> To truly survive the rigours of these Great Worlds, a sect, school, power or a clan requires two things. Firstly it requires wealth and all the blessings that brings – be it wealth of connections, wealth of talent, wealth in spirit jade or wealth in Good Fortune. The second though, which is often misunderstood, is that it requires an iron core. A force that can be considered not simply the strength of a sect, but its root, akin to the spiritual root of any cultivator. The purpose of this core, however, is not to lord it over others, or to act as some great threat, but to deliver accumulation that the first, wealth, is unable to. There are things you cannot buy with money, or chance upon by good fortune or truly claim through connections or even the control of the heavens themselves.

>

> This is why we prize those who rise up from lower worlds so highly. They do not bring wealth that our clans do not already have, nor do they bring much strength nor even much good fortune, truth be told. It is not even that they bring an understanding of the torment of the path, of clawing out every gain against an unwilling world and not succumbing – even this can be trained. What they bring is a pure accumulation, a strength properly forged between the anvil of reality and the hammer of mortality, tempered by the fate-shattering tribulations required to rise up from those mortal worlds. An understanding that in the end you cannot step back, cannot hide behind your wealth, or behind the veil of your heavens, that eventually there are no more teachers to call, no more qi to wield. That in the end it is simply you against the world, and it will not give you a second chance.

  ~From the personal writings of Mu Shansu, shortly before he vanished.

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~ ARAI – RUINED HALL ~

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By the time almost a week had passed, Arai found herself wondering if she might not have overdone the design for the array she had put in the ceiling just a touch. Many buildings were already starting to get small crystal agglomerations on them, and roof surfaces and the alleys were manifesting swathes of light frosting. She reckoned her core qi had risen to close to 600 units now as well, still with no bottleneck in sight. Her dantian had stabilised back into something approximating what it had been before as well. The rate at which her Intent merged with her qi in the refinement process remained broadly stable. However, her core’s absorption cycle was slowly increasing its strength cycle on cycle, and the passive radius of her Intent was slowly expanding around her at a similar rate.

She could see a similar effect occurring around her sister, for whom it was much more visible. Now the space for 20 metres around her rippled faintly like fish taking insects in a still pool. It was a truly weird optical illusion as well, where the ripples were neither vertically nor horizontally aligned. Her own ‘field’ of manifest Intent was a bit smaller in size and very different. To her it was fairly obvious, like a faint occlusion through the area around her; however, according to Sana, all she could make out was a faint shimmer about 15 metres around her when she focused on it, projecting it outward.

In both their cases, these Intents were much more diffuse than they had previously been. She had experimented a bit on the corpses that were scattered around and determined that if she just stood there letting it do its ‘thing’ it would flay mortal or Qi Condensation rats and minions while giving shallow flesh wounds to Qi Refinement Undren. Corpses higher than that she had to really focus upon to effect any change. Her intuition was that it would be somewhat less effective against living equivalents. This also doubled as a sort of passive drain on qi of lower realmed things, which was very helpful. ‘Sundering’ and ‘Severing’ within the Intent slowly orphaned and claimed a tiny bit of qi from everything they cut. On any single thing it was miniscule, but when you spread it out across everything within a fifteen metre radius… it was almost like she had a Qi Refinement shadow that was refining away tirelessly.

If she pulled it in close to her body, it became a pseudo-armour of sorts, especially when merged with her qi. They had both tested out their new qi defences using spears from the store houses during some breaks from refinement. Setting aside the fact that she had to throw her spears with Intent to even hit her sister at this point, the most basic bone spears were chewed up and dispersed upon almost before they made contact with either of them. Male spider legs could pierce it if combined with qi, as could some of the more formidable bones, but even then the wounds healed almost instantly.

It was at the end of the first week when she felt a faint rumble that shook the entire hall faintly.

“What was that…?” her sister asked, surfacing from her own meditation.

Looking around, she wondered that herself. It had passed almost as quickly as it arrived.

-That seemed to have come from behind them…? She thought, turning and looking back at that still sealed door.

“You don’t think they flooded that corridor, do you?” Sana said after a further long moment.

“…”

Flitting over to the door, she frowned, because it was impossible for her to push Intent through it, clad in the qi-repelling rock as it was. After a few moment’s further consideration she jumped up the wall and carved her way through into the spot where they had first observed the hall and scrambled down that hall. The qi density in the wall here was much as it was in the hall, but arriving at the end where their ‘emergency’ exit was, she could feel the faint hit of Yang Water qi through the thin layer of rock where before there had been none.

Returning to the hall, she found her sister standing by the other door with a frown on her face.

“They flooded the tunnel,” she supplied. “Or at least the part of it before the ante-hall before this one.

“This one is also flooded I think,” her sister said with a frown.

“What purpose does that serve?” she wondered out loud.

“Containing this place so that the poisonously pure qi doesn’t spread?” she guessed.

However, this also raised something of an awkward problem for their onward advancement, which based on her sister’s expression she was also thinking. Well, two things actually. The first was that it would be a huge pain to have to travel through completely flooded tunnels. And second, if they flooded those tunnels… were they still linked to the canals?

“If the canals are now flooded and joined up to the tunnels…” she said, not bothering to conceal the suggestive worry in her tone.

“Yeah…” her sister nodded, looking just as worried.

Neither of them had to say more really. She could easily recall that sense of intense ‘watching’ from the waters of the canals when they had gone to look at them. There had been no way to gauge its strength, but the symbol had reacted by making itself less obvious, which as close a ‘nope, don’t go there’ warning as it was possible to get without it… The symbol symbolled quietly, suggesting that she really ‘didn’t’ want to meet the things that made the water their home.

“What do we do now?” she mused.

“Well, we can burrow into the wall if they do flood this place,” her sister suggested.

That suggestion provoked several hours of rapid amendment of the small tunnel system by both of them. In the end they concluded that their current location was still, effectively the safest spot to remain for now. There would almost certainly be some advance warning of the tunnels opening on either side in any case which would allow them to flee to safety and seal up the path behind them. At that point, at the very worst they were just resigned to cutting a path to the tunnel on the other side of the canal and hoping it wasn’t flooded or just mining a route parallel to a tunnel until they found somewhere that was no longer flooded. She very much doubted that the Undren were willing to submerge tens of miles of tunnels just to cause problems for them.

After that moment of brief excitement, things settled down to be rather mundane, which made for a nice change. The devouring strength that her Golden Core exerted on the qi in her surroundings kept incrementally increasing cycle on cycle, day on day while the lake and the core itself slowly began drawing together. This finally reached a threshold that happened to coincide with her passing, roughly, 800 core units. At that point, almost two weeks after the tunnels had been flooded, the two finally collected and a radical change took place. Her Qi Lake slowly started to shift around the core, the thread still orbited it, as did the rings of shattered cores and crystals, but now they were integrated into the ocean, stirring up the shimmering surface, causing rolling vortexes to form and waves to start rippling in every direction. The mists rolled overhead, which were now being drawn downwards towards the core as much as they were somehow being repelled by the Qi Lake itself, which rapidly started to rotate, forming something remarkably like a vast tropical storm with her Golden Core at its Eye.

Once these changes stabilised, the devouring strength her core exerted on her surroundings rose so rapidly that she thought she was about to have a qi deviation. She was also pleased to observe that the speed of a single Intent integration cycle around her body was back to that of her heartbeat’s pulse.

Within 100 cycles she had increased her capacity by another ten units just from absorbing qi from her surroundings which was shockingly fast. The radius of her qi refinement’s attraction also jumped to about 20 metres. She could, she found with some experimentation, push it out to almost one hundred, but there was surprisingly little benefit to doing so. Thinking about it, she guessed that the rate of her absorption was being limited by her core or her body rather than the qi in the area at this point. To test the efficiency of the greater range would likely require a normal location. Somewhere where the density still wasn’t rising despite both of them refining it flat out.

“How long do we continue this?” she called over to her sister, who was now sat almost a hundred metres away.

“For as long as we can!” she yelled back, her voice somehow projecting across the distance as if they were standing next to each other.

Stopping her cycle, she skipped over to where her sister was sat so they could talk without her feeling like they were yelling from opposing buildings metaphorically as well as literally.

“It’s been almost two weeks and they have just… ignored us after flooding the tunnels?” she said, not bothering to disguise how much that had been bothering her. “That Dao Seeking one did escape after all... and they certainly ate a bit of a resource loss here.”

“Not that there is likely to be anywhere safer than here…” she conceded even as her sister opened her mouth and then shut it again.

“I’m pretty sure it’s our Physiques that are allowing us to survive in this place at this point,” her sister said after a moment.

She nodded in agreement at that as her sister continued speaking. “That rat ran like he had just seen his mother in law and his wife talking together when we dropped the ceiling.”

She nodded again, looking up at it. There were quite a few crystal growths on the arrays that they had carved into the ceilings of the rooms at this point. The arrays themselves were probably indestructible except with the leaf, sealed behind frostings of whatever the crystallisations were. The bits she had put in her own dantian didn’t appear to be simple spirit stones; if anything, rather than being broken down, they were being refined in their purity. Curious, she tried to draw one out, wondering why she hadn’t thought to do that before only to be met with a subtle sense of resistance. The feeling was akin to trying to pull herself up off the ground by holding her own feet and after a moment she stopped.

