> The ‘Wet Season’ usually starts on the last few days of the final month of the year. This is a day of great cultural import to many different communities and peoples across Eastern Azure: it is on this day, after the harvests have been brought in, that most villages honour their ancestors, give thanks for the year that has passed and look to the New Year. It is also the day on which, traditionally, villages used to divine the spirit roots of their children, condemn criminals, inaugurate the ancient rites of succession and much more besides.

>

> It is on this day, when the flow of qi through the world shifts from north to south and starts to move from east to west, that divinations relating to fate, destiny and good fortune are at their most sensitive. In this era, the most auspicious place on the realm plane on this day is the Jade Gate, on the Imperial central continent, and it is no mistake that the reconstituted Imperial Astrology Bureau has its largest pagodas there.

>

> What is truly interesting, however, is that this 'eye of good fortune' was once centred on the Yin Eclipse Mountains, and the re-centring of it to the Jade Gate is, in fact, imperfect. There are no absolutes, especially in relation to good fortune, and there have thus been times when, against all the odds, the eye has moved… and when it does – when the rains come early on Yin Eclipse, and the thunder comes late, on the last day of the year – each time, something remarkable or terrible occurs.

>

> Blue Water Sage, Demoness Mo, Song Jia, Di Ji, Cao Hongjun, the Three Schools Conflict. Great and small, all are bound by a single, ephemeral thread to a day when the compass of a world wandered back to its origin.

Excerpt from: The Wandering Compass

~By the Wandering Scholar, Seng Mo.

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~ JUN ARAI – NEAR JADE WILLOW VILLAGE ~

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*Boom*

Thunder rolled through the late afternoon sky, travelling out of the mountains towards the coast, making the falling rain shimmer iridescent in the early evening light.

“The rains come early, the season comes late… why do we even pay those worthless astrologers?” Old Xian, who was sitting near to where she was standing, remarked with some amusement.

“Good question…” she agreed, flicking the edge of her hat to dislodge some of the water settling into it.

Off to one side, Village Elder Chen was seated under his own umbrella, looking wet and miserable as he watched some thirty cultivators from the village work wearily in the rain and tangled vegetation of the clearing to finish setting up the formation she had provided.

“Are you not going to provide more instruction?” Elder Chen asked, glancing over.

“This is instruction,” she deadpanned, watching the group from the Ha clan and their Din ‘guest’ taking part below order everyone else around, trying to set up the formation she had provided as they ‘understood’ it, not as she had explained its use.

“They will fail to seal this one as well,” Elder Chen pointed out.

“I know,” she agreed, not looking at either Ha Botan or the youth standing beside Elder Chen: Din Kongfei, the ‘young hero’ who had slain the tetrid. “The instruction comes from why. This is a lesson, not a demonstration.”

“Very good,” Old Xian chuckled. “This is a valuable lesson to everyone, not that those who need it most seem to be taking it to heart.”

Ha Botan scowled at Old Xian and Din Kongfei just frowned, but neither said anything, perhaps wary of the exact status of the old man, who, despite several attempts by Din Kongfei to find out, had said nothing regarding that topic.

“At this rate we will be up here until it gets dark…” Yunhee, who was perched on another nearby rock, looking a bit like a bedraggled monkey in her own grass cloak and hat, added.

“…”

“If we are up here when dusk falls, we are up here when it falls,” she replied with a resigned shrug. “The request is what it is.”

“…”

Elder Chen stared at her as if trying to see if she was making a joke at the larger group’s expense… but she was not.

“But the mountains are certainly dangerous at night; surely you know this, Hunter,” Din Kongfei said.

“They are, Young Master Din,” she acknowledged, “but the conditions of the request are what they are, and it is required to be fulfilled, is this not the case, Associate Ha?”

“…”

“It is Young Lord Din,” Ha Botan corrected her with a supercilious expression, before turning back to Din Kongfei: “And while this is the case, Young Lord Kongfei, as you rightly alluded to, there is of course latitude, and consideration is given for competence and extenuating circumstances.”

“Really now…” Old Xian muttered drily behind her. “That would be a new one.”

“…”

Both Ha Botan and Din Kongfei again glanced over at the old man with faint frowns—

{M——’s Mani-fold Mount—}

The formation down below quivered, shifted and collapsed mid-activation with a dull thump, sending half a dozen villagers and Wen Bei sprawling, coughing up mouthfuls of blood.

There was some cursing and a lot of pointing this way and that as cultivators slumped down in the mud or on rocks, looking drained. After gesturing at a few people, the other youth from the Din clan, Din Jian Fuhao, and the four from the Ha clan, all shook their heads and came back up the slope.

“—As expected, it is a subpar formation, Young Master Din’s ‘Ten Thousand Jade Palms Upon the World’ would be far more suitable!” one Ha clan disciple was saying as they came into hearing range.

“Or perhaps ‘Caging Bands of the Tyrant Dragon’?” Ha Caolun, the ‘young master’ leading the escort of the Din clan pair added.

The third, Ha Erlang Leng, who was the only actual Pavilion-trained Hunter among them, just wiped the water from his face and, when he caught her eye, grimaced.

“Indeed, ‘Caging Bands’ would work,” the last disciple agreed.

“It seems your formation has failed… again,” Din Kongfei remarked to her with a faint hint of a challenge.

“…”

She shrugged and looked at the group below, trying not to sigh audibly. The day had been… much like this for the most part. There had been some initial success, once the complaining about the trek up into the valleys had died out due to general exhaustion and it being self-evident to the complainers that nothing they said was going to change anything. They had gotten half a dozen ginseng of various stripes that barely qualified as quasi-Qi Condensation, which were now held in several pots stacked beside her; however, none of them really qualified as a spirit herb because they were just hard to find and rather lacking in any real means.

That had been early morning. It was now late evening and they had found two actual spirit herb ginseng, both varieties not really sought after, and only caught one of them. The captured one, which had tried to drown Wen Bei in a mire and broken the legs of three people in its enraged ambush, was now in a pot beside Old Xian which still twitched occasionally if anyone looked at it. The second had escaped after a failure much like this, though born of genuine inexperience in working with the formation rather than people just giving bad instructions, as this failure was.

The herb they were now trying to corner had almost been a chance find as they made their way around the massif that towered above them, wreathed in mist and cloud. In other circumstances she would have cut through the forest, rather than follow an established path, but the combination of the large, rather inexperienced group and a need to be very ‘by the numbers’ meant they had taken the main path into this part of the valley. That decision had, apparently, been vindicated by Ha Caolun’s compass finding something auspicious nearby as they descended down to the shallow forest sinkhole they were now on the edge of.

“Should we go look for another?” Elder Chen asked her, which was a somewhat loaded question in its own right.

She swept the clearing below and shook her head. The ginseng was still there, lurking by some rocks, hiding its form below the quagmire formed of a small stream running down out of them from the massif above. It was the last place you would expect to look for one and it was aware enough to know that those it could detect down below were inexperienced morons. Neither she nor Old Xian had gone within a hundred paces of it yet, mostly in case something like this happened.

“That will not be necessary,” she said, slipping off her rock, withdrawing her spirit wood mattock from her talisman and focusing on her mantra. “I will be back in a moment.”

“Ha… Leng… could you come with me?” she asked the only other person in whose competence she had any shred of faith at this point.

“…”

Ha Leng glanced at the others, who just shrugged, and then started to walk back down the slope with her.

“I know… we don’t really get on,” she remarked to the dark-haired, slightly muscular youth, “but if this keeps up we will be walking around up here after midnight.”

“We will…” he agreed, not meeting her eyes.

It wasn’t that she had any real issues with him personally, as her impression of him was rather slight for all that he was her age and had been of the same ‘class’ for a year or two within the Pavilion. Rather, the issue arose from him being one of the many Ha clan scions who were… to put it bluntly, fair weather Hunters. It also didn’t help that he was a friend of Ha Yun, the young master of the Ha family, one of the major Ha clan factions in West Flower Picking Town. That faction were the main reason she was stuck doing missions like this, which they should have been doing… except they were always handed easy, high-paying jobs with the Ha clan’s estates around the province.

“How come you are here anyway?” she asked. “Weren’t you on a request with Han Shu? Setting up a formation in Green Veil Village and training folks how to use it?”

“That… ended early,” Ha Leng replied with a shrug.

“Ohh?” She frowned, glancing at him. “There was some problem?”

That request should have been very easy, if logistically tedious, given it dealt with furthering the clean-up of a long-running invasion of shadow-flower balsam from the foothills of the Yin Eclipse Mountains where they bordered onto the Shadow Forest to the south-east of West Flower Picking Town.

“Well… yes,” Ha Leng sighed, kicking a rock down through the tangled greenery as they walked down to the group.

“I have to admit, I am morbidly impressed,” she conceded, wondering what misfortune Han Shu had actually kicked over, “that stuff is a headache, sure, but it’s only dangerous if you happen to be a spirit herb field, a canal bank or someone’s finances tied to the wellbeing of those.”

“…”

Ha Leng scowled slightly, but did continue his explanation. “Well, when the local village authorities saw we had two nine-star ranked Herb Hunters along, they wrangled on a bunch of other requests—”

“Hah…” she could only shake her head at that. “No honour among the Ha clan?”

She could sort of guess what had happened anyway. No doubt someone had seen an opportunity – much like here – to throw a bunch of difficult requests at a group of people who were bureaucratically chained to requiring the authorisation of village authorities for the completion of their own mission.

“Low blow,” Ha Leng grumbled, swiping a tree branch out of the way. “Well, one of them that Han Shu took on, a mission to clear out a mutated balsam that was taking over fallow fields, led to the village leader’s son nearly being crippled, because it was actually a mutated blood vetch that had crept in from the forest border.”

“Oh…” she sighed, wincing.

Blood vetch, which liked to parasitize local fauna to tend and protect it, was unpleasant at the best of times; to run into a mutate outside the suppression zone was a great way to finish a bad day early.

“Is he okay?” she asked, because, while he was a bit older than her, Han Shu was someone she considered a colleague and a friend, and someone who, like Juni, had taught her when she was still in training.

“Yes, the village leader’s son is fine…”

“…”

She stared at Ha Leng but he just rolled his eyes.

-And there goes my lingering bit of sympathy for you, you tit, she grumbled internally.

“Han Shu is also fine,” Ha Leng said with a sigh, casting her a sideways look that was not quite suggestive, but edging towards it. “After that, we just set up the formation and one Hunter remained to stay and train people. Han Shu came back with us because he took a few injuries from the vetch.

“The clan elders needed someone who had actually set foot in the suppression zone to accompany Young… Master Ha Caolun, his friends, Young Master Din Jian Fuhao and Young Lord Din Kongfei. I was told to accompany them.”

“Ah, I see,” she nodded. “I am surprised they didn’t send Ha Yun or Ha Lian Qing.”

“Both of them are tied up in the Patriarch’s celebrations,” Ha Leng shrugged. “So… what do I need to do to make this work, so we can all go back and have a hot meal?”

“The problem isn’t the formation or the people, it’s the compass that that Din youth was using,” she explained. “The formation is set up so it creates its own compass, there is no need to shortcut it by adding another – that just disrupts the harmony.”

“Surely that would not matter too much?” Ha Leng asked with a frown. “That compass is a top of the line—”

“Two words: Grandmaster Mang,” she pointed out.

“Ahh…” Ha Leng sighed, casting her a faintly accusatory glance. “Why didn’t you say so? We could have been done with this already!”

“Would it have made any difference?” she grunted. “And I am here to teach, not lead by the hand. This is an important lesson. When I did it, they took us up to the edge of the Red Pit, and we stayed there till we worked it out for ourselves. It’s a basic requirement for ranking up to five stars. I would have thought some young lord with a bunch of fancy formations would have known about using stable centres and bespoke formations not playing well with cover-all compasses.”

“…”

Ha Leng glanced back up the slope at Ha Caolun and the Din youths and sighed, wisely choosing to say nothing.

“Uh… Miss Jun,” Heng Ning sat up from the rock she was perched on, wiping mud off her face. “Sorry…”

“Don’t be, this is not your fault. Recall what those old timers always say about people who can’t cut bamboo.”

“A crap woodcutter blames his axe?” Lun Quan chuckled.

“But are we the woodcutter or the axe,” Kun Shi, who was also nearby grumbled.

“I must say… it has been rather illuminating,” Fan Aoshen, who was the only one of Kun Shi’s ‘friends’ from the Jade Willow Sect who was here, added.

“Yes,” she remarked, to both question and statement, which drew a few weary chuckles.

“So what do we do?” Chen Lanfeng asked, also coming over. “The formation has failed twice now.”

“The application failed twice,” she replied, “which just means you have to change your methodology.”

“Change the methodology? Do you know the words you speak?”

She turned around to find that the Ha clan young master from Blue Water City had come back down the slope.

“Evidently, because I just spoke them,” she replied with a deadpan tone. “Unless I just imagined what I said and there is a blood ling tree this far out.”

“…”

“That was a joke,” she said, looking around at the suddenly tight faces on everyone else, Ha Leng included.

“Elder Chen has agreed to Pavilion Elder Ha’s suggestion that Young Lord Din be allowed to finish this with his formation,” Ha Caolun stated with a faint smirk.

“What is that going to achieve exactly?” she asked.

“That is not for someone like you to say,” Ha Caolun retorted.

“Will Young Lord Din leave his formation here for Jade Willow Village to use as they like?” she pointed out. “Will Young Lord Din stay and instruct some other experts in how it is to be arranged?”

“You are just here to do as you are told,” Ha Caolun said simply. “You may have some small status through your advancement by sideways means up the Pavilion roster, but you are just a small person in the end—”

“…”

She stared at Ha Caolun for a long moment as he spoke, then cut him off as she turned away and waved at Dan Fen Guang.

“Disciple Guang, could you go over to the pond by the rocks and poke around in it with a stick please?”

Dan Fen Guang stood up from his own mossy rock and returned a somewhat sceptical look, but walked over to the muddy quagmire with a few water ferns around it where she was pointing.

“Okay, Ha Leng, get ready—”

“Oh no…” the Ha clan Herb Hunter groaned, but she was already walking diagonally across the clearing.

“Don’t ignore me when I am…”

“Anytime!” she called over to Dan Fen Guang, tuning out Ha Caolun.

“What do you want me to do?” he called back.

“Just wade in there and start digging!” she said cheerfully. “The rest of you, get that formation set up again and eat a replenishment pill if you need to!”

“That is not what—!” Ha Caolun protested.

“If he can get his fancy ‘Ten Thousand Fingers’ thing set up before we catch the ginseng, he is welcome to it,” she said without looking around.

Dan Fen Guang was already up to his knees in the muddy edge of the pond, poking into its depths with one of the bronze-leafed willow staves as she got to where she needed to be, keeping her qi and intent completely hidden with her mantra.

“What exactly is he looking—”

Dan Fen Guang let out a shocked yell as something recoiled in the pond, sending him tumbling and the staff spinning across the clearing in a vicious arc.

The ground rippled as Ha Leng, who was half-way to the pond, stamped hard, sending a pulse of qi into it. It was weak and suppressed, but it did the job as a dozen briar-like tendrils lashed out of the ground, shredding clothes and sending people dashing for the rocks—

{Mang’s Manifold Mountain}

The clearing creaked, the leaves on trees shivering and the disturbed water in the pond shuddering. Everyone bar those channelling the formation and her, who had originally imprinted it, was frozen in place, unable to move so much as a finger. The only thing moving within a hundred metres of the centre of the formation was falling rain.

Shaking her head, she walked over to the edge of the pond and waded into the muddy edge of the pool. Hefting the mattock, she swung it down and tore up a large chunk of the ground, levering it back and forth—

Tendril-like creepers slipped out of the mud and a numbing qi slipped into her body, trying to put watery thorns in her leg muscles and distort the meridians running through them.

“Cast from the Spirit, the Heart is broken and the Renewal of the Body and Soul is subverted.”

It was wasteful, but she was a bit annoyed anyway. It was clear that the whole thing would turn into a pointless demonstration of Din Kongfei’s big formation, so showing off a bit was an acceptable price for resolving things quickly.

-If you want to make a mess, you can do it on your own time, she sneered, feeding her anger and frustration from the last few days, along with a healthy dose of the lingering recollection of the nightmare that had woken her, into the qi of the ginseng.

The ginseng, already partially locked in place, was stunned completely by a single retaliatory burst of her intent, the distortions to its qi allowing her to see for a brief moment where it was.

“Sneaky plant,” she muttered under her breath.

She walked back out of the pond where it had been and followed the track of its roots until she arrived roughly at the epicentre, which was nearly at the base of the slope below where Old Xian and the others were watching. Swinging with the mattock, she quickly opened up a hole in the loamy soil and after about ten seconds… had it bounce off something with a hollow *clonk*.

“…”

Scraping back the dirt, she saw how the ginseng had been able to move and sighed. Taking the mattock, she wedged it under the pot and pried it up—

The root of the ginseng lashed out at her but she ignored it, intending to take the hit and counter the poison with her mantra—

At the last moment, she threw herself back, rolling away from the limb. Even so, she was fractionally too late as a stabbing lance of something untouchable and impossible slid into her mind, ignoring every defence she naturally possessed as easily as the suppressing rain… and then ran into her mantra, which blunted the soul attack.

Wiping blood from her nose, she withdrew a talisman from her talisman wallet at her waist and blocked the follow-up attack with a barrier.

“What happened?” Yunhee, who had arrived on the edge of the formation, called over.

She waved for the woman to stay back and quickly went back to the ginseng. Flipping the blue-grey stone pot, monographed with the familiar ‘Tai’ symbol from the ruin, back over she grasped the ginseng by its main root and sent another pulse of intent-infused qi into it.

Its flesh recoiled, the recently healed scars weeping milky sap as it struggled with the last of its strength, lashing at her with its wilting, pale green foliage, attempting to escape the constraints of the formation.

The suppression around her creaked for a few more moments, then collapsed as those maintaining it ran out of qi, allowing Yunhee to arrive beside her, followed by Ha Leng and Ha Caolun.

“Well, there’s your ginseng…” she spat, tossing the exhausted herb down onto a nearby piece of luss cloth and passing the bowl to Yunhee.

“This is…” Old Xian, who had come down, now squatted beside the half-metre-long black-grey root, frowning.

“Golden Core black mud ginseng,” she pronounced. “One that has been heavily pruned down to size, probably to make it less detectable.”

“How does that help?” Yunhee asked, crouching down to look in the hole she had dug.

“By harming its vitality, its imprint on compasses will appear less; it promotes an instinctual desire in the plant to conceal itself, while also stressing it out,” Old Xian mused, using a knife to slice open the flesh where one of its old roots had been detached, exposing a pale blue Spirit Jade set into the herb’s flesh. “Ahhah! And it has a Spirit Jade… that will provide fuel for it, and also maybe…”

“—Is there a formation disk or anything in there?” she asked, thinking back to the other herbs she had found.

