~ Part 2 ~ ~ ??? – Misty Jasmine Inn ~

“Brother Kwan… it is time.”

Yeng Seng Kwan, or as he had been in recent times, Ha Kwan, and also Ha Pei Quan, sighed and sat up on the bed he had been lying on as the talisman around his neck chimed quietly in his mind.

“Thank the fates, I was getting tired of this,” he groaned.

“—What’s up, Quan? Tired of what?”

He glanced over at the youth from the Ha clan, Ha Xing Mugan, who he was sharing this room with in the complex of buildings the other side of the storehouse from the inn, and shook his head.

“Just tired of this place,” he replied absently, standing up.

“Begin infiltrating and sec—”

“I know,” he sent back, cutting off the talisman, shaking his head again.

-Idiot, we don’t need to be reminded, he sneered to himself.

That the ‘newbies’ sent messages like that was one of the reasons he had agreed to lead the actual infiltration. There were precious few real veterans of the old days among their number. Of the few who had survived, most had refused to have anything to do with Yeng Illhan and Strategist Huan when they reappeared a year ago, after almost thirty years of silence, with a plan to re-establish the Yeng Brotherhood.

Those refusals had been a bit galling, as they had been a close-knit brotherhood back then, but at the same time it was understandable. The circumstances in which the Blood Eclipse Cult had run out of control, and the demons that came for them at the end…

For a moment he had to close his eyes, because the sight of that figure, in their flowery robe, casually tearing through everything in its path, singing that horrid song…

-We survived, we deserve this, he told himself decisively. This is the very least heaven can offer us, for what we uncovered.

“You sure you’re okay, Quan?”

He turned to find that Mugan was still looking at him with a frown.

“Just the rain, and thinking about yesterday,” he replied, staring out the window at the downpour. “Really, it is the worst…”

“Yeah, it’s pretty shit,” Mugan sighed, sitting back against the wall, on his low bed. “Why did we even agree to do this?”

“Because idiots like Ha Yun said it would be ‘easy’?” he replied, stretching a few times. “Though, if Brother Caolun and Ha Wufan are successful, we will all get some benefits…”

“True…” Mugan grumbled.

“Doing something will help,” he suggested, deciding on the spot that Mugan could at least be useful cover. “I was thinking of going over to the shrine, then seeing if there was anything going on in the teahouse,” he added, offering the youth a hand.

“The shrine?” Mugan blinked.

“Bit of good luck hurt nobody,” he replied with a grin. “Brother Caolun certainly needs all the help he can get!”

“Uggh… yeah, that is true… why not,” Mugan nodded, accepting his gesture and standing up.

-Sometimes, it is just your time, he reflected drily, putting on a grass hat as he followed Mugan out into the deserted common area on the second floor.

Downstairs, nobody was keeping watch in the courtyard, which was expected really. Ha Huang, who was one of those stranded, had been the main impetus there. Without him, or Jiang Teng and Cao Cao, the others were nowhere near as dedicated. Their ignorance compounding their confidence in what they knew about ridgelines, no doubt.

“—Quaan! Mugan! You are up early!”

Trying to ignore the mispronunciation of his name, he turned around to find Ha Erfei and Ha Caotan had appeared from the main room on the ground floor, sheltering under umbrellas.

“Oh, morning…” he replied, noncommittally.

“Couldn’t sleep?” Erfei asked sympathetically.

“Nope,” Mugan said. “Brother Quan here suggested we go light some incense for Caolun and Yun…”

“…”

“—for good luck…” Mugan added with an eye roll, as the other two looked at them dubiously. “A bit of Good Fortune never hurt anyone, right Brother Quan?”

“Uhuh,” he nodded.

-Best laid plans… he reflected with a sigh, savouring the nostalgic smells of pre-dawn as they set off across the gorge.

It was easy to get lost in the gentle sound of the rain scattering off leaves, rocks and the roof above. Despite what it represented, it was… cathartic, in a way, to him at least, especially after a miserable night when the effect of the rains was… unpleasantly resurgent. If he closed his eyes, he could imagine he was back in the village where he grew up, on the edge of the massif… dogs barking, birds calling, early morning fires being lit, sending fragrant smoke from spirit wood logs through the air.

His intention had been to use Mugan to distract the priestess, but dealing with her and maybe four Ha youths would be noisy. They might have been lured to have fun with her, but that was also pointlessly dangerous.

He noted that the guards were also still standing outside the storehouse. Both glanced in their direction—

“Up early…” one of the guards remarked as they made their way down to the steps.

“Yeah… gonna go light incense in the shrine,” Erfei chuckled.

“Maybe pray that nobody else meddles with the weather, as well,” the other added, casting a sour look at the sky.

“Hah…” Mugan laughed in agreement.

Shaking his head, he kept quiet. They were joking happily with them, but he wasn’t fooled.

The Ling clan certainly knew what they were about, he had to admit. Their precautions and vigilance had made scouting the whole complex a nameless-fate-sent headache and a half, and they were rightfully suspicious of the Ha clan groups. That the Ha clan was also suspicious of the Ha clan had not helped, either. In that regard he really wished Ha Huang was here, so he could enjoy killing the meddling bastard himself later.

“How are the others?” Mugan asked as they passed the teleport circle.

“The ones who came yesterday?” Caotan grunted. “Probably in the teahouse already, raring to go, after what Wufan’s bunch brought back.”

“And Elder Lianmei?” he asked, just to keep engaged with the conversation, and on the grounds that all information was useful.

“Spitting blood,” Erfei sighed. “As you can imagine, that idiot Mangfan’s message to Official Botan yesterday… didn’t exactly help matters there.”

“No… I imagine it didn’t,” he mused.

Ha Erfei was right. Mangfan, or ‘Ji Mang Fan’ as he was properly called, was an idiot, and a liability. Too focused on his own interests, stoking the egos of the two idiot formations ‘experts’ Aofan and Kunbei, Mang Fan was not who he would have picked to be out there right now, mysterious ‘other helper’ or no. Not when this whole operation hinged on some rather carefully balanced coordination. Even that stupid message he had sent, while it obfuscated matters on the Ha clan side, it had not washed with Lianmei at all.

Pushing that annoying thought away, he followed Caotan and Mugan through the gateway and into the shrine. The lanterns in the shrine courtyard were lit and the doors open, so the others just went straight in, likely to get out of the rain.

“Anyone hooome?” Caotan called out, passing through the doorway.

“Be more respectful!” Mugan chuckled, pushing Caotan lightly in the back.

Looking around, it was basically deserted, with no sign of Priestess Ying.

“Feugh, that monkey is still here,” Erfei sighed, nodding to the corner.

Glancing over, he saw the small monkey was curled up on a prayer mat, sleeping under the broad grass hat it sometimes wore.

-At least it is predictable, he mused, shaking his head. If it could be kept offside, that would be best though…

Monkeys were dangerous even if left alone, and the fact that they were willing to let one run around here was an absolute liability. Wufan’s group understood that, at least, and had tried to chase it away. Sadly, though, Priestess Ying had warned them off both times and was frustratingly observant. It had been rather amusing to see a stuck-up, spoilt brat like Wufan get poisoned though.

“Oh… you are also here…”

He turned to find Ling Tengfei had come into the shrine, putting the final nail in any real poking here and now because Ling Tengfei was, like the Jun sisters, a person who actually observed their rituals. He was also a Ling scion and likely wary of the Ha clan’s ‘agenda’ up here.

“You are also here to offer prayers?” Erfei chuckled.

“Fairy Luo is out there, remember,” Caotan said. “Perhaps we should all pray that such a beauty does indeed save the day?”

-Oh please… he groaned inwardly.

“…”

Tengfei gave him a sideways look and just walked over to the Grandfather of Heaven’s altar and sat down, cross-legged in front of it, placing a pot and some sticks of incense down.

Shaking his head, he walked over to the Queen Mother of the West’s shrine and put an incense stick in the bowl, then bowed three times, murmuring a few words that those who were stranded would not suffer too much…

“Aiiiih… lets go get breakfast,” Caotan said after the others had also made some rather perfunctory bows and joked a bit more about praying for Fairy Luo and the other ‘beauties’ to all come back safe and sound.

Looking around the shrine a final time, he nodded and followed them out, casting only a brief glance at the closed door to the inner area of the shrine.

“Fates, I hate this rain so much…” Erfei grumbled as they made their way back across the courtyard towards the inn.

“Oh… tell me how much you hate it,” Caotan retorted.

“At least we get to see beauties in wet dresses,” Mugan chuckled.

“There is that,” Caotan agreed as they made their way back up the steps to the inn. “There is that…”

At the top, he noted that the guard on the storehouse had changed.

Pushing the door open, he cast a quick glance out at the rain-drenched courtyard and the teleport formation that was still ‘obstructed’ by the rain.

They had acted to the very best of their knowledge in providing security for this place, clearly expecting trouble in some capacity. The problem was, they had still grievously underestimated the depth of the infiltration, and the involvement of the Ha clan in matters… and the Deng clan, and the Kun clan. Illhan and Strategist Huan had even managed to get people in the Ling clan onside, which was genuinely impressive, as they had never managed that back in their glory days.

The rain was… unexpected, but welcome, in the eyes of the others. As an old-timer, he suspected, personally, that it was not quite as unexpected as it seemed. However, that raised questions about their backers he really didn’t want to think too closely about.

-So long as we stay up here though, there is nothing they can do, anyway, he reflected. What does it matter if Strategist Huan’s contacts have influence in high places…

“Ah, Mugan, you’re awake early!”

“Brother Erfei!”

“QWAAAN, MUGAN! COME JOIN US!”

Almost as soon as they entered, Wufan and Jingbei, who were sitting at a table with a few others and some of the new arrivals, spotted them and waved, far too exuberantly for the early hour.

-Have they just spent the whole night celebrating their big haul yesterday? he wondered.

“I guess you couldn’t sleep either?” Ha Ji Kunbei asked.

“Nope,” Mugan agreed.

“You go ahead,” he told Mugan as they walked over. “I’ll go get us some drinks and see about some breakfast?”

“Sure!” Mugan grinned, patting him on the arm. “Quan is getting us drinks!”

