The moment the Gate Array expelled her, her corroded armour-covered body splatting on the ground like a newborn calf, Suu Li could feel that things had changed.
The closed space was no longer closed; the former training grounds were fully exposed to the world, open sky above her head where there should have been a rippling mercurial barrier. That’s… not good. She could only think of a few reasons why this might have happened, and none of them were to the benefit of the Steadfast Heart.
Then as she was still reaching out with her sense, the researchers swarmed her, seeming to appear from nowhere to her drifting awareness. Some of them flinched back and began calling for the healers as they realised the extent of her injuries, but the ones with sterner hearts merely carefully reached out and started peeling warped scraps of ceramic off what was left of her skin. “Call a soul specialist! Serious injury to an outer disciple!” one yelled, and much like whacking the side of a beehive increased the number of bees, the panic in his voice seemed to multiply the number of bespectacled fools hurrying about.
A minute passed while she was tended to before, to her immense relief, someone actually competent appeared.
She was not personally acquainted with Aiya Yu, the head of the biologists inhabiting the research wing, but her unique scar – straight down the middle of her face – and relations with Elders Suu Li was more familiar with made her easily identifiable. The sea of lesser beings parted as their Elder stepped lightly down the metal walkways, her heavy robes barely moving despite her swift pace.
“Suu Li, fourth realm.” Cold eyes darted from one wound to the next. She was lying on a padded stretcher at the insistence of the healers, and the difference between them was only magnified by her prone position. “You've returned alone?”
“Seven disciples and three natives should be coming after me, Elder.” It’s strange none of them have arrived. But then, it wasn’t exactly unusual of the liminal space to have a strange relationship with time – in fact, it was only mildly expected that she would have emerged first, rather than any of the others.
“Name them.”
She did so, Aiya Yu’s expression becoming even sterner as she went down the list. “…And in order of observed strength there are Bone Softener, inner realm analog; Dreamfever, core realm analog; Bo, outer realm analog.”
The head researcher’s gaze moved to rest on the shimmering gate. “…Tai Sho. Hm.”
Suu Li couldn’t help but grimace. Yes, that was my reaction as well. Her own eyes went to the portal. “Can I be of any other use, Elder?”
Eyes the colour of ice locked with hers. “You’re one of my brother’s, yes?”
“I am hoping to be accepted into Special Operations, as you say… Though my sponsor is Elder Goldenseed, not Elder Seventh Wheel.”
Aiya Yu hmmed, her expression not changing. “…Your official debrief can wait until you are recovered, as you've taken quite an injury." She looked down with some curiosity, but then shook her head. "But, barring acts of god, you shall be able to continue on your chosen path without trouble.” Her voice suddenly took on a tinge of tiredness. “We will have need for a much greater number of special operatives in the coming days.”
For a minute neither of them talked, with only the babble of the other researchers and small glass-on-glass tinks as the healers picked her wounds clean with enchanted tweezers to break the silence. The soul specialist arrived, and did something that set a soothing balm over the ragged, inflamed thing behind her eyes.
The Elder nodded at the woman’s work and turned to go, but at the last moment Suu Li opened her mouth.
“Pardon, Elder,” she said, her voice softer than she thought it should be. “May I ask, were the other missions successful? Did we retrieve the other breaching treasures?”
Aiya Yu turned back, an inscrutable look on her face. “You left only a few hours ago, did you not?”
The ensuing explanation led into an early debrief, which melted into a thorough examination of her body, soul, and dantian by the head researcher herself. When Aiya Yu left, placing Suu Li in the care of her subordinates, it was well past midnight.
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Two days later, a fat alien with blue skin stumbled out of the portal, frightening the guards despite disciple Suu Li’s forewarning. One hour passed, then another came through, his wiry black hair stuck straight out like a bug’s antenna as he coughed up rainbow-coloured bubbles.
A week passed before the third, his bright yellow skin hanging from his bones as though he had starved for a half-year.
Then three months passed.