“True, true,” she remarked. “The only things we have seen so far down here that credibly out-ranked that Undren were the Spider Queens, the Unchained and probably that Lizard.”

“And the spear…” her sister reminded her.

“Yes, but the spear wasn’t hostile,” she pointed out with a chuckle.

“…”

Her sister shook her head and added: “The spear suggested that the Undren had… kin? That were at higher realms. I’m not clear what realm tenth circle actually equates to here, but a ten-star grade monster could be considered akin to a weak Golden Immortal…”

She gave her sister a ‘look’ which she assiduously pretended to not noticed. Never mind if a Golden Immortal came, if an Immortal came, they would not understand how they died before exiting this life… if they were lucky.

“How joyful…” was all she managed to say in the end.

In the end, they were able to cultivate undisturbed for an entire month after the flooding before the first real evidence of investigation occurred. Both of them stopped what they were doing and watched as the qi around the door leading to the other halls rippled faintly as a formidable qi sense tried to penetrate the chamber. It pushed out several times in random directions, not getting very far but clearly looking for something, presumably seeking the ‘source’ of the pure qi.

Without comment both of them immediately moved to the tunnels and rapidly made their way up to the edge of the chamber overlooking the whole hall, ready to flee and seal off the passage behind them.

However, contrary to expectation, nothing else really happened. The qi sense probed a few more times, the door actually rippled once, but never budged. Thereafter everything went silent again.

“They can't get in?” her sister hazarded as they sat on the edge of the hole looking at the far door.

“Or the qi is so dense that their qi senses can’t penetrated it,” she guessed.

She closed her eyes and pushed out her own qi perception, which she had really stopped using in here and winced before letting it fall away again. Her Intent could pierce the Myriad Elements Qi mist a little, but her own qi might as well have been cast into a fog never to be seen again. After some further consideration, they continued refining in the end; however, she found herself retaining a much greater degree of awareness of the doors than before, just in case.

During that time, her Lake of refined qi and Intent-infused qi was still expanding without any signs of slowing or reaching a further bottleneck. Most of the qi within the cores she had absorbed had been released now, which had led to several remarkably rapid jumps in her Core capacity. Her initial speculation regarding this was that it might be around ten times what she had when she started, which was 200 units or thereabouts. That would put her at just over 2000 core units and her sister a bit higher.

She had wondered for a while why the mists outside were not drawing the mist out of her body, like the waters in the first room they had made had, whereas the mists here, while condensing droplets of qi, were not really pooling them anywhere that she could see. If anything they just destabilised when they hit the ground and vanished back into mist.

Regardless of her speculations though, the qi reserves she had were utterly preposterous for someone at the Golden Core Realm, of that she was sure. Reviewing it, their progress was eye-wateringly fast, even when you considered the intense and unrelenting pressure they had been under. As far as she could measure, they had been in this place, in various locations, for just under a year at this point.

A year to go from nothing to the peak of Core Formation was…. well, it wasn’t unheard of. Ling Yu had taken two years to go from Qi Condensation to Core Formation, forming a Grade One Core. Yu’s younger brother, who was a total ass, had managed it in less than that thanks to a previous family treasure. Ling Yu, however, was the scion of an important branch of an ancient family with deep pockets and even deeper roots to the Azure Astral Authority. If someone as talented as that was afforded this kind of circumstance, what terrifying height might they achieve? It was a sobering thought in many ways, and one that drove her to keep pushing forward almost as much as the desire not to be ruined by this place.

She was shaken from those musings by another formidable ripple of qi sense pushing into the hall…

-No, not one… several! She was surprised that her Intent allowed her to intuit that.

They still barely made it a third of the way across the room. The density of qi in the hall was such that she was certain that opening up the door would cause a rather spectacular decompression shockwave. Probably they knew that as well though.

The sense tried to push through several times before receding.

“We could just double down on this at this point?” Sana suggested after it had finally stopped.

“What… make another set of formations in the hole at the bottom?” she said, raising an eyebrow.

“Yeah… if you look up above, the way the mist is swirling outwards seemed to be wholly predicated on the gathering formation. Up and down have very little to do with it,” her sister mused. “The density is also plateauing out up there.”

“It is?” she blinked, staring up at the ceiling and not getting any inclination of that.

“I… maybe it’s how my Intent is working with the qi, but I can sort of get a grasp for the way it’s settling if I focus really hard?” her sister said after a longer pause.

“Huh,” she was impressed with that, and still able to see nothing of that, despite believing her sister.

“An interesting difference in the things our Intent is helping us to perceive,” she mused.

“Yeah…” her sister agreed.

“So… you think if we put another lot down the bottom, the two gathering formations will start to interact within the room itself?” she said thinking about how her own qi was swirling in her dantian.

“It’s a reasonable hypothesis, and also they are likely investigating because they also have a way to detect the qi plateauing out. That means they are…”

“That they are confident they can deal with it,” she nodded.

“Exactly,” her sister nodded. “We can handle this much easily as it is. Compared to the pressure of the first one we made, this is nothing.”

“There is the issue of providing anyone else coming in here with nigh unlimited qi,” she pointed out. “Although they have that anyway… probably.”

They both trailed off in silence again. It was possible to argue against that, but she had to admit to herself that their best defence against anything over Peak Nascent Soul was killing it with the initial shockwave, or ensuring it was so crippled by the purity of the qi that they could surprise it and finish it with the dagger and the sword. If it was above Dao Seeking… the density here would hopefully buy them precious time to put down some arrays and run for the walls.

The qi density in the space was several times greater than it had been at the start, although the purity was largely unchanged. She was pretty sure that was down to their comprehensions and their own qi that went into the array to seed it.

-That’s actually another reason to do this, she thought to herself as they both jumped into the quarried-out depths in the centre of the hall. Our grasp of Intent and our qi reserves are such that we can make that array up there in a fraction of the time.

Much as she had expected, it only took them an hour and a half to make what had taken three days before. They selected one of the biggest hollowed out chambers deep in the bottom, a place that had likely been some kind of throne room based on the large dais and trophies on the walls. Several more ripples of qi sense fluctuated around that entrance above. This time it held almost fifty different signatures and managed to encompass much of the roof of the hall, including where the arrays were. It brushed over them, but the symbol did nothing at all, leading her to suspect that their own presences were functionally indistinguishable from the qi mists if you relied on qi sense alone.

A few moments later there was a dull rumble and a distant sound of grinding stone from the tunnel they had originally entered. It was accompanied by a powerful ripple of qi sense that pushed into the room from that exit, followed a moment later by one from the last exit that led on eastwards.

“Well that confirms that staying put was the best choice,” her sister grimaced from where they stood, halfway up the side of the quarry, observing the three senses sweep across the top half of the hall.

She nodded in silence, running into either of those other two…

An immense qi sense swept out of the sealed hall to the other parts of the settlement. It took in much of the hall with a bit of effort, diffusing in the deepest clouds, but covering as much as all the others combined. Her Intent somehow showed her its passage through the ambient qi as it narrowed down on the general location of the arrays in the ceiling then receded.

“Right… that’s not a Dao Seeking rat,” her sister said quietly.

She nodded in silent agreement. There had been something unknowable in that sense, a familiar absence she knew from seeing Immortals in West Flower Picking Town and Blue Water City. Principle.

Even as this was going on, they could feel the density of the qi stepping up another level. The symbol shifted in her mind and her core as the qi sense swirled around again. Henceforth it continued to interact in a very subtle fashion with the qi entering her body, disguising her slightly. After a few heartbeats she could only sense her sister through the symbol and by looking at her; it was as if she had just become one with the mists themselves.

“Well, that’s neat of it,” Sana said wryly.

“Huh, yeah…” she agreed.

“Well, that’s… odd” her sister added after a moment, pointing to something in a container by a nearby building.

Looking at it, she realised it was a shallow puddle of Myriad Elements Dew. Looking around she saw that there were now other little patches forming, rapidly in fact.

“So it was because of the density?” she said staring up at the varicoloured mists which were now… starting to rain droplets here and there.

“It seems that way,” her sister said drily.

Within ten minutes there were some quite substantial puddles forming in the cracks and lowest points of the hall. Looking at it, it didn’t give her quite the same ominous feeling that the liquid had before, but it wasn’t exactly inviting her to try sticking her hand in it either.

There was a grinding groan of shifting rock and the tunnel entrance in the direction they would have been heading towards opened maybe a metre and water started to flood in. With a ripple the qi mists twisted and expanded, meeting the Yang Water Qi that was flooding in.

Their plan was… solid she guessed, in that they were planning to use the water to blunt the shockwave… but…

“…”

The shockwave passed and was ‘dissipated’ through the water. With a rumble the gate dropped and the flow of water stopped. What was in the hall dispersed rapidly into the mists with flickers and cracks that were somewhat ominous?

“Uh… This might be…” Sana said nervously watching the mists interact with the Yang Water.

She nodded. The pressure had abated, but whatever was going on in those mists was... disturbing. After a few moments it subsided and the Yang Water Qi within the waters had been subsumed into the cycle within the hall.

