> …It was before the Blue Water City was founded, before the Blue Morality Emperor took his throne, that Lu Fu Tao, Blue Water Sage as he would later be styled, came to the mysterious and forgotten land of Yin Eclipse and meditated in the valleys. Apparently he lived in the Blue Water Mountains for several centuries, investigating the great mysteries of the Dao, training disciples and occasionally slaughtering demonic beasts and performing various deeds of good merit for the wild people of those lands who had long been abandoned to Imperial Governance and the Azure Authority alike.

>

> Then one day, as some of his disciples were exploring a valley within that dark and forbidden zone around the Great Mount, they found a spatial rift, purported to be not far to the west of the great peak of the thundering clouds. A place where that valley joined another inexplicably. Upon being informed of this, and being a valorous and upright person and generally righteous in his demeanour, the Blue Water Sage by all accounts became concerned for the local people who, unenlightened, eked out a crude living around the edge of the forbidden zone using herbs and other such things to sell at the coast to those who crossed the ocean.

>

> He, Lu Fu Tao, and some of his disciples met with several of the elders of those people and they in turn informed the future sage that their own ancestors had occasionally gotten caught in the rifts and that while some had vanished without trace, several had returned each having attained strange enlightenments. This discourse lead, apparently, to an exchange of views and teaching between the future sage and the locals who lived there. They showed him some of the things that had emerged over the years, mostly innocuous or strange, and he gave them new insights into the will of the heavens and the movement of the celestial bodies, sharing with them the teachings of the Heavenly Dao in all its wonder.

Writing on the matter of the Blue Water Sage Volume 2

  ~ Author Unknown – attributed to a Chronicler Jiang.

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~ JUN ARAI – JADE WILLOW FARMLAND ~

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‘—Never forget, the star-rating system exists for bureaucrats and book-keepers, not for you, who has to haul the fate-thrashed thing out of the dirt.’

These words of wisdom from Old Ling, the ranking elder in West Flower Picking Town’s Hunter Pavilion, echoed in her mind as she watched the three Golden Core cultivators wrestle with a purportedly ‘Qi Refinement’ lotus she was no longer sure she wanted to consider a Duo Li’s water lotus at all.

It had actually been the one to initiate the ambush, hiding amidst a bunch of its lesser spirit vegetation kin and pouncing on the unlucky Fan Bo Pei as he was dragging out a quasi-Qi Condensation one. In truth, up until this point the last four hours had gone remarkably smoothly, beyond a few people getting overconfident and being dunked.

The group had gotten a handle on the formation side of things pleasingly quickly and none of them were totally untalented with the compasses either. Both of those points were also working out in their favour now, because this lotus was a culmination of a slowly growing trend of finding life-attributed ‘water lotuses’ that were such in name only courtesy of minor water attributes rather than major ones.

“Is this even a Duo Li’s lotus at all?” Kun Shi muttered from nearby as he ferociously channelled qi through one of the bronze-leafed willow staves to help suppress the tentacled menace of a plant.

“Mutations are not uncommon,” she remarked, still undecided on whether she also needed to intervene.

“But this degree of mutation has to be somewhat unusual,” Chen Lanfeng, the female Jade Willow disciple, complained from where she was standing nearby, channelling through another staff.

“…”

That was very true, and why she was tossing up whether or not this could be considered one at all. It had probably originally been one, before it awakened, but the seeds were already from a mutate species that was minoring in life, if she was to hazard a guess. This one had somehow managed to tilt the balance entirely.

It didn’t help either, that their current spot was oddly close to one of the locations that Elder Li Wei had visited on his patrols a few weeks prior. There was nothing untoward here that she could pick out, in truth. The canal adjoined a large patch of fallow farmland not in use this season and the only thing unusual was the surprise appearance of this mutate lotus half a realm higher than anything they had yet encountered.

The battle continued for a few more minutes until Fuan Daiyi finally managed to drag the root out of the canal by brute force, cursing its nine generations all the while, as the other two wrestled with the errant secondary roots. When they finally got it to the shore it was bundled into a hundred litre reinforced pot, still managing to send two of the Qi Refinement cultivators holding the pot flying a dozen metres away with a last lingering lash of its roots before they got a cover on it.

“What by the nameless fate’s nine malign generations was that lotus?” Fuan Daiyi snarled, picking bits of lotus root out of the holes in his robe as he waded back to the shore.

“For a thing only at Qi Refinement its qi quality was close to peak Golden Core,” Dan Fen Guang added wearily, sitting down on a rock in the shallows to clean the mud off the spirit treasure blade that he had been using to cut at the roots.

“…”

The initially unfortunate Fan Bo Pei, having gotten to the canal bank, just sat on the grass in silence, looking like a bedraggled cat, recovering his qi.

Shaking her head, she walked over to the pot and lifted off the cover—

A tendril lashed out at her, which she blocked with her qi quite easily.

‘Spirit, Heart, Renewal, Body, Soul’

Exerting her mantra to the fullest, she reached into it, and as the others looked on, pulled the spirit herb up to the surface, ignoring its attempts at flaying the skin off her arms with its root fibres, which left only white welts before she manifested her mantra and her intent to briefly stun it into submission.

Holding the twitching plant up, she considered it pensively. For a Qi Refinement spirit herb it had grown up quickly – it was half a month old at best, based on the colouration of the rhizome. The lack of any evidence for the shedding and re-growing of its roots suggested it had done so largely undisturbed until today as well. Just holding it was making her hands itch slightly as well, telling her that it was already starting to lean towards possessing a proper yin life attribute having matured to this point.

A root twitched, trying to catch her in the eyes.

Moving her head back slightly, she shoved the lotus back into the pot and replaced the wooden cover, adding a rock on top of it. The pot continued to rock for a few moments.

“You can put that on the cart,” she said to Fuan Gu and Chen Da who were both standing nearby.

Sighing, both walked over and grabbed the pot, manhandling it back to her hand cart, which was not quite full of jars of Duo Li’s lotuses and a crate of roots.

“I think we will take a break here for a while,” she said, looking at the three exhausted Golden Core cultivators and the rather qi-depleted Qi Refinement ones who had been working to help suppress the plant. The two who had been thrown away were being tended to by some of their compatriots.

“How come you took less damage from it than they did?” Lun Quan asked, clearly curious, as she checked over the other jars quickly.

“I’m a quasi-Mantra Seed Physical Path cultivator,” she shrugged. “Physical durability is kind of our thing.”

“It is at that,” Pei Vung, another of the villagers and one of the few Physical Path cultivators among their number, agreed.

Looking around, she shook her head again and walked over to check the two who had been hit. Both of them turned out to be mainly stunned – as Qi Refinement cultivators they were not exactly lacking in durability, but both had gotten a good dose of yin life qi and would need to offset it with a few purification pills before doing anything intensive with their qi.

Once she was happy everyone else had settled down for their earned break, she set to pondering the question of the yin life attributes in the lotuses a bit more concertedly as she picked her way through the edge of the fallow field. Two further divinations got her very little, until she found a discarded little fired earth pagoda on its side in a tangle of brush and vines. Righting that, she noted two more hidden in the mass of quasi-spirit vegetation just beyond it.

-A graveyard plot? she realised, turning quickly in a circle, feeling a bit silly for not having thought of that before.

-It is in the right kind of place, she mused, though it’s odd that the divination didn’t pick it up. Did the owners of the field here deconsecrate it for some reason?

“…”

On a whim, she pulled out her teleport talisman and put an anchor sigil on one of the blocks, taking care not to disturb the vines.

-Given they moved the other point, this way if I have to go back into the Red Pit I’ll end up somewhere I know is safe, she thought.

It might not be necessary, but it was better to have done it and not need it than end up in a circumstance where she could only have regrets.

Taking one further look around, but seeing nothing especially that might identify the plot’s owners, she turned and made her way back to the group, looking for Heng Ning.

“You have a moment to talk?” she asked, coming to sit down beside the younger girl who was sorting through one of the boxes of lotus roots.

“Of course, Hunter Jun. How can I help you?” Heng Ning replied politely, half standing to offer her a salute.

“Are you related to Heng Ge or Ye Qin?” she asked politely.

“Heng Ge is my grand uncle,” Heng Ning answered. “Ye Qin is… I guess an uncle.”

“Does your family or that group of families have a long history with this part of the valley?” she asked, looking back in the direction of the road, barely visible through the misty drizzle.

“We have farmed here for a few centuries,” Heng Ning answered, frowning a little. “Why?”

“These fields?” she asked, looking around and pulling up the topographic map of the valley here for them both to look at.

“These, the ones over the canal, a few back to the road… a larger plot further south-west,” Heng Ning said, drawing on the map to highlight a vaguely trapezoidal area. “Why do you ask?”

“There are old fired earth grave markers here, over on the far corner of this fallow plot,” she explained, waving in the general direction of where she had just come from. “Do you know anything about it?”

“An ancestral plot?” Heng Ning mused, looking pensive for a moment before shaking her head. “It shouldn’t be ours… the family tombs are a mile to the south-west of here and always have been since my grand uncle’s own father’s time.”

“Did you own these fields back then?” she added.

“As far as I am aware, although I think there were some early disputes,” Heng Ning shrugged, looking and sounding apologetic. “I cannot say I know much about them though; if there are tombs here, or burials, they will be older than our family’s ownership of this land – you would be better off asking my grand uncle.”

“Thank you,” she smiled and stood, accepting the salute of the younger woman.

“Well, so much for that idea,” she mused after taking her leave of Heng Ning, although asking Heng Ge was something she intended to do if the opportunity arose.

Making her way back to the canal itself, she considered it. The flow of water was almost non-existent and in this season it was relatively shallow – ideal for lotuses and other plants like it really. If there had been a tomb or something that was disturbed, the shifting alignment towards yin would have explained the life attribute at least.

“Faugh,” she sighed again, fiddling with her damp hair. “No wonder this one also wound up on the clearance list.”

Leaving the group to continue recovering, she walked the short distance to the raised dyke between the field systems they were in and the next set and climbed it to stand below the row of trees planted on it and looked out in both directions across the fields.

The evening mist was starting to rise near several distant water reservoirs and paddy fields farmers had already started making, before the rain ever hit, in preparation for the wet season. The whole landscape was, beyond the raised roads and the distant mounds of those aforementioned tombs with their small shrine pagodas to the south, to the west and a further set even further west, ruler-flat.

The light rain cloaked everything in a shroud of silence – even the nearby conversations of those with her were muffled. All that was audible was the hiss of water dripping off everything, the rustling of trees around her, the wind on the grass and the occasional bird calling. Lines of lanterns snaked in the distance as people continued to harvest herbs as fast as they could, before the ground became waterlogged. Beyond the dyke, the other half of the canal was much like the part they had cleared, promising another hour of work at least once the others recovered…

Unbidden, the hairs on her neck stood briefly as someone initiated a teleport circle half a mile away, the shockwave of disturbed qi making the rain shimmer for a moment before settling again.

“…”

She watched the shimmering pillar of light fade away then pulled out her scrip. Looking at the map she had, if they continued on up their current canal, both waterways beyond it were connected to theirs, and there was another point where Elder Li had surveyed some three months ago beyond that. He had looked at two other points out here for some reason, but the paperwork on those was also not worth the parchment it was written on, let alone the time someone had taken to put it on jade, from what she could see.

A further teleport flare shot up further off to the east.

“…”

“What is special about these places?” she mused, mostly to the world at large, turning in a circle again, sweeping the general vicinity with the practised eye of someone well-used to playing ‘spot what might kill me’ in the High Valleys… and got nothing at all out of the ordinary.

Sighing softly, she turned back to look at the group, noting that most of them were still recovering. Shaking her head, she swept the landscape again, more slowly, taking in the details and trying to see if anything odd or unusual stood out, however, by the time the others had all visibly recuperated, she had to admit she was still no closer to seeing what had led the missing elder to this place.

…

The next two hours passed much as the previous ones had.

They cleared the rest of the waterway and advanced on to where their canal joined the next. Marking the direction that headed to the Gen estate’s spirit herb fields, she used one of her formation cores to seal off the canal they had just cleared, ensuring that no spirit herbs could inadvertently flee back into it. Once she was happy that was properly set up, she took them rapidly down the other spur, marking clusters of lotuses as they went until they reached a small settling pond where the canal had been temporarily dammed to enable a new channel to be built.

Much like the previous survey spot, the one near that spur, which she checked out while the group started sweeping back up the canal, had nothing particular to recommend it other than a slightly higher incidence of yin life attuned Duo Li’s lotuses in the nearby waterways. She even sought out some farmers working in the nearby fields and asked them about the location, but they had noticed nothing untoward in the last few weeks or even months beyond some irregular weather and the issues around village labour caused by the ‘new’ elder.

That did strike her as odd after a few conversations. An elder going missing, especially one so disliked, should have been the talk of everyone, and yet no farmer or labourer passed any notable comment on it.

Even when she returned to the group, those along with her made no mention of him being missing, and he was certainly not absent from their conversations. If the silence regarding it was not so oddly all-pervading, she would have asked already… as it was, the totality of that omission made her hesitant to bring the matter up herself.

-Something to ask Elder Mu or Clerk Bai about if the opportunity arises, she decided.

“—will it not be a problem to find them at night?”

The words, spoken by Chen Lanfeng, stirred her from pondering that, as she realised the girl had just asked her a question.

“No,” she replied, shaking her head and ignoring the lack of an honorific as some fights were just not worth it. “Especially not if they are mutating towards a life attribute. If anything, between the rain and the darkness it will be quite a bit faster to sweep them up.”

Chen Lanfeng looked like she wanted to ask more, but at that moment there was a curse and a lot of splashing from up ahead.

“Help!”

“LOOK OUT!”

“FATES CURSE THIS—!”

“CUT THAT ROOT—!”

“…”

“It seems they have found another,” Chen Lanfeng remarked, peering through the rain.

Nodding, she set off at a brisk trot, Chen Lanfeng following quickly after. Catching up to the group who had been weeding out the spirit vegetation Duo Li’s lotuses, she found that another Qi Refinement lotus had found them.

Quickly taking stock, she looked around for Fan Bo Pei and Dan Fen Guang, but both of them were now manning staves. Fuan Daiyi, however, was also hurrying forward, drawing his treasure blade.

“I’ll take this one!” she called over, waving him back as she stored away her hat.

Wading into the shallows, she immediately felt the drain on her qi from the lotus and, without any preamble, grabbed the nearest of the struggling Qi Refinement trainees, Fuan Gu as it happened, and tossed him away onto the bank.

“The rest of you get out!” she called to the two villagers slightly further away who had been wading forwards.

‘Renewal’ – she internalised the mantra mnemonic and set it to working against the absorption from the spirit herb as best it could.

Moving forward, she swept her gaze across the rippling swathe of lotus blossoms, that were all now starting to bloom, with a grimace. Both of the others who had been with Fuan Gu had been pulled under, and the drain made matters even worse.

-Figures we would get one like this eventually, she reflected—

Something – a root – lashed around her leg and tried to drag her feet out from under her. She focused on ‘Body’ briefly and gritted her teeth as the prehensile root tore at her boot then swirled all the way up her leg to her thigh before she managed to grab it and send her own qi, infused with her mantra, mainly focusing on ‘Heart’, back into it.

The lotus recoiled and she briefly had a grasp of where it was, hidden much deeper in the water than the flowers would have had any onlooker believe. Both other Qi Refinement cultivators – villagers – were flailing desperately below the water, trying to protect themselves as best they could.

The suppression formation being maintained by those on the bank was already starting to take effect at least, so she took the most expedient way of solving the visibility issue: she focused her qi into her legs—

{Flickering Steps}

Using her movement art she jumped into the air and then crashed back down into the waterway with enough force to scatter the whole contents widely over the surrounding landscape for a brief moment.

Water immediately began to flow back, but the lotus was still operating on instinct, rather than any real spiritual wisdom, so it pulled all its roots back to its body and started to burrow down into the mud, trying to drag the two villagers with it.

{Flickering Steps}

Using her movement art a second time, she flitted forward and without any preamble sent another pulse of her qi, again infused with the strength of her mantra and what intent she could muster, out of her body.

