> War came to Valinkar unannounced. We knew not what hit us when the Spider Eye tribe rolled out of the depths. For years we had suffered raids from them, petitioned the cities of the coast to send us aid to resist them. Year after year we had lost ground to them, but never, until that day, did we have ‘war’ with them. They came with fire and fury and slaves, a tide of Undren and Ghoblan, bound beneath the mountains to serve.

>

> Desperate for aid, we sent pleas to the coast, to Jerikhal, to Urmvar and to Grand Meltras, but all our pleas were met with rebuttal. Some denied our plight, some doubted that our little corner of the world was so beset when everything else was falling to ruin and others regretted that they had not the manpower to send for they were killing Ur’Vash and Ur’Inan on the Great Plains, as the church commanded.

>

> We held that gate, Valinkar, upon the waters, for 91 days. 91 days of slaughter before our gates. Our whole land we turned against the horde. Our farms became killing fields; our waterways, paths into the afterlife for uncounted souls; and our walls the cliff upon which their lives were ruined.

>

> On the 92nd day, today, we have finally understood. Ere the day is out, I will be dead. Any who could not fight, have already taken their own lives and their bodies are enshrined as Death Watch within the deeps of our city. Now, we will make our last stand, against the true darkness. We, who came here from the Eternal City a thousand years ago, will become Immortals at last – commemorated by our words in places like this.

>

> Nameless King, undeserving of legacy, I, Varus Emberkaid, Lord of Valinkar, Master of War, curse you. You and yours have ruined us.

  ~Recorded from the walls of a hidden tomb in Valinkar by persons unknown.

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~ LIN LING – STORM-WRACKED JUNGLE ~

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

Thunder crashed in the turbulent skies above, making the rain which had been slashing down like torrential arrows through the forest canopy ripple faintly. The wind shifted again, twisting chaotically as it made the trees shiver and the leaves spray water in every direction through the rain.

Silence

A moment later there was another huge volley of lightning, then the noise of the world that had been swept away briefly resumed and she narrowed her eyes, watching the bolts shred the top of a distant ridge line. The thunder that came with it this time had a bizarre after-echo that Lin Ling found put her teeth on edge.

The coalescence of the storm, as it was now, had been building over several days, ever since they extricated themselves from the first of the regression fields. Now it was massive – as big as anything she had ever seen, bigger than the hurricanes that sometimes swirled up in the imperial gulf. Perhaps it was even as big as the one that might or might not have sparked this mess in terms of scale. It was also…

The echoing sensation was followed by another, different kind of dissociation. For several disturbing moments, her senses, honed by the blood screamed at her that the world was all wrong. she didn’t need them to tell her that though, because as they warily continued to thread their way through the trees, resisting lashing branches and areas of flooding, the water saturating the landscape was… no longer wet.

It fell, it scattered, it looked like water, and it smelt like water, it tasted like water, it sounded like falling water – but for approximately three heartbeats she was absolutely dry, as was the forest around them.

Normality resumed a fraction of a second later though, and she was as she had been before.

Yeah, the storm was also weird.

-Wyrd, an old memory in her blood corrected her almost absently.

“Right… wyrd,” she muttered sourly, grabbing a leaf from a nearby tree and shoving it in her hat to stop the run of water that was now going down her neck.

“Please tell me I did not just imagine that?” Hao Jun yelled, his words barely audible over the hiss of the returned rain, holding onto his recently acquired grass hat with both hands to avoid it being blown aside.

“Nope…” Jin Chen signed back, pulling his own cape around him more tightly.

“Is this some kind of tr–” Han Shu stopped speaking as another peal of thunder cut off all sound for a few seconds. “Tribulation or something?” he finished, wincing slightly.

“…”

Juni just glanced at her, but she made no comment. The memories had a few things to say about this kind of weather, but she wasn’t going to share them with the others… not yet. For starters she still wasn’t sure how to explain it without making people panic more than she was already.

-Sometimes you just cannot hide from things… a voice muttered.

-You should not hide from...

-Shut. Up.

She rubbed her temples… and took care not to step in a muddy patch that would likely see her fall flat on her face based on how easily the stick she was carrying had gone into it.

“Dammit, I hate these fields,” she hissed under her breath, her words hidden from the others by the wind.

As if to mock her hopes there, a thorny vine nearly snared her, catching on her hat and half wrenching it away before she lashed at it with the stick.

-So, yes, she sighed to herself. Hey, Juni, about this weird… wryd, weather, don’t worry; it’s just the natural flows of qi in the sky above us destabilizing in a chaotic manner and messing with the conceptual fundamentals of reality, no biggie right?”

The memories spoke of them in relation to the destabilization of the atmospheric mana tides, which she was approximating to be the same thing. Their understanding of them was kind of strange though. The take-away though, was that while this was unnerving, it had the scope to get a lot worse. The memories they showed her, of rain turning to pure etheric mana, for example, made her blood cool slightly.

She might survive that experience, they suggested, but likely no one else here would.

Or sound becoming a dimensional shear plane.

If that happened though, the memories told her, they would all be dead before they knew it anyway… except maybe the one with the weird soul. It had taken her a moment to realise that they meant Ruo Han by that.

In short, whatever was going on, either with the storm itself, or to provoke the storm, was causing random destabilisations in the qi high up above, and that was spawning… irregularities with disturbing irregularity.

They were somewhat unclear as to whether the repression…

-STOLEN! HOW DARE THOSE VILLAINS! The young, enraged voice almost screamed inside her skull.

“May your nine generations be damned!?! Would you at least build up to that!” she complained, out loud.

“Edge of field, thank fates!” Jin Chen, who was up ahead with Han Shu, signed back down the line. He had gotten reasonably good with it, even if he skipped the odd word. Much better than the others for whatever reason.

There were visible sighs of relief from all parties, herself included, as they scuttled the last few metres.

The idea that this might be caused by a tribulation, as had been voiced a few times already, was still playing on her mind. The memories had conceded such a thing might be possible and there were cultivators in here that were Golden Immortals… even Ancient Immortals based on what the others had said, when such things came up in discussion. They had talked themselves back on that point since then, despite Han Shu bringing it up again just now… but a small part of her wasn’t convinced that they were not in fact correct with that first assumption. Her senses had become -much- more attuned in the last two weeks as the qi in her blood made subtle changes to her body. One of them was an affinity for shifts in worldly qi that a few subtle experiments and queries with the others suggested was several times greater than most of the rest’s, and even quite a bit better than Juni’s.

She stepped across the boundary and nodded grimly because, while the voices from the blood receded, the symbol in her mind’s eye didn’t really emerge from the depths.

That had little to do with the blood, she was learning. The two were related, but the symbol, the ‘Shield Bearer True Physique’, was distinctly its own thing. Instinctively, she also grasped from it that it was trying to make itself less obvious somehow. There was never any real interaction with it, but she got these sort of confirmed hunches that reflected off it every now and then, and invariably they were correct.

It had done it the first time the storm hit, moments after they stepped out of that first field – becoming less distinct for a few heartbeats, before resurfacing slowly. Since then, it had come back less and less.

Another volley of lightning struck the treetops across the valley around them.

The other instincts also gave her a reason, and they were very old instincts as well, both from the blood and within herself. They told her that there was something dangerous in this. Something that would bring them no good if they ran across it.

“Yep, it’s like I was saying,” Chunhua signed from where she was standing, peering up between a gap in the trees.

“So it is…” Juni signed as well, peering upwards as well.

She glanced upwards too, wondering what they were talking about. It did not take her more than a quick look at the way the clouds were scudding above, through the driving rain to see. The weather was going weird in a different way.

They had debated this a bit on the walk through the dense jungle they had just traversed, but good views through the canopy had been non-existent in the wind. Now, with the forest opening out a bit ahead of them, a sure sign of another ruin, and probably another field, they had a much clearer view of the sky, and Chunhua’s earlier supposition was clearly borne out.

“What is it?” Jin Chen yelled, also peering up at the sky and trying to ensure his hat was not blown away.

“The storm has no centre!” Juni signed and yelled at the same time.

“And the wind is… well…” Han Shu pointed in two different directions.

She had already noted that. The wind was blowing east, through the forest, but the trees on the far side of the broad clearing were blowing as if being moved by a south-westerly wind. Up above, she saw three flickers of lightning in rapid succession, but no accompanying thunder.

Unbidden, she turned and looked behind them into the shadows of the forest, because the niggling sense that had been with them ever since they first arrived near that first field, with the town and the vast slaughtering formation, was still with her as well.

Juni came and sat beside her. “Still worried about that odd feeling?”

“Yes. It refuses to go away, and it’s definitely not the storm, and I am no longer certain it’s that alignment either,” she signed.

“Something is stalking us?” Juni signed, half questioning.

“Could be, but my senses are…” she trailed off.

She wasn’t going to boast unduly about her senses now, but she hoped that she could spot most things that might stalk them inside one of those fields well before they got within range to be dangerous.

“It’s not… related to before?” Juni signed unobtrusively.

“…”

“No,” she signed back. “I was… worried about that at first, but this is… the blood is… Well, it is what it is, but believe me, I got a lot of practice at trying to work out what weird feelings in my mind meant down there… This is flat-out instinctive. A bit like your pet cat freaking out at the weather or something prowling around outside the villa…”

“Mmmmm,” Juni frowned and pulled out the compass she had made from the bamboo and did a divination from it.

“…”

They both considered the result, before she looked around, not sure whether to weep or laugh bitterly.

“Are you sure you didn’t make a cursed compass? Or break that one?” she asked eventually.

“While I will admit that this is a thing I have occasionally wondered,” Juni replied a touch drolly, she thought, “it appears to work just fine.”

She watched as the older woman flipped the bamboo compass, reset it and then did a series of calibration divinations to demonstrate that the compass, did indeed, work just fine – with and without qi.

“Shall we move on?” Han Shu signed over to them.

Shaking her head, an act that just scattered rain droplets and achieved little else, she patted Juni on the shoulder and they both caught up with the others.

They made their way onwards in silence, threading across the clearing even as the thunder boomed again and a bolt of lightning dropped from the storm again, turning a tree on a rock outcropping some half a mile distant into an ex-tree. The niggling sense of not being quite as alone as she would have liked did recede, but never quite went away.

“Is your soul sense still not working?” Hao Jun’s words drifted through a lull in the wind.

Ruo Han’s reply from up ahead was lost, but she got the resigned shake of his head. It was hard for her not to connect her odd feeling that nobody else seemed to have with Ruo Han’s suppressed soul sense. The memories volunteered nothing on that front, even though she gave them several minutes thereafter to supply something, which just made her want to hit something.

Useful, not useful…. useful, not useful…

It was hard not to play that game young girls played with flowers, plucking petals to see if someone liked them in her head at moments like this…. and yet…

-What ‘young girls’? she complained inwardly. In a different world that might be me.

Catching up with Liao Ying, who she was supposed to be ‘buddying’ up with today, she gave her surroundings another quick look and tried to quash the annoyance rising within her for a different reason. Thinking too much about that kind of thing, even out here, would also set the memories off.

As the day wore on, the two of them found themselves at the front of their little column again, and the path they were making through the jungle started to rise again, taking them out of the boggy, flooded flat of the valley floor they had been forced to traverse to keep out of the worst of the storm. Here, on the slopes, the terrain became challenging in a different way.

Collapsed trees and even the aftermath of lightning strikes, which had now, thankfully, stopped, along with the thunder, had left visible scars in the forest. Shallow soils were already giving way under the unnatural deluge, turning already treacherous slopes, riddled with hidden fissures and slippery rocks, into waterfalls that were half mud, half leaf litter. Displaced wildlife, mostly bugs and vermin that had been taking shelter, were everywhere. Twice, they had to waste precious talismans on carnivorous ants that were forced out of their nests by the flooding, and then, barely avoided a ruined nest of something that looked suspiciously like rock termites, each one the size of her fist, and the whole swarm at least Qi Condensation.

“We can’t keep going on like this!”

It was surprisingly Jin Chen who finally started to crack properly, as they recouped after that last close encounter – sheltering under a rocky overhang that was itself on its way to becoming a small waterfall in places.

“Going back is hardly an option,” Liao Ying snapped. She was rattled from nearly falling into the crevasse that had had the ants in it, when Jin Chen and Han Shu had been leading at the front and failed to notice it in the rain and the flooding. “Or did you walk through a different forest to the rest of us?”

“Yes, where the fates is that forest, the one you want us to go back through,” Hao Jun, who had been bitten by ants, although not those ones, added.

“Enough!” she hissed, putting a bit of her qi into her voice, to quieten them. “This is… unpleasant, yes, but it can get a lot worse, quickly.”

“Indeed,” Han Shu muttered. “This rain is near enough like that from the height of the wet season in Yin Eclipse.”

