~ Part 2 ~

~ Lin Ling – West Flower Picking Town ~

It didn’t take long to gather up a few other things, mostly clay pots and the like, then set off through the town, south of the river, to the Blue River district, where Grandmaster Li had his estate, workshop and shop.

“Ah, Miss Sana!” the old man at the counter declared warmly, almost as soon as they had entered the shop.

“Master Liwen,” Sana bowed politely. “I am here about the matter my sister talked to Grandmaster Li about a short while ago, in Misty Vale Village?”

“Ah, you are? Wonderful,” the old man said.

“I take it you just have to send some notification ahead?” she asked.

“And Miss Lin,” the old man beamed. “Two high-ranked Hunters…”

“Actually, my sister is coming as well,” Sana said with a slight cough. “So you get three of the town’s highest ranked junior Hunters for an afternoon, plus our friends here, Bai Jiang and Ying Ji!”

“Oh… you are the young lad who won the alchemy yesterday,” the old man mused, squinting at Bai Jiang. “Talented, very talented.”

“Thank you,” Bai Jiang murmured.

“I will just go let Master Li know,” Liwen added, giving them a polite bow. “Please look around at your leisure.”

“I did not know that West Flower Picking Town had a place like this…” Ying Ji murmured, clearly impressed as he looked around the shop, which was not actually that big, but showed off a remarkable array of different talismans and formations in various cases and on the walls.

“Actually, our town is nearly as well known for this kind of thing as it is spirit herbs,” she said, looking at the sequence of lightning attribute talismans he was admiring. “Talismans and formations are the core of most successful efforts to exploit Yin Eclipse. Without them, it would be much, much harder.”

“When the major source of your industry is a place where there is little advantage to being above Golden Core, just greater danger, it is understandable that folk try to find ways to level the field,” Yunhee, who was flicking through a manual nearby, agreed.

“True,” Ying Ji conceded. “Why is that?”

“Why do talismans work?” Yunhee asked, somewhat rhetorically to clarify she supposed.

“Uhuh,” Ying Ji nodded.

“Formations are obvious. It is because they adopt the existing strength and repurpose it,” she added.

“Indeed,” Yunhee agreed. “Talismans are trickier. Some do not work; it very much depends on the quality.”

“And the materials,” an old man, one of the few others in the shop, who had been browsing nearby interjected. “The materials are very important.”

“Yes, old Daoist,” Yunhee agreed. “They are.”

The old man, who had been considering the talismans on a stand next to theirs nodded in agreement, then politely bowed and moved on.

“Some joke that talismans are heaven leaving a way, in regards to Yin Eclipse,” Yunhee added. “That said, while I have spent many years in this province, I have had relatively little to do with the mountains themselves. For those of higher realms, they hold few allures and only dangers.”

“So people keep saying,” Ying Ji remarked. “Young Lady Juni impressed that upon us quite clearly at various points as well.”

“It is true,” Yunhee sighed. “You will see at Misty Vale. It is easier to experience sometimes.”

“—Ah-hah! Miss Sana, Miss Ling, you both look well this new year!”

She turned to find a tall, scholarly man with long brown hair and a well-trimmed beard had arrived, with Master Liwen following after him.

“Grandmaster Li,” she murmured, saluting him. “Thank you, you also look well!”

“Ah, it has been a hard year, but the fates send next year will be better,” Grandmaster Li sighed. “I understand you have agreed to go help my niece with her plant problem. That is most generous, most generous.”

“Yes, we have,” Sana agreed. “We stopped by so you could send word ahead, so we did not arrive and surprise anyone.”

“How thoughtful,” Grandmaster Li nodded. “Perhaps I might also impose upon you to take a few small items with you for my niece and her family?”

“Of course,” Sana replied, saluting again.

“Excellent,” Grandmaster Li smiled. “Liwen?”

The ‘old man’, who was, despite their somewhat differing appearances, Grandmaster Li’s best student, bowed politely to his teacher and hurried off.

“And you are the excellent young lad who dethroned our resident alchemists,” Grandmaster Li added, glancing at Bai Jiang. “It was a very fitting pill you created.”

“Thank you, Grandmaster,” Bai Jiang replied respectfully.

They stood around chatting politely about the Patriarch’s banquet and the events in Blue Water City for a few minutes, until Master Liwen returned with three neatly wrapped packages and a moderately-sized lacquered wooden box.

“Will they store?” Sana asked.

“They will, except for the box,” Grandmaster Li said. “Though that is not very heavy, despite its size.”

She eyed it critically then lifted it off the counter and found that he was right.

“We will send you word when we get there,” Sana said, storing the items away and considering the box again as well. “Can you give us a pack for that?”

“Oh, yes, of course,” Grandmaster Li nodded.

Liwen rummaged in a cupboard behind the store counter for a moment and passed Sana a carrying satchel that she then put the box into and slung over her shoulder.

“Can I purchase these?” Yunhee asked, placing a handful of tokens for some of the talismans on display on the counter.

That was how you had to buy things here. The items out front were all entirely genuine, but trying to remove them from the stands was impossible due to the protections in place. Instead, you took a token relating to the talisman you wanted and gave it to Liwen, who then gave you a full version from behind the counter.

“Ah, Miss Yunhee as well. It has been a while,” Grandmaster Li said brightly, glancing at the talismans. “In fact, please, a New Year’s gift from me…”

Yunhee blinked as he pulled out a talisman that was quite ornate and passed it to her.

“Oh, thank you,” Yunhee smiled, glancing at it and then storing it away before she could see what it was. “You are very generous.”

“Not at all, not at all,” Grandmaster Li sighed.

“Can I also get this?” Bai Jiang added politely, placing a manual on the counter.

“Seventy-five spirit stones,” Liwen replied.

“Oh, I thought it would be more,” Bai Jiang, who had put a whole Spirit Jade on the counter, coughed and put down three quarters of a cube of spirit stones instead.

“For a friend of Miss Sana and Miss Ling, we can afford to be generous,” Liwen chuckled, then glanced at Ying Ji, who was now looking a bit awkward.

“I was going to buy that set of lightning talismans,” he muttered embarrassedly.

“Four… five… seven Spirit Jades for the lot, factoring in the same discount,” Liwen said with aplomb.

Ying Ji nodded and took a token for the whole set over to the counter and put down the Spirit Jades without any qualms, claiming the talismans in turn.

“You can tell your sister that her order will be ready tomorrow,” Liwen added to Sana.

“Will do,” Sana said brightly, still adjusting the strap on the pack, before saluting Grandmaster Li again.

“Travel safe,” the Grandmaster replied, giving them all a polite salute.

Returning it, she followed Sana back out of the shop and into the street, with the others following behind.

“So, to the teleport!” Sana said decisively. “Or it will be dark by the time we get to Misty Veil, rather than when we leave!”

“Yep,” she agreed, falling in beside Sana as they started back through the streets at a brisk trot, Yunhee and the other two following easily after them.

…

The walk back across town was entirely uneventful. There were not that many people in the plaza, so they didn’t have to wait more than a few minutes before they were ushered onto the teleportation platform, given the usual instructions and told not to do anything strange with talismans or storage rings until they were off it at the other end.

The teleport to Misty Vale was about as expected really: once it triggered, the world occluded slightly around them, sliding out of focus for a few disorientating seconds before un-blurring itself to reveal a broad plaza of a similar style, surrounded by stone and wood buildings roofed in pale grey tiles, their edges picked out in bright colours.

“Welcome to Misty Vale,” the guard on the teleport said, sounding bored. “Can I see your talismans please?”

Pulling out her Bureau talisman, she held it up for the guard as they traipsed off the platform.

“Anything to declare?” he added, taking in hers and then Sana’s talismans without obvious comment.

“No trade goods, we are here to visit,” Sana replied politely. “Visiting Li Meimei’s house.”

“Very good, have a pleasant visit,” the guard nodded, waving them on through as Yunhee, Bai Jiang and Ying Ji also held up status talismans for the guard to see who they were.

“That was odd,” Ying Ji frowned, glancing back as they departed the walled plaza into a bustling village street.

“Not really,” she replied. “This close to the mountains, you need to take some precautions. This is a major gateway, so anyone coming in here might be going into the mountains. If they don’t come back, this way the guards can at least say they came through here.”

“And smuggling is a problem,” Yunhee added. “As is topically relevant, bandits are a problem and there is certain to be a degree of increased awareness now that events from Jade Willow have had time to circulate.”

“Didn’t the Ha clan wrap that up?” Ying Ji frowned.

“To the satisfaction of the people down on the plain, probably, but up here… they are always vigilant,” Yunhee said, leaving it at that.

