> …Setting aside the obvious questions of their ‘path’ and ‘conduct’, there are two ways to raise a disciple, I have always felt.

>

> The first is to spoil them rotten and give them every opportunity you never had. To give them the best arts, allow them to see great persons teaching the Dao and send them out to do their thing, with your name hanging behind them of course, in those great trials and grand scenes that define every generation.

>

> The other is to kick them out the door into the worst pit you can find, hide your name, give them the barest fundamentals and grind their nose in the dirt until their souls shine like diamond.

>

> In both cases, your disciple is likely to hate you, but only in one of those scenarios are they also not going to quietly hate themselves by the time they are done with you.

>

> Incidentally, if in the course of this you happen to find the much sought after third way, please go tell the rest of the Shu Clan, because they seem to have lost it up their collective ass somewhere in the last aeonspan and are clearly in need of having it removed.

Correspondence regarding how best to raise a good disciple.

  ~Ancestor Bronze of the Shu pavilion, writing to Elder Shu Kao of the Kao Branch of the Shu Clan.

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~ ARAI – RUINED TUNNELS ~

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Arai winced and looked around the tunnel. The local collateral was a blood-drenched world filled in qi-dispersing barbed fungi spores and qi-dispersing rock dust. The sound of drums had stopped, thankfully. That either meant they had just killed all their pursuers, or they were finally out of the way. Or their pursuers thought them dead, and would wait for whatever solution they had to deal with insane quantities of this stuff. Hopefully, it wouldn’t involve another explosion.

-Oh yeah? Do you wanna bet spirit stones on that? an obnoxious little voice piped up in her head.

“I … guess … we … walk,” she signed and then stopped because the density of dust out here made it fairly hard to see and even more difficult to ensure that she didn’t do something stupid and exacerbate the amount of dust that was already adhering to her.

It took an effort not to sigh. She winced and took a length of Luss cloth and bound it around her mouth and nose. Breathing wasn’t necessary anymore but it was easy to forget that and open your mouth. Sana had already arrived at this conclusion, she noticed, and was tying a length around her own face.

She reached out and grabbed Sana’s hand. Talking through the link was basically the only way they were going to communicate easily it seemed.

“I guess we walk?” she asked again.

“Yeah…” Sana’s voice echoed in her head.

That began a hellish trip that was comparable in its own way to the very worst of those early days in the sewers. Hours stretched away behind them as they slowly made their way through the hell of yellow dust. At one point early on, they heard several dull booms and sounds of rocks collapsing in various directions. While her qi wasn’t replenishing she realised that her Sundering Intent was permeating ever deeper into every part of her physical being.

Soon she stopped trying to cut her way out with it and instead wrapped it around herself as densely as she could, much like Sana was doing with the Maelstrom Intent. The impact was not dissimilar once she got the hang of it. She soon had a rippling field that extended about one metre around her in every direction that forced the dust away. Sustained and continuous use of it in this fashion appeared to be excellent training to develop it, albeit utterly tortuous on her mental faculties and unlike any kind of endeavour she had endured before.

They passed through several ruined outposts. Subsidiary halls like the first one they had encountered, albeit somewhat less extensive, built up and expanded like warrens. Everything was levelled within them, the shockwave having swept everything aside and left a swirling miasma of glittering yellow and occasional swirls of green. Most of the occupants were dead from the pressure wave, although a few sturdier Undren appeared to have succumbed to the dust.

They claimed what cores they could from the dead who were not buried, but the shockwave appeared to have dispersed or weakened the qi of almost every single thing it killed to a truly remarkable degree. The rubble-strewn ruin of the halls and collapsed side passages made any reasonable looting almost impossible in any case. The suppressing inertia of the qi-repelling dust and the mushroom spores meant that the replenishment of the qi mist was functionally nonexistent in any case.

In any event, nothing attacked them as they slowly made their way onwards, hours turning into days, until they finally reached a point where the hall ‘widened’ in a way that seemed dimly familiar before ending abruptly in a flat wall. Approaching it, she found the tell-tale motif borders that suggested this was a doorway that had somehow been sealed.

“Well, now we know what the distant booms were,” she scowled and gave the door an ineffectual kick.

“It’s more concerning that they have some way to control these, to be honest,” Sana muttered as she pressed her palm against it.

“Aiii... So true,” she flipped the leaf and turned to the door speculatively before walking across to the wall beside it. “What are the odds that there’s a colossal force of death and destruction behind there.”

“Honestly speaking?” Sana said with a frown, turning to look behind them. “This looks more like the ante-hall to one of those large octagonal shafts that we were flooded up before.”

She turned to look around the rest of the vaguely trapezoidal hall. Her sister might actually have a point there. Through the rippling curtains of yellow-gold and green dust, it was, if she looked really closely, possible to see swirling motif patterns that picked out different places around the walls. They hadn’t really been visible in the tunnel, although she had to admit she had stopped looking for the most part.

“One Soul Foundation spider core says that beyond that door it’s filling up with water and they plan to open the door in a few days to just try and flood us, secure in the ‘knowledge’ that we will be drowned or smashed to bits,” Sana said dryly.

“If you can find one that has any qi in it I will resolutely refuse to take that bet,” she replied, rolling her eyes. “In any case, there is a third option.”

“Ohh?”

“We survive and it washes us all the way down into the depths,” she joked.

“Please leave the funny stuff to me,” Sana said a touch sourly.

Shaking her head, she slowly walked over to the wall and considered it. The entry hall had quite a lot of rubble and fallen panels, but mainly near the entrance where they had come in. this close to the door the architecture was remarkably sturdy.

“You thinking we use the leaf and we cut our way around?” Sana asked.

“Yes,” she agreed. “I rather fear your somewhat humorous suggestion that we become miners and carve holes in the wall has become reality, dear sister,” she said with a faux-resigned tone

Rather than do so immediately by the door, they retreated to the nearest rock fall close to the entrance of the room and started there. There the shockwave had displaced several sections of the qi-repelling rock panels that clad most of the hall, exposing the bedrock behind them. Selecting a spot where they could replace the panel afterwards and thus broadly disguise the opening amid all the fresh collapse, she started to carve out a section as neatly as possible.

Even with the leaf, it was slow going due to the density of the rock and the need to suppress their qi as much as possible. The dust still lingered in suspension and coated everything. Moving it with Intent just stirred it up and meant they had to redouble their efforts to minimise the effects of continued re-exposure.

They alternated the task from the start, shifting rock out and scattering it loosely around the debris-filled hallway to disguise it as best they could. It wouldn’t survive a detailed investigation, but it was better than nothing and the dust made for a surprisingly convenient blanket of obfuscation. After a while they settled into a pattern where she cut rock, as her Sundering Intent did seem to help with the task a bit, while Sana used her Maelstrom Intent to prevent the dust from entering the tunnel in large quantities while dispersing rock that she mined. The Sundering Intent, as Sana had started to call it – which was a catchy enough name that she decided to just start using it – gave her the vaguest awareness of what was in the rock ahead of her for maybe… two or three hand widths? Enough at least that she didn’t cut into anything dangerous so long as she took things slowly. At least with the Sundering Intent she could cut out blocks of rock rather than malformed triangles.

She reckoned it took them several days of cutting and moving in the darkness to advance high enough to be comparable to the upper stories of the hall they were trying to bypass. Visualising the layout of one of those halls, from when they were flooded up through one, she was sure she didn’t want to clip any of the feeder channels that came out of the roof of the room allowing it to flood. She would have cut a path towards the large channel if she didn’t suspect it diverted away from the hall somehow, or stepped up over it via a lock system more likely. Cutting into that below the water mark would be disastrous in such an enclosed space.

In the silence of their endeavour she found herself reviewing the array symbols once again. Having used most of the basic ones now and being much clearer on what they did, it was easier to hypothesise what some of the similar-looking symbols might do, and how they could be drawn. That latter aspect was the main hindrance towards using quite a few of the so-called lesser ones lifted from the walls of the Academy. Those were much less demanding on their qi. To the point where she was pretty sure she could imprint two or three four-symbol arrays that used those in a row compared to barely one, without breaking into her refined qi for the more advanced ones. The issue was that they were drawn accurately, but lacked the intention of the ones Maria and Eleanora had set out, which while much more complex had something of an inherent sense of ‘rightness’ to them that you could follow. Most of their success so far had been identifying those lesser symbols in the more complex ones and working backwards from there. At any rate, it was something to occupy the large part of her mind that was just going to worry about dust or Undren or flooding with something productive.

Eventually, something that had totally defied the probing of her Intent, appearing to all intents invisible, snared up the leaf blade, stopping it dead.

-Well monkeyshit, she sighed and carefully excavated away that place in the rock.

Frowning with concentration, she carefully cleared away the stone to find a dozen lines of faintly glowing white-green Arborundum tracing a beautiful and complex pattern. Experimentally she poked at the rock between them and the leaf was repelled, like a piece of qi-infused iron ore that diviners liked to use.

“What is it?” Sana came up beside her.

“Finally found out what is letting qi flow through this place and presumably powering the doors and stuff,” she replied, blowing rock dust off the pattern.

“It’s uncuttable by the leaf and appears to project a field beyond it. We can cut up to the threads but not through them or the rock behind them…” she trailed off, thinking rapidly about the room layout and the distance they had come so far.

“This is something related to the opening of one of the flood channels?” Sana asked, looking back behind them then at the floor of the cramped space.

“I wouldn’t bet against that hypothesis. We’ll try to go over the top of it,” she nodded.

