~ PART 2 ~

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~ MENG FU — INTO THE JASMINE GATE ~

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The first thing that stood out to Meng Fu, as she took in the devastation—wreathed in a still seething haze of Yang-tainted miasma—that stretched away in every direction was that her disciple had probably just used a lifetime’s supply of luck to escape alive. The second thing that stood out, immediately tried to kill them.

With a shrieking, discordant howl, three figures—former Dao Immortals from the censure force, based on their armour—blurred out of the haze, launching themselves at them.

Corrosive Yang Intent welled up all around her, forming grasping hands that tried to hold her in place as the lead corpse opened its mouth—

Three beams of molten, liquid Yang Qi snapped into focus, aiming for her heart gate, dantian and head. Most cultivators would be tempted to dodge, or try to block them, However, she did neither, instead taking a step forward, smoothly and elegantly slipping past all three to the Dao Immortal’s left side. Behind her, the others had all shaken themselves out of their moment of reverie, keeping the formation, but moving a little apart, so that the nine beams—the three aimed at her, three at Meng Tan and three at Guanyue all harmlessly missed.

Rather than focus on striking the corpse, she instead let her motion carry her even further, feeling how the various energies around her were clashing and twisting—

She could not say she had ‘anticipated’ the golden shadow that rose out of the swirling miasma she left in her path, appearing in what appeared to be her blind spot, simply because ‘mere anticipation’ at this level of combat was woefully insufficient. Instead, it would be fairer to say that she understood enough about the ‘nature’ of Yang to be able to move in harmony with its natural intent. So, as it grasped for her, she just kept moving forward, while behind her, Sai Xingxiu’s whisk scattered the golden shadow.

‘You… you are worthy…’

Abruptly, a transfixing presence focused on her. A bright eye, akin to the incursive thing that the Old Scholar’s aspect had clashed with in the sect, tried to open in her mind—tried to open her mind.

Years felt like they fell away from her.

The haze of the ruined valley swirling around her became dark pillars.

The flickering flames of yang energies, golden lanterns.

A great hall, filled with hundreds, maybe even thousands of figures loomed over her.

“So, you are my grandchild child…”

She stared up at the figure on the great throne, veiled in red and gold, his robe embroidered in phoenix feathers and parasol flowers, the sheer force of his presence forcing everyone around her to kneel, their faces pressed to the floor. Beside him, a flawless, veiled goddess in purest white and shining gold, crowned in radiance, gazed back at her, a faint smile on her lips… that never reached her eyes.

“Submit to the Throne…”

‘Submit…’

“All that you are, belongs to this seat…”

‘Belong to this Seat…’

Dreadful whispers, echoing litanies and an overwhelming sense of oppression settled on her. They twisted memories, pushed and pulled at recollections, tried to worm their way into every corner of the concept of ‘who’ she was, ‘what’ she was… even ‘why’ she was.

Exhaling, she opened her eyes and the weight… well, it didn’t vanish, but its hold over her fractured, because it was just Yang. Yang was powerful, yes, overpowering and poisonous in excess. It claimed to embody the rules, the order, the structure, everything she should adhere to—

‘—if you would but take my hand…’

—And changeable.

It tried to wipe away the dominion, the power, and showed instead, lifting her up. Now, she was the woman beside the Emperor, and he looked at her with desire. At the wave of her fan, uncounted powers would bow down. At her word, they would charge forth, regain what was lost, return the Phoenix Throne to the apex—

‘—Do not be caught up by that certainty… trapped by thinking that you know what it is. At its heart, it is unknowable, alien, utterly other—because it was never ‘us’.’

Exhaling, she gazed up at her mother, sitting there by the pond, smiling at her as she held out her hand.

-Damnable thing, changeable indeed…

‘Do not make a mistake…’ the Old Scholar’s words whispered in her ear, and she had to smile bitterly as she put her right hand to her heart.

“Indeed, Ji Ming used up a lifetime of luck to get away from you,” she whispered, opening her eyes.

The oppression, the devouring hunger of Absolute Yang slipped off her. It wasn’t that it couldn’t find purchase. Maybe not even a Divine would be that formidable in the face of this. The problem, if you could call it that, was that it didn’t get ‘nature’, in some fundamental, yet bizarrely simple way. Realm, comprehension, certitude, foundation… all these things it could get. But its absoluteness was also its singular flaw. The simplicity of complex things a silent thorn to disrupt its allure.

The corpse of Elder Erlang Weng stood before her, his hand, burning a hole through her white robe, pressed avariciously to her heart beneath her own. His empty eyes a mirror reflecting the Sovereign Power of Absolute Yang.

Erlang Weng’s other hand rose… and she caught it before it could grasp her.

“S-save me…” Elder Erlang Weng’s lips barely moved as he held her gaze.

‘You can save him…’

The whispered, haunting otherness taunted her, calling to her pride now, her hatred of losing people.

‘I can bring them all back…’

“No.” She released the Elder’s hand.

With a snarl, the power puppeting his corpse swung again, his body warping, three… four… six arms instead of two, aiming for her limbs, to tear her clothing apart, to force her to her knees.

Ignoring those hands, she instead gently touched her left index finger to his forehead, where his third eye was, and pushed him away.

The corpse crumpled backwards, its clawing hands closing on empty air before it slammed into a half-buried block of masonry with a sickening thud. Much as she had expected, though, that did nothing much to its actual ability to move, because it just twisted, limbs spinning, and in practically the same instant, launched itself back at her, scattering golden blood—

“Ah, they have reached that stage…”

Stepping to the side, she decapitated the shadow of Meng Tan that had appeared out of the haze beside her with a sweep of her hand, scattering illusory form into a flare of yang energies that had tried to distract her.

In the same instant, every drop of yang blood shook, sprouting over twenty flawless copies of Elder Erlang—

-Grandfather, no wonder you demanded that I strive to recapture this primordial sublimity, she reflected, watching them move to flank her, an all-encompassing formation of Sovereign Slaughtering Yang forming beneath their feet as they did so. The difference, hidden in those lost words and misguided scholarly endeavour, is indeed... miraculous.

Spreading her arms, she continued forward, towards the ‘original’ Erlang Weng, if he could be considered as such.

Under the faint impetus of intention, her appearance now shifted as she moved.

Years flowed backwards. Her previous appearance, that of a motherly woman in middle-age, shifting into that of a heaven-quelling beauty in her early thirties—a much truer reflection of her actual age. Silver-streaked blonde hair turned golden with a faint coppery iridescence. Her features became smoother and flawless—not the unnatural jade-like form so beloved by younger generations but true, youthful beauty. Alluring, Harmonious. Natural. The kind only one with her understanding could achieve.

The robe she wore remained as it was, but now it fell across her body like the height of youthful fashion. Her hair swirled on its own and plaited itself up, seven feathers of red and gold forming an ornate fan to affix it. Only her eyes remained as they had been. Smouldering molten-gold, irises like black holes that contained the faintest hint of iridescent fire around their edges.

Formations were like a dance, alchemy a song, she had once heard it said. Formations sought to impose, while alchemy desired to transform. Whether one or the other could be considered Yin or Yang really didn’t matter, in her eyes. The approach required had to match the circumstance. Harmony within nature, simplicity from complexity, balancing what was given with what was received.

So now, faced with Erlang Weng’s ‘dance’, she let herself move in accordance to the harmony of the moment.

“Let these words of legend… Already awakening…”

Finding the accompaniment to slip through the golden shadows his formation was projecting to tear her apart.

“—into what I have become…”

Her words, her ‘song’, not seeking to overpower or clash with the Yang energies the formation was drawing towards her, like an all-consuming maw, but instead leading her on.

“This distant echo… of another world…”

The formation closed in, hungry, oppressive, and yet—with grace and elegance and a calmness of purpose, her every action matched it even as she stepped right into its heart.

“There is no dream we cannot achieve… If we truly believe…”

Erlang Weng’s ‘original’ body was not really the core. Yang didn’t need that in its formations, one part could support the whole as well as any. However, what Yang at this extremity did need was… control—and to maintain control, it needed focus and, in this instance, momentum to keep racing along the ever-thinner edge of improbability before its unbalanced nature caught up with it. So now, all she did was dance in front of the corpse of the Dao Sovereign, matching his furious determination to envelop her within the formation with the placid, overwhelming calmness of her demeanour in that moment… and at the heart of it, touched her finger to his third eye, once again—

Erlang Weng’s body stopped. Frozen in the abyss of her intent, instinctually unable to free itself from the island of calm she now embodied at the heart of the maelstrom, and that was enough. With a ripple, the entire formation overstepped its momentum by just a fraction, and with a silent crack, absolute Yang, robbed of its intention, returned to its instinctual nature.

Elder Erlang Weng’s clones, the golden blood, everything was drawn in with it, in a blurry spiral of collapsing space as it flowed inwards, towards the point of disruption, seeking to regain its momentum, so it could erupt outwards again.

The seven feathers left her hair and, swirling outwards, turned into matching clones of her, surrounding the collapsing point on its eight directions—

As she sang, the eight reflections of the same shifting symbol appeared before her and her clones… flowing inwards until they met what was now a seething unstable sphere of furious Yang energy, at which point they scattered into a gyre of multi-coloured mist.

“—Within this heart of you and me.”

As one, she and all seven clones stopped the steps of their dance, pressing their hands together, just as its instability threatened to tip back over and return it the control, albeit through utter overwhelming power. The swirling mists became a maelstrom of miniature versions of the symbol and… with a frankly anti-climactic *clonk* snapped together to form a metre wide, three-legged cauldron made of shimmering golden copper, matching the hue as her hair.

As soon as it appeared, all of the Yang strength trying to corrupt the area around her recoiled, including the strength empowering the corpses trying to assault her companions, and then in an almost farcical repeat of what had just transpired, abandoned everything else it was trying to effect and surged furiously inwards… only to reach a certain point and also be drawn into the cauldron, which consumed it like it was a bottomless pit.

“Will that actually seal it?” Meng Tan, the real one, asked as the others moved quickly to join her after destroying the collapsed corpses.

“Elder Erlang Weng was a formidable Dao Sovereign, but he was only a Dao Sovereign. The nature of his body as a vessel is only capable of that much,” she replied, watching the cauldron pensively, just in case something weird did happen.

“That has only sealed the Yang strength that had imparted itself into him, as well,” Arashin mused, looking around warily. “The scars that have been inflicted on this place run much, much deeper.”

“—And yet, they have already been robbed of much of their momentum,” Song Peizhi mused. “And the strength that has done it—”

“We are not done yet,” Sai Xingxiu observed as the errant, dispersing Yang energies abruptly abandoned trying to break the cauldron and began to stream away from them.

“Mmmm, Erlang Weng was not that good with formations,” she agreed with a sigh.

-Which means if Lian survived, this should be Meng Yu Dai.

“So, Meng Yu Dai?” Meng Tan stated with a grimace, his thoughts clearly mirroring hers.

“C-can you do that again?” Heng Jiayi asked her, unable to hide his nerves, despite his earlier courage in volunteering to come.

“Mmmm, it won’t be necessary,” she replied with a shake of her head, giving him and also Cao Liang, who was looking around nervously, an encouraging smile.

In truth, it would be convenient, but Meng Yu Dai was a very different kind of Dao Sovereign to Erlang Weng. His ‘control’ was far superior, for starters, and his grasp of what that realm represented significantly more nuanced than that of Erlang Weng.

If she had to compare to the two, Erlang Weng had been just typical of the realm, really, exercising the strength of his Dao through his law comprehensions as a form of domination, just like a King would his Kingdom. That was also why the Dao Immortals and Lord that had assaulted the others while she focused on him had fallen with him. Yu Dai, however, had sought harmony through his Dao and Laws and been a talented student of Feng Shui. He had also been killed by the Old Scholar, so his possessed corpse would, in a rather twisted sense, be a purer vessel, and based on what she had seen through Ji Ming, the embodiment of Absolute Yang here was much more suited to people like Erlang Weng… or Tuo Kankai.

“Mmmm,” Song Peizhi agreed. “This Yang Strength is incredibly domineering. Yu Dai will make a poor vessel for it, despite his superior foundation, in comparison to someone like Erlang Weng.”

“In that regard, it is Tuo Kankai that concerns me most,” Meng Tan muttered.

"—Sister Guanyue?” Arashin tugged at Guanyue’s sleeve. “Is there a problem?”

“A problem…?” Guanyue, who had been looking off to their left a lot while they were regrouping, frowned. “I… am not sure. I thought I detected something… familiar, over there.”

“Familiar, how so?” she asked, thinking back to the voices the within the Yang strength.

Even for them, especially for them, they could have terrible allure, of that she was well aware. None of them were neophytes, but the mind and the heart were an ever-transforming thing. Faced with the unknowable cocktail of influences that had produced the madness around them, there was no way to say what kind of opportunities this Yang strength could tease out from long and complex lives.

“It’s hard to explain,” Guanyue sighed. “It’s like… coming home to… like after a long absence, you just met an old friend? But fleeting,” she mused. “Hard to recognise, yet still them? It could just be this fate-cursed miasma, but we should be on our guard.”

As she was speaking, the new focal point of the Yang energies in their vicinity abruptly stabilized—

A golden shadow warped out of the drifting haze to their right, transforming as it did so into a giant figure almost six metres tall with the foundational strength of a Dao Lord, its leading leg already raised to stamp down on their location. In the same instant, two dozen other figures, all identical flitted into view, jumping out of frankly improbably places, their forms contorting and twisting as they closed the gap towards them.

“Play time is over,” Song Peizhi grunted, stepping to the fore and sweeping his two-handed sword up to meet the descending foot.

“Ji Li Fa, huh,” Cao Liang grunted, recognizing the luckless corpse as Song Peizhi severed its leg at the crotch. “He had a Yang-attributed body cultivation law.”

“Ya don’t say?” Heng Jiayi muttered, hefting his shield.

The giant Ji Li Fa shifted its centre of balance, a second leg sprouting from the stump of the first, aiming directly at Song Peizhi as it kicked viciously out. Unfortunately for the puppeteered corpse, Song Peizhi had already flitted past it, however, and the strike that almost seemed to drift gently into its chest, sending it stumbling back came from Meng Tan’s spear.

