> …As you are no doubt aware, the Hunter Bureau, one of our Bureaus of State, fulfils two important tasks on behalf of our Dun Imperial Dynasty. The first is somewhat unglamorous: the sourcing and securing of rare spirit plants, beasts and other natural curiosities that might otherwise languish beyond their sight. The second is to serve as the bastion of expertise which keeps in check the most dangerous aspects of our world’s natural threats. As such, we, as citizens of the Imperial Dynasty, should be deeply concerned with the strange state of affairs that has emerged across the ocean in this land, where the influence of our August Emperor and Imperial Dynasty has been resisted, twisted and refuted with depressing regularity and where the corrupt tendrils of the Azure Astral Authority still have some unfortunate hold over the Bureaus of State.

>

> I have, let me assure you, read several eminent and trustworthy accounts that describe the disturbing instances where young children are now being enrolled into the Bureau’s ranks. Even this might be fine, were they such as the upstanding scions of our own Imperial continent, Young Heroes of the hour who will one day stand at the apex of our great sects and be the strength of the Imperial Throne, but no! These are common or lowborn people with cultivations as limited as Golden Core. People without means, method, status or pedigree. Others are unworthy children of local nobility, allowed through corruption and base nepotism to ascend to ranks such as Deputy Bureau Chiefs and Senior Local Bureau Officials. Some, most shockingly and worryingly, are not even cultivators, but follow the debased and deeply flawed system which I discussed in detail at the close of the previous volume (Volume 82: On The Cultivation Practices of Indigenous Peoples: Considering Their Merits).

>

> While, as a scholar of history, I can appreciate that in certain times there is a need to remake rules – we need only look at the Astrology Bureau or the Authority Bureau to see models as to how this can be done correctly – I feel it is beholden upon me to state clearly, for the future posterity of these institutions and their role in supporting our Imperial Dynasty, that no good can come of these matters. Allowing lowly persons without rank or means to advance by shortcut and hand-waving through the ranks without consideration to their cultivation realm, let alone the indigenous who actively work against our August Emperor…

Excerpt from 'A Treatise on Eastern Azure Great World, in 100 Volumes'

  by Qin Qiu, Scholar of Qin.

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~ JUN ARAI – DAWN IN YIN ECLIPSE ~

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Jun Arai sat on a rock in the misty, pre-dawn gloom, by the entrance of the small cave she had taken refuge in for the night, listening to the sounds of the forest around her as she kept watch, waiting for the sun to rise.

The valleys like the one she was in now were unpleasant, steep-sided, narrow, humid gorges lined with densely forested cliffs, interspersed with waterfalls from springs higher up. In the darkness, the foliage was a dense mass of greens and blues, wreathed in shimmering mists swirling everywhere that rendered its depths utterly impenetrable to sight. All she could do was wait for things to subside a bit before setting out on the final leg of her journey.

*Kakaaaw, kakaaaaw!*

The cry of a bird made her turn back to the forest and search carefully until she caught a glimpse of some effervescent plumage.

The high valleys of the Yin Eclipse danger zone, as a region, were an unpleasant place at the best of times, especially when leaving them, due to the way the mountain range’s ubiquitous suppression worked. Everyone knew it suppressed anyone who entered the mountains to the peak of Golden Core. However, what was less widely acknowledged was that the suppression’s impact ran far beyond that.

Things like temperature, humidity and fatigue affected everyone as if they were mortal.

The land here repelled external qi and replenishment was next to impossible without pills or special methods.

Soul sense didn’t work either, except in a few very dangerous circumstances.

This all culminated in places like she was now to form something like an ‘edge effect’, where, in these claustrophobic, hot, humid gorges, it all combined into a desire to want to get out of them… and the suppression somehow pushed on that, almost like it was a sentient thing at times. It pushed you on, or pulled you back, dangerously leading you to lose focus on the ‘here’ and ‘now’.

*Kaaakaw… Kaaakaw!*

Another called back and she sighed in quiet relief, happy to confirm that it really was just a bird.

Idly, she let her eyes trace across the runic wards, worn by age, on the rocks either side of the entrance. Two served the purpose of disguising her presence here and also discouraging any wildlife from entering. A third, above her, was a defensive formation, but it was mostly depleted – one of a number of annoyances she would have to report in detail when she eventually made it back home.

In theory, even mostly depleted, the runic ward should be good for a few hits on any interloper, but she was not keen to test it and few predators out here came singly.

She waited for a few more minutes until she was satisfied that nothing obvious was lurking, then stood and stretched, making her way back into the interior of the cave where a small ruined shrine – built in a previous era from what she knew – had been converted into a way station for travellers by the influence she was part of – the Yin Eclipse Hunter Bureau.

The shrine itself was quite a simple thing, a convenient rock outcropping on the cave wall shaped into a small altar and a figure of a bearded old man holding a jar and a spear. It was flanked on both sides by a few pillars and several little alcoves which held bowls, incense and a few other oddments – no qi stones though, another ‘issue’ she would have to report, in light of her trip up here. The whole thing was decorated with carvings of flowing water, clouds and vines.

Pausing by the small pool, its edges tastefully shaped by the ancient shrine maker, she splashed some cold water on her face and stared at her shimmering reflection for a moment before running her fingers through her dark brown hair and sighing.

The reflection that stared back at her was a tired young woman of eighteen years with shadowed rings under her dark eyes and far too much mud still on her face from the previous day’s trip into this valley. Scrubbing a bit more of the mud off, she turned to her gear, such as she had decanted from her storage talisman, and considered what breakfast might hold.

“Really now—” she grumbled to herself as she took a fire attributed qi stone from her storage talisman and put it in the broad, shallow bowl that held the remnants of the previous evening’s fire, “—I know that this lot were a bit carefree and opportunistic according to the mission brief, but could they not have left something?”

Watching the embers rekindle into a smokeless fire, she tossed a few salted fish wrapped in aromatic leaves out of her storage talisman into the fire, then took out a small pot, filled it from the spring, tossed in some spirit vegetation she had gathered the previous day and set that to heating as well. As a final gesture towards edibility, she added a few useful mushrooms, a few leaves of qi-replenishing herbs and a block of dried egg noodles.

The depleted state of the way station, she knew, was almost certainly down to the mission that had brought her here – a search-and-rescue mission to look for an errant group of three scions from the Ha clan who had attained some acclaim of late in hunting rare spirit beasts in the outer valleys of the Yin Eclipse Mountains near West Flower Picking Town.

Apparently, they had garnered enough of a reputation that someone had thought it a smart idea to let them try their hand at the tendered missions from the Hunter Bureau, so now here she was, sent to ‘find’ them, and whoever wanted it done had had enough influence to get it bundled into the tranche of requests her local Bureau had to complete as part of its yearly quota – a quota which would turn over at the end of the month, a mere week away.

The whole thing, particulars and circumstances, had ‘politics’ written all over it, truthfully – not that she really wanted to dwell on that for the moment.

Staring at the flames, she could not help but sigh softly, resisting the urge to look at the briefing notes… again, as she waited for the food to cook. Instead, she pulled out a stack of slightly battered manuals from her storage talisman and put them on a handy rock.

She had purchased most of them in bulk for the sum of about two spirit stones in a market in her hometown of West Flower Picking a few days prior, in the passing hope that they might hold some general comprehensions that might be useful.

All of them were treatises on various aspects of ‘Cultivation of the Self’, the most basic and widespread philosophy concerning the accumulation, refinement and use of qi within your body to elevate one’s power and longevity, culminating in crossing the Immortal Threshold so you could pursue the path to the Heavenly Dao in earnest.

Picking up the first manual, titled ‘On the Paradigms of Eastern Azure’s Supreme Cultivation – Volume 3’, she opened it and found a previous owner, a Mai Quan Lu, had written—

‘In this world of ours, we’re all trying to get a bit stronger, reach a bit further.’

—on the blank page at the front in elegant calligraphy.

“Really?” she muttered out loud and considered the words for a moment, trying to see if they had any lingering ‘Intent’ or some other secret, which they did not. “I suppose that is true… Ah well, let’s hope it has some interesting…”

She trailed off, having flipped to the foreword to discover that the author was a scholar named Qin Qiu.

“…”

Resisting the urge to turn the volume into an expensive firelighter, she put it back and grabbed another with the more reasonable title of ‘A Discussion on Cultivation: Its History and Methods in Eastern Azure’.

Eastern Azure Great World, her home realm, had a number of different methods that focused on this, with their origins on different continents and elsewhere. The two most common and widespread means were ‘Spiritual Cultivation’ – a versatile method which focused on the promotion of spiritual qi to evoke all manner of mystical and martial arts – and ‘Body Cultivation’ – which instead focused on the use of spiritual qi to temper the physical body for greater endurance, strength, recovery, and so forth.

According to the sages of their world’s history, and largely repeated verbatim in the foreword of the manual as she flipped through it, both had emerged in an ancient era on the central ‘Imperial’ and southern ‘Argent Gate’ continents. The other most populous method was ‘Martial Cultivation’ – the domain of Sword Immortals and the like who created entire specialized cultivation paths out of honing and mastering Martial Intent, typically trading versatility for fearsome battle prowess – which purportedly originated on the ‘Western Shu’ continent on the other side of the Great World.

Rather annoyingly, because things regarding intent were what she was interested in, the text’s foreword just glossed over the specifics of that, referring the reader to another work by the same author.

Alongside ‘Spiritual’, ‘Body’ and ‘Martial’ cultivation existed three other methods that the foreword briefly touched upon.

‘Dharma Cultivation’ – the methods of Buddhists and some esoteric body refinement methods, on the ‘Merciful Skies’ continent – got barely two sentences, which was somewhat unsurprising. Buddhism had a... difficult relationship with the Imperial continent.

‘Soul Cultivation’ got a bit more, but again it was nothing she didn’t already know, just stating that it focused on the ‘refinement of the soul’ and its ‘elevation over the physical body’ and that it had originated on the ‘Northern Tang’ continent in the previous heavens. Nowadays soul arts were rare as she understood it – the last one she had seen at auction in Blue Water City, the provincial capital, had gone for something like 25,000 spirit stones, for a Core Formation grade art.

The last method touched upon was, in fact, the one she practised – ‘Physique Law Cultivation’, also called ‘Physical Cultivation’, which took as its core a special five word ‘Mantra’, rather than your ‘Spirit Root’ and a compatible ‘Law’. Annoyingly, but unsurprisingly, the author’s view on it was very colloquial, noting merely that it had its roots in the eastern, ‘Easten’ continent but was mostly now limited to the fringes of civilized Imperial territory in the east – Blue Water, Iron Gate and Yuan provinces on the Yin Eclipse sub-continent – and that it was likely to slowly disappear just as the soul cultivation path had due to its difficulty and complexity, though it had some local economic value.

Reading that made her sigh a bit. It was understandable, in a way, but still depressing to read such views.

The first chapter of the manual mostly talked about the philosophical frameworks of those methods and how they had converged over the eras.

The author talked at great length about how spiritual cultivation was the superior path, an umbrella for many of these methods – as over the eras body cultivation and soul cultivation had, as she understood it, been mostly integrated into that one philosophical pagoda to turn spiritual cultivation into the all-encompassing method it was today. Martial cultivation still stood apart, and dharma cultivation was quite uncommon.

Some of it was kind of interesting, at least in how it was presented, though much of it she already knew and the writer, or whoever he was referencing, seemed determined to mostly refer everything back to spiritual cultivation as the apex.

The second chapter which, after a quick check on the fish, she started upon, thankfully redeemed her poor opinion somewhat, dealing as it did with the different frameworks for categorizing advancement within the different cultivation methods.

The manual only discussed the ‘Mortal Step’ realms, but that was to be expected really. Treatises on anything approaching the Immortal realm, even in a Great World like the one she lived on, were not something you picked up in a day market.

There were various frameworks by which you ‘practised’ cultivation – the most widespread were called ‘Spiritual Laws’, ‘laws’ in this particular context simply being a term for step by step methodologies that walked a user through how to unlock the qi within their body, harmonize it, refine it into a foundation and then use it. ‘Canons’ and ‘Manuals’ tended to be more about specific techniques and arts. ‘Scriptures’ were much more holistic and also rare, tending to be curated or specially developed sets of integrated teachings in the form of manuals and laws.

Much of what was written there, she already knew anyway. On Eastern Azure, the Mortal Step had eight ‘major realms’: ‘Foundation Establishment’ → ‘Qi Condensation’ → ‘Qi Refinement’ → ‘Core Formation’ → ‘Soul Foundation’→ ‘Nascent Soul’→ ‘Severing Origins’ and finally ‘Dao Seeking’. Their nomenclature was adopted mostly in the vein of the terms popularised in this era, that came along with spiritual cultivation from the Imperial continent.

While everyone was ‘Mortal’ at birth, almost everyone on a Great World such as theirs was born with a connate spirit root – in contrast to a Lower Realm, or Mortal World, where that would be a rare occurrence. As such, with a few very rare exceptions, almost everyone could cultivate and acquire qi. This basic, starting realm was called Foundation Establishment and in a Great World was usually passed over at the age of five or six, merely requiring you to condense a thread of qi in your body, whereupon you became a Qi Condensation cultivator.

The author of the text also echoed what she recalled having been told by her father – that the three realms after that point: Qi Condensation, Qi Refinement and Core Formation were usually considered a sort of ‘set’.

All of them focused on the physical body, culminating in forming a Golden Core through merging your spirit root and your qi foundation to properly ‘set’ your cultivation foundation, open up your basic meridians and then at last start to grasp intent’ along with your qi.

The manual echoed the common knowledge that pretty much anyone was guaranteed to hit Core Formation in some capacity, even if they never cultivated a day in their life. The sheer density of spiritual qi in a Great World all but assured that. The same could be said of any method’s equivalent realm, except maybe martial cultivation as far as she was aware.

To cross beyond that realm, you had to undergo a tribulation, usually not that extreme unless your foundation was exceptional or rather esoteric. Even then, as she understood it, in a Great World it was rare to the point of being remarkable to actually fail any of those breakthroughs.

At that point, the author did take a side step in his discourse into a slightly more interesting topic: ‘minor realms’. These were the minor stages of progress within a major cultivation realm and were mostly a thing derived from advancement in Mortal Worlds, where progress was much more incremental as cultivation was much slower, resources much scarcer and spirit roots far less common. As a result of the superior cultivation environment of a Great World like Eastern Azure and its impacts on elevating the lower cultivation realms, the text observed, the boundaries between these early realms were not so extreme, and thus ‘minor realms’ didn’t really exist in common parlance in a Great World.

It would be rather uncommon for a Qi Condensation disciple to convincingly beat out a Qi Refinement one, but the gap between them was nowhere near as extreme compared to a Mortal World. The real dividing line was the comprehension of intent that came with Core Formation for spiritual cultivators or at the peak of Qi Refinement for martial and physical ones.

The second ‘set’ of three – Soul Foundation, Nascent Soul and Severing Origins – all focused on the development of intent, the founding of your ‘Sea of Knowledge’ and the maturation of your ‘Nascent Soul’. The realm after that, and where the text basically finished its outline, was Dao Seeking. Each of those realms required a tribulation of some form to overcome, culminating with a ‘Supreme Step’ tribulation, usually termed ‘Immortal Crossing’, to become a full Immortal.

The text did not talk of it but she was aware, roughly, of the progression above there – Immortality was the realm in Eastern Azure when you were considered as a real ‘someone’. It was the point most major sects considered as the threshold for admission into their core ranks. Above the Immortal realm came ‘Chosen Immortal’, ‘Golden Immortal’, ‘Ancient Immortal’ and ‘Dao Immortal’ and so on.

These terms had also been largely adopted for martial cultivators and body cultivators; however, her own method, physique law – or ‘Physical Path Cultivation’ as the author of the manual she was now looking over termed it – still retained its original terms. Why that was differed depending on who you asked but the overall progression was still the same, each step equivalent to its spiritual cultivation realm counterpart in its own way.

These realms were ‘Containment Realm’, which mirrored Foundation Establishment → ‘Physical Refinement’ → ‘Physical Foundation’ → ‘Mantra Seed Formation’ – the equivalent of Core Formation → ‘Body Tempering’ → ‘Soul Meridians’ → ‘Mortal Boundary’ and finally ‘Unity Physique’ which mirrored Dao Seeking.

The culmination of the Mortal Step was ‘Mantra Immortal’, a term she only knew of because her mother had once mentioned it in passing. She knew of nobody who actually held that realm outside of old records.

At this point, the author’s own proclivities started to shine through again as someone raised on the central Imperial continent, as they devoted a whole subsection to explaining why this failure of advancement meant that Physical Path cultivation was fated to go the same way as soul cultivation – a relict path only followed by those who had no means, talent or desire to advance into the Immortal realm.

The conclusion the author drew, as an aside there, was that the method might be good in a Mortal World, where cultivators alone were a rarity, but in a Great World like Eastern Azure, where qi was common and only upon achieving the Immortal realm would one truly be considered as having set forth on the myriad routes to the Heavenly Dao, it was just another relic of a bygone era, supplanted by the ‘superior’ spiritual cultivation method.

It was a familiar rationale, although not one her mother had shared. It was certainly the case that those who acquired mantras outside the framework of ‘Inheritance’ would struggle, but the method was by no means relict as she understood it.

Rather, it was beset by three problems: prejudice against the regional methods in the eyes of many, the fact that it was harder and slower to advance compared to the alternatives and, most importantly, the proper means by which you used and passed on the mantras to ensure their maximum efficacy were rare secrets so closely guarded that even within families they were not fully shared, never mind clans.

Her own family was a case in point: both she and her sister, Sana, possessed an inherited mantra from their mother; however, now that their mother had passed away, only she and Sana knew the whole specifics of that method. She could well envisage plenty of circumstances where mantras had just vanished from the world entirely as their successors died out.

This latter point was barely mentioned in the text, which was both amusing and annoying, because the author clearly had to know of it to talk about some of the other aspects as they did.