She had soon uncovered a veritable wall of the Arborundum filaments stretching to 3 metres in length and was starting to be concerned she was somehow cutting along its length rather than its height before she finally found the top. It adjusted latterly at 45 degrees making it clear that the channel was in fact octagonal in shape. The problem that presented itself though, was the shimmering ceiling of Arborundum lattice that presented itself above that, stretching out in every direction.

“Huh, that’s inconvenient,” Sana observed in a disgusted tone.

“To be fair, I’m actually more impressed that this leaf has served us so well for so long before we encountered something like this…” she muttered. “For an opportunistic pickup off a cart in a ruined city, its return is pretty spectacular.”

“The day it goes blunt is the day we have a problem,” her sister agreed, shifting more rock behind them.

They weren’t bothering to take it out of the tunnel now. There was enough space behind them that at this point they could just throw it backwards. Sadly, it couldn’t be absorbed into their dantians either, not that it was especially rich in qi in any case.

Another two days of monotonous digging, now forced to go down underneath the lattice by several metres rather than over it, saw them eventually encounter the bottom of another shimmering Arborundum lattice, angled 45 degrees outwards. That all but confirmed to her that the hall somewhere to their left should indeed be one of the octagonal ones with a central pit, of a similar size to the ones they had risen through before. After some consideration, they decided to bypass the hall completely. The likelihood of it being flooded from above was very high in her personal estimation and all the doors would almost certainly be sealed. In addition, the more she thought about it, the more likely it became that the entire hall was ringed in this fate-accursed lattice.

They had mined onwards for another day when, finally, the event she had been somewhat expecting finally occurred. There was a juddering groan that shook the rock all around them for several seconds. A faint wave of Yang Water Qi rippled up the tunnel, followed by the distant sound of surging water.

“Well, that confirms their solution to using the dust,” she remarked in a resigned fashion as she started to carve into the ceiling.

The tunnel was large enough for them to crouch in currently as she had kept it as small as was convenient to progress quicker. Unfortunately, that became a bit inconvenient in the current circumstance.

“Do you think this is going to flood all the way up to here?” Sana asked, looking behind them.

“I have to imagine that they designed this place so it could be flooded compartmentally,” she pointed out.

“Yeah… good point,” her sister agreed, then added: “Dig faster!”

Shaking her head, she kept cutting at the same speed she had been before; rushing in a panic would do no good now anyway. Behind her, Sana started stacking square blocks as a wall. One of her more useful discoveries when trying to decipher the symbols as she mined had been the stability symbol. Now that they had enough distance from the dust, their continued use of Intent on their own bodies had mostly purged it and they were both back to being able to absorb qi, albeit still with some difficulty and much-reduced efficiency, so arrays could be used a bit more freely.

“If you told me that the most important aspect of being at Core Refinement would turn out to be being able to turn qi into vital components directly so you no longer need to eat or breathe, I would have probably said you were an idiot,” Sana grumbled as she worked on making the relevant array on a large piece of flat rock.

“True, but it only works so long as there’s actual qi, and I’m still not certain that that isn’t just a quirk of the fact that we ended up using a pseudo Yin Yang True Elements Spring to form and temper our Golden Cores,” she pointed out. “That attribute seems to be related to Yang Wood, which outside of our array for it is basically only found in ancient spiritual trees and super rare, hard to catch spirit herbs.”

“Killjoy,” Sana muttered. “Still, I wonder what our actual lifespans are right now, because most Golden Core cultivators get a boost of a few hundred years and going by the Undren our cores are clearly a bit better than average.”

“No idea, no intention of trying to burn some of my vitality just to check either,” she rolled her eyes in the darkness and handed Sana another 40 by 40 chunk of rock. “How is the wall coming on?”

“Getting there… we really should have done this a day ago when you actually worked out what the symbol meant,” Sana grimaced. “Blocked off the step down.”

“Hindsight get thee gone,” she sighed, because her sister was right there.

A second surge of Yang Water qi in the dusty tunnel was accompanied by a sense of descending oppression that put her in mind of someone having just knocked the bottom out of an ocean-sized bucket-

The pressure wave smashed them both into the wall and scattered Sana’s wall around them with enough force to make her bones creak.

“By the nameless!” Sana spat as she barely managed to protect herself from the hail of flying rocks.

Shaking her head, she sat up, pushing rocks away, and found that there was water in the tunnel, rapidly rising. They both started to fix the ruined wall as fast as they could in the rising swirling, icy waters. It had almost filled the tunnel by the time she wedged the last bits in and used her physical strength to stop it from collapsing.

There was a sense of –setting- and the stability of the rock intensified subtly all around them. The gaps between the rocks bled away as her sister imprinted the three symbol array onto a slab under the water. Floating in the now totally submerged tunnel, she shuddered. The water was icy, with more than a hint of Yang Qi in it. It wasn’t dangerously cold by any means, but having gotten used to the hot darkness of the small tunnel, to be plunged into cold darkness was not exactly pleasant. Clearly, it had come from some large reservoir above them, or the sea on the surface perhaps.

-Or they just had a hole in whatever passed for a seabed and opened that. It’s flooded well above the height of the tunnel, she pondered.

Without further ado she started cutting at the tunnel ceiling, opening up space. The concentration of the golden dust in the water was obnoxiously problematic, but she was certain they had enough qi to outlast it. Soon she had carved a halfmetre wide space and determined that their seal behind them was holding. After that, it was just a matter of carving that new tunnel along far enough for them both to get out of the water, dumping the excess behind them.

“We are going to have to do something about excess rock,” Sana grimaced, looking at the half-filled hole behind them.

“I think we just have to live with it,” she added, resignedly. “Melting it is a no go. Turning that into a corrosive pool…”

“Yeah…” Sana agreed, glancing around them with a grimace. “That would be unpleasant.”

Regardless, the disaster was now temporarily averted, so all they could do was resume their tedious cutting through the rock, now in a largely airless space. Mercifully, as Sana had remarked earlier, there was enough qi in the rocks themselves to support them. There was some physical discomfort, noticeable because she had stopped her mantra from burying the physical pain she was feeling quite so agressively. They had already been doing that for far too long, and it was dangerous to lose your sense of what was an appropriate level suffering for your physical condition, on that everyone who had ever trained them agreed. It was like losing fear: it led to you not really knowing what your limits were any more, and that would get you killed or injured much more frequently as a result.

Between the nonexistent ventilation, the enclosed space filled with chopped rock chunks. The rising temperature due to their depth and Yang Water qi slowly filtered through the rock into the tunnel, making it humid as well as hot, and the environment became wretched.

It was a different kind of unpleasant compared to the horrible swamp from the tunnels below. The ambient temperature of the rock surface was at the point where a mortal would probably have died of heatstroke even if they had some way to avoid suffocation. Why it was so hot, she wasn’t sure. The best guess she had was that it was a side effect of the Arborundum lattices being active, because they shouldn't be that deep. The spear has said the sea between their city and the nearest landmass was a few hundred metres at best and they had gone down maybe 500 before finding the tunnels. It should be around 50 degrees, but the rock was close to the temperature where it could boil water.

They continued like this for an interminable length of time. They didn’t bother to cut sideways into the tunnel itself, based on the regular layout of the access points there would be a stairwell about 800 metres out from the far exit of the hall, and the goal here was to avoid drawing any attention to their escape from the hoard behind them.

Eventually, she pushed the leaf blade monotonously and felt it cut nothing.

-Monkey-shit, she grimaced signalling her sister to move back.

It turned out, however, that the dangerous thing wasn’t whatever they had just breached, but the fact that they had just breached a place with an actual atmosphere. When she pulled the blade out there was a *ssssssss* sensation in the air and the skin on her arm was lacerated before she could get it out of the way. It was close to a blade of air rushing into the tunnel, although thankfully it only cut in the first instance and only, from what she could see, because she had had her hand in front of the initial gap.

Carefully pulling it back the rest of the way, she carved open a small section and checked beyond. It turned out to be a stairwell, which was an unsought for bit of good fortune. Peering out warily, she found that they were about halfway up it and that it was largely deserted apart from some algae and a few mushrooms far below. Satisfied, she pulled herself out and dropped down onto the stairs, Sana following a moment later with a relieved sigh.

“In this whole wretched experience… I’m not sure what I hate more… that or sewers…” Sana finally broke the silence.

“Yellow Dust Rat Soup,” she said with a giggle.

“Oh. Yeah… I’d sort of blanked the bit before we began mining,” Sana replied with a shudder.

They sat there in silence for a few moments longer before she pushed herself up. “Well, let’s get this hole sealed up and get moving.”

“And next time we meet one of those towns we tunnel our way around,” Sana winced. “By the way, does your Intent feel oddly settled compared to how it was when we escaped the dust?”

“Hmmmmm,” she self-examined herself at her sister’s prompting.

She had, she had to admit, largely stopped thinking about the ‘Sundering Intent’ in an analytical way at a certain point. Doing so while using it so monotonously for days and days would have driven her slightly mad she was sure, and in any case, it had given her time to ponder the arrays.

Sana was right though. That sustained use seemed to have made a marked improvement in how it was settling within her body. It felt easier to use if anything, more a part of her than it had been before. She also had to think much less about making it fuse with her qi as it continued its own passive refinement cycle.

“Yeah,” she nodded. “It’s started to merge with my dantian much more… naturally…”

“It seems my Qi Sea has expanded a bit as well, which is bizarre, because we have been qi depleted for… close to two weeks?” she muttered.

