~ PART 2 ~

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~ JUN SANA – CLIMBING, HYOO ~

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Gritting her teeth, Sana ignored the faint burning feeling running through her arms, and checking she had enough grip on the cliff-face with her right foot, reached up with her left arm to find a new hand hold. The crude rope harness tugged at her awkwardly as she climbed, but she ignored that as well. It wasn’t even worth feeding it to her mantra at this point. Instead, as she hung there, she just used it to keep her body warm amid the uncomfortably chilly misty cloud swirling around her.

“Just look down…”

-Sure! She spent a moment to stare at the cliff face ahead of her, the rough surface of the wet rock a mere hand’s-width from her face, until the tugging feeling trying to distract her faded away again.

-Ji Tantai—Di Ji, you dog-shit bastard… you think this is enough to break me? I’ve been to the Red Pit you pampered little dog-master. There are literal trees more annoying than you!

Exhaling, she found her foothold and took a deep breath as she pulled herself up again, searching for the next handhold by touch rather than sight, following the grain of the rock until she found something suitable.

Below her, she was sure her sister was looking up, probably concerned for how long this was taking, but cliffs were cliffs, and the mist was a bitch.

“Just let go, you stupid bitch…”

“Only if you do!” she bit off in reply under her breath and pulled herself up again.

A fall from this height, into water, would be painful, but even here, likely no more than that. Compared to climbing out of the sinkhole, or even trying to scale the cliff on their first day here, this ascent was easy. Should be easy. That it wasn’t was starting to bother her as well.

Climb, breathe, curse, reach, foothold, hang, breathe, climb, breathe… it was monotonous. Handhold after handhold, avoiding vegetation, avoiding cracks, avoiding the areas where slippery moss clung, begging to be grasped just so it could shear off in her hand.

If there was a mercy, it was that there was nothing like Algru on the rockface—or poison creeper, or soul briar, or any of a dozen other nasty hanging things that liked to grace these sorts of places, at least not in the fashion you would get in the… outside, just…

Those plants were here, but their effects were… odd. Their sap in particular, or leaves when she broke them, still caused her a lot of discomfort—even through the luss cloth she was using to protect her forearms. However, while the pain was quite vibrant and the discomfort lingered, there was no actual, poisonous qi inherent to them, or at least none she could detect—

Her holding grip slipped slightly on the wet rock, its surface grazing her hand as she gritted her teeth and put all her weight onto her searching arm.

“Fate-thrashed-dog-son-bastard…” she spent a few moments longer cursing as she hung there, practically by her fingers, then swung herself up once again.

Climb, breathe… reach, foothold, hang.

This time, she didn’t lose her grip as she hung there, looking ahead, waiting for the mist to shift a bit. The hazy, fractal patterns of whatever the monkey had done were also more prevalent here, ghosting like shadows across surfaces she wasn’t quite focusing on. She had tried to avoid them as much as possible, while climbing, but sometimes, there was just no opportunity. Nothing bad had happened yet, but that was the problem with phenomena like that—the ‘yet’, part.

Seconds edged by, the fire in her arms starting to rekindle from its dying embers, until at last it parted enough to show more than a few metres ahead, revealing that it was starting to angle out a bit.

“Knowing my luck, it won’t be the top. This will just be a weathering scar,” she grumbled out loud, as talking to herself helped regulate her breathing.

“—is it looking?”

Arai’s voice drifted up from below through the swirling mist.

“LIKE A CLIFF!” she called back down, putting as much humour into her words as she could as the mist ate them up.

There might have been laughter from below, it was hard to tell through the pervasive hiss of wind and water on rock.

Taking another deep breath, she started onwards again, shifting her path to her left, to try and avoid going straight up the underside of any potential overhang. The previous cliff ascent had had enough of that to last her a long time.

Somewhat to her surprise, the stupid taunting of the Ji Tantai voice didn’t return for a whole five minutes, not until she was navigating the key point where she had to climb purely with her arms, nearly hanging free against the disconcertingly out-cropping rock. Thankfully, she had already found a spot to affix the rope, so even had she fallen, which she had not, it would merely have been an embarrassing drop of some ten metres or so.

“Little Lady Nameless take your voice…” whispering, rather than singing the song under her breath, she hauled herself up over the worst of the protruding ledge, hand over hand, arm-length by arm length until she found herself faced with an upwardly sloping face… and at long last a horizon of sodden loam within the mists, clinging between roots, sweeping branches and tangled vines.

“FOUND THE TOP!” she hollered back down.

“—ood!” came her sister’s muted shout back as she started climbing again.

Bug free, and mercifully without anything really unpleasant beyond some stinging creepers, her progress over the last few metres to the true ‘top’ of the ridge only took some further thirty seconds.

Reaching the top, she shook the rope a few times to make sure it was free of any obstructions, then picked a suitably firmly rooted tree several metres back from the edge to affix the end to and tied it off, before sitting down on its roots to catch her breath.

While she waited for her sister to make the ascent with the stupid puppet body, she spent a few minutes checking her gashed hand. Thankfully, while it had bled a bit into the luss cloth she had been using, it was just a deep graze, which was already healing, so after she had cleaned it and rinsed off the luss cloth, she smeared some healing ointment on it. She had just finished rewrapping the luss cloth when her sister laboriously hauled herself up over the edge.

Getting to her feet, she grabbed the few metres of loose rope left from tying it off and slid down carefully to offer her a hand.

“Thanks…” Arai was sweating as she accepted the help to pull herself up the final bit. “It feels like… that cliff is taller than it should have been?”

“It was,” she agreed, grabbing the rope from which the puppet was currently slung, hanging a few metres below her sister, barely visible amidst the swirling mists and taking its weight.

Between them, it only took a few moments to haul it up over the ledge, but again, she was cognisant of the uncomfortable heat across her shoulders as she dragged it up the slope.

“We… should braid… some of those creepers… into extra rope,” her sister grumbled, slumping down on a handy root and glaring at the puppet.

“…”

Rather than dignify that very obvious idea—which had occurred to neither of them before this point—with a reply, she kicked a spray of loam off into the swirling white void.

“Kinda typical of the way this day has gone so far,” her sister agreed, producing a jar of water and taking a deep drink from it, before passing it over to her.

She had her own, but accepted it anyway just to keep her sister happy, taking a sip, and then blinked in surprise as she tasted both sweet fruit and qi, along with a tang of alcohol and took a deeper gulp, savouring the refreshing tang.

“I put it together while I was waiting for you to climb,” her sister shrugged. “I figured we should use a few of the plethora of spirit stones we have somewhat efficiently. It might even become really crappy spirit wine if we leave it long enough.”

“Mangosteen spirit wine,” she stared off into the cloud, momentarily reminded of a childish experiment of yesteryear that had created some… very dubious booze.

“That was the first time we got drunk, wasn’t it?” her sister giggled.

“Yes, Father was furious,” she agreed, shaking her head ruefully at the childhood memory. “—and Mother…”

“She set it on fire, didn’t she?” her sister grinned.

“She did,” she sighed, recalling their mother putting the pot on the lawn at the back of the house and instructing them very seriously and at some length about checking the strength of such things before drinking it—even if they had a mantra.

“Aiiii…” her sister sighed as well, looking around at their surroundings. “Well, let’s go see what is what at the top of this cliff?”

“Uh-huh,” she nodded, going over to the puppet and hauling it up onto her shoulder.

Her sister gave her a sideways look when she thought she wasn’t looking, but said nothing and instead went over to the tree and recovered the rope, storing it.

“What does the compass say?” she asked, adjusting the body and then looping the rope of her climbing harness around it a few times to hold it somewhat in place and allow her to use both hands more freely.

“That the ‘path’ runs off…”—her sister pointed off somewhat to their right, into the cloud-shrouded trees—“that way, which should still be in the direction of the Jasmine Gate. The strongest signals for the skitterleap talisman are… ah, one moment.”

Muttering under her breath, her sister took the guiding ‘compass’ and spun it a few times, then gave it a good shake before trying to use it again.

“Okay, it’s definitely that way,” Arai pointed off the way she just had. “For some reason it was trying to tug towards the ones behind us.”

“The use of the talisman ahead of us is that far away?” she asked, surprised.

Distances were weird in this place, but that ‘confusion’ suggested the next activation was ten or fifteen miles away, which, even if Juni and the rest had run very fast, suggested a really protracted pursuit, even if it did bode well in terms of them escaping.

“Could be, could also be whatever”—Arai waved a hand at the shimmering patterns ghosting through their surroundings—“the monkey did. Spatial distortions do make for weird compass readings.”

“Praise be unto the teachings of Dao Father Ob—!” She ducked as her sister threw a handful of twigs at her, blocking them with the puppet.

The part of the cliff where her sister had spotted the ‘lightning monkey’ was some two hundred metres off to their right by her calculation, but they had covered barely half that distance, feeling their way warily through the maze of mist-obscured greenery and treacherous and slippery rocks when the first traces made themselves very visible. A lightning bolt that resembled more of a hazy red-gold fissure in the swirling cloud shifted and flickered chaotically over the treetops above them.