Finishing the chapter, she sighed resignedly, staring out at the misty greenery and swirling cloud of the valley, listening to the early morning birdsong for a few moments until she noticed that the soup was starting to boil, which would harm the vitality of the herbs she had tossed in.

“Ah… ah!” she grimaced as the heat of the pot made her fingers itch as she lifted it out with a bit of durable cloth.

Tasting it briefly, she sighed again and set it to one side to cool – it tasted of spicy dirt, but unlike her sister who was something of a perfectionist when it came to spirit cooking, she was very much of the ‘if it’s edible it’s fine’ school of thought. Poking the fish, she found they needed a few more minutes, which was only to be expected given how things were going, really.

Turning her attention back to the manual, she considered it pensively. Her hope that it would contain something interesting about intent or formations seemed to have been in vain at this point but, having started, she figured she should finish flicking through it.

“After all, if there was a weird talisman in the back and you missed it for laziness, who is the idiot then?” she grumbled to the world at large before flicking to the back page and staring at it.

It was aggressively mundane, with no mystical talisman or weird thing shoved in the binding. She peered at it carefully all the same, checking the pages’ paper, binding and the back cover… just in case.

“As expected,” she chuckled to herself. “We cannot all be that lucky bastard Wei Zhaohui.”

The third and final chapter talked mainly about why a dantian formed. As a physique law user whose foundation was built of a mantra of five mnemonics rather than a ‘law’ or ‘manual’ like a spiritual or martial cultivator, she didn’t form a dantian, so most of the observations on spiritual cultivation were not really relevant.

There was little in there about honing intent either, which was what she had been holding out hope for. Some, including a few of her friends and co-workers, did dual cultivate a spiritual law and a mantra, but that was a hard and tortuous path, even by the standards of normal Physical Path cultivation. Their mother had counselled them not to even consider it before getting to Mantra Seed in any case so it was rather moot.

Exhaling, she circulated her mantra.

‘Spirit, Heart, Renewal, Body, Soul’

The five mnemonics shifted through her body one after another, directing qi through her twelve ‘basic meridians’ and eventually infusing them into her bones – where a Physical Path cultivator stored their qi rather than a dantian. The process was continuous – unlike for spiritual cultivators before Golden Core – but focusing on it as she had just done, periodically, did improve the efficacy of the absorption of qi.

It also gave her a grasp of intent before Golden Core that was much better than any spiritual cultivator of her realm without a special method for it, albeit worse than a cultivator that focused purely on the Martial Path rather than the Spiritual one.

“Well, that was two spirit stones well spent,” she grumbled, putting it at the bottom of the pile and checking on the fish again. “I guess I can sell it on for that or shove it in the library at home.”

“…”

Sitting back, she considered ‘breakfast’ again then sighed again, shaking her head. “Probably it will end up in the library… or Sana will use it to wedge up that wobbly cupboard.”

She stared at the fire for a few more moments, then pulled out a small teapot and dumped some persis leaf tea into it, setting it to warm. It would at least keep her alert for what would likely be a rather stressful day ahead.

While she waited for that to sort itself out, she pulled out her jade scrip and started to review the notes she had for the mission briefing and also for the destination the trail out of this valley was almost certainly going to lead her to – one of the more unsettling and dangerous regions of Yin Eclipse’s myriad valleys, known as the ‘Red Pit’.

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~ JUN ARAI – INTO THE RED PIT ~

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Arai slid down the final scree of moss-drenched rocks in the densely vegetated gully she had been descending, into the edge of the Red Pit, and peered warily through the humid understory around her, looking for anything that might be out of place… or too ‘right’ for that matter, in the grey early morning light. Everything was obscured by mist and gentle rain, as was the norm here, and the latter in particular was making her life just a little bit more miserable than needed. Still, she took in her surroundings carefully, and listened with rapt attention.

The rustling of the leaves, the creak of tree trunks and the dull hiss of life all around her in the tropical cloud forest… all of it seemed to faintly echo with disquieting sensations. Like it was laughing at her, goading her, taunting her, luring her. It had been this way for hours, needling away at her slowly and steadily as she traversed this little bit of the green hell that was the infamous Red Pit.

-‘Just a little bit more miserable than needed – in every way imaginable,’ she reflected grimly, failing to detect anything out of the ordinary.

That was the description of this place, really – and even though it was after dawn, some aspect of night still lingered here, beneath the shadows of the trees and cliff walls above her…

It was, in many ways, a reflection on how these valleys really got under your skin. Especially on days like today when you were stuck with miserable jobs like the one she was now on, sent off on a dubious mission that had wound up taking her to this particular vegetated hell.

She exhaled, letting her thoughts settle again. Bad thoughts had a way of being hazardous for your health up here, quite literally, in the case of this collection of sub-tropical forest valleys on the western side of Yin Eclipse. Unfortunately, self-awareness was the only real defence on record, because the enemy here was diffuse, nearly intangible and ever-shifting in its strategies.

Taking a slow, deep breath, despite the almost stifling humidity and the fact that the air was so thick you could taste the jungle, she cycled her mantra.

‘Spirit – Heart – Renewal – Body – Soul’

The five mnemonics in her mind’s eye shifted and began to work on the flow of qi through her, feeding on the emotional turmoil that her environs were trying to stir up and helping clear her head. That was her real advantage here – the source of her and Sana’s exceptional request completion record in places like this – even if the specifics of it were a secret known only to the two of them, and not for lack of prying by others either.

“Thank you mother, for this mantra that has such a robust ability to resist soul-based attacks,” she murmured, taking a moment to offer the prayer of thanks to the world at large as she continued her inspection of her surroundings with a somewhat refreshed mindset.

The robustness of her tolerance against soul-based attacks was the primary reason she was at all confident that this lousy ‘request’ of a ‘clearance mission’ was genuinely within her means.

The Red Pit, the collective title of this valley and a bunch of others around it, was the poster child for one of the most insidious aspects of the Yin Eclipse mountain range: namely that the dangers it presented could be as much psychological as physical. The whole range was dangerous in that regard, but the Red Pit stood out – even amongst the most dangerous – in large part due to the 'Blood Ling' trees – the psychic spirit trees notorious as the sole living thing capable of manifesting any sort of soul strength under Yin Eclipse’s suppression. The trees gave the Red Pit its name through their ability to send intruders into a red fog of confused emotions that would rapidly get them killed by all the other ever-present threats.

Due to the suppression no one, no matter their realm, could guard against their intrusions with their own soul sense, leaving mental discipline as the only real means of resistance. The valleys' brutal reputation was further elevated by the blood ling trees also causing mutations and transformations in the biomes around them, turning places that were already dangerous into properly predatory ecosystems. In light of that, those not in possession of either high-tier mantras – like the one she and Sana had – or some very expensive talismans tended to avoid the Red Pit to an even greater degree than the other four famously anomalous bits of landscape present in Yin Eclipse.

She stopped to stare at the water ferns that were now sending swirls of mist to drench her and obscure her vision. It was resolutely devoid of rain everywhere outside a twenty metre radius around her. Vexingly, it was hard to say if it was just a higher realm fern somewhere or if there was a blood ling nearby, pushing the vegetation. That was kind of the point though: this place got you coming and going.

“Stop it,” she admonished them a bit wearily, looking around for her quarry’s tracks.

Really, there was only one trail, through a series of descending narrow gorges with a river, and it had clearly been traversed several days before. Even a blind person could find the muddy footprints in moss and the slashed branches where unneeded passage had been cut by those not used to moving through such dense understory.

The ferns kept raining in defiance of her command, which was just as expected, but the words did make her feel a bit better as she carefully stepped through the understory, skirting mossy rocks and various spirit vegetation, marking the passage of the trio where she found it.

Likely they had been in a hurry to make it back out of the higher valleys, she guessed as she followed along the tracks. While the physical nature of the suppression was uniform, there were quirks to the Natural Intent that came with it. Moving into the interior, towards the Great Mount, it carried with it a sense of being uncomfortably unwelcome, as if you were trespassing, that grew and grew like an itch you could never scratch. Similarly, while leaving, that sense of being unwelcome crept along behind you, like an ever-present shadow in everything you passed, pushing at all your instincts to ‘get out’. Even her mantra was not proof against it.

That haste to leave could, she considered while carefully making her way around another tangle of mildly poisonous spirit vegetation as she took care to disturb as little as she could, make even experienced explorers of these valleys careless in the moment. Places like the Red Pit could and would play off it, using it as a lure to draw you in. Old Ling, her teacher in the Hunter Pavilion, had described it as being akin to a large-scale formation with spiritual awareness: well aware of its location and, like an antlion pit, just waiting for the unwary or the incautious to hurry into its open, inviting jaws as they were departing the much more conventionally dangerous High Valleys above here.

To treat it as anything less than a holistic apex predator was tempting unknowing death.

“…”

A few metres further on, she stopped again, staring at the trail carefully and fighting back a sigh.

-Never mind the fate-thrashed, emotion-twisting trees, everything here has the potential to be dangerous in some way, she reflected, slowly back-tracking, away from a patch of vines that had been slashed and were weeping sap.

-Even children know that the more you disturb the landscape in these valleys, the more trouble you attract for yourself, and yet we have a group of up-and-coming Ha clan scions doing things like this?

She sighed. People thought it was only the spirit herbs you had to watch out for, but that was just naïve. Spirit herbs were still somewhat rare, even here; spirit vegetation, however, that was everywhere.

Leaves of trees might be poisonous.

Bark might explode — or try to turn you into bark.

Roots and vines might try to snare you.

Flowers could dull your senses.

Even humble grass could flay skin.

Rocks could turn out to be acid-spitting slime beasts.

Animals—

She paused and stared carefully at a tree ten paces to her right, flanking the tangled vines and their poisonous sap, making sure that the strange shadows on its bark were not the eyes of a well-disguised insectoid predator.

Theoretically, there should be very few of those in this valley, they were just as vulnerable to the blood ling trees as a stray cultivator was. That said, it was early enough that night predators or beasts foraging on the edge of the valley might be around. The Red Pit’s ecosystem further in did tend to view such things as a tasty snack, just as much as her, or those she was tracking, and at any rate assumptions in this place got you killed – that was a different kind of mantra that was now ingrained into her, after several years as a Herb Hunter.

Only when she was thoroughly satisfied that nothing was lurking did she move on again, carefully traversing right this time, through more ferns and moss-drenched trees, finally arriving at a shallow cliff, the dull roar of water, muffled by leaf and mist, a reminder of yet another danger – waterfalls and plunge pools. Those tended to be sinkholes, and anyone falling in would never be seen again – lost to the depths of the caves that riddled the floor of the valley... depths known to be death zones at least as bad as the Five Pits of Yin Eclipse.

Looking around, the only way down was to either risk sliding down through ferns, or risk a tree. Peering at the ferns and vines below her, she grimaced and pulled herself onto the winding trunk of a tree growing out below her. The moss was wet in her hands and she had to progress carefully, mostly for fear of things like leeches this close to the waterfall which was drenching everything.

The trail itself, she found at the base of the cliff, visible as yet more slashed vines in the canopy to her left, their sap faintly luminescent – a natural adaption to draw bugs, mainly – along with evidence someone had actually climbed a tree and cut bits off it.

-Just why would a Ha clan elder look at a reckless group like this and decide it was a good idea to send them into the High Valleys? she sighed.

She moved on. The tree she was now holding onto was already reacting to her presence; her right hand, touching the bark, started to blister slightly from the faintly corrosive substance it was secreting as a defence, but that was par for spirit vegetation down here.

Insects buzzed and hummed, also disturbed by her passage.

Satisfied there was nothing lurking obviously below her, she slipped off the arching branch and swung carefully to her right then dropped the remaining ten metres to land with a crunch on the gravel beach by the side of the plunge pool—

*Kwooo kwooo kwooo!*

A chittering hoot echoed from the trees above her. Stilling her breath, she suppressed as much of her qi and intent as she could, even as the greenery and the waterfall ate up the noise.

-It came from the right, across the river gorge…?

Carefully, she listened for the tell-tale lack of resonance.

*Kwoo kwooo!*

Across the rocky gorge, high in the trees, she caught the flash of flapping wings and heard the snap of branches moving, before finally spotting two large broad-beaked birds rising up to a higher tree on the misty cliffs above her.

-Treebills… just harmless birds.

She exhaled softly and stood, looking around the gravel beach for signs of the trail.

That was the other issue here: the ‘shadow’ within the valley would grab anything and see if it could nudge it, pull it or twist it. Even something as basic as the concern over the birds above and whether they were, in fact, mimic calls of some other nasty predator, could become a hidden blade the forest would wield against her viciously as it amped up her annoyance over the mission and the fact that she was up here alone.

She cycled her mantra again. Even self-awareness didn’t help there, as the thoughts were spooled out in her mind against her will.

It would be the one time you didn’t check though, that it really would turn out to be one of the obnoxious insectoid predators of the upper canopy – a tetrid stalker maybe; dog-sized, eight-legged, armoured, acid-spitting harridans that were fast, hard to kill and excellent mimics of other wildlife’s calls for the purposes of hunting.

-The last thing I need now is to spend an hour playing noisy, disruptive, attention-drawing talisman tag with one of those. Especially when this place is already starting to feel like I am much deeper in than I actually should be.

Frowning, she stopped at that thought and sent some qi into her scrip, checking her progress on the map. She was indeed, in a geographic sense, at the edge of the Red Pit, albeit the inner edge, which was much less surveilled—

An iridescent blue-green spider the size of her fist, with prominent, venomous fangs, shot out of the tangled tree above her, aiming for her shoulder.

Almost reflexively, she leant back, tracking its passage until it hit a rock near her with a faint *thwap*, scuttled into the moss before she could kick it away and vanished.

“…”

Giving herself a further shake, she quickly began moving on, focusing on concealing her presence, in case there were more – that species was mostly solitary, but therein, again, lay the danger of making assumptions. You never knew if even somewhat innocuous things like that might have been twisted or mutated by the blood ling trees.

-Is there a blood ling tree here? she mused, looking around again, trying to spot any of the tell-tale signs of mutated greenery as she made her way on.

The trail returned after a dozen or so metres, marked by yet another slashed-down vine that looked like a ‘Trappish Vine’ but was actually one of the dozen or so types that was totally harmless. Another reminder that the ecosystem here was happy to work with perception as much as reality. Beyond that, she found scuffed grooves, muddy and relatively fresh, in the mossy covering of a tumbled boulder where the slope went down towards the river.

Considering it, she wondered, yet again, about the request itself, because there was no way a group this incompetent should have been allowed anywhere near a request mission for variant beast cores in the valleys around here…

While it was somewhat manageable to survive forays into Yin Eclipse with fairly mediocre skills and knowledge, that was predicated on you nevertheless being quite cautious… and having either a lot of disposable income or a rich backing influence willing to lend material support. If you were stocked with enough expensive pills, talismans, portable formations and treasures that would actually work here in Yin Eclipse and exercised caution, you could survive despite poor basic skills... most of the time anyway. Unfortunately, ‘caution’ and ‘throwing large amounts of money at your problems’ weren’t qualities that usually went together…

Even then, those ‘explorers’ mostly just hunted preselected targets along known, comparatively safe paths within the Low Valleys. Paths that were close enough to the outside that support might get there in time to save you if it all went wrong. Luck and treasures tended to see them through most of the time…

The trouble was the interior, places like the path she had followed into this place.

Survival running those routes relying too much on treasures and wealth to resolve mishaps was an entirely different prospect, as you were bound to run into very bad luck sooner or later. You could do it… but you would never make a profit off anything you gathered if you were frequently resorting to those kinds of treasures on hunts…

-Though not everyone who hunts here does it to make a living, she mused, thinking about the trail she was following again.

Some just did it to raise their status as being ‘experienced Yin Eclipse hunters’, especially noble scions of the Ha clan.

“…”

Her instinct wanted to say that this group should not have been sent out for a mission into the High Valleys, and that somewhere there was a Ha clan elder who really didn’t want to take responsibility for this, except…

The problem was that the trail she was following was chaotic, irresponsibly plotted and showed very little in the way of evidence that those making it were relying on talismans, treasures or anything like it…

That said… that thought didn’t change the reality of her circumstances a great deal.

She was up here in a high danger zone, looking for a bunch of people, pretty sure that this was a body recovery mission someone with influence didn’t want to own due to how awkward it would be, without being provided the proper tools because they just had to pass off the mission as something else… likely to avoid undue scrutiny after forcing it onto the ‘clearance list’.

She cycled her mantra, focusing on ‘Soul’ and ‘Spirit’ to clear her head again.

Exhaling, the mantra did what it did; the rush of negative thoughts rattling around her head scattered like confused ducks and the moment passed.

-This kind of experience is almost a form of cultivation tempering, she thought wryly.

They didn’t snag that thought, gloomy as it was…

The blood ling tree, wherever it was, had to be a high enough realm to differentiate properly. That suggested it was at least Soul Foundation, a little over a whole major realm above her, who was on the threshold of breaking through to Mantra Seed – the Physical Path cultivator’s equivalent to Golden Core.

That thought was a bit…

The pull of the trees swung back like a vicious water current; it had been waiting for the end of the mantra cycle.

“Cunning thing,” she hissed under her breath, focusing again on her mantra to clear her head and bumping her evaluation of the tree up to probably Nascent Soul – two major realms above her, at the peak of Physical Foundation.

While she recovered her equilibrium, she rechecked the briefing notes and gave a half-hearted grimace as she again turned her thoughts to the nature of the trail she was following and the question of the apparent ‘preparedness’ of those she was following compared to the reality on the ground.

The strengths of the group she had been sent in here to find were purportedly peak Soul Foundation, neither good nor bad for the younger generation of this region. However, given she was noticing how oppressive this was, with all the natural advantages she had, that likely meant they had either brought some very good talismans for their mental stability or she was going to find corpses sooner rather than later…

Shaking her head, she stilled her qi and hid her presence as best she could just using her mantra, listening to the sounds of the cloud forest again – the creak of the trees, the *plip* of the water and the distant, taunting rustle of leaves high above.