“Uhuh,” Sana agreed. “My core capacity has increased by nearly 30 of what we decided to call ‘core units’ from what I can see… I wonder what criteria we have to fulfil to advance from Golden Core to Soul Foundation?”

“Doesn’t your art show you?” she asked, surprised.

“Not… as such,” her sister sighed. “It’s weird. It seems like my Intent has to fuse with the core in a certain way… but there isn’t any blueprint or guide for it. It just says that it will progress as it should, which is singularly…”

“Unhelpful,” she completed with an eye roll.

“Yes,” Sana groused, kicking her heels on a step. “Not to mention, it seems I can’t re-enter the pagoda until I reach some suitable level of attainment in its eyes for all four of the arts it already imparted.”

“That also assumes that the breakthrough process and the realm progression is similar to what we know…” she mused.

She didn’t need to add that what they did know was pitifully small. No more, really, than what the Pagoda had supplied to Sana. You condensed a core, refined your qi, opened your Qi Sea, gained an understanding of Intent… and then arrived at Soul Foundation when it reached some ill-defined tipping point… the problem wasn’t that either…

“It should be pretty close…” Sana mused, “The progression doesn’t seem to differ, and just the steps are a bit more specific maybe…?”

“Isn’t there a tribulation for crossing between Golden Core and Soul Foundation?” she asked quietly.

They made their way carefully down the stairway and scouted the tunnel beyond. It was largely empty apart from the obligatory fungi and dispersed rocks. The hall behind them ended in a flat wall some 800 metres back, so without further ado, they made their way onwards as fast as they could. The progress was steady, punctuated only by several spider attacks, until they arrived at the next junction to find that the tunnel was sealed. Back-tracking, they found that the tunnel on the other side of the channel was also sealed shut. They tunnelled carefully around the door and opened a tiny hole into the next hall. It was crawling with Undren. There must have been 10,000 of them massed into the area, coming and going through mined side tunnels.

Sana stared through the tiny fissure and signed: “I’m getting seriously fed up with this”

“How about we turn the tables a bit…” she found herself signing back, a truly malicious idea settling in her mind.

They both retreated back from the slit she had cut, before she started to explain.

In many ways it was a very obvious solution, one that they had considered for that first hall, albeit briefly. There though, the concern was that they should get distance from the Island City and not wanting to cause a huge ruckus right on the edge of the territory claimed by the Undren Kin. Now though, the gloves were truly off. She was ready to do this by the time that fate-trashed spider queen appeared, and certainly well before the rat tide and the golden dust. Now, it seemed only fair to return the favour somewhat.

“So,” she said with aplomb, clasping her hands together and stretching her fingers through each other. “The qi transformation arrays were really good at murdering even Nascent Soul spiders, given enough time to build up... and at this point we might as well try to get some benefits? If we can kill off an entire hall, how many Golden Cores and Nascent Soul cores is that to refine? Not to mention the qi from everything that dies in there will have nowhere to go given much of the hall is lined with qi-repelling stone and the main doors in and out of it appeared shut.”

“I like what you’re thinking…” her sister grinned evilly. “And at this point, they have made it very clear that they intend to kill us at all costs it seems. Their response to our presence here is… just a bit disproportionate, it feels like.”

“Well, we probably devastated every one of their settlements within 30 miles of tunnel by detonating that small mountain of rats like that…” she pointed out. “If that doesn’t warrant a response on this scale, I struggle to think what might?”

“Nah, I meant before that,” Sana said drily. “They basically deployed a small army to catch us.”

“There was no basically about that,” she said sourly. “They did deploy a fate-thrashed army to deal with us for some reason, and I doubt it was just for our cores.”

“So how do we go about this?” Sana mused… “I say we try to get above the hall.”

“Depends… how long do you think the lockdown will last?” she had been pondering that herself for a while.

“Either we are fate-thrashed unlucky and they lift it within minutes or they might just leave it for as long as they think we can survive in that other tunnel, while flooded and locked in…. I’d guess they leave it for a week at any rate…” Sana speculated.

“Well, we start anyway… and see. If they open it all up, we can just move on,” she agreed.

“Anyway… this should be even better training,” she reached out and exerted her Intent-infused qi to gouge out a handful of the normal rock. It was slower than using the leaf by a long margin, a bit like trying to scrape away compacted wet sand, but...

Sana raised an eyebrow. “How long have you been able to do that?”

“Not long at all…” she chuckled awkwardly.

In truth, she had only really discovered it in widening the hole to get them into the stairwell. Whether it was possible before that, she had been too focused on cutting the tunnel to worry about it, just letting her Intent do its thing.

“It seems my Intent has almost completely saturated my body, which brought about this advancement in its effectiveness,” she explained as Sana tried to replicate the feat on the wall and failed.

Her sister sighed in disappointment and shook her head as she continued explaining. “So, I figure this is what we do. The main things hampering us with setting up larger interlinked arrays was how ad hoc the idea and implementation was in the first place and the time it took us to set them out. Well, qi as well, but that’s much less of an issue now. The latter two are less of a problem, but it should be possible to seriously condense the scale of the array we made for the same amount of effort.”

She started to sketch out the design roughly on the section of the wall of the tunnel where they were sat.

“So before we essentially had eleven independent arrays and a gathering array. I had the suspicion before that the system was a lot more robust than we were giving it credit for and I think in hindsight I was right. Basically, we need to make a six symbol array that feeds five elements and has a control array that links them all together. The transformation between Yin and Yang can be handled by sub-nodes that link between them. Imprinting it would be utterly impossible, but basically, we end up with five chambers, one for each element and the core that is entirely focused on regulating their interactions and sustaining the build-up.”

“I see…” Sana mused. “It should be possible… This is essentially condensing Myriad Elements Qi directly rather than building into it like we did before. I take it you had some success with working out what some of the other symbols do and how they can be drawn?”

“A bit, yeah. Not much else to do when chopping rock really. It’s not like I have a bunch of arts to work on getting to minor completion or something,” she jibed.

“Hah. Stop stealing my role,” Sana gave her a playful poke in the side.

“In that case, I’ll handle excavating the interconnecting bits and you handle the side rooms and get them set up one at a time?” She suggested.

“Won't that be a lot slower?” her sister frowned before sighing and shaking her head. “This way we both get to dig, stupid Sana.”

“Tired, stressed-out Sana,” she said diplomatically, hiding her smile.

“We should seal that off though…” She pointed back at the hole they had cut below.

“Actually…” Arai found herself frowning. “Seal that off and cover it over. Then we excavate a new access in a really awkward place to see… that is basically thin enough that we can break it with physical strength to get out. Say… in the previous stairwell on the canal side of the tunnel.”

“Ooh...” Sana clapped her hands – “Those are nasty, but relatively harmless to us at this point.”

“Yep, that way we have some kind of out, even if it’s back-tracking.”

“So, where do we put it?” Sana asked after a moment’s further consideration.

“Middle of the hall, above the huge pit they dug down, would be best I think,” she said after thinking for a moment. “That makes it hard for them to get here, and I doubt it will occur to them that anything can dig through this rock at the speed we are until it’s far too late.”

“Okay, while you do that, I’ll go back and trap and seal the other ‘exit’ and then dead-end it and carve a new one,” her sister said, taking the leaf from her hand.

It took them a week to carve out the passageway to the middle of the room and get the series of rooms laid out. With two of them working on it, progress went much faster than she had expected, especially as her own gains with her Intent got slowly better as the days wore on. After a few days of using it solidly to gouge out stone, she had graduated from scraping rock away to using the Sundering Intent to trace extant weaknesses in the rock and fracture it that way. She was somewhat embarrassed for her past self, as they could have saved several days of work if she had done this from the start, but she comforted herself by repeating that she was a Herb Hunter, not a Spirit Stone Miner or a Jade Carver. Before the last few weeks, she had only really smashed rocks with a hammer to create a gravel bed in the garden that one time.

All the while, the forces in the hall came and went as they periodically checked on them. The settlement itself was, she judged, quite a bit bigger than the previous ones they had encountered. The hall they were in was one of at least three she suspected, perhaps a whole complex radiating out from this point. The only other large exit on the far end was also sealed in any event, so if there were access tunnels in and out they were not within sight. It seemed that the settlement could function without access to that particular underground thoroughfare in its entirety and they were just happy to leave it sealed.

Setting up the actual arrays, on the other hand, took her longer than she had anticipated and was quite a bit more technical. The structure, which initially seemed easy, turned out to be anything but. Her hope that you could do it with just the six central symbols turned out to be broadly true, but they still needed to set up five subsidiary elemental arrays in the five rooms that linked to the symbols, as it turned out. Her hope that the State symbols would allow for the transformation wasn’t… wrong. She just hadn’t appreciated the difference between theory and practice, it turned out.

In the end, she changed the design into a three step structure. At the periphery were five elemental arrays with five symbols apiece and state symbols regulating the transformation of Yin and Yang energy. Each of those then linked to an array that gathered them and then distributed the qi to the proper gathering array in the central room.

Neither of them had the qi reserves to easily imbue arrays that big or complex in one go, not to mention the structure was beyond anything they had attempted. Each section also had to be imprinted with their qi directly it seemed, and then reinforced with their blood to make it fix properly.