“When you say down on the plain…” Bai Jiang asked… then trailed off as they reached a point in the street where you got a good look at the view.

In the far distance, West Flower Picking Town was just visible as a smudge on the winding Blue River, if you knew where to look. Misty Vale was some two hundred miles away from it and probably five miles higher up, on the edge of the foothills below East Fury, right in the jaws of the edge of the suppression.

“This was originally a fortress,” Yunhee added, gesturing in the other direction.

Turning, she saw the familiar sight of the towers of Misty Peak Gate rising in the middle distance, blocking off the pass further into the Yin Eclipse Mountains. Even at this distance, it was possible to make out the pennants of both the Azure Astral Authority and the Imperial Court flying side by side above it, a visible representation of the uneasy alliance that controlled the region.

“Do you know where we are going?” she asked Sana.

“Roughly,” Sana replied, looking up and down the street. “The directions say San Fang Street, which if I recall right is…”

“Left, then up,” Yunhee said helpfully.

Thankfully it didn’t take them long to find Grandmaster Li’s niece’s estate, largely because it was also a talisman shop and even had the ‘Li’ sign outside it. Entering into the courtyard, they were met by a pretty young woman in a floral gown who bowed politely to them and let them through into an inner garden court where several men and women were sitting around, chatting, eating food and drinking wine.

“Welcome,” a tall woman with a faint physical resemblance to Grandmaster Li in the shape of her nose and her eyebrows said warmly, standing as they entered. “I am Li Meimei, this is my husband Li Rong Quan and these are the various members of my estate. Uncle already sent ahead that you would be coming. Please sit and have some food and drink.”

Nodding politely in greeting to Li Meimei and the severe-looking man seated beside her, she took a seat at the table where offered and quickly found herself served with a bowl of soup, a cup of wine and a piece of lightly smoked animal meat garnished in spicy sauce.

“It is to my uncle’s credit that he got two up-and-coming young ladies like yourself to come look at my garden,” Li Meimei sighed.

“Indeed,” her husband added. “I was resigned to it being another charlatan from the Ha clan, in all honesty.”

“Now, dear, you must be diplomatic. It is not the day to be grumbling about the Ha clan,” Li Meimei sighed, patting him on the shoulder and sitting down again.

They accepted a toast and made some polite conversation for a few minutes, introducing Yunhee and the others, giving Li Meimei the gifts from her uncle and then talking a bit about the current situation in West Flower Picking Town. Finally, though, after a further toast and the arrival of more food, Sana turned to Li Meimei and asked: “So, what is the difficulty? Grandmaster Li’s request was a bit light on details, if I am being honest.”

“Ah, that is because we don’t rightly know,” Li Meimei sighed, putting her cup of wine down. “It is clear that there is some issue. It is causing various spirit herbs to wilt and two have even had stress-related mutations. The last two Herb Hunters who came claimed the alignments of the garden were compromised and, after extracting quite a sum from my husband to realign everything, deemed them fixed, which they were—”

“—for just long enough for those charlatans to run off home with our hard-earned spirit stones,” Li Quan grumbled.

Glancing around, she saw his views were shared by most of those there.

“Well, I cannot promise a fix, but we will look at it,” Sana said brightly. “My sister will be joining us in a bit a well, so once she arrives we will make a start on looking at it, if that is okay?”

“Of course,” Li Meimei agreed.

After that, they continued to chat away and enjoy the meal until Arai arrived, about three quarters of an hour later, looking a little jaded.

“Everything sorted?” she asked after Arai had taken a seat beside her.

“Yeah… father just wanted to hear the long version of my week in Jade Willow,” Arai sighed, helping herself to some soup.

Not quite sure what she could say to that, she just settled for pouring Arai some wine and then some for herself.

“What seems to be the issue with this garden anyway?” Arai asked, after savouring the soup for a moment.

“It has some kind of corrupt alignment it sounds like,” she mused, thinking through what Sana and Li Meimei had said and the discussions since. “Some Ha clan Hunters came and poked around at it, but that didn’t help, so she was going to get Grandmaster Li to look, but he is very busy… so here we are.”

“Corrupt alignment huh…” Arai frowned, staring up at the blue peeking through the swirling clouds.

“That’s the best guess,” she agreed. “None of us have gone and looked yet.”

As it turned out, corrupt alignment was a bit of an understatement when they finally got to look at the garden. It was so gnarled that she could feel the wrongness just from entering into it. The shadows in the trees were a bit off, the grass felt like it clung to her shoes as they walked through it, and the humidity in the air had a sort of slimy chill to it that was not discernible anywhere else.

“…”

“This…” Sana stared around dully.

“What do you think?” Li Meimei said, staring around with an unhappy expression.

“I am no expert, but this is not a happy garden,” Ying Ji muttered, looking around.

“No, no it is not,” she agreed.

“Did you replace the herbs?” Sana asked, looking around with a narrowed eyes.

“No… we wanted to avoid that, and Ha Fanmei and Ha Jing Mun said it was not necessary,” Li Meimei replied with a sigh.

“Good,” Sana said, walking over to a tree, taking out a spirit wood shovel and starting to dig without any further comment.

Following over, she took out her own spade and started to clear away the dirt Sana was excavating until she found a tree root… at which point they all just stopped and considered what was there.

“That is not normal, is it?” Ying Ji commented at last.

“It is not…” Sana murmured, squatting down and running the soil between her fingers. “Did you buy any spirit herbs recently?”

“Not for a while, no,” Li Meimei frowned. “There is little need up here.”

“I imagine,” Bai Jiang agreed, looking around, then back out at the distant valleys, shrouded in low-lying clouds.

“—Oh, there was Mun Fei’s fire ginseng,” her husband remarked after a moment’s pause and a quick conferral with another man standing nearby, who had been introduced earlier as Li Quan’s younger brother, Rong Dufan. “Quanfei asked me if we could give him soil from our garden if you recall…”

“Oh that is true, but that was weeks ago,” Li Meimei frowned.

“A fire ginseng…” Sana said dully. “Not a red yin fire ginseng or something similar?”

“Erm… it might have been?” Li Rong mused, glancing at his brother Dufan.

“It was some kind of fire attribute ginseng for sure, Hunter Jun,” Rong Dufan mused.

“Where is your son now?” she asked, not having seen him, or anyone their age really, around the estate.

“Staying in Blue Water City, with Ji Mun Fei and his family,” Li Quan grimaced. “The boy is talented but he lets company turn his head, not even returning home for a day like today…”

“There, there, dear,” Li Meimei sighed. “It is okay, he’s just a teenager…”

“It’s unfilial is what it is,” Li Quan grumbled, while his brother just shook his head.

“Well, short of digging up your garden, I have good news and bad news,” Sana said with the bright, apologetic smile of someone having to deliver expensive news. “The good news is I have seen this contamination before, albeit much less advanced… and the fix is ‘easy’ at least.”

“And the bad?” Li Rong grimaced.

“You will need a new garden,” Sana answered with her best ‘I am just being honest here’ smile.

“Need a new…” Li Quan’s face turned white, then red.

“That’s rather drastic,” Bai Jiang murmured beside her.

“It is, but contaminated spirit soil that has affected the alignments is basically the end of a garden like this,” she replied, before waving her hand around expansively. “I mean, do you think this can be fixed by moving a few shrubs around?”

“That… is true,” Ying Ji agreed, looking around at the gloomy garden with a shiver.

“Yes, it is rather drastic,” Sana agreed, “But there is no point in me selling you false hope. You have soil in here that came from the Red Pit, in all likelihood.”

“From the Red Pit,” Li Meimei echoed dully.

“Yes, unfortunately,” Sana confirmed. “I’ve seen a similar contamination recently, in an estate in Blue Water City. In that case it originated from the soil from a yin fire ginseng that one of their young masters bought at auction. There, they just swapped out the pot and dumped the old soil in the garden. If I was going to guess, your son and his friend did something similar.”

“We should be able to work that out quite quickly,” Arai added. “With three of us here good at feng shui…”

“—We can help as well,” Ying Ji added.

“Five then, it will be very quick,” Arai corrected herself.

“Ling, why don’t you show them how to make a suitable compass while I go poke trees,” Sana said to her.

Looking around and weighing up the likelihood of there being a blood ling mutate in there, she nodded, quite happy to have Arai and Sana, with their strange resilience against the horrors of the Red Pit, lead on this.

“Make a compass?” Bai Jiang inquired, curious.

“Indeed,” she confirmed, rummaging through her storage ring and passing them a copy of the Han manual. “Skim that while I look for bits,” she said with a frown, casting her eye around pensively.