“That should be in the direction the talisman is going,” her sister informed her, from just ahead, where she had taken the lead to slash a crude path through the tangled vegetation. “But the talisman itself is…”

“It hasn’t fused it, has it?” she asked, her heart sinking. That would be just their luck at this point, to have gotten this far only to lose the small lead on the others that they had.

“I bet she…”

“Oh, for Fates’—!” she bit off a curse, as the voice’s insidious return nearly made her twist her ankle in hidden fissure beneath the loam. In a flush of anger, she directly cancelled the stupid, whispering voice, smothering it with her mantra with such force that her sister actually glanced back at her.

“Sorry, caught my foot,” she muttered, pulled herself free and adjusting the puppet on her shoulder.

“...”

The way her sister stared at her made her want to curl up inside, because despite the convenient slip, it was such an obvious lie.

“We can sling it between us, if you want?” Arai suggested, after a moment.

“It’s fine,” she replied, dusting off the worst of the mossy mulch. “Don’t worry about it.”

Even as she said that she knew it was a mistake, though, because the shadows of concern hiding in Arai’s expression only deepened; however, after a long moment her sister just nodded.

“Anyway, it hasn’t fused,” Arai added, tilting the compass this way and that. “It’s just…”

“Just…?” She made her way over to look at it more closely but could see nothing obviously off about it.

“Watch…” Her sister took two steps back the way she had just come and… the compass ‘flinched’ in her grasp, before settling back to how it had been a moment before.

“…”

Not at all sure what to say about that, she watched as Arai took two steps forward once more, and the compass shifted abruptly a second time. It was almost as if something was distorting the reading on this particular spot but looking around at the creeper-entangled cloud-forest they had been slowly slashing their way through, there was nothing that stood out.

“Does the other compass also act weird?” she asked, waving her hand through a particularly thick tendril of misty cloud that had chosen that moment to swirl through the trees around them, pale golden-red fractals flitting in and out of focus within it.

Arai pulled the ‘blocking’ compass out for her to see, then repeated the same test with, as far as she could see, exactly the same results.

“I guess we add it to the list of weird, nameless-touched shit,” she remarked at last.

“I guess…” her sister agreed with a resigned sigh. “We should rope up, by the way; this cloud is getting obnoxiously thick again.”

“In that case, we might as well just chop some of this wisteria-looking thing down and use that,” she suggested drily, tugging at a length that looked like it was a few metres.

Her sister gave her a long look then sighed even more deeply and nodded.

In the end, it took them about five minutes to extract several suitable lengths of vine, during which the cloud around them had become so dense it felt like she was in a steam bath, albeit an unpleasantly chilly one.

“Somehow, this humidity and cloud feels even worse than when we were going up to where we spent the night,” her sister grumbled, as they finished crudely twisting the vines together.

“No argument there,” she agreed, giving it a tug to check it was properly bound at her end, then looping it through the rope she was already using to hold the puppet in place.

“It’s the way it’s both unpleasantly cold and somehow smotheringly humid that does it,” Arai continued, turning so she could tie the other end securely to the loop she still wore.

“Secure,” she muttered, giving it a tug.

“…”

Her sister glanced back at her, then just sighed again. She nearly poked her sister in the back, but at the last minute stopped herself, suspecting that that was the sort of stupidity that that fake voice was trying to lead her towards.

Largely in silence, they resumed hacking their way around the creeper-drenched trees, in a kind of timeless slog. Rock slab by rock slab, twisted, rock-cracking tree by tree, one tangle of vines after another. The only measure of how far they had truly progressed, was the slow squiggle that her tablet was drawing on the crude map it was constructing as they went, and then the emergence of a vast swathe of ‘vibrant qi’ from a talisman.

“If I had known it would be this thick, I would have climbed along the cliff edge,” her sister muttered, slowly tugging her machete out of a collection of vines that were so fibrous even that excellent blade struggled with them.

“We seem to be nearly there at least,” she observed, shifting the perspective on her map slightly so she could match their path they had taken below a bit better. “Twenty more metres, give or take?”

“At least that… is… ah! something,” her sister grunted, finally wrenching the blade out of the thick, sappy vine that had been hidden among the others.

“Just imagine how vile this would be if it wasn’t… largely normal forest,” she added drily.

“True,” Arai muttered, slashing down the rest of the vine. “Oh! For fates’ sakes!”

Her sister abruptly cursed and kicked the tree beside her hard.

“What’s—Oh.” she was about to ask what the problem was, when she saw the veritable wall of verdant overgrowth emerging out of the mists right in front of them.

“Ji Tantai, or whoever did this! I swear I will find a way to make you suffer!” her sister cursed, glaring at the fresh vine shoots tangling over themselves.

“Wanna swap?” she suggested. “You lug ‘Ha Yun’ here and I’ll chop for a bit?”

“Ha? Hah.” Her sister stared at the puppet, and then rolled her eyes at her terrible joke.

“—Unless… if it’s this dense, it might actually be quicker to climb it?” she mused. “Even if its poison creeper we have luss cloth so…”

“Mmmm…” Arai stared at the wall of vines and then nodded. “Wait here, I’ll give it a try.”

“—First, let’s swap the rope over?” she suggested.

“…”

Arai stared at the short rope, then at her, then sighed and nodded again, running her hand through her matted, sodden hair.

-You are definitely getting stressed, she observed, as they began swapping out the short length of vine for one of the longer ropes. Not that I am any better…

Both of them were quite done with climbing by this point.

Thankfully, and rather against the vein of how things had been going up to this point the actual climbing, turned out to be disconcertingly straightforward, even if their visibility was frequently hindered by the smothering cloud. So easy, in fact, as they clambered over the carpet of new vines cloaking the ridge-top, that she couldn’t help but reflect that it might have been better to do this from the start.

The lightning, when they finally arrived at a point where they could make it out somewhat clearly, turned out to be two bolts, not one. One arcing out of the swirling clouds above and down the cliff ahead of them, the other rising up over a broad, slab-like ledge jutting out of the peak of the ridge and vanishing off perpendicular to their current path.

With the vast carpet of vines, which she swore were still growing, visibly in places, before her eyes, reaching it was ‘just’ a matter of carefully scrambling over the tops of several sprawling trees, then up a slippery, fern-choked waterfall gully.

Still, by the time they reached the top, she was cold, wet, had discovered a new species of spiny fern, and somehow even more thoroughly done with rock climbing than when she started. The shifting haze of intrusive qi was also thick enough here to make her skin itch.

“How many Fates-accursed talismans did they throw?” her sister muttered under her breath as they took a moment to catch their breath and orientate themselves.

“Enough that it makes a bit of a mockery of our progress back from the Aspen grove,” she replied sourly, pulling some more of the burr-like fern fronds out of her clothing and flicking them back down into the white haze below them.

The swirling cloud had only thickened as they climbed, to the point where she was barely able to see more than a few metres around them, and the last thing she wanted to do was cheerfully trip straight off the cliff edge for lack of seeing it.

“It does…” Arai agreed with a soft sigh, shrugging the puppet off her back and depositing it on the ground beside them.

“—You know, I don’t think this is going to shift much,” her sister added, after they had waited in silence for almost a minute, watching the shifting mists and the ever-changing flickers of red-gold lightning and iridescent qi clash with each other.

“No, it probably isn’t,” she agreed, getting to her feet with a grimace. The damp was starting to put a faint chill in her muscles, even with the humidity, and doing nothing wasn’t helping there.

“By my reckoning, the sheer edge is about twenty or thirty metres to our right,” Arai mused, consulting the map the jade scrip was projecting. “That is where the map we made below rejoins.”

That that didn’t help for the other directions, was a reply she kept to herself, instead just nodding.

“Though, it is weird,” her sister continued, glaring at their cloud-shrouded surroundings. “When we were climbing up the cloud didn’t seem this bad from below?”

“Maybe it’s getting thicker as time passes?” she suggested, not because she had any real proof of it, but rather because it was something to say.

“Pulled in by the lightning?” her sister mused, turning in a circle to look back the way they had come. “Maybe?”

“I guess we find the edge first?” she suggested, taking a long stave out of her talisman.

“Yeah,” Arai agreed, also standing up. “Do you want to leave the puppet here… or?”

“Let’s tie the rope to it,” she suggested after a moment’s consideration.

Having dragged it all the way up here, it would be bleakly hilarious if they then somehow managed to lose it simply because they couldn’t relocate this place.

“—it’s probably better for just one of us to go check as well, that way we can keep ourselves orientated?” she added, looking around at the slowly shifting white void that enveloped everything once more.

To say it was even more distracting and disorientating than it had been below was selling it rather short—and that was without the vision twisting web of reddish gold lightning flickers bleeding through it.

“I can do that while you check the map calibrations?”

“If you are sure?” her sister asked, frowning slightly.

“I—” she had to pause for a moment to forcibly bite by a reply that would have been rather more acerbic than she intended… and which has just bloomed in her mind kind of unnervingly in that moment. “—Yeah.” Was all she said in the end, choosing to ignore the slightly searching look she was got in return.

It would have been easy to let her sister go, to say she was also tired, or that… she was feeling on edge again—but her sister had to be tired from the climb as well, and suffering the same thing in her own way. It didn’t help that she realised she was again waiting for some creepy hint of that bastard’s intent, like a nudge in the back, or a whisper in her ear that never came.

