> In the catalogue of ‘superior’ ideas employed by those Dukes of the western provinces of our Imperial Commonwealth, the decision to hunt and kill one of the children of that most maligned, ill-served and misfortunate Daughter, Echidna – no less ‘Shussu Silver Tongue, Sovereign of the Devouring Sky’ – had always struck me as suspiciously responsible and uncommonly civic-minded. In removing that deep-dwelling tyrant from its grim swamplands on the western edge of the great Savannah, they actually managed to make their domains a tiny bit more tolerable for the other inhabitants.

>

> At the time, it was thought somewhat suspicious that they actually succeeded in ‘killing’ a child of that terrible curse on early man. Now, almost 2000 years later and having seen that particular coin finally drop, I can only applaud in the most ironic sense the true ‘superiority’ of their plot.

>

> Rather than just kill it, which they were apparently unable to do, their decision to chain it up along with much of its brood in their mine, in an effort to forestall the ticking time bomb of malpractice and mendacious maleficence, leaves me without words. Truly, this is like seeing an empirical proof that morons can exist on a level as yet hitherto unseen. And as someone who saw first-hand what the early iterations of the ‘Escalating Monkey Cage’ were able to do, that is really saying something.

  Comments attributed to Empress Sanae Everkind shortly after Undergrove was reclaimed.

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~ ARAI & SANA, UNDRENMARSH ~

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The mountains slowly grew larger on the horizon as they endured a largely uneventful week of onward travel through the perpetual wetland landscape. Ruined vestiges started to become more common, first as ruined towers or quarried out abodes on rock pillars, then later as small walled enclaves built up out of the wetlands by large lakes or on river banks. There were even some ruined roadways passing through the wetlands between them. Some were occupied, either by Undren or the small green-grey skinned demons, and they largely gave them wide berths to avoid attracting undue notice.

Finally, after eight days of travelling, they chanced across what could only be described as a ruined fortress city, built up out of the swamp. A vast lake bordered it on one side, while rivers and canals wound through its densely built and largely overgrown districts. It had high walls and sprawled across a series of shallow hills. Standing in the shadow of a ruined tower, on the outer wall, they took in the nearest hub within it.

“It’s almost as big as Blue Water City,” she muttered eventually, staring at the nearest large estate with its fortified towers and high walls on the side of a hill to the north of them.

“Yeah, the roads lead out in every direction… and yet…” Sana mused.

“It’s not in the same style as the depths,” she noted. “Not all of it at least.”

That was the other thing that stood out: the building style was a strange fusion of the familiar and the alien. Where they still remained, the roofs were peaked with sweeping eaves – even the style of the roof tiles, barely visible beneath carpets of moss or encroaching vegetation put here, would not have been out of place back home. The towers also had multiple layers like pagodas. Alongside them, though, were swathes of squat rectangular, columned buildings and broad courtyards with open spaces that were now largely overgrown or, if near a canal, flooded.

“Also quite occupied,” her sister noted, pointing through the mists to the south.

She nodded, having noted that heavily fortified encampment of the small grey-green demons about a mile away on the other hill. Of the two of them, it had turned out that when her own Sundering Intent was combined with her soul sense it was several times harder to trace and subvert compared to her sister’s Maelstrom Intent. She swept her soul sense over it carefully – taking care not to sweep anything too powerful. Even then, several formidable soul senses tried to clash with the edges.

“It seems the grey-green demons also have formidable Nascent Soul-”

She cut off and they both hid their soul sense as another, much more formidable one swept out from the west, from the direction of the Undren’s own enclave in the town. It also failed to spot anything as far as she could see and passed away after a few moments.

“So both of them have peak Nascent Soul experts here,” her sister said drily.

“Apparently so,” she agreed.

“I wonder, is this the habitation region that the spear talked about?” her sister mused.

That had been what she was wondering as well; however, her instinct suggested that it wasn’t, at least not directly. If only because the spear had said that was in the region right before the mountains, and quite likely the rock pillars did not quality as ‘mountains’.

“Probably not,” her sister added of her own accord after a moment. “That would be somewhat fortuitous I can't help but feel.”

“It seems this is something of a local hub for both the small demons and the Undren in any case,” she said, relaying what she had seen. “The demons appear to have a whole settlement up there, a few thousand living there with quite a lot of organisation.”

“That seems to be the theme so far,” her sister remarked. “Everything has ‘more organisation than expected’.”

“Mmmm,” she agreed, turning her investigation towards the Undren’s district, with a bit more caution.

They had secured quite a wide area between two hills. There, on the larger of the two hills, was a large octagonal building that appeared to have a path underground. Undren were scurrying around, moving slaughtered monsters of a dozen different types underground. In a brief few moments she saw two middling-sized serpents, a bunch of toads and frogs, several types of spider, two lizard-like creatures, a bunch of the ambush crabs even larger than she had killed and crates that likely had fish in them. Courtyards were filled with racks of fungi and spirit plants, curing somehow or just awaiting sorting perhaps.

She was about to pass on when a fearful Intent stabbed out at her, directly assaulting her mental defences. The symbol ate it up in the usual manner whole while she hissed and punched back at it. Both senses recoiled and she masked her own sense as another powerful sense swept the area they had been in.

“So, not just a Nascent Soul,” Sana said as they hopped down into the obscuring vegetation below the ruined wall, wrapping the seventh iteration of her reed cloak around her.

“Uhuh,” she agreed. “It felt like it should be a realm above me, nothing like a Principle within it though.”

“So early-stage Dao Seeking? Close to the spider we fought, or that other toad?” her sister communicated in her head, grabbing her arm as they both deflected another searching sweep.

“Probably,” she agreed, as she heard drums pounding in the distance.

“Well, it’s probably better we noticed it now,” she said after a moment’s further consideration as horns blared from the grey-green demons district as well.

They slunk back out of the city and sat in the edge of the wetlands observing the chaos that was unfolding. It went on for some twenty minutes before finally petering out, the drums falling silent and the horns stopping their periodic calls.

“I suppose they must be on edge, given half the stuff that is in this place,” her sister said eventually.

“Seems likely, they responded at the slightest brush, likely because my soul sense was something they didn’t recognise, but they have made no effort to come out and actually look…” she said, standing up and sweeping the wall for any sign of patrollers until it vanished into the mists.

“So I guess we skirt around it to the north?” Sana mused, pulling out a bunch of bones and claws she had cobbled together.

Tossing them in the mud, they both stared at them, looking at the relationship between the different pieces. Yin was diffused in a rather inauspicious way and heavily favoured the south. She tossed them in a second divination and got broadly a similar reaction. The feng shui of the landscape to the south of the city, around the lake, was bad. The north was somewhat okay, and the way they had come was not much better than the way north.

“Probably a good idea when all’s said and done…” she agreed.

Feng shui divination had turned out to be a surprisingly good way of picking broadly safer directions to travel in this place. She had to admit she didn’t have a lot of faith in it as a hard and fast ‘you should go this or that way’, but as a way of reading how screwed up the landscapes’ innate geomancy was it hadn’t really failed them yet in the days since Sana had started trying it.

“It looks like this place has sub-urban districts anyway, along the riverway, so we can still check out some of those,” her sister suggested.

“Assuming they aren’t filled with something else that’s horrible.”

“Assuming that,” Sana agreed with an amused sigh.

“And if we stumble across some ancient horror from beyond the knowledge of mortal kind, I’m going to hold it against your lack of talent with fortune-telling,” she snickered.

“Well if that Undren you spooked comes looking for us physically I’ll hold you accountable,” her sister jibed back.

Shaking her head, she set off after Sana who was flitting through the reed beds, heading north around the outskirts of the vast city. The neighbourhoods they passed through were largely flooded and claimed by the wetlands. Buildings were empty, mostly just walls sticking up through the reed beds. Waterways were clogged, gardens nothing but tangled masses of greenery. In the perpetual evening light and the mist, it gave her the feeling that she was walking through a dreamscape. There were some critters, mainly spiders and the odd lizard or frog, but nothing that came anywhere close to being a threat to them now.

“It’s weird that the male spiders are still utterly fearless though,” her sister muttered, grasping one that had danced out of a ruined roof space and tried to jump at her head.

