> Of all the monsters of this, or many other worlds, I have had the misfortune to tangle with over the millennia, neonates – those gluttonous devourers who haunt inauspicious waters – are among the most vexatious. Combining a very human avarice with a bestial strength and a blood-borne favour from the heavens themselves, they are also skilled ambushers. They are highly territorial and operate complex hierarchies over their lesser kin, who frequently bow before them in vast numbers. A nine-headed serpent of this brood is a thing so fearsome that even a Dao Ascension cultivator would step sideways from their path, while even those with as few as three or four heads can bring death and destruction well above their means.

Excerpt from ‘The Serpents of Southern Azure’

  ~Author unknown.

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~ SANA & ARAI, SUDDENLY LIKING THE WETLANDS A LOT LESS… ~

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Sana took the lead while her sister recuperated… the fight had taken a lot out of both of them… mentally and physically. Thinking on their near brush with calamity, she was in a foul mood when the Nascent Soul serpent lashed out of the treeline at her, sending out its soul Intent to try to paralyse them both. She impaled it without thinking, the casual Intent to rip it apart that accompanied her strike, splitting it from the jaw downwards halfway along its width. Her qi-infused Intent snared its core and pulled it towards her. She shoved it in her pack and they moved on without comment.

She avoided looking at the high rock outcropping where they had been observed from as they made their way onwards rapidly. At least the demons had had surprising decorum in this matter. She had assumed they would attack, indeed, had felt intents to attack from up there briefly during the dying moments of their battle with the serpent – or serpents – before they vanished.

Instead, she worked on the snakeskin ‘robe’ and other garments she had made as they sped onwards, refining them bit by bit to make sure that it wouldn’t get brittle once it dried out. The refinement art from the pagoda had a few things she was able to attempt, like tempering the material with qi infused with her soul strength and Maelstrom Intent. This turned out to be surprisingly laborious, even by the standards of the refinement art, but was fortunately something her Nascent Soul was able to handle largely on its own while she focused on their surroundings.

Over the next several days they were attacked by quite a few more serpents – varying from four-star ranked Soul Foundation ones all the way to those at the very peak of five star: Nascent Soul serpents who had mastered multiple qi arts. It slowed their progress considerably as the thickness of the mists restricted their ability to do much more than walk across the top of the grassy sward. She had to rely on frequent and repeated feng shui divinations combined with various other crude geomancy tests with sticks, stones and auspicious plants to ensure that they were not getting turned around in weird ways or misled subtly.

It was after one such particularly protracted engagement, when they eventually retreated into a valley between two massif pillars only to find the serpents didn’t follow, that they finally grasped the point of the soul sense suppression. Almost certainly it was intended in the first instance to keep the serpents at bay – anything else was just a happy accident in all likelihood. The smaller, Golden Core strength serpents followed, but all of the ones with soul sense basically abandoned pursuit.

Eventually though, their current cluster of massif ran out and started to twist away to the north, forcing them to cut out into the wetlands once more. Stood on the edge, they stared at the billowing mists which had slowly started to return over the previous day or so. Fortunately, it was just mist so far, and only a hindrance to their qi-enhanced vision, not qi sense or soul sense. Nevertheless, she was still as uneasy as her sister as they struck out into the swamp again, travelling eastwards as fast as they could.

Keeping low to the ground and concealing their presence as best they could, she reckoned they made it maybe five miles before they started to suffer attacks from serpents. This went on for several more miles as the serpents proceeded to probe them, never really engaging and mostly just tried to mislead them until, abruptly, the sense of being ‘watched’ returned.

This time, rather than run, because really there was nowhere to run to, she swept out her soul sense as far as she could, before the mists started to impede it properly.

“It better not be stronger than the last one,” Arai muttered as she swept her own soul sense out, scouring miles and miles of wetland around them.

“Well, if it is, we can only try to retreat back to the massif and try to take our chances with its occupants,” she suggested.

“I rather think they will try to kill us before they kill these things,” her sister grumbled as the hunting soul senses of the serpents recoiled, trying to evade their own sweeps.

It took a surprisingly short time to find their quarry – the serpents were quite cunning, but they occasionally made mistakes in trying to distract them this way and that. By the time the ruined tower and associated lake came into view, the mists had properly started to descend at last. Forced to approach on foot, both of them were struck by a massive soul attack as they got within around 200 metres of it. Fortunately, it was indeed not in the same league as their previous opponent.

This time, they linked and planted down a massive five-symbol Yin Blade Mist array. The silent scream of rage that blotted out all noise repelled all the mist in the vicinity, turning the area for 500 metres around the tower into a storm-lit white dome of mist. It was followed by a second, furious soul attack that made the world blur around them. It was also targeted very specifically at caging them and splitting them apart.

“That’s too fast…” Arai grimaced as they jointly repelled the attack, echoing her own concerns there.

Picturing a Yang Lightning array, she pushed almost half her Intent-infused qi reserves into it, an action which her sister mirrored and planted it on the ground. With a cataclysmic shriek, purplish-blue lightning arced out of the array, seeking out any and all things that it could strike. Dozens of bolts spidered across the tower, surged through the reed beds and then found their way to the deep pool to the left of the ruined tower, striking the two-headed serpent that was, as it turned out, lurking in its depths.

The serpent screamed and desperately tried to exit the now boiling and sparking water. Its body was smoking as serpents of lightning coiled through and around it, interfering with its ability to move properly. Before it could repel the lightning, she charged towards it, wielding the first move of the Heavenly Maelstrom Spear to strike at its left head. Arai followed suit, targeting the right head.

Their strategy was simple, expose its core and then Arai would sunder its life force directly – something her sister had gotten a lot better at in the intervening days. They had suffered inordinately for an understanding of how best to attack these strong serpents in that life or death struggle on the edge of the massif.

-This time, it will only be a life or death struggle for you, stupid snake! She thought in her head as she arrived before it.

Now that it was out of the water, she could see that it was clearly weaker than its compatriot, not genuinely an ‘Immortal’, but probably just a peak Dao Seeking serpent, unless it was hiding its third head somewhere else… It had different colours as well, with deep blue and green shades in its scales.

Her strike landed on the side of its head, her Maelstrom Intent barely slowing its movement enough to allow her spear blade to rend open its skull through sheer momentum. The force of the impact nearly ripped the spear from her grasp and made the wooden shaft twist and crack slightly in her hands. Arai’s physical body tore open the side of the left hand head while her Nascent Soul swirled out of her body, crossing behind the serpent and striking at the wound her spear had opened on the right head.

The serpent howled and tried to divide, but it was a lot slower than the white and red-black three-headed serpent that had ambushed them before. Leaving her spear where it was, she drew the leaf and stabbed into its ‘ear’ just below the serpent’s eye – even as its eye transmitted another massive soul attack at her, trying to paralyse her. Its own Nascent Soul was still injured as far as she could tell, unable to leave its body thanks to the still rampaging Yang Lightning.

Her sister’s Nascent Soul wavered and vanished, entering the core even as the great serpent turned its left head towards her as its necks flowed apart strangely. Leaping towards it, she met its open maw with a downward slice from the leaf that took off its horn and opened up a wicked gash through its jaw, even severing two of its large fangs. In response, the serpent shook its scales and spat a vast swathe of venom all over the area.

The force of the exhalation sent her crashing into the side of the tower, scattering masonry. Below her, a huge swathe of the swamp around them was now smoking faintly. The venom ate into her body, pushing her mantra hard to neutralise it. It was quite a bit stronger than the previous serpent’s venom – in fact, it was possibly the single most venomous substance she had ever been in contact, she realised as she struggled to refine it fast enough for it not to be crippling.

Expecting the serpent to be right on top of her at any second, she focused on it and found it was twitching on the spot, one of its heads looking very uncoordinated.

-Thank you, sis, she thought with a relieved sigh, seeing that Arai’s soul attack had actually borne fruit.

Pulling herself out of the rubble, she used Maelstrom Shifting Steps to travel back to it, grasping at her spear as her own Nascent Soul shot out to strike at the right head while it was distracted. She nearly tore it out, then changed tack and, using the leaf, cut for the point where the two heads were currently joined. Her gamble paid off as her wound revealed two basically linked cores in the process of remerging to try to break her sister’s soul attack.

Its physical body spun, attacking her in a rather uncoordinated fashion, but it was half a second behind her own actions and she had already carved out the core and tossed it into the swamp by the time it snapped down at her with its right head.

Dodging backwards, she narrowly avoided being hit by the flailing tail that lashed across the ruined land surface, obliterating smaller ruins around the tower as it tried to sweep them both away and protected its core. Arai splashed down next to the core and placed a hand on it as the serpent reared up to its full height and finally got enough control over its soul strength to manifest its soul form.

The mirage of the snake evaporated under the massive Yang Lightning array she put down. It nearly emptied her qi reserves, but it was worth it not to have to tangle with the added problems its soul moving outside its body would bring. Arai grabbed her arm and she linked again as Arai put down a Yin Fire array that finished what she had started, turning the serpent in front of them into a giant candle as its physical body shook. It still took almost five more minutes for it to die and they had to pierce both brains and its heart to finish it off completely.

Sat on its head, she finally caught her breath as her sister pried the two halves of the core apart, using her Sundering Intent to finish off the last remnants of the soul shards of the serpent. It was strange to watch the process from the outside, as the core seemed to grow serpentine tentacles in her hands every now and then and she could feel the oppressive, furious rage of the serpent right up until, abruptly, it vanished with no fanfare at all.

“It is hardly an efficient way to kill them,” Arai sighed, sitting down and letting the core drop into the mud with a *Plop*

“Indeed not… but it does prove that we can kill Dao Seeking Qi Beasts at the very least,” she agreed, jumping down beside her and grabbing one half of the core.

