Based on advanced geomantic calculations of Being Close to The Damn Middle of This Place, Sama skated through the shadows and the night and the crimson Qi-lighting to a section of white walls topped with crimson tiles that was generating a whole lot of vibrations, typical of the thrum that happened when great amounts of power used to set up large energy fields were deployed.

The pillars spewing faint scarlet flames lazily might have been a subtle hint, too, in that eye-slapping-ugh kind of way. Fires from sacrificial blood... they were probably running light on the stuff. No unlimited resources, after all! That meant all those disciples coming in vigorously and stumbling out drained of Qi were being used as batteries.

While it would be nice to kill a whole bunch of them, that wasn’t why she was here.

She hopped up on the edge of the wall, and quirked a sly smile. The bastards thought they were being clever.

A strand of her hair stole forward and swiped at something in midair. A crimson line came into visibility a foot ahead of her, neatly swiping off the very tip of her hair.

It was revealed in her Null, no longer invisible; red as blood, very thin, and very sensitive.

But they were dealing with a Forsaken, not a Powered or a Cultivator. These threads would react to any hint of energy directly manipulating them, but a Vajra, ki?

The tips of her toenails were driven into the wall and supporting her easily. She wove her hands about, seizing those deadly and sensitive threads in her Vajra, holding them taut as she severed them, and then simply tied them to other such threads deftly, rapidly clearing an opening for herself.

She only needed an inch of clearance on all sides to get through smoothly, pulling herself up and through the invisible opening.

Of course, there was another layer of the webbing on the inside of the wall, designed to catch the overconfident, but those sorts of people weren’t Trembling Sages, tyvm. She tied off that opening even faster, and when the bored guards on their thirty-second routes passed by, she was already past them and down into the inner Warding area.

Clusters of disciples were gathered here and there, many of them visibly sweating as they channeled energy into the Wards and alleviated the resource cost of maintaining them. She studied the flow of energy, and ghosted into and along the patterns organically, shunting from one flow to another towards the middle, where the most senior acolytes and masters had gathered.

She really, really wanted to pull out Tremble and show these pasty-faced fucks what being the Sage of Swords was all about, and had to tamp down on her killing intent, letting Seven Dragons worth of meditative techniques swirl through her thoughts.

Downsides of massive mental Stats were massive mental impulses. It required levels of control just as inhuman to keep them in control.

Sometimes, she just had to let her Stupidity Stat go, but this was not one of those times.

She was tracking and charting everything within ten paces, above and below ground, and matching it up to what she could see visually. She glided closer to various nodes and meeting points, verifying if the patterns changed or altered, and if there was symmetry.

There were alterations that seemed direction-based, external energy flows that matched powers that might just match those of Sects in those directions.

She glided to a stop by the Ward to the inner area’s short wall.

Currents of Qi were flowing by, preparing to ignite if they moved through something or were interrupted. They flowed into and out of the gates, the only viable ways in, the walls sealed off from above, patterns playing over the circular dome and arrangement of tiles and spires scattered upon it.

QL 32 work on the stonework, 35 on the Formation. Someone wanted some security.

Alas for them. A Source’s Sun would have ignited it already; a Void could purify it, but would interrupt the pattern.

A Null, well...

She smirked. It was a given that intellectual one-upmanship existed among high-Level people, and paper-scissors-rock of defenses was one thing they debated a lot. Building examples of potential defenses and getting past them was a very interesting thing to the Stealth-minded.

Certain things Voids did best. Other things, you just couldn’t beat a Null, especially one with a Vajra.

She reached out with her Null and spread it around this wall of Qi in front of her.

It wasn’t a Wall, or they wouldn’t be able to pinpoint disruptions. It was a bunch of parallel streams of Qi flowing sideways. The trick was to spread the streams along her Null, like forcing a stream to divert around a rock intruding into it, without breaking the flow like something material would do.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

She pushed her hand in, her Null expanding about it, forcing the parallel streams of Qi first inwards, and then up and down, all without breaking their flow, and slow enough to not trigger any alarms.

If there were independent timing pulses designed to measure continued synchronicity within each little beam, this would have been harder, but that would have required some advanced electronics and computational devices you didn’t find among Cultivators.

Soon she had a bulge large enough for her to literally hop over and through. As her Null receded behind her, each separately expanded thread flowed back into position smoothly.

If someone was specifically looking at this area, he would have noticed a momentary surge as the pattern was restored, and nothing else. Divine Sense was regularly sweeping this area, but what did a Null Darkstalker care about such things? The spiritual perception of the Daoists swept through her as if she was not there.