The whole procedure was taxing beyond expectation, in short, and not helped in the slightest by both of them still suffering from the lingering effects of the dust. Her qi gathering efficiency was still maybe a quarter of what it had been before; the mushroom spores in her skin were the main cause of that. The qi repelling and depleting dust had wormed its way into her lungs and arteries as well. It was possible to expel it and the spores with Intent, but her mantra was unable to provide her much relief from the pain of the process for some reason, so it had to be done gradually and with great care not to send them through her meridian gates while removing them from her body.

The one time that happened by accident she nearly suffered a qi deviation on the spot. During that time she also found, horrifyingly, that carving out a damaged section from her arm did nothing to actually ‘remove’ it. Much of the dust remained behind somehow, glittering spectrally in the place where the wound had been even as her body healed around it. This seemed to be the property of the greenish dust that was, she was starting to notice, bonded with the fungi spores somehow.

Still, despite all that, after three days of solid work, the cores of the five different arrays were all completed and they could let them start generating qi. Sequential activation of the feeding arrays in each room took an additional week, during which she started to stress out more and more about the hall settlement below. There was a clear build-up of forces starting to occur there, with dozens of Nascent Soul spiders, and even two more of the weird male spiders. They also saw two huge mutate rats with ballistae on their backs arrive with a large entourage of Undren wearing some pieces of metal armour painted black and red, which were now being housed close to either exit of the hall.

Finally, two days later, they had all the qi transformation symbols active and starting to generate Yin/Yang Myriad Elements Qi. With five of the sets of symbols all pulling qi out of the rock around them and the central formation funnelling it together into the central room, the pressure from the qi rapidly shifted from unpleasant to downright noxious.

They also discovered early on that ‘Isolate’ appeared to have no influence on these array structures. Her best guess was that it was the same ‘type’ as the transformation symbol. It worked in four symbol arrays because isolate was dealing with a different aspect of the array to transform. If there was a symbol that allowed the two to play nice in the same role, it was one she hadn’t found yet or simply wasn’t a part of the series they had.

Left with nothing else to do, they both alternated between refining qi to make the best use of the qi building up in the space and expunging the remainder of the dust.

Shockingly, within a mere 24 hours of starting the whole thing up, faint streamers of mist started to appear on the floor. At that point, it only took hours for spiritual condensation to start accruing directly on rock surfaces like faint varicoloured laminate sheen. The qi being transformed was so vast that both of them had to swallow it at a truly crazy rate even in spite of their lingering injuries, and it was still growing exponentially. Her dantian was soon full of elemental mist and it was all she could do to force her Intent through it as thoroughly as possible.

This process continued for another two days during which she felt that her core was growing even denser and darker. The faint corona around it was starting to turn faintly purple around the edge of the gold as well. The threads of elemental qi within it also started to change and slowly shimmer, the Intent-infused qi being incorporated into her core also changing them subtly. With every cycle, she could feel her affinity for the ten transformations of the elements encapsulated within it growing incrementally.

The Sundering Intent slowly changed as well, acquiring a subtle sense of transformation that she was sure came from the symbol. For whatever reason, she also started to become more aware of the main symbol in her mind’s eye. Its own Intent slowly started to bleed out more and more into the qi in her dantian, feeding the symbol in her core. During that process, the last vestiges of the dust’s injurious properties were also finally expelled, which was an enormous relief.

Surfacing from this meditative state, she realised that the entire mini-complex was nearly filled with varicoloured mists. A quick check of the jade tablet on her arm told her that she had been meditating for almost a week.

-It’s kind of scary how time just blurs away, she thought with a shudder. Is this what happens to old sages in their cultivation abodes? They just get caught up in the flow and before they know it a century has flown by…

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

Sana was sat nearby still deep in her own state. She could see the mist shifting and eddying around her in mysterious patterns. Getting up felt like moving through tar, such was the density of qi pervading the space. To move at all freely she had to use her own Intent-infused qi to oppose the mists and part them. Slowly, she made her way down to check the status of the hall itself.

To her great relief, they hadn’t opened the main door to their tunnel yet. The Undren had, however, opened one of the other corridor hall doors leading into a second large hall complex that sat beside this one. Not the one the two of them needed either.

It was hard to miss why either. On the edge of the hall, in that entrance sat a giant mutate rat, almost the size of the spider queen in the depths below. On its back was a series of drums and a throne made of bones. Upon it sat a remarkably muscular bare-chested Undren with grey fur and an actual beard, wearing metal armoured greaves and arm guards and a loose skirt of armoured plates sewn into grey hide covered in livid runes. It had no obvious traces of lizard until she realised that its horned ‘helmet’ was in fact bony protrusions from its own head, giving it the appearance of having four curved horns protruding forward out of its skull. She could sense no qi from it at all, unlike the grey-furred old rat she had met before, which meant it was possibly over Nascent Soul.

-A Dao Seeking Undren, she cursed her own previous thoughts on that matter for having drawn evil and hoped that it was just at Spirit Severing.

That was ominously outside their expectations. A Nascent Soul one they might hope to ambush or make underestimate in some way, at least running was possible based on their previous experiences. She was under no illusions that they could flee from an entity that was at Dao Seeking. Any tricks they could pull would be slight things before a master. There were no Moon Mushrooms to save them here, no slime pit to distract, no spear to free.

Suppressing her qi with her concealment art and stilling every other aspect of her, she quickly surveyed the rest of the room. The rat on the throne was directing others to create various structures throughout the hall. Large totems hung with various banners that held vast swirls of glyphs that put her somewhat in mind of the array symbols themselves.

The ambient qi in the hall was also noticeably rising over what it had been before, and as she looked again, she saw that a lot of the subsidiary activity that had been going on in the hall had stopped. Clearly, they had evacuated all the minions at the very least. Another ominous thought occurred to her as she turned back to look at the distant entrance to the other hall.

-Was that rat intending to make this hall his cultivation abode? That would be… problematic.

Grimacing, she quietly made her way back up, sealing the path again behind her to find Sana now out of her own meditation and stretching her arms and legs.

“Has the rat with horns on its head left yet?” she queried, seeing her return.

“Oh, did you already check? - And no, it’s still there. They are making some big totems?” she found herself asking, even though that was a really obvious question.

“Yeah. It scanned here with its spiritual sense three days ago, but didn’t seem to detect anything,” her sister remarked. “It’s quite remarkable, these arrays don’t seem to stand out at all. Only the spiders deep below have ever shown any ability to perceive them. I don’t think the ones up here are quite the same.”

“Something to be thankful for, anyway. Do you think we can spike it now?” she looked around at the thick qi mist. There were actual crystal growths on the walls now.

“Let’s harvest the crystals and make sure we have the escape tunnel clear. If that thing is actually Dao Seeking it will be able to swat us like bugs,” Sana grimaced and moved slowly over to a wall and started to draw what crystals she could into her dantian.

Experimentally, she cut at a crystal with one of the qi-repelling daggers and blinked as it couldn’t even scratch it. Not for the first time she cursed not having something that they knew clearly could cut things at realms below whatever Celestial Venerate actually was. Aside from qi-infused Arborundum and a weird rock that made up the dais by the spear in the city far above they had met nothing it couldn’t cut.

Trying again, with the leaf this time, she sighed mentally as it gave a fractional bit of resistance before slicing it apart.

“So, somewhere between qi-repelling and Celestial Venerate,” Sana drily observed. “That’s not at all a huge span of quality.”

She started to work on getting as many of the crystals as she could. Soon she had a small sea bed of Myriad Elements crystals in her Dantian. The spatial storage within it was clearly… big. It just vexed her that it only seemed happy to store things like this. Experimentally, she tried to take some back out. Nothing happened, which figured really.

Within an hour they had cleaned out all the crystals they could. It was time to try this attempt at mass destruction from Myriad Elements Qi poisoning it seemed. Signalling to Sana, she made her way towards the other set of much smaller arrays that they had set up to melt a bunch of holes through the ceiling.

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~ ZRECH, OF CLAN UL’KAL – WARLORD OF MOURNCLEAVER PIT ~

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Zrech Ul’kal, Elder of Mourncleaver Pit, sat upon his throne frowning. His Great Mutate rat was twitching its nose, clearly uneasy about something. He stilled it by throwing a Mana Core from a Jash’Grai-Dak demon onto the ground for it to gnaw at as he surveyed the totems that were being built to try to harness the rampant energies pulsing across the roof of the hall.

The emergence of the Mana Core Vein in this unassuming hall settlement was… inexplicable. All things like this had, as far as he was aware, largely been mined out back in the days of old, when the tyrant defilers from above had still held sway, plundering riches of the earth from their rightful children and slaughtering in four directions in the name of their kingdoms and stolen glory.

Then again, he reflected with a growl, inexplicable things appeared to have been happening a lot in this territorial extremity on the western fringes of their territories in the last few months. Now… there was Yerkush’s insanity in the neighbouring territory. The old spider molester had overreacted it seemed in trying to capture something or another in opening up his alchemical pits, not expecting that the prey he chased had been able to not only poison the entire swarm with some horrifically potent Thaumic spell but then detonate them in what was a remarkable display of Etheric manipulation. The ensuing explosion had caused so much devastation the other town lords of this district of Swarmblood’s westernmost enclaves had been forced to shut off much of secured connections out of this region. The Swarmblood Elders had also sent him to sort out that mess. Easier said than done, frankly.

He stared at the ceiling again… pushing those thoughts into the back of his mind. He had investigated it several times now. It was clearly just a Mana Core Vein, admittedly one where there had never been the faintest hint of one before, but just a Mana Core Vein. Its purity, however… the purity was remarkable. He liked to think he had explored widely – he had led expeditions for the glory of Mourncleaver for over three thousand years, risen to the rank of Warlord, destroyed a Mana Slime Well in the depths and captured its core, braved the snake warrens of the Undrenmarsh, slain a three-headed serpent and drunk its blood to get his horns… In all those long centuries, he had never seen a vein this pure outside of Swarm Blood itself, deep in the heart of this accursed prison.