-Though I might have to use grandfather’s manual as well, she reflected after a moment’s further consideration, looking around at the very unhappy shrubbery.

In the end, it only took the pair about five minutes to flick through the manual and gain the gist of it. Thankfully Ha Fanmei and Ha Jing Mun’s attempted realignment had done nothing lasting; however, as it turned out, she did still have to resort to her grandfather’s method in the end, simply because they could not find enough unaffected spirit vegetation close enough to the garden to make the Han Method worth trying.

“Mistress Li,” she said at last, going over to Li Meimei. “Do you have any unattributed bamboo I could use?”

“We have lots,” Li Meimei replied. “Why, do you need it to make a compass?”

“Yes,” she replied. “The garden is a bit far gone.”

Li Meimei nodded, waving for a maid to come over, instructing her quickly to go get some pieces and return.

“I must say, this is quite an interesting manual,” Bai Jiang mused as they waited for the maid to come back.

“It is the standard text for those who train as Herb Hunters,” she said. “As you can see, an understanding of feng shui is very important when dealing with problems like this…”

“Quite,” Bai Jiang agreed. “I wonder if you would be willing to sell me this?”

“Eh, you can buy it easily in the village here,” she replied. “Probably they have all the volumes as well. This is just the first one, which I keep as a reference, for the diagrams in the back.”

Bai Jiang flipped to the back, where there were a series of tables to help with the calculation of various auspicious and inauspicious attributes, and nodded.

“So, what do you want us to do?” Ying Ji added.

Frowning, she contemplated the garden again, then took out a bowl, walked over to a water trough and scooped some water out of it, filling it to the brim. Next she plucked a few bits of vegetation that were not horribly wilted from suitable plants and put them in it, watching how they swirled around and then… went totally diffuse.

“That… means that the alignments are wrecked,” Bai Jiang commented, consulting the back of the book and eyeing her crude compass critically.

“It does,” she nodded. “Which, looking around, we knew anyway.”

“True,” Ying Ji agreed.

“But that, on the other hand, means we can have some confidence in the results of some other divinations,” she added, standing up again.

“It does?” Ying Ji frowned.

“Yes,” she confirmed. “The most important thing in these kinds of circumstances is not just knowing what answers you want, but also what answers you might get. These plants are touched by the Red Pit, much like the problem in the auction house…”

“Except far more advanced?” Bai Jiang asked.

“Yep, much more advanced,” she nodded. “Thankfully there are no awakened herbs in here, so all you are seeing is this kind of thing…” she waved her hand around again, at the oddly gloomy shrubbery. “This is almost the opposite of Arai and Sana’s garden you saw earlier.”

“It is,” Bai Jiang agreed. “I must admit, I am very impressed with that. It is not something that is given much consideration back over the ocean…”

“Spirit herbs are more expensive?” she guessed.

“Yes,” Bai Jiang mused. “And there is not quite as wide a spectrum of herbs available to work with. As alchemists, usually we just work with what we can get through the Pill Sovereign Sect.”

“Much like people just buy compasses and never bother to figure out how they work?” she noted.

“…”

“I… yes, actually,” Bai Jiang said, looking at her sideways.

She was about to say more when she saw that the maid was coming back, with an armful of metre-long lengths of bamboo.

“So, I know I gave you the manual before, but this is actually better,” she stated apologetically.

“It’s fine,” Ying Ji said with a smile. “We are just here to help as you see fit.”

“How generous,” she chuckled, taking a length and weighing it in her hand, before holding it out and dropping it.

She dropped about six, which all fell in random directions, before someone asked her what she was doing.

“Checking their balance,” she replied, to the maid, who had asked, and who was watching on with bemusement before picking one up and dropping it again, watching it fall a different way.

“…”

“So, this is a different method,” she said absently, pulling out a machete and slashing a bamboo in half vertically before scratching a ‘life’ symbol on it. “It doesn’t look at how auspicious the alignments up here are… but rather…”

She took the bamboo and slammed it hard into the ground, watching it buckle and snap on an unexpected rock.

“Death,” she muttered, watching it quiver in the ground, before picking up another length, and walking some distance, inscribing ‘death’ on it and repeating the trick.

Again, it fractured, catching in the soil and scattering splinters.

“Uh…”

Bai Jiang stared at her dully.

“This looks at the life and death of the land itself,” she explained, repeating it a third time as she walked forward. “This is comically extreme though. Normally you have to do a dozen soundings to get ‘death’ with ‘death’.”

“This is a method for divining tombs?” Li Meimei, who was also looking on, asked, her eyebrows raised.

“It is,” she nodded. “But like all things, it can be used a few different ways. It’s great for finding points of misfortune in the ground.”

“You are divining the most auspicious point relating to the demise of my garden…” Li Meimei asked.

“Yes,” she replied, with a bright smile.

“Can we help?” Bai Jiang asked.

“Yep,” she nodded. “Split those bamboo lengths in half, write life on the left hand one and death on the right, then go around and stake them, alternately, in random points. When they split, leave it where they fall. If they don’t split, you can take it and use it again until it does. The longer it goes without splitting, the better.”

They stared at her with expressions that said ‘it can’t possibly be that simple’, but actually it was. It was a method that, like the Eight Trigrams, had its roots in genuinely mortal divinations. In this instance she was only setting up the groundwork anyway.

Over on the far side, Arai and Sana were now walking around kicking shrubs, occasionally digging holes in the ground and also arguing about another compass. Yunhee was just walking around the garden, her eyes slightly narrowed.

While they worked, she cut another piece of bamboo into seven equal lengths and marked them ‘life’ and ‘death’ as well, with one remaining unmarked, to represent the theory of ‘heaven leaving a way’. It took about twenty minutes for her to get a reading, but in the end, between the three of them, they managed to narrow the search area down to about twenty square metres to the left of the garden, which, when considered logistically, was right by the entrance.

“So, it is by the entrance…” Bai Jiang remarked at last, as they considered the area.

“It is,” she nodded, quite happy with that.

“We did all this to work out something that was quite obvious?” Ying Ji grumbled, looking around at the thirty-odd bamboo stakes in a radiating pattern from their current location.

“We did, but that is sort of the point,” she reminded them. “No divination is truly blind. It is the same with pill refining, is it not?”

“…”

“Indeed, you do not toss things in at random and see what is what…” Bai Jiang said.

“Do you have any basic divination talismans, Mistress Li?” she asked Li Meimei.

Li Meimei nodded and took out a sheaf from somewhere and passed them to her. Taking one, she stuck it on top of a bamboo rod and stepped back smartly as it burst into a flame that flickered a dirty red-black for a few seconds and then vanished.

“Yin, Fire, Inauspicious, Death, Earth, Lack of Balance,” she mused, then repeated the trick on another bamboo, which got something very similar.

It took her a further few minutes to put a talisman on each ‘death’ bamboo and then push some qi into them to link it up. At that point the formation tugged her qi quite forcibly, drawing it through the alignments in the formation to eventually scatter little red fires across a flowerbed right by the wall about ten metres inside the gate to the gardens.

“There is something to be said for lazy people,” Arai said coming over to stand beside her as she watched the red fireflies vanish.

“There is,” she agreed.

“They dumped it in the first flowerbed they saw…” Li Meimei sighed, rubbing her temples and looking around.

“Good fortune from bad,” she pointed out drily.

Taking her machete, she crouched down and scattered the leaf litter to reveal a discoloured patch of soil with lots of little white mushrooms growing along the surface in the dank, humid decay of the fallen leaves.

Arai took the middle shrub and held it for her to slash with her machete, revealing it had rotted through to the core, with the sap-wood of the little bush being pure parasitic mushroom.

“The next door’s garden looks a bit peaky as well,” Sana, who had climbed up the wall to look over, called down. “Ah, Sir… do you mind coming over here?”

A few minutes later, an old man with drooping brows who walked with a stick was also standing in Li Meimei’s garden, a resigned scowl on his face.

“So, this is the root cause, eh?” he said, staring at the whitish fungus on the ornamental shrub in the flowerbed.

“Yes, it seems so, Sir Fan,” Li Meimei said with an embarrassed expression. “My son’s friend, the Ji’s boy, Mun Fei, swapped out infected spirit soil in our garden… and well…”

“Ai… children,” the old man, Sir Fan, shook his head sadly, looking around at the unnaturally gloomy garden. “I take it your garden is gone?”

“It does look like it, yes,” Li Meimei agreed. “I really liked it, too.”

“Sorry,” Sana apologised.

“It’s not your fault, and it is better that it got caught,” Li Quan grumbled, though he still looked a bit angry she felt. “We might have dumped the soil elsewhere, otherwise.”

