> When the Eye is drawn to the East, and Dragon clashes with Phoenix, amidst the arrogance and fury the auspicious dawn will herald a new path through the lost gate, and with it the transformation of what could be, into what is will deliver a new era.
Auspice of Providence, delivered to his August Imperial Majesty at the turning of the year, at the most auspicious hour.
~Imperial Astrology Bureau
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~ JI MING – SEVEN SOVEREIGNS SCHOOL CENSURE FORCE~
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Ji Ming turned in a circle, taking in the sheer scale of the devastation of the valley where they had farcast. Chaotic parasol qi was everywhere, of such purity that he found himself struggling to think of what could have released it and the ruin it had caused.
“What in the nameless-fate happened here?” Elder Fuhai, one of the Dao Lords, asked, looking around dully.
“Good question,” a Dao Immortal called Jinhan added, glancing over at Tuo Kankai and his escorts, “though a bigger question is where is here?”
That was the other question.
“The summons was for Blue Water Province, to respond to a Dao Ascendant ancestor who was in danger?” one of the junior Elders muttered, looking around uneasily.
“Elder Kankai?” he called out to Enforcement Elder Tuo Kankai, who was standing a short distance away, looking around with a frown while his subordinates secured a perimeter.
“Elder Ji,” Tuo Kankai replied, giving him a polite, if somewhat cool nod.
“This does not look like eastern Blue Water province,” he observed blandly, scuffing the ground beneath his feet, which was basically yang-rich mud.
He stared at the exposed surface beneath him, kneeling down to get a closer look, because it had been melted by exposure to… what appeared to be liquid qi at a phenomenal temperature.
“Yeah, with this suppression, could we be somewhere inside Yin Eclipse?” Elder Fuhai replied grimly, his grip tightening on his weapon as he looked around at the swirling ash.
“Hmmmm…” Elder Kankai, who to his eyes looked somewhat put out for some reason, just frowned. “I am checking that now. The coordinates were confirmed by… but the originator is supposedly one… Ji Tantai, an inheritance disciple from the Seven Star Pagoda.”
“Who is not here, or if they are, they are dead,” Elder Pei, standing nearby and taking in the melted ruins and the yang swamp, observed sourly.
His own bet, looking around at the carnage, was ‘dead’.
The qi here was literally poisonous, even for him, and all the Dao Immortals had sturdy barriers out now, as they started to spread out and scout their surroundings. To say that the remnant laws in the misty haze around them were ‘exotic’ was probably underselling it as well. Some clearly came from spirit vegetation, as there was a subtle haze of yang wood and yang water drifting through everything, but the overwhelming majority was very pure parasol qi, yang fire and yang metal. Even his armour, crafted to survive combat at the Dao Sovereign realm, was not proof against some of it.
“Speaking of this being Yin Eclipse, what is with this suppression?” one of the other Dao Immortals, a Sect Guardian whose name he thought was Kang, asked, coming over to join Elder Pei and Elder Fuhai.
“Mmmm, yes,” Elder Pei agreed, glancing at him. “Senior Ji, should this not be like… golden core or something—isn’t that this place’s deal?”
“It is,” he agreed, using qi to enhance his senses as he tried to pierce the swirling smouldering bank of ashen smog and dust to get a better idea of what they were actually dealing with… and got nothing.
-If anything, it’s less helpful than just looking by eye, he reflected grimly.
Currently, the suppression was actually around the threshold of the Dao Step, which was not normal, from what he understood.
“It’s dropping as well,” Elder Fuhai noted, grimly. “If the purity remains like this, we cannot stay—”
*Hrrrrrrrrmmmble*
A tremor sent ripples through the surrounding quagmire.
“There is something really inauspicious here,” Formation Grandmaster Lian Erbei interjected, holding her skirt out of the mud as she waded over to join them. “Something is not right. I think a powerful sealing formation was misused here.”
“A sealing formation?” he muttered, looking around. That was not good news.
“Yeah, we shouldn’t linger here,” she reaffirmed.
“—We have to ascertain what is what first,” Tuo Kankai cut in, a trifle stubbornly he felt.
-What is his deal? He wondered. Is it just that he doesn’t like Lian Erbei?
“Clearly, someone blew…” he trailed off, as another, stronger tremor ran through their surroundings.
This time he felt the trace of darkness, like a whisper, that came with it as well.
“You felt that, right?” Lian Erbei asked him nervously, looking around.
“Do things… burrow in Yin Eclipse?” Guardian Kang asked uneasily. “I heard there are…?”
“No, the rock is too hard for the most part,” he replied, looking around warily as well now, trying to recall what he had been told over the years about Yin Eclipse by his senior martial siblings and also by his teacher, when she was about.
Unfortunately, it was not much. The clearest instruction, from teacher herself was, ‘if you plan to go there, speak to me first’.
-A bit late for that now, he reflected, resisting the urge to look at his communication talisman which, rather concerningly, was not finding a link.
The difficulty in this instance was that, as the only one of her disciples who was not either the Sect Headmistress, or an ‘ancestor’ and thus technically absolved from most ‘everyday’ sect duties, he had wound up on the participant lists for things like this because it gave the school some means to project power and prestige. Wave ‘Disciple of Meng Fu’ under most troublemakers’ noses, and they stopped making trouble fast, because people didn’t make trouble for his teacher. Not twice anyways.
Considering the exposed ‘rock’ around them, he crouched down again and pushed as much of his rather considerable strength as a quasi-Martial Eternal cultivator into it as he could. It didn’t give in the slightest.
“Okay, Sovereigns, to me!” Elder Kankai cut in, waving for the various Dao Sovereigns who had been organizing their ‘teams’ to come over. “I want to know what the fates is going on here…”
He glanced at Tuo Kankai, but the older man was pointedly not engaging with him at all. That was another headache of sect politics at work. As Meng Fu’s disciple he was technically the ‘ranking’ expert here, but Tuo Kankai was the Elder in charge of these things… and a prideful sod at that.
“Let’s leave him to it,” Lian Erbei muttered, giving Tuo Kankai a sideways look.
“Yeah,” Elder Fuhai agreed, looking around again. “Is it my imagination… or is that a crater off to our right…?”
Looking where Fuhai was pointing, he found that it was.
“Is your communication talisman unresponsive?” Lian Erbei asked him quietly as they waded through the mud towards the edge of the broad hollow.
“It is,” he confirmed. “The spatial qi in this place is beyond chaotic. I have never seen anything like this, not even with collapsed greater teleports.”
“Me neither,” she muttered. “There are traces of laws here, that I have never even seen before, and what’s worse, the yang qi here is unlike anything I’ve ever felt.”
He stopped to look at her, because that was concerning. Lian Erbei was… well, in another sect, she would have already been considered a grand ancestor, who had seen four Dun Emperors come and go. If she said she had ‘not seen’ a law before, that meant it was either really exotic or something else was going on.
“Huh… is that… come here, seniors!” Guardian Kang, who had gone ahead, called over to them, from the far side of the crater.
Another tremor that shook their surroundings, sending ripples through the mud.
“That surely isn’t good either,” Lian Erbei muttered, looking around uneasily as she picked up her pace.
“No, it probably isn’t,” he agreed, following after her and Elder Fuhai.
Guardian Kang, when they reached him, was standing knee-deep in mud, on the edge of a shiny blue slab that vanished at a slight slant into the quagmire all around them.
