For a long life and happiness in any Great World, there are three maxims that you should always adhere to. First, never annoy the Hunter Bureau. Second, never anger the Military Bureau. Third, if anyone ever tells you in seriousness that the Meng, Mo or Huang Clans are a pushover? Rejoice in your heart and do everything you can to become that person’s friend, for you will be able to make a fortune off of their gullibility.

Excerpt from ‘A Mortal’s Journey to the Sky’

~By Hua Xiaomei

~ Ha Yun – Ruined Amphitheatre on the Ridge~

“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!” ‘Brother Ji’ declared with a very unnerving smile, turning from where he stood, six golden rings that hadn’t been there a moment before gently orbiting his body.

Ha Yun stared blankly at the place where Sir Huang, Arai and Sana had been standing a second before.

-‘Brother Ji’ is… Di Ji?

-Isn’t Di Ji… dead?

“Sneak attack?” Ha Leng gawked, beside him.

Kun Juni, who had just managed to grasp some of Arai and Sana’s belongings, was dragged down by Ha Mangfan—

Lin Ling, who had been off to the side of the plaza with Han Shu, working on some kind of formation, spun and dashed for the edge of the cliff. Han Shu, meanwhile, cursed and vanished in a blur, arriving beside Mangfan—

*Tcch*

Din Ouyeng shook his head and two more arms appeared, grasping Lin Ling and Han Shu and pinning both of them to the ground.

“A real pity those two had to go over with that old fool who didn’t have eyes.” Mangfan said with a sigh, dragging the struggling Juni up. “Physical cultivators of that quality would have been quite the prize…”

Di Ji, who had been looking at the edge where Arai and Sana had fallen with a pensive frown, ignored Mangfan and instead turned to look back towards the ruins behind them, then up at the sky.

*Hruuuuumble…*

A distant peel of thunder shook the clouds, and the wind, which had been blowing from the north, stilled.

“…”

His brain was still trying to formulate a rational response to whatever the fates this was – a nightmare? Or some horrible hallucination – when the spot where Lin Ling and Han Shu had been standing, before they made their move, rippled—

{Mang’s Multifarious Skitter Leap}

Lin Ling, Han Shu and Kun Juni all exploded into multi-coloured butterflies, scattering a blinding cloud of qi everywhere. They swirled around him and his ability to process events snapped back into focus, as if he had had a bucket of icy water dumped over him.

Instantly, he palmed the strongest barrier talisman he possessed from the ring Elder Lan had given him.

“…”

Nothing happened.

Leng was also staring at his storage ring blankly.

-W-what?

The multi-coloured butterflies continued to swirl around, oddly.

-Why are they…?

The world was spinning faintly, he realised, the more distant pillars of the ruined platform seeming to turn…

Di Ji snarled, his mood changing in an instant from inscrutability to fury, and yet…

-Why is there no sound?

His ears itched, very unpleasantly…

Blood was running down his face and he could taste iron in his mouth, he suddenly realised.

-When did that happen?

His ears were ringing, he belatedly noticed as he tried to move back and found his legs were not cooperating, and stumbled back, the strange dissociation of the moment that had washed over everything fading away.

“You got hit by the aftershock of the Hunters’ art…”

-Ah! I got hit by the aftershock of… whatever hit Sir Huang and sent him, Arai and Sana over the edge? he realised.

“They tried to sneak attack you… with a blaze pine.”

-This explosion… is it a blaze…

-No… that can’t be right? Gasping, he tried to focus on the moment.

Instead, his legs failed to work and he found he was kneeling on the ground, shaking uncontrollably, his legs numb.

-Blood… on the ground?

There was too much blood…

Belatedly, he saw Ha Jiao, who just moments before had been talking to him, lying in two pieces nearby, his eyes empty, his expression confused, am unused talisman still clenched in his fist.

“J-jiao—?” he tried to reach out for his friend, but the words didn’t seem to have any presence, like they were only in his head.

-When did that happen?

-Blaze pines don’t cut people in half…

Looking around in confusion, he found the world was still spinning in a way that made it impossible for him to focus on anything more than a few metres away without immediately wanting to vomit.

“—FUCK!”

Sound flowed back into the world as everything stopped spinning so abruptly that he had to put his hands down to be sure the tilting world was not actually tilting and it was just the aftereffects of whatever had been done.

As his vision cleared, he found Ha Mangfan was much closer than he had been a moment earlier, while Sir Teng was stumbling backwards, bleeding heavily from his healed arm—

“FUCK! FUCK! FUCK!” Di Ji cursed, oddly, in what sounded faintly like it was Easten, looking this way and that. “They had a fucking talisman like that!?!”

