Part 2 ~ Jun Sana – Misty Jasmine Inn, Yin Eclipse ~

-At this rate, with the number of people here, this is going to resemble a real inn, Sana thought to herself with a small chuckle.

Still, sitting in the kitchen, sorting through a large stack of spirit vegetation that the perimeter guards had brought in, Sana found herself reflecting that missions like this were always more boring than they initially appeared. Sure, they had been sent off in a great hurry, under something of an ominous cloud, but when you broke it down into tasks… they were basically up here for just under a month, with instructions to gather everything remotely shiny and not sweat the details too much.

“How are we doing?” Mu Shi, who had gone off to check on a few other tasks, asked, sticking her head around the door.

“Half of what they brought is poisonous,” she remarked drily, pointing to the discard pile on the floor. “But what we have is pretty good. Tell them the next time they go out to gather more of this…”

She tossed a stem of a long-leafed green shrub with smooth bark and tiny yellow flowers just starting to come into bud to Mu Shi. “It will go well in soup and has a good dose of yang life qi in it.”

“Oh, golden star ground-thorn,” Mu Shi murmured, catching the thrown plant.

“So, what is it you need?” she added, having expected Mu Shi to be gone a good while longer.

“Oh, I came to say we will have a crab in a few minutes,” Mu Shi answered.

“A crab…” she repeated.

“Yes,” Mu Shi said. “Shunfei was a bit cryptic, but it will be teleported in shortly, which I took to mean ‘imminently’.”

“Okay,” she murmured. “I’ll be out in a moment.”

Mu Shi nodded and left again.

Rather than leave immediately, she went over to the soup stock she was making, checked it quickly, and adjusted the ward stones in the formation providing heat for the cooker so it would just simmer. Only when that was done, and she was happy it would not boil over, did she head out after the other woman.

It was still raining outside, so they both waited in the shelter of overhang provided by the second story of the teahouse area.

“It’s not quite what you expect, is it?” Mu Shi remarked at last.

“This kind of thing?” she asked, gesturing around.

“Indeed,” Mu Shi replied. “I have to admit, I have gotten far too used to rough traversal of the terrain. It feels weird to be here, like this… unnatural almost.”

“It is, a bit,” she agreed, watching two of the young monkeys dance around in the rain, chasing each other and kicking water out of puddles.

Abruptly, the teleport area rippled and the rain falling twisted outwards for a moment—

A large crab, a jar with a seal on it, a large cloth bundle and large log appeared along with a small outwards cascade of dirt, forest detritus, some small rocks and a lot of water.

“They were not joking when they said they found a crab,” she observed, taking in the one and a half metre wide razor shell crab, before shifting her eyes to the log.

“That’s…” Mu Shi was already walking quickly over to the log.

“Well, I’ll be buggered by a monkey,” Mu Shi muttered, holding up the cloth sack for her as she came over as well. “These are lingzhi, and good quality ones as well. They hit a real prize here.”

“Uhuh,” she nodded, staring at the large specimen inside the split part of what had clearly once been a much larger tree trunk.

“GUYS!” she called, raising her voice. “GET OUT HERE, WE GOT WORK TO DO!”

Lianmei, Mo Shunfei, one of the other guards, Ling Jing Fan, and a second Beast Hunter who had been stationed up here with Kun Ji, Jiang Wushen, all appeared from various places in the building and store area to see what the fuss was.

“Oh, that is a prize,” Lianmei almost skipped over to the platform to admire the lingzhi in the trunk. “The quality… it’s basically seven star-grade as well.”

“She didn’t say the crab would be that big,” Shunfei muttered, staring at the upside down razor shelled crab critically.

“They took the core out as well,” Jiang Wushen added, stepping around it carefully to get to the pot and opening the top…

At that point she had to step back slightly, as a wave of remarkably pure qi washed out over them.

“Fates get it on…” Ling Jing Fan declared, staring at the core.

“Seven-star grade core,” Wushen whistled, turning the shimmering orb over in his hands.

“Seems it just moulted,” Lianmei observed, poking the crab, which had a faintly grey-green shell, with a blade. “The razor ridges on its shell are barely set.”

“Maybe it was using the lingzhi for its breakthrough?” she guessed, looking around. “I can’t say I am hugely familiar with them, beyond knowing that they are a terror to stand on.”

“They are,” Lianmei agreed. “Second largest cause of severe poisonings, after spiders.”

“I guess we will start breaking it up?” she added. “We can put some of it in the soup and cook the rest? It will help a lot with everyone’s recovery.”

“It will,” Jiang Wushen nodded, especially in this rain. “I can do the wet prep if you want, and teach the other guards how to do it?”

“Why don’t we split?” she mused. “I am happy to talk anyone who wants through storing this monster lingzhi, and the rest can get a primer in crab butchering? Unless you want to do that, Shi?”

“…”

Mu Shi pursed her lips and then nodded. “I’ll do the small lingzhi?”

“First, though,” Lianmei said, eyeing the detritus scattered across the platform, “we clear this lot up.”

“Yes boss,” she agreed, taking a spirit wood shovel out of her talisman and humorously saluting Lianmei.

It didn’t take long, really, to clear the formation area. The main impediment was that the chaotic spatial qi infusing the dirt prevented it from being put in a storage talisman or ring. For that to be possible, you had to have a ring made out of materials from Yin Eclipse, forged inside Yin Eclipse. If there was someone in the province able to grasp Spatial Laws while suppressed to Golden Core willing to do that, she had never heard of them selling their work either, so lots of things like that had to be done manually. You got used to it after a while, though it always amused her to see how frustrated people unused to this place got with such things.

Once that task was done, though, they were still left standing around staring at the log with the lingzhi attached to it, which had been dragged over to the sheltered area of the plaza.

“This is way too big for a normal crate,” Mu Shi remarked at last, as they stood there looking at it critically.

“…”

“Actually, we can use it to our advantage,” she mused, crouching down beside it to look at where it was joined to the trunk, the seeds of an idea forming in her head. “Spirit stones are useless for this stupid levy, but nothing says we can’t use them to feed some of these plants for the next week or two? We could split this a dozen ways and triple its biomass in that time, and probably consolidate its foundation.”

“You want to raise herbs up here?” Ling Jing Fan, who was standing nearby, having helped drag it over, asked her a bit dully.

“Why not?” she smiled. “And if we nurture it in here, we can nurture other things in here as well. Qi beasts won’t come in and the defences are pretty good.”

“That… okay…” Mu Shi nodded. “Mushrooms like this are easy to manage as well.”

“Indeed,” she agreed. “We just need to keep feeding it decomposing detritus and it will control the ambience. It’s nearly pure yang wood attributed; it’s not a longevity lingzhi, but it’s fate-thrashed close…”

“ELDER LIANMEI!” she yelled, standing up again and waving to Lianmei who was watching the butchering of the crab.

“What is it?” Lianmei asked, coming over to where they were, “A problem?”

“No, quite the opposite,” she said, then quickly explained her thinking regarding the best use of the large mushroom.

“…”

“I see,” Lianmei mused, eyeing the lingzhi with an appraising eye. “Okay, do that. Take what you need from the stores.”

“So, what do we need to do to set that up?” Mo Shunfei asked.

“Easy: grab me a dozen yin and yang attributed water ward stones from the main stores, the large ones,” she mused, walking around the torso-sized slab of a mushroom growing down the inside of the hollow piece of trunk. “And a crate, probably, to put this in, so it’s a bit easier to reposition once we take it inside.”

…

With four people to move it – her, Mo Shi, Mo Shunfei and Ling Jing Fan – it didn’t take long to haul the trunk inside, pick an empty side hall off the storage area and wedge the trunk and its lingzhi upright in a handy crate. In the end, taking what they needed from the stores, the whole thing took her about half an hour to set up, which was not bad, given the rudimentary tools she had to work with.

“I feel like this is almost too easy…” Ling Jing Fan muttered as they surveyed their handiwork. “We found this already… and we have only had folks out looking a few hours?”

“Hah…” she shook her head, failing to stifle an amused laugh.

“…”

“Sorry, I don’t mean it like that,” she said, smiling at Jing Fan, who she had learned was about Juni’s age. He was also one of the least experienced among the guards, having mostly just done ranging patrols through the Low Valleys, hunting bandits and criminals.

“As to why we don’t see more of them…”—she poked the crate with her foot—“This is a big one. How much do you think this might sell for?”

Jing Fan eyed it critically. “…An Earthly Jade?”

“Yeah,” Mu Shi mused. “That sounds about right.”

“Agreed,” she confirmed. “To get it out of here, though, you either have to carry it or teleport. We have over fifty miles of valley between us and Misty Vale right now… To teleport this that far might cost an Earthly Jade, just for the talisman.”

"—not counting all the resources you would have to spend getting in and out,” Mu Shi added.

“Oh…” Jing Fan nodded, understanding. “It’s just not cost effective.”

“Yes, and besides, it was being guarded by an Immortal qi beast, refined by it probably – to consolidate its breakthrough. You would have to fight it, and if you were on your own, suppression or no, that either costs you a lot in formations materials, expensive talismans and more…”

“When you put it like that…” Jing Fan mused.