“Is that… arborundum?” Elder Fuhai muttered, crouching down and putting a hand to it. “Nameless fate, it is!” he hissed, after a moment, shaking his head. “And of such quality too…”
“Stand back…” he waved Elder Fuhai to the side and, focusing his qi, sent a pulse through the mud.
The roughly fifty square metres he exposed turned out to be roughly a third of an exquisite floor mosaic, in blue and red arborundum, depicting a taiji, surrounded by what looked like an ancient zodiac.
“Huh…” Lian Erbei murmured, crouching down by the nearest constellation, frowning.
“Something interesting?” he asked.
“Its… I think I’ve seen something like this,” she mused before pausing as another tremor rumbled through their surroundings.
“What could you explode that would push this much parasol qi into the environment?” Guardian Kang muttered, as a small eddy of ephemeral parasol petals drifted past them.
That was the question. Short of there being an actual grove of the trees up here, he was drawing a total blank. Even back in the sect, where the sources of that exotic qi were second to none. Only his teacher and a few of her most trusted subordinates, like his senior brothers and sister, had access to weapons made of the wood, never mind anything purer.
“If there wasn’t a grove here before, there may well be soon,” Elder Pei, who had come to join them, remarked. “And… is this arborundum? Yeesh… what a ruin!”
“Why do you say that?” he asked Pei.
“Some of the guardians are finding small saplings,” Pei replied, “already growing out of the…”
He trailed off as louder rumble shook not just the ground beneath them, but the haze itself.
“—and then there is whatever is causing that,” Elder Pei added, his gaze flitting this way and that nervously.
Elder Fuhai and Guardian Kang both paled, clearly suffering in this environment.
“Here, I have stronger medicine,” he murmured, passing Fuhai the pack at his side.
“Thanks…” Fuhai nodded, taking the pack gratefully and starting to search through it.
“I have to say, I don’t like it, Senior Ji,” Elder Pei added. “We need to leave here, get to higher ground.”
“Yep, we do, this place is… I can’t even say it’s terrible,” Lian agreed, standing up with a sigh and holding out a compass for them to see.
He looked at the dead thing, its usefulness obliterated by an absolute yang alignment, not at all sure what to make of that.
“Absolute Yang?” Elder Pei mused, pulling out a compass of his own—
They watched as it did the exact same, shifting once, towards… he couldn’t even say it was inauspicious, it was simply... Yang.
“Uhh, Seniors…” Guardian Kang tugged his arm suddenly.
Turning to look where the Dao Immortal was pointing, he saw, amid the clearing mist, a massive upright shadow, maybe two hundred metres high, fading into focus as the haze continued to settle.
“What is… that?” Elder Fuhai exclaimed.
“The pillar?” he asked.
“Uh… no…” Guardian Kang pointed.
Following his gesture, he found himself looking through the ruins to the right of the pillar-like-outcropping, which were shaking and trembling, blocks slowly… rising out of the ground—
Instinct saved him, Fuhai, Pei, Kang and Lian, as he drew his two-handed dao sword from his back, using it to cut space around them directly—
A moment later, the shockwave of yang qi, so pure as to be functionally invisible, searing even its own ‘intent’ out of the moment washed over them.
Their surroundings shifted, like reality was caught in the heat haze of a summer’s day, the drifting ash shimmering eerily—
“What the fates!” Guardian Kang screamed, in horror, as Lian’s barrier, supported by a small talisman formation she instantly conjured, turned the area immediately around them into a sphere of pitch-black yang water.
Even with that, though, and some support of the arborundum in the floor, his skin still blistered, and his qi turned chaotic. Fuhai, Pei and especially Kang, who were all much weaker than him, groaned and sobbed, holding their heads as their foundations suffered a horrifying assault for several seconds. Probably they would have survived without the barrier, but only barely.
“Motherless…” Lian exhaled, her face pale as colour faded back into the world around them—
He stared, frozen in shock, as a beam of molten white qi snapped into focus, obliterating the barrier and Elder Pei in a flash of iridescent fire, originating from…
Before he could quite grasp what he was seeing, the ground around them literally flipped over—
Awareness of his surroundings, limited as it was, returned, along with pain.
A lot of pain.
Insidious yang qi clawed at his body, like a smothering shroud.
“H-help…” a distant, desperate cry echoed in his ears as the debris shifted a little around him.
Trying his best to ignore it, he attempted to move, and found something heavy and unpleasantly hot pinning him down in the ashen mud. Grimacing, he tried to influence the laws underlying it… and found he could barely nudge what was around him. In fact, trying to manipulate them only seemed to intensify their chaotic nature.
-If I survive this… whoever called for this is going to have their soul pulled out through their toenails while being forced to listen to cursed Zither music for a millennia! A part of his mind cursed, as he slowly began to work himself free using as little qi as possible.
-Assuming Teacher doesn’t get to them first, another part of him retorted…
-Uhh… he imposed ‘silence’ on his mind’s eye, as he continued to systematically try and free himself, because voices in your own head—in the Dao Step—was baaaad.
Something in the yang qi was directly damaging his soul, leaving his physical state completely… well…
-Okay, not completely alone, he groaned, as he found strange profoundly inauspicious yang metal qi slowly worming its way into his meridians, having somehow invaded his body as if armour and defensive talismans were not even a thing.
There was a flicker of something in the terribly limited sphere of his consciousness. Danger.
"H-help me!” the cry echoed again, a bit clearer, as he finally found open air with a searching hand.
Gritting his teeth, he reached inwards, and focused on his Sword Dao—
Agony enveloped him, as he found the slab above him was partially molten as it scattered. Ignoring his qi, he used his martial intent to cut the world around him, becoming a living sword, to all intents, which bought him just enough time to cast himself clear.
“—Senior brother!”
Lian’s horrified scream rang in his ears as he slammed into the ground, then a moment later, he felt her hands grasp his and he was pulled out of the burning mud he had just landed in, and onto a stone slab.
Trying not to breathe, he opened his eyes and found Lian Erbei, half her robe burnt off, skin blistered badly, kneeling in the shelter of a collapsed stone wall along with the other formations grandmaster, Meng Yu Dai. His sword, thankfully rested beside her.
“You’re… alive,” he rasped, focusing on her, wondering if she was who he had heard screaming. “Kang… Fuhai?”
Lian Erbei just shook her head.
“I saw Tuo Kankai and some of his group retreating towards the nearest of the large stones, Senior Ji,” Meng Yu Dai added breathlessly.
“What got—” he started to ask.
“Help me—!”
-It wasn’t Lian? The words, like a broken whisper, pulled at his consciousness much more clearly than they had a moment before, practically compelling him to look back towards the crater they had just come around.
“Save… me… Little Brother!”
“—what’s wrong?”
He flinched as he realised Lian Erbei was holding on to his hand, looking very concerned.
“Senior Brother?” she repeated, pulling him back down into the shelter of the broken wall, as he found he had stood up, without knowing it, recovered his sword and started to move towards the crater.
“Please… Little Brother…” the call tugged at him, desperately.
-Little brother? something about the way that was phrased sent an uneasy shiver down his spine.
“Did… you hear that?” he asked, staring back in the direction the words had come, trying to pierce the shifting miasma billowing around them.
“Heard what?” Yu Dai asked him, uneasily, while looking around at the devastated landscape.
“Little Brother, you’re my only…”
-Did they really not hear that? he wondered, his grip on his sword tightening as he examined the disturbing resonance it held with his qi. Unless… is it something to do with the parasol qi running rampant in this place?
