> …The ‘Fall of an Era’, the ‘End of Tyranny’, the ‘Triumph of Good Men’ – these were all used to describe the day that Neron, Emperor of the Eternal City, met his end, assassinated in his bath even as he cavorted with a dozen slaves.

>

> Who killed him? Was it his mother, jealous that the young Emperor turned his attentions elsewhere? Was it his sibling children, who had sunk even further into depravity than he, seeking a new depth to plumb? Was it his exiled father – broken and ruined, his lineage in tatters seeking one final, desperate moment of catharsis? Was it his bodyguards – finally unable to stomach his depredations on that day as opposed to some other? Or was it some other, unseen and overlooked, a new slave, or a peerless expert of any hundred families who had suffered at his hands?

>

> In the end, we will likely never know, and perhaps it is unimportant, for while so many claimed responsibility for it then, few would speak of it now.

>

> For with his death, the ‘Nightmare of Neron’ did not end. In truth, it simply began.

Excerpt from ‘On the Origins of Darkness’

By Menoc of Tyre

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

~ ARAI & SANA ~

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

“Up! Get clear—!”

She caught her sister’s command to the three Ur’Inan dragging the platform as they took in the vast army ahead of them.

“How the Nameless Fates did this lot…?” she was in the process of asking when a grasping attack of the same kind as before swept down from above, pushing her down to the ground and turning her qi chaotic.

Crashing into the ground, she wielded her Sundering Intent and split the containers on her back with the Eldritch Spores, triggering a small array through her contact with the water that exploded them in a nova outwards.

The same grasping strength tried to grasp the other container, only to fail because it was made of qi-repelling stone, and so instead dragged her away from it. As a parting gift, she split it as well and watched as the pressurised water exploded out of it, sending a plume of soul-setting spores high into the air where the flowing wind of the storm wave swept them out into the forest along with everything else.

Dimly, she was able to grasp that the two groups of Ur’Inan had made it to the nearest platform and were, if they had any sense, running as fast as they could. She could only hope that the three from the Cloud Arrows tribe… and the others, made a successful escape in any event.

Above her, green lightning crackled around the large altar. Sana exploded both her remaining barrels, sending a vast cloud of spores out into the wind and rain, all adding a few of the spores from her own body into the mix as well in order to speed the process along. They had given a lot of thought to that in the depths as they made their way back.

However, the expected attack didn’t come. Instead, the bolt shot over at the pillar where the Ur’Inan had fled, narrowly missing them.

A second eye-searing viridian bolt started to coalesce only for the lead troll to sprout a pure white arrow and crumple like a puppet with its strings cut. The bolt went astray, arcing up the escarpment and vanishing into the mists as it was twisted aside even further by spore cloud. For its part, the cloud itself was drawn upwards by the momentary absence of anything now constraining it.

Still restrained as she was, Arai was treated to the sight of tens of thousands of slaves and pig demons rapidly succumbing to the spores, dropping like flies in bad air. The Nascent Soul and Dao Severing demons on the smaller platforms were equally afflicted, the spores ignoring their shields. Even the nine elders on the great platform were panicking now she could see, directing the trolls to take them away as space started to shimmer—

She watched dully as two shadows hit the towering platform like meteors, tilting it to one side. A dark streak shot for one of the old elders who was holding a phallic sceptre only to be blocked at the last moment by another of the pig demons. The presumed teleportation of the platform was prevented in any case. A third shadow dropped out of the sky accompanied by a wall of oppression and crushed the entire forest. The spores still hung in the air, but they were starting to sink a bit more quickly.

Frozen as they were, they could only watch the battle on the platform grimly. The spores were doing their work, but whatever the three new shadows were – and she had a terrible premonition about them now – they were much less effected by them than the pig demons, if at all. All she could do was focus on trying to shed the phantasmal chains that were grasping both of them from somewhere else, but that strength was… strange as well. It felt both near and far simultaneously. Like the wizened pig demons in fact.

There was a terrible shriek from the platform and she was treated to a strange and deeply discomforting feeling of having her vision forcibly drawn to it even though she was trying to not look at it too closely. Reality gripped her by the hair and forced her to look at it – spores hadn’t made it through the shield, but the pig demons on it were truly miserable now. The three shadows had killed two-thirds of them, and were no longer shadows, but three Ur’Inan. Huljas, Garlock and Ugrash.

Except… they were not the Huljas, Garlock and Ugrash she had been wary of for the last while, not really.

All three looked wrong—twisted somehow. Livid tattoos were rising out of their bodies and they had become half again as large. Their strength had also seemingly promoted to the point where she was certain they were comparable to the Ur’Inan Karoz they had killed. They were still weaker than the pig demons on the palanquin her instincts somehow told her, and yet… and yet they were absolutely superior—somehow.

A second white arrow appeared, seemingly from nowhere, fletched with purple and gold, sprouting out of ‘Huljas's’ forehead. However, Ur’Inan, if that was what he still was, didn’t so much as flinch as it went all the way through his head, and just tore the arms off of the pig demon and kicked it hard enough that its lower body, sans head was thrown off the platform, into the spore cloud below. The platform itself was, she realised, floating upwards now, away from the spores as the two demons still controlling it, she guessed tried to escape from the calamity around them.

Suddenly, the world went still.

“Big handiwork, Blood Eclipse Clan! You intend to renege on your deal with this seat?” a commanding and melodious voice echoed out of the chasm behind them.

-Blood Eclipse? As in...? glancing over at Sana, in that confused moment, she briefly found herself wondering, in a detached way, why in the Nameless-Fates the speaker was identifying these three... whatever they were, with the disaster that had befallen their home province, all those years ago, however, it was impossible to focus on anything as that voice continued to reverberate through their surroundings.

Sneering, Huljas grasped the neck of the pig demon he had been fighting and ripped its body apart, siezing its head and spine and then using it to smash another one as a crude weapon.

“We take what we want, debauched little lordling!" Garlock sniggered. "Our deal with you is dead with the emergence of the spore plague!”

The voice that came out of his mouth was not… the one that Garlock had used, though. It felt the same as the one from behind, but rather than defiling it was… it was also defiling in fact, but the implication felt different. A different kind of defilement, much more base and brutal—less about lust, avarice and desire and more about… ruin.

“…”

The voice from the depths, from the chasm, just laughed and a vast soul sense descended onto the battlefield. The thunder stilled and the barrier on the palanquin wavered even as her own consciousness grew dim. The soul sense shook her whole body, jarring her qi, disrupting it and costing her even more control over the spores in her blood. The symbol shivered and resisted it, preventing its access to her Sea of Knowledge, but only just. However, the damage it dealt was…

She groaned as spores from some of the ruptured pockets of her intent in her bloodstream took root in her physical body–

“Ymg' l' mgepah'gotha c' ahuaaah. hai. c' ymg' ephaiahuaaah!”

“Lw'nafh'nahor, ahnah hnah. ymg' ahlloig c' ymg' ah uaaahnythor?”

“C' ah yogshugg cahf ahazath, c' ah 'Yogshugg'”

“Ymg' ahlloig ymg' ahor c' mgah syha'h. N'ghftephai ‘Frn Ahazath’ ph'nglui mgepahmgep zhro”

The voices sang—actual voices this time—horrible and controlling… mocking her for trying to control them, for daring to think that they could use them as a tool. They even named themselves, though she dared not focus on the name, the symbol somehow forcing a break between her hearing of the word and her comprehension of its meaning.

“Ymg' ephaibecome c' uaaahnythor, llll ah'gotha hh' c' ephaibugnah ephaii”

Her mantra surged, the symbols for bestow and day fighting hardest even as the words and the spores wormed towards some aspect of her that she suddenly understood of as ‘Heart’, the sense of the core of her being. Her spirit root!

-No… Nope... No fate-thrashed way, she swore, as she fought with her mantra to prevent them making it into her actual meridians.

Another wave of soul sense washed past them, striking her incidentally as it attacked both the spores somehow, which just laughed and mocked it, their sibilant, acquiring voices echoing from everywhere.

“Mgepahmgep hnah, c' ah nafl ymg'!”

Hundreds and thousands...

“Ymg' ahorna chain c' llll ymg' aimgr'luhh.”

Tens of thousands…

“N'ghftephai Neron ah nafl cahf ahorr'eog!”

Millions… all united in mockery.

The presence that had arrived seemed to detect it, because it focused more on the spores suddenly. A blow like a hammer, pressing down on everything. The three on the palanquin finished off the last of the pig demons in that moment. Looking up, she could see they held their heads and spines as crude trophies. Laughing, the three demons crouched and then shot like meteors back into the sky to crash down on a distant pillar, laughing.

“Have fun with your spore plague! Old Pig!” Ugrash hooted.

“We will amuse ourselves in other ways tonight! Gigigigigi—!” Garlock sniggered.

“Bwahahaha—! We will take those old eyes as a good recompense!” Huljas cackled.

She stared dully. Even her soul creaked and her Sea of Knowledge groaned under the strain of the two-fold attack from without and within the three things that were certainly either controlling or pretending to be the Ur’Inan shot away to the south, leaping for the pillars, vanishing into the haze as the soul sense all around them raged and the ruined palanquin and the now broken statue collapsed into the field of spores, sending them swirling upwards.

“Have fun with your dross, Stupid Glutton!”

“The Blood Eclipse may not have gotten the Ur’Sar, but eyes turn to this place! Gwahaha—!”

Their mockery echoed on the wind, carried by the thunder somehow, and the swirling rains.

The sense behind them intensified abruptly and her qi became even more chaotic as whatever it did attacked the whole spore cloud. The miasma field around her contracted, but not by much as the moon mushrooms–

“Die!”

A vile, mind-destroying spike of disruption – seeking to corrupt the very nature of life and cancel her existence, and by extension rob the spores of an anchor, made her consciousness waver and forced her back into the shadowy arms of the symbol, within her dantian. Gasping, she realised that she was free of whatever had been–

Managing to recover enough coordination over her limbs, she tried to push herself up–

A force hammered down on her from above, making her bones creak and her qi in her outer body disperse slightly as the miasma field was truly pressured now. She struggled desperately as something that felt like a hand gripped her around the neck and dragged her upwards, into the sky. At the same time, a second crippling strike landed on her Sea of Knowledge, making the whole of her consciousness waver. Her symbol, which was already fighting against the spores, blocked it before it could do much more than give her pain, but even that pain was unutterable. A second blow hammered into her, trying to do something to her Sea of Knowledge.

Another hammer blow arrived and she shrunk back inside herself, feeling her soul creak under the strain as her awareness of the outside world shrank away.

If a fourth blow ever came, she didn’t feel it.

She regained consciousness.

As far as awakenings went, it was not one she was going to rank highly.

The pain rolling through her body was excruciating. Her limbs felt like they were constantly being burned with extreme heat and cold. Her body was unable to move in the slightest. But her soul sense was, remarkably, still intact, so she was able to perceive her surroundings as much as she then promptly wished she had remained in ignorance.

She was nailed to the wall, a miasma field stretching about a metre and a half around her in all directions, even into the wall itself. Sana was not there; that was the first thing she looked for, but the link between them told her that her sister was both alive and also similarly restrained. The ephemeral nature of the link suggested a reasonable distance between them as well. Her Nascent Soul and dantian were still intact, as was her core – however, that was where the good news ended.

Half her fleshly body and two of her outer meridian channels were subsumed by the eldritch moon mushrooms. The room she was in was a cube maybe ten metres by ten, and as it turned out, she was not simply nailed to the wall, but to the middle of a large stele-like thing that took up the whole of the wall on the side of the room she was in. Opposite her, sat on a blocky altar in the middle of the room, looking at her pensively was a tall, golden-tan skinned pig demon. Unlike the others, she had seen it was, outside of its head, a thing of physical perfection. On its pig-like head, it sported four horns, red marks flowing strangely from them across its face, neck and torso in a way that put her in mind of a perverse symbol array – in fact, the core of the array was on its forehead, which held a closed slit.