“Everywhere you are losing money,” Mu Shi agreed. “Walking around up here, for a non-physical cultivator, is losing money.”

“So if you got this out, you would be selling it overseas,” she grinned wanly, “and the export tax on it would take thirty percent of your profit. So even if you sold it for four or five Earthly Jades, you might make… two Spirit Jades, maybe three, actual profit.”

Ling Jing Fan stared at the mushroom with a complex expression.

“That’s why you would usually take stuff like this,” Mu Shi pointed to a box on the shelves put up that held one of the smaller lingzhi. “Each of these would still sell for a Spirit Jade or three, and you can keep well over half if you are lucky.”

“So yes, that is the sad tale of why nobody sells eighty kilo, Immortal grade lingzhi down in the lowlands,” she concluded.

“Truly a cruel tale,” Ling Jing Fan agreed.

“However, here and now, where spirit stones can be spent like someone else’s problem…” she added with a mischievous smile.

“Quite,” Mo Shunfei agreed, rolling his eyes. “You could offset a fair portion of it selling the crab’s core though.”

“Yes, but you would have to kill it as cleanly as it was,” she pointed out. “Unless you brought an elite team like Juni has with her, that’s going to be a horrid job.”

“True,” Shunfei sighed. “Very true. Not to mention, just because shit is suppressed, doesn’t mean an Immortal realm beast is not absolutely a menace out here.”

They spent bit more time checking that the formations were working, turning other folks’ hard-earned spirit stones into mushroom, then split up to go back to their old tasks. By the time she got back to the kitchen, she found a large stack of crab meat sitting on the table, waiting for her attention, so she and Mu Shi got stuck straight into that, heating oil in a large pan and dumping a lot of it in that to fry up. The rest, she put in the soup, matching it with a few other bits of spirit vegetation so it would retain its original, creamy flavour and not end up tasting of river mud.

“The last time I ate crab soup, it was your sister who made it,” Mu Shi murmured, watching the soup start to froth.

“My condolences,” she chuckled.

Arai was just as technically competent a spirit food cook as she was, but seldom cared to take extra steps to ensure the food was more than tolerably tasteful unless forced by circumstances.

“Hah…” Mu Shi shook her head. “It was not that bad actually; she just dumped a fistful of fire peppers into it to hide the muddy taste, as I recall.”

“That does sound like her,” she agreed, before spotting Han Wushen walking across the common room.

“Oh, WUSHEN!” she called after him, to get his attention.

“Yes?” he said, changing direction and coming over to the doorway.

“Any news on either the rest of the group or Juni’s lot?”

“Juni’s group I dunno, but the teleports from the coast are delayed still. Apparently the wet season coming early has finally started to bear its fangs and the Rising Dragon Gales have started. The storm front down there is causing all sorts of difficulties and they don’t want to divert through another teleport formation I suppose, for security purposes. I imagine that that group will not come until the morning now.”

“Oh, okay,” she replied, processing that. “Thanks!”

“No problem,” Wushen replied. “Why do you ask?”

“Just thinking about when this can be served,” she waved a hand at the stuff in the kitchen. “If we are not getting a group imminently, I guess we eat after Juni’s group comes back and gets cleaned up?”

“I’ll ask Elder Lianmei what her thoughts are,” Wushen mused. “She is talking with Senior Ying at the moment.”

“Well, I guess the pressure is off,” Mu Shi remarked as they watched Wushen depart.

“Seems so,” she agreed, looking at the food they had been preparing.

~ Han Shu – Ling Tao’s Estate ~

Standing on a second-floor balcony, looking out at the distant swathe of light that was Blue Water City, where it sprawled along the Blue River Delta, visible like a bright scar beneath stormy dark clouds and scattered rain, Han Shu found he didn’t really know how he felt. Having to relive the experience of telling all those families about the deaths of their loved ones… or not so loved ones, had left him feeling drained, especially the later ones…

He never had gotten to tell Xuafan Xongbei’s sisters, who had become courtesans working for a gang, about his death, and the indifference shown by the adopted Lun Xanchang’s family or Chong Erwei’s parents who had had so many other children just left him feeling queasy, even now.

Seeing the nest… the reality of their dark tomb had only made it worse somehow. The quality of the ‘reconstruction’ was so good that at his realm, walking around in it, it felt indistinguishable from reality, though Arai had said she felt it a bit lacking in comparison to the ‘reality’. She was still talking with the disciples and Lady Ling Tao, who had returned with Madam Xianlian, the proprietress of the Cherry Wine Pagoda, of all people, about that, and, not really having anything to contribute, he had been left free to mind his own business…

“Ho! I didn’t think anyone else would be out here…”

He turned, partly because the greeting was… almost something Sana or Lin Ling might have said, to find a blonde-haired beauty wearing a gown in the blue, silver and gold of the Ling clan had joined him on the veranda, unnoticed by him.

“Uhh… sorry,” he apologised. “I was just wandering and found the view worth staying for… I can go…”

“Ah, no, it’s quite alright,” the young woman, who had more than a passing resemblance to Lady Ling Tao, replied, waving her hand absently. “I am also just wandering.”

“Han Shu,” he introduced himself.

“…”

“Miss Yu,” the girl said with a brief smile. “You are one of the Hunters?”

“I am,” he confirmed, not sure it was appropriate to ask who she was, or comment on why he was here in detail either.

“I am Lady Tao’s niece,” Yu said with aplomb. “I come stay here sometimes, when the city gets a bit frenetic, and with the storm coming I’d much rather be here than by the coast.”

“True,” he agreed, looking back at the distant slash of light further down-river, bright enough to reflect off the clouds themselves in the haze.

-Her niece, he mused. So she is at least a core member of the Ling clan…

His familiarity with them was non-existent outside the occasional mission and those were all handled via intermediaries. Yu wasn’t that uncommon a name as far as he knew, so that didn’t really help either. Asking who her parents were would be a bit rude in any case.

“So, what are you all doing around here?” Yu asked him, leaning on the veranda as well.

“Ah… it’s a mission,” he replied carefully. “I am actually here to provide information on the bandits and the contamination of the auction, Young Lady Ling.”

“Oh, that,” Yu nodded. “I was there; it was quite the show. Blood ling trees sure are terrifying.”

-That is probably an understatement, he reflected, though he didn’t say so out loud.

“That they are…” he said instead. “It seems they will investigate thoroughly.”

“That would be a first,” Yu chuckled. “The talk in the city already has it as wrapped up neatly. A plot by rebels who want to undermine the visit of the princess, or so they say.”

Having dealt with the aftermath of it for half a day, quite intensely, he had to draw on his mantra to hide his annoyance at how… laid-back… she seemed about the whole thing. It was not surprising, really. He doubted she had ever set foot in Yin Eclipse’s valleys, or even had the interest.

“That is what they are saying,” he agreed politely.

“…”

She gave him a look that was so sideways he wondered if he had screwed up suddenly, and that some hint of his annoyance had just crept out, but she just gave him a half-smile and shook her head.

“Oh, Yu, here you are…”

A second young woman, with long dark hair and flawless features, appeared… who, in comparison to the first, was nothing short of disturbingly beautiful, in ways it was impossible for him to articulate.

“Lingsheng…” Yu gave her a polite bow. “I was just looking for you.”

“Ah, sorry, I got caught up admiring the second hall. Were you looking long?” Lingsheng said with a slight smile that made his heart race for a moment before he forced his mantra to suppress his emotions.

“Nope, I was just chatting to Han Shu here,” Yu said with a bright smile. “Admiring the view.”

“Interesting,” she fixed him with a stare that seemed to travel right through him in ways that were decidedly uncomfortable, for just a hint too long, before turning back to Yu.

“Perhaps you want to join us?” Yu asked him.

“Join… you?” he asked blankly.

“We were heading back for dinner; it will be with my aunt and all the school disciples. If you are helping them, I am sure you are invited as well.”

“…”

He was very tempted to refuse, because it was quite calm and remote here, or had been, but it occurred that it would also be rather rude to refuse, especially if she was Lady Tao’s niece.

“Sure, I will accompany you back,” he replied politely.

Yu gave him another sideways look, that made him wonder suddenly if she had expected him to politely refuse.

He was about to open his mouth and beg her apology and do so, when she just smiled and patted his arm companionably.

“This estate is big enough for an army to get lost in,” Yu giggled.

“Yes, it is very impressive,” he agreed, allowing her to lead him back down the veranda.

They walked back through the estate towards the main buildings, Yu and Lingsheng chatting away about the gardens with surprising knowledge for two noble young ladies. They occasionally asked for his opinion on something, which he was happy to give, but mostly he listened and walked in silence, until they arrived at the main courtyard, where he found Arai waiting for him.

“Eh? Yu?” Arai yelled, waving, not at him, but Yu…

“ARAI!” Yu yelled back, running over and clasping her hands. “I didn’t know you were here. Why didn’t you say?”

“Because I didn’t know you were here either,” she laughed.