Probably uniquely among those here, he had some experience and exposure with it. His teacher had given him a seed of that terrifying, exotic qi, when he reached the Dao Step, and he had consumed some rare pills that used it since—
“—Over there!”
“—brother!”
“Senior’s awareness is good…” Yu Dai muttered, as other voices rang through the haze, off to their right.
Before he could explain, however, other voices echoed off to their right, materializing into a group of bedraggled cultivators, who staggered out of the haze, pointing in their direction.
“—Ah… is that!”
“it’s Senior Erbei!”
-What am I, chopped liver? A discordant voice in the back of his head complained before he banished it.
“You are okay, that’s a relief,” their leader, a Dao Sovereign called Erlang Weng, who had come with Tuo Kankai, declared with a sigh of relief, “And Brother Ji and Brother Meng as well, how fortuitous,” he added, sweeping his gaze over the three of them, though he couldn’t help but notice it lingering on Lian.
Lian Erbei, who was the largely disinterested object of quite a few other senior elder’s ‘goodwill’, pointedly ignored him, as the group warily fanned out around them.
Most of them were Dao Immortals, Sect Guardians basically, though at the back he spotted another Elder, Li Jubei.
“Wasn’t Elder Pei with you?” Li Jubei asked, looking around with concern. “And Elder Fuhai?”
“He died,” Lian replied, a trifle shortly as she adjusted what remained of her gown.
“Pei, certainly,” he confirmed unhappily, still not quite sure what it was he had seen in that moment. “What is going on, Erlang? I know censures are expected to land ‘hot’—” his inadvertent pun drew some mirthless chuckles from those nearby, as he waved an arm expansively at the devastation and the shifting miasma— “But this is excessive.”
“That is the question,” Erlang Weng retorted, a touch archly he felt, likely because the Yang qi was also getting to him as well. “As a disciple of our esteemed Lady Meng, I would have thought you might know?”
“Not sure, Senior Ji,” Li Jubei replied uneasily. “We got attacked… think it was some kind of unusual yang-attuned spirit herb?”
-A spirit herb?
Thinking back on the fleeting shadow he had seen just before the beam of yang qi, that was a possibility, he supposed. However, the attack that had killed Pei, and presumably Kang and Fuhai, had overwhelmed Lian Erbei’s barrier like it was not even there.
'What kind of spirit herb could to that?’ he found himself wondering, a sense of profound unease gripping his heart. There were a lot of questions rapidly stacking up in his mind, and none of them had good, or even reassuring theoretical answers.
“If we have been summoned by some motherless junior, because they tried and failed to seal up a yang attuned spirit herb, I will ensure their nine generations wish they were dead,” Meng Yu Dai muttered under his breath.
“Preach that Dao,” Lian Erbei agreed, cracking a brief smile, before her expression turned serious again. “Though there are precious few spirit herbs capable of this kind of apocalypse…”
“It is only at the Dao Step,” said one of the younger Dao Immortals, still basically a junior in years, rather ignorantly truth be told. “Doesn’t that put us at an—?”
“Idiot,” another, much older Sect Guardian clipped him on the back of his helmet. “Yin Eclipse’s fangs are as insidious as they are potent, Shi.”
“They are, Guardian Fei,” Lian Erbei agreed, apparently familiar with the Dao Immortal. “Either this is some hitherto unknown aberrant area, or something or someone lifted the suppression from Golden Core to almost the Dao Step. In all the years I spent here, before the re-founding, I never heard of a place like this though.”
“So, something lifted the suppression?” he concluded, grimly, looking around them again, at the smouldering swamp and the drifting miasma.
“Probably,” Lian muttered, her expression taut as she also looked around uneasily, and with good reason.
That meant either a very powerful spirit herb, or someone very stupid using a treasure.
“What even would do that?” Meng Yu Dai muttered, wiping sweat off his muddy face nervously. “Are we talking a Venerate Realm Artefact or something?”
Yu Dai’s comment drew some more mirthless laughter from the others, not unrealistically really. Not even old ancestors or his senior brothers could produce those at will.
“Are there spirit herbs capable of it?” Erlang Weng asked, a little disbelievingly after doing some calculations on his fingers.
“Yes,” Lian Erbei retorted flatly. “And if one of them is here, you better pray to Old Grandfather Meng that whoever is responsible for this didn’t annoy one of them. Presumably you were not so lost in your meditations to recall what this part of the world was like before Lu Fu Tao created a miracle?”
“—were they not all hunted down?” another Dao Immortal asked incredulously.
“A few,” Guardian Fei grunted.
“Yep, mostly sealed away into the treasures of Dao Ascendant old freaks of the Imperial Continent,” Lian Erbei agreed with a sigh. “The powerful ones, like that terrifying oleander spirit tree—”
He exhaled, suddenly, fighting the instinct to flinch, or turn around, as at her words he felt… something, like a lingering breath on the back of his neck.
“—evaded all censure though,” Lian concluded, before noticing his unease.
“What’s wrong?”
“I…” his words caught in his throat, as his roving gaze found a young girl, maybe no more than fourteen or fifteen in appearance, mostly shrouded in a knee-length cloak of… lily leaves, standing some ten metres away, in the shallow, smoking water.
Curly locks, the colour of dark mud framed her face, which was hidden behind a rather rustic, red-painted clay mask of a grinning visage, her pupils shining like blue sparks in its eye-sockets. Her only other adornment was a greenish-blue lotus flower fixed in her hair at the back of her head.
She tilted her head slightly, her gaze meeting his… and he got nothing, no read on her strength at all. She might as well have been a painting in the world, for all the intent she gave away.
“Who are you… to Meng Fu?”
The words were soft, evoking the sense of lapping water and wind, and entirely in his head, he realised, sweating, in a way that had nothing to do with the infernal swamp around them.
“Her… disciple?” he thought back, unable to look away.
“Then you should run,” the girl whispered, as the space between them seemed to shrink. “And tell her, that a Tyr—”
The moment shattered, as, with remarkably inauspicious timing, their surroundings distorted. Black cracks slid in and out of the misty miasma accompanied by a soundless roar of collapsing space—
“Light of Wisdom,” turning, he started to speak the invocation to one of his core arts… to try and shelter those around him “Become—”
“—Senior Brother?” he flinched, as Lian Erbei’s voice cut through the moment and everything seemed to snap back into focus around him, in a profoundly disorientating way.
Lian Erbei, who was holding his arm, he realised, managed to stop him from falling embarrassingly in the mud, her face pale.
The others were also looking at him with expressions stranded between confusion and concern.
“Are you okay?” she repeated, even as he searched for the spot where the girl had been, and found… nothing, just muddy water, melted ruins and swirling miasma.
“I… thought I saw something, but it was just this cursed yang miasma,” he finished, rather lamely, not quite sure why he was hiding what he had just seen.
-Perhaps because their ‘vaunted’ senior brother hallucinating strange girls in pools of water is not going to reassure anyone? A part of him muttered, before he again banished it to silence.
“So, what do we do now, Elder Erlang?” Elder Li Jubei asked, uneasily. “Should we try to establish a defensive form—”
Before he could even finish, the space around them juddered ominously. A few nearby bits of loose, half-melted masonry drifted eerily into the air, before landing with dull splats and cracks in the quagmire.
“Ahh—!” one of the Dao Immortal’s recoiled in shock as his barrier talisman clipped a serpentine streamer of yang miasma, immolating it in a flash of inauspicious sparks.
“Yeah, in my professional view, channelled formations are gonna be tricky,” Lian Erbei muttered, eyeing the resurgent, shifting streamers of yang miasma in the haze around them.