“Good stuff!” Jingbei called over. “I’ll have some of the spicy lemon stuff!”

Shaking his head, he walked over to the kitchen and glanced inside. Of the trio from the Cherry Wine Pagoda, only Meilan was there, preparing breakfast, which was a relief. They were one of the major complicating factors in this whole mess. The Cherry Wine Pagoda was not easy to deal with, and their involvement in this had caught him by surprise, as it had a few others.

“What do you want?” she asked him.

“They want wine,” he replied, putting on his best ‘yes really, before breakfast,’ expression.

“…”

“Cupboard over there,” Meilan replied, pointing to one next to the door, then went back to sorting through the spirit herbs she had on the counter in front of her.

“What will be for breakfast?” he added.

“Noodle soup,” Meilan replied absently. “I can bring you some out in a bit…”

“I am happy to bring it for them,” he offered.

“…”

“Eh, okay,” Meilan agreed, to his mild relief.

“Uh… can I ask, where is Priestess Ying?”

“Why do you want to know that?” she frowned now.

“Hunter Shunfei asked me if I had seen her as we were going past the storehouse…” he replied.

It was a lie, but in this weather reading things like lies was almost impossible, even for people with real experience in this place like him. The Cherry Wine Pagoda trio were skilled, yes, but they were still lowlanders, and relied too much on their qi.

“Oh… eh, she’s probably in the baths,” Meilan said. “If you wait in the common room, you will catch her.”

“Thanks!” he replied, giving her a grateful smile.

Taking the wine, he put the jar on the sideboard, then walked over to the soup and poured out a large bowl, then took some fried bread from the pan next to it. Putting both on a tray, he nodded to her again and headed back out, snagging the wine on the way.

Back in the common room, he put the tray on a table, pretending that it was a bit hard to carry, and quickly dunked some extra alcohol into the jar. There was no need to poison anyone, after all, when the rain would ensure atypically strong alcohol did the job anyway.

Carrying everything back over to the table, he put it down with a grunt.

“You’re the best Qwaaaaan!” one of the other flunkies declared, giving him a jovial clap on the arm.

For a moment, he was tempted to stab the youth then and there, but controlled himself. Starting a bloodbath with this group would be unproductive. The goal here was to subdue everyone then kill those who were not necessary, not get into a pissing match with a bunch of silk-pants young masters who had small family armouries’ worth of talismans in their storage rings.

“I have to go run this message,” he said, excusing himself. “I’ll come join you in a bit.”

“Aww, did the kitchen maid grab your balls?” Jingbei, who he would not regret killing, asked with a smirk.

“I dunno about you, but I’d give spirit stones to have her grab my balls!” one of the new arrivals, who likely recognised Xiang Meilan as a ‘dancer’, remarked crudely.

“Yeah, what gives, they actually got you top-notch entertainment?!”

“Oh come on you two… get your minds out of the gutter!” one of the others grumbled.

“Yeah, we are here for the trial, not to ogle some dancer!”

“I swear, he’s as docile as Leng!” another of the youths, Ha Ji Yongbei, added with a grating laugh.

Mugan gave him a sideways look, which he ignored, continuing to play the loyal, if somewhat put-upon, Ha clan scion of Ha Cao Caolun’s group. It would only be for a short time longer, anyway.

-Wonder what face they will make when they realise? he mused. Will they be outraged, angry, sad? Will they despair or plead when they realise their part in this?

Shaking his head, he headed to the back of the inn, and the stairs.

Priestess Ying was a concern, mostly because she was an unknown variable. The main targets, however, were Kun Lianmei and Ha Faolian along with the remaining Hunters here; Kun Ji, Mo Shunfei, Jiang Wushen, Mu Shi and Duan Mu. Their talismans were important to the wider plan of securing this place. Kun Ji and Kun Lianmei, though, were also important in regards to their other, more optional mission: to ‘deal’ with Kun Juni, in a way that would be entirely deniable. That that had inadvertently fallen to ‘Ji Mang Fan’ and their supposed ‘other helper’, who he knew basically nothing about, didn’t instil confidence. The last thing they needed was Mang Fan spooking the Kun daughter and her just vanishing into the valleys.

Heading up to the third floor, he looked down the corridor and then headed for Kun Ji’s room, thoroughly suppressing his aura. The door was locked and sealed, but, having been here for a good few days, he had long since had time to study how they worked, and it took all of a few moments to open it by old-fashioned means. Kun Ji lay on the bed, lost in silent meditation. Moving with the utmost care, he walked over, and, withdrawing a talisman, gently placed it onto his bed—

Kun Ji’s eyes snapped open, but he was a fraction too late in his reaction. He clapped a hand over the other man’s mouth, his other grasping his hand—

-Shit! No ring!

The blade appeared in Kun Ji’s hand, nearly impaling him. Gritting his teeth, he half turned and caught the blade, twisting it out of Kun Ji’s hand. A moment later, Strategist Huan’s talisman took effect and Kun Ji slumped back, empty-eyed.

-One down…

He looked around the room quickly but saw nothing untoward in the way of extra talismans or anything that he had tripped.

“…”

Turning back to Kun Ji, he took a jar of the wine from his own ring and put a cup from downstairs on the bed, spilling a bit, making it look like Kun Ji had been drinking. The instruction for the others had been to kill him, and certainly that would have been easier, but living pawns in unlikely places, especially a high-ranked Beast Hunter and a trusted aide of the Kun clan with the confidence of its young miss, was too valuable a pawn to waste.

The ‘newbies’ Strategist Huan had brought in, who made that decision, also didn’t seem to appreciate how bothersome the Pavilion talismans could be. As it was, when Kun Ji woke up, he would have a headache and basically recall nothing. A puppet without ever realising it, until the time came to lure Kun Juni, another seedling who it would be an immense shame to ‘kill’.

Once he had ensured that the scuffle had gone unmarked, he recovered the talisman and slipped back out… he was about to close the door when a thought, a better way to maybe snare Kun Lianmei and the other Hunters, occurred to him.

Going back into the room, he sat in silence for a few moments until Kun Ji stirred again.

“Good Morning Brother,” he murmured, activating the talisman.

Kun Ji opened his eyes and stared at him dully.

“Go wait in the corridor,” he commanded.

Kun Ji stared at him, then nodded, his empty eyes becoming bright again. He watched carefully as Kun Ji got off the bed, then went and gathered a hat and left the room. The talismans were very good at what they did, but despite Strategist Huan’s assertions, he was not going to consider them fool proof.

“…”

Looking around a final time, he frowned, then, on impulse, went over to Kun Ji’s bed and put a child talisman for a special barrier he possessed on the underside.

-Can’t be too careful after all, he mused, making sure it was initialized correctly.

That done, he also went back out into the corridor and again stopped to consider his options…

Kun Lianmei was the priority target, really. With her in their grasp, everything would become easy.

Waving to Kun Ji, he murmured. “Knock on Kun Lianmei’s door, see if she is there.”

Kun Ji stared at him, then nodded, and walked down the corridor and tapped politely on her door.

“Elder Lianmei, are you in?”

There was silence from inside.

“Can you open it?” he asked quietly, really not liking that this method of control required verbal commands.

Kun Ji pushed the door, which opened and revealed an empty room with a rumpled bed and a few spare clothes hanging up to dry. The table had a few scrolls and a novel on it, along with a few spirit stones and a talisman she had started drawing then discarded.

-How sparse… he mused. Though I suppose she lives out of her storage ring.

Looking back down the corridor, he considered the other two Herb Hunters.

“Go, see if either of them is in their rooms,” he instructed Kun Ji. “If they are… ask that they come down to the storehouse to check the herbs… when you get there, chat with Shunfei. Be a slight, if welcome, distraction for him on a miserable, stressful morning like this.”

That would get the herb store open, potentially, and also put both Hunters in a known location, but also one where their options would be limited. It would also put an asset next to Mo Shunfei, who was annoyingly hard to pin down. The man had barely slept in the time he had been here and he didn’t even know where his room was.

Kun Ji nodded again and walked down the hall to Duan Mu’s room, banging on the door.

He followed after and quietly ducked back out into the stairwell, keeping out of sight.

A moment later Duan Mu opened it, looking a bit bleary-eyed.

“Can you and Mu Shi come with me to check the herbs?” Kun Ji said.

“Eh… okay,” Duan Mu nodded sleepily. “Give me give a min, okay?”

He listened in silence as Kun Ji went to bang on Mu Shi’s door, but there was no response.

“She has probably gone to the baths if she wasn’t downstairs,” Duan Mu said helpfully, having not quite gone back into his room. “Anyway, I’ll be with you in a minute?”

“Okay,” Kun Ji replied.

Carefully looking around the doorway, he saw Duan Mu had gone back into his room.

Moving quickly, he went back to the stairs and down to the common room, considering his next steps.

It was tempting to go straight to the baths, but actually, having used a charge of the talisman on Kun Ji, he realised he should probably go with him, in case one of the others did just kill him.

-I suppose I should go to the storehouse, move things along there, then go see about Kun Lianmei or Priestess Ying, he mused.

He had just got back to the table and exchanged a few pointless greetings when Kun Ji appeared, with a now fully-dressed Duan Mu in tow.

“Ah, Quan, come with me as well,” Kun Ji said authoritatively, waving for him to come over, even before he had started to pour out his soup.

“…”

The others laughed at his ‘misfortune’, as Kun Ji led both of them outside to the storehouse. Stealing a glance to the eastern side of the gorge, he saw that the lanterns were still burning in the watch towers as they had been.

“Is Shunfei up yet?” Kun Ji asked the guards at the entrance.

Two more of the guards, Ling Wentian and… Ling Jing Fan were sitting cross-legged on their beds in the guardroom. Both glanced up as they passed, their gaze lingering on all of them briefly, but again, neither commented. He had made sure he was among the more ‘helpful’ of the scions along with Ha Cao Caolun, chipping in with various tasks here and there, so seeing him in the company of Kun Ji and a tired Duan Mu would not elicit any problems.

Going down the corridor, he noted that the seals on the two herb arboretums had been reinforced again. That was… sub-optimal, but at worst, once the place was secured, they could just wait for the barriers on those various rooms to degrade, he supposed, assuming they couldn’t get someone to unlock them.