“Oh the other hand, it proves that fully powered five symbol arrays are….” she looked around at the ruin they had wrought.

The lake was mostly boiled dry from the Yang Lightning. The Yin Water mist, which the serpent had repelled, had levelled several square miles of reed beds beyond the now collapsed dome and the Yin Fire array was burning like little candles on everything within three quarters of a mile in every direction. Even the tower, which had stood for fates only knew how long, was a melted mess and half demolished.

“Our qi reserves for almost five square miles of utter devastation…” her sister giggled. “It’s certainly an interesting benchmark.”

“Did you notice that using the five symbol arrays is actually making our Sea of Knowledge expand a tiny bit each time as well?” she observed.

“Yeah, that’s kinda handy – albeit utterly impractical to practice in these circumstances,” Arai nodded. "Now if only we could work out how to make them trigger with any kind of range, rather than always having to put down the centre where we are.”

“Preach that Dao,” she muttered in agreement. That aspect of using them was still a lingering annoyance to both of them and a flaw in their wider utility she would give quite a bit to fix at this point.

Clearing the rest of the battlefield didn’t yield that much in the end. The Yang Lightning had obliterated most things below Nascent Soul in their entirety, and the Yin Water blade mist had nearly replicated the feat beyond. She recovered a few cores of water critters and a Nascent Soul crab, but the majority of the haul came from within the tower itself, which turned out to have a large sunken basement and flooded cavern which was the serpent’s lair in all likelihood. From that they got a few rather depleted cores of various swamp critters including a core that might have belonged to Dao Seeking Ambush Crab. Sadly they only had some qi in them and were totally devoid of any soul strength, so they divided them up and absorbed them before leaving before something else came to investigate.

As they ran on, following the edges of the water channels as much as possible, she finished refining the serpent’s core. The soul power from it all flowed into her Sea of Knowledge and became something like unrefined qi, for the first time providing her with a proper estimation of how much her Nascent Soul was capable of eating. It was a disturbingly high amount, which seemed to be offset by the fact that her Nascent Soul needed remarkably pure soul… energy she guessed she should just decide to call it.

More heartening, and a little surprisingly, her Nascent Soul was showing perceptible growth. Like her sister, hers now resembled her teenage self-

She was distracted from investigating her condition by a smaller blue-green serpent, taking after the kind that they had just killed she thought, trying to spit venom at her from a distance of almost a mile away. The droplets of venom covered the distance improbably quickly for something so diffuse, and she easily blocked it with her spear blade. In response she struck at it with her soul sense directly and found to her surprise it was only peak Soul Foundation. She blurred towards it with Shifting Maelstrom steps, covering the distance with a significant consumption of her refined qi and catching it after it had fled only a hundred or so metres, impaling it with the spear. It screamed at her desperately and spat a cloud of miasma that dissolved the surrounding vegetation and made the earth and water smoke.

Pausing to recover its core and refine it, she saw Arai had gotten two more of the ambushers. Her sword strikes were slowly able to eat up distance now if she expended enough qi, just like her movement art. Unfortunately, both of them were lacking in continuous sustain at this point. Her Maelstrom Intent and her sister’s Sundering Intent provided some passive qi replenishment in battle, but neither of them had anywhere near enough to offset the expenditure if they went all out. They could fight at that level for maybe two or three minutes, pushing their movement arts to the limit and attacking with as much force as they could before they would have to retreat. Or they could put down two to three Five Symbol arrays apiece before having to retreat. It still took her about 15 cycles to fully replenish her basic qi reserves with Intent-infused qi.

It was also a little frustrating, she thought as she finished refining the core, that it was difficult to keep track of the exact quantity of qi she had based on the system they had been using before. The numbers had just crept up to be too big again and knocking zeros off it didn’t really work like it had before. The incremental refinement and constant flux between her Intent-infused qi and refined qi also made it tough to keep track of in a truly precise way when her reserves were still growing as they were. Her current reserve was somewhere shy of 50,000 Core units, she reckoned, and the slow expansion in her capacity showed no sign of slowing. If it kept pace with what it had at Golden Core, she expected, then given that it had started somewhere about 30,000 Units, it might finish somewhere about 90 to 100k.

She sighed and swept her soul sense out again, as far as it was able. The mist hindered it frustratingly, as did some of the reed beds to the west, likely another weird spirit variant. The heady days of being able to see eight or nine miles with her sense were gone again it seemed. It had been down to two or three since before they encountered the first serpent-

The sense of being watched, this time from a truly great distance, abruptly reappeared.

A few of the ambush crabs hid even more covertly, and some birds fled. “This is going to be a nuisance, isn’t it,” she grumbled as Arai appeared beside her.

“That’s a huge understatement. I think whatever is spying on us is ahead this time,” Arai agreed.

Pulling out the spear from her serpent, she kicked the corpse away and considered her impressions of this new watcher. “It feels stronger than the last one we fought, similar to the first one we encountered.”

“Still not as powerful as those eyes watching us from within the massif as we were leaving,” she said with a sigh.

“Yeah… still not as powerful as that, but it might be that we just have to brave that massif – or another,” her sister mused, scanning the horizon.

With the mists swirling in the middle distance, massifs were in depressingly short visual supply in every direction.

“It’s hard to shake the feeling that dealing with the dark green-skinned demons in numbers could be even harder than the snakes as well,” she muttered, exhaling and giving her shoulders an exaggerated shrug.

Arai said nothing, and just swiped the mist with a hand, watching it swirl. Another tug appeared, a push from more to their left. Broadly north based on the spear’s explanation of the cardinal directions of this place.

“The centre of the wetlands appears to be to the south…” she said after a while. “I get the feeling that we have been subtly pulled south a good while before we realised it to be honest.”

“Yeah… we encountered nothing in the way of serpents before the city, but the mists were thick almost from the start,” Arai agreed.

They both stared up at the mists swirling above.

“I refuse to believe that all this place has to offer is eight star ranked beasts,” she said after a long pause.

Frowning, she pulled out the small collection of auspicious and inauspicious items she had built up as a crude feng shui divination set. Tossing them on the ground, they looked at the scatter. Another flicker of nudging soul sense came from the north… ish, but in such a way that it could be east if you hadn’t just stared at a divination telling you misfortune was coming from the north.

Her sister threw that divination twice more as she searched in her pack for the set of beast cores she had carved into a set of Jing Ching sticks, used for ‘proper’ divinations, that.

“Yeah, it’s trying to pull us south… that Intent was pushing from the north as well I think,” Arai muttered looking at the results of her own divination.

Spreading out a piece of snakeskin, she rapidly drew the compass needed with her own blood and then cast the sticks.

“Carrying Moon aligns with the Wayward Son and the Gloomy Monkey sits in the east.” her sister said, eyeing how they had fallen.

“Also you have the drunken immortal walking at night,” she pointed out the other alignment that basically said ‘your shit is being confused’.

“My first contact felt more ahead of us… but that would fit if they are trying to confuse us,” her sister mused as she looked around the waterway where she had killed the serpent.

She looked north, then turned to look south, which was apparently the actual north. The clue there was that the north side of the waterway was growing less plants because of the way that the light worked in this place.

“We have been going south rather than east,” she said with a frustrated sigh. “I bet this mist is one giant formation.”

“And you didn’t notice before?” Arai asked a touch reproachfully.

She sighed again and stared at the sky, thinking back on her past divinations. She had only made the Jing Ching sticks after they had fought the serpents after setting off from the last massif, having not found any cores with the right attributes until they started killing serpents more regularly.

“It is what it is. I think we have been mired in this formation in one way or another, likely since we arrived in this wetland. I would bet good spirit stones that it’s not actually possible to easily backtrack.”

She tossed another divination with the Jing Ching sticks and then cut another two of that core for good measure and then tossed it again with a slightly more robust number. The reading was a small magnitude more esoteric, but the gist of it was that east was broadly ‘north-west’. She threw another one and got an inconclusive divination on ‘backtracking’.

“All we can do is try to bait them out,” her sister said at last – “And try to pick a battlefield that is advantageous to us.”

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As they moved off in the new purported direction of east, they both let their soul sense auras shrink a little bit over time. After 30 miles or so of winding waterways, she had let it drop to almost half its current range, feigning being much more oppressed by the mist than she actually was. Abruptly, she snapped it back out to close to three miles and caught four different soul senses trying to slip past them and execute probing nudges pushing them back south.

“Well, it seems they can get careless… Let’s see if we can’t extract a toll on these fate-thrashed bastards.” Arai snickered, vanishing off through the reed beds towards the nearest, strongest signature.

The snake fled with remarkable speed, but it was still weaker than them in real terms, very early Nascent Soul. They overtook it within 20 seconds, even as she felt two somewhat stronger soul senses poke at her from some distance beyond it. Neither was able to do much to them as her sister descended on the snake like a bird of prey from the blue. Her strike landed a moment after, smashing into its head with all her speed and momentum, using the Maelstrom Intent to snare it up, burying what was left of it in the waterway.

Arai shot off after another which was only some hundred metres away, having lagged for some reason, as she carved out the core from behind its cranium. To her surprise though, its body abruptly melted away and flowed into the reeds. She shot after it and arrived just in time to see her sister decapitate the first of two heads on a two-headed peak Nascent Soul strength serpent.

Its soul sense smashed into her, breaking over her with no real effect. Its spiritual form decisively abandoned its body, surging forward to meet them, twisting water into misty blades around it as it did so.

Their Nascent Souls darted out to meet it, battering it back and dispersing it with a furious opening salvo of sword cuts and spear thrusts. Seconds later the battle was over as she found its core and dispersed its consciousness. There was a terrifying roar and a second two-headed serpent flashed out of the reed beds. This one was black and brown with golden markings and thick armour plates across its upper body and spines along its back. It swept up to its full height of maybe ten metres and breathed a sheet of corrosive blueish-purple fire over all three of them.