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Glancing around, he could see other barriers faltering as well now.
“What kind of yang law is this?” Guardian Fei hissed, stepping out of the way of another flare as it drifted past them, towards the crater.
“I have no idea, but its primal, and dangerous,” Lian Erbei replied grimly.
“Divinations are bust as well,” Erlang Weng muttered, glaring at a rather expensive compass that he had had tied to his belt. “A shame, I liked that compass…”
“…”
“—Anyway,” Erlang Weng added, looking around at them. “We should try and meet up with Grand Elder Tuo…” Erlang Weng trailed off as a female Dao Lord, in muddy armour, staggered out of the haze towards them.
“H-help…” she rasped desperately, as she spotted them.
“Senior sister Xiafei!” one of the Dao Immortal’s hurried over to help her. “What happened!?”
“We… Elder Hai is dead—” Xiafei broke off, coughing up a mouthful of blood that was far too rich in yang qi, and to his eyes, flecked faintly with gold, and slumped down against a fallen block.
“Dun Ancestors, she is having a deviation,” Elder Li muttered, hurrying over as well, to kneel beside her.
“What of the rest of that team?” Erlang Weng asked, as Elder Li and the Dao Immortal worked to stabilize her.
“We… not sure,” she gasped, before breaking off as another cough wracked her body, blood running from her nose and mouth again. “Something… like a… spider, or maybe a tetrid? Attacked us, but it was just a soul form… and when Senior Hai killed it, he… suffered some kind of deviation… then I came too and…” she trailed off with a groan and started cough ing up blood again.
“Shit… so there are yang-attuned qi beasts up here?” one of the other Dao Immortal’s groaned.
“Careful,” he warned Elder Li, as the Dao Immortal worked to pull off the front of her armour. “Yang Poisoning from this kind of place won’t be…”
He trailed off, as the Dao Immortal helping her suddenly grimaced, then turned pale, before doubling over with a groan, the qi around them turning chaotic.
“Nameless Mother! All Oufei did was touch her!” Guardian Shi hissed in shocked disbelief, as Elder Li, his face pale shifted to help the Dao Immortal.
“Anyone have any Sovereign grade yang purification pills?” Elder Li called over to them.
“Here,” Erlang Weng tossed him a pill jar. “Use…”
Erlang Weng trailed off as Xiafei suddenly spasmed, red-gold blood started to run from all of her orifices. They watched, in horror as it formed a head-sized… ‘thing’, akin to some kind of alchemical homunculus on her body—
He felt the barest flicker of instinctual danger from it, in that instant, like an eye opening to glare at them—
-Avoid… defend? Attack?”
Possibilities flickered through his mind, before he settled on proactively targeting it, to try and cut off whatever it was attempting, and thus avoid further casualties among their own—
In the same instant as he began to form the attack, however, he felt the inauspicious yang metal qi that had slipped into his body before, surge uncontrollably, and begin to resonate in a profoundly subversive way with his own intent—
—Motherless Dun—!
Biting off the curse, he desperately scattered his own attack before it could properly manifest, in an effort to prevent the invasive yang metal intent riddling his body running out of his control—
Someone grabbed him by the back of his armour, hauling him down out of the way as a beam of molten gold snapped into focus where he had just been. He landed in mud, at the bottom of a shallow slope pushed up over a collapsed wall, to find Lian Erbei lying beside him, her expression pale.
Above them, a shimmering veil of a multi-layered Dao Cage rippled, then scattered as the beam scythed through it, then vanished.
“Don’t attack it!” Yu Dai shouted from somewhere nearby. “Don’t even send intent—!”
Yu Dai’s instruction was lost as an effervescent wave of grasping yang qi rolled over their surroundings.
“That’s twice…” he groaned, thanking her in his heart as he finally got his qi under control again.
The feeling of helplessness gripping him was as unfamiliar as it was terrifying.
“Twice?” she repeated.
“You pulled me backwards,” he clarified, “Saved me…”
“…”
“I…it happened so fast, you just slipped and fell over the block, it was really fluky,” she muttered, not looking at him.
-It wasn’t her? He glanced around but there was next to no visibility where they were. Then who… That ‘young woman’?
“Anyway… this is really bad,” Lian continued, shifting her position so she was half crouched beside him. “Are you okay?”
“I… have it under control,” he replied, as much to reassure her as himself.
The look she returned wasn’t one of confidence, which was understandable. “I can guess now, what happened to Xiafei’s group,” she muttered, as another shockwave of yang qi flickered overhead. “What happened to you? You were nowhere near it?”
“As soon as I targeted whatever that was with any kind of ‘intent’, it…” he started to explain, then trailed off realising that it was actually not at all simple to explain. “The yang qi from the surroundings reacted, as if associated with some kind of profound curse.”
“Like a…” Following Lian Erbei’s words, he caught a flicker of her turning her perception inwards, then her expression twisted. “Shit… that’s bad, very bad.”
“It is,” he agreed, still not at all sure in his own mind how to deal with it. It was almost like whatever was responsible was tailor made to deal with martial cultivators. “We have jumped feet first into a—”
A flash of distorting space shimmered through the haze around them. It was followed, a moment later, by a vast, coruscating blossom of void fire.
Lian Erbei groaned audibly, while he felt his own heart sink. The ‘usual’ practice for censures, was to send in a strike-force, with support on standby. Usually, you only needed the first wave, and in fact, of the two dozen or so he had taken part in in the last few years, he could not recall off-hand a time where the reserve deployment had been used for anything other than mop-up.
“Well, that’s just—Ah!” Lian Erbei flinched as two muddy, armoured figures rolled down into their refuge.
Turning, he tried to suppress his qi and martial intent.
A moment later, a wave of searing yang-law-infused qi surged over the blocks above them, before scattering into the haze like ocean spray.
“It’s me, Fei,” Guardian Fei gasped, reassuring her as he deposited the muddy, pale figure of Meng Yu Dai, who seemed to be suffering soul shock, beside them. “I am glad you are both okay…”
“Likewise,” he replied grimly, watching the attack that had narrowly missed the pair fade away.
“Was that our support wave… just arriving?” Yu Dai asked weakly as Lian Erbei slid over to him and carefully started checking his injuries. “Because we didn’t check in?”
“Probably, yes,” he confirmed, hoping it was that, and not because some idiot had managed to do so.
“Wonderful,” Guardian Fei muttered sarcastically, echoing Lian Erbei’s reaction. “Ancestor Tan is gonna have us guarding spirit chickens for the next millennia over this.”
“I’ll take it, if that means we get out of here intact,” Yu Dai muttered. “—and stop fussing, senior sister, I am just suffering talisman shock…”
Lian Erbei scowled at the younger talisman grandmaster and just shook her head.
“Any others survive?” he asked them, as another flare of yang qi rippled overhead.
“Xiafei and Oufei are dead,” Yu Dai answered first, shaking his head. “I think Li as well, and maybe Jin Bai.”
“—Erlang Weng?” Lian Erbei added.
“Probably still okay,” Fei replied drily. “He was to the other side of you. They retreated back behind the wall to our…”
Even as Guardian Fei stopped speaking, he felt the shadow of almost incomprehensible danger brush against his instincts.
“Little brother…” the voice returned, like a lost child, grasping for him.
The world around them rippled and bent, as if reality was merely a reflection in a pond, into which a stone had now been cast. In the spaces between ripples, he saw other places.
An ancient cloud forest.