“If you wish to incinerate it, we will happily give you talismans, Sir Fan,” Li Meimei added to the old man.

“That is very generous,” Sir Fan sighed. “This infestation cost me my lovely jasmine. Quite disheartening really…”

“Oh no…” Li Meimei murmured, giving the old man another pat on the back.

“What are the odds we run into this problem coming and going?” Sana signed to Arai.

“I imagine there are a good number of affected people,” Arai grimaced. “It’s been a few weeks. Time for infestations to mature, like this one has.”

“Probably you will have to inform the local Bureau,” Sana said. “Or at the very least, find out if anyone else was affected by this.”

“Uggh,” Li Quan grimaced.

“The Ji family will not like this,” Sir Fan added. “They will lose a lot of face…”

“Yes,” Li Meimei sighed. “I think what I will do is send my idiot child to stay with my uncle in West Flower Picking Town. Quan, dear, can you call him back… I don’t care what excuse you use, just make sure that he comes and doesn’t suspect he is in trouble…”

Listening in from the side, she had a brief pang of sympathy for Li Meimei’s son. Really, it wasn’t his fault, probably, anyway, but she could already see how this was going to be spun by the Ji family, who she did know a bit about. They were close political allies of the Deng clan, and fancied themselves minor nobility in their own right within the province and would certainly ensure that their own precious child was not tarnished by this.

“If there are mutates here, how should we dispose of them?” Li Meimei asked them.

“…”

Sana stared around the garden for a moment, looking pensive. “Well, I suppose if you have the talismans, incinerating everything is a good start. Probably better to do that today, when it is auspicious…”

“You want to set our garden on fire… now,” Li Quan said.

“The sooner the better,” Arai clarified. “Once it’s burned to baked earth, excavate all that, pack it up and glass it, basically.”

In that moment, it occurred to her that they could actually extend their generosity somewhat further, especially since there was no downside to getting in Grandmaster Li’s good books.

“If it’s spirit soil, I can always take Bai Jiang and Ying Ji and go collect some from inside the suppression zone,” she added. “You could have the entire garden re-bedded in an hour or two.”

“You would do that?” Li Meimei blinked.

“Grandmaster Li has been a generous supporter of the Hunter Bureau,” she replied with aplomb.

“Hah… this style is much more agreeable than those Ha brats,” Li Rong remarked drily.

She had the good grace to look embarrassed, but only a little.

“Only one of us needs to stay here,” Arai noted.

“You stay,” Sana said, patting her sister on the shoulder. “The four of us can get what is needed and be back quickly. All that we need is a written request that we are on a mission to procure spirit soil…”

“That, I can write up,” Sir Fan, who was standing there watching with raised eyebrows, interjected. “This old man’s lesser hobby is telling gate guards not to sleep on the job. If you bring me some as well.”

“Done,” Sana said with a grin. “And apologies for not recognising you sooner, Captain Fan Jiang.”

“…”

“You recognise this old fellow?” the wizened old man chuckled.

“Sir Fan is a famous name in certain circles,” Sana said blithely. “Our father, Jun Han, would be disappointed if we did not pass on his best wishes on a day like today.”

“You are Jun Han’s little sprouts?” the old man mused. “I must say I did not recognise you either.”

“It has been a year or two since we last came through here on official business,” Arai apologised. “Normally we go directly into the mountains beyond Blue Pine or Green River Village.”

“The more direct route,” the old man nodded, having pulled a jade out and started to imprint it before their eyes.

“Your name, lass?” he asked her.

“Lin Ling,” she replied, passing him her own Bureau talisman.

He glanced at it then tapped it to the jade, which chimed quietly.

“You will want to go past the quarry, by the way,” the old man sighed. “The Deng clan have gotten a lucrative contract and have been making trouble for others.”

“Noted,” she murmured, accepting the jade and talisman back.

“I’ll come with you,” Yunhee, who had been standing back quietly and just watching, added.

“So much for this being a day off,” Sana sighed.

“Well, at least it’s an interesting day,” she pointed out, setting off.

“That it is,” Sana conceded.

The trip through the fortress gate was very quick, compared to how it usually went. They showed the request to the guards, who actually waved them through with cheers of good luck and some words of advice, clearly wanting to stay on the right side of the old captain. The valley beyond was much as she remembered it from her last trip there, just over a year prior, with some new recruits…

“It’s not at all ominous that they also told us to avoid the main quarry,” she remarked drily as they started up the road, which was like a leafy chasm through the valley in this season.

“Yeah,” Sana agreed, before turning to Bai Jiang and Ying Ji. “I do apologize for dragging the two of you along just to dig up spirit soil,” Sana added. “It’s not the most scenic, I understand.”

“It’s alright. We did volunteer,” Ying Ji replied with a grin. “And I must admit I’m rather curious to see for myself what the famous Yin Eclipse and its suppression are like.”

“Well you’ll have your chance there,” she laughed, giving Ying Ji a friendly elbow, quite looking forward, actually, to what their reactions were going to be. “This road is going to take us into the outer edge of the suppression zone alright. With the five of us here, the work shouldn’t be too onerous, I imagine.”

“Or too dangerous,” Sana agreed. “There is a slight chance of unexpected happenings anywhere in Yin Eclipse, of course, but these outermost places tend to be rather safe on the whole. So, as long as you don’t go poking around for trouble in some shallow cave or climbing the cliffs, we should be fine.”

“Even then it should be manageable, although I don’t recommend it,” she added, kicking a branch off the road into the rock-cut ditch beside it.

“Warning noted,” Bai Jiang said with a laugh, looking up from the Han manual, which he was still skimming. “I don’t suppose we’ll find any interesting spirit herbs out here?”

“Not here, no,” she shook her head.

“They clear this valley every year or two and any spirit herbs that do emerge this close to the edge tend to be claimed quickly or exterminated. It’s mostly spirit soil and vegetation for us here,” Sana added.

“You know, the last time I was here it was also to get spirit soil,” she remarked with some amusement as they continued on down the paved road into the verdant, misty greenery.

“It was?” Sana asked with a laugh. “That is rather funny to be honest.”

“Uh…” Ying Ji remarked, seeming troubled somehow.

“What…?” Bai Jiang trailed off, looking around uneasily.

They paused as both Bai Jiang and Ying Ji stopped dead, nearly leading Yunhee to walk into the back of them.

“Oh, it’s the edge of the suppression,” she said after a moment, glancing around.

-And they are fairly composed as well, given that we told them very little if anything about it, she reflected.

“Not much reaction,” Sana signed to her with a wry shrug, before adding out loud “It’s moved again,” pointing at two painted markers a little way up the road.

A part of her was a little disappointed they were not more obviously unsettled, but it made sense she supposed: Bai Jiang had said they were familiar with realm suppression elsewhere. She hid it by trotting over to the nearest of the stone pagodas. Picking it up with a grunt, she walked it back down the road to where they had stopped and deposited it by the roadside.

“Boundary marker,” she added, noting Ying Ji’s quizzical look.

That was an often overlooked aspect of the suppression: the field was never static. It shifted year on year in subtle ways. That it had advanced almost thirty metres westward was likely due to the rains and the early season change.

“How… odd,” Bai Jiang muttered, walking back and forth up and down the road a few times.

“The loss of soul sense?” Yunhee asked, sounding sympathetic.

“Yes,” Bai Jiang agreed, staring up at the rustling trees and the strands of bamboo swaying gently in the mists.

“I can’t feel my Nascent Soul anymore either,” Ying Ji shuddered. “I mean, I know it’s there, but…”

“This is why higher-realm folk don’t like entering here,” Yunhee said, giving them both a sympathetic glance. “You get used to it, and Intent still works, but it’s a different kind of awareness you need.”

“Y-yeah,” Ying Ji agreed with a grimace. “And in this green… qi sense…”

“Is useless,” she finished for him, even before Sana could say anything.

“Try it. You will find your qi efficiency as a spiritual cultivator is rather less than it should be,” Sana added.

“Oh… that is unpleasant,” Bai Jiang grimaced, producing a flame on his hand.

She watched as qi shifted subtly around Ying Ji, at least until it encountered the greenery at the side of the road, then it bled away into nothing very rapidly. He stopped after a few seconds and shuddered.

“That is so inefficient,” he remarked.

“And it paints a huge target on you,” she added. “Plenty of things out here hunt with qi-sense, and they are not so constrained.”

“Indeed, they are not,” Yunhee agreed.

“We don’t have to go far at least,” she added, starting walking again. “The road goes all the way to the first way post here, and branches to several active spirit quarries, though bearing in mind Sir Fan’s suggestion we will likely have to go beyond them.”