“Ah, Ji, you are up early!” Mo Shunfei said, looking up as they entered.

“Yes, it’s just the rain,” Kun Ji sighed. “It makes you restless… especially after that shit-show yesterday.”

“Isn’t that the truth,” Mo Shunfei agreed.

“Can I get the talisman for the herb arboretum, Shunfei?” Duan Mu asked politely.

“Uh-huh,” Shunfei nodded, tossing Duan Mu a talisman, who caught it and went back down the corridor, barely giving him a glance.

“Is Lianmei up and about yet?” Kun Ji asked.

“Oh, yeah, she came in a while ago and asked about the talismans, just in case there was any change in the weather or an update on Huang’s group. Probably she has gone to the baths, or to talk to Senior Ying.”

“Ah well, I suppose I can only wait then, if you see her, before I do…”

“Sure…” Shunfei nodded, looking at him with a slight frown for some reason…

“…”

“Oh, Quan, that box over there, take it to the kitchen,” Kun Ji commanded him, pointing to one of the boxes of herbs.

He grimaced and nodded, going over to it and picking it up, glad he was excellent at stilling his emotions, as his senses that ‘something was wrong’ were really tugging at him now. However, nothing happened as he left the room, leaving Kun Ji and Mo Shunfei to chat away.

Walking back out, he saw that the lantern on the left watch tower had moved from the left to the right side. A moment later, the right hand one moved as well, signalling that the towers on the western exit of Misty Jasmine Inn had both been successfully seized.

He listened for any raised alarm, but there was none.

-So far so good, he mused, putting the box down on the wall for a moment and attaching another child talisman to the underside.

Going back inside, he quickly took in who was there; Wufan’s group eating breakfast, two of the guards, who were sipping wine and playing cards, and the Bai clan trio of Luofan, Cheng and the girl who arrived yesterday with Ling Luo, who were all early risers it seemed.

Ignoring the laughter from Wufan’s group, he returned the slight nod of greeting from Bai Luofan and took the box to the kitchen.

“…”

Xiang Meilan gave him a frown as he brought it in.

“What do you expect done with that?” she asked.

“Mo Shunfei said to take it through to the storeroom,” he replied with a shrug.

“Haaaa…” she sighed shook her head, walking over to the door and opening it for him to go through.

Carrying it inside, he looked around…

“Where do you want it put?”

“Somewhere,” Meilan said with a shrug. “It won’t be there long, if I have any say in it.”

-Oh well, he sighed, putting it down fairly randomly on top of a crate of spirit figs that the brats with Ha Yun had been sending back the previous day.

If he had been able to get her as well, it would have helped, but there would come a point when this broke out into actual fighting anyway, he was sure. He had not seen any of the other infiltrators yet, which likely meant they were still dealing with their specific targets, claiming those worth using and disposing of the rest.

Exiting the storeroom again, he gave her a sideways look and went back to the common room.

-So… Lianmei or Ying?

That was the question really.

Of the two, Kun Lianmei was the more useful, but Priestess Ying bothered him. On the face of it, there was nothing untoward regarding her; she was just a reclusive cultivator who minded this place, kept to herself and had a bit of local knowledge, near as he could tell, and yet…

-Perhaps it’s just that she is a nun…?

If both of them were in the baths… he was fairly sure he could take them both… at that point, the only real danger remaining was the guard garrison. They would be hard to deal with if open conflict arose too early, even with the ones in the towers taken out, but that was why Illhan was coming in person. The more they could suppress and get offside before that, the better really.

“…”

“Brother Quan, you are really busy today…” Jingbei called over.

“I bet he is just worried about Brother Caolun…”

“Yeah…”

Shaking his head, he made his decision, walking on by and ignoring their laughter, and headed through to the baths at the rear of the inn… where he found Ha Ji Bofan, or, to give him his proper name, Jibo Fan, standing there in the ante-hall, waiting, along with one of the guards, Ling Zhan Bei, who was also one of theirs, sipping wine, looking like they were ‘waiting’ for the women to leave.

“Diaomei is in there, with Mu Shi and maybe Lianmei,” Jibo Fan, said quietly. “It—”

He held up a hand, silencing the idiot. The first thing you learned was that you never spoke out loud unless you could help it. He had spent quite some time ferreting out the various ‘tablets’ that were stashed to passively scan the whole complex. All it would take was one of those getting into the wrong hands…

“Sign, or say nothing,” he replied with their band’s special sign language. “Half these people are over Immortal.”

“…”

“Kill or capture?” Jibo signed after a moment, not very well either.

“Seems a shame to kill,” Zhan Bei added, wiggling his brows.

“Don’t be stupid,” he signed, shaking his head.

Jibo and Zhan Bei were, like the other infiltrator, Fan Jing, ‘newbies’. People Strategist Huan had recruited to fill their ranks. In his own opinion, all of them were too impulsive. If it came to the choice of succeeding here or killing a few people… well, up here, accidents were easy to fake and it was difficult to ask questions. However, ‘live’ was better than dead, especially where an influence like the Cherry Wine Pagoda was concerned. Their Pagoda Lord was someone who concerned Strategist Huan. No divinations on him stuck, apparently, which suggested he was likely a hidden expert of some kind.

Zhan Bei scowled, but nodded.

“So, do we go in, or wait?” Jibo signed.

Not for the first time, he found himself wishing one or two of the female members of their band had come with the infiltration party. Or that the Ling and Din scions had come… earlier. The problem was that the Ha clan had only sent male disciples, and the only female ones were all from the Cherry Wine Pagoda, until Fairy Luo arrived yesterday with the Bai girl.

“…”

The feeling of creepy unease made him turn to find Meilan standing in the doorway, a funny smile on her face, the knife she had been using to prepare spirit fruit twirling silently in her fingers.

“So… the rot was deeper than expected,” she murmured, walking forward—

He stared dully as she crumpled to the ground, a talisman imprinted on her back.

A moment later Ha Cao Caolun’s other bodyguard, ‘Sir Ha Cao Bo’ – in reality ‘Yeng Bo’ – stepped out of the shadows. Yeng Bo, who had previously posed as an ‘Elder’ from the Jade Willow Pavilion when they were working up there, who had since shaved off his beard and stopped dying his hair, nodded to him. After him stepped Yeng Qin Ji, who had been leading the first wave of the outside forces, and Yeng Leng Du, who had been planted as the ‘Ling Elder’ Leng Dushan.

“I came in by the roof,” Qin Ji signed.

“I captured Faolian,” Leng Du added, confirming the completion of his task even before the other woman from the Cherry Wine Pagoda, wearing a thin gown for sleeping in, walked in behind him. “The rest of the Ha clan elites are also dealt with.”

“…”

“Okay,” he signed walked over and crouched down by Meilan.

“Awaken, Sister Meilan,” he murmured softly.

She opened her eyes…

“Go into the baths; bring the other two out. Don’t arouse their suspicions,” he instructed.

“Accompany Meilan into the baths, don’t arouse their suspicious,” Leng Du murmured to Faolian.

She opened her eyes and nodded, getting up and storing the knife away.

He watched both go inside, then waved for the others to all get out of the hall, bar him and Yeng Bo, who took up positions by the door.

There was some splashing, then discussion inside that he barely caught.

“Meilan is a physical cultivator,” Yeng Bo signed. “It may not have taken…”

Feeling a little bit of pain in his heart, he nodded, palming a very expensive barrier talisman, which he placed against the wall and triggered.

{Deng Sheng’s Dao Cage}

The entire room – in fact, everything for about thirty metres around them – became a cube of frozen space, including the baths beyond the door all the way back to the rock-cut wall at the back. Yeng Bo was also frozen for a moment, until he reached over and released him.

Silently, they walked in and found Lianmei, Diaomei, Meilan, Faolian and Mu Shi all frozen, unable to move a hair. Lianmei was in the act of applying a rather problematic talisman to Meilan, while Diaomei and Mu Shi had been moving towards the walls, likely preparing an ambush of their own. Faolian had been moving towards Mu Shi.

It was an almost pathetically easy end to the ‘fight’, before it had ever begun, even if it had cost him a charge of one of the most ‘expensive’ talismans in his possession.

A Dao Lord grade ‘Dao Cage’ talisman usually cost tens of Earthly Jade. That that one had been in his possession ever since the years of the Blood Eclipse, when he had claimed it from a looted Deng clan villa, for free, didn’t really lessen the pain over having to waste a valuable charge on this.

All three women were now focused on him, their expressions equal parts furious and helpless as they strained, futilely, against their restraints.

He watched dispassionately as the barrier quickly forced all the qi out of them.

Only when all five were entirely devoid of any qi did he walk over to Lianmei, followed by Yeng Bo, and release the barrier, watching all of them crumple—

Diaomei and Lianmei both still managed to cover the distance to get to him in a step; however, without any qi and their foundations totally suppressed by the special properties of the Dao Lord’s Dao Cage, he easily caught Diaomei by the wrist. Bending it, he forced her to kneel, then quickly touched a ring on his finger to her storage ring.

She coughed up blood as the soul binding was broken, staring at him with attractively baleful eyes.

Yeng Bo blocked Lianmei, sending her sprawling, then grasped for Mu Shi, who had been backing away, fumbling with her own talisman.

“Don’t waste your time,” he remarked drily, moving forward as Meilan staggered up.

“Sister Meilan, capture the Hunter,” he commanded her.

Instead, Meilan turned and tossed herself into the water.

“…”

At this point, the others had come in, given the quiet ruckus involved.

“Get her,” he pointed at Meilan, who was now curled up under the water.

Likely she was trying to use its strange properties to mess with what Strategist Huan’s talisman had done. Whether it would work or not, he had no idea, but he had no intention of giving her time to try.

Jibo and Zhen Bei both grinned and jumped in after her.

In the meantime, Yeng Bo had taken out two sets of five silver bands from a pouch at his waist and was putting them around Lianmei’s wrists and neck. Immediately she gasped and tensed as their special properties took effect. With no qi in her body it would take very little time for any remaining soul-binds to break down. Elders’ Talismans were life-bound in any case, so there was no danger there.

“How anticlimactic…” Yeng Qin Ji sighed, sounding almost disappointed.