A great city in the shadow of immense mountains.
An island in a lake with a great tree crowned in jasmine.
A young woman with smouldering good looks, her arms dissolving into golden sparks as she stared sadly at them…
… and then there was silence
*crack* *crrr…ack* *chink*
And then an eerie, inauspicious sound, like a slowly shattering clay pot.
“You… must resist him,” golden lights danced on the far side of the crater, calling to him, their tone pleading, lost… horrified… alone. In them, he found a disconcerting resonance with the vision of the vanishing young woman he had just seen. Something of her qi, or perhaps her intent, as they faded forlornly away?
“—Or this world… will…” the whispered voice, however, lingered in the air around him—
Everything snapped back together, leaving him gasping in shock.
“—die…”
The word hit him like a sword, trying to pierce through his consciousness—
“Light of Wisdom, Become My Sword…”
The words, sounding alien to his ears, turned out to be his own, spoken by his Dao Soul as it sheltered him successfully from the grasping strength surging into his body—
“Tcch, this thing—!”
He stared, in horror, as a naked old man, his skin badly burnt, to the point where he appeared like some nightmarish devil, appeared, like an underworld ghost before him, palm outstretched.
“—Hey, wait, NO!”
In the same instant, the young woman from before appeared, between them, barely blocking the old man’s strike—
…
He opened his eyes and stared up at the haze of mist above him, sweating.
His whole body hurt.
Memories slowly flowed back into his mind from the last few moments. There had been an old devil unleashed… and they had been summoned to fight…
-No, that’s not right! he groaned, pushing back against the subversive re-arrangement of the last few minutes in his head.
As he did so, he found, to his horror that in the blink of an eye, the subversive incursion of that yang metal qi had almost reached his Dao Soul.
“Light of Wisdom, Become My Heart…”
Focusing the art his teacher had given him to practice inwards, to his relief, he found that it managed to repress it to a degree. Enough to regain awareness of his surroundings… though when he did, he wished he was still ignorant.
Guardian Fei and Meng Yu Dai lay dead on the ground nearby, their blood pooling around their bodies, slowly turning golden. Lian Erbei was slumped a few feet away, barely alive, looking at him with a lost, confused expression, full of regret… while standing over her, was the old man he had just seen a moment before.
“—All I can offer you, is the reward of a meaningful death,” the old man was saying, as he reached down to pull her up.
“Senior brother…” Lian Erbei mouthed at him, her qi turning chaotic. Within it, he saw the same hints of the qi subversion he was experiencing as well. “Flee…”
“No… Enough,” quashing is horror, he reached within himself, focusing on his sword Dao—
“Light of Wisdom, Become My Sword…”
{Illuminating Sword of the Wisdom King}
A brilliant white blade, wreathed in parasol qi slid into focus between him and the old man. It was the strongest art he possessed.
“Interesting,” the old man mused, as the blade flashed towards him. “I got to say—”
The old man blinked as the sword didn’t hit him, but Lian Erbei.
“What the—!” her shocked exclamation hung, disorientatingly in his ears, as his sword pierced between her breasts, sealing her Dao Soul into his own soul weapon.
As a crude solution to a serious problem, it was nothing if not esoteric.
“Sorry,” he apologised to her, as his Dao Soul pulled her consciousness into the depths of his Sea of Knowledge. “Where there is life, there is hope.”
The distortion in her qi abruptly intensified… before simply bleeding out into the air around her, where it dispersed harmlessly. The old man stared at her for a second, then let the lifeless corpse fall into the mud with a sigh.
Off in the distance, there was another dull rumble, then a vast flare of purple fire, tinged with death qi—
The old man glanced in its direction, then sighed again and focused on him.
“Just you… really, it is terrible, the villainy they wrought,” shaking his head.
“Why… are you doing this?” he rasped, trying to buy time to use the art again.
“Sometimes, death is the greatest gift,” the old man replied, stepping forward.
“But not mine, and not here,” he retorted, raising his hand to point at the old man.
{Wisdom Illuminating Sword}
A shimmering spark shot out of his third eye, transforming into a golden sword of parasol qi that contained within it, the comprehensions that would, one day, have become his Truth.
“Not bad...” the old man observed, as it flowed towards him, before simply raising his hand to block it with his open palm—
He could only watch in horror as a black slit opened on the old man’s palm, transforming into a devouring eye that enveloped his art, ripping it to shreds in an instant.
“Not bad at all…” the old man observed. “However, I can only say, your fate is a cruel one—”
Taking a deep breath, he refocused on his own body for a moment, and his teacher’s life-saving treasure she had bequeathed him to nurture and master, when he first took his bows as her disciple.
The scholar half reached out a hand, pointing at him—
A celestial figure wearing a phoenix robe and crowned in a wreath of parasol flowers appeared before him. Her golden hair was adorned with a fan of phoenix feathers, whilst in her hands was a two-handed sword identical to the one he had just used to seal Lian Erbei.
On her brow, the symbol for ‘Wisdom’ shone, while her elegant phoenix robe was emblazoned with ‘Sovereign’, the crown of phoenix feathers in her hair with ‘Illumination’, and her sword… with the symbol for ‘Sword’, as she raised it, hilt first to the sky with both hands—
{Wise Sovereign’s Illuminating Sword}
A shining golden sword split the chaotic sky above them, bathing everything for a hundred metres in a celestial radiance. Golden feathers drifted in the air and parasol blossoms swirled and danced as it enveloped the old man… whose form wavered for a brief moment, then scattered in a shockwave of black ash and discordant qi.
He exhaled, and then grimaced as he felt the burden of summoning that art, of the years lost and the accumulation sacrificed, settle onto his Dao Soul—
A strange, eerie rumble reverberated through the ruined landscape. With its passing, the haze seemed to recoil, while the previously rampant devouring yang strength… didn’t exactly lessen, but lost some of its greedy avariciousness.
Abruptly, their surroundings shuddered.
Blocks and dirt all around them started to drift upwards and the haze flowed away… to reveal a shadow-like horror slowly pulling itself up out of the ruins about thirty metres away.
In ‘form’ it resembled the bastard offspring of a squid and a spider-crab, distorted to fit into the shape of a cultivator.
As he looked upon it, something gripped his mind and locked out his Dao soul's control over his own body for a bewildering split second.
The shadow loomed over him, an eye in its forehead opening, like a mouth into absolute nihility, trying to draw him in. The shining woman in front of him raised her sword again, spectral blood running through her fingers… and then the world around him bent and there was only darkness and a sense of falling—
He hit the ground hard enough that he bounced up about a metre before slamming down again.
“SENIOR JI!"
A horrified shout pulled him out of his little world of pain.
“—What happened!”
“—Is that Senior Ji?”
“—Get an Elder!”
“—M-mist?!”
“—Elder Fang! Come here!”
“—Teacher, what is going on!”
“—What is this qi, this water?!”
“—Is he dead?!”
Panicked shouts rang everywhere as he got his bearings, finding he was lying on the floor of the Supreme Transmission platform, within the heart of the Seven Sovereigns Imperial School.
Groaning, he tried to move, and found his physical body was ruined, yang qi bleeding chaotically out of his shattered physical foundation into the surroundings, which were covered with a spray of mud and water from his previous surroundings.
“How are we still alive?” Lian Erbei sobbed in the back of his mind.
“Not a forgone conclusion,” his Dao Soul observed, dispassionately.
He was still alive, thanks, in no small part it seemed, to that life-saving treasure and the seedling of parasol qi fused to his soul that he had left behind in the sect. The cost to escape like that, though, had been extreme.