Nothing happened for a few moments. Then, with another rumble, the door in the direction they came from opened fully. Water cascaded into the hall in a rolling wave from the hall beyond. The flood swept away buildings and rolled around the wings of the quarried-out section, pouring down past them, propelled by the momentum of the water behind it and no longer restrained by differential pressure on either side of the doorways. With another rumble the door to the other hall opened and she saw… a Spider Queen and thousands of Undren massed in the hall beyond it holding banners, chanting and drumming. Qi mist sizzled off the barriers as the creature and the familiar grey rat stood on the head of the spider, while on a throne now mounted behind it squatted a gnarled, white-furred rat wearing a robe of what appeared to be flayed hides and wearing a crown of spider fangs. It was this Undren, her intuition told her, which was ensuring that the others were not poisoned.

That, however, was not really where her attention was focused, because the water flooding in from that side was much less constrained than the initial effort and was swirling into the quarry they were standing in, flooding down past them-

The explosion picked her up and threw them both across the rooftop into the wall before they were aware of what-

More explosions, like firecrackers sizzled through the pit as the water swept through the puddles of Myriad Elements Dew and started to fill up the quarry from the deepest point in a matter of moments. Struggling up, she saw the mists rolling disturbingly across the surface of the icy, Yang Water Qi rich waters, which were now flooded above the level of their arrays below and starting to roil very disturbingly-

“Oh… no…” Sana said weakly, staring at the twisting waters and then at her with round eyes.

She had reached the same conclusion at much the same time anyway. It was something she should have expected, she realised. Her naiveté with formations, or perhaps inexperience, had caused her to overlook it: Myriad Elements Qi held attributes of all types of elemental qi, both yin and yang, so cold Yang Water immediately drew a fundamental reaction from Yin Earth and Yang Metal. The Myriad Elements Dew that had just been drowned all exploded simultaneously, casting up a vast sheet of water in the face of what was still rushing in from that other fully flooded hall.

It made her bleed a bit from her ears and nose and made her teeth ache, but that was about it.

It also meant that she was able to see what happened next, which she was certain would haunt her nightmares for a long time to come. The mist of Yang Water Qi met those mists and the scattered dew drops in a series of eye searing *cracks*. Black lines seemed to outline the swirling, cast-up waters, the mists and the hall itself, even as the waters that were still falling down began to roil themselves further, fuelling the reaction…

The spider was backing out of the room, the rat on its throne screaming something as a second round of Yang Lightning sizzled through the water, followed by Yin Water… then Yang Wood from the mists, Yin Fire… Yang Earth, all from the general environment. The cycle flowed backwards and she felt rather than saw the shifting of the world all around them. She felt rather disoriented then heard the shifting distortions in the earth as the tunnel they had come down bent and twisted bizarrely as the waters expanded, roiling and spitting as they did so.

There was a horrible pause and-

…

She recovered consciousness some time later, floating in… water. Water which was bitterly cold and making her skin itch slightly. She tried to stand, realised the water was deeper than she had expected and flailed for a moment before managing to gain some stability. The water came up to below her breasts. Much of her armour had fallen off, leaving her mostly naked again beyond the Luss Cloth, fish skin and a few other bits of sinew holding on this and that.

Her scrip helpfully told her that almost two and a half hours had passed since she last checked, which meant that it was a bit over two hours she had been out for.

Looking around, they were at one side of the hall, on the upper level. Sana was floating face down nearby, looking like she had been hit by a large hammer but still otherwise very much alive. Her own body, was she realised, in revolt now that her perception was catching up with the reality of events. She still had her qi, and her foundation was okay, but the traces of damage to her body suggested she had suffered a massive blunt force trauma injury. Wiping a hand across her face, she was bleeding red blood with a multi-coloured hue from her nose… and most of her orifices in fact. The blood dripping into the water and leaving strange little flower-like ripples as it interacted with the water in strange ways.

The doors themselves were shut, but fissures snaked across the walls and ceiling. The most pronounced were…

-Oh, our tunnels! She realised, putting two and two together at last.

With a gasp, her sister regained consciousness near her and flailed just as she had for a moment before standing up.

The water dissolved the muck and grime covering her, leaving her skin as clean as it had been in a good while.

-Not a beauty regime to be recommended, she thought wryly, scooping up a handful of the water which was faintly multi-hued and familiar.

“What the fates…” her sister groaned holding her head. “Are… we… what exactly?”

She put her thoughts in order for a moment before replying. “I believe that dumping a vast amount of icy cold yang-rich water onto the Myriad Elements Dew destabilised it enough to start a chain reaction. That, courtesy of our escape tunnels, linked to the water that was flooding into the room and then presumably through that to the main reserve of water still in the tunnels in both directions.”

“Uh…” her sister said, looking at her with a slightly groggy expression still.

“Big Reaction. Much Boom. All the Deaths!” she supplied helpfully while waving her arms around.

“Uh, I get that, but how are we still alive?” Her sister said weakly. “And… is this Myriad Elements Water?”

“At a guess we were basically at ground zero, so the… whatever happened rolled outwards, using up water as it went?” she speculated, unsure of the exact details herself.

"Probably it’s also because we have been bathing in the stuff for fun,” her sister pointed out.

“Yeah…” she agreed, wishing it didn’t itch quite so much. “Who knew being exploded so much had such benefits.”

Looking around, the entire quarry was flooded with water... From what she could see, the room was still mostly sealed. The gates had dropped, but the fissures were now stopping the build-up of mist density that was so useful to their rapid progress. A single cycle was enough to confirm that, the density of qi was a magnitude lower than it had been.

Frowning, she crouched down, submerging herself completely. The water was icy, but that was about it. The itchy sensation she was feeling was just her being unused to cold she realised wryly. Completing a qi cycle, she stood and walked over to the edge of the building and slipped into the deeper water, letting herself sink slowly. The world around her turned very strange colours as she descended into the water, like she was looking through foggy colour glass, everything she looked at blurring and shifting bizarrely for moments at a time and settling only if she really looked at it.

Eventually she came to a stop, standing on the first layer of the quarry. Myriad Elements Qi was no longer raining down from above, but it was slowly condensing on the rock surface as precipitation on the frosting and crystals that had been slowly emerging over the last few weeks. Walking through the water, which was surprisingly dense, she dropped down to the next layer, finally stopping a pace above the floor. Here the water below her was so dense that she could, with her Intent, actually walk on the layer that was forming within the water, her feet disturbing it like it was silt. Below her, little serpents of Myriad Elements Qi were coalescing and drifting, leaving roiling distortions that were slowly propagating more and more.

Here, she tried to absorb qi again. The pressure of the water around her, enhanced by the qi, restricted the radius of her refinement to a few metres, but the effects were well outside her expectations. The first few cycles just drew qi out of the water around her, which was already ferociously pure and dense, well above what she had experienced above before the seal on the room was ruptured. Soon however, small drops of Myriad Elements Dew that were condensing nearby were also drawn in. She watched the first one she refined with trepidation as it flowed into her body, swirling through her meridian gates. Her meridians groaned as pure liquid qi flowed through them, swirling into her dantian and then back into her inner meridians where it merged with her Intent. After a cycle she kicked back up the surface. It was hard work, even with her Intent.

“Ah, you survived,” her sister remarked drolly as she broke the surface with a gasp.

“You should go down-”

She was cut off by a grinding sound as a paralysing spiritual sense far beyond anything they had yet experienced anywhere in this place swept across the room as the door to the other half of the Undren settlement opened. They both dived into the water and swam down as fast as they could. Heading for the hall where they carved the formation as her symbol shifted subtly, hiding her from the searching eyes of whatever it was that was coming.

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~ HARKUS, GREAT ELDER OF SWARMBLOOD - WONDERING WHAT IS THE REALITY HERE! ~

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“Great Elder?” A sixth circle servant shivered and carefully walked through the void after him.

Harkus stared down at the lake that was now the taking up a large swathe of the enlarged hall, frowning. He ignored the question of the servant and considered the pool carefully.

-Most curious, he mused to himself. Certainly I perceived an entity, maybe two there for the briefest moment.

He descended down and stood on the mana-infused water surface, getting a feel for its density. It made the fur on his legs smoke faintly and gave him muscle pains even through the shield of his soul-infused mana. The servants following him didn’t dare do such a thing. The waters were bleeding Thaumic overburden to the point where it would probably dissolve their flesh directly. None of them had tempered bodies after all.

“It...seems-s the vein was bigger than expected?” One of the oldest of his servants, an Undren wearing a robe made of sinews and set with hundreds of charms, floated down a bit and spoke to a compatriot.

“That fool Jassuk miscalculated,” another laughed nastily, gesturing to the ruptured doors.

He nodded silently, not getting involved in their discussion. Jassuk, Nest Lord of the Eight Eyes Pit, had gotten here first and cut corners. Although, given the density in here, neither Jassuk nor his disciple, who had an unhealthy obsession with spiders, would have possessed the strength of mind to perceive the details of this place. Their failure had been spectacular as a result.

“Trust a new-brood to not know what happens if you flood a True Mana Vein,” the third servant sniggered.

“What are the casualties?” he demanded, cutting through their discussion.

“Too many to count, Great Elder,” the first servant replied, bowing apologetically.