“Here…” Yunhee replied, pulling a muddy grey disk out of the earth in the pot, followed by what looked like a compass and a few cracked ward stones.

“This was set here deliberately, to injure people,” she mused, looking up at the path they had come down into the shallow sinkhole, then crouching down beside the plant to look at it more closely. “Probably forced as well, if they expended a whole Spirit Jade.”

“Indeed…” Old Xian agreed, turning the herb over for her to see the damage on the other side. “I agree that it has been forcibly promoted: to Soul Foundation in fact.”

She looked at the sap on the edge of his knife, which had a faint red sheen.

“And it’s a blood ling mutate,” she noted.

“What do you make of this compass, Sir Xian?” Yunhee asked, passing it over to him.

The old man took it and considered it pensively, then passed it to her.

She turned it over in her hands as well, looking at it.

“It’s an anchor compass; designed to stabilize alignments… or hide things.”

She passed it back to Old Xian, who nodded. “Agreed. Someone put this herb here, with a compass that hid the inauspicious traces and twisted the local alignments. The pot hides the plant from intent and the formation—”

“—binds it to the area, like the other that I found,” she agreed, taking in the sinkhole and thinking about its position relative to the path.

“This is a trap, designed to maim the unwary,” Old Xian said, standing up and brushing some of the mud off. “And a well-done one as well. Whoever did this knew what they were at.”

“It looks quite rustic?” Yunhee noted, turning over the formation centre.

“That is the point,” Old Xian said, “this kind of thing is popular out east. It is how the rebel forces north of Golden Promise have held out all these years…”

“Someone wants us to think this is Easten mercenaries,” she concluded, recalling what Talshin had said.

Old Xian nodded, then turned as Elder Chen and the others finally came down.

“What have you found?” Ha Botan asked, rather superciliously.

“An extenuating circumstance,” Old Xian replied blandly.

“A what?” Elder Chen frowned.

“This is a trap, an ambush set up for the unwary,” Old Xian explained. “A compass set in a pot that hides qi and intent, a formation to anchor it and the compass hides the ill intent and provides a lure for any looking for spirit herbs like ginseng.”

“…”

Quite a few eyes turned to Ha Caolun, who flushed with anger.

“It could have drawn anyone,” she said smoothly. “In any case, this changes matters significantly.”

“It does, would you not agree, Elder Chen?” Old Xian mused.

“…”

“What is the suggested method for dealing with this?” Elder Chen asked.

“We do nothing,” she replied with aplomb.

“We do…” Din Kongfei frowned. “This is something made by indigenous rebels, your own kind, have you no shame to say this before—”

Ignoring him, she continued. “The season is changing and the rain is showing no signs of letting up. If we leave this place well alone for a few weeks, all the forced herbs will perish and the danger will be gone.”

“And you can be certain of this?” Elder Cheng asked with a frown.

“It is well known how the valleys work; formations are sapped and qi replenishment is non-existent for things from outside, unless you use spirit stones and the like. This one was a Spirit Jade…” she passed the Jade over to Elder Chen.

“It was probably full when planted,” she added, “and even if it was not, a formation powered by a Spirit Jade that does something as simple as light a flame when qi is sent into it will last a matter of weeks at best, this is well known.”

“It is,” Ha Leng agreed as the others in the Ha group turned to him.

“…”

“So… we just go back?” Elder Chen asked with frown.

“Yes, in effect,” she replied. “As the most experienced Herb Hunter here, I have to say this. This is a teaching request. Not a mission to de-trap a valley. If you can pay me a Heavenly Jade and give me six months, five hundred cultivators and a teleport formation for personal use, maybe we can talk.”

“Hah… you are funny,” Din Kongfei interjected... “A Heavenly Jade? A teleport formation…”

“I second this, Chen,” Old Xian agreed. “Jade Willow Village already has enough bodies, do you want to add to it for something as prideful as this?”

Elder Chen cast a glance over at the recovering disciples, which included Chen Da and Chen Lanfeng, and sighed.

“We have got ginseng, they have experienced a bit, this is enough,” Old Xian added. “The village has been better served by Hunter Jun’s generosity in dealing with the lotus infestation in regards to training these kids than it deserves, frankly.”

“Okay,” Elder Chen sighed. “We will return and discuss matters.”

…

The trip back was… slow, and boring as it turned out, but she was happy to take that in the circumstances. The most onerous part of it was having to put up with the passive-aggressive attitudes of the Ha and Din group, coupled with the early onset of qi exhaustion for many of the less experienced cultivators due to trekking in the forests.

The rapid collapse in energy levels for many of the group served as a further subtle reminder that there were dangers to the suppression zone beyond the obvious. Qi exhaustion and replenishment was not a huge concern for her, because physical cultivators handled that rather well; her mantra worked just fine in the suppression. For spiritual cultivators though, the suppression on their laws and arts was harsh. For them, the only option was to replenish their qi with pills and that opened up the unpleasant prospect of pill overburden.

It was thus a great relief to most of those with her when they finally exited the tangled jungle, crossed over one of the canal bridges that marked the rough border of the suppression zone, and found themselves back in the spirit fields.

“Fates… I feel like I just vomited all my qi onto the ground…” Wen Bei groaned, sitting down on a boundary stone at the top of the bank.

“Don’t waste pills on recovery now,” she warned those near her as Wen Bei and some of the other Jade Willow Sect disciples started to take out recovery pills.

“What do you mean?” Fan Aoshen asked, pill bottle half unstoppered.

“Each time you endure that and don’t use artificial means to recover, it will lessen the effect next time,” she explained.

“Oh…” Kun Shi sighed and shoved the bottle back into his pouch.

“It also builds stamina, good for the foundation and the meridians!” Old Xian added, crossing over the bridge and dropping down a bundle of herbs which he had been steadily adding to all day.

Off to one side, she could see the Ha group had largely ignored her advice and were passing around several high quality recovery tonics.

-Oh well, not my problem, she shrugged, turning back to Old Xian.

“Did you find what you needed?” she asked, because she had not really had time to talk to him much on the descent.

“Oh, yes,” Old Xian nodded. “Just some medicinal stuff for Little Xian, to make a meridian tempering bath.”

“We will progress to see the village elders first,” Elder Chen, who had followed Old Xian over, interjected.

“Fine, no point in putting it off,” she agreed.

“Come on everyone, the faster we get back, the faster you can feel alive again!” she called out to the thirty-odd cultivators sitting around in slumped exhaustion.

There were quite a few groans, but most of them got back up to their feet and started to pick up bundles of herbs and the few ginseng worth bringing back. She watched them for a few moments until it was clear that nobody was going to fall over into the canal or something… and then did a double take, because there were three extra cultivators…

The three, who were kind of small and wearing broad grass hats and leaf cloaks saw her looking—

She threw herself flat as a rotten spirit fruit about the size of a fist hissed past her face. It hit Chen Da in the back of the head, who promptly screamed and fell down the slope into the canal. Half a dozen more hissed past her in quick succession, hitting various unlucky cultivators as everyone went scrambling for cover.

One of the Ha clan cultivators half got a talisman out, but the monkeys, for that was what they were, were already back over the canal, carrying a potted ginseng and two bundles of miscellaneous herbs and fleeing into the suppression zone.

“…”

Sitting up, she sighed and looked over the canal edge at Chen Da, who was trying to wipe stinking, pulpy durmian fruit out of his hair and climb back up at the same time.

“Well, that is a fairly—” Heng Ning started to say.

There was an explosion from across the canal that sent hot air and vapour swirling.

“HEY DON’T BE STUPID!” one of the locals a bit further along yelled at the Ha youth who had cast the talisman.

“Witless Bum! Witless Bum!” the hooted calls in very crude Easten echoed out of the steaming vegetation of the forest boundary.

“Shit…” Lun Quan, who had been hit in the face by one of the fruit, spat, wiping it off.

“Well, that is a fitting end to a shit day,” she remarked drily.

“Can we chase after them?” Fuan Gu, who was clearly inexperienced in the terrible ways of monkey bands, asked.

“With half of us splattered in durmian fruit juice?” she asked rhetorically. “Do you want to be stung and bitten by every scavenging insect within a mile?”

“Fate-thrashed things,” Elder Chen spat. “It seems we will have to…”

“Talk to the Beast Cadre?” she asked drily.

Elder Chen shot her a look, that tried its best to skewer her to the stone behind her but was rather undermined by the fact that he had also been hit on the arm by a durmian fruit.

“Which ginseng was it?” she asked.

“Just a quasi-Condensation one,” Heng Ning, who had gone over to help the two luckless villagers who had been robbed, called back.

“At least the monkeys will eat well tonight,” Old Xian chuckled, taking aim and sending a fruit he had actually caught out of the air sailing into the rain-drenched gloom on the other side of the canal.

“How did they pass unnoticed?” one of the Ha clan youths demanded accusatorily.

“By being very intelligent qi beasts at the Soul Foundation realm,” Old Xian remarked drily. “They are probably survivors of the West Flower Picking troupe from a few years back.”

“We have to go back and chase them!” Din Jian Fuhao, who had arrived beside them, declared grimly.

“…”

“That bundle of herbs was a thing that belonged to Young Lord Kongfei!” Ha Caolun, who had also arrived, added.

-Then why were the villagers carrying it? she wanted to ask, but thought better of it.

“That… would be inadvisable,” Ha Leng muttered.

“It is just three Soul Foundation beasts, a few good talismans will—”

“I am sorry, Young Lord Din,” Elder Chen grimaced, clearly finding a line to finally draw, “but that is out of the question. The monkeys, while a menace, are manageable in small numbers… however, if you kill them…”

“—you will have a whole tribe of monkeys rampaging through this region by night, tearing up fields, pissing in canals, abducting dogs and the like,” she finished. “It will become a matter for the Beast Cadre.”

Elder Chen again sent her a sideways look of impotent annoyance, no doubt imagining the kind of terms that a vexed Elder Lianmei might put on that kind of request.

“Usually you can recover things that they steal,” she added.

“I… doubt that will be possible,” Old Xian grinned.

“Oh, I agree,” she acknowledged, “but it would be remiss of me not to say so.”

“You can?” Ha Caolun frowned.

“Oh yes… however… yep, I rather doubt it’s possible,” she sighed, savouring the moment.

“Just say it!” Din Jian snapped.

“Well, you can put out an offering for them, then call out ‘Father Monkey, your servant is here!’. After that, when they come, if you bow down six times and call them grandfather they usually return things…”

“…”

“You—!” Din Jian hissed, his face flushing until Old Xian cut him off, putting a palm to the youth’s chest before he could summon a weapon.

“She is not joking, those pests learnt from the very best… watching young idiots in towns run riot. They drink, they gamble, they come with the rains when nobody can use soul sense to find them, and they act like absolute bandits, using every trick they learn by watching young masters at work,” Old Xian growled.

“And then they run away to the suppression zone and slap their balls at you,” Yunhee added.

“…”

“Why are such crude things tolerated?” Din Kongfei scowled. “It would never be permitted on the Imperial continent.”

“They also protect children, kill qi beasts and, if left alone, usually do enough good to allay the occasional bit of theft,” she pointed out. “Many a lost child has shown up wearing a fern cloak and talking about big brother monkey who killed a spider or similar, in these villages.”

“Indeed,” Elder Chen murmured. “While Young Lord Din’s displeasure is understandable, some things are just the will of heaven, please give our village some face and let this matter be.”

Din Jian’s expression twisted, then he just shook his head and stalked off in the direction of the village. Ha Botan frowned at them, then glanced after the youth and grimaced, setting off after him. Ha Caolun cast a final sour look at them then hurried after, followed by the rest of the Ha group.

“Something will have to be done about them,” Yunhee pointed out as they also started walking.

“Probably,” Old Xian agreed. “But that is not our problem.”

“No, it is not,” she agreed, looking at the slightly hunched back of Elder Chen as he stalked after the Ha group with the manner of a man who saw a lot of explaining to others in his immediate future. “It is just fortunate that they did not pester us in the forest.”

“Yes… fortunate,” Old Xian mused. “Very fortunate.”

“They will probably demand compensation,” Yunhee added as they crossed over a second canal and onto a proper path.

“The monkeys, or the village elders?” she joked, running a hand through the sodden hair at the nape of her neck.

Yunhee stared at her for a moment then shook her head in amusement.

“The village elders,” Yunhee clarified after a moment.

“Yeah, and probably they will take it out of the mission payment,” she sighed.

“How much is that anyway?” Yunhee asked.

“…”

She kicked a stone off into the rainy, amber-tinted evening gloom.

“Twenty spirit stones.”

“This daughter has had her horizons broadened,” Yunhee remarked, feigning utter shock. “They dragged you through this for twenty spirit stones?”

“Someone really hates this village… maybe even more than I do right now,” she muttered, shaking her head and scattering water droplets from the edge of her hat as she did so.

“Indeed, they got about two Spirit Jades’ worth of work out of you for a pittance,” Old Xian agreed, laughing. “If I were you, Miss Jun, I would exercise your right to talk loudly over alcohol here and there over the next few weeks.”

All she could do was laugh at that as well, because it was true, and the alternative was either crying or hitting something.

The rest of the trip back to the village was monkey-free, although she didn’t doubt one or two were nearby, hidden in the rain. Passing through the gate into the village proper, she did pull aside the guard and quickly tell him of the encounter, if only so it wouldn’t be held over her somehow at a later date. The guard, who was not anyone she recognised, just groaned and thanked her for the information before waving to his deputy to take over and heading off at a brisk trot towards the barracks.

Elder Chen and the Ha group quickly bid farewell at that point and headed off into the town, as did the others after some moments sorting out what would happen with the remaining spirit herbs.

“So, what do we do now?” Yunhee asked, as they watched the rest of the group scatter back to the shelter of their homes and estates.

“We go to the village elders,” she said without any hesitation.

“Probably best,” Old Xian agreed. “Don’t give the schemers time to get a story in order.”

“Uhuh…” she agreed, setting off towards the main square, just about visible above the rooftops thanks to the Pavilion, which glimmered like a ghostly lantern-lit tree in the downpour.

The main square was fairly deserted, which was unsurprising, given the rain was really hammering down now. Her paranoia was thoroughly vindicated, though, by discovering that the Ha group had come to the elders immediately, if by slightly circuitous means, and were already inside.

“I feel like this is getting a bit repetitive,” she mused to Old Xian as they stood in the hall, ‘waiting’ to be seen by the elders.

“You are right,” Old Xian agreed, “This old man is getting a bit tired of it as well.”

“…”

“Yunhee?” Old Xian said, turning to her erstwhile guard.

“Sir Xian?” Yunhee murmured.

“Take us in there.”

“Uh… that will cause some annoyance?” Yunhee frowned.

“I’ll permit it. I want a warm meal and a bath,” the old man frowned. “Standing here is bad for an old man’s health.”

“…”

Yunhee bowed slightly and walked over towards the guards.

“Hey… you can’t—” one of them started to say.

“The instruction was to wai—”

She never even saw what Yunhee did, they just crumpled to the ground, unconscious, blood running from their noses.

Yunhee pushed open the door and caught the blade that was cut at her bare-handed, shattering it like it was glass and tossing the weapon to the side.

“Kun Yunhee begs elders’ apologies. Sir Xian wishes to see you… immediately,” the young woman murmured, her voice carrying all the way through the building like a faint sigh.

“…”

In the distance there were various thuds, several curses and the sound of running feet.

She glanced at Old Xian, who just smirked and followed after her.

-Of course… she sighed, not sure why she was surprised. Talshin wouldn’t have put someone with her who wasn’t skilled.

The guard whose blade Yunhee had shattered sat slumped against the wall, his face pale, just staring at them as she walked past. Two more guards in the next room were standing to the side, looking rather pale and breathing hard as well.

“Sorry…” Yunhee murmured to them as she walked past. “Nothing personal…”

Feeling a slight pang of pity for the guards, who were only doing their job, she shrugged apologetically as Old Xian walked past and pushed the further door open.

“As I was saying… this is quite unacceptable—” Ha Caolun was saying as the door opened.

“The agreement—”

“Sir Xian,” Yunhee remarked drily.

“How dare you just—” the village elder who had spoken froze as a ghostly blade appeared in the air right before his nose.

Half a dozen guards rushed into the room behind them—

{My Blade Sings in the Rain}

The words echoed in the room, the humidity becoming uncomfortably sharp. The guards, and in fact almost everyone else, froze as ghostly blades seemed to slide out of the air all around them.

“A bit overboard, but well done, Yunhee,” Old Xian chuckled, walking forward and pouring himself a cup of wine. “Perhaps you might relax the alarm?”

“…”

The mayor nodded imperceptibly and the frozen guards behind her exhaled. The blades of humidity vanished like mist a moment later.

“This is a bit unorthodox, you could have just waited…” the mayor muttered, his hand trembling slightly.

“Sadly, this old man must treasure every moment in life,” Old Xian remarked, sipping his wine. “Who knows when it might be your last after all.”

The mayor and elders laughed, nervously. Ha Caolun and Ha Botan just sweated, the focus of Yunhee’s Martial Intent she supposed. The Din pair didn’t look that pressured, but she was reasonably certain they had treasures for that.

“How can we help you then, Sir Xian?” the mayor asked, putting down his cup.

“By sorting this whole mess out promptly, and with a minimum of fuss,” Old Xian said simply. “You do not want to antagonise Kun Lianmei any more than you already have, especially after one of this boy’s lackeys tossed a talisman at a trio of the Fern Cloak Monkeys.”

“Is this true?” the mayor asked Elder Chen, his eyebrows rising.

“I… was getting to that,” Elder Chen muttered.

“It didn’t kill any, but you can expect some retaliation,” Old Xian said matter-of-factly. “Probably they will wreck some canals or something, just to make a point. Plant durmian seeds in warehouses to draw pests, this kind of thing.”

“That is… concerning,” the elder from the Jade Willow Sect interjected.

“This and that are not related,” the elder who had been stirring up trouble before frowned. “This Hunter has not done what she set out to do, she gave her word.”

“And you intend to hold an elite Hunter of an influential Pavilion who has favour with an elder to this… because it suits the Ha clan to weaken influence that is not their own?” Lianmei remarked from the doorway.

“You came quickly,” Old Xian remarked.

“I was in the Pavilion, looking at the mission history for the Red Pit,” Lianmei shrugged. “Miss Yunhee’s martial principle has grown crisper.”

“You praise me,” Yunhee blushed slightly. “It is just some slight skill.”

-Is she one of the two elites Juni said she would send?

In the mess of everything else, she had almost forgotten, then assumed it was Chengde and Huanfu, though neither was from the Kun clan specifically.

“That…” the mayor looked a bit shifty.

“I believe this is simply a matter of over-enthusiasm,” Ha Mofan said, walking in from the other door, his hands behind his back.

“Over-enthusiasm?” Lianmei asked, raising her eyebrow as she walked over to help herself to the mayor’s ice wine as well.