-Six thousand years of accumulation and progress wiped out in a second, a part of him gibbered.
His cultivation had collapsed almost down to Ancient Immortal, and he had lost enough longevity to whatever that terrifying thing had done in the moment before he escaped, that he could probably pass as a legitimate Junior.
“Get… away…” he gasped, oppressing his intent as best he could, because the vile metal qi and worse was still in his physical husk of a body.
“What happened, Senior Ji!” Elder Fang, the Dao Eternal who was in charge of the teleport hall asked, hurrying over.
“Meng Tan…” he rasped. "Get Meng Tan… clear the—”
“It is useless to run…”
He tried to scream as the pressure of the intent accompanying the words ripped a hole, like a lidless eye, straight into the teleport hall.
“You should have just accepted your fate…”
The great wards on the whole complex disintegrated, like cheap paper in rain, as the horrifying old man descended out of the ‘eye’ into the hall like a demon god.
“—and, like those heroes of old… met your death with honour.”
All those present in the hall, except for Elder Fang and one other Dao Eternal, instantly collapsed like puppets who had lost their strings, their souls smashed, and their mortal chains entirely broken, delivering them an end without hope of reincarnation.
In his now crippled state, he only managed to endure, thanks once again to the link he still retained to the seed of parasol qi in his remaining Dao Soul, held in the inheritance shrine.
The response from the Dao and Martial Ascendant guardians who stood watch over the teleport gate was immediate and furious.
The grand hall rang like a celestial bell, a dozen furious male and female voices howled in unison, as they struck back against the terrible eye, that was still expanding around the old man, as he descended towards the floor of the hall.
In response, he simply raised his arms, which blurred shifting from one pair to six, each hand manifesting its own devouring eye—
{A Sword Severing the Day}
Elder Fang’s own furious attack smashed into the old man’s body, and as they looked on in horror, scattered like water off a rock, barely even leaving a mark. The other Martial Eternal fared no better, his Dao Weapon breaking like glass as the old scholar effortlessly grabbed it, simultaneously landing a blow that sent his lifeless body crashing into the far wall.
“Not bad,” the old man, who was still focused on him, murmured, as he touched the ground a few metres away. “But still…” —his hands, with the terrifying eyes on their palms pushed outwards, against the oppressing intent trying to cage him “—insufficient!”
He could only watch, in helpless horror, his consciousness continuing to slip away, into the devouring oblivion of that eye, as the old man physically dispersed the combined attack of the twelve Dao Ascendants—
“—YOU DARE! CREATURE FROM BEYOND!”
The rebuke slammed into the scholar, followed a moment later, by the roof of the hall above them dissolving into misty clouds, from which descended seven fairy goddesses, wreathed in phoenix fire and parasol flowers and wielding two-handed swords crafted of parasol wood.
“Little Ji…” his teachers voice suddenly rang in his ears.
“Teacher…” desperately, he reached for her, even as the darkness surged around him, and the yang metal poison in his body finally overwhelmed his Dao Soul’s valiant resistance.
The seven, meanwhile, had alighted in the centre of the hall, surrounding them, their swords blazing like seven suns, ephemera depicting the mythical parasol tree shining around each of one.
[SEVEN ~ SEVERING ~ PHOENIX ~ SWORDS]
The seven sword spirits spoke as one, striking inwards… as the old man raised his hands once again, grinning mirthlessly—
The last thing he perceived, as darkness overwhelmed him and the remnants of Lian Erbei’s soul, was the sky above collapsing upwards, revealing a radiant figure, descending like a winged fairy goddess from the sky, her hand reaching for him—
----------------------------------------
~ DUN LIAN JING – BLUE WATER CITY ~
----------------------------------------
“I thought the weather was meant to be fixed!”
“This is it ‘fixed’, moron…”
“Maybe don’t drink before lunch?”
“Are you saying Prince Fanshu is responsible for this?”
“—Yes!”
“How dare you slander Prince Fanshu!”
Dun Lian Jing, leaning on the balcony, sipping her lukewarm, formerly ‘iced’ tea, sighed softly, and fought the urge to tug at the light gown she was wearing.
It was almost like the weather was playing a cruel joke on everyone, for her half-brother’s moronic attempts to change it.
The rain was indeed gone, again. However, in its place was a sort of grasping humidity that was markedly at odds with the clear sky and gentle onshore breeze. The way it enveloped everything left her feeling clammy and constantly on edge—like unwanted hands were brushing against her, or unseen eyes were following her every move. It made her long for the rain, which was not something she would have believed possible, even a few days ago.
That she was currently stuck hosting a ‘gathering’ for promising young nobles from this province, didn’t help either.
“A problem, Princess?” Huang Shi Yuimei murmured, from where she was sitting nearby, fanning herself. A recent addition to her entourage, having been left to her by JiLao to be a trusted ‘helper’ of sorts ever since Fanshu arrived.
In some respects, theirs was a strange pairing. Shi Yuimei hailed from an influential household within the Wuli clan, of a status able to call Empress Huang Mei her elder cousin. Rather like Lingsheng actually, even for a princess like herself it was complicated to confidently name her their junior.
“Weather, idiots, politics,” she muttered, trying to push the fact that Shi Yuimei was half her age and a whole realm higher, from her mind. “Take your pick.”
“If it’s any consolation, apparently this weather is annoying people even Fanshu cannot deal with,” Shi Yuimei snickered.
“I guess there is that,” she conceded, absently wondering who she meant.
“Speaking of politics and idiots, any word on cousin JiLao?” Shi Yuimei asked sipping her iced wine. “He raced off earlier to Cao Leyang’s palace like someone had set his robe on fire.”
“No idea,” she replied, wondering why she felt a touch put out over that. “We are not joined at the hip…”
-Is it just that the last few days of having to host pandering dinners and gatherings have been especially tedious?
-A week or two ago, I would have been happy to let Ji deal with that…
Her suspicion regarding how she was having to play hostess, as she was at that moment, for all sorts of symposiums for juniors and formal dinners, was simply that Fanshu only relished them when they provided an opportunity for him to steal the show in some way. With her here, all the things a ‘princess’ would normally do could be pushed off to her.
Having multiple imperial advisors, including his own ‘imperial teacher’, lurking behind Fanshu , didn’t help either, she felt. In contrast, she had had one brief meeting with Dun Jian…
-Uggh… why is that the thing that comes to mind? She wondered with a grimace. It’s not like he has actually given much input.
-If he wants to spend all his time in Fanshu’s orbit, so be it.
“I figured he might have said something to you,” Shi Yuimei sighed, her tone somehow seeming to imply a certain kind of judgement.
She stared out at the swaying trees in silence, wondering why she felt so out of sorts all of a sudden. Ordinarily, she might have called Shi Yuimei out for her implication that she and Ji Lao had that degree of confidence. It would have been a bit awkward to send her back to Ji Lao, but absolutely, she would have found a petty way to get back at her for such an insinuation. Now, however, she just couldn’t find it within her, she realised. Especially since that vision with the Taiji. Lingsheng was still drifting about as well, having seemingly struck up a friendship with Ling Yu.
“…And she hasn’t so much as attended a dinner, since Fanshu really started to play the social scene…”
“—Who?” Shi Yuimei asked, sounding curious, making her realise she had spoken that out loud.
“Uggh…” she stared at her cup of tea, then poured it out over the veranda in disgust.
“Ling Yu,” she answered, staring back out at the gardens below.