“…”

Instead, after a moment of pointlessly checking the rope that joined them, she busied herself looping it up so it wouldn’t snag as she walked into the white void around them, then with a final glance around, took her staff out of her storage talisman and tapped it a few times on the mossy rock, familiarizing herself with how it ‘felt’ in her hand. Neither of them were inexperienced in this sort of navigation. There were plenty of places in Yin Eclipse where the senses could be smothered, and she had climbed high on ridges several times over the years. The sobering reality of it was that there were no tricks, what kept you safe was experience and focus… and awareness of your surroundings.

The rock felt flat on impact with the end of the staff, hard and based on the crisp, flat shudder, solid. She could make out the shadows of trees to their right, and what might be a rise to their left, due to the flatter nature of the white void, though again that could just be larger trees.

“Okay, let's do this…”

The words were mostly for herself—

“Be careful…” her sister murmured with a wan smile.

“Of course,” she nodded.

Taking another breath, she slowly started to walk forward, letting the staff push ahead of her. Her main worry was hidden voids, rather than low lying vegetation, and that was vindicated almost before she had gone four metres, when the end of the staff found hollow space then clacked onto rock after she had gone another pace. Already, her sister, the puppet and the rock they had stopped by were barely more than shadows behind her. The ground was thick with loam as well, between the slightly sloped surface of the rocks.

She found the void, which turned out to simply be a fissure fracture in the rock outcropping. Poking the staff into it, she hit rock after barely a third of its length and looking around there was no evidence what was beyond was unstable, so she crossed it and continued on her way.

At roughly twelve metres she again hit a void, however, and this one showed no sign of another side as she carefully pushed the staff out further ahead of her.

“You said the cliff was twenty metres?” she called back, crouching down and looking around carefully.

“Should be, yeah!” her sister replied, her voice sounding muffled even over this short distance.

“Interesting…” she muttered to herself, slowly edging forward.

She had no reason to doubt the map or her sister’s reading of it, so all she could think was that there was a shelf of some sort at the top of the ridge. When she reached the edge and looked over, though, she was met with white void and swirling flickers of red gold. Pushing the staff down, she didn’t hit anything below, not even when she looped some extra rope on the end and dropped it—it simply clattered off the cliff below. The only thing that stood out to her, as she considered the edge itself… was that it was flat. Very flat in fact.

Running her hand along it, the rock face felt practically glassy to her touch as well, which was odd.

“Something strange going on with the cliff edge!” she called back after a moment.

When she got no reply from her sister, though, she finally started to feel a little nervous. Doubly so, because there was suddenly a faint, insistent pressure on her, like someone, or something, was standing right behind her—

Steeling herself, she took a crouched half step back, then turned—

Something in the mist around her changed in that instant. It took all her training and experience in Yin Eclipse and in fact, her mantra, not to scream and jump backwards, into the void. She still had to put her hands down though.

A six-metre-tall Moon Loon was frozen, paces from her its arms blurring back like a series of overlapping, frozen images, as if captured mid strike on something. Even though she knew it had to be an illusory reflection, captured like the monkey and Juni on the cliff, something abouts its presence—its ferocious gaze, the chill of the intent bleeding through her surroundings screamed in the face of her conditioned response. Its eyes almost seemed to pierce through her, like twin moons…

Taking a shallow breath, she closed her eyes and opened them, and found it was still there. At the same time, she finally realised that her hand was touching… flat, glassy rock, where before there had been loam—

Her sister’s shocked yelp, and muffled cursing rang through the swirling cloud.

“What happened!” she called back.

“Something… weird!” was all she got back, which was a correct assessment, but unhelpful. At least her sister’s response told her she was okay though.

Warily, she took the staff and swept it through the figure of the moon loon. Its outline bled a little but didn’t disperse, telling her it was indeed a similar kind of imprint. Next, she turned her attention back to the ground around her, and found it was flat. Perfectly flat, in fact, though only on its horizontal plane. Vertically, it was sloping ever so slightly up, she found, as she laid out the staff on it, though fortunately not enough that she was likely to slip on it due to the slope.

“Be careful, the ground slopes towards the cliff edge!” she called out anyway, just in case her sister came over.

“Noted!” came the reply back. “The rock I was sitting on… just, uh, vanished. Sorry if I alarmed you!”

“So what in all the fates just happened?” she muttered to herself, looking around again. “Did we get turned around—or walk through some spatial distortion?”

The more she considered things, the more likely the latter felt.

It was certainly not the same place. The cloud felt subtly different—for starters it was still swirling against her face, rather than behind her, despite her having turned around. The rock wasn’t the same, either—she could tell even though it was mirror smooth. The colouration within it wasn’t quite the same. The humidity was also harsher, and as she considered the mist, comparing her memory from moments before, the flickering web within it literally snapped to a new pattern, flowing outwards, past her, in tune with the momentum of the cloud.

Steeling herself, she carefully skirted around the slowly shifting afterimage of the Moon Loon and made her way back along the rope. Counting her paces back, she found no trace of any fissure in the glassy surface.

Then she came face to face with a centipede.

That she, again, didn’t scream in shock as the three-metre-tall monstrosity bled out of the mist in a motion that was somehow both slow, yet functionally instantaneous as she was moving forward, was something she was quietly proud of. Even so, it was a magnitude more unsettling compared to the angry monkey beast. And not simply because they had been running away from one not that long ago.

Heart now pounding, she stepped around it, and paused, as the outline twisted in a different way, seeming to move with her. However, when she stepped back, it also flowed back into its previous position. As it did so, she noted that the cloud above it, which it was rearing towards, was slowly being ‘stained’ by blooms of darkness that rather resembled ink drops dissolving through water. Each of those blooms gave her a decidedly unsettling feeling as well, suggesting they were the residues of some powerful talisman.

She considered the whole scene for a moment, but there wasn’t much she could glean from it, other than the fact that both centipede and inky shadows were deeply unnerving, so after a moment, she carefully stepped around the illusory form and kept walking onwards.

As she did so, she also observed that the tug of the mist was slowly shifting towards her right, and that there were other ‘blooms’ of the same sort slowly expanding and contracting above her. The second thing she noted, with much more concern, after she had traversed all ‘twelve’ of the metres she had previously covered, was that the rope was still stretching out in front of her, and there was no sign of Arai.

“Sis?” she called warily.

“Yes?” Arai’s voice echoed from ahead of her, about as audible as it had been when she last called, she realised.

“I… think something is messed up with the space here,” she called back, looking around at the white walls of mist grimly.

“You don’t say,” her sister replied drily, though she could feel the faint edge in her tone.

“Can you shake the rope?” she called back.

“…”

There was silence for a moment, then, to her relief the rope in front of her rolled off the ground for a moment.

“Like that?” her sister asked.

“Yes!” she confirmed, turning to look behind her—

At this point she knew in her heart she should have expected something to be there, but a white monkey wearing a tattered, mist-soaked old robe, with a black staff resting across its shoulders, seemingly looking right through her was not…

Taking a breath, she looked to her right, and then had to stop, as the white monkey seemed to move with her vision.

She turned back to look at it properly and found it was just as suddenly gone, which didn’t help, at all.

“What’s wrong?” her sister called out.

“The mist is playing tricks,” she muttered under her breath, before repeating her complaint more loudly so Arai could hear her and wouldn’t worry.

In the end, she had to walk almost another thirty metres, by her count to return to where she had left her sister, who was squatting by the rope, consulting the compass with a frown.

“You okay?” her sister asked as she sat down beside the puppet, took out her water flask and took a deep gulp. “You look kinda pale?”

“I nearly fell off a cliff, came face to face with a Moon Loon, a Giant Centipede and a weird old monkey I’ve never seen before,” she replied after taking a second gulp. “And this water is unpleasantly warm. Oh, and it seems I covered almost forty metres while I’d swear I only walked a third of that.”

“This mist is certainly weird,” her sister agreed, giving her shoulder a squeeze as she glanced off in the direction she had just come from. “It would certainly be justice though, if Di Ji and those other bastards were eaten by a Moon Loon.” Her sister added with a hopeful grin that somehow never quite made it to her eyes.

“It would be,” she nodded, trying hard not to grimace. It was a nice thought, but…

“—What’s wrong with the compass?” she asked mostly to change the topic.

“It’s what isn’t wrong with it that is confusing me,” her sister sighed. “It shows them off in that direction—” she pointed off roughly to their left. “Which is good and all…”

“Why is that a problem?” she asked, not following the logic of her sister’s complaint.

“It’s broken the map,” her sister elaborated, bringing up the image. “Or at least I assume it has, if we just moved some distance.”

“Ah.”

Considering the geometry in front of her, she got what Arai meant now.

“Except, I’ve spent the last few minutes trying to work out where the ‘join’ should be, and what the orientation now is, and it draws a blank.” Her sister grumbled. “It’s like this ridge and the old ridge are the same ridge, but the compass clearly shows we moved some distance. Maybe four or five miles, as the bird flies.”

“Could the compass be thrown off?” she suggested. “If this is some strange teleportation anomaly echoing into wherever this place is?”

“If it is, we are just…” her sister gestured vindictively at the world at large, not needing to put that observation into words.