“It will only buy them a bit of time,” Din Ouyeng, whose tone oozed contempt, remarked.

“What kind of Qi Refinement brats have a Dao Sovereign grade Skitter Leap talisman?” Di Ji shook his head in disgust.

“Well-prepared ones?” Ling Luo, who had been seated over at the side of the arena, suggested, her tone… odd.

She was standing now, frowning, glancing between Din Ouyeng, Ha Mangfan… and…

“It’s not important, forget that name.”

He realised Ji Tantai was staring at him and blinked… trying to work out…

Their surroundings lurched—

{Fox Fire Barrier}

Something, he had no idea what, triggered one of the special barriers his father had had him bind to his dantian in the shrine before leaving.

In his mind, it was like there were two different scenes playing out. In one, it was just as he recalled a moment ago. In the other…

“—AAAAaaiiiiiieeeegggfk!”

In the same instant, he realised something had been very wrong with his perception of their surroundings; he became aware of screaming… which turned out to be coming from Ha Caolun, who, having been lying nearby, had just regained consciousness—

Sir Cao, Caolun’s bodyguard, who had also staggered up now, suddenly blurred towards Di Ji, his face twisted in fury.

“FUCK!” Di Ji cursed, glaring at him.

-Did father’s barrier… do… something?

Jiang Teng, who had been blocking Ha Mangfan, dashed for Di Ji as well.

The motion of both was so fast that to his eyes they were just after-images as they covered the dozen or so metres to their targets.

Focusing on the barrier, he tried to enlarge it, to also encompass the area where Ding and Mao and Mun were, a few metres away, cowering by a block of masonry. However, before he could move it more than half a pace, everything froze. Again.

Din Ouyeng was standing before Sir Teng, holding his sword blade with his hand. The white-and-blue-robed youth had a faint sneer on his face as his hand closed around the weapon, bending it like it was soft wax—

A palm strike sent Sir Teng flying towards the far edge of the plaza, vanishing into the ruins in a crash of scattering masonry.

Sir Cao… blurred and a younger version of himself was also suddenly charging at Di Ji, a beautiful jade sword, covered in carvings depicting foxes carrying pots of fire, in his hand.

-But Nascent Souls can’t—?

Din Ouyeng drew his own sword and smoothly moved to block Sir Cao, then cursed as the blade passed right through his own weapon, as if entirely illusionary, yet still cut his arm—

“You… how do you have a treasure like that?” Mangfan, who had been walking towards him, exclaimed, even as Din Ouyeng’s expression turned gloomy—

Three ghostly blades, similar in design to the one Sir Cao was wielding, slid out of the void, tracking for Di Ji.

{Purple Forbidden Sword: Three Excellencies Arrive}

Sir Teng appeared like a ghost behind Di Ji, stabbing at his chest, presumably with the intention of cutting his meridian gates.

Mangfan and Ling Luo both moved to intercept him, their expressions grim, only to gasp and stagger as two of the blades appeared, like shadows, beside them. Mangfan was cut through the side and the arm, while Ling Luo was pierced through the breast, staggering and clasping the phantom wound with a gasp.

Din Ouyeng, retreating from the ethereal weapon wielded by Sir Cao’s Nascent Soul, was cut across the back and in the arm, stumbling and barely parrying a blow.

Di Ji, his expression registering surprise at last, barely avoided being cut through the neck, twisting out of the way of Sir Teng’s strike.

In the same instant, however, a wave of golden light washed over everything, scattering strange, otherworldly rainbows in the rain and giving every plant its own little golden candle.

—Retching, he coughed up blood, as it passed over him.

The barrier around him and Leng rippled weirdly, their surroundings distorting subtly in a way that made him profoundly nauseous—

Off to the side, Mao and Ding, who had conjured a barrier to protect them and Mun, both coughed blood as it vanished like mist.

Struggling against the disorder in his own qi, beset by a feeling like he had just been simultaneously punched in the gut and kicked in the balls, he saw that Di Ji was now holding a small golden orb. It glittered like a gem and seemed to hold a blazing sun within it, seven rings orbiting it, each with a ghostly set of bird-like flames twisting within them.

The attack flowed backwards before their horrified eyes, the damage dealt to Din Ouyeng, Ling Luo and Ha Mangfan vanishing as if it never was.

Sir Teng, caught adrift, tried to retreat, only to be stabbed by both Ha Mangfan and Ling Luo, the latter decapitating him with a vicious backhand strike.