“Yes, a trying and stressful trip, inexperienced heads in Yin Eclipse, a young Hunter, good with theory but lacking in years,” Ha Mofan murmured. “I think it is best we put it all behind us. If it is a matter of further training to help bolster local capabilities, the Ha clan feels that this can be delivered without troubling the Pavilion quite so much…”

“…”

The elders didn’t stare at Ha Mofan, they were all far too canny for that. She buried a sigh and pulled out the paperwork for the mission, passing it to the mayor, who took it and stamped it complete.

“Thank you for your efforts, Hunter Jun,” the mayor said blandly, passing the completed slip back to her.

Accepting it, she bowed politely, but didn’t step back.

“Is there anything else?” the mayor frowned.

“Elder Chen has to sign it too,” she pointed out respectfully.

“Ah... so he does,” the mayor acknowledged as she passed it back to him.

Elder Chen came and put his own seal onto the document as well, then passed it back to her. She took a moment to read through it very carefully, then passed it to Elder Lianmei, who also skimmed it and nodded.

“We will take this to the Pavilion and see that Elder Mu signs it as well,” Lianmei said with a half-smile. “If you wish to talk to me about monkeys, that is possible, but you must be understanding; it is a very busy time, what with the harvest being early and the rains being so.”

The village elders all bowed, a few not managing to hide their grimaces or their sideways looks at Ha Caolun.

She followed Lianmei out of the hall in silence, followed by Old Xian and Yunhee, noting that the guards were still standing there looking petrified. It was only when they were back out in the rain that Lianmei finally spoke again.

“Fates! I hate those old geezers the most, trouble scatters off them like water off a duck’s back.”

“It is true that shamelessness is a congenital condition that only gets stronger as one wanders through the years,” Old Xian agreed.

“You have nothing to ask?” Lianmei asked her.

“…”

“No,” she shook her head. “I expect they will cause trouble over this in some way though?”

“Only if they want to have the most unproductive year ever,” Lianmei grunted. “Their determination to drag you down in some way… is concerning though. Especially since they seem determined to do it to a degree that is nearly desperate.”

“I hadn’t noticed,” she muttered sourly as they walked into the Pavilion courtyard.

“There is some trouble coming?” Old Xian mused, staring up at the rainy sky.

“I… there are rumours, in the Duke’s Household,” Lianmei mused. “And the usual actors in Blue Water City are making some efforts to hide their unease, mostly by burying everything under this imperial visit. There is also the presence of these bandits and the ‘convenient’ reappearance of that old ghost’s name and methods.”

“You expect there to be a counter-push from the Azure Astral Authority to that visit?” Old Xian frowned.

“What do you think?” Lianmei asked him.

“I think that when the Imperial Court pisses in the wind, the Azure Astral Authority is waiting to take a dump on the path behind them,” Old Xian grunted. “If someone on the Ha side is trying to weaken the Pavilions expecting that… I can see their logic…”

“It’s a dangerous game though,” Lianmei sighed, glancing at her.

“You… think this was deliberately targeted at me?”

“Deliberately, unlikely,” Lianmei shook her head. “Opportunistically... probably.”

They walked on in silence, into the clerks’ wing of the Pavilion, where she had come before, and were ushered into the inner room where she had talked with Clerk Bai. Elder Mu, who was staring up at a map of the valleys that had a lot of new marks on it, turned and bowed to them.

“We are here for your seal,” Lianmei said perfunctorily.

“Of course,” Elder Mu murmured, walking over to accept the proffered jade slip.

He skimmed it as she watched, then pressed a finger to it and returned it to her.

“Thank you,” she replied, accepting it.

“You should go file it now, before someone finds some other insanity to throw at the wall,” Lianmei remarked drily.

Bowing to her, she turned and left the room, followed by Yunhee, and headed across the courtyard to the mission hall. The hall itself was not all that crowded, so she was able to walk over to the desk and hand the slip to a bored-looking junior official without even having to queue.

“I want proof of successful completion as a binary jade,” she said. “To be refunded in the West Flower Picking Pavilion.”

“Euuugh…” the official grimaced, shooting her a dirty look and then skimming the mission. “Ah… this is… I will have to speak to an elder.”

“Is there a problem?” she asked.

“The… signatures will need to be reviewed before a jade can be authorized…” the junior official grumbled.

“I can wait, please leave the slip here and bring the duty elder,” she replied, holding out her hand.

“This is the Pavilion, nothing is…” the official trailed off as she didn’t retract her hand.

“Faugh…” he slapped the jade back into it hard enough to knock her knuckles off the counter and stalked off.

“He really likes you,” Yunhee remarked drily. “I can see it in the way he smiles.”

Sighing, she nodded, leaning on the counter and watching people wander around looking at mission boards.

“At this point, I will not let that out of my sight until this is done,” she remarked drily.

In the end, they had to wait almost ten minutes before the junior official returned with an equally annoyed-looking elder.

“I am sure this is a mistake, making trouble for nothing…” the official was muttering as they came into earshot.

“Ah… Hunter Jun,” the elder frowned.

“I want this submitted here, and a binary jade which I will redeem when I return to West Flower Picking Town,” she said holding up the slip.

The elder took it, examined the signatures, grew distant for a moment… then flinched as an annoyed-looking Elder Mu appeared, leaning on the counter.

“Can none of you idiots do anything in this place, do you not recognise it?” Elder Mu scowled, glancing at the junior official. “Is this a congenital defect of the Ha clan? Though I suppose it would explain your terrible foundation if your eyesight is that bad!”

“…”

The elder and official both winced and stepped backwards.

“I shall see to it immediately, there is just the matter of verifying the other two signatures…” the elder muttered, bowing to Elder Mu.

“…”

“Or it can just be done later…?” the elder coughed.

“Do. It. Now.” Elder Mu scowled.

The elder’s expression grew distant, then he flinched slightly, then nodded again.

“They are authentic...”

She watched as he walked over to a half-metre-wide slab on the table behind the counter, put the slip on a circular design upon it and a shimmering column of information hung in the air for a few moments before collapsing back down. Several seconds later, one of the jade ‘decorations’ in the shape of a taiji that ringed the edge of the slab extruded slightly, becoming partially detachable. The elder took it, inspected it and sighed, then walked over to her and put it on the counter with a scowl.

“Here, done to your satisfaction, Hunter?”

“Thank you,” she replied politely, taking it and inspecting it anyway, making sure it was okay – which it was.

“Have a good evening,” the elder muttered, before bowing to Elder Mu, who just sighed and vanished again.

The elder’s scowl followed them both all the way out of the hall.

Returning back to the clerk’s hall, she found Lianmei deep in discussion with Elder Mu and the woman she had seen on her first day, so she didn’t bother them and instead went over to Old Xian, who was sitting down sipping some tea and helping himself to some food that had been provided.

“From the face that young Mu made when he came back, I am surprised you are sorted that quickly,” Old Xian remarked drily, passing her a cup of tea.

“Everywhere I look in this village I seem to encounter people who just enjoy causing difficulties,” she sighed, flopping down on the couch and grabbing a rice ball wrapped in some fresh fish.

“That is the way of these places,” Old Xian agreed. “However, I must admit that this is exceptional, even in recent years.”

“What is the plan now?” Yunhee asked, also helping herself to some of the rice and fish.

“Dunno,” she sighed, then took a bite out of the rice ball. “Ib’s… ‘eird to think ‘hat…”

“…”

“Spicy…” she sniffed, staring at the fish and rice.

Taking a sip of tea, she washed the rice down and tried again. “Despite that being done with… I somehow can’t shake the feeling that it was thoroughly not worth it. I should be pleased I got it signed off… but instead I just feel tired.”

Old Xian just nodded, saying nothing, so she finished the rice ball and, taking another, dipped it in the sweet sauce, which made it much less fiery... and more readily edible, it had to be said.

“I guess we go back to the estate, then leave as soon as it is convenient? I suppose it depends on what else Talshin has to do.”

“Probably in the morning,” Xian agreed. “With the thunder, it will be expensive to teleport.”

“Ah… there is that,” she agreed, having almost forgotten the shift in the weather earlier.

“The auguries have already come in,” the old man added. “Apparently this coming year is going to bring changes and auspicious opportunities to those who are lacking in fortune.”

“Were the astrologers drunk when they made these predictions?” Yunhee asked drily.

“No, just high on their own egos probably,” Old Xian chuckled. “I imagine they will come up with something more specifically tailored to Ha clan prosperity though, given enough perspective and practice before tomorrow.”

Shaking her head, she poured more tea for all of them and then snagged a third rice ball.

They waited around for about ten more minutes before Old Xian finally decided in executive fashion that they should go back to the Kun estate and wait there.

Outside, the rain had lessened a bit, but the thunder was far more pronounced, distant flashes of lightning cutting through the clouds as they made their way out of the Pavilion and across the square…

“Hey… Hunter Jun! Miss Yunhee… Sir Xian.”

She turned to find Lun Quan, Fen Duan and Heng Ning walking across the square behind them, heading in roughly the same direction.

“Oh… hi,” she saluted them back politely as the trio caught up with them.

“We were going for a drink at Duan’s brother’s tavern,” Lun Quan said with a grin. “Want to join us?”

“…”

Glancing at Old Xian, who just shrugged, she nearly refused, pleading tiredness, but after a moment’s reflection decided against it. While the village elders had been a menace to her safety and sanity, the villagers themselves had been put through it as much as she had, so it was only fair to allow them their offer of hospitality.

“Okay, I can have one drink,” she agreed. “Old Xian?”

“Might as well, I know the place,” Old Xian mused.

…

‘The place’ turned out to be where she had delivered the spirit grass on her first day in the village, and, unlike the rain-drenched, humid outdoors, it was actually quite busy. Lun Quan took them up to the second story, where a few other villagers and farmers… including, to her surprise, Old Ge, were sitting around tossing dice and talking about this and that.

“Ah, Hunter Jun!” Old Ge remarked, spotting her almost immediately as she shook off her cloak. “Come, sit with us!”

Storing her cloak and hat away, she went over to the table and bowed slightly to the occupants, who were mostly spirit herb farmers, based on their garb.

“This is the lass who got rid of those fate-thrashed water lotuses?” another old man asked, eyeing her from beneath drooping white eyebrows.

“I am,” she said, accepting a cup of wine from Old Ge.

“To getting rid of water lotuses!” Old Ge grinned, offering her a toast, which the others all followed.

She accepted the toast and sipped the drink, which was pretty much what she expected, a fiery spirit grass alcohol that was potent enough to require her to use her mantra to negate its effects.

“Was some good work you did, saved a lot of people some headaches and expense,” Old Ge said.

“Thanks,” she murmured, taking another sip of the wine, then snagging a piece of fried crayfish to offset it.

“Heard that the village gave you the runaround,” another old farmer muttered.

“Those fellows only think with their wallets,” the white-eyebrowed old farmer grunted.

“That they do,” Old Xian agreed, sitting down.

“Oh… if it ain’t Old Xian, didn’t see you there!” another farmer grinned. “I have your alcohol, was gonna send it to the estate, but if you’re here…”

She shared a few more drinks with the old farmers, then went to talk with Lun Quan and the others at the next table for a bit. The conversation started out mostly about the local village, but soon moved to them asking questions about Yin Eclipse in general and what kind of strange things a high ranked Hunter might have seen.

Sitting with others, relaxing and just talking about… random stuff, was, to begin with, a rather jarring feeling, after the continuous strain of the previous days. However, unwinding, chatting about her experiences in the High Valleys; of running away from ambush turtles, of encountering the God Bewitching Jasmine and seeing the great waterfalls at the headwaters of the East Fury Torrent for the first time, did help to put the petty machinations and gnarled attitudes of those trying to exploit what should have been very straightforward events for their own gain into a kind of perspective.

By the time they had finished two jars of wine, Old Xian had come and joined them, and regaled them all with an account of travelling through the Fissure Flats, culminating in seeing a Martial Lord battle one of the dreaded ‘unchained’, the vast worm-like leviathans that ruled over vast swathes of the suppression zone to the north of the Great Mount.

Through the evening, various other locals, spirit farmers mostly, came by and offered her thanks… and even, in one case, some extra payment, for clearing out the lotuses, or teaching a grandson or daughter a bit about feng shui or formations… which, after the mess of the rest of the day was really quite gratifying and somewhat managed to restore her good impression of the lay people of Jade Willow Village at least. As a last act before they departed, they also offered a toast to the passing of the old year, and then made their farewells and headed back out into the rain.

By the time they returned to the Kun estate, it was properly dark; however, even there she ended up having to attend another meal… this one somewhat less jovial it had to be said – hosted by Kun Erfan Ji, largely, again, because it was the last day of the old year… and the first day of the wet season. Relegated to a lower table, which she was just fine with really, she passed the time, chatting with Yunhee and a few others in attendance about this and that regarding the Kun clan and bits of innocuous gossip she had heard from Juni. Once it wound up, she managed to get a few moments with Talshin to confirm that they were departing at first light, then made her excuses and just went to her room, where she flopped onto the bed, sealed the wards and just stared at the ceiling until she fell asleep.

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

~ JUN SANA – BLUE WATER CITY, GOLDEN DRAGON TEAHOUSE ~

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

Standing in the general crowd, waiting to ‘redeem’ her bid on the meek yin ginseng, Sana again found herself reflecting that outrage was a remarkably strange beast. There was certainly a lot of it going around, largely with the organisers of the auction for allowing such a disaster as ‘blood ling contamination’ to occur. There was also a lot of shameless manipulation feeding off it, as everyone and their grandmother demanded both recompense and the spirit herbs they had bid on. Such was the chaos that the auction had instituted a ticket system, though that was only working for a given value, because several people had actually robbed others to get lower numbered tickets so they could claim their herbs before anything else damaged them.

“It’s amazing how many ‘experts’ there are on blood ling trees all of a sudden…” Lin Ling remarked as another youth started pointing at a ‘book’ that probably claimed some very specific thing that was a flaw with the herb he had bought was a result of potential contamination.

“This is what happens when it spreads…” she sighed. “It will calm down in a few hours I suspect, but until then, everyone is going to be…”

“—like this?” Lin Ling giggled, waving her arm around at the disorganized chaos.

“Yep… a lack of self-awareness is an early symptom,” Baisheng, also sitting nearby, agreed.

“Token 297!” a voice called out from the counters across from them.

“Ah… that’s us,” Baisheng sighed, standing up.

“—perhaps… we might reach some kind of agreement then?”

She turned to find that one of a group of six female disciples dressed in pale blue and gold gowns had stepped forward to stand between them and the bustling scrum around the counters.

“…”

“How can we help?” she asked, trying not to frown, because she had watched this play out a few times already in the last thirty minutes.

“It would give our Zhi Zhi Mountain much face if you—”

“You want us to swap tickets…” she interjected dully.

“Our Zhi Zhi Mountain and our senior sister would—”

“Sorry, no thanks,” she replied, cutting off the other woman with a slight bow.

“…”

The woman opened and shut her mouth a little gormlessly, clearly not expecting such a flat refusal. Her friends drew themselves up, looking righteously angry.

“Merely some girl from the Bai clan, dares to look down on our Zhi Zhi Mountain?” one of the other women frowned, stepping forward.

-I mean, I’ve barely even heard of the name… she thought sourly to herself. Even if they are some bigshot sect, aren’t they from like the other side of the Imperial continent somewhere?

“Unfortunately, this is not possible,” Baisheng said, arriving beside her. “However, if it is a matter of you trying to claim your bid items… I fail to see why you cannot simply wait, as we have been, patiently…”

The woman stared at the two of them, then Baisheng, as if his reasonable words were unintelligible to her in some subtle, yet fundamental way.

“You won’t give our Zhi Zhi Mountain face?”

“You won’t give me any face?” Baisheng asked with a faint smile.

The air around them grew faintly heavy, the humidity and the heat of evening receding ever so slightly as Baisheng took a few steps forward towards the woman, who grew pale and started to step back.

“Excuse me…”

She stared dully as Baisheng took the other woman by the arm and forcibly parted the crowd, escorting her, her five juniors and the pair of them right through it as a path opened up almost improbably all the way to the counter.

“I believe our ticket was called out,” Baisheng said with aplomb, arriving at the counter.

“Ah… um… yes, 297… a ginseng… it is…” the youth on the counter looked a bit green, his gaze sliding this way and that.

Everyone else around them was nearly motionless, unable to do anything as Baisheng held whatever he was doing to keep the crowd and the chaos around them oddly suppressed.

*Ahem*

“Please do not trouble others,” a bearded man in a robe appeared at the counter with a pleasant smile.

“I do not believe I am,” Baisheng grinned, glancing around. “Am I troubling anyone?”

There was silence from those within earshot.

“See, I am not, rather… I am giving everyone a moment of stillness to contemplate their somewhat rowdy actions,” Baisheng sighed.

“…”

“Between actions there must be inaction, a pause to appraise one’s perspective. Everyone has concerns, worries, and difficulties. Yet this scene…”

*Ahem*

The bearded man, who had just frowned as Baisheng spoke, coughed… and whatever Baisheng had been doing vanished. Nobody moved however, or said anything nearby… making the counters a strange island of calm within the bustle and chaos of the wider entrance hall.

“So, you are 297… this herb… we are unable to send it out, it is one of those noted by Young Hero Dingxiang,” the old man frowned.

“Really?” Baisheng asked with a raised eyebrow. “I was with Sir Dingxiang just a while ago, when he unpicked this mess, this meek yin ginseng was not among those he selected.”

“I think you are mistaken,” the old man said sourly. “It is clearly here…”

He pushed the token across the table and indeed, it was marked as being ‘under consideration of contamination’.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

“If we are talking about suspicious herbs, this one is from a place near the Red Pit… Red Lake Village, and was flagged as potentially dangerous and anomalous anyway, after being confiscated. Apparently an inexperienced Herb Hunter made mistakes harvesting it and others were killed…”

“I see,” Baisheng nodded. “In that case, let us go seek out my friend Seong and my good associate Dingxiang and ask them in person?”

“You think this works like that?” the old man frowned, taking the token and handing it to an aide. “Stop trying to make trouble.”

“That is not the only herb I am here for,” Baisheng added.

“Not my problem,” the old man shrugged. “Get another token, queue back up.”

“And have my junior sister Yingli here so inconvenienced?” Baisheng frowned.

“Your…”

“My junior sister is part of Zhi Zhi Mountain. Her senior sister is Ji Yingmei… her teacher is the Singing Peak Fairy.”

Lin Ling, who had been puffing up in ‘anger’, managed to maintain her outrage, while she fed her shock straight into her mantra and just about managed to keep a neutral face. The woman, ‘Yingli’ from Zhi Zhi Mountain, looked like she was torn between refuting it and wondering if somehow she had made a terrible mistake and just tried to extort someone actually familiar with her senior sister.

