> The only thing worse than trying to eradicate a mutant, fungus infestation that learned to cultivate is discovering that they got religion and started a cult somewhere along the way and then got into politics as a side line. Truly they are a plague for our times.

    ~ Mo Shurian, Ancient of the Mo People.

> Where the fuck did these obnoxious mushrooms come from! Certainly they were never part of MY design! It’s a plot, I swear! A slander, mendacious! They all have it in for me! In for me I say! and I’ll fucking smite any bastard who claims otherwise!

    ~ Outraged entity of petty and mysterious origin.

> Burn them with ‘Heaven Fire', sear them with ‘Void Lightning’ and pulverize them with ‘Demon Thunder’. Even use ‘Manifest Miracle’ or ‘Unlimited Wish’ if you have to! Just be sure they are beyond dead by the time you are done. It is the only way. Also, no physical proof of termination by supreme order, recorded images are sufficient.

    ~ Official stance on the Eldritch Spore Plague from the Society of Adventures for the Northern Continent of Aertha Antiqua.

> I for one, hail our new Fungus Overlords, long may they rule! Equality for All! Long May they Spore!

    ~A misguided fool, shortly before assimilation.

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

~ Arai & Sana, Sewer Labyrinth ~

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

Arai crouched on the edge of the vast three-layer hall and watched the spider nest below glumly. The spiders knew they were up here, but neither group was going to make a move because of the third party in the hall. The colony of Eldritch Moon mushrooms, almost the size of a small grove of trees in their sickly white-green glory. The spiders avoided it scrupulously as if it was a kind of plague, which, in many ways they were. And so they now found themselves at a truly inauspicious impasse.

Returning back the way they had come was not viable. Another grey demon had chanced across them, with no warning whatsoever. It had been a smaller one, as far as she could determine, but even so, they had barely managed to flee into the darkness. The monstrous demon had been unable to follow them down the narrow tunnels that eventually led them to this point, but in the five seconds or so they had resisted it, they had nearly died three times. She winced, rolling her shoulder which was almost back to normal. The thing had turned her shoulder to meat mush and cracked every rib on that side and broken bones in her arm with a glancing blow while they retreated from it. Sana had suffered six broken ribs and several ruptured internal organs, then almost had her arm ripped off as the thing attempted to take the Arborundum leaf away from her.

She swatted another small (ish) spider and checked her scrip that was still bound to her forearm with the largest strip of Luss Cloth that she still had in case it had managed to dislodge it. Since they had blocked off most of the obvious ventilation bits in this tunnel for a few metres back. There was still a steady stream of them, but they had to come out the door to actually attack them and so were easy to deal with via deterrent.

“How is your side?” she asked Sana who was sat on the other side of the doorway focusing on recovering her condition.

“Like monkeyshit. How did that thing get where it did anyway?” she took another deep breath and exhaled a black mist of corrosive Qi, wincing.

“I guess there was another access in the tunnel beyond that point large enough for it?” her sister said with a frustrated sigh, exhaling her own breath of poison.

“Or it was asleep down there and we are just really unlucky…” she punctuated that by slicing the leaf blade down the edge of the door access to the landing they were on, severing three legs of a cat-sized spider that had been speculatively trying its luck.

It recoiled back and triggered one of the corrosive mist arrays she had double trapped.

They sat in silence, listening to the thump of bodies falling off the ceiling in the corridor behind them. A large heavily armoured spider with long legs skittered around the corner at phenomenal speed. The adult males were annoying. That was the only way to describe them really since they had started encountering them semi-regularly. It slashed at her and she parried the strike with the back of the leaf blade. For its part, the spider avoided it and stabbed two limbs at her head as it tried to scoot up the wall while remaining in shadow. Leaning back she forced it to overextend, just a touch, and grabbed a leg, dragging it out into the open and wincing as it stabbed her with three more legs. All of them were able to shred her qi defences so easily that she sometimes wondered why she bothered. In reply, she stabbed it through the thorax with the leaf, pinning it to the ledge. Dragging out the core she refined it and then flicked the dying spider off the ledge and into the area around the Eldritch Moon Mushroom. There was a not insubstantial spider graveyard growing there now.

The flesh wounds in her leg and arm healed over after a few breaths. A testament to how much qi was in her body, and how much progress she had made in a disturbingly short period of time. The immense spider queen, lurking on the edge of the gloom beyond the eldritch moon mushrooms, waved its legs and hundreds more of its brood scuttled away into shadows.

“That is starting to bother me,” Sana said, nodding at the vanishing spiders.

“Me to… there are far too many spiders leaving and not enough arriving to attack us,” she mused.

“Yep, either they are trying to lull us into a false sense of security, or something else is going on,” Sana muttered.

Cautiously she peeked around the edge of the doorway and was met with a veritable blizzard of poison spit directed at the doorway in general.

“…”

“My vote goes for ‘up to something’...” she grimaced, wiping off a few bits that had splashed her.

“What do you reckon about going across?” Sana signed.

“Doable, maybe, but definitely a last resort,” she signed back, eyeing the very slim margin of error to not get caught in the Moon Mushrooms ‘field’.

The other issue there was that it meant revealing they had noticed the steady stream of smallish spiders making their way around the ceiling very stealthily. All of them were vanishing into the gloom above them, and not coming down to attack, which just made her even more nervous.

“They are making a lot of noise aren’t they…?” Sana sighed, narrowing her eyes and looking upwards.

-They are indeed, she thought to herself.

“Over the roof! Now!” she said suddenly standing up.

“Eh?” Sana blinked, standing up as well.

The cold certainly that had just settled into her mind, refused to shift, as she eyed the ceiling. The noise behind was intensifying, the sound of conflict.

“The spiders are fighting something,” Sana said

“Uhuh.” She focused her qi into her feet and swung out, leaping for the next-

The leg smashed out of nowhere and nearly broke her arm, leaving her hanging by her fingertips. A spider mother the size of an ox peered over the edge and spat straight at her. Swearing, she kicked off the pillar and smashed into the roof, only to find that her qi was repelled from the rock.

-Monkeyshit, it would have to be that strange qi repelling stone! She swore in her mind, barely holding on by her hands.

Sana had also leapt upwards, with a bit more success.

-The spiders were fighting something, and the only thing she could think of was the Grey Demons. As if to validate her decision to flee the ledge, even as she swung to a new handhold to avoid a swathe of venom, the wall ripped and a wave of spider corpses swept out of the tunnel. Seconds later the spikes came in a rolling tide, not just across the ledge!

She kicked off the roof, back to the ledge at the same time Sana saw the danger and did the same thing. Moments later the spikes rolled out, the female spider blurred through them somehow and shifted bizarrely. A ghostly form of the spider swirled out across the roof and without any care for proper orientation of floor and ceiling opened its maw uttered a soundless shriek that made her limbs chill for a moment before the symbol swept it away. She watched dully as the spiders nascent soul skipped backwards across the ceiling beyond the Eldritch Moon Mushrooms and twisted weirdly, becoming more…

-Oh-fate-thrashed-mother-loving-nameless-its-an-Immortal!!!!

She didn’t even have time to act on her horrible epiphany as its body and soul swapped places and the spider became entirely corporeal once more because the entire ledge groaned and started to slump from above. At the same time, the entire hall rang like a bell and a shockwave hit them both from beyond the corridor somehow, throwing them back with pure, irresistible, physical force that made her vision blur and her organs shake.

Sana screamed in shock as she was hurled out into the void. She wasn’t much better off and plummeted down unable to keep any purchase on the platform that had just become a shifting forest of rock spikes again.

They crashed down on the edge of the eldritch moon mushroom colony. Seconds later a second wave of spider corpses rained down on them, spewing out with remarkable force from every gap on this half of the hall, courtesy of the expanding shockwave. The entire façade, walls, ceiling, pillars and landings hung quivering for a heartbeat then crumbled down under the sustained earthquake that had just ripped through everything.

Mustering her qi she charged up the collapse using every shred of capability at her disposal. She had made it halfway up when her sister’s horrible scream reached her ears. A small grey demon, barely able to fit down the corridor was standing amid the collapse. It had just thrown a long metal bar at her sister, smashing her out of the air and carrying her down into the eldritch moon mushroom field.