Mist drifted around, surrounding her like a claustrophobic wet blanket, making her robes stick to her and the shapes of the trees and shrubs around her distort faintly.

Finally, after some seconds, she caught the ghostly shimmers of an orb-weaver’s web drifting in the path some ten metres ahead of her, the limbs of the spider blending into the shadows of some cut branches as it hung, poised just above average head height.

“…”

It had been a necessary evil to check the blood ling tree, given the influence was so atypically focused for being so far away from the depths of the grove, but really, it was a terrible nuisance, as she was not unlike a fly that had just clipped the web.

Quietly, she took a few slow steps to her left and broke line of sight, before glancing around in the direction she had come from.

The nearby ferns on the rocks by the cliff rustled, shedding more mist… However, there was nothing there, as expected.

She unfocused her vision faintly, looking not at ‘things’ but at the ‘place’, as she continued to slowly make her way away from that location, avoiding the spider’s web. All around her the trees were looking more… distracting, like limbs might be hidden by leaves, or eyes… or a shadow in the bowels of one…

Without her mantra to repress all the stress that her surroundings were trying to induce, she would have been in deep trouble…

*Tkk Tkk Tkk Tkk Tkk…*

“…”

Tapping sounds in the distance made her bite her tongue, but she refused to walk quicker, and just kept her steady, careful and quiet pace, looking for the trail and not getting drawn in by the deeply unpleasant sensation of being followed that was trying to bait her into bolting in... any direction was likely pretty much equally fatal.

*Tkk Tkk Tkk Tkk Tkk… tkk tkk—!*

The echoes of some distant animal hitting a tree melded back into the sound of branches moving high above her and water dripping off everything in the light drizzle. The trail itself returned as scuffed tracks in the leaf litter, interspersed with some relatively fresh tears in the moss on rocks, before it vanished again into the diffuse greenery where the contour of the forest floor dropped once again towards the river which was winding down through the forest some thirty metres to her right.

-If I was injured out here, it would cause a big problem and everyone would be very regretful…

“…”

-Oh come on… she castigated herself, not that there was anything she could do about those thoughts. She would keep having them for some minutes at least.

It didn’t help that none of those thoughts were necessarily that far out either, even if the ecosystem did play up your paranoia something horrid. Given the politics and rivalries at play locally, between the Ha and Deng clans, the local Hunter Pavilions’ politics and the inherently political nature of the requests she was landed with, both this one and the teaching one, it was entirely plausible that someone was trying to use a mission to make some kind of political mess.

Working that bad thought away with her mantra, she considered the route ahead of her, seeking out any hints of damaged vegetation, looking across the broken slope to the rather innocuous rocks that the river was flowing down through, because she was sure she had tracked the path…

…

The next hour went much like the last, just with a slow ratcheting up of the creepy sense of a lingering ‘shadow’ behind her, like an itch between her shoulder blades quietly needling away. It lurked in every brush of a vine or rustle of a falling leaf as she followed the traces of the trail, rediscovered by the riverbank in the end, on down the edge of the valley as it meandered through various outcrops and then crossed over the river until the forest petered out into a much more familiar set of rocky slabs surrounding an upright stele and weathered statue of a woman of unknown origin, dressed in a strange robe and holding a spear and a lantern in her hands, that acted as something of an orienteering landmark when crossing through the valley from east to west.

-Finally, something familiar, she thought with relief, marking the ancient landslide off the jutting ridge to her north that shed little massifs into the forest and which indicated the edge of the ‘Red Eye’, the innermost region of the Red Pit, where there was a large circular ruin surrounded by the primary grove of blood ling trees.

-I really hope they haven’t gone there… she found herself wishing. Though if they did, I suppose I could just say that the trail went straight into those ruins and never came out.

Once again sending qi into the jade scrip tied to her forearm, she pulled up the map of the topography and drew it into her mind’s eye, connecting her current location to her previous trip here. The Red Pit was hardly circular, more like a curve and much wider in some places than others, making it almost impossible to keep track of your wider location in your mind’s eye, another thing that the blood ling trees would mercilessly exploit if given the chance.

Finally granted an anchored view of her location, she spent a moment linking up the trail down the unfamiliar route she had just traversed and surveyed the possible destinations of their route.

The result showed that she was about where she had expected, though a bit further north than she would have liked. The nearest exits, which she also marked, were about two miles north-west and west towards Jade Willow Village, which thankfully was where the trail seemed to be going.

-I swear, if I get to Jade Willow Village and find them getting drunk with serving girls in a teahouse, I’ll… probably just go complain to the Hunter Pavilion and go home, she concluded with a sad sigh.

She turned again, looking up at the tree above, and reflexively caught the face-sized spider by its thorax as it jumped for her face this time, warned by the last minute ripple of leaves and the slight distortions in the misty rain from the water ferns.

It twisted unpleasantly in her grip, its legs scratching at her forearm and shedding fine hairs that made her skin itch, as she considered it sourly for a moment then tossed it far away, across the slope to her left. As she watched, it hit a tree and fell, stunned, down a crevice near the river whose passage was currently barely audible over the creak and hiss of trees amid the oppressive veil of obfuscating spirit vegetation.

Continuing on, she noted the damp, humid air starting to cool – marginally – and sighed again.

-What are the odds that’s a ‘Meek Yin Ginseng’ or similar herb…?

There was no note of ginseng in recent records, but given that those recent records were her own from almost half a year previous, that was not surprising. She had checked before leaving, but equally unsurprisingly, there were no local updates on file for the Red Pit either. As a place on the arse end of a contested zone between two major clans, neither Ha nor Deng had much incentive to provide elucidation in or out of it and they controlled much of the local Pavilions’ hierarchies.

The further she went, picking her way slowly and carefully across the rocks that protruded up between the low-lying vegetation, the more the natural heat of the surrounding jungle continued to recede. Eventually, she found the route she was seeking and with it, as she descended through the rocks, the passage of those she was tracking as well. The traces were visible in the scuffed footprints in pockets of leaves here and there on the rocks and also in an egregiously obvious bit of fresh growth in a thorny tree.

Warily approaching it, she saw what had been the target of some previous, speculative attack. A bunch of reddish-grey and blue mushrooms were scattered across its trunk and the gully below. Giving the mushrooms a wide berth, in case they were highly explosive or otherwise potentially dangerous, she made her way cautiously down to check the gully itself. Someone had thoroughly rooted around in the gully and there were even hints of formations, wards scrawled on the nearby rocks.

-They… no, someone harvested a spirit herb here?

She made a note of that in the scrip, looking at the recovery of the scars and regrowth of the moss, which suggested that what she was looking at was weeks old… at least.

Sitting back on her haunches, she considered the surroundings and, after some consideration, pulled out a bowl, scooped some water out of a handy puddle into it and then made a very crude geomancy compass with five different elements of spirit herb leaves and looked at what it told her about the attunement of the surroundings.

-Yin fire?

Frowning, because that was a bit unusual, she warily drew out a blade of her own and scraped away some moss and algae from the rock behind the excavation, taking care not to get snagged by any leeches, revealing a few thin, spider-web-like veins of yin fire-touched iron ore.

More recently, she could see now that someone had made an effort to smash off a few lumps, the damage much fresher than the excavation.

The most obvious, if slightly surprising, conclusion was that someone had, within the last month probably, harvested a live ‘Red Yin Fire Ginseng’ out of this gully.

The group she was following had also poked about a bit, she noted, tracking their footprints in the dark red earth as they criss-crossed back and forth before going out of the gully again. Following them, her path took her down the gully and along the edge of another vine-strewn shallow cliff, until it eventually petered out amid a second small plateau of dense vegetation and moss-carpeted rocks.

After some cautious crawling to get around the worst of it, she came out on the lower edge of the boulders and found herself back in the world of water ferns. As soon as she brushed past them, the niggling sensation of the blood ling tree twisting the vegetation returned, carried on the qi of the water ferns, further solidifying her suspicions about that tree.

The choice here was fairly binary: go over the top and risk appearing right on top of a yin ginseng or similar kind of spirit herb – there would certainly be something growing in the rocks beyond them – or go through here and risk something hopping out of the ferns and trying to claw her face off.

Put differently, that was a choice between dropping straight onto a yin attribute alchemical bomb, or wasting a charge of a barrier talisman – so it was an easy choice really.

Palming the barrier talisman from her talisman wallet and steeling herself, she slipped through the ferns onto the rock slab beyond.

To her relief, no enraged shifting alkr or thorny centipede tried to stab or bite her, nor did she meet any leeches or another spider. However, the greenery beyond was…

She stopped to consider the thicker-than-expected vegetation. A lot of it was fresh growth, which was unusual in the dry season. Admittedly it was never really the dry season up here, as evidenced by days like the present one, but the water table did lower and it did rain less. Another time she might have been happy to see that, as it would suggest something worth harvesting, but now, her instincts told her that this was probably a bad thing. Pulling out a much cruder feng shui compass, made of a sheet of wood and some animal bones, she considered the readings: inauspicious, passing, oblique and yin hour.

Scanning the jutting, weathered rocks below more carefully, she finally spotted what she had been half-expecting, a lurking surprise. It looked like a large swathe of moss scattered through the new vegetation, an innocent enough thing under normal circumstances, but here…

She skimmed a stick through the air, about a pace above it, and watched as nebulous fronds unfurled everywhere, grasping at the disturbance of the air.

“…”

She sighed softly, not sure whether to be relieved or annoyed at the sight before her.

It was just an ‘Algru’ field, but it was a large one, spread across a vast swathe of the rocks below, and unquestionably dangerous – those fronds would flay her skin and it was probably poisonous as well. Going through it was out of the question, so she was about to turn around when her vision caught an odd shape snagged under one of the more vibrant-looking bushes to her right.

Clambering down the slope carefully, she made her way across two densely vegetated fissures, sticking to areas where the rock was smooth and waterworn.

When she got close, she pulled a staff out of her storage talisman and warily swept aside a few of the lower branches, fighting the algru that had snared up around them and now tried to flay the outer surface off the staff experimentally. What she found was a scrap of durable, spirit-woven cloth, snared on the thorns on the shrub’s branch. The shrub itself turned out to be ‘Brown Thorn’ – a localised variant she hadn’t immediately recognised due to the different foliage and the fact that it was not in flower.

Recovering the piece of cloth was out of the question, so instead she turned her attention to the crevice that the shrub was growing over. Using her staff to probe the edges of the nearest densely vegetated fissure, covered in ferns and sporadic bits of algru mat, she estimated that it was about ten metres deep.

Qi pooled in the depths, giving off a faintly silvery mist that managed to both be luminous and draw colour from the surrounding environs. It was impossible for her to make out what was at the bottom, although her wider knowledge of this phenomenon told her that that mist would be toxic enough that everything here would avoid it. Going down was out of the question, so if anything or anyone had fallen in there, it was going to remain there for the foreseeable future.

Carefully stepping across the fissure, she made her way onwards, across two more, shallower, vegetation-clogged fissures to finally reach the far side of the rock outcropping, where it shelved into a shallow overhang once again dripping with ferns.

Slipping down its mossy face, she spotted more tracks – still three pairs of footprints – in the soft mud protected by the overhanging rocks, where any things that had slid down from above would collect. Beyond it, in the open clearing between the rocks she had just traversed and another slab-like outcropping, she finally found the meek yin ginseng she had been expecting up above, and, with it, a tableau she had expected to encounter eventually – just not in the form laid out before her.

Below her, in the fading misty drizzle – the water ferns were still stalking her – she could make out… three corpses and a dog scattered throughout the low-lying vegetation within the clearing. The problem was that it wasn’t the corpses of the three male cultivators she was supposedly following, but three teenagers… and one small spirit dog.

A picture could speak a thousand words, and right now the diorama below was telling a moral tragedy written worthy of a famous scholar. It would certainly be useful when she had to seek answers down below.

After a very quick look around to check there was nothing obnoxious lurking, she got out her talisman and used her qi to link it to the scrip and start recording the entirety of the environs around her as a three-dimensional picture.

-Why and how are they up here and now deceased, for starters? she pondered, once again glad she had the option of her mantra to keep her emotions in check. They are certainly not part of my mission, and this isn’t a place you can just wander into… or be easily brought for that matter.

She was just about to sit down on a rock to let the recording start, when another treebill called in the trees nearby.

“Oh come on…” she hissed under her breath, frustration with her environment creeping out despite her best efforts.

-Where is it?

Pushing that annoyance back, she swept her gaze across the foliage around her until she saw the flash of wings and black plumage as it glided away through the gently swaying treetops, allowing her a little moment of relief. It was nice to see something be what it should up here.

The recording of the scene took a good ten minutes in the end, such was the obfuscating nature of the greenery, mist and poor light. Thankfully, no further distractions appeared to trouble her, so once it was finished she steeled herself and approached the centre of the clearing for a closer look, suppressing her presence as she went.

The meek yin ginseng was easy enough to spot given its size. The majority of its foliage was lurking in the shade of some rocks on the southern side, its bluish-green leaves shimmering in the first light of morning, themselves covering an area the size of a small vegetable plot. Even at this distance it was making her skin itch.

Pausing, she dug out some purification pills that were suitable for poisoning from plants that had qi purity akin to a Nascent Soul cultivator and swallowed them down with some water she carried in a flask in her storage talisman. The sensation of discomfort lessened, but didn’t recede until she started to use the ‘Heart’ and ‘Renewal’ mnemonics in her mantra as well.

Threading her way warily across the clearing, taking care to disturb nothing while keeping a careful eye on the sun above in case it suddenly turned overcast, she made it to the dog and the first of the corpses, that of a dark-haired young girl of maybe 12 years.

She lay face down in the dirt, cold as a block of ice, the cause of death abundantly clear – poisoning from yin metal and yin water qi. There were several holes through her legs, and looking around she could see that the extremities of the plant could be mistaken for thin, relatively harmless spiky ground herbage.

It was a good predatory strategy: ‘Persis Stick’ – which was what that had looked like – was quite common and a lot of animals would nibble it unsuspectingly.

“…”

She stared back up the slope at that odd variant of brown thorn and its ragged bit of cloth.

-Five spirit stones to me says that that’s also a meek yin ginseng, she thought with a grim sigh. As if I need more reminders of how smart and deceptively dangerous this place is.

Anything that had even a few years on it usually had a kind of cunning and natural cruelty born of a need to survive in a landscape like this. As to something like the ginseng in front of her that might have actual spiritual wisdom if it was at or above Soul Foundation, that was doubly dangerous.

Forgetting that was what usually ended Herb Hunter careers early, or permanently.

Warily, she took her staff and turned the body over. It moved easily, telling her that its foundation was probably that of a Qi Condensation–

Her thoughts went a bit fuzzy for a second as she stared at the face. Instinctually, she fed her anger and pain and sorrow, and annoyance at the blood ling tree that had just returned, to the mantra.

“Ha Fenfang,” she whispered, staring down at the young girl she had seen many times selling flowers, trying to forget that she had nearly seen her sister’s face there for a second. “Why, in the name of any fate that actually cares, are you here?”

Almost maliciously, the sagacious saying: ‘Animals die for food, people die for wealth…’ appeared in her head, providing an obvious, crude and depressing answer.

Feeling a bit numb and very glad of her mantra’s ability to eat her emotional turmoil and keep her mind artificially rock-steady, she made her way over to the second body a few metres away – another girl who had been running towards Ha Fenfang near as she could tell.

Again using the staff, she turned the body over and found another somewhat familiar face – Nen Hong, who had also sold flowers with Ha Fenfang. Her face was empty, frozen in mute confusion, eyes half-closed.

“Definitely not the young scions from the Ha clan then…” she hissed, sitting back on her heels and looking between them. As far as Ha clan members were concerned, both were basically nobodies.

-They would not be the type to be brought along either, no backing, no influence… nor could they have gotten them all the way here across the mountains from West Flower Picking Town… which means they came up from Red Lake or Jade Willow?

The third corpse lay on its back, but remained half-obscured by a bush it had fallen into. The depth of the small footprints nearby and the thrown-back arms suggested he had been in the process of stumbling backwards in shock.

Sighing, she made her way over and stared at the face, another half-familiar one: Nen Shirong, the younger brother of Nen Hong.

Nen Hong and Nen Shirong she only knew a little, but Ha Fenfang had regularly sold flowers she picked in the countryside to people visiting various teahouses in West Flower Picking. Now that she thought about it, she hadn’t seen any of them – or a few other such children – in recent weeks as she went about her own daily life in West Flower Picking Town between missions for the Hunter Bureau.

Looking around, she could see traces of their deaths – by qi poisoning – which would have been incremental… and agonizing.

Given their age and foundations, the paralysis would have been nearly immediate… and coupled with the lack of any obvious degradation to her surroundings it had probably taken them hours to die, or maybe a day if it happened in the morning.

She resisted the urge to hit something. That would do no good and only disturb the source of their death – the ginseng. Instead, she settled for spitting on the ground and muttered, “Screw you, Ha clan!”

She had expected that the refusal of the mission requester to supply a storage ring that could hold bodies – on the grounds that she was ‘searching for a missing team’, not doing ‘body reclamation’ – would come back to bite her.

Just not this way.

Carrying three corpses out was just about manageable – six corpses, if she included those she was originally sent to find, notwithstanding butchering the spirit dog, would be pushing it in terms of the logistics of getting out of here.

Massaging her temples again, she considered her options, of which there were three… though only two were really credible.

Firstly, try to seal the entire scene up, then head for the nearest village, Jade Willow, relying on her seal and the yin poison to deter any scavengers, and get one of those special spatial storage rings usable beneath Nascent Soul or a corpse-storage box, then come back here herself…

Secondly, try to get a local Nascent Soul expert with an ordinary spatial storage ring to come back here, into the depths of the Red Pit, with her… which she discounted out of hand almost immediately.

Or, thirdly, harvest the ginseng and carry these bodies down herself.