“I would say it’s exactly like it,” Juni, who had been peering at her compass for the last few minutes, interjected. “Sense suppression, climate that ignores any kind of qi armour, this crushing humidity…”

-Ah, she grimaced mentally, I had actually forgotten the humidity. My True Physique basically invalidated it and the rain felt lukewarm at best.

“There is a reason people don’t venture into the valleys in weather like this – not that that is helpful to us, here and now.” Han Shu sighed.

“So, if we can’t go back, and we can’t walk in this–?” Hao Jun was cut off by Ruo Han.

“Is it worth trying to wait out the worst of it?” Ruo Han interjected.

Han Shu and Teng Chunhua frowned, looking undecided. Juni tossed another divination with the stones and just sighed, sitting back looking annoyed. Clearly that was another dubious divination. Seeing their silence, everyone else looked at her.

“What… I still get the impression we are being followed, and these valleys give me the creeps,” she scowled. “I say we move on, get out of this valley into the next and hope by the good grace of the fates that this vile and unnatural storm isn’t as bad there.”

“We are still being followed?” Ruo Han frowned.

“Why didn’t you say that before…?” Hao Jun scowled.

“What,” she snapped a bit annoyed at the way it was making her feel. “You want quarter hour updates on whatever might be eyeing us?”

“…”

“Lin Ling is right,” Juni said. “There is more wrong in these valleys than we can comfortably explain… the lack of soul sense for starters.”

“Unless that’s part of the storm?” Ruo Han mused.

She shook her head. She was pretty certain it wasn’t the storm at this point. She didn’t have soul sense, but the sense of being pried upon, and now… over the course of the day, the feeling of being ‘unwelcome’ on some fundamental level was becoming stronger and stronger to her.

“It’s not,” she said.

“You know that for sure?” Hao Jun muttered.

“Well when you know for sure it’s not, let me know sage of Argent Justice,” the words slipped out without her really thinking about it.

“…”

“Enough. Be quiet all of you,” Juni growled, before Hao Jun, who had opened his mouth to retort could in fact do so.

The strength of qi Juni sent out with that second command was… interesting. She saw Ruo Han and Hao Jun’s eyes both widen slightly, although not due to the strength itself, she was sure, but rather the purity of Juni’s qi.

“We will take ten minutes here to eat something and recover some equilibrium,” Juni added, “however you have to do it. Then, we make our way onwards. There is nothing good about this storm.”

She was right there; her instincts were still buzzing at her in ways she didn’t really understand how to process. The memories were… awkwardly unhelpful there as well. Sitting down on a rock, after checking there was nothing lurking under it, she pulled a roasted root out of her talisman and started to munch it down. It was not what she would have called tasty, especially when washed down with water saturated with qi-poison nullification tablets and nutrition pills. A mixture of sweet and rancid that curdled your mouth and made you gag if you made the mistake of holding it in your mouth. Even persis sticks and a few other sweet, energetic herbs didn’t help cut through the medicinal flavour.

“Uggh,” she sighed, and forced herself to drink the last of it.

“Sorry for yelling before,” Juni sat down beside her as she pulled out a bottle of Qi Refinement grade Foundation Building pills and popped two in her mouth like they were candy.

“Don’t be,” she signed back, helping herself to the same. “There is something very odd about this, and the longer we stay here the odder it gets.”

“Define… odd?” Juni said, seriously.

“Unwelcome, awkwardly out of place, like something is trying to push me out of the valley. You know when you go to those parties where there are ‘actual’ ‘young nobles’? Like how they look at all the people who are under Immortal and over eighteen, silently telling everyone else to bug off and leave the heavens to those who deserve it?” she signed, scowling as well.

“That welcome huh,” Juni frowned.

“Yeah, worse than that. It’s like the valley here is accusing me of pissing in its ancestral grave or something, and all my instincts say it’s not natural,” she signed, and pushed her hat down to hide her grimace from the others sat a little way away. “Anyway… how is your cultivation… progressing?”

“Disturbingly,” Juni signed.

“That different huh,” Lin Ling nodded

“Well, I say disturbingly. It’s… fast… even in this weather,” Juni mused, pulling out a blue fire stick and starting to crunch it down. Gulping down half of it, Juni passed the rest to her and sighed. “You?”

“Disturbingly,” she deadpanned back, accepting the herb and wondering where Juni had caught it.

It was a mild psychotropic if you ate too much. Its main advantage was it levelled you out emotionally. Not good for the others, but for her, with her new constitution, and presumably Juni as well, its other useful perk – being rich in yang qi – was helpful.

“What about Han Shu?” she added after a moment.

“…”

Juni just shot her a sour look.

“He is advancing as fast as you or I…” she pointed out.

“He is, but he hasn’t spoken ten words to me that weren’t about the forest or teamwork,” Juni sighed.

“Have you… fixed your dantian?” Juni asked after a further moment’s silence.

She considered whether or not to answer that. She had. In fact, she had advanced to that state… Her dantian as it now was, was full of shifting mists rich in yang qi. Unlike Juni, she hadn’t undergone a ‘purification’ episode. That was why her friend was likely still unaware. She had passed that point the day after they met up with the Argent Justice group in fact. The reason for why, she wasn’t clear – her instinct was that it related to the way the physique worked maybe, and could also be a side effect of the pure yang blood. In any case, the impact on her was somewhat less pronounced. The main thing was that her dantian was starting to coalesce occasional droplets of ‘pure yang qi’ and the yang properties of her blood were probably now close to being a genuine poison.

In the end, she nodded. “Yes.”

“I didn’t have a…”–she didn’t say ‘purification’, but between the two of them, it was obvious what she meant–“likely because of how I advanced before.”

Juni nodded pensively, but said nothing more. She could understand her concerns there as well. Though the group had been growing closer… the question of trust still lingered for both of them, in more ways than one. Certainly when it came to the hard-earned rewards they had clawed out of the hell they had barely escaped from.

“It would be a pity,” she said eventually, thinking about what might need to be done, no matter how unpleasant…

“…”

Juni eyed her, before just nodding.

-Interesting…

She considered herself, inwardly… Those thoughts… she could understand them, but her instincts didn’t like them.

Not one bit.

That was the first time she had been delivered such a crystalline and succinct rejection by them. Not the memories in the blood, not even her physique. It was the echoes of the Lin Lings who had survived that ordeal, who saw twisting for what it was.

-Something is trying to twist us… subtly, bit by bit? She turned that thought over, pensively.

What the memories had told her… about Physiques, some of them anyway, made her wary there. She had to trust, to a point, what they…

-Sneaky sneaky…

“Ling?” Juni was staring at her.

“…”

“It occurs to me… that we have been very caught up in the pace of things…” she said, by way of an oblique suggestion.

Juni stared into the rain for a long moment.

“You… may be right,” she concluded softly. “But what do we do?”

“Get out of this valley, then get out of this storm,” she signed. “Then, if it’s still happening, we have to think more radically. I don’t have any talismans, but I am sure that the Argent Justice group do. Between us, we can set up a decent formation anchor and a support structure.”

“You want to… do that blind…?” Juni eyed her.

“We need a last resort,” she signed. “We can at least guarantee we don’t go backwards.”

“…”

“I’ll start gathering the bits as we see them,” Juni signed. “Do we tell the others?”

“Not yet,” she shook her head. “Maybe Han Shu, that sword is strange, so it might be sheltering him in a way that the others are not… but if we are being caught up like that… the fewer… elements…there are to a problem like this, the better.”

They sat there in silence for a few more moments, before Juni stood with a sigh. “I’ll go sound out Han Shu, and maybe Teng Chunhua. I’ll also check what is in Liao Ying’s storage and what we can carry, I guess. Is there anything you noticed?”

“…”

She pondered the previous day’s endeavours for a moment before two things did pop into her head: “At least one knotted rope, and probably the nutrition pills need to be checked.”

Juni frowned. “The pills I checked… but a knotted rope, we haven’t done much climbing yet. I’ll see if one was already done.”

Nodding, she left that task to Juni and settled down to consider the forest. Beyond the unwelcome feeling, which she was certain she shouldn’t have, based on the ‘origins’ of the blood, as she vaguely understood it, she definitely felt like something was watching them. It was certainly not impossible that they were being stared at by some genuinely powerful spirit beast...

-Except this and that… are not the same, she agreed with the memories that surfaced a little as she considered that point.

There were spirit beasts out here, but at the same time, their gaze didn’t feel like this. Her instincts were quite well attuned to what predatory gaze felt like even before she got the extra boost from the blood, and this… while predatory…. had a more deceptive intent to it, she thought. It was also really subtle.

Time flowed, their break in the end lasting almost 30 minutes rather than 10. There had to be some give, or Hao Jun and Jin Chen, and perhaps even Liao Ying would be… unhappy. Over that time, she pulled all her qi into herself and hid her presence away, becoming part of the rock she was at on. Now she just watched the forest with empty eyes again, looking for the irregularities… the little things that would pull the darkness out of the landscape before it got to them. Show her the death that was trying to find them.

She became aware of something moving deep within the green, within the rain and the shifting forest. An oddness in the leaves of a tree that was not… the right kind of odd. It was skulking far beyond any reasonable qi sense. Only visible to her thanks to her enhanced vision and the instincts she was still settling in to. Sitting there like that was almost a form of cultivation in its own right, honing her instincts to the changes that even qi couldn’t detect.

“Time to move.” Han Shu placed a hand on her shoulder.

The creature had gone, whatever it was some time before that. With a sigh, she nodded and stood, stretching her legs and taking a quick look around to see that nothing was left, before they headed out, into the rain that was still hammering down, punishing the forest and darkening the afternoon sky to gloomy dusk well before its hour.

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~ HAN SHU – JUNGLE VALLEY ~

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As they made their way on again, Han Shu found himself thinking about Lin Ling. Earlier, if he hadn’t known she was on that rock already, he would barely have seen her after she had been sat there for the 30 minutes they had been recovering. It was yet another reminder of how far their cultivation strengths were… diverging in odd ways. Juni had always been good at divination and feng shui, and whatever she had gotten in that ruin was subtly, and not so subtly, building on that. Lin Ling though… was, he guessed, becoming…

He watched her for a moment, before sighing and turning his attention back to the path that Teng Chunhua was currently leading, guided by Juni. Juni had mentioned earlier in passing that she wanted to speak to him about something, but had not yet gotten around to that, having been distracted by sorting out Liao Ying’s storage ring. As for Lin Ling? She was… inexplicable, that was the only way to describe it really. The young woman he knew, who was brash, and smart and always poking at things and fiercely proud of her achievements was still there, but it was hidden away now, unless you really knew where to look. It was almost like she had put on a veil or something. Even the sense of her, as they walked through the forest, was less, hidden in little ways.

“Oh come on…” Teng Chunhua groaned audibly from up ahead, where she was paused at the lip of the rocky rise they had been ascending to get over the low point in the ridge.

They scrambled up and as he made his way over the edge, a familiar, unpleasant absence washed over him for a moment, and his cultivation vanished. All that remained was the faintest hint now of the ‘Nine Origins Lotus Physique’ in his mind’s eye. That had become more and more stable over the last few days. Curiously, it was the only part of the ‘manual’ that advanced even in places like this, he had come to realise.

“Well...” Lin Ling muttered, narrowing her eyes and looking around warily.

“Great, another one of these places,” Hao Jun added, scrambling up behind him and taking care not to slip in the rain.

The ridge had been quarried, that was the only way to describe it. The passage through was visible ahead, or at least what was presumably the passage through was:. He saw a narrow, rock-cut channel, maybe a metre and a half wide that vanished into rain and gloom. The slope above was sheer and overhung. A natural spring had been diverted, crudely into a series of waterfalls that only a small army, or someone with a lot of manpower, was going to get up in a hurry, and above them the point where the two massifs split vanished into rain.

Off to one side, on the western-facing edge, visible through the wet gloom and the overgrowth of the jungle was a series of fortifications… but different.

The ones they had seen previously had been well built, made of deep blue-grey or reddish-grey stone. These were hewn directly from the rock outcropping around them, in granite, and crude by comparison. The blocks likely came from the channel itself, each one rough-hewn and maybe a metre by half a metre and as tall again. The building itself had an outer wall, a sheer curtain of vines that reached some ten metres where it was just about visible through the encroaching jungle. Behind it, another tower rose, built against the cliff, overgrown with vines and the odd tree.

“Well, that’s battle damage if ever I saw it,” Ruo Han remarked as they took in the scene.

“Mmmmm,” Lin Ling was still looking around the rest of the vegetated area, quite concertedly now.

“What is it?” he signed to her.

To his surprise she seemed not to notice, which was highly unlikely given how her senses now were…

“We should not stay here,” Lin Ling said after a long moment of looking.