‘Spirit, Heart – Renewal, Body – Soul’

It was a little-understood part of working in the Yin Eclipse Mountains, she had to reflect, that after a while something of that place stayed with you – followed you out, even. It wasn’t a tangible thing, but it was most obvious when it came to things like Martial Intent. The divisive, sapping shadow that suffused everything up there eventually left marks on you… and in this rain, sweeping off those high mountains, it had a certain faint resonance.

The root recoiled, and the two Qi Refinement villagers went limp as they also caught some of her manifestation.

-Sorry! she winced inwardly, wading over to it and plunging her hands into the mud—

“…”

What came up was not what she was expecting.

It wasn’t just a root, but a root with a shell, made of a pot graven of dark blue stone and covered in floral motifs. Her qi scattered off the pot, marking it immediately as a relic of some ancient ruin in her eyes. The lotus flailed at her, its flower almost glowing green in the half light as it tried to manifest a qi-based attack to strike her directly.

In response, she sent another wicked pulse of her own qi into it – while it was at Qi Refinement, she could now see that it was only barely that, for all that the purity of its qi was nearly comparable to hers – and stunned it a second time.

By this point a few others on the bank, Fuan Daiyi among them, had come out and recovered their unconscious, qi-depleted compatriots. Fuan Daiyi was also holding the waters of the canal mostly at bay in either direction. Wordlessly, she pulled the plant out of its shell and then had to stare for a second time.

-Right… this absolutely stinks, I knew it! she exclaimed to herself, staring at the ward stones and a small element suppressing formation jade in the bottom of the pot.

Before anyone else noticed, she stored the ward stones and the formation jade. Those would provoke the kinds of questions she didn’t necessarily want to answer given her other assignments. Idly, she also tried storing the pot in the bracelet Elder Mu had provided, but it refused, as she had pretty much expected. This wasn’t the first one of these pots she had seen in her time and that was a very common property they tended to possess.

“An ancient artefact?” Fuan Daiyi asked, walking over to get a better look at it.

“Yep, although not everything here is as it seems,” she said, tossing the whole thing onto the bank now someone had seen it.

-The question is… is there just one?

…

Ten minutes later, while she finished transferring the very stunned yin life pond lotus into a pot and sealed it up, the others had finished cleaning up the rest of the bed of the canal. Their search turned up several more bowls, a bunch of stoneware pots, a dozen fine ceramic plates, and a small broken chest made of spirit wood that had probably held the plates.

“What do we do about these?” Fan Bo Pei asked, staring at the small collection of artefacts now piled up on the bank.

She considered the pot that had held the lotus pensively. Had there not been ward stones in the bottom of it, she would have been inclined to think that the lotus had, much like a crab, found the pot and decided to use it for a den. The formation jade, though, told a different tale. Someone had dumped this lot in here, lotus and all, knowing enough about the latter to be sure it wouldn’t roam out of its nice secure nest. The formation jade was probably to put the thing to sleep so the cache could later be recovered.

-Monkey balls. Someone local is smuggling relics, she groaned in her head and heart.

However, as a strategy, it was remarkably reckless. A lotus like this would kill people, attract notice quite rapidly and get sealed, revealing the cache.

“Wait…” she frowned and walked over to the pile of pots and tried storing them.

Everything bar the pot that held the lotus stored. Depositing it all back out she turned to the fallow field behind her, narrowing her eyes.

“Disciple Daiyi?” she asked, turning to him. “Do you think you could turn over the soil on the riverbank and the field edge here?”

“…”

The Jade Willow disciple eyed her, then the pot in her hands, then the riverbank for a few moments before realising what she was potentially implying.

“EVERYONE GET BACK!” he yelled, waving to the others to get out of the way and pull the cart with them.

There was a short moment of confusion while everyone else worked out what he intended to do, then a rapid scramble to get out of the way.

She watched impassively as he did with qi manipulation what she would likely not be able to achieve even if she reached the peak of Mantra Seed as a hundred square metres of the soil on the bank and field margin rippled and twisted. Moments later a dozen other muddy pots and a second small wooden chest and an ornate fifty litre pot with a stone lid rose out of the ground.

“That’s a really ornate pot…” Wen Bei remarked, looking at it with clear interest.

“Did you miss any? Any points where your qi was disrupted?” she asked, frowning as the others returned to inspect the haul.

“Nope, nothing like that,” he shook his head.

“Huh,” she mused, then pulled out her best compass and warily walked over to the pot which was now resting in the dirt.

It only took her a few moments to determine that no compass gave any weird signs about it, so she had Fuan Daiyi open it from a distance. The contents were, however… somewhat underwhelming on first examination. It held a few scraps of cloth, a jade talisman, a spear head made of a dull golden-bronze metal, all mixed amid about a third of a skeleton’s worth of burnt bones and ash. The bones themselves were long depleted of anything but natural qi, but she could just about make out swirling patterns on them. Even without touching them, she could feel the lingering echoes of a ‘Mantra’ within those patterns, telling her that this person had been at least at the Mantra Seed realm before his death.

“A cremation burial,” one of the locals bowed to the remains.

“The land here is unconsecrated, so probably it predates the field alignments,” she remarked, looking around.

“What do we do with it?” Chen Da asked, eyeing the talisman, which had some ancient symbols on it in a swirling design like clouds and birds.

“In the first instance? Close the pot and shove it on the cart,” she sighed. “It’s a burial; do you want the bad vibes from taking something from it? Even if it is unconsecrated at this point.”

Chen Da and Wen Bei looked like they were about to say something before both shook their heads. Chen Da even bowed to the pot and turning back to looking at the other items.

“The chest also seems fine. However it’s… erm… Ah hah!” Fan Bo Pei, who had been investigating that, found the mechanism and opened it.

Everyone crowded around and were rewarded with the sight of a bunch of jade carvings of men, women and children, some more crockery, two old scroll cases and a luss cloth bundle that turned out to contain a book.

She took the book, which was bound in a faded red cord, and turned it over to look at the front cover, noting it was made of excellent quality parchment that had survived in the ground.

“The Life of Sir Tai Jong Seung…” she read out loud.

“It’s a ‘Life and Death’ script,” Lun Quan muttered, making an auspicious sign that many other villagers mirrored a moment after.

“So it seems,” she agreed, replacing it respectfully in the chest without opening it.

The pair of scrolls inside the scroll cases turned out to be scenes from the ancient warrior’s life. One held pictures of him, his wife, ancestors, children and their day to day life. The other was various battles, adventures, and at the very end, a scene of him sitting, missing an arm, with his eyes closed, upon the corpse of a hulking, grey-green demon with pointy teeth covered in visually unsettling white and black markings, wearing what looked like peoples skins on a battlefield filled with demonic-looking corpses.

“So he killed this demon and died in the process, they recovered his remains and buried him here?” Fuan Daiyi mused, peering over her shoulder at the scroll.

“It seems that way. This must be very old indeed,” she agreed. “The notations on the scrolls are written in Yin Moon Script.”

“Yin People haven’t lived in this land since before the Huang-Mo Wars,” Wen Bei mused. “This must be over 20,000 years old?”

She rubbed her temples, feeling a sudden headache of a different kind coming on. If it had just been someone’s ancestral grandparents they could have taken it back to the shrine in the town and everyone would have been happy. Something that old though…

“This ancient warrior killed a demon and lived righteously,” Fuan Daiyi said abruptly, “It is only right that the remains and these effects be taken to the village and interred within the village shrine.”

She exhaled quietly. The other two Golden Core disciples also nodded, clearly sharing Fuan Daiyi’s view, thankfully settling that – for now at least.

“How far down was it buried?” she asked him, changing the topic slightly.

“About eight metres,” Fuan Daiyi answered, turning back to look at the pit he had excavated.

“Bedrock?” she queried.

“No… gravel – flood deposit, I think, although I am no geomancer,” the Golden Core disciple added.

“…”

Turning to look at the distant massifs she frowned, thinking about what she knew of the local land forms and the alignments.

-Was this Elder Li looking for things like this? she mused. This is nowhere close to one of his points… and yet formation jades like that do not just get picked up by unawakened spirit herbs…

-If this is the case, this is going to be a right headache. Artefact smuggling is a problem for the Military Authority…

“Well, that was eventful in any case! Good work everyone!” she exclaimed, more brightly than she felt. “Stack them all up on the cart and let’s move on.”

There were a few groans, but they did as bid and they started on again. She could have had one of them store the stuff in a storage device, but on the face of it was better for it to remain ‘communal’ for now. Once it was handed over to the village elders, it would not be her problem in any case.

As she watched them start on the next section of waterway, she went back to pondering the other pot, which was also sitting on the cart now. Now that they had cleaned off the rest of the stuff in the canal and the field, she could see that they were not ‘artefacts’ in the same way this pot was – namely things from ruins within the mountain range.

In a way, that did make things a bit easier and assuaged her initial fears about artefact smuggling somewhat. If they had stumbled across some cache of artefacts someone was smuggling, that would have been a massive headache on all sorts of levels. However, the fact that that lotus had been in a pot, with ward stones and a formation jade, definitely told her that someone had trapped it there deliberately.

How it ended up in the canal was a mystery; it was also a bit older than the previous specimen they found. Considering its location on the map, she found herself wondering, suddenly, if the root of this lotus infestation wasn’t this Gen Weng’s estate after all. Comparing the distances on the map, she marked a spot about half a mile further up the canals from here, which would be the approximate, equidistant point from both spurs of the infestation. It also happened to be on the spur that led to Gen Weng’s farm reservoirs and also…

“Hey… Miss Ning!” she called, waving for her to come over.

“Yes?”

“This reservoir?” she pointed to the one that was off the spur near the point she had marked. “Do you know anything about it?”

“Oh, that one.” Heng Ning scowled, staring at the point she was highlighting.

Twenty minutes of discussion and a lot of poring over a map later and she had extracted from some surprising sources within their group that that reservoir and a bunch of other bits of land around here were one of a cluster of spirit fields that over the past few years had been bought up by influences from further afield. Nobody knew who the owner or owners were, not even the four from the local family influences. They were also largely managed by proxy, which was not unusual in truth; however, the local issue was that they were one of those estates using labourers from out of the village district.

Setting aside the local issue of land rights, another problem emerged as she stood on the top of the dyke, listening as Heng Ning, Lun Quan and Dan Fen Guang pointed out the land in the middle distance – the maps provided by the village for this request were inaccurate.

The whole set of spirit fields beyond the canal they were following were not, as her information indicated, accessible, but were in fact heavily warded and periodically patrolled. The reservoir and that canal spur, while technically common use under the laws set out by the village elders, had thus become inactive by default pretty much and were, as far as anyone was aware, now used by that estate to farm fish. The local farmers had spent the last season cutting new canals, like the one on the previous spur, having finally gotten fed up with things as they were, linking then up to a different reservoir.

There was a further layer of local anger in there as well that she didn’t need anyone to spell out. Those spirit fields would be using and influencing the communal alignments built up here over generations of effort that ran through this whole section of the farmland.

“Great, just great,” she sighed.

-And here I had thought to get through this by only having to spend ward stones and a formation core to get rid of the rogue lotuses in Gen Weng’s spirit pond, she complained inwardly.

“I suppose it is too much to hope that they blocked off the reservoir entirely when they cut the new channels?” she asked the group at large.

“I believe they intended to, but Gen Weng and Erlang Fu, who both own fields through here, both blocked that suggestion for some reason,” Fan Bo Pei volunteered. “Fei Jiang, the other local farmer, whose fields we are now walking along the edge of, doesn’t get on with either of them either.”

“…”

She sighed, already seeing in her head where this was likely going, given how badly Heng Ge and Yu Qin had been willing to cuss out this Gen Weng.

“Nobody gets on with those two,” Heng Ning added, also scowling.

“—The three have a disagreement on where the common use channel should run through their own field systems and until that is resolved, this and one other spur from an old well over there—” Fan Bo Pei pointed off towards another fallow section “—are still inadvertently providing irrigation to this side.”

“May the Auspicious Heavenly Virgin save us from the squabbles of greedy old men and their parcels of ancestral land,” she complained to the uncaring evening sky, which got a few laughs from those nearby.

“Sounds about right,” Lun Quan agreed, spitting down the bank into the gloom.

“So I am going to hazard that the obvious suggestion of warding off the junction, where the reservoir joins this set of canals, is going to be met with a big fat complaint from those three?” she mused, her gaze sweeping the landscape on the far side of the canal.

“Both Gen Weng and Fei Jiang sit on the Jade Willow Village Council of Elders,” Heng Ning supplied.

She gave in and kicked a rock with serious venom, sending it hissing off across the canal with enough force to put a small crater on the far river bank.

“So does this mean we are done for the day?” Wen Bei piped up, sounding far too hopeful.

She turned to look at the group, noting that quite a few were also looking far too hopeful, and just barked a nasty laugh. “Hah! No.”

“But if we can’t—?” Kun Shi, who had clearly been contemplating making it home for ‘dinner’, started to speak before she cut him off.

“All this means is that you are about to be getting an earlier introduction to the Dao of Formations as they apply to spirit herbs before we get to Gen Weng’s ponds!”

-Thank you Elder Mu, for giving me those formations cores… and curse you, idiot land owners, for making me spend two of them to solve your problem in the short term, she complained inwardly.

“…”

The sigh within the group was almost tangible, but beyond that nobody did more than grumble.

“Right, the first thing—” she mused, peering into the gloom of dusk with her qi-enhanced vision at the various groups of farm labourers working away in the distant, rain-swept fields. “—is to go talk to this Erlang Fu and Fei Jiang about their parts of the canal network.”

“Ummm…” Heng Ning looked a bit awkward.

“Go on?” she said, burying another sigh.

“Landowner Erlang is likely in West Flower Picking Town with his youngest daughter’s family. It is the Patriarch of the provincial Ha clan’s birthday in a bit over a week and his daughter is married into the Ha clan.”

“…”

“Ha Erlang…?”

“I believe so…”

“And what of Fei Jiang? What is his connection to the local nobility?” she asked.

“My cousin, Kun Kang, is married to his granddaughter,” Kun Shi answered helpfully. “I think his younger brother Kun Wencheng is also here. The fields behind us belong to the Fei estate.”

“And Gen Weng?” she added, looking around at the rest of them, a sinking feeling in her stomach.

“His daughter is married to the Ha clan,” Fan Bo Pei, who had largely cemented his status in her view of the group as the local scion who ‘knew’ things, answered. “I believe Gen Weng is also away at the moment.”

“…”

She skimmed the documents she had ‘helpfully’ been given by the local Pavilion but found no mention of anything regarding any of that anywhere.

-Well, it does at least explain how Gen Weng’s request ended up in West Flower Picking Town’s clearance tranch, she reflected glumly. This is absolutely another case of the Blue Water City Hunter Bureau sending out difficult requests to problematic Pavilions.

Probably, someone in Blue Water City had laughed themselves silly over this. It was a request that would seriously annoy all the clans local to here trying to gnaw at their influence in different ways. The Kun clan were the largest independent exporters of spirit herbs in the province pretty much and not hugely enthused by the taxes continually being levied on them as a result. The Ha clan… well this was Ha clan territory. As for the Deng clan, they were not obviously involved, but in causing a problem for the other two, it also allowed the Deng clan freedom to cause headaches as well.

-It also explains why Elder Mu has been so supportive after his initially cool reaction, she mused. Likely he saw that I had a close working relationship with Kun Juni through her mission listings and permanent record… and if he had been in isolation for a century, all the local clan politics will have probably passed him by.

“Okay, change of strategy,” she said, casting about.

“You… Kun Shi,” she pointed at Kun Shi. “Please go over there and inform whoever is overseeing the harvest in Fei Jiang’s fields that I want to have a talk with him about lotus infestations and canals.”

Watching Kun Shi trot off, she looked around again and picked out four more.

“You four,” she beckoned to Chen Da, Fuan Gu, and a pair of brothers from the village, Hu Jun and Hu Kian, to get their attention. “Please go and get me ninety-nine staves of bronze-leafed willow of comparable quality to what we are using. Try not to chop down any trees, but they need to be about two metres long.”

“What are we going to do now?” Fuan Daiyi asked, watching as the four trotted back the way they had just come, heading for the nearest stand of the trees a hundred or so metres behind them.

“We are going to seal the canal,” she replied matter-of-factly.