Din Ouyeng grimaced, his earlier fearful look replaced by anger, stalked over to Sir Cao, easily evading a sluggish attack, and grasping his Nascent Soul by the neck.

“Pathetic,” Din Ouyeng sneered, closing his hand into a fist.

“NO!” Caolun screamed, scrambling back.

The crack of energy that discharged was so bright that he was left with spots in his eyes. Sir Cao screamed in agony and staggered, blood running from all the orifices on his face. Ha Caolun, sobbing in terror, threw a talisman desperately in the direction of Din Ouyeng. The youth laughed and reached out to grab it—

When the world stopped ringing with strange aftershocks, the ridge was in ruins.

Di Ji and Din Ouyeng both had a few burn marks on their robes but were otherwise unharmed.

-Spark Dragon talisman? A memory surfaced in his mind of a particularly unpleasant yang fire talisman. Did Caolun just use a Dao Immortal grade talisman… and they are… okay?

“B-brother Ouyeng?”

Nearby, he saw Din Kongfei, who he had actually forgotten was there, had gotten up as well, looking first at Din Ouyeng and then at Di Ji and Mangfan in confusion.

Caolun lay, like a discarded doll, qi bleeding visibly from his broken body where he had been thrown against the altar piece with the words ‘Keep your Heart’ carved on it, his blood splattering the white stone.

Suddenly Di Ji’s eyes widened and he spun back to look at Sir Cao who had pushed himself up. Nine small green swords hung in the air around Caolun’s bodyguard, whose expression was now truly murderous.

{Nine Enchantings of the Jade Severing Sword}

The fire that flickered across their surface gave off an unholy aura of destruction that was eating up the man’s physical body. The swords shot forward, towards Din Ouyeng, Ha Mangfan, Ling Luo and Di Ji.

Cursing, Din Ouyeng dashed towards Sir Cao, barely evading two before being forced to deflect a third one directly with his own sword, being sent staggering back.

Mangfan, who had also charged for Sir Cao, barely blocked another, sending it spinning off to the side, shattering rocks until it passed out of the golden circle, where it turned a decent portion of the ridgeline beyond it into dust, the only things surviving being several of the tumbled stones.

Ling Luo conjured a spectral blue lotus that seemed to hold a small girl inside. The girl screamed, holding her head in her hands as the blades tore through it, barely slowing on their path to Di Ji—

A wooden shield carved with a golden painting of a phoenix appeared in his hands, barely deflecting the strike, which was dispersed all around them, twisting the space with strange green lines for a few seconds.

Several of the lines hit his barrier, which rippled slightly, scattering them away in clouds of green sparks.

When everything settled and the world slid back together, he realised that Ha Mao, who had taken refuge nearby, was dead, his body split in two and his eyes still wide with uncomprehending horror.

“No… no…!” Ha Ding’s groans ran disturbingly hollow in his ears as he found his friend, slumped against a fallen block just beyond Ha Mao.

Ha Ding was missing both his legs, weakly pawing at a bottle of blood-staunching pills.

Even Ling Luo, who had been dodging away, had been caught in the attack, he realised, her lower half lying on the ground while her torso lay, unnervingly, on a block she had been diving for.

Din Kongfei, slumped against another block, had just about managed to block it, but his left arm was a burnt mess and half his robe was destroyed. The pale shadows of his meridians, visible against his skin, spoke to the real depth of the damage. The talisman barrier in front of him was also disintegrating.

“D… dangerous,” Din Kongfei gasped, swallowing a pill and then coughing weakly.

Di Ji glanced towards him and frowned, then spotted Ling Luo… at which point his already angry expression twisted into incomprehensible rage.

“YOU MOTHERFUCKER! HOW DARE YOU DO THAT TO HER!”

He felt the words rather than heard them as Di Ji’s fist closed around the brilliant golden gem he was still holding.

His vision swam double and something swept across the ridge.

Elder Lan’s barrier shook, turning misty in places.

In a panic, he triggered his other lifesaving talisman, the one his father had given him for his tenth birthday. It would defend against a direct attack from an Ancient Immortal, according to the family’s Supreme Elder who had taught him how to use it.

-Ah. Nameless.

-Too weak…

-I can’t use it to its full potential…

That realisation was… just sad, he realised dully, watching the barrier around him slowly start to erode away.

Di Ji arrived in front of Sir Cao, his fist already plunged through the other man’s stomach. Sir Cao’s dantian was smashed in the same instant that the movement occurred, orphaned qi swirling out into the world around them.

The colours had bled out of the world, aside from the golden flames of the barrier around their location, flickering in slow motion.

