> —The true origins of the crystalline mineral called ‘Venerate’s Tears’ or in some ancient and contested texts the much less grandiose ‘Ignitic Arborundum’ is something of a mystery. Most of the current worth of material in circulation is from sources found already hewn from the land. As a resource, it only appears in the most ancient and relict of ruins and caverns throughout our great world. Usually, it is worked in some way, either fashioned into very mundane ornaments and decorations or, on the rare occasion that slab-like ‘ingots’ of it are recovered, they are invariably twisted or in the shape of cut lengths as long as a man’s arm. Divinations carried out on scavenged artefacts and pieces of its crystalline ore by great sages have determined that it is the fossilised remnants of some kind of primordial tree, but whether root or branch none have ever been able to claim with confidence to the satisfaction of my own person.

>

> Several things stand out about it that make it notable as a material. Firstly, even in its most impure forms it is impossibly durable; the only means to cut it is with a refined tool of a Venerate Cultivator or with an edge of the mineral itself. The consensus that has come to be over the aeons is that it can only be worked by someone of that lofty status. Secondly, all the artefacts known of it to this author are utterly inert to qi. Be they cups, plates, floor tiles or filigree decoration. Third, however, is perhaps most mysterious: while all such artefacts are inert, refusing any input of elemental qi or soul strength, they also—and without exception as far as I am aware—project a certain field of suppression to the world around them. A mere cutlery knife, or sharpened edge of decorative lintel carved from it can easily slice apart most barriers or artefacts.

>

> Subsequently its finest artefacts are much sought after as a ‘status’ statement rather than a mineral of practical worth for the average cultivator. The Imperial Dynasty of our world, for example, owns one set of plates, cups and cutlery wrought from exceptionally pure arborundum that is the exclusive property of the emperor himself. The Jade Gate Court’s signature ‘gate’ is also an artefact carved primarily from it, and the Shu Pavilion possesses a statue garden of several strange, matching pieces which it uses to entertain important visitors. Few give much interest to the raw material, unless exceptionally pure, such is the aforementioned difficulty in working with it. As far as I am aware, only the Seven Sovereigns School, the Hunter Bureau and the Lu Clan possess any notable reserves of the ‘ingots’ and mainly trade it to sources beyond the confines of this world.

Excerpt from – 'Mineralogy of Eastern Azure Great World: Volume 5.'

  By Sagacious Ascendant Jiao of the Earth Blaze Refinement Sect.

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~ LIN LING – MYSTERIOUS CAVERN ~

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With a scream she only heard in her mind, Ling felt Han Shu’s grip on her hand slip. Darkness and water rolled over her, accompanied by a suffocating sense of helplessness—

Pain.

Every bone in her body suddenly felt like it had been struck as she collided with a warped, smooth surface. Her qi bled out of her body, even as her vision returned, and she found that the torrent of water that had just enveloped her had deposited her right into an undulating lattice of blue-green crystal that was winding its way across the rock surface she had just collided with.

-I… didn’t die?

As a cognizant thought, it was followed by another, much less reassuring… that felt like an echo within her own mind.

-Yet.

The surging water around her suddenly tugged at her, blurring and shaking and turning into haze in a way that… somehow didn’t quite reach where she—

-Ah… AH!

Instinct, and something half remembered took over, even as the whole cavern around her groaned, in a way that was profoundly… concerning.

-Assuming it even works…

Ignoring the echo, a sure symptom that you did not simply ‘shake off’ a soul attack like those horrifying tetrid abominations had unleashed on them, she materialized her last talisman anchor.

The ‘Point Setting’ talismans were very esoteric creations, relying as much on feng shui and harmonization with ‘natural intent’ as they did qi to work; hopefully that meant they would not conflict with the fundamental stability of the vein.

*Foooooooooooooom*

A dreadful, vision blurring, grinding, reverberating crack shook her surroundings. The water that had been washing against the arborundum vein on which she had landed suddenly began to fall away, trying to drag her with it, out of its island of relative calm and into a turbulent maelstrom that was pounding in every direction—

-No. no… NO!

Clawing at the rock for purchase with one hand, she bit her lip and licked the talisman, desperately fighting her own body to avoid dropping it in the water or being swept away, and slapped it against the arborundum beside her—

-It worked! The shock and euphoria was like a bucket of icy water as the talisman flickered and an intangible force bound her to the location she was in, allowing her to exhale slightly.

To remove the talisman she would have to focus on it for some twenty seconds at the very least and it would still work even if she was unconscious. It was certainly enough to keep her safe and anchored to her current spot for the foreseeable future—

“You wretched girl…”

Her heart turned to ice, as the words, as much in her head as within the cavern, called to her.

Some twenty or so metres away, a lithe, feminine figure had stood up out of the churning water, unstable qi bleeding off of its silhouette.

“Get out from under there, won’t you?”

The words bled through her mind, forcibly pulling her gaze away from the figure in the water… to look above her.

“Run.”

-Run.

-Run out from there!

-Get off that rock!

-Get away from here or I’m going to die?

-Get us away from here…

-AWAY!

The amorphous thing, hauling itself out of the darkness above her was… something between a slug and some warped spirit herb. It had far too many arms—root-like, grasping things, and dozens of face-like aspects shifting across its exposed, ethereal flesh. Its head, or at least where its head might be, was a twisting mass of tentacles that were flowing out towards her, and it had too many eyes… eyes that peered everywhere, and followed everything.

She wanted to shut it out, but those horrible, piercing pupils, effortlessly ignored her mantra.

It whispered to her, hungrily, greedily.

She couldn’t discern what it was saying, but even so, a part of her suddenly yearned to ‘know’.

Its eyes in her mind were trying to peer into everything.

Into the mechanism of the—

-This is a soul attack! A part of her realised, weakly.

-It has to be a soul attack.

-Is it… though?

That voice sobbed, and it was hers… she realised… but also something about it felt…

“Arrrrgh!”

She did the only thing she could and grasped her face, clawing at it—seeking to do something, anything, to try and blot it out. Push it away.

-Yes… that’s it…

“NO!”

Barely, she managed to pull herself back from giving in fully to it and doing something… very, very bad.

-Get. A. Grip! She snarled inwardly, embracing her mantra as fully as she could.

She couldn’t do the things Sana, Arai, or Shu could, but she had still learned a few tricks—

The clawing, hungering abomination that was looming over her refuge in the vein of arborundum abruptly recoiled, as whatever it was trying to do collided with her mantra that was now simply… everywhere in her body—

“Heh.”

The snort of mocking laughter from the lithe female figure was like cold ice, grasping her limbs. The qi in her body shuddered, as if something were trying to pull it away, then to her surprise, the intangible force scattered.

“…”

The lithe figure stared at the vein of rock, her eyes narrowing, and then—

Her head abruptly felt like it had just been split open. She only managed to retain her mental focus… on her mantra… simply because she was…

She…

She…

She stared at herself, suddenly bereft, and empty.

Above her, the amorphous phantasm the lithe figure had to be conjuring flowed down, its maw-like head growing, the eyes spreading out, peering at her from every angle—

A vast, shuddering roar rolled through the whole cavern.

The lithe woman staggered sideways, the waters around her becoming so unsettled that she seemed to no longer be able to hold her footing—

“Get. Off. That. Rock.”

The command from the woman was like a spear, punching through her memories of the past few moments… minutes… however long it had been.

The whole cavern shuddered.

The rock above and about her groaned and creaked.

The crashing waves, now frozen, blurred iridescent.

“Cursed life roots,” the lithe woman snarled after a moment, lowering her hand.

-When did she raise it? A part of her…

-Just a moment ago… when she stood up out of the water.

She stared at Lin Ling… at her own self, within her mind, and then her mantra shifted weirdly and she was…

The last moment was like a fever dream of shattered moments.

“You think me a dream?”

The amorphous abomination peered down at her, its maw twisting to become… her face. Juni was there as well… and Shu… and Arai. Even Sana.

“I have them all” The monstrosity giggled, tentacles becoming grasping hands. “You are the last! Why do you fight? Just give up. Become mine… I have seen what awaits… and it will be easier for you.”

Gritting her teeth, she pushed herself back against the arborundum as the woman stared at her.

“Curious,” she mused. “Your mantra use is primitive, compared to the previous occupant of this body. I guess this vein is particularly pure. Ah well, it will—”

A shadow suddenly loomed out of the darkness of the cavern, behind the woman.

For a moment, she saw piercing flame-like pupils in the darkness, a shadowy form that was awfully like the Snapping Xuanwu of the valleys above, but… much, much bigger—

Her world turned white.

The lithe figure was a pitch-black shadow amidst it—

Her world turned black.

She had the vague awareness of a shockwave passing through her, and the rock around her shivering.

…

With a gasp, she opened her eyes.

Every part of her hurt.

A silent, thunderous howl hung like a shadow, just beyond her ability to hear it, seemingly frozen.

Golden flowers and seething swirls of white twisted through each other, searing themselves in her vision even after she somehow managed to avert her eyes.

The ever-shifting swirls followed her, no matter where she looked… except, she realised, when they touched the arborundum itself. That was still pristine, clear and pure, somehow, amidst the warped, broken moment that haunted her vision.

The shockwave passed and darkness returned.

The water in the cavern was basically gone, she thought.

In its place was a swirling miasma that something intangible in the arborundum vein repelled constantly a mere foot from her.

Within the miasma, she could dimly see the shadow of the lithe woman staggering back. The other… much larger shadow was slowly pulling itself to its feet—

A searing, white iridescent light rolled through the cavern.

The rock above her no longer groaned, it just slowly began to grow black cracks, that bled silently through everything.

The shadow-like form of the Xuanwu was trying to charge towards her, she realised, but everything beyond the arborundum was warping and shifting in a way that made her blood turn to ice. The lithe woman was staggering back, also trying to reach where she was—

The quagmire vanished.

There was crisp, eerie silence in the cavern for… she couldn’t even say it was a second. It was just a moment of ‘cessation’, amidst perpetual, cataclysmic—

A sense of profound and lingering sadness settled over everything, accompanied by the colour of everything she could see turning inside out.

Both shadow and lithe woman vanished in blurs of gore and disrupted qi amidst an eye-searing wave of iridescence that bled off every surface, shedding flower-petal like flames. A broken, stunned part of her wondered why they looked like parasol blooms, but before she could process what had happened, the entire cavern had transformed into a seething cloud of miasma, pitting every surface she could dimly perceive that wasn’t protected by the arborundum vein—

Her blood turned to ice as the whole cavern ominously creaked—

Everything around her that was not the arborundum vein she was practically welded to, warped before her eyes.