She swept the worst of it away with her Intent and qi defence. The skin robe held up remarkably well, she was pleased to see. Its coverage was able to support and reduce the burden on her defensive layers of qi substantially.

Twisting the flames out of the way, she advanced towards it with her movement art, stabbing towards the point where she was pretty sure their cores normally resided when they were in their two heads state, only for the second head to-

A coruscating purple bolt of lightning hit her between her breasts and punched her a hundred metres away to crash down into another waterway. Rather than get up, she focused her Intent-infused qi and sacrificed a quarter of it to create five symbol Yang Earth array. The spatial oppression it brought flattened everything within five hundred metres of her like a silent hammer blow. Another attacking two-headed serpent, which she had not even perceived – grey and blue in colour with leaf-looking scales, a broad shovel head and a single horn on each head – was flattened into the ground not twenty metres from her.

Moments later, a second Yang Earth array smashed down and she was also rendered immobile.

-That’s certainly one way to ensure we remain coordinated, she thought wryly.

The snake’s spiritual body flickered out, misty and indistinct amid the conflicting pressure of the two arrays. She waited until it was almost on top of her before deliberately collapsing the Yang Earth array and deploying a five symbol Yin-Yang Lightning array. The crack of white and black lightning twisted through the world around her and dispersed its spiritual body directly. It also inflicted what she could only describe as crippling damage on both snakes, the square mile of reed beds around her and everything else within it that wasn’t her. She got up, her limbs shaking as she rapidly recovered some qi and dashed towards the serpent as fast as she could. Its regeneration was ridiculous, the wounds she had dealt it already knitting back together.

She arrived beside it as it managed to recover enough of its damaged Nascent Soul to strike back at her. She staggered a bit as it tried to solidify the area around her, tearing open a huge gash through its side with the leaf, again offering a prayer of thanks to their past selves who picked the thing up on a whim. The serpent tried to retreat away from her, even as its own Nascent Soul wrestled with her own soul strength. A warning flicker in her peripheral vision made her lash out with the leaf and stab the tail-

The oppression on her surroundings vanished as it tried to flick her far, far away. She barely managed to avoid the strike, thanks to the leaf just being too sharp to get stuck, and in return used her movement art to arrive behind one of its heads. Even as it recovered and turned to face her, she executed one of the strikes from ‘Way of the Harmonious Maelstrom’, knocking it into the ground. Landing on it, she pushed a second, three symbol Yin Lightning array into it, stunning it briefly as she tore out one half of its core.

With a scream, the serpent did something bizarre and its body rippled, the scales on it shuddering. All the qi in the surroundings turned wobbly and chaotic and the serpent’s tail swatted her straight into the ground as she attempted to neutralise whatever it had done with her own Intent. The wound on its left head healed, even as its other head twitched drunkenly and the serpent tried to make its escape.

She skipped after it, burning more precious qi to snare it up in a field of her Intent, slammed down on the back of its head and cut open its neck as well, grasping the core. In a hurry, she tried to refine it directly without shattering its soul foundation, and watched as it was absorbed directly into her dantian. There, her soul immediately charged it down with its own spectral spear and cast the disorientated serpent into the depths of her Qi Sea. There it struggled vainly for a few moments, trying to resist the surging currents of Myriad Elements Qi and Maelstrom Intent before finally being consumed. Much to her surprise, however, a few moments later a small, single-headed serpent swirled out of the currents, a tiny imprint of the symbol in her Sea of Knowledge branded onto it where its own core would have resided. The core itself crumbled into shards and became part of the strata within her Qi Sea.

Shaking her head at that surprising bit of good fortune, she dashed back through the ruined swamp towards the other fight. That serpent seemed to be quite a bit stronger than the one she had just dealt with – Arai had managed to injure one head, but now the serpent was just running away, spitting fire and lightning at her.

-As a strategy it certainly has merit, she snickered, but only when there is one of us!

She focused on the passive disruption that flowed around her body and set it to messing with the fire field’s integrity. It worked much as she had expected, making it less focused on them and greatly increasing the amount of qi that the serpent had to devote to maintaining it, at least until it spat a sheet of lightning in their direction.

There was no blocking or dispersing that, annoyingly. The speed of it was far beyond anything she was capable of tracking, let along dodging. It hurled them both away and she intuitively tried to grasp a little bit of its energy as she cast her spear at it. Unbidden, lightning suffused her qi, carrying the spear with it, burying it in the unarmoured throat of one of the heads.

-You can do that!?! she thought in shock, and then smashed into the ground, spitting blood even as her body finished dispersing the lingering Intent-infused lightning qi from the serpent’s attack.

Staggering up, she dashed back towards the fight as fast as she could, using her old movement art for a moment to buy herself time to recover some much needed-

There was a sense of absence all around her, the ground drifted upwards and she felt her hair stand on end-

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~ ARAI, WETLANDS – GETTING A BIT TIRED OF SERPENTS! ~

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Arai saw the lightning bolt hit Sana and bury her in a crater of disintegrating mud and burnt swamp. Her instinct said that her sister was okay, just a bit stunned – what was surprising was that that had been an actual lightning bolt that the serpent had somehow summoned. It did not help matters that in terms of strength this one was several times more durable than the two-headed serpent they had ambushed by the lake. Twisting away, she dodged its tail swipe, barely, and opened up another large rent between the scales with her sword. She wasn’t so lucky with the next one, as the tail flicked back in mid-air, clipping her in the chest and sending her spinning a hundred metres away as if she were a ball in some child’s game of fetch.

Crashing down, she spat blood and swiftly refined the insidious qi that was trying to invade her body. Checking her qi, she put down a five symbol Yang Earth array, wincing on her sister’s behalf even as the cost of it made her a bit dizzy. Scrambling up, she ran back towards the serpent which was-

The lightning bolt buried her in boiling mud and made her vision go white for a second. Scrambling up, she cursed the thing in her head. It was visible now, flattened once again in the mud, straining against the restraint of the array which was rapidly running out of qi. Its enraged eyes sought her out, trying to injure her soul with a profoundly hypnotic and paralytic Intent. Its own soul form, fuzzy and diffuse under the strain of manifesting in the array, surged towards her, but her own Nascent Soul charged at it fearlessly, cutting at one head and dodging the strike of another, forcing it back.

She arrived at its side and slammed the sword between a gap in its thick scales and sliced upward with her Sundering Intent, sending a wave of Myriad Elements Qi into its body for good measure.

Her strike managed to partially sever its head. She swiftly levered out the core with the sword and used her Sundering Intent to scatter the soul strength within even as she scrambled over to the other side. The beast raged beneath her, rapidly expending what little qi still remained, but there was just too much Sundering Intent for it to save itself from its fate. She cut open the back of its neck and ripped out the core before stabbing its brain up to the hilt of her sword. Even then, its vitality managed to keep it alive, barely.

Sana yelled over: “Don’t cancel them!”

Turning, she saw Sana had pulled herself out of the wreckage of the crater, the blisters and burns of her skin already healing. The serpentskin and much of her armour had held up pretty well though. She was pleasantly surprised herself how durable it was turning out to be and how much that was helping her own qi defence as a result.

“Don’t cancel them…” her sister panted again. “We can imprint them and make the part of our qi ecosystem, just like the others.”

At that point, Sana had to pause and take a few deep breaths. Looking on, she could see ghostly imprints of meridians on her sister’s skin, suggesting a fairly hefty internal injury.

“Fate-thrashed, nameless-sent lightning bolt did a number on some of my basic meridians,” Sana explained with gritted teeth as she focused her Intent on her own body for a moment, and the swirling lines faded away.

While Sana was sorting herself out, she absorbed the core she had left undamaged and watched as the part of the serpent’s soul snarled in triumph and tried to attack her dantian directly. Her Nascent Soul swatted it down into the depths and the symbol combined with her mantra and her Sundering Intent in a strange way, subduing the serpent in a matter of seconds. Curious, she absorbed the other one and a whole host of little serpents swirled out, drew themselves together and tried to repeat the same trick, to no avail. Both pieces of the core were drawn into the depths where it was subsumed and a few seconds later a little twin-headed serpent, imprinted with her own qi and the symbol surfaced. It swam around through the depths for a few moments before arriving at the area where she had clustered most of her spirit herbs. There, it proceeded to explore for a few moments before looking a bit sulky. It took her a moment’s thought to work out what was wrong, then she opened up a small cave under the water in the pillar, its entrance beneath the water. The serpent swirled around then went into it, taking up residence within it happily.

“Huh…” was all she managed… The scene was too bizarre.

“Quite…” Sana nodded. “I only found out by accident, pretty much.”

Sana walked over and retrieved her spear, checking it for damage… the wooden shaft had held up pretty well it seemed, only a little bit charred by whatever it was her sister had done with the lightning… She checked her own sword but it was unharmed. Whatever metal it was made out of, it was remarkably durable.

“You know… these armour plates are almost as tough as the bone we got in the Undren warehouse…” Sana noted, prying one off the now properly dead serpent. “They are of a decent enough size that we could make something of the smaller ones.”

“True… but I don’t fancy being sat here for the hours and hours it will take to add bits to our armour in a proper manner… I guess we can take as many as we can comfortably carry,” she found herself saying, trying to hide the tiredness in her tone.

“Or we go looking for another nine-star grade spirit tree,” Sana joked, shaking her spear to check that the charring was merely superficial.

Shaking her head at the preposterous nature of that thought – they had been lucky to find the one they did after all – she started to carefully cut off scales with the leaf knife. While she worked, her sister went off to collect the other casualties of this skirmish. Her own soul sense told her that that was mainly crab cores and fish, dead to the Yang Lightning that hadn’t been vaporised by some minor miracle.