“The obvious thing to do is to find where the other end of the lightning bolt is,” she mused, considering the flickering red-gold web that was still blurring in and out of focus around them. “The directionality of the mist is definitely different here…”

“Yeah,” her sister agreed, getting to her feet and producing a staff of her own, to which she tied a thin strip of cloth.

Following suit, she did the same.

The methods employed for this sort of thing were pretty robust. Never mind hunters in their situation, getting lost in fog and low cloud, or needing to determine directionality in these sorts of environments was a common enough issue that even novice herb-hunters had to be able to overcome it.

Planting her staff in the ground, she considered the cloud flowing past them, and the notable lack of any engagement it had with the thin piece of cloth.

“Well, that confirms it’s not ‘wind’,” she mused.

“And yet we are cold and you can feel it on our faces,” her sister muttered, running a hand her sodden hair.

“So, its qi related more so than a physical effect, or something is broken in our surroundings,” she surmised.

“Indeed,” Arai agreed. “Or this mist isn’t really mist, and what we are seeing moving isn’t…” she trailed off, then shook her head.

“Well, first things, let’s find the epicentre of whatever is pushing it outwards,” she suggested. “Then we can worry about the more unknowable parts of this.”

“Yeah…” her sister agreed with a sigh.

“—I’ll carry the puppet this time,” she added as Arai started back towards it.

“You sure? It’s no—” her sister started to protest.

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“Turn about—you carried it up here,” she pointed out.

“…”

Arai gave her a look she again found herself affecting not to notice as she walked over to the puppet and lugged it onto her back.

“How do we want to do this?” she asked, before Arai could say anything further.

“Let’s see…” her sister turned in a slow circle. “If the epicentre is an impact point—like for the other end of that lightning bolt, if we both walk forwards a few metres apart, but not so far that we lose sight of each other, and make sure we are joined up by a short length of rope, as should eventually converge on it? The compass is pulling me slightly to our left, did you notice much of a shift as you walked?”

“A bit,” she confirmed. “It was always from the right side.”

“In that case, we can but try,” her sister declared. “First though…”

She watched as Arai cast about and then jammed her staff into a crack in the glassy rock surface.

“The next large-ish rock we see we really should pick up, and check if it stores,” her sister grumbled, tying one end of her climbing rope to the staff. “But at least this way we can find our way back here.”

“Good thinking,” she agreed, nodding as she measured out a length of her piece of rope, then passed it over to her sister, who tied looped it once around her waist.

After giving their surroundings one final look out of habit, in case something had changed—it hadn’t—she walked three metres away from her sister, so that the rope between them was taut, and orientated herself so she was facing directly into the oncoming flow of cloud.

Preparing herself, in case something stupid and unnerving appeared out of the mist like last time, she started to move forward, but in fact, all that happened after they had warily walked a few metres into the white void was that the rope between them slowly became slack.

“Well, this suggests that there is a convergent point somewhere ahead of us,” her sister called over.

“Yeah,” she agreed, looking around carefully once more.

There was still no sign of anything in the cloud here other than swirling shadows and the ever-shifting lattice of red-gold lightning sparks.

-I guess it is what it is, she reflected, taking a few steps to the side once more to—

Almost like a visual puzzle in a scroll painting, the shadows in the fog in front of her bled together to form another iteration of the centipede she had seen a short while earlier, though now she marked that its carapace segments were painted with red ochre.

“…”

She couldn’t even be mad at this point, as she took a deep breath.

“What’s up?” Arai asked, looking concerned again.

“Walk over to me, watch…” she pointed at where the centipede was. “About there.”

Her sister gave her a look, but did as she suggested, coming to stand beside her.

“That is unnerving,” her sister agreed, eyeing the centipede, then taking a slow step back the way she had just come. “Interesting as well.”

-So, I guess she saw the same thing… she mused, taking a further step to the right herself and observing how this centipede was also moving, shifting its body as if to block something descending from above… and off to their left.

“Whatever is attacking them came from roughly the same direction as us?” she mused as Arai slowly turned in a half circle.

“It does look that way,” her sister agreed.

There wasn’t much more to say, so after that they just continued onwards once more. In the end, she was slightly surprised that they only saw one more afterimage, which was of the same centipede, dancing sideways evading something. Rather in keeping with the odd nature of the mist, when it ended, it really ‘ended’ as well. After warily walking some thirty metres through it, it thinned out around them to nearly nothing within the space of two metres, and then as if carried away on an illusory gust of wind rolled back to reveal most of the ridge line for a hundred metres in every direction, lingering only in the tops of distant trees and scudding above, as it had before they started their climb.

It also revealed a diorama that was… beyond any of her expectations.

The red lightning—the arrival point of the monkey and their friends was about ten metres in front of her. A blurry maelstrom of fading lightning, within which she could just about make out the monkey’s descending form and then those of two female figures and a male one—Juni, Ling and Shu, at best guess.

The odd thing was that this whole scene was about a metre up in the air, but that was mainly because of what had created the glassy rock surface that they had been walking over. It stretched for a hundred metres in either direction, in a broad, regular arc, and the only way she could rationalize it, was as if someone had cut off the top of the ridge.

All across this scene, the afterimages of centipedes, the Moon Loon and three monkeys bled in and out of her gaze, shifting and reforming with every slight movement she made. The white furred old monkey was also visible in a few places, flitting in and out of focus. Some quick experimentation showed that the closer she walked to the cliff edge, the ‘later’ in the fight the scenes seemed to come from, which was… well, she supposed someone who understood spatial qi might be able to explain it.

“Ohhkaay…” her sister muttered at last, after they had stared at the whole scene for a good ten seconds in silence. “This I did not expect…”

“We are on the right track, though,” she pointed out. “And it seems the monkeys from the Inn have caught up to them.”

The fact that multiple monkeys had left afterimages in this place, along with those qi beasts was reassuring in its own way as well. It was proper confirmation at last that there was a way to have a ‘presence’ in here, which in turn suggested there should be a way to get out of this place.

“I wonder what—Hyaahk!” her sister, who had slowly started to walk towards the cliff edge suddenly flinched and staggered sideways a pace.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, hurrying forward to catch her—

Before Arai could reply, she found out, as a black shadow covering all of the flattened area suddenly snapped into focus, coming up to the middle of her torso as she grabbed her sister’s arm. Along with it, she suddenly felt like she was frozen in place for a heartbeat and simultaneously caught in the tug of some torrential current trying to pull her to her right. The clouds around them seemed to darken as well, and close back in.

Feeding her unease and shock into her mantra, she managed to avoid falling, and after a moment, the sense of being violently tugged passed, as did the encroaching cloud. Turning on the spot, she followed the path of the black shadow and shuddered, as she realised it was in fact the afterimage of some sort of weapon that had, with a single swing, obliterated most of the ridge top, to form the glassy smooth surface they had just been walking on.

“Fates… that’s unnerving,” her sister, who had also regained her balance at this point, muttered under her breath.

“Yeah,” she agreed, eyeing the cloud as she took another step forward.

The black afterimage of the attack vanished, and the scudding low cloud also returned to how it had been.

“Could the low cloud be a reflection of how distorted the landscape in this place is, by events beyond it?” she suggested at last.

She had nothing other than her instincts to back that up, but thinking about it, it seemed plausible.

“I can just imagine a certain bastard saying something like ‘these words you speak, do you know what they mean?’ her sister remarked drily.

For a moment, the sense of ‘dissonance’ in her mind that was the legacy of whatever Di Ji had done to her whispered in her ear, attempting to make her think her sister was mocking her, but she ignored it and just nodded in agreement.

“But yeah, I think you are right… and that doesn’t bode well—” she followed where her sister was pointing, off to their left, across the cloud-shrouded, ephemera-crowned treetops of the valley ahead, to where darker shadows of rising cliffs were just visible amidst the distant roiling cloud banks. “That is where the compass is pointing.”

It honestly didn’t need the compass to tell her that. The fact that the battle seemed to proceed in that direction was clue enough, in her opinion.

“So, that should be the rear side of the Jasmine Gate?” she mused, considering the distant peaks…

“It should be, yes,” Arai sighed, also considering the scene laid out below them.

They spent almost twenty minutes, in the end, exploring the full extent of the ‘battle’ on the ridge. Near as she could tell, the monkeys had shown up and the scale of the clash had also drawn in local qi beasts—like the moon loon, while Juni and the rest fled ahead of them. It also transpired that the ‘smooth’ cliff edge she had initially found was not the actual cliff edge, but a cut, caused by the same black-shadow-weapon that had carved a fissure, three metres across and almost twenty deep, most of the way through the ridgeline they were standing on. She was also pretty sure at this point that both ‘attacks’ were caused by the white-furred old monkey, as he was the only person with a black-coloured weapon.

“It's odd, though,” her sister remarked at last, as they stood back at the epicentre, waiting for her scrip—currently resting on the puppet’s back—to finish recording everything it could. “For all this—” Arai gestured to their surroundings generally “—why does it feel like there is basically no intent preserved from Di Ji and those pursing?”

“There… huh…” she was about to refute that, but considering the talisman ephemera above them again, she realised her sister was right. She knew that Di Ji and Din Ouyeng were responsible for this, but actually, it was as if the talismans were just casting themselves. There was not even any sense of ‘impetus’ in them, like you would normally expect to see.