A hulking armoured Undren with no corruptions, not one of his personal command, bowed and spoke up. “This subordinate understands most of the settlements within 40 k’ilom of tunnels are dead or dying. Either from the pressure wave or from the residual mana poisoning.”

He nodded, waving a hand for them to retreat, which they did with barely hidden sighs of relief. That was within expectation. The chain reaction had torn through the canals causing untold carnage, bypassing gates and shattering locks that were just slabs of stone blocking water flow for 20 k’ilom in every direction. It had even made it to the sea floor a hundred metres above. Nothing below the sixth circle would have survived the residual fallout and Jassuk and his disciple were both dead from the shockwave in the previous hall, their souls dispersed directly.

“Hmmmmm”

He walked in a circle on the water, looking into the depths. Something was certainly there, he had not imagined that, he was certain. Setting that aside, he looked back to the ceiling, wreathed in flowing currents of condensing Etheric and Thaumic mana. Their harmonious interactions were impressive. That was where Zrech, who had been very lucky to survive his brush with it, despite not being in the sixth circle, had reported the original vein had collapsed.

Frowning, he levitated towards the ceiling, pushing the mana mists away with a sharp gesture to reveal the vein above. Beneath the crystal growth the array circles were clearly visible, shimmering ominously.

“Ahh…” he sighed softly under his breath, looking at the familiar symbols. “Bel Oracle Script!”

He spoke the words out loud in his surprise, fortunately none of his subordinates were near, nor had they seen the array itself. That was their good fortune, it would have been a shame to have to kill them. They were all competent and knew their place.

Trying to organize his somewhat jarred thoughts, he looked at the different symbols. Now that he looked closely, there were at least three scripts represented… Red Sand, Bel Oracle and a third that he didn’t recognise, along with some simpler symbols in the subsidiary arrays. Both those scrips and possibly the third one were a thing of the old eras, from the Echelon of the Tyrant, a time before the Undren, but not unknown to them since their birth through the great endeavours of the Ancestors. A time when the Supreme Fathers and the Great Mothers first declared their Reasons to Be.

He was pondering this point when a faint flicker of a familiar aspect caught his eye. With a trembling hand he reached up and broke off one of the smaller crystals from a subsidiary array and inspected it minutely. It made his blood chill and his hair prickle. The aspect within held the echoes of the Mana of the ‘Shining Tyrant’ and also of the ‘Day Shaper’.

“So you have been unsealed…” he whispered, staring at the ceiling with a shudder.

That would require some careful adjustment of future plans; he had no illusions as to its temperament, unlike some of his less judicious peers. The world was still whole, so the other seal, the chains put on it by greedy fools from above, still held, but he knew the truth where those foolish manlings had believed the lies their lords had told them. He had delved in the deep dark of the Gate into Abzu. The place which the greedy and vain manlings and the vile, bloodthirsty elves had taken to calling Undren Mare.

He stared at it for a moment longer before realising why it still made him uneasy: there was another. He put that crystal back and stepped towards the centre, where the centre was carved in the ceiling. There he plucked a crystal with a dark purple hue to its white shadows, a presence touching its mana that was far more concerning, that made his skin crawl and his soul palpitate. It was known to all who lived in the darkness down here, where the manlings had buried their stolen gifts in a bygone era, trying to rid themselves of a dark curse brought about by their own greed. Edge of Extinction. Which it was he could not say, nor did he want to try to divine it. Certainly it was one of the upper echelon, and all six of those dread things were fearful beyond comprehension.

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Scrupulously he took his claw away from that one and looked for the other that had links to this fallen place, thankfully finding no sign of it. The Path-Sealing Bell was every bit as terrible as the other two.

It was not a natural mana vein. That much was abundantly clear. He had had that suspicion when first hearing the recounting of the injured Zrech. Not a natural collapse either, now he could see vestiges of another array echoing in the remnants of the ceiling where it had not fallen. Most perplexing and concerning though, was the central core. That was an archetype he knew of, by reputation anyway. ‘Boundless Transmutation’. A thing dead to this era, or as good as. A fundamental force carved up and corrupted by greedy manlings to fuel their era-spanning conquests. They had stolen its power to try to alleviate their cage and prove their betraying ancestors wrong, but all they had done was deepen their curse. A fitting punishment for the greatest enemy of all, the thieves who had taken everything from them, he thought with a grim relish.

The application itself drew out the mana of the world and condensed it into a broadly balanced if rather exotic compound mana derived from the extremes of Thaumic and Etheric manas. The purity made it dangerous for any below the sixth circle. Were it not for the weak and flawed comprehensions that seeded it, this vein would have been many times more potent, to the point where they would have had to abandon these tunnels in all likelihood. As it was, he considered, this could be useful, especially to him. It would help Swarmblood in tempering better captured beasts and could, with care, even be used to mutate some chosen lieutenants.

He sighed and looked down at the water again, unable to shift the feeling of being watched. He swept his perception down in to the depths, expending soul strength to resist the poisonous and corrosive purity of the mana within it. There was nothing, and the depths were starting to condense higher states of mana like the ones up here, just in semi-solid form. More akin to liquid metal than crystal.

The density was still rising as well. With a frown he focused on the cracks into the tunnels and drew upon some of the mana within the room to seal them. That would at least stop the poisonous influence of this place spreading further than it already had. The doors were ruined, but other points of access could be carved. The issue was, he thought sourly, that a trove like this would never remain just his to gnaw. The other old souls in Swarmblood would also want their share.

It would eventually reach stability he guessed. Without the water so idiotically introduced by that deceased fool Jassuk in his haste to lay claim to this place, it might have become a very useful mine for the crystals and for forcing mutations in beasts. With the water, it was a terrifying death-trap for anyone not of the Seventh Circle with strength acknowledged by the Ancestors.

And something had made it recently.

It was unlikely to be something that crawled out of the depths at least. The means were too… sideways. Even with the chains the seal on this place had put on so many, himself included, he thought sourly, they would not need to resort to something this crude.

Returning to the exit, he eyed his servants and waved for them to follow.

“I will return to Swarmblood for now. Organize a watch on this place; there is something here that is not right.”

The servants all bowed, casting nervous looks at the water when they thought he wasn’t looking and followed him out of the hall.

Finally one spoke after they had exited the hall... “Shall we have suitable people start to quarry some of the crystals, Great Elder?”

“No, not for now,” he shook his head. It was better to let them just mature at this point. With the hall’s exits sealed, using them as they were was a waste.

“As you command, Great Elder!” they all acknowledged, with sighs of relief he was amused to note.

“What would be useful, would be to salvage the corpses of that moron Jassuk and his disciple… and any of his better minions. They can pay for their crimes by being useful to Swarmblood in death.”

“Yes, Great Elder!”

“Oh, and seal off the conflux towards the depths in the other two tunnels and see that what remains is securely drained. It would be unfortunate for there to be a second explosion like that last one, and it will be vexatious if something like an Elder Slime crawls out and takes up residence in there,” he commanded with a wave of his hand as they entered into the ruins of the other hall.

“As you command! Great Elder,” the servants all bowed again and hurried off.

-Assuming that hadn’t already happened, he didn’t add.

All around him, the recovery was in progress. Massive mana-suppressing totems had been built and the dead were being salvaged, suitable mana cores saved for the worthy and the rest being sorted for various uses like beast rearing or summoning. Looking around, he waved a hand and called for his seer.

The black-furred rat appeared with remarkable alacrity from behind him and slightly to the left. It was a remarkable talent to have, he thought drily. It was one of the reasons why he humoured her, who despite being circles below him was almost twice his age and had still managed to avoid any mutations.

“Yes-ss, Magnificent One,” she hissed.

“If the watchers I set actually see anything leaving the pool, make note of it,” he said without looking at her as they walked on.

“Do not under any circumstances engage it for now. If it just leaves after a while, let it.”

“An Auspicious-ss Path… Oh Wise and Erudite Elder,” the seeress agreed.

“…”

“I am not a fraud,” she sniffed, dropping the affected hiss. “The dream sees clearly that the era is changing.”

“…”

He eyed her but said nothing. She was right in any case. Her prophecies were sometimes a bit dubious, but he had never known one to be wrong when considered objectively.

“You believe that this… these events are part of this change?”

“It is hard to say. Chaos has arrived, that much I can tell you, but from where, or by whose hand, I cannot discern, nor will I, no matter how you ask it.”

“Ohh?” he glanced at her.

“It is better that the chaos moving through here becomes someone else’s problem,” she said simply.

“On that we can agree,” he nodded.

His millennia old instinct as a cunning manipulator suggested that this was because the perpetrators had been boxed off and wanted to get some payback on that idiot of a spider lord. That they had chosen –this– method to do so was… a bit perplexing, but as a denial strategy it was certainly effective he had to admit, also insane, dangerous and more besides, but if it gifted him a spirit vein of this calibre, even if only temporarily, there was a lot he could ignore.

As it was, they were going to have turmoil enough to follow this. A huge swathe of territory had just been scrubbed of all living things and turned into a vast mana crystal mine. The core behind him was a juicy, but poisoned chalice in many respects. It would be far better to secure this area and set up a new force here. Zrech Mourncleaver was probably due a small advancement for the service rendered here.