“Oh?” Shi Yuimei frowned. “I didn’t know you knew her?”
Again, there was something in the girl’s tone that a part of her tried to find vexing; perhaps the idea that ‘she’ should know Ling Yu, rather than the other way around. Yet, again, she found herself silencing it.
“I suppose whoever the Ling clan has watching over her, is not keen to have her enter the prince’s orbit,” Shi Yuimei mused, eyeing her own now not so cool drink with a grimace. “That young Lady of the Kun Lord has also not shown herself, and for looks she is also someone Fanshu would definitely want to ‘collect’.”
“True,” she reflected, glad she was looking out over the park, so her expression of disgust was not visible to the room at large.
“I attended a dinner she hosted, with the young lady Kun Juni,” she clarified absently. “It was… diverting enough to be enjoyable.”
Looking back on it now, that dinner with Ling Yu and her friends almost felt like the high-water mark in her time here. Before that stupid auction, and then everything that came after. She had toyed with the idea of trying to draw those hunters into their task, but that seemed unlikely now. According to Ji Lao, they had been sent into the mountains to prepare herbs for the Shan Emperor’s ‘gift’.
“—The Imperial Uncle requires your presence, Princess.”
They both turned to find a tall, pale-haired youth wearing robes marked with the Dun Clan had appeared, entirely unnoticed and unannounced, on the veranda behind them.
-Is that why I felt so on edge? she mused, wondering how long he had been there, spying.
There was something about his manner, in the way he looked at her, and Shi Yuimei, that made her feel that was probably the case. Looking the youth over, beyond his robe, she saw no open sign of his status or rank, nor could she make anything of his realm, either.
“He does?” she asked, affecting to sound somewhat bored, even though inside she was frowning.
Apart from one brief meeting just after he had arrived, she had barely laid eyes on Dun Jian outside of official engagements. Between her brewing frustration over this ‘mission’ they were on, and the matter of her broken talisman, a part of her had actually been quite content with that state of affairs.
“I am to bring you to him,” the youth affirmed, just loudly enough that a few other groups nearby heard.
“…”
-So, he is one of Dun Jian’s household servants? She surmised with a mental sigh.
Those were the only ones who could just… not care about her status like this. Even Fanshu’s toadies and Envoy Quan had to at least pretend around her. That said, his dismissive attitude was unusual.
The surprising part was that she didn’t recognise him, she had thought that by now she was at least passingly familiar with all of Dun Jian’s influential hangers on.
As tempting as it was however, outright ignoring Dun Jian’s summons was probably not an option, so with a final sigh, she nodded to Shi Yuimei to follow her—
“Only you,” the youth added, again loud enough for others to hear, sounding almost amused?
“Yeah, no,” Shi Yuimei replied with an amused shake of her head as she stood up. “I don’t answer to Dun Jian, only to Duke Huang.”
The youth gave her a long look, then rather surprisingly, just shrugged, rather dismissively.
“In that case, don’t blame me later,” he murmured, his tone a hair of being genuinely mocking, setting off towards the stairs down to the level of the gardens themselves.
“Oh, I am sure I can find a way to,” Shi Yuimei smirked, falling in beside her and slipping her arm through hers—
“Watch him,” Shi Yuimei’s voice echoed in her ear. “He has Huang clan arts, and he is an Ancient Immortal.”
Glancing at Shi Yuimei, she nodded slightly, in thanks, mulling that over. It would certainly explain why she was feeling a bit out of sorts, and why the youth had the confidence to think he could influence her.
“—You know what they say about us Huang girls,” Shi Yuimei added with a mocking half-smile of her own.
If her implicit threat bothered the youth, however, he didn’t outwardly react in a way that he had taken her words to heart.
As they walked, she also observed that they were now the focus of various groups in the hall. Many were just curious about the sight of her being so obviously ‘escorted’ off, however, off to the side, she saw their departure was being watched with something approaching derisive amusement, especially among those who favoured Fanshu.
“Well, that’s all they will ever amount to,” Shi Yuimei snickered, before blowing a mocking kiss at one nearby group wearing Huang clan colours.
Amusingly, they all flinched at the realisation that she had marked their attitude.
Shi Yuimei laughed lightly, and she followed suit, both of them intentionally walking about a step slower than the youth, who was then forced to slow his own brisk pace just to look like he was still ‘leading’ them.
In that vaguely farcical manner, they descended to the lower level, where less influential juniors were milling about, and then out into the garden plaza, watched all the way by bystanders, no-doubt curious as to why she was being ‘escorted’ from her own ‘party’.
“Come,” the youth repeated, as they headed across the plaza. “Follow me pri—”
“Ah, Young Hero. Zhaohui!” she stopped, deliberately, beside a group who were talking eagerly to a youth she vaguely recognised from the tournament being held in her ‘honour’ when she first arrived.
“P-Princess!” Wei Zhaohui bowed, looking a bit shocked to addressed by her in person.
“I just wanted to congratulate you on your wonderful showing at the tournament!” she continued brightly, before pulling out a quasi-immortal spirit fruit that was good for nourishing nascent souls and passing it to him.
“T-thank you!” he repeated, accepting it without raising his head, as everyone around him ‘ohhhh’ed’ respectfully.
“Indeed,” Shi Yuimei agreed, producing a rechargeable, defensive Dao Seeking charm and awarding it to the lucky youth, who looked equal parts thoroughly confused and totally shocked at this point.
“I look forward to hearing about your future exploits!” she added, giving him a warm smile.
“You honour me, Princess! Lady Huang,” Wei Zhaohui murmured, bowing to them both.
She had to admit, there was a certain irony to the fact that his ‘fortunate encounter’, which would no doubt be the talk of his peers, was caused solely by her needing to recover some momentum in whatever was going on with Dun Jian.
Giving him a slight nod back, which was a substantial honour in its own right, she turned to the youth Dun Jian had sent, who was staring at her blandly.
“Well, lead on, my Imperial Uncle is a busy man,” she commanded him with a pleasant smile and a wave of her fan.
The youth almost looked like he wanted to refuse, but the problem with playing silly games with someone of her status was that occasionally you won stupid prizes. So instead, all he could do was bow just enough to appear respectful and lead them on, past the groups milling around chatting in the garden plaza, now sizing up Wei Zhaohui, and into the hall at the far side.
Here, a bunch of old men dressed in scholarly robes, who were sitting about drinking wine and playing chess, glanced up at them, but made no comment other than to give her and Yuimei polite nods of acknowledgement.
Beyond that room, she found herself in an entirely different ‘party’, albeit with a very familiar guest list. Fanshu was seated, talking to a blonde-haired youth in a white robe of the Huang clan on the far side of the room, while several other Huang youths, including Huang Ryuun, and followers of Fanshu hovered around them, listening attentively.
“Oh for…” Shi Yuimei’s expression soured faintly, as the youth started to lead them in that direction.
“That’s Huang Bai, over there, talking to Dun Fanshu, be careful of him, his status will be a problem if he targets you.”
“Huang Bai?” she murmured softly back, not at all familiar with him.
“He… is from off world, I had no idea someone like that was interested in Fanshu…” Shi Yuimei added, making clear by her tone alone that this wasn’t necessarily a good thing.
Thinking quickly, she swept her gaze around and spotted a pair of imperial guards who she recognised, guarding the entrance to the balcony overlooking the garden’s, wearing Dun Jian’s colours—
“Come,” she whispered, and split off from the youth’s path, heading for the balcony overlooking the garden.