“You are an enigma,” it spoke with a hypnotic, deep baritone that pulled at her mind in wrong ways.

She tried to speak but realised she was somehow silenced. Looking around, she saw runes running around the room in a script she didn’t recognise.

“You are not a ‘Mage’… not a ‘Physique Practitioner’… not a ‘Martial Master’… yet you have aspects of all three…” it shifted, exposing itself to her as it considered her pensively.

“You walked out of the depths, inside this vessel, yet did not control it immediately. Are you some new manifestation of those wretched things in the depths?” it pondered.

“You have awareness, of a sort…” Unable to say anything, she could only glare at the horrible thing and try not to focus on its phallic organ, which was almost the length of…

Her distaste must have somehow registered visibly because it laughed and got up, walking forward to stand just beyond the edge of the miasma field. She offered a small prayer to the fates that the miasma field that was probably going to cause problems was so dense around her that she was basically in a spatial pocket.

“Interesting… You can make that kind of look; does something of your host remain?” it chuckled.

“It is a pity I could not grasp those three from the Blood Eclipse,” it sighed, continuing to stare at her, its horrid, far too familiar eyes running across her body. “Too many questions. There were rumours of an Ur’Sar appearing among the pathetic savages to the east… Is that why they were there? To seize you and make you their brood queen? To give them living scions of pure blood?”

She tried to focus on what it was saying rather than its appearance, which was hard. There were two different versions of her in her head currently. One being held rigidly by the link between her Nascent Soul, the Symbol, her Mantra and her Sea of Knowledge, and the other which was apparently just a mess of disgusting urges that had wanted to just drink in the perfection before her. It was a disgusting feeling, made all the more so by the fact that she could do nothing to prevent that other-self making itself known.

The implication was that Huljas, Garlock and Ugrash had been… either controlled somehow or been infiltrating… but that made no sense… unless that was why they had survived when all the other male slaves had mostly died? The other Ur’Inan had seemed to know them at least, knew the tribe they came from, but that tribe hadn’t been this Blood Eclipse that the demon just mentioned.

“You are actually quite beautiful. It is a pity,” the demon sighed. “I wonder, how much of the host remains… You are able to control it and manifest that miasma field… but I know how your kind works…”

“It is a pity I cannot have you… It was amusing to watch some of the little ones die so… just getting close to you to reclaim that vessel and the others,” the melodious words sank into her, trying to pull her focus back towards it while ignoring the encroachment of the Moon Mushroom colony.

-Ahh, she desperately tried to stop paying visual attention to it and limit the part of her that really wanted it to utter just random gibberings in the corner of her mind.

-Inwards... displacement…

She looked inwards and found the thread.

Outside, the creature stared at her with a furrow in its piggy brow.

She stared at it, wondering why her mind was drawn to it in this moment, but only for a moment because–

Something reached into her mind in a way that should have been impossible as she understood it so far. It did so in a way that the Moon Mushrooms had never achieved, that even the Unchained had never achieved. It didn’t try to grasp her mind, but the very concept of her consciousness, like hands trying to lift the entire, conceptual being of ‘her’ out of ‘her’.

The symbol didn’t overtly resist, as such, but the way in which the action failed was bizarre in its own right – and excruciatingly painful as bits of her she had barely realised were connected to each other all resisted in their own way for a brief moment before snapping back together with enough force to make her Sea of Knowledge shake. It was followed by an intense sense of… warmth. The instinctual parts of her that were now thoroughly out of her control almost went insane right then and there. Even as she was, she felt her heart quicken as a sense of longing seeped into her, suffusing her whole body.

The symbol snarled this time, and properly pushed back against the warm, dreamy feeling, and when it left she felt like she had been drenched in filth. It left her Nascent Soul shivering and her Sea of Knowledge feeling like it had a layer of scum coated over the exterior for a few seconds.

“Oh… So that is how you are still… You are not controlled by the colony…” it purred, its eyes growing wide with… delight?

She was in a different place suddenly, a beautiful prince leaning over her, running his hands over her as she reclined on a div–

The distortion of her soul crumpled and she was pulled back to the present.

The creature had taken a step back and was looking at her seriously, for the first time, she realised. The heart of the array on its head was open, revealing it to be a third eye, which held… a…

‘He caressed her, whispered sweet words to her… took her by the hand and showed–‘

The symbol pushed again and she was snapped back to the moment much more forcefully. The pupil in the eye dilated slightly and the pig demon grimaced. She felt her mind creaking under the sustained pressure. Her already tortuous battle to keep the miasma and the spores stalemated in her body was disrupted and her qi, and the mantra supporting it, were forced to give ground under the two-pronged attack.

It picked up the leaf that was sat on the altar. “This is an interesting thing as well. Nothing like it is down here in this place… nothing worked to this degree certainly – yet it is dead, an offcut, worked for decoration and put in a palace floor…”

She watched, was forced to watch actually, as it turned it over consideringly in its large hands. “This style, it is of Evergrove, carved by their craftsman—it even has the moniker of the Van Jaal’s family upon it.

“I wonder how you came by it… You are not of that family; I know the blood of all those houses…” it walked around the stone altar in the middle of the room, looking pensive.

“You have a secret, certainly… How do you resist the Spore Plague. You are weak, a thing of the fifth circle, but even then not that exceptional. Compared to the scions of above you are a weak girl fumbling ignorantly with the tools of her elders and betters… Even the worst of them is a magnitude better than you…”

It turned back to stare at her again… “How to make you unpick your secrets… Ah… you had a sister…”

It clapped its hands and after a few moments two other smaller pig demons dragged a figure into the room… Sana, naked as she currently was.

“We removed the plague from her. It was an effort to do so, but it is possible...” it sneered, turning back to her.

Aware as she was, that her sister was still over two miles away, at least, and in no better condition than she was currently… she stared at fake version of her sister with distaste.

It walked over to the fake Sana and dragged it up by the neck, looking at it… then it pushed it over the altar.

She tried to look away, but something in its tone, of its grunts and groans, was hypnotic in a way that even the symbol could not reject. Her mantra, still forced to focus whole-heartedly on the other threat to her, could only provide so much, even if the horror before her did feed it somewhat.

“Ah… I see…” the demon muttered, stopping, before staring at her with those dreadful, dark eyes. “You know... that this is... fake.”

It laughed suddenly. “But that is okay; there is another way.”

It clapped its hands again and the two demons brought another figure into the room a short while later, a female Ur’Inan, about her build. They grabbed the fake Sana and dragged its limp body away.

“You… can deny it because it is fake. Hide behind the shell of your inner strength… but can you deny the reality of what is done, I wonder?” the demon asked with a disturbing grin.

It grasped the female Ur’Inan and held it up. “See, little one, this is what we do to Ur’Sar…”

She stared at the Ur’Inan, who stared back at her with a deep all-encompassing hopelessness and dread that made her want to scream and cry just looking at the young woman. Her soul sense told her clearly that this misfortunate prisoner was like Ragash and the others, crippled, but with her sanity and soul still intact.

She could only watch as the orc’s appearance melted into a version of… her.

Had she been able to snarl, or yell, or curse, she would have. As it was, the muscles in her face were barely under her command so all she managed was a certain flatness.

“That’s a better face… You understand… these ones will suffer because of you… You are Ur’Sar, you are hope, and you will ruin them," it declared, smiling faintly, pushing the Ur’Inan down. "Because of you, they will have to suffer this—

“I wonder how long whatever is protecting you can hold out… Ah… Such things… require… a certain… stability… of… mind!” it laughed and the Ur’Inan screamed, and screamed... and screamed.

“You are young… untried… untested! How… long can… you last?” The Ur’Inan wailed and flailed in its cruel grip.

She thought about just sealing her eyes, hiding in her soul… She tried, but it was useless. The scene was still there even if she hid in the depths of the symbol—something refused to allow it to go unseen. And the Ur’Inan, she realised, was praying… in its broken voice… The words ‘Ur’Sar’ kept coming back… again and again… even as it was ruined.

Other parts of her also refused it, for other reasons. This nameless Ur’Inan was sane… Had she not been someone like Rusula, or any of the others she had met and see and talked to… she had had hopes, dreams, a family? Yet now she was here, lost to all that…

-I am the only witness to her sorrow…

She realised tears were running down her cheeks. To turn away from it was as fundamentally wrong as what was happening to them both. Either turn from it and have that part of you defiled, or watch and have your innocence of the world defiled… a horrible choice. A flawless choice—betray yourself, or betray others.

…Tears ran down her face as she watched on in silence.

The Ur’Inan woman lasted a long time, but when it was broken the demon brought another… and another…

Something slowly started to shift inside her… slowly, imperceptibly… until it got bored and left.

That was…

Behind it, it left a pile of broken, mutilated and even partially eaten Ur’Inan. Some even bore her and Sana’s faces, lying around the room. Left to her own silent horror, she could only vow on their behalf to try to tear this whole evil place out by its roots somehow…

After it left, she could only turn her mind’s eye inward and start to war against the mushrooms properly. In the course of the unspeakable debauchery and death she had witnessed her soul had been shaken enough anyway that all of her exterior meridian system was now contaminated with the spores. It was physically impossible for her to forcibly expel them from her bloodstream at this point. Her body had a thin patterning of white veins across most of it.

Unfortunately, expelling them was both unrealistic and undesirable, of that she was very certain now. Had it been her over that altar, she would be dead by now. She was certain she was not as strong as half of those poor souls who had prayed for salvation from Ur’Sar-Ishara. The room had translated their prayers for her to understand as she was forced to watch on.

The war was an outlet for her pain and her fury. It gnawed at her mind, trying to destabilise her. That was certainly what the demon had been after. Even more horrifying was that it was undeniably effective. She could only crush, ruthlessly, the little candle flame-like distortions of despair, grief and horror that were starting to manifest IN her Sea of Knowledge as aberrant thoughts, uncaught by the mantra.

She was more and more sure now, that actually, this was a weakness… That she had miscalculated, long ago. The belief that her mantra was excellent for sheltering her mind was right, but the consequence was dreadful now that it was revealed. Without the mantra, or if it could not be drawn upon, she was glass, and that glass was cracking. It relied upon her to keep the shield, and while the mantra could and did work on everything, it was only, she was realising, able to do so much. It was limited by the strength of the mind behind it, and she… they… who had hidden behind it, relied on it for so much, were naked and weak when it finally reached a point, like now, where the rest of her just could not cope.

It was a terrifying thought in its own right, and one she had to struggle not to throw straight at the mantra, because that was also going to exacerbate this. The longer it tormented her and the more she relied on that to shield her, the worse the payback at the end would be… The demon certainly knew this, somehow.

The symbol in her Sea of Knowledge shifted faintly as if agreeing.

Standing in her dantian, she inspected her body’s dubious condition. Her capacity to retain qi was no longer increasing, nor was the mist in her dantian – but not, she realised after a moment of confused experimentation, because of the spores or even the miasma field. It was just because her physical body was no longer passively absorbing qi… and she wasn’t losing qi either, which was an additional mark against weird.

“Why?” she said dully, staring at her body through the mind’s eye of her Nascent Soul… trying to work it out.

At first, she thought it was due to the very thin qi within the room itself, which was almost certainly a sealed prison chamber, given how she was stuck in the middle of what looked like a giant stele set in the wall with strange metal spikes through her limbs. The whole setup seemed custom made to stop her absorbing qi… except… she wasn’t losing qi either…

“Oh.” She felt stupid suddenly.

Her body might have lost the physical arms of her outer meridian systems, but she was in the Nascent Soul realm, and her Nascent Soul held a complete mirror of her vital processes, her skeleton and… her meridians. A moment’s further experimentation showed that her Nascent Soul’s absorption was basically keeping pace with the spores’ drain on her unrefined qi, keeping the two in equilibrium.

