He caught Juni’s signing as he stepped back a bit.

“I think I saw something…” he signed back. “Could be another of those centipedes?”

There really was nothing there now, at least as far as he could see. There were no proper openings in the passage either, just a few shallow alcoves that had all been empty as they passed.

{Mang’s Immortal Wall}

The barrier, courtesy of Lin Ling, snapped into focus as an opalescent rectangle over the passageway, almost before he had finished signing.

“What…? We are not going back that way in a hurry,” Ling pointed out as they both turned to look at her. “And we were teleporting just now, this isn’t any more obvious…”

“No…” Juni looked like she wanted to say more as she gave Ling a slightly sideways look, but in the end just nodded. “No, it is not.”

-And yet, if I wanted to make a distraction…

The prickling unease that was like a breath on the back of his neck and not gone away with Ling placing her barrier. Slowly, and carefully, he turned to look back at the hall behind them—and he found himself staring into the eyes of the woman on the dais, her pupils glittering constellations of tiny blue stars that seemed to peer right through him…

It felt as if he were being drawn to her, the world around him fading away as she beckoned towards him, or maybe reached out—

“Hey…”

Juni’s hand on his shoulder made him start… and the moment passed.

“Sorry,” he grimaced, exhaling softly.

-Get a grip, Shu. He remonstrated with himself, nudging his mantra to settle a little more actively in his body and checking that he was still manifesting it properly to Juni and Ling—which he was, thankfully.

“Are you sure you are okay?” she mouthed at him, frowning.

“Yeah…” he nodded, giving her hand a reassuring pat. It felt cold in the gloom “I was just dazed, I think…” he added, re-examining the hall.

However, again, there was nothing there. Just the statue of the woman and beyond her, through a line of stone-cut columns, the misty expanse of another flooded cavern.

The statues eyes were… well, not dark now, but not shimmering like they had before.

-I guess it was just a weird refraction with the mist and the agitation in the ambient qi?

Seeking some kind of reassurance, he found himself examining the statue more closely. She was wrought of pure white stone with such life-like fluidity and allure that a part of him almost expected her to stand up at any moment. Her upper body was naked, while her lower half was covered by a dark robe that flowed down onto the dais she lounged upon. Her right hand lay in her lap, and her left arm was… outstretched, as if she had been holding up something to admire, or for others to admire, yet everything below her left elbow was missing, and in fact, most of the fingers on her right hand were as well.

In fact, as he took in her face, framed in hair wrought of what he thought was a dark purplish-red granite-like rock, he realized the vandalism done to her extended even there as well. Her eyes were empty gashes around her eye-sockets suggested they had been removed by force, marred her otherwise pensive face like scars, giving her whole visage a decidedly eerie slant.

-Wait… a moment ago, she had both…?

Just as he realised there were discrepancies with what he had seen a moment before, and what he was looking at now, his mantra rang in his head like a bell that had just been struck. His vision wavered and his limbs suddenly felt like they were weighed down with metal.

Gasping for breath, he found himself staring at a figure crouched on the top of the statue—feminine, maybe a bit shorter than Ling, with lank dark hair and pointed white pupils that pierced right into him—

“Submit…”

The word clawed at him, even as he tried to evoke his mantra, focusing on ‘Bright’ and ‘Gift’. If he had not already been focusing on his mantra a moment before, even that would likely have been beyond him.

“Submit to me…”

The voice cut at him, carving not at his mind, but at his body, as with gut-twisting certainty he realised what it was trying to do—subvert him so he couldn’t use his mantra properly.

“Bright heart, Iron mind, I am my own—”

The feminine figure warped in his sight, flowing off the statue to stand before him, even as he tried to formulate his mantra.

“—Beginning and there is no Worldly presence—”

With a faint sneer, the figure reached out and put a hand against his chest…

-She is aiming for the divination talisman!?!

Groaning mentally, he tried to move his arm to block her, but it was as if he were stuck in a quagmire and even his own qi in his body was sluggish.