What remained of Sir Cao’s Nascent Soul tried to flee.

Di Ji ignored it. Instead, Din Ouyeng reached out, almost at random as far as he could see from his current vantage point. Space twisted around his movement and he watched blankly as the hand of the youth arched impossibly, travelling all the way to the far ridge and grabbing something, pulling it back…

Sir Cao’s Nascent Soul flickered in Din Ouyeng’s hand as he held it up as if it were a bedraggled kitten, the green sword half stabbed through his own spectral body.

“Stupid. You think you can kill yourself or flee with this degree of capability?” Din Ouyeng chuckled.

“Just a clay pot, relying on treasures,” Mangfan sneered.

“Let me show you what real power is like,” Di Ji hissed and waved his hand.

Not sure what to expect, he tried to move his body, to get further into cover, but it refused to play ball.

Ha Leng, lying within arm’s reach nearby, was also still conscious, looking on in horror. Mun, blood running from his eyes, nose and mouth, just mumbled inarticulately where he lay slumped against the wall behind them, trying to help Ding.

Contrary to his fears of some vast art being unleashed, all that happened was the space around Ling Luo seemed to bubble and twist—

Abruptly, Ling Luo was intact again, taking two steps and then stumbling forward, grasping where she had been cut with a pale expression.

“You… what?” she managed to rasp, before dropping to her knees, her limbs trembling.

“You will regret this,” Sir Cao hissed. “The Ha family is not the—”

“Boring, boring,” Mangfan smirked.

“…”

Di Ji just shook his head and then turned to look at him.

He felt somehow compelled to meet that gaze, which was utterly… detached, in a way that made him want to close his eyes and wish that this nightmare was just… over, somehow.

Din Ouyeng closed his fist and Sir Cao’s soul was pulled directly into his hand, forever silenced. The jade sword appeared a moment later in Din Ouyeng’s other hand.

Mangfan walked over to Ha Mun and dragged him up by the hair.

“Wakey wakey Little Mun!” Mangfan said with a grin. “Time to pay your dues!”

“Nine… Generations… Monkey… sodomize…” Mun spat.

“Break that barrier,” Mangfan commanded Ha Mun, pointing at the shield protecting him and Leng.

“…”

He stared dully as Ha Mun twitched, and then vomited a mouthful of smoking blood at Mangfan, who dropped him to the ground and then gave his friend a vicious kick in the dantian before looking at him again.

“Look, ‘young master Yun’,” Mangfan said with a grin. “It’s nothing personal, but either you drop that little barrier or your friend here, who you worked so hard to save… will not even get to go to reincarnation. Okay?”

“…”

Before he could say anything, Mun, twitching on the ground, pushed himself up and suddenly grasped for Mangfan’s leg—

“Hope… you rot…” Mun gasped.

Mangfan cursed and kicked Mun away, slashing at his body with his sword… However, the qi Mangfan used for the attack just melted away when met with the poison still inside his friend.

“He can’t cancel it anyway,” Di Ji sighed, waving his hand, his previous anger seemingly vanished now Ling Luo was okay again. “It’s not that kind of barrier. Whoever made this is actually a genuine talent. First that ‘Skitter Leap’ talisman, now this… To think that the Ha clan would expend something like this on someone who only has a first grade core…”

“…”

Mangfan looked at him, sourly—

The whole ridge shook, the trees quivering and a few already-destabilized blocks of masonry tumbling. In the distance, a massive, thunderous boom echoed—

He stared dully as half a tree crashed down some thirty metres away, burning with bright red fire.

“…”

Mangfan and Din Ouyeng both glanced back across the plateau, frowning. Ling Luo, still looking shaken, also turned to stare in that direction.

Before he could wonder what was going on, though, Di Ji was suddenly standing beside the barrier.

The barrier rippled and twisted as Di Ji put his hand on it, pressing the golden gem against it… then, to his utter horror, through it.

As soon as its integrity was compromised he felt the recoil pass through him, the whiplash making him vomit blood as his world turned red. It also washed away the remaining dissociation and made him properly aware of his current condition, which was… very bad.

His body was ruined. That was the pain: his meridians had finally managed to supplant his nervous system to give him proper information. His back was broken in three places, his right leg was missing at the knee and far too many of the sensations he could feel were phantom pain tricking him into thinking he still had limbs. His left arm, that he had thought broken or trapped underneath him, was lying a few metres away and his left leg was also almost severed through. His dantian was ruined and his Golden Core, usually a deep gold wreathed in purple fire, was now cracked and dim, leaking qi.