“R-right,” Ying Ji muttered, looking at the trees and the vegetation now as if it had just tried to sell his grandmother.

They walked on in silence for a few hundred metres, following the paved road as it wound up the valley, before Bai Jiang spoke again.

“Why does it feel like the whole place is pushing me away? I have been to the Dragon Pillars, and that is suppression… This is closer to—”

“Actually, the Dragon Pillars are not really suppression,” Yunhee, who was bringing up the rear, interjected. “They are oppression, and they only affect your cultivation realm.”

“Yeah,” she agreed. “Here, everything is suppressed. An Ancient Immortal’s qi art would not be much more devastating than a Golden Core cultivator’s…”

“This is also why the grading differentiates between the purity of qi and the realm of a spirit herb,” Sana added.

“Oh…” Bai Jiang looked around again, frowning. “But that would mean there are aspects that are not suppressed?”

“Plants can advance past Golden Core,” she elaborated. “It’s just that once they do, they are suppressed thoroughly. It doesn’t stop them awakening, for example, and their qi will still get purer with age. There are places up here, mostly around South Grove, where the atmospheric qi is so pure that it’s toxic to anyone who enters. When we got that strange weather earlier in the week because someone removed the rains, the suppression went really nasty and everyone’s qi control became disordered…”

“The mist,” Bai Jiang shuddered.

“Yes, the mist,” Yunhee agreed. “It’s the worst of the ‘special’ weather you usually see on… this side.”

“Vile,” Ying Ji shivered.

“Well, we are almost there,” she announced, noting the marker for the way station ahead of them.

“Looks like there is a group up there already,” Sana added, pointing through the trees to where several columns of smoke were rising.

It took them another twenty minutes in the end to reach the first quarry, where they stopped on the edge of the rise, not quite coming out of the shadow of the trees to take in the scene below them.

“This is a spirit soil quarry?” Ying Ji asked, taking in the open cast mine below, where several groups of workmen, each numbering about twenty or so, were labouring to cut out slabs of a shale-like rock, that was well on its way to becoming coal, where bands of it were exposed in a ripple-like pattern running through the rocks.

“Yes,” she confirmed. “This is the main economic industry of Misty Vale Village. The spirit soil is ancient. Bureau records suggest it is the last remnants of an ancient shallow sea that persisted here before the mountain range. The oppression above kept it from decaying and it slowly transformed into a vast reservoir of yang life qi infused into that friable, shale-like rock down there.”

“Remarkable,” Bai Jiang agreed as they watched a group below slowly shatter off a two-metre slab and drag it into a cart under the watchful eye of almost twenty guards and an overseer.

“Huh…” Ying Ji glanced along the path, frowning.

“Oh, yeah, that is why you don’t wave qi sense around,” Yunhee commented as they spotted a group of guards sitting by the road about sixty metres away from them on the bend down to the quarry.

As she watched they swept the surroundings again, then went back to their dice game.

“I guess we are not getting spirit soil here,” she concluded, seeing another group below arguing with some guards at the bottom of the road.

“Indeed not,” Sana agreed, turning and starting to walk on down the main road.

“They are clearly not used to being here,” she remarked as they walked onwards.

“How do you gather that?” Ying Ji asked.

“You noticed that they were using qi sense to sweep the perimeter?” she explained, happy to be feeling like she was contributing a bit more for once as they continued on up the road, deeper into the valley. “You already saw yourself that it is very inefficient, and they are basically telling anything nearby what realm they are and where they are.”

“And there is a lot of native life with better qi sense than the average suppressed Golden Core cultivator, so using qi sense freely would sooner inform your surroundings of your own limits and how to avoid your perception than the other way around,” Sana added.

“We did spot them quickly,” Ying Ji agreed.

“So, if we don’t get spirit soil from there, where do we go?” Bai Jiang asked, curious.

“There are smaller areas, less accessible ones where large scale exploitation like this is not possible,” she explained, taking out an umbrella because the drizzle of rain from the overhanging trees was getting to be enough that it was annoying.

“There are smaller mines and the like that have been opened up over the years…” Sana agreed, poking at her scrip, which she was binding to her forearm. “The Bureau has a good record of them… so it won’t be hard to find what we need.”

“The old way station is up ahead, isn’t it?” Yunhee mused as they set off again.

“Oh, it is,” she nodded. “We can stop there on the way past for a quick look.”

“That would be interesting,” Ying Ji agreed. “Is it one of these old ruins that they showed stuff from in the auction?”

“Yes,” Sana said. “Although this one is not so much an old ruin…”

The way station was only about two hundred yards further down the road. Once, it had just been a rock-cut shrine built into the overhang of a smaller massif within the valley, but now it had grown into a small complex, with a covered area where people could rest on one side of the paved area.

The shrine itself had a wooden building erected beside it as well, with a wooden statue of a squirrel holding up a fruit to the heavens, festooned with garlands of flowers and several pots of incense burning before it. There was an old man in a ragged robe sitting on a mat nearby, murmuring a traditional prayer in the Yin language.

Off to one side, she noted that a group of eight guards in Deng colours and an official were sitting at a table, eating some food and wine, looking rather jaded and showing obvious fatigue.

“It is an actual shrine…” Bai Jiang remarked after bowing politely to the old man.

“Yes, it is,” she agreed.

“Can we go in and look around?” Ying Ji asked her.

“Sure,” she confirmed. “This place used to be managed by the Hunter Pavilion, but given how pacified the valley is, it’s basically defunct now and just serves as a handy resting place for those working in the quarries or moving between the village and the Misty Gate at the head of the valley. Most people overnight there, given it has actual beds…”

“—and a permanent garrison from the Military Bureau, guarding that pass deeper into the mountains,” Yunhee added. “Security helps.”

“To protect the mines here?” Ying Ji asked.

“Yes, and because forces from the east tried to use this route around a century ago to strike at the plains below,” Yunhee continued. “It also stops bandits and the like from exploiting an easy way to bypass the majority of the province’s defences—”

“You there!” the official, called over, interrupting them rather rudely.

“…”

“Yes?” she asked, giving him a polite bow.

“Why are you here?” the official asked perfunctorily, not even bothering to stand.

“To see the valley,” she replied smoothly, gesturing to Yunhee and the other two, who had just been about to go over to the rock-cut area and look inside. “My friends here wanted to see the suppression zone and experience it, so we have just walked out here from the village to see the shrine and maybe go to Misty Gate.”

The official stared at her, then at the others, not quite sure, she supposed, if they were taking the piss or not, but on the face of it they were ‘not’ a group out here looking like they were here to get spirit soil. Three young ladies and two sect disciples did not a mining party make.

“Mmmmm…” the official finally nodded. “See that you don’t take anything that is the industry of our Deng clan,” he added. “I will be informing the gate guards we saw you…”

Resisting the urge to roll her eyes, she gave him the barest of bows, then turned and walked over to the shrine, quite deliberately.

“He was pushy…” Ying Ji frowned, glancing back at the official as they walked inside.

“That’s clan officials for you,” Sana sighed.

Bai Jiang and Ying Ji just took it all in stride as they took in the carved interior with its seated figure of a woman wearing a red jade robe at the far end, in front of which was erected another small altar, this time honouring the Queen Mother of the East.

“It is quite something,” Ying Ji declared, taking a jade talisman out of his pouch and holding it up, presumably to record an image of it.

“They are,” Sana agreed.

“This is a small one,” she added. “Many of them have odd feng shui that tends to keep the qi beasts away. That is why some of them have become focus points for the deeper exploration of the valleys.”

“Do you all want to stand over there?” Ying Ji added, “I can take an image of us!”

“Sure,” Yunhee agreed with some amusement.

Nodding, she walked over and stood beside Yunhee and Sana, with Bai Jiang and Ying Ji joining them a moment later, having left the talisman hanging in the air, supported with a bit of his qi.

“So, you would stay overnight in these places?” Bai Jiang mused, looking around again once the talisman had recorded its image and Ying Ji had checked it.

“Yes,” she replied. “They are invaluable places to recover safely, especially deeper into the mountains. I am sure you have already noticed that your qi recovery is…”

“Yeah,” Ying Ji nodded. “Even recording that image was… oddly draining.”

“Unless you have physical cultivation or something, you will be eating replenishment pills like candy up here. That official had borderline pill poisoning already,” Yunhee agreed.

“He did,” Bai Jiang mused as they walked back outside again. “I was going to offer him something for it…”

“There is a reason why this place is considered to be the foremost forbidden zone in the world,” Yunhee grinned, taking a breath of the slightly less oppressive air. “It’s like this and you are only a mile inside it? Imagine what it’s like up there?”