“While I appreciate your desire to ensure the safety of others, are you showing no face to Zhi Zhi Mountain and those forces that stand with it?” Baisheng said drily. “The Bai clan has some links to it…”

“You…” the old man was somewhere between shock and real outrage now. “You brat… you…”

“If you do not believe it, please…” Baisheng slid a token across the counter.

The old man picked up the talisman and sent some qi into it.

A shimmering, fairy-like woman with flawless features framed with dark hair turning just slightly grey around her temples appeared as a half-metre-high image on the counter.

“S— Bai-Sheng,” she stared at Baisheng, the pause barely noticeable as the image rippled slightly.

“Seeing Fairy Sovereign Sky Song!” Yingli almost squeaked, curtsying so deeply she was nearly kneeling.

Her fellow disciples also curtseyed deeply, staring at the floor with worried expressions.

Others nearby also took steps backwards or bowed, because even if it was a small image, the woman held a sort of presence that was innately captivating and almost led you to want to bow to her and praise her. Her mantra did nothing to those feelings either, not that she expected it to really, given this was clearly a genuine senior of great influence and status.

“Apologies for bothering you… Aunt Ling,” Baisheng said with a slight bow. “This old man doubted I had an affiliation with Zhi Zhi Mountain.”

“…”

The woman stared at Baisheng for a long moment, then turned back to the old man behind the counter, who was looking like he wanted the floor to open up and swallow him whole, preferably not leaving any corpse to be tormented.

“This is the Golden Dragon… in Blue Water City?” she mused, looking around.

“It is,” the old man quavered.

“I don’t like what they have done with it,” she sighed. “Do not make trouble for Bai Sheng. If you make trouble for him, you can see it as making trouble for me. Is that clear?”

“E-eminently…” the old man gulped. “However… there has been a stipulation that no seniors are…”

“…” the woman didn’t actually speak, and in fact smiled beatifically, but at the same time a terrifying, creepy sensation suggesting that the humidity held hidden blades settled over the whole hall, making everyone freeze.

“What is?”

“Outrageous!”

“WHO DARES MAKE THIS RUCKUS?”

The sense of oppression lessened with the echoing shouts. Three old men, undoubtedly part of the overall security for the auction and exhibition of treasures, appeared a moment later, saw the woman on the counter… and froze like monkeys caught stealing herbs.

“…”

Sovereign Sky Song turned her head fractionally to look at the three old men and just sneered, waving her hand. All three forms vanished in swirls of mist.

“Disrespectful old thieves, raising their voice to this seat. They deserve to be dragged out back and have their legs broken.” Sky Song Sovereign sighed sadly, her tone and manner totally at odds with the words she was actually speaking.

“Whatever Bai Sheng here and m— the sect’s disciples want, see to it,” Sovereign Sky Song said perfunctorily to the old man.

“Y-yes… of course Lady Lingsheng,” the old man whispered.

“…”

“An auction… of odd spirit herbs… from Yin Eclipse, how nostalgic, I have not seen one in a while. Why was I not invited?” Lady Lingsheng murmured, staring around.

“It… invites to take part were only extended to those among the junior generation…” the old man whispered.

“…”

Fairy Sovereign Sky Song stared around at the hall for a further moment, then swirled into mist and vanished without another word.

“…”

“I trust there will be no problems getting any of the herbs for my junior sisters?” Baisheng asked drily, recovering the talisman and waving at her, Lin Ling and the Zhi Zhi group.

“N-n-not at all,” the old man stammered, turning and almost fleeing backwards.

“Well, that was funny,” Baisheng remarked, not bothering to hide his amusement.

“S-sorry for the disrespect,” Yingli mumbled, getting back to her feet.

“Not at all, glad to help,” Baisheng remarked drily.

Those nearby were still looking at them, murmuring and whispering in awe, concern or admiration. She could already see a few others holding talismans with calculating expressions as well.

“Here… your herbs… This soul blaze orchid!” a youth squeaked, planting a jade box about the size of her head on the counter with an audible thud.

“The herbs for ticket 1300 as well,” Baisheng added, “And the ginseng for 297…”

“The… ah… ginseng really is…” the youth wilted. “Really, Sir Kubai was not exaggerating; it is…”

Baisheng frowned, rolling the talisman across his fingers; however, before he could say anything, an imposing youth wearing a dragon robe appeared, flanked by several officials in white, blue and gold scholars’ robes and two guards wearing ornate armour emblazoned with the seal of the Imperial Envoy. They swept through the hall, people retreating rapidly from their progress, to arrive before Baisheng.

“Little friend, you have made quite a scene…” the young man in the dragon robe said with a frown.

“Ah… Qiao Cheng,” Baisheng murmured, bowing slightly.

“Regretfully, this herb you want is indeed—”

Qiao Cheng broke off as a radiantly beautiful young woman with dark hair done up loosely, wearing the same robes as the older woman in the projection, appeared, like a ghost, to stand beside him.

“You sent out invites for something like this and ignored this daughter?” she scowled, grabbing Qiao Cheng by the wrist and twisting his arm so he had to turn and face her.

“You dare disrespect—!”

The official who had spoken spat blood as a pale palm print appeared on his face.

The guards dropped to their knees, unable to move at all, their armour creaking oddly, though she could detect no other sign of what had been done.

“You, a mere nephew to a minor Imperial Duke dares to annoy me, who has kicked two Crown Princes in the balls for impropriety?” the young woman sneered. “This daughter does not consort with old men and villains, or suffer them to enter her sight.”

“Young L-Lady Lingsheng.”

“That’s Dao Daughter Lingsheng,” the woman purred. “Speak my name properly, or you will be made to respect it… Fates know you malingering monkey molesters deserve it. Kai Lan should have castrated the lot of you.”

“…”

The young woman’s tone, just like before was never less than utterly delightful… except the words she spoke…

-What the fates is even going on here, she sobbed, feeding all her burgeoning fear into her mantra and keeping a tight hold on Lin Ling, who was looking more than a bit unsteady now.

“You should visit more, Bai Sheng,” Lingsheng added with a faint smile.

“I will, if time permits,” Baisheng replied blandly.

“Now, take me to this princess, I wish to see pretty flowers,” Lingsheng declared flatly to the... Envoy’s nephew, apparently, who was barely able to stand from the grip she was exerting on his arm.

“…”

They all stared in silence as the woman walked off and the space around her moved as well, taking Qiao Cheng, his guards and officials, all unmoving, along with her. Only when she had vanished from sight in the direction of the gardens was there a faint exhalation throughout the whole hall.

“Well, that was bracing,” Baisheng remarked drily, turning back to the counter. “My junior sister’s ginseng please… and the herbs for Young Miss Yingli. It was ticket 1300 was it not?”

“Y-yes,” Yingli replied.

A few moments later, six more sealed containers were deposited on the counter, five of which went to the Zhi Zhi Mountain group. She took the one for the ginseng, holding it by the handles on the side and inspecting the container with some interest. It was a fairly standard storage container for a live herb, with a specially sealed space within that would keep the live plant in stasis so long as qi was provided to sustain it. The main reason they were not widely used was that they were both stupidly expensive to buy individually and hungrier for spirit stones than a greedy dog. It spoke to the high-class nature of the auction that they were handing them out as part of the service, really.

In silence, Baisheng led them away through the crowd. Yingli and the other female disciples followed after with complex expressions until they got to the exit, then bid them farewell and thanks. Exiting into the rainy courtyard, she walked after Baisheng, arm in arm with Lin Ling, until they were standing in the shelter of one of the pagodas put up for others to sit and watch the battles on the stage.

“What the fates just happened?” Lin Ling asked at last. “You… I…. was that actually the Fairy Lingsheng?”

“It was,” Baisheng sighed, looking a bit tired all of a sudden. “I almost feel sorry for the organizers of that mess. She is nearly as hard to deal with as Lady Xiao and Lady Hua in her own way.”

“I feel like I want to ask how… but I also think I don’t want to know…” she muttered, staring at the ceiling.

“A junior got annoyed and called his senior sister in a totally disproportionate manner to the problem at hand. The senior sister happened to be someone famous who likes spirit herbs,” Baisheng said, taking the herb box from her and making it vanish into some other space.

As she sat there in silence, mulling over that disturbingly reasonable explanation, Baisheng placed a teapot and a few cups on the stone table before them and poured tea out for both of them.

“But… how?” she asked, before pausing to drink the offered cup in one go, still trying to work out how that random sequence of events had just… exploded impossibly.

“Well, if you must know, it was obvious that there would be those watching the herbs put into the auction,” Baisheng said. “Now that the plan has been rumbled, they wanted to cut their losses. I do wonder why they picked that herb though…”

“Oh… that makes sense,” she conceded, taking a breath and staring at the tea, because the effect of the jasmine was… strong – much stronger than earlier.

“Wait… so all that was to… distract?” Lin Ling blinked, staring at her own cup.

“Now, everyone will remember that Quan Dingxiang saved the day… and that the self-styled Dao Daughter Lingsheng, only child and successor of one of the most difficult ancestors of Zhi Zhi Mountain, showed up, miffed at not being invited as a guest of honour to an auction about spirit herbs from the biggest herb garden in the starfield,” Baisheng said with a broad grin, not bothering to hide how amusing he apparently found all this.

“So… did you position us near that group from Zhi Zhi Mountain… deliberately?” she asked blankly, the last pieces dropping into place.

“Maybe?” Baisheng grinned. “The perception of a thing is as important as the reality sometimes. The Bai clan has some links to that sect, yet we were actually acting quite low-key… fishing is about patience and picking the moment, just as much as it is luck.”

“…”

“Then…” Lin Ling started to speak but just trailed off, staring into the rain.

“So what now?” she asked, holding out her cup for a refill, which Baisheng obligingly supplied.

“Now, we kill time until Ling Yu is done,” Baisheng shrugged, sitting down on a bench by the stone table and helping himself to some tea as well. “In any case, there will be a few ructions yet to play out I suspect…”

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

~ DUN LIAN JING – GOLDEN DRAGON TEAHOUSE ~

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

Dun Lian Jing found herself staring at the ‘contaminated’ herbs set out before her, wondering what would happen if she just turned on her heel and walked away, there and then.

-It’s not even my mess, this is all on that servant Qiao…

The answer, sadly, was that everyone would still blame her: figureheads were easily targeted like that. It wouldn’t happen here – here everyone would be very understanding… sympathetic, make amends and so on. No, it would happen back in the Imperial Court; her position would certainly become… difficult. Probably her ‘ranking’ would be reduced in the eyes of those who cared and maintained that rather voyeuristic system of measuring the different imperial scions against each other. Her status as the ‘favoured’ disciple of Dun Jian would also get questioned.

The various other scions, invited or included in the invitation by various forces seeking favour with her, were mostly milling around. Some were talking with the various disciples from the Myriad Herb Association who had been ‘managing’ and patrolling the garden area, she assumed, but most appeared either annoyed or bored… or were watching her. The only real exception, not that surprisingly she had come to think, was the City Governor’s daughter, Ling Yu, who was staring at the herbs with a frown… and her friend, the daughter of the Kun Clan Lord, Kun Juni, who was standing with her arms folded, staring at the groups milling around the spirit herb gardens looking for more affected herbs with the air of someone seeing their horizons broadened… and not in a good way.

-Based on what we discussed over that dinner yesterday, perhaps her views are not that unreasonable, she reflected. It is just a shame she has no interest in cultivation.

She still hadn’t had an answer to that question, despite making a few quiet enquiries. Most of the gossip regarding why the ‘Inheritance Daughter’ was not the Clan Lord’s daughter were the kind of political tales anyone who spent ten seconds in the Imperial Court could spot a mile off. Kun Xingjuan was clearly talented, quite remarkably so for what she had seen of the youth of Blue Water Province... but placed beside Kun Juni, she just came off as a slightly more aware young scion.

“You are dissatisfied with how this is being handled?” she asked Kun Juni, deciding to see if she could draw something out of her.

“They are handling it to the capabilities expected of such eminent scions, Imperial Highness,” Kun Juni murmured, saluting her.

“Our Deng clan has some experience with this terrible place, Imperial Highness,” Deng Guiren, the son of the Deng Clan Lord interjected. “This has all the hallmarks of the kind of sideways action promoted by the Azure Astral Authority during the Three Schools Conflict.”

“You think that Shan Lai is behind this?” one of the Ha clan daughters sneered.

“How would your Deng clan handle it?” she asked Deng Guiren.

“Seal up the herbs, interrogate all those who supplied them, look for the links backwards and uncertain bits. The contamination is in its early stages, so herbs must have been exposed at length prior to being here. Mutates with soul sense and the like are the key.”

“That is no more than Young Hero Dingxiang has already said,” an eminent Ji clan disciple from the Pill Sovereign sect remarked superciliously.

“…”

“—Oh… blood ling trees, that’s nostalgic.”

She was aware of the chatter and various conversations trailing off even before the words sank into her awareness, almost forcing her to turn to see the speaker—

She was dressed rather plainly, in a simple gown of sky blue, with white and gold trim, that shimmered with patterns of clouds – her hair done up rather lazily and affixed with a few hairpins and a comb shaped as a lotus flower.

“Who…?” Deng Guiren asked dully.

“Beautiful…” someone else sighed nearby.

“How?”

She realised she had spoken aloud, that the words had been drawn out of her like water squeezed from a sponge. She struggled with the sense that she was missing something… something fundamental about the scene before her, but it slipped away, like fog between her fingers.

“Shit… I—” she groaned, physically biting her lip as the compulsion to keep speaking tugged at her, like a cajoling friend.

“How is she doing that?”

“Soul Law?”

“Who is she?”

“How can it be soul related IDIOT!”

“This rain, doesn’t it stop soul sense?”

“She is so… fine!”

“Is it this contamination… are we hallucinating?”

“What is going on?”

“Was Senior Qiao that weak?”

“Where are our seniors?”

“Delightful!”

Whispered thoughts torn out as questions echoed everywhere as others, with less mental fortitude than she had, gave voice to thoughts that should have been just in their heads—

“Hiding while observing children? What are you, a pervert?” the girl sighed, the disappointed tone of her voice notably at odds with the comment she had just made.

“YOU DA—”

“Why are you here?”

The older-looking of the two Dao Immortal elders who were now standing beside the group from the Din clan and the Jade Gate Court frowned at the young woman in a way that made her skin crawl.

“I was not aware that I needed to ask the Din clan for permission to go places,” the young woman retorted, sounding like she had just been accused of killing cute furry animals, her voice a ghostly chime through the garden that made the falling rain shine and the raindrops reverberate. “—Are you actually shielding your disciples… it’s almost cute, are you old villains trying to make a liar out of a pure young girl? Make me a sinner before the Three Pure Ones?”

“…”

“And you just—” the younger elder opened and then shut his mouth, rather remarkably choosing to say nothing.

“As the wronged party, is it my business to care?” the woman murmured. “If the Din clan wants to keep its scions, it should not put them where I can see them. Compared to some, my approach is very reasonable. It is fortunate you have this rain right now. Scram with them before I change my mind.”

“You cannot act so overbearing here, even if you are a beauty anyone would tolerate,” one of the scions behind the elder sneered. “Elder Lun, you have my permission to—”

“…”

*Ahem*

Several more figures, including the Imperial Envoy Qiao Honghui himself, appeared from the far side of the courtyard… the cough shifted through the rain and the sense of something interfering with her ability to parse her surroundings wavered slightly—

She, along with everyone else stared dully, because the young woman was holding Qiao Honghui’s nephew, Qiao Cheng, in a rather vicious wristlock that had him half on his knees.

“Isn’t Qiao Cheng a Dao Immortal?” she thought… said… and groaned, clenching her fists, trying to fight whatever was happening.

“Isn’t that the Duke’s nephew…?”

“Senior Qiao!”

“You dare—!”

Trying to distract herself from wondering directly who the new arrival was – other than a huge headache – she looked around and found that it wasn’t just Qiao Cheng who was there.

The officials, elders and flunkies who usually accompanied him were all slumped or prostrated and five elite guards from the Envoy’s household were also kneeling, blood streaming from their mouths, incapable of movement…

“My memories…”

“Oh that’s annoying!” Deng Guiren gasped, shaking his head.

“What is causing this?” Huang Xianbei, an influential disciple from the Four Peacocks Court, groaned.

She tuned out the others, trying to focus on her own problems—

“Young Lady, could you show this old man some face and unhand my nephew?” the Imperial Envoy asked the younger woman, his smile almost waxen.

In her memory Qiao Cheng had clearly come into the room with the woman…

“And I just didn’t notice? Don’t—?”

She cut herself off before she actually spoke out loud about the artefacts that should have been protecting her from mental intrusion, though clearly they were nothing but trinkets now for some reason.

A second review of her memory told her that they had arrived at the same time… except…

“He hid his presence?”

Grimacing, she put her hand to her face, realising that the ‘old pervert’ that the woman rebuked and insulted before was probably Qiao Cheng as much as the Din clan elders – he was over a thousand years old.

“…”

It took quite a bit of self-control to not laugh out loud at what appeared to have just happened. Others trying to work out what was happening were not so fortunate, with quite a few bursting out laughing before they could put hands over their mouths or stop themselves by other means.

“Young Lady, what are you doing?” she asked, because it had to be something the young woman was doing.

The Duke’s nephew glared daggers at everyone, but somehow there was no intent at all behind it and he was still unable to free himself from her grasp for some reason.

“You sure kicked a big bucket, this kind of thing really resembles the matter of 150 years ago,” the young woman, who had knelt down to examine a plant, forcing Qiao Cheng to crouch down in a really awkward manner—

“When did she do that?”

—stood up again, dusting off her hands.

“Da—” Qiao Cheng tried to speak, then crumpled to his knees, sweating profusely, trying to fight something intangible she could get no grasp of that seemed to be almost pushing his head down, trying to force it into the wet grass.

“You are not allowed to speak in my presence, servant. Show respect and bow down,” the young woman murmured, looking around at the assembled crowd of onlookers, most of whom were now frozen in shock.

The Imperial Duke just stood there, under his umbrella, arms folded, his smile a little warped as he watched his nephew be publicly mistreated.

“This rain, I’d forgotten how vexing it is,” the young woman mused, shaking her head, then turned back to Quan Dingxiang. “I see you followed my mother’s advice regarding your spiritual flame.”

“I… yes,” Quan Dingxiang replied, bowing deeply. “Your fairy mother’s advice on that topic was without equal.”

“Mother?” someone blurted out from nearby.

“Who is she?” a disciple from the Imperial School asked, gormlessly. “She is so beautiful…”

Desperately trying to dissociate her thoughts, she tried to recall who would have this kind of presence, even in the suppressive weather.

“She can only be a senior who—” She bit back the thought… words, as her intuition screamed at her, trying to claw them back, but it was too late.

“Who is a senior, old maid, I am younger than you,” the young woman replied softly, both out loud and in her head – her tone holding an almost enraging sense of sympathy.