By the time Sana returned, she had a decent-sized snakeskin sack of scales stacked up. She had also discovered a bed of pseudo eight-star pond herbage in the ruins of lake that was stringy enough that it might actually be useful to bind them together. With a final look around, they swiftly made their way onwards towards the east.

She was pleased to see that the mists stayed weaker as they travelled on, swirling like low clouds for the most part. The nature of the wetlands did, however, slowly start to shift: the vitality of the land became faded, the feng shui of the landscape ever more Yin, the spirit plants more aggressive and the waters in the channels less clear. At least the mist didn’t drop back down to blot out the horizon. That would, she reflected as they made their way over swathes of spikey and poisonous mangrove, not help the local ambience at all.

Eventually, after several more hours of rapid onward travel, they arrived at a scattered series of massif pillars that held a wide swathe of ruins scattered across the reed beds, waterways and lake shores and on the outcroppings themselves. Tangled and overgrown, illuminated by the strange diffuse half-light that never varied, even when the mist was at its most extreme and the visibility at its most muted, the place had a timeless feeling to it.

“You know, there have been suspiciously few serpents since we hit this region…” Sana said softly as they walked over one of the ruined estates half-sunk into a shallow lake.

She glanced at Sana, masking a frown. That was the first thing she had said pretty much since they left the battlefield with the serpents.

“With any luck, we made enough of an impression that they have just decided to leave us alone…” she suggested, not really believing it in truth.

“Perhaps…” her sister didn’t comment further and just stood silently in the air beside her, looking down over the ruins.

Through their shared connection, which at this proximity was pretty good she felt… her own problems reflected back at her. It was a strange thing, and she was pretty sure Sana just received a similar feeling from her as well. Listening to the reeds move gently in the wind, sighing and whispering, she strained to hear anything else. There were no birds, no distant frogs, barely even the chirp of insects. Just timelessness and abandonment. Even the qi in this place felt slightly empty and lost within itself.

“Everything about this place is horrible,” she said after a long pause. “Let’s move on.”

“Don’t you think that that pagoda looks awfully like the one the spear gave us?” Sana said abruptly, pointing towards one of the tall towers between the massifs ahead of them.

Shading her eyes and squinting through the haze, she had to concede that it did. On the other hand…

“That’s like the third pagoda we have seen since we went around the city,” she pointed out. “The first two were entirely unremarkable…”

“Also mostly destroyed,” Sana muttered. “I think we should check it out, or do you just want to keep walking in a bendy line killing serpents from now until… whenever.”

She resisted rubbing her temples, and instead scrubbed a hand through her hair, which was getting longer again. Clearly, her sister was also starting to feel the strain.

“On the other hand, something made everything… like this?” she said, waving her hand around at the desolate landscape.

“It’s probably just a more pronounced example of what was going on at the city,” Sana said, starting to walk in the direction of the pagoda.

Frowning slightly, she resisted commenting for now because the last thing they needed was disagreements that mundane, and followed after her. Tangled reed beds consumed everything, split by deeper channels of flowing water. Trees grew on roofs, their roots winding down through the rooms themselves and into silted mud. The area around the Pagoda was set out much like the districts they had encountered around the city, except here everything was flooded up to almost the roofs of the first story. Setting that aside, the buildings were much more intact amidst the gnarled vegetation.

Her initial impression – that there was largely nothing living here – was it, turned out, not quite correct. There were surprisingly large numbers of fish swimming through the waters, especially in the deeper channels and the plazas which were now shallow lakes. She found one or two small serpents and the odd spider mother in a taller building, but that was about it. Curiously, soul sense and qi perception were both muted here. The qi wasn’t sparse, but it did hold a certain oddness – as if the lack of vitality had somehow permeated it and become incorporated within it. All of the creatures here had, it seemed, adapted to it in little ways. The fish seemed to be able to drain energy from the water itself, the spiders had shimmering dark markings on their chitin and exuded a sense of otherworldliness, while the serpent she observed was small and non-venomous but had a remarkably robust constitution for a Golden Core qi beast. All of them basically ignored the pair of them as they made their way onwards as well.

The more they walked over it, the less and less sure she became that they were looking at the same phenomenon as before. There, the disruption had seemed to affect the feng shui, creating pockets of land that had never integrated with the whole. This place, however, still had its own feng shui, but it was split off from the wetlands outside in some inexplicable way. It was also missing much of the most basic elements of its ambient vitality, yet still had the more complex aspects she had noted before…

-There is a riddle here, she thought to herself as they made their way on.

Her instincts told her it was an important riddle as well, but the longer she stared at the landscape around them, the less sure of what she was meant to be grasping she became.

-Probably that was why sis was drawn to here as well, she reflected, Sana having marked the same thing somehow, but not being…

-That’s a different problem, one that’s much harder to address, she thought with a sigh.

-And if I am being honest, it’s one I have as well. We overused our mantras in the depths, and are paying for it now in subtle little ways.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Up close, the pagoda was a bit more dilapidated than it had initially appeared from the distance. It held several large holes in the upper stories and the grounds around it appeared empty because most of the buildings within 200 metres had been levelled. Walking above the water, she could see their outlines, sunk in maybe four metres of still, murky water. Alighting on the top of the steps that led up to its ground floor, they both considered the carved doorway. In a weird way, it reminded her of the totems of the dark green demons they had had run-ins with, and it was indeed somewhat similar to the little pagoda her sister now had in her possession. Dancing animals of all kinds flowed up the pillars, moving between swirling motifs of vegetation, water and wind.

Sighing, she turned to look at the district beyond them and stopped, because unbidden, the mist had returned. “Um… sis,” she said, tugging her sister’s arm and trying not to sound faintly accusatory.

Sana turned and stared at the mists as well. They were covering the horizon in the direction they had come, slowly mounting up and falling down over the massif pillars that marked the edge of this strange area.

“Does the mist not want to enter this place?” her sister mused, turning to look in the other direction.

She was about to ask what Sana meant, when she worked it out herself. The mists were falling down from above, rather than swirling out like tendrils as they had done previously. The horizon was gone, but the visibility over the muted, desolate and timeless zone within the wetlands was still really rather good.

Walking around to see beyond the pagoda, she noted that the distant horizon beyond the pillars in that direction was also now just haze. “How did we not notice that before?” she muttered, as much to herself as to Sana.

Sana said nothing as they both looked at the swirling wall of mists that was slowly trying to encroach on this whole region. Within a few minutes, they were under what amounted to a hazy white dome. Sana’s observation that they struggled to enter into this place did at least appear to be correct. The mists trying to fall down from above were succeeding, but only very slowly and they were diffusing a vast amount in the process.

“I-” Her suggestion that they take shelter was cut off by the symbol shifting faintly in her Sea of Knowledge, hiding her presence in accordance to her desire not to be spotted by whatever was outside.

“Did your symbol just…?” Sana said, turning to look at her.

“It did, shall we go into the pagoda?” she muttered. “I guess if we have to pick a-”

The soul sense that swept out of the mists in the direction they had been travelling was simultaneously scattered and ragged and also… immense. It was a testament to its wielder’s strength, she was sure that it even made it the dozen or so miles from the edge of the zone to the pagoda with enough momentum to be tangible. She stilled her qi even as she felt it descend, standing stock still in the shadow of the pagoda as it searched the surroundings for a few moments before finally vanishing.

They both stood in silence, waiting.

As she had expected a few moments later another, equally powerful sense swept in from the north, then another from the ‘south-west’, basically surrounding them.

“I hate being right,” she whispered after the three senses had receded, thinking back to her own earlier speculation about the other serpent being three serpents or one.

“Those all belonged to the same serpent,” Sana said after a long pause.

It was fairly redundant to say it – she had come to that conclusion as soon as the second one appeared, but she didn’t have the heart to say that saying it out loud did not help. Through the link they now shared she could sense the faint flickers of unease in her sister that had gone from guilt at dragging them here, to relief that it turned out to be a smarter idea than it first seemed.

“Well, if we have to pick a battleground, this place is probably not terrible,” she suggested, looking around at the area surrounding the pagoda.

“Assuming they don’t just linger out there,” Sana observed.

“True, but if we don’t go out, they either spend ages sitting there, and we just sit here getting stronger,” she pointed out.

“True, true, it gains them nothing to try to cage us… unless they don’t realise…?” Sana mused.

She nodded at that. It was entirely plausible that this new pursuer simply did not realised that while this place was odd and unsettling, and their own ability to use soul sense within it was rather curtailed, there was still ambient qi here that they could work with. Sure, it was deeply weird ambient qi, almost of a level with what had been in the ‘Perilous’ Realm, but that was if anything an advantage in the midterm to the two of them. Absorbing the qi here was almost as good as snacking on Soul Foundation cores – the rarer components within it that went into balancing their unrefined qi so as to make it into Myriad Elements qi were more common, especially the more divisive one she still hadn’t settled on a decent name for.

“Doesn’t this place feel like…” her sister asked, as they made their way into the pagoda itself.

“Like the ‘Perilous Realm’?” she finished.

“Yes… like the Perilous Realm… in winter,” Sana agreed. “Well, if we have to pick a place to fight, it is, as you say, a surprisingly good place for us.”

“Don’t let it get to you,” she said drily.

Sana shot her a sideways look, but said nothing.

The ruined pagoda had been basically picked clean. The lower levels had some statues of seated figures in robes carrying weapons, but that was about it. The upper levels appeared to have been some kind of library or place for storing scripture based on the mostly broken shelves and tables scattered around. The uppermost levels, where the worst of the damage was located, were either burnt or scoured clean. It struck her, in investigating them, that the construction of this building, while in the same style as the estates beyond was… naggingly familiar in some other way. It wasn’t until they had returned to the ground floor and ventured into the basement layers that she worked out what it was that was tugging at her.