“Well, we are hardly amateurs,” Yeng Bo chuckled.

“…”

Sighing, he considered that even some of the veterans among them were a bit…

-All I want is for this to keep going as smoothly as this, he mused, because it was hard not to shake the feeling that something was still a bit off.

In the water, Jibo and Zhen Bei had finally caught Meilan and were dragging her bodily out, taking the opportunity to ‘tease’ her as they did so.

“Focus!” he signed. “There will be time enough to play later!”

“…”

Both of them scowled at him, but neither complained as they dumped the stunned young woman from the Cherry Wine Pagoda on the floor next to her compatriot.

“…”

“How long until the bands work?” he signed to Yeng Bo.

“A minute, at most,” Yeng Bo signed back, taking the second set of five bands and putting them on Diaomei—

“Aahhhug!” she gasped, and to his shock her eyes turned amber, like a fox’s.

-She has beast blood in her!?

Off to the side, Jibo and Zhen Bei were both looking at the luckless woman with undisguised interest now, as was Yeng Leng Du.

-No wonder that Ha Huang was happy to share her bed… he chuckled.

Women like that were a real prize, especially if they could manifest a physique.

“This just leaves… Priestess Ying?” Yeng Bo signed.

“It does,” he agreed, before adding “—what about Sergeant Shun?”

“I dealt with both sergeants on duty,” Yeng Qin Ji signed. “What about the other Hunters?”

“Mu is in the storehouse. I dunno about that Yufan?”

“Oh, the one with the Ha family brat who thought he was all that?” Jibo sneered. “I went up to his room and crippled him. Just like his cousin, that Shimo.”

“In that case, Jibo, Zhan Bei, with me,” he sighed, turning on his heel. “The rest of you… Secure here then go help with the storehouse?”

“Okay,” Yeng Bo agreed.

“Hey… where is her storage ring?” Yeng Qin Ji, who had been going around the four, checking them for treasures, asked, holding up Lianmei’s empty hand.

Yeng Bo stared dully at her.

He quickly replayed events in his head, and also got nothing. Certainly she had had it on her, and now it was…

“Maybe it’s in the pool?” Zhen Bei suggested, crouching down by the water’s edge.

“Well go look for it then!” he hissed.

Zhen Bei scowled and slid back into the water, ducking beneath the surface—

A fraction of a second later a small, wet bundle of fur danced out of the water and out the door, almost unnoticed by all of them. Only his years of dealing with deadly threats in Yin Eclipse even allowed him to perceive the fate-thrashed monkey as it fled, the ring grasped tight in its paw… though that was not what drew his attention, it was the white and gold jade slip grasped in its mouth.

“Shit…”

-There is always something unforeseen!

Turning, he raced after it, waving for Jibo to follow, even as the others were still reacting. He had no idea what that talisman was, but all his intuition told him that the monkey running away with it was probably a bad thing.

The monkey darted out into the common room—

“STOP THAT FATE-THRASHED MONKEY!” he yelled.

Half a dozen eyes turned to it.

“A monkey stole your ring!”

“GOOOO MONKEY GO!”

“HAHAAHAAA….”

“Pest, it stole a spirit stone from me the other day!”

Various laughter and curses followed it, as, thankfully, did three different barrier talismans—

The monkey somehow managed to dodge all three, though it left a bloody chunk of its tail behind with the last one.

Grimacing, he palmed the Dao Cage talisman again, preparing to trigger the inn-wide formation linked to it…

Jibo, however, beat him to it, lunging forward and catching the monkey by the remains of its tail. They both rolled out the door, to the laughter of the various Ha clan scions. Ignoring them, he followed after as Fan Jing stood up, holding the pest by its neck.

“It threw the ring out into the grass!” Jibo hissed.

“What about the talisman?” he asked.

The monkey grinned toothily. ‘You never find it’, was what it managed to intimate.

“Fates say we will,” Jibo sneered. “Or my name is not Ha Ji Bo—”

The monkey reached around and grasped Jibo by the balls with one of its feet, squeezing hard enough that the idiot actually dropped it with an agonized shriek.

Before he could do anything, the monkey did a strange shuffle and danced backward, snatching the talisman up from where it had somehow managed to stash it in a crack in the ground. The golden lettering on it was almost half formed now, only deepening his sense of concern over whatever it was.

Glancing around, he saw that the lights in all the watchtowers were swapped now.

-At least that is going to plan, he grimaced, looking around for it…

He spotted it after a moment, in the middle of the teleport formation.

“…”

With a leap, he landed on the edge, but the monkey just kept… drawing.

-Shit!

He darted for it—

The monkey half-vanished in a twisted flash of green fire.

Shielding his eyes, he found the monkey had collapsed, barely alive, gasping wretchedly as it kept drawing—

A moment later, Ha Fanjing – ‘Brother Fan Jing’, to give him his proper name – who had been on the balcony of the Ha clan complex, leapt down to land right beside the crippled monkey, a second talisman already in his hand.

Fan Jing stared at it for a moment, then snorted derisively and put his foot on its head.

‘Witless Bum!’ the little monkey managed to intimate, its bloody hand still grasping the talisman which lay beside it.

“Wait—!”

Fan Jing ignored him and just stamped his foot down on its head, killing the monkey.

He stared at the ‘newbie’ member of the Yeng Brotherhood and wondered if there would be any repercussions for strangling some of his so-called ‘helpers’ and dropping them in the forest somewhere.

His plan regarding the monkey had been to tie it up and put it in a jar until it was convenient to kill it in a way that wouldn’t get back to anyone. Not crush its skull in the middle of a rain-swept plaza after it had been drawing some strange thing on the fate-thrashed teleport platform.

“What?” Fan Jing scowled at him. “The stupid thing was vermin. Should have been killed as soon as it was seen. All they do is steal, or piss on things and then steal. Thanks to it I was pissing ass for two days!”

“…”

Stalking over to the monkey, he knelt down, but there was no trace of what it had been drawing, just a smoking puddle of its gore on the formation and the talisman.

He lifted the jade up carefully and considered it with a frown. There was no golden lettering on it at all, it was just a plain piece of white jade, now covered in smoking monkey blood.

Sighing, he tossed the talisman to Fan Jing.

“What do you want me to do with this?” Fan Jing asked, looking at the object with disgust before dropping it on the monkey again.

“So, what now?” Zhen Bei asked, catching up.

“…”

Standing up, he stared around at the gloomy gorge with a sigh, pondering quickly. There was still no sign of the actual force with Illhan, but that was not too surprising. Likely they were out by the walls, biding their time.

“All of you, with me. Let’s secure Priestess Ying,” he said at last.

Fan Jing nodded while Jibo, still grimacing, checked himself over for blood.

Looking around again, he quickly hurried over to the shrine, the others following behind. Thankfully, with the rain, people walking briskly did not elicit much comment in any case.

The lantern was lit, so he walked up the steps, waving for Jibo to remain in the courtyard, and looked inside the main shrine… which was entirely devoid of any sign of Priestess Ying. He gave the monkey’s little grass mat, and its hat, a complicated look, and then waved at the other two to get their attention.

“You two, check the other rooms off the courtyard,” he signed.

Both of them nodded and moved on past him.

Shaking his head, he walked across the shrine, to the door into the far room.

Peering inside, he found it to be a storage room and rest area, likely where Priestess Ying lived most of the time, based on the large rumpled bed in the corner. There were various pots, oddments, a few crates of this and that, spare altars for the shrine, even a sixth statue that was in the process of being mended. Most importantly, though, there was no sign of her.

Shaking his head, he was about to leave, when he noticed another door, barely visible in the gloom at the side of the room, was slightly ajar.

Quietly crossing the room, he opened it and found a corridor beyond…

-Huh…

Curious, he slipped inside, following it until it ended in a room that was clearly built right into the cliff. Here, there was a large statue, in white stone with lustrous dark hair, akin to the statues of the Queen Mother in the previous shrine, but somehow… more striking. As if there was a vividness to it that the lesser ones lacked.

It was unusual mostly for its nakedness. All statues of the ‘Queen Mother’ were either made with clothing, or provided it afterwards. Looking closely, he could see that the wall behind her was also carved with shadow forms, giving her the impression of having ten shadows, each holding a different object, like a lotus, a spear, a wheel, a sword, a rod and so on.

The oddest part of it, though, was the stele in front of her. He had to stare at it for a few moments before realising that it was a Yantra, or interlocking red and black triangles in the style of the Eclipse People, forming the moon rune for ‘East’, which was also ‘Time’ and ‘Red’, depending on how you read it.

The altar before it held a bowl of incense, and a stack of spirit fruit of surprising quality

-So this was the original shrine? he mused, before turning his gaze back to the rest of the hall.

In the middle was a large octagonal pool, similar in style but maybe a fifth of the size of the baths, steam rising from it.

Walking over, he carefully looked into it, but it was unoccupied. A quick check of the rest of the room and its altar showed no other exits either.

-Where in the fates is she? he mused, looking around pensively. Is she outside somewhere? In the storerooms maybe?

If that was the case, he supposed, it was what it was, but leaving loose ends made him uneasy. It was bad enough that that Hunter had slipped through the net. They still had no idea how much she had managed to glean. One of the secondary objectives of this had been to grab her, but sadly she was with the other group, so that would have to wait. They were due back in a day or two anyway, rain notwithstanding, and by that point this place would be thoroughly secured. With Lianmei and the others controlled, it would be easy then to catch them off-guard.

“Ohh… so this is where the women went to be alone…”

“This is actually quite nice, I wonder why she even bothered with the other one?”

“The statue is kinda… unnerving though…”

He turned to find Fan Jing and Zhen Bei had come in after him, the former eating a peach he had gotten from somewhere, probably one of the altars.

“I take it she is not in the rest of the complex?” he signed.

“Nope,” Zhen Bei replied, aloud. “And dude, stop that stupid signing. You think anyone will get anything up here, in this rain?”

“You know that they had actual immortal peaches on the altar?” Fan Jing added. “They are fate-thrashed delicious…”

Shaking his head, he ignored their stupid comments and just headed for the exit again.

Going back out into the main shrine, it was as it had been, minus the contents of the altars, except…

He had to look twice to realise that the monkey’s grass hat was gone.