She gave the rest of the particular building they were right outside of a thorough look and found a spider nest hidden away in a roof corner, a Soul Foundation Spider Mother with two more males and a lot of eggs.

“I guess they instinctually guard their territory,” she said, observing the critter as its claws stabbed at her sister’s arm, barely putting dimples in her flesh.

“Nothing in this place either, beyond that spider nest,” Sana mused, eyeing the spider one last time before throwing it right over the estate into a distant reed bed.

They walked on down the street, investigating other buildings as they went. “It’s still strange, I can recall when those things were a nightmare,” she mused.

“Yeah, even at Golden Core they were stronger. In fact, even now, that one was able to leave lines on my hand. What would one of those things be like out of this place? I know our bodies are still getting tougher day by day, but…”

“At least we are out-stripping them,” she pointed out. “I would be MUCH more concerned if they were still damaging us the same… That would…”

“Uggh, a whole world engineered as an endurance-testing formation,” her sister shuddered, clearly also thinking of the great testing formation in Blue Water City that the Hunter Bureau had. “That would be an un-waking nightmare.”

“You know, there are definitely two phases to this place, at least.” She said, stopping by another estate gate and peering into the inner courtyard.

“Well, a city this big can't have been built all at once…” her sister pointed out, very reasonably.

“I agree, but this doesn’t feel like that,” she mused, staring at the stones that went into the wall.

“Look at this house, this place is crawling with rock, this whole place is a mine… so why are the buildings made out of brick?” she picked up one of the fallen bricks, then a roof tile that was broken in the mud. “The roof tiles are similar-looking to dragon tiles… but the key thing is that they are fired earth, not rock.”

“Hmmm, yeah,” her sister mused. “I have to say though that there is only so much…”

“That book… the history book, do you recall it had pictures of different cities?” she said, frowning.

“Oh… huh…” her sister frowned and rummaged around in her back before handing her the book.

She had to flip through it twice before she found the picture she was after, a drawing titled - ‘Ae drawfing ovf aen aencieant ruian – ovf the ‘Mo’Ashai Raece’ origien’. Setting aside the fact that the book’s text didn’t seem to want to translate the caption properly, she could see the clear similarities in the building design now that she had the picture of the street in front her to look at. Flipping through the section, it seemed to be about ruins in a place called the province of Jerikhal, on the western coast of the ‘northern continent’ of the world where this place had apparently originated. The text stated that they were rumoured to belong to some ancient people who had lived there even before the Carrolan Sovereigns unified much of the southern part of that continent. By the time the powers who unified half the continent took over those lands, they had faded into obscurity leaving only ruins like these amid the vast jungles and rolling grasslands.

“What does it say?” her sister asked.

“That this place was ancient even by the standards of the people who perhaps carved out this ‘mine’,” she said, shaking her head.

“Then how does it wind up down here?” her sister said, looking around in puzzlement.

“This is a huge city, and even if people who came later added bits to it…”

“You ask me, but who do I ask,” she joked.

Wiping a bit of moss off the wall, she uncovered a slab set into the wall which was written in a familiar, unintelligible flowing script. “What I can say is that that flowing script that a bunch of those books the library were written in was clearly their language.”

She stepped into the entrance hall, which led to an inner courtyard, and scuffed the mossy mud on the ground. Just like everywhere else, anything that hadn’t been smashed into tiny bits had been taken. The walls in many buildings, of this style and others, showed signs of having once been panelled – even the floor tiles had been torn up here.

“I am impressed they left the roof tiles,” her sister said drily, scuffing the floor as well.

As they walked on through that neighbourhood, across one of the small rivers and then through another in a similar style, she started to register that the qi density in this part of the city was… odd. She had no difficulty refining the qi that was passively accumulating; however, the qi within the buildings themselves was weirdly muted, as if ingrained with a strange property that made it unable to properly gather.

“It’s really like what the Island city was like in the days after the monolith got destroyed,” her sister observed eventually.

“It does have that element to it, but this feels…” she trailed off, actually uncertain how to articulate it, finally settling on “simultaneously ancient and also totally unnatural.”

“Yes…” her sister frowned, pausing to toss her fortune-telling bones on the ground and looking at how they fell. “Well, that’s…”

Her sister’s tone made her look at them, whereupon she could only stare.

“That’s… not a normal reading… is it?” she said after a long moment.

The bones and stones were all aligned inauspiciously, refusing to give any reading at all.

“The vitality of the land here has been severed,” Sana said, looking around dully. “Completely severed.”

“This whole neighbourhood was put here and never integrated into the natural feng shui of this place for some reason?” she hazarded.

“That… is what it seems to imply,” her sister nodded, looking around them again. “Or had its feng shui ruined at a later date..?”

She nodded, it was an interesting enough problem, but neither of them had anything like the background in either formations, geomancy or feng shui to do more than guess as to the actual purpose of the act. As her sister had observed, it was only a very small number of buildings and sections of land.

After a while, it became clear that not every neighbourhood had this trait, and out of curiosity, she started to plot them with her jade recording scrip. By the time they had circumvented the city entirely it was clear that there were three distinct areas that held that property – all of them on canals and associated with the buildings made of brick with oval doorways and sloped roofs that reminded her of home.

Standing in the central plaza of the last district, which was almost half-buried in the wetland and a hotbed of ambush crabs as well as a type of crayfish that spat bubbles of Yin Water Qi that imploded, they finally found a stele. It had been badly cut up and the writing was illegible, but the statue that stood on the top of it still remained somehow. It depicted a sagacious old man with a long beard and a powerful, muscled body sitting on a pillar of rock, pondering something.

“Whoever tried to deface this statue did a good job with the face,” her sister remarked as they stood in the air looking at it.

“Yes,” she agreed. “By the way, does it strike you that there is a building… missing over there,” she said, pointing to the western side of the plaza where there was an open space that was about the right size for a large estate to have sat.

“Now that you mention it,” her sister nodded in agreement.

“Everywhere else is densely built up, but here…” she focused on the open space and the muddy ground flowed away as her qi swept it away to reveal what remained of the paved plaza below.

She kept on going, shifting a decent part of the edge of the reed bed out of the way to reveal the presence of foundations. Large stone blocks, buried in the mud. Sending her soul sense through the ground she mapped out the rest of it as best she could, battling against the repression and obfuscation from the swamp as well as the odd properties of the rocks themselves. The foundations were burnt and glassy but what remained suggested that the complex would have been about the size of the Hunter Pavilion... a rectangular building probably taller than most of the others around here, based on the size of the foundation stones. It would have had a broad central courtyard, a hall beyond it and two wings directly facing the statue in the plaza.

“Someone clearly didn’t want whatever was here,” her sister mused, drifting down to put her hand on the stone.

She was just about to turn away when her sense caught something faintly resonating with the symbol in her Sea of Knowledge, on one of the deepest stones, a ghostly image of a rune that she knew, intuitively, should have no place here. It was one that everyone learned when they studied the classics, because the power it represented was utterly iconic – a sigil inscribed in honour of the ‘Queen Mother of the East’, in Imperial True Script.

“Uhh, do you see that?” she said eventually after staring at it for half a minute, her mind spinning as she tried to work out why something like that was here.

“See what?” her sister asked, coming over to where she was standing in the middle of the plaza.

Focusing her qi, she opened up a hole and they dropped down three metres to land beside the stone, which was fused into the ground.

“Well… uh… that’s…” her sister said dully, staring at it. “Why is there a sigil proclaiming honour for ‘The Queen Mother of the East’ in a place like this?”

“You ask me…” she muttered, pulling the history book back out and flipping through it for a few minutes, letting the information in each page flow into her Sea of Knowledge directly.

A few minutes later she had most of the book memorised, but it told her next to nothing in this regard. The chapter itself appeared to only show a ruin on the ‘northern continent’ because the person writing it had not been able to get images of similar ones from elsewhere and spent a lot of time complaining about it in the text. There were several Queen Mothers mentioned, but nothing like what she was looking for.

“I take it that it has nothing,” her sister said after she had stood there in silence for a further minute or so.

“Indeed, it has nothing,” she said, handing the book back.