“My vital processes swapped from my body to my soul…” she mumbled out loud to her dantian at large. One of the serpents stuck its head above the water’s surface and hissed at her. She kicked water at it and it rolled its eyes and sank back.

Drawing in more qi, she found that the nascent colony on her outer body started to draw in more as she did. She drew less and it drew less.

“So that’s how it is,” she muttered.

Before, her body had held primacy, while she just let her Nascent Soul handle all the other things, but now… now that all her vital processes in her body were under siege, her Nascent Soul had primacy. What was in her body was the minor part, and the formerly mirrored systems in her body were the guiding light. Her body was just the physical structure that housed it. The two operated in synch – and she realised she had never actually used just her Nascent Soul to cultivate without her body as a medium…

She sighed and another serpent stared at her with mildly judging eyes.

“I know… I know,” she said, not sure whether to laugh or cry.

...

The demon came back after a while and tried to torment her some more, using various means – but it didn’t rape, murder and eat unfortunate Ur’Inan for some reason. Instead, it used various arts to try and pull her mind from her body, or damage it further.

Setting aside the utter horror of the circumstances, it was a really weird struggle.

The symbol was not necessarily a match for whatever the demon did with trying to defile her control over her qi, for whatever reason. The symbol was, however, more than a match for the strength of the mushrooms. The mushrooms were also able to disperse and diffuse whatever the demon was doing. The demon and the mushrooms both tried to ignore each other. The two seemed to have no interest in competing at a truly fundamental level but neither was able to let the other past. It got even weirder when she realised that the spores were, in fact, trying their fate-thrashed best to let the other strength through, but being stymied inexplicably.

It took a few panicked investigations before she worked that out – her bones were totally untouched by the spores. The spores tried, but they just flat out failed to get any purchase and the reason for that turned out to be her mantra, which had been fundamental to the creation of that set of meridians. That set of meridians, her soul’s meridians and the ones that the symbol had formed, were also, she found in the process of that investigation, much more synched up than they had been previously. With every cycle her Nascent Soul did, they drew a bit closer together as well.

The other missing piece to this turned out to be the means by which she was restrained in the chamber itself. Her limbs had been pinned to the wall with metal spikes that ran directly through her bones, and those spikes were not really spikes, but closer to bladed metal poles went quite a long way into the wall. Further than the miasma field at least. Investigating that carefully, she discovered that the miasma field itself was restrained by something within the wall.

“How ironic,” her Nascent Soul form muttered as she considered what had been done.

It was, truly ironic: in seeking to restrain her so securely that she couldn’t escape by musculature, and so that was secured beyond the means of the miasma field, they had actually given her a way to get a tiny bit of qi. The spikes themselves were clearly part of the imprisonment mechanism, and had a faint draining strength accompanying them. They also injected a bizarre and aberrant manipulation of Yin Earth qi into her bones directly. This was, however, easily overwhelmed by the combination of the symbol, the mantra and the holistic nature of the Myriad Elements Qi in her bones.

The demon did invariably return.

It threatened her, cajoled her, tempted her and then tortured to death dozens more Ur’Inan. In the end, though, it got bored and presumably just left her to rot once more. She could only guess that her lack of responsiveness – she couldn’t even cry any more as the spores surface takeover of her body had gotten to her face – was a deal-breaker.

Thereafter, it only showed up occasionally, and then just stopped coming.

Left to herself in the ten by ten metre cage, she tried to think of ways she could actually get out of here. Movement was impossible, both because of the spikes and because of the spores, and she was under no circumstances going to risk sending her Nascent Soul, which seemed to have passed oddly undetected so far, out of her body either. Fates only knew what horrible things could be done if they actually did grasp her soul. In the end, all she could think of was trying to progress enough that she called down a tribulation. The issue there was that her next big threshold was Severing Origins – or Spirit Severing as it was also occasionally called – which didn’t usually have actual Tribulation Lightning associated with it. As far as she was aware, the only tribulation that was likely to come was the one for Dao Seeking… That was a sobering thought.

Sana’s condition in the distance wasn’t much better than hers in any case, but was certainly no worse, so that was something.

As time rolled by at some indeterminate rate, she also noticed that the thread was becoming thinner and thinner. Soon it became clear, well clearer than it had been before at any rate, that the soul force within the thread combined with the now enforced primacy of her Nascent Soul were promoting her Nascent Soul’s age at a noticeably quicker rate.

Sat there, on the water, she found that the cycle of her qi was also changing again. Her Nascent Soul’s mirrored skeletal system started to acquire the shimmering sheen of Myriad Elements Qi while scraps of knowledge and understanding from the thread swirled into her Sea of Knowledge, reforming as a new red-gold thread within it.

How long the process took, she was unsure. She stopped counting cycles in the end because it was just maddening. Certainly, it took tens of thousands, but eventually, her Nascent Soul’s appearance reached the same ‘age she was.

The change that came was instantaneous.

The connection between her Nascent Soul and her Physical Body flipped like a coin. Before the primacy of her soul had been enforced, but now, instinctively, she grasped that it was natural. She also instinctively knew that how she appeared – her ‘physical’ body – would be a reflection of her Nascent Soul and no longer age in its cosmetic appearance unless she explicitly made it. She could, if she wished, actually appear younger than she was, but appearing older would require a lot of effort and further maturation of her Nascent Soul’s form, which would no longer be anywhere near as easy as it had been before.

Clearly, this was some sub-realm within Nascent Soul, yet on the heels of it, came a second intuition that came somehow from the symbol: her physique had also broken through in some way. The ghostly multi-hued bones in her Nascent Soul were rapidly connecting up to the inner meridian system in her Nascent Soul and within a singular cycle she felt a strange sense of setting as her bones’ vital qi also became more attuned to her Nascent Soul.

She continued with the cultivation cycles, because there was nothing else to do… However, as she did so, she started to encounter a faint sense of creeping unease that made her stop again.

At first, she thought it was related to the Moon Mushrooms, but that was not the case, and they were now permanently locked in a stalemate with her body, fundamentally unable to cross over into her eight core meridians or her five true meridians.

She tried to examine the room again, and the array in its walls that was sealing it all up, but had to draw a blank there. This time she tried to focus more forcefully on what it did, but it just slipped away like mist between her hands, leaving behind a vile feeling. Finally, frustrated, she tried to cut at that, much as she had the ‘vitality’ of the serpent, but her effort just bled into nothing and the array remained obscure.

Sana was still… about okay as she was, based on the vague ‘not good but not bad’ sensation the link gave her.

The sense remained, pending somehow. It put her in mind of an evil eye trying to seek her out, eventually leading her to conclude that whatever it was, it wasn’t related to her cultivation.

In the end, all she could do was keep an eye on it and keep on pushing forward with her cultivation, plodding towards Severing Origins.

Eventually, the ghostly, multi-hued skeleton in her Nascent Soul also reached completion. There was a sense of settling and her Nascent Soul pulled together and became more vivid. Staring at her hands then dismissing her clothing and looking at her whole body, she found that from the outside she now looked totally corporeal. Her body no longer had a faint ghostly shimmer. Calling the garb, it was still black and white, although now edged with multihued designs on the hems.

If she focused hard, she could see the meridians inside her and her core, the symbol and the skeleton.

The form still looked a little illusionary until the settling feeling passed and the healing vitality in her bones and her Nascent Soul connected directly. At that point, the thread that had been revolving around her core dispersed completely and flowed into her Sea of Knowledge, appearing around her Nascent Soul’s waist as a rope belt with a frayed tassel.

She found herself expecting something to happen… but nothing really did.

The sensation of being watched intensified slightly but that was about it. She spent some more time looking for what was causing it, but to no avail. It was… disconcerting though. Like having some inauspicious thing peering over her shoulder with a judging expression, waiting for her to slip up.

She calmed her mind and examined her state again… Fundamentally, she was still at Nascent Soul… Severing Origins was a fundamental purification of the body, not a realm as such, but a series of steps to cut away impurities from your mortal self in preparation for crossing the Immortal Threshold. Its three steps involved removing mortal weakness, then cutting away the impurities of earthly circumstance then eliminating impurities that might impede your heavenly path. The tribulation bit was after that, when you first created your ‘Principle’ based on those comprehensions and entered Dao Seeking to solidify it. That latter threshold was the one that many mortal realm step cultivators stalled on without either good fortune or a lot of preparation.

The main change she could observe from there on out, was primarily in her intent. With the red-gold thread becoming a belt on her Nascent Soul, the speed of her qi refinement once again sped up subtly. Her grasp of the purity of the intent also started to increase much more markedly as the knowledge within it was inside her Sea of Knowledge in a much more holistic way.

The demon returned at long last, proving that it wasn’t the source of the eye, at least in a way that she could determine. She ignored it in favour of trying to continue working out what was staring at her.

The demon stalked back and forth, whispering words that she ignored, right up until the spike punched through her heart, where her inner meridian gates culminated, with unerring accuracy. That just made her roll her eyes inwardly. It was horribly painful but now her Nascent Soul was the upper in the relationship between body and soul – and even before then it would merely have been an inconvenience, albeit very painful, but she was no stranger to withstanding pain by now.

The next one, though, shot straight through her dantian and collided with her physical Golden Core that spun at its heart.

Cracks ran across it as its rotation was jarred as the spike cut into it. Her inner world shook and her physical body shuddered, the best she could do that passed for a scream of anguish in her current circumstances. The symbol shifted and the internal structure of her dantian, which was already insanely robust for her realm, she was sure, fought back against the devouring power of the spike that had been rammed through her and deep into a hidden groove she had missed in the wall behind her.

Myriad Elements Qi attacked the spike like it was a dread disease in her body, corroding it and absorbing it into her core, scattering the remains through her dantian like miniature meteors. The crack itself healed in mere moments, leaving her with a spike that was ‘stuck’ through her body, but also partially disrupted and severed in a bizarre, phantasmal way by her dantian.

The sealing intent that came with it was strong… and similar to that the one that resided in the drain on her bones, she realised. The eight spikes were also now linked in some way. As she watched, the drain in the other seven amplified somewhat, but it was still no match for the control that the symbol exerted, or the hidden purity of her refined, intent-infused qi. Clearly, this had happened before, without the stabs through her heart and her dantian, only she had been incapacitated before. This new seal, in and of itself, seemed to further augment the existing seizing and drain, but focused more specifically on her Sea of Knowledge.

“…”

The demon stared at her in shock, holding another metre-long spike in its hands. It looked between her and the spike several times.

“WHERE IS YOUR SOUL, WRETCH?”

The roar, which came from nothing, was enough to actually shake her back out of her dantian proper in some way and re-engage with the remnant bastions of her physical body. The fury behind it made her mental focus and her consciousness waver again. She steeled herself for the after-effects, which she was beginning to really detest.

Yet to her surprise it was only that – her Nascent Soul shimmered imperceptibly under the onslaught, somewhat blunted as it was by the miasma. She gave it an obscene gesture or three, then, considering that it might actually like that, gave it a few more holy ones instead.

“Ahf' ymg' ah?

“Y' ymg' ulnah!”

“Bhagl ymg' ah orr'e!”

It screamed at her in a tongue rather similar sounding to the one the mushrooms had been using on occasion. The room went dark and the lines of its corners seemed to bleed inwards. The piles of corpses, many now rotting, were turned to flesh and bone paste and scattered everywhere.

Somehow, its impotent rage was the most joyous thing she had seen in a very long time. Grasping for control, she managed to puppet her physical body just enough to mouth a few words.

“You… sai-d… w-e… ha-ve… a… sou-ul… a-bO-mi-na-t-i-on…”

It stared at her duly…

“…”

“You… have control to speak?” For the first time, there was a flicker of what she could only call genuine uncertainty in its tone.