The miasma and the afterimages of those ‘maybe’ parasol flowers bounced painfully in her vision.

A profound sense that everything she was looking at was inexplicably wrong assailed her.

Even beyond the pain and the shock a part of her was dispassionately aware that she was suffering, the sense of nausea it brought was utterly, indescribably incapacitating.

At its most reductive, it was like she had just spun on the spot so much that she had to lie down, and shut her eyes, until it all just stopped. Yet she couldn’t close her eyes, and she had no way at all to make it ‘stop’. Not to mention a mind-chilling fear that maybe… if it did stop, that meant she was dead, or something.

So, she could only endure as everything around her kept shifting, twisting and distorting, over and over and over… and over.

How long it took for everything to settle down, she had no idea. It could have been minutes, or seconds, or even hours. She had no frame of reference even when she looked within her own body, because she could no longer sense anything. It was as if she was spiritually numb.

At some point the orphaned qi from the lithe corpse and the Xuanwu-like former occupant of this cavern had been jarred so much that it was leaving monochrome afterimages that haunted her vision. Of the shadowed figure grasping for the Xuanwu as its body deformed. Of the Xuanwu-like creature’s limbs shattering, its flesh liquifying. Over and over, they bled through her vision… until abruptly, she realised, that they were no longer moving, just shimmering like a heat-haze in the now still gloom—

Even as she started to wonder if maybe… just maybe, it was ‘over’, however, another tremor shuddered through the darkness around her.

This one was more muted, however. She could, somewhat surprisingly, sense its element, which was slightly yang, with hints of fire, thunder and occasionally wood.

She stared at the darkness, realizing that it was moving… brokenly. A misshapen, sluggish form was slowly clawing its way through the gloom towards her, resolving out of those broken afterimages—

-It's… not dead?

She stared in horror as glittering parasol-like flowers twisted out of the shadows that had been the lithe, feminine figure, trying to ensnare the other occupant—

Silence suddenly filled the cavern, sucking up her awareness of everything—

There was a colossal cry, like the ferocious call of some ancient, primeval bird or avian god.

A strange hiccuping wail, like an ancient beast in pain echoed through the cavern, only to be swallowed up in the reverberating ‘cry’ that had descended. Her vision swam, as she realised, to her horror, that the arborundum beneath her—and above her, was humming… There was a warmth to it that turned her blood to ice.

Had it been possible for her to have a heart attack she was certain she would have had one… as first one shockwave, then another… and another rang through the cave. Only after the fifth one in overlapping succession, did the vein beneath her become cold once again.

Everything returned to stillness, but for the broken sound of sobbing.

That was her, she realised, belatedly. She hadn’t even registered she was screaming. Even so, it sounded reedy and pathetic against the curtain of oppressive silence that was being drawn down after that echoing cry.

Besides her own ragged breaths, barely audible now, the only sound in the cave was the creepy *plip*, *plip* of liquid falling from the rocks above her.

As her vision adjusted, she found that there was no sign of either of the other occupants, just a blurry, iridescent smear of qi and miasma that clung to the gloom around her.

When those final glimmers at last faded away, the oppressive silence that remained was so thick that she found herself struggling to breathe, let alone continue sobbing in terror. The darkness was so thick as to be solid, with the edges of things barely emerging as eerily grey shadows.

-Have I somehow damaged my ocular meridians? She found herself wondering as she turned her head this way and that, chasing the grey haze that kept trying to lurk on the edge of her vision.

-Ah… no—it’s just the dark seeing pill; it hasn’t worn off.

Exhaling, she was relieved enough that, in spite of everything she had just seen, it didn’t seem to be permanent meridian trauma that she forwent trying to banish the dissociated part of her psyche that registered it… for a few seconds at least.

She was pretty sure she had suffered some proper soul damage, between the initial assault of the tetrids in the cavern, before they used the skitterleap talisman, and whatever… the one that had chased her, had—

It was a struggle not to look up, and she was still left with the uncomfortable feeling that some part of her had been about to speak up, and… then opted not to.

-Fate thrashed psychosis… she sighed, staring at the shifting gloom.

She was met with silence, bar the dripping.

No other shards of her psyche spoke up. No other voices in her head, though she was left with a disconcerting feeling of dissociation, like she was looking at herself in the mirror, and mouthing words, yet her reflection was just subtly out of synch with her.

Hoping that feeling would also go away, she lay there, in the dark, counting slowly, until there were no further shockwaves for almost five minutes, before finally managing to muster enough courage… and concentration, to finally release the talisman—

With a grunt of shock, she slid sideways and then, before she could gain any purchase, half slid, half tumbled painfully onto the floor below her.

It was only a fall of a few feet, but she still somehow succeeded in landing flat on her face, with one arm underneath her.

-I was lodged at an angle the whole time?

She had to use her mantra to force herself to sit up. Rubbing her face, she looked around and found that the lip was as it had been, which was… weird.

-Is it the qi diffusion and those shockwaves doing strange things to my perception of my surroundings? She found herself wondering.

Closing her eyes she rubbed her temples, massaging the qi flow through them a bit—and was met with a sharp stabbing pain.

-I guess I do have meridian strain after all, she groaned as she carefully tested what the damage was.

Thankfully, she didn’t seem to have ruptured any, but after opening her eyes, she still opted to use her fingers to forcibly create a new, temporary link between her principal meridians and her ocular meridian in her temple. It wasn’t ideal, but for a short moment she got a much better picture of the layout of the cavern.

It wasn’t as big as she had thought, truth be told. From wall to wall it was probably seventy-five metres at its widest point, with a ceiling averaging some twenty metres above her at best. She was about a third of the way around the outside of one wall, and the whole place was broadly shaped like a crescent moon.

To her immense relief, there was no sign at all of the tetrid corpse, beyond a few hazy afterimages that had to be some sort of spiritual resonance from the destruction of its body. The other occupant’s remains were just a varicoloured stain on her vision, blotting out everything across a third of it and melding vertices and geometry in ways that made her head ache—which even her mantra wasn’t really blunting—pulse painfully every time she looked directly at it.

The rest of the cavern was obscured by several house-sized slabs of roof that had slammed down. Grimacing, she picked herself up and, as gingerly and as cautiously as she could, crawled up the nearest one to get a better vantage point. So it was that when she got to the top, she saw for the first time, behind the remains of the unfortunate creature, the flat rectangular object outlined within the geometry of the far wall of the cavern.

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~ KUN JUNI – ??? ~

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Juni regained consciousness to find she was entirely unable to move. The last thing she could remember was being torn away from Shu and Ling amidst some sort of spatial quake, then everything had just… gone suffocatingly dark.

Now every part of her body felt numb and lethargic—more concerningly though, she was being dragged across a sandy cavern floor, rather like a log, by a small… lizard-like creature.

It had four arms and a long head, with sideways jaws that flexed weirdly as it stalked onwards. Four eyes, which she could see at any rate. Its clawed feet were reversed, like a birds. Rounding out the slightly contradictory set of features, it had small feathery protrusions on its elbows and knees. It also seemed half-invisible to her—parts of it not entirely there in the right ways. Its eyes were also somehow able to follow her, though that might have been her imagination, even though its head was facing the other direction. In any case, those eyes were deep amber-yellow with swirls darkening to black and no pupils.

Bouncing awkwardly on the ground as it dragged her over a rockier bit of the cave, she observed piled stone boulders, shadowy in the gloom, upon which were daubed—or maybe carved—weird… markings?

They stood out unnaturally in the darkness and made her mind go…

Made her mind go…

Go…

Go…

Something hit her in the back and her head was moved on her behalf as it bounced upwards off a rock. Contact with whatever that had just been was broken and her coherence of thought returned to her like a splash of icy water.

-We stopped? Or has that bump just injured…?

She half exhaled, half sobbed rasping shriek, air leaving her lungs involuntarily as the lizard kicked her, hard, in the stomach, then for good measure in the head.

[No look!]

[Primate child, look, bad. Un-die, problem.]

The words arrived directly in her head somehow, making it hurt even more. She hadn’t realised that was a pain threshold which could be bottomed.

More words arrived.

[Weak?]

[Pity. Primate Child un-useful. Blue and red concept unchanging.]

“Blue… Red?” She thought... wondering whether her brain was just permanently crippled at this point, which might explain a lot of things.

Between the Yin Qi in the waters, the fall, the ensuing bodily trauma and… and... those symbols?

-Right, thinking about those is a bad idea, a voice in her mind suggested gently.

-In any case, her disparate thoughts concluded, maybe this was all in my head and I am just trying to rationalise my slow degenerative death from Yin Qi poisoning?

-Should I not be more concerned about that?

Belatedly she realised she should be more concerned about that…

-Why am I not more concerned with my own potentially imminent demise?

That rather pointed question to her own thoughts went, perhaps mercifully, unanswered. Instead, the lizard thing communicated with her again, its words leaving headache inducing purple splotches in her mind’s eye for some reason.

[You bone, carve, concept of blue and red, you unchanging, simple, unknown?]

[Primate Luck like idiot, have word but no speak, have speak but no words, so luck, so like stupid.]

-I spoke out loud? She had no recollection of it.

At least that explanation somehow made fractionally more sense.

-Is it talking about my mantra?

-It just dissed you like you were a little bitch. A malicious voice surfaced in her mind, to go with the confused ones.

She was being hauled again as well, she belatedly realised. The creature clearly satisfied that she wasn’t going to look at any more symbols carved on rocks like a stupid person.

…

After what seemed like a small eternity, the small lizard person stopped hauling her and she was roughly propped up against a surface that felt like rock. The dark was stifling, pressing in all around her. However, finally left to her own devices and without needing to focus on healing her body due to the rough manner in which she was hauled, her vision began to recover and soon she could see enough to get a rough grasp of her surroundings… starting with the lizard thing squatting before her.

It was rifling through her stuff, not that what she had in her belt pouches or the pack was of much immediate use to man or beast. Anything valuable she still had on her person was in her storage talisman…

-Where is your storage talisman?

A worried voice tried to make itself heard, she tried to give it some thought.

-Her talisman? Talismans… she should have more than…one?

The train of focus, that was making the point between the eyes hurt for some reason, was broken as several other small figures skulked out of the dark to squat in a half circle around her.

[What is?]

[Is Primate?]

[Primate live? Rare.]

[Primate all luck. Is thing.]

[I thought suicide primate thing?]

[That also primate thing, can have luck and suicide same?]

[True.]

[True.]

A disorientating half conversation, a thing of single words and short phrases, rapidly unfolded around her, even as the pain in her head increased several fold in the process of witnessing it.