“Did you take the monkey’s hat?” he asked Fan Jing, who had just come up behind him.

“Eh… no, maybe Jibo did?” Fan Jing shrugged. “He was in here when we came in, looking at the shrines.”

“…”

Looking around again, he grimaced and wondered why he was suddenly feeling… uneasy.

“Can I help you?” He turned to find Priestess Ying standing in the doorway of the main shrine, a small basket of spirit fruit, freshly picked by the looks of it, in her arm.

“Ah… Elder Lianmei was looking for you,” he said apologetically, wondering why his intuition was telling him something was off… “The door here was open… and after calling out…”

“I… see,” she mused, apparently not that bothered.

-What is… it?

“Is there a problem?” she asked. “You seem… distracted?”

“Eh, no, it’s just the rains,” he replied as the other two, standing behind him, started to move toward the exit. “I suppose we will go get breakfast… sorry to have intruded.”

“Not at all,” she replied amicably. “This shrine is not my personal property, I just keep an eye on—”

{Deng Sheng’s Dao Cage}

He triggered the talisman, watching space freeze around them. It was a cheap trick, but it worked, he had to admit. Turning to Fan Jing and Zhen Bei, he freed them, then walked over to her and tore off the front of her gown as she glared at him.

Focusing the talisman’s effect on her, he watched the qi bleed out of her body.

“Sorry about this, Miss Ying,” he murmured, putting Strategist Huan’s talisman between her breasts. “It is just your time.”

“Grab her. We will go see what is what,” he said, dispelling the barrier around her so she could be moved.

Fan Jing and Zhen Bei grabbed Ying, stripping off the rest of her clothes, checking her for items as he hurried back outside. There was no sign of Jibo in the courtyard…

Turning, he went back inside and froze.

Priestess Ying was standing there, holding Fan Jing by the neck, while Zhen Bei groaned on the ground.

{Deng Sheng’s—

His use of the talisman was almost intuitive; however, before it was even half done, Priestess Ying was somehow standing before him, like a ghost, her palm pressed against his chest—

“You know…” Priestess Ying mused, almost conversationally. “I was asked the other day what I pray for, by a young woman? I replied that I pray for my parents, to my teacher, to the old friends I left behind…”

All the qi in his body vanished, even that locked away through his body cultivation, and refined as part of the martial method he had acquired.

—He hit the gateway of the shrine with enough force to demolish part of the stonework. Rolling out of the ruin, he gasped for breath, and then stopped abruptly.

*Cr-crack*

The sound was so alien it took him a moment to realise it was the sound of his own knee being shattered. He tried to scream, but there was no air in his lungs, even before Ying’s bare foot pressed down on his chest, pinning him to the ground.

In an almost detached manner, he noted that she had lost a leg at some point and there was a positively inauspicious star-like scar between her breasts. She also had a pair of gashes across her stomach… and below… like someone had… torn out her dantian and spirit root?

“I told her that I wanted to sit and have a good chat with old friends about the lives we led…” Priestess Ying purred, her eyes almost luminous in the pre-dawn gloom. “But I’ll let you in on a little secret… let all of you in on a little secret.”

Groaning, he managed to shift his head and saw almost two dozen grass-hatted figures, carrying blades, bows and spears, standing in the plaza, looking at them. Behind them, three twisting shadows in the rain, big as carts, lurked, barely visible; Illhan’s ‘Queens’.

“You know what I have prayed for… every day, since I came up here?” Ying murmured.

“…”

“Thanks…” she said softly.

“T…thanks?” he gasped, confused.

“Yes…” she smiled.

“Let my brother go and we can discuss matters,” Yeng Bo said softly.

“…”

His surroundings spun jarringly and he hit the ground with an excruciating crunch, mere metres from the dead monkey, its malformed face staring at him—

Coughing blood, he tried to move and found that his meridians were really not in a good state. Half the bones in his body were broken as well, and his dantian, while not ruined, had not come out well from whatever she did a moment before.

Priestess Ying walked over to the monkey. This time, he got a proper look at what she did, and the most terrifying part of it was that he had no fate-thrashed idea what he was looking at.

-How…?

On the one hand, she appeared to have walked perfectly normally, and yet, in his mind’s eye, she had just stepped from one point to another, as if the intervening space flowed away from her.

Kneeling down, she picked up the white jade which the monkey had had, and which Fan Jing had left beside it. She stared at it for a moment, then put it to the side.

“You brave little fool…” she murmured, almost tenderly, closing its eyes. “May your big brother strike your name from the Book of Mortals when you are born anew.”

The words, murmured so softly he barely thought he heard them in the rain, made his skin crawl. The pain and… hate in them was unimaginable and it only intensified as she placed the grass hat over the remains. Melded with the rain, it did indeed feel like heaven was weeping with her. Standing, she put her hands to her face, dragging them down across her bare breasts, leaving bloody smears, like tears in her flesh, her shoulders shaking for a moment—

A tetrid stalker the size of a pig appeared out of the rain, moving so fast that the world almost seemed to stand still—

He stared blankly as she swayed slightly out of the way of its strike, pressed her palm against its face—

The stalker bent bizarrely, and then disintegrated into a corona of ichor and shattered exoskeleton, its core grasped in her hand. She considered the core, then looked back at the assembled ‘Brothers of Yeng’.

“Who are you?” Yeng Illhan asked at last, from where he was seated on the top of the largest tetrid queen, a shadow-eyed stalker.

“Yeng Illhan, Yeng Bo… and you… Seng Kwan…” she purred, turning to look at the forces arraigned against her before finally looking back at him, as a strange symbol appeared on her forehead that became ‘Flow’.

The core twisted in her hand, the light in it dimming as the qi was drawn directly into her body, a feat which should have been basically impossible.

Grinning, she spread her arms, the shattered fragments of the dead core falling through her fingers like glittering glass.

“If you can kill me, you will find out…”

~ Kun Juni – Heaven Blaze Pine Grove ~

Kneeling on a rock, in the washed-out forest glade, Juni watched Arai, Lin Ling and Han Shu warily poke around the base of a heaven blaze pine, mulling over the ‘day’ they had just endured.

“So, what do you reckon?” Sana signed from where she was sitting nearby, in a good spot to look back up the slope towards the ridgeline.

“About what?” she replied, also in sign language, which was what they were using exclusively out here. “Which problem?”

“Huh… yeah, that is the question,” Sana conceded. “I mean… what do you make of Ling Luo being here?”

Ling Luo was indeed a riddle. One that bothered her perhaps more than she suspected it should.

Ling Luo, the only child of Lord Ling Jiang, was a few years older than her, close to Nascent Soul from what she recalled, and considered talented with formations for her age and realm.

As an acquaintance, she could not say she was particularly close; however, both she and Ling Luo were daughters of a clan, of an age and, roughly, a social circle. So they were at least on greeting terms. Still, her past interactions with Ling Luo, outside a few meetings in official roles, had largely been conversations at various functions young women in their position tended to end up at; sharing complaints about the Bureau or difficulties dealing with ‘Young Masters’.

From that perspective, she supposed there was a perfectly innocuous reason why Ling Jiang’s daughter was up here – she was a responsible, talented cultivator, who, through her work for Ling Jiang, knew her way around bureaucracy, logistics and the kind of jobs Mo Shunfei and Ha Faolian were doing. She was also a Ling clan person, and that meant you had a Ha person, a Bureau person and a Ling person here in that role. Kun as well, if she counted herself.

And yet… clearly Ling Tao had been resisting her coming. That had not been said explicitly, yet, but reading between the lines of their few conversations on the way here, Ling Luo had been… if not evasive, certainly vague.

“She is a bit distant to you as well?” she asked at last.

“Uhuh,” Sana nodded. “I know her to at least exchange greetings with, thanks to Ling Yu, but she basically looked right through me earlier, until I reminded her of it…”

“…”

“It could just be stress,” she mused, before holding up a hand as she considered the compass sitting by her – a bowl of water with some small, skittish water herbs drifting in it.

“Could be, but why is she even here?” Sana replied, before adding, after a short pause to look around herself. “Problem with the compass?”

“No… thankfully,” she replied, watching them swirl gently in the water, then sweeping their surroundings. “Well, she said she was forcibly teleported, much like Yun and Caoluns’ groups seem to have been,” she added. “Ji… Tantai?”

“Yeah, that seems to be his name,” Sana nodded.

“—Well, he and Sir Feilu both got dragged with her, along with three Ling clan guards, who never seem to have arrived?”

“Yeah, she said that, but…” Sana made a face as she signed.

Watching Arai, Lin Ling and Han Shu start to cut through the roots of the pine, carefully, she nodded in agreement. It all rang as perfectly plausible, and nothing Ling Luo had said on the way here contradicted the story, and yet…

“I suppose we will find out, when we get back,” she signed with a grimace of her own.

“Which does lead rather awkwardly to… Ha Ji Mangfan,” Sana signed, scowling.

“It does,” she agreed.

“He absolutely tried something with my sister, while we were disorientated from the teleport,” Sana signed with considerable emotive intent. “I will also bet you spirit stones he was in that grove already.”

“Arai already said as much, and Sir Huang agrees,” she signed back.

That got complicated, as well, because the early thought there had been that Feilu had been in the grove as well, with Mangfan, but Ling Luo had killed off that idea.

“Hopefully, with us running them all into the ground, none of them will have the energy at night, in this rain, to do squat other than lie on their bed rolls and curse that they ever came up here,” Sana signed with a grin.

“Let’s hope,” she agreed. “I for one cannot wait to get back to the Inn and get some answers to this.”

“You think that Wufan’s group might be responsible for all of it?” Sana asked.

“…”

“That can’t be ruled out,” she conceded. “Mangfan dropped enough subtle hints he had something valuable that I am surprised the moss we were walking on didn’t try to rob him.”

It was possible to ‘spoof’ a talisman call. It would not have taken any great guesswork for Botan’s bunch to realize that they were already suspicious of the use of the Seven Star formation – which was every bit as problematic as Senior Ying suggested – and maybe engineer a mishap. Sir Huang had felt that the herb was genuinely in control of the formation however…

-Yet what if someone was in control of the herb?