“This is the first vaguely…” Liao Ying, who was exhausted and still recovering from her brush with the venomous ants groaned.

“No.” Lin Ling shook her head. “This is an even worse place to be caught after dark than the town we first encountered.”

“How can you know that for certain?” Hao Jun scowled.

Sighing, Lin Ling took three steps inside, and crouched down in the ground, rummaging for something…

She stood up, holding a rock…

Nope, he sighed, understanding suddenly. That wasn’t a rock. Lin Ling held a skull, of a cultivator in fact, that had been hidden, looking almost like a rock, he realised, in the undershrub of a tree covered in tangled vines. It was very clear how it had died, given the side of the hole in one side of it. It was also… faintly silvery, with a strange geometric pattern.

They stared around at the clearing with a newfound appreciation for its construction.

“This is a battle site,” Juni muttered.

“It is,” Lin Ling agreed. “Not on the same level as the one that we found before, but…”

“There isn’t any formation-like thing on here though?” Hao Jun was clearly tired and bullish enough to fight the point.

“No, but that’s even more reason not to stay here: With our foundations repressed, any alignment here will have to be a mortal feng shui one…” he pointed out. “Our last experience with those wasn’t so good.”

Jin Chen actually laughed, although he hadn’t been making a joke.

“I guess the only way through is that channel they cut?” Juni asked Lin Ling.

“Seems that way,” she said sourly. “Well, let’s get this over with – I don’t want to be stuck in a battlefield at sundown.”

“Can you take the lead?” she signed to him.

He blinked, puzzled for a second before realising why she was asking him to go up front. The enclosed space wasn’t great for her spear, and his sword’s… the strange key’s properties made it a remarkably potent defensive weapon in the more enclosed space.

“Why him?” Hao Jun muttered.

“You want to take point?” Ruo Han scowled.

“…”

Hao Jun shook his head – but shot him a scowl and a quick glance at his sword, which he had now unslung as he made his way past. Juni came next, with Hao Jun, then Liao Ying and Jin Chen, then, at the back, Ruo Han, Teng Chunhua and Lin Ling.

“If you see any weird ward-like things, either carved or painted, let me know,” Lin Ling added, her scowl becoming even darker as they hurried across the open area and into the passage.

The others nodded, albeit a bit sullenly.

-I really want to be done with this place, he muttered inwardly, eyeing the sheer sides of the passage as they entered it.

“Oh come on,” Jin Chen, who also had a sword drawn, complained as the tunnel sloped down slightly and started to be filled with water.

He could only agree there. By the time it had levelled out it was over their knees, and murky with leaves and mud from up above. The passage itself was some 30 metres long. Its sides sloping inwards funnelled the water down, away from the hewn rock walls in two annoying curtains that ended in a fissure that had been artificially enlarged.

“Yep, this is definitely a key defence,” he muttered, warily skirting a hole in the floor that was a metre or so directly in front of the exit they had just come out of and currently a small gyre of water.

“Pitfalls, wonderful,” Liao Ying scowled.

“They are not that deep,” Hao Jun mused.

“They don’t need to be,” Liao Ying grumbled. “In these conditions, a fall of a few metres is more than enough to cripple most people.”

That was very true, he had to agree, as they swiftly threaded their way through the flooded fissure. Mercifully the water here was shallower, only up to his shins. Traversing that, they entered another corridor, about the same style as the last, but with the water flowing with them rather than against them. The reason for that soon became apparent when the channel opened out and they were stood looking at a half-flooded courtyard, hewn out of an enlarged fissure.

“Well, you wanted rock carvings,” he half joked, signing over to Lin Ling as they warily skirted across it, taking in the main wall, which was a graven façade in a crude style.

Lin Ling just nodded, considering them. The noise of falling water was such that talk was pointless anyway.

“On your left!” he warned as they made their way half way across the courtyard and he realised there was a hidden current beneath the water.

Turning back, he sighed inwardly, because the others were already tying themselves together with rope. Communication was difficult, but not for the first time in the last day or so, he found himself pondering that they were making a bit too much of a chore over it. Stress was one thing, but even with repeated reminders… the only people communicating regularly outside of their pairings were Lin Ling and Juni… it was somewhat galling that they were not bringing him into whatever their confidence was, because clearly something had spooked them both, and while they were taking a lot of care to put on a ‘business as usual’ kind of vibe, he was sure they were underestimating just how disjointed their group now was under the surface.

“What you make them?” Jin Chen signed to him badly after passing him the rope to tie off around himself.

When he was done, he looked again at the carved relief, which showed a group of figures wielding spears, shields and carrying the totem of an eagle fighting against and killing a group of people dressed in robes, fancy hats and carrying two-handed swords. The penultimate scene was the leader of the eagle faction, clear because he had a hat with an eagle’s wings on it, holding up the head of the leader of the sword faction, standing on his corpse, which was impaled with the two-handed sword while his compatriots did a strange sideways dance that had to be stylized.

“Robes fought eagles. Robes lost?” he suggested.

“…”

Jin Chen just sighed and said nothing, so he could only move on before someone twisted an ankle and got swept away.

It took another exhausting hour to clear the channel and arrive in a broad, cleared area on the other side. They found two more such reliefs, depicting similar scenes – great victories for the eagle group over a group who had crosses on their robes and a group who wore even pointier hats and also had spears not dissimilar to the one Juni now carried. The second half of the passage through had a whole other layer some 30 metres above them, colonnaded walkways cut in to the rock, occasional areas where it opened out and even another crude, block tower at one point. The only danger in the end, was the water and they made no effort to explore any side passages or try to climb up to the other layer.

The open area on the other side was a dense swathe of grass and bog land that truncated abruptly in the rain. Looking at the edge of it and Lin Ling poking it with her stick told them it was thick with mud and flooded to almost a metre. In dry weather it would likely have been possible to traverse, but here, in this unnatural storm, it was just a bog.

“This seems a bit... excessive,” he had to admit.

“Accidental landform, I would guess,” Juni signed back. “Look over there; that curtain of green is certainly another building… and on the far side, you can make out what should be a wall?”

He peered through the misty rain and the swaying vegetation moved by the driving wind and saw what she was talking about. Some 30 metres away…

“BEHIND US!” Hao Jun suddenly yelled.

The words were nearly lost in the wind, but he still had the presence of mind to-

‘Ugghh!’

The exhalation of breath of whatever it was that tried to land on him was enough to twist and try to avoid it, using the basic form of the ‘Martial Lotus Momentum’ art from the Lotus Origins manual. Something still hit him, sending him crashing into the water even as he got a glimpse of grass… and purple?

He rolled with it, cursing as he flailed in the mud even as the others were moving to try to respond, only to find their movements hampered by the fate-thrashed rope. Someone was yelling to just cut it, even as he finally extricated himself, only to find his assailant had vanished.

Staggering up, he tried to grab the edge of the rock where they had been, and found that his right arm wasn’t working and the sword was…

“Auaarrrrggfhhhk!”

He snarled inarticulately and ignored the red and scrabbled around, finding it half sunk into the water-

Juni landed on him, crashing him flat into the mud, sword in hand, grunting as she blocked something, her sword-staff-spear blade sounding metallic to his ears.

“Where is it-!” Jin Chen was yelling.

“Gone!” Lin Ling said in disgust.

“What the fates was that…!” Liao Ying quavered.

“Are you okay?” Juni dragged him up out of the mud,

“Yeah,” he grimaced, checking his right shoulder, which still wasn’t working right

“Ahhh…Shiiiii,” he gasped, inhaling as the idea of pain battled with the strange unreality of the wound itself. As he saw the rent in his garment and the amount of blood flowing out in the water… it didn’t hurt either, but that was because the edges of the wound were starting to look a bit black.

“Poison…” Juni grimaced, rummaging through her pouch as she investigated the wound he couldn’t clearly see. “You’re lucky you moved as you did or whatever it was might have landed right on your back and stabbed you through the spine.”

“…”

“GUAA Ka KA KA KAAAaaaa GUaaaaa Kiiiii!”

The shrieking howl, from behind them, reverberated through the chasm and even managed to cut through the rain to be clearly audible.

“Gua… ka…ka…kaaaaaa…”

A moment later, another answering call came from the forest ahead of them, echoing this way and that, carried on, or perhaps through the wind.

“Owwww!” he hissed, even as the others looked around, to find that Juni was physically slicing up his shoulder, having drawn her belt knife.

“Sorry, suck it up,” Juni muttered, putting pressure on the wound as he fumbled with his good arm for one of the mortal healing pills.

“Let me know when–”

“Huaaaaaa,” he inhaled sharply as he felt like he had been genuinely stabbed and sensation flowed back into his shoulder, mostly in the form of pain like several thousand ants biting at his wound.

“–it hurts,” Juni finished with a nod.

“Liao Ying, come here and hold this!” she commanded.

“What are you…?” he was about to ask, then felt his flesh being pulled together and her fingers pushing something into the wound.

-Oh, he gritted his teeth. Staunching ointment and a healing salve, into the wound directly. He focused on the breathing exercise from the Nine Origins Cultivation Law to try to push back against the discomfort. It somewhat worked, the meditation side of it had its roots in a mortal technique according to the information in his head.

“And done,” Juni gave him a pat on the shoulder and both her and Liao Ying helped him up.

The debate, quieter now, as to what it had even been was still raging among the rest of the group. Lin Ling was staring at the ruin with narrowed eyes.

“KA KA KAAAA Ohhaaaawaaa!”

Another haunting howl came from behind them.

“So, pursuers huh,” he grimaced.

“Yep. We shouldn’t stay here,” Lin Ling agreed grimly.

“There are–”

“Ka… ka… kaaa Ohhhh….” it replied, this time from the slopes to their right.

“So what now?” Hao Jun asked, looking rattled.

“They are still behind us, aren’t they?” Ruo Han said, looking back the way they came.

“Apart from whatever it was that just jumped on Han Shu, yes,” Lin Ling said.

“There were clearly calls from ahead…” Jin Chen muttered.

“Never heard of echoes?” Lin Ling replied… sounding tired?

“…”

“Of course I have, you stupid…” Hao Jun was pushed back by Ruo Han, who had been standing between them already.

“Enough, this divisiveness is part of this…” Juni stated.

“It is,” Lin Ling agreed… narrowing her eyes at the cliff again. “We really do not want to linger here.”

He nodded, and tried to move his arm, grimacing at the pain. The pills were already doing their work, thankfully.

“Why?” Hao Jun snapped. “You keep saying… move on, move on… and you never explain why… We can’t rest, we can’t recover… and you keep leading us into these…”

“Because my instincts are ten times better than yours… so just shut up and follow orders,” Lin Ling said flatly. “Or walk back that way, or into that ruin over there, see what happens… I may even go in and drag your body out afterward.”

“Ling… enough,” Juni said.

“No…” Lin Ling snapped. “I am done with this; I’ve had enough time to think about it. They need to shut up, follow orders and act their fate-thrashed age.”

“What do you think we have been doing,” Jin Chen scowled.

“Complaining vociferously about every decision made for the last week?” Lin Ling retorted, quite truthfully, although probably far too bluntly for her target audience. “Yes, this place is shit; yes, there is nothing at all to be gained from it; yes, we are all alone out here… and most importantly, someone or something else also knows it! So it may hurt your little sect disciple feelings for me to say this, but I don’t care. Shut up, do as you’re told, and when I say we move on, we move on. Not have a fate-trashed debate over ‘why’ every shady ruin looks like a wonderful place to rest! NOTHING IS SAFE OUT HERE…”

Stood on the side lines, he had to admit that that outburst had been a good while coming. Liao Ying was shaking, Hao Jun looked like he was about to retort, before Lin Ling herself cut off her own hissed diatribe mid-sentence and shook herself.

-Shit, so that was what it was, he grimaced inwardly, but managed to keep his face schooled. The field was messing with her emotional state again.

“Dammit,” Lin Ling scowled, using the strange curse word she had taken to using quite a bit of late and kicked a random rock. “I hate these fate-accursed fields…”

Ruo Han nodded and looked in his direction… “Indeed, let’s move on. Are you recovered enough, Brother Han?”

“I am,” he grimaced, shifting the sword to his left hand.

“Well then, let’s get out of this field before something else happens,” Juni scowled.

“It didn’t attack…” he signed to her.

“It didn’t need to,” she signed back, to which he could only agree.

“We are being stalked, aren’t we?” he asked, a little redundantly, but confirmation never hurt.

“We are,” she agreed grimly.

As they made their way warily around the edge of the flooded clearing, towards the ‘wall’ beyond it, he considered that point in more detail. The idea that something had been following them was one thing… but this wasn’t like that. This was more like a bunch of hunters stalking a herd. Goading them, trying to split up the group, making them at odds with themselves, using the landscape and the environment to their advantage. It spoke to a different kind of pursuer.