“This is like the academy…” she said as they walked across the water surface of a flooded corridor on the first level.

“Like the…” Sana frowned for a moment… “Oh… it IS isn’t it…? The style is like the ruins from before, and it has the same distorted feel, but here, it’s…”

“Subtly different?” she asked.

“Subtly different,” Sana agreed.

Making their way through the lower halls of the basement, everything here had been cleaned out as well. They encountered a Spider Mother and a small nest of the critters which they terminally evicted, but that was about it. There was nothing in the water and only a few spirit herbs and the odd lingzhi were growing in various nooks and crannies.

At the very bottom, on the third level, they found what she could only call a pit into the depths. An octagonal room with a square shaft and stairs leading downward that was totally flooded. Four large steles gave various instructions in a dozen different scripts – everything from information on local threats to a series of announcements about things happening down ‘below’. Looking at the dates on them, she could only guess that they were from before whatever happened to this place. The shaft itself was, from what she could see, referred to most commonly as ‘Under Marsh: Greytower – Shaft 3’. Greytower certainly referred to the place above, which given the way things looked outside seemed rather apt.

Satisfied that there was nothing else down there to pose a nasty surprise, unless something came out of the flooded stairwell, she returned to the first sub-basement with its round hall with her sister in tow. Outside, the mists had encircled the entire region and were now making actual inroads into the inner zone, falling from above and advancing in that way. There had been no more sweeps of soul sense, but that just made her more uneasy in truth.

In the end, they sat down against a wall and started to prepare for what was likely to be a battle every bit as grim as the one they had experienced in the initial ambush. If anything, the soul sense came across as stronger than that one and she could only hope that it wasn’t a nine-star rated serpent. A Chosen Immortal Qi beast would require some remarkable subterfuge to get rid of, and fighting it, even in a place like this, was utterly out of the question.

She used the scales they brought to fill in some of the more obvious weaknesses in her armour and make a defensive skirt of sorts that could give her thighs a bit of protection. The remainder went on better arm guards as she wasn’t using a shield. The overall effect was fairly ad-hoc, but it worked well enough and her mobility wasn’t restricted. Sana basically followed suit and kept the rest for repairs. Frustratingly, trapping the place proved to be impossible. Their attempts at placing arrays physically just led to them failing to work. All she could think was that the problems with the vitality of the land were interfering in some way.

Half a day had passed, during which they put up some defensive arrays outside and considered various strategies as the mist thickened and slowly encroached. By the time it got within half a mile of the pagoda, the draining sensation that came with it started to become palpable. Shortly after, a dozen flickering soul senses, as strong as those of the two headed serpents they had fought in the wetland before arriving at this place swept the pagoda all at once.

“Great,” Sana signed with a scowl, as they watched their unrefined qi start to bleed away faintly.

It was a sentiment she could only agree with, silently. At the same time, the symbol shifted again subtly and she felt it take her ‘Empty Eye Steps’ concealment art and do –something– with it in accordance with her desire to not be spotted. That was a curiosity of how it was starting to work, she had observed. She found herself wondering occasionally, how much of what it was doing was related to its own…

The symbol sent her a sensation that thinking too much right now was a good way to become snake chowder.

After a few moments, she saw what it was doing. It was something she had tried a few times before, but always with little success. It had done to her concealment art what she had done with her Sundering Intent to her movement art: taken the basic thing and used her Sundering Intent to adapt it to be better suited to her higher realm.

Through one of the gaps in the ceiling of this lower hall, she saw a massive shadow slip by, its body just outside the visual angle. It made no sound at all as it came and went, nor did it use any soul sense or even qi sense.

“It is hunting us just with its natural senses?” Sana signed very subtly.

She nodded, and as slowly as she was able, slunk up to the ground floor. The mists had almost reached the pagoda, swirling down over the ruins around it, creating a white plane some ten metres above the ground. Below it, on the waters, she could see the serpent that had come. A three-headed snake that was maybe four times as big as the one that had ambushed them. Pearly white scales with gold and red edgings and a grey underbelly. It tasted the air with its tongues and she could see a dozen smaller 1 and 2headed serpents slinking around the area, all the same colour as the three-headed one.

It opened its fanged maws and there was a sensation of dispersal as its hiss made the density of the mist step up a further level, drawing it down towards it. The symbol shifted in her mind and she was aware of the qi inside her quietly dissipating away somewhere else at the same rate as everything else around them. Within five heartbeats she only had her refined, Intent-infused qi and what was in her dantian; everything in her basic meridians was dispersed and her ability to touch qi outside her own body had completely vanished.

Even her mantra was still, barely doing anything beyond obscuring the state of her remaining qi within her body itself. The thread shifted subtly around her Nascent Soul, making the state of her qi even more obscure, masking her own being faintly and amplifying her Sundering Intent with its own ‘Severing Intent’ as she had started to call it, making her even more in tune with the environment.

Quietly, she slunk back down to the basement where it took her several seconds to find Sana again. Her sister was nearly invisible, such was the way in which she was blending into the world. They sat there, in silence in the dark for several long minutes with only the intuition of the serpents moving about outside and casting their soul senses hither and thither. Then, three pairs of serpentine eyes formed in the shadows of their room and stared at them directly.

By this point, her physical body, and that of her sister’s, might as well have been a dead thing, devoid of heartbeat or breath. The spiritual body of the serpent manifested fully as they watched silently. It tasted the air and shifted back and forth on the spot for a few moments, as if trying to decide what exactly it was seeing or detecting. Slowly, it came towards the spot where they were sat motionless. In terms of the opportunities and strategies they had devised, most had gone as soon as it became apparent that the serpent wasn’t alone. They still had nowhere near enough qi to make a proper six symbol array between them. Setting one down on a surface here had proven to be almost impossible with the strange disruptive influence of whatever was poisoning or affecting the underlying geomancy of this place. That left a very dangerous path indeed, one they would only get a singular chance at. The gap between their Nascent Souls and any Immortal Soul was as much as, if not greater than, the gap between their own souls and a mortal’s at this point. Only the symbol, which made a mockery of the established rankings of soul strength and what should be possible, could provide them the opening she was now waiting for.

The three-headed Immortal Soul of the Great Serpent opened its maws and inhaled. All the qi in the room was drawn towards it and the symbol, symbols, in accordance with her… their wishes as their link established itself briefly, let some of their masked, Intent-infused qi slip in silently along with what ephemeral scraps remained of the ambient qi.

With a flicker, she opened her eyes and stood in a dark, dank place. Sana stood next to her, holding her hand, while in front of them, a vast form of a three headed serpent was coiled up, looking this way and that, its tongues flickering.

The symbol shimmered on her forehead hiding her own Nascent Soul’s presence. Its core was nowhere to be seen she realised, but the strength of the creature was unhindered and unconcealed here. Without the symbol to hide her, her Nascent Soul would have been scattered in the blink of an eye. Comparing it to the manifested strength of various guardian beasts and things she had seen in the high valleys over the years, she guessed that it was close to the peak of eight-star grade. The mists that coiled around its Sea of Knowledge held a vast and obfuscating swallowing strength – not Intent, Principle.

“The mists themselves are a passive manifestation of the serpent’s Principle?” Sana’s voice echoed in her head.

“It certainly looks that way, but that’s not a thing an Immortal is capable of,” she shuddered in her own mind. “We barely overcame a baby Immortal snake…”

“…”

Her own sister’s deep unease was also permeating back through to her, echoing her thoughts. It was one thing to have the idea of doing this, based on what they had achieved before, against a baby Immortal Realm snake.

“How do we even do this?” her sister muttered. “As soon as it detects something is wrong it’s going to squash us like bugs.”

She could only agree, but just standing there, looking at this giant Immortal Soul of the serpent proved that running would have been disastrous. If it had swallowed them…? She shuddered, that would have been a very bad end to this.

-Would we have been able to kill it like we did that great water beast before it devoured us? She thought, before dismissing that as sheer lunacy even as the thought formed.

-Mutual death at best, in all likelihood.

“You know, do you think that that beast was like these serpents…” Sana asked suddenly. “It looked kind of serpentine…”

“Possibly, but there’s a big gap between a sea serpent beast and an actual snake,” she pointed out, hoping her sister’s speculation wasn’t going to be borne out.

“Attacking it directly is out,” she added.

“Then how…” Sana frowned, then steeled herself and manifested a small symbol with her hand.

The serpent above them shifted abruptly and stopped what it was doing, looking around.

A paralysing soul sense… investigated everything to the minutest detail. The symbol… symbolled gently and it failed to detect them. They were just nebulous elements within the qi it had pulled in, which was filled with all sorts of Intents, was the distinct impression she got from it.

-Things can seep into your dantian without you necessarily getting a handle on them. She quietly shelved that lesson away.

“Maybe the symbol can detect it?” Sana suggested, reminding her that focused thoughts were just whispers in their current state.

“Hopefully, but there have been things it struggled with before now,” she pointed out.

“Not helpful,” Sana muttered. “Helpful thoughts…”

“So what now…?”

“Try poisoning it?” her sister mused.

“This devouring principle seems able to gnaw at the weird dividing qi that is already permeating this place,” she pointed out. “And any Immortal beast’s comprehensions on…”

“No… with the Myriad Elements Qi,” Sana pointed out with an eye roll.

She was about to point out that they had had no luck with using those arrays in their own dantians when it occurred to her that this and that were not quite the same thing. Standing here like this, faced with this particular problem, the logic of why that symbol, and a few others, didn’t work inside her own dantian suddenly clicked. They already had a functional symbol in their dantians and their meridian systems were like the array framework, with their organs and gates as the relevant symbols…?