“Won’t that harm the alignments that run through here?” one of the villagers, Lee Fei, asked, looking worried.

“Only if it has to stay here for a long time,” she said, reassuring him. “This is a short term measure, because the bigger issue is not one that we can resolve here and now.”

“…”

“Well… what are the rest of you waiting for!” she said, waving for them all to get moving again. “Let’s get to clearing this next stretch in the meantime!”

…

They had done most of the next hundred metres, recovering some two dozen more plants, by the time the stave harvesting group returned and dumped some ninety-nine staves of largely acceptable quality on the bank. She immediately set them to carving earth and metal element formation runes on thirty-three of the best quality ones. While she waited on Kun Shi to return, she started sorting out ward stones and considered where would be best to put the formation down.

Unlike what she had been doing before, this would be an actual formation, with flags and a centre. The one she was going to use was a very minor variant of a category of formation called ‘Overturning Heaven and Earth’. They had a lot of uses, mainly in making ‘defence trenches’ around estates, but this one was a bespoke one she and Sana had paid Grandmaster Li, another formations master in West Flower Picking Town, to adapt for use in the High Valleys.

“So what’s this I hear about problems with canals?”

Kun Shi had returned, she realised, with half a dozen men in rather wet and muddy clothing, accompanied by a dark brown-haired young man wearing a near-immaculate robe slashed with Kun clan colours being sheltered from the rain by a very pretty maid carrying a wide umbrella and accompanied by two other youths who looked very bored. The final member of the party was an older, scholarly man with a long beard, carrying his own umbrella and a jade tablet.

“Jun Arai, Recovery Hunter,” she said, stepping forward and saluting the party as a whole politely as she introduced herself.

“You don’t look like one,” the brown-haired youth remarked, superciliously.

“…”

Without comment she sent her qi and intent into the storage talisman and used a handy feature of the higher grade ones to ‘summon’ her official robe back onto herself directly. At the same time she projected her full rank seal into the air for them to see – with its nine interlocking bronze rings, her name and the sigils for ‘recover’ and ‘official’ in the centre.

“Hmmmmm,” the older scholar stroked his beard, nodding. “That seems to be in order, Miss Jun.”

None of the others offered any apology for their earlier slight either, she noted.

“So what is this about lotuses?” the brown-haired youth asked, matter-of-factly.

“We are clearing the canals of what was reported to be a Duo Li’s lotus infestation—” she explained, pointing to their cart.

“Oh… that,” one of the youth’s two companions interjected.

“You need not worry; we have dealt with it,” the other youth added with a self-satisfied smirk.

“I will need to check your canals though,” she replied, pulling out the relevant documents for them to examine, which were taken by the bearded scholar without comment. “The ones we have been finding are mutated and no longer purely water attribute Duo Li’s lotuses.”

“…”

One of the labourers next to the brown-haired youth, an older man with a grizzled beard, whispered something quietly that she couldn’t hear.

“Mmm, I see, do you have conclusive evidence of this?” he asked, clearly in response to whatever the older man had just said.

Shaking her head, she walked back over to the cart and had them pull off the relevant pot, opening it and immediately taking her head back as the angry plant sent a root out trying to grab her neck.

“That evidence enough?” she asked, pushing the lid back on.

“Did that come from here?” the brown-haired youth grumbled. “Could have come from anywhere.”

-What the actual… she groaned inwardly, why is everyone trying to make things difficult today?

“It did, cousin Wencheng,” Kun Shi said a bit tartly.

“You lot, go check the cart. See if they really did come from here,” the young man commanded, basically ignoring Kun Shi.

“Young Master Kun…” the scholar glanced up from looking through the scroll that had been passed to him.

“If they came from these waterways without our permission, they belong to this estate and by extension my father, do they not?” Wencheng said as the two youths standing either side of him nodded.

“…”

Intent suddenly froze everyone in place, even Fuan Daiyi, her and the two other Golden Core cultivators along with them. It certainly emanated from the younger man, and was similar in many ways to Kun Juni’s.

-Wonderful, a peak Golden Core scion of the Kun clan, she complained inwardly.

“These do look like things which have come from our waterways,” one of the labourers said, holding up the pot with the other Qi Refinement lotus in it.

“Y—” Heng Ning was cut off before she could even utter a single word, her face growing pale and blood running from her nose as she was hit by a mild qi attack.

“Does someone wish to contest this?” Wencheng said drily, his intent actually pushing the Qi Condensation disciples to their knees and making blood run from their noses while all the Qi Refinement ones were pale and sweating now. “All you have to do is speak up.”

-Hah… I am sure he thinks that really funny, she thought sourly, tasting iron in her own mouth.

Grimacing, she internalised her mantra and let it do its thing, managing to lift much of his restraint. Thankfully he wasn’t a martial cultivator, just a Golden Core spiritual cultivator, and so the ‘Martial Intent’ which he was using to oppress them wasn’t much better than her own, despite being a realm above her. It did help that she was quite familiar with the Kun clan’s methods from sparring with her fellow Herb Hunter and Pavilion Official Kun Juni on occasion as well.

At least, since she apparently had to encounter a proper ‘Young Master’ type, this one was from the Kun clan, so that made their predicament somewhat easy to resolve, although a bit of an imposition on others.

Ignoring the slightly surprised looks from others around her, she withdrew a talisman from her storage which was carved of cream jade in the shape of a red, white and yellow lotus and emblazoned with the Kun family crest.

“Sir Overseer, let us not make this awkward?” she said with as polite a smile as she could manage and passed it towards the scholarly old man, who was certainly the overseer.

“…”

Wencheng snatched it from her hand before the old man had even taken a step, looked at it and then sent a wave of qi at her that nearly pushed her to her knees and made her vision waver, before tossing the talisman down on the ground.

“So you want to also fake some connection to our Kun clan? You think just anyone can have that?” Wencheng sneered, waving for his two flunkies to walk over to her.

-Oh fateless monkey drunk on his own piss, save me from bastards like this, she complained as they both started forward.

She sank her qi into her Hunter Bureau talisman and activated the message transmission function.

“Elder Mu… Sorry for the inconvenience,” she said, using her mantra to shift the youth’s intent to stop her speaking for a moment.

“Yes?” the voice echoed back into the air around her.

“Honoured Elder Mu, I appreciate that this may not be a convenient time, but could you please come to my location in the fields? There is a ‘matter’ that requires your attention,” she sent through the talisman, silently this time.

“…”

There was a fluctuation in the world and a moment later, Elder Mu’s Nascent Soul stood there, the rain drifting through it faintly, having teleported directly to her location courtesy of her Hunter Bureau talisman marking her location.

In the same moment, the restriction on her vanished and she exhaled.

“SEEING ELDER MU!” all the disciples saluted, as did the labourers, the farm overseer and, with a suddenly inscrutable face, the young man who had been making difficulties.

“What seems to be the issue? Official Jun?” Elder Mu said, peering around at the various groups.

“Could I impose upon Elder Mu to verify the token that this young master Kun has thrown on the ground?” she said blandly, standing up and dusting herself off and gesturing towards the talisman where it currently lay.

“…”

Elder Mu walked over to the talisman and picked it up.

“How did this come to be in the dirt?” he asked, frowning.

“The young master Kun threw it there,” she replied with aplomb, wiping the blood away from her mouth with the back of her hand, feeling no pity now for the fool.

“He threw it there?” Elder Mu murmured, his eyebrows climbing as he looked at the token.

“I—” the youth went a bit pale, finally realising he might have made a ‘small’ mistake.

“She…” one of his companions started to speak.

“This is Disciple Kun Mu. Might I ask which treasured disciple of the Kun family this token belongs to?” Elder Mu said to the world at large, holding the talisman and completely ignoring the spluttered protestations of Wencheng and his companions.

“My youngest child, Kun Juni,” an older voice with a rich, strong tone echoed out of the talisman.

“Disciple Mu acknowledges Lord Kun,” Elder Mu said very respectfully. “Myriad apologies for this inconvenience in contacting you so informally.”

“A little matter,” the commanding voice murmured before vanishing. The intonation on it though… implied that there would probably be difficult questions asked regarding the unfortunate Wencheng’s mistreatment of the Kun family’s talisman in due course.

“I…” Wencheng had a face as pale as milk now.

“So why is the talisman of the treasured daughter of Lord Kun Jiao lying here in the mud?” Elder Mu asked with almost disturbing joviality, his gaze sweeping across the assembled labourers.

“This one slipped in the rain and dropped it!” Wencheng actually dropped to his knees and bowed deeply, not quite pushing his face in the mud. “This one meant no disrespect. This one is clumsy and ill-mannered.”

Both his companions had dropped to their knees as well, she noted, though the maid holding the umbrella was just impassive, as if this had nothing to do with her at all.

“…”

Those looking on had expressions that veered from vengeful amusement in the case of the local nobles’ scions and the Jade Willow Sect disciples to incredulity and disbelief on the faces of the villagers.

-Be amazed, this is the Supreme Dao of Shamelessness, she snickered sourly in her own head.

“This old man humbly asks that Senior Mu be generous,” the overseer said at last, stepping forward with a polite salute. “I will see to it that Young Master Wencheng spends quite some time living up to the name the clan elders graciously bestowed him.”

-Oh yeah… she realised, his name can be written as ‘most genial and accomplished’ in High Imperial Script.

Elder Mu passed her back the Kun clan talisman, which she received without preamble and tied on her belt for now.

“See that he does,” Elder Mu said with narrowed eyes that suggested that his continuing generosity could be rather limited if required. “However it is not my generosity you perhaps need to worry about.”

“…”

“Official Jun, this old man hopes you can see that Young Master Wencheng was hasty in his words and tired from helping oversee the harvest,” the overseer said, turning to her and bowing deeply.

“Juni?” she asked to the air at large, triggering the talisman again.

“As diverting as your escapade in the country seems to be, Wencheng is an ass and his friends, wastrels. You need show no concern on his account; I will speak to my older brother about it later,” a melodious young woman’s voice came from the talisman a moment later.

Kun Wencheng, who was still kneeling on the ground, flinched visibly, as did his two friends. This time she noted the maid did smile faintly.

-Now that I think about it, he will absolutely have a minder from the clan, so that must be her, she thought, giving the woman the tiniest nod.

“Thanks, Juni,” she said with a faint smile.

“No problem. How are your clearance missions going?” Juni asked her, this time the message just echoing in her head.

“Like shit, as always – it’s just one huge mess of politics and opportunism rolled into a package designed to give even sages a headache,” she sent back.

“Sounds like mine,” Juni sighed. “What did Wencheng do?”

“Tried to rob me, then tossed your talisman in the dirt.”

“I’ll have big brother look into it,” Juni replied. “Stay safe.”

“Sorry to have bothered you at this hour,” she sent back.

“It’s fine. I’m sitting in a teahouse in Blue Water City, eating a meal with two vaguely tolerable idiots from the Kun clan and their friends who have come all the way over here from Pill Sovereign City. You are a diversion to soothe my heart and my mind,” Juni said with a laugh.

She shook her head and the talisman rang off.

-Sana is in Blue Water City, likely being wined and dined by Ling Yu; Juni is entertaining guests for her clan… Why am I the only one up to my neck in horrid crap? she complained inwardly.

“I am content to leave this up to Sir Kun Talshin,” she said politely to the overseer, who nodded as if this was mostly what he had expected.

She shot a sideways glance at Kun Shi, who was also pale and shaking, likely looking back on his earlier conduct in the day and wondering how close he had come to being on the receiving end of this treatment.

“So, how can this Overseer help you, Miss Jun?” the old scholar asked.

“Well, if you have cleared the lotuses out of your canals already, that will be a help,” she said. “However, we are going to seal this canal as it seems the epicentre for this infestation may not simply be Gen Weng’s spirit pond as the request I am here to address originally stated.”

“Ah, so you are here on that request,” the overseer mused. “You think the reservoir over yonder also has a part in it?”

“Gen Weng’s infestation is Duo Li’s lotus; there is hopefully no doubt about that,” she replied, “However, these ones in the canals are starting to major in yin life, rather than water.

“Perhaps Gen Weng’s has had a bizarre mutation… but my view on it is that such a happening in a short frame of time would be unlikely given what I have seen already. Those beyond this point, at the furthest extremis of the contamination were also Duo Li’s lotuses… without mutation.”

“They are? Hmmm…” Elder Mu, who was still standing there listening, interjected.

“I am led to believe that that land is warded and patrolled,” she added, looking back and forth between the two old men.

“So it is,” Elder Mu remarked after a moment of staring into the gloom across the canal.

“They are vexatious in that regard,” the overseer for Kun Fei Jiang agreed with a deep sigh. “They frequently cause issues and hassle. However, if it is just the matter of sealing the waterways so that their spur is isolated over this, that is not a problem. This old man will see to it personally.”

“I see,” Elder Mu nodded. “In that case, I shall leave you to it. If there are any further issues, let me know.”

“Of course. Thank you, Elder Mu,” she replied, bowing respectfully.

Elder Mu nodded again, accepting her salute, and his Nascent Soul vanished, making the steady downpour ripple again slightly.

She stared at the stack of almost prepared formation flags and shook her head wryly. “I will have to trouble Sir Overseer. Please come with me.”

“You lot, get back to the fields. Young Master Kun, please?” the old man said with a wave of his sleeve.

“Yes, Sir Overseer,” the labourers all turned and left, as did Kun Wencheng and his two flunkies, still with expressions stuck between relief, shock and angered embarrassment.

“So… what about these?” Fuan Gu asked, gesturing to the bundles of staves they had been working on before.

“Store them up. They will be useful,” she instructed them, then invited the scholarly overseer to come with her.

They walked some way along the bank, until she arrived at the point she had intended to start sealing up the canal.

“How did you intend to do this?” the old man asked, stroking his beard.

“An earth and metal variant of ‘Overturning Heaven and Earth’,” she explained. “Thirty-three formations flags in a crescent moon, forming an array that would make this whole part of the canal undesirable for spirit vegetation that has life attunement that overrides water. Not ideal, but it was only a short term solution until the lotuses in Gen Weng’s ponds are cleaned up. At that point all I could do was report this spur to the village authorities, having done what I can.”

“You are skilled in formations and feng shui for your age,” the overseer remarked, stroking his beard again.

“Senior overpraises. I have some small attainments,” she replied, bowing slightly. “It is only what is required for my rank.”

“I think we can do better than that, though,” the old overseer said with a half-smile, pulling out a jade and spirit wood compass whose aura suggested it was personally refined by the old man.

She watched as he sent the compass out, sending waves of qi into it as it rose through the rain to hover over the canal.

{Eight Trigrams Style: Eight Stars Auspicious Chart}

With a sonorous chime, threads of light swirled out of the compass in the colours of five elements, forming a vast eight trigrams seal that covered almost half a mile. The pillars of light reflected down and the whole formation shifted, aligning itself naturally to the harmonious aspects of the landscape before sinking downwards into the ground. Eight pillars rose up at various auspicious points, becoming tangible stone anchor points for it a moment later, each marked with a formation rune in a star. Finally, there was a sense of constriction in the air that was the old man’s principle before the rain swept it away again.

She looked sideways at the overseer, who was breathing a little hard. As far as displays of strength went, she could only say that she was impressed. His grasp of the Eight Trigrams Chart was much better than hers and the fact that he could put down such a large seal, even in this miserable weather, marked him firmly as being a Dao Seeking cultivator, although not one as strong as Elder Mu.

“This formation will hold for quite a while,” the overseer stated, surveying his handiwork with a pleased, if slightly tired nod. “A pain to do it in this rain, but it is the best time to root the fate-accursed things out, I suppose. It was a supreme nuisance to convince some Herb Hunters from Blue Water City to do our portion of the canals.”

They both looked out over the canal in silence for a few moments.

“I suppose you will still want to check them?” the overseer said with a chuckle.

“If possible,” she replied politely. “It is not that I doubt the earlier work, but the clearance request for Gen Weng’s pond made no mention of the wider infestation and while it was marked that two Hunters from Blue Water City came here and surveyed matters, there was no record of what they did left with the Bureau. This is the first I am hearing of anyone actually ‘clearing’ anything.”

“Really?” the overseer sighed. “Well, I understand your concerns then.”

“In truth, I only wound up doing this because it is raining. Otherwise these trainees would be learning about ginseng right now,” she added.