-They are going to damage our mind if this keeps up?

-At least while they are talking they aren't going to eat us.

-Don’t say that.

-At least in our death we will be useful.

-We were useful.

-No, we weren’t. Our spirit root is crap, we are only where we are because father is a good man. The clan doesn’t care about us.

-Arrrrrrgh!

She focused on the simultaneously disorientating and far more inane conversation in her own head for a second, forcing the disparate voices to slink back into the recesses of her psyche. They had one thing right at least, while the small lizards were talking, they weren’t eating her.

-They aren’t speaking with any sound.

One of the voices managed to cast its thought into the front of her mind almost in spite of her best wishes, forcing her to acknowledge that it had a point. The words she was ‘hearing’ had no sound, and truthfully, with mouths like theirs, there was no way they should be able to pronounce any kind of intelligible words for her to understand.

Between one moment and the next, she froze, or some part of her that was still trying to take notes froze.

…

Fighting to grasp that shifting sensation, she felt panic rising in her.

-Did I just pass out?

A lizard person…

-The same one?

-Are its feathers the same?

-It did something to us?

-Me… Did something to Me!

She almost screamed out loud to shut up the whispering non voices.

[We are called Sar’katush. It mean walk in deep place.]

The words that arrived this time didn’t really seem to hurt.

-Maybe the damage is just bad enough now that we can’t feel the pain.

The glum joint pronunciation this time wasn’t one she could find the heart to rebuke herself for.

It was pasting something on her skin?

She tried to look at herself.

Her head moved, like it was stuck in tar. She looked down at her legs, arms... breasts… belatedly she realised she was naked. Part of her tried to be embarrassed, but that was so far down the list of ‘this is not good’ that it was almost laughed out of her psyche. What was the point of mere embarrassment at this stage?

The lizard traced the faint scars on her legs, the one on her stomach and final a jagged scar across her shoulder with a clawed finger.

-Four claws, the ‘note taker’ pointed out. Three and an opposable smaller claw.

-And they are certainly claws, a more melodramatic voice giggled.

[~Impressed. Admire, Amusement. Good shape. Not old way. But still good shape. Primate very luck. Strong will.]

The coherent parts of her managed to all band together and permit her to croak out a few words.

“The child before said I was stupidly lucky?”

[~Concern. No speak. Injure. Bad. Big stupid luck. Very stupid. Such Luck.]

It made a gesture she could just about make out in the dark—spreading its arms wide.

[~Derision. So luck. Nearly fate].

There was a flash above her and a strange spider web of odd shapes and symbols covered the sky.

-Cavern roof, a voice corrected.

It was so far above and so dark that it might as well have been the sky, in any case–

There was a faint tremor and something hit the cavern floor, she thought. Then another stronger tremor.

[~Annoyance. ~Fear. Tsk. Above. Intensity. Stupid. Attract Unspeakable. Big Stupid. Hope Chosen can protect]

The small lizard…muttered?

-Is it telepathy?

-Soul sense?

-Isn’t soul sense suppressed underground?

-It wasn’t touching her?

The questions stacked up in her head to fast for her to process.

She reached for her mantra and found it somehow dull… sluggish?

[~CONFUSED.~Empathic. Is words to show? To see. To know.]

The explanation settled on her like a cloak this time, as if simple words were being used in a demonstrative way. She got the distinct impression with it that this ‘Intent’ was akin to telling a small child that fire was hot. While it was informative in tone it also, rather undeniably, carried a faint sense of insult.

[~AMUSEMENT. Is like. Yes. Not fault. Primate. Different. We gift. Make see. Do. Can share. Good. Bad. Intent.]

The longer explanation made even less sense, but seemed to imply that it was not something that came naturally… or perhaps just not naturally to whatever a primate was…

-Is that me?

Her natural curiosity towards the term resonated with enough of the chorus in her head to allow them to align for long enough to rasp out a question with actual words.

“W-what is... Primate?”

Instantly, a little luminous peach blossom materialized nearby and drifted towards her in a totally unnoticeable manner. She registered its presence, certainly, but saw nothing to be at all concerned about in it—

The lizard reached out and plucked it out of the air once it got a mere pace away from her. Holding it up, it considered it in a manner that projected… annoyance?

The feeling that came from it didn’t have words, but yes, it was certainly annoyed.

-Its annoyance is on the level of an ancestral grudge, the note taking voice judged.

-Evil spirits beware, for heaven has come, and thunder is in the air, another mocked.

She shushed both voices and tried to see what it was holding.

-Is it a flower?

-Where did that come from?

The voices in her head supplied their own thoughts to hers.

-And why does it make us all want to go hide in the corner and gibber.

[~Fury! Even here the thieves have eyes.]

If its strange face could scowl, it would have been thunderous she somehow intuited. As it was, the lizard person’s jaws merely flexed a bit and the golden and black eyes narrowed as it considered the twisting bloom, then it pinched it out, as if it were doing something entirely mundane, like snuffing out a candle. There was the barest flicker of something and it shook its hand.

In her mind’s eye she fancied she could see smoke and black cracks in the air for a split second, before it—

She flinched as a clawed hand snapped out so fast she couldn’t see it move, grasping for something by her… ear?

Suddenly aware she was drenched in cold sweat, she could only watch as it withdrew its claw, holding something she could not see. It brought it up and made a displeased sound and made a pinching motion again, then glanced sideways at her, its eyes doing the same, ‘I can see you even if not looking at you’ trick from before.

[~Anger. ~Deepening. Even here. Old thieves have eyes to see. Cannot see Sar’katush. We…]

It trailed off, looking up as another flash of energy swept downwards…

Then another…

And another.

Tremor after tremor shook the cavern.

In the distance she thought she saw a rock the size of a house drop from the ceiling and a moment later two more lizards – Sar’Katush, she corrected herself– stalked out of the gloom.

There was an uneasy pressure in the air of her surroundings now. Like everything was being charged, just before lightning hit. It put her in mind of a tribulation, rather terrifyingly, like the moment just before the thunder descended.

[~Worry. Intensification], one pointed up.

[~Worry. Escalation], the other nodded.

[~Fear. Bright Sovereign? Eclipse Sovereign? Dividing Sovereign?... Night… Sovereign?], the first spoke.

The Sar’Katush beside her made an odd twitch as if annoyed at that last mention for some reason.

[~Perplexion. Such Sovereign? This much?]

[~Denigation. This weak. Not sovereign. Not those sovereign. Stolen goods, death watching. Lingering resentment.]

[Primate. Obsessed with suicide. Dares to show words to it? Not like Sar’katush.]

It paused for a second and turned to Juni.

[~Questioning. In world beyond shadow, MENG strong? Principle? Morality? Devotion? Aspiration? Cloak?]

She stared at the Sar’Katush blankly, trying to work out what in the fates it was actually asking her. Something about the world outside. One of those, Meng?

-Like the Meng Heavenly Clan?

[No. ~Confusion. Empath have no word.]

‘Vast King?’

The words sank into her body like a great axe. Splitting her apart to the very core. Her dantian wavered…

Her vision was red, the world made of jelly.

She vomited blood from the pressure. It spilled across her breasts and flowed down onto the ground.

‘Scion, Path, Lotus, Body, Gift’

Her mantra thundered in her ears. Parts of her tattered psyche scattered, screaming in terror, before being dragged back by it and roundly corralled and tied back together somehow.

Just as abruptly, the pressure vanished. The agony in her body dissipated, fizzling out bizarrely as a shadow rose up behind the little Sar’Katush that had just spoken and bopped it hard on the head. The small lizard yelped and crouched down. The one nearby, the one that had dragged her, she thought, fell over laughing only to then flee with a yelp as something grasped for it.

A large, scaly claw, itself as big as her head, reached down and carefully grasped her temples—

The agonising darkness of spiritual death receded.

The sense of her body falling apart completely melted away and she was able to breathe again.

Her vision slowly became normal again and the red tint in the black of the world around her retreated, though the fuzzy warmth still lingered.

The voices in her mind sighed in relief and reformed as one.

Even the cold in her bones from the yin poisoning receded a touch.

[Forgive it. My child does not know its strength.]

The Sar’Katush who had spoken was, she saw, crouched nearby holding its head in its hands whimpering, shining tears moistening its four eyes. It was such a strangely normal action, as you might see from a child who had annoyed an elder on the street in town that she rather awkwardly found it hard to stay angry at it, despite the fact that it had nearly killed her.

[They are still learning and do not know their power. Please forgive her for her foolishness .]

She stared at the smaller Sar’Katush, who stared back at her with watering eyes.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

[Remorse, apology.]

It was an effort but she managed a slight nod. Not because she was unwilling, although she was sceptical, but because she was afraid that if she moved her head too fast it might fall off. Her body felt like it was held together with frayed wool and wishful prayers.

[I am Valash, of the Sar’katush. I watch. I alone remain.]

She tried to school her thoughts… the Sar’Katush were familiar, but she was struggling to recall where she had seen a four-armed, four-eyed lizard species with feathers spoken of before.

“There are… others?”

[Others…? The chosen protect our little enclave here and observe the farce unfolding up above.]

There had been a definite hesitance in that answer.

For a moment the chorus of her psyche all returned, almost as a coda, to tell her not to draw attention to that. That that was somehow a ‘bad idea’… a ‘very bad’ idea in fact.

“What did she mean by ‘Vast… or Meng King’?” she asked instead, returning to what the ‘child’ had tried to ask.

[She asks if a great pillar of old rules the land above. Her view is lacking, I can tell that they do not. What is the name of your ruler? The strength of the one doing battle above is born of the Mortal Eclipse Sovereign, even if it is not of him.]

“Ruler? The Governor of West Flower Picking Town? Or do you mean the Duke of Blue Water Province?”

Valash looked back towards the ceiling.

[Those are not the names of kings, they have the meaning of servitude, in their own way. Who rules them ‘Child of the Devouring Path’?]

“Oh,” she winced, of course, it was asking about the ‘Imperial Court’, the seat of ‘Authority’ over the whole of Eastern Azure Great World and the powers behind it.

“I don’t know… sorry. The Imperial Throne of Eastern Azure is currently held by the Second Dun Dynasty. Folk like us just know the title of the Emperor – ‘Blue Morality Emperor’.”

Valash seemed to turn her words over, considering each one in turn. The golden light in its eyes – her eyes? – she wasn’t sure on the gender but there had been implications of motherhood with the two smaller ones, passed through empathy, grew brighter and the darkness swirled more obscurely.

[~Pondering.]