“You… know her?” he signed to Arai quickly as he followed Yu over.

“You… two have never met before?” Arai asked him, surprised.

“I, a son of the Han clan, am hardly in a position to socialise with the nobility of the Ling clan,” he signed back.

“…”

Arai stared at him for a long moment, then shook her head.

“Sana told me some of your troubles,” Yu said sympathetically, putting her arm through Arai’s. “It must have been terrible.”

“It was rather horrid,” Arai sighed. “But it’s mostly in the past now. Now all the focus is on this ‘gift’.”

“I know…” Yu sighed. “It’s terrible politics, another reason I came out here. The whole city is just…”

Lingsheng, who had come to stand beside him, sighed and shook her head.

“She really is a bit absent-minded,” she remarked softly, glancing at him, almost challenging him to comment he felt.

It took effort, and another solid intervention from his mantra, for him to limit his response to a polite half-smile.

“…”

“Oh, where are my manners? Arai, this is Lingsheng,” Yu said, waving at Lingsheng. “She is a distant cousin from Sky Song Province. She came here for the auction and is staying with the Ling clan.”

“Young Lady Lingsheng,” Arai said bowing respectfully to Lingsheng.

“Just Lingsheng is fine,” Lingsheng said with a smile. “I understand you are a good friend of Yu’s.”

“Yes, my sister and I have known her since we were…” Arai held out her hand, indicating an age when she was quite a bit younger.“…”

Listening to the exchange, an ominous feeling suddenly settled into his stomach, because there was a ‘Yu’ who was ‘friends’ with Arai and Sana in the Ling clan. Ling Yu, the daughter of Ling Yusheng… the Lord of the Ling clan.

-Was I just walking through the gardens chatting idly to the most influential junior in the whole province? he shuddered.

“Ah well, we will see you at dinner,” Ling Yu said brightly to Arai.

“Okay,” Arai smiled.

“…”

Lingsheng stared at him again, then nodded slightly as Ling Yu returned, grabbed Lingsheng’s arm and led her off.

“…”

“Was… that Young Lady Ling Yu?” he asked at last, once the pair had left the courtyard.

“It was,” Arai said, giving him a sideways look. “You have never met her before? Really?”

“You think I move in those social circles?” he grumbled, coming over to her. “I don’t think I have ever seen her without a veil, or not in a distant formal setting, before today.

“How did the consulting on the scans go?” he asked, to change the topic.

“Well enough,” Arai said with a grimace. “It’s kind of draining really. Ling Tao thinks they can use it to divine some of those responsible, especially paired with that ginseng I found. They started hunting for them today, using the rain as cover.”

“Hopefully they catch some of them,” he sighed, noting a puddle nearby ripple as a raindrop hit it. “Starting to rain again as well.”

“Yep. Let’s get inside; it would suck to get drenched just before dinner,” Arai grinned.

~ Jun Sana – Misty Jasmine Inn, Yin Eclipse ~

They spent almost another hour, in the end, doing various small tasks around the kitchen while cooking down portions of the crab, until Lianmei came and stuck her head in the door.

“We have another teleport coming,” Lianmei said.

“Oh, Kun Juni is on the way back?” Mu Shi asked, because at that moment she was busy transferring roasted crab into a bowl and putting it in the oven.

“Yes, their group is coming back,” Lianmei confirmed. “That smells excellent by the way, well done, both of you!”

“Thanks!” she called over, while Mu Shi just rolled her eyes and adopted an ‘of course it is’ expression. “It’s ready to eat, basically whenever.”

Putting the other bits of crab in a crate full of yin water ward stones to keep it fresh, she followed Mu Shi and Liamnei back out into the teahouse area.

“It’s still raining, huh?” she grimaced as Lianmei put a hat and a cloak back on.

“Yep, forever and always,” Lianmei sighed, kicking the double doors open with her boot.

Rolling her eyes, she followed after before they could close again, heading outside into the dusk. The falling rain and the evening light gave the gorge an eerie otherworldliness, assisted by the copious lanterns that had been hung up on buildings and around the teleport platform.

“They said they would be here in five,” Mo Shunfei said, meeting them at the steps down to the lower plaza. “And they have more supplies, a few more spirit herbs and another qi beast.”

“A productive afternoon,” she remarked.

“Indeed,” Lianmei agreed. “It bodes well for the weeks ahead, though maybe that is just because of that huge lingzhi. If I found that any other time I would probably spit blood and anger myself to death over leaving it up here.”

“It does have that vibe, yes,” she agreed drily, glancing up at the swirling dark clouds.

They only had to stand about for some two minutes before the familiar distortion swirled out of nothing on the platform, resolving itself into six people, a bedraggled monkey and a dead snake, along with two large jars and a lot of water and mud.

“Huzzzah!” Lin Ling declared, almost as soon as the ripples from the teleport vanished, before kicking the snake in the head, quite viciously.

“Welcome back,” Lianmei called over as they made their way onto the platform proper to look over the haul.

“Thanks…” Juni, wet to the bone and looking a bit tired, replied.

“You found a monkey?” she pointed to the barely moving furry bundle that Duan Mu was holding rather nervously.

“Uhuh, marooned in a tree, being stalked by this snake,” Juni nodded. “It managed to send Lin Ling swimming, but that was about it, before we got it. It’s not a very high realm beast though, barely Golden Core.”

“Stupid snake,” Lin Ling muttered, kicking it again.

Off across the area, she could see that the monkeys there had stood up, watching with interest.

“Well, everyone go get cleaned up,” Lianmei declared. “There will be… a feast of far too much crab for you when you are done.”

“That is the best news I have heard all day,” Ling Shun muttered with a tired grin, hefting one of the jars.

“What did you find?” she asked, going over and taking one of the handles to help him move it.

“This one is a six-star grade verdant flower lotus and the other one is about a dozen lesser variants of the same plant,” Ling Shun said as they walked it across the plaza and up the steps. “Fortunately we got the jump on it.”

“What about the monkey?”

“We stumbled across him looking for a place for a teleport anchor,” Ling Shun added. “The snake that was trying to get it went for Lin Ling instead, though it got shot full of arrows before it could do more than give Miss Ling a dunk in the swamp.”

“So, do we have a teleport point for tomorrow?”

“In theory, so long as nothing happens to it overnight,” Ling Shun sighed as they made their way into the storeroom proper. “Where do we put this, by the way?”

“I guess we go ask Shunfei for now,” she mused as they moved down the corridor towards the main hall. “I set up a room for the lingzhi, but this is not really suitable for that.”

“—Sealed pots?” Mo Shunfei called over from his desk by the locus in the main hall as they entered.

“Yep,” she confirmed. “Where do you want them?”

“Put them over by that wall for now,” Shunfei pointed to the side wall of the main hall. “That way they are both out of the way yet visible. What’s in them?”

“Angry water lotuses,” Ling Shun chuckled darkly as they carried it over to where he pointed.

“Is there any other kind?” Shunfei murmured with an amused, yet sympathetic expression.

“Not really,” she agreed, as they both put the pot down and gave its seals a cursory check. “Dinner is soonish, anyway, just so you know.”

“In the teahouse?” Shunfei asked.

“Yep,” she nodded.

“I’ll be there,” he sighed, sitting back and stretching.

“Still working on the locus?” she asked.

“Kinda. There are plenty of formations things to sort out, arrows to check, formation cores to go through,” he said. “We have a tonne of talismans… literally, in fact. Someone needs to go through and check that the bulk batches are not defective…”

“It may be that they send us more people,” she mused, looking around.

“I think so,” Shunfei agreed. “A proper talisman master for starters, maybe a formations person too.”

“If I recall, that was part of the agreement with the Cherry Wine Pagoda,” Ling Shun added. “The pair coming from there are both formations experts.”

“That will help matters along,” Shunfei agreed.

“We will leave you to it, then,” she said.

“I’ll stay and get caught up on the loci stuff,” Ling Shun told her. “I need to sort out talismans for my squad as well.”

Nodding, she left him to that and headed back outside, into the rain. Rather than go immediately back to the inn though, she walked across the plaza and past the monkeys, who grinned at her toothily from under the shelter of the veranda around the shrine courtyard, and went into the shrine, looking for Senior Ying.

The shrine itself was a cozy hall, lit by lanterns and smelling faintly of incense. It was constructed in a broad semicircle, such that none of the five statues had particular primacy over any other. Senior Ying was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the hall on a rush mat, almost like a monk, humming gently under her breath, the threads of incense smoke rising from the altars seeming to swirl faintly towards her in a rhythmic manner.

-So she really is tempering her comprehensions up here, she mused, taking off her hat and covering her head with a loose veil from her talisman.

Rather than disturb Senior Ying, she just stood there in silence and watched her for a few minutes, in respectful silence until the older woman stirred and let out a long breath, before turning to look at her.

“Sorry to bother you,” she saluted the woman politely. “Dinner will be ready soon, if you want to eat with us.”

“Ah, of course,” Senior Ying said, standing up and bowing to the four directions, before stretching. “I take it the group is back?”

“They are,” she answered. “They found a few interesting things as well.”

