Fang Xiao and I followed Elder Cai through a twisting warren of lifeless stone hallways. There were traces of the life that had once dwelled in these ancient halls, silk tapestries withered into thin yellowed vines, wall scrolls eaten away by moths and beetles until only the wooden rods that had framed them remained.

Curious, that insects had managed to get in here. The outer formation should have prevented that. Perhaps a population had survived in the closed ecosystem of the temple for a thousand years?

Every so often we’d pass a piece of art that had stood the test of time. The most common were lacquered once-red lanterns now faded to the brown of long dried blood, lit anew by the Glass Flowers. But the most instructive were the mosaics. Even they were faded; small piles of stone grew from the edges of the hall, where the grout had failed and chips of jade and carnelian had fallen like rain. But neither the missing tiles nor the thick layer of dust could fully obscure the narrative unfolding before us.

Scenes from the life of a woman in robes of red and blue. A great romance, an archer in green appearing in dozens of scenes of parties and hunts. Scenes of grief and solitude, standing alone beneath the full moon. Carrying a lantern and bowl beneath an empty sky. Standing alone before an army, framed by a moon blazing brighter than the noonday sun.

Chang’e and Hou Yi. Or Chang’e and whatever the man’s name was in the earlier stories. Wu something? It had to be. Despite the many differences, it was too impossibly similar to be a different story. Or maybe I was making too much out of it? I still hadn’t heard the name Chang’e here, perhaps I was just fixating on the fact that Shennong was an object of worship in this world as well as the last one.

I had no idea what to do with any of that information.

Slowly, we approached the center of the complex. Or, the center of the miracle that protected it? It was hard to really gauge the geography of the temple itself except by comparing it with the mountain it was housed in. Even without releasing my spiritual sense I could feel the magnitude of the central formation, a mass of lunar qi as bright as the great white jade moon upon the wall. It was impossible to miss, a steady pressure like the light of the sun against closed eyelids.

Finally we emerged into an impossibly long hallway.

“That is most impressive.” Fang Xiao said quietly.

I did not disagree with him. My eyes could see for miles, and as far as I could tell, the hall simply stretched to the very horizon. The space was wide enough you could have run three trains side by side without touching either wall, and the ceiling was a full sixty feet above us. It felt almost airy, even though we were surrounded by thick walls of rock on all sides.

“The servants of Heaven have many faults. Insufficient architectural vision has never been one of them.” Elder Cai replied. “I do look forward to pulling this one apart.”

Instead of the physical lanterns we’d passed in the lesser hallways, this hall was lit by an even white glow that didn’t operate in a way compatible with my former understanding of light. The further down the tunnel you looked, the brighter the glow became. But it was sourceless, seemingly coming from everywhere and nowhere at once.

A few Glass Flowers lingered about the hall, studying mosaics or passing between the doors that abutted it. Their beautiful faces took on an alien cast in the strange pseudo-light, the impossibly even illumination left everything looking flatter and paler than it was.

We walked forward, towards the light. Backs stiffened and whispers died as disciples noticed us.

“Interesting. The entire effect is gradual, growing in intensity as we progress. The barrier protecting the inner temple itself must be asymptotic in nature, rather than anchored in a specific location.” Elder Cai mused.

It took me a moment to follow what she was talking about. Then I felt it, as I took my next step. The way my feet were moving didn’t match the seams of the stones in the floor, my slipper landing ever so slightly shy of where I expected it to.

“Is it tied to the intensity of the light?” I wondered aloud.

Instantly, a thick wave of shadow extended from beneath the hem of Elder Cai’s robes. It flowed outwards like half-solidified jello, leaving small pools around Fang Xiao and I’s feet.

“What are you doing! This is a sacred space!” One Glass Flower hissed.

Elder Cai took a few steps across the shadowed section. She paused, hitched up the skirt of her robes, then hopped. She took a few more steps, before looking up.

I suppressed a smile.

“Hard to tell, without seeing the floor. I don’t think it is. Will need to check again deeper in.”

“Perhaps the two effects stem from the same source then?” I mused.

“Possible. Likely even. Can’t trust the most obvious hypothesis. Will need instruments to confirm a relationship. Disciple Fang, bring me box four.”

Fang Xiao coughed.

“What?” Elder Cai turned, frowning.

“My movement technique is liable to interact with the contents of box four.” He said calmly.