The symbol snickered at her and she got the impression it was saying something like ‘took you long enough, idiot’. Shaking her head, she ignored it. It was right in any case, but in her defence how was she meant to work that out without seeing something like this. The discussions she had watched had touched upon it, and about nesting arrays, but this was the difference between being told in an abstract manner about something and seeing first-hand how it worked.

“How would we break a meridian system fundamentally?” she wondered in their shared mental space.

The serpent shifted its principle and their Nascent Souls drifted with it hand in hand.

-Assuming we can't leave the dantian…

“I think it’s pretty likely we can't,” Sana mused.

“Is it possible to use the symbol to split its principle from its Intent?” she pondered, looking around the misty, gloomy place they were drifting in.

“How do 'Principles' even form?” Sana muttered.

That was an excellent, and rather awkward point, she had to concede. Never mind knowing what a principle was, she was shaky on the fundaments of even ‘perceiving’ one. At their realm before they got caught up in this mess, it was a near impossibility that they would have ever gotten to that point through pure physical cultivation. All she really knew was the general homilies about it, which in this context meant basically nothing.

“On the other hand, we know that the Myriad Elements Qi in its full form, condensed from the circle of Yin and Yang is dangerous enough to make that Undren wary…” Sana added.

“Yeah, you don’t have to convince me of that…” she pointed out; they were sharing quite a bit of their surface thoughts at this point.

Sana just shot her a sideways look and she sighed, feeling annoyed with herself. Now was not the time to start getting snarky.

“Short term, external exposure seemed to do little, but what would happen if, unsuspecting, you got Myriad Elements Qi infused straight into your dantian?” her sister mused.

“That would be quite unpleasant,” she agreed.

That just left how really.

“Destabilise?” she mused, recalling what had happened to her own dantian when she tried to put down element symbols.

“Yes, I think. Buy time; we only get one go, I’d imagine,” her sister agreed.

The shimmering image of an array appeared in their shared mind space for a moment before dissipating.

“I’ll take the outer ring? You take the inner?” Sana suggested after some further thought.

“Okay,” she agreed and then froze as a vast wave of Intent and principle scoured the serpent’s dantian, searching for the thing that wasn’t right.

“Its instincts are terrifying,” she muttered.

“Yeah… it’s just its misfortune we are not easy to gnaw,” her sister giggled. “Score one for the inscrutable symbol.”

That was a fast mood switch, but their Nascent Souls were both a bit… emotive, she had come to realise. Inscrutable was a pretty good way to put it at any rate.

“Anyway, destabilise. Where do we start – Yang Lightning?” she pondered.

“Might be a bit obvious,” Sana mused, “Yin Fire?”

“It’s devouring principle,” she pointed out. That spoke faintly to her of Yang Water and Yin Thunder.

“Point…” Sana conceded, frowning as they continued to drift through the mists.

“How about Yin Earth?” the more she considered that, the more correct she felt.

“Hmmmmm…”

Her sister’s thoughts spun in the back of her own mind as she also considered it. She couldn’t help but remember the feeling it gave her during her advancement to Golden Core. Yin Earth was greedy and insidious, wanting to claim everything it touched and return it to itself.

“Yin Earth – Gather, Focus, Imbue,” she suggested.

“We can put down a dozen of those in quick succession and hope that the ensuing ruckus doesn’t get our souls severely damaged,” Sana agreed.

“Yeah, we can only trust that the symbol can shield us there,” she agreed.

The symbol sent a sense of ‘just get on with it,’ that made her look at it sideways in her Sea of Knowledge. They drifted on as the serpent hissed with frustration as it continued, and once again failed to try to find what was niggling its instincts in the qi it had absorbed.

It took a few more minutes before she got the opening to start that she had been half waiting for. She wasn’t really sure what it would be, just that she knew she would know it when it came. Abruptly, she felt the qi around them dissipating… being expelled.

She focused and imprinted the array. Sana followed a second later with another and then another and another.

The effect was instantaneous.

The serpent recoiled and its Immortal Soul screamed in pain as the symbol arrays turned all the various, disparate bits of qi they could touch into Yin Earth Qi, imbued with transformative Intent courtesy of their own symbols. It was like watching a fire spread through grass. Roots of Yin Qi tore into the creature’s dantian, trying to invade its inner meridians.

As the serpent’s own soul strength, sense, Intent… everything raged, she visualised the centre and watched as Sana set down arrays and held them in potentia one after another. They had put one of these down rapidly before, but this was the first time they had ever had to put one down like this. She was dimly aware of the insanity that was unfolding outside, the pagoda was still standing, but the serpent was wrecking everything outside, going insane and thrashing about like an insane thing. Although the walls had ruptured in the lower hall and they were basically buried at this point, their bodies in the basement were safe.

Sana finished, barely having enough qi even with what she was feeding her, and put the arrays down rapidly, one after another. When the requisite links appeared she immediately deployed the ‘Qi-gathering’ node and then the ‘Transformation’ centre. It consumed almost half her qi to do it like that, making her Nascent Soul grow fuzzy for a disconcerting moment as she almost overdrew what she had.

There was an agonizing moment where nothing happened and she was afraid she had made some mistake – then it started to convert all the qi around it. Their souls were tossed and buffeted in the turmoil, as the serpent screamed and raged, trying to disperse all the qi out of its dantian. Tossed like a leaf in the wind, barely remaining tangible, she managed to draw in a little bit of the Myriad Elements Qi to support herself.

Still trying to purge its own body of the toxic, uncontrollable energy that was now eating away at its own qi like a parasite, the serpent smashed its head into the pagoda, getting repelled somehow. Sana had started setting down a second set of outer arrays, connecting them in quick succession, she noted. Gritting her teeth, she drew in more Myriad Elements Qi and set down another array centre, groaning with pain as she really did overdraw this time.

A moment later, the serpent’s scouring soul sense finally found her – a crushing Intent struck into her Nascent Soul, trying to rampage directly into her own Sea of Knowledge and scatter it directly. The symbol, which was now the tether between her body and soul in a very real sense, shifted and her Nascent Soul was drawn back into her own body before the attack could be made permanent. As she departed, she could feel that the serpent had finally managed to isolate the portion of qi in its dantian that was the source of its woes – however, it was just too late to prevent their strategic exit.

Their Nascent Souls reappeared outside to observe the carnage. Myriad Elements Qi was leaking out of the Great Serpent, which had split up into three, still huge single-headed serpents. Many of the other two-headed serpents were also now badly poisoned, and those that were not were caught up in the madness around them, buffeted by shockwaves, random soul sense attacks and other insanity that was sweeping the whole inner region.

The great snakes screamed and raged and thrashed as they tried to rid themselves of the source of the qi, but short of abandoning their own cultivation and trusting to their fleshly Immortal bodies to survive, they were not going to get far there, she guessed.

-Not to mention, would anything as innately greedy, with a principle like that that is so devouring, be even willing to do such a thing? She thought with an amused snicker.

As they looked on, hidden in the shadows of the pagoda, the serpents started to vomit up blood and organs as their meridians crumbled under the immense strain of containing the Myriad Elements Qi. Its scales warped and its serpentine bodies started to distend… The serpent’s Immortal Soul suddenly blurred out of its body, decisively casting away its physical shell.

The shockwave of its anger as it emerged tore the world apart. They were caught up in a grinding cyclone of swamp that flew away for miles in every direction as it tried to obliterate everything. Remarkably, the pagoda still remained untouched. Even the snake stared at it for a moment before smashing at it directly. Its attack hit the stonework of the ground layer which just trembled a little: some loose bits of masonry shifted and fell from an upper layer, along with a few roof tiles, but that was about it.

With a scream that shook the world a second time, its soul darted into a nearby two-headed serpent which had been lucky enough to avoid the worst of the collateral damage. That serpent hissed piteously for a few seconds before collapsing and then just – exploded. The Immortal Soul erupted out of it, wailing in fury as Myriad Elements Qi started to well from that two-headed corpse as well. Now there was genuine madness reflected in the eyes of the creature’s soul as its injured form was drawn back into its physical body which reformed into a three-headed serpent once more.

It hissed and screamed, one head incinerating everything in a cloying cloud of vital fire. Another head screamed and cast lightning bolts through the sky in rage while the third swept the area with a soul-crushing Intent that spared nothing – not even the serpents that accompanied it. They both stared on, sheltered by the symbol and the great pagoda itself as the giant serpent proceeded to have an enraged psyche break over, she presumed, its need to discard its Immortal Body. After a few moments it even tried to fly up into the sky, only to find out it was no longer able to due to the damage done to its body and soul.

Howling in fury, it crashed down again and its form seemed to contract subtly. The world twisted and the mists, which were still not fully willing to permeate the space this close to the pagoda, were drawn inwards, towards it, forcibly. Hissing, it turned the formidable devouring strength of the mist on its own body, tongues of white coiling around it, trying to penetrate the slowly crystallising body only to be repelled. Shaking its body, this time it expanded slightly. This time the shockwave seemed to pass through the mist, repelling the world itself, pushing away the strange dividing aspect of the world around the pagoda for a moment. In the process, it actually managed to expel a decent portion of the Myriad Elements Qi…

“Not good,” Sana signed.

“Nope, not good,” she agreed, if it had a way to do that a few times…

They looked each other and rapidly started to draw in more Myriad Elements Qi to imprint another array directly outside. The spirit was so distracted by its almost successful attempt at trying to expunge the toxins from its own body that it had basically stopped looking at its surroundings with soul sense.

Even sharing the burden as much as the link allowed, she groaned and her form grew a bit fuzzy as the strain of deploying a third one with just her Nascent Soul started to take its toll on her already overburdened Sea of Knowledge.