“Understandable. I will send some labourers with you to help,” the overseer nodded.

“That…” she was about to say it was unnecessary, but on second thought just nodded in agreement. “That would be very kind of you, Sir Overseer.”

“If there are any further problems, send one of them to tell me,” the scholarly old man added.

“Thank you for your work,” she bowed politely and he nodded, before making his way back towards where his labourers were working in the distance.

Walking back along the dyke, she saw several labourers carrying lanterns break off from the next field and head over to where they were. Likely the overseer wanted to make sure they did no damage to Kun Fei Jiang’s fields and also to make sure that if they turned up any more pots like the ones stacked on the cart they knew about it. Such discoveries were not that uncommon, she had learned from the discussions of those along with her; however, old artefacts were old artefacts, and everyone liked spirit stones. Personally she felt it was a rather sad state of affairs – had she been on her own she would happily have reburied the pot where it was.

“Oh well,” she sighed deeply and took a moment to flick the water off her hat before making her way back to the group and the cart.

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

“Miss Jun?” she glanced at Kun Shi, who had sidled up beside her almost as soon as she got back.

“…”

“I am sorry if I came across as rude before…” the younger man said, bowing to her several times, his eyes almost glowing at the idea of being able to curry favour with someone who was a friend of one of the scions of the provincial Kun clan’s core family.

“…”

-What shamelessness! she admired inwardly.

“I believe Elder Mu did already warn you,” she murmured not looking at him as they walked on. “What was it he said when we were back before the Hunter Pavilion at lunch time…?”

“…”

She watched Kun Shi run back through the conversation in his head long enough for it to become awkward in his eyes, before taking pity on him.

“He said ‘Being unwilling to learn, or thinking something is beneath you will get you killed anywhere,’ as I recall,” she quoted.

“…”

Kun Shi gulped slightly. The warning hadn’t really been for him, so much as a more general admonishment of rigid thinking and the dangers Yin Eclipse presented, but turning the words fortuitously to this parallel point was, she had to admit to herself, deeply satisfying.

Her father would have put it more succinctly, when warning them not to bandy around his old military service: ‘if you live by the Dao of measuring your parents and connections, you are quite likely to die by it as well – never do it, unless you know the game is rigged!’ It was solid advice on the whole.

Kun Shi nodded silently at her words, his mood clearly having taken a bit of a hit.

Looking around, she quickly spotted Heng Ning who was looking after two other villagers, both Qi Condensation, who were still breathing a bit hard.

“You okay?” she asked Heng Ning, seeing she herself was also still a bit pale.

“I’ve been hit worse by spirit herbs,” Heng Ning grimaced, spitting in the direction of the distant fields where Wencheng now was.

“Hah!” she nodded in agreement and patted her on the back and then passed her a recovery pill.

“That isn’t…” Heng Ning muttered, looking a bit embarrassed and wiping her nose.

“It is,” she replied a bit more firmly, closing Heng Ning’s hand over the pill. “And if anyone else is injured let me know, the Pavilion gave me enough recovery pills at least.”

“…”

“Thank you, Hunter Jun,” Heng Ning murmured, taking the pill and washing it down with a gulp of water from her flask.

Off to the side, she saw the labourers from Kun Fei Jiang’s fields were looking a bit embarrassed, keeping their distance and wisely saying nothing as the group picked themselves up.

“How long is this going to take in the dark?” she turned to find Chen Da had come over, looking disgruntled.

“It takes as long as it takes,” she shrugged, looking around in the falling dusk, wishing that she had a proper vision enhancing art.

“There won’t be any issues using lanterns?” Dan Fen Guang asked, from by the cart where he was attaching one.

“Nope,” she replied, look around at the group, noting that Lun Quan and two of the other villagers were already distributing some for their compatriots who presumably didn’t have arts to enhance their vision properly.

For her, it was not such an issue either, even though she didn’t have an art, instead she could just use her mantra to augment the sensitivity of her vision, allowing her to see about as well in the dark as on a gloomy, slightly hazy day.

“Any other issues?” she asked to the group at large.

Everyone shook their heads.

-Well, in that case, let’s get on with this, then, she muttered to herself.

“Okay folks!” she called out, waving for them to get moving again. “Those lotuses aren’t going to pick themselves… more’s the pity.”

There were a few groans from those who were still recovering, and a smattering of bitter laughter from the rest, but everyone stopped milling about and started onwards again, the half a dozen labourers from Fei Jiang’s estate, sheltering under their own umbrellas, falling in behind in silence.

…

While the decreased visibility did slow their progress somewhat after they resumed, thankfully, much as Kun Wencheng had intimated, the canals through Fei Jiang’s fields had indeed been cleared previously, though not sealed off. As such, there were still a few small clumps of spirit vegetation lotuses that had begun to creep back in; however, they were all life-attuned ones, rather than water-attuned ones. This all but confirmed in her own mind that the secondary source was the estates across the river.

As they went on, though, heading towards the reservoir spur, it also became clear that she would be able to do nothing regarding the source of the yin life lotuses. The wards ‘protecting’ the field boundaries on the far bank were well hidden, visible only to her, through use of her compass, and the patrols, when she did see them, all moved without lanterns, clearly not for show. The labourers also confirmed that anyone who trespassed tended to get a serious beating and was dumped either in the canal or thrown back to the road in a few cases. Nobody had died – that would get the guards involved – but complaints about such behaviour were, among the local farmers and families, widely known to go nowhere.

That conversation also inadvertently revealed to her that the estate beyond the canal was not among the ones that were affiliated with the ‘missing’ Elder Li. Those were to the north-east of the town, although apparently in much the same circumstances – lots of guards, trespass treated harshly and so on.

She wasn’t necessarily sure she bought that explanation at this point though. The relic pot, now wrapped in luss cloth, was hidden in the front of the cart and the more she thought on it, the more likely it seemed that someone was growing those lotus mutates in that reservoir and they had gotten out. With their roots hidden in pots like that, they would be almost undetectable by accidental sweeps of soul sense or qi as far as she was aware, given the slightly disruptive nature of the stone used to make them.

Ha Erlang Fu’s fields also mostly seemed to sit on the other side of the canal, so she didn’t have to do more than have a quick conversation with a curious field manager or two overseeing the last of their harvesting as they made their way down the Kun side of the bank.

The last spot that Elder Li had surveyed out here also turned out to be on the boundary of Gen Weng’s land and Fei Jiang’s, on the edge of an active spirit field that was still being harvested by Gen Weng’s own labourers. She didn’t spend a lot of time looking at it because of the watchful eyes of both the harvesters and Fei Jiang’s farm workers; however, it was as unremarkable as the last two spots had been as far as she could see.

The actual boundary to Gen Weng’s fields was marked by a dammed canal, traversable via a new bridge that she again noted was not on her map. Having crossed it, they were met within a few minutes by a matronly woman with a severe expression, wearing Ha clan colours and sheltered by her own umbrella borne by a servant. Several guards with actual weapons followed after her, looking a bit annoyed to be out here in the rain.

“You are late,” was all the woman said perfunctorily, sweeping her gaze across the whole group before landing again on her. “We expected you to have made your way here much earlier.”

“Greetings, Madame…” she said carefully, searching for the woman’s rank as politely as she could.

-Thank the fates I had the presence of mind to put my rank robe back on, she sighed inwardly.

“You are speaking to Madame Weng,” the young woman carrying the umbrella supplied in a polite stage whisper.

“My apologies, Madame Weng,” she corrected herself and bowed more formally

“Humph!” the woman just looked at her haughtily, not acknowledging her bow.

-By the Nameless Fate, did I sell my own grandmother and her nine generations this morning or something? she complained in her heart, letting her mantra take the edge of her inner annoyance.

“Well, what are you waiting for? Give her the paper,” Madame Weng commanded imperiously.

“…”

Slightly confused, she watched as another man, a bespectacled scholar with a harried expression whom she had barely noticed before, stepped forward and handed her a scroll. A dapper youth in Ha clan robes followed after him, also accompanied by a beautiful young girl of maybe fifteen or sixteen holding an umbrella and lantern of much higher quality than any they were using.

She opened the letter and read the contents with a mental sigh. It was basically a waiver from the village explaining that all lotus plants they harvested on the Weng property would be property of the Weng estate.

-I suppose it is within their rights, she sighed softly. Won’t make it popular with the others though.

Skimming down, it also stated that the Weng estate was not the responsible party for the infestation and that they were as much a victim as any other, and that anything to the contrary would be taken as a personal slight against the good name of the estate. It even went so far as to state that all injuries incurred were the responsibility of the personal party, not the estate.

“You are required to acknowledge this…” the bespectacled scholar said a trifle apologetically.

Before commenting, she pulled up the clearance request a second time, pulling out the actual scroll with its jade seal and reading it through in front of them all.

“I see,” she said putting on a smile that only managed to reach her eyes because she fed all her inner anger into the mantra.

The clearance request did indeed have a perfunctory ‘acknowledgement of access permissions’ clause in it.

-No wonder the hunters from Blue Water City shoved off and cleared out the Kun clan’s canals instead, she complained inwardly.

Likely they had gone back and reported this, but rather than get involved in dealing with it themselves, someone had shuffled it to the bottom of the pile. That was the usual fate of missions like this where people started playing stupid games. Likely it had remained uncompleted and ignored until someone saw the potential within it to cause headaches for the local Pavilions and pushed it off to the West Flower Picking Pavilion as a clearance mission so the Ha and Kun clans could play politics in their own sandbox.

“Fine,” she acknowledged it. The Ha clan was paying for the formations she was going to use anyway, so it was all coming out of someone else’s pocket.

“A group of our labourers and my man here will accompany you, to provide assistance and directions,” the bespectacled scholar muttered.

“You can accompany them as well, Yong. We are short-handed as it is,” Madame Weng stated, before turning and leaving without further comment.

“I am Gen Guowei,” the bespectacled scholar said pleasantly, offering her a very slight bow. “The seneschal of the Gen estate. Please forgive Madame Weng. She misses her husband, my eldest brother, who is away in West Flower Picking Town on business.”

“Ha Gen Yong,” the youth added, introducing himself with a smile that he probably thought was enticing and pleasant, but just made her want to look somewhere else.

“…”

-So ‘Old’ Gen Weng is away in the big city – leaving his wife behind – to go to visit the Ha Patriarch?

She was glad of the rain, because with soul senses unimpeded, the aggressive eye-rolling and barely disguised snickering behind her would have been much more visible than it already was.

Gen Yong probably had noticed a bit, but said nothing, likely pretending not to notice. The seneschal, Guowei, just waved his sleeve and started to walk down the dyke.

“Has anyone tried to clear up the invasive plants here before?” she asked, thinking of the somewhat disrupted signals that the disciples were getting with the compasses.

“Some early efforts were made, before the scope of the problem became clear,” Gen Guowei answered, his phrasing diplomatic enough that she could only suspect that it had been a local attempt and not that successful. “We have cleaned up the infestation that came from the Kun fields though—”

“…”

Again, she was glad of her mantra, if only because it helped her in moments like this to remain serene and professional in her manner.

“You are, of course, welcome to check…” Gen Guowei added with a sigh.

“…”

“I am being paid by the village to be thorough in this,” she replied dutifully, waving to the group to start searching properly, suddenly glad she had the foresight to show them all how to overcome this problem right at the start.

“Understandable, understandable,” Gen Guowei agreed pleasantly. “I see you have made quite the haul already in any case?”

“There were a lot of lotus plants infesting the waterways that feed out of your Gen estate’s spirit pond,” she deadpanned. “Setting aside the question of a secondary infestation from another source, there were Duo Li’s lotuses on the other side of the Red Lake road – five miles away.”

“I find it hard to believe that one lotus’s seeds made it that far,” Gen Yong interjected, proffering her an arm as if she were some grand lady. “Perhaps this other source that local rumour is blaming on that Kun Wencheng? I hear he was experimenting with growing different types of spirit herbs.”

“…”

-Heaven save me from snakes and serpents, she complained in her heart.

-That said, I should pass that on to Juni… just in case, she mused after a moment’s consideration.

However, before he could prattle on extensively about this and that, as he seemed intent to, she paused, turning to the seneschal.

“Seneschal Gen, might I make a small request?”

“A request?” he glanced at her.

“If the estate wishes to claim all the lotuses here, we will need another cart…” she pointed out, because her hand cart was already very heavily burdened.

“Mmm…” Gen Guowei frowned. “Given the issues we have with manpower…”

Looking at their fields, which were almost all fully harvested, she noted that they didn’t look particularly short-handed. The half a dozen labourers, all at Qi Refinement, who had come with them were also just standing around near her hand cart, watching and sharing a pipe of some dried herb.

There was a long line of lights moving rapidly through another field a few hundred metres away, glimmering weakly through the misty rain. Back behind them was another batch as well.

“…”

She decided to let it drop, for a short while anyway. The particulars were not her problem to sort out, even if she was capable or so inclined.

As they stood there, Gen Yong mostly talked about this and that, while Gen Guowei just stood in silence, offering occasional interjections on behalf of Gen Yong, all the while watching those along with her work. What was curious, she noted after a while, was that neither made any attempt to draw comment towards the other estates on the far side of the canal from where they were, or Erlang Fu’s fields, despite there being some earlier talk of animosity between all three estates.

“You even found some old pottery,” Gen Yong asked eventually, as two of the villagers came back up and claimed some things from the cart.

“Some ceramics from the time of the Huang-Mo Wars that came up when we recovered some of the plants,” she replied with a slight shrug. “I am led to believe that they do show up around here every now and then?”

“They do, they do,” Gen Guowei agreed. “There was a lot of interest in them a few years back and it was somewhat renewed after the landslides of the previous season uncovered some new tombs over to the west.”

“I am sure you have heard about Young Hero Wei Zhaohui?” Gen Yong added, giving her a further smile.

She had, although those events were some few years ago now.

“…”

“I am familiar with him, and those events, yes,” she agreed verbally in the end, because Gen Yong seemed determined to wait for her to say something as they watched the group continue to sweep the canal below them.

“I believe something showed up in that regard quite recently,” Gen Yong continued, clearly enthused on the subject. “It is all very exciting; people have begun to wonder if there will be another Wei Zhaohui.”

-Did it now… she thought frowning, because nobody in their group had made passing mention of that kind of thing at all and it was certainly the kind of thing that would likely interest those from the Jade Willow Sect.

“There have long been rumours of some ancient ruins here,” Gen Guowei interjected smoothly. “Things are washed into the Red Lake River with the seasonal floods quite regularly; the thing Young Master Yong refers to was one of those. I think the rumour did not circulate widely, though, before the Blue Gate School got involved.”

“Ah,” she nodded, not actually that surprised.

“You do not seem surprised?” Gen Yong asked, frowning slightly.

“The Red Lake River has its headwaters below Mount Thunder Crest, where it flows straight out of the Yin Eclipse Underworld,” she pointed out, before adding non-committally, “Stuff washes out occasionally.”

If you were so inclined it was not hard to find pretty pots and other oddities when the river levels dropped. She had several back home that made excellent plant pots. The main issue was dragging them back down again because none of them stored.

“The Red Lake River flooded more than usual?” she asked, thinking about the flooded forest and the landslides.

“Enough last season to cause issues out here,” Gen Guowei replied, before pausing because the jars of lotus they had just finished harvesting had not gone on the cart, which two of the disciples were starting to pull again as they moved on to the next stretch of waterway.

She glanced at him, and noted that the enterprising souls behind that had been Lun Quan and Fen Guang.

“As I said, our cart is very heavily laden,” she pointed out sympathetically, before looking around at their rain-drenched surroundings with the stands of gently swaying vegetation bordering largely harvested spirit fields. “I imagine they will be quite safe here, nobody will rob your estate surely?”

The others in her group were already working on the next stretch of canal, starting to search out the auspicious points for the staves. She noted, with some amusement, that beyond the two pulling the cart, who had just rotated out, all twenty people were very busy doing lotus hunting things all of a sudden.

“…”

Gen Guowei frowned, then jerked his head sideways at the labourers, who scowled and put away their communal pipe as they moved over and started to rig up the pots to be carried, slung between some staves.

“You were saying about the flooding?” she asked Gen Yong with an interested smile, turning the topic back to what she wanted to know about.