Even as her mind went blank and rage took over, something connected with her, a grey palm the size of her torso stopping her dead in the air, as if she were a puppet. The thing looked at her, and… with eyes mirroring horrible sickle grin, squeezed.

Every bone in her body shifted. Her meridians twisted as a strange energy flooded her body. It drilled into her mind’s eye, looking for something and-

“Overturning Heaven… Nine Demises… Seizing Earth, Fire and Blood… I Deny Your Promise and Take What is Mine!”

Words hissed in her mind like molten blades. Not from the symbol, but the grey-skinned demon! The symbol itself felt… strange… the attack sank into her and vanished without a trace.

The grey-skinned demon eyed her and then dragged her forward only to suddenly freeze. She was aware of the world twisting behind her very ominously indeed. For the first time, she felt the aura of the Spider Queen in the shadows beyond the Mushrooms. Focusing not on her, but the grey ape demon.

The grey demon gave her one final stare and then pushed her backwards. Every shred of qi in her body vanished and she hit the floor like a meteor, bouncing twice before stopping.

Above her, the grey ape demon reached out a hand and the metal bar that had impaled her sister to the floor shimmered as if it were resisting the moon mushrooms devouring field. Even as horrible qi tried to disrupt her now empty meridians, the metal bar twisted and finally freed itself, snapping back into the demon's hand. It laughed and then slammed it into the ground.

The whole room shook, the walls cracked, the ceiling twisted and warped, the spiders beyond the field howled, and she saw the huge one recoil and then darkness fell on her from above.

When she recovered her consciousness she found that the ceiling had fallen on her. The horrible grasping qi was there even more firmly now. It made her see double and caused uncontrollable tremors in her limbs which she could barely feel now. With the last of her strength, she rolled over and pushed the rock aside, freeing herself. The symbol was twisting frantically now, working against the invader.

The edge of the moon mushroom field was…

-Far too far away, she should just accept her fate.

She screamed and hit her head off the rock, silencing the false voice in her head.

Focusing on the symbol, she pushed everything she had into her mantra to support it and then gasped in agony as a familiar reflex wracked her body. Qi Denial. The fate thrashed, nameless cursed abomination of a monkey, which was now sat above grinning and watching her flail like an ant in honey had dispersed all her qi.

As she watched, it frowned and reached out a hand. Something tugged at her faintly, and then stopped, cut off by something else that grasped at her, from behind. Grasped at both of them, she realised, because Sana was also moving in a weird way. Both the spider queen and the grey ape were trying to capture them? On one level she found that totally hysterical, on the other? It was terrifying because both of them were able to grasp within the moon mushroom colony field.

In the middle of this, she could feel the invading qi slowly gaining a foothold in her body. The symbol was fighting a losing battle.

-How frustrating, it would be easier to just…

Again she snarled in rage and pushed the feelings away. That was part of its lure. The moon mushroom would dull everything and then crush her apart mind and soul, corrupting her body until it became another part of it. A zombie corpse puppet controlled by evil mind mushrooms with no individuality. Of course, that assumed someone didn’t snare your body free and incinerated it. Or snared it and captured them both as both the grey ape and the spider queen seemed Yama bent on doing.

The things had a sentient malevolence that exceeded nearly anything else in Yin Eclipse and were almost immune to the suppression from the mountain apparently. While many records of dangerous things in the caverns were sealed. The Eldritch Moon Mushrooms and the Soul Setting fungi were open to everyone to read, even if you weren’t part of the bureau, such was their threat to anyone entering the mountain range.

The intent from the colony intensified and the sense of whispering in her mind became more insidious. The words were unintelligible, but they carried mind-numbing malevolence and sense of numb inevitability. The symbol… intensified somehow, just about matching them. Barely in control of her most basic movements, she rolled over and brought herself a bit nearer to Sana, who was still face down and unmoving.

-Please don’t be dead… please don’t be dead…please don’t be dead.

The thoughts rattled through her head like a second mantra. Above her, the fate accursed grey ape had cleared out the rest of the spiders and was now sat on the edge of the devastation eating a large one and watching them with the expression of a being watching the last struggles of a bug. Cancelling it in her mind, she managed to roll again, which didn’t improve the view. The spider queen loomed over the far side of the hall, hidden in gloom. Eight eyes, each the size of her head, rippled like moons in the darkness, watching her with a malevolence and hunger almost equal to the moon mushrooms. All around that side she could see spiders swaying and bobbing, waving their limbs in a way she had come to realise was both provocative taunt and probably some kind of insult.

With a final, supreme effort, she rolled once more and stretched out a hand, mustering enough control to grab Sana by the ankle and pull herself over.

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

~ Sana ~

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

Laying there, staring at the fate thrashed evil ape, who deserved to go to monkey hell and have his balls eaten by leeches, Sana felt something grasp her ankle only because her body moved slightly on the ground. The horrible thing's weapon had shattered her spine and left most of her inner organs somewhere on the slope she was sure. The injuries were recovering, but it was slow. She had had to sacrifice several bones worth of purified qi, which mercifully the abomination hadn’t been able to disperse with its strike.

-Nameless demon, I curse your nine generations!

-Evil spiders may your kind be met with every extinction…

The whispering of the mushrooms was like a malignant echo in her ears as well, telling her to become one with them, to just give in, and far more besides. Half of what they said was in a tongue so weird that she couldn’t even grasp the intention, beyond pure malevolence and hunger.

After a moment, what had dragged her, landed half on top of her. Arai, looking like a corpse, her body turning the colour of one huge bruise, unnatural lesions all across it

“Together...” the thought echoed in her head, barely getting through the cacophony from the moon mushrooms.

It took her a second to work out what she meant, even as the symbol in her mind’s eye reached out somehow and made a link between them. The next few minutes were a terrible mental war against the transgressing intent that finally stabilized into a dreadful stalemate. She… they... could feel the two symbols interacting on a fundamental…

They paused as the symbols sent something akin to a sense of asking them to still their minds as best they could so they could concentrate.

-Easier said than done, they groaned

Lying here like this thinking of –nothing- so they focused on repairing their bodies and keeping their cultivation cycles from being seized by the moon mushrooms. Pushing it around manually to help fight that bottomless, hungering intent. In a way, it was truly mindless. A mechanical process of steps; Trap moon mushroom intent and ambient qi, let intent from symbol erode moon mushroom intent, then shunt qi off into random meridian, rinse and repeat. Once, twice, ten times, twenty times, one hundred times.

The longer they watched the formation symbol in their linked mind’s eye work the more amazing it was. The simplicity of it was terrifying and awe-inspiring at the same time. It formlessly matched every shifting bit of mendacious and maleficent intent that the mushroom colony tried to infiltrate into her soul and made it her own. It was… almost like the symbol knew of the intent somehow. Their knowledge was feeding it, yes, but it had a familiarity with its opponent that spoke of a much older rivalry. A game of Go between masters, with their bodies as the board and their cultivation the pieces being moved.

They were still somewhat undecided on how sentient it genuinely was. There was a suspicion in both of their minds at this point that it was more like a bundle of instincts and intuitions. What was clear was that sometimes it worked better if left alone. Like now. Whatever it was doing to the intent that was warping the qi around them put her faintly in mind of unpicking a hideously complex piece of embroidery. Removing the stitches one piece at a time and almost at random, but always causing a disproportionate degree of disruption to whatever the mushrooms were trying to effect. After a while, the mushroom colony actually stopped sending intent which was… shocking. To their understanding, Moon Mushrooms were the apex, even those at the very top of their world, in those strange and rarefied realms where power was as much a manifestation of a beings state of mind as anything else had to fear even small ones.

The symbol… symbolled as the mushrooms withdrew their active strength. The action came across as something close to mockery, but whether it came from her or the symbol, she found hard to determine at this point. Certainly, the whispering words and half-glimpsed scenes that the mantra has been ripping apart were gone. On the other hand, their physical bodies were shot. Her muscles were totally infused with the colonies alien qi, even if it was making no headway with her main organs, meridians or bones and had failed to subsume what she guessed was her soul. Arai’s wasn’t much better but lacked the injury. Her qi had been dispersed and largely replaced by the moon mushrooms, so only her core and mental space were under her control now.