“It is an auspicious day,” Senior Ying mused, then noted her wearing of the veil and laughed lightly.

“…”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean it like that, Miss… Jun,” Senior Ying said with a faint smile. “You are just the first person in here in a long time who has bothered with a veil and it amused me.”

“Ah… oh,” she responded, a bit embarrassed. “My mother taught me to venerate the ancestors properly.”

Senior Ying nodded, bowed to the shrine of the Queen Mother of the East and then walked over to her.

“Senior Ying venerates the East?” she asked, surprised.

“All the Cardinal Courts are worthy of respect,” Senior Ying murmured. “I just happen to be touched by the East a bit more than the others. The hazards of living a long life I guess.”

“…”

She wasn’t entirely sure what to make of that, so she just bowed politely.

“Well, let’s go see about this dinner,” Senior Ying added.

They walked back out of the shrine, pausing to bow at the exit, and returned to the courtyard. The monkeys were watching the two younger ones, who were quite adorable, she had to admit, chase each other around like lunatics.

“Do… the monkeys want to come?” she asked, not at all sure what the protocol there was.

Senior Ying eyed her, then the monkeys, then her again.

“…”

“They will accept your hospitality and take some food they like,” Senior Ying said after a short pause.

The two monkeys from earlier grinned toothily at her and the whole group stood and shuffled after them.

~ Lin Ling – Misty Jasmine Inn, Yin Eclipse ~

“Whoever dreamed up these baths was a… a genius,” Lin Ling found herself declaring as she floated in the steaming pool in the women’s baths within the inn.

Somehow, someone had discovered that heating the water that came from the spring at the back of the room allowed the slightly divisive properties inherent to Yin Eclipse’s suppression… to work on tiredness and chill. Until Juni led her here, she had had no idea they even existed, let alone that a hot spring up here could have such an effect.

“It is… good,” Juni, who was lounging nearby in a shallower part of the pool, agreed. “Especially after an afternoon like that… How are your leg and neck?”

“Getting better,” she declared, standing up in the chest-deep water and rubbing her neck. “The snake was not that high a realm and I was only hit by its tail once. The water here even helps with that… I feel like my horizons have been broadened.”

“Indeed,” Juni nodded. “I’ve always suspected that it was a rather practical secondary consideration when they made this place.”

“Can you…?”

“Take it away?” Juni shook her head. “Nope, the water loses all efficacy within a short while, even shorter if you teleport it; the divisive property is very odd.”

“A pity,” she sighed, lying back again and staring at the ceiling through the swirls of steam. “So, what is the plan for tomorrow?”

“Assuming Arai and Han Shu can join us, and that we can get a boat, I think we go across the lake and scout this monkey valley, make a whole day of it,” Juni said after a short pause.

“—You two are still in here?”

She rolled over in the water and stood to find Elder Lianmei had come in and was standing on the side.

“Oh… dinner,” Juni sighed and stood up, water scattering off her.

“We will be right down,” she added, wading over to the side of the bath.

“Honestly, I was just checking where you were,” Lianmei grinned. “I know you are not as badly affected by the environment as the spiritual cultivators.”

“Nah, we will be down,” Juni said, “Sana and Mu Shi went to the effort to cook that stuff, so we can at least show our appreciation and eat it!”

“Hah… yes,” she agreed, pushing herself up onto the side and walking over to where her light robe and a handy towel were. “Did she cook the snake?”

“I believe it is grilling as we speak,” Lianmei remarked drily.

“Good, I will enjoy eating it,” she grinned, rubbing her neck again. “Stupid lizard…”

“A snake is not really a lizard,” Juni pointed out, also drying herself off.

“Shush!” she hissed back, not interested in hearing it.

After getting clothed again, she followed Juni and Lianmei back through the inn, into the common room… and immediately did a double-take as she saw the troupe of monkeys sitting in a corner tucking into a large plate of fried crab with obvious relish.

“…”

“Yes, Sana invited them for dinner,” Lianmei said with an eye roll. “I am not sure what bothers me more though: that they agreed, or that they thanked me for the invitation, not her.”

“I… see,” she murmured, giving herself a shake.

The others, those not out on tasks or keeping watch, were seated in the open area around two tables that had been pulled together. The repast was much as she expected, with a focus on spicy soup and crab, along with flat breads and a few other items brought up with them.

“Well, today is technically ‘Sovereign’s Day’, but I really don’t feel like saying anything,” Lianmei said drily. “Not only am I not a sovereign, but I feel like I have been ordered about quite enough by old men who fancy themselves so… eat up and enjoy!”

“Well said!” Senior Ying, who was also sitting at the far end of the table declared, applauding and laughing. “May the Grandfather of Heaven send that they be slapped by monkeys!”

“Is that not… inauspicious?” Ling Wentai muttered to Kun Ji.

Kun Ji pulled out a compass, somewhat humorously, she thought, and stared at it.

“Nope!” Kun Ji declared, before tossing it over his shoulder and grabbing his cup of wine. “I, for one, also salute our Grandfather of Heaven, and also hope that all old villains are slapped by monkeys!”

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the two smaller monkeys mime ‘slapping someone’ with interested expressions. One of the other monkeys laughed, while the others looked a bit confused.

“…”

Kun Ji, who hadn’t noticed, just downed the wine in one go, as did Ling Shun and Mo Shunfei, both struggling not to laugh, while Wentai just stared at his own cup, then sighed and followed suit, grinning wryly.

‘Ten Centipede’, one of the two older monkeys, saw her looking and grinned, then gave both younger monkeys a playful knock on their heads, and pointed back at the food, as if to say ‘don’t mind them, they are crazy, just eat your free food!’.

“…”

“They started drinking before eating,” Juni remarked as everyone else fell about laughing, Sana included.

“So did you,” she pointed out, giving herself a small shake and taking her seat beside Sana.

“Meh, I started drinking last week,” Juni retorted, sitting down on her other side and helping herself to a bowl of soup. “And if the Grandfather of Heaven makes it so that Grand Elder Jiang is slapped by a monkey in my sight, I’ll probably shave my head and become a shrine maiden in gratitude.”

“And not because he would try to find some way to blame it on you?” Kun Ji added drily.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the small monkey they had rescued stroking his chin contemplatively.

“Probably that as well,” Juni said with a theatrically sad sigh, studiously affecting not to notice it.

That largely set the tone for the meal, which was raucous and jovial, fit for the ‘inn’ in which they were eating it. With the monkeys – including, she realised the rescued one, which was at their table and had claimed a whole jar of wine for itself – it was also faintly absurd, which was also… she had to admit, a fit for the ‘inn’ in which they were eating.

Sana and Mu Shi vanished to the kitchen after an hour or so and returned with a large plate of roasted snake, which everyone, monkeys included, also devoured with relish.

At some point, Ling Shun and another of the guards, Ling Jing Fan, produced musical instruments, a lute and a drum, and started to play various songs, first just instrumental as the meal continued, but eventually all four guards joined together to sing a rather drunken rendition of ‘My Dear Azure Flower’, which was famous enough that basically everyone who had ever been in a teahouse knew it.

Ling Shun started off, surprising her by having an excellent singing voice.

“Though I have walked ten thousand years,

And seen ten thousand worlds.

No beauty have I seen since then

Who could compare to yours.

As you stood above the southern gate,

And waved us off to war.

Yours is the face I see at night,

My dearest azure flower.”

Wentai, Jing Fan and Mo Shunfei then picked up the second verse

“No sovereign’s daughter, fair and proud,

No fairy from a shining sect,

No Lady in a gilded hall,

No Saintess of the stars above,

Had words to keep me long.

For still my heart holds dear your song,

My truest azure flower.”

At that point Juni also got out her flute and joined in playing as well, while the rest of them, her included, picked up the next verse. In the end, they sang five more verses, of varying degrees of canonicity, until at last Senior Ying also joined in.

“Though I have lived ten thousand lives

And will fight ten thousand more,

No beauty have I seen since then,

Who could compare to yours.

As you stood above the southern gate,

And sent us off to war,

Yours alone, is the face I see at night,

My lonely azure flower.”

They sang two more verses after that, before returning to the original one to finish it off, at which point everyone applauded, a bit drunkenly at that point, including the monkeys, rather humorously.

“I can’t say I have ever heard that verse before,” Ling Shun remarked, as Sana went to get more food.

“It’s from the version I knew when I was young,” Senior Ying remarked drily. “I’d be surprised if you did know it.”

“I think there are as many versions of that song as there are people who have been in teahouses,” Lianmei giggled.

“That is most certainly the case,” Senior Ying agreed. “Songs about love and home are always popular, especially when their symbolism cuts a bit deeper than you expect.”

“If only the same held true for cultivation laws,” Ling Shun joked.

“That the ones which you can recite half drunk in the mountains are the ones with symbolism that cuts deeper than you expect?” Mu Shi remarked with an amused laugh.

“When you put it like that, it was not a well thought out comparison,” Ling Shun conceded.

“No… it is not, Sergeant,” Ling Fan agreed with a grin.