“What about it?” Gen Yong replied, his previous jovial manner having slipped a bit as his gaze lingered on the labourers working in the rain.

-What, did you just think we were going to drag it all back for you? She smirked inwardly. How cute.

“—that Gen Weng was advocating for flood defences…” she reminded him with a brighter, even more engaged smile.

“Oh… yes… Uncle Weng was the person on the village council who pressed most earnestly for that, especially beyond the eastern road between here and Red Lake Village,” Gen Yong nodded, saying that quite a bit louder than was perhaps necessary.

She noted a few of the villagers pulling a jar up the bank, whose families likely had fields over that side of the river, scowling at his comment.

“You are well informed about local politics—” she murmured, leading him on properly now.

*Ahem*

The seneschal coughed.

“—Yes, there were many competing views,” Gen Guowei interjected. “In the end there was no appetite for it at the time and then, last season… Now that those valleys are washed out, there was that terrible tetrid attack as well. It was unfortunate, but that is just the reality of things out here.”

“…”

She had to admit, she was quietly impressed. Between them, they were just talking about local news, but in the process there were all kinds of hidden little knives being put in there for other influences. It was no wonder those other farmers had been cussing Gen Weng out.

“I have heard a lot about how difficult local matters around Jade Willow Village are of late,” she agreed sympathetically, deciding to see how far she could take this topic.

“It is very difficult,” Gen Yong acknowledged, with a ‘distressed’ sigh. “Very difficult for honest landowners like my uncle Weng, who has done so much for this place to make a good living.”

“Mmm… everywhere I hear, there are losses being made,” she mused, watching Dan Fei Guang and Fuan Daiyi start to move the group on of their own accord, having grown into the most competent directors of the bunch over the course of the day, followed, surprisingly, by Heng Ning, who despite her lesser cultivation appeared to be well-liked by quite a few people.

“Yes, it is very difficult,” Gen Yong agreed. “It must have been very difficult to clear it to this point relying on so many villagers.”

“…”

“Their cultivations are somewhat lacking,” she conceded, solicitously, which was as far as she was willing to veer into bad-mouthing anyone.

She was also unsure what realm Gen Yong was. Likely he was only at Golden Core, though it was not outside the realms of possibility that he was a Soul Foundation cultivator. In any case, getting caught out in a lie or some obvious half-truths would not be helpful.

“Very true,” Gen Yong chuckled, watching three of the villagers wrestle a quasi-Qi Condensation lotus into a pot.

“There was some discussion of local politics within the local Pavilion, not that I bothered with it too much,” she added with a further shrug and smiled at him again – two could play at the buttering up game. “I am just here to do some clearance requests.”

“Right… right,” Gen Yong sighed, but frustratingly didn’t go where she was hoping, and ‘fess up to being one of the estates hiring out of town labourers on the cheap.

“Your harvest has certainly come in much faster than the others,” she observed, doing her best to sound impressed.

“Ah, yes, my Uncle has always believed in hiring those most capable,” Gen Yong replied with a grin, before adding, “I must admit, I find myself surprised that such a highly ranked Hunter as yourself would come out here for this kind of clearance request…”

“Clearance requests are what they are, and I had a few other requests in this area as well,” she explained. “The Ha clan in West Flower Picking Town is keen to support its more rural periphery.”

-If you want me to be a high-ranked Hunter from the town, I can certainly play that game, she mused with a mental eye roll. Fates know I’ve been around enough idiots from the Ha clan in our Pavilion to know how they view the world.

“It is very difficult,” Gen Yong sighed again, even more deeply. “The Azure Authority…”

“…”

She shot him a sideways look, but said nothing.

“Ah, you are in the Bureau, so I must be appropriate… appropriate…” Gen Yong remarked, using the moment to put an arm around her shoulder conspiratorially, which she brushed off politely.

“The Pavilions are as divided as anything else, or so it seems,” she pointed out, taking care not to dwell on his hand as he removed it rather reluctantly.

The strength being transmitted through it was very casual, but there was the faintest hint of intent in his action.

-Definitely at least Golden Core, she mused.

“A young lass like yourself must have a lot of good friends though, to rise so quickly,” Gen Guowei added sympathetically.

“Indeed,” she replied, hiding her annoyance at Gen Yong’s action, “it is very difficult; you do need good friends.”

“Oh indeed,” Gen Yong agreed, giving her a further smile.

They made it two more stretches of canal, before one of the labourers was dispatched to get a second hand cart, much to the hidden mirth of those with her. She affected not to notice, and merely praised the vigour and work ethic of the labourers to Gen Yong, who nodded and agreed… at some length.

After that, it was another hour, almost nine in the evening, and well past dusk before they made it to the end of the canals, where they adjoined the walled-in spirit ponds next to the extensive compound of the Gen estate itself. During that time, Gen Yong continued to make polite, if gossipy, conversation regarding the local village situation as they oversaw the group clean up stretch after stretch of canal. It almost became farcical after a while, but at least he had the presence of mind not to comment on the quality of previous attempts to clear out the Gen estate’s canals.

Clearly, someone had made an earlier effort to clean up a bit here and there, but their methodology had been… so haphazard that she was almost left wondering if they had tossed bamboo sticks or something to decide if lotus plants were there, rather than just checking.

“So, what about the lotuses in the spirit ponds?” she asked at last, once the labourers had taken their cart of lotuses off into the walled compound by the spirit ponds.

“That does not require your action,” Gen Guowei said, coming over to find her. “Sufficient steps have already been taken and that is now properly contained.”

“In that case,” she pulled out the physical copy of the clearance request, “I will have to ask you to certify that this has been completed to the specifications you set.”

“Mmm,” the seneschal read through it twice and nodded. “Indeed, you have purged the waterway of the lotuses. We will consider this request as completed. Payment will be forwarded to the Hunter Pavilion; you can collect it there.”

He put the Gen estate seal on it and handed it back to her.

“In that case, thank you for your hospitality, Young Master Gen, Seneschal Gen,” she murmured, bowing politely. “It has been a long day, so we must beg our departure and head back to the village.”

“We cannot interest you in any hospitality?” Gen Yong asked hopefully.

“I am afraid not,” she replied with a regretful smile and a second polite bow. “I have a number of other clearance requests – although perhaps we might find time to talk if you are in the village at some later date?”

Gen Yong looked a touch non-committal at that, which made her roll her eyes inwardly. Truly this lot did have aspirations.

“In that case, we will send an escort to take you back to the road,” Gen Guowei interjected, waving his sleeve.

A moment later, four guards wearing Ha clan colours trotted out of the walled compound, lining up and saluting Gen Guowei and Ha Gen Yong.

“Seeing Young Master!” they all called out.

“Can you escort Hunter Jun and these villagers back to the road?” Gen Guowei said perfunctorily. “It would not do to have them wander into the patrols those idiots in the next estate keep sending out.”

“Of course, Sir Seneschal!” the lead guard replied with a further salute.

“You have had problems with them?” she asked, curious.

“Everyone does,” Gen Guowei sighed. “And their grasp of field boundaries is occasionally lacking.”

“…”

“Thank you for your concern, Seneschal Gen, Young Master Ha,” she replied after a moment.

“No trouble at all,” Gen Guowei replied, waving his sleave.

Taking one look at the group, who had the body language of people very keen to be done with things, she waved for them to get moving. Without any further preamble they set forth as one whole group, down the main road from the Gen estate back towards town, flanked by the four guards with their lanterns.

…

They finally made their way back to the road just beyond the eastern side of the village, some twenty minutes later, whereupon the guards turned back without a word, leaving them to their own devices.

“Fates, I am so tired of this rain,” Wen Bei grumbled as they started off towards the distant gate of the village.

She shook her head wryly, but made no comment. In truth, she had stopped caring about the rain long ago.

“You get used to being damp after a while,” Pei Vung, one of the villagers who practised physical cultivation like her, replied with an amused laugh.

“Yeah, you spend enough time here in the wet season, you forget what sun and dry surfaces even look like,” another, one of the other girls from the village, Ma Changfei, added with a snicker.

After they had walked on, largely in silence, for a few minutes, Fuan Daiyi fell in beside her just as they were approaching the gate.

“What do we do now?” he asked her.

“Take the pot to the shrine, then leave this lot at the Hunter Pavilion,” she shrugged, patting the side of the cart. “You can divvy up what you want then.”

“Stop!”

The three guards at the gate made her look up and sigh as one of them walked forward under an umbrella, looking a bit annoyed.

“What is your business?” the guard asked curtly, looking over the muddy group and the cart. “Which farm estate do you belong to—”

“Ah! Hunter Jun!” a fourth guard, who she recognised as Guardsman Yan from her trip to the main guard compound earlier in the day, hurried out of the building by the gate.

“We are bringing in goods for the Pavilion,” she answered the guard, holding up the request.

“…”

The guard scowled and glanced at Yan, who had arrived beside her now.

“You can leave this to me, Jong,” Yan said, giving the other guard a pat on the shoulder. “Go enjoy your cold wine…”

Guardsman Jong eyed her dubiously for a moment, but clearly the appeal of cold wine and not being in the rain won out and he turned and left.

“Don’t mind him, it’s been a long day,” Yan said with a sigh, glancing at her cart. “Anything particular?”

“Just some stuff for the Pavilion and a few odd things to go to the village shrine. You know how it is when you start dredging in old canals,” she replied politely.

“In that case, go on through,” Yan chuckled, waving to the others.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw Wen Bei, Fan Bo Pei, Dan Feng Guang, Fuan Daiyi, Kun Shi and Lun Quan all shoving influence tokens back in their packs.

“…”

The action had clearly not gone unnoticed by Yan, who rolled his eyes and just waved for them to go on through a second time.

“I’ll follow you momentarily!” she called out to the group, waving for them to head on into the village.

Fuan Daiyi nodded and the others trailed past in a sodden gaggle as she and Yan watched them go past.

“Jong means well, but when he finds out the hell I saved him from he might even pay for drinks,” Guardsman Yan chuckled, gesturing for her to follow him over to the shelter of the veranda by the gate.

“I imagine so,” she agreed politely. “So, how can I help?”

“Bunch of messages for you. You’re popular,” the old guard chuckled, waving for her to follow him inside.

She stood in the office as he rummaged through a drawer and pulled out no less than four scrolls, passing them to her.

Flicking through them, two were easy – both relating to the lotus clearance, promising payment from two groups of local farmers. The third, somewhat surprisingly, turned out to be actual good news. The mutate plant she had been set to capture on the massif to the south-west of the village, a rather obnoxious variant of ‘spotted eye fungus’ whose spores could parasitize several valuable seasonal crops, had been turned in dead by a cultivator from the Ha clan in the afternoon, so that clearance request was scrapped. The last was a note from the village shrine to see them at her convenience about her earlier note, which she had almost forgotten about at this point.

“A runner from the Pavilion also came by earlier, an hour ago – said an Elder Mu wanted to see you when you got back,” Guardsman Yan added, finishing riffling through the drawers.

“Thank you,” she saluted him, then pulled out a few iron talismans and passed them to him with a pretty smile. “Go grab your card group a few drinks on my behalf. I can at least share my newfound popularity around.”

“You’re a right generous lass. Some others around here could learn,” the old guard chuckled, waving her out.

After that, she headed back after the others via the village shrine, which turned out to be a monumental waste of time. At the shrine, she met only with an acolyte who told her that the remains they recovered would be dealt with when they ‘had time’ apparently. In truth, they were much more exercised at how she had sent them a useless request that took up valuable time for no money and told her not to do it again.

Arriving back at the Hunter Pavilion, she found that the group had mostly sorted out the easy stuff already. After some consideration, she left the pot and its lotus to Kun Shi in the end, on the grounds that messing with the Kun clan had consequences beyond what most would care for. They spent a few further minutes sorting out some other odd plants then, seeing no other reason to keep them hanging around, she sent them all off with a ‘thank you’ and instruction that they would meet back there before sunrise tomorrow.

Subsequently, thirty minutes later found her back at the Jade Willow Blessing Inn, which she found to be surprisingly busy as she hauled her hand cart into the inner courtyard. Many of the others had elected to store their harvests overnight with the Hunter Pavilion, for a small cost. She, however, had a different idea in mind for most of the lotuses. The others had been quite happy to give her all the greenery from the harvested plants, which was basically useless, unless you happened to know a bit about spirit food.

“Which way to the kitchen?” she asked a serving girl who was sat out on the edge of the courtyard, smoking.

The girl looked at her and rolled her eyes, pointing a hand across the courtyard. “Deliveries round side, through the passage across the court – don’t let the old man see you here with a goods cart, he will go spare. Says it lowers the class or some bollocks.”

She nodded her thanks to the girl and as directed took the cart into another courtyard behind the inn which was much more bustling.

Looking around, she found who she needed quite quickly. It helped that she was familiar with this kind of setup courtesy of a good family friend in West Flower Picking Town. Mrs Leng owned a large spirit food business in the town and doted on both her and her sister since their mother died as if they were her own grandchildren.

Just taking them to the cook or the inn owner was what the others would likely have done – however, that would get you not very far at all in her experience, the cook would be too busy and the owner would not see her if he didn’t already know her. The inn’s manager was who she really needed – the person who oversaw all the logistics of… everything in a place like this.

In this instance, he was not hard to find either, given he was standing beside a doorway to the inn’s storehouse, haranguing several servants who were pulling crates and jars of wine out from inside.

“Good fates, are you lot paid by the time you take to walk your steps?”

Approaching, she watched him wave two servants by as they struggled under the weight of a hundred litre jar of ice wine that was misting the humid air and dripping with cold vapour.

“Hurry it up, if it’s room temperature before it’s served people will ask their money back and you lot will get no bonus!”

The servants, clearly used to his grumbling, said nothing as they continued to work.

Bowing politely, she attracted his attention.

“Sir Manager, a moment of your time?” she asked politely.

“You’re… that Hunter we got staying?” he grunted, looking her over. “How can I help you?”

“I couldn’t help noticing that we might be able to help each other out,” she replied with a bright smile, watching the ice wine as it was ported past her. “I notice the inn is particularly busy tonight, and the weather is showing no signs of playing nice…”

“That’s heaven’s honest truth,” he muttered. “So what is it you want to try and sell me?”

“A quarter of a tonne of Duo Li’s water lotus leaves and three live Qi Condensation, grade one lotus plants, all gathered fresh this afternoon,” she answered with a polite smile. “I also have a few dozen spirit vegetation lotuses and around one hundred kilos of roots.”

“…”

“Those are not easy to process...” the manager noted, giving her a searching look.

“I can process them if you require it for what you want to cook,” she replied helpfully. “My rates are very reasonable in that regard.”

“The greenery will of course have to be inspected,” he mused.

“Of course,” she agreed, having expected nothing less.

There would be a few in there that were a bit too yin life attributed for basic spirit cooking, however, all the properly yin life ones had been kept separate. Those would only really be useful for alchemy.

“I take it you have them with you?” he asked.

“The plants are on the hand cart over there,” she gestured to where the cart stood sheltered by the overhanging roof to keep off the worst of the rain. “The greenery I have in my storage talisman to keep it fresh. The roots are also in the cart because I didn’t break their foundations.”

“Ohhoh?” the manager eyed her more appreciatively.

They walked around to the cart, under the eaves while she negotiated the price, pending inspection of the goods. His initial offer came to about six spirit stones which, given she was operating almost entirely on pure profit, was not terrible. Mrs Leng would have paid eight or nine, but there, the quality of work was known.

While she showed the manager the plants, two servants came and quickly checked through the pots of live spirit vegetation and then the harvested roots. When they were satisfied with those, she brought out the four crates of bundled lotus leaves and took them through the initial inspection of those as well until they were again satisfied.

“This an exemplary crop, young miss,” the manager remarked at last, watching the servants finish putting the leaves back. “Just as fresh as you stated, and almost none of it damaged in the process of harvesting beyond a few leaves which will still be good for stew. We can pay you seven spirit stones for them, and offer you a small discount on your stay?”

She pretended to consider for a bit, so as not to look too eager and then agreed, saluting him politely.

“There is also… the matter of preparation? You said you were familiar with such? We are quite shorthanded,” he mused, somewhat leadingly, though that was expected really.