“…”

“Impossible…”

It stared at her, then at the spike in its hands, before casting that down in a fury.

“You… you clearly must have a soul, yet why… The threads are hidden…”

It stalked back around the altar and came to stand in front of her again, leaning forward until its face was a hair’s breadth from the miasma.

“I will find it… and tear it out and watch as your body is given to every one of my little ones. I will drag that welp of a sister in here and make you witness as she becomes my willing paramour… and when she has fallen, she will turn you… and you will bear my children… and you will bear their children thereafter…”

The words assailed her like chains and hooks, but they did little more than make her Nascent Soul waver, supported as it was by the symbol.

“Ha… Ha…” she mouthed.

“…”

It flexed its hands and then, with a howl, turned and smashed both fists down on the altar, shattering its top and making the whole room shake. The contents, which were not much, but did still include the leaf for some reason, scattered across the room. The altar top repaired itself within seconds.

“BREAK!” It snarled at her.

The word hit her like a hammer, making her mind waver properly this time. Her bones ground and her flesh shifted horribly before the onslaught of what was, as far as she could detect, just a word.

“…”

Panting, it stared at her, then, snarling, it stalked out of the room. A few moments later, a bunch of smaller pig demons and some slaves came in and started to clean up.

Eyeing the leaf, where it was lying on the floor by one of the gaps near the wall, an idea, and also a damage limitation point, surfaced in her mind. She had resisted the spike, but she was really not sure she would survive if it decided to just abandon her by throwing the leaf into her stomach.

The issue was how to ensure that the leaf was…

Looking around, she could only consider that it would be a shame if it was lost in the depths of the tower, and actually, that would be no guarantee of her safety. It would need to end up in the miasma, and in a way that…

All she could do was try to induce one of them to throw it at her in a non-dangerous place and then obscure it as best she could with her body.

-Thank the fates they made the lustfully idiotic piglets do clean-up, she could only think.

Sending out her soul sense, which was somewhat messed with by whatever was being done in the room, albeit not to the degree of her qi, she sent a thread into one of the little demons. The vileness of its mind was really…

-Without the symbol this would be next to impossible, she thought with a disgusted shudder as she whispered into its rotten, limited mind.

“Take up the leaf…”

“It will make the gold pig happy…”

“The whore on the wall made him angry…”

“If you stab it, the master will give you things to play with…”

“He will be impressed…”

She suppressed a revolted shudder as greed and lust lit up its mind and it grabbed the leaf and plodded over, ignored by the others.

Focusing she made sure it was holding the–

It shot into her remarkably accurately – piercing her below the diaphragm and well above her dantian. Its razor-sharp edge cut right through her and pierced the wall behind, leaving maybe half a hand width exposed, the blade facing upwards.

-That would have been embarrassing, she thought with a shudder.

Its decisiveness had caught her off guard. Had it gone in the other way up she might have been split from waist to crotch.

She gave a mental blink of surprise as she saw blood flow out of the wound and start to run down the wall behind her. Blood that contained spores…

In that moment, an unresolved aspect of the metal restraints and how they worked became apparent: the spikes absorbed blood; she wasn’t bleeding from the wound through her heart into the wall and that vital energy the spikes were seeping into themselves was what was actually rooting her into the wall itself. Unless she died or someone broke the array hidden in the depths of the wall that bound them, she would not be able to separate them from her body under any normal circumstances.

The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

-And it means that I don’t bleed spores everywhere, she thought with a mental eyeroll.

“Such precautions you took,” her Nascent Soul giggled nastily. “All undone because one little piggy wanted to stick its cock in something.”

Really, it was too absurd. The pig demon for its part, released from her suggestion, looked confused then went back to sweeping the gore down the side tunnels of the room. The blood from her wound, still bleeding due to the properties of the leaf, ran down the wall, beyond the miasma and entered the tunnels as well.

In her dantian, she could only laugh at that. The doom of this place was maybe secured just through that singular action as spores were now steadily flowing out of her body and into the tunnel. The pockets of intent that held them would disperse when they got a certain distance away from her anyway, as would the symbol’s suppressing restraint, such as remained over some of them.

On the other hand… the issue of making the blade itself less obvious…

She cast around the room, and finally had to suggest to another of the piglets that the blade had not gone deep enough and that there would be a reward for it if it went all the way through her. The demon looked around then walked over, leering at her. It considered its arms, then grabbed a slave who was using a very crude mop and made them do it instead. The Undren just managed to poke the blade all the way in without entering the miasma field. The healing of her body closed over the blade a few moments later. Horrible but probably as good as it would be.

The demon returned an hour later and noticed that the leaf was missing…

It searched the room fruitlessly, and even scanned with its soul sense, but found nothing. That it failed to find it was, she guessed, a combination of the nature of the blade and the fact that it was in the middle of the miasma field, covered in her own blood and spores. If she moved it, the demon might notice but that was impossible, so it remained painfully hidden and hopefully beyond misuse on either her or Sana.

Eventually, it stalked out again – leaving echoing shouts to ring down the corridor before the door slammed closed after it. In the absence of anything else, she could only return to cultivating.

By her count, it had to be… two days later, give or take, when the demon came back, enraged, and stood before her, staring at her.

“HOW,” the word sank into her body trying to command her in some way that the symbol was mostly able to reject and the mushrooms ignored.

“How did you do it?” The malevolence of its tone made her Nascent Soul, which it was still not seeing, she guessed, shake.

She could hear drums in the distance, warning drums in all likelihood. It pushed its soul sense into her, forcing the spores miasma aside, searching, and then saw the dried blood running down the wall.

“You…”

It stared at her dully… then looked around the room before it just started to laugh.

Abruptly, it turned back to her and opened its mouth. The world seemed to draw towards it; the greed of its strength was unfathomable as it physically tried to draw the blade out of her with pure intent. Yet that mostly failed, because of the miasma field.

“REVEAL. YOUR. SOUL.”

The words scoured her physical body only to be stymied again, despite the best intents of the spore colony by the comprehensive nature of the shell it had manifested around her. She might as well have been wearing misshapen fungus armour at this point. It tried to batter down her psyche directly but made no headway there either, because the symbol which was anchoring everything just slunk deeper and deeper into the metaphysical contention between her Sea of Knowledge, her Third Eye and her innermost meridians of her Nascent Soul and remained undiscovered in the depths of her dantian.

It raged back and forth before pig men hauled a dozen Ur’Inan in to the room which it changed and started to brutally torment in front of her. She watched, remembering their pitiful last moments and swearing once again that everything about this place would be brought to ruin.

When the last one was dead, it stalked out, leaving the corpses arrayed in macabre poses.

It took a while, but she managed to calm herself once more and focused back inwards, hoping that the spores in her blood would bring ruin while she tried to get strong enough to escape these bonds. Whether Origin Severing would provide that possibility was unclear, but she knew that if she didn’t get free of the wall and the mushrooms she was dead if the mushrooms alone were removed.

Time blurred by.

Her Nascent Soul’s own ‘Soul Intent’, which was subtly different in some ways from her ‘Sundering Intent’, became more and more manifest in its own right. As it did so, her Sea of Knowledge also began to grow within her Nascent Soul. Soon the two reservoirs of ‘refined’ qi were actually exchanging back and forth.

And it was here, finally, that she understood where the eye was, and the depth of the pit that the accursed demon had dug for her. It had known she would perhaps try this, she thought with a shudder, as she looked at how deep the scarring of her ordeals so far were. Her resolve was strong, and had become stronger – especially since this horrible ordeal began; however, that was not enough. She could see now, that a part of her, a part of her that had wanted to believe there was good in the world was… injured. It was like a sick disease that was slowly, incrementally distilling out of her being, gnawing at her Sea of Knowledge. She also knew now why the symbol wasn’t ‘protecting’ her from it and why the mantra had ‘missed’ it. It was because it was something that had come from her, within her. The evil demon had induced or maybe exacerbated a self-inflicted wound in her own psyche and in the process damaged her sense of what was ‘correct’ in the world somehow.

There was no stopping it either. It continued to grow whether she cultivated or not, fed by the ruined parts of herself that she could no longer control in her physical body and egged on either advertently or inadvertently by the moon mushrooms.

Finally, she also determined that the array in the room, which had been so naggingly familiar yet always slipped away from her understanding, was also promoting this. It was eventually her persistent attempts at sundering away that feeling, which she had been intermittently been trying for so long that it was almost second nature at this point that bore surprising fruit. With her somewhat more robust Sea of Knowledge, she managed to successfully encapsulate the idea of ‘separation’ between the rather diffuse ‘whatever’ that was interfering with her ability to understand the array and her Sea of Knowledge rather than herself.

The brief realisation of surprise – that that had actually worked – was drowned in the icy clarity of what she was dealing with. The array was like the one that had held the spear, both little and big. Its purpose was to hollow ‘her’ out from the inside out by subtle means. She could see the path by which it was done as well. The pig demon had so artfully manipulated circumstances to ensure that her decisions were nudged in ways that put her deeper and deeper into this pit, in different ways. Everything it had done, as she examined back with horror, during her captivity – all of it was leading towards inducing that or complementing it. The demon would put pressure from the outside, and all the while, unseen, this array had been gnawing away at a truly profound level on her.

In the end, she would be refined and the hollow shell that had been her would be filled up by this creeping corruption from the inside out – filled with a shadow that was seized by the array, through her Sea of Knowledge in a way very similar to how they had been using defiling qi, she guessed.

“That also explains why it was certain I had a soul,” she muttered grimly as she sat there in her own dantian.

Because the array worked, was working. The demon just couldn’t grasp her soul directly, presumably with the intention of integrating it much more thoroughly into this array in some manner.

She stared up at the sky of her own inner world and sighed grimly.

“This changes everything,” she could only say helplessly.

It also changed nothing. It just meant that she was no longer racing against outward, unforeseen circumstances. She was racing against her own degradation.

And it still wasn’t the fate-thrashed, inauspicious eye she realised – that was watching from some other place.

The way it was peering at her made her keep thinking of the latter stages of her Nascent Soul tribulation. Those had seemed almost personally vengeful in some way, as if trying to declare that she shouldn’t exist. That she was an abomination. That she was unworthy of what she had. That had been long before she ever met the pig demons, the Defilers, the naming behind which she understood much more clearly now.

“The world wants to kill me, this place wants to kill me, and these defilers want to make me a soulless puppet…” she muttered.

“Why in the nameless fate should I dance to your strings…?”

“So what if you declare that this is what is right?” she scowled.

The genuine injustice of it was… agonizing, actually. Now that she could see it, with such clarity off the back of this, it was… wrong. A perversion.

Something about that certainty seemed to touch a chord with the red-gold thread. Suddenly, an image slipped into her mind…

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

~ ELARIA – ST ROBERTA’S ACADEMY. ~

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

She stood above the ruins of the great court of the Academy – the key of Extinguishing Origins in her hand, watching the second wave of battleships shift in out of the void. The ruins of the advance force lay scattered about the vale below. The war there was already brutal, as it always was, and yet, it was inconsequential, because her sisters were both missing. Her connection to Eleanora had vanished just minutes ago, while her connection to Elsabeth, the vanishing of which had first alerted her that something was wrong, was warped and concealed. Her attempt at divining a link, through the shared threads of the good luck charm the three of them had forged all those years ago, had been blocked by a vast power. Not a singular group, but a collective – a collective who had expected her to divine it and then fled as soon as it became clear that they had not expected her to divine it. She knew who they were, mostly now, but before she could travel home, she had found ‘home’ was also missing, removed from the world, and while she was still calling Extinguishing Origins to her, the first wave had arrived here – for her.