In his mind’s eye, he saw that flash of grass…chitin… but what really stood out was the purple, and, now he inspected his memories closely, what might have been a spider limb.

-Was it a spider though, or something that wanted me to think it was a spider? That was the question to which he had no answer.

The edge of the cleared area gave way into a cliff with a winding path down it, into misty forest below that was the visual definition of ‘treacherous-looking to the point of life-threatening.”

Peering over the edge, then considering the path, Juni came to the same conclusion he, Lin Ling and Teng Chunhua did within ten seconds. Descending down the cliff into the trees was the better choice.

“We go down on a rope,” Juni said, already taking the length they had and starting to link it to the second length Teng Chunhua was unwinding.

“Can we?” Ruo Han frowned, peering over the edge. “Not that I doubt it, just the trees are a good hundred metres below…”

“Probably. We may have to drop the last few metres into a tree, but everyone should be able to do that safely,” Teng Chunhua said by way of explanation, presumably before Lin Ling might say something more pointed.

“Perhaps it’s better to rig up a rope and slide down it,” he suggested, thinking about their energy levels as much as his shoulder.

“Yeah…” Juni frowned, “we have one length of rope fit for climbing, but that is too far.”

“Who goes last?” Lin Ling asked.

“I will,” Juni said. “My climbing capabilities are the best of anyone here… much like your instincts are the best. That way we can recover the rope as well.”

“I’ll go first then,” Lin Ling nodded. “Then Han Shu, then the others, then Teng Chunhua then you?”

“Yep,” Juni nodded.

He watched Lin Ling grab the rope and start to hop down the cliff before bouncing out into the canopy below with it. It was a feat only she, with her enhanced strength, could have achieved. A moment later she reappeared and waved that it was safe, jerking the rope hard to show it was securely fastened.

Gritting his teeth, he hooked both legs around it, and, cradling his injured arm, started to descend himself, much more slowly. By the time he made it to the tree and was helped off to sit on a branch by Lin Ling, he was breathing hard and very happy to be done with the whole thing. The others followed in short order until it was just Teng Chunhua and Juni. At that point, Lin Ling left them in the tree, untied the rope and swung with it to the cliff, grasping onto a tree and tying it off there. As she descended, Teng Chunhua anchored it on at points until she also arrived at the tree they had picked.

“What are they doing?” Jin Chen asked.

“We want to recover the rope,” he explained, as Juni started to make her way down, climbing the cliff itself and tied to the rope which she had untethered at the top.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

“The art of recovering ropes is not a thing you need to worry about much if you can just jump off a cliff like this normally,” Ruo Han agreed.

“None of those seniors of ours brought ropes, that was for sure,” Hao Jun muttered.

“No… that was left up to us outer sect elders to procure,” Ruo Han observed, as they watched Juni rappel down another level and recover the next set of ropes.

The whole descent took about ten minutes – a testament as much to the mechanical skill of Juni and Teng Chunhua as anything else. Lin Ling’s role was, he was sure, to be the person holding the rope. Her strength under these repression fields had been proven to be twice even his, or Ruo Han’s for that matter.

They made their descent out of the tree to the ground as the trio scaled down the last of the cliff face and hopped across the rocks to rejoin them, looking only slightly out of breath for their physical exertions.

“It seems we are still within this field,” Juni observed, looking at the forest around them.

“This is mostly new growth, isn’t it?” he observed, now having a chance to look at the freshness of the greenery around them and trying not to frown.

“It does appear to be the case,” Lin Ling agreed. “Relative to the age of the forest on the other side, certainly.”

“That’s not… a good thing is it?” Ruo Han mused.

“Hard to say, but coupled with the skull Lin Ling found and the other evidence of combat up above… this land was probably clear… 30 or 40 years ago?” he hazarded a guess.

“That is a pretty good bet,” Lin Ling frowned, running her hand over one of the trees. “These have matured fast, for a hardwood of this size without anything like the support of a valley’s worth of spirit vegetation dragging everything up like the tide rising.”

Looking around, he realised that was a good point, the trees were young, but these kind of trees were prised for their timber and they grew… slowly under natural circumstances. The implication there was…

“Look… over there,” it was actually Hao Jun who spoke, making everyone flinch in case it was a return of his mysterious assailant. In fact, it was not. He was pointing to rock which had fallen over. A stele in fact.

Making their way over, it had all the hallmarks of a boundary marker, and the edges on it were surprisingly fresh.

“The alignments are still disconnected,” Juni observed, having got out her compass again. “But this basically confirms that this place was being used and cleared within a generation or two…”

“Weird,” he could only agree.

“…”

The rest of the group nodded as they considered the forest.

“Right,” Lin Ling said, briskly, “what I said at the top still stands, by the way: this is not a place we want to be loitering.”

Before anyone could make further comment, she was already threading her way into the trees at a brisk trot, scanning her head this way and that. The others looked after her for a moment, before Juni made a shooing motion and Jin Chen, Hao Jun and Liao Ying all started moving. Juni paired up with them, while he fell in with Ruo Han while Teng Chunhua now brought up the rear.

“Sorry about earlier,” Ruo Han muttered as they made their way on, rapidly now.

“It’s fine… it’s remarkable that an outburst like that… has not arrived sooner,” he said softly.

“She… seems on edge,” Ruo Han agreed.

“We all are, in our own ways,” he sighed. “This is… well outside anyone’s comfort zone at this point, and these repression–”

The rain turned to hail, instantaneously. Hailstones the size of gravel hissed down through the canopy as they all dodged into trees. It lasted for some ten seconds, then they swept through and the rain resumed. Picking one up carefully, he inhaled, because they were cold.

“Freak weather, of a different sort,” Ruo Han said, shivering in the humidity.

“Did you get any idea of what attacked me?” he asked him.

“Sort of… but…” Ruo Han frowned.

“What…?” he asked.

“There comes a point when you wonder if the world is just messing with you?” Ruo Han muttered. “Because I’d swear it was a spider that someone had tied a shrub onto the back of… but…”

“…”

“That someone painted partly purple?” he added.

“Well… yes,” Ruo Han agreed.

They jogged on in silence, the field showing no end in sight for quite a few more minutes before Lin Ling called them to stop on the edge of a rise.

Ahead of them, a river wound through the valley, vanishing into the haze of returned rain. The humidity had not quite recovered yet, so the wind was oddly chilling as it blew across the vast swathes of waist high sedges, reeds grasses and other herbaceous vegetation shifting back and forth in what was, effectively square mile after square mile of abandoned paddy fields.

“Is that… rice?” Liao Ying finally said, staring at the grass growing near to them.

“It is indeed wild rice,” Teng Chunhua agreed.

Buildings dotted the cleared area, which the jungle was reclaiming. Likely the main inhibitor of that was the frequent flooding from the river. Their style put him in mind of the cruder constructions from the passage rather than the much more styled and robust ruins of the valleys they had come through before. The style, such as it was, was also different, and much more familiar. Roofs occasionally remained on the towers, which were curved and sloped. Stone tiles in blue-green stone shimmering in the rain. wood was still present in some of them, including the nearest such cluster some two hundred metres away, where he could pick out collapsed eaves on a building and what looked like through beams on the tower.

“Recently abandoned… but then why is there a ‘field’ here?” Ruo Han asked the question preying on his mind as well.

“Go around? Or go through? That is the more pertinent question,” Hao Jun grumbled.

“Seems to make no odds,” Juni frowned, eyeing her compass. “Ling?”

“I can’t see shit in this gloom, more than a few hundred metres anyway,” Lin Ling sighed. “My vision is good but not that good. For what it’s worth, this doesn’t have the same… presence as the farmland from before though. I will say that we should get as far as we can before night falls.”

They all stared at the sky. His own scrip told him it was six thirty in the evening, although with the weather he just had to take its word for it. That put two more hours before dusk, which was more than he had felt. Looking back into the forest, he couldn’t help but feel they had covered a surprisingly large amount of ground given the circumstances.

“In any case, we do need to rest… so perhaps we pick one of these ruins and hole up as best we can?” he signed.

“…”

Lin Ling looked… undecided. Juni frowned as did Teng Chunhua, before both of them finally nodded.

“We can only risk it,” Juni said eventually. “The nearest ruin looks… clear enough, but if it’s full of bones or something…”

“It’s probably better than this new forest,” he pointed out.

“Indisputably,” Teng Chunhua agreed.

“Ruo Han, the rest of you,” Juni clapped her hands, drawing them out of their own little conference. “We will scout the first ruin. If it looks plausible, we will hole up in it until the worst of night has passed. If it is unsuitable, we will cut along the edge of the forest here and search out another spot.”

Their group nodded, looking a bit resigned, but fell in with less complaining. The trip through the grassland was remarkably anticlimactic. The field boundaries were easy enough to find so they went along the top of the nearest one and within twenty minutes had arrived at the small raised settlement. The buildings had started to be reclaimed by grassland, but were, thankfully just abandoned. Quite obviously so in fact. The interior décor was… odd as well. There was none of the carving of the previous ruins; these were just houses, with wooden furniture, much of it carved from spirit wood he found after some investigation. They found pottery and various baskets of goods in one house. Some of them even had things in them: a wine that nobody wanted to try tasting and several containers of dry spirit herbs.

There was some evidence of destruction: the well in the middle had been flattened and filled in, the doors of many houses had been smashed off their hinges and main rooms were clearly overturned. One had even been burnt down, but there were no remains anywhere, so in the end, they picked the fortified tower on the side of the compound and cleared it thoroughly of what remained that might be dangerous. That was, in the end, two spiders the size of his head and a rather grumpy, and surprisingly non-venomous, snake that they decided to let retain its pot.

Given how shattered half the group was, the first watch thus fell to him and Lin Ling. The latter scrambled up to the upper floor and found a place to lurk while he picked the direction overlooking the grassland that wasn’t obscured by buildings and, after accepting a few gourds from Liao Ying, stilled his mind to watch the world. Qi sense got you nowhere out here, especially at night when the darkness almost seemed to rise out of the ground and cloak everything in a miasma of suppression.

Hours slipped by and dusk fell. The storm wailed overhead and the rain eventually picked up again – sometime after midnight according to his scrip. Fortunately it didn’t reach the torrential showing that had started the day off and the building afforded more shelter than he had initially expected. With the wind, even the humidity dropped a bit. It was still unpleasant, but now within much more tolerable levels, for him at least. Watching the scenes of night unfold, he had to agree with Lin Ling something about how the scene was off, but he couldn’t quite grasp what it was, and the longer he watched, the more tantalizingly infuriating that was.

A night bird he didn’t recognise hooted in the distance, answered by another. Some insects hissed, their luminescence visible even if their chirps or other sounds were not. Frogs, or toads perhaps, were audible though, even in the rain and the storm, their calls echoing in the lulls in the rain, or when the wind changed to blow from the river.

And yet… despite that haunting, niggling sense of wrongness, nothing untoward was visible no matter where he looked.

Teng Chunhua came to take over in the 2nd hour after midnight. He considered sleeping, but the subtle off-ness that was now haunting him like a spectre showed no signs of vanishing, so in the end he just ate a fasting pill and carefully poked at his wound for a while until he was satisfied it was healing. Of the Argent justice group, only Ruo Han was awake, sat watching the grassland in the direction of the forest, his sword hidden across his lap.

“See anything?” he said, coming to crouch down beside him.

“Nah,” the older disciple sighed, shaking his head. “The others are basically out cold.”

“It’s to be expected,” he agreed. “Part of the problem has been the lack of actual sleep for many of them – they are not used to fasting pills and this degree of intensity of focus in an environment like this.”

“It would be sapping even with our cultivations available,” Ruo Han agreed. “How is your wound?”

“It hurts?” he murmured, “but it’s by no means the worst scrape I’ve taken out here.”

“What… happened to Lin Ling?” Ruo Han asked, after a long moment.

“You should ask her,” he said after a moment’s consideration. “Some things should not be explained by others.”

Exhaling, Ruo Han nodded. “She doesn’t like sect disciples, and not disciples from the southern continent… Am I to assume she is part of that Lin Clan?”

“…”

“I am surprised you heard about that?” he frowned.

“Argent Continent is a long way from the north, but several influences within the Argent Hall were involved in what you call the ‘three schools conflict’,” Ruo Han said with a sigh. “They went there at the invitation of a young noble from the Deng Clan, I believe – they have some influence in Argent Pavilion City.”

“The southern gateway across the great ocean,” he nodded. When it was put like that, it made sense that a big sect would have been involved. A long distance war over trade. It had been before he was born, nearly. A generation before Lin Ling, who had grown up in exile and never spoken about what part of the Lin Clan she was from. However…

“We did not have an easy time of it, before we ended up in here,” he sighed. “Our reward, perhaps, was that we survived at all. Fates know precious few walk out of the underworld that fall into it as we did. The chaos that unfolded likely played a big part there.”