In the distance, the sound of drums and horns and the sudden pressure of soul senses being deployed reminded her that there was a city full of other people only a mile or two away. Whatever had set them off this time wasn’t focused in their direction, but they decided to press on. Withdrawing her qi, the mud and water flowed back almost immediately, leaving almost no trace of their investigation as the dispersive properties emanating from everything scattered the lingering signature of her qi before her very eyes.

As they left the vast city behind, the wetlands slowly became more and more active. They passed several smaller ruined towns and fortified outposts in rapid succession. Many appeared to have been occupied by different groups of the small demons who spent almost as much time fighting over those, or fighting against Undren, as they did fighting the landscape itself. The average level of the combatants in the landscape seemed to be generally around Golden Core and Soul Foundation from what she could grasp.

Standing on the edge of one such conflict, over a large tower, she got to watch a band of the demons maybe two hundred strong fight it out with an Undren force of similar size to the one that had come to fight on the island city. They had arrived with it already well in sway, so it was hard to tell how it had begun, but the small demons gave a remarkable account of themselves – meeting the overwhelming ferocity with guile and proper strategy. They seemed to favour summoned creatures, poisonous arts and a lot of deception. They were countering the hordes of rats with waves of spiders and using several centipedes and a toad to obliterate minions while their elites held the Undren forces at bay, trading attacks with formations in the style she recognised from their war in the depths.

It dragged on for several hours before the Undren finally backed off, leaving the defenders with almost two-thirds of their number dead for four times that of the attackers. Both sides had several Soul Foundation realm combatants, but they rarely engaged directly from what she observed. Their role was generally to swat anything that got a bit too close to either line, occasionally casting arts at each other or supporting their own sides with controlling abilities and spirit-boosting abilities.

After two further days of travel eastwards, during which the weather turned wet and windy, they arrived on the edge of a much larger swathe of rock pillar massifs. Here the swampland wound through narrow corridors, following meandering rivers fed from deep pools that seemed to be welling up in the inland areas of the heavily forested massifs.

There were also markers of other demons here, painted walls in gorges, trees carved with strange signs or turned into statues of shifting animals, daubed in bright colours that defied the weather conditions. Stood before one, with the storm making the trees hiss above them and with thunder booming in the distance while the rain cascaded down through the canopy, she could, she fancied, imagine she was back in the High Valleys.

“Uh…. Sis…” Sana’s voice shook her out of her reverie.

“Oh.” She blinked at the group of hulking demons who were materialising out of the under-canopy some thirty metres away.

Almost all of them were around Golden Core in strength, with skin somewhere between green and black. They wore mainly furs and some lizard skin, and most were covered in war paint in red, blue and purple patterns that involved a lot of purple spirals and jagged lines. It matched rather well with what was on the tree carved into a totem.

“How did they sneak up on us?” she signed as more emerged from the greenery on the far side of them, two of them riding armoured spiders, which seemed to be the norm for this place really.

“I have no idea,” Sana signed back. “They blend in remarkably well.”

“Alf?” one of the demons riding the armoured spider pointed a stone blade at her and hissed the word in what seemed like remarkably crude Easten, based on the dialect.

“Nonn,” another one shook its head and made a series of follow-up gestures she needed no language knowledge to grasp.

“Lorm!” another cackled making a similarly insulting series of gestures that carried a similar Intent suggesting that it would enjoy having ‘a lot’ of ‘fun’ with them both.

“…”

Spinning her spear in her hands, she pointed it at him and mimed - ‘die first please!’ to it.

The others all laughed and then without any warning another of them screamed and just threw itself straight at her.

She stepped to the side and kicked it in the knee, sending it sprawling. The others all just laughed as if this was funny. The demon rolled up and swung its stone-spiked bone club at her head in a vicious upward arc. Its speed was surprising for a Golden Core cultivation and-

Her spear butt took it in the temple, knocking it out cold as she barely evaded the thrown bone knife that was painted entirely purple.

Arai snagged it out of the air a moment later looking at it dubiously before shaking her head and signing. “It’s made of the same bone as your old spear was.”

The other demons all laughed.

“Fight or run?” she signed.

“Probably better to just-”

Whatever her sister was going to say was cut off as a strange constriction settled over her, and probably her sister as well. She pushed against it with her Maelstrom Intent but that just went straight through it with no other effect. The demons all laughed and made more obscene gestures; one even pulled off its loincloth and revealed its disturbingly large endowment.

“It seems they wish to suffer,” she said, kicking the one she had knocked unconscious before down the slope behind them.

The first two that came for her she just punched in the face, watching them go down twitching without any real ceremony. A third she stabbed with her spear, sending a wicked pulse of Intent into its body that left it groaning and vomiting blueish red blood on the ground. Her sister brained two more and then kicked a third so hard they left an imprint in the tree they hit before falling to the ground flopping like a stunned fish.

At that point, the Golden Core demon on the larger spider who was wearing a fancier hat and less armour than all the others finally moved into action and charged forward. She grabbed the spider’s leg and threw it backwards. Whatever they had done had restricted her soul sense and her qi sense, along with her outward ability to manifest qi, but it had done little if anything to actually suppress her. The spider flailed and stabbed her twice, managing to draw light wounds before she smashed it into a tree, splintering the tree and leaving the spider twitching some metres away. The demon for its part tried to tackle her.

She had to acknowledge that for a Golden Core strength individual it was very strong. It was much stronger than she had been at Golden Core, which was kind of shocking; however, she was now a Nascent Soul cultivator and her physical body was transformed – baptised by that terrible tribulation. Without any suspense, she grabbed it by its headdress and yanked it up, which because of its own height really meant that it was now merely stooped before her. Bending its head back she punched it twice in the chest and then cursed as a knife, which she had totally failed to notice somehow, stabbed into her shoulder.

The poison on it was a Yin Fire and Yang Life one that made her blood boil faintly for a second before the symbol, her mantra and her Maelstrom Intent all acted upon it simultaneously. All the demons stared at her dully, clearly not expecting her to be totally unaffected. She exhaled a faint mist of Yang energy and then punched her attacker in the chest, feeling his ribcage crumple beneath her blow.

For good measure she stabbed him between the legs, ruining his quite prodigious manhood, which seemed only fair given the things they had been suggesting with their crude Intent.

Not seeing the other spider, she turned around to find that her sister had cut it in half and was grabbing the core from it. Its rider, now with both arms severed, was lying slumped some distance away, frothing at the mouth. The remaining demons, of which there were a good half a dozen, all shifted backwards slightly as she turned to look at them. The one that had suggested it would do this and that with her and that she would ‘enjoy’ it, flinched backwards as she lit upon it.

Narrowing her eyes, she took a step forward and it beat its chest and pointed at her as if to say - ‘You and me! We fight! I win!’ With pure physical speed, she arrived before it even as it was still finishing the gesture, lashing out with a kick. It screamed piteously as she ruined it, sending it flying back into the trees under the force of the impact.

The remaining nine all retreated rapidly back into the forest in a way that suggested that this was ‘absolutely’ not a retreat, but rather a strategic reorganisation of their chances.

“Well... that was… odd,” her sister said drily from where she had grabbed the second core from the other spider. “Why did we not kill them?”

“It seemed a bit pitiful,” she shrugged.

“Their body language made it quite clear what they were gonna do…” her sister mused.

“You didn’t kill any of them either,” she pointed out, eyeing the carnage around them, including one that was planted in a rock, twitching faintly. “Probably.”

Without further preamble they left the clearing rapidly, in case more showed up. There wasn’t really any need for communication on why, they had both fought the same opponents and the hulking demons had had the physical prowess close to Soul Foundation body cultivators or a peak Mantra Seed Cultivator… at Golden Core. A Soul Foundation one might well be as strong as they were, while a Nascent Soul one?

-Yeah, better to avoid that fight for now, until we are clearer on what we are dealing with, she thought as they ran quietly across the top of the grassland below the tree line.

They had only gone some two hundred metres though, when three more spider-riding demons shot out of the tree line behind them, jeering and hooting and making obscene gestures. Without much preamble, she snagged up a rock and tossed it backwards at a spider, hitting it with a pleasing *thwack* and an accompanying scream of shock from its rider. Her sister threw two more, which didn’t hit spiders.