“I admit we were remiss not to send you an invitation, esteemed Dao Daughter Lingsheng, but as far as we were aware, you were in cultivation retreat?” Qiao Honghui said at last.

The intake of breath among the older juniors was palpable. Even she flinched involuntarily, finally placing the robe – Zhi Zhi Mountain – and the influence within it; Sky Song Peak…

“I am sure there were plenty of others in retreat who got invitations,” Lingsheng said, her tone of voice sounding deeply aggrieved.

“Heart Bewitching Heavenly Physique…”

It wasn’t her who blurted that out, it was Lu Seong who was standing nearby.

Lingsheng stopped staring down Qiao Honghui and turned to look at Lu Seong… and by extension her again—

She opened her clenched fists and tried to breathe out. It was impossible to evade the young woman’s gaze. It was like being afflicted with a compulsion as Lingsheng just stared at her, her clear, bright eyes trying to drag opinions, embarrassing, degrading and derogatory out of her in spite of the various protections she had on her person thanks to her robe and jewellery.

Lingsheng held them in her gaze for almost twenty seconds, then sighed and looked away.

She had to fight the urge to drop to her knees and weep, because the crushing sense of ‘disappointment’ that washed over her was every bit as nasty as the sense of wanting to just spill her guts about every opinion the Imperial Court had on the woman.

“Heart Force…” the words were Lu Seong’s, thankfully – she managed to quash her own thoughts entirely for a moment, just staring at the wet grass and trying to push back the feelings of inadequacy and insecurity that were trying to worm into her.

“Fairy Lingsheng is amazing…”

“Peerless…”

“Is she even a junior at all?”

“Elders…”

“Get out of my fate-thrashed head!”

“—Bitch, I just want to…”

“—Even Dun Sheng…”

Exclamations, utterances and bickering echoed around her as others were also caught up by the presence of the woman who was, by all accounts, probably the Heart Force cultivator among the younger generation.

Much like ‘Tian’ Cang Di – the foremost martial cultivator among their generation – ‘Dao Daughter’ Lingsheng was someone who haunted the ‘rankings’ of their current generation as a sort of much-ignored spectre of unsurmountable potential. However, unlike Cang Di, and to a lesser extent Dun Sheng, the First Crown Prince, who both had many tales to their name and mostly upstanding reputations, Lingsheng was just dangerous.

“—Isn’t she a Dao Immortal?”

“Elders! A senior is attacking…”

“Help me, Mother—!”

Lingsheng was basically someone who did as she pleased, as exemplified by events here and now, and it was a very brave idiot who stood in her way. She was the only daughter of the Sky Song Sovereign, a World Venerate expert who had chosen to remain on Eastern Azure after ascension, and who was by all accounts one of the original ancestors of Zhi Zhi Mountain, having agreed to give the backing of her name and her personal mountain peak to the sect when it was first founded. That kind of person, even the Imperial Seat treated with polite respect.

That also explained why the two elders from the Din clan had appeared immediately.

The enmity between Sky Song Peak and the Din clan had existed since the founding of the Dun Dynasty according to some. Until recently, however, it did not boil over that frequently because the Peak, while influential, did not have many disciples and they tended to be rather reclusive. Somewhat inconveniently though, it had seen a notable return to prominence after the events surrounding Di Ji some hundred years prior.

“Imperial Princess Lian…” the older of the Jade Gate Court elders remarked, glancing at her... as if somehow expecting her to have a solution for this?!

“…”

“You worthless servant!” she snapped, her anger running away with her as Lingsheng turned back to look at her, her head tilted to one side.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a few people smirk at that… including some of the Din and Huang scions sheltered by their elders…

“Oh… you are that Liang one…” Lingsheng frowned, staring at her in a way she could only call deeply unsettling.

She narrowed her eyes, surprised that Lingsheng knew her mother’s clan name.

“Ah well, whatever,” Lingsheng mused, turning back to the arrangement and the corrupted plants.

In that instant, the sense of being caught up in Lingsheng’s presence bled away and she nearly fell over, such was the sense of ‘normality’ that returned between one thought and the next. A few others nearby were again caught out. One of the Ha clan scions actually cried, while others just turned on the spot and fled, uncaring for their status.

“Uh… esteemed Dao Daughter, you are familiar with blood ling trees?” Quan Dingxiang asked, bowing respectfully.

“I have a certain understanding,” Lingsheng shrugged, looking around.

“How might we best resolve this?” Quan Dingxiang asked respectfully, waving a hand towards the various herbs.

“It’s your moment, you tell me,” Lingsheng replied, switching to poking at a flowering fern.

“…”

Glancing over to the side, she could see that Kun Juni had slipped towards the back of the group, clearly unwilling to be at all party to these matters… and appeared to have taken Ling Yu with her, who was herself looking at Lingsheng with a faint frown of all things.

“—Even so,” Quan Dingxiang said smoothly, drawing her attention back to the scene before her. “Fairy Lingsheng is famous for her knowledge of spirit herbs, having you advise us…”

“Fine, I want my pick of the herbs,” Lingsheng said with a faint smile.

“Ahem… Eternal Daughter,” Qiao Honghui coughed politely. “This is an auction.”

“And?” Lingsheng said, looking back at him innocently.

“You are more than welcome to make bids…”

“Ehhhh…” Lingsheng stared at the various elders like they were unusual mushrooms and then just shrugged. “I’ll just go look around and see who bid on what… Qiao Cheng here has kindly agreed to escort me, haven’t you?”

Qiao Cheng, who was still half on his knees beside her, just nodded desperately.

“If anything takes my fancy I’ll be sure to let the relevant parties know.”

The Imperial Envoy frowned, but still made no direct intercession to ‘recover’ his nephew.

“…”

Without a backward glance, she hauled Qiao Cheng up and shoved him forward, walking past the Imperial Envoy towards the nearest pagoda, humming a tune under her breath.

“There is no issue with you taking something that takes your fancy, Fairy Lingsheng,” she said, thinking quickly.

Lingsheng paused, looking back at them with a slightly sympathetic smile that made her clench her fists again. “I gotta say, the moment’s passed… I think I prefer my odds of just looking and seeing.”

She didn’t bother to hide her angry look at the Imperial Envoy, who did not look quite as annoyed as she felt he should.

“You servant, are you trying to sabotage this?”

“…”

The words… her thoughts, echoed like a curse as Lingsheng shook her head in amusement, then just kept walking.

Taking a deep breath, she stared up at the rainy sky and tried to think about calming, peaceful things… like imagining the Imperial Envoy being beaten to death with sticks.

“…”

Nobody else nearby looked at her, likely all hoping desperately that the same thing would not happen to them. The awkward silence stretched on for a full thirty seconds before someone dared speak again.

“Um… there are some ways to ensure that the influence of blood ling trees is curtailed, Imperial Highness, Young Hero Quan.”

She turned back to the speaker, Deng Guiren, who was looking very wan.

“Go on?” she said, gratefully latching onto the opportunity to distract from what had just happened.

“The immediate impact is probably not widely disseminated. The trees themselves do not easily thrive outside of Yin Eclipse and the unique environment around the Red Pit,” Deng Guiren said, gaining a bit of confidence. “The famous traits are obviously widely known, but detailed knowledge of the way it mutates things is not so widely distributed.”

“Why so, Brother Deng?” a Myriad Herb disciple asked.

“Well, most egregious examples are dealt with through the Hunter Bureau,” Deng Guiren replied, giving her a respectful salute, “And they do not share much of that knowledge outside of their higher ranked Hunters. It is one of the reasons why they hold such a monopoly in influence still.”

“That and taxes,” Ling Yu interjected from the side. “Mostly taxes.”

Deng Guiren coughed and cast the younger woman a sideways look that she levelly returned until he was forced to look away.

“This kind of event does not occur, usually, because the Hunter Bureau closely monitors all aspects of such herb auctions,” Deng Guiren muttered, continuing on. “I can only postulate that some villains saw an opportunity to embarrass your Imperial Highness and take advantage of your good intentions. There are certainly others among our number here who are just as well-versed as I… yet who have not spoken up.”

He didn’t quite look at Kun Juni and Kun Xingjuan, but it was fairly clear to her that he was taking a quiet poke at them. Given he had also made mention of Shan Lai earlier, it was fairly clear where he was angling to push blame.

“Last I checked, the Red Pit was the Deng and Ha clans’ spicy gourd,” Kun Xingjuan remarked icily. “If you wish to hear about shadow balsam and Duo Li’s water lotus, this daughter can share quite a lot that is not common knowledge.”

“This is indeed true,” the Ha clan scion, Ha Caofang agreed. “Though the Deng clan of late has been very active in walking into places they should not… Perhaps this infestation has its roots closer to home than Brother Deng cares to countenance?”

“…”

“—Blame is not the concern,” Quan Dingxiang cut in, frowning at them. “The important thing is that the impact is minimised here and now. The Pill Sovereign Sect has several books describing these trees; lamentably, however, local knowledge is still preferable for such esoteric spirit herbs.”

“Well, in that case, one thing Brother Deng has not spoken of is that the mutable hooks of the blood ling’s soul sense can spread like a plague, anchoring in anything else with soul sense,” Kun Juni mused. “There is a reason most of those who go into the Red Pit, who truly understand what they are at, are below Golden Core and are rarely spiritual cultivators.”

“A lack of comprehension as a protection? Hmmmm,” Quan Dingxiang mused, nodding at her words.

“Not to mention, it’s even in the name,” Ling Yu added. “Though it’s understandable that a person of action like Deng Guiren here might not have read those books.”

“What are you insinuating?” Deng Guiren scowled.

“Ah… shit,” Quan Dingxiang sighed, staring around at the crowd.

“What is it?” Lu Seong asked.

“I believe I understand what Young Lady Ling and Young Lady Kun are suggesting,” Quan Dingxiang sighed again. “There are notes about the tenacious nature of the blood ling tree… and several anecdotes about how it has acquired its name. Blood, of course, refers to ‘Red’, the place of its origin, the Red Pit… *ahem*, ‘A Pit of Red. A bloody shard within the eye, where people are lost, and even those that come out are never found again’...”

“A quote from the writings of Pill Sovereign Lu Fei Shun,” Lu Seong mused.

“You have read it?” Quan Dingxiang asked Lu Seong.

“I must confess, I read it more for the accounts of the strange beasts described than the plants, but the bit talking about the mythical death fields of Yin Eclipse is… not something one forgets easily,” Lu Seong conceded.

“Yes… those descriptions are quite entertaining,” Quan Dingxiang agreed, which got a few other quickly-silenced chuckles. “In any case, the question is ‘Red’, because by all accounts the Red Pit is not actually ‘red’?”

“It is not,” Deng Guiren, still scowling, agreed.

“So the ‘Red’ in the name comes from danger of going there. Older texts call it the ‘Slaughtering Pit’ or the ‘Heart Breaking Mire’,” Quan Dingxiang went on. “Most scholarly studies focus on the fact that soul sense there is immune to the ubiquitous suppression, yet it has to be said, experiments on this elsewhere have largely been mixed as I recall.”

“—The trees do not grow elsewhere,” Deng Guiren interjected. “There were indigenous rebels, working with the Astral Authority, who tried as much 150 years ago.”

“Quite,” another scion from the Deng clan piped up. “Their efforts were largely met with failure—”

“—whereupon they immediately switched to raising mutates, and the result was millions dead and the province brought to the brink of ruin before it all died down,” Ling Yu remarked drily.

“Indeed,” Quan Dingxiang nodded. “I recall hearing of that dreadful disaster; however, it was curious even then how little was written – or made available, at least – about the specifics…”

“I believe I may shed some light there, Young Hero Quan,” one of the officials beside Qiao Honghui spoke up. “There was much embarrassment about how matters got to that point, especially for the Hunter Bureau… and regional governance. To avoid a repeat, all of those responsible for the cult were killed and the records sealed. Others spoke out against it, but the political momentum was inconvenient at the time. The rogue elements were suppressed within the local populace and since then the province has been largely free of such sentiments…”

“Until now,” she pointed out sourly.

“…”

“Yes… until now,” Envoy Qiao conceded.

“So the texts written did not mention the trees and mutates for fear others might work out too much of those matters?” Quan Dingxiang asked, his frown deepening.

“Indeed,” the Deng clan elder sighed.

“And mostly, it was a matter for this province,” the Ha clan elder standing nearby added with a slight shrug. “How many young scions here are familiar with the ghost-hopping monkeys of the Meng Mountains, or the dangers of the Zhi Mountains?”

“I would hazard many elders are not,” the same official from the Imperial Envoy’s palace murmured. “That Young Hero Quan is so well-versed in the lore of our province speaks admirably to his broad-minded approach and interests.”

Quan Dingxiang, who had just been listening silently, nodded politely to the official and elders, then turned back to the contaminated herbs again. “Basically, the danger seems to be in heightening emotions… something akin to the way Heart Force techniques work.”

“Which is how that… vixen just embarrassed so many people,” another official scowled.

“The plants have innate Heart Force…” she repeated, shaking herself out of the odd reverie she had just fallen into.

“They mutate minor traits that are similar to its more aggressive applications,” the Deng clan elder agreed. “This is why the Hunter Bureau has kept them sealed. The question of naturally occurring Heart Force techniques…”

-Would be priceless, she mused, staring around again, noting several scions were looking much more interested now.

Quan Dingxiang just sighed again and shook his head.

“Our Deng clan had some knowledge on these matters, but much of it was lost during those events 150 years ago. What was recovered later showed up mostly in the hands of rogue actors who could be traced back to backers on Shan Lai,” the Deng clan elder mused.

“…”

She wanted to agree that that was quite reasonable. There had been a lot of momentum towards the Imperial Court in the last week… and to have a disaster like this in Blue Water City associated with her would undermine that somewhat. However, her intuition towards plotting and the amount of things that had tried to trip her up that were absolutely not the result of some distant off-world power suggested that the root causes of this likely lay closer to home.

-After all, provoking tensions between the Imperial Court and the Azure Astral Authority is not a thing only favourable to the latter, she sighed to herself, wishing JiLao was here and had not been held up by something at the Blue Gate School.

“This is all very well, but pointing blame like this does not solve the immediate problem,” she pointed out.

“Perhaps Young Lady Juni might shed light there,” Deng Guiren added with a faint smile. “The West Flower Picking Town Pavilion has had much success in regards to the Red Pit in recent years.”

“I cannot say I have been there more than once,” Kun Juni replied politely. “I am a clan liaison and the daughter of the Clan Lord, do you think I can just take a summer stroll up there?”

“Who knows what you can do…” Deng Guiren chuckled, glancing at Kun Xingjuan now.

“If you want to fix the immediate problem, destroy every herb here,” Kun Juni said, waving at the assembled group. “Contamination, especially of ginseng from neighbouring valleys north of the Red Pit, does happen and that is usually how it is resolved.”

“Destroy?” a Lu clan scion scoffed. “Some of those herbs are priceless!”

“Is that the only way?” an Imperial School disciple added.

“My senior brother wanted to buy that lotus!” a woman’s voice called over.

“…”

Shaking her head, she walked over to Quan Dingxiang and Lu Seong, trying not to look at the carefully calculated expressions of annoyance on the faces of the Imperial Envoy and his officials.

“What do you think?” she asked.

“I think that they are probably fine sealed up as they are,” Quan Dingxiang said after a long pause. “The Young Lady from the Kun clan is probably right, I expect after these are properly examined, the worst will need to be destroyed, but some of these are expensive herbs and their owners will be very unhappy. I imagine there will be a lot of compensation demanded.”

“Certainly, yes,” Lu Seong grimaced, looking around at the fractious crowd. “Brother JiLao not being here is an inconvenience.”

“He was detained at the Blue Gate School by a matter,” she said by way of explanation.

-And yes, it is an inconvenience, she agreed to herself. A huge one!

“The issue here is really that the local influences are just trying to curry favour and make others look bad,” Lu Seong mused. “The Blue Gate School is really who should be…”

Looking around, she could only agree. The issue was indeed as he was suggesting. Everyone with any kind of status, like Deng Guiren… had an opinion, or an agenda, but nobody was actually offering a solution to be effected.

-Is this what Quan Dingxiang was hinting at when he talked about the nature of the name? This whole thing is just digging itself deeper and deeper… and yet nobody can get enough momentum to do anything.

“And here comes more trouble,” Lu Seong muttered, much more quietly, giving her a subtle nudge in the arm.

She swept her eyes in the direction he was sort of looking in and saw Huang Ryuun, Huang Fuan and a few others coming over, along with Din Huan, flanked by two more elders, both from the Jade Gate Court.

“Indeed,” she agreed with a grimace.

-So if others are being drawn out… why am I not…

Her thoughts trailed off and she had to resist the urge to rub her temples, because, viewed objectively she was also being affected she was sure, just not like a lot of the others.

“Most of those speaking out stridently are men,” she murmured...

Quan Dingxiang and Lu Seong both turned to look at her; the former looking pensive, the latter just looking a bit puzzled.

“The name is a description… a warning….”

“It is…” Quan Dingxiang agreed, looking around as well.

-Is it making me withdraw? she asked herself. The ‘Imperial Princess’ should be commanding, dominant, outgoing… and yet I keep ending up feeling passive… I was undermined by Lingsheng, the Envoy clearly has no respect for me as a person, just using my status for his own ends… as are half the others…

It was a bit of reductive reasoning that she hated. It made her stomach hurt just thinking about it, because she had left the insecure, small girl, who missed her mother so terribly and was hopelessly adrift in the myriad shifting sands of the Imperial Court, far, far behind…

-Except I haven’t, a part of her murmured, and something here is dragging that out. The people who want to be the focus are being more… I… and others are withdrawing…

She looked around a second time, more carefully. The various scions with something to prove were being pushy: Deng Guiren, Ha Caofang, the Huang clan, those from the Imperial continent – all of them were arguing for their view of who was responsible, why, what should be done to the perpetrators…

The answer was there, tantalizingly close, and yet it just wasn’t within her means to grasp somehow… and that was infuriating in a different way.

She looked at Lu Seong and sighed again, pulling out a communication talisman.

“JiLao…”

“What is it?” Huang JiLao’s voice echoed in her head.

“Is there anyone in the Blue Gate School who isn’t an elder in the Deng or Ha clans who knows about blood ling trees?” she asked.

“…”

“Yes,” Huang JiLao replied after a moment’s delay. “Why?”

“Well, there is a small problem at the auction the Imperial Envoy has arranged.”

“…”

“We will be there shortly,” JiLao replied with a faintly resigned tone.

“You and…?”

“The expert in question is the vice-headmistress, who I was already meeting,” Huang JiLao replied. “We will be there in a few moments… anything else I should know?”

“The daughter of the Sky Song Sovereign showed up, unhappy she wasn’t invited,” she replied with a mental grimace.

“May their nine generations—! I told that idiot Qiao Cheng that they should just send it to every major sect,” Huang JiLao hissed.

