…History is mute as to what finally convinced the future sage that the rift would be worth investigating. However, according to what is said, having made suitable preparations with his disciples and close companions to secure his lineage should he not return, he meditated for thirty-three days and, on the thirty-fourth, selected an auspicious time and entered that place with several other reclusive experts.

Apparently, he underwent nine trials and encountered nine mysteries that eventually led him through dark paths to a great crystal house amid a field of flowers. What he encountered there, no book teaches in detail, but according to those who observed that group’s return, he departed with some haste, only pausing to advise the local chieftains to treat any rifts they encountered with the greatest respect and caution and not to treat any gains obtained from them cheaply or frivolously.

Soon after returning to the coast he founded Blue Water City at the mouth of the Blue Yin River, before eventually departing our world on the Great Xuan Expedition. Before he departed, he was met with members of his clan and others who had come to learn of his endeavours, even being styled Blue Water Dao Sage by the Emperor himself, but no one could convince him to speak of what he had encountered.

Nonetheless his journey stirred a furore in that generation, such that all its great scions descended on that place, dreaming of great achievements of their own… Unfortunately, it was not to be, and the pride of a generation fell without trace in those rifts and the sects that sent them all suffered inexplicable calamities shortly after.

Writing on the matter of the Blue Water Sage, Volume 2

~ Author Unknown – attributed to a Chronicler Jiang.

~ Jun Arai – Jade Willow Village by Night ~

The rain lessened as it approached midnight, although the mists, carried on the east wind, did not. This change, however, did subtly alter the way that the suppression of the distant mountains extended beyond their natural borders in the gloom of night. The humidity remained, but qi and soul sense became even more diffuse in the misty haze than they had been before, effectively trading the drenching rain for a major headache for anyone who wanted to see more than their ‘normal’ sight range by any means. South Grove Pinnacle was a very different kind of natural problem compared to the eternal rains of East Fury or the heavenly drum that was Thunder Crest.

Walking through the night market, she reflected on those quirks of the different minor peaks of Yin Eclipse as she considered what was on sale. In a way, she was really quite happy with the change in weather; it played rather helpfully into her current deception, as her biggest concerns were experts with soul sense or anyone with well-developed qi sense. In a town like Jade Willow, however, that was really not many people. For everyone else, the restriction on soul sense was a minor nuisance only and in the case of sellers probably actually a ‘benefit’, so with the lessening rain, the number of people out buying and selling was actually quite high.

To her amusement, as she made her way out of the main square, she even saw two of the Jade Willow group who had been with her, Chen Da and Chen Lanfeng, standing with another male disciple she didn’t recognise selling off their own lotus roots. Presumably they had realised that they were good for spirit food at this point, especially with people craving cool, refreshing things in the muggy, still night air.

After a short moment of consideration, as she stood across the street from them, under her own umbrella which she had still kept out, she decided to test out the quality of her obfuscation on them. As she recalled, the Ha and the Chen clans did have a certain relationship, so chatting to them could also provide her with a means to ask about Elder Li and his ‘disappearance’ in a way that wouldn’t go back to her if she was successful.

Meandering over to where the pair were negotiating with an exasperated old woman who was clearly unhappy at the price point they had put on the lotus roots, she stood nearby until Chen Lanfeng noticed her.

“Ah… Young Lady Ha?” Chen Lanfeng bowed slightly to her after taking in her robe. “Can we also interest you in some of these premium grade lotus roots? They were freshly harvested today!”

“…”

She was glad she had her mantra to rely on, because otherwise she would not have managed to keep much of a straight face. It was true that the lotus roots had been ‘premium grade’ when she supervised their hauling out of the canals. However, their preparation of them was much less skilled than hers had been. It wasn’t quite at the level of miss-selling goods, but it was no wonder the old lady was grumbling.

“You prepared these yourself?” she asked politely. “Miss…?”

“Chen, from the Chen family,” Chen Lanfeng answered respectfully. “Yes, we prepared these properly ourselves.”

“May I?” she asked, gesturing to one of the piles of roots on their stall.

Chen Lanfeng nodded, so she took a few at random and considered them, tuning out the old woman who was now castigating Chen Da and the other disciple for preparing them like they were potatoes and expecting her to pay for them like they were ginseng roots.

“Mmm…” she put on a show of being non-committal, and then decided to do them a small favour. “I must admit, the quality leaves a bit to be desired… however, if I might make a suggestion?”

She leaned in, and murmured to Chen Lanfeng, quietly now so the old lady, who was at Qi Refinement, wouldn’t notice. “You would likely get more selling the spirit food directly. For one spirit stone I can tell you how to make Cold Bones Stew?”

“Uh….” Chen Lanfeng looked a bit surprised at that. “Well… but one spirit stone?”

“You will struggle to sell these roots for twenty iron per kilo as it currently stands. But if you put them in soup, you can probably make one hundred litres of soup and sell it at five iron a bowl. Nobody will be able to tell how it was prepared. All that matters is that it tastes good and doesn’t poison anyone.”

“…”

“And why is Big Sister Ha being so generous?” Chen Lanfeng murmured, narrowing her eyes.

“Because I want a small favour in return,” she replied, doing her best ‘ohohohoh’ young miss impression to accompany Chen Lanfeng.

Having seen her fellow Herb Hunters Lin Ling and Juni… and more importantly Ling Yu at work, she was pretty good at it by this point. Making people think you were a ‘young noble’ was more to do with mannerisms and attitude than anything else, she had come to realise over the years.

“I was passing through and wanted to catch up with my cousin and her friends,” she said softly. “She came here from West Flower Picking Town, but upon arrival, I found that she is not at the inn she said she would be at and all I hear is people complaining about folk from West Flower Picking Town stealing jobs?”

“Your cousin was wrapped up in that?” Chen Lanfeng murmured with a frown, looking around at the drifting groups of people walking up and down the street for a moment. “She probably isn’t staying in the town. However, a young miss like you… Those are mostly just common folk who came here for jobs?”

She sighed deeply and shook her head, “Just what are they up to now? Truthfully, I was asked by grandfather to check on them as I happened to be passing through here on my way back home… but arriving here I found no mention of them after asking around, and knowing how upstanding an influence the Jade Willow Sect is…”

Chen Lanfeng smiled slightly and nodded in agreement. “It is understandable. The Ha clan is the prosperity of this village, but local politics has soured that somewhat this last year or two…”

“So it seems. I had heard that they were supposed to be looked after by a new elder here at the Pavilion… a Ha Lee… Li?” she added, fudging the pronunciation slightly for effect.

“Ah.” Chen Lanfeng’s expression flickered faintly before she recovered her previous demeanour. “Elder Li… has caused some ructions of late.”

“Apparently so…” she agreed with another frustrated sigh. “I was hoping to meet him on behalf of my elders.”

“I can only tell you what I have already said,” Chen Lanfeng sighed, leaning against the upright holding the umbrella sheltering the stand up. “Most of those who are involved in that don’t come into the village nor do they really have a lot to do with the sect. Our Chen family was approached a few times, about land I think, but my father was not really interested because we have to manage our own circumstances and it was just juniors making the approaches. As far as I know, Elder Li never asked for anything of our Chen clan personally.”

-Well that at least is interesting, she mused to herself. Matches with what I learned earlier, though it also implies that Elder Li might not be the real driving force in some of this?

“I see… that is indeed a problem,” she mused. “I can only hope that they have not gotten involved in something stupid…”

“Yeah,” Chen Lanfeng agreed solicitously.

“Well, I must thank you for your help…” she added with a brighter smile. “If I might ask about…”

They chatted on for a few more minutes after that before Chen Lanfeng finally acquiesced to trade the recipe she was offering for a spirit stone.

Based on the quantity of roots, she was pretty sure they had all of the Jade Willow group’s supply of roots on them right now in any case, so they would make double or even triple that back so long as they were even slightly savvy. In return, she even learned a further, surprisingly valuable piece of information as she prodded at the edges of what Chen Lanfeng had said about land and juniors being the ones making the approaches to people.

Apparently, the local Ha clan had some disagreements with the Deng clan and a few other local influences to the north of the village over land use rights. They had as a result started to shun those from the village for certain work-related contracts for a good while before Elder Li arrived and so, according to Chen Lanfeng, Elder Li had merely stepped up the process of bringing in people from West Flower Picking Town… not started it, as had been implied to her.