‘Pax Gloria’

‘Lothringars Pride’

‘Ancienna’

‘Meritan Gulf’

They were missing their names, their regalia obscured, but she knew the four great battleships of the Holy Empire well enough to make a mockery of their disguise. Never mind the figures who stood ahead of them, approaching on smaller ships shielded by their links to the Void Walls that the battleships were projecting.

Three Masters of War, two Arch Magisters, four Source Sovereigns and two Lamp-Lighter Lords. All of them had hidden their colours, their faces and even their sources but again, they could not hide their intention from her. Not now that she had decided to look backwards rather than forwards. One of them, a man of stern bearing, his face hidden behind a faceless mask, wearing plain Arborundum armour and carrying a source regalia that was also hidden, spoke grandly.

“People of Saint Roberta’s Academy – the Second Imperial Princess has been Denounced for Heresy and Blasphemous Practices! She has aligned herself with the death cult of Original Extinction and sold her soul to the Darkness beyond the eye of Chronominthian. On behalf of the great council of Ecclesiarchs’ before the righteous power of all nations, we who have cast aside our ego, stand here today to announce that judgement will be served! Let no man stand forth that is not equal under God in this grand endeavour – I command thee all, stand back and let this Black Witch be taken to Lothringar that she might be delivered before the holy council and judged according to the teachings of Almighty God, who is Merciful and Righte–”

She cut him off before he could actually say something properly offensive. “Why such dishonesty Kranz Manaheim? Is it really necessary for someone of your stature to skulk all the way up north, old thief that you are, hiding your visage like a leper?”

“You… heretical wretch, you dare interru–” she cut off one of the Source Sovereigns – Henri Catteban of the ‘reconstituted’ Grand Duchy of Rengrad, if she wasn’t wrong.

“You proclaim righteousness before god, but all I see here are a bunch of bought dogs.”

“Do you deny your crime?” Warmaster Kranz said blandly.

She held up the blade with an amused expression, eyeing the ‘plain’ black blade he had at his side. “Why don’t you bring that trinket over here that you painted black and we’ll test that?”

“…”

The others all stepped off their craft and walked through the void towards them. In truth, it was a problematic group… but…

The deceit in their words was belaying their delaying actions, the first wave had attacked without mercy. She stepped forward and wielded ‘Reason’ to cut the void. For a moment she stood in two worlds, real and unreal, the strikes of the two old Ecclesiarchs who had emerged from the shadows between atoms behind her, aiming to seize her directly found nothing.

“In this at least you are honest,” she said with as much mockery as she could muster, arriving before Henri Catteban.

The Source Sovereign had awareness in the moment, even adrift as it was, so his eyes went wide as saucers as she sank her hand through his neck and sent his severed head and half of his upper body into the ‘Ancienna’ half a mile away. His broken body, still with the barest breath of life passed through the void wall and fractured the outer shell of the ship. The array she had implanted on it triggered and she watched as black blades scythed apart the whole ship, turning it into dust. The death sigh of 7,291 people echoed through the world as she extinguished their chances of rebirth and for good measure slew everyone within a single generation of them in their immediate families.

Turning to Rudolf Manavar, who was on the same boat as the late Henri Catteban, she smiled. He was a bit stronger than Henri, but not by much. The two who were chasing after her found her as she arrived before him, frozen as he was.

“Remember, Rudolf, Manavar Ebrocht, for you are Dead.”

His immortality gone, he plummeted to the ground below -shriven of his stolen strength. The spells sent to stop him inexplicably foundering as his karma became ‘death’.

Turning, she moved towards her nearest attacker and spoke the words in her heart.

“Spirit-Heart, Enchanted, Path-seeking, Night, Day.”

Calamity fell from the void as she called upon the End of the Day. The blade cut at the wizened figure in golden robes who was grasping out his almost skeletal hand for her.

The terminal edge of the karmic reason severed its grasping hand forever, never again would he possess a right hand in any life, past or future. The golden words he spoke split the air and became a horrified curse as he fled backwards. Spinning, she arrived before the other, in his red robes, silver and gold armour, and stabbed for him.

“You-!” the Ecclesiarch Baradanus screamed in shock as her strike split his divine weapon.

Extinguishing Origin arrived before him, a bearded youth with red gold locks and eyes as black as his sisters were pure in this form. A golden charm blazed on Baradanus’s armour as it shattered like glass, and he was thrown into a distant mountain peak with enough force to demolish it and break the void around it. Dimension quakes ruptured outwards as the mana vein within it partially destabilised.

The sky suddenly went dark. Decimation Atmos, pitch black lightning imbued with the intent to ruin all, fell from the void, summoned from the Star Ocean as the two Arch Magisters from the great Academy at Gallicia and in Lothringar cast their spells, not at her, but at the academy itself.

A figure rose from the pagoda below, a woman in blue with white hair and tanned skin wielding a silver crescent. The first bolt she split and dispersed with a wave of her hand then lashed out with the other, snaring it with a mysterious length of rope that dispersed into sparks as the terrified students and teachers of the academy cowered below. The old powers who had been slowly seeping it for a century or more were frozen as another figure rose up from below also wearing Arborundum armour and riding on a Solar Jade Golem.

“You are late Uncle Edward,” she said with as much humour as she could muster.

“There was a complication in the depths, and there are invaders below. We must finish this fast,” the Duke of Everkind growled, drawing his own sword, one of the Mirrors of Sequence, she noted.

“Can I leave these rats to you?” she said, casting around for the source of the next ambushers.

“Gladly, I’ve long wanted to give the Masters of War of the Holy Empire a properly honourable haircut,” Edward cackled.

“Gotcha,” she muttered as she found the irregularity.

“You old fogies sent the younger generation here just to try out the waters didn’t you?” she said, her sword shifting to become a mirror version of her with a different hairstyle that sent a white-robed old man plummeting to the earth like a silver meteorite and a surprised scream of rage.

His impact shook the mountains and levelled almost a square mile of the valley below, what was left of it anyway. The death sighs of tens of thousands of attacking troops echoed in her mind’s eye as they fell without even understanding what had ended them.

A shockwave tore apart the horizon and a golden figure with ten wings of white and gold fire stepped across the horizon to arrive mere metres before her. She cut at it with the sword, uncaring, and watched as it scattered and its form returned to its normal state: a figure about the size of a griffon with four eagle’s wings, a lion’s body and a bearded human head, surrounded with golden flame that made the world dim by association.

She grinned, and stepped backwards as two more figures arrived: robust old men in ascetic white robes, laurels of golden oak leaves on their faces and holy mitres held in incongruously bejewelled hands.

“You are excommunicado, no longer a member of…” Ecclesiarch Menacanthus trailed off as two more shadows appeared behind her, golden-red haired, a boy carrying a stone bracelet and a girl wielding a black, stone rod.

“You… you have…”

“What…” she smiled.

“By your actions…” his companion hissed. “BEHOLD! HER MEANS ARE OUTSIDE HEAVEN! HER ACTIONS DEFY THE RIGHTEOUS NATURE OF THE WORLD! EVEN THE CHOSEN ENVOY OF OUR LORD DARE NOT LOOK UPON HER FRIGHTFUL VISAGE!”

She glanced sideways at the Cherubim, whose name she was pretty sure she remembered as being [unintelligible]. It was looking like someone who has been told this would be an easy gig only to discover that they have been sent to collect peaches stolen from the Garden of the Queen Mother of the West.

It was hard not to laugh. She stepped forward, and it flinched backwards, knowing full well what she was capable of. Those here might fear it, but within this land there were four individuals who would pluck its wings for children’s charms and flay its hide for a foot rug, one of whom was already travelling here from Uwillwaden in the Russic Marches to the west.

“Do you not have an honest word in you?” she said, staring at them grimly, matching faces to signatures who had hidden away the trail of whoever had stolen away Elsabeth.

She closed her eyes and stared at the dark sky above her before sighing and looking back at them. The last vestiges of attachment for the world she had been born into this time fading away – what they were after didn’t really interest her at all. They had had this war before, believed they had ‘won’ it, twice… and were still not satisfied with the answers they had ended up with.

“I said it then, and I’ll say it now: when covetous old thieves hold the strings of Heaven’s Eyes, only calamity can come of it…”

“Against such greed as yours, there is only one answer…” she said with a sad smile.

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

~ ARAI, FEELING THAT PAIN IS A THING THESE OTHERS SHOULD ALSO SHARE ~

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

The words fell into her mind like thunder, echoing across an aeon-span. The conviction within them was phenomenal, putting into words the sentiments she had been struggling to grasp for months. It resonated with her Nascent Soul and touched the symbol in her Sea of Knowledge which rippled in… agreement even as the rest of the phrase settled in her mind.

“…We must seize our own good fortune and fight to the very end to sunder apart your deceit!”

A lidless shadow eye opened up inside her mind, peering into the inner world of her dantian via her Sea of Knowledge. Its demeaning, debasing… defiling gaze trying to strip away everything she could ever have been and make her a debauched pawn of her own base instincts.

She screamed the words back at it and cut at the darkness instinctively, with all the determination she could muster, blinding that detestable pupil, watching as it recoiled then collapsed in a howl of rage.

In the same instant, she was dimly aware of the room and everything else around her disintegrating outwards.

Demons of black thunder, tinged with myriad colours rose in her mind, crawling out of her Sea of Knowledge with the intention of tearing her soul down. She cut at them even as they tried to warp and pierce her organs, aiming to pull her body down like a single tentacle mass. She cut at the shadow in her Sea of Knowledge, whence they originated without even really thinking about it – focusing her Sundering Intent thoroughly upon that critical point that had given birth to that terrible eye.

The shadow vanished and she felt… lighter–

The bolt of white lightning was cast down from on high. The sky above her held a facsimile of the horrible pig demon that had tormented her. It raged at her and screamed in tongues even as she cut apart its thunder, cut apart the sky, or tried to, like she experienced Elaria achieve within that moment.

It split and scattered even as more bolts fell, rising again as horrible things with distorted appendages of white and black – abominations that were all lines and angles that broke her vision and tried to disrupt her will and cloud her judgement. The rage that she had within her was not a friend to her, but a tool for them, a cloud on her judgment… She made to cut and stopped herself, barely realising the trap it had just tried to set for her at the very last moment. Cut away something like that and she would be ruined, a buried instinct told her.

The lightning crumbled away.

The world above and around her warped as a clawed hand shattered the sky, reaching down for her. Dozens of grey-tinged bolts of black lightning fell, tearing into her body from the grey claw. Its strength ripped through her, searing her bones, melting her flesh, entering the world and becoming pig demons that charged at her screaming. She cut them apart even as her arts foundered, and she was unable to wield any arrays beneath the oppressive, descending clawed hand.

The darkness in her soul surged again, renewed in vigour somehow, the eye opening in the sky once again even as she cut at it, blinding it again…

The great pig demon came for her, wreathed in black and gold lighting, pulling her up from the sea of its brethren’s corpses. She spat in its face as it tried to push her down on a black stone altar and cut at it with all of her intent, blinding the eye in its head as lightning consumed them both. All the while the darkness in her mind cackled that she deserved it… deserved it all… this was what she got for using the Eldritch spawn, this was what she got for siding with savages… for not just dying like she should have, that this was what a thing like her deserved.

She cut at it and it fled, again.

Dimly she was aware even as she struggled in two worlds that real and unreal were merging: the golden skinned pig demon was really there, grasping at her even as the lightning flayed them both, trying to force her down and claim her horrifically and do something utterly abhorrent in the course of ruining her tribulation.

-Where did the…? She wondered where the moon mushrooms had gone and then realised that they had fled her, leaving her to her fate even as the lightning arrived.

The pig demon was screaming at her now in its evil tongue, its face a hand’s width from her, pinning her to the altar. She envisaged the sword from her vision that had cut down from the sky and severed the old man’s hand… an inevitable edge of black carrying an edge of silver from on high… and it descended.