“None of them know real hardship,” Ruo Han sighed. “Or loss, except for Jin Chen… As the person who should be leading them, I can only say that I am culpable, but this… The answers to enduring here have to come from within…”

“They do,” he agreed.

It was a brutal lesson, really, and one you never stopped learning.

“Let me know if you see anything weird,” he patted the older man on the shoulder and left him to his window, Ruo Han just nodding and fell silent again.

Silently, he made his way down to the ground floor, past the slumbering forms of the three disciples. Juni was sat there, her eyes shining faintly in the darkness, watching the access up. He nodded to her and she signed okay as he made his way softly outside, onto the raised platform that formed the first level of the tower. The ground floor was only accessible from here, and below that, the cellar was flooded.

At this new, lower perspective, he crouched in the shadow, watching the large sward of waist-high grasses and beds of wild rice that stretched away towards where the forest would be half a mile away. The grass hissed in the wind, and the rain made a faint staccato drumming on the foliage as he listened to it. Were they not in this place, they would have had wards and talismans to check. As it was, all they had was a set of subtle alignments Juni had put up around the tower that would dissuade things from coming here.

Time passed as he listened carefully to the sounds of the natural world around him, thinking about the patterns they held – bird calls, responses, wind on grass, branches on walls, frogs, insects dancing in the dark. The jungle was never silent, even in a storm like this.

Silence…

It hit him in the face like a wet fish.

That was what had been off about the valleys before. They were too empty. Too silent. Even in the storm, there should have been… more disturbance. Perhaps it was down to the nature of the forest – an insect jungle rather than a jungle with mammals and other bigger predators… however, there had been those bipedal lizards with feathers. The fates said they never met another pack of those.

Time passed slowly. The storm was still rumbling overhead ominously when the pre-dawn gloom crept across the landscape. He really found himself wishing he could work on his cultivation. It had been progressing quickly as his physical mantra had already done a lot of the work and the marriage of the two was very efficient at absorbing the qi of the world. A few bones were still condensing ghostly lotus root patterns that traced back to a weird stylised lotus symbol that was growing in his mind’s eye. Had they not landed in here, he might have broken through that bottleneck tonight.

That was the other thing that was bugging him, he had to concede. The patterns on that skull had looked awfully like those forming on his bones. Not in their style, but just in the general appearance. Had they looked like the lotus patterns he would have been deeply concerned.

They packed up what little they had and, an hour later, exited the ruins. With dawn, the rain still kept messing with everyone’s senses and soul sense was still apparently gone; however, the visibility was such that they had to conclude that one way or another, the vast cleared area was probably the way to traverse this valley between the massifs.

The climate was at least no worse than the previous night, and with no evidence of weird alignments or other oddness, they made good progress for several hours, passing other ruins like the one they had overnighted in. The rest and a few hours’ sleep, combined with some fortification from fasting pills had perked the others from the Argent Justice sect up, and so the trip onwards was… if not pleasant, at least all of the problems were from without rather than within for once, even if that was a slightly unfair prognosis.

All the while, he continued his vigilance, pondering that niggling feeling. Speaking to Juni about it just raised his confusion, because while she admitted to being concerned, she didn’t have the same… lingering feeling of being watched. Even Lin Ling, who took on board his observations with an ever-deepening frown said that what she was experiencing wasn’t quite the same. That left all three of them feeling weird in different ways… which, the longer he thought about it, the more it disturbed him.

As they moved on, he continued to pay close attention to the sounds of the forest, looking, not for oddities because he suspected that their stalkers were far too careful for that, but for little differences in how he might expect things to be.

The first big ruin they found in early afternoon, cut into a rising outcropping on the edge of the forest. The grasslands had narrowed at this point into a meandering valley between the two rows of massifs. Steep cliffs rose, almost impassable even with the vegetation cover – unless you were a monkey.

It was set into the side of a rising gorge that was cleft into the cliff, with stone buildings that reminded him rather remarkably of the one he had seen in the depths. The style of the buildings was different, but the broad layout, even the access over a partially collapsed bridge and embankment over a meander in the river was similar enough that he could not help but link them in his mind.

Lin Ling took one look at it, shook her head and waved for them to walk right on by. Looking at it, he could see why in his heart as well. It looked too innocent, and old; however, in that antiquity the vegetation just looked… off. It was difficult to pin down why. Maybe it was the way the shadows fell, or his lingering memories of what had occurred after his last trip into such a ruin. After some standing around considering it, Juni also pronounced it deeply sketchy and with that they made their way onwards without looking back.

A few more river bends on, and there was a dull, distant rumble of returning thunder and the rain, which had receded to more of a mist, returned in earnest. Visibility dropped rapidly and within minutes they were adrift in a green sea of hissing faintly steaming vegetation. In the distance, from the south this time, he saw the faintest flickers of lightning spidering through the swirling clouds and the rain.

Eventually, after another mile, a second ruin loomed out of the misty rain.

“Great,” Lin Ling scowled. “This one is even worse than the last.”

“…”

The others eyed her, but he had to agree weirdly. The strange, niggling bad vibe he had was getting stronger as well.

“What does the divination say?” Teng Chunhua asked Juni.

“…”

“Useless,” Juni shook her head. “The alignments of this valley are just… All the readings I get are weird. If I was just starting divining stuff around here, I would see no problem, but things do not shift around like this…”

“Could be the storm?” he suggested, regretting not for the first time that he was better versed in those methods – unfortunately it was a matter of experience, and he rarely ended up with missions that required that depth of knowledge.

“It could be,” Juni agreed, looking up at the distant lightning, even as another rumble of thunder echoed. “However, this storm is much more… normal. At least by first appearance.”

“For what it’s worth, none of us see anything odd about it, not any more so than the previous one,” Ruo Han added. “Could it be related to the storm up above?”

“Hmmm…” Lin Ling narrowed her eyes, staring at the ruin again.

On the face of it, he had to agree with her. The ruin complex itself, in the same general style as those in the rice fields, would not have looked out of place back home in truth. It was situated on the edge of the valley, with the river meandering several hundred metres across the open sward to their right. At the back of it, set against the valley wall was a large building of several floors that mostly still had a roof. Had it been back home, he would have said it was an ancestral temple or something similar. With the avenue of buildings and the walls around it, it certainly had that look about it.

The spiky angles and the shadows and the rain certainly didn’t help it not to look supremely-

The shadow blurred out from under a shrub behind him and lashed at him so fast he thought he was seeing things.

It scythed at his heart, his neck, his dantian and his forehead simultaneously even as he threw himself back and slashed upwards with the sword – cutting haphazardly at the thing with as much form as he could muster.

It danced back, his strike ill enough timed that the sword’s properties somehow failed to properly catch it. The thing, meshed in grass, bizarrely coloured purple and with far too many legs, danced around the half strike and with a long limbed blur nearly impaled him through the leg and the chest until the flat of his sword caught it, sending it flying backward.

Ruo Han, who was nearest, cut at it directly as it flew back and they watched it poke a leg out, blocking the sword and using it to fly in an improbable direction and vanish into the greenery with barely a ripple.

There was a pause for a second as everyone just stared dully.

The second blur, he only caught by good fortune, from the corner of his eye.

He spun and cut upwards at the last possible moment. The shadow tried to twist in the air, stabbing at his face even as it avoided the sword-

The sword bisected it, even though the strike had been evaded and he sighed in relief at the now somewhat familiar little shift as it occurred, glad that that property of the blade still worked. The creature collapsed to the ground leeching ichor, and they finally got a good look at what it was, even as they closed ranks looking for the other one.

It was the oddest thing he had seen here, probably. A squat, eight-limbed, slightly armoured spider with six eyes that was entirely painted purple, apart for the large clump of grass that was tied to its thorax and the weird, blue and white run in the back of its abdomen. The final standout feature was the fangs, which were rather nasty looking.

“…”

“Well… at least we–”

Juni pushed Ruo Han out of the way as the other spider dropped down almost on top of him. He struck upwards even as she stabbed for it. It skittered away from both, crazily and then avoided Hao Jun’s sweeping strike, providing him with the unusual record of having had two sword blows parried by arachnids. It danced with improbable fluidity through their attacks and shot towards Juni so fast its legs might as well have been a blur.

“Accursed-evil-!”

Her curse was cut off as she dodged to the side and for the briefest moment he saw… what he could only describe as an oddity. Her movement was fluid, natural and the creature somehow missed her, only catching cloth with its limbs.

-Stupid injury!

He grimaced and used the opening cut from the ‘Nine Origins Sword’. It didn’t even have a name. Most of them didn’t, he had found, just being named things like ‘Cut Number One’ or ‘Breath Cut’ and things like that. The creature shot away from him and failed, inexplicably. Spiders’ faces were generally inscrutable, but what passed for inexplicable confusion was mirrored in its eyes for a second before his strike took it through the thorax. It clipped his arm as it thrashed once before its demise, giving him a nasty laceration along his forearm as it shredded the skin, leaving a faint blackening and numbness behind it.

Gritting his teeth, he cast around swiftly for others, while the rest of them looked at the second one, which was also painted purple, covered in a bundle of grass. It was also bigger, the size of a dog and with thousands of tiny barbs on the insides of its thin, armoured limbs.

“It’s Golden Core…” Hao Jun warily poked the brownish-bronze pearl with a silver sheen out of the ruin of the thorax.

“Fates…” Liao Ying, who had her sword drawn as well now hissed…

“This is a male…” Lin Ling said, squatting beside it. “It has no evidence of sacs in its abdomen.”

“What good does knowing that do us?” Jin Chen asked, looking around holding his sword nervously.

“It tells us that there is likely a female around, and maybe more males. It also tells us that the female is likely four or five times bigger than this,” Lin Ling poked the male spider.

“Oh…” Jin Chen looked around more uneasily.

“They aren’t web weavers either,” Teng Chunhua said, poking at the small one… “This is female, and looks like it’s a Qi Refinement, two star ranked monster maybe. Its inner shell isn’t fully formed either…” she sighed.

“Great. That means they get gender dimorphism when they break through to Golden Core?” Juni sighed. “They don’t look like any species I’m familiar with either.”

“Hmmmmm… they appear to be ambush predators… they look similar to the tunnel spiders that were occasionally recorded in the South Grove Ruins… But if they are similar to those, that’s...” Teng Chunhua trailed off.

“That’s bad,” he agreed, smearing a detoxification salve on his wound. “Those are very annoying to deal with.”

“That’s not the real problem though,” Lin Ling said with aplomb, holding up the ruins of the purple spider.

He considered the numbness, which was already receding and the blackness. “Yin Wood and Yin Fire in the venom most likely. The affinity of these seems different.”

Teng Chunhua nodded, taking the core, having wiped it off and turning it over in her hands. “You’re right, Lin Ling.”

“The grass is stuck on with spider web,” Ruo Han observed.

“Uhuh,” Juni nodded, peering at the one Lin Ling was holding up.

“So, what is the bigger problem?” Hao Jun asked.

“Well... These spiders don’t have web spinnerets. They don’t make silk at all,” Lin Ling said critically. “They also don’t have hands.”

“Oh…” Liao Ying stared at the spider...

“Wait… what does them not having hands have to do with anything?” Hao Jun frowned.

“Where did the silk come from, and last I checked spiders don’t have fingerprints,” Lin Ling said grimly. “Someone painted these spiders purple and tied a bunch of grass on them… grass… which has faintly psychotropic properties on its surroundings no less.”

“…”

“Well, that explains why we didn’t see them. I wonder if they also have some form of active qi-camouflage, like the tunnel spiders…”

“So… eum…” Hao Jun frowned, looking uneasily at the forest, with the rain and the mist and the green. “Do we take refuge in the ruins and wait for this mist to pass? There is no way we can spot these out there…”

Liao Ying was staring at the spider, frowning, while Jin Chen was nodding in agreement with Hao Jun. Even Ruo Han looked conflicted, however…

-Thinking like someone stalking prey… isn’t this absolutely a trap that is playing on our fears?

That thought, once it was lodged was very hard to dislodge.

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

~ LIN LING – JUNGLE RUINS ~

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

Stood there, looking at the ruin in the mist, she tuned out the worried chatter from the others. Their concerns were…

-Understandable, they are thinking like prey, an old voice whispered, almost hungrily.

-Yes… like prey… It is a long time since anything dared call us… prey, another agreed.

She tried to tune those and other agreeing voices in the blood out as well. They would have picked right now to come out of their silence. Her instincts were still whispering at her.

-Not the spiders.

-No… the old, wiser-sounding voice agreed suddenly, not the spiders.

-Spiders would not dare to make us prey, a younger brash voice snarled.