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

~ SANA - RUINED, FLOODED HALL ~

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

They sat in silence in the icy depths for several hours after the terrifying old rat departed. The attempt it had made to probe the depths had, Sana felt, been easily comparable to the strength of the Spider Queen from the depths. It had also walked on the water’s surface and flown in the air. All the ones that accompanied had void-walked as well. An Immortal old rat with Dao Seeking allies. Even now, several of those were sat at various points near the exit, their Qi Senses permeating the room in shifting scans.

“Well, this is a bit of a nuisance,” she said eventually, grabbing her sister’s hand to talk through the link.

“Your talent for understatement is undiminished,” her sister chuckled.

“Clearly the heavens heard us when we claimed we didn’t want to become miners and have decided to mock us,” she added with a theatrical sigh.

“On the other hand, we cannot stay here forever,” her sister mused.

“Indeed,” she agreed, eyeing the floor of this room below them. Even here a faint patina of the semi-solid Myriad Elements Qi was staring to form.

“How close do you reckon we are to breakthrough?” her sister asked pensively.

“No idea. I’m not suffering any slowdown in the amount I am absorbing,” she answered. “We could try destroying the arrays we put down here?”

“Possibly,” her sister mused, “However, the amount of qi in it now might cause a backlash; the basic ones imploded if you did improper things to them, remember…”

She did remember. Keenly in fact.

“I wonder if we can limit or constrain it somehow with another array?” she pondered, again looking around the room with the crystals forming within the flowing currents of qi in the water and the rolling particles of semi-solid Myriad Elements Qi illuminating everything in gentle varicoloured light. If it wasn’t such a dangerous environment it would be breathtakingly pretty.

“I’ve yet to grasp one that does anything remotely like this, and who knows how long it will take,” her sister sighed.

“Me neither,” she sighed. “It’s likely one of the ones like the State symbol. Those are the worst to work out. I only stumbled over that other use of State that we adapted down here because…”

She trailed off and unslung the pack from her back, pulling out the manual that dealt with the six elemental arts. The skin it was made of was holding up very well in this environment. By comparison, most of their short-lived armour was long gone, the sinews that had held it together having given up as a result of having been corroded beyond repair while they were unconscious in the water. The metal weapons and the leaf were okay though, so there were small mercies in there.

Opening it, she whistled in surprise as a rippling pocket of protective qi bloomed around it. The manual itself was now brimming with qi. She flipped it to the first art and stared, because it was gently glowing in the gloom. Flipping through the rest, all the others were glowing similarly.

Arai mused... “Can we actually use the book to cast the spells directly?”

“…”

“Did we even try to infuse the others with extra qi?” she asked, trying to think back… She was sure they hadn’t.

“Not that I recall, I don’t think it ever occurred…” her sister said with an embarrassed chuckle.

“It’s possible they didn’t have that capacity anyway,” she mused.

Curious, she placed her hand on one and it rippled. A flow of information tried to enter her mind directly for a few seconds before it turned very wobbly and she got a horrible headache, then a nosebleed. Shaking her head, she took a few moments to recover and then focused on it a second time. This time she merely focused on projecting her qi through it. With a flash of qi, the whole room was filled with a shifting wave of miasma that rapidly distorted and dispersed to become just another part of the Myriad Elements Water.

“Well that answers that,” her sister said. “But why did you get a nosebleed?”

“It tried to imprint the art onto me but it got repelled or wouldn’t stick somehow,” she explained, wiping her nose.

“I bet it requires us to actually get to Soul Foundation.” Arai sighed.

“Oh. Sea of Knowledge…” she felt a bit silly for not thinking of that.

“You know, I think we can sort of work this to our advantage,” her sister said, sounding contemplative.

“We can?” she asked, wondering what idea she had lit upon.

“There is the gathering symbol remember? It should be possible to set up two subsidiary arrays that are just dedicated gathering and focus points for us to refine on.” Arai mused, drifting over to the core of the gathering arrays in the room.

“So we refine here, try to advance, or if it becomes too toxic for us to handle, we just carve a hole into the wall and get mining?” she said drily.

“Pretty much, yeah,” her sister said cheerfully.

“…”

“The supreme Dao of gouging holes in rock will yet be ours,” she said drily.

“…”

Her sister sighed and let go of her hand to start making the required additions to the core part of the array.

…

Time slid by strangely for her, as the qi became gradually more voracious all around them. She went through 100 cycles, then 1,000 cycles, then 10,000 cycles… Her Qi Lake was almost a proper Qi Sea at that point with a vast storm of Maelstrom Intent stirring up the dense clouds of Myriad Elements mist that orbited her Golden Core. Finally, at 35,362 cycles there was a fundamental shift in her body.

The Maelstrom Intent-infused qi seemed to reach some critical density as it swirled around her Golden Core and tiny lightning bolts started to flicker off it into the mists, agitating them. The very next cycle, her entire Qi Lake rippled outwards slightly, her Intent flooding her body in a subtly different way to how it had before. This process started to repeat every time she completed a cycle. With each ripple she slowly became more and more aware of something else… The Intent seemed to illuminate it faintly for her: a second shadow she never knew she had, which was now manifesting slowly within her.

With each ripple that swirled out from her dantian through her body, she felt different parts of the shadow slowly settle into her body: into her blood, bones, flesh, even her meridians were reflected within it faintly. Finally the symbol itself, hanging like a moon in her mind’s eye, reconnected in some incrementally more profound way to the one in her dantian. In that instant, she had a strange, otherworldly experience. As if she had developed another sense, that there were two versions of her sat there, her and a shadow of her and then in that instant everything around her shifted outwards slightly.

Waters infused with Myriad Elements Qi raged around her in coruscating, vortical torrent.

She could feel every flow that approached her with crystal clarity, distinguish different elements in the swirling mists, even grasp their concentrations. Within her dantian the symbol and her core somehow found an extra speed to shift up to. The vortex and the rippling within her Qi Lake became a singular, ceaseless cycle that cascaded completely out of her control. The flickering corona on her Golden Core acquired a black strata to overlay the white, purple and gold ones she already possessed. Rapidly they intensified to become a flickering flame within the heart of the vast maelstrom that now was her dantian. Ten coloured lightning bolts extended from the sparks that rose from it, flickering and dancing as the corona slowly took the form of a young girl.

Her Golden Core occupied the place where the dantian would, while the ‘other’ symbol, the one in her Mind’s Eye, settled into the forehead of the mirage-like figure, in the place where her ‘Soul’s Eye’ would reside in the middle of her forehead. A ghostly array circle slowly formed in front, linking her eyes, her third eye, the ‘head’ of the ghostly little soul and the symbol that was slowly forming on its forehead that registered itself as ‘Formless Permutation’.

She wasn’t sure when the process finished, except that she now felt a boundless vigour flowing through her body that exceeded simple vitality. She stared at the version of her that was familiar in her memories as six –year-old her, just starting out on the path of body cultivation. It was strange, like having your reflection wave at you out of the mirror.

That her opened her eyes and suddenly she was…. not in two places at once, but she was suddenly standing in her dantian… like a giant amid a storm. The pagoda quietly sat there, letting qi wash over it, unhindered by the body shaking changes going on around it. She reached out and intuitively drew the maelstrom of water around her, within her. An unending torrent of qi from outside flowed into her meridians which were shifting to accommodate the new flows of qi and the connection between her mind’s eye, the symbol, her core… and her soul.

Almost as shocking in its own way was that the array that was focusing qi towards her was able to sustain everything she was demanding of it right now… and do so for both of them at once. Looking across she could see Arai surrounded by a shifting vortex that looked like it was trying to shatter the very space they were in. Her Intent-infused Qi Aura was still rising as well, just like her own.

She no longer simply had to focus deliberately on drawing in qi from around her: her Nascent Soul was drinking it in like a miniature Kun Peng, forcing it through her meridians and fusing it with her Intent using this new meridian system that had opened up. With every cycle, her body’s meridian system was also slowly gaining a shadow version within her Nascent Soul.

The progress was painfully slow, even at this density and purity of mana, where each cycle was forcing her qi reserve to expand at a rate she could only consider something close to brute forcing the issue. Some quick calculation suggested that at the current rate it would take her close to 60 days straight to have all the meridian channels she held within in her body become reflected in her Nascent Soul.

Everything slowly stabilised and she was just wondering if the process was done, when the elemental qi around her started to flicker with very strange distortions.

The lightning bolt tore down through the firmament, bypassing the world above, passing through some undefined space, splitting the clouds and then tearing space directly to strike at the depths of the watery pool in the ocean. This she somehow saw in a weird, other perspective-

-If I had been able to see the ‘sky’ far above the cavern I would probably have wanted to hide, shadow her introspected having to watch this breakthrough in others.

-Shadow?

-What…?

That thought… with its deeply odd perspective suddenly made her head hurt…

The symbol snickered at her and made a rude gesture somehow that her little nascent-self mimicked at her.

-Getting dissed by my own…?

The deeply strange moment passed without her having time to worry about it in great detail because the lightning arrived in a haze of brilliant white and blue-green. It rolled around her like an azure serpent before surging at both of them, trying to shatter their bodies.