It cut from the sky storm clouds above, dimming the world for a brief moment as he watched its descent onto the two of them through the gash in the roof.

It split her from the pig demon, piercing it through the head.

It travelled into her third eye, cut into her Sea of Knowledge and split her from the darkness, extinguishing it utterly.

That strike split her Sea of Knowledge and made her whole body start to disintegrate. The silver lightning fell onwards, into the liminal place between her body and her Nascent Soul, the place where the symbol truly resided, she had come to realise. The light cast within that void by the lightning illuminated strange threads of many colours that ran through her, out of her and around her. Most were silver white, but there were others in grey, blue, green, red and… black. Mainly they were harmonious, some just were, others were bizarre and several, several gave her a sense of binding, inauspicious discomfort and… a very subtle and avaricious greed.

With the last of her strength she managed to use her Sundering Intent to deflect the silver blade from ruining her symbol and instead made it miss it, cutting several of those greedy and inauspicious threads-

She regained consciousness to find herself lying half over the melted black stone alter with the smoking corpse of the golden skinned pig demon lying on her.

“May your nine generations be impotent, evil eye of heaven!” she screamed at the sky at large.

It took a lot of effort to shift its hulking carcass, but at least she had managed to avoid its physical depredations, albeit by nearly dying from tribulation lightning.

“That would probably have been a better way to die in any case,” she muttered as she fuelled her remaining anger to worm out from under the corpse which was so dense as to be immovable to-

There was a furious sensation in her head, she realised: Sana – who was howling in rage and pent up…

The storm-wracked sky above recoiled and she got her first look at a tribulation bolt from a vaguely healthy distance as a silver lightning bolt consumed a tower that was barely within her field of view about two miles away across the sprawling city. Even at that distance, the shockwave seared her skin and cooked the rock around her, further charring the scattered corpses all around her. As she watched, the lightning twisted and turned for the briefest moment as if being manipulated in some way, then collapsed, skittering down into the city below.

Remembering that she had soul sense, she watched as the vengeful torrent of death vaporised a vast swathe of the region around the tower that wasn’t built of what she assumed was qi-repelling stone before finally dissipating.

“Ahhhgh-!” she was cruelly reminded that she had the leaf stuck through her as she slid sideways under the demon.

She paused and stared at the sky for a moment, then reached beneath her and very carefully pushed the leaf further into the altar until she could grab the handle and lift it out. After that it was easy to extricate herself, if a bit gory.

Crawling free, she slumped down and checked her condition.

Her dantian was in ruins, at least superficially – her Golden Core was gone… but her Qi Sea, where her Sundering Intent-infused qi had been accumulating, and her Sea of Knowledge, where her Soul Intent-infused qi had been gathering, had merged.

The boundary of her dantian was now a devouring ring that just drew in any qi that touched her body.

Her meridians, the system of qi in her bones and her Nascent Soul were all connected somehow, like overlapping layers of some optical illusion.

She cycled her qi and watched it get absorbed through her meridians into her new Qi Sea.

“Aiieh?”

She couldn’t help but exclaim in surprise as she realised that the ruins of the pillars were still there, buried in the now much smaller amount of rubble in her Qi Sea, the arrays on them still extant, if not so harmonious. Her Golden Core really was gone through – her Nascent Soul had actually replaced it and was in every way an upgrade in the role, being able to move freely. As she watched, her dantian shifted abruptly back to the proximal state it had been. The same pillars, setup, everything existed in her Nascent Soul’s mirror of the Qi Sea.

“Ohh,” she put her head in her hands and winced as her body reminded her that she had just come through the wringer.

It didn’t help that the whole setup inside her body, which she understood intuitively, was… both simple and complex.

The gist of it now though, was that due to the way her qi circulated, all three of her meridian systems both in her physical body and her Nascent Soul were in absolute unity in any task she put them to. Physical body and her Nascent Soul perfectly in balance, with the symbol at its heart, binding everything together with her Mortal Physique.

“So that’s why the Dao Seeking cores had so much more qi,” she could only exclaim out loud.

The compression of qi and its purification was now a magnitude higher. Qi that arrived in her Qi Sea already had intent in it. The refinement and compression going on meant that it wasn’t simply a case of doubling or tripling – or even quadrupling…

She focused and guessed it was maybe ten times more when full if you decompressed it.

Her higher brain functions mostly caught up with her circumstances as she calmed her mind and she gave a little mental jig, amused to see her Nascent Soul dance around scattering lotus petals. It was a very snazzy ephemera.

In the end, all she could do was laugh… It was that or weep really.

“I broke through to Dao Seeking directly,” she giggled.

“Dao Seeking…” Just saying it out loud was…

“All three severings in one go…” She threw back her arms and gestured at the sky above.

Her laughter faded away and she sighed, because she was weeping as well, because Jun Arai had broken through to Dao Seeking, but Jun Arai was also buried in the ruins of this room. She had taken the first steps, properly, towards Immortality… and yet the cost had been the innocent young woman who arrived in this hell, sent here by the actions of others.

“Life for innocence…” she whispered, staring out at the ruined city below.

The question of what was severed, wasn’t actually all that clear either…

“I don’t feel different...” she muttered to herself, staring at her hands once she had scrubbed the tears away.

That shadow in me had been many things… fear, terror, uncertainty, guilt… but I still have all those… Emotions, grief… memories…

“It can’t have been as simple as that I severed the array, I killed the pig demon and… whatever those threads were?” she said to the world at large.

“How the fates can I have severed a thing, three things, and not understand what exactly it IS that I severed?” she groaned.

Thinking about it some more while she recovered, she concluded that the array had something to do with outside manipulation and that strange subversion, the Pig Demon was… something to do with the defiling, or maybe that really was as simple as it seemed. As to the third thing, she still had no idea, and no matter how hard she looked she could find no traces of those threads.

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

~ SANA, REALLY HATING ON THE WORLD RIGHT NOW. ~

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

Sana picked herself out of the ruins of her prison and viciously hurled the remnants of one of the pig demons over the edge. She had risked Severing Origins when she felt her sister’s soul imprint start to crumble. They had gone through that threshold at almost the same time although she seemed to have finished later.

She glowered at the pagoda, which twisted innocently at her and gave her its most apologetic angles. It had finally coughed up its secrets in the long darkness she had endured as she had made enough progress with both her cultivation and the first and second parts of the spear form to make her ‘worthy’ or however it considered things.

Another demon scrambled into the room, saw her and charged at her. She grasped it by the neck and threw it over – it was only early Nascent Soul and couldn’t fly, not here. It screamed in a rather funny way as it bounced off the tower before falling silent.

“No more than you deserve,” she spat after it.

The three other smaller demons that came in were flayed to their bones and scattered like the trash they were. So many survived the bolts. What she had severed, they had severed, because it seemed to have been somewhat similar, was a bit mystifying. On the simple end, it had been the darkness within, on several levels. The complexity of it though… she would be more worried if the pagoda’s instruction hadn’t told her that this was usually normal, that the next step was to grasp the extent of what had been severed. That was the first piece of the equilibrium that was necessary to create a principle.

She had to take all those things that comprised her, including her understanding of what had been lost as well as gained, and craft from it something unique to her. It had been very specific that if she settled for less, she would not be able to achieve immortality with the path she was currently on.

“Overcome one obstacle and you meet another,” she sighed, thinking that over again as she looked at the city around them.

About two miles away was another ruined tower that gave her a slight tug in her mind – that was where Arai was being held, had been held now. Looking back over the city, she shuddered. The whole thing gave her a bad feeling actually.

Taking her soul sense, she swept the entire tower and executed every remaining demon in it she could, sinking her intent into them and ruining their minds, plunging them into a maelstrom of pain. It was possible to wield the attacks of the spear form as mass soul attacks, the pagoda had now helpfully coughed up, so she buried them with Awakening of Nammu, an art that had some remarkably pointy edges the more she considered it.

“Still more merciful than you all deserve,” she muttered, turning to…

“Oh come on… is it that easy?” she hissed, incredulously.

Her attack on the small demons had ripped several slabs off the wall, revealing the remnants of the ruined array. ‘Breaking, Chains, Defile, Overcome, Yin, Link, Isolate…’ there were seven of the symbols she could make out as she tore panels off where she could. There should be nine if she guessed right, but the others were either gone with the lightning or buried behind things she couldn’t touch. It was however enough to give her the clue she needed.

“I severed the chains they used to bind my qi and my sea of consciousness… Literally, I severed the concept of being chained?” she shook her head ruefully.

It made sense, after the fact… and it wasn’t just that what she had severed, but her instinct told her this was right.

“You can actually sever something like that?” she shuddered.

It was a small but decisive step. Some part of her that had always been beholden to… other things… unquantifiable as they were, but she was now fully hers.

The city below was in ruin; she swept her sense out looking for a banner specifically, and instead found moon mushrooms. They had fled her with the tribulation of black and grey, but there were far more than there should have been. The spore cloud had covered most of the city… albeit lightly because of the wind and rain. Taking one last look around the room, she sighed. All her gear was gone – there was a faint tug in her mind that told her where her scrip was. It wasn’t soul bound, but it did have a tracking imprint that had miraculously survived and told her it was around 90 miles north-east… ish.

Walking to the edge, she peered over, and then with a sigh, just jumped off the edge. It was a 700 metre fall to the bottom which she slowed with her intent at the last, to land next to a small miasma field.

She eyed it pensively, and then walked into it, because there were no banners for whatever reason. It tried to whisper to her, but the ability of the spores to subsume a bit of her and make it into… them, was gone. A big colony, a properly mature one might well be able to claim her eventually, but it would really have to gnaw for its gains.

Pondering that, she walked out of the field again and then stopped…

“No way,” she muttered… “Fate?”

She instinctively looked up at the sky, but no lightning came.

She wanted to laugh, suddenly. That is too preposterous… “Did I sever something to do with fate?”

The more she thought about it, the more it made sense, and still no lightning came.

The symbol sent a sense that suggested she would have really regretted that if she was wrong. She could only agree there, but for the first time in… a very long time she suddenly felt a flash of happiness for some reason. The symbol shook its metaphysical head and went back to sorting out her current condition with her Nascent Soul.

She drank in qi and rose up through the air – flight was now an intuitive part of her movement art, which was both cool and slightly annoying, she couldn’t help but feel. Had it just said ‘you can’t fly like that until your Nascent Soul becomes the principal part of your cultivation’, she would have saved herself days and days of being annoyed over it over the last few months before their capture.

The appearance thing was kind of cool, but she had already had that novelty with her mantra. The intuitive understanding that she now had a lifespan that measured into the thousands of years, though, was somewhat disconcerting.

Arriving at the tower, she alighted on the ledge where Arai was sitting, looking pensively at the carnage below. Her sister looked like she had been crying.

Sitting down, she stared down at the mess below and put an arm around her. Arai flinched slightly but then leant against her.

“Well, that was pretty shit,” she said after a while.

“Yes… yes, it really was,” was all her sister said, scooting a touch closer to her.

“I would give anything to go back and tell my past self to go dig into a pillar before we ever got into that feng shui trap of a valley and just cultivate it out for a few years,” her sister said softly.

She nodded, agreeing – although she was pretty sure that it wouldn’t have worked out like that. The sense that something was pushing them along was… gone somehow… but intuitively she was getting the feeling that there was more to this mess and their relentless pace than met the eye.

“The three of us soldier on however,” her sister said with bit of a wet sniff and a sigh.

“Three?” she asked puzzled and found the leaf being waved in front of her.

She stared at it… and shook her head, amazed. “How did it end up here?”

“At this point, after you and father and mother, I think I have more emotional investiture in this piece of green crystal than anything else,” her sister said with another sniff.

She sat there in silence, not sure how to react, really. In the end, they both just sat there in silence, embracing each other for a while, her sister’s head resting on her shoulder.