He gestured and one of his sage heralds approached.

“Yes-ss great warlord?” the servant bowed.

“How long before we can open the far gate,” he gestured towards the doorway that was leading towards the flood pit access.

The core of the vein was somewhere above the hall, but his senses told him that the most accessible parts of it lay beyond the gate. It seemed to travel in a curve towards the canals.

“Several more days-s great warlord!” the servant replied, bowing again, having found someone to ask.

“…”

He eyed the servant, who bowed and continued explaining. “The control hall is in the Eight Eyes territory. It was… flooded.”

He ran his claws through his beard and resisted kicking the servant. It was not their fault, even if the answer of ‘several more days’ had been being bandied around for two weeks now. They could always tunnel around the door, but that would be dangerous if they ever needed to flood the lower levels again… While the spread of Ancestor Moonrat’s ‘Grand Achievement’ had been a thing of greatness before this shard of the stolen world above became a prison, since then it was more of a nuisance, and it had long since escaped any semblance of control, if such a thing had ever truly been under control.

They still had no idea what caused that great bloom. Apparently, it had escaped and even led to the destruction of the Sar’katush Enclave on the surface. He fervently hoped that wasn’t what that idiot Yerkush had been chasing. It had killed a leviathan, escaped an eldritch bloom, escaped the flooding of the depths, killed that old monster of a prophet and unsealed the weapons from their millennia-old attempt at refinement…

As to what it was, nobody was clear. Maybe it was one of the Grey Witches from the southern seas, or some slime that got a lucky mutation. The worst-case scenario though would be that it was one of The Great Enemy that had somehow lingered on. However, the Spirit Tyrant above had, according to the Great Elders, proclaimed this land free of their dominion with the completion of its seal above. Although, its betrayal of their alliance with the sabotage of that same seal made that information suspect to many - among which he included himself. Still, none of their kind had apparently been found in these lands, above or below, for over 20,000 years.

-If one of them had survived somehow, or hidden away… he considered grimly. Only the Great Elders, Grey Lord of the Life Flayers or one of the Sovereign Slime Pits from the deeps, who amassed the remains of ‘The Great Enemy’ like collectors hunting after rare specimens, might turn aside such a being

His servant subtly got his attention and he turned back to look at him, and at the new arrival standing beside him.

“We have received a communication from Warlord Yerkush, Great Warlord,” another servant said, bowing.

“I see,” he waved a claw for it to continue.

“Lord Yerkush apologises. The delay was caused by interference from the dispersal of the disjunctive spore mushrooms. He says that he has begun the process of releasing the lockdowns. There may be some light flooding, but the way will be open within a few d-”

He nodded, cut them off and motioned for the servant to leave.

That was something at least. They could ascertain what the easiest way to investigate the vein was…

His instincts shifted even as his mount twitched its nose and looked at the ceiling. The fur on his arms abruptly rose and he tasted mana in the air. As if hypnotised, he stared at the middle of the ceiling as it fluctuated faintly-

“OUT. NOW!” he roared.

Every Undren within earshot poured towards the tunnel entrance without any complaint. They had evacuated a lot of those in this hall, but there were still a lot of workers and craftspeople, not to mention higher circle guards…

The distortion settled and he breathed out in relief, having it-

His sharp instincts, well attuned to changes in mana density, warned him moments before the true rupture occurred. Several different points of subsidence rippled across the ceiling as something warped within the vein itself and a shockwave of ultra-pure compressed mana flashed out.

Mists of mana followed, and their purity made his hair properly stand on end. This wasn’t simply a Mana Core Vein. This was a True Mana Vein of some description, and how by their ancient ancestors had something like that appeared here…

“SIRE!” his servant screamed. “This is like the…”

It was just like the one that was reported to have emerged by that accursed tool. Apparently, it had been pure enough to force an entire spider brood above surface briefly, leading to Warlord Mektz’s rather humorous demise, but it was nothing on the scale of this.

He snarled and struck out, compressing space with his grasp of martial mana, creating a rippling barrier below the collapse, but the damage was already done. At this density, even if it dispersed through the whole complex, it would still be lethal in short order to anyone who had not attained an Ancestral Unity, or risen to the level of a Nest Lord. Undren who were lucky enough to be near the tunnels were desperately fleeing. The population loss was not a particular problem, but the loss of resources in the depths of this place would be annoying and the corpses would feed the vein as it consumed the entire hall…

Drummers in the far hall, where the majority of the population were relocated, were hammering warnings. He grit his fangs and cast another space wall even as they backed out of the hall, buying the few elites in the vicinity time to retreat. They were not that vital, but wasting good resources pained him, especially the two True Core spiders and the War Rat.

He was in the process of activating the restriction totems to see if they would make any difference when there was a splintering from the centre of the ceiling and a second shockwave rolled across the entire hall as the central part of the ceiling collapsed directly. Within the mists he saw flickers of crystalline fragments raining down, making his blood run cold. Elementally Attuned Locoi Crystals.

They were worth small cities’ ransoms on the old surface, never mind here, if you could get a few decent sized ones, but plucking one out of a vein directly? That would be suicide for anyone they had on hand or could easily call upon.

He roared and backed away, out of the entrance, sending his mana into the control mechanism to close off the connection between the two halls. The initial shockwave had already slain tens of thousands but the settlement itself could still be saved…

Even so, he could feel mana poison seeping into his body. His mutate rat was staggering as well. He vomited blood and saw one of the true core spiders nearby keel over, twitching. The door slammed down and there was a moment of blissful silence and then horror.

The shockwave in the ceiling ran through the roof of the tunnel, following some unseen fault in the rock, cracking the area above the door slightly then spidering out and bringing the whole roof of the tunnel down as they scrambled backwards. He saw his servant of many years succumb with a scream as pure Mana Core mist in all its eight colours swirled like the tendrils of an eldritch abomination through the fissure.

Grasping for control over his rebelling bodily mana so that he could teleport, he-

He collapsed in a tunnel 20 miles away that he had casually designated as a backup transfer point a few weeks back.

His body was… his mana matrix was already badly contaminated by the pure mana that was nothing short of poison in his veins. It was rapidly corroding the channels and interfering with the way his... limbs...

He focused on his home teleport point and barely managed to force out the spell formation-!

Space rippled around him and he crashed into a stone floor, his limbs spasming while his vision blurred.

-ARRcane… MAna diSperRsal! he thought brokenly as he struggled to grasp for a nearby chest that held emergency supplies.

If he… was… going to survive…

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~ ARAI – RUINED UNDREN SETTLEMENT ~

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Arai found she could only look down in awe at the havoc that was wrought by the shockwave of Myriad Elements True Qi.

The initial pressure wave eliminated most of the settlement in a single pulse, the mists doing in anything else in short order. The follow-up one seemed to have also travelled into the rest of the complex, but the decisive actions of that Dao Seeking rat that had unfortunately teleported away seemed to have collapsed the tunnel between them. But it was still badly poisoned, from what little she had glimpsed, so she was hopeful it might not survive.

In any case, there was no time to dally around. She jumped down into the hall below, crashing onto a rooftop and charging for a Nascent Soul spider she had marked as her first quarry.

They moved as fast as they could, targeting the elites that had collapsed and gathering and refining cores as they went. After several minutes of frenzied looting, her sister’s Intent-infused voice carried over to her.

“Hey, over here sis!” she looked over to see Sana standing on the lower level waving her arms.

She rapidly made her way over to the building Sana was standing outside. One of the male mutate spiders was dead in front of it along with almost 40 Golden Core Undren and another Undren wearing a robe made out of spider carapace. All were very dead, blood and foam frothing their mouths and bleeding from all their orifices.

“What is it?” she queried.

“This is a proper warehouse!” Sana was grinning like she had just won a thousand pure spirit stones gambling. “Come look! It’s no wonder they had so many elites here.”

She followed Sana who almost skipped into the warehouse and stopped dead, staring. It was totally outside her expectations. She had been expecting a series of very large piles of monster bits and maybe some ores and bone, or mushrooms. Instead, she got all those, but on redux and with far more logistical order than she had perhaps credited Undren, based on their functionally crude building practices.

“Some of these mushrooms are eight-star!” Sana held up an Earth Element Lingzhi like it was some kind of holy talisman.

Picking another one up from that crate, she scanned it with her qi sense. It was also almost eight-star, as were two others she checked in rapid succession.

Looking around, there were other things as well, water-filled stone troughs holding aquatic herbs in Yin and Yang rich waters, presumably gathered from deep pools. Elsewhere she could see crates of cores, orderly piles of bones of various creatures, mineral ores in stacked piles. She even found several stone boxes in designs similar to those in the island city, alongside a pile of empty stone pots. Next to those were large bales of chitin and several crates of spider carapace.

“It seems spider carapace is the fashion of choice down here…” she poked a crateful with her foot.

“It seems a shame just to leave this all here…” Sana sighed, opening another crate which was full of grade two cores.

“Ohhh… Look, they have more of the tomes!” She said suddenly.

Walking over, she picked one up from the stone shelf beside her sister. It was called ‘Histories of the Southern Continent: Gods and Monsters’, another next to it was entitled ‘Thaumaturgical principles: Volume 5’. The final one was called: ‘Ten Songs: Fact or Fiction? - Do the primordial mortals still walk among us?’.