Walking briskly, giving some pleasant smiles here and there to various juniors who glanced their direction, they made it all the way to the balcony, where the guards finally stopped her.
“Dun Jian summoned us, Captain Fushan,” she told the more senior Imperial Guardsman perfunctorily.
“Mmmm…” Captain Fushan glanced at the youth who had been ‘leading’ them, and then at Fanshu, then sighed and nodded slightly, clearly unwilling to be caught up in stupid games.
Giving him a polite smile of thanks, she led Shi Yuimei onto the balcony. There, as she had hoped, she found Dun Jian, talking to a raven-haired beauty in a low-cut gown in Kong clan colours. Huang Hunji was also there, conversing quietly with a tall, fair-haired, scholarly youth whose white robe was covered in a majestic teal and gold Luan. Another youth with reddish hair in a white, Huang clan robe stood silently beside him.
“Lord Huang Luan,” Shi Yuimei sighed, giving him, rather than Huang Hunji a formal bow, and a half glance at the youth beside him.
“Ah, junior sister Yuimei!” Lord Luan said brightly, “And your friend must be Princess Lian?”
“I am,” she replied, bowing politely to him, still not entirely clear as to his rank, though the greeting Yuimei had given suggested he was part of the Wuli family.
“—Lian?” Dun Jian had turned to them as well, now, looking a little surprised, though he recovered quickly.
“You asked for me to attend, Teacher,” she replied respectfully, now thoroughly sure that her ‘summons’ had been Fanshu playing stupid games.
Dun Jian raised an eyebrow, but then just nodded.
“Lady Xin, let me introduce my most promising protege,” Dun Jian said, waving her forward with a warm smile.
“Lady Xin,” she murmured, giving the young woman from the Kong clan a polite salute. “Imperial Uncle…”
“Please, Jian, when we are in informal company,” Dun Jian said with a pleasant smile. “Lian here has been…”
The wind changed.
One second, it was stagnant, the next it was fresh and vibrant, flowing out of the south, out of the depths of the storm-wracked ocean, and on it… came…
“You Dare—!”
The echoing words were less… words than a manifestation of the primal forces of nature within their world.
“How impetuous…” Huang Hunji, who had come to stand beside Dun Jian and Lady Xin muttered.
“Indeed…” Lord Luan agreed, staring out at the ocean a little uneasily.
“So forceful…” Lady Xin murmured. “There must be a dozen at least?”
“To respond like this...” Dun Jian trailed off, frowning, as the qi around them started to dance and thrum.
All along the horizon, now, she could see dark clouds surging forth in a vast tsunami, flashing with golden qi that flickered from horizon to horizon—
Something rolled over them, draining the vibrancy and colour from the world as it did so. There was a fury there, and a sense of otherworldly oppression—
“Oh…”
All their expressions suddenly twisted with concern as the world around them groaned.
“—CREATURE… FROM… BEYOND!”
The words crashed into her head, each syllable like a peal of thunder, the promise of violence within them was at once awe inspiring and dreadful. Beyond the pavilion—across the whole city and its surroundings, in fact—spectral lattices of a vast formation, its scope and complexity beyond anything she had ever observed even within the imperial palace shimmered and shifted into focus. Millions of symbols shifting and adjusting—
“W-what is…” Lady Xin’s expression turned uncertain a moment before she too saw them.
Seven stars hung over the southern horizon that had not been there before.
In the blink of an eye, they had risen high into the sky, as if…
Her mind went blank as she saw they were not stars, but figures, holding swords. Seven radiant celestial goddesses, surrounded by blazing, golden coronas that shone with an otherworldly starlight. Each wore a glorious phoenix robe and wielded a two-handed sword of exquisitely carved dark wood, which shed ephemeral parasol blossoms.
Their scattering trails were flocks of phoenixes, whose echoing cries carried an intent so arrogant and prideful that it seemed to repel the very heavens above and sublimated the ocean below.
Just to look upon them made her want to drop to her knees and weep for having seen such a glorious, if profoundly terrifying, sight.
“Seven Severing Saintess…” Lord Luan mumbled, with pale-faced horror, as the horizon fell away with their approach, as if the very world itself was distorting with their passage.
“Seven Severing—?” Dun Jian hissed, his expression turning grim.
“Fates damn that mannish Meng bitch!” Huang Hunji exclaimed, very undiplomatically, she felt, if he was cursing who she thought. “She had a card like this hiding?”
“—As in… her?”
Turning, she found Fanshu and several of his flunkies had come through, accompanied by Huang Bai.
“Is she t-trying to a-assassinate brother Fanshu?” the youth who had ‘escorted’ her here, stammered stupidly. As amusing as that would be, she was fairly sure this was a treasure nobody would use just for a junior. Even one as annoying as her half-brother. Not even the Meng clan… probably. “Over something like this—?”
Abruptly, the swords in their grasp exploded with a radiance so bright she was left seeing iridescent holes in the world.
Everyone fell silent, as the view above them distorted, bizarrely, as if the world was bending in on itself, the high mountains of Yin Eclipse rising up, to a fearful grandeur, as the horizon behind the seven dropped away—
The coronas around each dancing goddess flared, becoming a multitude of phoenix wings.
With a thunderous crack of breaking space, the world above them rippled and the very dome of the sky split, transforming into seven falling suns, descending from a vast shadowy pavilion—
“SEVEN SEVERING SWORDS OF THE PARASOL PAVILION!”
The words the seven goddesses spoke rolled over Blue Water City like an oppressive hurricane.
“Brother Huang,” Fanshu gasped. “Can you—”
Half turning, she saw that one of the Huang youths with Huang Bai had a golden talisman emblazoned with a flaming luan in his hands—
One of the seven suns suddenly wavered, its arc… shifting as if…
Her heart skipped with terror, as a vast, horrifying oppression settled on them, originating from the seventh ‘goddess’ who was now looking directly at them—
Had Dun Jian not caught her and Lady Xin, she would have fallen, she was sure. Even so, she saw his face was pale and strained. Fanshu and the other juniors were not so lucky. Only Huang Bai managing to remain standing, as all the others crumpled to their knees, their faces pale.
“YOU IDIOT!” Lord Luan practically screamed, hitting the offending youth so hard he went sprawling in a heap, bleeding from his mouth, simultaneously snatching the talisman and casting it far into the sky, beyond the barrier of the city—
The oppression receded, even as a trailing tendril of golden fire swirled down from the seventh star to hit it, the two colliding in an almost anticlimactic crack of darkness—
The ripple that passed through them nearly made her vomit, and left eerie, iridescent shadows through their surroundings. A moment later, a shining glyph appeared over each person present, even the seniors, and the formation for the city’s defence above them shimmered inauspiciously, giving her a profound and unpleasant feeling of being stared at by something that cared nothing for her status as a princess, or even a junior…
“Oh for…” Huang Hunji raised his hands, only to be stopped by Lord Luan, who had recomposed himself.
“Don’t, Brother Huan, anything made by Lu Fu Tao is not simple, and the formation he has placed on his pride is fearsome for a great world. Such that even I cannot see the whole of it.”
A moment later, the glyphs vanished, as if they had never been, as did the deeply creepy feeling of being watched.
Meanwhile, above them, the seven goddesses with their swords had, in that confused moment, passed over Blue Water City, leaving thunder and a rain of parasol blossoms and phoenix fire in their wake and were descending with ever increasing momentum towards the distant, rain-shadowed peaks of the coastal mountains towards Yin Eclipse.