Belatedly, he realised that his last resort was still in his remaining hand: the ‘Heaven Shifting’ talisman that Elder Lan had given him, that had taken so long to bind.

He stared at it blankly, and then at Di Ji, who was slowly prying open the barrier centimetre by centimetre.

At Din Ouyeng, who was looking on with amused disinterest.

At Mangfan, who was grinning like a maniac…

At the crumpled form of Ha Caolun, bleeding out on the ground.

At the injured Din Kongfei…who looked equal parts terrified and horrified.

At the slumped form of Mun…

At the bisected forms of Jiao and Mao, their expressions still etched with confused disbelief.

At the dying Ding, who was just looking at him, tears running silently down his cheeks, pills scattered nearby.

At Leng…

His blood was already on the talisman, and the instructions had stated that it could be triggered instantly, pulling him away… except…

Ha Leng’s hand was resting on his arm, close enough for him to easily grasp…

His own awareness of his condition told him he had mere moments left to live with his core disintegrating as it was. Nobody in the family would be able to save him in this condition either. Unless someone like Elder Lan was on the scene right where he arrived, he would be a corpse…

“Yun… flee…” Ha Leng whispered desperately, staring at him with bleeding eyes, a crumpled talisman clutched in his fist. “I’ll—”

-Sorry mother… father…

He never heard what Ha Leng was going to say, as he had already pressed the ‘Heaven Shifting’ talisman onto his childhood friend’s outstretched hand and triggered it. Ha Leng seemed to waver, like a mirage, and vanish from their nightmare.

Through his fading vision, he saw Di Ji’s face twisted in fury, reaching out for him…

“Stupid…” he rasped, pulling the last talisman out of the ring Elder Lan had given him.

As the final darkness closed in he felt… happy?

Ha Leng was merely suffering from soul shock and physical trauma, having been protected by the barrier and a handy stone block. He might die if he was left untreated, but it would take tens of minutes. Enough time for someone to teleport to him. That way this betrayal by the Din clan, and the presence of Di Ji, would be known of at least.

The pain slipped away as he fed qi into the talisman, watching it flicker ominously in front of him. His final thought, as he triggered whatever it was, was that at least Ha Leng, his oldest and dearest friend, might at least survive this calamity.

~ Kun Juni – Fleeing into Yin Eclipse ~

Kun Juni hit the forest floor with enough force that she was sure she had broken something more than her pride. Arai and Sanas’ stuff scattered around her as she rolled.

Groaning, she made to get up, but a hand had already grabbed her robe—

-Nameless-accursed-bastard-may-the-heavenly-virgin-curse-your-nine-generations!

Cursing in her heart, she swept her attacker’s legs away, drawing the blade from her belt to cut at Ha Mangfan, her heart pounding in her ears—

“No! it’s ME—!” Han Shu’s hoarse voice gasped—

Remembering the cruel sense of… sublimation from before, she pushed through her fear… and stopped just in time, because her rescuer was Han Shu, who had backed away, his face pale.

“…”

She stared at the blade in her hand, which was bloody. Han Shu looked at the wound on his arm and grimaced as it healed up.

“Sorry,” she winced, looking around.

“It’s fine!” Han Shu said. “You okay?”

“Yeah… I…”

She stared at the remains of Arai and Sana’s stuff, the moment of their vanishing replaying in her mind.

-They teleported… yep, they had my life-bound talisman, they are just somewhere a few miles away in the Inner Valleys!

Repeating that in her head, she quickly gathered up their stuff, helped by Han Shu.

“Where is—

She had been about to ask where Lin Ling was when a wave of heat swept over her, from her left, blistering her skin and making the vegetation smoke—

A massive explosion shook the whole valley. The rolling wave of devastation flipped her over like a doll as trees bent and rocks cracked everywhere.

*Krrrrrrrrr—*

Splintering wood made her roll desperately, as a moment later half a tree tumbled down...

*ffsssssssssss—*

-Oh sh—

The heaven blaze pinecone exploded.

…

She came to, being dragged through the forest, by Han Shu, thankfully.

A moment later, Lin Ling appeared, her expression pale, out of the smoking ruin of the valley they were in, slightly behind her and to her right.

Ling said something, but her whole world felt like she was stuck inside a ringing bell.

‘Scion, Path, Lotus, Body, Gift’

She focused on her mantra, trying to get it to heal her body, but it was still painfully slow.

“…”

“They blocked that way,” Lin Ling yelled as loud as she could.

“Nameless… fates,” she rasped the curse out.

Every breath was agony, she was finding. Behind them, the forest was a wall of familiar reddish fire, tangled trees and smoking rocks.