Two more groups came shortly after that, merging together before attacking. The leader of the group, yelling insults and obscenities from a distance, pounded his chest. When he started to pleasure himself in the name of making lewd gestures, she threw a spider at him, knocking him into the river. Rather than give chase, his compatriots who were still standing all just laughed and then started beating the leader up…

“How bizarre,” her sister muttered as they ran on, to which she could only nod in agreement.

It soon became clear, over the course of the next day and a half, that they were skirting along the edge of the areas of several different groups of these new demons. The valley they were in presumably acted as some kind of border between their groups, because both sides had different totems. They came under attack several times, mostly in the same manner as before. The most bothersome were a tribe or band that just shot arrows at them from the tops of the pillars as they ran past. They were eventually attacked from behind by a further group as they evaded those archers. It was with some relief that they finally made it to the other end, and into a swathe of massif-dotted wetlands once more, before the melee spread and something above Soul Foundation came. The demons for their part showed little inclination to pursue them beyond the fringes of the massif.

Two more days passed much less eventfully as they travelled onwards, crossing the smaller massifs until it became clear that it was just easier to cut around them. That was reinforced by an encounter with an archer who shot at them from so far away she couldn't see anything of them. Invariably their soul sense would be suppressed within a few minutes of entering the massifs as well, making tracking down their attackers in the greenery time-consuming. The demons were also hard to kill. Even Golden Core ones could take a huge amount of punishment, and with soul sense suppressed and soul strength attacks unusable thanks to whatever tricks the demons were using in their territory, killing them was simply not worth the effort, they eventually concluded.

In the end, they cut back towards the swamplands and started to skirt the edges of the massifs, following the water channels along the edges of the reed beds and through the mangroves. There were still ruins here as well, and occasional totems painted in garish colours, decorated with trophies, but they met no demons or much of anything else in fact. The wetlands were eerily quiet in the hot wind and humid, tropical rain.

As they went on she became aware of something else as well, an ethereal presence out in the wetlands that she couldn't pin down with her soul sense, hidden in the rain and mists. Something about it made her skin crawl, and no matter how they hid their presence with ‘Empty Eye Steps’, their mantra and even the symbol, it never really went away.

They continued on for almost two days, feeling the nudging instinct that something was following them – always just outside of their perception range and just able to avoid their soul sense somehow. The rain stopped as did the thunder which was welcome at least. However, before long the qi-sapping mists that swirled above started to drop down towards the reed beds and mangroves, and the mist walls in the swamp to their south began to thicken concerningly. Soon it was at a point where running more than a dozen metres above the ground was impossible without expending more qi than they gained.

“Whatever it is that’s following us must be able to manipulate these mists a bit…” she muttered as they were pushed down below the height of the mangrove trees. Any higher than that and its drain was strong enough to affect the qi within her body that she had already absorbed but not yet infused with Intent or soul strength.

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

“I think there is actually a void of qi up there somehow,” her sister signed after a few more minutes as they were forced even lower.

Frowning, she headed upwards and sure enough, reaching a height of about 200 metres, she found even her ability to walk in the air foundering inexplicably. Running there for ten seconds she had to drop down to 170 metres then 160 as it rapidly fell away.

“You’re right,” she sighed with a scowl, dropping back down beside her a moment later. “Any kind of air walking above a hundred metres is basically impossible now.”

Abruptly, her sister stopped. “Whatever it is, it’s trying to disorientate us.”

She looked around and hissed in surprise. They had unwittingly veered slightly southward, away from the line of mangroves and grassland beyond it that flanked the nearest massif. Exhaling, she suppressed her qi-enhanced senses a bit and went back to more mortal forms of observation. At that point, she could feel the slight disruption that was occurring in how she perceived the landscape. It was like a constant sense of being led on by something you couldn’t quite grasp.

Cutting back towards the massif and the mangroves that bordered it, she watched as the mists crept lower and lower.

“There is another wave coming in from the southeast,” her sister signed, alerting her to the invisible white wall that was rapidly falling down behind them.

“-Monkeyshit!” she signed back, and sped up.

It caught up with them within a few seconds and as soon as it washed over them she felt the cost of using her movement art to skip across the top of the reeds increase by almost fivefold. A moment later, the void in the air above them dropped over the reed beds like an invisible blanket, forcing them to stand on the water surface as the mist flowed above and around them.

Within a few more seconds, their visibility was completely cut off. At the same time, she found her ability to control the qi outside her body begin to slowly dissipate. As they flitted on through the reeds towards the mangroves, the creepy sense of being ‘watched’ also began to ramp up ominously.

“Aiee-!” her sister hissed suddenly and nearly slipped into the water.

A fraction of a heartbeat later the void above dropped down to the ground, making running on the water impossible. She had to leap smartly, grabbing Sana by the arm and landing on the massif side of the wide, reed-clogged, slow-flowing channel they had been following to avoid being dunked in the water embarrassingly.

“How odd…” her sister signed. “I can still draw some qi out of the air and the land, but even with Intent my ability to control it is almost non-existent outside of my own body’s field…”

She nodded. The pressure from above was now quite noticeable.

“Fortunately we are on the right side of the channel,” she signed. This was going to be trouble.

“We should have…” her sister sighed and trailed off.

“Something has been messing with our heads, without the symbol ever realising it,” she said, reaching the same conclusion.

“Yes, this degree of environmental control…” her sister muttered.

She frowned, looking at the smooth flowing surface. The rustling reeds behind them felt off somehow, like it wasn’t just wind that was responsible for their shifting in the distance. The sensation of being ‘watched’ stepped up subtly and the symbol in her Sea of Knowledge shifted faintly, hiding its presence?

“We break for the massif wall,” her sister signed, her unease clear on her face.

She nodded and her sister slipped into the reed beds, using her Intent to leave barely a trace of disturbance. Following after her, she did the same thing, pushing through the thick, dense reed bed, parting them in natural patterns to slip through. All around them the rustling and hissing of the wind, muted by the mists, provided an eerie backdrop.

In an unnerving way, it reminded her of the thick mists back in the first valley, back when they nearly died to whatever that many-legged black shadow-thing had been. Not the cold, because this was stifling, but the sense of ominous intensification that had come with the mist. As if to punctuate that, the symbol intensified its own sense of concealment, blending them with the mists somehow even as the sense of unease she was feeling kept ramping up.

Crossing the next water channel by carefully swimming under the water, she saw other denizens of the waters hiding. Nothing was active at all now. An ambush crab followed her barely visible eye stalks lying in the mud, but it made no move. The carnivorous fish lurked in the river grass, their bellies flat to the mud, their auras suppressed, visible only because she was good at pattern recognition.

They slipped out of the water in silence. Passing through the next reed bed, they skirted a deep pool where she saw another ambush crab on the far shore, slowly blending into the dirt, its eyes fixed on the direction from which they had come, totally ignoring them.

It was with great relief that they finally found the mangrove bed, passing by cowering wildlife that was hiding for all it was worth. Behind them the reed beds were barely visible in the shifting, rolling curtain of mist. The sense of being ‘hunted’ was close to stifling, like chains around her limbs, as they swiftly made their way between the trees, using every shred of their control over their Intent to make their passage smooth and silent while trying to stick to trees and walk as little in the mud as possible.

They had just passed through them and arrived at the end of the sward of breast-high grass that separated the mangroves from the massif’s vegetated walls when the cessation of all noise rolled over them. The feeling that came with it was subtle, yet ominous, like a wave that had overshot its mark and was about to draw-

She sprinted flat out for the massif wall as something came through the mangrove after them. Her sister kept pace with her, not even breathing now. She had stopped her own heart, puppeting her body with qi and intent, hiding as best she could. Behind them, the passage of the thing through the mangrove was marked only by the sensations that came through the air: shifting earth, shattering trees… All sound was now truly gone from the world, as if dragged away into some other reality.

The tall grasses came up almost to their breasts as they charged through them as fast as they could, using their movement arts now without restraint. Something rolled… no, slid, after them-

The ground underneath her warped into a vast, fanged maw. She was about to curse that this was really not on, when she saw a second maw approaching from the side and a third… somehow, from up front. All around them six serpentine heads shot at the pair of them, closing off every direction. Eyes fixed on her, boring into her mind, eclipsing her psyche and becoming her whole world. They carried a ferocious sealing Intent, trying to paralyse her body and soul simultaneously.