-Yep. Yep.

-This Sucks. This sucks.

There was a strange sense of dissonance and she realised that something… ah... they realised that the grey-skinned demon had tried to pull them apart again. There was no sound or sensation as such, but she had a strange phantom awareness of the bones in Arai’s hand, where they had gripped her own arm shattering as something briefly tried and failed to pry them apart.

Bizarrely, the colony was working in their favour there. The qi that was flowing between them was still mainly under its control, even if the intent within it had receded. Their physical bodies were basically claimed by it in a physical sense, making their removal from the death field that much harder.

-Yes, this really sucks, really, really sucks, they both thought.

A hellish stalemate between three powers with them as the chew toy. Not how they had intended to end their days by any stretch. Time flowed on weirdly, measured by the cycles of their qi until, almost as abruptly as it had begun, they became separate again. For a moment she panicked, but it turned out that her returned sense of 'self' was purely cognitive. The link between the symbols had, if anything, grown stronger and the shifting cycles of qi far beyond her comprehension were, with every cycle becoming ever more esoteric.

She was still grappling with that when out of the corner of her eye she saw something twitch in movement.

-One of the males they had kicked off that was somehow still…?

-Oh fates get thrashed and go die to the nameless scourge! She swore in her own head, as she got a better look at it.

The corrosion of the field on the corpses had reached the point where the colony was starting to puppet corpses that had cores remaining. They had both been careful there, but despite their best intentions, a few probably got through.

-Except that is one that had been stabbed with the leaf.

In her head, it occurred to her in that moment that the assumed knowledge about Eldritch Moon Mushrooms might have a few gaps in it. The Bureau’s information suggested that things without an intact foundation couldn’t be turned into active aspects of a colony, but….what if that only applied to small colonies. This colony was big, now she got a better look at it from eye level. The mushrooms around the pool were the size of small trees and there was a lot of residual detritus in this place.

As if to punctuate that disturbing conclusion, another nearby spider corpse also twitched faintly, and then another. The swearing in the back of her head grew more pronounced as she watched the initial male spider twist and slide around, slowly lurching up on its limbs. The wound where it had been stabbed had a faint whitish mound growing out of it.

A new thought sifted through her head…

-What if this wasn’t quite the same thing as what she was thinking of.

-What if the colony could control corpses in more than one way?

Nothing in her memories of the bureaus extensive entry on these mushrooms talked about this kind of thing. It was closer to the tricks some other mushrooms used to parasitize things directly. In any case, it was missing several legs and had a big hole in its abdomen, so its progress and that of the other two that had started moving a bit further away were pretty slow. A fourth one, from right by the edge of the collapse was also rising now, merely crushed, and without any obvious white furring.

By the time a sixth one, behind her, so she couldn’t focus easily on all of them at once, had emerged, the mushroom colonies intent had returned. It ghosted around her, swirling into her body periodically and doing its best to avoid the symbols. Its whispers spoke of inevitability. There would be no salvation. Whether it took an hour, a day... a week... a year… a century, they would join it, and do so willingly at the last.

Her threats to set it on fire and chop it down just made the intent quiver in what felt like something between derision and amusement. A sense of a great being looking down on a struggling bug… attempting to crush her, not with soul attacks or intent, but with pure despair at her situation.

With a sigh, she tuned it out as best she could, she knew what it was trying to do. It was aiming to distract enough of her from whatever the symbol was doing, that it could find a chink in her defences. The symbols defences. As a strategy, it was probably a good one, but it seemed to not really grasp how intuitively linked she was to her symbol. The more she watched it work, the more she was drawn back to those four words that were reflected within it; 'Formless Permutations Mortal Physique'. The 'Mortal' part just confused her, but 'Physiques' or 'Constitutions' as they were sometimes termed she was sort of clear on, thanks to Ling Yu talking about them and some other anecdotal bits of information. However they were 'inborn', never acquired as far as she was aware. As to the other bits; 'Formless' as it appeared in her mind suggested something much more profound than ‘being without form’. Something closer to 'Boundlessness'? 'Permutations' was again strange and hard to pin down, it linked with formless, but had a strange kinship with transformation. Her sister's Physique was ‘Myriad Transformations’, which was only a squint different from hers, as she was able to see both symbols as they twisted and did their thing in some kind of in-between space within both of them.

Putting that aside, she turned her attention back to the problem at hand, the spiders that were slowly making their way, pace by pace towards them. There were over a dozen now. The leaf was nowhere to be seen, she suspected she had seen it fall somewhere in the rubble, but her sense of disorientation was so great about their location that she couldn’t be sure. That meant it was all on them… her.

She focused on trying to recover control of a limb without interrupting whatever the symbol in her soul was actually doing. Her qi pushed down her meridians, their condition making her wince. The strange qi was riddling everything, trying to twist and corrupt her own body, to turn it into a cage for her own sapience. The intent of the mushrooms seemed to think this was ironically funny somehow. In any case, she would need to take a risk it seemed, as amusing as that idea was when portrayed in a certain light.

Her best guess was that the mushroom colony now also wanted them separated, so it could focus on isolating and subsuming them. Their contact wasn’t that great as it was. Her sister had slumped over her, drawing herself to her leg and then collapsing. From what she could tell, Arai’s condition was more stable than hers, but much more locked in. where she had been injured, her sister had been robbed of all her qi, so her body was totally riddled with the grip of the moon mushrooms.

-First step, get much better physical contact, that way the symbols could work together much more fundamentally, her intuition suggested.

It took a few agonising minutes to get what she wanted visualised in her head. It was an egregious act of self-mutilation in many respects. She picked her lowest rib on the left side as the sacrificial goat and directed the mantra to unlock its thread of purified qi for her to use. It would cancel its progress, but she had no faith that there was enough qi under her control in her body otherwise to make this work.

The earth eruption symbol, one from the hall that had been quite obvious in its intended use, imprinted with that qi directly from her body into the ground beneath her, activating in an instant. Spikes of earth slammed into her body, flipping her over onto her front and making her crash down right on top of Arai, so they were lying across each other side by side.

Her suspicion was born out as instantly the connection between them went from feeling a bit ephemeral and stretched to rock solid again. The mushroom colony’s intent hissed oppressively around her and bore down on her once again, sending its annoyance like a thousand tiny spiders through her body trying to wreak havoc. A spider that was nearly there stabbed her with a limb, and tried to pull her away. Fortunately, it was so badly damaged that it couldn’t really get much purchase and the linked cycle of qi between their two bodies from the mushrooms didn’t help. If they wanted to separate them, they would-

Another one stabbed her, both of them in fact and tried to tug them again, both of them, towards the mushrooms.

-Ah, so that was their plan.

She grimaced inwardly. As ideas went it was a good one. Drag them closer to the centre of the colony and put them under more pressure, hoping the symbols wouldn’t be able to keep up their resistance and whatever they were doing. Soon a dozen spiders were slowly and viciously moving them hair by hair towards the centre.

In that hell of invisible scuttling, she lost track of time. Pain, mostly phantom was a baseline for perception between them or so it seemed. She had mostly stopped bleeding, not due to her injury recovering, but because her blood flow was almost frozen by the qi poison in her soft tissue. Her life-force, their life-force was being sustained by the symbol and the dense shield of intent around what remained of her core organs and most valuable meridian systems.

-When had it reclaimed her meridians?

That was a surprising revelation. She had been so focused on just keeping what qi she could flowing that she had for some unquantifiable time lost track of her own condition…

-Dangerous, she shuddered.

More shocking, as she re-engaged with her body and fought to explore it, bone after bone was gaining filaments of pure qi, with every cycle another bone was gaining a filament as the symbols worked on whatever it was they were doing. Her ruined rib had recovered, her shattered back healed, and soon every bone had a filament once again. The change that occurred at that point, however, was not what she had expected.