“You know, the suppression here is indeed very odd,” Sai Xingxiu remarked to her as Meng Tan and Guanyue closed off the mob of corpse’s attempt at cutting into the flanks of their group.

“It lacks a certain… edge, for sure.” Arashin agreed.

Indeed it did, she had to agree. She had not really had a chance to consider it, what with how quickly they were set upon, but now that she had a brief moment of calm, she could compare the ambience to other… instances where she had been in Yin Eclipse in circumstances like this, and there was a fuzziness to what was repressing her that was unusual. Arashin had put it very well, in fact. There was a distinct lack of a ‘primal’ edge to it. Why that was, it was hard to say, but her first hunch was because whoever had ‘raised the roof’ here was much more familiar with the workings of this place than the usual idiots attempting it—

A flash of deep red bled through the haze ahead of them, bringing with it a moment of unnatural stillness to the tumult as the tortured spatial laws of their surroundings briefly ceased to function. The giant form of the staggering Ji Li Fa juddered, then seemed to skip in place, in her vision.

-Oh come on!

For a moment, it was like she was adrift in a mighty current, being washed backwards through the last few moments, powerless to do anything, while the ghostly forms of dozens of Ji Li Fa’s raced towards her—

The ground beneath her feet flowed away from her, the air surrounding her tried to strangle her, darkness clawed at her… tempting her to dare to scatter it, as the screams and shouts of her companions rang in her ears.

“Why won’t you save us…?”

The young girl stared imploringly at her, her expression haunted, even as it was torn away from her vision. Her parents, suddenly there with her, reached out, pushing the girl forward, as she held out the doll.

“At least save her…”

“At least save someone…”

Their pleas were so vivid that it genuinely hurt as she watched as everything was consumed all over again… until at last, the darkness ran out of momentum and scattered—

A golden hand snapped into focus right in front of her—Ji Li Fa’s outstretched hand, bigger than her head, trying to grasp her… yet it could not. The stillness of the moment of that ending darkness held a reflection of the manifestation of ‘auspicious endings’ that she had presented back in the sect, without her even needing to call upon it. The ‘end’ of the moment left Ji Li Fa forever stranded there, and after a moment, that version of him vanished, collapsing into unstable yang qi… which was then scattered by Sai Xingxue’s whisk.

“That was Ji Li Shin’s innate art…” Heng Jiayi hissed as the other copies of Ji Li Fa also scattered like ash on the wind. “Both of them perished here?”

“It shouldn’t be,” Arashin frowned. “Li Shi should be off world at the moment?”

“She is.” Cao Liang confirmed. “How can her brother’s corpse use that art?”

“It can’t,” she elaborated, looking around with narrowed eyes now, for the hidden tells of the wider trap. “This is all smoke and mirrors.”

“Meng Yu Dai?” Meng Tan suggested.

Her instinct was that it should be, but Yang energies that could seep souls to this degree were tricky. It was entirely possible whatever was controlling the bodies could fish arts out of corpses’ memories, even ones it had no business being able to. In which case, her earlier assessment that Meng Yu Dai’s body might be less dangerous than Erlang Feng’s could be wildly off the mark. Even if his soul was ‘gone’, Meng Yu Dai’s body had had a lot more opportunities to see…

“You are… indeed, a most worthy vessel…”

The voice sang hauntingly in her ears, as if whoever was speaking was actually standing back-to-back with her.

“I had not seen… not since those days…”

Taunting, sultry, mocking. It sounded like her, but there was a creeping, discordant sense of ‘command’ within it, that she would never have used.

“How miraculous…” her shadow whispered. “That here and now, I would be able to reclaim—”

Eight versions of her, wreathed in peerless yang power, a Daughter of Heaven in her full might and majesty, stood around her, their hands outstretched, as if the others were not even there, the symbols of the Eight Trigrams forming out of searing yang flames.

She had to concede, it was a good idea as a maelstrom of flame bled out of the surroundings, attempting to envelop her. A smart strategy even, as eight became sixty-four, courtesy of the fan of feathers each clone had, mirroring the one she wore. Many other experts would have been undone by it, but it again showcased the critical flaw of Absolute Yang… and how its use of Meng Yu Dai’s body was flawed. This ‘Punishment Cauldron’ was powerful, yes, but even projected with the full, auspicious might of an Eight Trigrams formation and the purifying power of Absolute Yang… as a sealing art, it entirely failed to restrain her.

The fire itself would have been a problem for most, but for her, who had been born from fire, and a fire far more profound than ‘mere’ Yang, at that, it was merely painful.

The purifying element it was trying to force upon her was also too extreme, and incompatible with the harmonies the formation required to function efficiently. To properly work, it required aspects of Yin, as well as Yang, and while it might have been able to draw that ‘Yin’ from her, she certainly wasn’t going to provide it anything to work with.

As such, the secret to enduring, then breaking the seal was… also a bit stupid. She simply needed move to the ‘Wind’ portion of the formation and remain there, as the sixty-four versions of her furiously channelled their Absolute Yang strength towards her, until an auspicious point emerged where she could twist the formation to her advantage

This was still by no means an ‘easy’ feat, to endure that long. Familiar as she was, with the inner workings of this particular style of formation—and to a degree few any outside of Vast Obscurity Grove could likely conceive of—only she could achieve it, she suspected.

Almost immediately, the yang versions of her also read what she was doing and the internal workings of the formation began to adjust accordingly as they attempted to shift the fire nexus, and thus change the location of the thunder and wind ones by association.

The first hurdle was also the most obnoxious as well, in her opinion. Certainly, by remaining within the wind nexus, the ‘purifying flames’ of the formation would themselves never reach her. However, she would also have no grasp of the formation beyond it thanks to the impenetrable haze. She also had to grasp how the formation as a whole was moving beyond her sight, simply by the momentum of the flow of flames streaming around her. Make one mistake and she would be dislodged and have to contend with the full fury of the intent that was attempting to impose the seal upon her.

The first few cycles were the hardest, because not only was she was still adjusting to some elements of the rampant intent within the Absolute Yang Flames, but the superstructure of the formation itself was still somewhat malleable, something the clones of her were taking full advantage of.

In the end, the clone versions were actually able to keep her chasing the wind node about the shifting formation for all nine minor cycles of the initial formation activation as well. At one level, that was frustrating, because she had to waste precious tens of seconds that might be critical later, but it was also not entirely unexpected that they were able to keep her on the back foot for so long.

While it was true Meng Yu Dai’s body would not have more than a few lingering traces of experience with this art instinctually etched into its corpse, the degree of yang pressure being exerted meant that even the meanest residual slivers of past uses could be unravelled to a frankly frightening degree. The focus of the Absolute Yang Intent on the nature of her ‘self’ and its embodiment of the clones of her were also certainly playing a role there, nevermind that she had unhelpfully demonstrated a fairly profound version of it not a few minutes ago.

Thankfully, her disciples, now thoroughly under siege from yang-possessed corpses on the fringes of her awareness were also bought some time, because the clones of her could spare nothing for them, while she moved with the wind node.

With the tenth cycle, and the completion of what was in effect one ‘complete’ revolution of the art, the formation finally locked into the primordial trigram arrangement and the nature of the challenge she faced changed. The outer shell, in the form of a ghostly ‘clay cauldron’, now rapidly began to form, finally blocking her awareness of anything beyond the already opaque formation layout.

Now she no longer had to worry about the wind node being moved from under her, unless they broke the entire formation. Instead she had endure the vision searing discomfort of being surrounded by a hungering maelstrom of Absolute Yang Fire while on the one hand ensuring that she gave nothing at all to the formation to feed the Yang-Yin cycle it was attempting to set up to devour her body and soul, and on the other, basically winding up its momentum as it perpetually chased that ‘Yin’ aspect she would never give, until an opportunity to flip the whole formation over presented itself.

There was also the secondary issue of the ‘byproducts’ of the Absolute Yang fire combusting everything else within the formation in its ceaseless hunger for that Yin fuel. However, the environs of the formation were already so suffused with Yang qi that it only took three cycles to exhaust what was there, and then a further two to consume all but the most intransigent forms of unstable qi. At that point, even without her having to do much, the speed of the formation cycles began to ramp up substantively. As she observed its behaviour, she also found confirmation of something she had begun to suspect, already. That the Intent within the Absolute Yang Strength, while it was very firmly melded with it, and exceptionally—profoundly in fact, in tune with it, was not actually… innate to it.

That raised another interesting possibility on how she could disrupt the formation as a whole. Rather than take control of it, she could instead try make it over-run its momentum entirely. In effect, tripping up the cycle by inducing it to move so fast that it began to either overwhelm nodes, or just tear through them completely. If enough failed in one cycle the entire formation would collapse, and the backlash would be… catastrophic to whoever, or whatever was manipulating it.

The more she pondered that, as cycle after cycle sped, the more and more that approach appealed as well. For starters, it would entirely collapse the momentum of the Absolute Yang Strength for some distance around the formation. It would also solve the issue of where the Meng Yu Dai ‘body’ was. As a third, albeit more self-serving benefit, it also allowed her some time to do something she had never expected to, so soon after breaking through—temper her intent and comprehensions against the hostile avarice of an Absolute aspect.

Usually, she would have to go back to Vast Obscurity Grove for something like that. With this formation there were a number of benefits to be gained, and in fact, controlled use of it for deliberately purifying one’s intent was one of its more ‘secret’ uses within the Grove itself. Compared to that though, this was an altogether superior opportunity, simply because it was very difficult to convince someone, except maybe her elusively reclusive Great Aunt, to do so without any ‘reserve’.

The first ‘slip’ still took thirty-two full cycles to emerge, which was testament to just how firmly wedded to the Absolute Yang energies the intent directing it was. It also confirmed, yet again though that the intent was not innate to it, or it would have been able to reach thirty-three fully-in-control cycles, at which point she would likely have had to make a few further adjustments. She could have tried to break it there, because that thirty-second node’s primacy lay in ‘Wind’ where she was standing, but the cycle itself was in ‘Lake’, so she resisted the temptation. She would probably have succeeded, but the ‘Wind’ and ‘Lake’ Nodes were not on the same axis of the formation, so the collapse, while bad, would not necessarily be irreversible.

That the thirty-second node the cycle hit was ‘Lake’ rather than ‘Heaven’, also meant that the controlling intent was deliberately trying to restrain the momentum of the energies surging through the formation and subvert her position on the ‘Wind’ node by slightly more sideways means. Unfortunately for it, that was difficult in the extreme, even with its control, and the fact that it was not innately emergent from the Absolute Yang Strength was the crack she had to pick just the right moment to strike at.

The next wobble came faster than she expected, though, at the thirty-sixth rotation, where the cycle finally overwhelmed a node—‘Earth’ in this case, but didn’t bypass it entirely. A third slip at thirty-nine—‘Lake’ again—was similarly, inauspiciously placed, so she let it pass by. After that, though, there were no further slips as the cycles started to creep into the forties. However, the momentum did finally begin to run out of the controlling intent’s grasp. On the forty-third and forty-fourth cycles it overwhelmed both ‘Earth’ and then ‘Thunder’ in quick succession. The latter was a possibility, but she again held her strike, simply because the intent almost felt like it was watching on that node, especially.

-I guess it will be forty-nine after all, she reflected drily, as it again wobbled on the cycle, which tore through ‘Heaven’ so fast that it nearly wiped out the node entirely. Grandfather, your formation really has difficult karma with that number.

Indeed, as it hit forty-nine, which because of her work earlier in keeping to the wind node, actually fell on ‘Wind’, and not ‘Flame’, which was its optimal, auspicious point, or ‘Heaven’, which would have been equally bad for her, she finally gave the momentum of the intent a little extra help on its way.

The flow of the Absolute Yang Strength, already past her, over-ran the ‘Water’ node, then obliterated the ‘Mountain’—weakened because of the stress on its opposite, ‘Lake’ and also the ‘Earth’ one, which was already suffering from the previous wobble there. As the cycle hit ‘Thunder’, she then struck the exposed weakness in link between the Absolute Yang Strength and the Intent guiding it… and shut her eyes.

Her world turned red and black.

Air vanished.

Qi combusted, consumed by the ravening current of Absolute Yang, leaving only toxic, unstable primordial remnants.

The ground around her turned to glass, and was ripped up in the same instant, to become a glittering ring of jagged death.

Devoid of the stabilizing influence of the earth node, the cauldron became a juddering, unstable maelstrom of nigh-uncontrollable Yang energies.

She could have let the recoil run wild at this point. It would absolutely consume all the yang clones around her, but like everything else in this competition of the strategic understanding of the fundamentals of reality that was… a trap. A yawning piece of bait wrapped up in the inevitability that all control of a circumstance was, in some way fleeting, and the real winner and loser was who folded first. Unfortunately for the Intent now furiously trying to regain control over the rampant Absolute Yang strength enveloping everything, she was pretty confident in her ability to control Punishment Cauldrons that ran wild.

“Impossible…!” the sixty-four versions of her gasped in concert as the cauldron, as she focused all of her intent onto her palm… and grasped the ‘Heaven’ node—

“Is it, though?” she murmured, contemplating the black sphere that now rippled in her palm, bleeding red that sucked all the luminescence out of… well, probably the entire valley.

Left unchecked, the shockwave would likely turn half the valley to glass, even with the repression of Yin Eclipse weighing down on everything. Meng Tan and the rest would survive… probably, but it would turn the moment back against her quite profoundly, and undo every advantage she had just eked out. Now, however, the Yang energies had a different kind of formation at their heart and a different point to fixate on, anchored by their absolute nature, rather than the intent that had previously suffused it. ‘Heaven’ was the core. ‘Lake’ the foundation, ‘Wind’ structure and ‘Fire’ the substance… and the only rival link to her control of it was Meng Yu Dai, who was now clearly visible to her in this twisted moment, standing several hundred metres away.

The ground beneath her shattered, turning into iridescent qi.

“I feel my grasp of fire, formations, and the Eight Trigram’s is being a little disrespected here?” she continued, as the ground beneath her shattered, turning into iridescent qi.

Her disciples, still held in the grip of the formation that she had used to bring them all here, were drawn right into the centre, with her, while the bodies of the Dao Lords they had been fighting were obliterated in smears of tearing space. The sixty-four clones of her fared a little better, as they were not really ‘corporeal’ things, but the breaking of space still shredded close to half of them. Those that remained flowed back together, becoming a shadow-version of her, standing behind that ghostly form of Meng Yu Dai like a puppet master, a mirror of the same black orb dancing before him.