Elder Cai pulled something from her robe and tossed it to him. It moved slower, then fell farther than it should have, forcing Fang Xiao to stoop to catch the small token.

“Good catch. Knew I kept you around for something. Find a spot to land the Black Sun.”

Did she just hand a twenty-odd year old disciple the keys to a war machine that could probably level a city? It said something about the last few weeks that I wasn’t even sure if that rated as something I should be concerned about. It would probably be fine.

The two of us walked deeper into the light. Disciples became sparser the farther we went, though we passed a few sitting against the far walls of the hallway, attempting to cultivate the strange mixture of lunar and spatial qi.

After a few minutes, we stopped. Using the adjoining doorways as landmarks, we’d only progressed a few hundred feet. Looking at the crowd of disciples in the distance, it seemed like closer to a mile.

Darkness flooded outwards from Elder Cai again, but this time she didn’t even need to bother to avoid my feet. The flood simply ran out of momentum before it’d extended more than a few feet from her.

“Was that the same volume as last time?” I asked.

“Yes. How does it look from your perspective?”

“Substantially smaller. To you?”

“Approximately the same area. It’s not direct suppression, the spatial phenomena is simply far more intense. We’re easily standing several bu apart now.”

Interesting. What was that, ten feet? Elder Cai still looked close enough to touch if I were to lean a little.

“Light must not be affected as much as matter. You don't look that far away.”

Elder Cai hummed thoughtfully, then extended an arm in my direction. She waved it around in the direction of my nose.

“The perspective is all wrong. Your hand looks as if you’re holding it directly in front of your face, even though your arm is fully extended. Like a painting done by a poor artist.”

“Domains must be disparate. It splits targets into their own sealed spaces?” Elder Cai muttered under her breath. “What is it partitioning on? Innate Qi? Matter?”

She turned over her arm, beckoning to the darkness seeping out from beneath her robes. Slowly, the dense black fog began rising to meet her, forming into a floating orb.

Elder Cai proceeded to ponder her orb. Occasionally she prodded at it, making it grow larger and smaller as she manipulated her qi. I left her to it, happy to accept the tacit dismissal.

I felt comfortable here, more so than I’d felt in a while. I was beginning to get a handle on Elder Cai. She was so much less inscrutable than so many of my new colleagues. She wanted to understand the great formation of the temple, and to loot the resources in its depths. She liked being acknowledged as an expert, especially by me, her nominal senior. She didn’t like being distracted from her work, compromising, negotiating, or being told ‘no’ directly.

Simple. Clean. Manageable. Possibly a mild touch of the ‘tism. Her personality might be a problem for juniors who chafed under her dictatorial whims, but for me, it was perfect. I didn’t mind the lack of manners or the way that she presumed everyone knew less than her. Especially since I did in fact know less than her.

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The formation itself was the opposite in a way, but no less pleasant a change of pace for it. Nobody understood how it worked. There were no verbal land-mines, no obvious wrong answers to avoid. It was just a bizarre mystery people were working around without really understanding, which summarized about half the projects I’d spent my professional career working on. Familiar territory. Well, perhaps that was an overstatement, but it was a comforting thought all the same.

How could I dig into this? I didn’t understand the qi mechanics well enough to pursue that angle. Cai had implied that the field behaved differently around people than it did between them. How far did that bubble extend?

I pulled my sword from my belt, sheath and all. I extended my arm to its full length, holding my sword perfectly vertical. I turned my arm over, ninety degrees to the right.

My sword moved slower than it should.

There wasn’t a resistance. There was nothing to push against. The tip just moved slower than it should have. Not by much, but by enough to notice. Only a full quarter of a second after my wrist finished moving, did the tip of the scabbard come to a stop at the nine o’clock position.

I pulled my arm close, and made the same motion.

It was faster.

That made no sense. My wrist was moving at the same rate. My sword was a straight piece of steel. The angular velocity of the tip was a function of the rate at which the hilt rotated.

I extended my arm again, trying to look at both my wrist and the tip of my sword at the same time. Despite my best efforts, one of the two was always blurry, as if it were out of focus. My sword didn’t look like it was bending. It just looked wrong, like I was seeing something that shouldn’t have been possible.

I extended my qi around my sword, and made the same motion. The tip lagged.

I unsheathed the blade, and focused. The cold un-light of my sword intent flickered into existence around the blade, cutting through the uniform white glow of the hall. I turned my wrist once more.