Each filament just kept growing and growing, becoming denser and denser with each cycle. Slowly the filaments grew minuscule extensions that flowed through her bones and started to connect to her twelve basic meridians. Soon she was able to affect that cycle as well, pushing qi around, mimicking as best she could what the symbol was doing, drawing, pulling compressing and coaxing the energies around her ruined body. With every cycle she completed the system became more and more solid. The capacity of her Qi Reservoir kept increasing as well. It was almost a hundred cycles before she finally grasped that, within the subtle re-arrangement of the twelve basic meridians was a variant of the symbol for her physique. At first, she thought she was seeing things, but the reality of it was soon clear, within two hundred it was beyond any denial, and as strange in its form, as it was in its manifestation, appearing to be bent through some extra plane she couldn’t quite see that allowed it to be that symbol and yet fit the pattern of the meridians in her body.

By three hundred cycles its completeness was almost palpable, even as time became totally abstract. The gloom outside and the oppression of the moon mushrooms meant she couldn’t see more than a few metres now. All her perception was inwards, her vision abandoned and her other senses there only to provide immediate warning of danger. The cycles were no longer consistent either, depending on where the qi threads were developing. Limbs developed fast, extremities really fast, organs slow, core organs like the heart and brain so slow it took dozens of cycles. Spiders still came and tried to stab her... them, and drag them over; but her physical body might as well have been a block of Qi Stone welded to the floor for all the good it did.

The whole experience was excruciating as her body subtly reorganised it in ways that both awed and terrified her. What remained of her perception was a strange ghost world of innate perception. She had closed her eyes tens if not hundreds of cycles ago as much to avoid getting stabbed in the eye by a spider as anything else. At some point, her respiratory system had fully connected with her twelve meridians as her body kept robbing qi from the moon mushrooms and making it it's own. Her vascular system and her digestive system were also starting to merge and connect in similar ways. Slowly pure qi was shifting out of her bones, flowing through her meridians and swirling through the symbol that was forming with her whole body as its framework. The point of connection twisting somewhere in her navel, at the very heart of the symbol, where her spirit root would reside, somewhere above her womb.

She felt like she was drifting in a new world now, rolling mists of qi flowed around her, slowly condensing into a pool upon which she was lying. A body forming around her, bones, meridians, organs, a framework of being. It kept shifting and changing, growing more and more solid with every subtle shift as she drifted in a timeless state of becoming. Completion was such a subtle thing that it surprised her when it arrived and the final line was drawn, the final piece connected together, mind, body, soul, origin and potential. Everything distorted and her perception flooded back.

She gasped and drew her first breath…and remembered she was called Jun Sana.

-I forgot my own name…?

That thought should disturb her, the dissociation between self and sense was… strange, but at the same time, she understood intuitively that whatever process had started with the symbol in that valley had just completed its first fundamental step forward.

Qi was rolling through her body from an intangible point above her navel. The filaments in her bones all connected to it, to her meridians and with a shock she realised to her…

I have a dantian now!?!

That realisation made her heart skip a beat, and then realise that her heart was beating once again, slowly. Turning her mind’s eye inwards she marvelled at the ghostly space that was both there and not. Its scale was strange in many respects. It felt akin to the meeting point, the heart of her meridians, the very centre of her body, but now that she considered it more closely, it wasn’t really a dantian as she might have expected it to be defined. It held qi, but it was more focal point than a reservoir. The reservoir flowed through her whole body, in qi filaments that had now become shifting pools of liquid qi in her bones.

If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

The next realisation she had, was that she had a lot of qi. Qi that was starting to flood back out of her meridians and into her muscles, fighting tooth and nail, directed by her Mantra and the Physique Symbol to disperse, devour and refine the corrupting qi from…

-Oh.

Reality restored itself fully and she realised she, and Arai were both stuck in a huge Eldritch Moon Mushroom Colony.

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

~ Arai, Moon Mushroom Colony ~

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

When her perception of her own sense of being stabilised and Arai opened her eyes, she found that Sana was slumped on top of her, the swirling exchange of qi and the link between the two symbols had basically fused them together with the ground. The world around them was a twisted haze of qi that made her eyes waver just looking through it, but that was secondary to the condition she found her body in. the symbols were still shifting in their eternal dance, ripping qi away from the flailing intent of the mushrooms and devouring it, refining it, purifying it and distributing it through her body.

Her bones had reached completion, except it wasn’t a state she had envisaged in her wildest dreams. The cores of her bones were a shimmering matrix of purified qi that connected to her twelve basic meridians and to her organs, focusing everything towards a single twisting point.

She stared dully at the twisting gloom above her for a few seconds just letting the reality sink in. she had a Dantian now. She was also certain that that strange sense of dissociation, where she had been adrift in an ocean of multi-hued fog, drifting on cool waters had been related to her soul somehow. Spiritual Cultivation, Physical Cultivation, the way qi was pulsing through her organs, still gently attuning meridians was remarkably and rather improbably close to something like Body Refinement… and whatever the symbol was doing with her soul.

Dual Cultivation, using physical and spiritual means was done, but somewhat fraught and ran into the same brutal progression issues that Physical cultivation did to the point where it was only a resort of those with poor spirit roots to eke out the most they could from their talent. If their inborn spirit roots and local politics had been a bit different she would never have met either Juni or Ling, daughters of noble houses they would have cultivated their family’s inheritance arts and never entered the Hunter pavilion. That they had done so was basically an admission that they were no longer of value to their families and could live their lives as they wished.

On the other hand, dual-path cultivation and even triple-path cultivation away from the shadow of Physical cultivation was known of, if rather rare. The common combinations were Body Refinement and Spiritual Cultivation or Body Refinement and Dharma Cultivation. Flip sides of the same coin in many respects, but both requiring special laws, canon or scripture and deep pockets to advance. Physical cultivation and body cultivation basically cancelled each other out and the Physical Cultivation would always take precedence for no noticeable gain and a lot of demerit. Their fundamental incompatibility was something she knew had exercised scholars for a long time. Even her mother had just shrugged and explained that some things were just incompatible. Looking at her body now, she thought she understood why as well. Without the symbol to change her meridians in this strange process her body would be so weirdly developed that it would take tens of times the effort for every little advancement.

Finishing running through the options, Triple Cultivation was the preserve of backing far beyond any means in Yin Eclipse as far as she was aware. True Unity; Spirit, Body, Soul… only one law she knew of promised that, the ‘Blue Morality Canon’. The famed inheritance law of the Imperial Clan and only practised by the Emperor. If others had access to such things, they kept quiet about them and were likely families with roots in Heavenly Clans and strength beyond the sky. Spiritual Cultivators fudged this from what she did know and cultivated with Martial Intent and Body Refinement as well, but it was prohibitive and complex, requiring especially attuned laws and the right spirit root.

As to quadruple cultivation? She had never heard of it. Theoretically, it should be possible with Spiritual Cultivation, Martial Intent, Physical Intent and a Soul Art, but that was just her speaking words.

And yet…

And yet, staring at her own condition that was all she could think of this as on a certain level. The alternative was perhaps even more terrifying, as it spoke to a different kind of superiority she was aware that she had been denying on a near instinctual level ever since the Physique manifested itself. Certainly, there were three, maybe four systems working in perfect harmony in her body. The Physique Symbol, Physical Cultivation, Spiritual Cultivation and maybe Bodily Refinement. Even if she considered that Physical cultivation overruled Body Refinement, she was possibly on her way to condensing connate control over intent as well, which was a hallmark of a Martial Cultivator, even if a Mantra User was able to do so as well under specific circumstances.

-Or maybe it’s all one thing and I am really overthinking it and this is all one process. One art, one law. All the symbol.

- How terrifying would that be?

On the other hand, she conceded, she probably was letting her worries, stress and rampant speculation run away with her. Most likely the symbol was its own thing, and this system just wasn’t quite what she expected. When she considered its origin, this conclusion was eminently more plausible in a way that was much easier to rationalise than this being something out of wild fantasy and myth.