-Huh…

The thing that surprised her was which shadow version of her it picked. The clones it had just projected were straight-forwardly mirrors of her current appearance, but the one now standing behind Meng Yu Dai… was not.

-Now, why did you pick that appearance, over all others?

She mused, considering her dark mirror. It was a little older than she currently appeared but still had something of the same ‘older sister’ vibe she tended to project when she didn’t need to either appear as her ‘true’ self, or some sort of ‘elder stateswoman’. The key differences though were in the way she was styling her hair, and subtle increase in the more enticing aspects of her ‘beauty’, that was both alluring and yet also a little more artificial than she usually cared to present.

Cao Liang and Heng Jiayi didn’t seem to have noticed, but that was not too surprising, for she had not presented this particular ‘look’ in their lifetimes. Tan, Guanyue and the rest though…

“So, it was like that…” Meng Tan growled. “I think this confirms a few things.”

“Whoever planned this, planned it well,” Sai Xingxue remarked coolly.

“Murali’s Shrine has been robbed, hasn’t it?” Guanyue asked, narrowing her eyes.

“A-ancestral teacher’s…!?” Heng Jiayi hissed, his concerned expression turning stoney.

-It certainly looks that way, she agreed, with an inward sigh.

The Seven Star Pavilion had been founded by Meng Murali, and the last time she had held this appearance was at her friend’s funeral, abandoning it thereafter. Partly in protest over the meddling of powers that the other great clans had moved to shelter in that era. The ‘wise and beautiful lady of Meng’ who advised emperors and befriended empresses and had been slowly rebuilding her faction’s strength had been called away to a dreadful war not long after, and the version of her that came back, to a world where those she had put faith in to protect the Seven Sovereign’s place in it had profoundly failed their duty, no longer had any interest in playing nicely, or within the constraints of ‘the great game’.

This version of her, that she was now looking at, could only come from an impression gained from qi before that time. Murali’s shrine within the ancestral grounds of the Seven Star Pavilion was one of the few places such artefacts, like the parasol sword she had crafted for Murali, and the luan-feather crown she had later gifted her when she became a Dao Venerate, remained.

“Well, it doesn’t change much…” Song Peizhi added,

Even as Song Peizhi was speaking, the shades of all seven Dao Lords who had been part of the censure force shifted out of the yang maelstrom to float in front of Meng Yu Dai.

“I presume…?” he asked, glancing at her as, led by Ji Li Fa, they raised their weapons and as one, charged forward towards her.

“Yep, go for it,” she replied drily, as she considered the shifts in what passed for their ‘qi’.

The fact that the intent possessing Meng Yu Dai’s corpse only had eyes for her was actually a blessing. That it was drawing heavily on a grasp of her from that previous era was a second, entirely unsought one. And perhaps an even greater boon, of sorts, because none of those with her had been luminary figures in that era. Peizhi, Xingxue and Arashin had already been reclusive, peerless experts whose stars had been fading to myth. Guanyue and Meng Tan had been up-and-coming talents, and Cao Liang and Heng Jiayi were not even born.

It was also interesting that it wasn’t leveraging the strength of the Yang Intent that made up the bodies—at least in the way it had been before. All seven shades were currently initializing what could be considered some of their strongest ‘offensive’ arts, which the intent was arranging into a sort of ‘pseudo’ eight-trigrams, yang formation, with Meng Yu Dai as its controlling locus.

Qin Chuan, Yu Shangrong and Jin Fuhai became the striking face of the formation in front of Ji Li Fa, which made sense, as that trio’s strongest arts were both yang—Fire, Metal and Water respectively—and best able to recapture some momentum within the unstable maelstrom of Absolute Yang fire that was roiling around them. It was also directly trying to influence her disciples, as best it understood them—offering what seemed like an enticing opening, or maybe even provocation for Guanyue, as the art Qin Chuan was using was one that came from her family line.

-Did it pick Guanyue to try and tempt because of whatever she sensed earlier? she found herself pondering, as rather than Guanyue, it was Heng Jiayi who actually stepped forward, along with Cao Liang, to meet the incoming onslaught.

Guanyue, herself and Meng Tan moved to their flanks, while behind them Sai Xingxiu settled into the ‘pseudo-controller’ position within their mini formation.

Fuhai’s ‘Ocean Break’ rolled into Heng Jiayi a moment later—waves of unstable yang strength crashing down on the deputy leader of the Seven Star Pavilion. Rather than block it with his shield, however, Jiayi skilfully caught the ‘wave’ before it had properly crested, letting it split around him, at which point it was robbed of enough of its cohesive intention.

Before Xingxiu could scatter it though, the ‘foam’ of those collapsing waves transformed into a maelstrom of glittering stars—drifting like seeds blown from willow catkins across the ethereal waters. Within that alluring, beautiful scene though, a hidden danger swirled, like myriad invisible swords focused on all her disciples, born of Yu Shangrong’s ‘Celestial Ghost Sword’.

This time, it was Cao Liang who acted, shrouding them in the veil of his Martial Intent that cut not the yang qi targeting everyone, but rather the space all around it. The result in the end was that the swirling cloud of stars just flowed over them but never actually reached any of those it targeted—

A ripple of red light—Qin Chuan finally making his move—rolled over the collapsing waves of the ‘Ocean Break’, a moment later, two ten-metre-tall manifestations embodying the strength of his ‘Flying Phoenix Leg’ surging out of the swell aiming to flank Cao Liang and disrupt his efforts.

Rather than trouble Cao Liang, however, Xingxiu finally made his first real move, disrupting the momentum of the waves with a casual-seeming sweep of his whisk—

The swell and their surroundings turned turbid and sluggish, as, with the appearance of a ghost, Xu Jia Yi faded into focus in front of Xingxiu, a staff in her hands drawing a new maelstrom of water from the lake with the intent of isolating all three. With her attack, the other two bodies—Qin Chi and Fang Pei also moved towards Tan and Guanyue—

The entire ‘lake’ turned flat as a millpond, as Meng Tan calmly spun his spear and planted its blade into the waters. The thousands of near-invisible arrows that Qin Chi had conjured out of the spray scattered as if they had just collided with a great cliff, courtesy of her disciple skilfully merging his position as ‘The Mountain’ in the formation with his ‘Vermillion Cliff Spear’—

“Southern Wind, like Thunder, Rain from Heaven, like Lightning.”

Guanyue’s words hung in the stillness as the ‘sky’ of the maelstrom of yang energy above roiled.

The bodies of the seven elders suddenly seemed tiny as the overwhelming might of her intent, manifested through those words blossomed like a hurricane, with Guanyue drifting like a celestial envoy at its heart. Dreadful winds cut at them. The reverberations of the grinding maelstrom above washed through them. The water in every direction roiled once more, deforming chaotically as it struggled to contain the competing clash of all the arts… and yet…

-Indeed, this is the difference in perspective, she reflected with a soft sigh, as she stood on still the placid waters of the ‘Lake’, contemplating the entire tableau of the clash as it shimmered like a moon-touched reflection beneath her feet.

Standing some distance from her, Meng Yu Dai and her Yang-manifested clone were also watching the battle, seemingly oblivious to her presence here. The interesting thing, though, was that her ‘clone’ was only present here, and it was entirely through Meng Yu Dai that it was exerting influence on what transpired in the struggle over the control of the ‘Lake’ node. Had it just used the Dao Lords as vessels to channel its ‘strength’ that struggle would have been much more overtly arduous for her side.

-Is there some issue with its Intent?

Curious, she found herself considering how it was trying to reassert control over the maelstrom of Absolute Yang Qi. The clone’s Intent was much more… ‘acquisitive’ than ‘absolute’, in truth, the impression she got was distinctly ‘martial’. ‘Conquering Yang’ felt… disturbingly apt, in fact. Odder though, was that from this perspective it felt almost hollow. There was a weight of years yes, comparable to someone from her mother’s generation, which should have been enough to effortlessly overwhelm them, and yet it felt empty. The true vibrancy within it, little more than… several hundreds of thousands of years if she had to put an actual number on it.

-So, it is trying to conserve its core strength, and recover its accumulation from their corpses?

In that light, the actions of the old ‘Moon Scholar’ made a lot more sense. Also why it was now clinging to her clone, and had taken that form. Not to mention why it had thought to try and use this method to devour them.

-Did… did someone think to feed me… or mine to this thing? Or sabotage the gains I finally made?

In other circumstances she might have gotten… actually pretty angry, but here and now was not the moment to let her heart be touched by such things. Especially as of the myriad forms of Yang, ‘Conquering Yang’ was significantly more vexatious to deal with than ‘Absolute Yang’ in her opinion.

Still, it had its own weaknesses within its nature, trying to re-exert control over the Yang Energies, she could feel that it was content to…

-And this is why its nasty, she reflected ruefully to herself, as she considered the rather twisted multi-layered gambit within what the clone was presenting to her.

On the surface, it was focused mostly on re-gaining control over the nodes it had lost, re-creating the missing ones to match them and then overwhelm her. With that in mind, the battlefield in ‘Lake’ appeared to be the least fiercely contested by the clone, in a spiritual sense simply because the corpses were there, tying up her disciples and her. By its ‘nature’ it seemed to be drawn most to ‘Heaven’, even before ‘Fire’ and was content to work on those to isolate her again in ‘Wind’. However, all that was, in fact, simply a stratagem to lure her out of ‘Wind’, she suspected. It even seemed to be factoring in that she might notice that—with the way it was moving also presenting the possibility that it could isolate her, or just strand her in ‘inaction’, doomed by being unable to advance or retreat, where it could wear her down by a different means.

This was Conquering Yang. Insidious. Relentless, Everchanging, and practically Ceaseless in pursuit of its goals, yet lacking the rigidity of its more Absolute counterpart.

Even an expert in the Eight Trigrams would probably be drawn in, if only because of how formative certain philosophical theories were in the wider Martial Axial. For her, there was also a further layer of insidiousness, because the clone, while it probably didn’t have her memories, it was extrapolating from informed sources. While she made no claims to be a particularly great general, or leader of armies, she did have a lot of experience with strategy and politics, and that era, which the clone was taken from, had been particularly political.

Before she could decide on what to do, however, circumstances in the ‘Lake’ node picked for her. She had been largely passive there, letting Song Peizhi and Arashin guard her, while the others screened them, and now Fang Pei finally managed to get around Guanyue. The idea was seemingly to attempt to draw out one of that pair, so Meng Yu Dai could strike at her directly.

The nature of that strike was also… well, she supposed she should have expected something like it. The weight of Conquering Yang suddenly snapped into focus around her, but rather than try to oppress her directly, it again tried to call to what it saw as her background, namely the historic complexities of her family’s position between Vast Obscurity Grove, the Heavenly Meng clan and the wider geopolitics of the Heavenly Bureaucracy. On paper, she could see how its call to ‘transcend the limits of her station’, and overcome what some might—had, in the past framed as the ‘Limitations of her Nature’, might sway the ‘her’ that the clone understood.

Conquering Yang of this quality certainly would allow her to reject such ‘Destiny’ and throw off those limitations that it felt constrained her. She would be able to rise anew, unstoppable, to heights nobody in this Axis of the Higher Heavens would be able to touch.

-And yet, a poisoned crown will always be poisonous, she reflected drily. Once taken in, impossible to remove. In the end, she would be just a part of this intent. Maybe not now, but it would never leave her. Given her family history, it was a little odd that the Intent didn’t seem to get that she would be familiar with not one, but two catastrophic examples of the fallout from just such efforts.

The same offer was subtly pushed to Song Peizhi and Arashin, she couldn’t help but notice, yet neither was at all touched by it.

-Or perhaps it feels it is worth the—

The clone suddenly snapped into focus in front of her.

Meng Yu Dai reached out to her—

—effort to try and bait me this way?

She stayed stock still as the clone stared at her, or rather, through her, at her reflection in the Lake, a slightly perplexed and vexed expression mirrored on both its face and Meng Yu Dai’s.

It certainly knew she was there, after a fashion, anyway. Its influence in probing the Fire and Heaven nodes would allow it to gain a rough approximation of where the Wind node was now as well. Still, as long as she stayed within the concept of ‘No Mind’, at least in relation to her interactions with the formation as a whole, it would inevitably be drawn into one of a few fairly narrow stratagems. The alternative was to tear up the board completely and try something else, and it clearly wanted the Yang energy, or perhaps could not afford to relinquish it?

Below her, Arashin and Song Peizhi finally made their moves, pushing back Fang Pei again, as the surging cycle of destructive Yang reached a culminating point once more within the Lake Node. To an onlooker, the storm wracked waters resembled the ocean in the grip of a rising dragon gale. Guanyue and Tan were still pressuring the whole cycle from the flanks.

Before her, Meng Yu Dai crouched down and put his palm to the mirror-flat water—

At the heart of the maelstrom below, Fang Pei and Qin Chi, responding to the instruction from Meng Yu Dai suddenly fell back, while Jin Fuhai slipped through a barely discernible gap in the pressure being put out by Cao Liang and Heng Jiayi, striking at Sai Xingxue, in an effort to force apart the heart of their formation—

Sai Xingxue met the incoming attack with a grimace, doing his best to redirect the surging momentum of the waves, but suddenly supported by Fang Pei and Qin Chi, it wasn’t quite enough. The waters crashed over him, and the formation her disciples had been maintaining collapsed—

The clone finally exerted its influence through Meng Yu Dai, sending a piercing thread of Conquering Intent into the lake to further stir the waters up and strike at Meng Guanyue—

With a soundless eruption of water, Sai Xingxue fell upwards out of the mirror clear water behind Meng Yu Dai, calling upon the Kunpeng aspect of their formation to cross from the depths of the lake directly into the Heaven Node.

The clone blurred and blocked the descending strike from the whisk—

“My Sword Cuts From the Heart.”

Song Peizhi stood in front of her, his sword outstretched, its blade piercing through Meng Yu Dai’s Forehead.

The connection between Meng Yu Dai and the briefly distracted Yang Intent wavered—

“Not bad.” Her clone sneered, the moment before her splitting like a scattering reflection in the water, one still holding the whisk, the other pushing back at the moment to the point just before Song Peizhi’s sword connected with Meng Yu Dai’s forehead. “But you still cannot overcome with just this—”

The sword slid through her clone’s fingers as if it was not there, and once again pierced Meng Yu Dai’s forehead.