“Was… that… you?” she asked Ling.

“Yeah… sorry I…”

*KUUAAAAASSSSK!*

The inarticulate, keening wail from beyond the wall of fire made her skin go cold as ice and her heart skip a few beats. It also answered at least three questions.

Firstly; why Lin Ling had likely tossed out an entire heaven blaze pine.

Secondly; what had likely pursued them across two ridgelines the night before.

Thirdly; who was responsible for everything.

A moment later a cow-sized, eight-legged monstrosity exploded out of the wall of flames some fifty metres away.

Even at this distance, its presence made her skin crawl with the kind of fear that prey feels just being in the vicinity of something they cannot escape.

“…”

“Can you use it?” Lin Ling asked.

“Yes,” Han Shu nodded.

“In that case…”

The tetrid queen hurtled through the ruined forest towards them, covering the distance impossibly fast—

*KUUAAAAASSSSK!*

Its gaze seemed to hunt her out, drawing her attention inexplicably towards it, in a way that she had never, ever, experienced before. It seemed to worm into her mind, clawing and gnawing at her, shrinking her awareness of the world, even as her limbs chilled—

{Mang’s Multifarious Skitterleap}

Her surroundings blurred as Han Shu triggered the talisman that had saved their lives once already.

In the moment before the world became a chaotic maelstrom in her peripheral vision, she saw Lin Ling toss out a second heaven blaze pine—

*KRRRRRRRRR—oooooom….*

The sound was still reverberating as they landed hard in a tangle of bushes and ferns on the south side of the valley they had been in.

“Ohh….” She groaned, pushing herself up.

Lin Ling was lying half on top of her, while Han Shu, who had initiated the transmission, was to her other side.

“That was one of the… eight-star grade ones,” Lin Ling moaned, getting off her. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be…” she coughed, getting her bearings.

*KUUAAASSSK!*

“Oh come on…. it survived that?” Han Shu groaned as the distant cry of the tetrid queen echoed through the forest.

Shaking her head, she focused on her mantra, glad of the protection it gave from the gaze and scream of the stalker.

It was ironic that her inauspicious spirit root and decades of working only on her physical cultivation foundation was finally paying off. If she survived this, and that was a big if, she would have to buy Old Ling some excellent wine. It was his teachings, beating the arrogance and conceit out of her like she was a dust rug in the process of advancing her training, that was keeping her alive at this point.

“You think you can escape, little rebels?”

The words whispered through the trees, clawed at her, at all of them, based on the pale expressions Lin Ling and Han Shu made.

Behind them, the forest filled with manic laughter.

“Let’s go…” Han Shu groaned, dragging her up.

Nodding, she focused on her qi, using her mantra to calm the chaos wracking her body.

His… face hung in her mind, tangling up her thoughts.

Just the idea of running from him seemed… an anathema.

It was her place, to be beside him.

To accept him…

To…

She bit her tongue and focused on her mantra, banishing the cursed influence of…

-Ji Tantai?

That name didn’t seem… right, somehow. The Ji bit was…

Han Shu grabbed her by the hand and just started to run.

Taking a deep breath, she tried to push…

His hand was distractingly warm, large… gentle… his would…

“AAAAAARGH!”

She screamed, out loud.

“Shu, use your mantra on me!” she snapped.

“My… mantra?” Han Shu blinked.

“Yes, like Arai did for Ha Mun!” she added.

“…”

Han Shu gave her a long look and then she felt a subtle… strange sense of calm flow through her. The strange, uneasy feeling that had settled in her breast didn’t shift, but the strange thoughts, desires, the haunting familiarity did…

In the distance, laughter echoed through the forest again.

“Di Ji…”

She said the name like it was a curse, which it might as well be, if that was that person.

Han Shu and Lin Ling gave her complex looks as they started off through the forest again.

“Was that really…?” Han Shu trailed off.

“Not staying to find out,” she said grimly, looking around, trying to decide which way they should go.

“Yes, why ARE we standing here like morons, waiting for it!” Lin Ling asked, exasperated.

“…”

“SHIT!”

She kicked a rock, hard, and started to run, arbitrarily, through the forest, heading for the nearest ridgeline. In the distance, more mocking laughter, and a haunting call for them to just give up, echoed between the trees.

-Are they treating this pursuit like some kind of fate-thrashed game? she complained bitterly.

It might very well be one to them, based on what she knew of the nameless-blessed calamity that ‘Ji Tantai’ had revealed himself to be.

Sliding through moss and algru, ignoring the painful lacerations, she suddenly found herself nearly pitched feet-first into a crevice full of spider webs.