Spiritual Cultivation, Physical Cultivation and the Physique seemed…

Truthfully, the longer she considered it, shelving away the random thoughts of other things, for now, more of what she saw in her body made sense in that regard. In a way, it felt like the symbol was the missing piece between the two that made them play nice. There was no sense of primacy of one over the other like what Juni and Ling talked about when they did discuss cultivation and about which their mother had warned them about. All the parts were working holistically, in unity, slowly gnawing away at the invading Qi from the Eldritch Moon mushrooms.

Soon, that took away any spare focus she had to worry about what systems were what and why. In a matter of ten cycles, her body had transformed into a wellspring of pain. Unending, unquenchable, unceasing pain. It was worse than the frost from the mist event. It was close to her initial fusion with the symbol. By twenty she found even that focus, with the help of her mantra slipping perilously. Phantom pain was rapidly overshadowing real, suppressed pain in ways that made her seriously question exactly what the nature of the Mushrooms hold on her physical body was. Thankfully, it was clear by thirty cycles that the symbol was not afflicted by the issues she was having.

Sensation and controllable awareness started to filter back in as the deeply unpleasant void of warmth in her body receded. She could feel Sana, lying on top of her warming up slowly as well. After sixty cycles she finally understood the pain. Her body had basically died. All her extremities had suffered damage on a level so profound she struggled to grasp it. The sensation of blood returning to her limbs, flowing through her body alone was enouh to make her want to scream and scream and scream, except she still had no real means to do so. Within that, there was also a phantasmal feeling of injury that was absolutely damage to her soul. It seemed to be healing, but the healing itself was nearly as bad as the cause or so it felt.

She also realised that dozens of spiders were stabbed into them both. Impaling her limbs and her exposed side. Mostly it seemed to be male spiders she had thrown, based on the injuries to their corpses. That confused her for a moment, until she remembered that quite a few of those she had stabbed and thrown were ones she had just refined the qi from, and not actually removed their cores afterwards. An embarrassing oversight there, clearly that was ‘enough’ of a foundation for the moon mushrooms to do their thing.

Sana who was lying on top of her now seemed to have borne the brunt of their punishment though. That realisation made the rage that was welling up in her heart even more turbulent. It surprised her how angry she actually was right now, for having supposedly been basically a soul and a bunch of qi rich bones in her own body for… however long that process of finishing Qi Condensation and breaking through to Qi Refinement and forming a Dantian had actually taken. It had felt like six or seven hundred cycles, not counting this unthawing and expulsion of the qi poison from the colony from her body. A number close to two weeks surfaced from a corner of her brain and she shivered.

After a few more cycles she gained a proper awareness of her limbs and their state. Her left arm, under Sana, hadn’t been stabbed very badly so she managed to extricate it with a bit of effort and-

The spider limb appeared from nowhere and smashed down on the side of her head, planting her face into the dirt and making her nearly crack her teeth. It left a nasty gash in her scalp and skittered off bone in a way that was deeply disturbing to feel. Another blurred forward and hit her in the neck, so fast she couldn’t even perceive it. However, even as it pinned her down, the symbol shifted and the qi in its body was consumed leaving behind a broken corpse. Grasping it, she ripped it free and then smashed it onto the ground. The impact made her arm jar and sent a shooting pain through her whole body.

-Fates, what kind of durability?

Grimacing she hurled it with as much vigour as she could and sent it spiralling away out of the field into the rocks in the gloom beyond.

The one that had stabbed her head blurred over her and she was face to face with the broken maw of a male spider, covered in white green fungi that were spreading from the wound she had dealt in its thorax. Focusing her qi she head-butted it, even as it tried to bite her, sending it rolling away and leaving her eyes watering and her head feeling like it had just had a rock dropped on it. Fortunately, the next one that arrived was nowhere near as durable and she was able to leaver a leg off even as dozens of others that were still around them, stabbed into them started to disentangle themselves before the symbol could devour them as well.

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

~ Sana, Moon Mushroom Colony ~

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

Sana was shaken out of trying to sort out how much of her body hurt as it put itself back together when her sister managed to roll out from under her and started smashing spiders with commendable fury. Gasping with her own anger, she mustered as much coordination as she could and ripped out a particularly annoying spider limb that was placed between her shoulder blade and her spine. The qi in it seemed to have reinforced it, so rather than pound it into the ground as she had just watched her sister do, she imprinted a lightning array straight onto it. Even as she did so, another moved and tried to stab her through the neck. Moving her other arm she caught that as well and sent a second array into it. Her new, much-enhanced qi capacity showing its immediate benefits as both spiders turned into candles even as she continued to ramp up the qi that was flowing into the arrays. The lightning rolled over both of them to minimal effect, it was her qi after all and their symbols still had a connection to each other. The spider puppets were hardly so lucky and most were exploded or incinerated bar a few on the periphery.

She only stopped feeding qi to the arrays when everything within visible sight was smoking, disarticulated chitin and burning smears of ichor.

“Still alive…” her sister said with a rasping laugh as she pushed herself up on her knees

“Seems that way…” she chuckled, struggling up herself.

“I’m going to burn this nameless blessed colony to the ground!” her sister glowered, looking around at the smoking devastation.

“I have a better idea!” she hissed, the anger over what they had just endured finally welling up in full. “These fate thrashed spiders helped try to feed us to these mushrooms… not to mention that grey ape that caused all this and has now run off somewhere. Why don’t we set this thing off, let it do the business THEN burn it down!”

“That could get out of hand.” Arai coughed. And spat out a mouthful of black blood.

“Have we met anything down here you care about more or less than these mushrooms?” she countered, before bending over and also coughing up a lungful of black blood.

“Impurities?” she signed because speaking was only going to make her dry retch.

With an eye to her ruined clothes, such as they were, she tore off the binding on her scrip and the few other bits of stuff like the luss cloth and threw them away before they could be contaminated. Arai followed suit a heartbeat later. Both of them were just in time as it turned out, as black blood started to well out of every pore, followed by a miasma of qi poison that hadn’t been refined by the symbols.

In an effort to retain what little remained of her clothing she pulled off the rags she was left with as fast as she could and threw them a good distance away, even as blood started to well out of every pore. If she had thought that the experience after surviving the use of the symbol was bad, this was if anything worse. The smell was something akin to rotten meat and yin decay, enhanced by the most unstable elements that remained from the qi poison that they had been refining. Her skin crawled and itched uncontrollably as the black sludge sloughed off her. If there was a small mercy, it was that there wasn’t anywhere near as much as before.

Sitting there, she shuddered then leant over and with a grimace, picked the least of the bits of her ruined garments and cleaned herself up as best she could. When they were both done, her skin still crawled and the revolting sensation still lingered, but it was the best they could do for now. Tossing the rags away she tried to incinerate them with the basic fire array, only for them to turn out to be totally fireproof. Lightning did nothing either, and after some more frustrated experimentation neither did corrosion. That just seemed to sum up the entire experience really.

“Uhh… is it just my imagination or is the qi gradient shifting?” her sister said suddenly.

Stilling her senses she focused more deliberately on the field from the moon mushrooms and sighed with agreement. “It’s contracting towards the pool?”

“Yes… growing smaller.”

Turning to look around, she saw that all the other spider corpses covered in white-green veins that hadn’t been eradicated by her lightning were crawling towards the fungi around the pool with remarkable alacrity for their current state.

Turning to the mushroom colony, which was dully sending malevolent intent at them, which she had been ignoring much more easily now, she pointed at it and then made an obscene gesture. “We're gonna deal with these fate thrashed spiders, and we are going to make you suffer for the first and last time in your however long millennium's lifespan. Get ready for it you nameless spawned bit of mildew!”

Turning back to her sister she cast her eye along the periphery and added sourly. “Any idea where the leaf fell?”

Arai gestured to the rock slide in a resigned fashion. “We can add it to the list of things to curse the fates for.”

“On the other hand…” her sister picked up one of the normal spiders and considered it as it twitched feebly in her grip, trying unsuccessfully to get at her with its five remaining legs. “It’s worth checking this actually works as well as we hope.”

“Point,” she conceded and picked up a spider, sending her qi into it.