“—More soup?” Sana, who had just returned with the serving bowl refilled, asked her as she sat back down.

“Did you make enough to feed an army?” Mo Shunfei chuckled, dipping his own bowl straight into the large one.

“There is a lot of crab,” Sana pointed out.

“A loooot of crab,” Mu Shi agreed, pouring herself more wine.

“I made enough to feed maybe ten more people,” Sana added.

“Oh, yeah,” Mo Shunfei conceded.

“Though with the monkeys, will that be enough?” she wondered, noting that they had almost polished off their share as well.

“Probably. If it comes to it we can just quickly make some more food anyway,” she laughed.

After that, they sang a few more songs, until eventually events sort of became a bit hazy for her.

…

...

When she basically recovered, she found herself lying in a bed, in one of the rooms of the inn, with Sana next to her, sound asleep.

“Uggh…”

She sat up, and got a nasty shock as her head felt like it was going to dissociate from her body. She just about managed to avoid puking on the floor and instead flopped back onto the bed and stared at the wooden ceiling.

“You’re up…”

She rolled over, slowly, to find Mu Shi, wearing a light robe, sitting by the window, reading a book. Belatedly she also registered that the light outside was slightly grey.

“Sunrise?” she blinked.

“Yes, it’s just before dawn,” Mu Shi replied.

She tried to move again and found her eyeballs hurt.

“Is this the first time you have ever drunk spirit alcohol up here?” Mu Shi remarked drily.

“I… have a hangover,” she groaned, realising what was what.

“You do,” Mu Shi agreed. “Did you forget that the suppression also means that can happen?”

“I…”

She had, she realised, in the joviality of the previous evening. Likely the spirit alcohol had been strong stuff as well. That was the problem with having a mantra and a physical cultivator’s constitution, it was easy back in town to forget that that stuff could be potent.

“I didn’t do anything stupid did it?” she asked, apprehensively, trying to review events and not having any luck.

“Like get naked and fight with a monkey?” Mu Shi asked…

“…”

She stared dully at the other woman.

“No, you did not…” Mu Shi said blandly, making her sigh in relief. “Eventually Sana just carried you up here, then fell asleep herself… Neither of you realised this was my room…”

“Hah—” she managed to stop herself laughing, just about. “Sorry.”

“It’s fine, I only came up here an hour ago and both of you are very quiet, so I just left you to it. A few hours’ sleep up here can help a lot.”

Putting her hands over her face, she focused on her mantra a bit, but it only did so much, and that ‘much’ was not a lot.

“If you want to sober up fast, go to the baths,” Mu Shi added, guessing quite accurately what she had just tried to do.

“I have to walk there, though,” she groaned, trying to move again and failing.

“…”

Mu Shi stared at her in amusement, then just shook her head and went back to her book, which she could see now was an old volume of ‘One with the Spear’.

In the end, she waited for Sana to wake up and they both went to the baths together. True to what Mu Shi said, they did indeed help, significantly, and after only twenty minutes of lying in the warm, soothing water, the fog-like after effects of the first hangover she had had in a good few months faded away.

“Uggh, I forgot how obnoxious hangovers can be,” Sana groaned at last.

“Uhuh,” she said, still not willing to nod, even though the worst of the symptoms were gone. “Though it’s not like there are many opportunities to get drunk up here.”

“—and live to remember it,” Sana agreed.

“You two are fast off the mark for the state of intoxication you left in…”

She looked up to find Lianmei had entered the baths, followed by Juni.

“Mu Shi recommended we come here…” she explained, a bit aggrieved that neither older woman looked particularly the worse for wear.

“Us hardened old women are better at holding our alcohol,” Lianmei snickered.

“Who is old,” Juni grumbled.

“…”

Lianmei shook her head, then stripped off her own robe and slipped into the water, sighing happily. In the process, she couldn’t help but notice that the Pavilion Elder had several really nasty scars on her body.

Catching her look, Lianmei sighed. “I got those in the Blood Eclipse. I think I keep them as a reminder that that bastard Yeng Illhan’s corpse was never found.”

“…”

“That’s the person that might be behind the blood ling contamination?” she asked.

“Or some of his teachings,” Lianmei added with a further, deeper sigh. “Still, best to let people like Lady Tao deal with that.”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to bring up bad memories,” she apologised.

“It’s fine,” Lianmei said, shrugging.

“Popular,” Senior Ying who had also walked in, added, surveying the four of them. “I had rather gotten used to having this place to myself.”

Before she could say anything, the other woman also stripped off her robe and slipped into the water with a sigh.

They lounged around in the baths for about another half an hour, everyone mostly just happy to relax in silence, before Lianmei was called away by Mu Shi.

“I suppose we should go sort breakfast,” Sana sighed, hauling herself up on the edge of the bathing pool.

“We?” she grumbled, wanting to stay in the water a bit longer, in all honesty.

“I did have to carry you to bed…”

“In the wrong room,” she pointed out.

“Nobody’s perfect,” Sana muttered, her response garnering laughter from Juni, Lianmei and Senior Ying.

“I suppose that’s fair,” she conceded.

Sighing, she swam over to the edge and hauled herself out. Going over to her clothes, she towelled herself off, tossed on a fresh robe for her storage talisman and tied her hair back in a crude ponytail so it could dry while staying out of the way.

Heading to the kitchens with Sana she found that the inn was… gratifyingly quiet. Had the others been bustling about, she felt she would have been rather put out really.

“What should we prepare?” Sana asked.

“This is a trick question, right?” she replied drily.

“That’s a winner!” Sana grinned. “Go put the crab soup on, unless you want it cold.”

“…”

Shaking her head, she took the bowl and put it on the stove, igniting the fire element spirit stones inside it and adjusting the formation accordingly. By the time the soup was boiling, Juni and Senior Ying had also appeared, as did Duan Mu, also looking rather bleary-faced.

“You forgot that you could get a hangover up here?” she asked him as he stumbled over to the table and poured out some herbal tea from a pot Sana had made.

“…”

“—s not right…” Duan Mu mumbled.

Her mood lifting slightly, knowing she was not alone in that experience, she went back to watching the soup, humming under her breath.

“I have good news and tepid news,” Liamnei said, coming in after Duan Mu.

“Tepid first,” Sana said promptly.

“They are not sending people before lunch,” Lianmei said promptly.

“And the good news?” she asked.

“They are happy to risk sending inanimate objects, so we are getting boats and most of the supplies in thirty minutes,” Lianmei added.

“So… the morning’s plan is… we cross the lake, and make it to somewhere where we can set up an intermediary teleportation point?” Sana mused.

“That seems like the best use of time, yes,” Lianmei agreed. “I talked ideas over with Juni and Sergeant Shun last night. “The consensus was that you Hunters will be best used as the trailblazers. We will send you up in day or two long hops to set up teleportation points that we can then use to drop teams in behind you.”

“So… we go in, sweep for dangers, secure temporary bases and then a second group comes in behind?” she said, nodding.

“Yes, this also means that less experienced Hunters can be deployed in larger teams to sweep.”

“That… might backfire,” Sana noted.

“The announcement of the gift goes live tomorrow anyway,” Lianmei said.

“I thought it was today?” she said, sure she had heard something to that effect said.

“Dawn on the first day of Rising Dragon,” Lianmei said. “Tomorrow. The truth of it will probably reach most major clans by today though. It’s the announcement from the Imperial Court that is supposed to be today.”

“Not at dawn though, unless we are so out of the loop nobody cares to tell us what it is,” Sana noted.

“These declarations of when things will arrive are all the whims of old fogies playing for stupid prizes,” Lianmei grunted. “What is going on down there is not our problem anyway. In any case, we will grab breakfast, then a team of six of you will take the boats and cross the lake, once they arrive.”

“Assuming they arrive in one piece…” she murmured, then immediately felt bad for saying that out loud.

“…”

Sana had to put her hand over her mouth, and even the hung-over Duan Mu coughed trying not to laugh.

“Yes,” Lianmei agreed, giving her a sideways look. “Assuming they arrive in one piece.”

…

They had just finished their breakfast – of crab soup and toasted flatbreads – when Mo Shunfei came in and cheerfully told them all that the teleportation would arrive in a few minutes.

Finishing off her second bowl of soup, she took a final piece of bread and shuffled out after him and Lianmei, as did Sana and Duan Mu, putting on a cloak and hat to ward against the rain, which was still drizzling persistently. The three of them waited in the shelter of the awning set up the previous day, until, after about five minutes, the teleport formation distorted, scattering a corona of water vapour and rainbows everywhere as space destabilized—

*Crrrrrrrak*

The sound of displacing air made her ears ring as a small vortex of rain obscured everything for a few seconds.

“No wonder they don’t want to send people,” Duan Mu muttered as everything settled back to normal.

“Probably that would be fine,” Lianmei chuckled, heading out of the shelter towards the platform. “You might vomit up your breakfast though.”

“…”

Shaking her head she followed the others out after Lianmei, to stand by the platform and inspect what had been sent.

“I somehow expected them to send smaller boats,” Duan Mu said after a moment, as they took in the pair of seven-metre-long river skiffs.