“It was on the altar in the middle of this place when I regained consciousness, along with a spear blade and the carved talisman I had to protect from the banners,” her sister said softly.

“The demon knew where it came from: that house in… Evergrove… belonged to some family called the ‘Van Jaals’… I eventually had an opportunity to make sure it wasn’t used to do something dangerous, like carve out my Golden Core… or yours… I tricked a little demon into impaling my stomach with it and then managed to get it shoved deep enough to heal over the injury from the front while I was impaled on the wall.”

By the time her sister was done, her tone had become dull and monotonous. She could feel the twisting pain and the sadness through the link, melding with her own at this point. That did however clear up the matter of the massive spore infestation.

“So you did all this?” she said, waving her hand at the vast cloud of spores and dozens of miasma bubbles all over.

“Yeah… probably… It’s not a tenth of what they deserve, either,” her sister said with a nasty laugh. “I bet they used the contents of the blood channels in our rooms for food or something and it didn’t get noticed until it was far too late.”

At this proximity, it was possible to actually see some of her sister’s memories, just as Arai could probably see her own. The commonality of their experience was… depressing. It had been an ingenious strategy, a broken part of her had to acknowledge: torment them, put them on edge then just leave them to rot in those arrays like they were some slow cooking food dish.

The faces of those who had died before them both, praying to a god they knew nothing of… believing they were chosen daughters of that being, or ancient ancestor, made her… feel like she was betraying a little bit of them somehow. She had watched them die… and been glad it wasn’t her even as she forced herself to watch their dying moments… because nobody else would ever bear witness to it that cared.

“Shit…” realised she was crying as well… again, not that there was any point in stopping it.

“If we don’t remember them… will anyone else?” Arai said softly, echoing her sentiments.

They both sat there for a while, looking down at the carnage unfolding below…

“Do you think we can actually level this place…?” Arai muttered after a while…

“I would love nothing better,” she agreed. “However, I am pretty sure that even if we tore it up root and stem, turned it over three paces deep and salted it afterwards, it would still be a place of unutterable horror.”

“Yeah…” her sister muttered, “but I’d still be ALL for scorching, corroding or exploding as much as we can.”

“And after that,” she said looking north-east…

“Oh, yeah… We should go track down our jade scrips,” her sister agreed. “Mine is north east-ish… somewhere.”

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

~ ARAI - BURN IT, ZAP IT, CORRODE IT, THEN RUN LIKE CRAZY ~

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

Dropping to the ground, she sighed and glanced at her sister.

“It’s really annoying that THAT is the thing that was stopping flight,” she said, looking around.

“Isn’t it – all those hours I could have spent productively doing other things, and the fate-thrashed knowledge would have spend our cultivation speed up enormously,” Sana agreed, viciously kicking a slab of masonry into a building.

As they made their way towards the main square, she considered the knowledge of what she had severed. Thinking it through logically, and then going to investigate what the demonic array had actually been… it made sense – although it raised more questions than answers.

“If you told me a few months ago you could actually sever a portion of the ‘agency’ that others have over you I would have called you mad,” she muttered.

“Yeah… it’s… both simple and really gnarly,” Sana agreed.

“It also makes me realise that I was being very boring with my Sundering Intent,” she said more quietly.

“You did Sunder away those serpents’ vitality,” her sister pointed out.

“I did… but even that was relying heavily on the red thread,” she sighed.

“Sure you can sunder a person’s qi, or even their intent… but could you actually sunder the idea of them attacking you for a brief moment?” she mused out loud.

“Those words you speak, do you know them?” her sister said with a shake of her head.

She sighed as well, because it was true, and weirdly enough that made Ha Yun’s face flicker through her mind. She poked Sana, hard.

“Www! What was that for?”

“Thanks to you, I just thought of that jerk Ha Yun,” she scowled.

“Why him?”

“I think he was the last person to seriously say those words to us,” she said. “Do you think the others are…”

“Alive? I hope so,” Sana said softly.

“How long do you think we were caged up?” she asked.

“There? Or in our own heads?” her sister said dryly.

“That is a fair point,” she said, considering that they had really overdone the emotion caging thing with their mantras, which had ultimately rather exacerbated what was done to them by the demons, in all likelihood.

She was still pointlessly pondering how long it had been when they finally entered the main plaza that she had seen from above. It was chaos, and also the hub of the pig demon ‘resistance’ against the moon mushrooms. The plaza itself held a huge platform that looked suspiciously like a teleport array – or a series of them. Now though, three huge totems had been built of the three-headed demon pig ancestor or whatever the fates it actually was. Three wizened elders were busy leading thousands of pig demons in a mass ritual that involved a lot of debauchery and, based on the piles of corpses, several tens of thousands of dead slaves. The whole thing was being protected by a barrier that was at least the same grade as the one on the big palanquin from the chasm.

“So how do we do this?” her sister mused, staring down from their rooftop at the plaza

They were easily spotted as it was, although untouchable within the spore cloud at this distance, she guessed.

“Those wizened old pigs are at least Immortals,” she judged after a while.

“Yeah…” Sana nodded.

“As to how we do it?” she drummed her fingers on her leg for a moment, thinking. “Something to break the barrier, ideally without emptying us of qi in the process, so Yang Lightning if we activate it together.”

“I like it,” her sister nodded. “Very heavenly judgement.”

“Also, we can set that up and then run,” she pointed out.

“This is true, and whatever they are doing gives me a creepy feeling,” Sana muttered, staring at the huge array painted in blood in the middle.

“Yes, a huge blood ritual on top of a ‘possible’ teleport array does not strike me as a thing to stick around for,” she said with as much humour as she as capable of mustering.

“Ah, and the infestation has reached the second stage,” Sana said, grabbing her arm and pointing.

She swept her soul sense out and saw that spore-controlled pig demons were already starting to emerge in the distance, wiping out remnants of resistance. It took her a while to actually find the source, a huge colony that had grown out of a pit that must have been a reservoir at one point below the city.

“We could add Yin Fire to the Yang Lightning?” Sana mused, turning her attention back to the square.

“Punchy and burny,” she nodded, eyeing the ritual again, which had stepped up a level in all respects. “We can put them on the walls of the buildings?”

“And, for once, we have huge quantities of blood to work with that isn’t our own,” her sister added.

It didn’t take long to start working their way around the area, drawing and carving arrays into walls, their actions passing largely unremarked for the first three arrays. When it was finally noticed, one of the wizened pigs waved a sceptre and a bunch of the trolls that had likely drawn the palanquins were sent out to stop them.

She let Sana keep drawing circles while she dispatched them with the leaf. Outside of the spore cloud she might have had a problem with fighting several of them – they were all Dao Seeking and a bit stronger than her – but with the spores slowing them down and bereft of direct control, they were easy to deal with. As an added advantage, after her breakthrough the corruption to their qi cores was trivial to deal with so she was able to refine them in full view of the demons behind the barrier, who raged and screamed at them.

Soon after that, they started to send powerful slaves – ones who were at Severing Origins and Dao Seeking. Those were equally mindless, with power but no intelligence, but they did manage to delay matters a bit, especially the Ur’Inan who retained some abilities.

It was only after those fell that the wizened old pigs sent out actual pig demons, all of them heavily branded with their disturbing red arrays. These gave them some protection and, if she was reading the crude symbols right, were linked to the totems somehow. Eventually though, they stopped sending those valuable troops out after she killed a few by just running away from them then attacking them if they retreated. Instead, they resorted to throwing things through the barriers and using the occasional art to attack.

By the time they had completed and chained all the arrays in a huge circle around the square, the panic of the three old elders was palpable. They were screaming at them to 'chant harder', or something to that effect, and also demanding more sacrifices.

The link between them for activating symbols now worked at a distance of a few metres, so the strategy became for Sana to do the activation while she just guarded, practising weaponless attacks with her Sundering Intent. They had judged it pretty well, but it was still a close-run thing between them to trigger a single six-symbol lightning array drawn out with blood.

It activated with a crack and a howl, blue-white lightning arcing out and smashing into the barrier as it sought out somewhere to earth. The barrier didn’t so much as tremor and the pig demons cheered and started to jeer and make obscene actions and threats at them. Moments later it cycled to Yin Fire and a flickering wave of candle-like flames rolled over all the corpses in the vicinity, until it connected with the barrier which didn’t budge.

“As expected...” Sana said mirthlessly as they ran on to the next set.

“Yeah…” she agreed. The three demons were all maintaining the barrier and were all over Immortal so a single strike from a quasi-immortal array shouldn’t do much, she guessed.

“Ah…” she hissed suddenly, because in looking at them she realised her eyes had been… she focused her intent and found that two more pig demons who were not wizened and ugly were sat cross-legged in the middle of the array. They had golden skin and wore weird hats that accented their horns. One wore a flayed robe of skins and the other a staff with a bunch of cages dangling from it that made her eyes water just focusing near it.

“What is it?” her sister asked, starting to activate the second array.

“There are two more… like the one who was tormenting us,” she said.

“Where?” her sister asked, frowning.

“In the middle of the array, hidden somehow,” she explained.

“I think…” Sana frowned.

“Don’t waste energy worrying about it,” she said, cutting another torso that was emblazoned with a rune on it that exploded in the air after she split it into flesh ribbons.

The demons laughed and jeered as they activated three arrays in succession and none did anything much to the barrier. Their laughter faded however when the first array triggered again. Then the second array… then the third array, just in time for the fourth array to get activated by them. By the time they had made it all the way around and activated the seventh array, each one was discharging in sequence and then recharging again.

It took three cycles of barriers before she was happy that they had actually started to degrade the barrier itself – it was starting to ripple and the three pig demons were properly sweating now to maintain it. There was also a steady stream of fungi zombies attacking that didn’t help really.

“You know…” she said. “They are cowardly and craven, and those five are absolutely all over Immortal realm… so why aren’t they teleporting away?”

“Maybe teleportation is impossible in here?” Sana suggested. “I don’t think we have seen anything do it.”

“Yeah, but we also have a pathetic sample size to work from,” she pointed out.

“Could be that the barrier doesn’t allow it,” Sana mused.

The longer the seconds ticked by, the more unease she felt about that circle and the sacrifices.

“This is going to do its thing,” she said decisively. “We should cut our losses and get out of here.”

“The ritual,” her sister nodded grimly.

“I’d love to interrupt it, but with every passing second it’s making me more uneasy now for some reason. It looks to be far too much for just that barrier.”

“It is, isn’t it,” Sana said. “Now that you mention it, when I looked at the town from above… before I came over to your pillar, it gave me a really bad feeling as well.”

“…”

“You’re right. This will do its thing,” Sana said decisively. “I refuse to die having just taken a half step towards immortality after all this fate-thrashed misfortune just for the sake of wanting to see a bunch of these abominations fry.”

That deciding that, they both shot towards the city wall. She was able to cover about 500 metres in a single step now, which was a shocking advance on what it had been before. However, at the edge of the city they had a problem…

“There’s another barrier here. The whole city has been sealed off, inside and out…” she swore and threw a rock at it, watching as it exploded into dust.

“That might explain the lack of teleportation?” Sana mused.

“Probably,” she agreed, walking towards the nearest wall.

Without any preamble, she started to cut through the rock as swiftly as she could. As she had somewhat expected, there was an Arborundum lattice in it; however, it wasn’t charged and had gaps in it of maybe half a metre here and there. Fully uncovering one, she rapidly started to gouge through it so they could worm their way out.

“Ummm… dig quicker…” Sana hissed. “There…”

“Don’t tell me… I don’t want to know…” she shot back and intensified her digging.

As soon as she had opened up a big enough void past the lattice, Sana squirmed through to join her and shoved rock chunks out behind them as fast as she could. It took agonizing minutes to carve out the path on the other side. The wall was thick, but at least it had blocks in it. The leaf was able to make shorter work of the material fusing them. Eventually the knife poked through void, and she tore open a hole as fast as possible.