Finally, after purchasing a kilo of the roots, she bade Chen Lanfeng farewell and good luck and moved on, walking through the market, twirling her umbrella pensively.

On the face of it, that bit of local gossip seemed quite innocuous, but she was pretty sure she knew more about Yin Eclipse, four miles to the east, than most people in the village who were not Pavilion elders or old recluses did. Someone had been harvesting ginseng from the Red Pit and she would bet actual spirit stones at this point that this local disagreement between the Ha and the Deng was because the former suspected the latter were plundering their ginseng fields – likely using the floods and decreased access as an opportunity.

It was a piece that filled out a part of the puzzle she was staring at; however, the more she pondered that, the more her treatment at the village shrine was also starting to nag at her. They had been dismissive of her, but more than happy to take what the locals brought with no questions asked? Her first instinct there was that they didn’t want to share goods with the Hunter Pavilion, but if she was so inclined she could have claimed them in the fields... and they would know that…

Shaking her head, she wandered on, starting to pay more attention to the stalls selling oddments, not quite sure what she was looking for now, but certain that she was looking for something.

…

In the end, it took her over half an hour of almost random perusal as she walked through the side streets and along the village’s main canal to finally stumble across what she was looking for… or rather… had it stumble across her.

“Hey miss… good fortune charm?”

She found herself standing opposite a young boy, maybe ten years old, holding a patchy paper umbrella in one hand and carrying a box containing the most spectacular collection of semi-plausible oddments in the other, much of it looking not that far off something potentially dredged out of the mud of a local canal.

“Yes?” she smiled prettily, bending down slightly to look at what he was proffering.

“Oh… miss… you be careful your dress doesn’t get dirty!” the young boy smiled back at her hopefully, reminding her not to step in an inconvenient puddle.

“Ohohohoh…” she patted his cheek and nodded, before turning her attention back to the tray and murmuring: “So polite.”

After much of a day spent trawling through the local canals herself, and having found a small grave in the process, she knew what she was looking at in the tray. Most of it was pieces of worked stoneware pot and a few ancient coins that had been selected because they already had holes in them, allowing them to be conveniently turned into ‘talismans’.

The folkloric views this close to the mountains were a strange collection of beliefs – especially once you started digging into what the ‘truly’ local folk believed. One such belief was that the mountains held an eye that watched over you and that things that came from the rivers bearing the marks of the mountain held a special connection to it. Ruined fragments of stoneware pot, made from the strange qi-repelling stone that only appeared deep in the inner regions, were thus frequently turned into charms against misfortune.

The designs were what drew people to them and several of those in the tray matched perfectly the pot that had held the lotus root. However, that in its own right was not what was important. Rather, it was that the decorations on such things tended to be tied to the ruin they were found in, which was something almost nobody outside of those who had been into the less disturbed ruins deep in the mountains would know.

Of her cohort, only Juni had been into ruins beyond those beneath South Grove Pinnacle. Her friend was also the only one trusted by Old Ling to lead cave delving requests, which tended to be the only missions where senior hunters regularly teamed up. Juni had led her and Sana into three such ruins and explained a lot about them.

In any case, the crux of it was that the boy’s box held fragments of stoneware pot that to her eyes clearly originated from the same place as the pot that had held her lotus.

“…”

She poked through the collection of talismans for a few moments then, brushing the others aside, picked one out.

It was not the same as the others. A round fragment of stone with a square hole in the middle. If she looked carefully, four words – ‘Earth’, ‘Fire’, ‘Blood’ and ‘Sky’ – were carved on it in Easten, the language of the ancient people of Yin Eclipse. Flipping it over, she found ‘Dream’ carved on the other side along with a picture of a pagoda. The exterior was marked with the same patterns as the pottery had been. It was a gate talisman for an old Yin clan if she was any judge.

“Oh… how pretty,” she murmured, turning it over in her hands with undisguised delight.

“Ah…” the boy suddenly looked surprised and grabbed at his throat.

“How much for this one?” she asked with a happy smile.

The boy, awkward now, shook his head.

“Erm… that’s not for sale… Sorry miss, I musta dropped it in there,” he muttered as he fumbled around in his pockets and then looked at her pleadingly.

“…”

She resisted raising an eyebrow, but handed it back to him anyway, watching as he shoved it in a pocket.

“This one then,” she said after a moment’s consideration, picking out a star-shaped shard that had a design of a squirrel holding a bottle drawn onto it in yellow paint.

“One iron, miss,” the boy replied a bit more confidently, holding up a finger.

“…”

She resisted rolling her eyes and handed him the iron talisman coin, which made him beam.

“I’ll give you five if you tell me where these came from?” she added, holding up the additional iron talismans, finally deciding to see if he would bite.

“Five… erm…” the boy tried to look po-faced but it was impossible for someone his age.

“I don’t… rightly know. My brothers just give me the stuff to sell…” he answered, even as he tried and failed to stop staring at the five iron talismans in her hand.

“…”

“I can take you to meet them though?” he added after thinking about his response just a fraction too long.

“It’s fine,” she murmured, affecting not to notice and instead patting him on the head. “I was simply curious.”

“Thank you for the sale, Miss…” the boy said, beaming again as if she had never asked the question.

Flashing him a further bright smile, she departed, twirling the ‘charm’ between her fingers, having left him the five iron talismans anyway. It was a lot of money, but that was beside the point, because this ‘meeting’ had told her as much as the chat with Chen Lanfeng in its own way. The boy barely cast her a second look, and went on his way, trying to sell more talismans here and there – mostly targeting ladies it had to be said.

She, for her part, also kept on walking and perusing as if she had noted nothing, occasionally stopping and looking at the odd curio and asking a question here and there.

Only when she was certain the boy was well out of sight did she pause to lean on a parapet and look out over the misty canal, lit by glimmering lantern lights on both sides, and stop spinning it to consider the reverse side and the mark hidden on it.

The art of selling people dodgy talismans during bad weather was one she was not unfamiliar with. West Flower Picking Town had quite a few such outfits and it had not escaped her notice that the youth had added the one she eventually selected, along with a few others like it, to the tray when she picked out the round talisman, while she should have been distracted looking at it. His technique was excellent, but she, who had to stake her survival on spotting plants capable of obfuscation that would make that child bow down and call them teacher, was not so easy to fool.

-So Jade Willow Village has a gang… and they have some kind of source on the stoneware pots that is the same as wherever the lotus contamination came from…

-Not to mention, someone already marked me asking questions?

Her mind drifted back to the previous night and the stall vendor who had told her his seniors had something of interest to sell.

-That was after I left the Pavilion… and the guards hinted there were people faking identifications?

The latter, though, might not be related to this, she had to admit. Such practices were fairly common where sects were involved and status talismans could be the difference between causing trouble for others and evading it yourself… so long as you were not caught.

“Hey, my young lady… you all alone here?” a very dapper youth carrying a fancy umbrella walked up beside her and leant against the balcony, looking into the water below as she pondered that point.

She glanced sideways and considered the new arrival. He was hiding his cultivation, but not the quality of his qi, which, combined with the intent that swirled around him faintly, marked him as a Golden Core cultivator. The intent wasn’t malevolent at least – though she didn’t put much stock in that as a gauge these days.

“I believe it is customary for you to introduce yourself?” she murmured with a faint smile, brushing her hair back as she did so and turning to look at him properly.

“…”

He recovered well and saluted her politely. “Wen Suan, a disciple of the Jade Willow Sect, Young Lady Ha.”

“Xiuying,” she replied after a moment, dropping her family name and transliterating her own name ‘gentle blossom’ into the closest thing that Imperial Common provided: ‘beautiful flower’.

“I had not heard that the local Ha clan had such a beauty in their ranks,” Wen Suan replied, putting on what she was sure he thought was a winsome smile.

She didn’t bother to correct his assumption and just kept looking at him in silence. There was probably a half and half chance at this point that he was just an innocent opportunist as opposed to an actual member of the same gang as the boy she had encountered a short while before.

“You flatter me, young master Wen,” she replied, wondering if he was some relation of Wen Bei. He certainly dressed like it, though given her own attire that was no guarantee, especially not with the guards’ comments about identity talismans.

“Why don’t we go grab a drink?” he asked her after a moment.

“…”

“Thank you for your kind offer, but that would be improper,” she replied with her best smile, pulling a fan out of her storage talisman and tapping it on the wall she was leaning on.