Her nascent ‘self’ reached out and grasped it, and she saw something near her sister do the same…

-Oh-shit-oh-shit-monkey-balls-on-a-stick… Dual Tribulation!

She threw her panic into her mantra without even pausing.

-Group tribulations are really, really dangerous!

That thought went as well, there was no getting off this horse now it was going wild.

A second white and green-bronze bolt pulsed at her, then a third-

-Isn’t this kind of… easy? she thought as her little Nascent Soul grasped the third one and effortlessly-

The deep blue green bolt descended like a serpent, splitting the void and aiming right for her third eye. Half a dozen smaller white-purple bolts skittering after it.

She tried to move her physical body to resist it but the pressure accompanying the strike paralysed her. It struck her forehead and-

She laughed in defiance at how easy this was and seized it with her hands. White bolts were devoured by her Intent without her even doing anything. The blue-green bolt pulsed again in her hands trying to overwhelm her now that it had a connection. It struck six times in rapid succession and she smashed each one effortlessly.

The sense of disunity between her Nascent Soul and her body had vanished completely at this point. Stood there, she put her hands on her hips and stared defiantly at the storm-laden sky, beyond which was a swirling vortex of Myriad Elements Qi that her body was still drinking in in colossal proportions.

Nine cracks tore open the sky above her and nine golden bolts, like the spears of a divine warrior, descended. Each one brought with it nine deep blue bolts and a hundred white bolts.

-Eh?!?

-Isn’t that a bit of a step up, she complained in her ghostly heart.

However rather than arrive all at once, they merged and pulsed at her. The first golden spear didn’t target her third eye, instead striking for her dantian directly. She pushed out with all her Maelstrom Intent and twisted it apart, letting the maelstrom around her devour the directionless gold, blue and white lightning. The second and third strikes followed rapidly until finally all nine had been ripped to shreds and scattered.

With a howl, the sky shifted once more, the clouds falling upwards as shifting shadows rippled amongst them. Sky-devouring flood dragons of shadow and thunder howled beyond the vault of heaven. With those howls came twelve bolts of brilliant golden lightning, each edged with a white-hot absence of colour that seared her eyes. The twelve tore through space, arcing down from the dread maelstrom above, twisting this way rapidly intensifying-!

Something locked her in place, an immense weight pressing down from above – golden lighting burrowed into her twelve meridian gates, surging through her body and appearing before her Nascent Soul-

She twisted all the Maelstrom Intent she had to break it apart. The purple lightning that came with it. Dozens of bolts were dispersed. For a moment, she was successful in delaying the golden bolts, holding them in individual abeyance as they impaled her physical body-

A vast, heaven-shattering roar that carried the intent to disperse and devour her body and soul arrived. The pressure became even more all-encompassing and the golden bolts swirled around her, arriving at her third eye and surging into her body a second time, fusing to become one singular bolt. It tore through her bodily defences as if they were gossamer, ruined her Intent, scattered her qi and struck at her Nascent Soul directly, taking the form of a vengeful golden spear decorated with flowing dragon motifs as it did so. She screamed as a pain beyond anything she had ever experienced, even with the moon mushrooms, even from the initial use of the symbol wracked her.

It traced her ghostly meridians, trying to tear her apart before finally running out of steam and dissipating into her soul directly. Before she could register it, a second pulse arrived and then a third, each one stronger than the last. Raging torrents of heavenly torment that ate at her consciousness. In the end she thought that there were twelve pulses. Her soul felt like it had been flayed.

Her body was… well, it wasn’t terrible actually. The raging lightning had hit her soul so hard that it had actually reinforced her connection with her core. In the process, it had also provided further tempering and widened her meridians. Her little Nascent Soul’s golden and purple coronas were getting more robust.

She stared up at the sky, which was getting even more leaden and ominous.

-How many more phases this was likely to have? she cried, trying to feed her worry to her mantra. Golden lightning is already?!?

-My mantra isn’t?

That brought a second realisation, that was cut off as the sky recoiled and she felt an unearthly force both pull her up and push her down at the same time.

The bolt that descended from the storm-dark sky was unaccompanied. A dark golden sword from heaven shrouded in black fire that gave off a sense of worldly suppression. She was dimly aware of the duality of the strike as it arrived -not that she had time to dare focus on her sister’s tribulation.

-Together, we rise or fall!

The silent joint declaration settled in her mind even as the golden-black bolt appeared in front of her like a phantom, bisecting her Nascent Soul and striking at her Golden Core before she was even able to register it fully.

There was a horrifying moment of emptiness as she was sure her body was about to physically explode under the force of the impact. The qi within her combusted under the strike and it took every shred of mastery she had over the Maelstrom Intent to not vanish into a mist of organic remains and splintered remains.

She screamed even as the second bolt came, turning everything she possessed at it.

Then a third – sliding out of the void like an executing sword as she desperately sought for some kind of answer…

A spear of qi appeared in her hands and she desperately used the first form of the Heavenly Maelstrom Spear to attack the weapon-shaped lighting. Each one that fell was a near soul-destroying battle in its own right, testing her resolution to depths she would not have believed possible before that moment. When the fifteenth and final sword was at last dispersed she was barely able to stand. Her little Nascent Soul haggard yet defiant, holding itself up with the qi spear.

Her Nascent Soul’s meridians were almost half formed, she realised belatedly, and her body, which had been baptised by the lightning was also undergoing strange changes. Her bones had acquired a faint golden sheen with a matrix of dark gold and black lightning bolts that ghosted opaquely against their creamy crystalline hue. Her flesh was tempered and her blood seemed to have golden sparks reminiscent of the lightning in it now.

Sound vanished from the world and her gaze was drawn skyward once again as the clouds turned matte black and twisted in on themselves. A pure black bolt, a shadow against the pitch black sky, only visible due to its silvery yellow tint fell down towards her. As it did so it transformed to become a version of her, its face twisted into a furious snarl, also wielding a spear.

She desperately mustered every bit of her Intent and skill with the Heavenly Maelstrom Spear Form and met the strike head on. Equally matched, they were thrown apart, skidding across the mirror water of this strange other place that was no longer quite like her dantian. As fast as she recovered, the lightning version of her was somehow faster. With a scream of defiance she thrust at it seeking the same heaven-twisting feeling she got from that strike against the male mutated spider.

The lightning bolt version of her split apart under the twisting spiral of the blow, becoming a cloud of black-yellow sparks that were devoured by the maelstrom of devouring qi around her, absorbing themselves into her Golden Core and Nascent Soul. Another bolt arrived, and another. Each one carried a different colour she found but all wielded a spear and they became progressively better with them as well. It wasn’t until the fourth one though, that she finally associated them with the Yin and Yang aspects of the Five Elements.

When she finally vanquished the eleventh bolt, the sky grew still and the pressure stepped up again.

Rather than a simple lightning bolt like the previous waves, the colour slowly drained from the world until everything was black, white and grey. A great stele seemed to descend from the black rolling void above her, graven from black cloud and white lightning. The ‘her’ that appeared on the flat plain of liquid qi was grey and misty. An older form of her, an adult towering over her childlike form full of horrible sense of judgement – as if to say that this was all she would ever amount to.

Just a child, playing with the toys of others.

“Unworthy”

It didn’t strike with any weapon; it just reached out to grasp her, like an adult grasping for a child to punish it.

She grimly struck at it with every shred of capability she could muster. It sneered and just slapped a hand out at her, unblockable and ephemeral until it plunged into her soul. She was beset by a disorientating fuzziness as she fought to reject it, as if she were about to dissipate entirely and abandon-

With a scream, she forced herself back to the moment and twisted free of the strike, summoning all the conviction she could to reject it and barely succeeding. The now defeated energy that had been its strike was absorbed into her Nascent Soul directly.

After that, she descended into hell. Shadow after shadow descended from the sky, trying to catch and punish her, crush her, beat her down and ruin her, to abandon her path as she danced on a knife edge between disaster and victory. Shadow after shadow fell, buried by her spear and her desperate steps, using the Shifting Maelstrom Steps to barely avoid disaster again and again. By the time the 33rd had disintegrated into grey sparks, almost 70% of her meridians in her Nascent Soul had manifested.

The pressure simply increased.

She wanted to scream out in rage and defiance but her soul was forced to its tiny knees as giants descended from the heavens. Faceless versions of adult her. She counted 66 in total. Ringing her like colossi, they tried to blot out her very existence…

The scene shifted: ‘She was watching her brother get taken away while the elders of their mother’s clan suppressed father and walked towards them both with greedy eyes that spoke of a future devoid of opportunity as they were sold into marital bondage for the good of the ‘clan’, to redress her parents’ dishonourable actions.She tried to scream, shout, deny… but they grasped her and dragged her…’

Something fought in her, mind telling her this wasn’t real.

That she was about to die-

About to fail her tribulation.

She opened her eyes and her 12 year-old self-picked up its spear and struck the first elder, impaling him through the stomach and tearing out his grey core of flickering lightning before devouring it. They came for her, and she fought with a fury she never knew she possessed. Born of watching her mother die, of seeing her father weep.

“What kind of daughter submits after seeing that” she howled at them even as they fell…

“What kind of sister lets her little brother be taken away like that!”

“Old men, hiding behind tradition and filial piety to justify your greed!” she raged at them even as they fell.