[Hmmmmm…. I do not know this name. The years flow by in this place and the cycle of our generations is always so small now. Thank you for answering our questions . You may rest here until—]

There was a sense of horrific disjunction.

The symbol patterns shining in the air over the town shifted and distorted, buckling on one side as if something not quite in phase with the rest of reality had just cloven through the world firmament itself and caught it.

[~Confusion. Sadness. Annoyance.]

[Ah. The moment closes, the disruption of that foolish action arrives.]

Valash’s empathic voice seemed different for a moment, more distant, more aged… more sorrowful?

The qi within the chamber recoiled as a sheet of golden-white death poured down from above. With it came a crushing silence that flattened all noise into insignificance. The world around her faded into white, the geometry of her surroundings picked out by hazy black lines… edges bleeding myriad colours. Things reflected in the gaps between that were impossible, horrible…twisting unreal things.

Just looking into those broken spaces for the split second that the ‘change’ persisted was worse in some inexplicable way than all the previous trauma combined.

Suddenly, she was aware that she could not breathe. There was no air and the temperature… she felt the frost of the void burn her to the bone even before it condensed like a sparkling cloak, covering everything. Valash put a claw on her shoulder and she felt the ‘warmth’ return, although she still couldn’t breathe.

As quickly as it had arrived the cold, the iridescence covering everything and the golden white aurora raging above vanished. However, in that brief moment of illumination, she saw a world of unspeakable horror. Her surroundings flowed and twisted: One moment there was a cavern, villages, lizards… Then a cavern city bedecked with abomination and defilement – all ruined angles and eldritch signs.

Sar’Katush prayed to pits of horror and fed upon their own kind who would not follow them. Darkness crept from every corner, howling in fury at the light from above.

She saw a great statue robed in bloody skins, daubed a lurid yellow, wearing masks made of thousands of skulls – reaching for the light, fuelled by the hungering, whispering words and prayers, seeking the substance that the force that intruded into their domain could provide.

Shadow rose, burying everything. The absence of light was a mercy, but the horror in her mind would not fade.

As she watched, immobile, everything shifted and distorted.

The intact buildings of the little village crumbled.

All the Sar’Katush melted away into some other place.

Wards vanished…

The stones decayed before her eyes, and finally, before her vision blacked out, she saw the pit in the heart of the village—

Five eyes stared out of it, all the starry sky seemed to be held within them…

Something other… emerged.

She had seen it in her mind’s eye moments earlier. The presence and the statue from the city merging inexorably. Reaching for her, a scaly limbed claw, warped with pustules and effervescent… tentacles.

A sensation of utter hopelessness touched her mind—

…

She hit loam and felt herself sliding, rolling like a doll.

The thing was before her.

Hopelessness sank into her mind like clinging briars. It coiled around her emotions, her memories, and her sense of self, found parts of her, regrets and hates and loves and fears she never even knew she had.

It wormed into her spirit root, into her dantian… into her blood, her flesh… even her bones, whispering words, she knew not, even as each syllable slowly gnawed away at her consciousness.

She tried to move and found her body wouldn’t respond. She screamed at her mantra, dragging it out of whatever enforced lethargy had gripped it and pushing word after word, like branding irons, into her tortured psyche.

Scion—To Believe.

Path—To Define.

Lotus—To Protect.

Body—To Heal.

Gift—To Bring Forth.

Desperately, she cycled the physical mantra in her mind. Once, twice…

The force locking her down mocked her feeble attempts to resist it and the mantra’s influence turned sluggish, even as the thing came onwards, slowly taking shape. It looked like a Sar’Katush, but it was vast, cloaked in a skin of flayed, yellow dyed skins, a hundred… or a thousand faces staring out from it. Human faces, lizard faces, faces of rat people? Of some green and grey skinned creatures. All of them stared at her hungrily, whispering… telling her that she was going to join them. Welcoming her to their great and glorious purpose.

The creature’s five eyes were dark wells within the hood.

The four arms became eight…

Became sixteen…

Became thirty-two – all of them reaching for her as its terrible maw opened wide and its tongue split to become…

She brokenly managed a sixth cycle, barely, as the hunger of the thing finally overwhelmed her focus—

A scaly claw grasped her shoulder.

[Help. ~Sorrow. Believe. Saved.]

Valash emerged from the darkness before her, two other small lizards beside her. Each holding one of her hands. They held up little flames in their hands that danced… she wanted to say they were merry, but the little lizards reflected inside them had faces that could only be described as resolute, in a way that was nearly heartbreaking to bear witness to.

Valash stared at her, sheltering both smaller Sar’Katush with her other arms, as if to protect them as well as her from the darkness rising behind.

-Why isn’t she speaking in whole sentences? A voice returned in her mind.

-What is that horrible shadow?!

-Its robe… tattered…

-It has eyes…

-The eyes… It sees us... like suns… I…

-It… in the waters… black stars!

-Eyes, like twin suns, rise in the waters. Strange is the night where black stars rise. Where flap the tatters of the king. Die thou, unsung, unwanted, and become my—

That was not her voice.

She forced the mantra out for a seventh time, barely, as the other voices descended into inarticulate screaming.

[~Resolute! Believe! Saved!]

The children’s lights were tiny in the darkness, little threads of their strength flowing into her, sustaining the words of her mantra in some subtle way. Even so, they were unable to illuminate more than a fraction of the world in the face of the creeping shadow that was welling up behind the yellow-robed Sar’Katush advancing towards her.

If the creature was terrifying, the shadow behind it was Unspeakable.

Within that darkness, five eyes, the eyes from the pit in the village, opened…

[~Desperation. ~Resolution. ~Apology. Believe]

The words of the small Sar’Katush held a heart-breaking conviction, even as their own tiny lights were snuffed out at last.

Valash’s eyes closed for a second.

[This. Not Right. Our crime, not deserving.]

Her eyes snapped open, and blazed with a dark fire. No longer were her eyes golden, but pure white, with a black flame dancing in each one.

[You. Should. Not. Fall. Like. This]

Something pressed into her mind... The words of the mantra reordered themselves slightly.

-That should be impossible, a small voice belatedly whispered.

No chorus contested it, even as the darkness receded.

She felt the gritty loam beneath her, cold and damp.

Scents of the cavern flooded into her world: fungi, still cavern air, slight decay.

Sounds of dripping water, a haunted groan of some kind and… pain.

It came from her side and got worse as she tried to move her limbs in reaction to it. An arm – her right arm? – twitched, barely. She could feel a rock on her left foot, a shooting pain there as well. Her right toes moved. Her left arm? Fingers twitched.

-So my back isn’t broken… that’s something, she reflected weakly.

Above her the ceiling was flat… still, even.

-Just like water?

The haunted groan in the surroundings was her own voice, it turned out.

Painfully, she managed to move her right arm to see what was hurting so much in her side. Her arm felt like squishy tofu as it moved. If she wasn’t at Physical Refinement this would be impossible and even as it was, her qi barely moved. Every meridian in her body felt like it was on fire, or frozen – frozen in the act of being on fire maybe – as she puppeteered her arm directly.

Eventually she found the source, gingerly probing her side with clumsy fingers. The offending thing was a piece of bone, impaled through her body. Exploring it carefully, she found her blood was flowing out of the wound and running down to drip on the ground. Her hand found other bones, even as the exertion caught up with her and forced her to stop.

-Ah… I’m poisoned…yin qi. 'Dark Yin Qi' in fact.

Her mind finally processing the symptoms as she pieced back together the previous events and reasoned out that it must have happened as she was dragged down. The fact that her body felt like a living manifestation of Fire Pepper noodle soup was the defining symptom, pretty much…

-Or not?

As her hand explored the wound more, she found the same hot and cold chill on the bone.

-Death Qi?

-What kind of ‘Death Qi’ is like this?

Unbidden, the haunting memories of a shadow holding a little flame and a sense of sadness slipped into her mind.

-I don’t need to start hallucinating now! she hissed inwardly, pushing it away.

Steeling herself, she got enough purchase on the bone at last and pulled it out. As soon as it left her body, the icy cold became so strong it blistered her fingers—

It took serious effort to drop it before it broke her fingers, such was the density and the way she was puppeting her arm.

-What the fates is with that insane weight?

-Oh great, she groaned, as she lifted her hand up to look at the damage. The personal dissociation is back.

Her flesh had frozen on contact with the bone and now almost all the skin on her palm was torn away. The wound was smoking faintly in the gloom.

-Wonderful. Just fate-thrashed wonderful.

It took a supreme effort along with several deeply frustrating moments of dull fumbling and fervid cursing but she managed to push herself upright and slump properly against a convenient rock to take in her surroundings.

In front of her and partially beneath where she had fallen it seemed, were three skeletons; one large and two small. All three had elongated skulls which were oddly structured, particularly around their jaws. Long limbs and as she counted them, four arms apiece. All the bones were a deep reddish brown – like jasper.

For a few nervous breaths it defied her scrambled mind as to how she could actually see that, until she realised that the bones had an inner glow that didn’t extend outwards. Muddy feathers, untouched by age, lay around all three skeletons. The largest skeleton was holding two smaller skeletons and one of its forelimbs was sheared through.

That was what had been spiked through her side.

Looking around, she supposed she must have landed on it directly, when she fell from above. Looking closer she could, she found, just make out the stains of her own blood on a leg bone and the severed arm bone, though it was fading fast.

-Are they absorbing my blood? That thought made her heart race, and not in a good way.

Tracing the cut, she found that it extended all the way through them – a single slice that had bisected all three where they huddled. The small ones behind the large skeleton.

What little warmth that was inexplicably lingering in her body, perhaps from the mantra, or the pills she had taken to ward off the yin waters was also starting to recede, she noted, as she finally surveyed her immediate surroundings themselves.

“Thank you merciful fates for letting me land right here,” she muttered under her breath as she stared upwards again, at the distant ceiling, rippling faintly in the gloom.

It was miraculous, frankly, that she had landed where she had. Squinting, she tried to see further, frustrated that she could not for some reason. Her vision faded away a matter of a dozen metres in any direction, with what was beyond just gloomy shades and guesses based on noise.

Even so, to her right she could make out that the cavern floor sloped upwards in a series of rocky slabs. To her left, it was a strewn field of slabs and boulders, with several large outcropping before it faded into the gloom. There was a hint of rippling water in that direction as well. Anywhere else and she might have died before ever regaining consciousness.

-Really though, I should be able to see further than this?

-Is the darkness messing with me or is it something unique to…

Her frustrated thoughts trailed off as she realised, finally, that it was because her Darkvision pill had worn off.