All three had problems…

The storage rings and corpse boxes she could use were rare and expensive, and even with her status as a Junior Official it would be difficult to convince someone to loan one to recover ‘unimportant’ bodies from a high-risk danger zone like here. A round trip would also take nearly three days… and with what she had on hand, most formations would not last that long… and there was no guarantee she could even get the type of storage ring she needed in Jade Willow Village.

It would also cause issues with the timeframe allotted for the clearance requests.

As to leaving them here…

Frowning, she took her staff and tried to move Nen Hong’s body away from where it had fallen. There was an immediate, subtle shift in ambience throughout the clearing, a chilling of the air and a faint shadow-like sense of foreboding that made her mood sink even further.

Looking at the compass which she had hung from a handy branch, it showed inauspicious yin, water… and metal, making it clear that if she did try to remove them as was, the ginseng was likely to try to flash freeze her or worse.

Almost on cue, the blood ling tree tried to grasp her sadness and frustration at what she had found.

‘Spirit, Heart – Renewal, Body – Soul’

“Seriously, I’ll come burn you down…” she muttered, as her mantra rebuffed its attempt to nudge her mental state.

That sense of creeping, chilling air told her that the ginseng was at least somewhat aware of its surroundings, even if this was the time of day it was least active. However, while it would take a while for the bodies to get pulled underground to nourish the root base of the ginseng, with their intact foundations they would be appealing prey for other, stronger roving parasitic spirit herbs or some scavengers from the edge of the valley.

She could seal it up; it was early enough in the day for that, thankfully. However, that then left the question of what to do with it. That would just make the bodies more vulnerable to scavengers, and if she robbed it of its meal the herb would certainly hold a grudge, posing a new hidden danger for when she next came back here, or ambush some other poor souls for revenge.

“…”

Thinking about it, it wasn’t outside the realms of possibility that that was what had already happened here, considering the nearby traces of ginseng harvesting and the tree.

Killing it would be dangerous on her own, even if she sealed it up. The death reflex alone might incapacitate her badly enough for other things to finish her, and if she harvested it, she would have to toss it or lug it down with the corpses.

For the latter argument though – a live, Nascent Soul stage meek yin ginseng was worth between 30 and 50 pure spirit stones, assuming she got it back to West Flower Picking Town alive… and without getting robbed.

Puffing out her cheeks, she turned the various ideas over in her head for a few more minutes before finally deciding to start with the most desirable outcome: seal and harvest, then work backwards from there depending on how it panned out. In any case, sealing it would have to happen, and she had enough ward stones to make one proper attempt at it as it was.

After a bit of consideration of the various formations manuals she had on hand, she selected a yang fire attributed sealing formation: ‘Fu’s Flames of Yang’. For minor supports she selected the earth element formation ‘Mu’s Little Mountain’ and the water-metal element formation ‘Fivefold Yang Saps the Sky’.

The goal of her strategy was both to ensure that the water aspect of the plant didn’t run out of control and to exploit the ginseng’s own reason for being here to sap it subtly before it became aware anything was wrong. As a metal-water attribute spirit herb, the environment was not that good for it, but it was tolerable, forcing the plant to always focus upon its relationship with the world around it.

The theory was not dissimilar to someone entering harsh training before a breakthrough to test themselves. When seen like that, the Red Pit – a place rich with yin energies that tended more towards various forms of fire, earth and life thanks to the blood ling trees and their twisting of attributes – was ideal for it.

Subsequently, her formation would twist some aspects of the yin fire attributes of the local feng shui to make it a bit soporific without properly unbalancing it, then leverage the inauspicious hours to force the plant to be subtly repelled by its surroundings, allowing her to harvest it.

Looking at the sky, she calculated that it was still within the most auspicious period of the day for yang energies, the period just before, during and after sunrise. That was the time when new heavenly yang energies from Eastern Azure’s sun swept across the region and to succeed, she would need to complete the initial activation of the formation before the current hour passed, and without spooking the blood ling tree that was periodically annoying her.

Decision made, she moved around the perimeter of the clearing as stealthily as possible and started putting ward stones in complementary places that would allow the feng shui of the environment to further reinforce them, while also looking for traces of other victims being nearby.

She had nearly gotten three quarters of the way around the perimeter when that evidence did materialize in the form of blood splatter on the ground and some withered, blackened grass showing signs of frost burn around a few boot prints. It continued for a metre then, near as she could see, vanished mid-footfall.

Sighing, she set the compass to work out what it could garner from that and continued on her way. By the time she was done, she found one other trace of passage, a lopped off branch of a tree, but nothing else that was obvious, so she turned her mind back to the important matter of the formation.

With as much care and subtlety as she was able to muster in the circumstances, she took the formation centre, a carefully carved piece of blue jade containing an inset beast core about the size of her hand, and carefully made her way into the clearing and picked out a suitably auspicious spot near the middle for it. Then, with bated breath, she slowly began to integrate the centre for the ‘Fu’s Flames of Yang’ formation into the various layouts she had already set out – all the while watching the main plant of the ginseng carefully.

Thankfully it was content to just keep lurking, waiting out the time of day and paying her no obvious heed, so once the formation centre was set, she placed it on the ground and slowly started to feed her qi into it.

Formations, especially ones that worked with feng shui, were easily the most versatile tool any aspiring Herb Hunter had to work with. It really helped that she was a physical cultivator from an established lineage as well. Anyone could learn mantras but only those who had had them passed on at birth tended to know the secret and hidden arts that went with their use. One such trick was externalising your mantra.

Normally the mantra worked inwards; now, though, she set two of her mnemonics, ‘Renewal’ and ‘Spirit’, to focus outwards, letting their impetus flow through the qi that was entering the formation centre, helping it harmonise with the surroundings even further while also starting the chain reaction that allowed the formation to use the seed of her qi to put down roots and draw ambient qi from the surroundings to support itself.

A spiritual cultivator without intent would struggle to do this without exhausting themselves – the mantra made the task, if not trivial, much less taxing.

Still, by the time she made it back to the edge of the clearing, it had cost her three fairly expensive qi replenishment supplements and taken almost thirty minutes before the Nascent Soul grade formation fully settled.

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Taking up position on a nearby rock, she started to cycle her mantra again, ensuring that her mental state remained clear and nothing weird manifested in the clearing, and began preparing the second, much more dangerous, step.

If she tried to dig it out now, it would be so fused to the earth as to be impossible – which was where the metal and water element formation, ‘Fivefold Yang Saps the Sky’ came in. It would break that connection by heightening the metal attributes in the land, making it more inauspicious for the ginseng and introducing an elemental qi gradient that would slowly bleed away all the metal qi from the ginseng until it and the land repelled each other.

Only when it was devoid of metal qi would she put an earth formation around the whole thing to finish it off. As such, she had to wait for the time between the second and third hours after dawn, when natural shifts of the daily cycle tended towards the naturally inauspicious.

-How dare you be partly metal attuned, she castigated it in her head as she sorted out the various ward stones she was going to need. Had you just been a regular meek yin ginseng I’d have been done with this by early morning!

A small water fern shivered nearby… making her pause and eye it carefully in case it decided it wanted in on the action somehow. The blood ling tree getting bored and deciding to mess with her again would spell the end of this whole approach… because the downside of this method, as such, was that she would be feeding her qi into a natural lightning rod until it settled, in an inauspicious place, at an inauspicious time.

-Getting shocked half-dead by a rain shower is not on the agenda, she muttered in her head as she surveyed the layouts she was going to need, started to select points ahead of time and also readied her teleport talisman tied to the way station on the western edge of the pit... just in case.

After that, all she could do was wait, so she settled down and nibbled on a dried persis stick to keep her focus and aid qi recovery until the appropriate time.

The setting up of the ‘Fivefold Yang Saps the Sky’ formation, when the sun finally shifted, took much less time than ‘Fu’s Flames of Yang’ had, although the constant vigilance was several times more nerve-wracking, even with her mantra to draw away all her emotions.

Thankfully, though, the water ferns didn’t rain and after only ten minutes she could feel the hairs on her arms and the back of her neck start to shift as metal qi started to get drawn out of the surroundings and dissipate into the wider environment. From a certain perspective, she was sure people would have called the whole process ‘unglamorous’… or perhaps ‘boring’. Those people, however, could go screw themselves, because boring was just what she wanted to see.

As the minutes ticked by and the formation did its thing, she watched the mass of blue-green greenery get more and more droopy and wilted until, by late morning, the whole plant looked a bit like it had been afflicted by drought... which in a sense it had been, she supposed.

With its metal qi now dispersed, she used the last of her ward-stones to set up a large earth element formation – ‘Mu’s Multifarious Massif’ – around the whole clearing and began to repeat the whole process as the yin fire formation started to pressure the herb’s Soul Foundation properly. The purpose of the earth formation was both to restrain the yin water qi that lingered and also to prevent the thing from bolting in its weakened state on the off chance that it did manage to wake up.

Now was the critical point in the whole process, because she was in a race between how long its Soul Foundation could hold out without getting permanently damaged, and how fast she could safely harvest its main body. If it all went according to plan, she would have one live meek yin ginseng. If it didn’t, she would be out of pocket, although the trip back would be several times easier.

Taking off her boots, she put a bunch of the remaining earth ward stones in them and then set herself up a minor five element cancelling formation to protect from the worst of the qi. Next, she took a sack of luss cloth and a large 75 litre pot she usually used to store water for general utility out of her storage talisman. Tipping the water out, she tossed all the remaining earth and metal ward stones into the bottom of it and covered them with a few handfuls of soil from the clearing before returning it to her talisman. The last thing she did was grab a shovel and mattock made purely out of unattributed, auspiciously aligned spirit wood and a proper divination talisman, which she slapped onto her right arm and activated.

Carefully picking her way through the clearing, she felt the tug of the divination talisman as she carefully fed it her qi and intent, directing it to predict where the main tubers might lie.

One was easy enough: it was where Ha Fenfang was lying.

A second, she soon found, had extended towards where Nen Hong lay.

The third turned out to extend under a small outcropping of rocks, which was going to pose a problem in all likelihood.

The fourth was under the large swathe of wilted blue-green vegetation.

The root stock around the tubers had mostly receded at this point as the plant tried to conserve qi by compressing its form.

Shaking her head, she took up the shovel and started with the root nearest Ha Fenfang.

You couldn’t use qi for any kind of serious excavation in the valleys. The entire environment behaved like a quasi-formation, repelling external qi vociferously, so any kind of harvesting work had to be done the old-fashioned way, with sweat and cursing. It was the main impediment stopping people cleaning out whole valleys of their spirit vegetation for quick money. It did happen, but not often – she could only recall a single, small instance of it since she had started out as a Herb Hunter, aged twelve, in West Flower Picking Town and she was eighteen now.

Soon, she had exposed the tuber, which was shrinking back slowly towards the main plant stem. It was pale cream with a blueish-purple metallic tinge that occasionally hued to green and yellow depending on how she looked at it. The main part was about as thick as her arm and some forty centimetres long with a rough texture and a pronounced outer skin suggesting it was at least one hundred years old. The threads connecting it to the main body were as thick as her finger and starting to show the first tell-tale signs of yin fire poisoning.

Setting aside the shovel, she took up the spirit-wood mattock and started to rapidly excavate a trench, all the while keeping an eye on her surroundings in case anything came to bother her. A mattock was a surprisingly good weapon but breaking it would be expensive. Tools of the quality she was using were worth more than the ginseng she was harvesting – and that was if she caught it alive and unharmed…

By the time she had the third tuber exposed, the poisoning had started to make some of the leaves of the plant manifest little reddish-black flames.

Leaving the tuber under the rocks for last, she started to search for the main body within the vegetation. Most of it was subsidiary sprouts that had not even reached the point of awakening. The better ones she tossed to one side – some of them might be saved, but they were not the priority now. Tracking the three tuber lines in, she eventually caught the body, which was about the width of her thigh and half a metre long, slowly and spasmodically shifting through the soil like a greyish-blue bark-textured slug.

Considering it, she re-evaluated her earlier assertion that it was a Nascent Soul spirit herb down to a Soul Foundation one, while the age of the core tuber was probably two or three hundred years.

The soil around it was already sparkling with frost as it tried to protect itself, so she left it alone for now and started tracing the last tuber. As she had half-expected, it was thoroughly ensconced in a narrow fissure in the rock and was probably the second most significant part of the plant after its main body based on the size.

Withdrawing her ironwood staff out of her storage talisman, she swiftly scouted the small outcropping and was relieved to find it was, in fact, just an erratic boulder washed here by the river and not some further outcropping of the shelving slabs of bedrock she descended to arrive to this location..

Above her, a bird gave a piercing cry and she had to pause to look and satisfy herself that that too was just a bird.

“Always there is a monkey you don’t see, sneaking up to piss in your soup,” she sighed, pulling the pot back out of her storage talisman and taking a bunch of the earth ward stones back out.

Nothing had come… yet, but that didn’t mean that this whole endeavour had not been marked, especially after she had made such a mess of the localised alignments in this part of the valley.

It took only a few moments to set up a very basic earth-repelling formation and use her mantra to link it into the natural qi of the landscape. Standing back, she watched as the boulder shivered slightly and the formation ran out of qi. That was expected, but the goal was to confirm that it was movable in its entirety. Shoving the end of the ironwood staff under one end, she found a convenient rock to stand on and focused on her mantra and the qi in her body.

‘Spirit – Heart, Renewal, Body – Soul’

Compared to spiritual cultivators, physical cultivators – even those who were not inheritors – tended to have much more in common with body refinement experts and could exert up to one and a half times the physical strength of a spiritual cultivator their realm. When you factored in her Mantra Manifestation, her own strength at the peak of Physical Foundation was almost double that of a good Qi Refinement expert.

Exerting ‘Body’ to the utmost, she pushed her qi into her movement art and used the momentum to lever the rock onto its side, exposing its underside and most of the tuber. Her qi reserves melted away as she staggered to a stop, leaning on the staff. The whispers of the blood ling tree tugging at her consciousness also returned, right on cue, trying to fog her mind in the brief moment of exhaustion.

The tuber itself, though, did as she had hoped and also started to recede, pulling itself out of the rock and towards the main body with somewhat sporadic jerks and twists.

Swallowing down a replenishment pill or three, she drew upon her mantra and fed it the stirred emotions, the euphoria from having moved the tuber and her worries over her surroundings, using it to sweep away the tiredness for a while. It was a handy, if dangerous, trick, because all she was doing was tricking herself into ignoring the exhaustion rather than properly recovering from it.

“Gotta speed it up,” she sighed, leaning on her staff, taking in her surroundings warily once again and noting it was now past noon. “Recede faster, you accursed thing!”

Her complaints achieved nothing much, but they did make her feel better – at least until she noted the tuber in the rock unobtrusively trying to split.

“…”

“Oh I hope a monkey shits on your head,” she grumbled, making her way over to the rock and shoving the staff into a fissure.

Swallowing down another qi replenishment pill, she felt a rush of energy flow through her body and her bones grow warm briefly. Gritting her teeth, she put her feet against one side and used all of her strength and leverage to push down against it. Her feet sank into the ground and the muscles on her arms and core corded and complained for a few brief moments before she was rewarded by the sharp sounds of cracking rock as she found the stress point in it.

Grabbing a hammer from her storage talisman, another useful thing she had found convenient to always carry, she hit the end of the ironwood staff a few times, driving it further into the fissure. It took a few minutes of wary hammering, but eventually, with a grinding crack, the whole thing split in two, and the full extent of that tuber was finally revealed.

“Hurry up, or I’ll set you on fire,” she cajoled, watching the tuber finally slope off into the ground, heading for its original body.

The longer everything went on, the more difficulties were likely to arise, especially now that it was past noon. The inauspicious hour of the afternoon was one she definitely wanted to avoid if at all possible… and ideally, she would be out of this valley, or at least the vicinity of this part of the valley, before late afternoon.

“…”

She exhaled and focused on her mantra again, cursing the damn trees, who were certainly responsible for those nudges towards wanting to speed things up.

Minutes flowed by as she walked between the different tubers, checking their status. The plant should be working by instinct now, stunned as it was… but, as ever, assuming that uncritically was the kind of thing that led to you becoming the fourth body here.

It was thus a tangible relief when the four tubers all finally returned to the main body, which was now the combined size of a large goat.

“Right, your time’s up!” she remarked to the world at large, summoning the pot and returning as many of the earth ward stones as had survived their ad hoc use into its base as she could.

Adding a few shovelfuls of the earth from around it into the pot, she tossed out the rolls of luss cloth she had for this kind of purpose and, after swallowing down a neutralisation pill for yin poisons, set to work bundling up the plant.

The yin water qi that lingered in it still stung her arms and made her hands go numb but it was manageable with patience and soon she had bundled it up and pushed it into the pot, glad she had picked the larger one, and retrieved the cloth. It took a few more nervous minutes to fill it up with soil and then wrap the outside with cloth to insulate it.

Only when the top was properly sealed did she at last sit back with a weary sigh and survey the damage.

The clearing, rather unavoidably, looked like an open-cast mine.

Walking over to Ha Fenfang, she experimentally tested to check that her body was in fact movable now the herb had been dissociated from this locality. When that did indeed prove to be the case, she rolled the body in one of the heavy-duty luss cloth sheets and then repeated the same for the others.

The next step was very boring: she went and made a crude frame from some lengths of wood she had brought and lashed the pot to it. The overall pack would be well beyond mortal capability to carry, but for her it was pretty manageable, if a touch unwieldy. Finally, she recovered what remained of the formations and, with a final sweep of the clearing, brought up the topographical map and considered her route out.

Her current location put her somewhere south-east of Jade Willow Village. It was not that far in truth – no more than 12 miles as the bird might fly, and there was a reasonably close exit, some two miles to her south, that led down into the valleys rich in ginseng… with a way station on the way out.