“Can you ask her a few questions?”

“…”

“Yes,” Huang JiLao replied.

“What is the best way to neutralize their effects?”

There was a short pause before Huang JiLao spoke again: “One herb or many?”

“Over twenty,” she answered.

“You cannot seal them, so split them up. Move them out of soul sense range of each other. Apparently multiple herbs afflicted by the corruption can act like a feng shui formation. Passively they just disrupt matters… do any have awakened spiritual wisdom?”

“…”

She turned to look at the herbs, then at Lu Seong and Quan Dingxiang.

“Do any of those herbs have awakened spiritual wisdom?”

Quan Dingxiang stared at her, then at the herbs, then at her again and clapped a hand to his forehead.

“I am sorry, Princess Lian, I have made a terrible blunder… I know how we should be able to buy time at least.”

“Yes, they do,” she replied to Huang JiLao.

“In that case, split them apart, move them far away, stun the ones with spiritual wisdom directly. You will not be able to seal them, because the soul sense fusing into them is closer to a kind of intent and basically immune to all forms of suppression. Herbs with awareness will work to disrupt your ability to ‘fix’ them, because they are touched by the views of the original soul sense from the blood ling trees…”

“And that means?” she asked, with a sinking feeling, noting from the corner of her eye that Quan Dingxiang had hurried over to several disciples from the Pill Sovereign Sect and was having a hurried, quiet conversation with them, pointing at several herbs.

“Princess Lian, it seems that matters have somewhat gotten away from what was planned!” She found Huang Ryuun, the Imperial Envoy, Din Huan and two senior disciples from the Imperial School had come over.

“Shut up, I am talking to my Teacher,” she said; she was lying brazenly, but with soul sense obfuscated nobody, not even the Envoy, would know unless they called Dun Jian right there and then.

“…”

“Still there?” Huang JiLao asked, because she had cut off the speaking communication momentarily.

“Yes, sorry, I was interrupted by Huang Ryuun,” she replied flatly, speaking out loud for once and noting Huang Ryuun flinch slightly at being called out by name.

“Bah…” JiLao grunted. “Anyway, the herbs with wisdom will be trying to manipulate you all so that you cannot deal with them. Lady Ling Tao expects that all sorts of aspersions and theories will be flying around, yet nobody will actually be that focused on dealing with the herbs themselves…”

“Yes,” she murmured, “That is pretty spot on.”

“In that case, it is doubly important you split them up and let nobody interfere with them, we will look at them when we get there in a few minutes,” Huang JiLao added.

“Okay,” she sent back.

The transmission cut off a moment later.

“Princess Lian, If I might—”

“Excuse me a moment,” she murmured, holding up a hand to stop Qiao Honghui speaking, “Young Hero Quan?”

“Yes?” Quan Dingxiang asked.

“You have reached some realisation?”

“I have, I was foolish before, the solution is deceptively simple, if not stated outright in either of the texts I have been thinking of.”

“You are confident?” she added, a touch suggestively.

“I am sure that this will not hinder matters,” Quan Dingxiang said, glancing at the various dignitaries behind her, then at her with a slight frown.

Behind Quan Dingxiang she could see the disciples moving herb pots away from each other and grouping them towards the far side of the garden into a few different categories.

“In that case, Young Hero Quan, I will await your good news,” she declared.

“Yes… we will,” the Imperial Envoy agreed. “We will of course provide Young Hero Quan every assistance. Now… Princess Lian?”

“I shall strive to do my utmost,” Quan Dingxiang murmured, bowing respectfully to her and then to the Imperial Envoy.

“Imperial Envoy Qiao, esteemed guests of both this province and our homelands across the ocean!” she said, raising her voice and ignoring Envoy Qiao. “Young Hero Quan has made a breakthrough in how to manage this vile sabotage.”

“Hooray!”

“Senior Quan!”

“As expected…!”

Various shouts of support and appreciation echoed from the crowd still gathered around, as she swept her gaze across the Envoy and his officials.

“As such, I feel that the best thing we can do is provide Young Hero Quan space to work. Imperial Envoy Qiao, Honoured Elders, Young Nobles, shall we perhaps move to viewing what remains of this grand display… before some other freak plot of misfortune befalls it?”

“Ah… Imperial Princess Lian takes the words right from my mouth,” Envoy Qiao murmured, bowing politely, mostly, she was sure to hide the annoyed look on his face.

“In the absence of your nephew, perhaps you and the other organizers might take the lead?” she said, finally setting her trap. “With such eminent persons from the Huang and Din clans in attendance it seems only fitting that our Imperial Court’s highest official show off the riches of his province with the help of the most erudite elders of its clans.”

Envoy Qiao, who had certainly been about to foist off the task to someone else, actually looked up at her in surprise.

“I fear that I have not the—”

“Nonsense, you must have a very learned view of these lands; after all, you have supported many opinions in what has been discussed just now,” she insisted, proffering him her umbrella directly. “I will not take no for an answer.”

-And you can carry my umbrella like the servant you are.

“What solution is it exactly, that Young Hero Quan is effecting?” a nearby official asked.

“The one so wisely espoused by Deng Guiren,” she replied drily, waiting for the Imperial Envoy to take the umbrella. “I cannot pretend to be as learned as Young Hero Quan who has made a lifetime of study in such matters, but there was something about the harmony inherent within the name of that accursed pit and inauspicious feng shui… then he started talking about how spirit herbs view the world, and I must confess that I just asked him if he was certain and then instructed him to get on with it.”

“…”

The others, Lu Seong included, stared at her slightly askance.

-This seat can do the princess ‘thing’ just as well as anyone else, she smirked to herself.

“Well, Envoy Qiao?” she murmured, all but shoving the umbrella in his face.

Left with no other choice, Envoy Qiao took her umbrella and stood, holding it over her.

“Lu Seong?” she murmured. “Could you inform everyone else?”

“Ah… oh… yes,” Lu Seong coughed and nodded, gripping a talisman in his fist.

“EVERYONE! YOUR ATTENTION PLEASE! IT SEEMS THAT… YOUNG HERO QUAN HAS MADE A BREAKTHROUGH! THERE IS NO FURTHER DANGER FROM THIS ATTEMPTED SUBVERSION, THE IMPERIAL PRINCESS HOPES YOU WILL RETURN TO ENJOYING THE AUCTION AND EXHIBITIONS, ALTHOUGH THE GARDENS REMAIN OFF-LIMITS WHILE YOUNG HERO QUAN COMPLETES HIS WORK.”

Few in the immediate crowd would have failed to already draw that conclusion, but his voice carried far enough to probably reach the foyer, courtesy of the talisman used. Applause and salutations for her, for Quan Dingxiang and generally for the matter being resolved erupted in a wave through the garden, much as she had hoped.

“Ahem… that may be a little hasty,” Envoy Qiao frowned.

“Do you have more to add?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Well, there were some things mentioned by Young Noble Ryuun, before we came over; records of the Myriad Herb Association … perhaps some others should assist—”

“Young Hero Quan, do you require any further assistance from the Imperial Envoy or Huang Ryuun?” she called over to him in her most earnest manner.

“…”

Quan Dingxiang turned to stare at them, then bowed in polite refusal.

“It seems he is fine,” she said, smiling apologetically at both of them. “Perhaps if matters do continue to stagnate Young Noble Ryuun’s kind offer will be of help, but for now, it seems only fair to give Young Hero Quan his moment, would you not agree?”

“Hmmm, yes,” Huang Ryuun agreed, his face impassive. “Your Imperial Highness speaks wisely.”

“Yes, let us see how Young Hero Quan does,” the Huang elder murmured, stroking his beard.

“In that case, I see no reason why we cannot get started with the real reason I am here,” she said with a bright smile. “Let us go see these rare and unusual artefacts that purport to show the mystery of this province.”

“We will go to the pagodas?” Qiao Honghui asked, leadingly.

“I think we should start with the galleries around the courtyard,” she mused, looking at the crowds still milling about.

-That buys JiLao and Quan Dingxiang more time without idiots breathing down their necks and also means we won’t run into Lingsheng somewhere in that green, sodden maze, she reflected.

“That…” the Ha clan elder frowned.

“Is there an issue?” she asked.

“Oh… no, not at all, it is just that the majority of interesting objects are within the pagodas,” one of the officials pointed out.

“I… see,” she mused. “Well, people went to the effort of presenting them, so it seems only fair to save the best until the end,” she mused.

“As your Imperial Highness wishes,” the official replied, waving to two guards to hurry off ahead of them, no doubt to clear the halls as they went.

“Lead on, Envoy Qiao,” she added, waving for him to lead the way.

The Imperial Envoy shot her a faint look of displeasure then walked off, holding the umbrella for her.

The others fell in behind in a sort of gaggle of hushed conversation that she mostly tuned out as he led her across the gardens and into the right-hand hall, which was usually one of the rentable meeting and reception halls for the Golden Dragon. She hadn’t actually been that sure what to expect, not after hearing the discussion of the caves and ruins beneath the mountains the night before… but what was on display was… really rather underwhelming, she had to admit.

“These are all styles relating to bygone eras…” she noted, looking around at the various pieces of sculpture and carvings displayed around the room, along with old pots, jade slabs, artefacts and such.

“They are,” Envoy Qiao agreed, nodding to a guard they had passed on the way in, who promptly took up station by the door, effectively closing off the gallery. “The periphery of Yin Eclipse has been occupied at various points in the past. These carvings on the left, for example…”

“—Are in the style of the early years of the Second Dun Emperor,” she finished for him. “I have seen the Crown Prince’s palace, this style is a bit worse than that.”

“Well… yes,” he conceded as the others in the group fanned out through the hall. “However, they are a pivotal piece of evidence when it comes to the influence of our Dun clan on this land and its rightful place within the rule of the Imperial Court.”

“Perhaps,” she agreed, turning to look at the other side of the hall. “Yet that is the Shan… and that…”

She trailed off, because the style of the twin blue dragons coiling around the throne that had caught her eye was familiar in a way she had not expected.

“Isn’t this a copy of the imperial throne?” she asked, walking over to the crystalline form of the chair which had had its back smashed out at some point.

“…”

Qiao Honghui looked awkward for a moment, then collected himself, following her over.

“It is in the style of the Shan Dynasty; an inferior product, certainly, to the one passed down as a trophy by the Shen, then re-imagined by our Imperial Ancestor, Emperor Azure Tyrant.”

“I see,” she murmured, running her hand across the crystalline blue rock, feeling the smooth grain beneath her hands.

It was tempting to buy it then and there, but she knew there would be no way anyone would dare possesses such a thing anywhere close to the seat of imperial power. It would be seen as either an attempt to mock the Imperial Seat, or attempting to rise above one’s station. Neither of those things were charges you wanted levelled at you by the powers that orbited immediately around the Imperial Throne itself. All you could do was buy it then gift it to the Emperor.

“The owner suggested it belonged to the Duke who ruled this province back then. It was recovered with these various goods from a tomb believed to be associated with the last Shen Governor of the province,” Envoy Qiao explained both to her and the others who were looking on from the sidelines.

“I wonder who provided that,” she mused.

“It… came from the imperial collection,” Envoy Qiao replied, a bit more quietly.

“…”

-Of course it did, she reflected, not sure why she expected any other reply.

Shaking her head, she moved on, looking at a few more statues, most of which appeared to be of old ancestors of long-lost clans or guardian figures from ancient shrines. The only interesting one was a statue of a venerable man with a beard, reaching up to grasp the sky.

“Sky Seizing Venerable,” she read the inscription on the archaic statue.

“An ancient expert who stood at the top of his era, Imperial Highness,” the Deng clan elder interjected. “He is an ancient ancestor of my Deng clan. We were invited to partake in the reclamation by your imperial grandfather because of our own ancient links to the province.”

“Are there any objects not associated with some old ghosts or villains?” she remarked drily, walking on towards the end of the hall, then stopping at another statue which was odd…

“Who is this?” she asked, staring up at the two-metre-tall seated man with a bushy, Confucian-looking beard, his robe adorned with foxes chasing flowers, who was positioned to look down at something.

The statue itself had no inscription and she could see someone had made a spirited effort to chop the head off, as a hand-sized slice was just visible through a part of the beard. Sweeping her gaze across the rest of him… her eye fell on the talisman carved on the old man’s hat.

“Tai Kai?”

“Ah… it is a statue to that old villain,” the Imperial Envoy frowned.

“…”

The Ha clan elder frowned slightly at that comment, she noticed, but said nothing overt.

“Do tell?” she murmured.

“Tai Kai was a Dao Ascendant who ran a cult during the Shan Dynasty,” the Imperial Envoy shrugged. “He was known to consort with foxes and all manner of demons, not an upstanding cultivator at all.”

“It isn’t that Tai clan, is it?” she asked, looking at him sideways, because there was a Tai clan that sprang to mind… except calling one of them an ‘old villain’…

“’That’ Tai clan?” Envoy Qiao frowned.

“Tai Yanmei…” she murmured, recalling the name of the woman who was currently terrorizing the Heavenly Hundred ranking of noble scions across all the major influences of the great starfields in their corner of the higher heavens.

“Aha…” the Deng clan elder shook his head, laughing lightly. The Din clan elder just stroked his beard and smiled, although it never really reached his eyes she noted.

“No, not the same Tai clan,” the Din clan elder murmured after a moment. “Not at all.”

She had to resist the urge to stare at him, because that ‘denial’ did not, in fact, inspire her confidence.

“There were some other artefacts associated with ‘Tai’ that I observed through the collections,” Lu Seong, who had been following along with her, interjected from nearby, “in the galleries across the gardens...”

“It is a common character, many clans have probably risen with it,” the Imperial Envoy replied, somewhat dismissively. “It is an important moon rune for example, relating to the ‘Balance of Heaven’.”

“I see…” she mused, staring up at the old man, still trying to work out why she found his face oddly familiar in some way.

-Maybe it’s just the styling, there are a lot of Confucian statues around the Imperial Palace?

“That cult was associated with Yin Eclipse?” Huang Ryuun remarked, also coming over.

“This land has always had a difficult relationship with the righteous seats of power,” the Imperial Envoy remarked respectfully. “Our Dun dynasty has fared better than many previous in that regard though.”

“…”

Giving the Envoy a sideways look, she walked on, looking at the other statues, not getting involved in that conversation, finally stopping before a large hand that held up a lantern.

“I must concede this is odd,” she mused to Lu Seong, who was still with her.

“It is…” Lu Seong agreed.

“Huh… they put that in here,” Ling Yu came to stand beside her as well, staring up at the lantern with a frown.

“You know it?” she asked.

“Originally, it was dug up from somewhere near Teng Lin Town,” Kun Juni said, also coming over. “Later, it was repurposed into an altar piece of the Ancestral Shrine to the ‘Golden Soul’ within the Lin clan compound there.”

“It was associated with the Ling School?” Lu Seong mused.

“Lin School,” Kun Juni corrected him absently.

“Ah, sorry,” Lu Seong nodded. “You certainly know a lot about these matters, Young Lady Kun.”

“I had a teacher in the clan when I was younger who was very interested in these ruins,” Kun Juni elaborated. “He was fascinated with their origins, and as part of my responsibilities I had to learn various Easten languages and scripts. To return to the original point, however – yes, that lantern was associated with the Lin clan until it was ruined.”

“Since then, it’s been in the grand atrium of the Imperial Envoy’s palace,” Ling Yu added. “The lantern usually holds an imperial seal.”

“…”

“It certainly fits the theme,” she mused, noting that neither young woman had sounded hugely enthused.

“That one over there is another ancestor of the Deng clan,” Ling Yu added, pointing to another old statue given pride of place over a display of various jade slabs.

In fact, most of the statues were old ancestors of imperial clans as it turned out. The showpiece of the whole room was a founding inscription for a city that predated Blue Water City within the province by several hundred thousand years, dedicating it on behalf of the Ji clan to the then emperor.

The further hall along that side of the garden was much the same, just with smaller items. The most interesting, if it could be called that, was a set of nine ancient stones of different minerals, each carved with a subtly different symbol on one side and a peony flower on the other. There was no real aura about them, until you picked them up, at which point there was a subtle weight to them that immediately put her in mind of something to do with divination.

Most of the ancient artefacts, though, had long since had their power sapped by the suppression of Yin Eclipse. Even so, they were all displayed in such a way as to leave the admirer in little doubt that the current powers in Yin Eclipse on the part of the Imperial Court had deep roots in the province that might even predate the Azure Astral Authority in a few cases.

Not really interested in how impressive various clans’ ancient ancestors looked, or in hearing about how they had done this and that to elevate Blue Water Province, after a few more minutes of looking she had Envoy Qiao lead them on to the next set of exhibition halls on the far side of the courtyard.

That side was split into four floors. The first was just a gallery of various pots and other oddments that had come out of the rivers, along with things like ‘Life and Death’ scrolls and some ancient portraits of battles from the time before the Blue Water Sage had returned spiritual cultivation to much of the inland region of the continent. The second floor was more of the same, as it turned out – simply taking you further back in time.

The third floor was split into two, the first part being a long gallery of various carvings.

Standing looking at the salvaged wall carvings, she eventually had to ask the question that had been plaguing her for some time – almost since the first hall and the statues in fact.

“If these have come from Yin Eclipse, from within the suppression zone… what was the point in bringing them out?”

“Mostly, it is so learned scholars can study them in safety,” Qiao Honghui replied politely, if slightly condescendingly, as if the answer should have been obvious. “Some were brought out to sell… others for curiosity, like the one at the end…”

She glanced at it again – it had caught her attention when they entered the hall – then looked away. A few of those with her had already gravitated towards it since she looked at it earlier. It was masterful, certainly; whoever had picked out the designs had done so in a way that drew upon the natural shapes of the rock, so that it never quite showed the same thing twice. However, if you stared at it too much, you just ended up getting a headache.

“Ah, that one,” Huang Ryuun, who had also come up, nodded. “An interesting thing, it would make a nice visualisation aid for feng shui.”

“If Young Noble Ryuun is interested, I am sure the seller could be convinced,” a Ling clan elder, following the pair she assumed to be Ling Yu’s brothers, spoke up.

“Perhaps,” Ryuun agreed, tapping his finger to his lips. “Perhaps…”

“Does it not instil some interest in you, Your Highness?” Deng Guiren added, glancing at her.

“It is certainly appealing,” she conceded, aware that Ling Yu had a somewhat annoyed expression. “As others have said, a useful thing for increasing your comprehensions on natural feng shui.”

The next hall beyond the wall carvings held more pots, but, in this case, ones that were genuinely worth admiring. All of them were made of arborundum of various colours and forms, again associated mostly with old powers of Eastern Azure now lost to past aeonspans. The showpiece was a ‘Xiao’ symbol, of all things, which got a lot of interest from the scions of the Imperial continent following along.

“Is there nothing regarding the other inhabitants of the land?” she asked at last, looking back down the hall.

“Other inhabitants?” Envoy Qiao asked.