It wasn’t even a matter of this place, either, because she could easily discern those traces from the illusory ‘counters’ to some of those talismans—from the red-ochre marked centipede, from the three monkeys they had met at the inn and the moon loon. Only the old white monkey was just ‘there’, but even in comparison to that, the talisman users were entirely opaque. She could make out a faint absence amidst the black ‘sweep’ that might have been a barrier, for example, but nothing of who or what it was protecting.

“It almost feels like it goes beyond ‘no intent’, now that you mention it.” she mused, frowning as she considered what the talisman was recording.

Just because the suppression existed in this place didn’t mean high realm qi beasts were simple—or stupid, or lacking in skills. Setting aside the old monkey, Moon Loons were terrifying, territorial qi beasts and all the accounts of them in the Hunter Pavilion spoke of them in terms of the Dao Step. The last confirmed kill she knew of in the pavilion’s records was almost six centuries old, and that had been one that came out of the mountains for some reason and attacked a village. From what she recalled of that account, examination of the corpse had revealed its qi purity to be akin to that of a Golden Immortal cultivator, and that it had been an adolescent.

There was some more to it, but as far as she understood, qi purity as a measure of strength was very hard to fool, and talismans had clear limitations in that regard. Intent preserved in their activation, while small, should be capturable by their scrips, because they were designed to work in places like Yin Eclipse. And yet, what was being preserved in there was… empty, in some way she couldn’t fully articulate.

“And I have a hard time believing they are this disciplined, even with treasures up here,” Arai muttered. “If it was doable with treasures more bastards like them would come here and get gains.”

There was also that, she had to agree.

“Still, you recall all those stories about Di Ji,” she sighed. “If there is some silk-shit bastard likely to have a treasure that can hide their presence, even in these circumstances…”

“…”

Her sister stared at the scrip for a long moment, then turned away and kicked at the smooth ground in a rare show of actual, and very relatable frustration. She could almost feel his presence mocking them—her. Deriding her for thinking that they could ever pin this on him by such mediocre means.

“—Well, given that looks like it will take a while to finish,” she cut in diplomatically, and to distract from that unsettling feeling. “—We could make something to eat?”

The sense of lingering fatigue in her limbs had not diminished, and looking out over the tangled mess of trees between them and the distant, cloud-shrouded massif that probably marked the borders of the Jasmine Gate, she doubted there would be that many more pleasant spots between here and there. A part of her also just wanted to do something that felt productive, rather than be continually assailed by bouts of whatever had been done to them while they stood around in the cold and damp waiting for the talisman and compass.

“True,” Arai agreed, sitting down on the smooth rock with a deep sigh. “This place seems as good as any.”

Taking out a stoneware bowl, she placed it on the ground between them, then half filled it with water and added a fire element ward stone. While she waited for the water to heat up, she considered what they had available—which wasn’t anything particularly lavish, really—and crumbled one of her soup cakes into the water and started to stir it. The whole process of dissolving the cake into soup only took about five minutes, mostly because you had to simmer it for a little while, or the taste was kinda bland, so while it did that, she sorted through the spirit vegetation and other items in her storage ring and picked out some lotus leaves, a few mushrooms and other supplementary herbs and added them at suitable intervals.

The end result was no masterpiece of cooking, by any means but, taking a sip, it was perfectly tasty, and pleasantly warming—if a little earthen beneath the spices, thanks to the mushrooms, so, once it had simmered appropriately, she scooped out a bowl and passed it to her sister.

“Ah, the glories of mushroom soup,” her sister chuckled, setting aside the scrip that she had been fiddling with and taking a sip. “Is it any wonder I only drink it up here?”

Rolling her eyes, because she knew what her sister meant, she scooped her own bowl full out of the vessel and took a gulp. The soup cakes were nice, but you could have too many of them, and if you were up here for long periods of time, the idea of eating spicy mushroom soup back home became very unappealing. Still, after the climbing and the damp and the cloud and with the fatigue tugging at her limbs, it was nice to drink something that was actually warm and tasty in a not at all illusory way.

She took another deep drink of it and blinked, realising she had been hungry enough to almost drain the bowl already. Arai—who had also already finished her portion—set her bowl aside and sighed deeply, eyeing the soup pot pensively.

“Clearly we are hungrier than we feel,” she murmured, helping herself to a second portion.

“Yeah,” her sister agreed, dipping her own bowl for a second helping. “It helps that it is actually a little warming.”

This time, she did force herself to drink and eat what was there a bit more slowly, but between them, they still polished off what should have been enough soup for them and Juni and the rest in short order.

“I wish I’d had the foresight to claim some of that crab before we left the inn,” she sighed, considering now empty cooking bowl as she wiped out the inside.

She was a little tired of crab, taste-wise, but the addition of its nourishment would have gone well with the soup. While their group had brought such things with them, but they had been in the Ha group’s storage rings from what she recalled.

“—Mmm-hum,” Arai, who was now munching on a mangosteen, nodded in agreement.

Setting the bowl to the side, she stared out at the swirling cloud and the island-like tree tops piercing through them and started to examine how her qi was circulating naturally within her body.

She could have used her mantra from the start, but the surprising depth to her hunger made her watch to test something first. While neither of them had any foundation of ‘Spiritual Cultivation’, their parents had taught them, quite laboriously though not without dividends, how to follow the natural circulation of their qi without using a mantra or a spiritual method.

Outside the mountains, there was, truthfully little benefit to that knowledge at their current realm in terms of cultivation speed or anything like that. However, it was enormously helpful when it came to understanding your own body and how it received qi. The ‘Cultivation Law’s’ most spiritual cultivators used, were generally constructed around a template that took qi around a specific path, according to their father. It required them to perform certain actions, and in response the law would move, accordingly illuminating the passage of qi around your body. Later, you could supplement this with Intent, and Soul Strength and so on, and it was generally very efficient. The issue with this, their parents had explained, and then shown them, though, was that it typically meant that someone who relied on laws had a poor idea of the actual, underlying principles of qi circulation. Through theory and practice, you could still remedy that, but for most, that was the point of having a cultivation method—it was a map made by a much wiser head for them to follow.

At the time, she remembered complaining bitterly at being made to sit still listening to her own breath and heartbeat, or do continual, slow, repetitive exercises at the auspicious hours of the day and night. But looking back on those days now, she could only admire how wise and profound their parent’s efforts to teach them this knowledge was, because in Yin Eclipse, it proved its value every day. Even now, setting aside her mantra for a moment, it gave her the knowledge to look carefully at her body’s condition.

Lying back, she let her limbs relax and breathed in and out, naturally for a little while, focusing on how her body felt. Her muscles were tired, and sore. Her shoulders hurt from the climbing, and her hand just from the wear and tear of their travel to get to this point. She couldn’t ‘see’ her meridians or anything like that, again because she lacked a law or spiritual foundation, but with her breath and her heartbeat she could get a rough approximation of their condition, even now… and it was, well, it wasn’t bad, for what they had been through, she supposed.

They had already tried absorbing qi from their surroundings and found the efficacy in this place to be worse than Yin Eclipse normally was—even with their mantras, but now she was interested in how much the food gave her back. The soup cakes and all the ingredients bar the water, which was just clean drinking water from their house, were made with ingredients intended to offset some of the issues you would usually encounter here, yet, after almost a minute, while she could feel some change as energy began to spread into her body, it… was not much more than she had gotten trying to absorb qi from outside, and still a net loss, by some margin.

“…”

In silence, she continued to examine her body’s resting absorption rate of qi from the food for another minute, before finally accepting that it wasn’t going to improve and reached for her mantra.

That was where she had finally realised the remarkable benefits of a years-long slog to understand ‘why’ and ‘how’ her body moved qi around, even if her understanding was superficial compared to their parents’. To utilise your mantra visualisation and conceptualisation were important. Having a good mantra helped, but the key was about imagination, their mother had stressed, and their father had concurred, his instruction focused more on martial mentality exercises that supported that.

'Spirit. Heart. Renewal. Body. Soul.'

Each one she considered for a long breath in isolation.

'Spirit' to examine the vigour of the qi she was absorbing from the food.

'Heart' to see how it resonated with her.

'Renewal' for the way it exchanged with the natural systems of her body—in her gut, in her blood, the condition of her muscles and in the natural circulation of her body.

'Body' did something similar, but her interest was much more holistic.

As for 'Soul', that was the first time she had realised how different their mother was, from some other physical cultivators she had seen. Soul, their mother confided, was the mnemonic that had mutated when they were born. What it had changed to, their mother never said, just giving her a smile that in retrospect she could not help but thing was a little sad. Now, with Soul, she considered the nature of the food itself, and her body.

Thrice, she performed that simple cycle, before fully focusing on improving the absorption rate of the food into her body. To her surprise, the effect was much greater than she anticipated. It was still a net loss, but it was… not a catastrophic one. If she had to quantify it by proportions. Without her mantra, her body was barely getting base-line sustenance and maybe ninety-five percent of the qi was being lost to the strangeness of their surroundings, exiting her body via her breath and sweat and for the rest of it, just diffusing slowly out of her. With her mantra, that loss was still about eighty percent, but even beyond the mountains, her refinement efficiency for qi at the same purity as her physical foundation was passively at about fifty percent.