She was not falling for that trap. The Ha clan had deep roots in Blue Water Province, but they leaned towards the imperial end of the political spectrum and many in their younger ranks at least affected to adhere to the ‘Blue Morality Scripture’ of the Imperial Court, if only for the doors it opened socially. As a proper young lady of the Ha, the clan rules would be pretty clear that she not go drinking alone with random strangers she met like this, even if she had a male escort.

“…”

“Of course it would be,” Wen Suan agreed with an understanding nod, recovering well she had to admit. “Where are my manners, please allow me, Wen Suan, to escort you back to your lodging? This is after all a most unbecoming hour for a proper young lady like yourself to be out and about.”

“Thank you for your kind concern; however, I will be just fine on my own,” she again politely refused him.

“Cousin Suan!” a more familiar voice echoed from nearby.

-So they are indeed related, she mused.

Wen Bei and several other youths in fancy robes had crossed over the nearby bridge and were approaching through the mist, carrying lanterns and umbrellas.

“Who is this beauty? Was there such a girl in our village?” one of them asked with a chuckle, looking her over.

“Xiuying,” she saluted them politely with her fan.

“A beautiful name for a beautiful flower,” another said jovially.

“…”

She affected to be marginally flattered, and cast a sideways look at Wen Bei without him noticing. He was looking at her with the same vague interest as the others but showed no hints of recognition either.

-All hail wearing a pretty dress, she thought wryly, slowly twirling her umbrella.

Two of them had sent threads of qi sense out at her, looking to try and determine her realm, but with her mantra keeping a tight hold of her qi and her use of ‘Empty Eye Steps’ they got basically nothing and in return told her that they were both Qi Refinement and weaker than her anyway.

“I had agreed to meet my cousin here,” she sighed, snapping the fan shut again, making the mist swirl faintly. “However, she and her brothers are most late.”

“Oh? If she is anything like as beautiful as you, perhaps we are already acquainted?” Wen Suan murmured, trying again.

“I doubt they are known to you young masters,” she sighed. “They do not move in our circles. I was merely asked to check on them while passing through here on business for a few days, and yet…”

“Ah,” Wen Bei nodded as did the others.

“It was most undignified for them to keep you waiting like this,” Wen Suan agreed, sounding sympathetically conciliatory now.

Smiling again, she kept tight rein on her own intent and let only the tiniest hint of annoyance creep out.

“In that case, let us not keep Miss Xiuying,” Wen Bei said after a moment. “We are already late as it is for Brother Shun’s gathering.”

The others nodded, although Wen Suan still looked disappointed, even as Wen Bei dragged him away by the arm. She watched them vanish into the misty drizzle before going back to looking at the rain rippling on the surface of the canal, splashing amidst the lily pads as fish occasionally gulped at the disturbances.

-Perhaps it’s just a small village and I am reading too much into things… she reflected with an inward sigh, spinning the talisman around idly.

It was hard for her to say for sure that she was being watched, but ever since she had stepped out of the inn she had been treating the village like it was one of the inner valleys. Viewed from that perspective, it was interesting what impressions started to come to the fore.

Watching people bustle down the street beside the canal, looking at stalls, engaging in trades, making the most of the lack of rain, the thing that really stood out to her was the lack of guard patrols.

Since she had left the inn she had only seen two, both small, both in the vicinity of the main square. She had noted when she went to their compound, and earlier when they returned to the village, that the guards appeared to be quite understaffed. It was possible that they were mostly busy keeping the road secure for the harvest, but in weather like this, she would have expected them to double their focus on the village itself.

The lack of soul sense from powerful cultivators to keep things locked down was potentially as dangerous as it was liberating. Never mind the usual opportunities to get away with things like miss-selling goods, when this weather came to West Flower Picking Town for instance, she knew that gang activity and such blossomed like weeds as petty criminals took opportunities not otherwise afforded.

-The question is me… what good does targeting me do? she mused, taking the pendant and turning it over in her fingers again, considering it. Either my disguise has failed, in which case they know I am a nine-star ranked Hunter, and potentially one with the ear of the Kun clan’s upper echelon... or it hasn’t, in which case I am a miss from the Ha clan. Neither of those backers is known to be… lenient.

Sighing, she stashed the talisman away in a convenient pocket – it was a feature of them that they didn’t store in talismans or rings after all – and looked around the street with its lantern-lit stalls again.

That consideration was also why the pot, with its sealed-away critter, was currently with Kun Shi. Of all the group he was now the least likely to abscond with it, being well aware that the wrath of the Kun clan could descend on his head. If it got ‘stolen’ from him, she could get Juni involved personally and the Kun clan could be about as lenient on that kind of thing as the Ha clan were.

“The only real difference between a gang and a clan is money and time after all…” she chuckled to herself.

That gem had actually come from Juni herself, when she had remarked on some matter or other regarding the shadow market in spirit herb trading of all things. The same could be said for many local influences as well though.

She watched the water in the canal for a few more moments, enjoying the stillness it presented in contrast to the slow bustle of the street, before collecting herself and setting off on her wanderings once more.

Crossing over the bridge, she perused stalls as she went, just in case something did stand out. Mostly it was just sub-par spirit vegetation, the discards from the harvest along with a few other opportunistic things, but amid one stack of manuals at a stall selling various cultivation resources she was surprised to find, rather randomly, a manual relating to Martial Intent with a focus on archery.

The price listed on it was only three spirit stones, which was surprising in its own right, though she supposed, after looking through it under the watchful eye of the stall keeper, it was because few people fancied archery in any serious way. To be a successful martial archer made you sought after, but it required significant investment in secondary arts to really get the best out of, and those kinds of supplementary things were all much more expensive than the archery forms themselves.

Trading the three spirit stones for it, she stored the book away and, after a final look down that street, started to walk back towards the Jade Willow Blossom Inn.

Her room faced onto the canal, on the second story, and as she approached, considering again how she was going to go about dealing with the missing Elder Li request, her senses, used to scanning for innocuous-looking threats, spotted movement where there should be none – in the window of her room, which was… open.

“…”

Sighing softly to herself, she changed her plan and kept on walking.

Staying out all night was not impossible, but that little, innocuous slip suggested a few things to her: Firstly, someone was likely after the pot and secondly, if that was true, they didn’t know Kun Shi had it. That mostly ruled out anyone in their group at least, but did narrow it down to someone who had seen the pot – so either from the Gen, Erlang or Fei estates or someone who had otherwise observed it out there in the intervening time.

She had almost made it to the village square when the third possibility emerged like a dark spectre from the ether though: Whoever had stolen her original herb and the body of the Ha clan youth might have decided to follow up on their work for some reason.

That secondary event was still an oddity; Ha Fenfang, Nen Hong and Nen Shirong were likely affiliated with whatever shady business the Ha clan was engaged with. She had originally assumed that they had been brought into the Red Pit as bait…

-But what if it wasn’t quite that simple? she thought to herself, thinking of all the mendacious things you could use weak, inexperienced people for in a place like that.

Turning on her heel, she walked back towards the Hunter Pavilion.

It didn’t take her long to get there and even at this hour it was all lit up, a steady stream of people going back and forth into it.

Dressed as she was and walking purposefully, nobody accosted her or even glanced in her direction much as she made her way to the mission hall and stood there, looking around. It took her a few moments of searching to re-find what she was looking for, mostly because someone had shoved the official, Bureau mandated clearance board off to an unobtrusive corner, but sure enough, there was a months-old request there for the removal of a blood ling tree along with several notes on them in the watch list section of the board.

Skimming the request, and then the other supplementary notes – it was not that informative really, just a list of suspicions about the border of the pit shifting north of the village and an assertion by several parties that ‘a new blood ling tree’ was responsible – she sighed deeply and left the hall again, this time heading for the exit of the village.

Exiting the gate, she was not so much as looked at by any of the rather harried guards remonstrating with the owners of a wagon full of some kind of spirit fruit.

The traffic on the road outside the village was, if anything, even greater than it had been the previous day, likely a result of the lessening of the rain leading anyone who had precious crops who couldn’t afford to teleport them in directly to transfer them to their family stockpiles, secure in the village.

Largely ignoring the traffic, she walked along the roadside until a particularly dense swirl of mist afforded her the opportunity to slip unnoticed off the road and down the bank. Without any hesitation, she stored all her garments directly into her talisman before arriving at the bottom and slid into the canal like a silent serpent, leaving the star-shaped pendant behind.