“You tried to take everything we ever had, deny everything we might be! Just because you feared and hated mother so!”

She didn’t even register the change in the tribulation when the opponents ceased to be sneering old men and women and became powerful soldiers in Bureau armour, Clan Elites and family members of those old elders. Each raging in retribution for her ‘acts’ of murder. She cut them down all the same, devouring their lightning even as her being crumbled bit by bit. She was burning her potentia now, not that she cared any more -all that mattered was that they fight to the very end.

When the 99th fell she was ragged, exhausted, falling, but unbeaten… While her meridians were formed fully, she knew that she had no qi left… nothing left to give.

Above her, the silver figure descended, its beatific expression smiling at her as it cast her off the cliff. It was a face and an expression that haunted her when she closed her eyes, that refused to vanish into oblivion no matter how much she fed it to her mantra, cursed it or denied it. A single, simple, tyrannical action that had torn apart their world and left them running ever since, beholden to all the suffering that had come after.

She screamed in final defiance, fuelling every single remaining bit of lingering fury over their plight in this hellish place at it, striking with the determination to make it understand that even here and now, while it might kill her, it had not broken them... and everything paused.

Power flowed into her… not qi, just… sentiment, Intent even. From the symbol, from the pagoda, from the thousands upon thousands of cores they had refined the dead that lay all around them on the mirror plain, testament to the torment they had suffered, caused and overcome. Testament to the reality of their achievement.

The two of them stood side by side on the mirror plain, staring at the silver tyrant with that youthful, demeaning face and dismissing expression. With its golden hair and cruel eyes, carrying a silver lightning bolt in its hand. There were no words to be spoken. It exuded judgement, the power of heaven, the superiority of its form over them. Imposed them in their rightful place, as things for it, to be shaped by it, praised by it, used by it or… discarded by it.

“Rise or fall… TOGETHER!”

Both of them put everything they had against the towering Intent that descended towards them like an executioner’s blade. It passed through them even as their own strikes landed on the silver and black tyrant. It dispersed into lightning and was swept away even as their bodies crumbled. Their souls frayed… their cores cracked. The symbol roared in their minds, all of the things that had led to this point lifting up their ruined bodies and broken forms, bestowing a boundless vigour and vitality that swept back through them, grasped them by the hand and told them that after all they had done, to die here, was… unacceptable.

Their meridians reformed.

Her body healed, pulling itself back together.

She floated in water that was inky with her own blood. The array below them was still intact… somehow.

The hall above them however, she was able to grasp in some intuitive way, was demolished completely.

The ruin that the tribulation had wrought was terrifying. Rock was melted and warped. The nearest gate had holes the size of her melted in it where lightning had come down. There were still molten pools of burning rock and Myriad Elements Mists that flickered with remnants of lightning. The density of the water around them… no, she couldn’t call it water any more: this was well on its way to becoming pure Myriad Elements Qi in liquid form.

She checked her body and found it was basically okay. A bit battered and almost devoid of qi... But… she did a single cycle and… sighed slightly because it was back to 23 seconds to complete. Then sighed more deeply because what it added to her reserve was like a raindrop in a lake…

Within her dantian…

Her dantian was, she found, changed beyond all recognition.

The Pagoda now floated in the lap of her Nascent Soul which looked like her 12 year old self now. She stared at herself as she processed what she was seeing…

Her perspective shifted and she was standing in a shifting space that looked a bit like an empty void, but with various elemental flames and little crystalline shapes forming in it.

She walked forward and the floor rippled below her.

She was standing on an endless floor of water with stars shifting overhead.

It reformed around her again even as she tried to process what she was seeing until she forcibly made it not.

“Did we break through Soul Foundation and step into Nascent Soul directly, just in the course of one horrific tribulation?” The words she thought, she somehow spoke instead, which was downright weird for a few seconds before she got the hang of it.

She shivered...

“Still, it seems kind of undeniable.”

“Okay, that’s going to be weird.”

Looking around, she determined that this was, indeed, her Sea of Knowledge.

“Do I no longer have a dantian?” she wondered for a brief, confused moment before hitting herself on the head because she was overthinking things.

She refocused slightly and registered her actual dantian as a secondary part of her perception of her body. What she was seeing here was the things in her dantian that held aspects of ‘soul power’: the symbol, unsurprisingly; remnants of Nascent Soul and Soul Foundation cores; the spells she had learned and the little pagoda. The ‘Sea of Knowledge’ itself seemed to have replaced her Mind’s Eye, or maybe upgraded it was a better description.

She stood there, her mind spinning slightly, trying to adjust to things as they now were. She had, she realised, never given a lot of thought to how Nascent Souls really worked. Before she fell into this place, the idea of cultivating to Nascent Soul had been an idle daydream at best. She would have reached the pinnacle of Mantra Seed, probably through the combined help of their father, Old Ling, Mrs. Leng, Old Oudeng and Old Fang’s and lived for a 7-800 years if she was lucky. If she survived, she would probably have become an elder in the Hunter Pavilion. Now, she was a fully-fledged cultivator, having crossed the threshold between Golden Core and Nascent Soul completely.

-Aiiieeeh… she sighed inwardly as she floated in the multi-hued waters…

Now it was clear as day. Intent formed the bridge between body and soul, allowing her meridian system to connect to her third eye. From there her soul and body had become intangibly bound. Her mortality was no longer constrained by her physical state, but rather her soul directly. She could see the symbol much more clearly as well now, like an extra layer of it had somehow slid into focus, giving its ever-shifting flowerlike structure a ring of leaves that put her in mind slightly of the patterns within the vast symbol below the statue in the pagoda, or on the statues. The symbol was also another link between the two, connecting her Core to her Nascent Soul via her Mind’s Eye turned Sea of Knowledge.

Her core was still there, in her actual dantian. The flame that flickered around it, a shifting corona of black, white, purple and gold flame, was the link to her Nascent Soul. The core itself was a flickering orb of darkness that contained thirteen orbiting flames that were integrating with the symbol and… somehow synchronising with the patterns on the leaves in her mind’s eye… or maybe the symbol was integrating with them.

The Qi Lake within her dantian was a Qi Sea now and properly immense. Rolling clouds of qi above it flickered with white, blue, gold, black and grey lightning which struck down periodically into the shallow waters. Her Nascent Soul sat on the surface of the Sea, right in the middle, with the Golden Core where its dantian should be and the Symbol ghosting in its forehead where her third eye would be. Her meridians were connected and mirrored in some strange intangible way between her body and her soul.

She completed a full cycle of refinement and watched the whole system drain her surroundings of Myriad Elements Qi at a tremendous rate. It almost made a dent in the qi of her surrounds she thought with a mental eye roll. Her sister did the same thing a moment later and between them she was able to see that they could just about delay the exponential growth when both of them exerted their full strength.

That just left her Qi Sense…

-Nope, she thought wryly, ‘Soul Sense’.

She pushed out her Soul Sense, which was quite intuitive to grasp as it turned out, and also… powerful. The hall above provided some hindrance, but apparently her affinity for the Myriad Elements Qi also extended to her Soul Sense, so she was able, with a bit of focus, to not diffuse it too much. Curious, she pushed it down the tunnel they had come from. It stretched away and travelled almost seven miles she reckoned before she felt it grow hard to control and diffuse.

Returning it, she sent it into the other hall, finding it had a fairly large group of Undren who were basically having an argument involving a lot of pointing at the door to the hall. Something brushed back at her and she saw a grey-robed rat with mottled fur, who had been remonstrating with a black-furred Undren who was, she realised, the first female Undren she had ever seen based on the breasts at least. The grey-robed rat, who wore hundreds of charms made of bone sewn into its robe, turned and looked directly ‘at’ her with a frown.

She stared back, aware that her child-like form was misty and unclear, and, given the very narrow focus of her Soul Sense, likely only visible to this rat.

It pushed its sense against her and she felt her own Intent bend a bit. Pushing back, she was barely able to match it. It frowned and focused more and she felt her sense was about to crumble when she remembered she could use her Intent with it… probably?

The Maelstrom Intent infused into Soul Sense and she shifted around the probing attack on her mind.

The rat pushed more and eventually stood up and hissed at her, making its arguing compatriots all turn and look in confusion as the rat pointed at the hall and then made a further effort to quash her soul sense. She resisted it as best she could, but even with the Maelstrom Intent it was clear she would lose over time. Sighing with defeat, she eyed the symbol, which shifted faintly and deflected the malevolent Intent from the rat’s own attack back at it using the Maelstrom Intent.

The Undren staggered and spat some blood. She tried to gauge its actual strength but couldn’t see a hint of anything on it which either meant that the charms were hiding it, or it was a markedly stronger Nascent Soul cultivator than she was. In any event, its own counter-probe had gotten it nothing because the symbol was masking her own Qi, Intent and Soul Strength, making her to all intents a deep pool into which nothing that was cast returned. This also explained at last how it was able to negate all those different attacks.

Rather than push her ‘advantage’, she just backed off and gave the rat a long look, then, with a metaphorical shrug, she let the focused interaction melt away, leaving it staring pensively in the space she had been occupying while its compatriots all looked around in confusion. A few moments later, she felt several strong soul senses sweep the ruined hall, finding nothing.