A formation like that would need a guard. Usually you did so with some kind of feng shui alignment, as those tended to be much more durable than a standard formation. A ten- or eleven-star spirit herb would also do it though, especially an awakened one. You did see herbs like that used in formations, especially for rural estates. There, however, the herb was usually raised as a ‘partner’ of sorts. Nurtured and trained diligently, like a glorified guard dog, the more respectable side of the kind of traps Arai had encountered at Jade Willow.

Her intuition there, however, was that this herb was not like that.

Arai had told her about her experience before they met back up, which was certainly… odd and only served to put her even more on guard. If it was between Arai’s recollections and any testimony by someone like Mangfan, in regards to the wiles of spirt herbs? She was going to pick Arai every time.

The regions around the Aspen were a sanctuary for the strange and dangerous.

Old Ling had once told her that offending the Grove was no less dangerous than offending a hegemonic influence. Usually those who did either died before it ever became a problem…

If a group of idiots with their noses in the air had actually captured an awakened herb from there, this was going to have ramifications comparable to the chaos unleashed by the auction. It would certainly spell the end of any cultivator going through the Grove for a long time.

That led them rather unpleasantly to the biggest issue, really.

Something had followed them all the way from the Aspen Grove, or near enough. On the face of it, all the evidence pointed to the centipede, but the problem was… that it wasn’t the centipede. She was fairly clear on its limitations and unless something fundamental had changed in the five years since it was last spotted by a Hunter, it couldn’t cross ridges. It could go under them, but that route was not direct.

“I don’t suppose you have any further thoughts on what might have followed us?” Sana muttered.

“Nothing definite,” she replied with an apologetic grimace. “It never got close enough, just kept trying to push us. To the point where even the Ha bunch, who are about as valley-wise as a pet dog, started to comment.”

Unknown to everyone but Sir Huang, they had actually crossed two ridges in the late evening, and their pursuer had followed them both times. They had also not been anywhere near as ‘lost’ as she let on to the others. The tomb in the lake was a somewhat obscure landmark, but it was mentioned in Kun clan records.

It was possible it was the herb, especially given Mangfan almost certainly had the Seven Star formation core on him… but that was another problem that would have to wait until they got back. It also precluded her wanting to attempt any teleports, just in case the Wufan group really were the root cause of this.

“…”

“They are going to chop it down,” Sana signed, changing topic abruptly.

She sighed and nodded, glancing at her compass again. It still showed no threats.

Arai was looking up at them, so she made the okay sign.

From a distance, she watched, nibbling her lip as the three conferred with sign language, discussing who was going to be the one doing the actual cutting. In the end, Han Shu took the blade, Lin Ling crept back to a marginally less lethal distance in case it all went wrong, watching carefully, and Arai stayed within arm’s reach of the trunk.

Han Shu took a few breaths, set himself and swung—

With a single sweep of the blade, he neatly truncated the tree about ten centimetres above the ground.

“For all that he is kinda bad at swords, he does know how to cut,” Sana remarked as the tree barely shivered, then vanished with a *pop* as Arai stored the whole thing away in the storage ring.

*thop*

*Thop*

*hhhhhssssss…*

All three froze as two pinecones landed across the other side of the tree, steaming faintly in the rain.

“…”

“There are always ones that drop, unless you are a master,” Sana signed, her hands shaking a little.

Arai very warily stepped over to the cones and stored them away as well.

Already, she could see the haze of yang qi bleeding out of the ground around the roots of the felled tree, pine needles smoking.

“And that is why you always clear around the tree,” Sana added.

“Uhuh,” she agreed.

Harvesting heaven blaze pines was a task that was surprisingly simple, yet in no way whatsoever would you consider it ‘easy’. Even if you followed all the steps, all it took was a few missed cones, or a slightly wonky cut, or, fates forbid, having to cut twice, to make your day terminally unpleasant.

Arai, Han Shu and Ling made their way back up the slope to them, sweating.

“Well, that was fun,” Lin Ling signed.

“Sorry about dropping those cones,” Han Shu added.

“It’s fine,” Arai shook her head. “Something like that always happens, it’s the price of having to harvest them at this kind of inauspicious hour.”

That was, indeed, another kicker. Normally you wanted a very auspicious hour for dealing with dangerous herbs. For Yang-rich heaven blaze pines though, wet, raining, flooded and washed-out forest in the pre-dawn hours was about the only time you would dare cut the things down.

“What grade was it?” she asked.

“Qi purity is nine-star grade, so close to Chosen Immortal at least,” Arai signed with a grin. “Though we can only fit two or three that size into the ring…”

She grimaced, because that meant they were almost out of space. Her ring had three smaller trees, Arai had four, Sana had two, Ling had four and her big ring had seven around the size of the one they had just cut. They could probably store three or four more.

“I suppose talismans are still out on the other end?” Han Shu asked.

She took out the communication talisman and focused on it.

“Lianmei?”

“Faolian?”

“Shunfei?”

“…”

There was a flat silence in return, as if she had just spoken into nothing.

“Nothing still,” she signed.

“It occurs to me that we could just walk back ourselves…”

Glancing to her side, she saw that the bowl was trembling, the blooming pond weed retracting its flowers. Looking back in the direction of the ridgeline, she saw a figure very cautiously picking his way down to them.

“Yeah, I don’t think that will be immediately possible,” she signed, drawing their attention to the new arrival, who after a few moments turned out to be Ha Leng.

-He came on his own? she frowned, a little surprised, in truth.

It took Ha Leng about five minutes to make his way over to them, sweating hard and looking at his feet with a great deal of unease. It was actually kind of amusing to watch, although she understood his fear quite clearly.

A valley with heaven blaze pines in it was a place where any misplaced footstep could be your last, and, all around them, there was evidence of their presence. Fresh scars of growth in the mossy rocks, inharmonious gaps in the understory, black scars in the soil and missing branches on the broad-leaves that sprawled between the stands of pine.

It all contributed to a very clear picture… which, interestingly enough, put quite a lot of ‘edge pressure’ on the state of mind of anyone going through it. Much like… say the Red Pit, valleys with heaven blaze pines built their own feng shui defences, and other spirit herbs tended to contribute as well.

Leng, being smart and actually pretty dedicated, for a Ha clan hunter at least, certainly knew that; however, he didn’t have the depth of knowledge to know why they had picked this part of the valley, which was not on a slope but rather down by the river that flowed through it, from the ridgeline above. The real clue was the lack of soil cover… and the mud.

Nature had already done much of the clearance for them. The scars of recent explosions on the rocks and the lack of a lot of leaf litter told her that the flooding from the rain had swept away a lot of the lying cones. They would wash downstream and eventually form new colonies elsewhere, in this valley and others.

“How come you are here?” she asked him, dropping the sign language at last in consideration of Leng understanding what they wanted as he finally arrived by her rock.

“Sir Huang sent me to check up on you,” Leng said, looking around uneasily.

“Didn’t anyone else come with you?” Sana added, peering with a neutral expression back up the slope he had descended.

“No, the others are not especially well-rested and well, this uh… valley is not…”

“Yeah, heaven blaze groves are not a place to wander if your mentality is not good,” she agreed, moving over so he could clamber up. “It does rather get in your head…”

“Yeah…” Leng agreed with a grimace, still looking around uneasily.

“I suppose we have been a bit longer than we thought,” Sana remarked, glancing at the scrip on her arm. “The idea was to be back well before dawn…”

-In case the shadow of the mountain moves, or is moving, she finished in her own head, glancing down towards the lower end of the valley.

On a clear day, their current location would have afforded them a truly spectacular view, although not the view Leng or anyone else in that party expected. Heaven blaze pines liked slopes facing the Great Mount. In truth, if you walked about three miles down here, below the altitude of the cloud forest, you would again find yourself in the Aspen Grove, only a few miles from the ‘right’ path above the waterfall in fact, although without any ridges to provide a barrier from the herb or the centipede.

“It makes sense to get the most out of this place today. Tomorrow might not be as ‘hospitable’,” Han Shu observed, flicking water off his hat for emphasis.

“Hospitable?” Leng repeated, looking around with an expression stranded somewhere between concern and confusion.

“You have to harvest these trees on days like these,” Sana said with an eye roll. “Any other day…?” she mimed a big explosion.

“…”

“I am aware of what heaven blaze pines are like,” Leng retorted, scowling a little as he adjusted his hat to shake off some of the rain.

“Well, I suppose if we are an extra person… Sana, Arai, do you want to take a break?” she asked Arai.

Of the five of them, Arai and Sana had rested the least, and Arai had also healed Mun several times more during the night.

“Do we not count as people?” Lin Ling grumbled.

“You and Shu can continue on your own, I’ll take Leng,” she said with an amused grin.

“Okay,” Han Shu agreed, though he also cast her a slightly jaded glance.

Lin Ling just sighed, but didn’t argue.

She watched, feeling a bit bad, as they headed off slowly through the flooded dell, towards another of the reddish-grey-coloured pine trees, which was in about a foot of gently steaming water.

“So… uh, what are we going to do?” Leng asked her uneasily as she slipped off the rock and started looking around carefully.

“Don’t worry, I’ll show you what to do,” she said with a grin. “So long as you are systematic, it’s not too bad.”

It took her about five minutes to lead the very nervous Leng to another, somewhat smaller adult pine, further along the slope.

“How much storage space have you got in your ring?” she asked him, as she investigated the surroundings, just in case there were any other spirit herbs lurking.

Getting scalded by a mutated water-fern lurking amidst the ground cover was not how she wanted to finish this harvesting trip.

“Eh… quite a bit,” Leng replied, looking around nervously. “We were just clearing what was left over in Portam Rhanae…”

“Enough for a few whole trees?” she mused, looking around at two other smaller trees some ten metres away.

“…”

“We can try?” Leng replied hesitantly.

“We need to be sure,” she said drily. “If you try and store one and it doesn’t work, and it falls… they will never find our corpses.”

“…”

“That’s… not a cheerful thought,” Leng muttered, looking up at the thirty-metre-tall tree beside them, his voice a bit on edge.