The energy flowed around its ruined body as she investigated the white veins. They were doubling up for something approaching a meridian system that was rooted in the remains of the crystalline accretion in the thing's thorax, its qi core. It was largely mindless, which was a plus, this probably wouldn’t work if the thing had any sense of self-cognition. Taking her qi she fed it into the core and watched as the qi around her twisted weirdly. Her sister was doing the same experiment pretty much. They walked over to the edge of the field and she stuck out the spider she was holding, watching as a small rippling field appeared around it as she continued to feed it qi.

“It’s nice when something actually goes as expected,” her sister said observing her own spider.

She watched as Arai walked a bit further away and pushed more and more qi into the spider, until there was a rippling, shifting field about two metres wide around her.

“Drains your qi very fast though,” her sister noted.

Testing for herself, she found that that might well be an understatement. As bursting with qi as she was, she could probably push out the field to three metres or maintain it at two for a few minutes before she ran out. Replenishing her qi was impossible while pushing it out like this it seemed.

“Do you think this is likely the first time anyone has ever used one of these things as a deliberate offensive weapon? She mused, turning to eye the spiders on the far side of the hall.

“The field has contracted another few centimetres,” her sister added, eyeing the floor behind them.

“Mmm, makes sense, it’s probably trying to form enough density to push us out and leave us at the mercy of the spiders,” she said, eyeing the mushroom colony with a nasty look.

“Still…I wonder what persuaded the spiders to take up root here?” Arai mused as they walked around the outer edge of the field.

“I guess it makes for good access security… normally the mushroom colonies only claim things that fall in and don’t go walking. Probably the spiders feed them and they tolerate the spiders on their periphery.” She mused. “Also, up to this point, and based off what we know, we are likely the first thing that’s wandered in here that hasn’t been eaten by them…”

“Unsought for, the ecology of Eldritch Moon mushrooms... How scintillating” Arai laughed, the anger in her voice almost tangible in the air around her.

“Indeed…” she grinned nastily and picked up a second likely looking spider, a very crippled male that had an intact core, cast in here by the collapse.

“We need get Queen with first attack. Absolute,” she barely managed to sign.

After a moment of juggling, she freed a hand and added in a more fluent manner. “That thing is probably comparable to that big grey demon in strength. We only get one crack at it.”

Her sister nodded without bothering to reply. The statement was largely rhetorical in any case, neither of them was confused as to the stakes here. Moving through the hall, around the pool, she kept track of the region of rapidly deepening qi density that was beginning to restrict their access to the rest of the cavernous hall. The nearest mushroom tree shivered as they passed within ten metres of it. Needling intent pushed out at her, trying to infiltrate her straight to her dantian.

The symbol cancelled the incursion with convincing prejudice.

Arriving at the far edge of the field, they watched the scuttling spiders still in the gloom beyond. She pushed qi into her ocular meridians, properly for the first time and her vision cut into the gloom, turning everything into faded colours and monochrome shadows.

The spider queen hulked on the wall at the far upper corner of the room. Well out of throwing range. She passed out of the field and the spiders flowed back for a few seconds then hundreds of venom spits hurtled towards them. They both threw themselves flat and the attacks distorted against the dense qi field around the colony, getting smeared somehow as they passed through the air and becoming hopelessly dispersed after half a metre. At the same time, the boundary rapidly warped and shifted back almost half the distance towards the trunks of the nearest mushrooms and rapidly thickened, leaving them stranded metres adrift from it. The spiders in her hand were still trying to return to the colony. Their energy more frantic now.

Sneering a bit she pretended to be shocked and injured from the receding qi as if it had struck at her as it receded. The intent in the colonies action was clear, but also rather pathetic, in that the spiders likely hadn’t noticed their experiment on the other side.

The spiders rolled forward in an angry wave to consume the two of them.

She watched until they were within leaping distance. Hundreds threw themselves forward, and in response, she pushed qi in the infected spider corpse in her hand and rolled it forward. It only travelled a metre, the qi field blooming around it to almost two metres. After a moment it righted itself and started to flee with commendable haste towards the colony, but the damage was already done.

Hundreds of spiders were caught in the field as it ballooned out around them. The weaker ones died instantly, the strong ones struggled on for a few seconds and then also collapsed. She kept the field of the other spider active for a whole 10 seconds before cancelling it and letting the first spider scuttle back home, in the appearance of self-defence while she was still slumped there. That had taken about a quarter of her current qi reserves. The spider queen took the bait, however, recognising the danger their probably ‘puppeted’ corpses posed.

With a silent howl that made her limbs grow numb even as the symbol subtly weathered it, the spider queen waved her forelimbs and the darkness shifted… hundreds of males of varying sizes charged forward, several even had faint spiritual blurs around them suggesting they were at least at Soul Foundation and trying to manifest their intent. Beyond them, she could see two larger males, bigger than the spider mother they had slain, lurking in the shadows of the large exit on the far end of the hall.

Sluggishly her sister ‘released’ the other spider which was now legless, in such a way that if you recalled the original boundary of the field her action would spawn a good strategic enhancement along the edge of the pool.

Most of the onrushing horde dodged out of the way but a few unlucky ones were caught in the two-metre zone around it.

She activated the field of the other one and stumbled forward a few paces. Smaller spiders flitted away while a rain of venom shelled at her from a distance. She made it twenty paces with Arai stumbling after her in an uncoordinated fashion. The gamble here was twofold, they had to get into a position to stop the queen fleeing down the tunnel, and do so before it got spooked and either tried to wipe them out in one decisive hit or fled. It was large enough that it could only go that way she was pretty sure.

It was with her heart mentally in her mouth that she finally made it halfway across the floor and sluggishly slumped down, holding the spider, the qi field receding a bit as she retracted it. She had half her qi left. Arai stumbled after her in a shambling manner, making it almost the full distance, before the Spider Queen, who had been turning to follow them finally twigged that something was off and with a roar, lowered her body and opened her maw. She watched as qi flowed inwards towards the queen and a shifting malevolence flooded the entire hall, intended she guessed to hinder her responsiveness. It took a few seconds for the art to properly initiate, whereupon a shimmering orb of truly terrifying corrosive life qi started to manifest in front of the queen.

{Flickering Steps}

She triggered her movement art, pushing it as far as she could and feeling her roll out of her body. The room blurred around her and the Spider Queen spat the art prematurely, the orb dispersing and searing the entire side of the hall in stone melting death. Its reaction speed was many times hers, but it was inherently limited by its misunderstanding. Had it realised they could move it wouldn’t have locked itself down for that art in those precious few seconds she was certain, and would instead have executed them physically. She arrived beside a leg even as the queen's body shifted, triggering the spider she held with all her remaining qi. The field ballooned to three metres and the vile qi of the mushroom colony took hold even as Arai managed the same feat on its other side, catching two more legs and skidding under its abdomen even as it tried to leap into the air, having executed the art that required it to focus qi on that location. It was just a hair's breadth too slow, and miscalculated for a second vital moment, sweeping out at them with its legs to knock them away as the fields around their spiders faded.

That merest of margins allowed them both time to sacrifice a bones worth of vital qi to replenish their reserves instantly and expand the field for a single blinding instant to ten-metre overlapping fields that covered half the Queen in an instant even as it started to retract its limbs and flee. Dropping the spider she sacrificed a second bone and fled past the mushroom field for the far side of the hall. The queen convulsed and flailed in the fields, falling victim to the all or nothing lethality of the field. As far as she was aware, it didn’t matter if it was a tiny mushroom or a tree, the field was equally lethal once it was manifest. Equally, it didn’t matter if you were a Mortal or an Ancient Immortal. If you ate a Moon Mushroom field to the face to that degree you were history. Their survival would, on a certain level, be construed as utterly illogical if you didn’t know about the symbol.

In their wake, the other spiders in the room all roiled in rage and confusion, unable to fully process what had happened.

With the Spider Queens to feed off of, both spiders were already sprouting their own proper little mushrooms. Nearby corpses were getting white veins. The Queen shook off the soul shock and rolled backwards. At the same time, a terrible shadow danced forward stabbing into both of them. Her limbs went numb and her mind wavered even as the symbol drowned the worst of it and dispersed the rest. A heartbeat later, the spider apparition wavered and crumbled as the spider queen started to succumb properly to the contamination from the field. Drunkenly it staggered after them, losing coordination as a limb slammed down far too close behind her, missing her by luck as much as anything.