She pointed up to the towering peaks of East Fury, only their lower flanks visible amid the swirling sea of cloud from their current location.

“It’s unpleasant,” she added drily. “The suppression itself doesn’t change, but that niggling feeling of being unwanted, an interloper, an invader in a place you are not meant to be?”

“Oh…”

“Imagine that, for every waking hour, an itch you cannot scratch, always getting just a bit stronger,” she continued.

“Very, very unpleasant,” Sana agreed with a sagacious nod of her own.

“…”

Both Bai Jiang and Ying Ji shot them a slightly judging look, but, she had to admit, she was having a bit of fun with this. The constant dismissive attitude by those in Blue Water City who had come with the Princess’s visit had irked her enough that it was hard not to enjoy the moment when outsiders discovered that, actually, the reality was worse than words had led them to believe.

“And it gets worse when you are leaving, if that is at all possible,” she added with a grin.

They walked on in silence for a few more minutes, until Sana finally led them off the main road, up a smaller trail, occasionally glancing at the scrip she had now tied to her forearm, before bringing them to a stop in a clearing.

“There is an erosion feature on the map just above here,” Sana said by way of explanation, pointing up into the forest above them. “And no obvious sign of anyone coming up here recently on the path.”

“Lead on,” she declared grandly, pointing up-slope with the pickaxe.

Sana just shook her head and started to climb.

In the end, it didn’t take them long to find some actual spirit soil: there was a large slump of it washed out from further up not a hundred meters up-slope, slowly bleeding into the forest.

Several fractured slabs of good quality were in the process of flaking away from the exposed fault line above it and the rains were dissolving what had come out into the forest, giving rise to verdant eruptions of vegetation. Mining it out was a bit trickier, but thankfully you could dig it up and toss it in a pile, then store the pile rather quickly. Between the five of them and the spatial storage devices available, in the end, it only took them a short thirty minutes’ work to get more than enough, store a few of the bigger slabs away and head back down to the road again.

“I suppose we should head back now, anyway,” Sana added. “If we stay away too long, they will think there was a problem.”

“True,” she agreed.

The walk back down the road was much brisker than the trip up it, in part because they didn’t want a second run in with the pushy official. As such, it took them only ten minutes to return past the way station with its wooden buildings and arrive back at the markers at the edge of the suppression zone…

“I wouldn’t recommend using pills now,” she said to both of them as they continued on towards the distant gate, visible through the swirling cloud and tree tops.

“Why is that?” Bai Jiang, who had been in the process of retrieving a pill, asked. “I feel… rather awful, and badly drained of qi.”

“It’ll do your foundation and meridians good to recover the normal way,” she replied, echoing what she had been told by Old Ling years ago. “It’s actually a form of tempering, really. Good for the stamina too.”

“Oh, that is good to know,” Ying Ji murmured, taking a deep breath and putting away the pill bottle again while Bai Jiang did the same. “Is that why the three of you are so unaffected?”

“It is,” Yunhee answered. “Although physical cultivators are also naturally less affected by the suppression.”

They walked fairly briskly back to the gate after that, and were waved back through by the guards without as much as a cursory inspection, in spite of the official’s earlier threat, which made for a pleasant change she felt.

“Indeed, something tells me the Deng bunch are not making friends of the gate guards,” Ying Ji commented after they were fully through and heading back up through the town towards a large pall of smoke drifting up into the sky above the Li estate.

“You think?” she grinned.

Returning to the garden, they found it a blasted quarry, exposed down to the bedrock with several labourers pulling out large chunks of what was basically glassed soil and stacking them up in preparation for what would presumably be further destruction.

“What kept you?” Arai, who was sitting nearby, watching, remarked.

“We bypassed the quarry, as suggested, so we ended up going all the way to the way station,” she explained.

“Ah! You are back,” Li Meimei exclaimed, coming over, followed by Sir Fan.

“We have your soil. Where do you want it?” she asked.

“Hmm… just dump it in the warehouse over that side,” Li Meimei said after a moment’s consideration. “I trust that is okay, Sir Fan?”

“Yep,” the old man nodded. “I’ll get someone to come take what I need of it later.”

Following the directions, they trooped over to it and emptied their various storage rings and talismans into several large piles of quasi-spirit rock and loam.

“So, what now?” Bai Jiang asked.

“Now?” she grinned. “We go get some food!”

“…”

Sana and Arai both stared at her.

“What? They need it,” she pointed out, gesturing towards Bai Jiang and Ying Ji, who were indeed still showing symptoms of mild qi exhaustion due to not being at all used to being in the suppression zone.

“That… is a good point,” Ying Ji agreed, frowning. “I do feel kind of tired.”

“That’s the suppression again,” Yunhee agreed.

“You are more than welcome to stay for a meal,” Li Meimei, who was sitting nearby, added.

“We already imposed for lunch,” Sana replied, demurring.

“But you have done all this… I feel like we should at least feed you,” Meimei sighed, looking between them. “And you can get freshened up here if you wish.”

“…”

“Yes, it would be good not to return home looking like a bunch of day labourers on a spirit farm,” she agreed, tugging the skirt of her muddy knee-length robe for extra emphasis.

Sana stared at Arai, who just shrugged, then nodded in agreement.

“In that case, we will have to trouble you, Mrs Li,” Sana sighed.

“Not at all,” Li Meimei said with a broad smile. “Please follow me.”

Somewhat outside her expectations, the Li estate had a large bathhouse with a wonderful view out across the valley towards the mountains. Even though they had not done… much, it was still nice to just lie in the warm pool and let its refreshing warmth, quite apart from the ubiquitous humidity of the mountain air, work its way into her body.

“This is very nice,” Yunhee, who had joined them, commented at last, sipping her wine and staring out at the swaying tops of the bamboo and the occasional peaked roof of an estate below them.

“It is,” Arai agreed from where she was also lying on her back in the water, staring at the sky. “Even though this turned into more work that I expected, we still got a bit of a day off I suppose…”

“I should hope so,” she said, trying not to dwell too much on how… much more physically developed all three of them were in comparison to her.

-What a stupid thing to think about now, she thought—

“Is something wrong?” Sana asked her, appearing beside her.

“It’s… just been a strange day,” she replied, regretting her earlier thought now.

“Yeah, it has,” Sana agreed with deep sigh, staring out at the swaying trees and the swirling cloud. “Want to talk about anything?”

“I… I dunno. It just feels strange going around with you… with a family that…” she trailed off, feeling a bit silly now she said it out loud. “The last time I had a Sovereign’s Eve or Day that felt like a family gathering… was when grandfather was still alive.”

“Mmmmm…” Sana nodded, then gave her a hug—

Her friend submerged her in the pool in a single movement, pushing her down with a bright grin.

“Wha—!” she yelped, flailing for a moment, before breaking free of Sana and standing up in the chest deep pool, spluttering and wiping water out of her face.

“You are thinking stupid things,” Sana giggled, splashing her. “Feeling better now?”

“Was not!” she pouted, though oddly, she realised in the moment, she did feel a bit better.

It was like a bit of her worries had just been diffused by the silliness of her friend’s action, though it hadn’t helped her insecurities about her appearance compared to Arai, Sana or Yunhee…

“Was too,” Sana smirked, pulling a childish face at her.

“You who won the lottery in looking pretty should show some humility,” she retorted, folding her arms.

“Doesn’t watching them make you feel old at heart?” Yunhee remarked to Arai with obvious amusement.

“It does, yes…” Arai agreed, rolling her eyes, before sitting up on the water, using her qi to support her body.

“Bah!” she caught a double handful of water and tossed it straight at Arai, who scattered it, then unbalanced as the ripples caught her off guard and sank with a muffled curse of her own.

“…”

“We should get washed up, anyway,” Yunhee said with a half-smile from the edge of the pool. “Or maybe they will come rushing in here to see what the problem is.”

“…”

“If they do that, can you send them flying across the valley?” she joked, recalling the sight of Huang Fuan flying away.

Yunhee just rolled her eyes by way of reply.

Sighing regretfully, she dunked her head under the water again, then stood up and wrung her hair out, clambering out of the pool and claiming a towel from the side.

They dried off quickly, put on fresh robes and went back out of the baths to find Ying Ji and Bai Jiang were already out and also looking revitalized, drinking wine in the main courtyard and watching several youths from the neighbouring estates engage in sparring matches while others looked on.

“Ah, you are finally here!” Ying Ji declared, waving them over.

“There will be a meal later,” Bai Jiang informed them, “but Mistress Li suggested we go look around the village for a bit?”