The serpent snapped around and fixated on their location as more Myriad Elements Qi started to swirl out from the pagoda itself. The array had taken quite well in comparison to their earlier attempts – something she could only ascribe to the serpent’s own act of somehow repelling the disruptive forces that were present here. With a juddering hiss, it locked the entire area down with its immortal sense, freezing everything it could perceive with its soul Intent, them included. The symbol shielded them from the actual soul attack once again, but their Nascent Souls were unable to move.

Its gaze peered through the air at them and it suddenly grinned and inhaled once more. To her shock, the world around them wavered and they found themselves back in its Sea of Knowledge rather than its dantian. Here, the mists were like a roiling tide over dark waters. The sky above was streaked with thunder and shook in such a way that it made her soul grow fuzzy just to look upon it.

The giant serpent surged up out of the mist and dark water, striking at them both with a vast, devouring strength that was pure principle melded with soul strength. The symbol shrugged and let a sliver of its own Intent be swept up-

Her consciousness snapped back to her body and coughing blood and gasping she pushed against the rubble and soil that had buried her. Sana’s hand moved, grasping hers more firmly, signifying that she had also been thrown back out. Her Nascent Soul was back in her dantian, but it had been badly damaged and near dispersed by the Immortal Intent. It looked like someone had dragged her 14 year old self through a thorn thicket and then kicked her all over for several minutes. It was slowly repairing itself, but wouldn’t be in any fit state for a few hours at least.

Pulling herself out of the mud and dirt, she took a few deep breaths and took in the devastation around her. The hall was mostly collapsed, filled with liquefied mud and water. There was no sign of the serpent, so she pulled Sana out of the mud beside her and stumbled over to the nearest hole up and carefully pulled herself up, praying to the auspicious fates that no horrible surprises were waiting for her.

Sana came after her a few moments later and they took in the devastation from the ground floor of the pagoda. The lake outside was a rapidly filling basin. The pagoda itself was still standing, miraculously, but looking upwards she could see it had lost a great deal of its roof tiles on this side. Elsewhere, scorch marks and the higher than was comfortable ambient temperature, not to mention the faint patina of Myriad Elements Qi that was coating everything, told her the rest of the story.

“It blew itself up?” her sister muttered.

“Or it just blew up,” she suggested.

Either way, it was annoying. Its core or cores would be either shattered or more likely totally gone, along with most of its body or so it seemed.

“We seem to have survived again,” Sana said, sitting down with a sigh.

She laughed weakly at that and swept the area with her soul sense, as well as she was able. All the accompanying snakes were dead. She counted 16, which was three more than she had seen initially. Their cores were mostly intact, but all had sustained catastrophic damage to their foundations.

-No more snakes for our Qi Seas from this lot, she thought sadly.

Her sweep with soul sense also told her that she had misjudged the size of the explosion slightly. They weren’t at the centre of the crater, they were at the centre of the inner crater. You could fit most of West Flower Picking Town inside it she reckoned.

The mists were gone in a massive ring around them, dispersed by the explosion. She could, however, see them reforming in the far distance, in the direction she had been hoping was ‘east’. That turned out to be much closer to south than she was happy with. Fortunately, they had dispersed enough that she could see the darker clouds far above them, and also the chain of rising rock towers and forested valleys to the north east. In that general direction, she could also make out the mountains, much closer than she had expected, their white peaks rising into the dark clouds as the stormy twilight cast strange shadows on the distant landscape, making the scale of things hard to discern.

“I find myself impressed that the damage done is not more,” Sana observed, coming to stand beside her.

“Very true, very true,” she nodded, turning her eyes from the horizon where they needed to go according the spear, and back to the ruined city before them.

It really was a city, buried in the mud. She had thought that the roadways were submerged under a metre or two of mud, but now that much of it had been swept away, she could see that most buildings were three or four metres high. Road surfaces had been scoured by the explosion, roof tiles stripped and the odd wall collapsed here and there, but by and large it had weathered the explosion of an Immortal Realm entity disturbingly well. The distorted sense of timelessness was also returning quite rapidly, she noted as an aside.

Determined to make the most of this unexpectedly weird second encounter with an Immortal Serpent, they spent several hours looting what they could from the vicinity of the pagoda. Most of the serpents had been peak Nascent Soul beasts, and a few had even been Dao Seeking. To her surprise, they did actually find a few pieces of the three headed serpents core - they were misty and white with clouds in them in a bunch of different colours. Sadly most of their cores were barely worthy of being considered cores at this point. Most of the other creatures in the immediate vicinity had suffered the same fate – their foundations dispersed and their qi devoured by the Great Serpent. However, upon searching a bit further afield, they found quite a few aquatic critters, some spiders and a toad that had died to soul shock or just the shockwaves themselves. By the time they had finished harvesting all of that and adding the cores to their Qi Seas, the crater had almost refilled and the mists to the south-east were a proper curtain once again.

Rather than linger and risk a third round with more serpents, they immediately struck out for the nearest edge of the massif and the distant, much larger massif uplands, scouring the land for any further dead that they could scavenge as they went. Once they had everything opportune, she finally got the chance to do something she had been intending to do for a very long time: see how high they could actually walk. Almost since they first had that inauspicious encounter with the mist-web-net things, there had always been mists of some kind restricting how high they could walk.

In the end, they were easily able to ascend to at least a mile in height without encountering anything much that prevented them.

“This is… quite calming,” her sister remarked after a while as they sped onwards towards the massif that was still rising above them in the distance.

“I never thought I would miss the suppression of the High Valleys,” she said with a dark chuckle.

“Ah, yes, the promised land where Immortal Realm monsters can barely exert the strength of a Golden Core rabbit and nothing is able to bring out a spirit body for more than a brief second, and only if they want to waste all their qi reserves,” Sana replied with a light laugh, some of her previous good humour having returned.

Soon, the mists from the south-east started to flow back across the land below them, forcing them higher. The draining power also returned, much faster than she expected. With it came a sense of predatory devouring that had not been there before, and which, if anything, was stronger even than that of the previous serpent. Without comment, they both ascended higher, having no interest in meeting a genuine nine-star serpent. It exerted a noticeable pull on them, trying to drag them down, even when the mist was a good few hundred metres beneath them. It wasn’t until they had ascended to a height of close to four miles, as near as she could reckon, that they finally escaped its dragging chains entirely.

The darker clouds loomed high above them now and lower clouds scudded by in the distance, carrying with them swirling gyres of turbulence. The temperature also dropped to well below freezing, not that that had too much impact on them beyond making her admit that she preferred the humidity to the cold at this point.

In the distance, thunder rumbled and they watched a spider web of blue-white lightning sizzle down between the upper and lower cloud levels.

“I don’t think we want to go much higher!” Sana said, projecting her voice with some soul strength to make it carry over the winds that were hissing by at this height. “Getting hit by natural lightning would be…”

“Bad,” she agreed with an eye roll.

“Yes. Bad.” Sana nodded.

“At least the qi density is good,” she remarked, watching the swirling currents shift in the distance.

“Yeah! My Nascent Soul has almost recovered already!” Sana agreed.

They ran on for several more minutes as she noticed something else that was odd. At this perspective, they had a much better look at the lay of the landscape both ahead and behind them. Looking behind her, she could see the shadowy peaks of the coastal mountains peaking up maybe a hundred miles behind them, ahead of them as the crow might fly.

“There was definitely something weird going on down there,” Sana remarked, pointing to one of the massifs.

“Yeah, we should have seen those clearly from the ground; everything is flat,” she agreed.

“Not to mention it’s only what… thirty miles from the edge of the massif with the pagoda...? Some of those pillars are visible through the serpent’s mist and must be at least a mile and a half high.”

“Spatial distortion?” she guessed.

“Or something to do with the serpent’s mist?” her sister hypothesised.

“Like some kind of vast spatial dilation formation?” she shuddered.

“Yeah. We had to have crossed close to 8 or 900 miles of wetland since we left the tunnels, and yet the gap between the mountains behind us and ahead of us can only be 300 miles, if even, and we are well past halfway there.” Sana mused, turning her head this way and that.

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

They continued on for hours, the mountains slowly getting bigger in the distance. Thankfully, there was little danger of running out of qi and it appeared that the bizarre void in the world had been entirely caused by the mists. That was not to say that this place was without its dangers. The turbulence of passing clouds, which moved much faster than they could, required them to exert a lot of Intent-infused qi to avoid being thrown out of the sky. The lightning strikes were also terrifying: just coming within a mile of one made her qi turbulent and getting hit by one would at the very best be a fast trip back to the wetland below. That was something neither of them was keen on.

Off the back of that, Arai found herself working more and more on her movement art – both to make it more efficient and also to see if she couldn't grasp some idea of how you could actually fly with qi. At the moment they were both basically exploiting their Intent’s ability to manipulate and influence the qi around them to walk through the air. Her own Intent was, she was starting to feel, actually bordering on proper spatial manipulation. It was a very short jump, she was starting to realise, between shortening the space between two points and using her qi as a bridge to move across them directly without touching the intervening distance. Sana’s method was somewhat different, yet also had some commonalities. Primarily her sister was using vortexes of qi to propel her steps forward far faster than would have normally been possible, twisting the connections between points to contract the space between her steps.

Both applications, were absolutely touching on the edges of Spatial Intent, albeit at a truly primitive level.

She was actually starting to wonder if she could get this very short range spatial truncation that her Sundering Intent was allowing her to use to the point where it was approaching the Severing Intent that the thread had manifested a few times. If she could grasp that, her movement art would basically reach the point where her steps were pseudo-teleportation, although probably it wouldn’t be quite that simple.