The blade sliced through the air without distortion or obstruction. But the space itself remained twisted. Elder Hu might have been able to cut the distortion itself, but I certainly couldn’t.

“Amusing yourself, Elder Hu?” Cai said, looking up from her strangely pulsating ball of darkness.

“It’s not just empty space being bent. Contiguous objects are affected, even those shrouded in qi. But sword intent is unobstructed, as are objects close enough to a person.”

“Interesting.” Elder Cai mused. “I was unable to meaningfully oppose the phenomena with qi alone. Perhaps it isn’t spatial manipulation at all then, but some form of authority. Something similar to Elder Xin’s Still Waters, or the Sectmaster’s Pathless Night. A direct resistance to motion would be more vulnerable to your undirected intent than a spatial phenomena.”

I nodded, as if I understood more than half of that.

Elder Cai turned away from the blinding white glow at the far end of the hallway and looked at me directly.

“You are abnormally personable today.”

I tensed. Had I gotten too comfortable?

“You on the other hand seem much the same as ever, as insightful as you are abrasive.” I replied.

“Ah, there’s that viper’s tongue. How kind of you to turn it to my aggrandizement. Still, I’m surprised you didn’t rush directly for the trials.”

“It’s rare I run into a defense that I cannot cut. It’s worth a detailed examination for that alone.”

I turned to stare at the blinding glow of the formation in the distance. A few hundred yards away, but as untouchable as the moon. Elder Cai followed my eyes.

“Besides, I’m the only Nascent Soul cultivator here.” I continued with a wry smile. “Any trials suitable for me aren’t going to be cleared tonight. Perhaps you should be the one in a rush.”

Elder Cai frowned, and I’d worried I’d overstepped.

“I always hated the idea of inheritance trials.” She said slowly. “It’s disgraceful that someone long dead should presume to judge my skills. They challenged Heaven and lost. I owe no respect to their remains. I would rather take their treasures by force, then be judged worthy by a failure.”

Huh. I hadn’t expected that.

The two of us lapsed into a companionable silence, as Elder Cai returned to manipulating her orb of darkness.

For the moment, I was out of ideas for digging further into the mechanics of the great formation. Instead, I found my mind drifting towards the subject of cultivation.

I’d spent so much time trying to become something I wasn’t. Elder Hu’s cultivation wasn’t mine. There’d been so much fear and arrogance in the way I approached it. Elder Hu’s cultivation base was the work of several lifetimes. At least two hundred years of effort, perhaps as many as four hundred, had gone into it. And he hadn’t left behind a single written note. I didn’t even know the name of his cycling method, if it even had one.

It was one thing, to come up with a new cultivation method from scratch. It was rare, but some people managed to create their own qi condensation methods without any formal education at all. It became far less common as cultivators climbed through the realms. Most paths ended in dead ends.

It’d been the height of arrogance, to think I had any chance of picking up where Hu Xin left off and pushing forward. The breakthrough to void-shattering supposedly wasn’t one of the great bottlenecks, like core formation, nascent soul, or immortal ascension. But it still required a colossal volume of qi, absolute mastery of a complex cycling pattern, and an inhuman level of understanding of the concepts that underpinned the method itself.

And if Hu Xin’s understanding of the sword had been insufficient to take that next step, how could I hope to?

I was starting to suspect that the very fact I could even command his sword intent was because when he’d advanced to nascent soul, he’d effectively imbued it into his cultivation base. All the treatises I’d read implied that was the qualitative difference between core formation and nascent soul, the step of merging fragments of the great dao itself into your qi.

And yet, the idea of giving up was unthinkable. These last few weeks, the demands of the sect had been light. But over the course of decades, I had no doubt I’d eventually be forced to choose between my morals and my neck.

Perhaps Qin Wenyan wasn’t the only one on the wrong track. I quite literally couldn’t disperse Elder Hu’s cultivation, but what if I just ignored it, and forged my own path?

The human body had three dantians after all, and I’d seen no evidence Elder Hu’s path made use of the upper or lower except as pass-throughs.

Everything I’d read said that having multiple cultivation bases made further advancement harder, if not impossible. It was strongly discouraged, more associated with demons concealing themselves or indecisive dilletantes than geniuses. But I had no real chance of advancing anyway.

What would I be, if I could become anything? What path would I walk?