“—that can take this Gift from me…”

The partitioned part of his focus that was working on articulating the mantra finally completed the ‘verse’ and instantly the sense of pressure on him lessened a fraction. Not a lot, but enough to allow him to summon a blaze cone from his storage talisman—

The explosion slammed him into the barrier Ling had conjured. Juni and Ling both went sprawling, screaming and cursing in shock as talisman barriers flickered around them. The woman that had tried to grab him… wiped her face with the back of her hand and just tilted her head to the side, then glanced at the other two and snorted.

“Bright heart, Iron soul, I am my own Beginning, and no Worldly Presence can take this Gift of my Bright heart and Iron soul…”

Feeding the pain and the disorientation right back into his mantra, he got it properly moving at last, finding a means to loop it continuously.

Juni rolled to her feet first, and stared at him, not at the woman.

Taking out a second cone, he crushed the scales in his hand, injected a bit of his qi into it and lobbed it at the woman, who sneered and side stepped—

The second explosion left his ears ringing but more to the point, clearly silhouetted that there was a figure there. Juni and Ling, however, both flinched away and as it cleared, the woman was already standing over him.

“It is useless…” the woman chuckled, reaching down, her white-hot pupils boring into him. “You cannot resist…”

“Oh… yeah?” he gasped, as mantra cycle after cycle rapidly stacked up, rolling through his body, by way of the reservoirs of Vital Qi in his bones, rather than his normal qi circulation.

Every mantra user who could do this had a ‘trick’ or two. His was being very hard to poison, as it turned out, for just this reason. Meridian damage was also something he could weather to a shocking degree, compared to most of his peers.

‘Even if you have a mantra, you cannot resist intrusive attacking intent that easily, but—

His uncle’s advice whispering in the back of his mind, he shifted his own intent, hiding the hidden fangs of his mantra—

“Foolish…” the woman snickered, slamming his body into the barrier, even as all the intent she had been pushing into him melted away. “You think I cannot deal with you with pure, brute—”

The woman gasped, then staggered back, and turned—

A shadowy form of a middle-aged man—the Lord of the Kun clan, he realised blearily, was standing in front of Juni, his expression murderous.

“Wretched beast—”

The phantasm’s words hammered into the woman, who was holding her head now.

“—you think just because you are possessing a corpse you can gain some advantage?”

A ripple of dissociative power bled through their surroundings and then the woman collapsed like a broken puppet, a dark, multi-legged shadow flailing chaotically around it—

With a soundless shriek, the creature suddenly spun in a way that was fundamentally unnatural, and melted away into nothing—

Before he could react, what had to be a soul attack collided with his mantra. A vile intrusive force every bit as horrible as that fates-accursed spider’s venom tried to claw its way into his body.

“Bright heart, Iron soul, I am my own Beginning, and no Worldly Presence can take this Gift of my Bright heart and Iron soul…”

In the core of his psyche, the rolling words of his mantra met it, matched it and with a sense of vision-blurring nausea, overwhelmed it, leaving him gasping for breath.

Every bone in his body hurt, and almost half his qi was gone, he realised. Juni, nearby, was sitting on the ground, her face pale, blood running from her nose, staring at the spot where her father’s phantasm had just stood. Ling, lying a little beyond her, was holding an alignment disjunction talisman that was slowly burning away a charge.

“W-was that a… tetrid?” Ling groaned, getting to her knees.

“Yes…” Juni replied. “A Nascent Soul Tetrid, possessing a corpse.”

“And it’s… dead?” Ling asked, nervously, now looking this way and that, her question echoing his own fear, because the divination talisman was still giving him profoundly inauspicious vibes.

“I should hope so,” Juni muttered, producing some qi replenishment medicine and swallowing it.

“…” Ling considered the talisman in her hand, then slapped it on her arm and with a grimace, also palmed two qi replenishment pills and took them with a swig of water.

Following her example, he quickly did the same.

“Can we store it?” he suggested, nodding to the corpse of the young woman lying on the ground.