-Yes, spiders are prey… We are not prey to them… another agreed.

-This feeling…? another, very old voice murmured.

It hadn’t been about the spiders, though they were surprising. As the voices implied, her blood had no impression of them. In their mind’s eye, she intuitively got that they were incapable of killing her unless they came in their dozens. Their venom was ineffective on her, her physical power was comparable to them and although her speed was less, her reactions were not. She hadn’t moved because the voice that spoke of spiders as prey had warned her not to.

-What feeling? She asked the other old voice.

-Stolen gifts… another thief, a younger, angrier voice suddenly snarled.

-Indeed… what was stolen, so long ago…?

-And now they try to turn it on us… another, the angry, hungry old voice hissed.

She sighed, and looked at the ruins. They had told her not to move, because they saw the others as the bait, the lure now. The shift in perspective was unsettling actually. Those older voices gave clarity to the idea, explained that whatever it was that was after them was still trying to gauge them, lure them in.

It was a compelling idea, to fight them in the ruins. It made sense. Even if the whole place was infested. There were solid walls, angles, approaches, you could counter speed with weapons and awareness, overcome odds…

“So… we can fight them off if there are more…” Hao Jun was explaining…

“Yes, but they are fast, and there are a lot of blind angles…” Teng Chunhua replied, sighing.

“And swords are not good weapons for this,” Juni, who was the only one aside from her with a polearm at this point, said grimly.

“Yes, logically it is a good idea to fight them in there… rather than out here, in the green, without sight, without eyes… and without qi,” she mused.

The thunder rolled again overhead, leading to a brief intensification of the mist. Her gaze caught motion on a nearby tree trunk, quietly slinking around oh so carefully. She moved, just as the spider jumped for the back of Liao Ying’s head as the others turned to reply to her words.

The spider smashed into her chest with enough force to send her rolling. It bit her, hard, and then spasmed a few seconds later, as she plucked it off, crushing it with both hands. That moment bought time for the others to react.

Han Shu cut another as it leapt while Teng Chunhua lashed out with a machete blade and sent a kick at a small one as best she was able. Ruo Han managed to stab two more in rapid succession, each barely a foot across.

One landed on her hat, stabbing through and scratching her face. She shook her head and bit her lip as hard as she could before spitting a mist of blood at her hat and watched as the spider spasmed under the influence of the poison. The wave was dispatched in a few moments this time, with only a few scrapes that were quickly dealt with, leaving them a dozen smaller spider corpses, all painted purple.

“So… why are they all painted purple?” Han Shu asked the most pertinent point as he went around stabbing the last few that were still faintly twitching.

“I wish I knew,” Juni agreed.

She turned on the spot, looking up at the trees, scouring them for more spiders; she saw a few possible places they might be lurking high in branches, nestled in opportune places. The decision to put psychotropic grass on them made more sense when you considered the number of plants living in the trees themselves, including several flowering grasses with broad leaves. After a moment, she turned to look back into the complex behind them. Beyond the gate, the mist swirled as the wind changed direction again and she was able to make out the nearest buildings more clearly.

-Lots of places to hide.

With that shift in the wind though, her ability to pierce the distant gloom was, for a moment, much improved and her eyes were drawn to the multi-storey building with its pyramid-like roofs. At first glance it looked rather like an old ancestral hall from back home, but that was only superficially so. Robbed of the veil of secondary mist, she could tell that the roof had a central tower obfuscated against the rising roofs that abutted the cliff. The tower was lined with squat statues of brutal demonic figures with long arms, flat, angular faces and pointed ears, as were several other areas of the roof.

She swept the rest of the–!

-Statues? Everything else we have seen outside of that old sanctuary of Bright Fortune has been relief or stylized…

Nothing she had seen had actual statues, not here, not down below, not in any ruin yet. Carvings yes, several inset reliefs and half statutes but always human-looking. She focused again on the middle tower and saw no statues.

She sighed and looked away, making sure the back of her body was facing the building before catching Juni’s attention with her hands. It was unlikely that it would make any difference in the long run, but she was playing with tiny margins of advantage now and hoping the battlefield was somewhat even.

“What?” Juni signed.

“12 attackers, on tower, roof, humanoid, don’t react, just be ready,” she signed as rapidly as she could.

Han Shu and Teng Chunhua both caught her sign as well.

“If we are getting stalked by a pack of spiders out here… it seems stupid to go traipsing through the forest now…” Hao Jun was pleading.

“I have to agree with brother Hao…” Jin Chen muttered… “I’d rather fight these things in there, with flat surfaces to spot them than out here.”

The sense of being observed returned…

There was no malevolence in it somehow, but the blood sneered at that and refuted it. A mighty beast of yore, its kind a thing of myth and legend in and of itself, but it still had the ancestral memories of its progenitor species as well as its own and they had been less blessed in the predator and prey stakes.

The uneasy feeling intensified slightly and she saw three larger blotches sat in the shrubbery about 20 metres from her on her left. They melded so neatly with the jungle understory, even swaying in the breeze, that all that gave them away to her excess vision was the eye. She saw another oh-so-carefully stalking through the distant gloom to her right, taking up position, then another on a tree above.

The one to her right moved first, she snapped a twig by stepping on it deliberately just as she saw it tense and dart forward. It was fast, but the sudden noise made everyone pay closer attention to their surroundings just as it charged for Ruo Han. A dozen smaller spiders sprung from their points, several she hadn’t actually caught and the trap was sprung.

The repression field melted away like mist and the spiders accelerated, dancing through their lines, all staying out of sword reach of Han Shu she noted as they struggled to adapt to the sudden return of their cultivations.

The male dashed for Hao Jun, catching him in the leg even as he struck at it with his treasure sword. Their blows repelled each other – the spider deflecting Hao Jun’s strike and he being protected by a treasure on his person. She had to admit that Hao Jun really had no karma with spiders at this point.

-Why have they lifted the repression? She found herself wondering.

-Why now?

None jumped for her either; instead, she saw something nebulous on the edge of her vision and then there was a stinging pain on the side of her face, her chest her leg and her back. The Yang Intent in her blood burned the venom away even as it melted her skin…

She bit back a scream and staggered, ‘giving’ one of the male spiders an opening.

Juni flowed towards it striking out with her spear staff, yet it didn’t bother to evade, foolishly trusting to its armour. Her spear impaled it clean through, severing thorax and abdomen.

There was a scream from behind her and she saw Jin Chen crumpling as the male spider stabbed at him, even as three males ran interference against Han Shu for the precious moments required for smaller ones to swarm over Jin Chen–

Jin Chen used what she could only assume was an earth element talisman. It exploded with enough force to make her teeth rattle, scattering branches, greenery and combatants everywhere. She rolled with it and saw Hao Jun attacking another spider, lightning flickering off his blade as he tried to get an opening to use a talisman in his hand. Han Shu had finally dispatched one of the spiders and now the others were just corralling him at range even as he danced away from their attacks. A second one got too close and was somehow stabbed even as it singularly avoided getting stabbed. She found herself wondering what its limits were as she stomped on a small spider and caught a second out of the air. She spat her own saliva back at it, watching the spider twitch as the yang qi-poison in the blood in her mouth killed it in moments.

Two more shifted out of nowhere, totally escaping her notice until they were almost in her face. She spat a spray of blood at them and watched them die, even as she registered what had happened.

-Great, they can camouflage themselves from qi sense.

She spun around looking to tell someone else, only to hear a scream in the mist, amidst the din of splintering branches and flashes of qi arts. There was a second scream, this time enraged pain and fury from Teng Chunhua as she tore a spider off her back and smashed it into a tree, doing more damage to the tree than the spider, even as two more crawled up her legs biting repeatedly. A moment later a second pranced sideways out of the shrubbery, scything legs towards Teng Chunhua.

{Flickering Steps}

For the first time in quite a while, she properly used that basic movement art. The world faded around her. She arrived beside Teng Chunhua at the same moment as the spider arrived and grabbed it by two of its legs. Chunhua, who had clearly started using her mantra to heal, grabbed the other two and tried to tear it apart.

“What the…” Chunhua eyed the struggling creature dubiously.

She had to agree, it was far too durable for a Golden Core spider given their combined strength.

“Juni!” she yelled, seeking the obvious answer to the problem.

Juni, who had just kicked another spider away, shot over to arrive beside them, stabbing the swordstaff through its abdomen, ruining it. She snared the core in the same instant and refined it. It was a waste, according to the memories, but it was better than leaving them lying about.

With that, they finally had a moment to take stock. All the spiders in the clearing were Golden Core or weaker, it seemed. All painted purple, although few also had blue on them.

Ruo Han and Liao Ying were standing back to back, surrounding by a circle of small and large smoking spider corpses. Ruo Han was wincing and staring at the melted hole in his robe. Jin Chen was being administered to on the ground by Hao Jun while Han Shu was dispatching a few small spiders that remained. Nobody was dead at least.

“Shit… fates be cursed…” Liao Ying whimpered, starting to struggle with the sleeve of her robe, which was smoking. It seemed she got spat at too…

“Is Chen okay?” Ruo Han called over.

“Yeah. He got stabbed pretty badly, but the poison is light… We have enough pills but he isn’t going anywhere for a few hours…” Hao Jun winced… “And neither am I… got stabbed in the leg and it broke the bone. Those things’ limbs can use qi just as well as any mid-grade spiritual weapon…”

“Never mind that the repression just vanished like that,” she muttered, looking around.

-I’d bet actual spirit stones it’s so they can leverage that camouflage for starters, she muttered.

“How are you, Miss Teng?” Han Shu asked, coming over.

“I’ll live… It hurts, mostly from the poison, but I have pills…” she winced and took another poison-refining pill as she spoke.

Juni looked over at her and looked worried. “That was awfully convenient timing…” she murmured.

“Yes. If you wanted to lure a bunch of suspicious people into a trap, convincing them that the forest is full of nasty spiders trying to bite their heads off is a good way to go.” She kicked a purple spider corpse.

“I just don’t see why they aren’t attacking already, whatever they are,” Juni frowned.

“Worst case scenario? They are working on turning the repression field back on,” she suggested.

“…”

“I hate how you have this special talent for ideas like that,” Juni muttered.

“Or there is some reason they need us to enter those ruins…” she added. The sensation of encroaching wrongness was even stronger now. The symbol of all things started to shift in her mind’s eye, receding again.

-Shit… shit… not good, was all she could conclude.

“We have to take some cover!” Hao Jun winced… if we get caught out here by another wave like that.

“And injured as we are… we can’t use the formation… My meridians are injured as are Brother Hao’s…” Jin Chen gasped from where he was slumped.

“Not in these ruins, we don’t,” she said decisively. “Use your brains for a second and apply some unscrupulous logic.”

They all stared at her for a long moment… then at the spiders… she was pleased to see they were indeed just panicked and not terminally stupid after all. Jin Chen groaned and pulled himself up, hitting acupuncture points to seal of some of his damaged meridians. Hao Jun did the same, which would provide him with short term mobility at least, even if it was likely to cause issues for his leg healing if he kept that up too long.

She heard that weird night bird hoot again.

-Well hello there, old friend, I have far too good an ear for sounds now to be fooled by that, she hissed mentally.

It was the same bird she had heard hooting back before their first ambush by those spiders outside main portion of the slaughter formation.

Moments later she saw two more male spiders slinking oh so subtly out of the middle darkness to her far right… their outlines broken up by bundles of vegetation affixed to them.

-But why are they all painted purple? She asked the memories again, and as expected they were silent.

-Fine, be that way, she sighed.

She gestured to her right and flapped her hand twice before making a rude anatomical gesture.

After that, she palmed her second strongest talisman she possessed from their bit of looting back in the ruin where Juni got her medallion – a Yin Water attributed Poison Mist Talisman. Most of the really good talismans had been bound by the cultivator who fled. What remained were mostly Dao Seeking and a few Immortal Grade Talismans. It still gnawed at her that that bastard Di Ji had stolen her talisman wallet with its entire contents. This one was not ideal for her. Its saving grace was that it had concepts of friendly fire built into that could be assigned with her intent – at least it wouldn’t kill everyone else.

She pointed to the path along the trail, past the ruins and back towards the river and made a cutting motion.

Juni signed to her that she also had a talisman, and then Han Shu nudged the others. The two injured were helped by Ruo Han and Teng Chunhua. She waved her hand three times.

Three seconds later everyone other than her and Juni broke for the path as fast as their movement arts would allow them.

{Misty Moon Vapours}

She hurled a talisman at the ruins while Juni sent her Yin Earth Corrosion talisman at the area where the male spiders and dozens of other weird little anomalies in her qi-enhanced vision were slowly picking their way towards them.