While the rest of the sect bustled along, rebuilding in the wake of what was now called ‘The Appearance of the Golden Maiden,’ accepting new disciples, moving to and fro with the pulse of the world, the research wing held its collective breath.
All of their divinations failed; the Bird’s Eye Glasses remained dark, communications with the disciples on the other side returning no answer. Scouts sent through, volunteers all, floated in a dream realm without going anywhere. The breach itself even stopped expelling energy; the artificial swamp dried up over the course of a week, much to the dismay of the otherworldly guests.
A new breach was attempted, and it failed for indiscernible reasons. Reality was torn, but the liminal space at the new location was no more accepting than at the original site; you could enter, but there was nowhere to go.
It was as though the Sixth Reality had stopped existing entirely.
But then, for no reason they could observe, everything began moving again. On the morning of the twentieth day of the eight month, as the mild autumn winds carried the lightest touch of fog away from the mountain, five disciples were disgorged from the portal all at once, their limbs tangled together.
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The screens turned back on, and communications once again flowed through the liminal void.
But the pictures they showed were nothing like before. Though it had almost seemed like time had stood still, nothing could be further from the truth; the disciples from the other side had been there for almost an entire year, four times longer than their home reality had experienced. Some of them were dead, and others had lost their cultivation as their armours failed, switching to the local style out of necessity.
Where before the gate had been placed amongst a flat plain of mud, it was now inside a fortress of black iron and compressed salt, manned by the remaining Steadfast Heart disciples, a group called Metal Bite, and what was left of Clan Horrible Swamp.
Or rather, Clan Moving Waters; the name Horrible Swamp now belonged to a splinter faction.
Over the next days, more and more of the situation was understood as travel resumed. This is what the sect pieced together:
Several days after the beginning of the negotiations, a great army had appeared. With thousands of warriors bearing down on the breach, Elder White Knuckle had elected to evacuate rather than be wiped out – but before preparations were complete, saboteurs struck. A local religious group within Horrible Swamp had rushed the gate, performing some arcane ceremony upon it before being cut down.
From that moment it was as though the liminal space was frozen. Nothing could even touch the breach, let alone go through. New breaches were attempted, but the results were even worse than what the sect had achieved.
And so, they dug in. Created a killing field with enchantments and spells and White Knuckle’s incredible strength. For almost thirty days, they had held. Losing ground, losing people… but they held. Waiting for a chance to return home, for reinforcements. For anything.
But more and more enemies appeared, natives with strange powers, Clanbosses bearing their people on their backs. And then, even greater powers crested the horizon.
So they fled west, closing the breach with the aid of treasures and leaving their killing field behind. Horrible Swamp, cracking at the seams as its members chose one side or the other, was nonetheless an able guide. They crossed the swamp, then ventured out into the wastes.
They fought great hulking metal things, small crab-like creatures that swarmed by the tens of thousands, human-shaped constructs that attacked with intellect and no regards for their own lives. And all the way their backs were hounded by pursuers.
But eventually, they encountered allies of a sort: the Metal Bite Clan, who had little care for anything other than stemming the steel tide. The disciples settled into their territory, a place called the Iron-Brick Fortress, and endured a second siege.
This one was more successful; for whatever reason, the great powers had elected not to follow them across the wastes, staying near the sight of the original breach. Only warriors pursued them, and though some of them were comparable to an Elder in strength, none could stand up to White Knuckle. And even beyond that, Fort Iron-Brick was a stronghold hardened by decades of ceaseless combat; its walls were forged metal, thick as a mountain, and the besieging force had to withstand the waves of metallic beasts rushing in from the surrounding desert.
In the end, of the eighty-six disciples that had left the sect, only fifty-one returned. The majority of the casualties were lower realm martial artists; they gave their lives to protect their weaker diplomatic brothers and sisters. Their allies, the Clan of Moving Water, came with them – Elders watched with gritted teeth as over eight-thousand ogre-like creatures marched into the sect, their protestations swept aside by White Knuckle’s authority. Metal Bite elected to stay behind in their eternal Hellscape, rejecting any offer of sanctuary, and in gratitude the Elders sent a year’s worth of wheat flour before gladly sealing the breach that had been made inside the fortress, leaving not a single way to cross through from either end.