“…”

Grimacing in pain, Ling moved over to join them and put her hand gingerly on the body. It shimmered then, to his relief vanished into the storage ring—

“Oh… how hard you have fought…”

A shadowy figure appeared like a ghost on the right side of the hall, tall, looming and… disconcertingly misshapen. Its words were soft, yet within them was a grasping, suffocating cruelty.

“—how far you have run…”

On the left side, a barely visible second figure. Slender, feminine maybe, wearing a broad brimmed hat, stalked forward.

“Yet… it has all been for naught…”

A third figure appeared, crouching on the head of the statue, piercing eyes like blue spears stabbing into him. Freezing his limbs.

“Once doomed…” the first figure sneered, walking out of the shadows fully to reveal themselves as some horrific amalgamation of cultivator and tetrid, with four extra limbs protruding from their back, chitin armour bursting through their flesh and eight insectoid eyes deforming their face.

“—Detected…” the second figure giggled, also moving forward.

She was as unnervingly alluring as the first was horrifying. Lithe limbs, enchanting eyes and yet, within them there was an empty void that hungered, calling to him. Demanding that he cast everything aside and just submit. Give his flesh to her. His soul for her nourishment…

His mantra, still whispering in the back of his mind just about managed to pull him back, and yet…

“And now caught…” a fourth voice purred, sounding like it was right behind him.

The figure from the head of the statue was gone, and a cold, clammy hand was tangling its fingers in his hair, forcing him to look down.

Water lapped across the rock, showing him his pallid reflection, and the face of a pale, drawn youth, with thin lips and sunken eyes, staring down at him—

“My offer still stands…” his own pale reflections suddenly whispered, seductively. “You can still… save them…”

-Oh no. No, no, no, no!

His heart pounding, he stared at the smiling face, drawn back to the ghostly figure in the waters, cold sweat prickling across his body—

The entire hall shuddered, leaving him with blurred vision and ringing ears. All around them, the darkness was suddenly shifting, swirling and distorting, practically commanding every shred of his focus to look only into the depths of the tunnel. Even the tetrid-corpse abominations turned, staring at the strange, multi-armed shadow of twisted proportions now pinned against the other side of Ling’s barrier that was still sealing off that route.

The figure tried to move. Pushing against the barrier… and then… iridescence spiralled out of everything. Fronds of algru bled out of the walls around the barrier, which itself bent inwards, warping and distorting until it was nothing more than a ball of unstable qi reflecting the ghostly remains of its five foundation nodes—

Instinct, and his mantra just about allowed him to look away a fraction of a second before the iridescent wave of algru enveloped the barrier completely—

With a silent crack, he was dimly aware of something passing at great speed above them, then suddenly he was able to move again. There was no algru… no iridescence, shockingly little damage to his vision and most importantly… no barrier.

Just the thudding sound of his own heartbeat in his ears. Turning, he found the corpse of a… it was hard to say what it had been, actually. some of it was impaled on the broken arm of the statue—a long leg, scaled skin, a clawed hand, or foot dangling, three arms splayed limply from its twisted torso, while dark gore and smoking blood stained the pale stone of much of the statue.

Belatedly, he realised the tetrid that had seized him had relinquished its grasp, and staggered back, holding its head, while the other two were also dazed.

The desire to suddenly look back at the tunnel grasped his head and practically pulled his body around…. At which point his heart nearly had a deviation.

In the tunnel, beyond where the barrier had been, a dozen lantern-like lights were bobbing, carried by short, shadowed figures clad in ragged clothes. In their midst, a pale, iridescent clad, vaguely feminine figure walked. All he could make out was pale skin, dark, tangled hair, a wreath of something like blooming algru polyps adoring it… framing piercing, ice blue eyes—identical to those he had just seen a moment ago, on the top of the statue in fact. In its hand, it casually held what looked like a bloody-flayed skull of a lizard-like creature, likely belonging to the corpse now impaled on the statue.