“Sure,” she nodded.

“But no more jobs or anything,” Arai declared flatly.

“No arguments there,” she agreed, while Sana, who was still plaiting her hair, rolled her eyes.

“Ohh… pretty ladies!” one of the teenagers who had been sparring came skipping over.

“…”

He froze, almost mid-step, as Yunhee basically skewered him with her gaze, making him cough awkwardly and salute them.

“Young Misses, I am Li Feibo,” he said with as much composure as he could muster. “Might I know your names?”

“Lin Ling,” she replied drily, trying not to laugh at him, because Yunhee had quite ruined his moment.

“Kun Yunhee,” Yunhee said with a bit of extra emphasis on the ‘Kun’.

“Jun Sana,” Sana replied.

“Jun Arai,” Arai politely added.

“He is the nephew of Mistress Li,” Bai Jiang remarked. “She told him to act as our guide around town…”

“Ah,” she nodded, looking at the youth who was doing his best to recover his momentum. “In that case, we are in your care.”

As it turned out, first impressions of Li Feibo were somewhat misleading. He was just easygoing in every sense. He knew everyone, laughed with everyone, and if someone told him to bugger off, he laughed at them, as he took them around Misty Vale Village basically showing them what amounted to the ‘sights’… which was to say, it had a pretty view and some good talisman and herb shops.

Li Feibo was also an apprentice talisman maker, so was more than happy to take them around and talk at length with Bai Jiang and Ying Ji about the local specialities and the important role talismans played in the everyday livelihoods of those eking out a living right at the edge of the mountains.

She, for the most part, just followed along with them, enjoying the sights and sounds of the town, only occasionally disturbed by the distant rumble of a tribulation, feeling for once like she was actually… doing very little at all.

“—Do you have any thoughts on this manual?”

She was stirred out of her reverie by Ying Ji, who was holding out a divination manual for her to look at.

“Oh…”

Focusing on it, she found it was another of the variants on the Han Manual, of which the town’s shops had a good few on offer. As a staple manual with deep roots in the core industry of the Hunter Bureau, a great many people had used it as the foundational text to further develop their own theories upon.

“It’s a local variant of the manual I was using before. That is the classical version that the Hunter Bureau provides and occasionally updates…”

She flipped through it, noting that it put less emphasis on compasses and more on reading the landscape.

“I’ve always found the most useful part of it was the stuff on compasses,” she noted. “But that’s just me.”

“Oh… interesting,” Ying Ji mused.

“The advantage of knowing how to make your own compasses is that it saves you hundreds of spirit stones a year,” she added with a grin. “Not to mention a small fortune beyond that in divination talismans. If you were ever wondering how it’s possible to be poor in a land where there are spirit herbs you can grab after walking for twenty minutes inland from here, it is because you will spend it all on talismans and compasses.”

“Indeed,” Li Feibo, who was leaning on the counter, chatting to the youth minding the shop as they sorted through a stack of manuals, agreed. “There is a saying here… if you want a successful household, one son should be a hunter, one son a talisman maker and the daughter a painter.”

“No alchemists?” Bai Jiang joked, looking up from where he was also flicking through a manual.

“It is better to sell herbs to skilled alchemists for a lot of money than it is to spend a lot of herbs to become an alchemist for cheap,” Yunhee remarked. “The cauldron economy alone is vile.”

“It is,” Bai Jiang sighed. “It is…”

“Did you find anything interesting?” Ying Ji asked his friend.

“Yes, actually, thanks to Miss Sana,” Bai Jiang nodded, holding up two manuals, one called ‘The Harmony of the Verdant Sea’ and then a second called ‘The Eye of the Land’. From what she recalled, both, despite their fairly grand names, were basically treatises on the feng shui of garden arrangement.

The other three he had under his arm, as he made his way over to the counter where the youth watching the shop and Li Feibo were chatting away, were expanded versions of the Han Manual’s first three volumes.

“Not at all,” Sana, who had drifted over to look at what was by the window of the shop, glanced over and waved a hand absently. “Both provide excellent teaching on sympathetic feng shui.”

“There was something about fireworks later?” she asked Li Feibo as Bai Jiang and Ying Ji both handed over spirit stones for their purchases.

“Oh, yes, there will be a celebration for the Celestial Sovereign in the village square at dusk!” Li Feibo replied. “We can go after dinner.”

“That sounds like fun,” Ying Ji added.

“Yes, there will be a martial tournament as well, that was why we were practising earlier. They say that an expert from the Green Fang Pagoda is coming to judge it and the winner will be made an outer disciple!”

“That is quite the opportunity,” Yunhee agreed as they started to make their way out of the shop.

“Just so long as there is nobody from the Ha clan and they don’t decide to swap it to painting,” she joked, then ducked as Arai took a playful swipe at her tied up hair.

“Too soon, too soon,” Sana murmured beside her.

~ Jun Sana – West Flower Picking Town ~

By the time they finally got back to West Flower Picking Town, night had descended and the rain had started to fall properly again. In the end, they had stayed for the meal, then watched the fireworks exploding over the cliffs above Misty Vale Village for their own festival for the ‘Sovereign’s Eve’ and watched some of the martial tournament to boot. It was a much more carefree end to the afternoon than the start, Sana had to concede as the three of them threaded their way back through the streets towards home, dodging stalls and puddles alike.

They split with Yunhee, Bai Jiang and Ying Ji at the main thoroughfare through the Red Flower District back towards the Kun District, wishing them farewell and apologizing in part for it being such an odd day trip in the end.

“I still feel kind of bad about dragging them all the way up there and then basically using them as manual labour,” Lin Ling remarked at last as they watched the trio vanish into the lantern-lit drizzle.

“It is the reality of that kind of thing…” she mused. “Though in the end, it was not that onerous, and we got to see their reactions to Yin Eclipse, which was worth it.”

“Yep,” Arai agreed.

“True,” Lin Ling nodded, sounding a bit more subdued than she had earlier.

-Is she still bothered by the messages she got from her family earlier? she wondered.

Much like Ling Yu, she found it hard sometimes to reconcile Lin Ling to her family circumstances. Ling Yu at least had people in her camp, as did Juni, but Lin Ling… was just abandoned to the circumstances of her family, except when she went out of her way to avoid them, like she was doing now, and even that was still being controlled by them in a somewhat perverse way.

“Do we buy food?” Lin Ling asked as they arrived back at the plaza.

“…”

“What do we have at home?” she asked Arai.

“Cloud rice, noodles, what’s in the garden… I mean we ate a meal at Misty Vale anyway…” her sister pointed out.

“That’s true, but father might not have,” she reminded them.

“Mrs Leng’s market stall will be open still,” Lin Ling added.

“That… is true,” she conceded.

In the end, they did walk to the market, even though it was raining, and, after spending a little while chatting with Ning Sora, returned back to the estate with a small meal’s worth of spirit food and the best wishes of Mrs Leng who had showed up briefly while they were there.

It was a bit of a cop out, given that today was supposedly a day when children honoured their parents, and expected to cook a meal for them in the evening, but in a sense, Mrs Leng was something like a surrogate grandmother to both her and Arai, and had always taken a keen interest in them, even before their mother passed away. Father would not complain anyway.

Arriving back at the house, the lights were still off, so they went inside and Arai and Lin Ling went around, making it look lived in, while she put the food into a preservation cupboard, noting again that the spirit stones on it were still draining too fast.

-At least that may be fixed after today, she reflected.

Going over to the cooker, she put a fire stone into a plate and placed a large pot of water on it for tea, then went upstairs to change out of her smarter travelling clothes and into a lighter robe more fitting for the warm, humid evening.

She had just gotten out of her robe, when there was a knock that reverberated subtly through the room, telling her that someone was at the door outside.

“Monkey-bothering visitors,” she grumbled, quickly pulling on her fresh robe. “Always when you least expect it…”

Hurrying back down stairs, she met Lin Ling in the main hall.

“Where is Arai?” she asked.

“Getting changed,” Lin Ling replied.

“In that case, can you go sort out the tea in the kitchen while I see who this is?” she murmured, grabbing an umbrella from by the door and heading outside.

“Okay!” Lin Ling called after her.

She had gotten half way across the courtyard, though, when the door opened anyway and her father escorted three others inside.

“Sorry, maybe they went out for food or…” her father trailed off as he spotted her walking down to meet them. “Or not…”

“Sorry, we just got home,” she apologized, retreating back into the shelter of the main hall and its overhanging roof as the group quickly hurried across the courtyard.

“It’s fine,” her father said, reaching the steps while the old man with him closed the door after a pair of women.