Over the next few days she slowly got better at this streamlining of her movement art. In the process, she also saw a few ways in which she could make it more utilitarian. Her observations on the way her qi flowed, initially with the goal of trying to unpick the riddle of flight, showed her a few places she could actually make efficiency savings in Flickering Steps. The process also, she found, began to instil something like ‘muscle memory’ into her Sundering Intent as it worked with her movement art, making critical points in the flow of qi for the art more intuitive to perform. As a result, the distance she could cover with a single stride had slowly increased from about 20 metres to almost 30. Sana was still faster in a straight line, but she was slowly gaining on her in that regard, and she was much better at making precision changes in direction at speed.

As the mountains got closer and closer she got a new-found respect for the height of those mountains as they kept rising and rising before them. To the north, the clouds had started to grow steadily darker, mirroring the vast storms they had seen on the ocean far to the west. Cloud forests coated their distant flanks and their peaks were wreathed with snow. She could see glaciers glinting in some of the higher valleys. At best guess, those lower peaks, wreathed in clouds a layer above their current cloud level, were comparable to mountain peaks like those of the East Fury spur – maybe seven or eight miles at the very least. The mountains behind them, where she could get glimpses of them through swirling stormy clouds, were at least half again, maybe 12 or 13 miles.

Birds occasionally passed by in the distance as they made their way onwards, now crossing along the edge of the forested massifs that peaked through the mist below them. It was rare that any of them were over Golden Core, but they did meet one Nascent Soul bird that was similar to the Rocs that infested mountains south of Blue Water City. It attacked them aggressively from above, trying to snatch her out of the sky. They fought a short duel with it where it quickly became apparent that neither party was able to do much to the other. It was unable to shake them from the sky with its wind gusts or the lightning cast from its claws, while its soul attacks did nothing at all. For their part, they were unable to harm it beyond dislodging a few feathers with Intent-infused qi. Eventually it left in a huff, screeching what she was sure were curses in a rather emotive manner.

Much more concerning, was the other thing they saw, far in the north, amid the higher clouds: a great flying creature that appeared to have more than one head and held its own inner light comparable to the fires in the sky. Fortunately, it made no move towards them and just drifted on at its great altitude.

Like that, almost another full week passed in relative calm before they were finally forced to deal with the slowly encroaching front of dark clouds that they had been watching roll off the mountains to their north. They braved the turbulence of the pressure front for as long as they could, until the wind and clouds towering above them got close enough that the peals of thunder from the clash between cloud and wetland humidity got to the point where they were in danger of being stunned out of the air by the shockwaves.

Fortunately, she considered, as they rapidly descended towards the foothills of stone pillar escarpments, they had largely escaped the wetlands proper. The sub-tropical forest landscape below them was awfully like the foothills of the Yin Eclipse Mountains beyond West Flower Picking Town now that she thought about it.

They made it another few miles through the shrieking wind, breaking through waves of rain before the thunder transformed into the first burst of visible lightning. She saw great flickers of blue and purple jumping between the cloud layers above and behind them, reflecting through the clouds. It was followed almost immediately by a thunderous distortion that made her whole body shake and her qi turn turbulent. She tasted blood in her mouth and felt her ear drums rupture with unpleasant and painful pops.

Nearby, Sana staggered slightly and pointed downward with one hand, wiping blood from her nose with her other hand. She nodded and they both stopped using their movement arts, dropping towards the nearest pillar top. She shifted the distance 30 metres from its top and stumbled a touch inelegantly upon connecting with properly solid ground for the first time in almost a week and half. Sana drifted down a moment later and also stumbled, she was inwardly gratified to see.

Lightning flickered down a second time and struck a mountain top half a mile away with a roar and a flare of light.

They made their way from pillar peak to pillar peak amid the rain and the thunder, rushing to stay ahead of the storm front for a while longer before the lightning properly arrived overhead. She watched one bolt splinter a mountaintop across the valley, sending house-sized chunks of rocks tumbling as they sought out a rock shelter on the side of their column. The one they found on the north-facing side had a surprisingly good view out across the lower pillar peaks towards the swamp where the storm was still advancing towards them.

The storm front showed no signs of abating as time passed, so she turned to an idea she had been pondering for quite a while: carving arrays on bits of her armour. Up until this point she had just not had a free moment explore what was and wasn’t possible, or a suitable store of material to do so. Taking some of the scales, she carved a small array formation onto the back of it, filling in the void with a bit of her blood and then imprinting the array with her qi directly into it. She was mainly looking for interesting defense-orientated symbols, and so started on the basic series they had acquired from the academy.

The first few were a bust, her application of an array that small led her to make minor mistakes with the framework. After that, she also had a few that just did inexplicable things, even though she was trying to avoid symbols in series that had potentially dangerous active effects. One turned the colour of the scale bright blue; another made it float in the air when she pushed qi into it. She filed that one away for future experimentation, even though it ate qi at a rather annoying rate for what it did. Several others just went on fire and another made the scale she carved it on vanish with a pop of collapsing space, never to be seen again. That one she also filed away, determining not to experiment with it until she could work out what superior symbol it was derived from.

She finally found one in what she was terming the ‘Unattributed Yin Series’ for now, that absorbed qi she put into it and used it to strengthen the scale. However the scale’s capacity for qi was really low, despite coming from a seven-star monster.

As she went on she finally built up a short list of useful defensive symbols, mostly from the extensive ‘alphabet’ of several hundred from the room in the academy:

One that absorbed a bit of her qi and gave a defensive boost, which had initially seemed interesting only for it to turn out to be rather less useful when she realised that once the shield of qi it stored ran out, it slightly damaged the thing it was attached to. There was one that repelled a bit of elemental qi of the opposing element of the material type it was engraved upon. One that drew in a bit of her qi and then repelled anything that struck the inscribed scale when it struck it, depleting the qi - basically a better version of the first shield-like one. There was also another variant of the same symbol that absorbed attacking qi and used it to reinforce the material struck up to a certain point that seemed to be limited by the material used. Finally she also found another variant of that symbol that projected a defensive field of qi around the object of the element type it was engraved into - that seemed promising until she discovered that overlapping fields did not play nice.

None were really what she was after in any case, which was a symbol that would just make the material stronger passively over time by drawing qi into it. As such, she found herself turning to the fundamental symbols from the discussions, looking for symbols with similar shapes in them to the ones she had just picked out. At least it helped while away the hours while her Nascent Soul cultivated and the storm raged outside.

Eventually the wind and rain passed; the thunder still rolled overhead and occasional lightning bolts dropped into the highest towers, but the worst of it was restricted to the open sky above the pillars. Collecting up their stuff, they departed, heading down the valley in the direction of the mountains.

Their trip across the treetops was, if not vexatious, not as easy as either would have liked compared to their rapid progress before. After three successive ambushes by spiders and an actual Alkr, not to mention one further Roc, they both found themselves carefully sweeping ahead with their soul senses, keeping it as weak and diffuse as possible to see if there were any obvious threats. Mostly she saw spiders and other insects scavenging the forest below them. Twice they passed by bands of the small grey-green demons hunting but they were about as much threat to them as a thrown rock.

“There are ruins to the south…” Sana nudged her and directed her towards the wetlands just as they passed into another broad, winding valley between ridges linking rock pillars.

Sweeping her sense south, she caught outlines of buildings disguised beneath the greenery, built out of one of the towers. There were also small grey/green demons and the larger dark green demons within them, keeping watch unobtrusively. None of them were above Golden Core that she could detect. It took her a few more moments of looking harder before she caught a Soul Foundation old green demon sat in a carved cave high up on the tower cliff. His soul strength was pretty low however and he never noticed her sense pass by.

“The caves in those cliffs go back a long way and my sense can’t penetrate very far into them,” she observed. “They are also crawling with the demons. If we go in there, we will have to fight in and out probably.”

“You notice there are also grey-brown–skinned ones?” Sana said, pointing a bit further south-east.

Looking in that direction, she saw that Sana was right: there were a bunch that looked somewhat more like swarthy people from of their race, just with greyer skin and smaller eyes. Beyond them… She narrowed her eyes as Sana noted, “there are more ruins in that direction and someone has made a serious attempt at disguising them I think.”

Arai found herself squinting through the misty drizzle at the tower beyond the one they were looking at. It was a lot larger, and the style was again curiously reminiscent of the tall towers of the academy, and yes, there were ruins built up around its base though it was hard to track them given the development of the forest. Something was also messing with her…

It took her a moment to see what Sana meant. The lines she was looking at refused to be followed somehow and the greenery of the forest also added a further layer of disruption to whatever had been done.

“It’s a feng shui formation,” she said eventually.

“It is, and a pretty good one: the very nature of the land here has been turned towards hiding this whole place,” Sana agreed. “It’s easy to see one or two buildings at a time, but as soon as you try to see the whole thing, even with soul sense, it just flits away and you get nothing but your own confusion turned back at you.”

Nodding, she hunted for the source and eventually found a crude altar here… and a totem carved into a tree that was close to the other buildings’ ant caves. It was very normal looking, but that wasn’t the point. It exerted a subtle shift on the surroundings that was familiar to her: it was how spirit plants frequently hid and obfuscated their surroundings, but done artificially.

She sighed and looked up at the dull grey thunder clouds overhead. “Now I am even less inclined to mess with these demons. That degree of feng shui knowledge is not good to cope with.”

“No… it is not, and feng shui formations are all about understanding,” Sana murmured under her breath as she stared down at the ruins. “They have very few preconditions on cultivation realms.”

“Do you reckon we missed others?” she mused as she looked back the way they came.

“If they are this subtly disguised?” Sana nodded. “Undoubtedly. In fact, I suspect that the ‘habitation zone’ that the Spear talked about probably started back in the swamp with that pagoda and its district.”

“Yeah,” she agreed. “We were too fixated on the idea of getting to the mountains.”

“Maybe,” Sana agreed a trifle glumly. “However, if what we are after is buried here, under this sub-tropical jungle, hidden by alignments like that, we are going to be here for months just walking around valleys trying to find things the old fashioned way.”