The formations grandmaster’s corpse rippled, Yang Qi bleeding off of it for a moment.

With a snarl, her clone pulled its hand back and the Yang Qi snapped back into it, but as it did so, she could see that that just that action had cost it a few tens of thousands of years of ‘weight’. That momentary distraction was also enough to allow Sai Xingxue to reclaim the whisk and flick out with it—

The entire mirror-lake of ‘Heaven’ around them trembled as the clone’s ability to influence the rest of the formation was further pressured, if only for the briefest moment.

Unfortunately for the clone’s wider efforts to subvert her influence in the formation as a whole, that was enough.

All she had to do was take a few steps to the right, anchored as she was within the Wind Node and the other three naturally shifted to retain their harmony in relation to them. As a result, the already weakened spread of the clone’s Conquering Yang Intent found itself isolated in all three, relative to Meng Yu Dai, and with no way to reclaim any of that, within moments it was all consumed by the raging maelstrom of Absolute Yang Qi—no amount of strategy enough to overcome what in military terms would be considered a massacre to the last man of all those pressuring forces.

Song Peizhi cut again with his sword, but this time the clone easily deflected it, manifesting two extra arms as it also pushed back at Sai Xingxue much more forcefully. At this point, though, it discovered that it was awkwardly undermatched in the simple weight of qi years within their accumulations that the pair could exert. They were also realms above Meng Yu Dai and had so many hundreds of thousands of years on him in terms of true cultivation foundation that even in the grip of the Conquering Yang Intent it was embarrassing to see them matched so directly, for all his genius in life with the Dao of Formations.

Faced with the real possibility of losing everything, the Conquering Intent encapsulated in her clone took Meng Yu Dai’s body and retreated like a ghost through the primary yang axis of the maelstrom around them—

“Misty Pines Sing at Midnight.”

Song Peizhi’s voice whispered through the surroundings as the lake below turned dark. The sky of Absolute Yang still surged, but all the colour rapidly faded, as if the sun within it were setting, replaced by a night-time gloom that twisted your vision if you stared into it for more than a moment.

Meng Yu Dai almost seemed frozen, mid step, as Peizhi’s misty sword hung, inescapably before him.

“Peng Tail Descends from the South.”

Sai Xingxiu appeared behind Meng Yu Dai, his whisk falling in a sweeping arc towards her clone and the formation master’s body, following the primary axis of the maelstrom, linking Heaven and Lake anew as he did so.

The influence of the Conquering Yang Intent on the other nodes recoiled, collapsing under the combined pressure of their attacks, which were targeting not only its vessel, but the space around it. The space around Meng Yu Dai turned misty and ethereal, a faint, sorrowful whispering—like the singing of the pine trees in the night air Peizhi’s art was named for—permeating everything.

Just as the clone was about to move, however, the Lake, reflected below them scattered upwards, vast cliffs of water rising on its periphery, as Meng Tan also finally made his move, matching Xingxiu’s strike.

The corpses of her Dao Lords immediately broke off their now clearly futile efforts to force control of the Lake and charged straight for where both she and Arashin were standing—

All of them froze as the sky above them shifted, swirling counterclockwise until the distortions caused by the Fire Node were little more than a compressed ring seething around the horizon. Above them, Meng Guanyue floated, her spear pointing down, the entire maelstrom shifting to orientate its core axis on her spear, such that what the energies coursing through it momentarily around her transformed the vault of the Heaven Node above into a facsimile of one of the Meng Heavenly Court’s most feared artefacts in the current era—The Umbrella of Wisdom.

For the briefest moment, the reflections of Lake flowed across the underside of the ‘Umbrella’, then with a crisp, clear crack, the remaining influence the Conquering Yang was able to exert over the Absolute Yang Maelstrom was comprehensively broken, if only for a moment.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

That was, however, the opening she had been waiting for. Bowing her head, she clapped her hands lightly four times.

Everything wavered before her vision, then with a silent roar, the maelstrom of orphaned Absolute Yang Qi scattered outwards, returning to nature and the four directions.

The sky above and the umbrella faded away, the scattering lake melted into nothing, returning to the muddy, steaming swamp that had been the Jasmine Gate. Three great pillars emerged, like shadows out of the disrupted energies, then everything fully returned to normal. Meng Yu Dai’s body staggered backwards, but was unable to escape Song Peizhi’s sword, which pierced its third eye.

“Wretched child!”, the clone, adrift in the middle of this strange scene declared, abruptly refocusing its attention on her.

It sneered, as she felt its Conquering Yang Intent spread out into their surroundings, simultaneously grasping for the Dao Lords’s bodies and Meng Yu Dai, chasing the dissolution point of the Absolute Yang, and also seeming to be looking for something else—

-Does it have other corpses under its control? She frowned.

In terms of those dead whom she had accounted for, she had not seen any sign of Rantai Mao nor Fan Ji, the two other Dao Sovereigns who had come with Tuo Kankai. Nor any sign of Yu Xianyu, the Martial Sovereign or Tuo Kankai himself for that matter. It was Yu Xianyu that would be the biggest danger, even if Tuo Kankai was a Dao Eternal. Xianyu was older, a quasi-Martial Eternal himself and also the true lineage inheritor of the Celestial Ghost Sword in this era. In this force, despite being a lower realm, in terms of merit and capability, he was on par with her own disciple, Ji Ming, and while she hoped he lived, she had seen little to support that.

“You think this achieves anything?”

Its words reverberated through the whole valley, less spoken and more evoked straight from the remaining Yang Strength, which was suddenly surging back towards her clone, drawn right from the point of collapse before the orphaned Absolute Yang could truly pass beyond its grasp.

-As expected, what we just faced is but a part of it, she sighed grimly, as all around them the air turned thick and suffocating, the flow of qi in their bodies sluggish and stifled… Will I end up having to use ‘that’ talisman after all, in spite of everything?

Even as she thought that, however, a fissure of brilliant white lightning silently split the heart of the valley. Emanating out from it, a white-edged ripple passed over the stone pillars, which shivered faintly, casting swirling afterimage carrying hints of the Celestial Zodiac across their surface. All around them, the roiling, orphaned yang energies shuddered as it passed through them, distorting and lessening in some intangible way that she knew intuitively no strength of ‘Laws’ could achieve.

Testament to that was how her clone, which had been about to fully consume Meng Yu Dai with its conquering Yang Intent flinched as the wave passed through it. White lightning sizzling off the body as the clone was pushed back from it, while, when it passed through them, she experienced what almost felt like a recursion of the moment before, when they broke its influence over the eight trigrams formation, the suffocating pressure on her scattering, amidst a crisp, clear chime.

“Ah.”

Beside her, Arashin’s utterance and uneasy sideways glance at her perfectly encapsulated her own suspicion.

-Could it actually be him?

“—You!”

Her clone blurred, the Yang Intent within it re-coalescing with a speed that was frankly frightening to behold as it finally burned some of its remaining vitality.

“Wretched…”

Before it could finish speaking, their rippling surroundings settled, and the mists and miasma flowed away.

The three pillars of rock towered above them, traces of charred vegetation now visible on their surface.

“Such a hunger, there is in you… to shape what is to come…”

The words, spoken by a tall, muscular, bearded man who was sitting on a fallen wall, staring pensively at her clone, were calm and measured, but carried a weight of ages and a presence that no one else on this world could muster, maybe not even the ancient beings that kept the gates of these mountains.

He looked much as she remembered him from her youth, when her mother had first introduced her to him, before any of the calamity that led to the creation of this forbidden land had ever come to pass. The only real trace of his true form was the ghostly patterning of white-golden scales across his shoulders and forearms, and perhaps a faint suggestion in the flowing nature of his beard. Tang Long Jiao. A name to strike awe and fear. To evoke mystery and wonder. Unchallenged for his seat at the true apex of Eastern Azure across three aeonspan. Not even Dun Fang, with the might of the Kong and the Huang had been able to shake him. Though, because he had been basically silent for this entire era, there had been no shortage of rumours that the Heavenly Kong had perhaps forced him into hiding, or he had suffered some injury, yet in retrospect, the fact that he was here, in Yin Eclipse, made a lot of sense to her. She couldn’t help but notice he had one of her mother’s swords resting beside him.

“Base amphibian.” Her clone sneered, mustering all of the haughty grandeur and arrogance of a Meng princess, that was a little awkward for her to watch as it faced down one of the pre-eminent experts of the world beyond these mountains. “Grown beyond your station all of you. You think you can match me—that this place can resist forever?”

“—What would you know about ‘forever’?” A hauntingly familiar woman, dressed in long flowing dark robes, her dark hair crowned elegantly with a tress of mulberry and jasmine blossoms slipped into focus beside the old dragon. Her eyes were like the voids of new moons as she gazed at the clone. “Little spark that has only ever known a sun-filled sky.”

“A weed that grows in darkness is still a weed,” her clone retorted, mockingly turning its gaze to the woman.

“—it has been many a long year since this old self was witness to such a nature as this…”

“If you speak of nature, base lizard, you should understand it truly, no?” the clone retorted. “Even though you have risen to such a height. It is simply as a curio in the palm of your master’s hand. I wonder, which hypocrite’s gate or mountain did you prostitute yourselves to guard, until they declared you ‘disciplined’ enough?”

“I had forgotten how mouthy they get, when you put them under pressure…”

A second female figure, also clad in the same dark robes, a crown of flowering reeds wreathed in her dark hair, murmured, faded out of the mists to Tang Jiao’s right, followed a heartbeat later by two others.

“Yapping away, seeking purchase by any means, this is always their way…” the woman wearing myrtle blossoms as her crown noted drily.

“Certainly, Yang, when unbridled and unburdened with greater purpose, is a right pain in the ass,” her compatriot, who wore a garland of night-blossom and a half-moon crown in her hair, chuckled mirthlessly.

-So, that is four of Mahavaran’s Great Seats, here, plus this old fellow? she mused, taking in their surroundings. There should be more than that, and the fact that this place was still such a ruin spoke strongly of how much had transpired here.

“How pathetic,” her clone sneered, looking around. “Do you plan to hide in shadows, all of you?”

As it spoke, it raised a hand and the mists around them turned bright white, before melting away to reveal dozens of figures, crouching or standing on the ruins in their vicinity.

The majority were of course spirit herbs, clad in cloaks of lily leaves, faces hidden by fired clay masks upon which they had daubed the symbols of their kind—lilies and irises, reeds and orchids, mangrove and willow. In their midst, and just off to the left of Tang Jiao, however, stood three more of the Great Seats of Mahavaran—The Saintesses of Mulberry, Willow and Flowing Reeds, surrounding the bedraggled figures of her Sect Enforcement Grand Elder Tuo Kankai, two Dao Immortals—Yu Fei and Wen Kangfei, and more surprisingly, Elder Qin Chi, who had just been clashing with her disciples.

Meanwhile, off to Tang Jiao’s right, a pale beauty with a luminous white waterlily as a crown holding up her dark hair was perched on another section of wall, sipping wine from a pale crystalline bowl. Her manner seemed casual, but her eyes, fixed on her clone, were ice cold.

The most surprising though, were the white furred old monkey, who was squatting on a nearby fallen archway, a dark wood staff balanced across his shoulders as he took in everything through narrowed eyes, and the scholarly looking young man off to her left.

The Old Monkey Venerable was nearly as elusive in this era as Tang Long Jiao, and as for Tai Wen… she could count on one hand the number of times he had appeared in private, let alone public circumstances in this aeonspan. That he looked, here and now, largely as she remembered him from the heyday of Taishavaran—in that archaic white linen tunic, his beard cut short, dark hair loose and shoulder length—was doubly unusual, because in the aeons since, he had committed almost fully in style and appearance to his position as one of the Ha clan’s most ancient and esoteric and unpredictable ancestors.

-Is he here because his son contacted Tan?

What was really interesting though to her, was how if it wasn’t for the ephemeral third eye on his brow and the faint hues of what appeared to be a zodiac cycle swirling around him, she would probably have looked right through him. The Zodiac cycle was odd as well, not the one typically seen on Easten Azure, and which was still shimmering faintly on the great stones towering over them. Rather, it resembled one she had only seen in a few places—most notably in the great shrine of Mahavaran. It was also oddly similar to the one that adorned the floor of the ancestral shrine at the heart of Vast Obscurity Grove—

Barely had she given rise to that thought, but the Yang Intent in their surroundings trembled faintly, almost in… anticipation?

-So, that is your plan, huh? she sighed inwardly, stepping back from those thoughts.

It was a smart idea, in truth. All of those here had something to keep close and in revealing everyone in this manner the Conquering Yang Intent was clearly trying to feed off the moment.

“Well, I suppose we should bring this to an end,” her clone remarked with an arrogant smirk as everyone failed to be drawn, even the four fortunate survivors from the censure force, though that was likely due to the three warding them. “There is little benefit to stringing it out further.”

As the clone spoke, she could feel something in her almost begging to give some form of response, a rebuttal, a cutting remark, anything. Feel the Yang strength in their surroundings dragging on her soul properly for the first time, trying to pull something of her into the influence of her clone.

Nobody said anything in reply.

Nor did they try to resist, either.

The spirit herbs just continued to watch. The Great Seats of Mahavaran simply remained as they had been. The old monkey scratched his nose. The lady with the white lily took a sip of her wine. Tang Long Jiao just remained impassive. Tai Wen continued to watch impassively. Even her own disciples kept their calm amidst the surging tides of intent trying to make any form of connection—

“You think stepping back in this manner is sufficient?” the clone actually laughed as it spread its arms wide—

The strength of yang that enveloped was all encompassing. It called to every interaction she had taken since arriving here. It whispered through her clash in the sect. Through her whole life—lives lived. From her earliest years, through her breakthroughs, trials and tribulations. Through every step forward. Every step back. Every choice made. Every sorrow endured. Every triumph attained.

“I am in your very nature.” Her clone whispered, appearing like a ghost before her, its presence piercing deep into the recesses of her memories, flowing towards the present day “I am—”

It paused, suddenly, staring at her, confusion in its eyes.

“Indeed,” she whispered, finally, to its face. “I am.”