-That can’t be right…

Fighting back panic again, she focused on her own condition again. The Darkvision pills had effects that lasted for days and lingered long after that, but the one she had ingested had indeed worn off completely. Grimacing, she reached for her pouch, intending to get another, fighting down her frustration over it, because she didn’t have many of them… and to have to take another—

-Where was her pouch?

“Where is my pouch?” she repeated it dully, not that it helped.

It wasn’t like her bag, or her storage talisman for that matter, had some fancy enchantment that would allow them to come when she called.

Eventually, her conscious perception caught up with physical reality and she became aware of why she was so fate-thrashed cold and feeling so unclothed. It was because she was, actually, totally naked. Her clothes and her bag were nowhere in sight. Instinctively she clasped at her neck and found that her storage talisman and her pavilion jade were both also gone.

That, unfortunately, provided an opening for her recent memories to start to settle back into place properly. Memories she really didn’t want to consider, that she had hoped were just hallucinations brought on by subconscious perception of her ambient surroundings and qi poisoning, multiplied out by a healthy dose of blunt force trauma from the fall.

She stared again at the three skeletons, at the glowing mushrooms that were growing in the soil beneath them and which thankfully were pretty harmless. Looking into the middle distance, she could see other patches of mushrooms against the gloom. That would be why her vision was working as well as it was, the ambient light was just enough for her physique to work with, and her ocular meridians were well developed for her realm.

Twisting her head, wincing at the pain in her neck, she checked more of the surroundings. More mushrooms mainly, and rock slabs. Upslope and down. The largest collection was downslope, on several mounds of tumbled rocks, adrift in a large expanse of what was probably water from the way their light shifted oddly on it. She could just make out the shape of standing rocks that seemed deliberately placed.

-This…

The undeniable proof that the nightmare had been real echoed in her mind.

‘Devoted, Path, Lotus, Body, Bestowal’

The fate-thrashed lizard had indeed changed her mantra in some inexplicable way. With that realisation, the adrenaline that had carried her through the last few hours finally failed her, and she slumped down to stare blankly into the middle distance of the cavern, uncaring that tears were rolling down her cheeks.

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

~ HAN SHU – THE DEEP CAVERNS ~

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

Pain warred with instinct as he felt his closing palm connect with something hard in the maelstrom of dark, faintly iridescent mist—

Suddenly he was no longer falling through the tumult of water, Juni and Ling nowhere to be seen, but skidding along its surface, currents lashing at him and the swirls of the mist around him tugging at his limbs, as if to drag him into it—

A vast ripple rolled over everything. Helpless, he could only look on in horror as up and down transposed themselves, the darkness of falling water and the vision-searing iridescence bleeding through the mist merging in truly distorting fashion—

He collided with what had to be a rock surface. It tore at his clothes as he skidded along it, blind to everything pretty much, except the terrible roar of water all around him and the creepy ‘cracking’ sound that was still echoing above it.

Pain warred with instinct as he felt his outstretched palms drag across the ragged surface.

-No, that’s weird, why do I feel like… I’ve just experienced this?

A dissociated part of his awareness, held apart by its role in keeping his long form mantra cycling all this time tried to scream at him. However, he had no opportunity to worry about that momentary sense that he had just experienced this a moment before, because a vast ripple was flowing through everything ahead of him, and all he could think of was that he had no way to avoid getting caught by—

Suddenly, he was falling, darkness grasping at him, the horrible cracking in his ears reverberating through every part of his body.

The divination talisman was screaming at him to be anywhere but where he currently was, as the skitter leap talisman’s activation truncated abruptly and disorientatingly. Flailing, trying to gain some control over where he was being swept, searing pain that even his mantra could not fully blunt enveloped his body as he fell into the maw of the roiling iridescence.

-Oh come on! he snarled, as yin attributed Earth Qi clawed at him from every direction.

Desperately, he reached out, trying to find some purchase on something, and to his shock his hand collided with what felt like rock, moving far, far too quickly—

Gritting his teeth, even as he tried not to inhale any of the mist, he used his ‘Iron’ mnemonic to reinforce his hand, grateful for the foresight that had led to him wrapping his hands in luss cloth earlier, and clawed at the surface as he skidded chaotically across the screed of falling water. Slick, pitted rock refused any purchase for several agonising seconds, then at last, almost when he was afraid that he would be swept right off of it, he found some purchase—

His arm screamed at him as his descent came to an abrupt, painful stop as he slammed side-first into rock. A non-physical cultivator might have actually broken their arm, he suspected as he hung there, feeding the pain back into his mantra. As it was, he was sure he had torn ligaments in his shoulder, and maybe elbow as well, but that was likely far better than the alternative of falling into whatever was causing this dreadful miasma of yin-attributed Earth Qi. Even with the combined buffer of his mantra and the pain severing medicine he felt like he had fallen into a soul-briar patch.

Falling water pummelled him, as he fumbled with his free hand to get an anchor talisman.

-Please hold, please hold… please hold…

“Found you.”

The words slammed into him like hammers, nearly making him ruin the talisman as a large, multi-legged creature landed on the rock above him.

He stared up at the multi-armed tetrid-possessed corpse, his mind momentarily frozen, only the momentum of his mantra on his body keeping him from losing his grip on the rock-face and falling. It was now almost half tetrid, its limbs shifting for purchase as it glared at him with the face of a middle-aged, bearded man that had far too many eyes.

With a cruel grin it stretched out one of its non-tetrid hands and a powerful force suddenly grasped him, dragging him slowly up the rock, trying to pry him free from the handhold he had gained.

He was just about to risk locking himself to the rock with the anchor talisman, when another rock crashed down nearby, with an audible grinding of stone on stone.

-Ah!

Slapping the talisman onto the rock face beside him, as he was dragged across it, he fed as much qi and mantra-infused intent into it as he could and then focused on the tetrid in his mind and triggered the talisman.

With a furious snarl, the tetrid-corpse abomination was practically welded to the rock, courtesy of the talisman.

“You think this changes—?”

The tetrid ragingly clawed at him, as it slowly pushed itself away from the rock face, which was starting to shake and groan worryingly. Gritting his teeth, he shifted his body so he was sort of facing towards where he had felt that other rock come down, put some of his intent into the divination talisman until it gave him a—

To his shock, he got the most ‘Auspicious. Do It. Now!’ reading from a divination talisman he had ever gotten in his life.

Taking a breath, he sent the pulse of mantra-infused qi into the anchor talisman and this time, reversed the activation, while focusing solely on himself—

With a gut-wrenching lurch, he was thrown backwards, off the rock face and into the void.

The tetrid-abomination, still straining against the rock, stared at him in shock, as cracks of iridescent qi slowly bled outwards from the talisman activation point, and then with a crisp, clear and decidedly unnerving ‘crack’, the rock-face shattered, dragging a huge avalanche of rock and the still trapped tetrid down into the roiling miasma—

He slammed into rock and threw out a hand to stop himself as he began to roll across it. The Earth Yin mist here was even worse than where he had just been, but he could only ignore it, and trust that the combination of his mantra, the medicinal pills and the luss cloth in his garments would give him some protection. Fortunately, he found a fissure in the haze after sliding only a short distance.

Behind him there was a terrifying crash and the entire cavern shook.

A vast flare of golden-orange Yang Qi blossomed in hazy gloom. A bonfire-like flower shining in the waters amidst the crumbling scree of rock he had just brought down on his attacker—

The mists around him recoiled, then flooded away, revealing choppy, turbid dark ‘water’ that held a worrying pale green iridescence beneath an expanding nova of eerie golden petals—

For the briefest moment, as it washed over everything around him, he had a snapshot of a great underground cavern. Of the curtains of water deluging down from above. Of crumbling forms of stalagmites and stalactites silhouetted like immense pagodas in the water. He had landed on the shattered foundations of one, broken into pieces by a slab that had come down from the ceiling above. Of the glistening, thin web of dark green iridescence trapped in the rocks all around him—

The divination talisman screamed at him, even as he realised what he was staring at.

The size and concentration of this lake also spoke to how long it must have sat here undisturbed, just doing its own thing.

-Oh no. No, no, no…

The field of golden petals on the surface of the Yin-saturated waters shuddered, then slowly began to sink into the waters all around him, as if being swallowed up by them.

The golden-orange bonfire that his gut told him was absolutely related to the tetrid… winked out.

In that instant, he wanted desperately to believe that the concentration-differences between whatever Yang Qi the tetrid abomination had had within it, and the literal lake of water that had been steeping over a vein of ‘Earth Origin’ ore was too big for it to properly destabilize, but in his heart, he knew enough that that didn’t matter.

He was standing on the edge of what might actually be Eastern Azure Great World’s single largest ‘Earth Core Alchemical Bomb’, and he had just dropped a pure source of Yang Qi right into a concentrated lake of a treasured substance that was infamous for its very unpleasant reactions to jarring force, Yang Qi and spiritual water.

As if to spite him on that thought, the waters all around him started to hum with a sickly, dark green luminescence.

He flinched as a huge stalactite scythed down out of the gloom and buried itself in the roiling mist barely twenty paces away from him with a disturbing *plop*. A moment later, a much larger chunk followed it down,

“Di Ji, I really hope the nameless fate inflicts a terrible end on you!” he snarled under his breath as he scrambled up the rock and quickly examined the nearest edge of the cavern, hoping for a way out.

It was a fairly ineffective curse, for a piece of scum that was so far living up to every evil rumour about him and then some.

What looked like the edge was about thirty metres from him, across a quagmire of fallen rock half submerged in the choppy lake—

A grinding, juddering boom shook the cavern.

Behind him, one of the already badly damaged stalactites crumbled off the ceiling and slammed into the seething waters with the sort of disturbingly flat *crack* that you only got when a dense object hit a viscous liquid far too hard.

Gritting his teeth, he judged the distance to the next rock, and couching down pushed as much qi into his legs as he could and jumped.

Somehow, he cleared the distance, landing hard, even as the waves from the impact behind him broke over the outcropping he had just been on. Not waiting, he picked the next rock and jumped again, trying to ignore how the luss cloth wrappings on his hands were starting to smoke.

-How in all that the fates proclaimed to oversee can a single Golden Immortal… well, two Golden Immortals and their Ha crony, flip the entire Thunder Crest and East Fury high valleys to this degree? He complained in his heart as he quickly hauled himself up the side of the broken stalagmite he had landed on, trying to get clear of the immediate corrosive spray of the waves.

Scanning the near side of the cavern now, he was deeply relieved to see what appeared to be a vertical fissure, rather resembling some kind of erosion feature, no more than sixty metres away, to his left—

A terrifying roar crashed over him, rendering him limp.