“Now, Run!” a voice in his head snarled.

Moving almost on instinct, he snatched a pill bottle out of his storage ring and after checking that it was the right one, swallowed down the contents. The pain in his body melted away to little more than a sort of dissociated whisper. Focusing on his mantra, he fed that initial feeling of dissociation into it directly and, just as his uncle had said, immediately felt the strength of influence of his mantra on his body and surroundings undergo a quantifiable shift.

The ‘Mortal Pain Severance Dan’, part of the Han clan's alchemy canon, was a complicated medicine. The version the clan sold outwardly was basically a pain-suppression medicine of last resort, valued by martial and body cultivators in the form of a pill. The version developed for the clan’s physical cultivators to use, however, was actually in the form of a tonic, and specifically tailored to synergize with their mantra.

It was a critical component in the safe utilization of the pill steeping in the tonic itself, which he had also just swallowed—the Nascent Blood Burn Pill. If the Severance Dan was ‘complicated’, then the Blood Burn pill was a legitimate ‘forbidden medicine’. Originally a berserk pill for Body Cultivators, a Han clan ancestor skilled in alchemy had adapted it for use by his clan’s physical cultivators.

The theory was that rather than refining the pill fully, you held it within your stomach and used your mantra, specifically the ‘Bright’, ‘Worldly’ and ‘Gift’ mnemonics to integrate it into your qi cycle. This effectively turned the Nascent Blood Burn Pill into a pseudo-mantra seed, while it passively stimulated the qi through the body to temporarily elevate his physical condition to something close to a pseudo-soul meridian’s expert and massively replenish the qi within his body.

The down sides were that he had no control over the ‘soul’ intent that the pill’s influence would draw out, and that his ability to suppress his own qi would be nearly non-existent. Fortunately, that was where the tonic version of the Severance Dan came into play, because as part of how it worked, it naturally suppressed outward emanations of qi from his body. It also had the added benefit of massively dissociating him from the physically excruciating pain that the Blood Burn Pill caused, though he could also feed that back into his mantra for further benefits if required.

Returning the bottle to his storage ring, he took a breath to let his qi cycle… sort of stabilize and then, focusing on the skitterleap talisman, he grabbed the dazed Ling and stunned Juni by their hands and triggered it.

Their surroundings warped as he let the path of the skitterleap talisman be influenced by the divination one. The hall flowed away from them, its floor, now covered with a shallow film of rising water turning dark. The walls opened out into a blur of haze, rock cut buildings, falling water and shifting shadows. Glancing behind them, he saw the three tetrid possessed corpses turning away from the shadowed, lantern-carrying figures, their expressions shocked—

The multi-armed one snarled and vanished, reappearing, to his horror, like a ghost, growing in size and grasping for the three of them—

The lithe beauty hissed, shifting in a blur that cut through the occluded distance effortlessly—

“Stop!”

Even with his mantra to shelter it, and the influence of the Nascent Blood Burn Pill stimulating it, the qi in his body juddered alarmingly, and started to turn sluggish at her command. His limbs felt heavy and cold and he could feel the momentum of the skitterleap talisman within all three of them slipping away, agonizingly—

The ghostly form of Juni’s father appeared, a second time, blocking both figures—

The whole cavern lurched.

The air around them turned viscous.

The water beneath them seemed to tilt and twist, crazily.

Beside him, Ling screamed, silently, as his grip on her hand slid inexorably away.

Desperately, he tried to keep it, but suddenly rather than flying forward, he felt like his stomach had just dropped out of his body.

Juni was just… gone, he realised in horror, her outstretched hands reaching for them both, despair etched on her face. A shadow falling into water that he struck a moment later, with enough force to shake every bone in his body.

“Ling! Juni!” he tried to focus on them, with the talisman, with the skitterleap, but the tidal force of whatever had just washed over them was so strong that he felt like he was being pummelled by a furious torrent of falling water, and then everything went pitch black and the only sound that remained was akin to that of slowly cracking glass.