It was as if, momentarily, she was no longer standing entirely in this ruined valley, amidst the ghosts of a place and a people long buried. She also stood in a garden, listening to her mother play that gentle melody.

Her mother stared at her, and through her, and… the melody stilled, for a discordant disconcerting moment.

“Interesting.”

The word caught on the Yang Intent and shook it so profoundly that that alone nearly dissociated it completely from the attempted intrusion in the ‘core’ of her soul. Yet that alone, was not quite—

She didn’t turn, but a hand fell on her shoulder. Warm and reassuring, a fatherly presence, from a time long before politics and heavenly clans ever influenced her thought. She did not need to see his face, but there were others there as well, now. Older. Stranger. Half remembered, as if dreams that lingered for but a moment on waking. A young woman sitting drinking tea, joking about alchemy with her mother. A blonde-haired woman gently dancing through sword forms on a mirror-bright lake amidst towering parasol trees. An old man, white haired, sitting cross legged in an alchemy lab, pondering a broken furnace. Each was mundane. Normal. Reassuring.

Each was terrifying. Aloof. Untouchable.

None turned, none even acknowledged the moment, but they didn’t need to. They simply were, and that was enough. The Yang Intent recoiled, the eyes of her clone widening as the moment around her fractured.

She saw Tai Wen reclining on a beach with a golden-haired beauty, laughing as they passed a jar of wine between them, admiring a setting sun over an azure sea.

She saw a turtle dragon meditating beside a pool of water.

Saw a young monkey splashing in a waterfall with his friends, watched by a handsome, older one, dressed in a tiger skin.

Saw… a dark path overshadowed by ancient trees in a place that had no sky.

The woman with Tai Wen paused, mid sip, one arm around his shoulder, and her gaze, along with his slid sideways to this moment, somehow.

The reflection of the turtle dragon stared back too deeply.

The handsome monkey didn’t turn around, but slowly reached towards his ear, as if to scratch it.

The dark path whispered, and shadows, seeming to walk beneath those leafy branches paused, but for a moment amidst the singing boughs…

A five-eyed shadow gazed out of the gloom beneath all, hungrily… and then it all passed.

The clone grasped for her one final time… and stared, blankly, as it beheld the ‘truth’ of her heart.

“Now, do you finally see?” she asked, sighing as it lowered its hand, gazing at her in incomprehension.

Its gambit was good, she had to concede, but in the end, it failed simply because… of perspective. It had gambled that those around her were each, according to their natures, susceptible, tied to a destiny not of their choosing, yet its understanding of each of them, here, was in some simple way flawed.

“No wisdom…”

Tang Long Jiao’s words, spoken not in any mortal tongue but that of dragons and other great beasts, were calm and contemplative, but within them she could still feel a thrumming current of energy, of thunder and drums. They washed through their surroundings, and as they did so, shimmering white motes seemed to shake free of everyone and everything,

“No attainment…”

Her clone—clones in fact, because there were afterimages in front of Tai Wen, the monkey, Tang Jiao and the spirit-herb saintesses, stared blankly at something, then with a faint, soft sigh, dissolved into golden-white sparks.

“Since there is nothing to attain… Auspicious Ending.”

Tang Jiao made an auspicious gesture with his right hand as he finished speaking.

The motes of light swirling inwards flickered, and then coalesced into a single, palm-sized white feather, with a slightly off-putting lustre.

Silently, the night-blossom saintess walked forward and before it could drift to the ground gently gathered it up in the folds of the black stole she wore—

As soon as the dark fabric fully enclosed it, she felt like she had just been released from the grip of an unsettling, oppressive shadow.

Beside her, Heng Jiayi and Cao Liang gasped, while the others all shivered.

“Is… is that it?”

The person who finally spoke up in the moment of silence was actually Yu Fei.

Beside her, she could feel some of her own companions—particularly Jiayi and Liang—giving her sideways looks likely wondering the same thing, but none willing to quite so rashly put into words their own questions.

-Such is the lingering trauma of dealing with this sort of yang strength, she reflected ruefully.

The scars of such a battle to quell yet not sublimate your every thought and action to such a strength would linger for some time. Even for her. The calmness of the moment within which they were now would feel like a trap itself. There would always be that question in your mind, ‘was that actually it’, and the great curse of such a strength as they had faced tended to be that that worry was the handle it sought to continue on. Myriad, mysterious, everchanging, unceasing, always seeking a new way.

“While it is true, that Yang is Myriad, mysterious and ever changing,” she replied softly, saluting Tang Jiao, the Saintesses, and the others respectfully. “Thanks to our efforts, a line does appear to have been drawn.”

She didn’t quite phrase that as a question to Tang Jiao, but even for her, it was difficult. Fortunately, there was strength in ritual and propriety here to fall back on. Eliminating Yang was impossible, unless you wanted to face something even worse. What they had succeeded in doing was returning this particular dominant element influencing everything to something approaching passivity.

“It is, and I believe that is the case,” Tang Jiao agreed, returning her salute.

The others, even the monkey also returned the salute. Even in this, there was careful, yet not forced ritual.

“It has been a long time since we last met, Great Lord Tang,” she added, politely. “Please allow me to extend greetings on behalf of myself, my family and my disciples—and to you, Honoured Saintesses, Lord Venerable White, Sagacious Lord Tai.”

“It has indeed been a long time since there was such a meeting of powers as this,” the Willow Saintess agreed drily.

“Odd, that it always happens in the face of those beyond this place, doing stupid things for ill thought-out reasons,” the white furred monkey added.

“Destiny is in what is written,” Tang Jiao remarked with a wan smile of his own.

“Probably why so many of my kin never learned to read good,” the white furred monkey replied with a toothy grin.

“If only it were that easy,” Tai Wen murmured drily, walking over to join her and her disciples.

“If only,” she agreed, saluting him politely.

“—Ahem.”

Before she could strike up a conversation, however, Guanyue, who had been quietly conferring with Sai Xingxiu as all this was going on, coughed politely to get her attention.

“What is it?” she asked as Guanyue also saluted Tai Wen.

“The… um, ‘sense’ that I had before, has not gone,” Guanyue informed her, uneasily. “I can still feel something pulling—calling even—at me.”

“You can…” she frowned, glancing around.

“—I… think I can shed some light on this matter, actually, young lady Meng,” Tai Wen cut in politely.

“You can?” Guanyue blinked and stared at him, before quickly adding. “—Lord Tai.”

“Mmmm, there are a number of things I think you will be interested to hear, all of you, in fact,” Tai Wen added, nodding to Tang Long Jiao, and the white monkey, before casting a pointed glance at Tuo Kankai and the other ‘fortunate’ survivors.

“Oh?” Tang Jiao raised an eyebrow.

“I have been witness to some of the build up to this grim start to the day,” Tai Wen informed them. “Some of my descendants, of the Ha clan, were caught up in its tumultuous prelude…”

“The local hunter bureau, and this matter of a gift for the son of that ambitious lad on Shan Lai,” Tang Jiao mused, slipping off his rock, claiming her mother’s sword as he did so.

-I will have to ask him about that, she sighed inwardly. It didn’t seem outwardly damaged, but even this close, she could sense little, if anything, of its condition, which meant either it had spent most of its qi—something she felt was unlikely—or he was deliberately supressing it. They could be exuberant, and had been rather bored out of their scabbards until called to this rather unwise use, but they should not be that undisciplined as sword spirits.

“You know of it?” it was Tai Wen’s turn to look a little surprised now.

“Do you doubt that I have some means?” Tang Jiao drily.

“Not at all.” Tai Wen responded wryly.

“They are children of pluck,” the white monkey mused. “One would even say merit, if that term were not worthless in the world beyond these days.”

“They are… that they are,” Tang Jiao agreed, a little sadly, she thought.

“Anyway, I can elaborate on some of the events as we walk,” Tai Wen interjected, gesturing for them all to accompany him towards the pillars and the heart of the grove. “Assuming I may…?” he added to the Jasmine.

“Matters should be resolved,” she murmured, inclining her head.

“I presume this has much to do with why your son contacted my disciple, Tan?” she asked quietly as they started walking.

“That is a part of it, yes.” Tai Wen affirmed as the others fell in behind and somewhat around them. “If you will allow me,” he continued politely. “I will share a little of the background as I understand it, in any case…”

“Of course,” she murmured, more than happy to hear his take on events.

“Well, I first became aware of some of these matters a week or so ago…”

As she listened to him give a quick summation of the unravelling of the political situation in Blue Water Province over the previous week, she took in the damage done to the valley once more.

Tang Jiao, the Jasmine and the white monkey were both just walking in silence, listening as well, while behind them, the saintesses seemed content to usher the surviving members of the censure force over to her disciples, but didn’t leave them unescorted. The lily-crowned woman just fell in near the white monkey, seemingly a bit reticent now for some reason.

“So, this appears at its root to be some ploy by the Din clan?” she mused at last, as Tai Wen started to explain the actions of the group that had actually reduced one of Yin Eclipses great ‘stronghold valleys’ to a smouldering, yang poisoned swamp.

“On the surface, at least,” Tai Wen agreed. “The four had enough artefacts on them to secure the foundation of a hegemonic power in this era. And on the face of it…”

“—A large quantity were seemingly robbed from one of my sect’s subsidiary powers,” she sighed.

“Yes.” He affirmed. “Speaking of that…”

Even as he spoke, she felt something subtle shift in the air around them. It wasn’t a return of the yang strength but, so attuned in the moment to ‘yang’ energies was she, that she still felt the faint attempt at something prying on this location, before it foundered on something.

“It seems eyes have begun to rove, and that was remarkably precise for the chaos around here,” she frowned.

“Yes, they had some potent protections,” Tai Wen nodded again. “I regret that that might have been the result of one of them—a…”

“Devouring Eyes talisman?” she frowned, considering the residual trace as it dissipated into the valley around them. “Someone is looking for it?”

“You see it clearly,” Tai Wen confirmed, before sighing softly.

“A Devouring Eyes Talisman… hmmm, that explains some things… certainly.” Tang Jiao, who had been listening silently until this point as they walked mused, stroking his beard.

“That is a big investment,” she mused.

Even in a great world like this with the interest of multiple heavenly clans associated on it, those were the tools of the truly deep pocketed.

“I take it the Meng one is…?” Tai Wen trailed off, not quite looking sideways at her.

“Accounted for? Yes,” she affirmed drily.

There was much to share here, but she didn’t need to give him, or anyone else here, more than that. It was currently being used to shelter Azure Sword and as an extra layer of protection on some assets she had no interest in letting the wider great world get any hint of. It would be of no use against someone of Tang Jiao’s realm anyway in any case.

“The one they used should be the one that belonged to the Zi clan,” she informed him after thinking for a moment.

She had told Yun Quan she would let Azure Sword take care of it, but in fact, if the Tai clan was willing to help there, it would only be a benefit.

“—Ah, the one that went missing during the collapse of the last dynasty…” Tai Wen frowned. “I thought that ended up in the hands of that old fellow from the Kong, like so many other things.”

“Apparently not,” Tang Jiao mused.

“I had planned to do something about it, after… this…” she waved a hand at their surroundings. “But perhaps we have a common interest in this?” she added, glancing at Tang Jiao.

“It does indeed suit none of us to have such a tool unaccounted for,” Tang Jiao agreed.

“Although, knowing they possess it, and are seeking it already?” Tai Wen glanced up at the sky, pensively. “It seems a waste to eliminate it injudiciously…”

“Just using it for this is a waste,” she mused.

It was not impossible that someone had decided to deploy it just for this, but even if…

Unbidden, the flash of that red-eyed, androgynously alluring figure, grasping for her mother’s sword, slid back into her mind’s eye.

“Are there any sealed remnants in this place, Lady Jasmine?” she asked, turning to the Jasmine Saintess.

“There are a few,” the Jasmine affirmed. “But they are not simple, and the things you must brave to get to them…”

“Are even less so,” Tang Jiao mused.

“Those eyes…” she nodded, thinking back to that creeping, hungry sense at the end, just before the Yang Seed was pacified.

“They are such a thing,” the Jasmine agreed. “Lost, broken, remnant and wholly dreadful.”

None of them needed to say more than that, really. There were truly things in this place too terrifying for words, entombed in the darkness, bound to it in ways so profound that her mother had claimed they were obscured even from the Heavenly Dao in part.

“But what if some idiots did get past…” she frowned. “And returned?”

“Then things will change.” Tang Jiao said simply, but with such a subtle sense of finality that if they heard those words in the corridors of the Imperial Palace, she wondered if the current Emperor might not chop the head of every member of the Din and Di clans this very hour.

“—and the people of this world will learn anew why those few who remain, who saw this place fall do not speak of those days lightly,” Tai Wen sighed, before glancing at her. “Why?”

“Hmmm…” she glanced at her mother’s sword, in Tang Jiao’s hand. “I saw some things before coming here. Among the targets that these swords struck at, was a group fleeing a cave, but the timing does not easily match, unless…”

“Temporal manipulation…” Tang Jiao frowned, holding up the sword to ponder it. “Profound and difficult to discern.”

“I have been granted certain protections,” she reminded him.

“Understandable,” Tang Jiao nodded.

“What did you see?” the Jasmine asked.

“A pale, androgynous youth, dark haired, red eyes… in the shadows of a cave mouth. Two other obscured, and he held in his hand an object that even though I picture it now, I cannot describe,” she elaborated, conjuring a facsimile of the scroll capturing his appearance and that moment that she had previously drawn, because the original memory was well beyond her being able to manifest directly. “It is cube-like, though and maybe… this big?” she held her hands about fifteen centimetres apart.

“There are a few things that could be,” the Jasmine sighed.

“It was able to repel one of my mother’s swords,” she added.

“Hmmm, I can make some inquiries,” Tai Wen mused. “There are…”

He trailed off again and glanced at the sky, as for the second time, she also felt faint brush of prying eyes.

“That is those three old fellows on Mount Kunlun,” Tai Wen grunted.

There was another subtle sense of peering, if indirect and unfocused eyes a moment later.

“And that should be old Shan Jiang,” Tang Jiao shook his head. “He has not gotten any lighter in his touch, despite the years, how disappointing.

“Well, he was warned not to rush to get to Venerate too quickly,” she chuckled, recalling who he was speaking of.