“It depends on what you want to cook,” she answered. “If it is just Icy Li Soup, I can prepare the roots for you for… an extra spirit stone. If you are looking to make Moon Green Stew, I can also do the leaves in a way that will retain the ‘cool’ of the yin water while removing the harsher attributes… That, however, takes a bit of time, so would be an extra two spirit stones.”

“You are… very familiar with the working market rates,” the manager noted, almost accusatorily.

“I was trained by Mrs Leng Shuang, in West Flower Picking Town. I am one of her restaurant’s regular herb suppliers,” she murmured.

“Oh hoo, I have partaken there, truly an excellent establishment, a place everyone wishes to visit when they go to the town,” the manager nodded with a broad grin, before adding, “My niece works there, Miss Ning Sora. I am Ning Xiaodan, a pleasure to make your acquaintance…”

“Jun Arai. Truly, the world is small; Ning Sora and I do have more than a passing acquaintance,” she said brightly, impressed at how small the world could be sometimes. “She minds the market stalls for Mrs Leng and always speaks very warmly of her family in Red Lake Village.”

“She is indeed filial,” Manager Ning sighed. “My brother’s youngest daughter.”

“I will pass on your regards when I return,” she replied politely. “Did the Ning family not also use to own an inn here?” she added, thinking of the now closed down inn she had been intending to stay at.

“Ah, yes, my cousin did own such an establishment,” the manager agreed, albeit a bit more glumly. “He has fallen on hard times though – he expended a lot of effort to enrol his son into a good sect in Blue Water City but the boy turned out to be profligate and unfilial, offending a youth from the Ha clan. They put pressure on some local influences and made life hard for the family, so the inn went under a few seasons back. The people who own it now only open it for the ginseng season. I have always worked at this inn though.”

“So, where are these lotuses?” a thin woman with a flushed face exclaimed, bustling over.

“Ah, Cook Seung,” Manager Ning nodded brightly. “Right here.”

The cook looked through the goods a second time, nodding happily.

“Excellent, excellent…” she said at last, putting down a bundle of the leaves. “There is a lot of clamour for cool and refreshing things on an infernally humid day like today. The rain has a lot of people on edge…”

“Miss Jun here has some skill with herb preparation as well; for three spirit stones she is willing to prepare most of these,” Manager Ning added brightly.

“She does… you do?” the cook glanced her over a second time with a more appraising eye. “Very good, very good… you have done well, Manager Ning.”

“I always do well,” the manager grumbled.

“…”

The cook shot him a sideways look, then just shook her head and waved to two servants standing nearby.

“You two, take this lot in!” she commanded, pointing at the contents of the cart. “Miss Jun, if you could go with them, I will follow you shortly and tell you what is needed.”

After that, it was fairly perfunctory. She was paid ten spirit stones and spent the following hour rapidly skinning and then leeching the lotus roots using a very basic formation. For an extra three spirit stones she was also happy to instruct two of the junior cooks in the use of the formation she used and even got a free dinner out of the whole endeavour.

In the process, she also finally managed to make some tangential enquiries about Elder Li – using the guise of being someone from West Flower Picking Town and having heard ‘this and that’ about a few acquaintances coming to work here and complaining that they were put upon to do unreasonable things.

The two junior cooks were, it turned out, more than willing to talk about what they knew, even if it was precious little beyond rumours really. It did however confirm to her that someone had been keeping Elder Li’s ‘disappearance’ under wraps and that neither cook had any particular knowledge of what those coming from West Flower Picking Town had been doing – other than it being associated less with the Pavilion and more with the Ha clan.

When she was done, she went back up to her rooms and, after tossing her dirty clothes into her storage talisman, had a long, cold bath courtesy of a few water attributed ward stones. Only when she had finished a whole jug of cold spirit wine did she get out, dry herself off, and go over to the mirror.

She had been tempted to rest for the remainder of the night; however, the earlier conversations with the cooks had shown her a few angles she could use to get more information about Elder Li.

It didn’t take long to fix her hair into a style favoured by young ladies of the Ha clan and then find a hair pin that had a fox on it.

It was unfortunate she had no dress robes made in the style of the Ha clan with her, she reflected. They were quite popular in West Flower Picking Town and she had several at home, but had not thought to pack formal wear for a trek into the mountains. In the end, though, she managed to put together an outfit from what she did have with her that was broadly red, purple and grey themed and would make her look like a guest expert or minor branch member of the clan.

The last touch was to put on a bit of makeup, which she didn’t really like, but was necessary just to make her not quite look as she usually did.

The overall effect was that of a cosmopolitan merchant’s daughter who had a family connection to the Ha clan and wanted to be sure everyone else knew it.

In that regard, it helped that the Ha clan was a huge edifice in the province and you could probably throw a rock in any village within five hundred miles of West Flower Picking Town and hit someone related to them. Her goal wasn’t really to impersonate someone from the clan in any case, just to mislead the casual observer enough that her questions would not seem out of place.

She took one final look in the mirror and, after satisfying herself that her cloak was affixed properly, she stored everything else away again and focused on an aspect of her skillset that saw little general use outside of the mountains – her stealth art.

{Empty Eye Steps}

The art was a curious one, in that it didn’t come from the standard repertoire of Hunter Pavilion martial forms like many others learned during training. It was a thing included in the training by Elder Ling personally insofar as she was aware and only known to those he taught personally in the West Flower Picking Pavilion.

At her current realm it would founder quickly if soul sense, or exceptional Martial Intent, was involved; however, that, again, was not how you were meant to use it. It was all about making you less noticeable, not invisible. The way it worked was quite simple as well. It was half divination art, half movement art, except rather than focusing on allowing you to move quickly it focused on allowing you to move in a way that didn’t attract attention. It was at its most effective if you were subtle, and it had a second major advantage – it didn’t require you to externalise any qi and only manifested a tiny bit of intent, making it more a matter of concentration to maintain than qi reserves.

Waiting until the hall outside her room was empty, she departed quietly. The main court of the inn and teahouse was still packed, word having gotten out about the cool and refreshing soup that had been added to the menu just an hour previous. She didn’t linger there though and swiftly exited the inn, putting up her umbrella and walking in the direction of the main plaza and the teahouses and market that was still ongoing there.

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

~ KUN JUNI – NINE DANCING CARP TEAHOUSE, BLUE WATER CITY ~

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

“I have to say, this rather sucks.”

“Yes, you have said that three times already, please drink more wine!”

“They could have at least let us go to the—”

“So you can stand there being told to run errands by Senior Lu Meng Jiang or Young Master Kun Baotan?”

“Yeah… at least here we can chat about stuff and not be constantly mistaken for servants…”

“We might have gotten to see—”

“Seriously, if you think they would let us anywhere near the same section of the Golden Dragon Teahouse—”

“—stop being such an old maid, it’s good to have dreams!”

“Monkey-cursed Baotan, just because his uncle bought him that fancy spirit flame…”

“…”

Listening to the group at the table she was at argue away, Kun Juni, daughter of the Kun clan, Herb Hunter and Junior Bureau Official, found herself tuning them out to watch the group of musicians leading the lower level of the Nine Dancing Carp Teahouse in a rather catchy rendition of ‘On the Dao to Nowhere’, a popular drinking song, trying to pick out the notes…

“—What do you think, Fairy Juni?”

“…”

Her focus broken, she sighed softly and turned back to the speaker, a disciple of the Lu clan, Lu Weng Li, from Pill Sovereign City, rapidly replaying the last ten seconds of conversation around her and realised she had been asked about why an ‘Imperial Princess’ might have come to Blue Water City.

In truth, that was why she was actually here, in the Nine Dancing Carp – the clan elders were spooked by the arrival of the princess and the fact that the entire envoy she brought with her appeared to be juniors. In the case of those with her, she could, she suspected add the ages of any two of them together and they would still be younger than she was.

Thankfully, social status in these contexts overrode any lingering questions about cultivation realm, and as the daughter of a Clan Lord she was pretty much the most important person at the table, despite the fact that everyone else was at least Golden Core and a few were even Soul Foundation.

-The eldest among them is barely twenty… the transparency of the clan elders’ efforts in that regard though, made her teeth hurt a bit.

Involuntarily, her gaze found Kun Feng Jinhai and Kun Ying Ji, sitting nearby.

-Probably that is why I am here, doing this. With my foundation I am just a symbol here representing the strength of others. A beautiful symbol with many enticing elements, but a symbol nonetheless.

That pair, laughing away and discussing the battles in the plaza from earlier, were the original reason she was here. Two scions of the Nine Moons Province Kun clan who she had been tasked to ‘show around’ Blue Water City for a few days by the clan. Jinhai’s family was associated with the Myriad Herb Association, a direct competitor of the Hunter Bureau, while Ying Ji was affiliated with a branch influence of the hegemonic Four Peacocks Court.

-Their desire to try and match me up with someone influential to their purposes is just…

“Politics,” she replied, pushing that thought from her head and taking a piece of fresh fish wrapped in an ice lotus leaf from the platter across from her. “The Imperial Court probably doesn’t like how the Azure Astral Authority is showing more interest in this province in recent years.”

“My Senior Brother heard it was because the Deng clan invited them over… personally,” the only other woman at the table, Ha Lianmei, a Blue Gate School disciple, interjected, casting her a faintly challenging look as she did so.

-How… stupid, she thought, almost feeling sorry for her. Are you not aware of how much trouble this visit is likely to cause for everyone?

She sighed again and took a mouthful of her fish, enjoying how cool and refreshing it was in the muggy night that was as bad as anything you might find in the valleys of Yin Eclipse.

Ha Lianmei was not someone she had much acquaintance with, however, Ha Lianmei was also one of an annoyingly large group of her ‘peers’ who thought they knew enough about her to make socializing awkward. In this case, the younger woman… girl really, had been prodding her subtly all evening, trying to draw out ‘contentious’ opinions that she could then rebut. The whole evening, brief interlude with Arai aside, was really only serving to remind her yet again why she so disliked doing these kinds of things.

The elders in the Kun clan had sent her cousin, Xingjuan, to the actual meeting in the Golden Dragon Teahouse. Once, she was sure, she would have felt slighted or something… that the 'daughter' of the Clan Lord was here, rather than there, however, at thirty-four, she was easily the oldest of those seated around the table and had no real interest at all anymore in the manoeuvring of the younger generation in Blue Water Province either in this place, or in the even more elitist surrounds of the Golden Dragon Teahouse.

-And by arriving like this, they make it much harder for the Azure Astral Authority or any powerful clan, to step in and make a public fuss… she reflected. After all, seniors interfering with juniors just opens up the floor to all kinds of meddling. Especially if those juniors are an Imperial Princess and a scion of the Huang clan.

“…”

“Come all you old villains, you scammers and rogues…”

“We’re on the Dao to nowhere… lets find out where it goes!”

The lyrics of the drunken chorus from down below drifted up, cutting through the lull in conversation at their table as she realised everyone else had turned to her, clearly expecting her to have something to say about what Ha Lianmei had just said.

“If the Deng clan can invite an Imperial Princess over, the Ha clan certainly has some problems,” she replied drily, taking a sip of her wine, and having decided that she wasn’t that sorry for her.

Ha Lianmei flushed slightly, and opened her mouth to refute that, but she didn’t give the younger woman a chance to continue. “I would be more worried about the Blue Gate School. I trust you recall what happened the last two times an Imperial Scion came this side of the ocean to play around in Yin Eclipse?”

“…”

Looking at the slightly blank looks of those around the table, she sighed inwardly for the third time in as many minutes and just took a further sip of her wine to wash down the fish.

“If you want to know, go read a book or something, or give the storyteller down below some spirit stones, I am sure they will be more than happy to sing tall tales about the noble endeavours of Prince Fanshu or Princess Miao on a day like today,” she remarked with a half-smile.

“Awww…” one of those beside Lu Weng Li grumbled.

“To hear you tell it would be…”

“Lady Kun, don’t be so reticent!”

Shaking her head, she claimed another piece of the fresh fish.

The Three Schools Conflict left her particularly… conflicted. Her older brother Talshin had served with the new Duke, Cao Leyang, in that mess. He had had little nice to say of the experience. It was also off the back of that that the clan of Lin Ling, her fellow Herb Hunter, had met their downfall at the hands of imperial machination, and been forced to relocate to West Flower Picking Town from Teng Lin Town, far to the south, on the other side of the great forests that stretched from Yin Eclipse to the coastal Blue Water Mountains.

Probably the storyteller for the teahouse would recount some tale or other, but whether it would be quite the one anyone from the Imperial continent wanted to hear was another matter. The sentiments over those upheavals thirty years prior were not as polarized as many liked to think and even a lot of Imperial Court advocates had complaints there, never mind the much older history of the Iron Crown Duke’s scions and Kong Di Ji… or the heavy-handed suppression of the locals after the Blood Eclipse Cult emerged prior to that…

-Curse you for making me think about such things again, she thought sourly, taking a further drink of her wine. Though that is certainly another reason this is a mission led by juniors.

“Such things do not make for a particularly edifying topic of conversation, I will give you that, sister Juni,” Kun Ying Ji, added sympathetically.

“Quite,” Ha Yung, the other proper Blue Gate School disciple with them agreed with a slight scowl at Ha Lianmei.

As she recalled, both Ha Yung’s older brothers had died in the conflict, killed for holding minor posts in a village Hunter Pavilion in Ha clan territory by a group of ‘young masters’ from the Imperial School who had come to defend the ‘good name’ of the Imperial Court from ‘slanderous actions’ by the Azure Astral Authority.

If Ha Lianmei noticed his glance, she didn’t acknowledge it, just holding out her cup for a waiting servant to refill as she stared at the various platters in front of her.

“So, you work in the Hunter Pavilion?” Kun Ying Ji asked her.

“I hold an official post as a liaison for the Kun clan,” she replied with a polite smile.

He certainly knew that already, but at this point, she could understand why he was just making polite conversation to move matters away from what was clearly an awkward topic.

“So, Fairy Juni, I heard there are all sorts of remarkable treasures that have emerged from the forbidden zone?” Lu Weng Li asked, leaning over, shifting the topic back to one that had already done several rounds.

“Things do wash out,” she conceded. “Though, mostly what turns up is stuff like pots, it has to be said.”

“And you did say, earlier,” Bai Jiang remarked with a good natured laugh.

“Pots?” Kun Feng Jinhai asked, sounding amused and reminding her that he had not been there for that.

“—I heard that some treasures occasionally show up at auction, real treasures, not these pots you spoke of,” one of the Lu clan members accompanying Lu Weng Li said, speaking up for the first time and cutting off Feng Jinhai’s question.

“Ah, you speak of that chest, brother Yung,” Lu Weng Ji nodded.

-Chest? Oh… the one that got scalped by the Military Authority Bureau, she realised.

That had been odd, she had to admit, even though she knew something of the inside track on that, albeit rather by accident thanks to her position in the West Flower Picking Hunter Pavilion.

“Do you know anything of that?” Ying Ji asked her. “They are saying it is another example of the Azure Astral Authority not knowing its limits.”

Around the table, quite a few of the others nodded in agreement at that comment.

“While I do act as a liaison to the Hunter Bureau for the Kun clan, I am only a junior official,” she pointed out with a self-depreciating smile. “The Sheng clan on Shan Lai who back the Military Authority and the Shen clan who bought the chest do not get on… there was a suggestion that it was associated with the last Empress of the Shan Dynasty in some way, likely because of the swan and moon motifs on the chest…”

More than that, she had no idea, but it was not hard to extrapolate the circumstances in which two arch rivals with bad blood stretching back hundreds of thousands of years would find a way to bend the fairly exacting rules of the Military Authority Bureau to snatch it away.

“Oh…” by his tone, Ying Ji was clearly a bit disappointed by her explanation, which she found somewhat hilarious.

-What did you expect? Some validation that the Azure Authority is overreaching? It’s just two big clans doing what clans do…

“That is quite uncommon though, mostly it’s the odd plate or box full of junk. Fishermen periodically haul such things out of the rivers south and west of the mountains,” she explained to the group at large.

“But they must come from somewhere?” Lu Weng Li pressed, picking up the thread of that topic quite unerringly.

“There are ruins,” she agreed. “However, you would not care to explore them I think. Not when the most interesting thing you will find is some nigh-indestructible ornate stone pot with tasteful wavy patterns on it that has no other special properties than its remarkable inability to be stored in spatial containers.”