She flipped through the ‘Thaumaturgical Principles’ manual and whistled. It contained only six ‘spells’; however, each one was vastly superior to anything in either of the beginner books they had found. The system they were part of seemed subtly different as well, as they had no material preconditions and behaved much more like ‘Arts’. It was worn and battered, but the text rapidly rearranged itself before her eyes as she flipped through it, informing her that the six spells were: Fire Burst, Icy Winds, Thunder Charge, Shockwave, Miasma and Mist Burst.

“Sis! Forget anything else in here,” she grabbed Sana who was looking at the rest of the shelf and shoved the book into her hands. “We just hit jackpot. A book with ‘spells’ in it that don’t seem to be for Qi Condensation realm cultivators and have their full framework layouts!”

Picking up another one, a small book with dense script and few pictures that fit in her hand, she skimmed through it. The ‘History of the Southern Continent’ appeared to be a loose collection of essays on various places and people, presumably from the land this whole place originated from. Flipping through it she saw a lot about deserts and how savage and positively inhospitable various populations were on this ‘Southern Continent’. The only ‘giant mountain’ it mentioned was something called Mount Kesh, which was home to some grand cabal of Immortal ‘Wytches’, while the only sewers it mentioned were complaints about the lack of them in certain coastal cities. She recorded it with her scrip flipping through the pages, just in case there was something in there that might be useful down the line, but from what she could see it might only be of serious interest to a scholar or someone travelling through that land. In the grand scheme of things not that helpful to either of them except for the flavour. In any event, she was pretty sure that that this ‘ruin’ they were stuck in - the mine, originated on an entirely different continent of that world.

The other, a slightly larger book, was… weird. She flipped through it and found it basically like one of the pamphlet things that people wrote when they wanted to be provocative. Usually, they were on stuff like ‘Indigenous barbarians are kidnapping innocent village girls in ‘X’ place! - Why won’t the Bureau do anything about it?’ This one seemed to be in the same vein, except-

“Sis?” she asked, trying to control the tone of her voice. “You know the way you said that your art… what was it called again?”

“Erm… Heavenly Maelstrom Scripture.”

“…”

She looked at the entry which was titled: ‘Divine Spiral Sage: attributed creator of Heavenly Maelstrom Mortal Scripture… historically ranked 4th out of the 10 ‘False Gods’ of the Ten Songs Martial Society’. The essay itself actually contained very little of note. A lot of speculation about where the sage originated, what their signs were and how much influence they had exerted or if various disasters could be attributed to them or their disciples. Now that she thought about it, the overall group did sound awfully like a Heavenly Authority akin to the Azure Astral Authority, the Supreme Sovereignty Alliance or the 10,000 Stars Bureau who controlled whole star fields.

She flipped through the rest of the entries, all of which were prefaced with the title Mortal: Red Dust, Broken Heavens, Moon Dream, Longevity, Divine Spiral, White Lotus, Sleeping Dragon, Black Blade, Weeping Sky and Bright Ruin. Red Dust had very little written about them; it seemed that the author was genuinely afraid of whatever entity that was. The name even sounded ominous to her. Mortal Red Dust was basically evoking the central tenant of the vicissitudes of life. Someone who was worthy of attaining such a title was clearly an apex old monster of unparalleled power. Broken Heavens was treated in a similar way. The author claimed they were an arch destroyer and villain, but the claims were written in a way that suggested that their fear of truly badmouthing this person somewhat outweighed the agenda on display.

Moon Dream was, she realised with a start, someone who had been mentioned in some capacity in the discussions they had watched so many times, or at least a great Pagoda named after them.

Mostly the information contained within appeared to be hearsay. The author seemed to hold a fairly dim view of a lot of them, calling several calamities and existences that defied ‘real’ Gods and made good folk afraid for their souls.

Bright Ruin, Black Blade and Weeping Sky drew particularly insidious allusions within their essays: The author attributing plagues of infertility, miscarriages and various other widespread societal misfortunes to their auspice.

Black Blade appeared to be associated with the delightfully ominous sounding ‘Daughters of Extinction’. A mysterious death cult that apparently worshipped the ‘Principle of Universal Extinction’ in some way and who generally appeared uncalled and unsought for to visit various calamities on worlds and peoples. Weeping Sky was either with some race called the Aelfaen D’varad or some kind of Aelfaen False-God, an evil demon. In either case, they had apparently warred against all other sentient races and the D’varad people had been hunted to near extinction by the ‘Righteous Heroes of the Nine Kingdoms’, whoever and whatever those were. The entry also suggested that despite being ‘dead’ Weeping Sky was meant to lead a terrible eldritch cult that hunted the descendants of those heroes across myriad worlds, determined to deny them and all other righteous folks a place in heaven by her own hand.

The author suggested the ‘Longevity’ was responsible for somehow ensuring that people in large swathes of the place this tome originated in could not live beyond their allotted time. The subtle accusation there seemed to be that Longevity actually stole the life-force of all mortals somehow to prolong their own by demanding that they only live an allotted span.

Moon Dream was apparently an illusionist, temptress and deceiver whose teachings influenced women to be unfaithful and men to covet things they should not. She showed false truths and led wise men astray with deceptive auguries. The author also seemed to hold that she was dead, having been murdered and her soul scattered for her crimes.

To Bright Ruin, White Lotus and Sleeping Dragon, the author attested various warlike actions and acts of disruption within that world’s historical record. Mostly the essays painted them as very contradictory figures. They were at times both petty thugs and mendacious villains who were cowardly and did all sorts of evil deeds and also some powerful threat that others had to be wary of at all times and should never forget. Either way, the author claimed they had fled into the savage darkness of the sub-axial regions, whatever those were, and from there they raided various righteous worlds and did various unspeakable things.

She sighed and shook her head, putting the book back on the shelf. It was interesting enough, but the tone made her view it rather dubiously. The collective authors or whoever had compiled the stories, whose name was worn off the cover sadly, were clearly people with money to burn and an agenda if they had made this collection of stuff into a book that ‘anyone’ could read courtesy of its changing script.

“What does it say?” Sana asked, taking it and flipping through it.

“That there are ten old monsters who banded together to make something called the ‘Ten Songs Martial Society’ and that the authors didn’t like any of them very much…” she said dryly.

“That sounds awfully… like a Heavenly Authority…” her sister mused, observing the same thing she had, which she found oddly amusing.

Leaving Sana to look through that book and the few others on the shelf, she went to look through the other crates in the warehouse. Mostly they contained more of the same. Some odd crystals that were quite rich in qi, a few manuals in indecipherable languages and some grey slabs. She picked up one and blinked as it rippled with gold scrolling symbols which promptly rearranged themselves to ask her for a passcode. Sighing she put it back, checking the others. One didn’t have a password but just turned out to be extensive instructions on how to maintain some kind of teleport array. Diagrams for switching out qi cores and such. She had a brief moment of elation at that discovery, hoping it might have an actual layout for one or even instructions on how to make one. To her disappointment though it just contained projected schematics of disconnected parts of a very complex array and disconnected excerpts that were mainly: Put Crystal A here, don’t move Crystal B, is it x, y or z colour and so on.

Eventually, they wandered into the adjoining hall, which turned out to be even more crates of monster cores and various bones.

Sana joined her a few minutes later, carrying the tome with the six arts under one arm and rebinding her scrip to her forearm. They spent almost an hour looking through it, before realising that it was actually much better sorted than even their initial observations had suggested, just not in the way they thought. The ramping up qi density had made it harder to notice, but it turned out that everything against the walls was higher than grade five. Anything that was in a crate had an elemental affinity and the armour materials were scrupulously sorted by quality with the worst at the front and the best at the back of the second hall.

The next few hours were spent rapidly absorbing every monster core they could. Starting with the weakest ones and working their way along. There were thousands of three-star grade cores and over a hundred four-star ones. The surprise was the 31 five-star grade and seven six-star grade cores. After much poking around she even managed to find a pseudo-seven-star grade core that in all likelihood had belonged to a giant rat, due to its earth affinity. The vast majority were wood cores from spiders and water cores from something aquatic, probably a reared fish.

The really ridiculous part of this was that their Qi Lakes absorbed every core below fourth grade without as much as a flicker of complaint. They had to sit down and refine the five and six grade cores, and the efficiency wasn’t great, but she got maybe ten percent of the qi left within them, which when purified into Myriad Elements True Qi was akin to eating a top grade foundation pill. The pseudo-seven-star they refined together and got them almost as much as the others combined.

By the time they finished plundering the warehouse, the size of her Qi Lake and the density of her Golden Core had both increased notably and would likely continue to grow for quite some time as the vast array of core fragments were broken down over time. She reckoned there was probably thirty or forty times her current unrefined qi capacity just locked away in the drifting crystal shards slowly being released over time. The main advantage they seemed to give was to her qi refinement speed where they were acting almost like gravel in a water barrel for jade.

Her capacity, which they were loosely defining as units of ‘Core Qi’, had risen to about 310 units now and her core had gained a very definitive purple hue to its corona. The agglomerations of qi forming in the spiralling rings of misty elemental qi had also started to ignite periodically, forming little blazing orbs that shifted and attuned themselves to her core’s rotation, accruing more power from the mists. They no longer collapsed down into the sea. Several were actually taking on golden sheens, like miniature Golden Cores, something that she was fairly sure was not typical. Nothing she had ever heard of mentioned having multiple Golden Cores. Then again, in terms of size between them and her core, it was like comparing a small child’s doll to a great statue.