That said, though she had been horrified at that initial realisation, aged about six, according to her father that was… actually very good. Most common spiritual laws only allowed for about twenty to thirty percent efficiency per ‘unit’ of qi. A good mantra user tended to be around thirty to thirty-five, according to their mother, who had also confided that the main reason for their exceptional efficiency was because they had the combination of mnemonics they had.

-I wonder how it goes if I pressure it? She mused, focusing more of her intent and her unhappiness at their general circumstances into her mantra.

This time, the loss dropped by about five percent, which was… well, she supposed it was more of a testament to how annoyed she was that the effect was that good.

-Which leaves the long form…

It took her five attempts to find a cadence that fit with the visualisation she wanted, but once she did, she found the efficacy of her body to absorb the qi from the food to restore itself increased to the point where she was ‘only’ wasting sixty percent of the qi, but basically none of the ‘nourishment’ that was preserved in its vitality.

Outside, those would have been embarrassing numbers, but in here, it was… enough, for now, she supposed.

“How is it?”

Breathing in, she sat up and letting the cycle of words slip into the back of her mind, glanced over at her sister, who had been doing the same thing, pretty much.

“With the long form, it's about a sixty percent loss,” she informed her.

“About the same, then,” Arai sighed. “I also tried with a spirit stone, in some water with a few ginseng leaves, and it's not much better.”

She made a face. That was a good method in a pinch, but harsh on your body. The qi purity in spirit stones was significantly higher than their physical cultivation realm.

“Hopefully it won’t come to that,” she grimaced.

“Still, we don’t have any spirit wine, so it might be a good idea to make some,” her sister mused.

“Ah, yeah, Ling had all of it, didn’t she,” she sighed again, glancing over at the blurry afterimages in the lightning.

From where they were seated, she could see all three beginning to move off towards the edge of the ridge, slowly losing definition as they went.

“She did,” Arai nodded ruefully, following her gaze. “Still, even if we can boost the efficacy, we don’t have an unlimited amount of food. That meal gave me back… enough, for now, but…”

“Yeah…”

She didn’t need to say more than that, really, by way of reply.

They would be okay for a while, so long as their supplies held out. However, with what she observed just now, she could probably eat three of the large bowls of that soup and still have room for more, if they continued to exert themselves as they had been. That could be extended if they started to get exotic, with things like home-brew spirit wine and replenishment pills, but consuming to much pure qi… had other risks, not least because both of them were basically right at the upper limit of their realm, and had been for a while. Reaching the point where their physical foundation irrevocably began to move towards mantra seed, while they were stuck in this place… would not be good, she suspected. Especially not if they did so accidentally.

“Shall we get moving again?” she asked, instead, getting to her feet and stretching a little.

“I think so, yeah,” her sister replied, projecting the map for them both to see. “It seems to have finished unsnarling itself, I hope, while we ate, and the compass is still pointing out there—” she gestured out across the treetops to the distant, cloud-shrouded slopes a few miles to their left. “The only other thing maybe is to systematically record the rest of these afterimages?”

“What hasn’t it got?”

“Hmmmm…” her sister poked at the scrip in her hand and then a rippling blur unfolded in front of them.

A red lightning bolt slammed down into empty space, transforming into Juni, Ling and Shu, along with the red-ochre monkey. A moment later three other monkeys, crouched on what were probably the afterimages of non-existent rocks, bled into focus. One she recognised as ‘Ten Centipedes’, while the second, painted in white and red swirls was the female from the inn. The third was the white-furred old monkey she had seen earlier.

They had some sort of quick conversation with Juni, it looked like, then their friends sprinted for the cliff edge and vanished. A moment later, a sheet of white rippled through the scene, then something twisted and seemed to jump. The next image was the moon loon landing, dodging something and howling silently at the sky, while the other monkeys scattered. The two centipedes flowed out of nowhere, flickering in and out of her vision as they also dodged or struck back at something invisible. The scene jumped again, amidst a flare of dark purple that bled down from above—the inky shadows she had seen before, she supposed, then with a silent shudder, the black line sheared off all of the ridge around them, scattering voids in the white and purple that might have been trees and rock. There were a few more disjointed scenes, like the Moon Loon raging at something else, then it finished.

“As you can see, its mostly the bit between here and the cliff,” her sister mused. “It shouldn’t take long, and it might be helpful in at least letting us know where they descended?”

“Might as well, then,” she agreed. “While you do that, I’ll get another jar of spirit wine started?”

“Sure,” her sister nodded, passing over her own storage talisman.

In fact, that didn’t take very long at all. She was still packing persis bark and ginseng greens into a jar of water and doing the calculations on how many spirit stones would be optimal, when her sister called over that she had found where Juni and the others descended the cliff. The ratio for something that was borderline undrinkable was about six spirit stones per litre of water, so in the end, she just put half a cube in, added some lotus seeds and half a ginseng root, filled it up to the brim, sealed it shut and put it back in her storage talisman.

Going over to where her sister was, she found her contemplating a shadowed image that appeared to be Juni as she jumped into the void.

“That’s a long drop,” she muttered, peering over the edge into the misty treetops a hundred metres or more below. “Though I suppose distances in here are a bit different.”

“Yeah,” her sister nodded.

In the end, descending the cliff took much less effort than she feared. It was nowhere near as sheer as the one they climbed, and there was a good amount of solidly rooted vegetation for them to move between. It was still a relief for to dump the puppet down onto leafy loam though.

Even down among the trees, the traces of battle were everywhere. Vibrant fresh growth was practically sizzling across huge swathes of the understory, accompanied by veils of misty white-ness that made her skin prickle as they walked through them. There was no way to avoid them, either, as they went… though she supposed that if something bad was to happen it would already have done so.

“Huh…”

However, they had only walked for some five minutes, winding their way through the trees, over rocky outcrops and around tangled mires of fresh, twisted understory, before her sister stopped and stared at the map her scrip was still creating.

“That is really… odd.”

“What’s wrong?” she asked, peering at it.

“Its… something is off with the distance.” Her sister muttered, looking around at the trees. “From what I observed up above, it should take us almost an hour, maybe two, to walk to the slopes of the Jasmine Gate, and yet…”

She pointed off ahead of them, through the gloomy haze of the understory. Squinting in the shadows between the trees, she found what looked like a clearing, with a cliff beyond it.

“Could be a large outcropping?” she suggested. It wasn’t that she doubted her sister, but to have gotten there already would be… “Though I guess we can only go check?”

As it turned out, her sister was completely right in her assessment. After only a hundred odd metres they found themselves in a clearing bounded by four large, familiar steles, that led to a path that vanished into a gorge shrouded in misty cloud and hanging vegetation, the walls of which held various rock-cut buildings. In the distance, she could hear the sound of falling water as well. She was actually rather glad to reach the clearing itself, because the last stretch of the forest had turned unpleasantly cold and gloomy as they walked through it. She kept wanting to look behind her, and into the shadows between the trees, because she had the distinct feeling that she was being watched, and it was unpleasant in the extreme.

“…”

Turning in a circle, it was hard to know what to say, honestly. According to the Hunter Bureau records, every entrance to the Jasmine gate was marked by these four steles, carved with swirling jasmine and mulberry flowers. These ones were quite a bit less worn than the ones she knew, however.

“I guess it’s like on the ridge?” she hazarded at last. “Between the lightning and the barrage of talismans… it changed the way this place reflects what is outside?”

“It has to be that,” her sister nodded.

“—Still, does the feeling beneath the trees as we walked here… remind you of the spider pits?” she added, eyeing the dark undergrowth they had just come through.

Here in the clearer, waist-high grass it somehow seemed even more ominous than when they had been walking through it.

“Now that you mention it, it does rather,” her sister agreed, looking around pensively.

Taking another few steps forward, she paused again, though because as she moved, the sense of unease only deepened, while the shadows at the clearing’s edge—

If she had not already experienced the illusionary scenes on the cliff top, she would probably have flinched at the way they seemed to coalesce into the ghostly forms of several actual spiders—tunnel spiders by the thickness of their limbs and dull carapaces. Off to her right she could see the ruin of one of the centipedes as well now, tumbling backwards in slow motion out of the trees.

-Of course there was probably a nest in some cave beneath here that got disturbed by all of this. She mused.

She was about to point them out to her sister, when she realised Arai was staring back behind them, her face as pale as the cloud above them.

“What is…?” she turned and found herself looking right at a flawlessly beautiful young woman, about the same sort of age as Juni, sitting on an outcropping boulder they had just walked past moments before.

With her lustrous black hair and pale skin, she had all the poise and manner of an aloof, ethereal ‘fairy immortal’. However, the diaphanous, deeply revealing silken robe she was clad in was more akin to something you might see courtesans wearing. It was the ever-repeating pattern of ghostly dark eyes embroidered onto the cloth that was most disconcerting. She wanted to look away from them, but something about them seemed to hold her attention in a way that neither the Moon Loon nor the centipede, nor the unsettlingly passive white monkey had on the ridge line.