In all likelihood, the other three had headed for that so, after some final checking, she started to look for their trail again. That, at least, was not difficult to find. It was heading towards the river, which would bend around and flow south towards the flooded gorges below the Red Pit. However, it also raised an interesting problem as she considered how close it ran to where she had just found the meek yin ginseng.

Either those she was following had seen the bodies and just decided not to get involved with that mess, which was possible, or they had come through before Nen Hong, Nen Shirong and Ha Fenfang had perished. Thinking through the timeframe, she guessed she could charitably add an extra day onto the disciples’ trip… The problem there was that she had, up to this point, been following a trail that was maybe a few days old… not a week.

“…”

Grinding her teeth in annoyance, she went back to the clearing, looking around the edge carefully. It was, as it turned out, surprisingly hard to find evidence of the trail that Ha Fenfang and the others had taken to the scene of their demise, certainly compared to the trio she was following.

It took almost ten minutes and several stops to check her geomancy compass to work through the interference caused by the fourth person’s flight, before she found scrapes on grassy rocks near the river channel, telling her they had come along the edge of that…

However, at that point, things only got weirder, because as she followed it, that trail merged with the one she was following, roughly speaking, and then after another hundred metres of following both, split again, with evidence of several sets of male footprints scuffed on the moss of some rocks, as if a bunch of people… maybe eight or nine, as she counted them, had stood around here for some time.

Putting her pack down, because it was rather unwieldy, she carefully climbed up into the rocks and on the rise, into the shelter of an overhung slab with a surprisingly good vantage through the forest, found a soggy, scattered hearth and two dropped pill bottles with marks from Blue Water City on them amid the water ferns.

*Kekekekekek*

A drilling sound of a bird hammering on a distant tree made her pause, shaking her from her thoughts.

*Kekekekekek*

A second echo came, from the same direction, off to the north, near the river, but it didn’t assuage her suspicions, because it was… if not identical, so close that it was verging on the uncanny.

Slipping back down the rocks, however, she had barely gone a few metres when she felt the faintest of snags on her back and arm—

“Arrrrgh! May you piss blood and die!” she swore under her breath as the silently trailing creeper of a ‘Life Catch Vine’ stiffened and tried to drag her upwards into an overhanging kobbin tree.

Grabbing a branch, she focused her qi and, supported by her mantra, triggered her movement art as it coiled around her pack.

{Flickering Steps}

The world went slightly blurry around her as she used the momentum to tear herself free and leap down to the base of the slope in a scatter of leaves, ignoring the crash and snap of the vine being torn out of the tree behind her. Grabbing it and taking care not to pierce herself with more thorns than she already had been, she smoothly pried it off her, tossed the twitching length away and swallowed a healing pill.

Above her, the water ferns she had disturbed on the way down were already shivering, the mist thickening…

She grabbed her pack even as a huge pall of mist swirled out, obscuring everything and drenching her and all the forest within twenty metres of her as surely as if she had just dumped a bucket of water over her head. In the same instant, it became unpleasantly hot as several points of red-gold light glimmered in the mist on the rocks to her left.

“Of course there are some ‘Sun Orchids’ up here,” she snarled in annoyance and triggered her movement art again.

She landed outside the mist, her skin blistering faintly from the scalding, qi-infused steam that she had narrowly avoided.

Grimacing, she swallowed another purification pill and knelt down by a tree to recover some qi while things settled. The wound on her back was also healing now, the mild paralytic in the barbs leaving numbness and itching, but no other ill effects thanks to her mantra.

Only when the glimmering little sunbeams drifting casually off leaves had dissipated, did she get up again and start to once more search for the trail, threading her way between rocks and trees, looking out for more vines, finally finding it once again near the river.

She had only gone another few hundred metres, though, before she ended up stopping again.

This time, it wasn’t because of any threat, but because lingering on a rock were the remains of a negative imprint of a marker talisman. Those were usually used by the pavilion or sects and clans when mapping valleys. They provided fixed points of reference and even, if you invested heavily in an expensive one, acted as a short range teleportation anchor. This, as she considered it carefully, was one of the latter.

The marker was also impossible to read – at best guess, it was weeks old and already almost subsumed by the natural qi-devouring properties of Yin Eclipse’s ground.

Peering around warily, trying to ignore the distracting patterns in the tree branches, she considered her compass, but it registered nothing untoward in the local alignments… However, visually…

“…”

“Oh, come on…” she sighed softly, attaching a Nascent Soul grade protective talisman to her breast, even as she started the recording function on the scrip again.

Beyond the marked rock, about twenty paces along that trail, lurking well-disguised in the bowels of a large tree that had likely been split by lightning at some previous point, was a corpse. A twisted, broken and bloated form of a fourteen year old boy if she wasn’t mistaken.

-This is why you at least clean up your corpses! she complained inwardly as she slowly started to retreat backwards, staring at the upper canopy of that tree, looking for the tell-tale signs of tetrid stalkers.

“…”

{Li’s Prism Guard}

The barrier triggered as the claws of a female tetrid stalker about the size of a large dog scythed out of the vegetation to her left, its tail skittering off the barrier beside her head, sending her rolling and making her qi drain away at a rate that was… problematic.

As it retreated, she caught a glimpse of fresh exoskeleton.

-Fresh moult…

-Recent corpses

Pushing herself up, she tossed a Nascent Soul grade lightning element talisman at the tree, and swallowed a replenishment pill.

{Fu Kan’s Lash}

A blue bolt sizzled through the undergrowth, catching two other tetrid stalkers and bisecting the one who had just hit her before striking the tree, which shuddered and smoked. The corpse inside it wavered and vanished in a haze of ash, as did most of the rotten core of the tree she guessed.

Without waiting further, she tossed down another lightning talisman and sprinted between the trees, not away from the nest, but towards it, because that was the place least likely to have more, in truth. Her paranoia was vindicated as something hit the ground behind her and the barrier took a solid hit, trying to knock her sprawling to the right as another third of her qi evaporated.

The blood ling trees whispered, like a breathless sigh that travelled through the whole forest, settling across her awareness like a cloying blanket.

-Idiots, if you’re going to do this kind of thing, at least do it in a valley that isn’t this inauspicious…

-Nameless-accursed…

-I hope your nine generations piss on your ancestral shrine…

-May the heavens infest all your eggs with blood leeches!

Snarling curses in her head at both the idiots responsible for this and the tetrid stalkers as she skidded past the still-smoking tree, she made it thirty metres—

{Fu Kan’s Lash}

The hair on her neck stood up as the flare of lightning from the talisman she had dropped behind her made the humid vegetation steam even before the sound of the bolt discharging reached her.

She didn’t pause to see if the stalker had died – that was how you got killed by the other ones – and instead dropped another talisman as she raced for the slab outcropping that marked the rise into another section of the Red Pit—

Right on cue, her barrier took another unavoidable hit as a spray of acid drifted through the foliage all around her then the whole bush erupted as a proper adult tetrid stalker made its appearance.

This one was the size of a large goat, with long spidery legs, huge fangs and an armoured carapace. Its broad flat tail was already curling back up, having disgorged its spray of acid.

Palming another lightning talisman, she ducked behind a tree, cursing that she was lumped with the load she was.

Discarding it would almost certainly be necessary, but the idea of leaving the three here to suffer the same ignominious fate as that other youth, who she had a hunch at this point might be one of the Ha clan ones she was seeking, made her skin crawl. Throwing the spirit herb at it would be logical – it would easily deal with this stalker, who was likely at Soul Foundation… and probably fogged in some way by the blood ling…

“…”

And yet, as if to prove her supposition totally wrong, the stalker didn’t attack, but instead receded into the forest again, hiding itself amid the diffuse wall of greenery to aim another acid attack at her.

-Not berserk…

“Shit,” she hissed under her breath.

-Why are you not berserk? You have to have grown up in here?

A few possible scenarios flickered through her head, each more irresponsible than the last.

-Unless you didn’t grow up here, and someone brought you in…

Behind her, the sound of cracking branches barely gave her warning as she scrambled aside to see two more, much larger limbs lash at her from green shadows—

The blow made her bones rattle and sent her tumbling through the trees, the barrier around her dimming. Twisting, she managed to get a foot to a rock, and focused on her movement art.

{Flickering Steps}

She hit a tree, winded, surprised her pack had survived as long as it had as she pushed herself up.

A tetrid stalker, lightning damage apparent on its carapace, leapt into the tree above her, its tail already uncurling—

‘Spirit, Heart – Renewal, Body – Soul’

She focused her mantra and regained control of her straying thoughts as the mist of acid from the tetrid stalker settled through the world around her, making her exposed skin blister and her clothing start to smoke faintly.

She slapped another lightning talisman on the tree beside her and used her movement art again.

{Flickering Steps}

This time it carried her about 40 metres forward as she hurtled between trees, trying not to snare herself on anything. Crashing into the ground, having been stopped by an awkwardly placed fallen tree, she swallowed two more replenishment pills as the forest behind her blazed with lightning—

*KUAAAAAAASSSSSSSSSKKKK*

Behind her, a tetrid stalker’s cry reverberated, carrying with it a sense of clear annoyance and frustration. With any luck, she had cooked their main nest with the first talisman.

‘Spirit – Heart, Renewal – Body, Soul’

Her mantra shifted and negated the intent within the attack even as she directed it to double down on that action. The sound still made her limbs stiffen, and a foot-long bright red centipede that had just emerged from the tree trunk she hit twitched and died, falling on her head.

Coughing, she pushed herself up… and found herself staring straight at a tetrid stalker the size of a horse, black carapace blotched with red marking it as a mutate affected by the blood ling trees, maw already opening—

{Flickering Steps}

The stalker’s acid mist spray made the vegetation smoke behind her as she pushed qi into another lightning talisman.

{Fu Kan’s Lash}

The bolt hit the adult male, identified by it spitting acid from its mouth rather than its tail, and sent it reeling, sparks scattering off its limbs as she rapidly turned over possibilities for flight.

She had a few talismans that would probably stop it dead, but using them incautiously up here would probably cause her more problems than they solved. Short range displacement talismans – those she could afford – worked by mass as well; hers were mostly good up to 150 kilograms. Far less than she was currently lugging about, and worth more than the sum total of everything else she had expended so far besides.

-Only idiots with a death wish complain about the cost! she remonstrated herself.

That left her two emergency teleport talismans, one from a previous trip here that was anchored to the way station below the cliffs and another that was unbound.

To her left, she saw a flicker of a smaller tetrid—

Using her movement art again, she narrowly avoided its leap as it crashed down where she would have been standing, and spun through the loam to avoid tripping with the unwieldy weight she carried.

Again, rather than follow up its attack, it retreated back.

“…”

The map in her mind’s eye told her that the forested rise of the nearest massif ridge, where it rose to split the Red Pit from a smaller gorge before descending into the Low Valleys proper, was about one and a half miles away as well.

Grinding her teeth, she picked her line and…

The divination compass in her hand twitched readings about as inauspicious as it was possible to get, and she cancelled that thought. Instead she changed course and started back towards the southern exit.

Ahead of her, the bushes remained resolutely normal, but death never looked anything other than disturbingly normal out here anyway.

-This is why I hate working alone, she complained in her heart as she swerved between trees, watching for life catch vines and other lingering menaces even as she palmed two more ‘Fu Kan’s Lash’ talismans from her wallet, casting them back behind her.

Those talismans, despite being quite expensive, were a godsend unlike any other out here. In a place where suppression pushed everything down to Golden Core, nothing dodged lightning. Quite a few things could resist it, but even those would be slowed a bit. Behind her, she strained to hear the tell-tale tapping of communication between the stalkers, but got nothing.

Abruptly, her compass gave a warning again, guiding her to her left…

“…”

-Yeah, I don’t think so, she sneered, the map in her mind’s eye telling her that ‘left’ would take her back straight into the jaws of the nest.

It also didn’t register as inauspicious and she hadn’t messed with the ambient alignments so extensively that they would be giving weird readings this far away…

-What if someone else did…? she reasoned and ground her teeth again.

“…”

Even as that unsettling thought emerged, her enhanced senses caught various tapping and clicking echoes travelling through the forest from all around her. To the untutored ear, they would sound mostly like trees shifting in the wind, branches shifting and water scattering, but she knew them for what they were: the sounds of various nests communicating about what had just happened.

-Why is there a whole tetrid colony this far into this valley on the western edge?

That part didn’t add up… The male tetrid stalker she had just encountered was probably a peak Soul Foundation one, based on the intent within the cry at least…

In the distance, her lightning talismans triggered, a faint flare through the mists swirling in the understory of the trees that lit up almost a dozen drifting candles across the gloomy forest as it sought out targets for a few moments before fading away.

Checking her wallet, she pursed her lips and then put another one down, hidden, next to where she was—

The faint scratch of chitin on leaves was all the warning she got as an iridescent blue ambush spider the size of a cat danced out of a crevice above her, its forelimbs already striking. Twisting away, she punched it hard in the face and then kicked it against a rock, stunning it.

“For fates’ sakes,” she grumbled, looking around to check it had been alone.

After confirming it was, she took a sturdy branch and wedged the stunned thing upside down, between two rocks, trapping it. That was the problem with making a noise: it stirred everything else up, making you an immediate and attractive target to all manner of things that would otherwise just ignore you – like ambush spiders that usually hunted at night.

Leaving the stunned spider behind, she moved on, listening carefully for the first signs that the tetrid stalkers were going to come looking outside their territory. The question of the trail was somewhat moot now, unless she was very lucky. All she could do was take the three she had back and report what else she had seen.

Arriving back at the river, she looked up through the mist at the vaguely visible shadows of the rising valley wall ahead of her. The river was less a gorge and more a broad, meandering set of flood terraces now, as it spread out over rock slabs and pooled into shallow lakes centred on deep sink holes.

Here, still, the oppression of the blood ling trees was far greater than what she recalled, as she threaded her way swiftly along one of the more exposed ledges of rock, heading for the exit down, and finally arrived at the other main orienteering landmark in this part of the Red Pit. At this point, the landscape opened out somewhat, facilitated by the lakes into a broad, marshy area where trees didn’t really grow because of the shallow soil.

Passing by its southern edge, she scrambled up through another rock-strewn rise, avoiding algru patches as she went, to finally arrive at the exit she sought, a fissure fault between two of the massif towers that made up the Red Pit’s western edge… and nearly spat blood at the sight before her – because a massive rock fall obscured everything.

Vegetation was already sprouting out of it, making the edges hard to pick out; however, the broken edges of rock slabs scattered into the forest around her were not particularly fresh, she noted dispassionately, feeding her anger to her mantra. Looking up, she could also make out visible sheer planes on the cliff above, so probably it had come down from a combination of rain and some inauspiciously placed lightning or a rock slide during the previous wet season.

It was frustrating, but these things did happen.

-More problematic is why it wasn’t on the most recent map from Jade Willow Village, she complained inwardly. They should be doing surveys of the Low Valleys ahead of the wet season?

The map she had, which was last updated on the outer periphery three weeks ago, showed nothing on the far side other than two reported landslips on the edge of a neighbouring valley, but neither were near the recognised path through…

“A curse on people not reporting things,” she glowered, taking the opportunity to shake the water off her grass hat.

Looking up at it, she contemplated what to do… Going south was an option, but that would require backtracking close to the tetrid stalker colony and if there had been one landslide of this scale that went unreported… she was not going to bet against others. North would lead her into the Red Eye and the place where most of the mutate plants lived… which was also not appealing. That left crossing to the ridge itself, between one of the massifs…

Staring at the topographic map in her mind’s eye for a moment, she sighed and started towards the landslide itself. Scaling it was the least bad option, really, at least from this side. From the far side, she was pretty sure it would be close to impassable, but she had ropes and anchor talismans for that.

The route up was fairly easy, at least to begin with. The collapse had feathered out into a series of slumped shelves, the looser material mostly held together by a tangled waterfall of fresh, seasonal greenery. In many ways it was similar to the slope she had descended into the valley. Now, however, with an unwieldy bundle on her back, and with the ever-present threat of a random ambush by a tetrid stalker, ascent became something of an act of masochism.

After the first shelf, she divested her bundles, tied them with rope and then climbed with that instead as best she was able, only pausing when she ran out of rope to haul the pot and three corpses up to the next place before continuing on. Everywhere there were water ferns and small spirit herbs. Most were harmless, but all of them had been touched by blood ling trees, so she was beset by a thousand little nuisances as she made the ascent.

As such, it was with great relief that she finally made it to the crest of the slippage and lugged her bundles up after her. A quick check over the other side told her that she could descend quite rapidly down the far side, which was much less overgrown. The sheer forest descending below her was much as she recalled it, just with several huge gashes out of it where the avalanche had swept down.

Checking her divination compass, she found it spun randomly, as expected. Feng shui on valley boundaries and ridgelines – which this was, despite the landscape damage – was almost universally weird. There was no understanding of why, as far as she knew; it just was what it was…

She turned back to look behind her, and stopped as a goat-sized tetrid stalker with a dark carapace, marked by deep red splotches, slunk down out of a cliffside tree some ten metres away and watched her with obvious hunger. It hissed at her and, without any preamble, spat a mist of acid, identifying itself as a male and forcing her to duck behind a rock, cursing.

Training kept her from running around the rock, mainly the knowledge that where there was one, there would certainly be…

Looking around, she saw the other tetrid stalker as it crawled out of a tree on the edge of the slope she had just ascended. A nasty lightning burn to its carapace and a missing leg marked it as the female she had encountered first, whose nest in the tree she had likely torched.

“I hate being right,” she sighed, as it slowly made its way towards her, its tail uncoiling.

One of her worries before was that someone might have done something dumb, like bring a bunch of bound qi beasts into here to guard either a hidden camp or some herb they wanted to harvest, not understanding the kind of place it was. Or they had understood and done so anyway, in which case she fervently hoped that they had been this brood’s first victims as reward for their breath-taking stupidity.

“You’re certainly not native to this valley,” she judged, pulling out her ironwood staff and warding against the female.