“The Easten Tribes, the Yin Eclipse Peoples… the North Fissure cave people.”

“Ah… you have read some older books I see,” he nodded agreeably. “There are some objects presented in the last hall along from this, but compared to even the most meagre pot here, little holds the eye or the fancy.”

“Oh…” she frowned, then questioned: “Is there not a fourth floor?”

“It is being prepared for the banquet later,” an official clarified.

“For the start of the New Year’s celebrations,” another added with a bow.

“…”

-In all the mess below I totally forgot that was a thing, she sighed, staring out the window for a long moment, feeling stupid.

“If you like, we could progress to looking at the pagodas now?” the elder from the Deng clan suggested politely.

“I see no harm in looking at these other things, the pieces of heritage of the local folk,” she said blandly. “I have seen enough statues of wise old men as it is.”

“…”

The Envoy actually sighed, but waved for her to follow him. A few from the group with her also followed – Lu Seong and some of his friends mostly, and surprisingly a few locals including Kun Juni and Ling Yu.

Much as the Envoy had implied though, the hall was rather underwhelming, being mostly dominated by a pale grey stone stele, a half-metre tall, that stood on a raised plinth in the middle of the room.

There were a few talismans, carved in odd ways but really just talismans, on a table as you entered. Along the main wall a collection of pots in odd, cruder styles decorated with pictures of mountains, stars and strange symbols had been arranged, interspersed with some crude stone carvings of monkeys wearing hats and a squirrel holding its hands up, perhaps to support what might have been a bowl. A few jade and spirit wood tablets in Easten script hung at the end.

Walking around the stele in the middle, she came back to the front and considered it pensively.

‘And if you go chase— squirrels through the shadows on the——’

She read the inscription, which was framed by a young girl in ancient-looking garb chasing a squirrel that was holding a bottle and scattering what looked like pills. Someone had slashed two sections out and made a spirited attempt at cutting the stele in half, partially bisecting the squirrel.

“The locals have odd beliefs about the mountains,” the Deng clan elder explained. “One is that certain animals are sacred. The squirrel guides, the monkey guards, the dog hunts, the eagle smites… wild spirit beasts of those four are treated with reverence by them. It is mostly superstition though.”

“Like primitive guardian beasts,” Lu Seong mused.

“Yes, they are a crude appropriation of the Celestial Guardian Beasts,” the elder of the Din clan agreed, frowning with obvious displeasure.

“Is that a piece of a sword wedged into it?” she asked, peering more closely at the cut, where a shard of metal about as big as her palm was buried.

“It is,” the Imperial Envoy nodded.

“The stone is quite famous,” Deng Guiren added. “If your Imperial Highness is interested—”

She waved a hand for him to continue.

“The story goes that a demon squirrel haunted a fair companion of the Blue Water Sage such that he was enraged and smote the first effigy of it he saw upon walking into a village, so disgusted was he with the backwards ways of the indigenous folk and their rejection of the Spiritual Path. The sword fragment is perhaps more valuable than the stele, but has not been removed, as I understand it, because it was an artefact of the Blue Water Sage and might hold some of his intent—”

“I’ll be honest,” Ling Yu, who was standing at the side with her arms folded, head slightly on one side, cut in. “That sounds like bollocks.”

“And you know more about this?” Deng Guiren frowned, clearly not enthused at the interruption.

“The Blue Water Sage was known to be a kind and patient teacher, who embraced local customs and mended bridges where others, earlier, had sought only conquest. He helped the people elevate themselves, not by denigrating their old beliefs, but by helping them to find a way to fit spiritual beliefs into them,” Ling Yu replied, folding her arms.

“Your teacher has some views,” the elder from the Din clan said, a touch condescendingly.

The Imperial Envoy coughed lightly and added. “Well, there are many tales, even if it is within the living memory of some, who can really say for sure…”

“…”

The Din and Deng clan elders nodded in agreement.

“The person who taught me was there, when Lu Fu Tao walked these lands,” Ling Yu replied archly. “It was only thirty thousand-odd years ago, not sometime in the last aeonspan!”

“…”

The Din elder glared at her, but clearly decided that getting into an argument with her was not worth it, so settled for a shrug and a muttered comment about ‘speaking some words’.

“In any case, this is about all there is… that isn’t in the pagodas,” the Imperial Envoy added, moving to change the topic, with a look around the hall.

Nodding absently, she walked another circuit of the room, considering the old things with a frown… not because they held any real interest, the Envoy was right there, they were just crude, mundane things made by common folk, now displayed a bit mawkishly, but so she could contact JiLao again without attracting much attention.

“Have you arrived?” she asked.

“Yes, we got here a while ago…” JiLao replied, sounding a bit hesitant.

“Is there a problem?” she murmured.

“Kinda… maybe… Quan Dingxiang has done the right thing, but there may be quite a few contaminated herbs that slipped by the initial investigation according to Ling Tao.”

“Is there any problem with going in to look at the pagodas?”

“…”

There was a pause, then JiLao replied with a negative.

“In that case, I will head down,” she sent back. “You may end up with Huang Ryuun or someone from the Myriad Herb—”

“Already dealing with them,” JiLao replied, sounding a bit resigned. “Thankfully they do actually know what they are doing, it’s mostly just the two from the Huang clan who are being a nuisance.”

“If you can free yourself, you probably should come look at this stuff,” she added.

“I know… especially in light of what held me up earlier,” JiLao agreed.

“Is there a problem… Princess Lian?” Envoy Qiao asked, walking over to her and bowing slightly.

“Huang JiLao will be joining us momentarily,” she replied. “We will go down and meet him and then look at these pagodas you are so eager to show off.”

“Of course,” Envoy Qiao replied, waving for her to follow him.

Ignoring his hand gesture, she walked past him and headed back out to the other room, where there was a heated debate going on about the various interpretations of the Xiao symbol among those who had come along with her from various influential imperial powers.

Ignoring them as well, because she couldn’t care less about what they actually did, she headed back down the hall and was almost at the exit before most of the group realised she was departing. There were a few calls for her to come look at the symbol, but she was fairly sure that her Imperial Uncle Dun Jian was not interested in those. Heading back down the stairs, not actually moving that fast, she was met by a slightly damp Huang JiLao at the bottom.

“Young Noble JiLao,” Envoy Qiao muttered, half bowing to him.

She glanced at the Envoy, then at the umbrella, now closed, that he was still carrying, then just walked straight out into the rain.

The Envoy flinched behind her and moved much faster than usual, drawing the umbrella and shading her before she got more than a tiny bit damp. As they walked on, followed by JiLao, she was aware of Envoy Qiao shooting her a nasty look that she deigned not to notice, for now at least.

“How has the matter with the blood ling herbs progressed?” she asked.

“It is under control,” JiLao said, to which she just nodded agreeably.

“Good news,” Envoy Qiao added. “It is Young Hero Quan’s achievement, certainly."

“Should we get a guide?” he then asked.

“Hmm… unnecessary,” she replied, glancing at the group behind her. “Inheritance Daughter Kun, I am lead to understand you and the Young Lady Kun have some local understanding?”

“We do,” both murmured politely, not really looking at each other.

“If you would escort us to the first pagoda… Snow Jade?” she asked.

“With respect,” Kun Juni murmured, bowing slightly, “the best person to provide such an escort on this side of the mountain would be Teng Danbei.”

She turned to Teng Danbei, the younger of the two scions from the Teng clan in attendance, who was standing a bit further back, looking like he had just seen a tribulation cloud appear unheralded with his name on it.

“Young Lord Danbei?” she asked.

“It would be my honour,” Teng Danbei replied, collecting himself and hurrying over.

As it turned out, Teng Danbei was better informed about the valleys and odd places of the eastern side of Yin Eclipse than she had anticipated. He also focused on talking about ruins, which really seemed to be his thing, she came to understand. He pointed out interesting plants as well, and answered a few questions for others as they walked along, but really, he wanted to talk about ruins.

-Did she do that deliberately? Because of our conversations over the dinner yesterday…? she mused, glancing at Kun Juni. She really is the political one of the pair… is that why all the favour seems to be aimed at the Inheritance Daughter?

Because Danbei took a surprisingly circuitous, if rather informative, route through the gardens to the pagoda, it took them almost ten minutes to reach the actual pagoda, raised up on a rock platform to look out over that whole area of the wider gardens.

“This… pagoda is meant to represent Snow Jade,” Teng Danbei said, by way of explanation. “It is perhaps the second oddest of the great peaks, after Thunder Crest, which is forever shrouded in lightning.”

“How does it get that name?” she asked.

“Because it is shrouded in an eternal blizzard and the snows on its peak are so dense that they can be carved like jade and take weeks to melt, even when taken down into the jungles below,” Teng Danbei answered. “It is almost impossible to get up there though, because the conditions are so harsh that almost no Golden Core cultivator, or anyone suppressed to Golden Core, can survive long without very expensive talismans.”

“The cold saps qi,” Kun Xingjuan added, “breaks it down somehow, so pills, talismans, everything you take up there… even storage devices start to fail after a time.”

“Indeed,” Teng Danbei agreed. “The mountain has some terrible Yin affinity that devours everything it touches over time.”

“That will not be an issue here I hope,” a female cultivator joked from the back.

“Ha-ha… no, I think not,” Teng Danbei agreed, inviting them to follow him up the last flight of steps.

The interior of the pagoda’s ground floor held items much like the halls had. The most eye-catching things, really, were several short blades, daggers, a spearhead and arrows carved from blocks of deep red and white stone. A block of each type of stone, which according to Teng Danbei was sometimes recovered out of the rivers or found fused into the walls of caves, was presented with the items.

In terms of durability it was apparently second only to materials like arborundum or solar iron, which were immutable to forces below the Venerable Step. That claim was met with some initial scepticism until a Dao grade treasure was presented and the blade chipped easily by a white stone dagger.

Why it was not more popular or widely known was immediately made clear when she tried to send some qi into that dagger and her qi and intent were scattered like badly woven threads.

“Is there anything on the upper floor?” she asked, noting the stairs.

“Oh… that is again just storage for the gardens outside,” an official added, “a place to store the containers for the herbs and some formations to keep things in check and provide security for the auction…”

“The central pagoda, on the ornamental lake, has collections of exceptional treasures from across the whole mountain range,” Envoy Qiao interjected.

“I see…” she nodded. “In that case… shall we head to the next one?”

There was nobody especially familiar with the area around the North Fissure Flats, as it transpired, so Teng Danbei also guided them through that region. The pagoda for Fissure Peaks, the immense cleft mountain to the north-west of the Great Mount was… actually much less interesting than the Snow Jade one had been, as it turned out.

The mix of objects on the lower floor was mostly just various vessels, matched, she presumed, using the knowledge of the designs, some weapons that were clearly those of ancient cultivators and several rare, Dao Step beast cores. The showpiece there was a slab of glassy black stone engraved with flowers and carved into the shape of a kind of door. She could feel ‘something’ off it, but what exactly it was defied any understanding she could level at it and apparently even the person presenting it didn’t know, merely hoping that someone could trade knowledge on what it might be.

The next pagoda Kun Juni led them to. It was the one for Thunder Crest, the giant peak to the west of the Great Mount which was apparently responsible in part for the vile, soul sense-obfuscating weather.

The ground floor of that pagoda held more pottery, engraved with various patterns of leaves and flowers, a lot of it inlaid with arborundum. There were several weapons made of golden-copper metal, which was interesting because any damage they inflicted physically was apparently mirrored on your Nascent Soul. It was also utterly immune to enchantment and the few attempts at soul binding such objects had led, according to the seller who attested to having witnessed those attempts in person, to agonizing death or a permanently crippled soul.

The East Fury pagoda, again, held a very similar selection of items on the ground floor.

Some more pots, plates and cutlery of the indestructible variety, a pair of short blades made of stone that repelled qi, a worn statue of a woman holding up a sword in one hand and a book in the other… and half a bowl that Deng Guiren assured her was some kind of ancient spirit furnace. The only other thing of interest were several figurines on a table, each about thirty centimetres high, showing men and women in armour with unreadable symbols carved on their foreheads.

They were led to the South Grove pagoda by Ha Caofang, who again just rattled on about ruins, having clearly picked up that that was the ‘theme’.

That pagoda was about the same as the others – pots, odd everyday items associated with the ruins there, all of them quite spectacular it had to be said, several sets of ancient artefact weapons recovered from earlier eras’ failed explorations and one very corroded golden-copper sword made from the mysterious metal that did ‘soul damage’.

The final pagoda of the outer ones was Golden Promise Spire, which a disciple from the Ji clan, Ji Xiaofang, escorted them to. By this point, the pots were expected, so she gave little thought to most of them and gravitated towards the other odd items on display. One was a bowl carved with the same ‘feng shui’ technique she had come to recognise, giving the illusion of shifting clouds flowing around its interior as you looked into it. The only weapon on display was a broken bow, crafted from dark wood, inlaid with patterns of swirling golden thread.

The final object was… a bracelet made of a mellow gold, carved with beautiful flowers. Picking it up gave an immediate sense of gentle calm, allowing her to recognise that it was, at least partially, made of ‘Soul Gold’, a metal much sought-after in making high grade artefacts due to the way it helped a wielder soul bind an object. Eastern Azure had no known natural lodes of it – though Crown Princess Miao was rumoured in certain circles to have access to a source of it... which, with this being exhibited here and Dun Miao being the ‘patron’ of the Golden Promise School, she suddenly had a strong suspicion may be somewhere in Yin Eclipse.

A quick check of the price on the bracelet told her it cost one hundred Heavenly Jades, which was...

Putting the bracelet down with a soft sigh and looking out at the tall, lantern-lit pagoda with its subsidiary spires, on the lake in the middle of the garden, she turned to Envoy Qiao.

“So, that leaves the lake pagoda?”

“It does,” he agreed, his eyes also lingering on the bracelet.

“Well, lead on,” she said drily. “I am sure there are those outside eager for the whole place to open up again.”

“Although how many can afford half of the things sold in these…” Ha Caofang remarked, also glancing towards the bracelet, which drew a few laughs.

Shaking his head, Envoy Qiao escorted them back out of the pagoda and into the rain again. The path to the central pagoda, situated on an island in the middle of the ornamental lake – now much decreased in size to accommodate the spirit herb gardens – wound back the way they had come somewhat, crossing over several smaller canals before arriving at the bridge.

“There are two displays here,” Envoy Qiao said, leading them over the bridge, past a pair of guards dressed in imperial colours who saluted them smartly, before finally bringing them all to a stop in the paved area before the island pagoda that usually held some tables, shaded by ornamental trees.

“These spirit trees—” he paused to gesture somewhat dramatically to the dozen flowering trees ringing the courtyard, “—are the first. They have been planted here for your enjoyment, showing off some of the very rarest natural treasures Yin Eclipse – and this province – possesses.”

On the left, the one that immediately caught her eye was a peach tree sporting half a dozen half-ripe peaches nestled amid patchy blossoms: a reminder, if one were needed, that most of these trees could flower and fruit simultaneously.

“Is that a genuine peacock peach tree!?” Huang Fuan, who had appeared at some point, exclaimed, noticing the same thing.

“Yes,” Envoy Qiao replied, as others hurried over with Huang Fuan to admire it. “The owner has put the six peaches currently on the tree up for bidding, to be delivered when they ripen. These terms are the same for all the other trees.”

“That is indeed generous,” Lu Seong murmured.

Looking around, she had to admit he was right. The peach tree was eye-catching, but all those present were desirable in some way.

“Crystal fruit, a spring breath pomegranate… ten thunders walnut…” Lu Seong muttered, turning in a circle.

“Not to mention two other varieties of Immortal peach, a plum tree, a mulberry and…” Huang JiLao agreed, also looking around.

“What is with that cherry tree?” she asked, because even in the lantern light and the light rain it was hard to look at.

“Oh, that’s from the Ha clan estates,” Ling Yu, who was still standing nearby, said blandly. “It’s a thing one of their old ancestors left for them as far as I know. They have a courtyard with a dozen or so. The flowers make for very strange wine that can get anyone, no matter their realm, equally drunk apparently.”

“Is that all?” Huang JiLao asked, looking at it with interest.

“Oh… no, as an alchemical reagent it removes any kind of hostility for a pill based on rank. If you grind down the cherry pits and use them in pill refinement for say… an Immortal grade pill, a proper Mortal could eat it like it was totally harmless and get all the benefits.”

“That...” she stared at the younger woman.

“Oh, the downside… the trees are terribly hard to bring to fruit and the flesh, while edible, apparently tastes like the worst thing anyone eating them can imagine…”

“And each of these trees grows in Yin Eclipse?” a woman from the Nine Moons sect standing nearby asked, looking around, taking in the riot of blossoms.

“Each of these trees, aside perhaps from the Ha estate cherry tree, has descended originally from a cutting or seed of a tree or grove that exists within the confines of the mountain range,” Envoy Qiao confirmed.

“—I absolutely have to have one of those peaches!” a youth from the Imperial School declared, loud enough to cut through the general hubbub. “Anyone who competes, I will show no mercy!”

“I cannot help but think that showing these to this lot… while the blood ling’s effects are still there, may backfire,” Kun Juni murmured.

“…”

“You might have a point,” Huang JiLao said drily. “The effects of the peacock peach alone are enough for people to start drawing weapons…”

He was not wrong there. All ‘Immortal Peaches’ helped restore damaged vitality or lost longevity. The peacock variety were additionally sought-after mostly to either help promote your spirit root, or, in the case of the pit, if refined into the dantian, to help strengthen a Golden Core by one or two revolutions during formation. Even if consumed after that point, they had a chance to purify your Core, making them ludicrously expensive to purchase on the open market.

“…”

She watched the various other cultivators argue over the peaches for a moment, then went back to looking at the other trees.

“Huh…” Huang JiLao remarked, also turning his attention away from them.

“What is it?” she asked.

“That tree on the far side…”

She followed his gaze and found it, nestled between the pomegranate and the crystal fruit tree – a mango tree.

“It’s a mango?” she blinked, spotting several oval, golden-green fruit, each about the size of her fist.

“It is…” Huang JiLao mused, walking over to it.

She followed him, mostly ignored by the others… except for Ling Yu and Kun Juni, who also came along with her.

“You know it?” Ling Yu asked, looking up at the fruiting branch above them.

“Is this a golden soul mango?” Huang JiLao asked, brushing his fingers across the leaves. “The purity of the qi within it is remarkable.”

“It is,” Ling Yu nodded.

“…”

She was glad of her experience with treasures, because in truth, she had never seen an actual golden soul mango tree. Even the Imperial Court did not have one as far as she was aware, as they were notoriously hard to nurture in captivity.

Checking the information provided on the tree itself, she found that the ‘quality’ was listed as eleven-star grade, but no mention of its actual realm was given.