“He was,” Tai Wen agreed, returning his gaze to their immediate surroundings. “In any case, I believe we are nearly here, though even in the short time since, the landscape has changed even more.”

“Well, a lot of explosions will do that to a place, even here.” The Night Blossom Saintess suggested archly. “Maybe someone should blow up Blue Water City like this, see how many identifiable landmarks remain?”

“Be my guest,” Tai Wen chuckled mirthlessly. “Maybe just give me a bit of forewarning so I can get anyone I care about out of there first?”

“…”

The Jasmine rolled her eyes.

“The tree… the island… the immortal pillars… hmmm.” Tai Wen turned in a slow circle, considering their surroundings and the badly burnt spirit tree rising above them, then beckoned to Meng Guanyue, who had been walking along in silence, letting Meng Tan and Sai Xingxiu talk to the survivors of the Censure Force. “Miss Meng, do you have a stronger sense of what is calling to you here?”

“I… yes,” Meng Guanyue nodded after a moment’s contemplation of their surroundings, then pointed towards the rising swathe of smoking mud and tumbled stonework ahead of them. “It’s there.”

She tried to spread out her senses to check the surroundings but found, much as she anticipated really, that she could barely penetrate the surface of the slagged mud, nevermind what was below. Everything was suffused by a nauseating mix of decaying yang strength, Parasol Qi and a few other very exotic traces that put her in mind of a phoenix’s rebirth pyre. There were also lingering traces of one of her families’ compasses—almost certainly the one originally placed in Murali’s shrine.

“There are profound, yet conflicting traces of the Dharma here,” Tang Jiao mused, crouching down scooping up a handful of the heat-hardened mud and crumbling it between his fingers.

“Those brats deployed one of your Tang clan’s old Judgement platforms,” Tai Wen informed him, jerking his head towards the nearest of the uprights.

Looking where he indicated, she quickly located the scar-trace of extermination lightning at its summit.

“Extermination lightning, huh,” Song Peizhi muttered under his breath beside her.

“Fortunately, they wasted it quite spectacularly,” the Jasmine informed them. “As to what is buried here…”

She turned back to the Jasmine and watched as she stretched out her right hand—

The ruined ground around them shuddered. Cracks spread across the undulating, glassy surface, spreading swirls of iridescent qi wherever they went, then, with a grinding groan, the rubble and dirt drifted up into the air and swirled away, exposing the golden-hued outline of a half-buried figure.

“So, I was going to explain before…” Tai Wen sighed as they watched the Jasmine drag the figure over to them. “But we got distracted by those prying eyes.”

“Explain…?” she raised an eyebrow.

“—Long ago, I had the misfortune to meet a meddling old fellow who wanted to make his end a problem for other people,” the woman with a lily in her hair cut in, walking forward to join them.

“You certainly know him by reputation—if not by merit,” the Lily added. “Mahajingvu, they called him, the Arhat of Great Spirit. There is a lot to say about him, but I did not always live in these mountains. I was born in the Lake of a Thousand Stupa’s, and lived there with my sisters, until that Prince Kong Wei Yuan toppled them to prove a point. I escaped. Most did not, and were refined by him into great golden pills for his disciples.”

“Mahajingvu saved you,” she sighed, recalling that gloomy moment from a bygone era.

It had been in the Interregnum years, when the Meng clan’s control was shaken by the fall of Yin Eclipse and many eyes were interested in it. She had not yet set up the Seven Sovereigns precursor influence, when Kong Wei Yuan had arrived, seeking a foolish junior who had somehow led along one of his junior female relatives. The Junior had been taking part in some competition hosted by the Thousand Dharma’s Temple. The old master had tried to mediate, but failed, and Kong Wei Yuan had obliterated the entire place, lake, ancestral grounds and all, taken all its wealth… and refined all of the spirit herbs. The old master of that temple had been one of Mahajingvu’s disciples.

“He did,” she nodded, staring at the young woman. “He took me to Yin Eclipse, and tried to convince me not to pursue vengeance, but the world is cruel and that Prince Wei never forgot.”

“How does that tie back to her?” Tai Wen asked, sounding curious.

“I came across her, already dying from the blades of Kong assassins,” the Lily replied. “Her life-essence was already crumbling, and it was only thanks to her mantra that she endured under their cursed blades—"

“—And you kept her corpse ever since? And didn’t even send word?” Guanyue growled, rounding on the woman.

“I offered, but she refused,” the Lily shrugged. “They marked her with a curse, and she was determined to not condemn others, especially those closest to her.”

“A curse…?” she frowned.

That made sense

“To beguile and damage those around her,” the Lily elaborated. “However, as long as she remained in these lands, their unique nature was able to dampen it. I cannot claim to have any regard for your folk—never have you done right by us, and ever have you sought to sublimate us for your own ends; however, she and I struck a deal. I could not save her mortal longevity, and unfortunately, her companions had already fallen and the one she sought was beyond reach—”

“White Swan?” she asked.

“The same,” the Lily nodded. “With Mahajingvu’s aid I was able to forestall the curse they wrought, and agreed to preserve a spark of her essence within her mantra. I even sent word that she had perished, and took some steps to obfuscate how, to dissuade the Kong. Because of your clan’s past connections to my homeland, I even went behind her back to tell your clan, but my messenger was treated lightly by those who followed her in her role in the Meng clan, and so she considered that enough, in the end.”

“Treated… lightly?” Guanyue’s eyes narrowed as she turned back to look at Tuo Kankai, who flinched and flushed with anger.

-Ah, of course it would be something like that, she sighed inwardly.

Indeed, it was hard, from the height they stood on, to point fingers at a being like this. To argue over the corpses beneath one’s feet was little better than descending to the level of children, rolling in the mud, screaming insults that would bring no catharsis.

She had been off world at the time, and Guanyue had accompanied her on that ill-fated endeavour in the Ten Songs Starfield. Tuo Kankai’s family had been courted by other factions in the Heavenly Meng, and his father had gained the seat Guanxi held before she vanished. For the sake of his own family’s advancement in this era, he had likely let the search for his predecessor quietly fall into shadow, and preoccupied as she had been with the collapse of her clan’s influence on her return, it had never reached her, beyond the report that Guanxi vanished in Yin Eclipse, along with Hao Tianxun and several other notable companions of White Swan Empress.

“It seems I have failed you,” she muttered, putting a hand on Guanyue’s shoulder.

“M-My father would never!” Tuo Kankai snapped, turning to Meng Tan. “Ancestor Tan, Ancestor Song, will you take the word of this… this corpse robber, over my family?”

“Today?” Meng Tan raised an eyebrow. “You do not want me to answer that question, I hope.”

Tuo Kankai flinched as if slapped, then turned to her, to her surprise.

“Young Lady Meng, my family has served your clan loyally, I refuse to speak ill of our founder’s lineage, but surely…?”

“…”

She stared at him for a long moment, not sure whether to laugh or cry. It was true she looked nothing like Meng Fu, but he was part of the Seven Sovereign’s Upper Echelon. Not recognising her for a moment was one thing, but to still be blind…? Though she supposed, on reflection, he had not been able to hear her conversation with Tai Wen, such was the nature of the suppression here, and she was acting very casually, so…

With a sigh, she shook her head and turned back to the Lily, picking her words carefully.

“Circumstances in the past are the past. Today is today, tomorrow will be tomorrow. Do you have any other corpses that I should know about?”

“It is fairly self-explanatory why you have Hao Tianxun in your possession,” Tai Wen remarked drily. “But I am curious about Xue Ming.”

“Hao Tianxun?” she turned to Tai Wen now, surprised.

The Lily gave Tai Wen a sideways look and sighed.

“It seems a great many threads are coming back together in ways few could have foreseen,” Tang Jiao mused, giving the Lily a deep look.

“So it seems,” she agreed just about succeeding in not sighing outwardly.

“—Is this the mythical ‘failing upwards’?” the Myrtle murmured to the Willow just loud enough for the rest of them to hear.

“Enlightenment, indeed,” the Willow snickered.

“I don’t have your missing emperor, if that is what you are wondering. He vanished in the Green Grave,” the Lily replied to Tang Jiao, before glancing archly over at the saintess’s. “Even they can’t go there lightly.”

“—In any case,” she cut back in, before the topic could get derailed further by needless bickering. “You said that a spark of her consciousness was preserved?”

“She intended it to pass on her legacy, if circumstances permitted,” the Lily nodded. “I did not expect that some aspect of her soul would be temporarily reconstituted via what they did with that compass—however, it did give Mahajingvu the means to help her, in the end.”

Indeed, the Jasmine had pulled Guanxi’s body over to them while they were talking, and she could see now why she had not been able to sense it before. The dark golden coating on her skin looked innocuous from a distance, but it was in fact a manifestation of a very famous, if now exceedingly rare, Dharma Method.

“Is this one of the Great Golden Bodies?” Meng Tan asked her.

“It is,” she affirmed, before glancing at Tang Jiao. “It should be the Great Purity Golden Body?”

“Indeed,” the old dragon nodded, crouching down beside the body. “That old fellow had cultivated it to a remarkable degree. It seems he has cast it off onto her, and taken the next step.”

“It… hasn’t been contaminated by the yang energies?” Cao Liang asked nervously.

“No,” Tai Wen replied before she could. “This method is…”

“—Storied?” she suggested drily.

That was putting it mildly. The ‘Great Bodies of the Transcendent Vehicle’, to give them their full and slightly mealy-mouthed name in Imperial Common, were the pinnacle of attainment for any Dharma practitioner prior to attaining the status of an enshrined Bodhisattva, and each was comparable to a peerless Heavenly Physique. Surely some idiots in this era would roundly curse Mahajingvu’s name, that he had ‘wasted’ the opportunity to bestow such a treasure of the heavens on a ‘mere’ corpse—but then again, that was also why they would never encounter such a treasure no matter how many lives they lived.

“That is a way to describe it, certainly,” Tai Wen agreed.

“And yet… he still perished in these mountains, such a figure…” Heng Jiayi sighed, shaking his head.

“Perished perhaps, but it was not in vain,” Tang Jiao shook his head. “I think you understand that, in your heart, don’t you, young lady?” the dragon added to Meng Guanyue. “This, perhaps, was his trial, and questing with good will, he has overcome it.”

“I… yes,” Meng Guanyue bowed to the old dragon, a complicated look on her face.

-Ah so this was why she was so determined to come along, she mused, considering Guanyue, who didn’t quite meet her gaze. Though whatever he left must have been cryptic, or she would have said something of the specifics, unless that was also part of his advice?

Crouching down by the body, she carefully placed her fingers to Guanxi’s temple and third eye—

The golden hue coating her skin peeled a little at her touch, some of it flaking off as Guanxi stirred, swirling around them for a few moments, darting this way and that like a tiny curious fish, before fading away.

“Is… is she okay?” Guanyue asked nervously.

“She is alive,” she informed them drily.

In terms of her physical condition, Guanxi was little better off than Ji Ming or Lian Erbei, though she had the advantage of a much stronger foundation. Still, her soul’s connection to her body was fragile, and largely supported and sheltered by the Great Purity Golden Body, which was slowly and methodically refining qi of all types from the surroundings to restore her.

She was about to say more, when a faint tremor shook their surroundings.

“It’s just an aftershock,” Tang Jiao reassured the censure survivors, who all flinched, as the distant echo of falling rock reached them. A moment later, however, she also felt another probing spiritual sense disturb their surroundings, seeking from beyond the horizon. This one had more in common with the second, but had more of a ‘flowing’ feeling to it, so it was one of the old Ancestors from the Huang factions.

“It occurs to me that the spiritual reactivation of a Dao Step Cultivator, along with the presence of a Great Golden Body, might show up on some of those greedy fellow’s divinations,” Song Peizhi observed.

“Mmmm, yes,” Tai Wen nodded. “However, if it is just this much, I can keep obfuscating matters.”

“Once things calm down it will return to how it was,” the Jasmine added.

“L-Lady Meng?”

Guanxi’s voice, disbelieving and quavering, whispered ethereally in her ears, transferred purely by the intent from her soul

“Is… that really you?”

“It is.” She affirmed gently.

“You… are…?”

“No, I am not a trick of a phantasm of their making,” she reassured her.

“…”

She could still sense some quite understandable hesitation from Guanxi’s spirit. Setting aside the whole matter of her death, she could feel the traces of what the compass had done to her, now as well. On its own, it had not been able to achieve a complete spiritual re-activation, but the spark that the Lily had kept had provided enough to work with to bridge that gap. It was indeed just the kind of quiet, profound auspicious working that would draw the over-sensitive and acquisitive eyes of those who should really know better, if only because the number of entities capable of this feat in this era were few and far between, and none were remotely simple.

Rather than force the issue, however, she took her hands away and sat back. After a moment, Guanxi took a shallow breath and then, at last, opened her eyes to look up at the cloud-veiled sky.

“Weird… it is like I can still almost see that meddling old fellow,” she whispered. “Why did he…?”

“Destiny is in what is written.” Tang Jiao murmured wryly. “What’s done shapes what’s to come.”

Guanxi flinched as she realised who had spoken.

“Indeed,” the Jasmine agreed rolling her eyes. “—none escape.”

“I feel that that old homily is getting a lot of milage today,” the white monkey grumbled.

“This… really isn’t some devious trick of that villain?” Guanxi asked, disbelievingly, as she took them in.

“What villain would dare conjure me?” Tang Jiao chuckled, making his way over to her.

“—or know this appearance of mine.” Tai Wen snorted.

“Or even know who they are…” the Lily added shooting another sideways look at the other Saintesses that they affected not to notice.

Guanxi’s eyes widened a little as she realised the Lily was there, then she sighed deeply.

“It seems our deal is complete,” the Lily bowed formally to her.

“So it seems.” Guanxi agreed.

“When you say ‘that villain’?” she asked.

“The thing in the Yang Intent…” Guanxi replied softly. “I could hear it, even with whatever that old Buddhist did, it kept trying to lure me out of myself, showed me all sorts of…” she trailed off, shuddering.

As Guanxi spoke, she found herself carefully examining the Yang Intent in their surroundings, but unlike with Ji Ming, her words drew no overt reaction from it, which was reassuring.

“It even took your form, Lady Fu, though not as you are now… but how I remember you,” Guanxi added.