-Ah… Shit, he thought, all the strength melted away from his limbs and he collapsed like a stringless puppet on the rock.

-After all this, is this how I die? This… stupidly?

“WAS IT YOU, MORTAL, WHO DID THIS TO MY CAVE?”

The words seemed to freeze the entire cave.

He stared, mind blank as the lake surface to his left recoiled, flowing away from the shell of a huge tortoise dragon as it surfaced, skin smoking, Yang Qi and golden flowers sizzling off its hide, to glower at him, its snake-like tail spitting white fire as it slashed at the water.

Even someone as untutored in these matters as him could tell it was utterly enraged.

-Are you senile, old turtle? A sorry voice in the back of his mind shot back, as it raised itself up on the half-submerged rocks and moved towards him. Has the acid here addled your brain? Do you think some Quasi-Mantra Seed cultivator with a few Qi Condensation arts is going to be able to do all this? Here?

The talisman on his chest exploded in a flash of purple fire and vanished into dust—

The tortoise dragon glowered at him, its eyes burning like white suns in the frozen gloom, then abruptly, it shifted, turning into a tall, bald, muscular, middle-aged man with a long, ragged beard and blistered skin. The only sign he had been the turtle dragon was a ghostly pattern of golden-white scales across his shoulders and forearms.

The loose yellow robe he wore disintegrated almost as fast as summoned though, such was his proximity to the water. In the blink of an eye, the dragon arrived beside him, grasping him by the scruff of his neck and then strolled across the rocks and up the fissure, away from the lake in a matter of moments, as if the whole thing was no more taxing than a walk in the park.

The cavern they arrived in, however, turned out to be little better than the last, he observed dully, as the dragon stepped from platform to platform in a dizzying manner. Here too, mist was rapidly condensing and this close to the waters he could see the ‘Earth Origin ore’ destabilizing under the malignant influence of that other qi and the huge influx of Yin Water that was infiltrating through it.

Surveying the scene, the turtle dragon hissed at length in a language he didn’t understand – the intention of the invective was pretty clear though, as they both watched sparks of green, orange and pink start to drift up from the lake around them.

In truth, a part of him was somewhat mesmerised by the sight of the waters themselves starting to rise upwards, strange flares and auroras passing through voids in it. Most of him, though, was still complaining about dying to the world’s largest alchemical bomb, while another fairly insistent part was swearing it would haunt Di Ji’s nine generations. The bastard probably had kids with some poor girl, such was the breadth of ill rumour about him and his doings—

There was a momentary sensation of lightness. The world spun around him—

Falling, darkness, emptiness.

…

He awoke with a scream, delayed from that final moment, to find the dragon sat on a rock nearby, his eyes closed in meditation.

He chose to ignore in his mind that it was naked, dragons were...

Dragons were…

“…”

Mythological.

That was all he could get. It was a lame conclusion really, but it had been a stressful day. Other parts of his mind pointed out they were also proud and meant to be difficult to deal with.

“You are lucky, boy.”

The volume made him wince, but he found to his surprise he suffered no soul shock.

“You compare me unconsciously to those little mortals who cannot control their presence? Well, it is to be expected for one so young. With Growth comes Wisdom.”

“Oh, Honoured Sir, t-thank you for the instruction!”

He just about managed to salute in apology, replying as carefully as he could. Dragons were not unknown, great ones were peerless existences but even lesser… err... No.

-Bad thought.

-Very. Bad. Thought.

-Any dragon is a formidable existence.

It always paid to be as polite as possible. “I am very grateful for the rescue, you…”

“No, lad, it is I should thank you…” the dragon trailed off as if considering something. “If not for you, your little talisman, and that cursed soul, I might have been led astray by the distortions caused by the fighting above, and the consequences of that would have been…”

The dragon trailed off again and coughed a bit awkwardly. “No… dragon would… should, die such a mediocre death. Certainly not one of my noble kind. So you, young benefactor, were presented to me to guide the way.”

He managed to avoid sitting there slack jawed. That… he had been delivered to the dragon so it wouldn’t die in that giant alchemical bomb masquerading as a cavern? That kind of self-rationalisation on your place in the world and how others found you was truly worthy of such a rarefied existence.

-Yes, that was a good way to think of it, he thought quickly.

“So tell me young benefactor—” The dragon stroked his beard and considered him with narrow eyes. “—What has dragged the qi of that little chick all the way over to this gloomy land to disturb my secluded meditation in these depths? It is true that she is exuberant, and her family delights in bringing simple misfortune upon my kind in the most vexing ways. However, I had thought she had mellowed somewhat since she was tricked by that preening ‘lesser’ cousin of mine during Yuan Long’s time.”

Listening blankly, he found himself wondering who this ‘little chick’ was, in reality, not to mention her ‘family’ or this dragon’s ‘lesser cousin’.

He thought of a possibility, and then tried to un-think it just as quickly.

-Could that Di Ji somehow have such a backer as some kind of Phoenix or Luan? Were they caught up in a battle between two mythological creatures? Was that why Di Ji was here, to draw out this dragon?

After a few moments of panic, however, more sane thoughts intruded based on everything he ‘knew’ about Di Ji, which was mostly whispered tavern tales and now their encounter with him. He found it unlikely that someone like that could have the legitimate backing of a phoenix… a creature associated with righteous pride, eternal transformation, rebirth and purifying fury…

-It could be an evil phoenix? A less than helpful voice in the back of his mind added.

“What concerns you so, boy, that you do not answer my question and instead look so terrified and confused with equal measure?” the dragon asked, stroking his beard.

“…”

-How can I explain? Staring back at the dragon, trying hard not to think of the cold sweat running down his neck, he tried to sort out his jumbled thoughts.

“More to the point,” the dragon rumbled, drumming his fingers on the side of his face. “What kind of insanity is going on up there to bring someone as small in years as yourself all the way down here? This far into the depths of the second layer beneath the Jasmine Vale and the Thunder Well of Mahavaran?"

“…”

At a loss to explain simply, Han Shu found himself explaining their trip into the mountain range, the events that had unfolded these last few, horrifying hours, of Ji Tantai, Di Ji and the attack, of their flight and eventual refuge in the depths to try to navigate back through the Jasmine Gate to escape their pursuers. He even found himself talking about the reasons why they were in the mountains in the first place, and about the issues the town, his clan, and likely province as a whole were having.

Somewhat to his surprise, the dragon listened pensively, merely nodding occasionally and did not interrupt until he had finished the whole thing, coming full circle to his abrupt arrival in the cavern they had just left, pursued by that tetrid abomination.

“A remarkable tale, young benefactor. To strive so, when you are so little and achieve so much. Most remarkable.”

The dragon seemed to ponder for a few moments.

“This Di Ji is unknown to me, but he and his compatriots are both brave and foolish in equal measure to make such a ruckus as this. There are things in the depths of these mountains that have crept in here over the aeons that are truly best left undisturbed. The suppression in this place makes it a treasured land for those who seek to hone the edge of their existence to new heights, and many will not welcome a disturbance like this as generously as I. It is a place where the Immortal may feel a mortal’s joys. Where Sovereign may live as a simple man. Where even those not born to it may feel the shadow of death once more.

“It is a place where you can strive to exceed your limitations at every level. There is always a greater height. Always a deeper abyss. Always a more violent thunder. A more mysterious Fate…

“Ahem… anyway,” the dragon coughed. “In short: life and death in this place are not according to the rules as you know it, or our worldly fate perceives it, so here a ‘refinement boundary’ boy may fight beyond his limits to challenge the greatest odds again and again, perhaps to receive a remarkable boon or god-born treasure cast across the aeonspan… While an old geezer like me who has seen the will of the heavens turn and turn… and turn again—borne witness to the horrors and the marvels of those endless seas, will still find his every move tested beyond what his old bones can stand…”

The dragon seemed to grow sad for a second as he held him in his gaze. “—Or find something that is greater still.”

He stared blankly at the dragon for a long moment as that was not what he had been expecting, then gave himself a shake and finally collected something of his composure.

“Uh, Honoured Sir, my—”

The dragon held up his hand, giving him an appraising look.

“I know what it is that you would ask of me young benefactor… and I fear you will think my reply, now, despite my intentions, to be cruel.”

“…”

“Your virtue in holding all your companions in your heart is clear to me. You hope that I can help your companions just as I helped you, and deliver you all from this hellish disaster that is not of your making.”

“I… yes.” he affirmed, lowering his head, his heart sinking at that ‘you will think my reply cruel’ comment.

“In truth, I was minded to, but… alas, that might be beyond even my capabilities, and I would not give you false hope, young benefactor,” the dragon sighed. “Our connection should not be sullied by such a gilded, empty promise. What I can tell you, however, is that even though they have all been swept into the mysterious dark of these mountains, they do yet live—and just as you have arrived before me, each and every one of those who entered these mountains with you, surely has their own trials to meet on this path that Destiny is laying out before us.”

Before he could say anything, a grinding rumble ran through the entire cavern. The dragon grimaced and glanced up at the ceiling.

-The battle was still ongoing? While talking to the old dragon he had somehow… zoned out of being aware of it, he realised.

“It seems I misjudged that Meng chick.” The dragon grumbled as the shadows around them took on subtly luminescent hues for a moment. “It seems hers was not the spark that lit this place on fire, although she seems determined to finish it. Really, she should know better, given her perspective on this place.

“In any case, it seems I must still owe you something, young benefactor. All I can do is give you a warning, or perhaps a promise. In my time here, I have felt that the truth of this place is surprisingly simple, yet in that simplicity there is a wisdom and complexity to confuse the wisest of sages, ensnare the most malcontent old ghosts or break the will of the most tyrannical emperors. In due course you will surely remember these words which we have shared here and hopefully they will help you take a small step forwards at that time, young benefactor. Consider it my gratitude for a new perspective.”

As he listened to the dragon’s words, the world shifted slightly—

The dragon was already gone, swirling upwards in a hidden twist of motion as the last syllables faded away. All that remained was a sense of unsettling dislocation as the present and past moments he had just experienced flowed through each other.

In one, he was seated in a distant cavern listening to the wise words of a mysterious old sage, who had saved him, and in the same, yet distinctly different instant, he was leaping sideways, avoiding the giant slab that came crashing down as he navigated the precarious fallen slabs at the exit of the cavern.

The divination talisman exploded into white fire and he screamed in shock as the pain somehow cut through the influence of the pain severing dan and his mantra—

A boulder slid past and gouged into the wall, snagging on something beneath it in the collapse.

Pandemonium subsided and he groaned. The pain in his chest was unspeakable—Like the worst ever case of heartburn.