She took a careful step backwards, closer to her sister, and tried not to grimace as the woman’s gaze slowly slid across them, with a dark intensity that made cold sweat prickle on the back of her neck.

Taking a second, then a third, she nearly didn’t want to breathe, because those terrifying eyes—like dark pools that seemed to almost stare through where they were standing, didn’t leave her at all. It was almost as if this figure, whoever she was, could see them… which would be…

Gritting her teeth, she carefully took a step to the side, and flinched, as the woman’s eyes suddenly narrowed and slid to follow her. Heart pounding in her chest, she reversed her step and found that the woman’s gaze somehow… never left her, not even when she took a step forward again, towards the tree line, to see if this was like on the ridge line.

She had to use her mantra on herself to sign to Arai, who fractionally glanced at her, then back at the woman who was still staring right at them, then slowly took a step towards her.

This time, the woman’s gaze clearly flicked to Arai, just for a moment, then, somehow, before she had even moved herself, went back to her.

-She… can she actually see us?

Prior to this moment, she didn’t know what she would have given to be acknowledged in this place—to have a chance at escaping, yet now… faced with this unsettling figure—

Abruptly, the woman’s gaze slid off them, to something else, behind them.

“…”

The desire to turn was so overwhelming that she nearly sobbed out loud. Fighting the urge to just curl up in a ball, which somehow her mantra had next to no influence over, she half turned so her peripheral vision could take what was behind them and found half the clearing was covered with a blurry, dark greenish-gold, multi-legged afterimage, the middle of which was twisting into the ghostly silhouette of a masked cultivator—

For a moment, she thought it was another spider, but then she got a proper look at the front legs of whatever it was, and found they were those of a tetrid stalker.

“…”

The woman behind them was now sweeping her gaze slowly across the clearing as a whole, where to their left and right she could now make out several more ghostly, adult tetrids —

The sense of being transfixed suddenly vanished.

Her sister grabbed her hand and, without a word, they both sprinted towards the far side of the clearing as fast as they could. Behind them, she felt a deeply unsettling sense of something shifting, tugging at their limbs, accompanied by a chill akin to clouds passing in front of the sun. Still, it was only when they were some distance into the gorge itself, that she dared glance over her shoulder and found… the clearing now wreathed in mist, and no trace of the shadows that had been there before, or the dark-haired woman.

“What… was that?” she hissed, trying to ignore how hard her heart was still beating.

“A… I think it was a spider queen,” her sister replied, taking a shallow breath.

“…”

“There are portraits of them in the library Old Ling has, remember? Well, some of them. Yu… something. She was infamous back before the Huang Mo Wars,” her sister muttered, talking a little too fast.

“She definitely looked at us, right?”

Her sister didn’t answer her question, just took out the jar of mangosteen spirit wine and took a deep gulp, before passing it to her.

“…”

Taking gulp herself, she did find it settled her nerves a little.

“We are definitely in the Jasmine gate, anyway,” her sister added. “You can smell it, even if there are no flowers…”

Indeed, a faint scent of flowering jasmine seemed to cling to every breath she took, despite the singular lack of any evidence of the plants themselves.

“Thankfully the compass points straight that way—” her sister pointed up the gorge, ahead of them.

“Good,” she replied emphatically, passing the jar back. “Because even if it didn’t, I would not go back into that clearing.”

Even now, cold sweat prickled her skin and she really didn’t want to look too closely at the shadowed openings between the vegetation clad, rock-cut columns across the narrow gorge from them. In fact, after that experience she suspected it would be a good while before she would stop looking twice at any deep shadow.

“…”

Her sister contemplated the jar for a long moment, then took another long gulp herself, before storing it again.

Both of them gave one final, long look at the now eerily calm clearing, then, without saying anything further, briskly made their way onwards.

The narrow gorge was surprisingly easy to navigate, not least because once they got their bearings, they found there was an actual, paved path running along one side of it. It was still rather overgrown with a thick carpet of ferns and ground creepers, but there were no fallen rocks, or evidence of collapse from above, so they cleared the whole passage in about five minutes, moving at a brisk trot.

Only when it began to open out again did they finally stop, because the obstacle facing them was… a lake. The far side of the gorge here was a vegetation choked cliff that she could just about make out through the drifting mist, maybe two hundred meters away from them, however, the paved pathway they were following ran straight into the gently lapping water. It had clearly risen above its normal level, because the shoreline they had to stop at was just a broken line of ferns and ground creepers, and most of the lowest level of rock-cut passages she could see to their left also just dipped into the waters. The sound of falling water felt like it came from their right, at least, and that was also the direction from which the current was gently flowing.

“I am still not going back,” she remarked, after they had stood in pensive silence where the paved path vanished into the shallows.

“Even if we wanted to, the compass points straight out there,” Arai informed her wryly, pointing off to their left, into the swirling mists, where the waters blended into the mist and what could either be the shadows of partially submerged trees, or the gorge narrowing again, it was impossible to say from where they were.

“…”

“I guess we are making a raft, then?” she suggested, shrugging off the puppet and taking her machete out from her talisman.

The idea of trying to wade into it, nevermind swim was laughable, really. Most of the middle of the gorge was open water, and all the obvious semi-submerged trees were close to their side, so there was no telling how deep the water could be, or what the currents beneath its surface were like—and that was without even considering the issues with their qi replenishment or the unwieldly nature of the puppet.

“Yeah,” her sister agreed, looking around at the available vegetation.

Thankfully, there was no shortage of suitable materials.

“On the bright side, at least we have some proper bamboo,” she observed, pointing off to their right, where a sprawling clump was growing along the submerged cliff margin.

The actual process of making a serviceable, rectangular raft didn’t take long. Neither of them were new to such tasks, and the bamboo was only in about a meter of water, which meant it was easy enough to chop down some suitable lengths. Some further poking around on the accessible margins of the flooding also revealed what was probably the original water-margin, along with a substantial, if almost entirely submerged reed bed, its flower-heads still just about above water. So, after they had cut enough bamboo, they spent twenty-odd minutes harvesting several bales worth of the stems to use as buoyancy.

Lashing the whole thing together with sturdy vines and flexible withies of bamboo and a few other suitable shrubs, she was pleased to find it would take both of them and the puppet and was still stable enough to stand on.

“As expected, it won’t store,” her sister grumbled, giving the construction a forceful push down on one side to double check if there was any odd warping, once they had finished double checking it sat nicely in the water.

Wading over, she tested the other side for a moment, then pushed herself up onto it. The whole thing was just under one and a half meters wide and three meters long. With the puppet lashed securely in the middle, it also didn’t tilt, unless she actually bounced on her feet at the very rear.

“Shall we?” she suggested, picking up the bamboo pole.

Giving the gorge behind them a final glance, her sister nodded and pushed herself onto the front, moving to sit down on the puppet.

Poling them away from the shore, she was relieved to find that the current, while constant, was not especially vigorous. The main hazard was submerged trees of which there were quite a few fully under the water, each seeking to rip the pole from her hands at the slightest opportunity.

“Huh, that’s surprising…” her sister remarked after they had travelled a dozen or so meters, reaching out and snagging a twig from one of the barely visible submerged trees as they passed.

“Oh?” she glanced at the tree… then did a small double-take as she realised what it was, a moment before something snagged the pole, making it twist viciously in her grip.

“Is that a Yellow River Mangrove?” she asked, leaning on the pole to bring them to a stop.

In terms of rare woods, it was almost as sought after as the aspen, and nearly as obnoxious to acquire. The only place it grew was deep on the southern fringe of the boggy valley between the Jasmine Gate and Thundercrest’s lower peaks. Its value was also rather esoteric, in that it was a stabilizing yin-attributed spirit tree. Its fruits were occasionally used in high-grade purification elixirs, and the bark made one of the few pigments that would remain stably attached to Luss cloth. Mostly, though it was prized because of the silk silkworms made if nourished on its leaves.

Thankfully there had never been any requests for ‘wild’ timber, or saplings, because several of them grew in a special part of the ornamental gardens of the Blue Gate School, who curated and sold access accordingly.

“It is,” Arai nodded. “Does that mean we are also close to the Xuanwu boglands?”

“…”

“I mean… I’d take that over the Jasmine Gate,” she suggested, doing her best to inject some levity into her tone.

She was trying hard not to think about what they might be heading into, in that regard. The forest outside had been aggressively normal, at least until what they found on the ridge line, but since then, things had been getting progressively weirder, and more unsettling. Her last trip into the periphery of this place still lived rent-free in her nightmares occasionally.

“Yeah,” Arai nodded. “In any case, it looks like we are going over a whole grove of them.”

“Figures.” Looking around, she could see tell-tale patches of faintly choppy water in every direction now, and the drifts of water lilies were presumably clustering on the submerged trees as well. “It’s going to be easier to paddle through this, rather than pole, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, I was just thinking that,” her sister agreed.

It didn’t take them that long to fashion two crude paddles out of some of the excess bamboo. It was mostly a matter of splitting some lengths and opening out the ends to give them a bit more surface area. The most awkward thing for her was not dwelling on how they really should have made them before they set out as she did so, as it was entirely foreseeable that navigating the raft would hit a complication like this.