She swam, never leaving a mark on the surface before surfacing some distance away in a dense clump of golden star lotuses. Completely suppressing her qi and intent using her mantra, she watched and waited. Sure enough, about five minutes later a few figures came hurrying down the road and stopped for a moment where she had left it. As she watched, they had a quick debate on the roadside, then three scrambled down the bank and stood around, looking confused.

Eventually one of them picked up the good luck ‘charm’ she had been sold and tossed it viciously into the water before casting this way and that. A moment later two sweeps of qi surged down the bank, attempting through pure brute force to overcome the dispersive effect of the lingering suppression carried in the misty rain.

As she watched, all around her lotuses bloomed.

Across the bank, trees shimmered faintly.

The water rippled, the alignments within it snapping back rigidly, further diffusing any lingering trace that might have been discerned of her passage.

Lying motionless in the shallows, she watched with some amusement as ignorance derailed any attempt they might have made at finding her. The canals might be innocuous, but the golden star lotuses along with many others were qi-gathering or qi-equalising plants. A third sweep went by a moment later, also finding nothing, by which point every spirit plant and herb within visual sight with any kind of connate awakening was thoroughly spooked.

One of the other figures gesticulated this way and that and then clipped the figure who had thrown the talisman in the river around the head.

-Not all of them are idiots then, just the one that counted in the moment, she snickered silently.

A fourth sweep, much more subtle and powerful, swirled across everything, the intent within it close to inscrutable to her, suggesting it likely originated with a Soul Foundation expert.

“…”

It also achieved nothing, beyond making a few lotus flowers bloom even more intensely.

The group stared around, then slowly made their way back up the bank and set off, in the direction of the nearest bridge crossing the canal she presumed.

A further ten minutes passed after that before she finally felt comfortable moving on. However, rather than get out of the canal, she instead sank into the depths and swam slowly along the canal bed, making her way further out into the field systems, towards the edge of Yin Eclipse. It was slow and somewhat frustrating, especially when it came to avoiding the various spirit herbs, many still spooked by the qi sense from before; however, the rippling rain two metres above her hid what little disturbance her passage did betray, so the worst she had to deal with was the odd grasping strand of river grass and one rather vexed fish that tried to bite her hand.

In the end, she swam like that for almost thirty minutes before finally pulling herself out of the water at the edge of a broad, shallow pond to take stock of her circumstances.

Using the distant lights of the village she determined that she was about two miles westward of it, deep in the field systems and thankfully a long way from the road. Looking around, the misty rain was starting to pick up again, and thankfully while there appeared to be a few groups working in nearby fields beyond the pond, there was no sign of any obvious pursuit.

-Well, that sucked, she reflected as she silently waded along the bank until she found some slumped rocks from an old retaining wall of the pond and used them to climb out.

Checking she had left no obvious traces, she made her way stealthily up the shallow bank and into the shadow of some handy shrubs, where she pulled on a loose-fitting rustic robe and squatted, listening to the hiss of rain and the sigh of grass and reeds shifting in the night air for a few moments, contemplating her next step.

As far as choices went, she was not left with any immediately reassuring ones.

-Going back to the village is out… she mused, staring at the distant lights. For a gang to endure in a place like that it has to have either connections or backing and I have no way of knowing who or what is associated with it.

-Going back home is also out, she reflected with a sigh, turning to look into the distant shadows of rain falling. Even if I go to the Military Authority it will cause me so much shit before it’s ironed out that I will probably be demoted to eight-star and likely barred from mission requests for a good while.

That was what annoyed her the most, really. Compared to the mess with the ‘stolen’ ginseng, the fallout from her dumping three clearance missions and claiming that a gang tried to kill her in Ha clan territory would present so many opportunities for others to dump shit on her from a great height that she might as well just go back to the village.

-That leaves the third option… she thought with a much deeper sigh, turning to look east, into the haze of the next front of rain already intensifying as it passed out of the suppression zone. Terrible decision that it is.

Under normal circumstances, going into Yin Eclipse at night, even the outermost periphery of the suppression zone, was something she would hesitate to do – especially in unseasonable weather such as was currently plaguing this region and sweeping out to the coast.

-To get anywhere with this I will need to work out what is going on with the access points to the Red Pit it seems…

Turning her head this way and that, she resisted the urge to kick a rock into the tangled shrubbery along the pond edge.

-Not to mention half that stupid elder’s ‘survey’ locations are up there…

“…”

Puffing out her cheeks, she stared around at the swaying reed beds and the yet to be harvested spirit grass again.

-Not to mention, I need to actually recover their corpses, that will be the evidence that alleviates a great many problems, she thought unhappily.

-Not least my own conscience for leaving them up there.

“…”

In the end, it was that final thing that was the decider. Not the threat of the clearance missions, or failure… or gangs or the missing elder, but the words she had spoken to her mother the previous morning – if she closed her eyes she could all too easily see herself in place of either Ha Fenfang or Nen Hong… reaching desperately for Sana, dying an agonizing death alone in some miserable valley for the prosperity of others, her end unlamented except by a father who would likely never see her body returned.

“If not me, then who…” she murmured into the darkness at large.

All she got for an answer was the hissing patter of rain and the rustle of leaves and shifting branches as nearby plants along the edge of the shallow pond swayed in the east wind.

“…”

Casting one final glare towards the distant lights of Jade Willow Village, she turned and set off along the edge of the pond, heading for the nearest field margin.

The solitude of the walk was also, in its own way, rather cathartic, certainly, it provided her a quiet moment to calm down again without using her mantra and not feel quite so… vexed with her circumstances. It helped that she knew roughly where she was going, thankfully, and while the fields were not deserted by any stretch, nobody really paid any attention to one more person dressed like a spirit farmer walking with a degree of purpose through the rain.

In any case, it took her just over half an hour of brisk walking to make it through the fields, across several more canals to finally arrive at the ‘official’ edge of the suppression zone, marked only by a rather overgrown stone stele by a canal bridge which was itself currently blocked off. She checked for wards or odd alignments but found none, likely because the true edge of the suppression was actually fifty metres over the village side of the canal, an occurrence not all that unusual truth be told. The ‘variable’ nature of the forbidden zone’s boundary and ways to spot its movement was one of the main things she would have instructed the teaching group in if they had originally headed into these valleys.

Crossing the canal, she looked around but saw no obvious signs of the bridge having been used at all recently, so just continued on as she had been.

The land beyond was mostly abandoned and fallow, slowly being reclaimed by the edges of the spirit vegetation forest. Here and there, she passed areas where enterprising spirit farmers were growing the odd grove of spirit trees or other, less easily exploitable types of spirit herbs; however, despite the lingering traces of land management she didn’t relinquish her vigilance, or her measured manner. Yin Eclipse at night was dangerous and the boundaries of zones doubly so, especially when abnormal weather was factored in.

Her paranoia paid off, having barely gone half a mile beyond the canal, when she caught the shadowy form of a long-legged spider the size of a large dog lurking over something it had caught. It paused about the same time she noticed it, making her grimace and further suppress her own presence, pausing in the open grassland to listen carefully for any oddities. After a few moments, though, it started to move again, retreating into the depths of some trees, dragging its unseen prize with it.

-Welcome to Yin Eclipse, she thought sourly, watching the direction it took before pulling out her compass to consider it.

The readings were about what she expected, really – ‘creeping, inauspicious danger’ mixed with ‘obfuscation within the yin hours’ and ‘uncertain yang’. It was a very fancy way of saying ‘it’s dark, rainy and you’re in a place where there’s lots of spirit vegetation.’

Sighing, she put it away again and set off a little less briskly, directly into the forest.

The easy way would be to cut along the forest margin until she hit the actual path up to the south-western edge of the Red Pit, but that was out of the question for several reasons, not least due to her concerns about anyone following after her. If there was a place a bunch of malcontents or bandits might try to ambush her, it was on the known path to her destination.

The ‘direct’ route, by comparison was not an easy walk, especially not on a dark, rainy night. The initial impression of the land being flat and mostly forested was largely an illusion preserved by the rising rocky massifs that dominated the horizon, distracting any onlooker from the geomorphology of the land between them. Rather, the actual land surface rose quite rapidly and rather abruptly, much as it had within the Red Pit itself, areas of dense vegetation separated by shallow cliffs, formed by uplifted rock shelves that stretched for miles beneath the undulating forest canopy.