The symbol shifted for the first time since the mists had emerged, shaking it off in the nick of time, even as the serpents’ attack pierced into her Sea of Knowledge inexplicably somehow, clearly intending to disperse it directly.

In the instant she defeated the attack, all the heads snapped together and the giant snake’s maw closed over both of them. A vast inhaling strength grasped her body, trying to draw all her qi, refined and unrefined, out of her body. Desperately, she pushed back with all her strength and Sana’s Intent rolling around her as well, as the snake tried to swallow them both down in a single gulp.

Snarling, she stabbed upwards with the sword even as her sister lashed out with the leaf knife and the snake dissipated. She crashed into the grass, disoriented as the giant snake collapsed around them, turning into a dozen snakes, each body as thick as her, that shot off in every direction.

With a hiss, one shot out of the grass so fast she could barely register it even as it arrived before her. It was impossibly fast, its maw opening to bite her- she had a disturbing moment of clarity as she observed its triple rows of serrated teeth concealed behind a triple set of large fangs as it bit at her.

She cut at the serpent with her sword and her Sundering Intent-

Venom covered her upper body as it recoiled backwards spitting in her face. It stung her limbs, coldness seeping into her, carrying with it a vicious devouring, dispersive strength that tried to eat away at her qi, seize her body and turn it against her. Her sword strike met the horn on its nose and it collected the momentum with a smooth flick of its head, throwing her backwards into the grass.

-No you don’t! She hissed in her head; it was trying to split them up, almost certainly.

Another shot out into what it perceived as a blind spot, its maw opening to bite her torso. She twisted in the air and cut down with her Intent directly this time, no qi involved. Her Intent scattered off its hide while the sword blade itself cut scales. The impact of her attack did little damage, but did flatten it awkwardly into the ground, making it break a few teeth as it snapped shut on noth-

Something arrived out of the mist, two tails she realised, as her Nascent Soul moved with a speed that could only be instinctual, parrying one while she barely got the sword between her and the other. She experienced a gut-wrenching sense of discomfort as her Nascent Soul’s childlike form was turned into mist and reappeared in her dantian by something else. Blood ran from her nose and her vision briefly turned pink from the backlash.

Reforming in her body, she was surprised at how little qi she had actually lost. Her Nascent Soul scowled and stomped a foot, sharing her inner anger quite demonstrably and then gesturing into the void in a way no 12-year-old should ever have sought to emulate.

A silent scream shook everything, making the world judder and distort around her.

-Well done sis! She cheered grimly. Certainly, that was Sana’s doing.

There was the barest warning of disruption – she dodged as fast as she could entering against the attack to cut down its angle, having fought enough spiders and other horrors to know that trick by now. A large snake, maybe twice the size of the last ones shot out of the grass, its horned head gouging for her, intending to ram her directly. Her prescient decision to close the angle caught it off guard slightly, the old metal sword slicing down its side even as its horn hit her in the side. Her mantra shifted, trying to endure the damage while she desperately ignored just how much of her side was now plastered over its horn. The blood of the serpent smoked on the blade even as it split the scales.

The snake scooted sideways in a nearly impossible motion, managing to avoid anything more than a light scratch which was already healing. Lunging after it, she managed to stab it properly this time, before being thrown away by its body shifting, leaving the sword stuck in it.

Crashing down into the damp grass, a dozen smaller snakes, each several metres long, exploded out of the grass from every side, lunging for different parts of her.

Inhaling, she converted a fifth of her total qi into a five symbol array: Yang Lightning, Focus, Detonate, Isolate and Penetrate. Silently, the lightning flayed the smaller serpents into bloody chunks. The grass vanished in a swirling mist of glowing sparks and the ground smoked all around her. The large serpent, still with her sword stuck in it, moved so fast she thought it had teleported, shifting backwards; however, it still wasn’t fast enough. The lightning landed on her sword, creating a link between the array and the serpent, outlining it like some burning candle in the mists. For a split second, she swore she could see bones as its skin turned translucent while it writhed, howling soundlessly, as waves of something hammered at everything around them.

Another array, Sana’s, triggered in the distance – the mist’s density deepened immensely, exuding an ominous sense of sharpness as it did so. The large serpent that was attacking her was caught on the edge of it, having lost a huge swathe of scales and started to bleed smoking blood over the ruined ground. Staggering up, she charged for it, amassing Intent-infused qi in her body as she drew a spear blade and the short sword.

Its head snapped around and enlarged – she was suddenly faced with a snake maw three times the size it had been a second before, snapping down on her directly. She swept her sword upwards, trying to exploit its restrained position and watched as its head split into two heads. Both heads blurred out of the way, avoiding her strikes in an utterly improbable manner and bit her directly.

She stabbed one behind the eye with her short sword, which was probably all that saved her from being torn in two as it flinched. With the spear blade, she tried to stab the second head in the eye. The bait worked because it split its heads a second time only to eat a full nova of her Sundering Qi into its smaller, weaker heads which had to split a third time to evade the worst of it. At the same time, she rammed the short sword up to its hilt. The way it spasmed suggested that she had gotten the-

The nine heads remerged into one, the larger, brain-damaged head melting away into a bloody mist that re-joined the whole with no other apparent ill effect…

“…”

-Monkeyshit, is it an eight-star monster? She thought dully.

-This degree of physical regeneration and body control is just…

-But why isn’t it-?

She got the answer to the question ‘why isn’t it using its Immortal Soul’ before she even finished articulating the thought. Something in the eye of the horned serpent sank into her Sea of Knowledge, freezing her in place both mentally and physically. The symbol shifted and shattered apart the bonds on her psyche; however, it could do nothing for her body as the snake turned its head sideways and bit her torso, hammering her into the ground.

The pain was… Venom surged through her body as it crushed her flesh and tried to draw out all the qi inside her. Her mantra struggled but the shock was just too-

She surged out of her dantian even as her physical body collapsed, striking into the creature’s brain with a sword formed of her own Intent. In that instant, the red thread, which had been previously orbiting her Golden Core, flowed into her Nascent Soul. Immediately she was struck with an almost instinctual sense that she needed to cut something with it. Part of it was a rejection of the moment itself, a sense of fundamental denial, for her body had nearly been bitten in half – and she was not going to die like this; the rest of it was a desperate desire to cripple this fate-thrashed serpent properly.

The snake didn’t even howl – it just twitched and collapsed. The thread slid back into her Nascent Soul and her Nascent Soul flowed back into her body. A second later, the large serpent’s whole body turned into bloody mist and flowed away, in the direction of her sister’s own battle…

She spent several terrible moments of helplessness while her body ‘healed’ enough for her to get up, panicking as much about Sana’s battle as her own condition. Her mantra was still not behaving right either, spinning aimlessly as if something were confusing it.

-That is not the way I wanted to comprehend the meaning of ‘if the soul lives, the body can recover’, she thought with a shudder, getting her condition under control at last.

The thread, which she was certain had saved her life in the course of that auspiciously timed intervention was now floating around the shoulders of her Nascent Soul. It was frayed at one end where she was sure it hadn’t been before. Whatever that had been by way of an attack, it was clearly something that was deeply damaging to it. The sense that had accompanied what the thread had been done was so… absolute as to be almost inconceivable. She tried to remember the feeling that had accompanied it; it wasn’t really ‘sundering’, but more like… a demonstrable strike that had split this and that in some fundamental way?

There was a terrible boom in the distance and then a sheet of fire swept through the mist. It turned the grass, such as remained around her, to ash and seared the skin off her muscle even as she wielded her Sundering Intent and whatever qi she had at her disposal to try to keep herself safe.

-Not Sana’s fire, the snake’s.

She flailed and found the long sword without really thinking about it. Her Nascent Soul raged, adding that it hoped the serpent was ‘sexually violated by monkeys’, leading her to wonder where it was getting its attitude from… she had not been that precocious at that age.

The fire sank into her body even as she stumbled through it, and her Nascent Soul’s rage turned somewhat incandescent as it took damage at the same rate her body did. Lacerating waves of agony swept through her body as her mantra struggled to cope with taking away all of it. Why it wasn’t so effective at taking away pain she wasn’t sure, but it was exceptionally bad timing on its part.