Pushing himself to his feet, he found that the scree flow was still clattering down around the stalled slabs, however there was no immediate danger of further collapse.

-A talisman worth every spirit stone my ancestors spent to make it! He praised the divination talisman in his heart as he continued up the slope as quickly as he dared, gritting his teeth.

If he died now, because he stopped to admire his good fortune, those same ancestors would see to it that he would be cursed from sunup to sundown. That said, it was hard to shake the feeling that something distinctly odd had just occurred relating to the explosion of the talisman… starting with the fact that it had, well, exploded. It wasn’t one from Grandmaster Mang after all.

Wincing, he rubbed his chest. He had no way to heal the burn in his current already overdosed physical situation and while it wouldn’t necessarily scar, the pain was still profoundly unsettling for how it seemed to linger in parts of him that he couldn’t quite perceive.

He shook his head, clearing his thoughts and focusing on his mantra a bit more directly.

-No point in worrying about it right now anyway, he reflected. If I survive I can go ask Uncle about it.

He made it to the top of the slope and was met with the sight of the next cavern complex dimly reflecting in his Darkvision. Moments after he had crossed over, however, he staggered drunkenly as six immense quakes rumbled through the caverns in very quick succession. The cry that accompanied them like some terrible avian god descending into the world. It barely even qualified as noise, it was simply a statement of being—

Fury! Righteousness! Purification!

All of these sensations were transmitted for a few disorientating seconds as he fought to stay conscious.

Fortunately, the disorientation only lasted a few seconds and, compared with the disruption of the wave of golden-white qi, all it did was dislodge a few already destabilized pillars off into the roiling mists of this new cavern.

Thankfully, the exit through the new cavern led upwards and was also ‘relatively’ straight forward to get to – certainly in comparison to the previous…

He shot a final, dark look at the collapse behind him, hoping that tetrid abomination would not come raging out of its shadows.

The aftershocks from the seven impacts had brought down the remainder of the fissure he had escaped through completely, blocking off the route from below.

-Hopefully that would seal in the worst of the damage should it actually go critical in the near future, he reflected. Though… on that note, he eyed this smaller lake warily. It was also seething, but nowhere on the same level.

Exhaling, he picked a route and started to make his way onwards, relieved as he did so, that the commotion above was finally, mercifully, starting to subside. though given how deep he was within this cavern system under the Jasmine Gate, it was hard to find any real peace of mind. Taking stock as he made his way across stable rock for once, he thanked the fates that he had presciently put his talismans and storage jade around his neck and tied them with luss cloth cord. If he lost that he might as well have just gone and jumped in the lake and made it a quick end.

Skimming what he did have, though, he grimaced. The bags were largely empty on the way out. Expensive, but they had survived.

A shuffle through his storage talisman showed that the main casualty of the acid below had been stuff like the food pills that weren’t kept in it.

His stock of talismans had been eviscerated of the most useful ones, but that was expected really.

There was a large pot of purification pills and some healing pills. He would need to take one when the pill overuse lessened.

In the meantime...

Hopping onto the first stalagmite, he started properly on the path upwards. The first thing was to try and find Lin Ling and Juni somehow… He still had a sense via the skitterleap talisman that they were bound to it, and thus… alive at least. There was a lingering sense of that from the remnants of the divination talisman as well. If fates had been merciful, they hadn’t ended up in quite the same degree of mess he had.

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

~ JUN SANA — JASMINE… GATE? ~

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

Sana found herself drifting. She couldn’t say it was an ‘unpleasant’ sensation simply because her nervous system had capitulated at an indeterminable point prior to this. Assuming she wasn’t already dead, and this was what the point of demise felt like, only her foundation and mantra were sustaining the frozen sparks of her life at this point. The idea that she might already be crossing over to the afterlife was really not helping. No matter how persistently she scrunched those morbid thoughts into a ball and pushed them away, they kept coming back.

-It could be some weird variant of the afterlife.

-Death is complicated after all.

She focused hard, banishing the— they were not ‘voices’, like the disembodied intent of Di Ji had been—fractured shards of her own subconscious that were prodding and poking away at her.

-On the other hand, I really hope the effort I just spent to keep them in check wouldn't have been better spent sheltering my organs, she thought.

And yet death, and ideas of death… Just. Would. Not. Go. Away.

Disgusted with that part of herself, even if she suspected the lingering malaise of what Di Ji had done to her, but unwilling to waste more vital energy on it, she let them spool out in the background while she focused on the important things – like trying to ensure that her remaining organs didn’t fail.

Her subconscious promptly started to vociferously debate with itself about what ‘death’ in a world where great sages poked and prodded at the destinies of those much weaker than themselves, while old freaks and ghosts were able to mess with time and space on a disturbingly casual level, might actually ‘mean’. She ignored it resolutely and focused wholeheartedly on the resurgent chill in her bones. It currently felt like it was trying to break out and reconnect with the deathly chill from outside. Only when they started on personal grief, particularly the death of their mother, did she finally send a sweeping thought to scatter them away. Even so, she was left with the lingering memories of her father’s bitter rants about those self-same ‘sages’ and ‘ghosts’ echoing in her mind’s eye.

Finally, however, she managed to reconnect to some sense of her surroundings.

-My nervous system is frozen solid somehow. Probably that was a mercy as her blood was barely flowing as it was.

-Grass beneath her? Check.

-Sky, well, misty cloud above her—tinted a disturbing red… so my eyes are ruined? Check.

-Also not ‘above’ her – ‘ahead’ of her, a stray part of her subconscious corrected her.

Sighing inwardly, she had to acknowledge that it was correct, it seemed.

It was impossible to move, so she couldn’t see what was holding her left wrist… hand?

-That should be Arai? She had been standing right next to her.

It helped in a strange way that the damage appeared to be purely physical. Whatever it was that had been done to them, by whatever it was that conjured or brought this mist, didn’t seem to be related to qi.

-Or if it was, it was so powerful that she couldn’t even perceive it, a more rebellious fragment called out.

-In any case, it was no form of qi she could do anything about.

She pushed back at the various parts of her mind which were trying to give other theories. As time passed, they were getting more persistent, which was not a good thing.

She knew she didn’t really suffer the ‘split voices’ issue from psyche breaks. Neither of them should, truth be told. Their mantra was particularly good at soul stuff and they had a lot of exposure to places like the ‘Red Pit’, compared to most of the other herb hunters. Especially herb hunters their age. Even so, the disparate shards of her consciousness were getting more incoherent, or morbid, or confused.

Some screamed...

Some sobbed...

One just wanted to ramble about grass and nothing she could do would shut it up. Another had been quietly reciting their mantra non-stop. She was grateful for that last one at least. It was at least being useful. That was what mattered.

Time flowed on, either seconds or minutes, she couldn't say.

Her vision was less pink now which was good. That probably meant she wasn’t dead, so she continued to lie there and stare at grass, trying to filter out the little voice that was explaining how THIS particular bit of grass was more interesting than the last hundred blades. She really wished she could just shut her eyes.

Slowly other things re-associated in her mind and body.

-Stuff.

-Wherever they….?

-...She?

-This place was….

-Had time passed?

-Of course it had.

She froze.

–Ahahah, the voices giggled at that.

That was probably not good. Becoming the voice in your own head was absolutely not a symptom of getting better.

The feeling of dissociation had been growing steadily stronger even as she fought to save her liver from the cold. It was like trying to focus after not sleeping for days… except… she didn’t need to sleep?

-Oh. My... memories are breaking apart.

All she wanted to do was close her eyes, and just sleep…

-No. No. Very bad! All the shard-like voices invested in ‘not dying’ turned on her.

The mantra still rattled through her head. She had no idea how she was actually doing that, a voice in her head supplied. The one that was –still— talking about fate-thrashed grass told it that it was obviously because this hill was made of very special grass.

She wanted to scream. At them. At her. At the world. At the thing that had put her in this state.

-You can scream because we are feeling pain again.

She eyeballed the shards and really focused on pushing them back together a bit. They didn’t resist, but it was like trying to pile up fine sand with her hands… and there just wasn’t enough sand.

-Why can I feel?

It was odd.

Too odd.

Her nervous system was a chunk of ice. Her brain, lungs and heart were about all that was still properly protected.

Another voice in her head supplied that she was probably suffering huge brain trauma in some manner, likely due to the exposure to whatever it was, the shadowy thing in the fog.

-That was unhelpful.

The voice that she couldn’t really focus on at all pointed out that it wasn’t there to be helpful. It seemed far too happy about that.

Every part of her body hurt. She still couldn’t move, and the chill in her body was still there. Although it was fading, maybe? Probably. Her hand was no longer purplish. Ah. Her vision was no longer pink. That was why. Now her hand was pale. Whitish blue and smeared in dried blood and torn skin? It looked like a corpse’s hand, she thought. One left too long in a blizzard. A hand, in no better condition than hers, held hers through the grass. Dull pulses echoed in her head.

-The grass was taller than she recalled?

Odd… it had been short? Shorter?

The shard of her subconscious that was rambling on about grass was triumphant, telling her she should have been looking at it first.

-Because it wasn’t the same grass!

-You could have started with that point. Rather than something about the shape of the fibres on the blades making it Alusis Broad-grass rather than Alusa Meadow Sedge, she shot back at it.

-I am you, the voice pointed out, even as it dwindled away into the distance, its task presumably done.

One after another the shards of her subconscious folded back into herself. The dull thunder-like pulses in her head were getting stronger now?

-Oh...

-Not thunder, heartbeat.

Her eardrums were either smashed or rendered functionally inoperable. Her face was in agony. Pain inside her face. Ice crystals in her sinuses.

-Wonderful, she thought somewhat sarcastically.

It was funny how the mind fixated on that kind of pain, rather than, say, the agonising frost burns and lacerations she was also becoming aware of. Still, her having an actual pulse was good. Then again, the voice droning the mantra was also getting quieter. So probably not good.

She focused on the words her mother had told her to visualise. To pull out the potential of her body thread by thread.

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

She might as well have thrown the mantra into a deep pool for the good it did. There was no energy to spare to curse, all she could do was focus harder.

‘Spirit. Heart. Renewal. Body. Soul.’

The pain transformed slightly. The cycle shifted. She felt the intent filtering through the words.

-Again.

‘SpIRit. HEaRt. REneWal. BOdy. SouL’.

This time the mantra fled from her like a slippery fish. Too much concentration.

Her mother’s words spontaneously resurfaced in her mind. A kindly face, a gentle voice saying: “No Sana, you cannot force it. This isn’t like a spiritual law where you can get there JUST by sheer bloody-mindedness half the time. You must ACCEPT what is given. Receive the words as if they are an old friend. You cannot force them to be a part of you.”