-That would make it potentially a quasi-Dao Step spirit tree, she mused, considering the fist-sized fruit. If you put these up at auction outside they might reach millions…

They were treasured primarily because they could grant actual immortality without ever crossing an Immortal tribulation. Furthermore, consuming one didn’t prevent you from actually undergoing Immortal Crossing as many other such methods did. The real reason they were so ‘expensive’ however, given a peacock peach was still only Earthly Jade, was because consuming them could also help with the comprehension of natural principles and laws relating to the soul. In the open market a single one might cost hundreds of Heavenly Jades.

She glanced around at the courtyard of trees, noting everyone else was still obsessing over peaches, which while precious were not quite in the same league, then back at the mango. Taking out her auction talisman she put it to the pedestal before the tree and eyed the cost of a reserve bid on one of the fruit with a slight grimace. A single one was fifty Heavenly Jade – half a million spirit stones…

-Well that means the seller knows their worth at least, she sighed.

Checking how much she had in her storage talisman, she put a bid on one of two hundred Heavenly Jade, then two more of one hundred each on the other fruit, nearly emptying the supply of spirit stones she had on her person.

-That will at least make others wince before bidding on them, she giggled, stepping back to admire it some more.

“Oh… is this a golden soul mango!?” Huang Fuan’s irritating voice grew closer. “I wonder which influence put this up!”

“An old elder of the Ling clan has always been rumoured to have one,” Deng Guiren remarked, also coming over. “And it’s in fruit… lucky! The Ling clan are notorious hoarders, never letting these things out for others to enjoy.”

Without any preamble he stepped past them and put his talisman on the jade… and winced.

Huang Fuan walked over and put his talisman on it as well and raised his eyebrows.

-Idiot, she sighed, shaking her head

“A bit expensive?” Ling Yu remarked sweetly.

“…”

Deng Guiren scowled at her, then glanced at Huang Fuan; however, rather uncharacteristically, he didn’t really act that confrontational with Ling Yu and just grimaced.

-Don’t fancy a third trip into water? she smirked to herself.

“Princess Lian,” she glanced around to find that Envoy Qiao was also heading over, followed by the officials, “shall we head into the pagoda?”

“Yes, let’s,” she said, happy to move away from the mango for now. The only other people who had seen her bid on them were Kun Juni and Ling Yu in any case, and even if the latter had some connection to the tree, neither seemed the sort to call her out on it.

“Everyone, let us go in now!” Envoy Qiao called out. “There will be plenty of time to look at these things after the auction fully opens.”

There were a few groans from those still interested in the trees, but everyone followed after her and the Envoy as they walked into the ground floor of the central pagoda, past four more guards, who saluted them formally.

“These are the… most impressive treasures the various influences of Blue Water Province have uncovered in Yin Eclipse,” Envoy Qiao said, gesturing around at the two dozen or so items on display.

She had to admit, taking them in, that they were all grand... to a greater or lesser degree.

“Half of them are pots…” she pointed out drily.

“Well… some things just are what they are,” Qiao Honghui remarked a bit sourly as they walked into the middle of the hall, between the various stands. “In any case, allow me to introduce the first items of… interest.”

Qiao Honghui stopped by a stand that held a fragmentary piece of a breastplate made of milky white jade… surrounded by several seals and a stele about a metre wide and two high, that held what appeared to be a chart of some kind.

“What is the chart?” Huang Ryuun asked from the side.

“A bit of a riddle, Young Noble Huang,” Envoy Qiao replied, looking at it critically. “It was initially recovered from a tomb dating to the Shan Dynasty, far outside the suppression zone to the east, and captured by imperial forces during the wars before the time of the Blue Water Sage. It appears to depict a map, and certain points on it have been identified, one of which was found to contain a similar, if much more damaged stele. Unfortunately, the path into the mountain that the stele presents has claimed every explorer who goes past that point since it was discovered some three millennia ago.”

“So… a tantalizing mystery that ends in inexplicable death,” Huang Ryuun remarked drily.

“That is usually how anomalies in Yin Eclipse work,” Ling Yu remarked from the side, rolling her eyes.

“And what of the breastplate?” JiLao asked, walking around it.

“That is made of real ‘Snow Jade’, Young Noble Huang,” the Envoy said, giving Huang JiLao the same address as Huang Ryuun. “A mysterious object indeed—?”

“It has slowly replenished itself over time,” the elder from the Teng clan added. “It is not for sale, just for show. The price asked for it by the person putting it up is… difficult.”

“When you say… over time?” a youth from the Shu clan asked.

“It was found during the reign of the Star Singing Emperor in the Shan Dynasty,” the Teng elder said with a grimace. “Since then it has roughly restored itself from three scales.”

“…”

That got a few whistles of appreciation and several laughs.

“What does it do?” Teng Danbei asked.

“Anyone who strikes it is turned into snow and dies,” the Teng elder said softly. “That includes just dropping it with your qi in contact with it. Among its ‘victims’ is at least one Dao Eternal.”

Several of the scions from influential clans who had been leaning in for a closer look at it shuddered and backed off.

“Dangerous and valuable,” JiLao concluded.

-But not really what we are after, it seems, she mused to herself.

“What about this?!” a youth from the Four Peacocks Court exclaimed, gesturing to another nearby plinth on which rested half a mask, the face of a beautiful, serene woman, protected by several substantial seals.

“Why the seals?” JiLao asked with a frown.

“Because this is actually dangerous,” the Teng School elder muttered with distaste.

“Compared to that?” the Shu youth asked, waving at the breastplate.

“Ah… yes, Young Lord Shu,” the Teng elder nodded.

“The submitter wished to remain totally anonymous, simply giving a few guarantees about how it should be handled,” the Imperial Envoy explained, not for the first time.

“Originally, it was found in a spring deep below Golden Promise Spire…” the Ji elder, who had spoken little up to this point, added. “An old record from the early Yuan Clan exists about it being found associated with a strange golden flower, which drifted on the water without any roots and vanished without a trace when the explorers tried to seal it away. As to why it is sealed—”

“Anyone who handles it goes insane,” the Teng School elder interjected. “It was a thing kept by the Lin School originally. How they got a hold of it is unknown, but a very similar mask is talked of in accounts relating to the last days of the Shan Dynasty.”

“When you say ‘insane’?” Huang Ryuun asked.

“Well, they start screaming about a ‘Quazam’, declaring her the Great Mother of Heaven… then usually have a deviation and demonify on the spot,” the Teng School elder grimaced.

“…”

She stood there staring at the half of a beautiful face, not quite sure what to make of that. There was something sad about it, a hint of loss or regret that tugged faintly at the edge of her awareness. Cursed artefacts from previous eras were not unknown; the ruins on the Western Shu continent turned them up regularly and family or clan burial grounds were usually cursed as well to deter robbers, but an effect like that, that worked so quickly and specifically, was… odd.

“Huh…” the Teng School elder exclaimed suddenly. “What the fates, why is this… here?”

Tearing her gaze away from the mask, she turned to see what he was remarking on and found him standing by a small statue, or maybe large figurine, of a naked woman, her skin carved entirely out of flawless white stone and her hair from dark red-black jaspers. Her pose was almost seductive, holding a round fruit made of deep amber-gold stone to her bosom with both hands.

“Maybe someone moved it?” one of the officials frowned.

Curious, she walked past him and picked it up to get a closer look—

Immediately, she got a strange, creepy feeling, like someone was standing behind her, whispering in her ear. Struggling not to flinch, she carefully put the figurine down and stared at it. It seemed to stare back at her, its gaze oddly oppressive, almost judging in a disconcerting way.

-Why did I even pick that up? she thought with a shudder, realising that she had been drawn to it in some strange way.

“Huh… so they moved that here?” Ling Yu, who had followed her over, remarked under her breath.

Glancing at Ling Yu, she noticed that off to one side several others, including Huang Fuan, were eyeing the statue with slightly flushed faces, standing somewhat awkwardly.

-Really? she sighed, shaking her head in disgust.

“You recognise it?” she asked, moving slightly so she didn’t have to look at them.

“It was in the East Fury pagoda earlier, I saw it while looking for a spirit herb,” Ling Yu answered, staring at it critically. “As to who put it out for display, I dunno, look at the price though.”

She touched her talisman to the jade beside it and flinched.

-It actually costs a Dao Jade… and they want an actual Dao Jade for it as well, not a million spirit stones?

“How much is it?” Lu Seong asked, curious.

“You could buy it,” she chuckled darkly, “if you don’t mind offending Pill Sovereign Yongzheng.”

“…”

Lu Seong stared at her, then poked at the jade and winced.

“—Oh… this is really something!”

She turned to see the others clustered around a rugged upright that had been fashioned into a standing stele. A few others got out of the way as she walked closer to it to take in what it was. On the face was a carving of a many-armed woman suppressing a five-headed serpent with five clawed limbs in the ruins of a town. Each of her six hands held a pure white sword, while a circle of six flames, shaped like eyes in six different colours, swirled around her.

Two rows of strange runic characters ran vertically down each side, which after a moment reorganized themselves in her mind to read: ‘The ruin of Lerna, devastation of Maloth, bound by the Saintess of Six Eyes’.

“Shall we go see what else is here?” she mused to JiLao, noting that everyone else, bar a few of the locals like Ling Yu and Kun Juni, who had wandered off to look at other things, were interested in trying to work out what was going on with the text on the stele.

“Yeah,” JiLao agreed, looking around curiously.

Moving away from the group, they passed a stone table that held two large, ornately-carved bowls, and a Dao Sovereign grade beast core of all things. Behind it, against one of the interior dividing walls, sat a wall carving depicting a star chart of some kind that gave a disturbing sense of depth if you stared at it from odd angles.

Another table held half of a glittering silver skeleton, its remaining bones entirely devoid of qi, intent, or any kind of energy she could detect. Several items, jewellery and such, were laid out around it, a short note explaining that they were all found together, buried in a cave near East Fury, during the time of the Blue Water Sage.

“Earth, Blood, Fire, Water?” Huang JiLao murmured, looking at the blue-grey stone talisman resting beside the body.

-What exactly is Imperial Uncle Jian interested in here? she frowned, sweeping her gaze across the rest of the room. He sent us chasing those slates, yet apart from a few similarities in the designs… there is nothing like them here at all?

Beyond that body stood a life-sized statue of a beautiful woman, also carved in white stone, her hair picked out in amber and gold, holding up a seven-coloured bird in one hand, as if about to hurl it. Her other hand held a lantern, into which swirled blue-grey stone carved into flowing water, which at some point likely went all the way to the base of the statue, but which was now broken off half-way down.

At first glance the statue, while pretty, looked rather normal, until she noticed that the woman had a symbol carved into her forehead that read ‘rainbow’. Just looking at it provided a strange sense of shadow, as if the rainbow was both there and not, or somehow doubled up.

“This is similar to the smaller statue?” she mused, glancing around for JiLao… then finding that he was still by the skeleton, looking at the other items on the table.

Shaking her head, she poked the jade next to it and saw that it had been ‘found’ shortly after the time of the Blue Water Sage when a large landslide dislodged a ruin on the usually inaccessible upper slopes of Thunder Crest.

Sighing, she was about to walk back over to JiLao when her eye caught another stele, set against the dividing wall across the pagoda. Walking over to it, the blue and red circular object turned out to be a taiji of all things, about a metre in diameter.

At first glance, it looked rather ordinary, except that the ‘yin’ was red and the ‘yang’ was blue.

“—The colours are reversed,” JiLao mused, coming to stand beside her.

“Eh?” she blinked.

“Sorry, I saw you just standing here staring at it and came over to see what was what,” he said.

“I… was just staring at it?” she asked, turning to look at him, confused.

-I just walked over here a moment ago, it’s been… five seconds at most?

“Yes, for a good minute,” JiLao replied, looking at her oddly. “Why, is something wrong?”

She opened her mouth to say yes, but realised she couldn’t actually put her finger on what was wrong. She had been staring at it… it had been a kind of weird afternoon, it was not outside the realms of possibility she had just zoned out for a second.

“…”

She turned back to look at the taiji again…

-What? she stared at it, not quite sure of what she had just seen in that moment.

Wondering if she had just imagined the change in the flow of the lines within the grain of the rock it was made from, she took a slow step to the side and turned away again. Almost like a puzzle picture, a second image slid out of the rock, implausibly, impossibly, even.

“…”

Turning back to look at it properly, the colours fell back into the rock as if they never were, the white vanishing into the gaps between red and blue in a way that totally defied understanding.

Moving her head back the other way, she saw the image shift into focus once again, the middle of the taiji seeming to recede into the stone, which was losing its colour now she was not looking directly at it, picking out a squirrel with two tails in the middle of the circle. A moment later, the taiji itself turned translucent and something shifted in her awareness of it.

Focusing on it properly again, she stared, because the new image had replaced the old.

“You… can see that?” she asked JiLao warily.

He nodded silently.

“Is that some kind of feng shui alignment?” she guessed, wondering how it had been done.

“Maybe?” JiLao frowned, moving his head from side to side.

She took in the new image in silence, trying to work out what it actually meant. The taiji was still there, the squirrel was still there… and in each hand, it held the ‘eyes’ of Yin and Yang, a red and a blue orb. Below the squirrel, within a sphere which looked more like the phases of the moon now than an actual taiji, words shifted out at her from the stone the squirrel stood upon.

‘If you go chasing squirrels and you know where to fall through the shadows on the path where the eye becomes the wall just remember what—’

-Just remember what? she asked herself blankly, trying to parse the words which flowed very oddly as she tried to read them, as if there was a rhyme or structure that was just out of reach.

Tracing it back down, she saw that the ‘text’ actually truncated where the stone ended.

-It’s incomplete because they cut the fate-thrashed thing out—

She flinched, her flush of anger vanishing into momentary, inexplicable panic as a woman spoke right beside her, and turned to find Lingsheng standing slightly behind her and to her left.

“You…”

“If you go chasing squirrels… and you know where to fall… through the shadows on the path… where the bright eye becomes the uncreated wall… just remember…” Lingsheng murmured in a strange singsong cadence, “—what the bright moon said…”

“You can—?”

Before she could say anything, Lingsheng took her hand and placed it on the squirrel’s face—

She stared at herself, as if through a mirror or a reflection on a moonlit pond… except it wasn’t her, she realised. The woman who was also touching the mirror was older than her, her features somehow touched with a sense of age drawn not from lines or greying hair, but the experience of life itself, bearing down on her like a veil.

Her other self was not dressed as she was either, but in a manner akin to some of the statues she had seen, draped in folds of deep blue cloth, edged with geometric patterns that formed white and gold flowers, tied at the waist with a sash of golden cloth. It was simple, yet somehow… regal and feminine in a way even her current garb could not encapsulate.

“Liang Xing…”

The other image spoke, the words hanging in her mind, even as her image of the other ‘her’ settled. For a brief moment, she could see other figures on the mirror behind her; two women with dark hair, their features shrouded by the deep azure blue shawls they wore, one patterned with many-petalled golden flowers, the other with subtle, shaded lotus-like blossoms.

A third woman stood a little to the side, younger in some way, but also much, much older… while behind them were rolling hills with occasional trees and some strange white buildings with lots of columns at the front.

The eyes of the other her sank into her, its face… her face…melding disturbingly with memories of her mother… not as she was now, a cold and distant figure within the Imperial Court, but as she remembered her, when she was young, kindly, aloof… powerful.

“—Keep your Heart…”

The mirror rippled, the scene shattered and the red and blue taiji re-emerged to obscure everything, leaving her staring wide-eyed and sweating at the place where the ‘other’ her had been.

“Keep your Heart…” Her mother’s voice echoed in her head for a moment before fading away as well.

“W-what just…” she tried to speak, but Lingsheng’s hand over hers was vice-like, anchoring her in place in a manner that spoke absolutely to the other’s phenomenal strength within the ranks of the younger generation.

“Some things… should remain uncreated,” Lingsheng said softly, not looking at her, their hands jointly tracing a moon rune that looked like a squirrel with its arms held up in praise of something situated where the squirrel’s head had been.

“Especially where greedy old eyes linger, unable to find the solace they seek.”

She tried to find words, but actually couldn’t, because the whole experience was utterly bizarre.

The other woman withdrew her hand—

“Eh?” Huang JiLao flinched sideways at her appearance.

“…”

“Lingsheng!” Huang JiLao gawked, taking a step away from her.

Lingsheng, now standing where she had been as if the scene never happened, sighed and took a bite out of the plum she had procured from somewhere, chewing for a moment in silence.

“Everything that comes out of those mountains is weird, or so I’ve been told,” Lingsheng said at last, after eyeing the taiji for a moment, then took both of them by the arm and turned them away.

“Next time you see Big Sister Shan you should tell her to visit, mother likes talking to her,” Lingsheng said with a pleasant smile, passing JiLao a plum, which he took blankly.

“What are you?” she managed to say.

“Don’t think too hard about it,” Lingsheng chuckled, passing her a plum as well. “Have a plum, they are delicious.”

Wordlessly, she stared at the plum in her hand, then took a bite out of it. It was juicy and sweet and held a faintly cooling qi that flowed through her whole body, refreshing it in some way—

“EH—!” she gawked and strangled a yelp, realising it was a ‘spring and autumn plum’ of all things.

“Did you take these off the tree outside?” she hissed, staring at it dully and realising she had completely overlooked the plum tree… which was odd but made sense if it was one of these, they were notoriously impossible to find for anyone actually looking for them.

“I won’t say if you don’t!” Lingsheng smirked.

“…”

She stared at the plum, which was perhaps the single most expensive item on any tree out in the courtyard, then quickly put the rest in her mouth, swallowing it down before someone noticed, and stored the seed in her storage ring, noting that JiLao had done the same with consummate haste.

“Princess Lian, Young Noble Huan…”

-How does he manage that, she complained, putting her thoughts back in order as Envoy Qiao walked over to them and bowed just deeply enough for formality.

“—Dao Daughter Lingsheng…” he added, noting Lingsheng’s presence as well with a faint scowl.

“Is everything okay?” she asked Envoy Qiao, putting herself on the forward foot so as to not have to deal with the strangeness of the last few minutes.

“Of course,” Envoy Qiao said, straightening up. “However, we must bring this tour to a close soon. There is still the matter of the banquet to see out the year and all the ceremonies that will go with that.”

“Ah, of course,” she nodded, suddenly feeling rather tired, noting that he was surreptitiously looking around at the items near them, no doubt interested in what had caught their eye… or maybe Lingsheng’s. “We will be right with you…” she added when he made no move to leave again.

“Of course,” Envoy Qiao murmured, bowing again and departing.

She watched him go with a sigh, then turned to look at the rest of the items.

“Shall we look at the rest of these?” she said, glancing at JiLao.

“Sure,” Lingsheng mused, beating JiLao to his reply as she withdrew a peach from her sleeve and started to eat it. “There is endless fun to be had staring at fancy pots.”

“…”

She stared at the other woman and swallowed a sigh, wondering suddenly if she could convince her to attend the banquet as a guest of honour.