“Yes, it took a semblance of my appearance, drawn from the memories instilled within that core, and perhaps the compass you were tasked to use as well,” she replied.

“L-Lady Fu?” behind her, Tuo Kankai’s horrified gasp as reality finally settled on his shoulders made her roll her eyes.

“Now this idiot realises?” Arashin snorted.

Rather than immediately reply, she instead turned to look over towards where the great peak of Yin Eclipse would be and spent a moment composing her thoughts. The temptation to just scream pure rage in his face was actually very real, but the world did not need to see ‘Meng Fu—Furious and very willing to set things on fire starting with you edition’.

“You can control something of what these idiots trying to pry in here can see, right?” she turned back to Tai Wen, an idea—not entirely uninfluenced by a desire to turn that thread of rage in her into something productive to the moment—emerging.

“I… can, yes,” Tai Wen replied, giving her a calculating look.

“…”

She considered their surroundings, and then the distant cliffs, where fires were still burning in places, then with a sigh turned back to her disciples.

As she did so, her appearance shifted, the years settling back onto her—not so much that she looked ‘old’, but rather returning her to the appearance she had presented in the Seven Sovereigns. Beautiful, poised, motherly—a Heavenly Lady of status and prestige. Her robe she kept, for continuity, but a simple armour some older eyes would recognise as ‘her’ belongings, slid into focus over it.

Considering the perspective of how this would probably be presented, she glanced over to Meng Tan, Cao Liang and Heng Jiayi.

Sai Xingxiu, Arashin and Peizhi, intuiting something of what she was about without her even having to explain, had already smartly stepped back a few paces. Anything Tai Wen did would not be able to eliminate their presence entirely, but standing apart from her, they could be mistaken, in the suppression of the surroundings for mere ‘experts’ accompanying her, such was their age and general unfamiliarity to the powers of this era. Guanyue there was no point in concealing, and she herself had made no move to. Her arrival in the sect had been spectacular, and likely the most overtly marked, so her appearance here would not be unexpected.

“Six survivors…” happy things looked as they should, she finally fixed her gaze coldly on the stunned Tuo Kankai, who flinched back from her, as if slapped by her words as she slowly began to walk towards him. “Forty-seven… and six survived?”

“S-six?” Tuo Kankai managed to stammer, his already ashen expression turning sickly.

Yu Fei, Wen Kangfei and Qin Chi were just frozen in shock.

“Two Dao Sovereign Formations Grand Masters, a Martial Sovereign with a True Heart and Principle, three Dao Lords with an Earthly Principle, led by an Eternal realm Grand Elder and a Dao Eternal with a Heavenly Principle... Since when does a censure force like that just teleport blindly right into the heart of one of the most infamous forbidden zones in the entirety of the Azure Astral Starfield?”

“Are you trying to tell me that as external elders, purportedly versed in ‘living in the world’, you have risen to this eminent and respected position and never heard how obnoxious this place is to those of the second, nevermind third step, who enter unprepared and incautiously?”

The survivors flinched back from her, pale-faced and trembling as her intent bore down on them—Tuo Kankai practically grovelling in the mud, unable to move a muscle.

“—and you did that… just to save a bunch of Golden Immortal brats; one of whom is apparently an inheritance disciple of whom I have never heard, let alone met and whom no one can even inform me exactly which Inner Hall Elder of the Seven Stars Pavilion he was attached to?”

She paused for a moment, as she took the opportunity to gesture to their surroundings.

“Who has apparently vanished without a trace before you ever got here!”

Her disciples and Heng Jiayi all judiciously took an extra step back, as the air around them started to shimmer in a manner not at all dissimilar to what the Yang Intent had been doing earlier, but in this instance, it was all her. Nothing external influencing the haze of her inner rage physically manifesting for a moment, in spite of the realm suppression.

“The other—” she hissed, leaning forward and dragging the grovelling Tuo Kankai up, purely through her manifest intent, so he had to look her in the face. “—The other is an inheriting disciple from the Jade Gate Court’s Din Clan no less, who again, I observe is not here to be saved, and does not appear to be dead.

Tuo Kankai’s clothes that had survived this hellish place in much better condition than the more junior members of the censure force, actually started to smoke under the pressure of her presence.

Shaking her head in disgust, she turned away and gazed in the direction of the heart of Blue Water Province, and West Flower Picking Town, for a long moment, as much for dramatic effect as anything else. The onlookers expected a certain response in any case, so, she would give them one to chew on.

“Not only have you guilelessly behaved like the Imperial Court’s running dogs, disgracing the reputation of our side, but because of you, and your thoughtless actions, our vitality has suffered today,” she hissed, turning back to him.

That was honestly an understatement. Even a top tier sect would face a catastrophic collapse in their capabilities just from the losses incurred by this elite censure force, nevermind what had happened in the heart of the Seven Sovereigns since.

“Make no mistake, we have bled today. Xianyu and Shangrong. Yu Dai. Erbei—Ming… Dao Sovereigns and especially—especially Dao Eternals, do not grow on trees, to be picked and consumed like seasonal fruit as some Golden Immortal brat likes!”

Even though she only named those five, it was the disbelieving faces of the dead lying in the grand teleport hall—of Fumei and her golden-haired doll, of that little girl’s father and mother and so many more besides—that stared back at her.

Certainly, some who might witness this would see weakness in her actions. Or impetuousness, or a host of other flaws. She could kill Tuo Kankai, here and now, and she doubted anyone would complain, either.

Another ancestor of a great sect in her position would—and see strength and justice in that action. But even with the rage seething in her heart, she knew that would be a mistake. The wrong choice. It was crueller to let him live with the consequences. As Tang Long Jiao had said, as her mother had told her, as even her great grandfather had occasionally complained—‘What’s done, shapes what’s to come, none escape’.

Off to the side, side she could actually see Tang Jiao nodding, and the old white monkey rolling his eyes again.

There was not a clan or influence in the Seven Sovereign’s that hadn’t suffered in some way today, and it would not be hard for those who looked to piece together much of the general chain of events, and link it back to the censure force, itself a relic of a complicated accommodation reached by Tuo Kankai’s own father, among others with the new world order in this era led by the Kong and Huang. Tuo Kankai, so keen as he had been to lead it, would not escape the legacy of this as long as he lived, nor would his family and clan.

“But…” Tuo Kankai, lifelong politician that he was, finally managed to collect something of himself. “T-the c-censure request —”

“—Indeed, as part of the ‘treaty’ your father helped negotiate… in absentia,” Meng Tan cut in, coldly. “We, as a ‘righteous sect’, do have an obligation to provide support for Imperial Censure requests. However, there is an exception.”

“—Yin Eclipse.” Cao Liang added grimly, proving he at least had read the documents in full. “And any request to its surrounding provinces…”

“—Must be authorized by a core ancestor!” Heng Jiayi added flatly, folding his arms.

“Which last time I checked, was me, or Guanyue, or my immediate junior brothers,” Meng Tan continued as she watched on, approvingly as they found their stride. “Or Sect Mistress Yang. Junior Brother Ming, however, despite being teacher’s disciple, does not hold that position.” Meng Tan added, as Tuo Kankai opened his mouth, presumably to protest that exact point.

That was reading a little sketchily if you were literalist about the hierarchy within the sect, she had to concede, but it was also reminder to carve out a clarification on that when they returned.

“I certainly didn’t know about this until it occurred,” Cao Liang added gloomily.

“Nor I.” Guanyue agreed grimly.

“—Nor did Meng Yang,” Meng Tan nodded, as Tuo Kankai wilted under their baleful glares.

“Teacher—” he turned to her and saluted her formally. “I shall take these four back to the sect and see that a thorough investigation is undertaken.”

“First—” she held up a hand. “Tuo Kankai, I hereby strip you of your rank of Grand Elder in charge of Discipline.”

“A-ancestor–!” Tuo Kankai actually had the nerve, possibly due to the lingering influence of the Yang Qi on his judgement, if she was being charitable, to try and protest. Indeed, he nearly bit his own tongue a moment later, regret flashing in his eyes.

“…”

Rather than say anything, she just held his gaze steadily for a full ten seconds, watching him squirm, until at last she sighed and turned back to Meng Tan.

“Take them back,” she instructed him, doing her best to inject a peak amount of ‘I am very disappointed in this development’ into her tone.

“As you command, Teacher.” Meng Tan and the others all bowed politely, and she glanced over at Tai Wen, letting the moment drag for a few more moments so Meng Tan could direct the four to move a little further away.

“—And cut!” she declared drily, once they had moved a few metres, letting her anger slip back into the shadows

“Does that give you enough to work with?” she asked, giving him a cute smirk as the years slid back off her once more and she returned to her prior appearance.

“More than,” Tai Wen replied drily.

“…”

Tuo Kankai and the others were staring at her in shock like they had seen a ghost, such was the speed at which she ‘returned’ to her previous manner. Several of the ‘lesser’ spirit herbs watching in the middle distance were actually applauding cheekily she couldn’t help but notice.

“I was not kidding,” she informed him flatly. “You are no longer Discipline Grand Elder, and you have no idea how deep of a shit hole this catastrophe could yet become.”

“—yet.” Arashin deadpanned.

“Anyway,” she turned to Peizhi. “If you could take them to my personal estate, I think that is best.”

“As you command,” Song Peizhi saluted her.

Sending them back to the sect was out, if only because she did need answers, and those two missing Dao Sovereigns were bothering her. With damage done to the Seven Sovereigns there was no guarantee they would be secure, either, whereas with Azure Sword, who was basically managing it, there was no question of anyone short of someone like Tang Jiao’s stature getting close to them.

“Can you take her as well?” she added, nodding to Guanxi, who had watched the whole performance in silence.

“I can,” Song Peizhi confirmed. “I believe the Golden Body will protect her?” he added, turning to Tang Jiao and bowing respectfully.

“There should be no problems,” Tang Jiao agreed.

She watched as Guanyue helped up her sister, then carefully walked her over to the still shaking Tuo Kankai and the others. Peizhi spent a moment staring up at the sky, then walked over to join them.

“Ah—Actually…” she held up her hand to stop him.

Peizhi paused, turning back to her, a questioning look on his face.

“Take Tan and Jiayi with you as well,” she added, before turning to Meng Tan. “Can you go to Yang and stay with her? If you can, find our scholar friend as well.”

“Ah, of course,” Meng Tan nodded, seeing what she was thinking without her having to explain.

Meng Yang would certainly be heading to Blue Water City in short order, with a suitable escort, but having Meng Tan accompany her, along with Heng Jiayi would send a very clear message, and also give added weight to any conclusions their ‘curious’ onlookers might be tempted to draw.

“What about me?” Cao Liang asked, a little hesitantly.

“You get to stay,” she smirked. She had not had many opportunities to instruct him, and Yin Eclipse was as good a place as any to broaden his horizons, especially on a day like today. There also wasn’t much he could contribute, beyond awkward politics if he went to Blue Water City.

“…”

Cao Liang gave her a very confused look, while Arashin just put her hand sympathetically on his shoulder, ignoring the look she shot her as Meng Tan and Heng Jiayi made their way over to join Peizhi.

“In that case, we shall take our leave first,” Peizhi formally bowed to all of them.

Accepting his salute, she then stepped back, as did Meng Tan, taking Cao Liang and Heng Jiayi with him—

There was a sense of rushing wind and then the entire group around Peizhi… blurred upwards, vanishing into the cloud. The only trace they had been there was the vibrating cloud of dirt trying to fall upwards after them, which lingered on for several seconds before collapsing back to the ground.

While this was going on, she noted a few extra faces had appeared among the onlookers as well. There were some more awakened spirit herbs, but amongst them were a few that stood out.

An old Xuanwu, who had retained its natural form was deep in conversation with a bearded ‘old man’ in a grass cloak and hat—a ginseng herb based on the laws she could feel on it, that was itself a rare example of its kind taking on a male, rather than female form.

A Great Golden Kite, in the form of a muscular cultivator in a ragged blue robe, face concealed by a mask in the style of its species, but still sporting dark red-gold wings, was speaking to the white monkey venerable.

Three tall, strikingly beautiful dark-haired women, also dressed like cultivators, in revealing silken robes patterned with ever-repeating eyes were listening in on the Xuanwu, while a fourth, slightly older was standing with the Jasmine and Myrtle saintess’s.

All four were close enough in appearance that they could have been sisters by blood as well as oath, and she suspected they were—both, though not of any ‘sect’ the average cultivator would care to encounter. The Spider Queens of the East Fury Peaks had been a force in this region for a long time, influential even to the point where they had controlled sects and territory in the surrounding provinces, at least until Lu Fu Tao set in motion their reclamation in the current era.

The elder listening to the Saintesses noticed her gaze and saluted her politely, only for the Myrtle to then say something and to her surprise, lead the spider queen over to them.

“May I introduce Yushiki, eldest of her generation,” the Myrtle stated.

“Lady Meng,” the Spider Queen bowed politely to her. “Lord Tang.”

“I don’t believe I have had the pleasure,” she replied, returning the salute politely.

Behind her Xingxiu and Arashin had also politely saluted, as did Cao Liang, though he looked a bit reticent, she couldn’t help but notice. Yushiki also let her gaze stray to her disciple for a moment, but chose not to remark on it.

-I suppose there is some difficulty there with the Cao going back to Lu Fu Tao’s time, she mused.

Before any of them could say anything further, though, a winged figure descended down from the swirling cloud above to land on the nearest of the uprights, its sense sweeping across everything quite forcefully.

“Even that fellow got shaken out of his solitary roving, huh?” Tang Jiao muttered as everyone turned to consider the huge form of the shoebill stork.

“The shockwaves travelled far,” the Myrtle sighed. “Both below and above… The valleys between these peaks will be greatly disturbed for a long time, I suspect.”

With a ripple and fluffing of its feathers, the shoe-bill’s form shifted into something similar to the Golden Kite—a tall, muscular, winged male cultivator, clad in loose-fitting blue grey robes, though it kept its ‘real’ head and signature beak, then it descended down to the ground to land a short distance away.

“Strong,” Cao Liang muttered as the presence of the laws around it buffeted everyone a little.

“It is,” Sai Xingxiu nodded. “This is the elder son, he has always been a bit rough, and he dislikes those from outside these mountains intensely. Even before his mother was hunted down by Dun Kong Jiang, to prove his worth to become crown prince to replace Dun Fang after he left.”