By the time she arrived at a series of lakes that were the starting point for the river system that fed the irrigation canals for Jade Willow Village she had, she reckoned, been walking for almost two hours. Along the way, as she made her way through the dripping, dark greenery, up the shallow shelving escarpments, she strained her senses for oddity and found no shortage of it. The jungle was, simply put, too quiet. There should have been bird calls, insects, monkeys and more out and prowling and hunting in the early hours… instead, she heard only insects and rain for the most part.

At this point, she was faced with a choice, yet again, about which route to take.

The generally known trail past the reservoir lakes, which she had almost rejoined at this point, would take her parallel to the Red Pit, about two miles north of her current location, before eventually looping back around and entering the shallow valley above the lakes from its natural entrance, cut by millennia of runoff from further into the mountain range.

She considered that path pensively for a few moments, taking in the clearly risen water level of the lakes, swollen not only by the weather but also likely the changes wrought above by the flooding in the Red Pit, and shook her head.

-Guess today is just one of those days, she thought, sweeping her gaze across the flooded forest floor towards the shallow cliffs beyond the lake. It’s no wonder nobody was interested in poking around up here if it’s been like this for a while…

The second route she could take was straight up those cliffs, over the shallow escarpment, which would bring her directly down into the area adjacent to the Red Pit.

Despite it cutting a large chunk of walking off any prospective trip, anyone with a modicum of local knowledge would resolutely refuse to go this route under normal circumstances, largely because it took you within a stone’s throw of the Red Pit at a few points and the cliffs were not a pleasant place to explore. She only knew it was a viable route because it was the path she and Sana had taken years ago, when the Hunter Bureau sent them here for orienteering lessons with Old Fei – Immortal Fei – from the local Pavilion.

The problem, really, was the extent of the flooding. The reservoir lakes were an inconvenience but she could, if she was so inclined, actually go swimming in them, so long as she took a few pills to blunt the edge of the chill. The real danger there lay further along the ‘common’ path, which would eventually take her around to the next valley and end up near a second set of lakes which she most emphatically did not want to go swimming in, or accidentally wade into waters that had washed out from them.

“…”

She stood in the wet gloom considering her options for a few moments before sighing and stimulating her mantra a bit, setting off towards the shallow cliffs.

It didn’t take her long to find a suitable path up, thankfully. While the flooding was obnoxious, she was familiar enough with the deep areas of the reservoir lakes to avoid walking into any, so the trip across them and then ascent up the cliff beyond only took her about twenty minutes in the end, including a short diversion around some life catch vines and a few patches of algru.

Arriving at the top, she again paused for a while, letting her senses adjust to her new surroundings.

The ‘valley’ before her shelved back down through patchy forest, eventually opening out into a broad open area below the massifs that bordered the Red Pit itself. When she and Sana had come here the first time, to be instructed by Old Fei, she had, like the other dozen trainees on that trip, thought at first glance that the lakes here were much the same as those in the area she had just passed through. Old Fei had, at the time, quickly disabused her of that notion.

Where the reservoirs behind her were largely just deep and cold, the lakes ahead of her, adjoining the massif ridgeline, were true terrors of Yin Eclipse. Each and every one was a sinkhole. A deceptive death trap, their surfaces usually thick with leaves resembling wide clearings in the tangle of vegetation, their waters hidden by stillness, disguising the reality that they were hundreds of metres deep and filled with qi-rich waters infused with decay.

“Well…” she sighed softly; sweeping her gaze out across the open areas, she found that her earlier paranoia was thoroughly vindicated.

Even in the mists and the gloom she could see clearly that the water level had risen, the usually obscure sinkholes visible as swathes of rippling dark water in the rain. To her right, audible over the rustle and hiss of the forest, she could make out the sound of a substantial waterfall where before there had most certainly not been one.

-That will be the overflow from what I found up in the Pit, she silently judged, letting the sounds of the forest wash over her as she continued to observe the area around the lakes.

“…”

The lack of usual forest sounds was unnerving, she had to admit. It was the sort of thing you expected higher up… where there were predators capable…

-It’s too like the Red Pit, she thought grimly, looking up at the misty heights.

Turning that unpleasant thought over in her mind for a few more moments, she exhaled softly and stood again, carefully making her way along the higher ground, adjacent to the flooded sinkholes, heading towards the sound of rushing water.

It didn’t take her long to locate the waterfall, which was pouring down one side of a huge slump of shelving rock, rather like a collapsed stack of manuals, that now thoroughly obscured the most direct route up towards the Red Pit. As far as waterfalls went, it was quite substantial and well on its way to completely changing the lay of the terrain within the valley, somewhat to her consternation.

Pushing a bit of qi into her ocular meridians, she drew upon her mantra and focused on the slump, which even in the gloom and the rain she could see was coated in a cloak of fresh greenery.

-So, the gorge beyond it is flooded? she mused, staring up at the misty, roaring deluge. That would certainly explain how wet it was when I got into it the other day…

She considered the collapse with a degree of resignation for a few minutes, tracing potential routes up it and looking for any obviously dangerous plants, before picking her way around the edge of the flooded area until she arrived at the actual river... which was less a ‘river’ and more a fairly fast moving flood. The rising ground of the escarpment at her back constrained the worst of it, but she could already guess that there would be several smaller waterfalls down the usual path up and likely any number of other minor headaches to navigate.

If there was an upside, it was that the waterfall was not flowing directly into any of the sinkholes, stirring up their icy depths. That meant it was likely that the waters flowing down were not especially dangerous in their own right, given how free-flowing they were. Thankfully, after a few cautious experiments, her intuition there was proven correct, at least in the short term, so she gritted her teeth and waded in, making her way across the old valley floor, staying well clear of any of the locations where there had been sinkholes.

Arriving at the base of the collapse, she started to climb, carefully, avoiding water ferns in the misty gloom and constantly on the lookout for algru, leeches or worse – hook bats. After some thirty metres, much sooner than she had expected, she stopped and closed her eyes for a second.

-Blood ling tree…

Breathing in and out softly, she used her mantra to bury the niggling feelings of uncertainty that were subtly pushing tendrils into her mind, using the crushing humidity and her wariness in the dark as the barbs to snare her.

Gritting her teeth, she continued to climb, eventually reaching the top without any real incident and looking out over the gorge beyond.

Much as she had expected, it was flooded, probably to a depth of several tens of metres, based on what she recalled of the path up. A quick survey of the extremity of the new ‘lake’ also told her that the way station was at the bottom of it, submerged beneath twenty or thirty metres of icy water flowing out of the depths of the mountains above.

At the far side, she could just make out a further collapse, which had brought down more oblong slabs, also rapidly being consumed by new, seasonal greenery.

-It’s almost like there was an earthquake up here? she frowned, looking up at the damage above her, again wondering how it had not been reported.

Certainly the collapse, the rising water and the blood ling tree’s influence stretching all the way to her current location was enough to ensure that nobody without a mantra like hers or some very expensive talismans was going to get into the Red Pit by that route with any ease.

“…”

“Did I offend some old expert in a past life?” she grumbled, crouching down and considering the waters about thirty metres below her.

Her main purpose in coming up here was to try and recover the bodies of the three children. The question of the other ‘recovery’ mission was also hanging over her as well, though in the grand scheme of things it bothered her a lot less now she had a solid chunk of very convincing evidence to support the idea that they were likely ‘Missing Beyond Recovery’ in the Red Pit.

The ‘smart’ idea would be to just wash her hands of the whole thing at this point. Most Hunters would and take that option out, but the idea of leaving the three out here…

‘Spirit, Heart, Renewal, Body, Soul’

She focused on her mantra, pushing down the subtly surging tendrils of influence from the blood ling tree… or trees.

“Here a blade, there a blade, everywhere a fate-thrashed blade…

“Little Lady Nameless has a blade, Am-i-tah-ba-ahh!”

She exhaled the words in a singsong cadence. Mantras could also be used in that manner. The rhyme was originally her sister’s concoction, an alteration of the common ditty made a few years back. The dark humour in it brightened her mood enough to push off the malign influence of the plants for a moment as she continued to ponder how stupidly dangerous her options were again shaping up to be.

-Objectively, swimming through that is beyond insane, she reflected sourly, looking at the dark waters, swirling with hidden currents as they flowed down the gorge. Then again, this is fast moving water and clearly not settling…

Considering her options, she pulled out a middling-sized jar, tossed several rocks in the bottom of it and then tied two lengths of rope around it, one around the rim and one to the lid in such a way that it could be opened fractionally while the other rope closed it again. Once she was satisfied that that worked, she slid carefully down the rocks to get slightly closer to the water, squinted at the depths for a moment and then tossed the jar out like a fishing line, watching it sink from view.