“That’s not an auspicious natural feng shui alignment,” her sister muttered as she wormed her way out then pulled Sana after her. Indeed, the sense in the air was very wrong now.

They sprinted across the landscape – towards the distant mountains as fast as their qi would carry them.

She reckoned they had travelled for five minutes when she felt a dragging sensation behind her. Without thinking, she swept up Sana with one arm and then severed behind her, cutting the distance as best she was able. The dragging sensation lessened for a brief moment and they both shot forward for a mile – then it returned.

Cutting behind her again, Sana yelped in shock as she pushed her movement art to its limit and dragged them both forward. Clouds swirled overhead, streaming towards somewhere behind them as she ran carrying Sana.

The dragging intensified and Sana cursed and tried to slow it with her own intent as well… “What the hell is this fate-thrashed… It’s like some kind of overriding… You’re able to cut it with your intent?”

“Somewhat,” she acknowledged, expending another chunk of qi to allow them to leap forward.

“Uh… that’s not good,” her sister said with her voice quavering.

She glanced to the side and nearly stumbled, because it wasn’t just them being pulled. Everything was drifting backwards: trees, grass... rocks… even the odd confused, low realm qi beast

“How fast can your movement art go if you’re not matching my speed?” she asked with a grimace.

“…”

“Lots faster,” Sana said sheepishly.

“You run, I cut,” she said decisively.

Sana nodded and wrapped an arm around her waist. They linked for good measure and she sundered the sensation of being dragged behind her. The world warped around them as Sana pulled on a bit of her qi as well as her own and she lashed out a second time, then a third, using every bit of focus she could muster. By the fourth shift they crashed into something directly and she staggered up, realising the drag was no longer there.

She looked out at the plains below them: the city was visible in the distance, still.

“That’s… a long way,” she could only concede.

Looking at her sister’s qi consumption, she could only concede that this was going to be close, had she done that earlier they might have been stranded below rather than actually making it to the foothills.

“Yeah, at full speed it’s almost short-range teleportation,” Sana said with a grimace, looking wan. “However I can only do four shifts in a row and then I’m flat out of qi – it’s like your sundering… but it twists the distance between two points rather than truncating them directly. Sorry, stopping can be a bit…”

She waved a hand dismissing the apology as unnecessary.

“What by the nameless fates is that?” her sister panted as they both desperately recovered qi.

She could see the twisting effect as a hole was slowly opening up a void above the city. As they watched, the sky rippled bizarrely and then, abruptly, destabilized and something distended downwards even as the clouds above buckled and warped outwards.

“Ten seconds and I can shift us again,” Sana said grimly.

The ripple twisted and black lines suddenly streaked out across the sky. The clouds flowed away and lightning in lurid reds and purple started to drop like rain from the clouds. The storm wave in the distance recoiled under contact with the wave of black lines.

There was a moment of deeply ominous stillness and then a figure stood in the sky over the city.

The symbol in her body shifted and had hidden them even before the space settled.

Even at this distance, it was as if the thing was no more than a hundred metres from them. All of the world felt like it was focused on that point, focused on the figure that had descended. It was a pig demon with three heads… wearing an open-fronted robe that was basically spliced bodies from what she was very, unfortunately, able to see.

“Still alive?” her sister said, sounding sick.

She wanted to be sick, to hide her eyes, anything. They all writhed in horrible torment, their shrieks washing over her, making her soul shiver. She reached out and grabbed Sana by the hand, feeling her shivering as well, clammy in the humidity.

In its left had, the creature carried a staff made of burnt wood, maybe even an entire tree given its size, from which hung cages, each one containing mutilated figures, mainly women, but some men, of many races, most of whom she didn’t recognise, all of them being roasted alive in phantasmal purplish flames. In its other hand, it carried a great butcher’s cleaver inscribed with vile symbols that formed into an array that had at least twelve symbols.

“To anything I ever called a demon that wasn’t before now in this place… I…” her sister mumbled.

“It’s like a nightmarish mockery of everything designed to torment woman-kind spawned out of the febrile mind of a drunken torturer high on soul juice…” she muttered.

The aura it extruded was vile and disturbing. Space snapped back together and it vanished into the distance. Still dimly visible over the city in the far distance, but now mercifully the size of a small puppet.

“Run!” Sana shouted abruptly.

Distance shifted and they were crashed into a thicket of spirit plants. She scrambled up, checked she still held the leaf and then started to run, Sana keeping pace beside her. After a few hundred metres, she swept her sister up and shifted herself.

“At least the symbol can hide us from…” her sister trailed off as both their symbols suggested tacitly that while, yes, they could, that was only the case if it wasn’t actively looking for them.

“Let’s pray to the fates it’s there for the moon–”

She was cut off as space crumpled again and three sets of evil gimlet eyes starred down from the sky overlooking everything. Scouring everything.

“You just had to–!” Sana moaned.

Space twisted and they shifted, Sana not bothering to wait for her to put her down. Something grasped for her even as she instinctively cut at the world around them. Her intent wavered and she screamed at the thread to help her. It shifted and the grasping sense dissipated for a fraction. Her sister spat blood and–

–they crashed into rocky scree.

She rolled and stared up at the thing, standing where they had been in the far distance below, in a valley.

Her sister spat blood onto the ground a second time and the world blurred around them properly. This time it felt different as well. The distance they covered was immense. The speed incomparable–

She hit icy snow and tasted thunder in the air. The storm was above them, the thunder of the storm wave shaking the very peaks themselves.

Below them, there was an enraged howl and the sky split, the heavens parted and the storm dispersed and the pig demon strode through the void, up the mountain, grasping out for them with a hand.

Thunder boomed across the horizon and the lightning sizzled horizontally. The pig demon paused and then turned, waving its staff. A sheet of purple fire swept out at the sky as a lightning bolt danced across the heavens itself, grasping it… She could only stare.

The figure left the lightning and with a howl fell through the void as the axis of the world twisted – the horizon was above, the concepts of up and down totally subverted around them for a terrifying second as the figure bypassed the sheet of purple fire and crashed into the pig demon, throwing it backwards into the slope before them before dancing backwards.

Their ‘saviour’ if she dared to call it that, was almost two and a half metres tall, powerfully muscular and with ashen skin. Its golden hair was plaited and shimmered with an inner fire that made her think of the summer sun, while its body was covered with white and green tattoos. Upon its head it had two antler horns and its ears were pointed. It grinned revealing very white teeth with incisors.

The other thing that stood out, she realised, was that it was wearing a robe of human skin. It was very clearly human skin as well because the faces, ears and all were still present in places.

The demon recovered itself and its mouths all started to salivate. The ashen-skinned assailant just sneered, struck at it and with a flick of its wrist struck at the demon with another weapon, a whip – made of various vertebrae studded with black glass spikes. The demon, for its part, just swept its staff out lazily and sent the assailant staggering back.

Ignoring the two, she gripped Sana and fled, cutting the distance even as a stray strike from the whip ruptured the mountain slope below them. She pushed every shred of qi she could into her movement art, hurtling upwards–

Something snared her even as she reached the cloud line and slammed them both into the snow.

A small… human-sized clone of the three-headed demon walked through the air towards them even as another shockwave split the sky and land in the distance.

“I mgepah nafl ah'hri ahhai uh'enah ot mgep'ai ehyeahog ur’sar…”

“I did not believe when the slaves spoke of another Ur’Sar…”

It spoke – but the words didn’t match what they heard somehow, rearranging themselves into common imperial.

“Turns out they were wrong, idiots that they are… consumed by their lusts… So resource of you... to put that plague amongst them…”

She shifted her qi, sacrificing–

“You wish to run?” it laughed even as her movement art shifted them both.

{I deny it. You cannot run. Nothing that is mine may run.}

The words had a terrible finality about them. They didn’t touch her… but they seemed to seep into the air and land around them. She collapsed to the ground, having burned so much qi and gone nowhere, sobbing in agony.

{Be silent, ill thunder… you vex me.}

It sneered… and the thunder receded and the cloud around them grew still.

“It has been millennia since I added a new toy to my staff–” the left head sneered glancing back down the slope.

The middle head focused on the pair of them, freezing her in the spot as if she had just had nails put through her limbs- “To think I would get two at once… and both so elegant and mysterious… Do not fear little ladies… you will enjoy my hospitality f-”

What it was about to say next went unfinished as the horizon behind them rolled over on itself bizarrely, breaking like a wave and scattering almost to the slopes they were on. Off that wave stepped a second grey-skinned figure, female this time, with white hair tied into ornate plaits. Various feathers of different sizes and colours held back her hair and adorned it like a crown. Again, she wore a robe woven of skins stolen from a dozen other races.

“You are certainly a sly one, old pig. My little brother is a real meathead, to get caught by your clone. I don’t believe we have ever had the personal pleasure…”

“D’varad Ru’kali…”

“I had wondered why the haruspex said that this day would be a day of celebration – and now the heavens align to bring your defiling pig’s ass out of your brood pit!” the new arrival said with a grin that made her already tormented emotional state run… colder still.

“I see… so that is how it is,” the demon suddenly started to laugh. “I see… I see!”

“I carved up your brothers and served them as bacon in a votive offering to the Unspeakable One… I carved up your father and burnt his soul on a pyre praising the crawling chaos…” Ru’Kali hissed, the words she spoke making the world around them warp and turn to shadow as the runes on her body started to glow with an inner light as well.

“You are here because that old father of yours cannot move. The world seals him… This is…” the demon head in the middle sounded happy while the other two laughed… then its body just blurred and it split into three.

The fat one gave a scream of rage that sounded like “N’eron”. It shook its staff and those imprisoned in the cages screamed and lashes of weird pinkish purple flame tore at the grey female demon.

The muscular one that was totally naked wielded the great cleaver roared “N’Ergaz” and charged towards the woman so fast the space broke around them as they both looked on, frozen by some inexplicable strength that was now oppressing everything and draining all of her strength, moment by moment.

The last one – wearing the robe of living bodies – danced back and made a strange symbol in the air in front of it and proclaimed “N’Evral”. From that symbol extruded creepy pink tongues of lightning that transformed into pig demons bearing flutes, drums and trumpets – each one had a cultivation greater than hers…

Ru’Kali, the grey-skinned devil woman, laughed and blocked the attack from the cleaver, kicking that demon back effortlessly. It seemed shift in the air oddly as she then hurled a bone sickle at the robe-wearing pig demon who dodged to the side. The sickle demolished the waves of his summoned pig demons, turning them into twisted, warped things as they plummeted to the mountain below.

The purple light from the staff exploded outwards, swirling around and briefly obscuring the pig demon with the cleaver before coiling around the D'varad Ru'Kali who just laughed and somehow stepped past it, cutting down at the staff-wielding demon with the other sickle directly.

The remnants of that purple fire swept towards them. Arai found herself trying to pull Sana back, screaming in fear as she cut with what little–

A wizened hand fell on her shoulder and the purple fire scattered.

Staring up, Arai found herself blankly staring at a spindly Ghoblan with grey-white skin and an actual beard, who was wearing a very scruffy garment made of lizard skin. The hood had the skull of an Undren for a hat, while it had two Antlers stuck in the eye sockets. In her discombobulated grasp of events, they looked awfully like the ones the grey devils had. It patted her shoulder rather compassionately she thought and then looked with narrowed golden eyes out of a thin, pointy face at the scene before it.

“Yous is sure noisy… making big fuss on my White Depths peak.”

It didn’t speak loudly, but everything went still: the thunder above receded, the lightning seemed to fall away into insignificance for a moment, her thundering heart and chaotic mood calmed bizarrely and the pig demons and the grey-skinned Ru’Kali were both frozen like naughty children caught in some deeply inappropriate act.