“So long as they fit in a storage talisman or ring it’s all good,” Lianmei mused, walking over to the nearest one and peering inside. “They gave us masts and sails as well, for what good that will do.”

“The supplies are all okay,” Sana added, from where she had gone over to look at the other pile of goods. “And we have two pill crates of base building pills.”

“Hmmm…” Lianmei nodded, giving the boat beside her a light shove. “Okay, take the crates in. I’ll move these somewhere less annoying.”

“Working… Ho!” Sana declared, humorously, grabbing the two stacked crates of base building pills.

“Oh come on, are all the others iron bars or something?” Duan Mu grumbled, picking up another crate and grunting.

“Nope, stable jades,” Lianmei called over.

Walking over, she opened a crate and found it full of fist-sized dull green cubes marked with some very fancy formation work. Stable jade cores were effectively used as secondary cores for a temporary teleport formation. Their purpose was, as the name implied, to stabilize the alignments around a formation and stop it doing unpredictable things. Normally the ones built into a teleport talisman were sufficient, unless you were doing very big hops or transporting a lot, but up here, any hop larger than a few miles would likely need at least one on either end, if not two.

“We didn’t have these yesterday?” she noted, picking her crate up.

“Yesterday we didn’t know the Rising Dragon Gales would come early,” Lianmei called over.

“Another fine win there for diviners everywhere,” she observed, starting towards the store house.

“Yep, our diviners are very fine, the best people, apparently,” Lianmei agreed, rolling her eyes.

It took them about twenty minutes to store all the goods away, by which point preparations for the day’s trip were also well underway. Returning to the boats, which had been moved over to beside the awning and were being curiously inspected by the monkey they had rescued the previous day, she found Juni, Lianmei and Senior Ying in discussion.

“Ah, there you are,” Lianmei said waving to her and Sana to come over.

“If you are up for it,” Juni added, looking at them both, “the team to cross the lake will be the pair of you, me, Mu Shi, Kun Ji and Jiang Wushen.”

“Sure,” she nodded, having expected as much.

“Okay,” Sana nodded.

“I will come with you to the lake, with Ling Shun, Duan Mu and Ling Fuhan, drop one of the boats off for you then we will hike back to take a look at the valley a bit more,” Lianmei added.

“Will they store in a talisman?” she asked, eyeing the one next to them.

“Yes,” Juni nodded. “Though there is not much space left for anything else.”

“At least we won’t have to leave it,” Sana mused.

“Indeed,” she agreed, peering inside it.

“We will teleport out as soon as everyone is ready, pack expecting to be out for a full day,” Juni said brightly.

“Of course,” she nodded, as did Sana.

It took them about twenty minutes, all told, to grab what supplies they needed and meet back at the teleport platform. Mostly, the gear was the same as the previous day, so the main addition, for her anyway, was more purification pills and spirit food.

Once the test that the teleport anchor had not moved was complete, achieved by sending a large rock through to the other end and watching the brief snapshot of the destination, which was the same bit of open jungle clearing she recalled from the previous day, they all assembled on the teleporter and watched as Mu Shunfei went around and checked all the spirit stones.

“Everyone ready?” Lianmei asked at last, once Shunfei had confirmed all was as it should be.

The nine of them all nodded.

“Teleport in five, four, three… two… one…”

Lianmei counted it down while pushing a thread of qi into the talisman she held in her hand. At one, the space around them twisted and she felt a deeply unpleasant lurch, as if someone had grasped her stomach and tried to yank it through her pelvis—

The world around them resolved into wet sedge and scattered tropical trees—

Expecting the drop, she crouched in mid-air and landed in knee-deep water a moment later with a splash.

“Not bad, we are only thirty metres out,” Juni said, having also landed as she did.

“It does confirm the need for stable jades though,” Ling Shun added, coming over.

“Agreed,” Juni said.

“EVERYONE HERE?” she called out.

A chorus of six confirmations rang out from nearby as the others made their way over.

…

Once they had gotten their bearings, it didn’t take long to navigate the half mile to the proper edge of the flooded forest, where they had rescued the monkey the previous day.

“Ah, I see, there is a ruin over there,” Lianmei mused, staring out at the choppy water, split by trees and a few barely visible stone walls.

“Yes, that is where we came from yesterday,” she added, pointing roughly south-east. “You can walk across most of that; the water is only a metre deep for the most part. It shelves rapidly though, about a hundred metres out to the east, where there is a fault running right down the valley—”

“—Where the line of trees are?” Lianmei asked.

“Uhuh,” she nodded.

“Based on our recovery of the lingzhi yesterday, it’s probably flooded to between three and five metres,” Duan Mu added.

“A lot of water,” Jiang Wushen mused, staring out at the new lake, its far shore lost in haze and trees.

“Yes, well, there is a lot of rain coming off East Fury,” Lianmei sighed. “Do you want the boat here, or shall we go closer?”

“Its draft is shallow enough that we can start here,” Juni said after a moment’s contemplation. “We will report in to Mo Shunfei every thirty minutes.”

“Okay,” Lianmei nodded, holding out her hand—

The boat appeared with a splash in the shallow water. Experimentally, she gave it a push and found it moved freely.

“I have the mast and sails stored,” Juni added, turning to the rest of them, six paddles and a longer pole appearing in her hand in rapid succession as she dumped them into the boat. “We can probably punt it most of the way to the deeper water.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Kun Ji agreed, before glancing at her. “Do you want to keep the map again, Ling?”

“Sure,” she agreed, nodding as she poked her scrip and starting it on doing that again.

“Okay, we will watch you out, then start back,” Lianmei said, stepping back. “Good luck!”

“Same to you!” Juni replied.

“Uhuh!” she agreed, waving at the group of four.

“Stay safe,” Mu Shi added.

“Good luck,” Kun Ji and Jiang Wushen both echoed.

“…”

“Ling, you are lightest. Do you want to go in the boat and pole it?” Juni asked her.

Nodding, she vaulted in and picked up the pole as the others scattered to the sides, Jiang Wushen taking up position ahead.

She had not, in truth, done much with boats, but punting skiffs was something she was vaguely familiar with, as it was a popular pastime in the summer months when the Blue River was not a swollen death trap, so it only took her a few tries to get used to the rhythm of the vessel as she pushed it onwards.

It took them about thirty minutes to make it to the deeper water, a task managed entirely without incident, which was somewhat unnerving really. At that point, the others got in and they started paddling, with her now acting as the person steering using the rudder at the back.

“I have to say, this is unnervingly scenic,” Mu Shi declared after some ten minutes of steady paddling out into the flooded forest, drifting between trees. “I keep expecting something to happen… and yet…”

“Probably most of the active threats were washed away when it flooded,” Jiang Wushen replied, from the front, where he was keeping watch and occasionally feeding her course corrections. “I’ve seen a few large fish in the water, but that’s about it really.”

“Nothing much in the trees either,” Kun Ji remarked. “Though this valley is fairly… low maintenance. I’ve seen areas of the Low Valleys that are more dangerous to be honest.”

“Still, let’s not lower our guard,” Sana added. “If the boat sinks it’s a long trip back jumping between trees…”

“Quite,” Mu Shi agreed.

Quite against the run of that statement though, the next four hours were… boring. They had one encounter with a tree spider that tried to jump into the boat, but that was about it. Eventually they made it out of the flooded forest and into choppier, open water where the original river valley would have been, and even there, the crossing was… basically routine. There were a few things in the water, it was clear, but nothing was interested in poking a boat, and they made no effort to antagonise anything either. The greatest difficulty, if it could be considered as such, was actually the current within the water, but even that was not very harsh, given the sheer breadth of the flooding.

“Do we go back into the trees or go upstream like this?” Juni finally asked Jiang Wushen as they approached the far side of the open water.

“I… think we should probably stay out here,” Jiang Wushen replied after some consideration. “There is not that much in the water that’s dangerous beyond razor shell crabs and the odd serpent, given that the valley is fed by waterfalls.”

“And by comparison, there may be things stuck in the trees quite happy to take a punt on us,” Mu Shi added.

“Uhuh,” she agreed.

The spider had jumped for Sana, not her, but the bruises from the snake the previous day were still fresh in her memory.

“I dunno. I found having to punch an invisible spider the size of a dog in the face… invigorating,” Sana said sarcastically.

“So that’s a full vote for river then,” Juni remarked drily.

“Yep!” they all chorused.

They spent the next two hours, almost until midday in fact, paddling upstream, until finally they started to see rising trees in the distance to their right.

“The waterfall the monkeys talked about should be about two miles north-east of us,” Jiang Wushen said, standing up in the boat and shading his eyes to peer through the rain.

“From the map, it looked like it was close to the lake edge?” Juni said.

“Yep,” Jiang Wushen confirmed. “The flooding will make it much easier to approach. Normally that whole side is a foetid swamp full of snakes and insects.”

“Having it a metre underwater will make it fairly trivial to bypass,” Kun Ji agreed.

“I’ll report in then, that we are making progress,” Juni said, taking out the talisman.