A second limb came for her with a freaking inexorability that spoke only of death, only for its intent to waver and become bizarrely diffuse. The spider stumbled sideways and then shrieked, audibly and mashed a wall with another limb. A glimmering corona manifested around it for a second before running out of its control and fizzling out, leaving her with a cold sweat and a sense of relief as she made it back past the colony. It had tried to detonate its core just now, she was certain. That would have been the end of them all probably had it succeeded.

The spider queen groggily staggered after them, slipping and sliding as it lost coordination its soul became contaminated. It started to glimmer dully and its qi became unstable but it was already far too late for it to explode its monster core. A disorganised hail of qi poison shots rained down at them as they ran back towards the large colony, even as the two large males and several females far bigger than she was comfortable with started to take control of the mess behind them.

-We need the damn leaf now, was the only thought rattling around her head as small spiders swarmed around the space across the ceiling that had previously been blocked off by the mushroom field.

Realistically, there was no way either of them were cutting through the queen's exoskeleton without it; and the queen was, in her estimate probably a nine-star monster. Maybe even a ten-star ranked one. It was also key to part two of this plan, turning the mushroom field over so they didn’t die horribly to a spider tide. Another minute or two and the big spiders would restore order and get past, there was that immortal spider mother for starters.

Arai arrived at the landslide a few paces ahead of her and tore a chunk of rock out about the size of her torso and slung it at the colony without blinking. As strategies went annoying the colony so it erupted only had benefits for them now it was clear they had got some hard-won resistance to its corrupting effects.

“It should be near here!” her sister signed as she threw another piece, this time at the ceiling with a lightning array slapped on it.

The rock arced through the air and sent a wall of lightning hissing across the roof, dropping hundreds of oncoming spiders into the miasma below and forcing the rest to recoil as she danced from spider to spider. The rock itself fell right on top of a mushroom on the near edge of the field.

On the other side, the queen finally got her soul corrosion back under temporary control and emitted a shriek that dimmed the whole room. Eight eyes appeared inside her head and for a brief moment, she had the sensation of being ripped apart from the inside out, stumbling to her knees and bleeding from her eyes and nose. Her meridians creaked and twisted, and the qi in her body ran out of her control for a heartbeat as an immense intent bore down on her, shaking her newly formed dantian too its core before the symbol deflected it away.

“Thrashed fates who sell souls to the nameless, without that symbol we would be dead so many times over its unfunny!” her sister gasped.

“I doubt that’s what those young nobles from the central continent say with their inheritance laws and their backing from beyond the sky!” she giggled manically, it was almost farcical how they were still alive at this point.

“They would say something like ‘YOU DARE! I am the chosen one who totally will rule over the whole world! Bow before my awesome power… and fear my old uncle’… or something stupid like that.”

Fortunately, the shriek of the spider had been just as devastating, if not more so to the other spiders in the room. The unrestrained fury in its action had eradicated most of those between it and them. Seemingly realising this, she was aware of it moving erratically on the far side. A moment later a corrosion orb skipped across the wall and sprayed down a miasma of acid that flowed off the qi repelling slabs that littered the collapse.

Shaking her head, she grabbed another rock and threw it at the colony, scoring a glancing hit on a large mushroom. The field around it was still decreasing, the intent of the colony was clearly to turn it into a proper shield. Frowning, she put down her mushroom and pushed qi into it until it finally gained its own mini-mushroom and became stable, the spider twitching faintly and no longer showing any intent to return to the colony now it had reached that point in its development. Grasping another rock, she hit the same mushroom her sister had a moment earlier, noting it quiver involuntarily.

“The repelling slabs!” she signed suddenly.

Nodding her sister grabbed one side of one and she took the other. Between them they were barely able to handle it easily, sending it crashing down into the field and making another of the mushrooms shake. Two more slabs went in quick succession while the mushroom, which she was able to kick around a bit to help them, provided some unintentional protection from smaller spiders and the chained attacks by those nascent soul mothers intent. Her qi was recovering fast, despite the deliberate act of self-mutilation done. The bones were recovering, but while they ‘injured’ almost a quarter of her meridians were unable to operate efficiently. That was definitely something to keep in mind for future uses of that resort. Four of five in one go would likely see her temporarily crippled, her qi reserves were also hindered while they recovered it seemed. Even so, she was back to a third of her capacity already.

The spider queen bounced on the spot, its fury visibly manifesting in erratic manifestations of its injured soul form. It let out another scream of qi that tore through the tunnels like a soundless riptide. This time she was able to brace for it. Even then, it made her vision waver and the qi in her body grow chaotic to a degree even the grey ape that fought the sludge had not achieved.

“Does it want to bring every spider within several miles?” Arai signed grimly, excavating another slab in search of the leaf.

“So long as we either find the leaf or make the colony spore before it buries us in spiders it’s all good!” she signed back.

Grabbing a big slab, half the size of her, she expended some qi this time to flip over toward the pool. It twisted and bounced twice, careening against three mushroom trees before smashing down and landing on top of a few smaller ones. All of them were starting to quiver now, which was what they wanted to see. Right on cue, a tide of spiders of all sizes, from her fist to a small horse rolled out of the tunnels above the collapse. Arai threw another slab and she pushed more qi into the mini colony beside her, feeding it with her own purified energies from her dantian to make it rapidly expand its range to almost 7 metres. That snared a gratifying number of the new wave of new arrivals who fell down the slope limply.

The queen howled and clawed her way up the wall, her limbs scrabbling for purchase in her uncoordinated state and crouched in a familiar manner, lobbing another corrosion orb directly at them.

Cursing she fled on her sister's heels even as the orb gouged a thirty-metre crater out of the rockfall scattering resistant slabs everywhere along with a wave of corrosive miasma. Both of them were lucky, barely getting caught by it, even so, it ate her flesh to the bone in a moment and was in danger of damaging even that before her body got purchase on it and neutralised the damage.

-Not out of danger by any means, she shuddered

Looking across to check her sister was okay, she caught the glimpse of the Arborundum leaf lying in the middle of one of the puddles of corrosive qi that had formed in the ruin of the collapse. Cursing to herself, she circulated her qi to the max and darted for it, barely resisting the damage that the miasma above it caused in the process.

Scooping it up she used her movement art to flicker towards the colony, her sister following her and scooping up what remained of their scattered kit and the two scrips in the luss cloth wrappings.

Looking across, it seemed that their salvation had arrived not a moment too soon as well. The field's range was decreasing less now, but it was enough to provide space for the queen to make it around to their side and properly try to take them down with her. She had been laboriously making her way along the side of the room and was now paused again, qi building up for another corrosion orb.

She arrived at the edge of the qi field keeping as much of it between them and the queen as they could and she finally felt she could exhale. It was indeed dense enough to be a proper barrier now, as an experimental shove against it demonstrated. Her hand could sink in, but it was like pushing into wet sand.

The Spider Queen stared at her, considering the distance.

-Oh no you fate thrashed don’t! She hissed, even as the queen flawlessly lobbed the orb.

It travelled in such a way that it landed between them, taking advantage of their momentary separation as they fled to the barrier. She was about to dodge away, when it occurred to her that her movement arts momentum might actually take them through the outer extremity of the barrier, which would provide by far the most protection from the attack.

Signalling her intent, she charged straight at the field, punching deep into it, parallel to her sister. Her momentum took her almost five metres into it before she was slowed to a sluggish stop near one of the mushroom trees.

Behind her, the orb exploded into a mist on impact and swirled around half the hall, vindicating her snap decision to flee this way. It merged with the colony field and was neutralised entirely before it made it half the distance to her. With a final lunge, she was frozen solid in space a fingers distance from the trunk, the Arborundum leaf in her other hand barely a fingers width from the stem. As a roar of rage smashed into her from the colony, she had to reflect that within every insane endeavour like this, there was a tiny bit of good fortune required. In this case, it was brought about by the symbol itself being repelled faintly by the attack, making her body convulse, freeing her grip on the leaf, which tumbled from her grasp.