In the end, they also refined the Lingzhi and various other weird spirit herbs. They had no other means to do anything with them in any case. Sana tried to use her refinement art on a few of the mushrooms with hilarious consequences, turning them into weird things which all combusted like firecrackers a moment later, leading to her to stalk off to look for more books muttering curses at the pagoda. The ores gave them both a weirdly inauspicious vibe and a scummy feeling when she pushed her qi into them. Even the symbol sent a suggestion that these were things she didn’t need.

The last thing she did was look and see if there was anything worth turning into some clothing or better yet armour. Unfortunately, all the spider carapace in the warehouse appeared to be… rather recently parted from its prior occupants and rather flimsy. She found some pieces of what appeared to be centipede chitin though, which she made into a loose breastplate and backplate and skirt courtesy of some rope and cord made of sinew and mushroom fibres. There was also a bale of bloody, flayed grey skin, which she left well alone.

In the course of their exploration as the qi density kept rising in the now fully sealed hall, they found two more storage halls of similar content. One had a spellbook in it that contained various strange spells for doing stuff like washing clothes, opening locks, purifying water and the like, which her sister claimed into her pack without comment.

They also found what seemed to be a small roll of fish skin which was sturdy enough that it repelled every bone spear in the warehouse. It was still easily sliced by a qi-repelling dagger, but you couldn't have everything she felt. It was also properly treated. When laid out there was about two metres of it which was enough to make a decent satchel for both of them that could carry the tomes and a few other sundries and be securely tied so it wouldn’t impede movement.

While Sana was doing that, she finally found a large chunk of bone that the qi-dispersing stone couldn’t cut, stashed in a pile at the rear of that warehouse. The leaf blade still cut it like butter, but still, it was an improvement, and she found she could push her qi into the bone without it breaking. She carved a long sword, a shorter curved blade and half a dozen daggers out of it. She considered the rest of it for a moment and then started to carve some basic plates out of it with the leaf so Sana could have some armour, and to augment her own. Thirty minutes of work had gotten her some fairly serviceable bits of chest, waist arm and leg armour that she was able to affix to what remained of the fish scales and connect together with sinews.

In another portion of the warehouse, she found long lengths of bone from some huge beast, presumably a water creature of prodigious size. They weren’t quite as durable as the qi-dispersing rock but they were a near equal. She dragged one out and set it to one side so her sister could make a spear out of it, and started to work on another, carving out five centimetre shavings. She finally found a box of sinew, which was indeterminate enough and cured that she didn’t care too much what it came off. Most of it was pretty weak but she found enough that the stone blades couldn’t cut to do what she wanted and set about re-tooling her torso armour for the second time in an hour so that it didn’t restrict her movement quite so much, while providing a bit of additional protection to her back, legs and vital organs.

By the time she was done with the second set, Sana came over to see what she was up to and informed her that she had finished sorting out the cores in the warehouse and absorbed her share. Sana then happily set to fashioning her spear and tailoring the crude armour she had made her for her own purposes. Leaving her staring at the pile of cores, mostly cores at Soul Formation, totalling about 200. Even factoring in the poor efficiency of the absorption, which was already a magnitude better than she might have expected anyway thanks to the symbol, it was a lot of cores.

It took her almost two hours of just sitting there absorbing one after another to get through them all. By the time she was done, her Qi Lake was close to the size of an actual lake. Her Golden Core was a roiling eye right at its centre. Her Core Qi had increased to 390 units and still showed no signs of an upper limit. Monster cores were starting to form small belts around her Golden Core, flickering as they rotated. The droplets of elemental qi precipitated as the rotational pressure slowly refined them dropped like meteors into her Qi Lake and then sank to the sea bed where they became the cores of new eddies and whirlpools. She could also see the centre of the Qi Lake starting to ripple and twist faintly below her core, where the vortex of qi droplets rose, indicating the beginnings of some kind of super vortex. It was frankly fairly primordial in how it looked.

Once they were done with the warehouses, she decided to go check out what the deal was with the fracture that had spewed Myriad Elements Qi into the corridor that the Dao Seeking Undren had sealed off. To her shock, it was filled with the corpses of several thousand Undren including the giant rat the Undren had been riding and another of the larger male spiders. She carved it open and hissed because it was a genuine seven-star core, replete with glittering pseudo-Immortal veins on it. Several of the spiders were also grade 6 cores, as, to her surprise, were two of the dead Undren near the rat corpse.

She wasn’t polite and took various bits of cord and a better belt off one of them. All wore the weird grey skin robes. She was sure they came from the grey demons at this point. Just touching them made her skin crawl and gave her unclean and inauspicious vibes so she left them where they were. All her instincts said nothing good would come of wearing it, especially if they ever encountered them. Sana joined her shortly and they divided up the cores as best they could, refining the seven-star rank one between them.

The breakthrough, when it arrived during the refinement of the core, was remarkably abrupt, but only for her sister. Sana gasped and she was hit by a distorting wave of Intent that flowed out of her, swirling around both of them before dissipating. It affected her surprisingly little, beyond making her skin tighten and giving her a faint feeling of constriction for a few moments. When it passed and they both relinquished the connection, she could feel a certain pressure emanating from her sister that hadn’t been there before.

“I am going to guess that that was not Soul Foundation,” she said, wiping a dribble of blood from her nose.

“Uh… it was not,” Sana said, sounding a bit shocked herself. “It appears to be a minor stage breakthrough within Golden Core, or something very close.”

Sana stared at her hands then her body, before speaking again. “I’m not sure what you could even call it… As you said, isn’t the next realm after this Soul Foundation?”

“What changed?” she asked, focusing her own perception on her sister. “I can feel a certain… pressure.”

“Uhh…” Sana frowned, looking confused in all honesty. “It’s hard to explain… I guess my Maelstrom Intent fused with the core in some way, or maybe became accepted by it? I can't really find the words to describe it, it’s like… before, I had to focus to emit the intent, but now it’s just like an extension of my mind. It merges automatically with my qi… to the point where I have to focus quite hard to not make it do so.”

Sana paused and waved her hand in the air. She watched as the faint distortions to the qi around her rippled in and out of focus bizarrely.

“What is your Core qi capacity?” she asked; hers was around 410 units now.

“Uhh… around 450?” her sister replied after a pause, “but I don’t think it was just related to Qi capacity.”

She nodded, staying silent as Sana went on.

In all likelihood, it wasn’t related to it directly; however, the difference in capacity was a touch surprising. It was only forty units and her sister had likely absorbed a lot more qi before they ever arrived in the hall, so maybe that was the discrepancy. That and the law from the pagoda.

“The connection between the Intent, my body, my qi and the Golden Core itself seems to be what triggered it. Once all of them reached a certain threshold it just… settled?” Sana said, looking a bit awkward.

She chuckled lightly and shook her head. Sana was still likely feeling a bit bad over her progress not being quite as fast as hers. It didn’t really bother her anymore though, beyond the occasional twinges brought about by the Intent overwhelming her emotional control. That hadn’t happened in a while though.

It took them hours to clear out the remaining cores in the joining hall. The alterations to it put her in mind of a fortification in all honesty. The path across it was about two hundred metres long and more of a bridge or walkway with occasional walls that passed over a series of workings and side halls. Almost a thousand elites, mainly Golden Core, but also a fair few Soul Foundation Undren, were scattered throughout it, most of them in a manner that suggested they had been fleeing for their lives. At the far end was another sealed door, this time with a proper shimmering rune on it. The leaf motifs across the far wall glowed dimly with an inner luminescence that did not radiate. Out of curiosity, she tried to cut the wall with the leaf, but it did nothing more than put a faint white line on the stone which rapidly recovered itself.

By the time she was done, having taken the majority of the cores at Sana’s insistence, her Core Units had risen to nearly 450 as well. Much as she had expected though, her Intent showed no signs of merging, so they both went back to clearing out the hall. They also sealed up the exit fissure that bypassed the door. The fortress halls beyond had had little in the way of loot beyond some weapons that were largely unsuitable for either of them and a few more bits of armour that turned out to be as good as what they had.

The depths of the area quarried out in the middle contained a remaining, much more concealed storehouse. Inside it were mainly more monster cores and a few more stockpiles of random artefacts and quite a lot of six and seven-star mushrooms. One annexe was even growing Algru in wide pots, fertilised with a truly disgusting blend of rats, spiders and some kind of eel-like fish.

Another series of offshoot halls down there, they found a deeply unsettling room that was plastered in bloody runes and held a truly inauspicious aura of death qi. At its heart was a third spellbook that focused on something called ‘Form-shaping’. This largely seemed to involve forcing mutations on unfortunate victims through various evil means. The complex also held several books on summoning various Demonic Beasts and Qi Beasts as they would call them. The methods were all complex and involved a lot of suffering and bloodshed to bend the victims to the will of the shaper or the summoner from what she could see.

This place also solved the ‘question’ such as it was, of the larger male spiders. These turned out to be a special form of bound creature. The spiders themselves could be naturally created by forcing mutations in male spiders, or summoned directly in a permanent conjuration that seemed to require a vast number of spider bits and cores to create. Once summoned, there was another ritual that would bind them to a particular person if required, allowing them to get even stronger and grow with whoever had bound them. The person binding them had to sustain them with a portion of their own qi and vital force, but in return would get access to various powers associated with the summoned creature.