Not waiting to see the damage, the two of them blurred after the others. Behind her she heard the flicker of the talisman triggering. Seconds later the sound of rain on vegetation dulled as Juni’s talisman melted most of it in a 40 metre swathe, followed by the sound of crashing branches and birds taking flight as half-melted trees collapsed. Hundreds of spiders, dozens of males, charged out of the trees after them.

She caught up to Juni in a few moments, who swept out with her spear staff, slicing vegetation and collapsing a tree in passing as they both flickered through the underbrush as fast as they dared. Behind them the wave of spiders came on. She was starting to wonder if she made a mistake and it really was just spiders when an arrow slipped out of the gloom, making her spin to avoid it. There was no sign of whatever shot it and it vanished into the trees to her side before she could get a clear look at it.

Dodging around another tree, her instincts told her to keep moving. She was rewarded when another passed right through the tree, barely missing where her head would have been, leaving no mark before vanishing into the green like a phantasm.

There was a scream from up ahead and 4 male spiders shot past her, rapidly increasing in speed. The biggest was almost half the size of her and had weird red markings on its legs as it lashed out at her, trying to slow her.

Instinctively, she leapt for its body, making sure she had nearly a full mouthful of blood.

It reared and another appeared right behind her, stabbing its limbs into her back, aiming for her spine and making her twist away as best she could.

{Flickering Steps}

Her movement art allowed her to evade the worst of it as total avoidance was never an option. The limb sank into her body and the spider spasmed and flailed as the yang poison that was her blood did its thing. That limb was still stuck in her as she crashed into the big one, spitting the whole mouthful of blood into the joint between two plates of chitin on its thorax.

The blood stained it and smoked faintly, making it writhe and roll, trying to get her off. Two more arrows ghosted through the gloom, undetectable to her qi sense, only getting caught because her vision was so much better than it had been. She rolled over the spider and pushed qi into her leg meridians to charge towards Juni, keeping as low in the undergrowth as she could.

Another male spider danced through the trees overhead before launching itself with a speed that left only after-images at her. It didn’t pierce her either, just tried to cage her in place.

-Definitely being directed, she could only conclude.

-Spiders are prey, they are not predators to us, the memories murmured a tad unhelpfully for once.

-Even the small ones are acting well beyond the boundaries of a Golden Core qi beast…

She skidded under a bush and arrived almost at the bank of the river. Without blinking she threw herself straight over a small tributary that was running into it from the massif above. Juni shot after her a moment later, her blade stained with spider ichor and nursing two nasty wounds to her side that were already healing.

The trail the others had left was obvious, and far ahead she saw a flicker and a crack of another talisman half a mile away on the far side of the river. They had made good use of the opportunity they had bought with those two talismans and between them Han Shu with his sword and Teng Chunhua and Ruo Han would be able to get the others safe.

Juni landed beside her and both of them shot off as fast as Juni could. Up ahead there was a second detonation of blue fire that also carried wind qi–

The male spider somehow overtook both of them, stalking through the forest which almost flowed backwards around them.

-Please don’t let it be Soul Foundation, she complained in her heart.

The instincts refuted it, telling her that it was still Golden Core as she called it, though how they knew that she had no specific inkling – perhaps it came from the blood.

She was just turning to see what was happening, when suddenly there was a terrible pain in her stomach and she was picked up and cast almost 50 metres to crash into the ground, finding she had a hole right through her the size of her fist. An arrow, striped blue and purple and covered in her blood, reverberated in a tree a dozen metres away.

Her body was already pulling itself back together, but the pain… and something else… messed…

She struggled on the ground and there was a white hot pain in her back as something pinned her to the ground…

The spider.

-Why do you flee…?

-These things… do not run from them…

-This is unbecoming…

-We will not…

In the moment of her shock, the voices were no longer just in her head – They were her.

Fury, that had been simmering away in her mind, became their fuel and she screamed in frustration and pain… and anger… and the world for a single instant screamed with her. The beast inside screamed with her.

Vegetation turned to ash in a sea of flames as the ‘Yang’ of the forest burned for her. How she even knew that, or knew how to call it out… The spider on top of her flailed and died as the corrosion of the qi within her bled outwards from her body, forming a miasma field several metres wide.

Reality returned and she was a bundle of pain as bad as anything she had ever been. Worse than the top of the stairs, worse than her tribulation, worse than the sensation of her mind being unpicked strand by strand by Di Ji.

All of that, she could now remember in crystal clarity, even as the strength ebbed from her limbs. Snarling, she grasped her qi with her mantra and forced herself to puppet her limbs even as her body worked to regenerate her spine, which the spider had shattered with its parting gift of a strike.

Taking stock of her condition in the conflagration of a clearing, she shivered and forced away the cold somehow, the panic turning into fuel.

Her meridians were… half destroyed

She had a fist-sized hole through her stomach where her dantian should be.

And another through the side of her ribcage that had nearly collapsed when the spider shattered much of her back. The hole there had actually exposed her heart.

-Even as I am, I should be dead or dying, she thought with a shiver.

Physical cultivators had an almost verminous durability, but even they had limits and the physical trauma she had just undergone, along with the…

Her wounds knit back together, drawing in yang strength from the world and she realised her misconception. She had a dantian, but it wasn’t where her qi was stored, just where it was focused. It rolled back out of her bones – strange flame-like patterns swirling through her flesh, blood, meridians and reforming in her navel–

Instinct warned her and she cast herself away, gasping soundlessly in pain as three arrows ghosted through where her head, neck and heart would had been. Some twenty metres away, Juni was pushing herself up – she had taken an arrow through the shoulder, tearing a hole that exposed bone, visible even at this distance.

With far too little sound, a spider with a body as big as her bed back home – maybe two metres along its squat, armoured and very spiny abdomen and then a further metre for the rest of its body picked its way through the ruin of the clearing. This one had dull brown and green patterning, covered over with gold, black and red paint. Its carapace was broad and flat with various spikes on the side and had the same red runes daubed on it. All the armoured limbs had barbs the size of swords on their joints and tens of thousands of blade-like hairs on its lower thorax. Its front pairs of forelegs were nearly twice the length of its rear ones, and the six pairs of eyes on its armoured forehead.

An armoured crab spider…

She wanted to swear, but had no words…

On its back sat a squat, hunched figure with muddy grey coloured skin, wearing armour of the same carapace type as the spider and carrying a bow. She couldn’t make out the features; its face was hidden entirely by a hollowed-out spider’s head… from a male spider, it seemed. It looked the right proportions to be a cultivator… but she got no instinctual presence of humanity from it.

-Strange creature… The older memories sounded… confused.

-Darkness… to dark… the old, hunting voice muttered.

-Like the clay-born… fake gift of earth, stolen from life… a younger voice snarled.

-Dark thing, failure, succumbed to what should not… another added, its voice shaking in anger.

-Death thing, dying thing… another hissed.

While she was still struggling, the rider laughed and hooted… like a bird. The spider reared and spat a cloud of venomous mist at her.

{Flickering–

A forelimb arrived before her, snaring her even as she started to move, pinning her down to the ground and taking exquisite care not to break her skin. Sneering inwardly, she spat the blood in her mouth at it. The carapace of the leg smoked and the corrosion started to eat into its flesh as it flinched back and she scrambled away.

The spider’s rider did something, made a strange sign with its hands and then unslung its bow even as the wound started to heal again.

Juni arrived beside her like a ghost, the attack of the creature somehow missing her by millimetres and there was a sensation of twisting space around them both. The valley blurred around them and the short range teleportation talisman sent them a mile down river, depositing them both in a flat sward of grass amidst trees in the middle of the valley where it opened out. The talisman crumbled into dust as Juni gulped down a healing pill.

“Shit…mother-loving monkeys… uggh…” The older woman stared at the scraps of paper that had been the remnants of the group’s only teleport talisman.

“We should have gone further than this?” she grimaced.

“It broke the talisman at the last minute… somehow,” Juni snarled.

“Wonderful. How long do you think it will take that one to catch…”

She regretted the words as soon as she said them, because the spider and its rider reappeared on the edge of the forest, some twenty metres away.

“Teleportation?” Juni said dully, even as they both knew it likely wasn’t that.

“Just fast,” she sighed, the memories helpfully telling her that that distance in ten seconds was just so so.

Groaning she palmed a Nascent Soul grade attack talisman – a fire-based one this time.

On the ridge line, almost level with them on the far side of the valley a series of large detonations echoed, accompanied with flares of blue and green fire swirling up into the air. The other group, still under attack.

“Dammit,” she grimaced as the spider rider also turned to look that way… then at them…

The rider made a rude gesture that required little in the way of interpretation and laughed again.

The spider itself already seemed to be recovered from the poison she had dealt it, but this time, the rider itself hopped off the spider and walked slowly towards them, unslinging a net from its waist which it started to twirl.

The blood’s instinct told her not to get caught by it, even as Juni pulled out her swordstaff again and palmed another talisman while both of them backed up.

-No shit Lao Zhu, she shot back at the voices and instincts in general.

Her instincts for its strength got her nowhere, and clearly if it was happy to leave the spider back it thought itself more than their equal. She threw down the talisman.

{Blossoms of The Meng Pavilion}

The shockwave of expanding fire, a sea of blooming flowers swept out to fill the space between them.

{Flickering Steps}

She ran, as fast as she could, Juni shooting after her with her own movement art, her talisman still unused.

Their pursuer considered the sea of fire then just slung the net outwards. It flew upwards into the air, expanding as it went to cover an area almost the size of a market plaza, dropping down on all sides. Her qi went turbulent even as the edges fell, then sluggish. Her intent and her qi flow twisted and became impossible to control even as she wrestled with her mantra to fight against it. Her saviour was Juni, who grabbed her and got them both beyond the edge of it, barely–

The armoured crab spider was waiting for them. It spat another sustained hail of venomous mist at both of them and she could only trust the strength of the yang poison in her own body to keep her eyes safe. She had barely touched qi sense the whole fight anyway. With any luck their attacker would assume that she wasn’t very good with it.

The forelimbs swept out and swept them both apart; Juni was clipped by one and sent pinwheeling away even as she triggered the talisman she held. The cloud of corrosive miasma annihilated a hundred square metres of grassland in an instant and enveloped them both. Picking herself up, thanking the fates for expensive talismans like that, she fled through the–

The long forelimb lazily unfurled and pinned her to the ground. It had moved so fast her…

-Oh may your nine generations be molested by the most evil fates! She cursed

It was a Nascent Soul qi beast.

She spat a mist of her own blood and yang qi at the arriving limb and took one of the jars from her storage talisman and drank it. The arm wavered only for the whole mist to suddenly disperse as the physical body of the crab spider arrived. It moved far faster than it had any right to, she felt, before swearing as the arrow narrowly missed her neck-

It deformed her body without ever touching her and sent her flying sideways to crash down in a shrub some twenty metres away, her limbs numb and her qi chaotic.

She looked up to see the shifting shape of the net above her, somehow melding with the rain–

{Flickering Steps}

Fuelled by the qi she had just taken into her body, she fled backwards, even as the net continued to expand to encompass her surroundings and her qi in her body once again went chaotic and started to run out of her control.

Yang Qi erupted out of her, incinerating everything, and the net was dragged away somehow. When the flare of energy vanished she scrambled up, re-orientating herself and found her tormentor standing two metres away from her, twirling the net idly.

The armoured spider appeared silently out of the rain some ten metres away out of a coppice of ruined trees, staying to places she couldn’t easily track it and now she thought she caught a glimpse of another spider with an armoured carapace and a broad bulbous abdomen.

-Soul Foundation, and just watching… or hunting Juni?

-Curse you Di Ji, for leaving me with no reasonable offensive talismans!

“…”

Decisively, she palmed the strongest Immortal grade talisman in her possession.

{Heaven’s Cry – Balance of Fate}

The grassland around her disintegrated. She was protected from the initial up-strike as purple lightning sizzled out of the talisman into a Kirin and ‘screamed’. The spider was already jumping for her even as the lightning bolt sizzled into the sky, reflecting a massive formation like pattern in the sky that covered half the valley. The grass, water, earth, even small rocks started to drift upwards unnaturally. Her hair stood on end as the concentration of metal qi in the world surged.

The bolt hit the spider and sent her flying, just from the shockwave. The rider did something and part of the lightning twisted and was warped by it even as they were consumed by it, surging towards her–

She couldn’t even scream as she was caught by it and hurled away. The impact sent her crashing into something and then down into water which boiled around her as the whole world turned into noise and light.

Belatedly, she realised she had hit the valley wall, almost four hundred metres away. She had used her intent upon activating it to try to spare both of them the collateral, but even with that, having been the epicentre of a peak Immortal Grade Metal attribute talisman…

That she was not dying was a miracle of heaven to be worthy betting her life in such a manner.