They sat there in silence while Juni stared into nothing for a minute, before speaking again.

“Lianmei’s group have gotten back okay. They killed another snake and found some tree orchids. The others are due within the hour as well,” Juni summarized.

“That all?” Mu Shi asked.

“Yes,” Juni confirmed, putting the talisman away.

“Well then, let’s go find a waterfall,” she said brightly.

“Waterfall, waterfall, waterfall,” Sana added, humorously.

“Enough, you two,” Juni said with a chuckle.

“Come on, at this rate we are going to have to start playing music or something to keep us alert,” Sana said.

“Tempting, but no,” Mu Shi said, rolling her eyes. “Let’s not jinx matters.”

“I know…” Sana sighed, her tone turning serious again. “But this is fate-thrashed unnerving.”

The others all nodded at that. It was undeniably a bit disconcerting to have gone all this way and basically encountered no real danger at all.

…

The ‘waterfall’, when they found it, was not quite what she was expecting. The swamp Jiang Wushen had talked about was totally gone, visible only from the odd tree and rocky outcropping. Beyond it, a raging torrent poured down out and eroded gorge, scattering into a dozen lesser waterfalls that scattered a small bank of mist across the base of the cliffs.

“So, how do we get up that?” she asked at last as they observed from as close as the swirling currents easily allowed them to remain still in the water.

The forested slopes of the ridgeline effectively adjoined a new lake at this point, with very few places to easily start the ascent.

“Good question,” Jiang Wusheng agreed.

“I guess we can go to the edge of the swamp and work our way around?” Mu Shi suggested.

“It’s that or go straight up the edge of the main torrent,” Sana noted. “Didn’t the monkeys say that was the way to go?”

“They did,” Juni grimaced. “However, what is doable for a monkey up here is not necessarily so easy for us.”

“The issue I can see is that those slopes will be a flooded, muddy mess,” Kun Ji mused. “Not to mention there may be landslips and other waterfalls we can’t see.”

“Yeah… I suppose so,” Mu Shi conceded.

In the end, they decided to at least attempt to follow the guidance given. As Kun Ji had pointed out, the slopes of the ridgeline were a tangled mess of sheer cliffs and disrupted terrain. Guiding the boat close enough to the southern side of the waterfall, they soon started to find fallen trees in the water and evidence of at least one large rock fall. Their eventual disembarkation point was almost on the edge of the u-shaped gorge, which up close, turned out to be the least sheer part of the whole spur descending down off East Fury.

Storing the boat away, they climbed the first hundred meters to arrive at a shelving ledge covered in dense vegetation… and, rather surprisingly, a fairly straightforward path up, formed by a much older erosion event where a portion of the cliff face had slumped down and formed a secondary pillar with a gap in-between.

“Turns out monkeys know what they are about,” Mu Shi conceded, as they considered the route up between the pillar and the cliff.

“Yeah, although it’s still really sheer,” Jiang Wushen mused.

“Well, none of us are any stranger to climbing,” Juni sighed, withdrawing a length of rope from her pack. “Who wants to go first?”

“I should, probably,” Kun Ji said with a degree of amusement. “It is my job, after all.”

“Nah, I’ll mark the path,” Jiang Wushen said, shaking his head. “You’re better at divination so if I fall to my death you can at least find my corpse afterwards!”

“…”

She wanted to think they were joking, but really, they were not.

“Nobody is going to be falling to any death,” Juni muttered, passing the rope to Jiang Wushen who just rolled his eyes.

Once Juni had checked in again with the inn, Jiang Wushen slowly started to make his way up the sheer, slippery rocks. The order of ascent was set as him, then her, because she was, again the lightest among them, so the best placed to check his path and ensure that the ropes were secure, then everyone else with Kun Ji coming last.

Their ascent to the first obvious stopping point took about ten minutes, which was… not as long as she had anticipated. She had expected that there would be algru on the rocks and all sorts of annoying ferns and such, and there certainly were those things, but in nothing like the quantities she might have reasonably felt should be there.

“I agree, it’s a bit disconcerting,” Jiang Wushen agreed, when she commented as such once they got to the top of the first tumbled slab and had secured the final ropes. “However, at this point… I say we just accept it and see how far this takes us. I am all for this place being this humane.”

“I know,” she sighed, waving the others down below that they could start up. “However, it doesn’t mean it isn’t gnawing at me like some sage cutter ants.”

“I know what you mean,” Wushen agreed sympathetically.

Once the others had reached their point, they started up again, repeating the same process. It took them three relays to get to the first proper levelling off, with the last one finally presenting a proper threat, which did, admittedly explain a lot of the lack of earlier threat – hook bats.

“So, hook bats, eh,” Juni said, once they were all safely up and past the nest.

“Well, it was expected we would meet something,” Sana remarked sagaciously.

“And it does explain the lack of other threats,” she agreed.

‘Bats’ were not especially scary; hook bats, however, got their name because they had talons and hunted in swarms. Their favoured strategy was to dive at prey en masse, drag it up high into the air and then drop it to its death. It worked because the swarms were huge: even a small one, like they found slumbering in a very innocuous-looking crevice, had hundreds of individuals. The average strength of the flying rats tended to be around Golden Core as well, and with the suppression, no individual cultivator would stand any kind of chance against a few dozen of them without a lot of talismans, let alone a hundred or more angry flying ones with poisonous claws and little regard for individual safety.

“How much further do you think the top is?” Mu Shi mused, peering up into the mist that wreathed the cliffs.

“Hard to say,” she sighed, having long since stopped worrying about that. It was hard enough to climb the slabs anyway, without distractions like wondering when it would be over.

“I reported in while you were climbing, by the way,” Juni added. “The next group have arrived and are getting settled in. If we want an extra person or two and can set up a formation, Arai and Han Shu are both happy to join us.”

“Not here, I think,” Kun Ji remarked drily.

“No, not here,” Juni agreed. “But more hands will certainly help once we get into the valley proper, if it is untouched.”

“Do we even need to ascend over the ridge line though?” Sana asked, peering across the top of the slab they were on.

“…”

That thought had occurred to her as well, before they found the hook bat crevice, though she had not had the opportunity to voice it yet.

“I think we could,” she added. “We are above the level of most of the waterfalls at this point, so we could follow this edge of the slab to the far end and see what is around the corner?”

Jiang Wushen frowned for a moment, but to her mild relief, the experienced, older Hunter did also nod after a moment. “Looking is not a bad idea, next section is really sheer, and we will be climbing into that mist,” he mused, squinting along the water-worn surface.

“We can swap leads for a while as well, if either of you need a break,” Juni suggested.

“I am happy to take over Ling’s spot,” Mu Shi volunteered, even as Sana opened her own mouth, then shut it again and puffed out her cheeks.

-Both of them must be feeling a bit unused, she guessed. This plethora of competence is not the usual experience for any of us.

“I am okay for a while yet,” Wushen said with a grin, though he did sound a bit fatigued.

She was okay, largely because of her physical cultivation and being the second in line. Most of her exertion had come on the last section, where they had had to free-climb a good way around the crevice to avoid the bats.

“I am fine for a bit longer. Thanks though,” she said with a smile.

“Okay,” Mu Shi nodded. “Don’t push yourself too hard though!”

-Please don’t let me regret that, she though wryly, starting off along the ridge line, with everyone following this time.

Somewhat to her surprise, though, there was a path, albeit a rather precarious one, around the corner. At this height, she could see why there was a U-shaped valley there at all. The waterfalls were slowly eroding out a ripple in the bedrock, the slabs falling down being parts of one of the undulations that were breaking away slowly under the erosional influence of millions of tonnes of water pouring over the tops of them and seeping down into the fissures between them. As such, the whole valley was slumping down, slowly, into the swamp below.

The waterfalls themselves fed a large pool in the middle, which would once have been the source of the main waterfall pouring down into the swamp. Now, with the slump they were navigating, it was split into a dozen smaller ones.

“We should be able to go straight across there?” she pointed along the level they were on, where various parts of the folded rock strata conspired to form the highest of several steps up the sides of the valley.

“And get over into the next one,” Jiang Wushen agreed, pointing to two other fissures where the ridge had split off and collapsed outwards.

“Yeah,” Juni, who had come forward to join them, also agreed. “We only have to cross two smaller waterfalls as well.”

Despite having a clear goal though, it still took them almost another hour and a tortuous hidden climb past a third waterfall to finally cross the whole ridge line and arrive at an elevated vantage point where they could look out over the valley beyond, which was feeding the waterfalls. The area beyond it was a tangled swathe of verdant forest, nestled between tall massif pillars the tops of which were hidden in low cloud.

“Well, it certainly looks promising,” Sana declared at last as they all took in the vista below them.

“There are even some ruins there…” Mu Shi noted, pointing to a distant series of angular ‘features’ on the nearest massif pillar.

“Where should we put down a teleport formation?” she asked, looking around pensively.

Their current spot was not bad, in that regard, though it left little room for potential deviation. That was why nobody had suggested it yet, she was sure. If you got more than a few metres’ deviation you would end up tumbling down a sheer rock face to a rather stupid death.