“There are a whole bunch in the hall beyond the ruined gate, along with a very ruined settlement,” she told Arai, who was now looking at her quizzically.

“Your nose is bleeding…” her sister pointed out.

“Ohh...” she noticed it was… “I had a bit of a tussle with one of the watchers. I’m pretty positive it’s at least Dao Seeking, but my soul sense, with the help of the symbol, is at least that powerful, it seems…”

“Do you think they will come investigate?” her sister frowned.

“Maybe? If they think I am at least as powerful as they are, they might be cautious... There was no one else that powerful there… but if they call the other one… I’m very certain that the Undren I just played mind tag with wasn’t the one that came here,” she shrugged.

“Once we have taken in as much qi as we can, we should probably leave though. The tribulations did a lot of damage out there so likely someone like that old rat will come investigating again.”

“Yeah… better safe than sorry.” Arai grinned. “But… Nascent Soul.”

She rolled her eyes at her sister’s exuberance and started drawing qi from their surroundings.

…

After a dozen cycles it was clear that this was going to take quite a while. The tribulation really had wrung her almost dry it seemed. As she watched the cycles slip by, she found herself focusing once again on how her Nascent Soul’s dantian and her Sea of Knowledge, which the longer she looked at them seemed to be two halves of the same thing in effect, interacted with her body’s dantian. The Intent bridging the two was still shifting around with each cycle, as if it wasn’t fully settled somehow. She spent some time looking at it before realising where the lack of harmony was creeping in.

With a thought her little Nascent Soul started refining the qi in her dantian’s Qi Sea a second time, passing the Maelstrom Intent-infused qi through its own meridians, distilling some of it into its Sea of Knowledge and dispersing the rest out as mist that was then recombined and refined again in the shifting maelstroms and vortices. The qi in her Sea of Knowledge slowly merged with her soul directly, using the Maelstrom Intent to blend it and use it as fuel to grow stronger. She wondered what this realm should be called... Presumably it was a sub realm within Nascent Soul but the Maelstrom Scripture was silent on things like that, almost as if they held no real importance to the author of the scripture.

-Haaa… sighing again, she gave up on that thought for now.

She was musing about what going on with the inner workings of her Nascent Soul and getting used to perceiving things through it when she realised the Pagoda in her lap had lit one of the little lamps on its first layer.

Focusing on it, she found that rather than it becoming bigger, she became smaller as she approached its exterior until she was floating in the air outside the first floor. There were stairs up the outside she now saw, and walkways around it. It wasn’t even that its form had changed; it felt more like she had attained some quiet acknowledgement from it and was, as a result, able to see more of its true form than she had previously.

The octagonal shape of the first floor’s veranda had four shrines set into the exterior walls which corresponded to the four arts it had taught her. The one for the Harmonious Maelstrom Manual and Way of the Harmonious Maelstrom was the one that now had a little lit lantern with a fist sized flame on its pedestal. Walking around the rest, she found that the one for Maelstrom Shifting Steps had a tiny flickering of a flame glittering in it as did the one for Heavenly Maelstrom Spear. The one for Myriad Maelstrom Primordial Cauldron was basically just some tiny sparks.

She withdrew her sense, content that even if she couldn't re-enter the Pagoda, she now had a way to gauge her progress with it at the very least, and a rough guide of what was necessary to work on.

“So what does your Sea of Knowledge look like?” she asked her sister who was sat there, staring into nothing.

“Kinda weird, like an ethereal lotus blooming on a pond surrounded by mists,” her sister said looking a bit… embarrassed, actually.

She nodded and wisely said nothing. Her sister had always liked drawing flowers, especially when they were younger. She also vowed to see if she could redecorate hers a bit in due course.

“My soul also looks like me when I was twelve years old…” her sister said with a wry smile.

“Yeah, I guess we have to advance them to ‘adulthood’ via refining qi to make them grow in stature,” she supplied.

“That seems to fit,” her sister agreed. “I kind of regret not searching out some manuals on that kind of thing in the markets now…”

They talked on for a while, comparing other aspects of the tribulations and their brief bits of self-investigation. Both of them appeared to be able to summon spectral weapons relating to their Martial Forms with their Nascent Souls and travel a short distance outside their bodies with their perception using their Nascent Souls. The distances were about similar when all was said and done. She reckoned she could travel a bit further than her sister, but her sister’s soul sense was… well, tyrannical. The Sundering Intent that came with it was overbearing and incisive. Her own was more diffuse and subtle but she supposed no less dangerous in its own way. Eventually, they reached the point where they were happy with the amount of qi they had absorbed. They did a quick circuit of the underwater region gathering all the best crystals and made their way to the surface.

-How… odd, she thought, standing on the surface of the water like it was solid rock.

She stared at the water and then ‘thought’ about sinking into it, up to her knees, witnessing that she did as her qi and Intent moved accordingly.

-Very odd indeed, she mused, examining how it worked. To move from one to the other was like holding different mind-sets about how the world worked.

-Amazing as well though, she had to acknowledge, looking at the ceiling now. So this is what it means to have an intuitive grasp of the way your Intent works with the world around you?

“Flight is a Nascent Soul thing, isn’t it?” she muttered under her breath, which just got a laugh from her sister.

It took her a good twenty minutes to work out the trick to ‘flight’, which, it turned out to her disappointment, wasn’t really flight in any case. It was more using her Maelstrom Intent to levitate herself using her qi and if she cycled her qi while doing it, the process was nearly self-sustaining. As it was, she reckoned she could support several days of continuous flight at normal running pace, or maybe a day at her previous top speed. She could certainly go faster than that, she felt, but it cost exponentially more qi and would require more practice than the space down here afforded. In any case, it seemed that the Pagoda was dropping subtle hints that she should work on her movement and spear arts if the lanterns were anything to go by.

They rapidly gathered all the crystals that they could on the ceiling and from the most obvious outcroppings on the hall, all the while keeping a wary eye out for any Undren coming to investigate. The place was swept with qi sense twice, but both times it was insufficient to reach the ceiling where they were working. She was still relieved when they finally got them all. As a final gesture they tried to break the array core on the ceiling, but it turned out to have sunk so deeply into the rock that cutting it up with the Arborundum leaf did basically nothing and after a few moments it actually repaired the damage dealt thanks to the qi rolling around in it. They both made a wary note of that -apparently it was possible for the qi gathering aspect to exceed the control of the array itself and become properly self-sustaining. On one level it made a lot of sense in hindsight, given what it was doing was changing the rock into qi on a certain level, and it would eventually reach equilibrium, but leaving it behind as it was… unfortunate.

With nothing else left to do, they took stock of what remained of their gear. Looking over their ruined armour, she had to concede that it might have been premature to make it when they did. The fish skin pieces were still good, as were was what remained of her long-suffering pieces of Luss cloth, but she was once again just wearing a crude half-skirt, greaves and arm guards for the most part. The jade tablet she had bound to her forearm was none the worse for wear, which was to be expected really, given the quality of the craftsmanship that had gone into it.

-It would be a real pain to lose you, she reflected, giving it a comforting pat.

Even with her currently enhanced Sea of Knowledge, she was pretty sure that absorbing even a tenth of the information on it into her would be close to impossible if she wanted to keep her sense of ‘self’ intact. Even the Mantra wouldn’t help with the problems that came from overstuffing your brain with knowledge.

Sighing, she hunted around for the bone spear she had made and scowled, because it had become brittle, like glass. Most of the other bones were on their way to becoming that way as well. Spider chitin in the warehouses was just elemental sludge. That meant they were back to the leaf and the metal longsword, the short sword and the few spearheads. The latter, which she was carrying, seemed none the worse for their dunk in the Myriad Elements Qi, which was reassuring.

She grabbed the other two books from their shelf and stashed them with the manual in her fish skin backpack while her sister scoured as best she could for other stuff. She hunted around for a few other oddments that might supplement her ‘armour’, which was more an excuse to provide her with some inherent modesty at this point. Sadly, there was nothing at all left that would be suitable, so she could only give up after some searching and accept that she, and her desire for some general modesty were concepts that shared no common destiny.

Her sister came and found her a while later, having also drawn a blank regarding clothing while salvaging what little remained, and they made their exit eastwards. The ruined hall behind them largely devoid of anything of removable material value to them that wasn’t in the deathly dangerous lake well on its way to becoming a Myriad Elements Pond. Their exit from the hall ended up requiring them to mine an extension through the tunnel they had dug so many weeks prior; whatever seal the rat had put on the doors seemed to have involved triggering the lattice in it, preventing it from being cut through.

The final bit of good fortune, she noticed as they made their way onwards, was that her sister had finally made some progress with her basic movement art. As near as she could tell, she had managed to incorporate some aspect of the ‘Sundering Intent’ into it allowing her to cover over a hundred metres with a single stride. There were a few ground contraction arts in the Hunter Pavilion back home, but none were close to that good. In Blue Water City you might be able to find one, but it would cost you an arm and a leg in spirit stones probably.

It was a nice note to end that traumatic ordeal on, they agreed as they hurtled down the tunnel as fast as they could, making distance from the hall and whatever Undren remained in it, heading broadly eastwards once more as the spear had directed them.