Considering his confidence, and general lack of experience, she decided after a moment of reflection to do the first set of roots herself. Motioning for Leng to watch, she started to slowly check through the leaves and needles beneath the tree until she lifted up a fist-sized pine cone.

“We have to clear all of these,” she said. “Carefully, they are really unstable… if they burst…”

“As I said before, I am aware of what blaze pine cones can do,” Leng murmured a bit reproachfully.

She gave him a pat on the arm and started to work, keeping half an eye on Arai and Sana, further upslope.

In the end, it took them ten minutes to clear the area around the tree. Once she was satisfied there were no unpleasant surprises awaiting them, she motioned for Leng to observe her again, and then took out the blade she usually used for butchering qi beasts. Eyeing the tree and the ridging at the base of the trunk, she tracked a root and stabbed the blade into the ground, feeling the faint bite of resistance as it cut through it. Tracking to the next one, she repeated the process, slowly working her way around the whole tree until there was only one root left.

“When I cut this, be ready to store it,” she said to Leng, who just nodded uneasily and put his hand against the tree.

Watching him, she sliced the root… and nothing happened.

“Uh… is that meant to happen?” Leng asked.

“Typical,” she sighed under her breath, looking around. “There really is always something.”

Missing roots was why chopping the trunk was technically better; however, the margin of error for the person storing was non-existent. With Leng being unconfident and inexperienced, those precious few seconds that the tap root anchoring the tree would buy them could be the difference between life and death.

Leng frowned and made to give the tree a poke, but she caught his hand in time and just shook her head.

“Sorry,” he grimaced.

“It’s fine,” she replied, waving for him to move over so she had a bit more room to look for roots.

Repeating the circuit, she again motioned for Leng to try and store the tree. This time it did vanish into his ring with a whoosh of displaced air, central root column and all.

Heading over to the two smaller pines, she repeated the process, watching Leng cut this time and storing the tree herself, surprised that even one that small was still a six-star blaze pine.

“How are things up top?” she asked him as they set to work on the second one.

“…”

“Mun is no better, Mangfan is an ass, the Din pair are… inscrutable and Fairy Luo and Ji Tantai are poking about the ruins,” Leng muttered.

“So, as we left,” she replied with an amused shake of her head.

“Yeah… It will be a relief to get back to the Inn,” Leng murmured. “Hopefully we can get proper treatment for Mun there, and find Fang…”

“Yeah…”

That was about as committal as she felt able to make her reply. The odds of Chu Fang still being alive were depressingly slim in her view. As for Ha Mun? Arai had ensured he would live, for a while at least, so long as she kept tending to him. It would probably be enough to get him back to the Inn, though what happened there…

“I know you don’t think he will survive,” Leng said softly. “And that you don’t—”

“…”

“If it was Ha Botan here, or Leng Dushan… do you think Mun would still be with us?” she asked him.

Leng stared at her and then shook his head, looking depressed, understanding her meaning. To those elders, Ha Mun was just a disposable minion. The only reason he might be healed at all, if Ha Yun really forced the issue, was to give Ha Yun’s father face. The economics of it were just not worth it in their eyes, to create a cripple who would live for a few decades at best and give nothing more to the clan.

“While some of my friends may not like your friends very much, do not mistake that for anything more,” she added, watching as Ling and Han Shu finished cutting down another tree. “We will do what we can to keep Mun alive.”

“…”

Leng gave her a complicated look. In a way, she understood, because the same view was prevalent in the Kun clan… and it annoyed her. Life was not cheap, and the consequences for its loss were rarely straightforward. She only had to look at Arai and Han Shu for a recent reminder of that.

“Sorry…” Leng muttered. “It’s… been… stressful.”

“I know,” she replied, giving his shoulder a sympathetic squeeze.

It was not lost on her that Ha Yun had somewhat idolized his older cousin when he was younger, nor that Leng had also likely known Ha Yuanbei. Her own role in that sorry tragedy was certainly a factor in Ha Yun’s attitude.

“…”

Suppressing a grimace, she looked up at the dark sky, thick with rainclouds, and sighed.

“Shall we grab another?” she asked Leng, putting on a slightly more encouraging smile and looking around for another suitable tree. “Now that you have your eye in…”

Leng looked around at the ferns and the gloomy whispering forest, clearly conflicted on that point, but did nod after a moment.

In the end, they harvested two other smaller blaze pines before she finally called it quits and led Leng back where Arai and Sana were sitting quietly, conversing in sign language so esoteric that even she could barely get a quarter of it.

“Find any more good ones?” Sana asked her as they sat down on the rock, Leng puffing a bit from the exertion, to wait for Ling and Han Shu.

“Two more six-star ones,” she replied.

“What do you want to do about storing what we have?” Arai added.

“Yeah… Um… am I going to be stuck with these two trees in my storage ring until we go back?” Leng asked a bit nervously.

“…”

In normal circumstances, that would be quite an obstacle, she had to concede. Usually, you just took the timber straight back and it was unstored in a specially-prepared pond filled with unattributed, qi-rich water by someone quite a few realms higher than the timber itself. There it could be safely de-coned, and the timber cut. Moving them in and out of storage talismans incautiously was how you blew yourself up. She knew this because it had actually happened. An entire blaze pine going up had demolished a city block in the Blue River District a few years back.

“We have an interface,” Sana said drily. “Or we would not have been quite so ad-hoc in this.”

“Ah… oh… oh,” Leng stared at Sana with mild shock.

As a reaction, it was kind of amusing, because ‘talisman interfaces’ were not actually that uncommon. They were used widely in shops for selling goods, especially alchemical ones, which tended to be unstable if treated incautiously. You could link up storage crates to them and basically make a formation that temporarily joined two or more stable storage spaces. The downside was that the crates, while they could be stored themselves in their base form, were bulky when set up.

“We can set it up when we go back up,” she decided. “The plan was to set up a forward base camp anyway and the Heart Keeping Ridge is as good a place as any.”

“Heart… keeping?” Leng blinked.

“Oh yeah, that’s the informal name for this ruin,” Arai replied, before she could. “You saw the flat area with the seating?”

“Uh… yeah?” Leng frowned.

“Well, there was some kind of statue on a plinth when you go through the passageway from the area where we are camped to the open area by the cliff. Someone took the carving long ago, but the last line of text is still there – reads ‘Keep your Heart’ in Ancient Easten… hence the name.”

“We’ll show you on the way back,” Sana added. “I am sure it must have been mentioned earlier.”

Thinking back, she wasn’t sure it had been, actually. They had gotten up there, staggered into shelter and then prepared food, before half the group pretty much collapsed into a fugue state. After that she had mostly spent time recovering herself and starting the maps from the previous day syncing up. She had left that tablet with Sir Huang before coming down here.

-With luck those will be done when I get back, she mused.

“Probably we will use that area for the teleport formation anyway, given it’s flat and not that heavily overgrown,” she added.

“We should have set that up before we came down here,” Lin Ling grumbled, finally arriving back beside them, followed a moment later by a much muddier Han Shu.

“Eh… I dunno that I like the idea of teleporting things out of a heaven blaze grove at this kind of hour,” Han Shu muttered.

“…”

“You know what I meant,” Lin Ling pouted.

Han Shu just rolled his eyes.

“We can teleport again?” Leng asked, sounding surprised.

“For goods,” she reminded him.

“Oh… yeah, right, sorry,” Leng grimaced. “Long day…”

“So, I guess we head back then, re-organize and sort out breakfast?” Sana concluded, standing up with a grimace.

“Uhuh,” she agreed. “If we stay any longer Sir Huang is going to think something happened, to us and Leng…”

“True,” Leng agreed.

After a quick check around the vicinity, she collected up the compass, because it was a shame to dismantle it after going to all the effort to make it work, and fell in behind Arai and Sana as they started off up the path.

“Breakfast, breakfast, breakfast!” Lin Ling chanted under her breath, following after Sana.

Leng, looking at Lin Ling’s carefree attitude, shuddered, which she found kind of amusing as he also set off after Arai and Sana.

The trip back up the valley, which she mostly spent at the rear, chatting with Han Shu, was uneventful.

They re-ascended the ridge by a ruined rock stair that had been cut aeons ago, to connect the ruins at the top to a small settlement of terraces and houses around the waterfall that flowed down from halfway up it.

Arriving back at the top, they set off across the rocky, overgrown plateau, back towards the ruins. However, they had only gone a hundred or so metres along the path back towards their camp, when they met Jiang Teng coming the other direction, looking around with a slightly concerned expression.

-Ah, he must have been sent to check on us, given Leng went and didn’t immediately come back.

“Ah, you are okay,” Jiang Teng said, taking in their muddy appearance and the still out of breath Ha Leng, with some relief she noted. “Huang was getting a bit concerned.”

“Yeah, sorry about that,” she replied with an apologetic grimace.

-What a time, when the bunch guarding Ha Yun are the ‘reliable’ ones…

“It’s an optimal hour to risk life and limb in pursuit of things no smart person would go near, so we just made the best of it.”

Behind her, Lin Ling just sniffed derisively.

“Heaven blaze pines?” Jiang Teng asked with a raised eyebrow, glancing down the cliff into the haze of swirling cloud.

“Uhuh,” Han Shu nodded in a rather uncommitted fashion.

“Any success?” Jiang Teng asked as they started back along the roadway towards the camp again.

“Mmmmm… Better than expected, actually,” she replied. “There were a few good quality trees down there, so the plan is to get some food then sort them out and see about starting to set up a proper camp here.”

“This would be a good place,” Jiang Teng mused. “Sir Huang has Ding and the others fixing breakfast, but I can make no claims as to its edibility.”

“Truly it is said that the Young Master has comprehended that most mysterious of Daos,” Sana chuckled.

“Oh?” Leng asked, a bit sourly.

“Yes, the Dao of setting empty noodles on fire,” Sana giggled.

“Pfffft—!” Jiang Teng snorted a laugh and even Leng cracked a brief smile.

Rather than go the more circuitous route back around the promontory, they instead just cut straight along the edge of the plateau. Their group made their way back to the far side of the ruin where they had spent the night, just as the pre-dawn gloom was finally, properly starting to shift, crossing one of the currently flooded gullies fed by runoff from the higher ground to their west to arrive at the edge of the open assembly area.