Normally, things that grew up in the valleys didn’t leave the valley of their birth. It was, as far as she knew from the sealed records in the Hunter Bureau, related to the same fundamentals that made all the spirit vegetation in a valley act like one giant formation, and prevented you digging with qi. As such, the fact that they were here, on the ridge, was a dead giveaway.

It was an excellent place for an ambush. The question was whether it was one set up by the blood ling trees, or by a bunch of cultivators…

-Clearly, the fates have determined that today I will lose spirit stones, she complained to herself, palming a paper talisman and sending a bit of qi into it before slapping it onto her chest just above her breasts.

She didn’t activate it just yet though; instead, she completed her circuit of the rock and then gave the rope to which the various aspects of her pack were attached a vicious pull. The bodies and the pot all went tumbling down the slope. The pot would be fine in any case; it was more durable than she was probably.

The female shot straight past her, over the ridge, while the male just attacked her as if she were the only thing in its world.

-Yep, definitely a monkey-born puppet, she cursed in her heart, sweeping the staff at the male.

Her blow made it dance back, but rather than fight it, she took the opportunity to slip off the ledge and follow her gear down the slope, after the other tetrid stalker. The male charged after her for a bit before scrabbling to a stop and retreating back up the slope as she passed out of the range of the blood ling trees and the Red Pit’s proper boundary.

Below her, she saw the female tetrid stalker crash down beside her pack and smash it to smithereens, scattering corpses and the jar further down the slope. She had expected that it might have gone after the corpses, but once the pack was broken up, it turned around and charged straight back for her, its tail uncurling again to send another spray of acid.

Sighing, she activated the talisman.

{Li’s Alignment Disruption}

‘Alignment Disruption’ talismans were not a common thing, by and large. They were a niche product made for those who did a lot of rearrangement of ambient feng shui – like for ornamental gardens – or for those who worked deep in the higher valleys of the Yin Eclipse Mountains. Their normal use was this: containing or capturing spirit herbs that were able to properly twist ambient feng shui into hoops and leverage dangerous forms of Natural Intent. They had a small side benefit, though: they also disrupted auspicious and inauspicious harmonies of qi.

She watched as the tetrid stalker crumpled to the ground, twitching spasmodically.

Scrambling down the slope after it, she pulled a long blade out of her talisman and also ate another qi replenishment pill, noting with some annoyance that the pill was less effective than the last.

-Last thing I need is to run into issues with temporary pill resistance now!

Arriving beside the creature, she set the blade against an eye and stabbed inwards, aiming for where she knew its brain was. The talisman on her chest would continue to work for as long as she had qi – which, given its immortal grade, would not be long, so delaying its recovery was key.

Once she had ruined both sets of eyes, she counted five chitin plates back and stabbed deep into the body, levering her blade back and forth. The tail twitched and flopped and acid slowly flowed out as her damage to its spit glands took effect. Finally, she started on the legs, rapidly breaking them at the first joint.

The blade itself was already starting to corrode under the influence of the ichor, so once she had taken enough legs to cripple it, she pried off the fourth chitin plate on its back and proceeded to gouge out the beast core, breaking its foundation.

“May a monkey taunt me with its balls,” she swore under her breath, considering it as it glittered bloodily on the slope.

It was a Golden Core grade one, which was a relief… yet also somewhat frustrating, given she had just wasted a charge of her disruption talisman. The interior was also a faint, misty red, which spoke of the influence of the blood ling trees, while its flesh showed a faint pink tint around its inner organs.

It also didn’t shed much light on its origins. It wasn’t a puppet, but it was clearly not bound to the valley, even though it was a partial victim of sublimation by the soul sense of the blood ling trees.

With a sigh, she considered the body parts and then stored all of them in her talisman. They were close to worthless now that she had thoroughly dismembered it as a precaution, but likely the knowledge that there was one less Golden Core qi beast this vicious in this part of the world would be good news to someone.

Taking a deep breath, she cycled her mantra, then set about recovering her scattered pack.

The pot was still okay and, while the bodies were now a bit muddy, all she had to do was lash together a new frame from some extra timber.

Despite how qi-intensive it was, she didn’t de-activate the talisman itself until she was properly in the base of the gorge, which was badly flooded, several new waterfalls spilling out of fissures on its northern edge. In many respects, it was not much different from the one she had descended through to get into the Red Pit, except it was narrower and much wetter.

Much, much wetter.

Looking around, she had a pretty good idea of why nobody had bothered to report the higher collapse, because the narrow valley would be a nightmare to travel up if you were unfamiliar with it.

She was just pondering the best route down, given that most of it was a roiling torrent, when the divination talisman that was still on her arm twinged faintly. Frowning, she turned and then, almost inexorably, looked up… to find the adult male tetrid the size of a horse crouched in a tree above her, watching her.

“…”

-How… if you’re a mutate?

-Shit… was I baited into using that disruption talisman?

Her qi was still nowhere near enough to use the disruption talisman again… which left her with a very small list of options.

It leapt for her, legs lashing in a blur of black and red at the same time she activated the precious teleport talisman—

There was a sense of lurching distortion as the tetrid stalker filled her whole world, accompanied by a cold pain in her side and the sound of splintering wood, before her surroundings spun, jarringly.

—She hit the ground, which was sandy, face first, and then something hard smashed down on top of her, flattening her into the ground, even as she strangled a scream of anger and pain with her mantra.

Groaning, she attempted to roll over, ignoring the sharp pains all down her side, trying to work out where the stalker was—

It… or rather a third of it, lay twitching and broken, bleeding ichor out onto the dark sand, only a metre from her; one limb, the one that had nearly stabbed her, lying almost on top of her.

“First… stalker,” she gasped, as much to remind herself of her priorities as anything, funnelling her anger into her mantra again to help her physical recovery.

Pulling the corroded blade out of her talisman, she shrugged off the shattered remnant of her pack and lunged for the twitching form, stabbing the blade forcefully into an eye, piercing deep into its brain and levering it back and forth, just to be sure. It had been cut in half, but that didn’t mean it was dead.

Ignoring the very insistent pain in her side, which was telling her that she might have broken more than a few ribs, she tore the blade out and punched it through the joint of the nearest limb, then the one after it, before noting that that was just… half a limb and scrambling over it to get to the ruin of its mid-section.

“…”

Its Soul Foundation core was there, exposed… about the size of her fist, pale grey with dark red swirls inside it, again marking it as contaminated by a blood ling tree.

Gritting her teeth, she cut at the flesh around it – ignoring the splatters of corrosive ichor – and after some moments finally separated it properly from the stalker, noting that its body was already showing signs of restoration, and stored it in her talisman.

-Never have I been more glad that those teleport talismans are military pattern ones, that teleport an area rather than an object, she reflected, looking around at the scattered debris of the forest that had come with her, cut off by the outer edge of the teleport field.

Sighing, she stored the remains away in her talisman, trying not to feel aggrieved. Were it not for the contamination, the core would have been worth almost as much as the ginseng, but with it… pretty much the only place she could sell it was Blue Water City. The body itself was the same really, probably only valuable to the Hunter Bureau.

-Speaking of the ginseng…

Sitting back and wincing… she stared around…

“Motherless sons of monkeys… someone has moved the anchor point?”

The teleport point should have been outside a cave, at the far end of the series of gorges she had been in, associated with the way station there, purported to date to the time of the Huang-Mo wars. Instead, she was in what appeared to be a shallow sinkhole. The stele that was the anchor point was sunk into the beach by the pool some metres away.

Checking the teleport talisman, the Earthly Jade used to power it was almost two thirds depleted, telling her she had gone… four or five miles, maybe?

Half of her pack, including the ginseng and half a dog, lay scattered all around her landing point, however there was no sign of the three bodies, making her punch the sand in frustration… and push herself up to look around more carefully…

“…”

Staring at the wall of the sinkhole, above the beach, she wondered if the world was playing a bad joke on her because there, slumped against the wall, by some rocks, was a body… a different body. A youth in Ha clan robes, eyes vacant and staring, various pill bottles scattered around him.

“…”

Not quite sure what to make of it, she stumbled over, carefully until the cause of his death became obviously and familiarly apparent – yin qi poisoning.

“What are the odds that I find another one?” she muttered, turning back to look at the moved anchor point.

Poking him carefully, she grimaced, because his body might as well have been a block of ice.

Focusing, she pulled up the images she had taken and confirmed her hunch, even before she found the red mud on his boots and the tangled remains of blackened grass scattered on the sand nearby. There was little question that he had died from the same ginseng that had killed Ha Fenfang, Nen Hong and Nen Shirong. The qi signature was familiar and he had taken a much harsher dose than any of them had. There was also evidence of frost-burn across his body – dark shadows on his fingers and black on his lips.

Speculatively, she tried to move him and found that it was... doable, even if he was a bit heavy. A quick search of his robes revealed only a storage ring she couldn’t open and no other identification, beyond the robe marking him as being from the Ha clan.

The most likely explanation was that he was the person who had taken the three into the Red Pit and, having run afoul of the ginseng, fled via teleport talisman, abandoning the others only to succumb here.

Scanning the beach, she could see where he had landed now, and the crawled trail he had made to get to where he eventually died. It was a sad, lonely end, agonizing as well, but unlike the others, she found it hard to muster any sympathy for him in her current circumstances.

…

It didn’t take her very long to remake her pack a third time, lashing the body, wrapped in one of her two remaining luss cloth canvases, beside it as best she could. The only other things down there were several large jars by a far wall, all empty, and evidence that people had trekked into the sinkhole at some point recently, though presumably prior to the youth’s unfortunate arrival.

The exit, thankfully, did not involve much actual climbing, but was via a rope ladder through a water-cut cave that brought her out into a bit of nondescript spirit vegetation forest beside a squat massif bordering the edge of the reclaimed border of the farmlands south of Jade Willow Village.

After taking stock for a few minutes, she marked the location, not on the Bureau map but her own, for now, and started to orientate herself as to where exactly she was.

A few minutes of walking brought her out of the forest, along a narrow animal track and into the scrublands, where she eventually arrived at an abandoned canal. Following that, she finally crossed over into the proper, managed landscape, passing by a large artificial lake in the process that fed active canals.

Soon after she was walking through the margins of actual fields, rows of spirit herbs of various cultivated species waving in the breeze. She had to resist the urge to skip a little bit with relief at finally leaving what had been a thoroughly obnoxious day’s venture safely behind her at last.

Even so, only when she had at long last reached the bank of the raised road that ran through the broad valley, just as the sun was starting to dip, did she finally allow herself a relieved sigh, slumping down on the stones that marked the road’s edge and staring at the cloudy late afternoon sky.

At this time of day, the massif two miles away cast a long shadow that almost felt like it was reaching out to grasp you, which was itself another aspect of the so-called ‘edge effect’. Indeed, the woods in its lower valley that she had been wading through not two hours before now appeared subtly darker, projecting a certain presence when beheld from the open landscape of the farmland that had not been so discernible when she was inside them.

“Really, properly cultivated fields are the most delightful thing,” she exclaimed at last to the world at large, attracting some odd looks from the few travellers on the road who were giving her a wide berth and the farmers in the nearest field.

Looking at her condition, she could understand why, to be honest. Setting aside that she looked like she had just rolled out of a briar patch, her garments were muddy and sweat-stained… and also splattered with tetrid ichor.

The clincher, though, was certainly the corpse beside her, who still had enough yin qi in him to make the grass wilt slightly – through the cloth wrapping him up.

Eventually, she stood up again and made her way onto the road, having grown tired of the weird looks.

-It would suck to have to explain to a patrol at this juncture why I have a corpse and no coffin, she sighed inwardly as she sent her qi into her storage talisman again.

It was a running joke between her and her sister at this point that both of them needed to clear stuff out of their storage talismans, but right now she was glad that she had had the foresight to store a fate-thrashed handcart. Summoning the somewhat rickety old thing, which usually languished in a storage hall in their house, she pulled the body onto it, then lugged the jar up as well.

For good measure she pulled out her other three large jars and added them to the cart as well to balance it.

Into them, she decanted a bunch of spirit vegetation she had gathered up here and there which was destined to be sold off in bulk as alchemical materials for a bunch of spirit stones. It wasn’t that she was trying to avoid having questions asked about the meek yin ginseng, but the fewer questions that were asked about a spirit herb that could be sold off for close to half a spirit jade, the happier she would certainly feel until she could get it into the pavilion’s secure vault.

“Hey miss…”

She turned to see that one of the older-looking farmers had finally come over.

“You a Hunter?” he asked, with a thick, rural accent, leaning on his mattock.

“Yep,” she held up her jade.

“Interested in a few spirit stones for a job?” the old man asked.

“…”

She eyed him dubiously. “There is usually a process for this kinda thing…”

“Aye, well… it’s a bad season, you know…” the old man spat onto the ground. “An’ we got a problem with a water lotus infestation that nobody seems to want to come fix.”

“A Duo Li’s lotus?” she asked, wondering if her luck was good or bad suddenly.

*tcch*

“We aren’t rich like that bugger Ol’ Weng,” another farmer, who had also come over, said.

“That one got his son into the Jade Willow Sect an’ all… Now he thinks he’s better and all.”

She quickly scanned the listing for that request, which had also been bumped up to clearance for some reason, and did indeed find that it was to harvest a bunch of wild Duo Li’s lotuses for a ‘Gen Weng’ outside Jade Willow Village.

“Well, story is pretty straightforward: his boy set to growing some weird herbs he got and turns out not all the seeds was what was said. Ended up with a mutated lotus that ate all his other herbs in that pond.”

“That was kind of funny,” the second farmer, standing nearby, said with a dark chuckle.

She raised an eyebrow at that comment. Usually there was some solidarity between spirit farmers over stuff like that.

“Eh, don’t feel sorry for the bugger. Got himself a fancy wife, bought out a bunch of folks’ land and now fancies himself a gent. Calls his ‘farm’ an ‘estate’ and all,” The second farmer replied, spitting into the ground. “Got stuff on the cheap with those connections? Cuts corners with it and now it’s making problems for everyone else? Just because his grandson has a bit of talent he suddenly thinks he’s better than that?”

“Now, now, Qin,” the old farmer interjected, cutting off his companion’s grumbling about local influence politics to return to the matter at hand. “What’s a problem is that it’s spread to a bunch of other ponds and canals, even this side of the road. Got to the point where it’s begun to bother the livestock.”

She read the request again, which said nothing about that, and resisted the urge to rub her temples.

“I am set to harvest a lotus near here for one Gen Weng…” she said, sounding as pensive as she could.

“See, I told you, fits. It’s clearance season and all, innit?” the second farmer, Qin, muttered, eyeing her cart. “I didn’t see you go up though?”

“I didn’t. I walked across from West Flower Picking,” she said blandly. “As you said, it’s the yearly ‘clearance’.”

The two farmers turned to stare at the massif, over which the clouds were building noticeably now, then looked back at her, then at the cart with its body.

“Guess you seen some bad business up there, sorry we bothered ya,” the older farmer said a bit more politely.

“It’s fine,” she replied, brushing off their comment and coming down to stand in the field beside them.

“You old-timers see this and that, I guess? You’re working out here all the time?”

“Aye, we see a fair bit, not all of it nice sometimes,” the old farmer said. “I’m Heng Ge, but a nice lass like you can just call me Old Ge; my presumptuous friend here is Ye Qin.”

“Well, I think we can reach an agreement – I can’t deal with a bunch of lotuses right now though, not unless they are spirit vegetation rather than actual spirit herbs,” she said frowning.

“As far as we can tell, the worst of them are Qi Condensation stage,” Ye Qin said. “They’re in the waterways over the other side of the road for the most part. Not really spread over here yet, thanks to the sluices under the road, but when the wet season comes it will be bitter work to get them uprooted. Better to get someone like yourself to do it proper.”

“You’re certain they are Duo Li’s lotuses?” she asked.

“Should be, or near enough – seen enough of them buggers over the years to know what’s what,” Old Ge nodded.

“Aye, likely came from the Jade Willow Sect,” Ye Qin added. “Their ponds are a good source of low-grade spirit soil, but only if you treat it with respect. Problem is some folks are just wanting things on the cheap, not respecting others…”

That was a familiar refrain. Dealing with inadvertent contamination of soils was a perennial problem as people tried to make do each year.

“Indeed,” Old Ge nodded. “Used to be a good thing, but these last few years, with the local tensions between the nobles, the pavilion and the sect, it’s become more troublesome. Folks cutting corners, outsiders buying the good stuff, or they twist a few connections to get it cheap like that fool Weng did. Invariably some seeds are in it that nobody notices and we get a season of weeding some strange variant spirit vegetation out of the canals before they can wreck the field alignments.”

“Aye,” Ye Qin grumbled, spitting on the ground again in annoyance. “This season it’s even worse, though, on account of the new Elder at the pavilion.”

“One problem at a time,” she said with an eye roll. “I can certainly look at these lotuses, so long as nobody runs off with my cart.”

“You think anyone around here is going to do much running off with a bunch of corpses that badly poisoned?” Ye Qin asked dubiously.

“Never underestimate what people will run off with,” she shot back, only half joking.

…

Ten minutes later, she hauled herself out of a shallow irrigation pond, one faintly twitching lotus in hand. It was barely a grade-one spirit herb. A purist back in West Flower Picking Town would probably have still categorised it as spirit vegetation. It was, however, undeniably a variant of Duo Li’s water lotus.

“Well?” the farmers asked, looking at the plant in her hand as she turned it over, appraising it.

She swept her eyes across the waterway... which had maybe a few hundred lotus pads in it. Mercifully, only a few dozen were likely actual Duo Li’s lotuses at this point.

“It can be done,” she mused, calculating out in her head how much clearing a few canals of unwanted water lotuses was likely to cost her, either in time or ward stones, against what they could likely afford. “But I can’t do it now; I need a small crate of ward stones and a few decent divination compasses.”

“Aye, I guess you will force them out with an alignment-raising formation or something?” Old Ge mused.

“Pretty much the easiest way to do it,” she agreed. “I won’t be too badly affected by their soul sense either.”