“Long has it been since one of your kind came to these places,” the shoe-bill stated, provocatively to her.

“We have little cause,” she replied blandly, holding its gaze as it looked down at her.

The staring contest, which was farcical really, lasted for about ten seconds, before it was forced to look away, eliciting eyerolls from the several of the onlooking spirit herbs.

“And yet, now the qi of your wretched weeds pollutes our valleys, and the screeching lament of your minion’s death-pyre still echoes in these heights,” the shoe-bill retorted.

“…”

“Last I checked, these were not your ‘heights’ either,” the Myrtle cut in, archly. “And Lady Fu is our guest. We have already plucked one insolent bird’s tail feathers today. Don’t tempt my sisters into working to create a set, An’yong.”

The shoe-bill flinched backwards as the Myrtle’s presence intensified profoundly for a moment, then with a faint grimace, bowed to her in apology.

Rather than accept it though, the Myrtle just slid her eyes sideways to her.

“…”

The An’yong stared at the Myrtle, then at her, and then sighed, its shoulders slumping and some of its anger and arrogance fading as it bowed to her in apology.

“The moment has got to me, please accept my apology for my interruption.”

“It is fine,” she waved her hand more magnanimously, accepting his slight bow, because there was no point getting caught up in fractious tit-for-tat with what was one of the real powers of these peaks.

“This does bring us to why I wanted to introduce Yushiki to you,” the Myrtle continued. “And I anticipate that Lord Jiao also has thoughts in the same direction?”

“You anticipate wisely,” Tang Long Jiao agreed, stepping back into the conversation at her invitation and holding out one of her mother’s swords to her.

She accepted it and blinked as she realised it was… completely sealed.

“Before you ask, it was like this when it tried to hit me. I had to be quite… robust with the spirit,” Tang Jiao informed her apologetically. “But it should suffer no lasting damage.”

-Ah, that would be what I felt, she mused, considering the weapon in her hand and recalling what she had sensed at the moment of their impact.

Focusing her intent on it, she touched her mother’s control seal, imprinted into the sword directly—

It shook, the space around them trembling faintly, but the seal, while it weakened a little did not crack, and some semblance of it seemed to fade out of her awareness, even as she searched for it.

“Time Law?” she narrowed her eyes, staring at the blade.

“Indeed,” Tang Jiao grimaced. “And their application is strange. Hollow, aloof. This was not done by a person, but an object. The intent behind it is formidable, but should be no match for me, or for several others here—” he nodded to the Jasmine. “And yet…”

“It resists…” she pursed her lips and tried again to reconnect her mother’s seal to the sword.

The link wasn’t broken, and in fact, from her side, it registered nothing wrong—unless she held the sword in her hand and tried directly.

“The seal is out of synch with the moment?” she frowned after a moment’s further consideration.

“Indeed.” Tang Jiao nodded.

“—You say that, but you have not in fact shown it to me, yet.”

She blinked as the Jasmine appeared right beside them, giving Tang Jiao a sideways look. Cao Liang, so focused on her and the sword, actually started in surprise.

“Ah, my apologies,” the Dragon coughed. “Events simply overtook the moment.”

“Indeed,” the Jasmine agreed drily, before turning to her. “Can I have a look at it, Lady Fu?”

“Sure…” seeing no reason why not, she passed the sword to the Jasmine, who considered it for a long moment, then closed her eyes—

A shimmering eight-pointed star appeared over the jasmine’s hand, expanding to cover the whole sword, then with a silent sense of something shifting, a blurry figure staggered into focus next to them, holding out their hands to stop—

With a crisp chime something within her link to the sword changed, and suddenly the sword spirit, bearing a remarkable similarity to her mother, stood there, looking around in shock and anger, before finding her.

“I… uh, sorry, Young Mistress.” The sword spirit bowed to her abjectly. “We failed to—”

“It’s fine,” she stopped the spirit bowing more deeply. “Circumstances are what they are, and you did your best.”

“No… you don’t… ah…” the spirit started to speak, then trailed off, a look of confusion on her face and put a hand to her temple—

The Jasmine caught the spirit before it could fall over, which was not normal behaviour for one.

“The seal still remains,” the Jasmine sighed. “I just exploited a loophole few have ever been able to close in the nature of such artefacts that gain sapience in this way.”

“What… did that thing do to me?” the spirit asked the Jasmine in confusion. “I feel like I have a hole in my head.”

“You do, your ‘self’ of the last… hour, at least, is still bound within the sword,” the Jasmine informed the spirit. “If I had all of you in front of me, I should be able to break it, but…”

“This seal is going to make finding them hard,” she sighed.

The aura of the sword was non-existent, and while there was some outward emanation, it was sealed by something Tang Jiao had done.

“—In fact, this is going to be a bigger problem,” she groaned, as she considered the sword in the jasmine’s hand.

“The Parasol Qi,” Sai Xingxue suggested.

“Yes,” she nodded, looking around.

There was still a lot of it, even in the surroundings here, but it was not of the same quality. The source was probably the sword that had been in Murali’s shrine.

“—The second aspect of this,” Yushiki spoke up again, “relates to this army of mutated tetrids that has sprouted like mushrooms in the rain.”

“Ah yes, them,” Tai Wen sighed, turning to her. “I was going to bring them up, but again, events have overrun my original explanation a little.”

“Understandably,” she conceded.

“The tetrids should be the work of a newly emergent influence—the Five Fans,” Tai Wen continued.

“The who now?” Arashin asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Ah, I know something of them,” Cao Liang spoke up, burying a grimace. “On the face of it, they are a local ‘bandit confederation’ that have been operating in the shadows of Blue Water Province of late. They emerged around the time of the Three Schools Conflict, some thirty years ago though their roots go back to the Yeng clan—”

“And a few others,” Tai Wen added.

“Yes, they have been a continual thorn in the side of my nephew,” Cao Liang sighed.

“Yeng Clan? The group from what used to be Iron Fan Province, when Ling Yufan was still Grand Duke?”

Unfortunately, the detailed geopolitics of Eastern Azure for the last forty or so thousand years were a bit of a haze to her. It was one reason she was content to let her disciples, and the sect handle the immediate, political pushback to this whole mess.

“—who the Deng displaced during the reclamation thirty thousand years ago?”

“That’s them,” Cao Liang confirmed. “The Blood Eclipse occurred while you were in seclusion. And then my older brother…”

“—Decided now was the moment, to seek his own destiny in the dark corners of this place, yes,” she continued, seeing where this was going.

“Anyway, this army of mutated tetrids should be their work,” Tai Wen confirmed.

“Yes…” Cao Liang didn’t quite meet her gaze there.

She knew he had had no part in that—his relationship with his older half-brother and former Duke of Blue Water Province, Cao Hongjun was strained… at best. They shared a father, and little else, though she supposed Liang had had to step up since Cao Hongjun departed so abruptly, and before anyone could work out what he had uncovered in that place.

“The Yeng clan were skilled at the manipulation of creatures,” she mused, pondering what she knew of them. “But it is no small investment to raise an army of such things capable of causing problems this deep into the mountains…”

That spoke to a much deeper backer.

“Indeed,” Tai Wen agreed. “My son has been looking into this, and it seems that this group is a front for various influences on the Central Continent who want to disrupt the Azure Astral Authority’s weakened grip on the province since the Blood Eclipse. With that in mind, they have also seemingly drawn in the surviving perpetrators of the Blood Eclipse and elements of some of the older tribal powers and their ‘fronting’ influences, like the Golden Mask.”

“How severe a force are we talking?” she asked, turning back to Yushiki.

“Tens of thousands, they are crawling out of nowhere,” the spider queen replied with a grimace. “And there are many mutates, born to Parasol Qi and worse among them.”

“So, this collaboration runs deep,” Tang Jiao mused. “I saw one, in the depths, briefly. It was a formidable thing—for what it was, fused to the body of a powerful physical cultivator—reminiscent of the Purple Cloud Cult.”

“There are some like that among those running riot through the valleys north and south of here,” Yushiki added. “According to my sister—” she nodded to the elder of the three still talking to various spirit herbs “—they first appeared in force to the south, then rapidly from the north, as our nests were disturbed by those who eventually penetrated the heart of this place.”

“These things, we know of them also,” An’yong frowned. “For several seasons, our lesser kin have observed them to skulk in shadow, seeking paths to the pits beneath the high peaks. They are not hard to kill, but they are elusive.”

“—And my mother’s swords are scattered right into the heart of this,” she sighed more deeply.

“I should be able to give you some indication of where they went,” Tai Wen interjected helpfully. “The temporal distortion does make things weird, but it should not take me too long to get you something useful.”

“We should be able to make a compass from this sword as well,” she mused, after nodding to him in thanks. “If you can provide telemetry as well, it should make things much easier.”

“I know where one is, Lady Fu,” Yushiki added. “It is about ten miles that way, buried in the ridge.” The spider queen pointed north-east as she spoke.

“They should have landed much closer, surely?” Cao Liang asked, frowning.

“Initially, yes,” she agreed. “However, between the extant dimensional distortions affecting this place, the extensive bleeding out of the spatial reservoirs in surrounding ridgelines, and this temporal seal, if they are all only ten miles from here I will be impressed.”

At her words, the sword spirit just slumped its shoulders still further.

“There is also the influence their presence will have, if they are all bound like this,” the Jasmine mused, considering the sword. “Parasol Qi is avaricious and, unbound from the ego of the spirits in those swords, it will act in defence of itself in a way that will be particularly insidious on the local valley eco-systems, especially as the suppression starts to push back.”

“Not to mention all the Yang Qi that has been diffused across this part of the mountains,” Tang Jiao added. “It penetrated deep enough that i would be very surprised if those five-eyed lizards are the only thing it disturbed down there.”

“Ugh, there are them as well,” the Myrtle rubbed her temples, glaring at the distant ridge to their right.

“The… thing we saw when the seed tried to… do what it did at the end?” Cao Liang asked Arashin quietly.

“Yes,” Arashin nodded grimly. “They are dangerous beyond compare.”

“That this era has never dealt with them in force is a mercy you should thank the Pure Ones for,” Sai Xingxiu agreed, his words eliciting nods from the Myrtle and Tang Jiao as well.

“They can still die.” Yushiki observed grimly.

“—Eventually.” Arashin added.

“You know what the worst part of this is?” Sai Xingxiu put a hand on Cao Liang’s shoulder, and gestured to the ruin around them. “Even with all this, and what transpired back at the sect, I still don’t think this morning has made my top three ‘what in the heavenly gods possessed someone to do what now?’ incidents I associated with these mountains.

“What would you rank first?” The Myrtle asked drily.

“First?” Sai Xingxiu laughed mirthlessly. “I think the ‘demise’—or at least I have to assume he perished—of ‘Heaven Grasping Ascendant Sage’, would top the list for me.”

“Uggh, please don’t speak of him,” the Jasmine shuddered. “What kind of lunatic tries to refine this entire place as their Heavenly Truth?”

“An idiot?” she suggested blandly, while Tang Jiao just shook his head ruefully.

“—If there was a red talisman and a bell rope somewhere that said ‘danger, do not touch, world may end’, you know cultivators would be queuing up for a thousand miles to yank it off,” Tai Wen interjected, rolling his eyes.

“Especially if paired with the special allure this place seems to project for a certain kind of idiot,” she agreed. “If I had a Dao Jade for every time someone has attempted it I’d have three, as well, which is slightly disturbing in its own right.”

“It’s happened three times?”

She was amused to see Xingxiu look somewhat aghast, though it was understandable really.

The matter with Heaven Grasping Ascendant Sage had… been memorable, and not in a good way, and truthfully, neither of those other two incidents she referenced had been close to that scale. The backlash Jiang Tianyu’s ritual had caused in the mountain had nearly fractured the fundamental principles of the world in regards to the advancement of all cultivators, and it had taken almost fifty thousand years and a huge amount of resources from the Meng and Tang Heavenly clan’s to fix, and even to this day, there were certain dao’s that Eastern Azure’s heavenly order would persecute excessively, in spite of the best efforts of every dynasty since.

“What would you consider second?” Arashin asked with a giggle. “The death of Prince Ming Huangfei?”

“Probably,” Xingxiu sighed. “And of course, there is the incident with those horrific five-eyed things during the reign of the Eternal Star Empress. The cost to eliminate that ruin… we had to purchase at a price that makes the ‘Blood Eclipse’ that is so recent a scar on this region seem a mere skirmish in comparison.”

“Quite,” the Jasmine nodded. “It is easy to speak of it now, but the root of that Yang Strength cannot be underestimated. If left unchecked, it could be a disaster as great as any you have seen since these mountains fused with your world.”

“All the more reason for us to act appropriately,” she stated, glancing at the others. “All of us can recall worse moments than this, but that doesn’t mean what has transpired this morning cannot yet spiral out of control.”

“That is certainly something everyone here can agree on,” Tang Jiao nodded at her words. “Even if these incidents feel like ancient history to youngsters such as you,” his gaze took in the spider queen, Cao Liang, the shoe-bill and even Xingxiu and Arashin. “—and quite rightly banished to the nightmares of us old folks, does not mean a moment like them cannot come again.”

“—Especially when these last few generations have continued to surprise in all the worst ways,” Tai Wen mused gloomily. “It is depressing how quickly—”

“—or lightly,” she interjected.

“Yes,” he nodded. “They cast off the memory of what happened a mere thirty thousand years ago.”

“Immortals are easy to raise, with power.” Cao Liang suggested pensively.

“—And few in this era truly appreciate the fangs this land can present you with if you treat it without care,” Arashin sighed.

“Such hopes and dreams, those covetous children had, upon the return of Lu Fu Tao from this place,” she added, shaking her head ruefully.

“—And yet, for all the weight of manifest destiny your people have claimed, they still saw the pride of their junior generations sink without a trace into the mountains,” the shoe-bill remarked hawkishly.

“If there is one thing I have learned, in all my years watching these mountains from near and far, it is that they care little where you come from, or where you intend to go to,” she replied. “My mother called this place a tombstone, and I have seen nothing that has dissuaded me of the wisdom of her pronunciation since the day it crashed down.”

“A tombstone, huh,” the Jasmine turned to look towards the interior, and just sighed softly. “That is indeed an epitaph it is hard to deny.”