As it turned out, the mangrove bed was… substantial, however, and between the eddying current, the snaring swathes of water lilies, and not quite submerged trees their progress was slow, and deceptively sapping. If there was a saving grace provided by the otherwise unrepentantly cruel fates, it was that it didn’t broaden out much, so even as the mist started to settle in around them again, they were able to keep both sides in clear view, at least for a few hundred meters as the progressed onwards.

Eventually though, that did change, the gorge opening out, into a vast expanse of over-flooded wetland, within which the only landmarks were the occasional outcropping rock slab, and some stands of more substantial trees not totally subsumed by the risen waters. Between them was either open, faintly rippling swathes of open water, out of which the crowns of mangroves and the occasional patch of taller reeds or swamp bamboo peeked and little else.

For almost half an hour, they slowly made their way through it, following the compass trail, until at last… the compass just seemed to break. Between one moment and the next, the directions it was giving flipped three times and eventually stabilized into a regular oscillation that she recognised from experience as a sign of a conflicting divination that was not quite extreme enough to break the compass, but only just.

“Well, I was wondering when this was gonna happen,” her sister sighed, as they glumly considered the skittish reaction of the compass.

Taking in their current surroundings, there was nothing especially notable to make the wetland here stand out compared to any they had passed through up to this point. There was a rock outcropping to their left, about thirty metres away in the fog. A stand of willow trees to the right, that had to be on slightly higher ground as well, because they were only half submerged. A broad undulation of the drifting lily pads was slowly shifting around them, carried along with the same steady current that had been helping their progress.

“I…”

She was about to suggest that they paddle backwards a few dozen metres and see if that helped, when the mist around them… recoiled. That was the only way she could describe it. It twisted in her vision as if a great gust of wind had just caught it, opening up their view of the valley ahead as it rolled back.

The wetlands stretched for easily a mile in each direction, bleeding into dense, forested slopes that rose into the cloud above… which as she watched with sudden unease were also recoiling and starting to twist.

That wasn’t even the most disconcerting thing though. That had to be the ruins that were revealed. The nearest were maybe a hundred metres ahead, a scattering of half-submerged constructions surrounded by a wall that was part overgrown by the mangroves. To their right, beyond the willow trees, was an actual ruined pagoda, maybe sixty metres tall, with at least five floors still intact. Ahead of them, meanwhile, the mist had cleared enough that she could even make out what looked like the dark shadow of wall, or maybe an escarpment, cutting across most of the valley.

As she shaded her eyes, however, she found all of a sudden that she couldn’t quite focus on it for some reason. It was as if the entirety of the newly revealed horizon was shimmering… or rippling.

-Oh no. Her heart suddenly skipped a beat.

And, as she continued to look at it, that rippling was coming…

No no no...

“Umm… sis...”

Her sister’s voice, now containing a certain edge, cut through her slowly mounting dread, at the fact that that rippling haze was seemingly moving towards them.

Tearing her gaze away from it for a moment, she glanced over at Arai, who was tugging on her arm, pointing behind them.

Looking that way, she… found that the wetland behind them was also… rippling, features in the middle-distance distorting on the edge of her vision, now, in a way that…

“Umm… The sky, I think—”

Her sister never got to finish that sentence, because suddenly, everything around them was turning.

Mesmerized, in a horrified way, she could only watch as the receding mist and cloud flowed out from the direction they had come and swirled around the dome of the sky above them. One after another, the montane peaks around them seemed to bend, melting into that swirling white river.

And the world kept turning.

It was like being stuck in the middle of one of those children’s lanterns, which you spun to see the animals move.

“Oh…” her sister grabbed the puppet, sounding as queasy as she suddenly felt.

At the same time, her mind somehow seemed to catch up with the motion of the world and the raft felt like it was tilting beneath her. A wave of dizziness swept over her, as the sky rolled onwards.

“Oh, fates—”

Her sister sounded nauseous, but she couldn’t spare any effort to look at her, since she was suddenly both very concerned with holding onto the raft, and also firmly caught up in the stomach-churning twisting sensation of everything pitching and tilting around her.

The mountains moved.

The sky rolled on.

The clouds spiralled and billowed.

The entire vista around them reshuffled itself.

Groaning, she grasped desperately at the edges of the raft, but even that seemed to twist in her grip, slipping away from her, mocking her desire for stability as it pitched and warped weirdly.

She tried to scream and found herself vomiting instead as the nauseating sensations overwhelmed her.

The sense of disorientation only grew more and more intense as she found her gaze inexorably drawn to the transformations occurring in the surrounding landscape. She wanted nothing more to bury her face in the bamboo and sob, but reality clearly had other ideas.

Vertigo became all-consuming, a crippling persecution by this place upon her psyche as it grabbed her attention somehow and forced her to face the changes unfolding in the landscape around her.

Submerged buildings slid into one another, through one another, over one another, transformed into new buildings or reverted into old ones seemingly at random.

The landscape around them flowed backwards, somehow streaming away from the surrounding changes. Outcroppings combined and changed, trees bled through one another, the distant slopes of the mountains above them rose and fell, changing, altering, inverting, collapsing without rhyme or reason. The ruined pagoda a few hundred metres away became three. A dark spike of black glass half a mile tall bled out of the mountain peaks to their right, not quite at the same scale or perspective. A grey building with huge windows and the grey tower appeared behind them—or maybe it was ahead, she no longer had any firm grasp on that—only to melt into the mountains again as like the prisms twisting in a children’s toy, the horizon around them split apart and reformed, over and over… and over—

The motion of the world overtook her senses entirely for a moment and she was lost in a warped blue void. No land at all, just twisting sky until what had to be the Thunder Crest Pinnacle dropped over the horizon of her twisted world and the land pitched back into a perspective in which she could see it again.

By the time the third full circuit of the river of clouds had swept her along with it, the ruins and the wetland around them had completely transformed beyond all recognition from what it had been before. The peaks started slotting back into the spinning lantern of vertiginous chaos, one after another.

First, somehow, came Snow Jade, which should have been impossible, because it was on the literal other side of the Great Mount, yet here, in her vision, it also had never-before seen collections of towers, stairways and buildings cut into its heights.

The forests coating its slopes shuddered, gaining and losing seasons in the blink of an eye, until abruptly, the heights were again subsumed by a vast blizzard of snow, leaving it dusted white and sparkling again.

Next… against all logic was North Crest Ridge and the Chain Spire—a series of crown-like spikes now at its peak framing a tower of glossy white stone—which should have been between the Fissure peaks and the Great Mount, a part of her broken mind pointed out. Chain Spire, with Thunder Crest Pinnacle, which she had seen before, came after, except now a vast complex of workings was visible rising up its face around the cracked remains of another glassy-black shard, impaled into its peak like a vast black tower.

The East Fury peaks, like a jagged maw of peaks rose from the depths of the chaos, its perpetually cloud-shrouded peaks now also clearly visible as they towered over her. The great grey tower and hall now stood on its slopes, jutting out above the ridgelines, the tower rising almost as high as the mountain itself. Below it, the terraces and valley gardens swirled out of the chaos to populate its lower slopes.

South Grove Pinnacle came after, rising like a great behemoth to overshadow everything, its crescent crown now also containing the complex of grey buildings that had littered half the landscape before.

Then East Watch, sporting a shimmering complex of red and white buildings covering its west flank then twisted through it, like a mirage, before the buildings partially vanished, leaving only the white behind.

The red, she saw a moment later, had not disappeared but rather was somehow now present in the Golden Promise Spire, as part of a geode-like city, hollowed into its eastern face, in a radiant vision of red crystal and blue peaked roofs, the construction all rounded towers and alien arches and spirals.

Bridges of shining blue and white flowed outward from nothing and connected Golden Promise to the East Fury Peaks, one after another.

Everything hung, impossibly motionless, amid the twisting chaos for an agonising second. She felt like her eyes were being pulled out of her head as the world tried to make her focus on both the still bits and the chaos that bled through everything else.

Then everything suddenly slotted together, stacking one piece over another. Mountains bled through each other, and the world finally relinquished her from its horrible grip.

…

…

Even after she had stopped sobbing from the disorientation and was certain that the spinning of the raft beneath her was all now just in her head, she remained limply on the ground for several minutes.

Her body was cold and trembling, an odd sensation that took her a few seconds to place... Her qi had run out of control and was seeping out of her body into the waters around them! In a panic, she grasped her mantra and screamed at it to lock everything that remained inside her body. With great reluctance, it sluggishly responded and started working with her body to stem the flow of that precious, irreplaceable energy. The cold was settled deep in her bones, and the base of her skull felt...

-Soul shock.

She scrunched up her eyes and tried to push away the feeling that a small demon was sat on the back of her back, hitting the top end of her spine with a pointy hammer.

There was something sticky all over her face...

-Uggh. She was literally lying face down in her own vomit, which was pooling on the bamboo slats. Gross!

Rolling over, she finally dared to open her eyes a fraction, and was instantly given cause to regret it, because she found herself staring directly up into the sun, which against all probability was shining down directly overhead.

When the blotchy spots vanished, she pushed herself up on her knees and managed to not immediately fall over, or off the raft. The disorientation was still lodged firmly within her body, it seemed.

“I want to die," Arai moaned from nearby.

“Preach it, sister," she made a face.