“Fate-thrashed thing!” she snarled, cutting with the sword.

Her Intent managed to split a path through the flames and she dashed towards-

Something shot out of the fields of fire, breaking her path: another snake, just as large as the one she had killed. Its eyes fixed on her and the freezing came again but she was ready this time, the symbol already moving to neutralise the attack when it came. It recoiled away as her blade gouged its jaw, breaking a few teeth-

The tail descended out of nowhere, hitting her in the chest and punching straight through her as if she were made of wet paper, pinning her to the ground. The horned serpent loomed over her and exhaled a sheet of lightning at her. Instinctively, her Nascent Soul projected an array that was just ‘Divide’ and ‘Isolate’, its form growing fuzzy as it expended its own qi. The lightning still got her, but the damage was reduced by at least two-thirds, she reckoned.

It withdrew its tail and reared up, striking down at her even as she struggled to recover enough to dodge a dozen metres to the side.

It made no difference.

There was no avoiding it.

It somehow still found her and smashed her into the ground.

Her bones broke, her muscles tore, her organs ruptured and her lifeblood flowed away into the earth.

She abandoned her ruined body, striking out with everything she had, dragging the physical sword up in her tiny hands. It was like a great weapon now, only wieldable with two hands… and the weight of it seemed somehow… greater. She avoided looking at her ruined, shattered body as she levelled the sword at it.

The serpent smiled and suddenly spoke.

“Wonderful. You finally left that annoying cage…You are such an… interesting specimen of a Human primate... I have not seen a mortal physique that could be considered… prey… since before this place fell… How opportune to be able to take this accumulation and weld it to my own.”

The words ate into her, constricting her, piercing her spiritual form and pinning her in place as they turned the mists into a swirling sea of disruption that tore at her qi and her soul’s strength. She gathered her Sundering Intent as best she could, desperately rejecting the cold words that carried with them a most inauspicious sense of inevitability and demise.

There was a detonation in the distance – an earth-shaking explosion that was somehow muffled by the fog, accompanied by a sense of space starting to distort faintly.

“The other is better than you are…. Haa… but my other two heads will see her devoured as well… Two such gifts… truly wonderful.”

Even as the words cut away at her, she thought of that strike, trying to recall exactly how Elaria had executed it. It had seemed so normal at the time, too normal in fact. Her intuition told her abruptly that it was nothing to do with the movement.

‘You can cut anything… it’s just a state of mind.’ She watched Elaria, stood on the beach with a group of five others, split the rock by slicing down at it with a piece of driftwood. She had assumed at the time it was a Qi Art, how naïve.

Breathing hard, she focused on resisting the slowly constricting mists that were grinding away at her Nascent Soul.

-If the Intent of the mind is to cut…then ‘Cut’.

-To sever… then ‘Sever’.

-To sunder? Then ‘Sunder’?

-No, she shook her mind, cursing it and her own inability.

-What I want is to sunder this wretched, fate-thrashed thing from its vitality so it will actually die… but…

The constricting mist finally wore through the shield of her Sundering Intent and the snake shifted towards her somehow. She saw its spirit form flicker out of its mouth… out of its real form, behind the current one, in the mists, for the first time.

She cut, and prayed – and groaned as the spiritual body ate up her strike and arrived in front of her without-

It looked as confused as she was as its physical body, behind the very real looking Immortal Soul that had spoken to her, was bisected clean through its skull, its core exposed completely, the red-gold thread slipping like a miniature serpent back off the blade of her sword, looking even more tattered.

“…”

The snake turned, and its Immortal Soul dispersed bizarrely even as it tried to lunge towards her, but she wasn’t fooled by the feint and dashed towards its body. It would be nice to think that it hadn’t been expecting such a thing. It was presumably an Immortal realm monster; the idea that some mere Nascent Soul it had decided to hunt down because it had a tasty physique could pose such a threat to its life could actually temporarily incapacitate it.

It flowed back into its body and puppeted it, but it was still a hair too late. Her Nascent Soul’s tiny hand touched its core and she pushed her Sundering Intent into it along with her pure Myriad Elements Qi. The snake’s body shuddered, trying to move its own qi in response to her attack, but she had made enough headway in that brief instant before its consciousness reasserted itself to give the symbol all the head start it needed. The symbol in her Sea of Knowledge raged, for it was very put out at being called prey, a feeling she could sympathise with. The Immortal Soul of the snake struck back at her, only to encounter the transformative fury of her Intent. She had a brief, strange moment of double vision and then, with a horrified scream, the serpent’s consciousness dissipated directly.

Qi, now lacking any kind of constraint or control, rolled out of the corpse and the core, and ‘Immortal’ soul energy poured into her Nascent Soul like a torrent. She felt her being grow fuzzy under the strain even with the help of the symbol and her Sundering Intent. With it came tattered scraps of death lurking amid the torrent – the vestigial consciousness of the serpent. Crippled and dispersed it might be, but it was still an Immortal. She knew in her heart that when they dispersed the Spider Queen’s consciousness, all the hard work had been done by the Eldritch Moon Mushrooms.

Their war changed scenes as the Immortal Serpent clawed bits of itself back together, drawing on the connection with the rest of itself. She was inside its core, she realised, inside its world. A terrible and dark place, full of mists that rolled, trying to consume her. The symbol blazed on her forehead like a third eye and the red-gold thread swirled around her, cutting passively at the mist, dispersing it even as it tried to overwhelm her.

Shards of the serpent’s consciousness assailed her – if anything, it was a threat as great and terrifying as those that arrived at the very end of her tribulation. Every strike she executed tested her resolve as she cut them down, devoured them, refined them and refused to succumb. She had no concept of how long she fought – she sought out shards even as they desperately sought out her. The thread defended her even as it grew ever more tattered, while the Symbol shattered every shard she subdued. Barely sustaining herself, she managed to stay ahead of them – of the hundreds, thousands of insane, furious, desperate, hungering serpents swirling around her, determined to consume her and avert their own calamity. Just as she was determined to avert hers. Her actions were a soul attack in their own right; she knew, intuitively, that this was causing terrible pain to the other heads trying to attack Sana.

Almost as abruptly as the fight began, it ended. There were no more shards to fight. There was no scream, no final hiss, no last words – the dark, devouring, misty world just collapsed around her and she was back in the grassland, floating above the skull of the serpent. The core was now dull and cracked, its multi-hued, crystalline sheen of before now frosted and fading. She drew it into her soul sea, letting it fall and become part of the ecosystem developing there even as she returned to her body, which her senses were telling her was in a lot of trouble.

Her bones knit together slowly and her organs repaired themselves even as she paid as much attention to her surroundings as she could. There was another dull thump and a second manifestation of a fearful twisting force.

Suddenly a huge serpent head loomed out of the mists over her. In desperation she struck out with her Nascent Soul, sending as much Intent to pierce at its core as she could manage. The serpent grinned and effortlessly shifted aside, even as its own soul form blocked the attack.

That surprised her for a second... does it not know what had just happened to the other head?

-Or does it just not…

Something locked her soul down entirely, stopping even her conscious thoughts, leaving her with a bizarre and inexplicable sense of double awareness – for a brief moment, she was both thinking and a bit annoyed at this little serpent and also totally unable to think. The constraint on the frozen part of her consciousness shivered, and the cage that held all of her in place shook faintly. The serpent… serpents… paused and laughed at her before turning back to pry open her barely alive body. The soul attack they were orchestrating didn’t touch the symbol or anything to do with it; in fact, it scrupulously avoided the slightest bit of contact with her soul. Instead, it flowed around her body and started to tear apart her navel, slowly dragging out her Golden Core directly.

She tried to move her mantra to stop it - but to her utter shock it just circulated unable to gain purchase on anything, because, just like her soul, the Serpent’s smaller soul strength clones were not touching anything to do with her qi either. They… It was simply drawing her core out of her body somehow in a way that didn’t interact with anything that would allow the mantra to get a grasp on it and stop it…

Rage consumed her as much as fear and she abruptly found she could bury neither of those destabilising things in the mantra either. It was somewhat beyond her expectations how deep that well was, even in this strange, divided state. Every little bit of grievance up to this point, from beginning to end, culminating at a singular point – she was absolutely not going to be devoured by some nameless accursed little snake!