There was the Path of the Bleeding Heart. It still sat in my storage ring, too interesting to discard, but too situational to put to use. I’d considered giving it to Qin Wenyan, but my gut told me that was a bad idea. The raging alcoholism, the way he’d immediately jumped at rejoining the army once I’d mentioned it might help him overcome his bottleneck. He didn’t strike me as a man who did moderation well, and an addictive personality and blood cultivation seemed a recipe for a monster.

I could follow it myself. The chief limiting factor of blood cultivation was the practitioner’s ability to kill men and beasts to use as resources. Even if I restricted myself to hunting monsters, I would have effectively limitless cultivation resources well into core formation.

But what was even the point? I had ideas for how such a technique might be turned to heal as well as harm, or synergize with Elder Hu’s sword. But even if I took that technique all the way to the peak of core formation, it wouldn’t give me many options I didn’t already have.

There was cooking. I was probably the best cook in the Pathless Night, I'd yet to see an elder or inner disciple who treated the art as anything other than a chore. By mortal standards, I was no slouch. But dedicating my life to it? Making it the foundation of my being? I’d worked kitchens, but it’d never been more than a job to me, and far from my favorite one at that. I cooked because it was fun and good takeout was expensive, it wasn’t something I’d ever really considered dedicating my life to. Did that calculus change, if being good enough at it brought power and immortality? Not really.

I wanted to learn immortal cookery. Hell, immortal brewing too. But I didn’t think I cared enough to try to make it the foundation of a cultivation technique.

When you stripped it all away, who even was I? Forty years had felt like such a long time, but what had I ever really truly cared about, beyond my family? I’d worked in kitchens and bars, military bases and software startups. I’d spent decades in schools and years in ambulances.

None of it ever mattered to me enough to dedicate my life to it. It’d all ever been a means to an end, a way to see the world or put food on the table.

The closest things I’d ever had to a passion were medicine and software. And I’d balked at the working conditions of medical residency, and I’d only ended up in software because I’d have blown my brains out before I reached an air force pension.

Funny, how small our lives can look in hindsight. Or our careers at least.

It was an idea though. Software was just information in motion. Well, not really. Running software was information in motion. At rest it was just a series of instructions. My upper dantian was empty. An abstract command of information and knowledge, that was the sort of power that might change my circumstances. Render myself impossible to remember, or difficult to track.

I stared at the formation. I’d watched it so long now I almost felt like I could make out moving characters in the featureless white void. The formation that managed this whole temple had to implement certain patterns I was familiar with. It would need authentication and authorization. Some concept of state, to be able to turn door barriers on and off. There had to be more functions, if this complex once supported thousands of inhabitants, and had the intelligence to test and reward those who took its trials.

It was just the seed of an idea. I didn’t know what information qi would even look like on its own, let alone how to cultivate it. But if it existed anywhere, a formation like this ought to have a great deal of it at its core.

Perhaps it was entirely the wrong track. It would be a long journey before it amounted to anything useful. There was a good chance that I could make more progress defending myself in the short term by simply focusing on maximizing my advantages, acquiring more powerful magical swords, or learning more dirty tricks. Or just find another, less concerning, Void-Shattering cultivator to serve. I'd have seriously considered defecting for the Qin Empire already, if they weren't at war, and apparently slowly losing to boot.

But the idea of my own cultivation called to me, beyond practicality. Once I ensured my own safety, and Su Li's, it was perhaps the thing I wanted most. It was hard to articulate why exactly, even in my own head.

Perhaps it just felt like a way to be me again, instead of Hu Xin.

“Elder Cai!” A voice called out from behind me. “I’ve brought box four.”

Elder Cai looked up from her orb, blinking. It had grown while I stared into the light. Now it was half a dozen feet in diameter, and every so often it bulged violently, as if something trapped inside were trying to escape. I felt like I should be surprised by this, but my ability to be shocked by anything was pretty stretched at the moment. I probably needed a few months of normalcy to really recalibrate, before that particular brain function would work again.

“Good! Give it here.” She barked. “It will take a delicate hand to avoid tainting the stones in an environment this aspected.”

“Elder Cai.” I said. The in question woman looked up from the crate she was unpacking, already surrounded by arcane implements wrought in metal and glass. “Your comment, about the temerity of the dead, to dare to test the living, strikes a chord in me. Would you mind assistance in your efforts to dismantle or subvert this formation?”

Elder Cai smiled brightly, and her eyes flashed once more with lightning.

“Why Elder Hu, your sword opens up so very many interesting approaches. I would be honored to dismember this formation with you.”