“If these old bones actually had some talent with the formations side of things I’d do it myself,” the old farmer grumbled. “But my old man never saw fit to impart the blessings of a scholarly education.”

“How about this: I have a few things to sort out in Jade Willow Village, and a clearance request for teaching local folks here about spirit herb hunting…”

“You’re also here for that rotten root of a request?” Ye Qin said, raising an eyebrow.

“It’s that time of the year when the pavilions start getting political about what gets cleared off their books,” she replied, sighing.

“The nameless fate curse their politics,” Old Ge grumbled.

“My niece was in line for that teaching o’ yours, before the new Elder pushed up the number of Jade Willow students and Pavilion brats taking part,” Ye Qin added sourly.

“No offence, miss,” Old Ge added quickly.

“Cost us a pretty penny to get her considered as well, then they turn around and say there isn’t enough space,” Ye Qin muttered.

“…”

Listening to them grumble, she started to get a headache of a different kind. Her premonition was that suddenly Jade Willow Village was going to cause her…

“Oh, nameless fate take this accursed season and go fornicate with monkeys while you’re at it!!!” Old Ge suddenly swore.

Right in line with his curse, she felt the first drop of rain as the clouds that had been sweeping past the edge of the massif started to build and spill out over the fields around them.

“Rain from the east,” she scowled.

“Typical,” Ye Qin grimaced, looking around and running a hand through his hair in frustration.

“I am guessing the astrologers claimed it would be a longer season…” she asked sympathetically.

“Those monkey sons couldn’t predict a straight line if it rammed them up the ass,” Old Ge scowled. “They did indeed.”

She watched as the clouds continued to swirl, billow and build. The wind was already changing, from the dry north wind, rich in earth qi that had been nourishing the spirit grasses growing here, to a humid east wind. Even if it was a one-off thing, it would certainly herald the earlier than expected arrival of the wet season.

More rain fell, confirming her intuition that this was indeed what the rural folk called ‘The Rain from the East’. It was more than just rain; it was a sort of earthly phenomenon in its own right. It came from the inner valleys of the Yin Eclipse sub-continent, from the depths of the ‘danger zone’ that was the surroundings of the Yin Eclipse Great Mount. In the case of this storm it was drawing the perpetual rain of the East Fury Peaks and the suppressive miasmas of South Grove Pinnacle with it.

Based on the size of the clouds and the colour, it would certainly rain for the rest of today and overnight. Probably there would be intermittent rain tomorrow and the day after as well.

People called that an ill omen – especially spirit herb farmers who were trying to bring in their crops. In the distance she saw an alchemical flare shoot up and then another and another as various observation posts over the fields became aware of it and started to alert the nearby settlements and Jade Willow Village.

“It was already gonna be a so-so harvest,” Old Ge sighed. “And now we get this along with those polluting lotuses?”

“Well, I can probably help with your lotuses,” she said at last. “As I said, I am going to be teaching a team from here how to survey for ginseng and not kill themselves trying… However, I am sure that it would be beneficial for them to receive a slightly wider education.”

“To see a bunch of brats from the Jade Willow Sect weeding the waterways of lotus plants… in this weather? I’d pay gold talismans for that,” Ye Qin snickered.

“Anyway,” she mused. “Even if it doesn’t work out like that, certainly something can be arranged. In return, I would like to ask you if you have ever seen the youth in my cart around here before now…”

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~ JUN ARAI – JADE WILLOW VILLAGE ~

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The rain fell, humid and hot, turning the dusty road into a mud track as Arai, sheltered by a waxed paper umbrella lashed to her back, pulled the handcart laden with its sorry cargo along, watching the scenes of rural chaos unfold in slow motion.

Men and women cursed and complained as they rushed about, directing labourers to cut spirit grass or castigating them for pulling up roots wrong. Others struggled to get the already threshed grasses, stacked out to dry, under cover. The shadow of the suppression that came with it wasn’t even the worst part though. That was reserved for the humidity – and, for the farmers making their living off the land here, the bugs.

They buzzed around her handcart, drawn by the yin qi that lingered within the youth’s body as well.

They rolled in small clouds across the fields, rising out of the ground, brought up by the moisture and now rapidly taking flight. They would ruin the feng shui of the fields, painstakingly adjusted for the season’s harvesting, even quicker than the humidity would.

“Oi, miss, get off the road!” someone yelled behind her and she glanced over her shoulder to find a cart fully laden with spirit grass trundling along at some pace.

“…”

She was tempted to point out that the road was more than wide enough for both, but the Ha clan flag flying on the wagon made her hold her tongue and just pull her cart out of the way.

“Stupid bitch…”

The driver, clearly an upstanding person, spat in her general direction and she caught the comment on the wind as the cart vanished, its driver already complaining at the next person.

“Hey miss! Can you give us a hand too…?” a group who were hauling bales up the bank nearby trailed off as she shook her head.

“Sorry, you think the bugs are bad, you don’t want to be near what’s in my cart,” she called down apologetically, pulling it back onto the road.

“Bah, bet they just don’t wanna help,” one of the others down below sneered.

-Not if you all keep acting like assholes, I don’t, she complained inwardly. And you’re not volunteering that your cargo could drop the wheels off my cart about ten minutes after I get to the village either…

She had plenty of sympathy for the wider plight of the harvest here, but there was nothing she could do…

“…”

She paused, staring at her cart as she pondered a few other ways she could potentially be inconvenienced in an annoying fashion in the few miles she still had to go before reaching Jade Willow Village.

-The last thing I need is someone just commandeering my cart…

Grimacing at that thought, she checked quickly how much luss cloth she had in her talisman, then looked down at the group hauling the bales.

“Bring it up. I can take a few bales and one of you comes with. One pure spirit stone per bale,” she said, waving to the older man who had asked originally.

“One!? That’s daylight robbery!” the complaining one grumbled.

“It’s my cart,” she pointed out. “Not to mention, you’re asking me to transport ‘Blue Fa Grass’…”

She eyed the grass, and the fact that all the harvesters were wearing luss cloth gloves. Nobody had been about to volunteer that piece of information.

“…”

The older man scowled at his compatriot then started to drag the bales up the bank. While they did that, she shifted the body to the front of the handcart, beside the jars, and then spread her remaining luss cloth fabric sheets down to protect it. By the time she was done, the older man had arrived at the top of the bank and dumped two bales onto it unceremoniously, before catching a third that was thrown, then a fourth. Soon she had ten bales on it, which almost paid for the charge on the talisman she had used earlier.

“Half payment up front,” she said, eyeing him.

“…”

“You’re pushing it, miss…” the other farm labourer grumbled. “We work closely with the Jade Willow Sect…”

“And if my cart breaks because of your corrosive grass… what were you going to do?” she said with a faint smile.

The labourer ground his teeth as the older man waved for a youth to come over and told him to accompany her back to the village. He then handed her five spirit stones and told the youth to pay her the rest upon safe delivery of the cargo to town.

“This is quite the day,” she said eventually as they started off again. “I’m Jun Arai, by the way.”

“Duan,” the boy grunted.

-Great, she sighed inwardly. At a time when I actually need to hear local gossip without seeming to pry… and would have been happy to have a chat as well…

-What heavenly influence did I offend to end up holding the shit end of this stick…

They walked on in silence, she pulling the cart, pondering the recent surge of suspicious deaths around the Red Pit, he walking under his own umbrella on the side of the road for several hundred metres, before ‘Duan’ finally spoke again.

“Whatcha transporting that would mess with that monkey-buggered grass?”

“Spirit vegetation,” she shrugged, because while she was happy to talk about many things, a Ha clan corpse and a spirit herb worth close to half a spirit jade were not things she wanted in the local gossip pool.

“Must be some hellish spirit vegetation,” he said, walking up beside the pots, which she was glad she had now bound shut.

“It comes from near the Red Pit,” she said absently, amused to see him recoil and return to the verge.

“Gatherer, then…” Duan muttered, as much to himself as her she felt.

“Something like that,” she agreed. “It’s not been a good day in any case.”

“Ain’t that heavens’ accursed truth,” he grumbled. “First that fate-thrashed elder, now the wet season’s going to come early.”

“Some problem with the sect?” she asked politely, deliberately leading the question.

“Nah, they’re on the narrow for once – problem is the Pavilion. Got a new elder, from the Ha clan, working with the Blue Gate School of all things.”

“I’d have thought that was a good thing…” she mused.

*Ptah*

Duan spat into the mud. “Cheapskate, taking opportunities away from us good working folks – all the good jobs go to his friends from the city. They come here, do their bit, leave again. Don’t even stay in the village. Instead they are always holed up at the monkey-buggered cunt’s estate.”

-So local Ha clan doesn’t get on with the Blue Water City Ha clan, and you have the Deng clan mixed up in this as well from what I recall of the local scene… wonderful, she thought to herself as he complained on about various incidental opportunities ‘he’ and those he seemed to know had missed because of this ‘elder’.

It was gloomy enough now, with the sweeping rain coming in, that she nearly felt like she wanted to put a lantern up.

“Hey, hey! Idiot, get out of the sodding road!” another voice yelled in their general direction.

This time it was a cart ahead, carrying some thirty or so labourers with lanterns and broad hats.

“Then learn to drive in a straight line you drunk bell-end!” Duan yelled back.

“May a monkey bugger your sister, Duan!” someone called from the cart as it clattered by, pulled by two rather vexed-looking horses.

“She will have to wait until it’s done with your mothers!” the youth snickered.

“…”

She sighed, and said nothing – it was just better that way.

Instead, she took a lantern out of her storage talisman and lit it with a thread of her qi, hanging it off the underside of the umbrella. A good half of those running around were Foundation Establishment at best, so while she could see clearly in the rain, now that the misty ground fog was welling up others would not be so fortunate. Getting into a fight with an angry cart hauler and having to throw them off the road would not be a good re-introduction to the Jade Willow Village militia.

In the distance, in the village of Jade Willow where they were headed, several bells started to peal – a call for emergency labour in the fields.

“Gonna be a long night for a lot of people,” she mused.

“They are gonna be paid good, I am sure,” Duan grumbled. “Us who own the fields, though, are going to be the ones paying that shitty mountain range’s tab, mind.”

“Yeah, and it’s a lousy tipper,” she agreed, giving the general direction of the Red Pit another obscene gesture which Duan mimicked with a laugh of his own.

Their shared antipathy for the place seemed to serve as something of a conversational ice-breaker, as Duan grumbled by way of follow-up: “At least we didn’t waste no spirit stones on those astrologers. They get worse every year.”

He mimed stroking a non-existent beard and added: “The moon shall rise on the zenith day, and your auspice shall be twisted thrice widdershins by unseen things – beware purple! That will be ten spirit stones, peon, and double if you want it in Imperial Common!”

“Hah!” she couldn’t help but laugh, both at the accent he put on, and because he was pretty much spot-on in lampooning an Astrology Bureau divination.

“Is the Singing Willow guesthouse still in business?” she asked, as the village got closer in the rain.

“Been here before?” Duan asked, sounding a bit more curious now.

She had, in fact. Both she and Sana had come here as part of the training in West Flower Picking’s Hunter Pavilion. The influence of the Ha clan was pretty much one third of the Pavilion at this point, so much of their ‘training’ had been in Ha clan regions.

“When I was twelve,” she replied, leaving it at that.

“Funny age to come to this shithole. Was it for the school?” he asked, eyeing her in a way that made her think he was trying to guess her age now.

“Interesting local view,” she joked, diverting the conversation away from that.

“Hey, hey, I love this shithole just as much as the next person,” he chuckled. “It is our shithole, after all. About the Singing Willow though, it has closed down. Not sure why, heard the owner moved to Red Lake.”

“A pity,” she sighed. It would have been nice to stay somewhere a bit familiar after the way the day had gone.

By the time she arrived at the gates, it was nearly proper evening. The road was thronged with men and women of all ages, rushing to and from the fields carrying sacks, harvesting tools and coverings. The guards had actually opened both gates to facilitate through traffic and a group of cultivators in green robes were busy setting up a temporary teleportation point just outside the gates.

It confused her that there wasn’t a queue to get back in for a moment, until she realised there was; it was just inside the village in the mustering yard. Teleportation circle aside, it was all very mundane, but that was to be expected, given that talismans like most would have here would be of little use in this rain – it made a mockery of one’s realm strength.

“At least the rain is honest,” Duan grinned as they made their way past two men in green robes looking like sodden rats.

“Screw you, Duan,” one of them grumbled as they made a rude gesture in their general direction.

-Great, I got the one escort into town who just mouths off to everyone, she sighed, although the truth of it was that this kind of interaction was pretty normal in her experience.

Still, it was better than getting her cart tipped out and seized; she had seen two others suffer that fate on the way down the last mile of the road. Storing the cart and carrying everything would have been too blatant at that point. It would also likely make the discussion with the militia more awkward.

“What you queuing up for?” Duan grunted, grabbing a handle and leading her around the line.

“…”

She pulled her hat down slightly to hide her face as various people in the queue glowered at them or complained.

“Oi, Bei! You owe me money!” Duan shouted at a guard who was looking particularly harassed as he listened to a wagon driver complain about something…

“Oh, may my mother dance with monkeys,” the guard groaned, just as she did.

“Look, it’s easy: ten bales of our grass and this lady has three jars of spirit veg,” Duan grunted, “and I get my brother to forget your tab for the last week.”

“…”

The guard stared at him for a long moment then nodded, before looking back at her, then at the cart.

“What is that?” Guardsman Bei asked, pointing at the wrapped body.

Sighing, she pulled out her rank talisman and stepped around the cart to stand beside him, putting on her best smile. “An unfortunate soul I recovered on my way back from a mission,” she explained. “I am taking him to the Pavilion to see that he is recorded, then I will repatriate him to West Flower Picking Town.”

Guardsman Bei looked at her, then at the queue behind them, then sighed. “Okay, someone will be sent to check though, when the shift ends, and you will need to come back later and make a statement about it.”

“I can sign a chit now, confirming it,” she said with a shrug.

“…”

“That’s fine, your rank talisman is guarantee enough,” the guard muttered, again looking at the queue behind them.

For half a moment, she was tempted to insist, given the youth was from the Ha clan, but he was already moving to look at the next cart, so she just shrugged in the end and walked back to Duan.

Inside, the village was quite a bit quieter than outside, people hurried by huddling under their umbrellas or cloaks, staying away from the kerbs to avoid the puddles. As the guard had intimated, it didn’t take long for them to arrive at their destination, a warehouse on a side courtyard near the central square – adjoined to the back of what appeared to be a large tavern. Even in the rain she could catch the faint whiff of distilled spirit alcohol.

“You’re harvesting the grass to make spirit wine?” she said dubiously.

“It’s cracking stuff,” Duan chuckled.

“I’ll believe it probably cracks things, your liver for starters,” she chuckled.

“Oi, Fen! Open up, first lot of the harvest is here,” Duan hammered on the gate and hollered loudly.

There was some grumbling and an older version of Duan opened the door and peered out.

“That was fast…”

“Got a lady to carry the first lot. We owe her five spirit stones.”

“Uggh, that much?” Fen scowled, before passing her the five pale blue circular crystal coins imprinted with the motif of the Ha clan.

He opened the door and she offloaded the bales.

“Not interested in making a second trip?” Duan asked.

“Gotta deal with this lot,” she pointed to the ‘bundles’ and the jars. “Sadly, it will wait about as well as the weather… not to mention I got a date with a guard.”

“Hah… he’s a lousy drinker,” Duan nodded. “Well thanks for hauling it in. You can have some drinks on us if you come by later, say Fen Duan sent you.”

She nodded and gave him a polite salute, then turned the cart around and trotted through the streets with it towards the Hunter Pavilion in the centre of the town.

Clearly, the night market had been setting up in the various squares of the village before the rain arrived – now it was half abandoned, people clearing routes for carts and the like. What was on sale in the remaining covered stalls was mostly basic spirit herbs from the foothills around here and a bunch of mundane village things. If she wanted to see anyone selling manuals or other oddities it would likely be later, once everything else settled down.

The Hunter Bureau’s local Pavilion was a large walled compound located off the main square of the village, ringed with multi-story buildings and dominated by a towering pagoda. The other sides of the square were dominated by the barracks for the local militia, and an adjoining set of buildings she recalled as being part of the village administration. Barely visible in the evening rain were the lights of a series of pagodas and tall buildings that would be the Jade Willow Sect, the local power backed by the Ha clan that the village had grown up around.

Making her way through the gate, she ignored the hustle and bustle around the outer buildings and went around the circumference of the region surrounding the pagoda to where the secure warehouses were usually found.

“Oi, not here!” an officious voice called out from the shelter of a veranda.

“I’m not here for the harvest,” she called up, holding up her Bureau talisman.

“That’s what they all say… Scram, or I’ll call an elder!” the junior official snapped, as if that was some terrible threat, before walking back into the hall and closing the door firmly, not even appearing to have seen the talisman.

Sighing, she pulled the cart over, decanted the pot and body then lugged them up the stairs.

The idiot hadn’t restricted the door at least, so she was able to open it again. The interior was a well-lit hall where a few bored-looking trainees were sat around playing a card game and drinking wine – as if the local agricultural economy wasn’t imploding outside.

“Oi, may monkeys screw your mother—” the junior official who had just sat down again scowled.

She again took her talisman out from under her grass cloak and, displaying the nine-star rank insignia, held it up for them to see with a scowl.

“Ah…” one of the others spat out their wine.

“ELDER!” she put all her qi into her voice, which meant that her voice echoed a good way.

The four junior officials were left white and shaking – none of them were higher than three-star, which meant that they were all either Qi Refinement or Golden Core. Her qi-infused shout, with added intent, was enough to stun them quite effectively. Any other time she might have been a bit diplomatic, but the jokes about her mother, now dead six years, were something of a bottom line, so she wasn’t averse to throwing these morons under the wrath of an elder if it was doable.

“What in the blazing—?” a disgruntled voice echoed as an old man with a wispy beard wearing rather rumpled blue-grey robes with five silver slashes on them – marking him as a five-star ranked Pavilion Elder – entered the room.