Her soul form shook in place once again as she tried unsuccessfully to properly shake off the constraint on her other, frozen half... and realised abruptly that she was going about it all wrong. She had soul force to burn, literally, and while her consciousness seemed to be frozen, it was only the consciousness within her physical body from what she could tell. Thoughts re-established themselves in a more coherent manner and her sense of dissociation from her own self vanished as she abandoned worrying about her physical body, basically confirming her suspicion that she had been doing a pointless thing. Several of the serpents broke off from swirling through her body and went back to the large serpent’s spiritual form that was sustaining the ‘cage’ around the disparate parts of her strength. She punched the same point she had been hammering, and there was a faint *Kacha* sensation as the ‘sword’ her soul was wielding tore through the cage and then the soul form of the serpent, dispersing it and making the snake recoil.

It surged up to its full height, and then a spear sprouted out of the top of its head as her sister crashed down onto it with a silent howl of rage. Her strike impaled its skull to the ground, splitting its head open courtesy of the strange metal of the spear blade.

She arrived at the wound and shoved her Nascent Soul hand into it, looking for the core by the base of its spine. Tearing into it, she didn’t even wait for the fragments to come to her, she just struck randomly into the mist with every shred of her Sundering Intent she could muster and was rewarded with a shocked shriek. A giant serpent blurred out of the shadowy fog and towered over her.

“How dare-!”

The symbol reflected straight at it somehow, and for the first time she got to watch it work from inside a core. The serpent’s eyes seemed to mirror it for a bizarre moment and then it ripped through the soul form like a terrible curse. Everything it touched crumbled and became her qi. The serpent itself splintered into thousands of shards, like a broken window.

-Oh, monkeyshit, she had just enough time to realise she might have done a remarkably stupid thing by coming in here before the Symbol had really done its thing as they raged towards her.

Her first strike with her own Sundering Intent swept dozens away, but hundreds hit her, making her mind grow fuzzy-

The serpent’s own form emerged in her Sea of Knowledge somehow, reforming to meet the Symbol on the other side. The serpent shards opened their collective maw, and closed on nothing. The symbol shifted away in a bizarre manner, deflecting, twisting and obscuring the oncoming attack, all the while never allowing the serpent to gain any ground on it at all.

“Impossible… this is?”

The serpent’s voice was weak… incredulous, as its attack broke over her with as much impact as a single wave on a granite cliff.

“You think I am that easy to gnaw, beast?” she screamed back at it, her panic from the moment before transforming straight into an incandescent desire for revenge.

It's Intent crumbled under her renewed onslaught as she plundered soul strength from its core and made it her own. She felt its consciousness dissipate for a second then blur back with a terrible vengeance. In a moment of embarrassed epiphany, she remembered that arrays were usable somehow in these places and promptly summoned a Yin Lightning Array inside its core.

“What… no… you…!”

The serpent’s horrified wail vanished with the last remnants of its soul form.

“I will definitely remember to do that next time,” she muttered to herself as she withdrew back to her own body for a second time.

The pain was beyond regret. The injuries from the snake trying to tear open her flesh to get at her core were healed, but her qi was dangerously low and the combined trauma to her body was as bad as anything she could conceivably recall.

Groaning she tried to sit up and found Sana kneeling beside her.

“Keep lying still! I have some qi to spare...”

All she could do was nod. Her vocal cords weren’t healed yet from where a serpent had tried to tear open her throat.

“Shit…” Sana sniffed... “This is crazy, I’m….”

She reached up weakly and shut her up by putting her hand over her mouth…

“We….survived...” she signed weakly, following it with “and no thanks to the fates, who can go get stuffed.”

While her sister supplied her qi to heal her physical body, she shifted her attention back to her dantian. Her Nascent Soul was flitting around directing qi like a stern teacher, pointing this way and that. That wasn’t what was remarkable though – her Nascent Soul was older. She no longer looked 12 years old, but much closer to 14. A bit taller… a bit more developed – a bit sullen-looking actually, although that could just be the moment they were in. It did make her wonder, somewhat irrationally, if she had perhaps actually looked as moody as a 14-year-old. It had been a rather shit period in their short life to this point: between the aftermath of their mother’s passing, the Ruan Clan’s actions after it and their rapid progression through the ranks of the Hunter Pavilion, there had been little to enjoy in those years.

Refocusing on their surroundings, she saw that the mists were slowly fading away to reveal the storm-lit sky once more as she lay there getting healed up by Sana and her own Nascent Soul. It was a weird feeling, and after 30 minutes, she was deeply relieved that she was intact enough to draw her own qi in from their surroundings. Now that the devouring mists were gone she found she could recover it easily and was healed enough to stand within ten cycles.

“Was that one eight star monster or three?” she groaned as she sat up.

“I think it was just one…” her sister muttered. “What kind of self-respecting eight-star monster bothers to come and hunt down a bunch of Nascent Souls; we can't be much better than the crabs or a spider.”

All she could do was laugh, weakly, at that.

“The first one I killed said it wanted to refine our Mortal Physiques, and also said something about seizing our accumulation and ‘welding it to its own’,” she said when she had finally collected herself. “That somewhat enraged the symbol actually…”

“Oh… was that what that was…” her sister said, giving her a weird look. “My symbol went monkey-nuts about the time you planted the lightning array.”

Standing, she winced and moved her arms about. It was a weird feeling, to have a memory that the two halves of your body had very nearly been ripped apart. Making her way over to the corpse, she found that its core had totally dissipated, which was unfortunate, but expected, given she had used Yin Lightning inside it. Apparently, that method was not without its disadvantages.

“How did you kill the other one?” she asked, leaning against it. “I only managed to get the first one because it was overconfident, cutting its skull open by surprise and fighting inside its Sea of Knowledge directly thanks to the Symbol.”

“I managed to reach small success in the spear form… I think,” her sister said looking a bit embarrassed. “Then I hit it with a mist and lightning array several times.”

-Oh, the explosions, she recalled vaguely.

“I think I finished it off with a Yin Earth Array, but it was a bit of a blur. Something else happened as well that got it distracted. It got me enough time to carve open its skull with the leaf. That slowed it, but then it got suddenly distracted again and tried to come over here which gave me an opening to sever its head. That body then merged with this one and shot over here like it was being chased by a demon from hell…”

“Well at least my near brush with my own mortality had some tangible benefit other than getting me in touch with my own seething inner rage at a much more fundamental level…” she said with a weak giggle.

“Such are the opportunities we make for ourselves,” Sana said sagaciously.

“Yes,” she agreed with an eye roll.

Sana made her way back over to the severed head of the first serpent and levered out the core. It was dim and flickering, qi draining out of it into the surroundings. For an Immortal-ranked Beast Core, it was a sorry thing indeed. Sighing, her sister sat down and refined it without comment. The whole process took about five rather nervous minutes, but eventually, the last glimmers faded from it and it shattered into pieces before being drawn away into her sister’s body.

“I know I swore I’d wear that damn rat’s skull as a hat… and that other Spider Queen cheated me out of that, but this thing… I am so turning this thing into a proper cloak or something,” she muttered, turning to look at the corpse she was leaning against.

As ideas went, it was actually not a terrible one, she had to concede after a few moments’ consideration. The short sword turned out to be quite up to the task and soon she had a three-metre by one and a half-metre piece of hide stripped off it. The skin was remarkably durable even in its current state. Cleaning it also turned out to be easier than she expected: due to the realm of the beast, it was easy to scrape off the worst of the blood and fat from it with her Sundering Intent without damaging it.

Measuring it up, she cut a hole in the right place for her head and shrugged off what remained of her current garb, bar the Luss cloth skirt, and pulled the skin over her head, tying it around her waist and beneath her breasts. It came down to just below her knees and was easy enough to move around in. It also took her qi, which was a nice bonus. She replaced the other bits of armour that had survived the Yin Fire with parts from the serpent also. Sana followed suit with the leaf blade and cleaned up the hide as well because that turned out to be just easier.