“Probably down where the slope opens, towards the waterfalls,” Kun Ji mused, drawing her attention to an area a few hundred metres away and to their left.

Following where he was pointing, she saw that the forest did open out there, into a less vegetated swathe of tangled scrub and tall grass.

Juni, also following his gaze, nodded as well. “It actually looks like it might be part of the ridge… if we can find a gorge back through, that would be ideal.”

“It would,” Jiang Wushen agreed, looking further along towards the rivers. “Especially if this place is largely untouched in recent times.”

…

Descents were always hard, so she was not surprised when it took them well over an hour to finally reach the bottom of the slope. The initial area Jiang Wushen had noted turned out to not be that suitable, for the simple reason that it was covered in blade grass, a rather obnoxious spirit grass that had edges like razors if you caught it just wrong. However, following the edge of the ridge line further along for some hundred metres did bring them to a water-cut gorge that went all the way through to the valley they had just come from.

“How depressing,” Sana muttered as they made their way back along it, the raging torrent rumbling by some twenty metres to their right.

“Indeed,” she nodded.

“Hah… it’s very rare you ever find the ‘easy’ way through ridge lines the first time around,” Kun Ji, who was walking behind them, interjected.

“We know,” she sighed. “Doesn’t stop it being depressing. If we had gone down a level, we could just have walked right through here after climbing up the side of the waterfall this leads to…”

“…”

“Here should do for a teleport point,” Juni declared, cutting through their grumbling and pointing to a point where the gorge opened up ahead of them.

“Yeah…” Kun Ji agreed, looking around at the sparse vegetation, which only got dense higher up where the light was better and the tumbled, mossy rocks. “Not much danger of landing in the river and at worst all anyone will get is a few bruises if they don’t get the ground.”

Without comment, she took out a jade talisman and a stable cube and started to link both, while the others poked around making doubly sure. It was deep within a ridge line, but that was no excuse not to check.

“Someone has been here before!” Mu Shi called over at last, just as she was nearly finished associating the stable jade and the talisman.

“Monkey balls, that’s a recent talisman,” Sana, who had gone over to join her, cursed.

“One of those groups who came through a month ago?” she guessed, calling over.

“…”

Mu Shi and Sana just shrugged.

“Pill bottles over here as well,” Juni declared a moment later. “They certainly stopped here, maybe on the way back?”

-Oh well, she reflected, putting the teleport anchor down on the clearest spot that was level for a few meters.

“This is set up!” she called over, putting a spirit jade into the middle of the jade disk.

“Might need more stable jades,” Jiang Wushen observed, coming over.

Looking around critically, she found he was probably right. Taking out two more, she spent a moment linking them, then walked each one some two metres away and put them down on the ground surface. Placing a spirit jade in one, she watched as the patterns on the cube shimmered, then spread out over the rock surface itself. Going to the other two, she repeated the process, by which point the others had come over as well, to watch the four-metre-wide circle originating from the disk and the three jades form.

The whole process took about five minutes, likely because the rock was sapping the qi.

“Those are going to need more spirit jades,” Sana noted, kneeling down by the one she had been nearest to and adding two more in quick succession.

“It is what it is,” Juni sighed, feeding a few to the second.

Nodding, she added a handful more jades to her one as well.

“It only has to last for a week or two,” Mu Shi remarked, taking out a second disk and putting it down on top of the anchor.

As she watched, the two snapped together. Juni placed a cube of five spirit jades into the formation disk, then took out a talisman and placed that on top as well, until it chimed audibly.

“Right, everyone clear!” Juni called out, not that anyone needed warning, really.

A few moments later the air around the anchor shimmered, casting strange reflections in the gorge for a few seconds and a scroll appeared, dropping to the ground.

“Well, that worked better than expected,” Jiang Wushen remarked, sounding relieved.

“Yep, they are going to send some folks through,” Juni confirmed.

She stood there and watched in silence as the symbol created by the stable jades and the anchor shone, then the area for two metres around the anchor point occluded, like it was a bubble within the air, the water vapour scattering into rainbows—

*Shuffft*

The wind within the gorge changed direction momentarily, then five people appeared, only a foot or so off the ground, and landed with experienced ease.

“Sis!” Sana exclaimed, skipping forward and giving Arai a hug.

“You could have just stayed at Misty Jasmine Inn for the day,” Juni remarked to Han Shu, who was the second of the four.

The other three, rather surprisingly, were Senior Ying, Kun Lianmei and Ling Wentai… along with the monkey they had rescued.

“Why… is the monkey here?” she asked, caught slightly off-guard.

“It claims to know about this place,” Senior Ying said.

The small monkey nodded vigorously and made a broad hand motion that just about implied ‘this place I know!’

“…”

She was about to say something when she froze, as did the monkey. Standing on the rock, about three metres to her right, just below a broad tree, was an adorably cute, auburn-furred squirrel with two tails and a white crescent mark on its forehead, staring right at them.

Waving her hand very quietly, she attracted Sana’s attention, and Juni’s, who both glanced where she was pointing and also froze.

“What is…?” Mu Shi started to ask, then also spotted the squirrel.

Almost as soon as she spoke, the squirrel moved; however, rather than go for Mu Shi, she felt her heart lurch in her breast as it appeared beside her and stared up at her with reddish eyes, before calmly grabbing the pouch on her belt with two paws and landing on her shoulder.

-How is this… squirrel here, she groaned, trying to keep her breathing steady. I should have known something like this would happen… The day was so easy… and now we encounter this…

The auburn squirrel with a white crescent on its head was a known mutate spirit beast, a villain with an impressive list of incidents to its name, assuming they were all the same squirrel. It was also at least a seven-star ranked critter, an Immortal realm qi beast, with an innate grasp of earth corrosion.

That aura was now sitting over the whole area, like a subtle, fluffy blanket, barely perceivable to her except as a faint taste of dirt in her mouth and a vague sense of ‘vividness’ in the rocks that had not been there before. While part of her wanted to genuinely admire the squirrel's control over it, the rest of her just hoped it kept that control, or they would be leaf loam before any of them could blink.

Both Kun Ji and Jiang Wushen were making hand signs to her not to do anything.

“Be careful,” Lianmei signed.

“I know!” she signed back, well aware that the Beast Cadre actually had a rather favourable impression of it, on the whole, even if it was hard to get beyond the earth corrosion and the fact that it was right by her head.

There was a reason, after all, that the local folkloric religion venerated the squirrels just as much as it respected the monkeys. They could bring good luck and strange opportunities… The problem, however, was that they could in equal measure be a total malignancy. It was not uncommon to hear of Hunter teams who were bullied by it, or them, and it frequently robbed valuable pills and harvests.

-Is it a good or a bad thing we have no harvest? she suddenly wondered, as it sorted through her pouch and then grabbed one of Sana’s dried soup cakes and took a large bite out of it, apparently unfazed at how spicy the raw thing would be without first being soaked in boiling water.

“…”

“And this is a ridge line!” Mu Shi signed back. “How is it here?”

“Clearly, it is not limited by the ridges, just like the monkeys,” Arai signed rapidly.

“No shit!” she signed back curtly.

“Do we try and bait it off?” Han Shu signed.

She nearly shook her head, then stopped herself, cold sweat running down her neck as she found the squirrel staring sideways at her, and instead settled for signing “No!”

“Maybe it will just leave when it finishes eating my soup cake?” Sana signed hopefully.

-Yes, let’s all pray for that! she agreed mentally.

Beside her, the squirrel, which was just finishing the last of the cake, paused to stare around.

-Please…

The koppi squirrel hopped off her shoulder, arriving in front of Sana and Arai in what she could only describe as a very stylish landing as it stretched out its arms and landed on one foot.

“…”

She watched, holding her breath, as it pawed at Sana’s belt pouch. Sana, also sweating, very slowly moved her hand and took it off her belt, offering it to the squirrel. It poked at it once more then gave a vexed chirp. Sana gulped and carefully opened the bag, which if she recalled right had been a gift from her late mother, tipping out the contents – a food pill, some bread from breakfast, now rather soggy, and a few bottles of various medicines – onto the ground.

The squirrel took the food pill, considered it, then set it to one side.

“…”

While they all looked on dully, it then picked up a pill bottle and turned it over in its paws twice, shook it carefully, then licked the top. If a squirrel could look pensive it probably would have. Then it held up the bottle and, to the shock of all of them, monkey included, gave Sana a small bow, tipped both tails flat to the ground and in a flicker seemed to fall straight into the earth, pill bottle and all. The last thing to vanish was its paw, which snagged the food pill.

The aura of earth qi flowed away after it, like water down a drain, and they all exhaled and slumped to the ground.

“This is why you don’t say stupid things on Sovereign’s Day,” Ling Wentai muttered.

Sana stared at the spot on the ground where it had vanished, saying nothing.

“…”

She also stared at the place it vanished for a good twenty seconds before vocalising the thought she was sure almost all of them had. “Sana, did it just thank you formally for stealing a bottle of fever-breaking pills and a spicy soup cake?”