When they got there, though, what surprised her was that half of the Ha group were already present, listening to Caolun very badly translate some of the text on the carvings below the rows of seating, with Sir Cao looking on. Ji Tantai and Ling Luo were wandering around on the far side, also looking at carvings and talking quietly, while the Din pair and Mangfan were sitting in the shelter of one of the ruined buildings, just watching the others.

Pausing at the top of the steps down to the open area, Sana nudged Leng and pointed out a fractured altarpiece in front of the rock staircase that led back through a fissure in the promontory to where they had camped.

“That’s the inscription we mentioned,” she told him.

“Oh…” Leng nodded, following where she gestured, but didn’t seem that enthused.

“It’s a shame we are here in the rain,” Arai mused, as they made their way down the steps towards the ruined altar.

“Yeah, the view from here is… impressive,” Sana agreed.

“—Oh, hey! LENG! Come over here and look at this!” Ha Ding, who had apparently abandoned his brief stint as a cook, called, waving to Leng from where the Ha group were milling around.

Leng gave them a glance and sighed. “Let me sort this out first!” he called back.

Jiang Teng just shook his head, gave her a sympathetic glance, then headed towards Sir Cao.

“I’ll go get the storage crate…” she murmured to the others. “Do you want to get the framework for that sorted here, Ling?”

“Oh, yeah, I have the formation template, don’t I,” Lin Ling nodded. “In that case, everyone give me your Hunter talismans…”

Sana and Arai both passed theirs over to Lin Ling,

“—Yours as well, Leng,” Lin Ling added with an eye roll, holding out her hand. “Remember, the formation needs a soul signature, suppression or no…”

“Oh yeah,” Leng grimaced and passed her his Hunter Bureau talisman, and then the storage ring as well. “Sorry…”

That was a useful sub-function of the Bureau talismans up here, they worked with interface formations, allowing for very easy setup and transfer of goods without having to go through the whole rigmarole of everyone being ‘part of’ the formation for the whole transfer.

“Where do you want to set it up?” Ling asked her, looking around with a frown at the bunch of shadowy entrances to rock-cut rooms around the lower level of the semi-circular plaza.

“Probably better to do it in the open, we need to set up the teleport formation as well,” she mused, looking around, trying to think where the formation itself would go. “Probably on this side, in the nearest room?”

“Okay,” Ling nodded.

“In that case, we can sort the teleport formation, while you go look for Sir Huang,” Sana volunteered, then glanced at Ling; “Ling, you have most of the teleport stuff on you, right?”

“I do,” Ling confirmed, taking out a box, then a bunch of formation jades, and several cubes of spirit stones, which she handed to Arai and Sana.

“I thought the plan was breakfast first?” Han Shu muttered.

“This will take a while,” she conceded with a resigned sigh. “I’ll go check on breakfast while I get the storage crate. I assume it’s with the herb pots we unloaded last night?”

“Should be!” Sana said.

“I’ll come give you a hand carrying it then,” Han Shu volunteered. “I am fairly sure I recall them putting stuff in it.”

Nodding, she left Arai, Sana and Ling to it and headed off with Han Shu, back up the steps.

“Sorry, I am not trying to avoid you,” she muttered to Han Shu after a few moments. “I just…”

“Want to get this all over with?” Han Shu finished with a tired smile.

“Yep,” she agreed…

*Rumble…*

The clouds above them trembled slightly with the peal of distant thunder.

“…”

“I really hope we don’t get a thunderstorm,” Han Shu muttered.

“Yeah…” she agreed, looking up at the still largely dark sky.

The valleys below them generated a lot of yang qi, and, while the ridgeline was safe from qi beasts, they were currently above the cloud layer. An actual thunderstorm merging with the Rains from the East would be… unpleasant. Likely it would force them off the ridge entirely, to a lower refuge. The maps she had noted that there was one, but it was about six miles to the west, further along the chain of massif-plateaus that marked the boundary of the Inner Valleys.

Shaking her head, she quickened her steps and they were soon back in the open plaza with its circular pool—

A much louder peal of thunder rumbled in the distance, to the south-west, making the rain tremble and the water in the pond ripple.

Inside the hall where their camp was, she found Sir Huang sitting, poking at the fire.

“Ah, you’re back!” Sir Huang said with a relieved sigh.

“Yeah, we got lucky with the pines and decided to make the most of it,” she sighed.

“Where is Mun?” Han Shu asked.

“Oh… he managed to recover enough that he could stagger under his own power, so they took him out to get some air, and to allow the earth qi in here to dissipate a bit,” Sir Huang said.

“I suppose that’s something,” she half-muttered, setting down the bowl-compass that she was still carrying. “The others are setting up a teleport formation and sorting out storage rings.”

“Your spatial contamination has worn off then?” Sir Huang observed.

“Has yours?” she asked, curious.

He nodded.

“In that case, it should be a priority for us to try and establish some contact with someone?” she suggested.

“Yes; unfortunately, that requires Ling Luo’s cooperation, probably,” Sir Huang sighed.

“That… shouldn’t be a problem?” she frowned.

“You would think, but she is almost inseparable from her friend ‘Ji’,” Sir Huang sighed. “I guess it’s finally struck home that she is alone up here with a bunch of Ha clan scions and people she doesn’t really know, bar you and presumably Sana?”

“…”

“I’ll go speak to her,” she said with a grimace, feeling a flash of sympathy for Ling Luo.

“She is in the plaza, with the others,” Sir Huang added.

“Okay,” she nodded. “We might need you for the formation though. We were going to set up the storage crate, but now I am here it occurs that maybe it should stay here and we set up a secondary node near the formation?”

“That works,” Sir Huang nodded. “I can go do that, it’s fairly easy.”

They spent a few moments after that sorting things out. The crate had already been set up, so, rather than go through the faff of moving it, she just lifted a talisman charm off it to give to Lin Ling. It was less than ideal, but the distance wasn’t big and they had lots of spirit stones to fuel it. Once that was sorted, they went back outside and through the fissure to the plaza.

There, she found Din Ouyeng, Ha Mangfan and Din Kongfei now all standing around the ruined altar, eating spirit fruit and taking about what it might have been used for.

“Ah, Brother Huang, Hunter Arai wanted to speak to you,” Din Ouyeng said as they passed. “Something about the formation they were setting up?”

Glancing over at Arai and Sana, who were working their way across the plaza with a compass, she nodded.

“I’ll go see what they want then,” Sir Huang remarked.

-Guess I’ll go see Ling Luo about a Loci then, she mused to herself, looking around for her.

“I’ll go help Ling with the talismans—”

Another rumble of thunder cut Han Shu off, making everyone glance up at the sky as the rain shivered.

Nodding, she headed over towards the far side of the plaza, where Ling Luo and ‘Brother Ji’ were sitting conversing, with some wine and food, under an umbrella.

“Ah, Juni, good morning,” Ling Luo said politely as she arrived beside them.

“Do you have a moment to talk about Loci and formations?” she asked politely.

“Sure,” Ling Luo said, waving for her to take a seat.

“Ah, work stuff, I’ll leave you to it,” ‘Ji’ said with a bright smile.

She nodded politely to him and watched from the corner of her eye as he sauntered over towards the middle of the plaza, twirling his umbrella idly.

“Really, this place is vile,” Mangfan muttered, behind her.

“…”

She turned to find that Ha Mangfan and Din Ouyeng, who had been walking along the wall carvings looking at them, had now reached those behind her.

“Anyway, with your Loci, we should be able to…”

The life bound divination talisman, which had barely triggered when the fate-thrashed spirit herb went wild, twinged, catastrophically, telling her that today was the most auspicious day ever.

“…”

She put a hand to her breast, focusing on the odd, thoroughly disturbing feeling, trying to disentangle what…

Mangfan stood, right in front of her, his hand pressed between her breasts. She had never even seen him move, somehow.

-What the…

Reflexively she ghosted back, avoiding his hand, which held a shimmering white and gold talisman—

Inexplicably she tripped over a shrub, her attempt at using her movement art interrupted.

Rolling up, she looked around and froze for a moment, even as the sound of tumbling masonry intruded into her awareness.

-Where!?

There was no tumbling masonry, anywhere she could see…

“…”

It took her a stunned moment to work out what was wrong with the scene.

-Where is Sir Huang… Arai… Sana?

Sir Huang had vanished. Or, to be more exact, where Sir Huang, Arai and Sana had been standing there was now an empty void and some flapping cloth from his bag, and the scattered remnants of Sana’s pack dropping to the ground. ‘Brother Ji’ stood there, in the plaza, his hand outstretched… a look of annoyance—

The talisman ended.

“Really, this place is vile,” Mangfan muttered, behind her.

Without so much as hesitating, she turned and screamed, “LOOK OUT!”

Exerting all her strength she drew her bow and an arrow, aiming for Ji; however it was already too late, somehow.

The arrow she had loosed at Ji seemed to hang in the air, like the space between them was somehow much greater than it was meant to be.

Everything around her seemed sluggish.

All she could do was stare dully at the empty space where Arai, Sana and Sir Huang had been, at the collapsing rocks of the plaza, carrying all three of them into the cloud-obscured void.

“Tcch!”

He glanced at her and her mind froze, as if she had been nailed to the air around her. The annoyance in his expression, as if he was disappointed in her actions…

Something in her, in the very root of her being, felt drawn towards him, as if, by his acceptance, she could be somehow…

She wanted to kneel before him.

Beg his forgiveness.

The divination talisman and her mantra screamed at her, somehow telling her that even though she had only been hit by the ‘talisman’ from Mangfan in that divined moment, it had still managed to have some impact on her.

She managed to get to the edge and grasp Sana’s bag before it fell, then a hand seemed to grasp her by the back of her robe and drag her backwards.

‘Ji’ turned to the group, his annoyed expression vanishing, and smiled in a way that made her skin crawl.

“Well, that’s the nuisances dealt with,” Mangfan sneered behind her.

“Bit of a pity,” Din Ouyeng grunted.

“Everyone, this is a bit sudden, but I feel I must introduce myself before this gets out of hand,” ‘Ji’ said with a sigh. “I… am Di Ji, and I am so pleased you are all able to be here, today, to help me in this endeavour I have planned.”