After that, they cut off some other bits to line bracers, shin guards and then make some belts and crude boots. The rest of the hide, such as they could manage, was cut into two-metre by one-metre lengths and rolled up. Where that was impractical, they just cut it into strips to make some ropes and a few scabbards for the various blades and finally a second carry sack apiece.

“It is surprisingly tasteful looking,” her sister said, admiring the whitish-grey colour of the skin with its red and gold bands.

As a final act, they cut off the twin horns and cut them up with the leaf to make proper armour plates for their shin guards and armguards as well as forehead protectors with some short horns on them. The overall effect was pretty fearsome she felt, when all was said and done.

“I’d give up so much right now for a proper storage talisman” Sana sighed, kicking the corpse again.

Speculatively, she tried to absorb the flesh directly, but it went nowhere. The bones were similarly impossible and if they had not acquired metal weapons by this point she might have been tempted to try to make weapons of them. However, snake bone was not particularly dense and it would take a long time to make armour from it. Time she was pretty sure they didn’t have. Beyond that, they simply had no way to carry it with them. She nibbled on a bit of the meat speculatively, but it was so dense as to be inedible; her teeth might as well have been grinding on polished stone.

“No point in bringing any of this with us either,” she sighed, spitting it out.

It was a bit of a waste, but they had no means to process it easily and it would be impossible to keep hidden or suppressed at their current realm. Speculatively, she tried to put an Isolate Array on a chunk, but it didn’t do anything, presumably needing something more along with that. In any case, she had no inclination towards carrying around several dozen kilos of inedible meat for fates knew how long.

“Yeah,” her sister agreed, giving some of the flesh a poke.

In the end, they used the Flame Blast art from the tome on each of the bodies and combusted them directly, letting them char and smoulder away in the hope that it might deny the bounty to any others at least.

That done, they made a quick check of the surroundings for any other cores, which turned out to be fruitless. The few corpses they found were totally drained of qi, presumably thanks to the mists. In the end, all they could do was make their way hurriedly across the grassland towards the edge of the massif, leaving the smoking ruin of a battle site behind them.

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~ HUNTER KARUSH, NEARBY MASSIF ~

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Hunter Karush watched the two depart from the scene of their titanic battle against one of the serpentine devourers from his vantage point on the top of a great pillar. Several of his younger brethren had suggested they go down and attack the two females of the unknown tribe and take them back to the tribe as claimed. He had put the boot to them and they were sleeping off their stupidity soundly behind him.

“Children with no eyes,” he chuckled.

Those two had overcome a Neonate, a progeny of Shussu, advancements higher than they were. Their strategy was naïve and their age was slight from what he could see, but their strength was undeniable. It was also strange in ways that his eyes could not see clearly.

They were at the very least the Shamaness's of some distant tribe, but he had a suspicion they might be something more. Something much more ominous, a thing of the tales of the old shamans and the wise elder who had once walked the plains far above. Several times in the past year, their shaman had pronounced a time of change, when the great curse that gripped this land would be shaken, and that this would occur in the east, in the Defiled Lands.

Those two both carried metal weapons made of Star Iron and used God Runes - with their dark hair and tan skin they were either from the far western lands, there a few of their most ancient people still lingered, warring with the Jash'Grai and the D'Varard. As best he could hazard, these two had likely journeyed from there, making this trip to prove themselves. Just as their ancient forbears, children of the ancient Tribe of Ur'Khal, and Ur'Sar, shaped in the old world - from the mud of Great Aranzah had walked forth to do great deeds to claim their mantles. Unfortunately, there was no way to know if they venerated the 'Maker' and his primordial daughters, like they did or were still beholden to the dark destroyer, the 'Name Breaker'. Adherents of both fought in those far lands beyond the dark waters and the City of the Unspeakable Evil.

He looked back at the unconscious fate-seekers, shaking his head. “Certainly, there might be much ‘honour’ in claiming them, but you do not understand what it is they used, idiots… or where they likely came from...”

“Hunter Karush?” one of the other watchers, from up above dropped down beside him.

“Do we pursue?”

“No, let them go. They are not interested in us I think,” he said. “And besides, you want to fight those two… capture those two, who killed a tyrant who has ruled over that stretch of muddy grass out there since before this place… well, since before our ancestors came to this patch of our underground prison?”

“They will be unhappy,” Hunter Yazor shrugged, glancing at the young tribal warriors.

“They will have their lives; they will have to learn an old man’s contentment at some point,” he cackled.

“Anyway, they are too dangerous, they know the Runes of the Gods and have comprehended them to a degree that is comparable to our tribal shamans.”

“The shamans would reward us well if we…”

“While that is true, Yazor, you are more experienced than that,” he said, giving the younger warrior a clip on the shoulder that made him wince and bow his head in apology.

“Great Hunter, I was overeager.”

“A Hunter does not apologise,” he grunted and punched the other one properly, sending him sprawling. “Learn from your mistakes and do not make them a second time; this is a luxury most do not get.

“Yes, the shamans would reward us well, but those two wield the runes as well as any who have gone east to the great complexes and returned… sane. Your eyes are young and your strength infirm, but I saw them wield them in the mists. Do you think you would live against two like that, who used the Runes of the Most Ancient Gods like we might throw punches? Honour is good, but with a long life you can have a lot of honour and many wives. With a short life, people will say you lived brightly, but those are just the words of other people.”

“It is as you say, Great Hunter,” the younger Hunter nodded, walking over to the others and beginning to kick them back to wakefulness.

"Not to mention that anyone trying to forcibly carry off a Shamaness, let alone a pair of them would never be able to sleep safely again in their company," he added for extra emphasis.

It was much better to let them pass quietly and remain largely unobserved. When a suitable length of time had passed, he would tell the Warmaster of the tribe and the Chief, and by then these idiots and others would not be able to go haring after them with blazing eyes and disaster in their hearts.

The elders would be displeased if dozens of third and fourth advancement young warriors all got themselves killed because they wanted to do something as stupid as play around with those two…both of whom had eyes he had only seen on those who walked out of the darkness in the east - and berserkers looking for an excuse to snap.

He observed the two vanish swiftly into the misty haze.

“They are already gone?” Yazor asked, arriving to stand beside him once again.

“Yes, they have great walking strength,” he nodded. “If it were not for the Neonate's ability to shape the world according to its hunger, they would never have gotten caught like that.”

They sat there in silence while the others behind groaned and stirred. It was only once he was sure the pair were well on their way that he did pull out a set of pipes and send a piercing call that echoed mysteriously on the wind. A few moments later it was met with another, much more distant one. Gatherers would come to reap the benefits of this. The harvest of a single, Neonate with three heads, likely at least 6th advancement, was a once in a generation thing.

They had burnt the corpse, presumably to hide their use of god runes, but that was not a huge problem. They had left much of the skin on the other two and the bones were all here, a vast resource of war for generations of tribal warriors in that alone.

“Will other serpents come?” Yazor asked after he put the pipes down.

“Probably," he shrugged - "But not for weeks, or maybe months.”

“It is too close to the edge of their range?” the younger hunter queried, it was not often after all that those of his stature had anything to do with the Neonate Serpents. As soon as they successfully transformed, manifesting multiple heads, they became a thing for Warbands to deal with, or groups of Great Hunters like himself.

“Not as such, the true Neonates have big territories and are very protective of their domains,” he explained, as the serpents were largely avoided unless you ventured beyond the wards that suppressed their powers.

“The nearest ones to the east and south that we know of anyway, are weaker than this one… by a little anyway. They do not have the sentiment of avenging kin as we do; one less old serpent means more for the younger ones, but they will want to be certain it is not a ruse or that the elder Neonate isn't just sleeping off a big meal somewhere. They do not die easily so it is difficult for the others to tell when a serpent has been truly exterminated, rather than just crippled and lying low somewhere."

“In the meantime, we will be able to make some valuable pickings, maybe even get to its nest below the pillar of the old Farlath tribe before others move in,” he added. “We owe all this to those two – don’t you think it would be improper to repay that service by capturing them…”

“…”

“You make a wise point, Great Hunter,” Yazor muttered.

He watched in the distance as the spear-wielding female of the unknown tribe casually executed a 4th advancement serpent that had been subordinate to the one they had previously killed…

-Yes, not messing with those two was a good thing for their tribe right now. A very good thing indeed.