She was up under the edge of the roof, carving into the stone of the wall with her claws, using her Null to make the area seem unchanged to Divine Sense as she carved through the brick quickly and made herself another opening to squeeze through.

She was holding the bricks in her hair. As she came through, she restacked them behind her. She couldn’t replace the mortar perfectly, but propping them with the right bits meant they still fit perfectly and didn’t break a pattern before her Null receded.

Grinning as some Master’s Divine Sense swept by and didn’t react, she crawled weightlessly forward among the beams that supported the roof until she could see the room below.

The most senior Masters occupied the middle of the Formation below, which she memorized at a glance. Many kinds of Qi were coming and going from this space, although Blood Qi dominated, focused on the sensory and protective aspects.

That twat over there in the overdone robes and Big Mustache had to be at least seven feet tall, and had a Glaive next to him that fairly burst with the deaths of multitudes. He also had to be the Outsider they’d brought in.

She studied him, her thoughts like a lake, keeping all killing intent neutral, looking without judgement or analysis, simply assessing and measuring, memorizing to get the details right, making no calculations or deductions that would affect anything.

It only took a few moments to paint it all into her Visual File.

Then she calmly reversed course, pulled out the bricks, backed out in greased Vajra’d silence and put the bricks back, the razor-thin cracks balanced out by internal bumps that kept them in their patterns. As a patrol stepped past, the threaded Wallward of Qi bulged out and away, she dove through, and began to make her rapid way out of there as it flowed shut behind her.

She was out of the Warding area before her thoughts actually started moving much again, and some killing intent emerged.

Damn, she didn’t want to let them know someone could reach their walls without being detected yet. Leave that until she was on the last one or two of them, and it was time to inflict some fear and terror on them.

Someone totally invisible had a greater chance of being seen than she did. Moving with speed and surety, and because she totally wasn’t going to miss this chance to scout out someone’s base of operations, she made a circuit of the Six Demon Swords Sect headquarters, and left by a different route than she’d come in.

There was a bit of running ahead of her in a region full of Qi and hostile creatures and Cultivators and the like, but that was what lightfoot and a movement rate of 150’ were made for.

If she entered an area outside the sensory grids of the Sects, she could upload everything immediately, but that would probably take a few days, when she could arc outside the grid on the way between two of the Sects.

She was also very curious as to what Traveler was going to do about all this. Given how much Traveler loathed Cultivators, it was probably going to be fucking epic.

For now, it was time to see if the Starving Ghosts were all that.

Maybe I’ll be discovered and get to kill a whole bunch of them!, she thought fondly...

-------

June 21, 2019, the Summer Solstice...

There was a lot of anticipation this time around when I returned to Detroit for the Summer Solstice. It was the shortest night of the year, the longest day, and unlike December, when the sun came out it was going to be at the height of the summer.

People had been quietly putting up places to stay, portajohns, sewer holes, and reserving locations to throw tents for many, many miles around for literally months once they learned I would be at this ceremony.

Sama’s tour of the nine Great Sects should basically finish up today. She had run hundreds of miles each day between the Great Sects, skirting the smaller ones, and had witnessed atrocities, vile behavior, and decadency that she could do nothing about in passing, enough for any sane person to send any Daoists straight to Hell, and especially these.

Heavenly Sky, a lofty-seeming Sect with a mountain-top citadel in the Himalayas, was the last of the Sects she was visiting. They were ‘valiant defenders’ sparring with the phobos spilling down from the Phasma of Tibet, in reality just tempering themselves as the Phasma wasn’t spreading even if they did nothing. Indeed, it was retreating, which they loudly claimed credit for.

They would have probably been really unhappy to learn that less than twenty miles away in the yellow mist a force of Forsaken had suddenly altered the course of their advancement directly towards them after Sama had followed them to their ‘sally point’.

The Heavenly Sky Sect made a big show of benevolence, and all, but normal humans were slave labor in their fields, and the Sect oversaw every birth to identify any Powered born and take them away immediately. Anyone tested to have strong meridians was also taken away to become a Cultivator, and rarely if ever visited their family again... although a family who generated a Cultivator was treated appreciably better than others.

Have more kids, make more Cultivators, naturally enough...

Six Demon Swords. Starving Ghosts. Black Dragon Claw. Hellfire Ice Note. Willow Bone. Lofty Mountain. God and Ghost Eaters. Withering Word.

Heavenly Sky was the last of them. I already had a pretty good idea of what the design of the final Formation would be, but Sama was checking, just to be sure.

Then she was going to pull Tremble out of where her Sword was waiting inside her heart, and probably go on a killing spree, Singing and letting them know She Had Come.