“Sorry for the disruption, Honoured Elder,” she said with a salute, “I am here to have some goods stored securely.”

“…”

He eyed her talisman, then them, then the load she had put down in the meantime.

“You… she…” the junior official who had been mouthing off to her spluttered. “Uncle…” he finally managed plaintively.

-Oh for fates’ sakes, she groaned inwardly.

-Typical, the moment I finally let this fate-accursed day get ahead of me, it’s to annoy some idiot whose uncle is shielding him.

Sighing, she reached out and pulled half the luss cloth off the corpse.

“I am here to register a body recovered from the Red Pit for secure storage, along with what killed him,” she said, deciding to take refuge in procedure.

“Hmmmmm,” the elder stared at the body, stroking his beard, for a long moment then sighed deeply. “Okay, bring it through. I take it you will want a chit?”

“Yes, Honoured Elder,” she said, saluting him politely. “I believe that is the procedure.”

Picking up the herb pot, she started to walk after the elder, who paused and eyed her, then the body and the junior officials.

“You three, go grab a pallet to bring it,” the elder said, waving his hand.

The three who had been playing cards sighed and got up, sloping off.

She followed after the elder as he led her down the corridor and into one of the side halls which had a bunch of shelves and slabs.

“I’ll have to trouble you to seal this securely,” she said with an apologetic smile to the elder, putting the pot down on one of the vault pedestals.

“What is it?” he asked, eyeing it.

“The spirit herb that killed him, a mutate yin type ginseng that might have been contaminated by a blood ling tree,” she supplied helpfully.

“…”

He eyed it again and sighed, walking over and sending some qi into a box on the desk, from which he retrieved three red and white coloured talismans. She put the pot on the pedestal and then pulled out her scrip and talisman. The elder held out the three sealing tokens and she imprinted her own qi into them, then linked that to her scrip and the Hunter talisman. Finally, he put his own qi into them and then applied them to the pot, which was surrounded by a shimmering barrier.

“Many thanks, Honoured Elder,” she politely thanked him again. “Sorry for the trouble, but it’s got the potential to be bothersome.”

“What of the body?” the elder asked.

“I found him while fulfilling another mission and thought it inadvisable to leave him up there,” she explained. “He appears to be a member of the Ha clan, though I don’t know if he is local or not.”

“I see, I see,” the elder mused.

“Sorry about before, Honoured Elder,” she added. “They were quite uncooperative, and I thought it easier to speak to someone in authority, especially after they shut the door in my face after me showing my talisman.”

The elder nodded noncommittally at her justification for her earlier actions, leaving them to stand there in silence until two of the pavilion trainees appeared carrying the body. She was quietly pleased to see, as they scowled at her in passing, that both of them looked a bit ill from the yin qi.

“Put him over there – on a slab,” the elder commanded the pair, waving to a few raised rectangular blocks by the far side of the hall before turning to her once again. “I take it you won’t need to store him here long?”

“Just a few days, I imagine,” she replied after a moment’s thought. “I’ll get someone from the local temple later on if they are available as well.”

“Hrmmm,” the elder vaguely responded.

She nearly sighed – likely he was displeased at her, either for being late or for making a scene and offending his nephew, she guessed.

“Thank you for the help,” she said, saluting him again.

“Don’t you have details to enter?” the elder frowned.

“Would it be possible to return and do them in a short while?” she asked, thinking of the guard’s warning. “I need to speak to the captain of the gate guards,” she said.

“The protocols are rather clear: It has to be logged by the person reporting it when it’s reported.”

-And so you pay for making a scene, she reflected glumly to herself.

“I’ll leave my nephew here, Ha Kwan, to help you with the process. It is his usual job,” the elder added before leaving her standing there with the now-smirking youth, whose whole expression just radiated ‘so you think you’re some bigshot?’.

That smirk lasted about ten seconds, until she put her talisman into the information locus in the hall and her record and rank became clear to them. It was somewhat funny to watch his attitude shift as she did the various bits of record entry without ever asking him – all recovery-certified hunters were expected to be able to do it anyway.

As she filled in her entry, she idly wondered about the treatment she was getting. The annoyed attitude of the elder at least made sense given that he and this youth were from the Ha clan – the clan were a big fish in Blue Water Province. The various Hunter Pavilions, on the other hand, were all subsidiaries – like branch sects, in essence – of the Hunter Bureau, itself a monolithic continent-spanning organisation with roots in every province on every continent of the Eastern Azure Great World.

The local Pavilion here was a very minor facet of that immense whole. Even the Pavilion she was part of, in West Flower Picking Town – the administrative capital of this region within Blue Water Province – was just a minor part of the controlling regional entity in Blue Water City.

The problem here came with the Ha and Deng clans and the power backing the Hunter Pavilion not being on the same side of provincial politics. The Pavilions had been founded by the Azure Astral Authority, while the Ha and Deng were ostensibly neutral, with closer ties to their geopolitical rival, the Imperial Court that ruled two thirds of their Great World. The Ha in particular was thus currently embroiled in trying to pry bits of a very lucrative monopoly away from the Hunter Bureau and the Azure Astral Authority – and the authority was fighting back by messing with the power of regional bureaus to promote those who were not sympathetically aligned to them. She herself had no links to either side, but her nine-star rank had likely marked her to the elder as being someone affiliated with the powers in the Azure Astral Authority.

Finally finishing by entering a copy of the death site of the three unfortunate children, she disconnected her talisman and scrip and smiled in thanks to Ha Kwan, who was now just leant against the wall, looking very bored.

Walking back out, she saw the others had resumed their game, cheating on their hands, she noticed, to make Ha Kwan’s worse than it had been.

-So much for honour among morons.

They gave her rude gestures on the way out, which she ignored, and upon returning to her handcart, she stored everything in her talisman, before setting off to talk to the guards.

That meeting, as it turned out, was very short indeed. It turned out that the captain was busy and she was instructed to come back in the morning, so it was barely ten minutes later that she found herself back on the streets, umbrella again in hand, now in search of an inn.

Staying in the Pavilion was a possibility, but she had no enthusiasm for that given how her earlier interactions there had gone. What she wanted now was a nice meal and some wine, then somewhere quiet to sit and organise her thoughts, work out how much she was now out of pocket for the day’s adventure and have a bath.

The village, as she walked back through it, was no less wet, muddy and full of people rushing hither and thither to sort out precious harvests than it had been on the way in. However, it was now starting to show signs of its night market springing to life.

Night markets were what they were – every village of Jade Willow’s stature tended to have one. The day market was mostly about spirit herbs and the day to day commerce of a place like this – ceramics, food stuffs and the like. The night markets, though, were for cultivation materials, alchemy and anything you didn’t want looked at too closely.

This one was equal parts people associated with the Jade Willow Sect and various villagers and people working for different local influences trying to turn things into capital quickly to get spirit stones so their harvest wouldn’t be ruined. Walking along, she watched as disciples from the school hawked various wares, pills and formations they had drawn mainly, and occasionally tried to offload manuals they had procured by various means.

…

“—Special deal, this manual came from a real ancient ruin!”

“Five spirit stones for this ginseng, rare mutate!”

“Spirit beast eggs…”

That last one made her pause, but much as she had expected it turned out to be someone selling spider eggs – a reminder that nights like this also had a lot of people trying to sell trash as gold.

“High grade physical cultivation mantra! Twenty pure spirit stones…”

That also made her pause, if only to check the stand of the scammer in question and shake her head in sad amusement. Finally, however, she did stop at a stall manned by a girl and a boy, both wearing broad conical straw hats and the robes of the Jade Willow Sect.

“Ahem!”

She had to cough to get their attention, because they were glaring daggers at a stand across the way, being watched over by another disciple from the same school who was selling three times what they were.

“Can I check the qi density of those?” she asked, pointing at two jars of qi replenishment pills.

“Don’t you mean quality?” the boy corrected her absently.

“I’m a physical cultivator. I don’t care about quality so long as it’s not at the point where you made them taste like garbage or cause side effects,” she pointed out.

“Huh, I see…” the boy frowned, before the girl elbowed him in the side and he opened a jar and tipped the contents out into a bowl for her to check.

The quality was kinda crap if she was being honest; the pills were clearly made at a loss as well. However, now that she was just into buying things for damage limitation on her stores this kind of good was far more useful than the polished pills that were overpriced elsewhere that she had seen.

“You are trying to advance your alchemy?” she asked, picking one up and sending her qi into it to check that it was in fact edible.

“Yes…” the boy nodded, the look in his eyes almost pleading with her to buy them.

“Honestly, I can see why you are struggling to sell these, but today, your luck might be good,” she said putting the pill down. “Do you have more jars of these?”

“Three!” the girl replied, after glancing at the talisman she still had tied to her waist.

She did some calculations in her head and then pulled out one of the pots of spirit vegetation.

“I’ll trade you five kilos of this, for all of those jars.”

“That’s just…”

The boy was about to complain that she was offering him spirit vegetation when she leant in and added, “It comes from above the High Valleys, beyond the Red Pit.”

The girl, whose cultivation she noted was higher than her own, or at least better concealed, scooped a handful of the various bits of spirit grass, leaves and the odd flower out and considered them.

“You intended to sell this for alchemical compounding?” Unspoken there was the “—so what’s the catch?”

“I was, but a few kilos less doesn’t make much odds,” she replied.

And it didn’t; the request wasn’t a mission, more a convenient favour for a friend of hers and fellow pavilion member, Kun Juni, and her older brother Kun Talshin who ran a herb brokerage in West Flower Picking Town. Few people were in a position to gather qi-rich spirit vegetation that was of consistent quality from beyond the mid-ranked danger zones of the Yin Eclipse valleys these days.

“This quality… it is very good,” the girl conceded. “Okay, we have a deal if you make it six kilos.”

“Throw in an actual bottle of Qi Condensation Spiritual Replenishment pills and we have a deal,” she countered.

“A small bottle,” the girl responded stubbornly.

She made a bit of a show of considering it, but the girl was clearly the seller here to the boy’s ‘expert’ craftsmanship and she wasn’t above being a bit altruistic, despite how vile a day it had been.

“Okay,” she agreed finally, sweeping up the jars as the girl measured out six kilos of mainly spirit grass and then passed her a further, small jade jar of pills.

Opening it, she checked the half a dozen pills and nodded. They were not amazing, but still good quality for what you could expect here. “A pleasure doing business with you,” she added with a smile which the girl finally returned.

Leaving them to their sale, she wandered on, buying a few other things – most of it utterly mundane.

A collection of clay jars to hold ginseng, a bunch of woven spirit rope to carry them and some other sundries like lengths of timber. Annoyingly, albeit understandably, there was no luss cloth at all worth looking at, which was what she was now badly short on, with three rolls lying up near the red pit. Based on the ridiculous premiums and poor quality of what she did see was being sold at, she guessed that all the local stockpiles had likely all been snapped up by people suddenly needing to pull poisonous herbs out of the ground in a hurry.

-I can only hope the Pavilion has some reserves, she sighed, walking on past a stall selling a roll for eight spirit stones a metre that would have barely protected against nettle rash.

“Knowing my luck today it will be hybrid weave gloves,” she grumbled out loud, kicking a stone into a nearby puddle. Those worked, but were much more finicky for novices who didn’t know a lot about the nuance of harvesting wild ginseng.

She also kept an eye out for other items of use to her personally. That had gotten to be something of a ritual to her, as a physical rather than spiritual cultivator: looking for manuals that would give her techniques she could actually use or which would improve her comprehensions. The ones she had with her all had all proven to be a general bust.

“You going to actually buy something?” the owner of the stall grumbled, as she paused to consider a stack of books that turned out to be a complete edition in compiled volumes of Qin Qiu’s ‘Treatise on the Noble Families of the Imperial continent’.

“You have anything that actually has Martial Intent techniques amongst this lot… or anything relating to feng shui?” she asked, putting volume 1-10 down.

“You want those things in this backwater village?” the youth chuckled.

Shaking her head, she moved on, looking at another stall which was mostly formations tokens much worse than any she had.

The next two stalls also turned out to be similar fare, with a few low grade Qi Condensation manuals thrown in for good measure, none of which were useful to her, given the stringent requirements on physical cultivators learning such arts.

She was just considering a manual talking about mortal unarmed arts, when a voice behind her made her turn, to find the boy who had asked her if she wanted to buy manuals standing there with an umbrella, panting a bit.

“Hey… Hey!” he panted, catching his breath. “I… don’t have any, but my junior brother has one he was trying to sell.”

“Go on?” she prompted, suspecting that there might have been a hidden ‘only’, or ‘but’ in there.

“His stall is in the next street over,” the youth added helpfully. “Take the next right, then go down by the kobbin tree full of graffiti.”

“…”

She watched him salute her politely and scurry back to his stall in contemplative silence.

“On a day like today, what are the odds someone actually wants to rob me?” she muttered under her breath as she watched the youth return to his stall from beneath her umbrella and then stared up at the rain that was pouring down, suppressing all kinds of senses.

Out of curiosity, she pulled out her crude divination compass and considered it. The angles turned ‘oddly’ and it suggested ‘an ambience of yin’. On the face of it that meant the weather was shit. It also implied potential for personal danger and general misfortune in the near future.

Shaking her head in disgust, she turned and walked further on down the street until she had rounded the corner, then she suppressed her qi completely and hid her presence, just as she might going through some of the worse areas of the higher valleys, and headed back in the direction of the main square.

…

In the end, she settled upon an inn with its own teahouse associated, called the ‘Jade Willow Blessing’. It was a three story building located on one of the side streets of the main concourse to the central square and offered her a room, meal and privacy for a very reasonable four iron talismans per night.

It was tempting to eat food in the teahouse attached, but in truth, her heart just wasn’t in it, so instead she placed an order for whatever they had going and just went straight to her room on the second floor, overlooking a canal.

She had, rather nobly, intended to work out her expenses, but faced with the prospect of revisiting what had transpired, she instead just started to run herself a hot bath and waited for the food to arrive.

That, at least, didn’t take long, and when it did, it was a simple, if well-cooked, spread of rice, various bits of fried river fish and a soup with noodles and spirit herbs, accompanied with a whole jug of spirit wine.

Even so, she did sit and compile a quick list of expenses while eating the fried fish, and it made for very depressing reading.

She had used all her ward stones, most of her refined beast cores, all but one of her lightning talismans, a whole charge of her disruption talisman and a teleportation talisman. After a moment’s consideration, she struck off the charge on the disruption talisman, deciding she could just leave it for a while and it would restore itself… and then with a sigh the teleport talisman, because it had been an insurance expense for a prior mission she had never had to return.

Totalling up what she had potentially earned, assuming the meek yin ginseng remained in good health, she had forty pure spirit stones’ worth of herbs for thirty in expenses. The various bits of spirit vegetation and other herbs she would likely have to trade directly for more replenishment pills.

“What a mess,” she grumbled at last, nibbling on a piece of fried fish as she stared at her working out.

“Oh, and neutralisation pills…” Leaning back, she stared at the pretty painted and carved ceiling.

-Oh well, it is what it is. Pills are there to be used, not hoarded, she reflected, trying to make herself feel better and not really succeeding.

When you added it all up, it was almost half a bottle of Golden Core grade pills and two Nascent Soul grade pills. Worth it, certainly, because she was alive, but alchemy was a cruel foe of personal finance.

“Fate-thrashed tetrid stalker, I hope your nests get infested with blood leeches!” she cursed, reaching over and lifting her wine to toast its hopeful misfortune. “And may your trees all become habitats for life catch vines!”

The expenses themselves were not really the problem; it was the unexpected nature of it more than anything. As her father, and any number of others probably, would say: ‘spirit stones get you comfort and means, but you can only earn and spend them if you’re not dead’.

Recalling the extra ten she got from Duan for the bale transportation, she added those to the others, which brought her funds up to about forty, and a few dozen sundry talismans of various grades. Barely enough to recoup her losses and ensure she was properly stocked for the other missions she had yet to do.

-I should’ve taken Duan up on his offer to carry more loads of spirit grass. “Here’s to not taking your opportunities,” she complained reproachfully, downing that cup of wine and pouring another.

Drinking her second cup, she turned her attention back to the meal before it got any colder than it already was. It was better than dwelling on having not brought more spirit stones with her. It was a futile complaint anyway. She had a small fortune – by the standards of a place like this anyway – on her as it was. Out here, forty to fifty pure spirit stones was the average turnover of a small household for the whole fourteen months of a year – if you didn’t do a lot with cultivation resources at least.

-Not to mention I bet they are going to be stingy with the resources for the teaching mission. Especially if this rain keeps up, she thought with a further, inward sigh – that would be more expense in all likelihood.

Leaning back, she stared at the ceiling again, then got up and walked over to the table, where the wards for the room were set, and sealed it off. Once she was certain no one was going to come in, she stripped off her clothes, grabbed the jar of wine and walked over to the bath in the other, rather dimly lit room, a large, full-length affair panelled with wood, and slid into it.

The water was hot and faintly medicinal, helping to sap away the ache in her body and the very real pain in her side.

Sitting in it, she took a deep drink of the wine, straight from the jar this time, and finally released the vice-like grip her mantra had been holding on her emotional state for most of the day.

“I really hate this job sometimes…” she whispered, leaning back and staring at the ceiling, ignoring as best she could the trembling in her hands and how hard her heart was beating as her body succumbed to hours and hours of stored up emotional turmoil.

“Why can’t we all just gather herbs and get along?”

Sitting up again, she reached over and grabbed the jar, taking a deep gulp of the wine, then another… and another, ignoring how it spilled into the water.

It was a futile complaint, she knew it… the world knew it… and even after she threw the empty jar at the wall and watched it bounce rather than smash, she was left with no answer she cared for, just hollow emptiness and the frozen faces of Nen Hong and Ha Fenfang, her own features and Sana’s melding with them.

“Mother… it’s days like today that really make me hate that you are gone…”