“…”

That got some laughter from the group with Ha Lianmei and Ha Yung, most of whom were familiar with the paradoxical nature of the things that usually turned up on the borders of Yin Eclipse.

“Surely that does make them interesting?” Kun Feng Jinhai mused. “When you say ‘nigh-indestructible’?”

“I once saw a Dao Lord kick one. The Dao Lord broke their foot,” she replied with aplomb, the memory of Kun clan elder Aokai doing that was a cherished recollection of her youth in many ways, as he was one of the old bastards who had backed her cousin.

“Like… a Dao Lord?” Ha Lianmei said, affecting to sound mildly disbelieving.

“…”

Shaking her head, she ignored the younger woman and helped herself to a piece of spirit fruit.

“It is impressive, but intact ones are fairly rare unless you go into the mountain range and dig them out yourself… and Yin Eclipse is not really a place worth braving for mildly indestructible plant pots.”

“No… it is not,” Ha Yung agreed with an eye roll.

“I suppose it is not… however I have also heard a great deal about the wealth of the spirit herbs within the forbidden zone,” Bai Jiang mused.

“Yes, perhaps we should place a mission request!” one of the youths next to him said with slightly drunken cheer.

-Oh please don’t suggest that I escort you all on a sightseeing trip up there, she prayed in her heart, taking in the interested expressions of all those from Pill Sovereign City, Feng Jinhai and Ying Ji included.

“…”

“Was it a mission like that that you had to leave to talk about earlier?” Feng Jinhai asked, offering her a refill of her cup of ice wine.

“Eh… no,” she replied, accepting the refill with a smile. “Nothing so exotic, it’s just the time of year when the Hunter Bureau cleans all the annoying requests off its books.”

“A difficult monopoly,” a Lu clan disciple, from the Pill Sovereign Sect, interjected.

“…”

“It is,” Ha Lianmei agreed with a sideways look at her again, inserting herself back into the conversation even as she fanned herself and tried hard not to look like she was sweating in the humid night air. “We give so much to them and see nothing in return.

“What kind of request could require someone of your standing to directly intercede though?” the girl asked, with a slightly vacuous expression.

“It was just an issue with an overzealous junior of a regional family,” she replied, not biting on Ha Lianmei’s attempt to drag the question of local politics into matters.

“You know how people get with sect talismans and authority,” she added, which got a few wry laughs around the table without her having to give away too much about her distant cousin Kun Wencheng’s brief foray into genuine ‘young noble’ levels of stupidity.

“Quite, quite,” Ying Ji agreed, rolling his eyes.

“The request he interfered with was to teach villagers how to harvest spirit ginseng, but in this weather, it was changed to something else, probably some problematic spirit herb well clear of the forbidden zone,” she mused taking a further sip of her wine and trying to recall what Arai was actually doing and how that might have intersected with someone like Kun Wencheng.

The teaching request had been for ginseng, but a coddled idiot like Wencheng would never be let anywhere near the lower valleys, especially out near Jade Willow where you could throw a rock from the village outskirts and have it land in the Red Pit.

-Could it be the spotted eye fungus on the massif near there? she mused to herself, fighting the temptation to pull out her scrip and look. Arai was assigned that… Oh… and there was that lotus infestation. In this weather that would be doable.

Now that she thought about it, probably Wencheng had been sent out to help oversee the harvest, so the Duo Li’s lotus thing was quite likely.

“Yes, this weather is horrid,” Bai Jiang, the other Pill Sovereign Sect disciple sitting with them agreed. “Is this normal for here?”

“The rain?” she mused. “Somewhat, it’s a bit early though. Usually these rain fronts start appearing a few weeks into the wet season that we will see in the New Year.”

-It’s like an awkward family gathering, a part of her thought, looking around the table at the others who were all fanning themselves or trying not to look like they were melting. Talking about politics, the weather and what we did today…

“The weather is just, like, vile,” Ha Lianmei agreed, fanning herself for extra emphasis and changing her position to show the visitors a hint more bosom as she pouted.

“How do you not look like you are melting?” Bai Jiang added, taking a deep drink of his own ice wine.

“This is fairly normal for the interior,” she replied, smiling slightly at Ha Lianmei who affected not to notice. “I am just used to it, that is all.”

“…”

“This rain is like, the worst,” Ha Lianmei sighed. “I’d like nothing better than to be able to spend the wet season over the ocean in Hajing City or Pill Sovereign City,”

“Quite,” Feng Jinhai nodded, proffering Ha Lianmei the jar of ice wine, which the younger girl accepted slightly too quickly. “Haijing City is delightful this time of year, the autumn plum blossom on the great boulevards is exquisite…”

“Have you ever been, sister Juni?” Ying Ji, who was as far as she knew a native of that city, on the north-eastern coast of the Imperial continent, asked her.

“To Haijing City?” she mused, leaning forward to grab another piece of the fish and ignoring the sideways looks it got her.

At nearly six foot, with long dark-brown hair, naturally flawless features and a figure to match, if Ha Lianmei, who was short and sandy-haired, wanted to compete in looking traditionally pretty in the eyes of others, she was more than happy to accompany the younger woman in that. It didn’t help the younger girl either that the Ha clan’s traditional purple and red getup did not favour her complexion.

“Y-yes,” he nodded, coughing slightly and sipping his wine.

“No,” she replied, sitting back and sighing softly. “However, I have been to Pill Sovereign City with my father once… To watch the Pill Sovereign Grand Trial.”

“…”

“Oh, the last one of those was some twenty-five years ago…” Bai Jiang mused, looking interested.

“Ah…”

She sighed, annoyed at herself for having walked into that. It wasn’t that her age was a sore point, rather that that had been one of the last trips she had taken overseas, when she was still in line to be the successor to the Kun clan in the province. Just a few weeks after getting back, the old bastards had had their divination that her spirit root was ‘inauspicious’ and would ‘lead to disaster’ and she had been kicked to the back courtyard within a week, with her cousin Xingjuan, the daughter of the Kun clan’s supreme elder, installed as the new successor.

“I do believe it was,” she said blandly, ignoring Ha Lianmei’s supercilious look. “Quan Dingxiang took first place as I recall?”

“It was indeed Senior Quan,” Bai Jiang agreed with an admiring sigh. “Such a remarkable alchemist, truly Pill Sovereign City and Nine Moons Province’s most exceptional talent.”

“I’ve always been more partial to Senior Dongmei,” Feng Jinhai chuckled, not quite managing to avoid looking sideways at her.

-Well, I suppose that comparison is flattering enough, she thought with an inner sigh.

“Bleugh,” Bai Jiang retorted. “Surely she is a beauty, but so reclusive, have you even seen her in person?”

“Have you?” Feng Jinhai shot back.

“Nope!” Bai Jiang said with aplomb. “However Senior Quan taught my outer disciple hall alchemy three years ago and even gave us some pointers!”

“…”

“I admit I was somewhat overawed at the occasion,” she shrugged. “It is all very impressive and spectacular when you are nine.”

“How come you attended?” another of the hangers-on with the Pill Sovereign group asked.

“My father was invited, he is a sworn brother of Lord Bohai, they fought together in the Huang-Mo Wars,” she explained.

-All praise to the Dao of dropping big names, she reflected wryly, noting that even Ha Lianmei had to work to affect being unimpressed.

Quan Bohai, along with her reclusive great grandfather Kun Zheng and Headmaster Lu Ji of the Blue Gate School, were among a group within that era of calamity who had excelled to the point of becoming household names for their various deeds and accolades accrued during that chaotic time. Quan Bohai had been awarded high rank in Nine Moons Province and was someone who was widely respected among the righteous powers across the water.

It was a connection that her father sometimes joked about, saying that friendship for a week and one blocked blow had gained the Kun clan a foot on the dock in Pill Sovereign City that was immune to most bricks being dropped on it. Such connections were, admittedly, at the heart of the clan’s economic success under her father’s tenure as leader.

-I suppose I can take some comfort in the fact that old ancestor Zheng is even harder on cousin Xingjuan than he was me, she mused, before reminding herself that she was supposedly ‘above’ all that mess now.

“Oh to be born into a generation like that…” one of Ha Lianmei’s hangers-on, a Ha clan youth, who was barely fifteen and at the top of Qi Refinement, only marginally higher realm than she was, sighed.

“Indeed, of such great events are legacies made…” her other companion agreed.

-Yeah, I doubt that, somehow, she thought drily, accepting a proffered refill of her wine from Kun Ying Ji with a polite nod.

“You disagree?” Ha Lianmei asked archly.

She was about to pretend she had not heard that when she realised it was directed at Bai Jiang rather than her, who was looking a bit disgruntled at the comments.

“War is not a thing we should aspire to,” Bai Jiang remarked. “For every legacy made, and every name carved into jade for future generations, how many bones lie forgotten and abandoned?”

“That is what it means to strive,” Ha Lianmei pouted, fanning herself again.

“Tell that to those buried in the Three Schools Conflict, or those seized by that Kong Di Ji,” Ha Yung muttered.

*ahem*

She coughed politely, heading off the incipient argument.

“Indeed, to seek the Dao is to strive with every step,” she agreed. “However, so is carrying on the hopes and dreams of those who have fallen upon it, whether we met them in harmony or in conflict.”

“Wise words, they belong to the Blue Water Sage, do they not?” Lu Weng Li mused, raising his own cup.

“Yes,” she agreed.

Ha Lianmei opened and shut her pretty mouth then showed surprising wisdom for her sixteen years in choosing to take a deep drink of her wine cup rather than get caught up in a philosophy debate on the acceptable costs of the pursuit of unlimited power with those older than her.

“Though it is much too early in the evening and we have consumed nowhere near enough spirit wine to make such a discussion appealing!” she added with a grin, raising her own cup.

“Well said!” Feng Jinhai agreed, raising his own cup in mock salute and taking a deep drink, with the others following suit.

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

~ LU JI – LITTLE HARBOUR, BLUE WATER CITY ~

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Lu Ji sat, wine jar in hand, on the edge of a sheltered veranda in the Lu family estates, looking out over the lights of Little Harbour and, beyond the river, the Blue Dragon and Central districts of Blue Water City in the misty evening rain. Fireworks had started to shoot up, scattering light through the rain and casting bizarre shadows off the clouds streaming above. The trees below, part of the parkland within the boundaries of this enclave on the heights of the island, hissed and sighed in the wind.

It would, he reflected, likely come as a surprise to many that Little Harbour had, on its heights, these various estates. Once this island, rather than the mainland across the river delta, been the bustling heart of the city, as his Grand Uncle Lu Fu Tao had envisaged it. In a way, it still was, but more technically than practically. Slowly, however, over the years, it had become the ‘old quarter’ of the city. The climate in summer was not exactly enjoyable unless you were up here, and perhaps most importantly, space was limited. Subsequently, most of the influential families who had gravitated towards the city after its establishment had, over the millennia, relocated their main estates across the river.

There, they could overlook the vast gardens surrounding the Blue Pagoda, currently lit up to his eyes by hundreds of thousands of lanterns as people congregated and mingled in what was an impromptu festival of sorts. Of those other families, only the Ling clan had always had their compounds near there, giving their name to the Blue Dragon quarter. Now, aside from his personal estates and a few smaller influences and sects, only the Ha clan among the region’s large influences still retained any presence here, on the inland end of the island, where they largely controlled and owned those docklands.

“Really, ‘nephew’, if you came here just to sit on a veranda and drink wine, you could do it at ‘the party’?” his ‘aunt’, Lu Xiao grumbled from where she was seated on a couch, sipping her tea and flipping through a book.

“Revered and most Serene Ancestral—”

“—Auntie.” Their surroundings actually shimmered slightly as she corrected him. “Calling me by that preposterous title that the current boy in the imperial hot seat ‘awarded me’ to make his position more secure makes me feel like the world has both passed me by and paused to spit in my tea at the same time.”

Trying not to sigh, he glanced in her direction.

He had returned here to avoid going anywhere near the banquet, letting his personal disciple Ling Tao, the Vice-Headmistress, handle that along with the other school elders while he tried to forget the worst of the day’s events and collect himself for whatever surprises tomorrow might bring. Lu Xiao’s presence here was a surprise in that she came and went, largely without warning or reason.

To many, Lu Xiao, the ‘Lady Xiao’, was an enigma wrapped in a riddle, seasoned liberally with a mildly terrifying mystique. Here, though, she looked almost aggressively mundane. A pretty… beautiful, brown-haired woman in her mid-twenties, dressed in a grey and silver gown patterned with clouds and dancing animals. Her face had the flawlessness of someone who had already been beautiful long before the allure of her realm took over and elevated it to idealised perfection; however, she had never lost what could only be described as charmingly severe eyebrows or the short scar on her left temple.

“At least go sing songs with Fairy Cuifen or Fairy Luijan on the river or something… Fates know you resisted marriage long enough; at least go amuse others and make young ladies lament rather than haunting my veranda like a drunken raven…”

Shaking his head, he politely ignored her admonition and continued to ponder the day’s events.

“I came here to avoid that party,” he grumbled “The ‘civil elders’ meeting’ hosted by that boy Huang JiLao was more than enough to remind me why I prefer to spend the long years of my life out here, in what so many have been calling a ‘back-water, provincial herb warehouse’ of late—”

“It is true that the delicate sensibilities of those from across the ocean are easily thrown out of kilter by actual endeavour,” Lu Xiao cut in, sighing theatrically.

-Not to mention I’ve seen quite enough of that princess, and if I saw her ‘minders’ from that Qiao’s estate again so soon I’d probably try to kill them, he added to himself.

With a sigh, she put aside her book, got up and came to lean on the balcony beside him and held out a cup she had gotten from somewhere. “On the other hand, nephew, you put far too much store by the trappings of what your father and grandfather built. It is not the attitude the future ‘head’ of the family should have. Those things are not what are important, and you know it.”

“Are my thoughts, at least, not my own?” he muttered darkly.

“When you come and drink on my veranda? Nope,” Lu Xiao said contritely, ignoring the fact that it was…

“It is my veranda,” she reiterated, eyeing him sideways. “This whole estate was built for me, by your Grand Uncle…”

“…”

He took another drink of his wine to avoid commenting, because the worst part was that she wasn’t wrong. The whole estate, and probably when you considered the land contracts stretching back well before the founding of the city – most of the island they were on, was owned by her.

Theirs, the Lu clan, was one that many in the current Imperial Court still considered upstart commoners… under normal circumstances anyway. Never mind that it had a lineage of cultivators stretching back at least a million years and counted among its number several Imperial Advisors, an Imperial Chancellor and even an Empress in the later years of the Shan Dynasty that had preceded the current Dun Dynasty. The fact that they currently possessed one of the foremost alchemy canons on any continent was tilting that balance slightly… although after today’s events he was doubly sure that it wasn’t necessarily in entirely good ways either.

The crux of the problem, really, was that while his old ancestors were, simply put, terrifying old things, most of them had long since left the confines of Eastern Azure for broader skies in past aeons. Those that remained did not have the same views as those older generations, with the exception of… the enigmatic Lu Xiao, who was presently leaning on the balcony and watching the fireworks in silence.

To most, she was nominally considered as the youngest sister of his Grand Uncle Lu Fu Tao’s own mother. Lu Fu Tao, who was widely venerated in these lands as the Blue Water Sage, who had founded Blue Water City and basically cemented Blue Water Province as a proper regional power some thirty thousand years ago. She was the only one of that generation who still paid attention to family matters and hung around this city, mainly in the Blue Pagoda or this estate since the city’s founding like the old ghost… she most certainly was not.

“…”

Without comment, he poured her cup full to the brim and smiled at her wanly.

He had to admit that, in her own way, while she was… eccentric, especially when she decided to turn her gaze elsewhere for whatever reason, she was probably the only person in the city who he could trust to give him good counsel on the day’s events. He had intended to seek her out in the morning, when his mood was a bit better…

Her presence here, rather than in the Blue Pagoda, was… disconcerting.

“So what if some brats come and kick it over,” she sighed, waving at the distant towers of the Blue Gate School, mere shadows in the distant rain. “Your short-sighted moron of a father signed over this catastrophe without a care to you when he went crawling up the leg of Dun Sheng and Dun Miao’s little faction all those years ago. It is just a school. Compared to the wider legacy here, it is nothing. He knew that well enough to almost sell it out then, and he knew nothing.”