Her body screamed and her meridians were scorched and sparking, her blood scattered across the rocks. The only reason she was still ‘her’ was that her consciousness was being sheltered by the symbol and something in the memories of her blood and the deep Yang Intent seeping into her bones meant that there was a fearful vitality fighting the thunder directly. Her core organs were just about intact, her heart was… she forced her qi to bring it under control.

-Please don’t be dead Juni, she prayed in her heart as she watched the purple lightning rage in the distance as the fury of heaven struck down indiscriminately.

…and then the entire world turned itself inside out.

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~ KUN JUNI – VALLEY BY THE RIVER ~

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Juni desperately dodged the strike of the Soul Foundation spider mother that had charged out of the grass at her after she was thrown away from Lin Ling. All that was keeping her from death right now was the fearful, almost inextinguishable endurance of the Bright Lotus Earthly Physique, coupled with her mantra.

That and the divination art… although the final, indisputable edge was her swordstaff.

Her mantra and the Bright Lotus Earthly Scripture worked together to purify the debilitating poison that the mother was spewing as it effortlessly dodged her strikes.

{Double Dragon, Sundering Surge}

The spider skipped back as she executed the full strength of the martial technique, charging after it in a blur of qi, using the ‘Heart Shifting Steps’ to find her the critical moment to strike. All around her, spiders and plants were shredded as the spider mother kept its distance, waiting for her ‘gamble’ to end.

Thankfully it was slow, slower than she had expected in fact, given it was a proper Soul Foundation beast and she was, in principle, two or three realms below it. In truth though, she knew its job here was only to delay her… to play with her. It was only attacking her when she…

She tried to use her movement art to get past it and was forced to dodge back and block a sweeping blow from a foreleg. ‘Heart Shifting Steps’ gave her the moment to aim for. Her arms went numb and in the aftermath of the strike, the spider sent another cloud of poisonous hairs at her from its abdomen.

Snarling, she capitalised on its momentary lack of mobility to leave a deep cut on one of its forelegs, even as her qi armour tried to shelter her from the worst of the spines. Her efforts barely protected her vital organs and she was forced to backhand a male spider that ghosted out of the shadows.

-What I would not give right now to have Ling’s corrosive blood, she complained in her heart.

It cut towards her heart… which was a surprise. They were certainly trying to cripple her, but they didn’t aim for her dantian, instead her heart, and her meridian gates for the most part. They were unerring in it as well.

-What in the heavens did I sell for us to get chased after by a fates-accursed Beast Tamer! She cursed. Grandmothers, your descendant was filial!

Beast Tamers were the worst kind of opponent in a landscape like this, be they cultivators who had caught up to them, or something else. She was still undecided as to which this actually was. The artefacts their opponent wielded…

She skipped backward and the spear’s blade cut into a leg notch in the spider mother’s forelimb at last. Her momentary success was short-lived though, because it immediately tried to snare it away. A wave of qi shooting through the weapon at her even as she tried to store it. She was repelled away from the weapon, her arms numbed to crash into the ground.

-Your nine generations! She swore.

The spider considered the spear, which was still lodged in its forelimb then considered her and waved its arms mockingly.

-You can do–?

Ironically, she thought moments later, being disarmed probably saved her life as a storm of Purple Lightning obliterated the entire grassland and coppices of trees around her. In the instant she registered it, she saw Lin Ling get thrown towards the valley wall, hit by a lightning bolt. The spider and its rider were silhouetted in the maelstrom, writhing as the lightning tried to consume them.

Lightning arced across the clearing, skittering through the spiders like a tide of enraged spirit demons, stomping them into explosions of sizzling ichor. A tendril earthed itself on her spear as the spider mother dodged backwards, far too slowly. The lightning obliterated the spider mother, exploding its limbs, cracking its carapace and half-disintegrating its abdomen with a further stray bolt.

Lightning consumed the trees and shrubs around her, even as she vainly tried to muster enough control over her qi to use ‘Heart Shifting Steps’ to escape. However, it was to no avail. Though Lin Ling had clearly included her in the activation criteria for the talisman, or she would have been hit by a bolt, she had a hunch what talisman that was, and collateral damage was the middle name of a ‘Heaven’s Cry’ talisman.

Metal qi surged through the earth all around her, eating into her flesh, trying to cook her bones from the inside out and disperse whatever she had that passed for a soul. Her saviour, beyond her mantra, was the Bright Lotus Symbol in her mind’s eye in the end – it reached out and–

Whatever it was doing was lost because the world turned upside down, leaving her groaning amid the leaf litter for a heartbeat before the whole sky buried her in a single instant.

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~ LIAN JING – INAUSPICIOUS TOWN ~

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Lian Jing stood in the ruined town nestled in the middle of a vale within the mountains, wishing she had the freedom of her own mind to curse the climate of this restricted space. The town was overturned and signs of battle lingered all about. The Gan group had been largely unconcerned about what had occurred here, at least until they reached the heart of it.

She hated what she saw for two reasons: first, it was nightmarish, and second, it reminded her that the Gan Clan was just one kind of ‘evil’ that existed.

The corpses of some fifty cultivators were scattered about the plaza. Many hung from buildings, by their entrails, flayed and dismembered. Others were stacked in piles, burnt – remains of gnawed bones speaking to their miserable fate. The savagery on display seemed to slightly unnerve even the Gan Clan and the Red Sovereigns cultivators as they explored the aftermath. Nothing had been left beyond ruined corpses: clothing, weapons, storage rings and every other accoutrement that the victims of the massacre possessed were gone as far as she could see.

Bound as she was to follow Gan Renshu, Gan Tai and Gan Bingwen, she could only follow after them as they walked, uncaring of her presence, into the largest hall, and found it festooned with the gratuitously butchered. A large altar in the middle of the room, that had a spherical depression the size of her head in it, was daubed in bloody runes. Even to pseudo-mortal sight they made her queasy and her skin crawl. Just by being here, she felt that what remained of her slowly degrading soul strength had been faintly tarnished. Gan Bingwen walked around the room a few times, muttering and shaking his head before Gan Renshu stopped him.

“What occurred here?”

“An inauspicious ritual,” Gan Bingwen replied blandly.

“I can see that,” Gan Renshu replied, sounding a touch annoyed.

That seemed to be underselling it, because from what she could see, even with her mortal eyes, some part of those festooning this place were still alive somehow.

“I mean that’s all I can say,” Gan Bingwen said with a sigh. “The nature of this act is… bizarre. It is not a formation, at least none I am familiar with. Rather, it seems like a forced manipulation of the fundamental alignment of this place.”

“Someone forcibly screwed with the feng shui to make it… like it is?” Gan Renshu asked, looking around.

The two diviners stared pensively around for a moment before both shook their heads. “Nope… this seems to be working against that somehow – it’s a powerful working in its own right.”

“A manipulation purely intended to influence the alignment of this space – it seems to have been enacted after the altar was messed with as well,” Gan Tai mused… walking in a mazy pattern through the bloody lines coating the floor.

“Ah!” Gan Tai exclaimed suddenly, and crouched down to pick up a piece of stone and bring it over to the altar.

They watched as he spun it over and then put it in the indent, moving it around until the piece sat there normally, a piece of a shattered sphere.

“Interesting… something or someone seems to have deliberately smashed this...” the diviner murmured, putting the piece aside.

“We should get some of the others in here, have them start looking, carefully, for more pieces of this,” Gan Tai mused.

“You,” Gan Renshu pointed at the woman from the Storm Blaze Sect, who she realised had also followed them in here. “Go call Gan Jiao and a bunch of the others in here.”

The woman looked like she might actually resist for a second, which was laughable really given how strongly she was bound, before bowing politely and walking off.

“Perhaps this was a seal?” Gan Bingwen was now turning the piece Gan Tai had found over in his hands while the other diviner had hopped up on the altar and was peering at the depression itself.

“It certainly seems like it. This group of cultivators may have disturbed it,” Gan Tai agreed.

“Or disturbed whatever was in the process of disturbing it,” Gan Renshu posited.

“Possible,” Gan Bingwen nodded, “but with the deeply screwy way that the alignments are in here, reading any kind of lingering intention is impossible at our realm.”

“They could even have smashed it deliberately,” Gan Renshu added, looking about. “Not everyone who entered here is likely to be a righteous member of the path of heaven like we are.”

-Who is righteous, you whore-spawn who cavorts with the nameless fates! She spat in her head.

“So what is it you found?” Gan Jiao asked, leading the other prisoners in.

“This is probably not a job for prisoners,” Gan Renshu frowned.

“It’s one reason why we picked up a few more though…” Yan Fu, who had also entered with Yan Ju and Wen Di remarked peering around curiously.

“What kind of inauspicious…?” one of the women from the Sky Fairy Pavilion mumbled, while the two most recent prisoners just shivered. All of them had been ungagged now, she noticed.

“Not everyone is righteous,” Yan Fu remarked piously.

“Who are you claiming is righteous, after what you did?” the female herb hunter sneered.

*tcch*

Yan Fu hit her, sending her sprawling before Gan Renshu held up a hand, stopping further rebuke.

“We didn’t bind you like we did this one, but that can change if it becomes necessary,” he said dryly as he pointed at her, and she cursed him again in her heart.

“You five, go look for more pieces of this. When you find them, bring them to me,” Gan Tai said flatly, waving to the prisoners who mechanically spread out through the hall.

“Do it carefully. Don’t disturb the formation here,” Gan Renshu added.

“Yes, yes,” Gan Tai said with a wave of his hand.

“That’s probably a wise idea; these runes are not a thing I am familiar with,” Gan Bingwen added with a frown. “Nor the ones on the altar for that matter.”

“What’s it for?” Yan Ju asked, wandering over to one of the living corpses on the wall and staring at it.

“It’s partially suppressing whatever was done to the feng shui here, although the impact appears to be very minimal,” Gan Bingwen said absently.

“Putting a crack to weaken perfection,” Gan Tai agreed.

“Well, record what you deem fit then and see if you can work out what that altar did,” Gan Renshu said, turning to leave.

“And what of the rest of it?” Gan Bingwen asked, waving at the rest of the gore-drenched décor. “Do you want me to take it apart after we work out what it did?”

“If it is disrupting the totality of whatever was done to the feng shui of this place…”

“It wouldn’t do to trap ourselves in here. Formations that work off absolute alignments are the worst,” Gan Tai pointed out. “We do have the tools to do it, but that would be a waste – and there is no guarantee we would be able to salvage our losses from these unfortunates to make up for the loss. At the end of the day, you don’t waste major treasures to acquire lesser ones on a treasure hunt, especially not when those kinds of major treasures might become necessary later.”

“True,” Renshu nodded. “Well, we will worry about it later.”

“How inauspicious,” Gan Jiao interjected with a mock shudder from where he was peering at one of the living corpses that had almost been turned inside out.

“That’s saying something,” Yan Ju, who had snuck in behind him, agreed.

“This is what happens when people recklessly overreach. Such foolish kids…” Gan Jiao sighed. “They should have known better than to poke around in a ruin like this.”

“Indeed. They were pathetically weak,” another of the Yan group remarked from the doorway where they were leaning. “The strongest here is barely Dao Seeking.”

“True, Brother Bei,” Yan Ju snickered.

“Well, I guess they can be thankful that they at least performed a valuable service in someone’s plan. It’s certainly more than their meagre destinies would have otherwise–” someone commented irreverently.

“Enough…” Gan Renshu said, cutting off further chatter with a wave of his hand. “Try to work out what it does, then we will worry about whether or not it’s worth dismantling later. Whatever was wrought here is probably not to our benefit.”

“Did you find any clues out there as to what this place actually is?” Gan Renshu added after a further moment’s consideration of the space.

“Beyond being bizarrely focal in the landscape and all routes very subtly forcing you to pass through this fortress town?” Yan Fu mused… “There is barely any hint.”

“Hmmm…” Gan Renshu looked, if not annoyed, somewhat perturbed, which made her feel happier at least.

-Got to take your victories where you can… her thought was cut off as Gan Renshu twisted the seal inside her, making her soul feel like it was being squeezed unpleasantly and her stomach knot.

“Speaking of that, Gan Jiao found something else you should see,” Yan Fu added.

“Very well,” Gan Renshu nodded, giving the room one last look.

“Princess,” he pointed at her, “You can come with me, no point in having your delicate sensibilities offended by all this.”

The others chuckled at her, as she followed Gan Renshu out, her stomach still feeling like someone had reached into it and twisted it viciously. Behind her, the five captured women were poking about in the shadows of the room, shivering in fear as they looked for the other pieces of the sphere.

“A pity. This one would have been a real beauty,” Gan Jiao remarked, pointing at some corpse.

“At least her innards are also beautiful – jade-like within and without,” Yan Bei jested.

Cursing them all in her heart for making her witness this, she stepped back into the light of the outside, following after Gan Renshu and Gan Jiao.