It only took some thirty seconds to hit the bottom, and did so without ever reaching the limits of the rope, whereupon she pulled the other rope, removing the lid. She waited for an appropriate length of time and then started to haul the jar back up again, pleased that there was weight on it.

The jar broke the surface after a few moments and she carefully dragged it up onto the shelf she was on, inspecting the rope and jar as she did so.

The whole exercise involved a few different tests of how dangerous the waters might be. The first and most obvious was that the jar was recoverable at all. If the decaying strength of the water was enough to dissolve fairly standard qi-reinforced rope any thoughts of swimming in it were out. Similarly, if the jar was pitted and corroded, that was another ‘I think not’ sign.

Thankfully, neither rope nor jar showed obvious damage so she opened it up and considered the dark water within pensively, then grabbed a branch of a convenient shrub, shoved it into the jar for a few seconds then pulled it back out.

“Well, that’s promising,” she mused, looking at the water dripping off it with no obvious ill effect or inauspicious aura.

Stimulating her mantra, she focused on ‘Body’, ‘Renewal’ and ‘Spirit’ and grabbed the wet branch. The water was unpleasantly cool against her skin but did nothing particularly untoward.

“Well, here goes nothing,” she murmured, and warily pushed her arm into the jar.

After a moment she put her palm flat against its base, her arm submerged up to her elbow in the unpleasantly cold water, gauging the density of yin qi within it using her mantra and past experience. A few moments’ exposure was enough to tell her that her earlier speculation was spot on. The water was too fast-flowing to have settled, even at the depth of some twenty metres that the pot had sunk to.

Tipping the jar of water out, she watched it run away and then stored everything away again. Grimacing, she then consumed a pill to help her nullify yin qi poisoning and stripped off all her clothes bar her scrip – which she kept bound to her left forearm – and her Bureau and storage talismans. Her last bit of preparation was to lift the images of the gorge as it had been before it was flooded out of her scrip and use some of her qi to embed it temporarily in her mind’s eye.

“Fates, please don’t let me regret this decision,” she muttered, making her way a bit further along the edge of the rockfall and sliding down to the water’s edge.

The water was, as expected, unpleasantly cold as she slowly submerged herself into it, though part of that was simply down to the muggy, humid heat of the night air to which she was now somewhat acclimatized. Sinking slowly below the surface she let her eyes adjust to the murky gloom and pulled up the image of how the unflooded valley should have looked.

The way station, thankfully, did not seem to be under the main collapse, so she circulated her qi, reinforced it with her mantra and smoothly started to swim through the water in its general direction.

As she swam, she could already see signs of aquatic spirit vegetation mutating out of the terrestrial flora of the old gorge. Algru mats glimmered eerily in the darkness as she swam down past them, her passage making them extend feelers in response to the disturbance in the water. Trees were already gaining shadowy streamers of algae and vines were forcibly mutating themselves using water qi in a few places as well as she swam above them, trying to match the image in her mind’s eye to the gloomy, underwater world she was now traversing.

It took her ten minutes and one return to the surface before she finally found the way station. Approaching it, the first thing she noted was that the wards intended to protect it were no longer intact…

The stele she already knew had been relocated, but swimming inside she also found that nearly every element of the ancient shrine had been torn out, as had the means to replenish the moon rune wards that ancient experts from the Hunter Bureau had placed at the rear of the small cave complex.

With a mental sigh, she poked at her scrip and set it to record an image of the whole place as it currently was, both to make reporting the whole thing to the Bureau less hassle and also, rather morbidly, in case she came to a bad end.

While she let it do its thing, she swam through the three side rooms, checking mostly for the sake of completion, to confirm that all the supplies in them were, as she expected, long gone, not even the pots that would have held things like firewood remaining. It was somewhat depressing to look at, but this was not the first way station she had encountered cleaned out, nor, she supposed, would it be the last. What was interesting, though, was that it had clearly been flooded for long enough that algru was starting to colonize all the rooms. That allowed her to say that at the very least this place had been submerged for a month or two.

A faint nudge in her mind’s eye as she was considering the nascent algru colony told her that the recording had completed, so she swam backwards out of the room—

Intuition saved her from a serious headache as a greyish-green serpent as long as her body swirled out of a fissure in the ceiling, trying to wrap itself around her neck with the intention of choking her out.

Grasping it, she sent a vicious pulse of intent into it, leveraging her mantra’s ‘Heart’ and ‘Soul’ mnemonics slightly as well. Stunned, it twitched in her grip a few times as she contemplated what to do with it for a few seconds before sighing mentally and tossing it aside. She could have killed it, she supposed, but the risk of drawing more underwater critters was not one she wanted to take.

Without a backward glance, she swam out of the way station and rapidly made her way up to the surface, slipping out onto a handy rock.

“Jun Arai, seventeenth day of the fourteenth month, Millennium of the Rising Dragon, Year of the Blue Lotus, Imperial Court Calendar, Red Pit Jade Willow Way Station,” she murmured, pushing some qi into the scrip and recording the day, month and year within the scanned image.

It chimed gently in her mind a moment later and she relinquished the thread of qi she was sending into her scrip with a sigh, reflecting not for the first time that standard form imperial calendar dates were far too long when written out formally.

Sitting on the rock, she considered her options for a moment, before synchronising her talisman and the scrip momentarily and pulling up her most up to date list of the way station locations and statuses throughout the western edge of the mountains. Pending her update, the one she had just been in was happily listed as ‘active and usable’… as of five days prior when the last major synchronisation of those records had taken place for their talismans.

-What kind of local Pavilion sits on this knowledge for over a season? she grumbled, rubbing her temples and letting her mantra turn her annoyance over the whole ordeal into useful recovery.

The answer was not a nice one, in any case. One that has a bigger fish to fry than a few collapsed access points into the near edge of the nastiest area in the whole west side of Yin Eclipse, she reflected sourly, thinking about all the rumours of local politics.

She remained sitting quietly on her rock for a few more minutes, before slipping into the water again and silently making her way around to the far shore. There, she exited the water, put her robe back on and again spent a moment to suppress the qi flowing through her body, which she had unavoidably had to stimulate for the swimming.

{Empty Eye Steps}

Palming her teleport talisman, she stuck it onto her stomach and focused on ‘Body’ and ‘Soul’ for a few moments, integrating her mantra and ‘Empty Eye Steps’. Once she was satisfied she had about as much presence as the average shadow, she stealthily made her way up through the smaller collapse, skirting water ferns and the occasional patch of fresh algru growth, heading for where she had been ambushed before.

Much as she remembered, the gorge was drenched in water, even more so in fact now that it had had a day or two of torrential rain to boost the water flowing out from the mountains. Her progress was slow, but also quite uneventful, because the environment was utterly inhospitable for anything at all really. What spirit vegetation remained on the floor of the gorge was properly drowned or washed out.

It took her an hour, in the end, to make it past the newly formed river gorge, only occasionally having to stop and see if she could spot the offending blood ling tree that periodically tried to poke at her.

Mostly it tried to play off her annoyance, but being well rested and much more on top of her circumstances than she had been after three days trekking in and out of the valleys to previously arrive in the Red Pit, it was basically a low key nuisance that her mantra kept at arm’s length. She was sure it helped that the gorge was rather light on living spirit vegetation of any real age, though in a season or two the place would transform into a nightmare to traverse thanks to the pressure the environment was putting on all the maturing vegetation.

It was not difficult to find the spot where she had teleported either, if not for the reason she anticipated.

Standing at the base of the slope, staring at the spot in her mind’s eye where she had been, she found the trees gone, a large puddle helpfully obscuring everything and no sign at all of anything relating to her.

To the untutored eye it would have been perplexing, however to her more practised eye it was clear someone had come here and scoured out all visible traces of the teleport. Where they had failed in their deception was in the simplest thing really – the ‘pool’ was not where such a thing would have formed naturally from the flow of water down the gorge.

“Monkey shit,” she sighed, staring around at her surroundings in the darkness. “I should have gone to Red Lake Village with that fates-accursed body… it was only half a day’s further walk!”

As far as complaints went though, it was futile, and it didn’t even make her feel a lot better, such were the cruel realities of hindsight.

Shaking her head, she pulled out her compass and considered the readings, looking around warily. It gave her nothing particularly out of place – for being on the edge of the Red Pit, in the dark and the rain, approaching one of the most inauspicious hours of the pre-dawn day – so she put it away again in the end, and went back to just looking at her surroundings.