The other surprising find was a small cache of metal weapons deep in one of the halls off of the lowest level. Of most interest were two swords: a long blade and a short one. Both cut rock almost as easily as the Arborundum leaf, and indeed that seemed to have been their primary function, slicing up qi-repelling rock in the room they found them in. She guessed that made sense in a weird way.

She very carefully tested its durability with the leaf, pressing it against the damaged tip of the worse-looking short sword. Without much suspense, it nicked the metal albeit with a tiny bit of resistance. The longer blade’s hilt was also damaged in the same way. Remarkably, the longer sword also had a scabbard of all things. Overall it was rather similar in style to the one Elaria had wielded, albeit with a broader blade and a slightly more rounded point. Its handle suggested it was designed for being wielded in either hand.

Checking it as carefully as she could, even very cautiously sending some qi into it in the end, she found it hard to say whether she was happy or sad that it was just a plain boring old sword made of some excellent metal.

Some further hunting about in other parts of those halls turned up a bunch of metal spear blades hidden under a bed and several daggers in a pot shoved behind a door, all of which they took before continuing on with something of a spring in their step.

The rest of the areas appeared to be living quarters for what she assumed were ‘important’ Undren, based on the relative opulence of the furnishings and the size of their personal stores. There were almost no dead though, beyond a few Soul Foundation Undren who looked like guards. What they did find eventually was a mined hall that held a circular pit and a small prison that held the caged corpses of several of the large grey-skinned demons in cages. She cut one cage open and looked for its core, but it didn’t have one as far as she could see, so she had no idea what realm it was beyond ‘too strong for her qi to injure but anything else we have cuts it’. Elsewhere in the prison were several cages full of small grey-green humanoid demons maybe 4 feet tall and with very pointy teeth and ears.

Further along from that, they found a much more expansive selection of cages in a wide, low ceilinged hall that she could only describe as a crude slave market. They left that area quietly. It was hard not to feel a bit bad for the unwilling captives, irrespective of how unpleasant or hostile they might have been in life. Dying like that might have been a mercy, but still… it left a bad feeling with her to have witnessed such a nasty place and Sana had a rather sad look in her eyes as they made their way back to the upper layers.

Back in the comparatively open upper levels, they both settled down to focus on refining the rather ridiculous quantities they had absorbed. The process was helped by the increasing density of qi spiralling down from the arrays in the ceiling. As the next few days passed, she found a long-running hunch she had had about the cores largely born out as she watched what went on in her dantian. Simply put - their qi was too pure for the cores they were absorbing not to mention they were also heavily biased towards only two of the five elements.

They needed Myriad Elements Qi to make the best out of anything they refined, and the more impure the qi, the more it required to balance out what was missing and refine it successfully. That was why she had only been seeing maybe four or five percent of the qi be refined. The rest was simply too impure or mixed to have any real meaning to her foundation in the short term, and so instead became part of the overall system of her dantian where it was slowly broken down over time and re-constituted into something more useful.

Throughout that time, she spent most of her effort on her Intent in any case, focusing on it for hundreds of cycles, grinding it into herself with ever-increasing ferocity and using the Sundering aspect itself to push it even further into her body, all the while controlling it as best she could to avoid incurring actual injuries

The change, once it did occur, was sudden and abrupt, just like in Sana. Between one cycle and the next it just… shifted. At the same time there was a *shufft* sensation all around her as her body emitted a shockwave of Severing Intent into the area around her which swirled and then settled over her almost like a cloak.

At the same time, everything within her Qi Lake that wasn’t her Golden Core… homogenized. That was the only way to describe it really. The Sundering Intent rippled outwards from her core, sundering mist, condensed qi, crystals, and remnants of cores into a glittering cloud of twisting chaos for a heartbeat. Her Golden Core spun again and everything re-stratified, drawing the cloak of intent back through her meridians and into her core where it settled.

Inside her core, she saw a 14th shimmering thread coalesce, this time silver with a faint black sheen to it. When it touched the symbol itself she felt the symbol adjust it ever so slightly in a way that defied her sense, but in the process the intent suddenly became hers.

Comparing before and after, she could see why her sister had struggled to explain. Probably the feeling was unique to every person. Before this point, it was like a tool, something she could pick up and put down at will but which she had to work with and focus on to get anywhere with. Now it was just her; it no longer messed with her emotions or felt like it would cut apart her meridians as she wielded it. It also… bizarrely… no longer sundered or severed in quite the same way.

Before, the Intent had been very direct, terminal… lethal in the sense of sundering, but now it was somehow more… transformative. It broke apart things it came into contact with, sought out weaknesses and stress points, but at the same time exerted a measure of control in reforming them or taking a part of them back into herself.

Almost instinctively, she grasped that anything she injured with her Intent-infused qi would find a bit of its qi sundered away and delivered to her if she desired it. It reflected, in a strange way, her deep-rooted desire to overcome this place, to not have it defeat them. Now, she could subvert a little bit of it with every action she took, turn its failure to grind them down into her own means to move forward. It was a subtle, yet remarkable little epiphany on how ‘Intent’ came to be, wrapped up in a singular instant.

She noted that Sana had retreated quite a long way away when she refocused on her surroundings.

Looking around, she gawped as she realised why. Her shockwave of ‘Sundering Intent’ had ruined everything within 100 metres of her. Buildings were lacerated, Undren that had been scattered were no more than bloody smears, even the tower she was sitting on, while still standing, was… precarious. Even where Sana had been, almost 200 metres away, buildings were somewhat damaged.

She waved an awkward apology and got a very rude gesture back and a belated hand wave.

Shaking her head she stood and leapt off the tower, landing on a roof thirty metres away with a thud as Sana approached.

“Was the shockwave you made also that big?” she asked.

“Yes, actually,” her sister said with a bit of a sniff, she thought. “You just didn’t notice it because I controlled it so it wouldn’t hit you so much.”

“Sorry,” she winced, “I didn’t expect it to go that far. You should have told me.”

“It’s fine. I only got a few scratches,” Sana said, ignoring her subtle dig for not warning her about the range.

Standing there, she cycled her qi a few times to get a feeling for how it had changed. Her Qi Lake rapidly reforming, much smaller than it had been before, but now the liquid qi in it was… varicoloured?

“Is... the uh... qi in your Qi Lake more multi-coloured?” she asked Sana.

“Oh, yeah… it did that for you?” her sister said with a nod. “Much smaller as well, but the density is crazy.”

“Uhuh,” she agreed.

She watched it as it swirled, the attraction of the Golden Core was much more obvious now. The red-gold thread was also a bit smaller and she fancied she occasionally observed tiny fibre like sparks flit off it every few cycles to merge with her core. Taking another deep breath she watched the refinement again and judged that the actual quantity of qi being refined by each cycle had effectively quintupled.

Within a few breaths, her dantian was totally filled with mist once again. The Intent swirled through her dantian like wind, agitating the mist as it was drawn around her Golden Core. The rate with which it was scattering droplets was much improved and her Intent was present within every droplet that fell. It flowed through her meridians and she watched as the Intent was infused as it completed the cycle, returning back to her Qi Lake and flowing into her Golden Core with each cycle. Where before she had had to focus consciously at the most auspicious points to make that integration happen, now it just… happened without her doing anything. Her focusing on it sped the process up, but the overall efficiency barely budged.

“I see what you mean about Intent becoming much more integrated. It’s really miraculous…” she marvelled.

Lifting her new sword, she executed a basic cut and watched the air hiss faintly as she did so. Infusing some qi into it, she was pleased to see it bore it easily. Slashing out towards a building 20 metres away, she watched as her Intent and the qi passed through it like in a slicing wave. Stone slid apart and a third of the building collapsed in on itself.

Curious, she repeated the same trick, but with a firebolt, and watched it melt a decent-sized hole in a building wall where before it would have exploded in a puddle of flames…

Silently, her complaints about her basic movement art resurfaced in her mind. Making a new movement art was a laughable prospect, really… but this… this opened up a possibility she had not been able to consider before. She had tried it, but now she knew why it hadn’t worked: her Intent had not settled in her qi at that point.

She experimentally used her Intent-infused qi to move with Flickering Steps.

The world went weird and she had to stop and breath hard, refocusing on what she was doing.

The basic movement art was designed to enhance her reactions, make her footwork hard to read and if you really pushed it give you a burst of speed that made it look like you were moving with a distracting flicker.

Now her qi was twisting the distance between the steps in a bizarre way that made her faintly nauseous as she tried to parse the world around her in slightly discontinuous moments. Sana watched her for a while, then went off to keep looking for stuff she guessed. It was pretty boring, what she was doing in any case.

In the end, it took her almost two hours of just walking around with Flickering Steps to get used to the sense of the Intent interacting with it: turning, sitting down, standing up, doing rolls, then flips, jumps and so on. It wasn’t quite as if she was having to relearn how to use the art, but it was pretty close. The main thing, though, was that her speed had gone up by almost tenfold for only a marginal loss in qi-efficiency and consumption. She could cover the distance from one end of the hall to the other in ten strides if she really tried. Directionality was a problem, but that would come with experience she was sure. She could, in any case, turn almost on the spot and go in any direction from any given point.

Smiling happily, she made her way back to another building and sat back down. The qi density was still ramping up in any case, and there was no sign of anyone making any effort to get back in here. Given how fast the presumed Dao Seeking rat had fled, nothing else in the vicinity was likely to want to try their chances. With that in mind, she felt, it was downright negligent not to make use of this environment to see how far they could push on before circumstances conspired against them once more.