—Father's voice: “I think that’s an oversimplification, dear. I won’t pretend to understand a tenth of what it is you are teaching the girls, but for a spiritual law, you have to control the flow of Qi. It’s hardly sheer bloody-mindedness as you put it.”

—Her mother sounded annoyed: “Shush! You will confuse her. She needs to understand that control is not about domination, it’s about harmony. It’s a—" the memory trailed off as the words dwindled away.

-What the dark-fate! Stupid memory!

-Why no perfect recall!

"Cycle. Not a—" the words came back momentarily before vanishing again.

-Cycle... shifting pattern, harmonious rhythm of the body!

-Moron, stop fighting me! Let me work!

She stared into the darkness of her own collapsing psyche and sweated mentally. When your own mantra started speaking to you things were bad. Very very bad.

‘Spirit. Heart. Renewal. Body. Soul.’

It worked. But it didn’t feel as strong as it should. Her vitality was slipping away. Like the creeping hands of some malignant spectre, realisation concerning her bodily condition filtered through to her. Her body was ruined beyond even the capability of her foundation to support. All she was doing was treading water, slowly drawing out her death…

That went straight into the mantra bin and she started to repeat the cycle again.

Her memories were blurry now. It was hard to focus, trapped in this world of icy fog, in the present. Even as she struggled to eke out that next cycle she could feel everything slipping away from her into the shadows.

Suddenly she heard her mother’s voice so clearly she might have been sitting right next to her, felt a hand on her head, her hand clasping her right hand. A warmth and a sense of care she had not felt in years.

“Child…” the voice seemed… sad?

-Why was mother sad…?

“What has happened to you…”

“Oh, Sana… Your mother is just going to go away for a while... if you both grow strong maybe we will meet again my dear little one. You must look after your father. He can be a real idiot at times—"

'Spirit-Heart. Heart-Body. Renewal-Promise. Body-Spirit. Soul-Day.'

Her mantra throbbed, twisting in her body to the point where it was barely her own, yet… somehow it was not rejected, even as what it had become bled through her awareness, accompanied by bitter, mocking laughter that almost sounded like their Mother’s?

“Tho my Soul to Sleep, this Promise I seek—Renewal, of Body, of Spirit, of Heart, this Day to keep.”

The longform mantra whispered softly, like a lullaby in her mind, bringing with it the most complicated and near unfathomable adjustments and associations of the mnemonics in her mantra.

Soul and Day, Heart, overlapping into Sleep, Body and Renewal bleeding into Promise, and back to Body, then Spirit and Heart, somehow again touched by spirit, before returning via Spirit to Soul then Day, to begin anew.

{A Thought Through Eternity}

She thought she saw her mother's smiling face, her arms holding her, comforting her, telling her that everything would be okay, as she lay amid blooming chrysanthemums—

"Live!"

It felt like she had been dropped in boiling water. The strength that flowed from this lone word set her body alight. She floundered in her mind. Hot. Cold. Light. Dark. Everything spun, but nothing quite moved. Consciousness was physically returned to her like a slap in the face. Her eyes snapped open. She gasped out loud. It felt like a soundless death rattle. Every part of her was in agony. Her bones felt like they had jaws and were gnawing at her muscles. Her muscles felt like they were twisted and contorted in ways nature never intended beneath her skin. As for her skin? She couldn’t decide if it was on fire or frozen solid.

Pain was reality, her whole world was pain now.

She screamed silently and kept on screaming until the hand holding hers squeezed hers.

Her sister's voice, from nearby sounded like she was gargling ice crystals. “That’s probably not a good idea.”

She ran out of breath to scream and gasped.

Air flooded her lungs—she hadn't breathed in. The pain was quite something.

Eventually, she managed to speak haltingly.

“S-ss-sis? H-how?”

“Ah.” Arai sounded equally raspy and distant.

She tried to move her head to look at her, but her body was still numb.

“Something mother left us, I… uh, think,” Arai sounded not sad, it was an emotion that she knew because it was inside her as well…. complicated.

“I heard her voice. I guess this was her…. gift,” her sister’s voice was muted even through the rasp.

Her own memories were still tattered and fractured. No voices, at least. She tried to summon up the words from the memories. There had been a few. Something in the tone lingered with her.

The homily came first: 'Accept what is given, receive what is due' - even old Ling had muttered it occasionally when she was sure he thought none of them noticed when he was particularly annoyed about something.

The other memory was nebulous. Like it deliberately didn’t want to come into her mind’s eye. Whatever words her mother had spoken to ‘save’ her, or maybe ‘safeguard’, refused to make themselves known. However, something in the tone of their mother's voice lingered.

She focused on that, and repeated the mantra. She only managed a single word in the same manner.

‘Body’

Her body breathed. That was the only way to describe it. The tension melted away and the pain, while still there, was now more recurring memory than active reality. She stared up at the sky. There was a sun there.

“Sis?” she said after a while.

“Yes?” Arai croaked.

“We survived.”

“Yes… It seems we have.” Arai’s voice mirrored her own.

It was hard to say how long she lay there, on the grass, before she felt capable of rolling over. Everything hurt. But at least she could move without screaming, thanks to the mantra. Arai lay there, looking like something that had just crawled out of a blood pit.

“Can you move?” she asked.

“Yeah… I… uggh… sort of. I was just,” Arai replied, sounding hoarse. “Figured it was better… to take it easy.”

“Yeah…” it was hard to disagree with that logic.

She looked around and finally realised why her subconscious had been ranting about grass. Because the grass was different now. It was taller, for starters. It had been about shin high before on the hilltop. Now it was close to waist high.

Pulling herself up, using the nearest upright rock for support, she took in the landscape. If there was an upside, it didn’t appear to have completely changed around them. The broad brushstrokes were still the same. They were still within a wide circle of twelve upright stones. Now though, she could make out dull relief figures on each one.

There was a woman holding a jar. One was a sheep, another a crab, and a pair of jumping fish. Twelve in total, animals and figures. She couldn’t call the carvings ‘crude’, but they were certainly highly stylized. The Zodiac, though not as she knew it.

It took her longer to place the other change. The view was still awe-inspiring. The forests now climbed precipitously up the mountain slopes, vanishing into the cloud in the distance. She could make out what appeared to be a tower, rising pagoda-like out of the misty forest, but as to everything else?

She had taken in the circumference twice before the rest of the changes sank in. They were certainly not in the Jasmine Gate. Thankfully, the puppet and the raft were still there, but beyond the hilltop they were on, there was next to no resemblance to the place they had been in moments before. No swamplands, no real ruins. just sedge grassland and stands of trees crowning the tops of undulating hills.

The landscape felt much more… complete, as well. Harmonious, even. The vegetation encroached into the vale, but no longer was there a weird shift between sub-tropical jungle and montane cloud pine for starters. The vale was broad and flat. The river still glittered in the distance. The huge cataracts in the distance rumbled. But seemed more structured.

Now that she looked closely, there were in fact buildings in the distance, on some of the slopes to the east – towering compounds and interlocked complexes that squatted on the edge of the cloud line. Their design a mix of familiar and unfamiliar. There were pagodas and stupa-like things, rectilinear buildings with peaked roofs and sprawling halls that barely registered above the treeline. Even several large villa-like structures that were, apart from the flatter roofs, similar in their construction/design to those on the coast near Blue Water City, here overlooking the valley from the higher ridgeline.

Some looked mostly intact, but in others, she was able to pick out some missing roofs and tumbled walls. Her instinct suggested they would be unreachable. Most of them were above the lower mist line or hidden in the forest that encroached onto it.

Arai had managed to pull herself upright and was also looking around, wincing and checking her limbs as she did so.

“That’s… probably not good,” her sister muttered, suddenly holding up the jade talisman around her neck.

She blinked and peered at it. “What’s wrong with it?” she asked, not seeing anything obviously off.

“My talisman says we have been out for three days.”

“Three…?” she stared at her sister, her heart suddenly thudding in her chest.

“Yeah,” Arai groaned.

“And it seems we are no longer in the Jasmine Gate?”

“Yeah,” she nodded. “Probably it happened when the mist moved on. I hope that doesn’t come back. I don’t think mother left us a second... whatever that was.”

“…”

Her sister didn’t say anything in reply, not that she really expected her to. Their knowledge of physical cultivation was about the same, and she had no clue at all what it was she had just experienced. She had no idea you could manipulate mantras like that, or attain that sort of ‘resonance’ with them.

“By the way, did you also get the weird recollection thing that went with it?” her sister asked.

“I… did get something like that,” she nodded. “Mother started lecturing me about acceptance and not forcing control?” That memory had slotted back neatly into its place. The follow on one was still fuzzy and indistinct though.

“Oh… erm, yeah,” her sister stared off into nothing for a moment. “You were always terrible at that when we were young.”

“And you were shit at unarmed…” she trailed off, staring out across the vale. “And after that?” she asked carefully.

“Oh,” Arai trailed off as well.

Neither talked much about the time of their mother’s death. The memories were cruel and difficult. Easier to just forget that her mother’s extended family were such people. Father had taken steps to ensure that they were properly removed from their matrilineal grandfather’s clan. Their brother had been the compromise of sorts. A pitiful thing that she hated to talk about, or dwell on.

“Mother was there, in the dark, holding my hand, singing a song. I think it was the day before she passed away. It was something like a lullaby, but I didn’t recognise the words. I think it was one of the ones she sometimes sang when she was sad, or we hadn’t had a good day somehow. Then…”

She grimaced. Not because it was hard to recall, it was just painful.

“—I was in the garden, lying beside the chrysanthemums…”

That was a weird memory, because until this point, she had absolutely zero recollection of that, yet it was clearly there, in her mind now.

Neither spoke for a while. Arai finally gave a big sigh and fell back on the grass. “Well, it seems no good will come of dwelling on it too much. We survived.”

“We have.” She agreed softly.

A short while later she sat back up. “There’s a lake down there. Assuming it’s not filled with Yin Qi. Or deathly corrosive, or actually boiling so hard it doesn’t even ripple…”

“Or actually a portal into a timeless death zone that draws in everyone it touches, turning them into one-dimensional images,” she added sourly, thinking of the Black Pit.

“Yes. Or that,” Arai shuddered.

“Shall we stagger over there and see if we can’t clean ourselves up a bit? Maybe see if we can work out where the fates we are now?”

She stared at her sister, then at herself. They both looked like living corpses. “That’s not a bad idea,” she conceded. “You look about as bad as I feel.”