Aside from the effort made to scavenge up all traces of her teleport, the rain had almost certainly washed away any trace of the perpetrators, so all she could do was stand there and try to recall, as best she could, the moments before her teleportation.

-The tetrid stalker was on the tree on the cliff above here, she mused, turning to look up at that rock face.

-It jumped, and I teleported almost immediately, most of my upper pack was scattered by its strike but the jar was not…

-It was nearly dead on arrival… and missing limbs?

“…”

Pulling her compass back out, she stared at it, trying to see if it picked up any traces of death qi in the surroundings. To her surprise… it did – a vague, lingering pull towards the far side of the gorge.

Frowning, she warily followed the readings from the compass, picking her way across one of the shallow torrents… where it petered out and vanished.

“Huh…”

She stopped on top of a boulder in the stream that her mental image of the valley told her easily predated all the recent collapses and stared around suspiciously.

The gorge was a wreck, the flooding and the shifting water levels having swept away most of the soil by this point. Most of the trees not deeply rooted into the rocks below were gone and with them almost all the spirit vegetation. The slope she had come down was already gaining shades of qi-luminescent algru that had not been there two days prior… especially around where…

Sighing, she rubbed her temples gently, realising what she should be looking for.

-Talk about stupid, this whole thing has me seeing shadows and complications everywhere! She castigated herself as she turned in a slow circle, looking not for ‘damage’, but for hints of unnatural recovery akin to the algru sprouting where she had butchered the tetrid stalker on the slope above her.

Truthfully, however, there was precious little for her to see. Her compass told her that there were traces of yin attuned qi in the environment, along with death qi, but thanks to the rain and the flooding they were diffuse and ephemeral at best. If she didn’t know she had dropped corpses saturated in yin qi here, she would have just assumed it was a lingering trace of a spirit herb or some unlucky animal.

-If they came here before… the water level might actually have lowered? she mused, looking back down the gorge.

-Ah…

Her gaze fell on the boulders on the far side, which were old, older than the recent collapses, and provided a potential path back down that wouldn’t require boulder hopping even if the water was higher.

Heading in that direction, she found her suspicions quite rapidly vindicated, as not twenty paces along the boulder scree, there were a few fresh scars of moss that were happily flowering. The compass barely picked up any trace of yin qi though, which made her mood darken slightly.

-They might have had a corpse coffin or a fancy ring, she told herself, as much to forestall the inevitable…

The blood ling tree sidled up to her psyche like a shady scammer, all smiles and ill intent, even as she focused on her mantra again to rebuff it, banishing all thoughts of mutilated bodies as it did so.

Exhaling, she continued onwards, spotting two other places where plants that had been damaged were rapidly springing back with fresh growth, until her path eventually took her back to the rough area where she had exited the lake after swimming across. A much more detailed scouring of the shore turned up nothing much, but that didn’t really surprise her. If they had known this was flooded, whoever came up here might well have brought a small boat, and with care that would leave next to no… trace...

She stared at the water thinking of all the submerged trees just below the surface and scowled, hating herself momentarily without any help from the blood ling trees, even as she stripped off her clothes again and slipped into the water.

Somewhat to her surprise, though, her hunch proved to be correct. Following the current, she found several trees that had freshly damaged branches beneath the water and eventually, low down on the far side, a scrape along the water line where fresh algae had been caught by something hitting it with considerable momentum.

Clambering out there, she re-garbed and found two more spots where someone had had an ill-fated encounter with slippery rocks and moss that eventually took her all the way back around the lower edge of the collapse and down by the waterfall, where the trail vanished into shallow water.

She poked around the edge for a bit, but found no trace of it, so in the end, she could only give up and trust to the predictability of those likely less experienced in their surroundings to try and find it again.

With that in mind, she made her way back across the shallows of the new river, picking up the old path… that would have led into the area with the sinkholes… and then had to stop, because again, she caught the faint mental buzz of a blood ling tree reaching out.

“Well now…” she growled under her breath, turning to look behind her.

Peering into the misty rain, she pushed qi into her ocular meridians to see even better, scouring the sheer cliffs above her. There was no tell-tale sign of a tree on this side; however, vegetation exposed to their influence would start to warp over time and if left unchecked these lower valleys, only some five miles from Jade Willow Village as the bird might fly, would soon start to see more mutations and dangerous plants emerging.

-Explains why nobody ‘noticed’ at least, she reflected, considering the distance of the effect. It might also explain the slightly sloppy trail back out of whoever came up here… yesterday.

A quick check of the path, a lot of which was precariously flooded, told her that the shadow of the blood ling’s influence extended some two hundred metres beyond the edge of the lakes. It was well past the main trail and even extended to the point where she had come up, which made her a bit annoyed at not having noticed it then and there. That almost certainly meant that anyone who came up here would get caught subtly, long before they might have expected to encounter anything related to the pit itself.

-Explains the warnings anyway, and the clearance mission… and maybe why nobody has done anything.

She could almost see some official in the Blue Water City Pavilion seeing that, not really understanding what blood ling trees were and thinking it a wonderful coup to send it back to Jade Willow Village so the Ha clan could choke on it.

-No wonder the village was getting twitchy about the teaching request. The ginseng harvest is the lifeblood of this region, and also the root of the Ha clan’s influence here. Interrupt that, and you cause all sorts of knock-on effects, she mused.

She shook her head, banishing those thoughts for now and returning her attention to her immediate surroundings as she walked back past the waterfall, mapping the extremity of the expanded influence of the blood ling trees and looking for any traces of the trail—

She had gotten about half way down the path back to the main trail, when she abruptly felt an ominous chill settle in the air all around her.

“Shit—!”

{Flickering Steps}

She blurred backwards immediately, preparing to trigger her teleport talisman even as a wave of icy yin energy exploded out of the ground all around her. Blossoming flowers and tendril-like stalks unfurled out of a nearby brown thorn thicket, accompanied by a dull pressure on her mind. Focusing on ‘Spirit’ and ‘Soul’, she shook off the tendrils of the soul-based attack from the spirit herb easily and continued running. Only when she had reached the nearest patch of rocks, back in the direction of the waterfall, did she finally stop and look behind her at the glittering coat of frost crackling across almost two hundred square metres of the clearing and surrounding forest where the main trail met the path up to the Red Pit just ahead of her.

-Nameless son of a whore, may your nine generations die in sin-flames!

Scanning the shimmering greenery of the forest, a significant portion of it cloaked in a lethal shroud of yin-rich frost, she looked carefully but found nothing…

“…”

Looking at her divination compass, she considered the readings and frowned, because they also showed nothing untoward…

The subtle shadow of the blood ling tree came back again, faintly, as she continued to ponder.

“…”

-Talk about stupid… stupid, stupid, stupid! she cursed in her heart, annoyed at herself as much as the herb.

She clenched her jaw for a moment, then exhaled, banishing the attempt at influencing her.

-Fate-thrashed place trying to get you coming and going!

Once she was sure the moment had passed and she had buried the turmoil with her mantra, she took out several copper coins from her storage talisman and tossed them on the rock beside her, considering the readings. The ‘Eight Trigrams’ chart worked just fine and told her, in not so many words, to ‘expect misfortune on the path’.

Three following readings all told her that ‘the path upward was unreliable’ in a few different ways, which made her properly grind her teeth at last. To the untutored that reading would usually mean that progressing as she had would be somewhat unpredictable, but divinations could come with many shades and one of its more intuitive readings was that qi-based divination, the ‘path upward’ from strictly mortal, qi-less divinations, was being interfered with somehow.

“Qi… some nameless-accursed villain twisted the local alignments?” she hissed under her breath, looking through the surrounding forest at the entrance to the lakes with narrowed eyes.

In the rain and the darkness the only evidence of it came from the coins she had just tossed, but mortal divinations were fairly solid and almost impossible to subvert, unlike qi-based ones…

She nearly used her talisman to call Elder Mu right then and there, but held off – barely – aware that the blood ling tree might still be trying to push her to make hasty judgements.

-Shit, I’ve not even seen the sun rise and already I hate today, she complained in her heart, mulling over the different ways her close encounter could be viewed.

-The least paranoid possibility is that this is exactly what it appears to be, she mused. It’s right on the edge of the blood ling tree’s influence, so perhaps it’s a spirit herb that is opportunistically stalking the edge?