“That is… true,” he grimaced, taking another large gulp of his own wine. “I cannot deny that my own family branch of the Lu clan has excelled quite remarkably in being a problem.”

“In that at least, you see better than most others,” she chuckled darkly. “While I cannot fault your grandfather for setting up the school, he should have passed it directly to someone like Ling Bai or even you when you achieved Dao Immortal. That he chose to saddle it to your father, knowing his temperament, was—”

“—A terrible mistake?” he suggested.

“That is a good way to put it,” she agreed, sipping her own wine. “However, to blame your father for this mess is to rather ignore those old fogies of your grandfather’s generation. Their strategy of pushing our clan’s promising protégés towards the court was only ever going to end up with this and they knew it. Talents like your father’s, that could have been properly nurtured, sold out for their own aggrandized opportunities and those fools, weaned to expect privilege and accept mediocrity, are left with golden bosoms to lie on and the back-handed compliments of their peers for epitaphs.”

“…”

Taking another drink of wine, he let her complain, because she wouldn’t stop, even if he got down and…

“Well I might, for the novelty,” she snickered, casting him an amused sideways look.

“…”

“If he had been my disciple I’d have sent him heavenward as soon as he hit Dao Lord,” she grumbled. “I guess if there is one good thing that bogus title is good for, it’s keeping an eye on what those feckless old men are up to.”

“Probably only you can call the other Imperial Advisors that…” he muttered, taking another deep drink of the wine.

“Hah!” she laughed, and held out her own cup again for a refill. “I was thinking more of our honoured Lu clan’s ‘Old Ancestors’ over the ocean – but that bunch of preening geese do rather qualify.”

Having different factions within a clan as large as the Lu on different sides of continental politics was not, in truth, that uncommon. Even within this province, the Ha clan were in a similar situation, as were the Ling clan, in their own way. The divisions within the Lu clan, for example, were only in his Grand Uncle’s generation; with the exception of himself and a few others who were side-lined in various places like this, most were thoroughly in hock to the Imperial Court at this point.

The real source of his Aunt’s displeasure in all this was the linking of the ‘Blue Water Pavilion’ with the school that his father had implied all those years ago. That was a thing he had deliberately ‘not’ considered earlier when dealing with the princess, being well aware of the means behind her to pry out things if they really needed to.

Linking the two in the eyes of the court had been mostly brushed off as unfounded rumour. Still he, and especially his Aunt, were certain there were eyes there that saw and didn’t believe.

“More wine,” she held out her cup and he obligingly poured more.

Drinking it down in a single gulp, she held it out again.

“What? You came here to complain, cannot others complain? Oh high and mighty school master?” she murmured.

“…”

He smiled and poured her another cup, which she only sipped this time, giving him a pointed look.

“While your mental gymnastics are amusing… as I said before, it is good to be filial, but being so to the point of obstinacy is just a waste of your talents. The school is just a school. Even if they pull it up root and branch, overturning the entire city three feet deep, sifting the soil for every grain of sand, they will not find what they seek, what that boy Dun Jian greedily thirsts after.”

“So you say…” he conceded, “but surely that is not all that matters?”

“Good governance? You had a few thousand years of it,” Lu Xiao snickered. “Those little people below you, who were your father’s toadies, got fat on your excellence and the Ling clan actually being able to count past three without putting two in their own pocket. If they cannot respect what was forged for them, that is their loss. It is good to feel bad about it, but if you lament every fool who causes trouble for themselves in the aim of trying to get ahead on another’s goodwill, you will find the world has a great many more troubled fools than you realised and you are much more lacking in forbearance than you previously thought.”

“…”

He eyed her sideways…

“You worry too much. As someone who has seen quite a bit more than you, let me tell you this: While you are right to be concerned about their foolish desire to go into the depths, consequences are a thing people must experience.”

“Undeniably,” he agreed, pouring her some of the wine. “However, I would prefer that I not see them meted out quite like that.”

“If it makes you feel any better, I can tell you that Dun Jian’s plotting will likely come to nothing,” Lu Xiao sighed.

“And you know this because…?” he asked.

“Because I have perspective you do not,” Lu Xiao said a bit more tartly. “Remember I have entered that place – properly entered it – not scrounged around in some dirty caves and robbed a few graves for my knowledge.”

“—And yet, all you have ever said about it was ‘don’t ask…’” he pointed out, taking another deep drink from his own cup.

Below them, fireworks started up again, blossoming into colourful flowers and dancing animals over the central plaza, unhindered by the rain.

“Indeed, ignorance is best when it comes to the depths of the Yin Eclipse Mountains,” Lu Xiao said with a deep sigh, holding out her cup again. “That was the lesson that shattered the generation before yours, remember?”

“I remember,” he muttered sourly. “It would be hard to forget the body count of those that failed to come out of that place, after they all rushed in wide-eyed and bushy-tailed, seeking riches and glory on my Grand Uncle’s robe hem.”

“Exactly,” she nodded, a half-smile flitting across her shadowed face. “Time, however, is a cruel bitch and likes to dull memories and provide ample evidence to those who seek it that the bad things that happened to others, will not happen to them. The Dun clan of your Great Grandfather and Grand Uncle’s generation could not so much as shake a leaf free from that place. The lot of today, with that mediocre boy on the throne, cannot even rise to that level.”

That much was true. Yin Eclipse did have a reputation of sorts among the older generations. Even he, who had been a young boy when Lu Fu Tao returned, had never quite gotten a grasp on it – and in any case after the disaster that followed, those on the Imperial continent and especially the current Imperial Court, had largely ignored it or denigrated it since, preferring to focus on the much more accessible accolades of pushing further against the Azure Astral Authority in their weakened position since the Huang-Mo Wars had swept through here like a maelstrom of carnage twenty thousand years ago.

More independent individuals, like Lu Xiao, largely treated it like an alchemical bomb made out of stinking hook bat shit that might explode at any moment, as far as he could tell.

“The questions they asked today were quite well-informed… and the events of the last hundred years have not exactly been kind…” he pointed out. “It is one thing to plead ignorance, but there are enough willing parties in the city below who are looking to curry favour with the Imperial Court at the expense of the Azure Astral Authority that even unfounded rumours regarding what Grand Uncle returned with could cause all sorts of problems?” he trailed off… thinking about the three slates… again.

“Those slates and the alchemy canon…” Lu Xiao nodded pensively.

There was no point in acting surprised, likely she knew more about the goings on in the city than he did, and the place had been awash with various rumours since the early afternoon in any case.

“So… what do you recommend?” he asked, staring into the rain, watching it splash off vegetation below them.

“Well, our concerns here do not begin or end with the school, as much as you are determined to do the right thing by it…” she said eventually.

“—and yet?” he retorted, noting her lingering silence at the end of her reply.

“At worst a bunch of people who probably had it coming will have to die, and I might finally get shot of that preposterous title,” she giggled.

“…”

Sometimes, the smartest answer was indeed to say nothing, so he stood in silence and they both watched the fireworks bursting in the sky, sending rainbow ripples through the rain and casting strange shadows off the clouds that streamed overhead like a vast inverse ocean in the sky. His Aunt, for all that she was an ‘Imperial Advisor’, had no love for the ‘vaunted’ position she held – or the rumours that surrounded it. He had to acknowledge, as she had at the time, that it was a canny piece of theatre.

His Grand Uncle had departed the world shortly after his return from the depths of Yin Eclipse, and Lu Xiao, who had gone with him on that journey, was left as the ‘rising star’ of his generation in the eyes of many. Rumours associating her with the status of the Emperor’s Mistress and the like had dogged her ever since.

“The two who came from Dun Jian, the Huang boy and the princess, were poking around about events from one hundred years ago… and the shady dealings that sparked off the Three Schools Conflict,” he said eventually.

“You are worried that this is the prelude to another round of influence trading between the Imperial Court and the Azure Astral Authority?” Lu Xiao mused. “That the Third Imperial Prince is making a continuation of his gambit that ruined the Lin School and that Dun Jian, opportunistic serpent that he is, has sent that girl over to shake things up?”

“That… is a possibility – Shan Lai is also putting more and more pressure on their influences here to draw wealth out of this land,” he agreed.

Before all this had spun in sideways, unseen and unsought for, that was what had been haunting the school’s senior administration. The political manoeuvring around it was getting to the point where something was going to snap soon. The contested nature of this corner of their world meant that most influences paid dues in several directions to keep everyone happy and the Azure Astral Authority had been ramping things up in subtle ways of late as they sought to exert influence through the Hunter Pavilions.

He was pretty sure their intent was to target the burden of the coming year towards the Ha clan’s heartlands around West Flower Picking Town as well, likely as retaliation for the wider Ha clan’s perceived movement towards the Dun and Din clans.

“Rather, it is the matter of Cao Hongjun during the Three Schools Conflict that probably exercises them more,” Lu Xiao muttered. “Fates know it bothers me. Compared to events one hundred years ago, or even 150 years ago when there was a resurgence of the Blood Eclipse Cult, he was in and out of that place before anyone was even aware that he had designs on it.”

“…”

That had also crossed his mind. Lu Xiao had been elsewhere at that point. She did occasionally travel and go off world, and it just so happened that that event thirty years ago had caught her by surprise, which was rare. It had caught everyone by surprise, in fact, and though it was largely overshadowed by the collapse of the Lin School… she had sent him to get several concessions out of the duke. However, the Meng clan, along with several other parties had also moved at that point and Cao Hongjun had basically vacated to a position of elevated responsibility as the Great World’s Military Authority Seat for the Azure Astral Authority thereafter, taking him beyond the reach of almost anyone who could ask questions as far as he could see.

“Aiii…”

Lu Xiao sighed and shook her head. “Let those two brats have their fun for now. Them and the ones who came with them. I know the calibre of those young nobles, and knowing what I know of that place, they will probably survive, if only because of the depth of their wallets…”

“Assuming that they aren’t also being plotted and this isn’t some grand design for the Imperial Court to justify sweeping the whole Province?” he muttered.

“Ohh?” Lu Xiao narrowed her eyes.

“One of the princess’s ‘minders’ from the Imperial Envoy’s estate killed… my ‘Xiaoling’, did it to frame the princess in my eyes in fact, likely assuming I wouldn’t see through it.” Even saying it, thinking about the little orchid made his anger rise, even though he should be above those kinds of emotions.

“Xiaoling huh…” Lu Xiao murmured.

The rain shuddered bizarrely and the trees hissed in a way that was not natural. Above him, the rainclouds actually shifted faintly as her own anger crept out. The orchid had been a gift from her, millennia ago. Initially tongue in cheek, he suspected, given his love of beautiful company and women who would sing when he was younger, but he had come to treasure the gift more and more over the years. In the distance the fireworks twisted as her anger caught the wind itself and the whole city shivered faintly amid the rain, as if a silent thunderclap had just swept out.

“They did that, huh…”

The moment passed and the rain and mist was as it had been. Probably some experts had marked the moment, but unless they were powerful Dao Ascendants like his Aunt, they would not know what it was they just experienced.

She looked at him and just sighed, drinking her wine.

Thinking of its beautiful singing voice, he poured more for both of them and found himself recalling the charming little illusions it had liked to make…

The cup shattered in his hand, falling to the ground in tinkling shards as he watched the light show sent up by another barrage of the fireworks in the distance. The thunderous roars of a dragon and a phoenix intertwined to form a giant tree that then shed its leaves as a thousand falling lights that illuminated half the city for a few moments. The rain itself was also fading away, for a while at least, leaving the air clearer as the wind managed to shift back to blow from the west, bringing with it the smell and taste of the ocean.

Rather than get a new cup – the broken one had been something of a favourite – he drank directly from the jar and wondered if he should just seal his body slightly so he could get more than ‘theoretically’ drunk off it. It would be a fitting end to the day, or a start to the next one perhaps.

“It is possible that the crown princes are manoeuvring in some way,” Lu Xiao said eventually, “That said, Dun Lian Jing is not exactly a shining star… even if she is in Dun Jian’s pocket.”

“Princess Dun Miao?” he asked, thinking again of his father’s current position as Court Alchemist to the Third Crown Princess.

“That would be a surprise; she is by far the least amenable of any of the crown princes and princesses,” Lu Xiao grumbled. “Then again, she is someone who operates on the same side of the Imperial Court as that snake Dun Jian and neither likely wants to see the Third Prince make more gains.”

“…”

He grimaced and took another swig of the wine, staring out into the rain.

“Fuagh,” Lu Xiao actually spat over the veranda into the trees below. It was a remarkably unladylike action as her mood shifted back towards annoyed. “If this has blown back from your idiot father and those two old freaks who dare pass themselves off as the Lu clan’s Officiating Elders… Damn your unfilial father and may he and his unfilial ilk suffer locusts to bring them a misery every day.”

He shuddered, even though she had put no actual intent into the curse. Someone at her realm could actually make those kind of statements stick… and as much as he disliked what his father had wrought for his own self-advancement, he was still a filial son and there were limits…

*Ahem…*

He changed the topic rapidly. “So… if they are going to poke and pry…?”

“Hmmmmm…” Lu Xiao frowned, likely pretending not to notice his discomfort, and then pulled a book out of thin air and tossed it to him.

He skimmed it and raised an eyebrow. It was an account, albeit rather incomplete, by one of the adjunct generals of Cao Hongjun, of the duke’s movements during the Three Schools Conflict. Not a verbatim recounting relating to their trip inside the depths of the mountains – by all accounts, none of those existed thanks to the heavenly oaths the old duke had made anyone who went in with him swear – but records of those who had fought with him on the campaign prior to that point. It had some very interesting aspersions cast against the Imperial Astrology Bureau as well – a few, regarding the Lin clan’s ancestral grounds, were news even to him.

“Give them that; it will provide enough hints to make those two squirm a bit and maybe convince them to ask a few questions of those who sent them here. Certainly they already tried by other means…”

“They did, or implied as much,” he agreed, thinking back on their ‘request’ for him to explore other means of speaking with the Cao clan and the Blue Duke’s estate…

There was certainly no way that Cao Leyang, the current Blue Duke, even if he was so inclined to entertain the pair, was going to talk about his father. He himself had a dodgy relationship at best with his; Cao Leyang, however, was a model son and deeply respectful of his ancestors. He would sooner swear an oath to heaven and abolish his own cultivation than talk behind his father Cao Hongjun’s back regarding whatever good fortune the old man had gained from his expedition.

The Huang clan’s backing of the Iron Crown Duke, across the straits on the Northern Tang continent, would not help either. That relationship went all the way back to the Huang-Mo Wars. The Cao Dukedom had arisen at about the same time, and the rivalry and antipathy between the two ducal households, while lessened since the events of one hundred years ago, was still a difficult undercurrent of regional power broking that had the most remarkable talent for reappearing in unexpected ways.

“While they will have to grovel a bit, if they can gnaw at that bone rather than anything that is of actual importance, it would be better,” Lu Xiao said with a resigned sigh. “How you ensure it ends up in their hands is up to you, but I would suggest letting the princess stumble across it. Huang JiLao is unusually methodical – for a Huang clan scion.”

“…”

Scowling, he pulled another jar out and drank from it directly, toasting the memory of his poor orchid again as another wave of fireworks swept up into the sky – this time they were lotus blossoms that gave way to dancing maidens who scattered flower petals down across the central square.

“The viewpoint of the younger generation across the ocean is so skewed towards the rhythm of ‘trials’ and ‘opportunities’ – things they can lord over, and which pander to their inborn sense of superiority – that none of them will have cared about it when it happened, which was ‘conveniently’ during the Dragon Pillar Testing Competition…” she added with a certain degree of amusement tinging her voice.

“Both times no less,” he added somewhat more dryly, seeing where she was going with this.

It was a good idea, just one he had not been in a position to easily execute without a bit of bait like the book she had given him.

“That does have to be some kind of record,” she giggled in a very unladylike way. “So even if some of them would otherwise have taken note, it will have passed them by, one way or another. Tell them nothing. Let them assume what they want and see if you cannot see where their source of information really comes from.”

-And hope it is, indeed, not my idiot father, he added inwardly.

“That would be for the best, yes…” Lu Xiao agreed, no longer smiling.