Going inside, she waited in the hall, wondering who they were, until her father led them all inside out of the rain, whereupon the old man divested himself of his umbrella, revealing himself to be Elder Ling.

“Elder Ling!” she said brightly, saluting him. “Sorry, I didn’t recognise you in the dark.”

“Me neither, apparently,” Kun Lianmei added drily, storing her own umbrella away.

“…”

The second woman also put away her umbrella, making her do a mental double take, because it was Ling Tao of all people.

“Lady Ling, Elder Kun,” she said quickly, saluting them both.

“Shall we go through?” Jun Han said, waving for the three to follow him through the hall to the smaller reception room beyond it.

“Please, lead on,” Old Ling said politely.

“Is it just you at home, Sana?” her father asked as they walked across the hall.

“Erm… Arai and Lin Ling are also here,” she replied. “They were going around putting lights on. We just got back, soaked, so we changed.”

“Dinner?” Jun Han added.

“Er… we got take out from Mrs Leng,” she coughed awkwardly.

“Hah… okay,” Jun Han chuckled. “Why don’t you put it out for our guests? We will eat inside, I suppose, given we are not many and it is raining outside.”

“Okay,” she replied and trotted off to the kitchen, leaving her father to show the three elders through.

“Who was it?” Lin Ling, who was sorting out the tea asked as she entered.

“Father,” she replied… then trailed off as Arai, dressed in a similar light robe to hers, skidded into the room as well.

“Sorry, I was changing,” her sister apologised. “Who was it?”

“Father,” she repeated. “Elder Ling, Elder Lianmei… and Lady Ling Tao are also here as well though,” she added, after Lin Ling had put the teapot on the table.

“That…” Lin Ling gawked.

“Oh,” Arai blinked.

“It’s possible father sought them out after you talked to him earlier?” she suggested.

“Possibly,” Arai conceded. “I mean, I did show him the ginseng, yes. And narrated the events and showed him the scans… Still, it’s a bit fortuitous…”

“Y-yeah,” Lin Ling nodded. “Given we spent a day and a half looking for them.”

“Can you get the food out and set places?” she added to Lin Ling and Arai as she picked up the tray of tea.

“Okay,” Arai nodded.

“Ling, can you help me carry this?” she added, gesturing to the plate of appetizers Mrs Leng had added in.

Lin Ling nodded, collecting it up and following her out of the room with care.

Heading through to the reception hall, they found Jun Han, Ling Tao, Old Ling and Kun Lianmei talking away quietly. She couldn’t hear what they were saying either, beyond observing that all of them looked concerned.

“We have tea and refreshments,” she declared, announcing her arrival.

“Ah, excellent,” Jun Han said, standing up and taking the tea tray off her while Lin Ling put the plates down on the table.

“We can eat food in a few minutes,” she added. “We are just sorting the kitchen out—”

“No problem,” her father nodded. “We will come through when you are ready.”

Bowing politely, they headed back to the kitchen and its associated dining area in silence, until Lin Ling said: “Do you get the impression there is some problem?”

“I do,” she grimaced.

Arriving back in the kitchen, she found Arai had set the places at the round table in the dining area, unpacked the food, put a pan on and was stir-frying noodles as well as quickly sorting through some greens from the garden.

“They are talking away about something, so they will be a while yet,” she sighed, accepting a cup of wine from the ones Arai had poured out for both of them and left on the side board.

“That is the way,” Arai agreed, rolling her eyes.

It took about ten minutes in the end, between the three of them to quickly add to the food Mrs Leng had given them, with a stir-fry, a salad of fish and cloud-rice and a quick expansion on the soup from lunch with extra greens and some pre-cooked meat. It was a bit hasty, but by the time they had it all on the table there was thankfully enough for seven people.

They had just finished tidying up the kitchen and making the dining area presentable, when Kun Lianmei came in.

“That smells delicious,” she declared, admiring the repast set out on the table.

“We did what we could,” she replied drily. “Much of it is Mrs Leng though,”

“Your part looks just as good,” Lianmei chuckled, giving her an encouraging wink and a grin. “When will we hear you have abandoned us for the mountain of spirit stones Leng Shuang can offer?”

“I doubt it, somehow,” she murmured, feeling a bit embarrassed as she fussed with the settings, while Arai and Ling both laughed in the background.

A few minutes later, Elder Ling and Ling Tao also came through with Jun Han, who took his usual seat also admiring the repast as they put together a few extra dishes from what was in the cupboard to supplement things – a rice and fish dish and some bitter greens from the garden mostly, along with the spicy and sweet sauces from earlier in the day.

“Sorry it’s a bit of a mix,” she apologised. “We were not expecting visitors…”

“Understandable,” Old Ling said amicably, “Our arrival here is unexpected, so we can only apologize.”

“Indeed,” Ling Tao said, giving her and Arai and Lin Ling encouraging smiles. “I did not expect to see you again so soon, but heaven moves in rather mysterious ways of late.”

“That is one way of putting it,” Old Ling agreed.

“We do have a matter we need to speak to you about anyway,” Arai added. “Though it can wait until after dinner.”

“Yes, Jun Han has explained some things,” Ling Tao agreed, then glanced at her. “Some other matters will take a little bit more I suspect.”

-Ah, of course, I got that spirit herb when disguised with Baisheng, she grimaced. He would not want that kind of disguise being uncovered and we even went to all the effort of disguising it…

-Though that means Ling Tao knows?

She caught Lin Ling’s sideways look but had no way to really reply to it.

“Elder Ling, if you would like to give the blessing?” Jun Han asked, turning to the old man who was now seated beside him.

“Hmm, yes of course, it is that day, isn’t it?” Old Ling replied with a twinkle in his eye. “In that case… hmmm… let me offer a toast to everyone.

“Great Emperor and Grandfather of all of the Heavens, Celestial Sovereign Supreme, you who rules the most August Throne and pronounces the Judgement of the Dao itself, we offer our thanks to you, on this most sacred day; to those who have come before, on behalf of those who stand among us and with those who will come after in our minds,” Old Ling stated, holding his wine cup in both hands.

“Praise be unto he, most High and Supreme, Celestial Sovereign of the Heavenly Chronogram.”

Lifting her wine cup, along with everyone else, she saluted the centre of the table where Arai had set up a small food offering of various fruits and spirit herbs from the garden with a pot of incense at the centre and a seated statue of an old man wearing an emperor’s crown.

“Praise be unto he…” she echoed, saluting the little ‘altar’ three times.

Normally, at this point, the ‘eldest daughter’ would dutifully serve everyone out a portion of a meal she had cooked, but because the portions were already served and half of it was take-out anyway, Arai just settled for passing the plates out to everyone in turn.

“Got to love these little rituals,” Lin Ling murmured softly to her, which made her roll her eyes as well.

“Thank you,” their father, who would usually have offered the toast Old Ling gave, stood and saluted everyone, once Arai had finished putting the last plate down, one that held only a paper chrysanthemum in the spot their mother would have sat in, then added, “Please enjoy the meal!”

“It does look delicious,” Kun Lianmei said, lifting her fork and tucking into it.

“It is,” Old Ling agreed. “Most… delicious.”

“You should be proud of your daughters,” Ling Tao agreed with an amused smile, helping herself to some of the salad. “Their talent for buying takeout is truly praiseworthy.”

“…”

“Their own cooking is quite nice as well,” Old Ling chuckled.

“It is,” Ling Tao laughed.

“So, what did you do with the afternoon?” Jun Han asked them as they started to tuck into the food. “You went to Misty Vale Village in the end?”

“That’s quite the distance,” Old Ling mused.

“We did,” Lin Ling confirmed. “And even took Bai Jiang and the others through the gate for a walk in the valley.”

“How did they take their first taste of the suppression?” their father asked with an amused smile.

“Quite well,” Lin Ling replied with aplomb. “Nobody ran away screaming.”

“Has that actually happened?” Ling Tao asked with a half-smile.

“Yes…” she replied, then had to pause so as not to start laughing.

“When we took a group in at the Three Gorges Valley earlier in the year,” Lin Ling continued on her behalf. “Several of that group broke down almost immediately after we teleported to the head of the valley and two of the disciples from Fan Star Pavilion by the coast nearly had a psyche break within thirty minutes.”

“Some people do not like to lose access to parts of their cultivation,” Old Ling observed. “The mountains are very honest in what they expose in people sometimes.”

“That they are,” Kun Lianmei agreed, between mouthfuls of spicy fried fish.

They chatted away about that for most of the rest of the dinner, sharing anecdotes and strange tales regarding the experiences of others in Yin Eclipse, which she had to admit was a pleasant change of pace.