Looking back at the cliff, barely visible through the hazy rain, she pondered that again.

-However…yin attribute ginseng, in fact, yin attribute herbs in general are not at all common in this valley… especially not in this environment. To run into a Golden Core ginseng down here would be quite remarkable in this season, to run into one with spiritual wisdom developed enough for this kind of strategy…

No matter how she thought about that, it was really quite unlikely.

-Which leaves the second possibility… she thought with a sigh. That it’s a trap, deliberately laid.

Turning back to the path, she pulled up her map of the common trail and considered it sourly.

-Based on the location, it’s a toss-up whether it was aimed at covering the tracks of whoever cleaned up the teleport location in the gorge or if it’s… something more sinister?

-With the rain stopping last night, this would be the main route into the valleys where the village wanted me to train my group from yesterday…

Just thinking about that gave her an uneasy feeling in her stomach, because there was a yin attribute spirit herb capable of this kind of mess that she knew of… that was currently in the wind having been stolen right out of the Pavilion…

-It might not have killed me, but it would have caught most of the students and catastrophically injured them, except for the Golden Core ones if they were fast on their feet, she considered.

The third, slightly less paranoid option was that this was a trap, but it was… incidental, not aimed at her at all, but rather someone wanted to stop people investigating… this area? Or even to just serve as an alert that someone had come up here.

-In any case though, this is breathtakingly obvious. If it’s for ‘me’, they have to know that if I survive they have a huge problem on their hands?

“…”

-And won’t it just run away? That was the most obvious thing actually. Those plants are smart, but if it was my ginseng, it was only at Soul Foundation. It had five roots, but its awareness was minimal and I was scrupulously careful… There was no way it should have been at all aware…?

“It’s not a spirit plant?” she murmured under her breath. That was the further, deductive possibility, but even that didn’t feel right to her.

“Did someone bind a spirit herb here?” she muttered, staring hard into the misty rain. That was the obvious conclusion really…

Gritting her teeth, she hid her qi completely with her mantra and palmed her barrier talisman. Next she ate another of her high grade purification pills and used her mantra to stimulate its efficacy further with ‘Renewal’ and ‘Heart’. Finally, her preparations done, she slipped off the rock and very warily made her way back towards the area she had just fled from.

The cold was already dissipating in the pre-dawn mists, the humidity attacking it from all angles, turning mildly misty, wet forest into a genuinely fog-shrouded green maze. Here and there, trees showed signs of frost damage and the odd insect or bird lay dead where they had been unlucky in life. Arriving back at the boggy path, well on its way to becoming a permanent stream in places, she warily made her way parallel to it, down towards the main trail some hundred metres downslope, looking for something, well… anything that would stand out.

If you wanted to bind a plant in one location, it was doable; however, out here such bindings would not last long – a few days to a week at most. Talismans and formations left in situ slowly had their qi drained away by the landscape, and the different alignments of this place meant that only methods like moon runes – powerful, ancient runic glyphs from the previous aeonspan – endured with any efficacy. And even those needed regular restoration after a few years of continuous exposure to this place.

“Someone, somewhere is not paying me enough if this is a bound spirit plant,” she hissed under her breath, reaching the extremity of the frost wave itself, noting that bits of ice were still bobbing in the waters flowing down the path.

Above her, a treebill hooted and she paused, sweeping the leafy canopy until she found it, seated on a high branch, fluffed up in the cooler air. Further to her left a red-jaw, a small bird that preyed on insects, snickered as well, followed by a few other birds, all likely woken up by the small disaster that just unfolded below.

It didn’t take her long to find what she was looking for. Whoever had laid the probable trap had been in a hurry she supposed and there were tell-tale signs of passage through the forest when she really looked. After a minute or so of careful digging at one such spot, she found a small formation flag buried about half her arm’s width into the loam, stuck in a crack in the bedrock.

The workmanship on the flag was pretty good, a method more mainstream than the one she had had the students using. It certainly re-confirmed to her that there likely was a spirit herb here after all, and that someone hadn’t wanted it running… for a while at least. The qi in the flag was heavily depleted and it would likely run out before the end of the day, at which point the ginseng corralled here would vanish like the mists it had left here, a dangerous threat for anyone roving incautiously now it had gained a taste for how easy people were to prey on compared to forest animals and a grudge over its captivity.

Shaking her head, she pulled out one of the high grade formation cores and a blank talisman.

“Thank the fates everyone thinks they are a formations master with a little knowledge and a fancy manual,” she sneered, replacing the flag where it had been.

She spent a few moments inscribing ‘Mu’s Little Mountain’ into the core, attuned it to her qi and linked the key runes from the flag and its own formation straight into it, using the talisman as the medium to link to the core itself. Taking a length of cloth out of her storage talisman, she stuck the core in it and took general aim downslope. Spinning it a few times to get the motion, she lobbed it almost to the main trail, towards the likely epicentre, counting down in her mind.

*Thock*

She caught the sound of it hitting a rock and…

*HUWWWWwwwwwwwwwnnnnnn…*

The echo of the full strength of the formation triggering made the whole forest surrounding her shiver slightly, trees shedding water like dogs shaking themselves.

Shaking her head again, she walked onwards. Everywhere trees creaked and spirit plants shivered under the sealing oppression. In this early hour, with water everywhere, the yang earth attribute of the formation needed to do little to lock down everything. The frost wave from earlier had also temporarily damaged the vitality of a huge swathe of the spirit vegetation, so pushback from the environment was much weaker than it should have been.

The formation core was not hard to find – the shimmering glyph of a mountain-like constellation glittering in the air for metres around it – lying quite close to the point where the path up to the Red Pit joined the main trail.

“…”

Sweeping her experienced eye across the locality, she sighed softly and made her way on past the formation, finally arriving at a large thicket of brown thorn, a nasty shrub with thorns that secreted a necrotic yin poison, and carefully made her way around it.

Squatting down by a convenient fissure in the rock, she squinted along it and then pulled out a second high grade formation core. This one she inscribed with a fire forcing formation – ‘Hong Hong’s Red Roots’ – and tossed it down into the heart of the thicket before backing away quickly.

This kind of profligate spending of resources was akin to throwing out spirit stones to fix a hole in the road, but she didn’t really care now. Moments later, there was a *shufft* and the entire landscape around her wavered – every plant gained a little red flower of fire over it as the humidity started to seep away and the aridity rose rapidly.

Triggering her barrier and eating another purification pill, she was vindicated about half a minute later when the entire thorn bush crumpled into loam and she was left staring at a twisted, bedraggled plant that was desperately trying to pull itself out of the baking ground in the suppression.

“So not my ginseng… figures,” she sighed, watching the steadily wilting ‘yin blossom lamium’ struggle against the furious double-edged attack of the fire and earth formations.

Donning a pair of luss cloth gloves, she made her way back over and squatted down by it, digging in the ground with her spirit wood shovel to find the root stock. Pulling it up, she considered what else came with it with a sour grimace – a few cracked and depleted beast cores someone had shoved around it and a talisman with a basic vitality forcing formation to guide it and link to the wider formation restraining it.

The plant itself was barely Qi Refinement, transplanted here, its root stock augmented deliberately and then anchored to this point with the wider formation as a living trap for the unwary, incautious or unsuspecting.

“The fine art of forcing plants…” she grumbled, tossing the worthless bits of it away. The thing was unsellable and would have died before the day was out, thanks to having its potential drawn out so forcibly.

Considering the roots, she cut away what remained that was useful and stored it away. The herb would likely fetch a few dozen silver talismans from an alchemist, or failing that she could see if it could be transplanted into their garden at home and nurtured into something useful.

Now… she did send a communication to Elder Mu.

“Honoured Elder, sorry to bother you at this inauspiciously early hour. A small matter has come up regarding my clearance requests. When those I was meant to teach arrive, can you tell them that we will not be doing anything before lunch? I will speak to you in detail later.”

There was a dull chime that told her the message was received and a short nonverbal acknowledgement echoed back before she closed off the channel again.

Considering her options, she stared around again with a deeper sigh.

-If nothing else, it covers their tracks thoroughly enough, she complained, looking at the damage done.

“…”

-I suppose I must look at the locations Elder Li was checking out next, she decided at last, sending qi into her scrip to bring those up.

Near as she could see, he had visited quite a few points within the ginseng fields – of which this valley was one of the principal ones – so with a resigned sigh, she looked about one last time then set off for the nearest one, keeping half an eye on her compass just in case.