Curious, she watched as the field totally failed to hinder it in the slightest, the qi in it just flowing off it like water from a rock. It hit a slanted rock at the base of the tree that she had thrown earlier and spun sideways, down the slab. The Arborundum palm frond met sharp edge on with the edge of the Eldritch Moon Mushroom’s stem, slicing through it without even pausing, passing beyond it, tipping off, flipping over and embedding in the next trunk at an angle, whereupon it slid down under its own trajectory, splitting the trunk entirely in two, effectively felling two trees. The tree beside her sloughed backwards and collapsed onto another one, while the other collapsed sideways and flattened several smaller ones by the edge of the pond.

She was laughing hysterically in her head even as a terrible hiccupping upheaval ripped through the entire colony. The terminal damage to the trees finally managed to do what the rocks had failed to. Trigger their instinct to spore at a level where even the colony consciousness might struggle to suppress it. The cap of the almost felled tree exploded outwards with enough force to make her bones rattle. The one she had felled followed suit a moment later, then the three that had been ruined by the collapse.

-Thankyou fates for some poor soul in the distant past managing to find out about the overriding tendency of these fate accursed things to spore if you fell them and living to tell the bureau about it! She cackled in her head.

Faced with the pressure wave and unable to move away, she groaned silently as her body twisted under the immense force of the detonations. That was a bit outside of her expectations, perhaps the colony was devoting too much effort to drawing its miasma field in on itself?

When she recovered her senses, still frozen in space, the entire hall was filled with ghostly white-green spores that shifted like clouds of ephemeral flame. The spider queen had realised the trap too late, its view having been obscured for the critical moments before the trees were felled. It was slumped drunkenly metres from the entrance to the tunnel, twitching feebly amid the shimmering veil of spores.

Every spider in the room was dying now, and those in the surrounding tunnels she was sure. The spores would spread like wildfire under the strength of that detonation. She had expected them to claim the room, but at this rate, they might claim quite a bit more. Anything they infected would spread them further as they fled the spore cloud. The spores themselves were a bit different as well, they carried with them an intent that made things infected with them mad with panic, and possessed of a preternatural desire to seek safety with others, and thus promoting further spread before their infection took hold and the bodies collapsed, immobile.

That was why it was called a spore plague. The spores that took root in the dying could wipe out whole cavern ecosystems in minutes, just from the initial spread. Almost none of those miniature colonies would survive, less than one in a million as she understood it. Most things did not possess sufficient qi for them to latch onto and they would burn out after a short while and become dormant as they required living hosts of a certain foundation to really excel. However, from several billion spores, only a few hundred needed to cluster with some dead to form a new successful colony. Setting this off, in the middle of this horde of spiders as good as cancelling this entire region of the sewers and turning it into one singular behemoth colony.

Moments later, whatever was holding her collapsed, releasing her. The field around the colony erupted outwards to its original size. The other mushrooms were starting to shudder ominously. Grabbing the leaf, she stabbed another tree, half cutting through it as she made her way through towards her sister. Each tree she injured pulsed and released effervescent clouds of spores. Another juddering, enraged mental attack washed over her and she got the distinct impression from the symbol that she was pushing her luck.

Mentally taking a deep breath, she mustered her strength and charged towards the edge, blurring through the trees slashing trunks as if she was cutting grass, uncaring if she felled or wounded. Crossing the edge, Arai was already a few paces ahead of her as the entire colony rippled behind her. Mushroom after mushroom expelling searing clouds of greenish-white.

“Remember how I said this might not be the best idea?” her sister signed.

“Well it's done now!” she shot back, as they ran towards the spider queen.

“True, but the strength of this is a bit…” Arai said with a worried hand gesture.

She nodded tersely. That was true, it was seriously beyond what she had calculated, assuming that it had made its most serious effort to claim them initially. That it was able to interfere with the symbol at the level it had, was something she planned to keep in mind. Things could shake it, given enough provocation and that could see them dead without knowing what killed them in all likelihood.

Both of them charged towards the spider queen. The vital thing now was to separate its beast core from the body before the spore cloud claimed it as a new source of nutrition for a colony, not only would it be a waste, it would be giving a pointless victory to the spores that was otherwise avoidable.

She started cutting at the top of the thorax even as her sister started clearing out corpses nearby, removing the possibility of clumping. The Arborundum carved into it like butter. After a few moments, her sister arrived and started throwing away pieces of cut flesh as she exposed them. Already white veins were starting to appear on the Spider Queen’s exoskeleton from the earlier contamination. After a few more moments of frenzied cutting, a flood of viscous ichor and inner organs, probably its first stomach, welled up through the wound. It was corrosive, but not to the point where her qi defences couldn’t cope as she kept on cutting a grizzly channel across the back of the thing looking for the core.

In the end, it was almost at the back of the thorax, a swirling green-black agglomeration that gave her a rather ominous vibe amid the well of ichor.

“No way are we moving that easily,” Arai sighed as she threw a few more pieces of innards and ichor away.

“Guess we get to test how long this takes to refine in situ after all...” she winced as she sought purchase in the horrible pit.

“I’m never going to feel clean again” her sister muttered under her breath as she helped her pry out another piece of the thorax armour to expose the top of the core in its entirety.

In the end, they stood on the core, as there was no way for them to easily get it out, and the white veins were already incurring through the flesh, working their way towards it.

Linking their symbols, they both pushed intent into the core, groaning as their small incursion crashed straight into the roiling energy of the Spider Queen. The qi within it was bizarre and otherworldly, also utterly foul at first touch and possessing a most immense devouring intent that tried to devour their own qi outright and transform it as a route to seize their consciousness and live on. The spider queen’s soul raged into their bodies with a gleeful hunger and a determination to make them suffer to the utmost… for all of about half a second.

Before the symbols could even step in, the perception from the spirit ghost ran into its own wall, the purified qi in their bones that was swirling out into their body to protect it from this new invader under the impetus of the mantra. The calibre of the two forces was immense in their own way. The Spider Queen’s realm was clearly over immortal, but by how much it was impossible to say. Its Intent was totally stymied by the symbol, while its qi might as well have been rain on rocks for all the good its corrosive principle did in the short term to their purified Myriad Elements Qi it had crashed into in their bones. The back and forth tug of war lasted for several agonising seconds before the symbol shifted and the spider queens ruined soul was properly cancelled in a hiss of black, green and red smoke.

After that it became very academic, the symbol slowly seeped the core and the impure qi from it flooded out, into their bodies where it was rapidly devoured up by their circulation system. What little remained of the queen's intent and lingering consciousness was unable to gain any purchase at all and the whole refinement process of cancelling its soul and properly orphaning the qi amid the run of its body took only two hours in the end.

Clawing their way out, they both looked around the hall, which was now dimly lit by spores to the point where it was possible to see even without qi enhanced vision. The drifting spores were almost like drifting snow. She waved her hand towards some carefully and they shifted out of her way before she could ever touch them.

“Given we appear to have acquired functional immunity to the Eldritch Moon Mushrooms should we just stay here and fully refine this qi?” Sana suggested, kicking the core beneath their feet.

Several small colonies were already popping up close to the ruined fungus grove near the pool. Turning her attention back to the corpse, their removal of the connection between the core and the body’s meridian system had slowed the incursion of the white veins significantly. They would still claim the core eventually, but now, devoid of an easy roadmap of the spiders meridian system to get there, they would have to rely on gradual seepage through the dense body, the flesh of which still held a lot of qi and lingering resentment.

“It will certainly hold a grudge and if it joins up into one huge colony we will have a headache in spite of our current circumstances...” her sister mused.

"We wanted to kill everything down here, not turn it all into a Heretical Buddhist mushroom preaching the Dao of Eternal Unity beneath the singular God Mushroom. Not to mention, there are plenty of other cores out there that are much more vulnerable than this one, and which we can refine much more efficiently now the immediate danger here is dealt with.”

Nodding, it was what she had been thinking herself really, she slid off the giant spider carapace after her sister, heading to the left side of the pool while her sister went right.