Throwing out a hand, she stopped herself dead with an anchor talisman she had stuck on the back of her hand and hauled herself back.

“Watch it!” she called to Han Shu, who skidded to a stop just in time.

Ling, a few metres farther over, just grimaced and took a running leap, crashing into the shrubs on the far side of the gorge, rolling out of sight in a flurry of leaves.

“Shit…” she looked both ways, then, in a moment of inspiration, pulled out a high-grade formation core, put some fire ward stones and a Spirit Jade in it, and then dropped it straight into the hole.

Han Shu, guessing her plan, took out a second core, a metal element one, and tossed it down after priming—

There was a crack and an explosion behind them that made the ground tremble.

“…”

Shaking her head, she sprinted north along the edge of the gorge, dropping more fire element ward stones as she went until she had enough speed to launch herself like Lin Ling had—

With a grunt, she landed on mossy rocks on the far side and stopped her slide again with the talisman, rolling up just as Han Shu landed beside her.

Glancing back, she saw that thousands of shadows were moving in the webs below her, dimly illuminated by the ward stones tossed down.

“There’s another fissure ahead,” Han Shu said, hauling her up.

“Must be a cavern below?” she guessed as they set off again. “We are well above the level of the river here; it must run out of these caverns and down the waterfall we climbed past the other day?”

“Uhuh,” Han Shu agreed, looking this way and that.

*Hrrrrrumble*

There was a flash that illuminated the whole forest around them, followed by a vast, reverberating rumble that drowned out the shriek from the tetrid stalker.

-Did Lin Ling toss out a whole sheaf of talismans? she wondered, not that she was complaining.

The very last thing they needed was a tetrid queen rampaging after them, especially if it was… the bandits.

“Ahead,” Han Shu signed. “Thirty metres.”

Nodding, she grabbed a bag at her waist and realised it was Arai’s. Grimacing, she let it drop and instead went to her storage talisman and took out a clay pot. Nestling it under her arm as she ran, she tossed in a handful of rather obnoxious spirit herbs and some spirit stones.

“—what are you?” Han Shu asked.

Shaking her head, she ignored him, pouring some spirit alcohol in after the mixture and giving it a really good shake.

-Yep, that’ll do, she grimaced, as the mixture started to smoke ominously.

Arriving at the fissure, she put as many of the blaze pine cones into the pot as she could fit and threw herself across to the far side, dropping the pot down as she did.

If there was a cavern nest of cave spiders down there, bringing them up would unpleasantly delay the pursuit a little.

“What did you put down?” Han Shu asked, slowing for her.

“Just run!” she hissed, speeding up.

They made it fifty metres further, leaping over slabs as the ground started rise, before the ground behind her lifted slightly—

The pressure wave from the detonation of almost two dozen destabilized Immortal realm blaze pine cones sent both of them tumbling across the rocks, through ferns and tangles of vines. Groaning, she scrambled up and looked around—

A spider the size of a cat landed, enraged, a few metres away—

{Fu Kan’s Lash}

A lightning bolt obliterated it, and two others she hadn’t even spotted, followed by Lin Ling skidding to a stop nearby.

“What did you do!?!” the younger girl gasped, panting hard.

“A pot of blaze pines into that spider nest,” she gasped out. “RUN!”

“Oh…” Lin Ling glanced at the slabs behind them and then set off up the rising ground, skipping along with enough lightness that she suspected she had used an ‘air-walk’ talisman or similar.

Wiping blood from her nose, she set off after Lin Ling.

The wave of insidious, lingering intent – carrying something undefinable that might actually have been soul sense – swept over everything a moment later, vindicating her decision to throw the pot down.

-Do they actually have a treasure that is helping them force the suppression?

That thought had occurred briefly on the ridge, and the lingering shadows of whatever Di Ji had tried to do with her certainly suggest he could use Soul Intent. The disturbing part was that her talisman from the Kun clan had done nothing for it, while it had just worked to blunt the worst of the attack from the spider, just now.

-Still, pushing the suppression up to Soul Foundation is… insane!

The means to do that did exist, but using such a method, even in the Low Valleys, was… suicidal. Up here, it was just asking to die without a grave. Everything was enmeshed into the valleys in bizarre and esoteric ways. Pushing the suppression upwards in a region like this to Soul Foundation would get you noticed like the world’s fattest, juiciest fly smashing into a spider’s web.

She didn’t look back to see if the spider queen was coming to the surface; instead, she just prayed that the creature might buy them a few more minutes against the pursuit, or maybe go attack the tetrid. Probably it would go for that, because spiders and tetrids did not get along.