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Things had gone in a really weird direction, Bo thought. At first, it had been pretty understandable – they went in the hole, then they came out of a different hole, just like they should. Well, he did, at least. Being alone with a bunch of aliens hadn’t been great; these ones weren’t as friendly as Lu or his friends had been.
But his clan brothers had made it eventually! It just took a while. Bo had wanted to go back into the colourful tunnel, see if he could drag the others out, but the humans thought that was a bad idea. Whatever, it worked out. Softy and the Warboss hadn’t been well at all when they came out, even worse than Bo had been with all the drugs he had taken, but they all lived.
That wasn’t always a thing that happened.
But then, things went sideways. All the humans were panicking, and no two of them were giving the same answer when he asked what was going on – he got the feeling that some of them didn’t like him much, but even the nicer ones were all cagey. He got put in a room with a gold-eyed human a bunch of times, which was tedious since they all asked the exact same questions every time.
Then, they started to get real sick. Bo and his brothers that was, not the humans, they were fine.
It didn’t happen all at once. Softy noticed it first, how they were always a little out of breath, just a little thinner than the day before.
It sucked, for a while. The humans took a lot of blood and meat from his arms, and then gave him pills. They didn’t work, at first, but a month later he started to feel better.
Softy stayed sick for a while, and Dreamfever for a real long while, but eventually the pills worked for them too.
So everything was okay. Not good, they couldn’t go home, but okay. The humans weren’t bad, just kind of boring mostly. But then he found a few that could fight, and things were a little better than okay.
And then the portal opened up again, but they still couldn’t go home.
Bo was outside the barracks, like usual. The swamp the alien Clanboss had put them in wasn’t like Horrible Swamp at all – it was too bright, and the water tasted bad, and the wildlife was strange and too scared of them to catch – but it was better than staying indoors, which was cramped and still smelled like tree tar a whole month later.
Bo didn’t know why it smelled like that; he had pulled up a few boards and it was all held together with nails, no tar to be found. It was just one of the many mysteries of why things were the way they were here. Like why they all had to eat ten times as much, or why the women had stopped giving birth after a few days, or why the sun here didn’t hurt to look at.
Actually, that last one wasn’t a mystery; it turns out that the sun was just made of normal fire here. Still weird, but not a mystery.
Something that deserved the title much more was how a good quarter of the clan had turned traitor. A quarter! Even if a Great Ancestor told them to do it, that was too many!
He kicked the water, watching as the spray made a little half-circle of banded colour in the air. A passing gang of sharpies made noise at it, trying to grab the pretty lights, before it all drifted down. C’mon man, get outta this funk. Things’re gonna be fine; Still Water’ll get everything back on track, and we’ll be home in like, a year or something.
But no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t make his smile feel natural. I can’t help but think that things’re gonna turn out to not be fine at all. Like, how can we fight Big Joe? The other Ancestors? Do we even wanna try? Obviously they weren’t gonna turn around and bite the humans in their little soft necks – Horrib- Moving Waters was better than that! They always fight head-on! – but maybe it would be better to just ask to be put in a different swamp on, like, some other continent. That was probably a solution, right?
Bo mulled on it for a minute, just standing while the sharpies capered around making fake lunges for his back. By the time they got bored, he was still standing there.
But then he blinked, and raised his head to sniff at the air. Smells like… home?
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Hidden under dense copses, in deep caves and on the peaks of middling uninhabited mountains, something changed. All across the continent of Greengrass golden-eyed men and women stiffened, and beasts poked their heads from their burrows, as a new smell drifted on the air.
Except for one spot which didn't match, entirely out in the open. In the centre of a sect named the Steadfast Heart, a portal like a soap bubble flickered for a half-second. It disgorged five figures, then wavered and disappeared.