The lower part of the ridge climb was thankfully straightforward. A dozen vertical leaps carried her and Han Shu a third of the way up it, to the base of the actual cliff. Lin Ling was still burning her current air-walk talisman, so she just ran straight up, dodging from tree to tree to keep cover.

Above them, a chain of lightning bolts roared across from over the previous ridgeline and scoured the cliff.

-That is a ridiculous talisman, she complained in her heart, if talisman it was.

“My concealment talisman is about to run out,” Han Shu signed as she landed beside him on a more open patch of rock.

Without comment, she passed him Sana’s spare talisman sheaf. She had both their bags, having grabbed them as she bounded off the ridge they had been on.

Han Shu stared at it with a complex expression, then took the wallet and withdrew a talisman.

“You think the Ha cultivators are all dead?” he asked, his face pale as he rapidly reapplied his talisman.

“No idea,” she replied, wondering that herself as she considered the route ahead, up the tumbled cliff to the top of the lower ridge. “With Sir Huang being sneak-attacked by that…

“Ling was the one who triggered the talisman…” she added.

“Doesn’t the next valley also adjoin the area where the Jasmine is?” Han Shu asked.

“It does,” she nodded, grimly. “Good idea.”

“Good…?” Han Shu stared at her.

Ignoring him, she looked around for Lin Ling, and then found that she had reached the base of the cliff proper ahead of them, and was now pointing to the top of the ridge.

She waved back and also pointed up, nodding.

“Is that wise?” Han shu asked.

“Do you have any better thoughts?” she signed back at him. “With the suppression pushed up to Soul Foundation, there is nothing we can do to them, unless we ambush them.”

“They are insane…” Han Shu hissed under his breath, finishing reapplying his talisman.

“Sadly, I suspect not,” she grimaced, crouching and jumping up to the next boulder. “Just ignorant and very confident.”

Ha Shu grimaced and followed after her.

“And they may be tracking us via our jades anyway…” she added.

“…”

Han Shu glanced back at her and grimaced.

-I should have grabbed Ling Luo and fled immediately, a part of her groaned.

Ling Luo had come with Di Ji, and as much as she wanted to believe that was just happenstance… all the little oddities in Ling Luo’s behaviour suddenly made sense if she was already being controlled…

-That sense of wanting to belong…

She bit her lip and kept climbing.

If Ling Luo was grasped, they could certainly be tracked by their jades.

Ling Luo’s Jade Loci was able to do that and a lot more. As such, as far as she could see, their only strategy for survival was the ‘death fields’: the places any smart explorer of these valleys usually avoided. Paths where anomalies hunted, the lairs of terrible things in the valley floors that the jade records Lianmei had had her pore over talked about.

-Run through them all, a small voice in the back of her head whispered. Bury these shits with the nightmares even their darkest dreams cannot grasp.

-If Arai and Sana…

She aggressively banished that thought.

-They had my life bound talisman, they were alive when they went over…

“So what do we do?” Han Shu asked her as they hauled themselves over a ledge and started rapidly climbing up a leaning slab of moss-covered rock.

-Turn it all over…

“Turn it upside down,” she hissed, gritting her teeth. “They cannot fly, so they have to teleport or rush after us.”

That was probably why they had chosen to force the suppression somehow: to them, it likely seemed an expedient choice given their background, but up here soul sense just made you a target, and, with any luck, they would die horrifically without ever knowing the extent of their mistake.

“They are teleporting blind,” she signed, pausing to slap a water element talisman next to a patch of water ferns with a thirty second delay. “So we abuse it. Drop stable points with unattuned anchors into dens and crevices.”

“…”

Han Shu nodded, then offered a hand, which she took and let him haul her up the last bit.

“There is a centipede nest up above…” he signed with his free hand, pointing to the tablet bound on his arm. “Marked on Lianmei’s maps!”

-Not what we intended to use that knowledge for… but it is what it is, she reflected grimly.

Unlike the area they had been in before, this part of the High Valleys was not completely unknown. Their original strategy had been to come in a large loop, setting up a forward base somewhere on the far side of the area they had been working through before, then cut back through here, collecting things like blaze pines. As such, most of the major threats were at least marked on their maps, even if the exact locations were a bit…

They scrambled on, and, when they passed it, she took out one of the jades, sent a pulse of qi into it, then dropped it into the dark fissure in the cliff. Han Shu put an alignment disruption talisman under a fern.

That done, she finally risked a glance behind as they started climbing again, heading for Lin Ling.

The forest was on fire, despite the pouring rain and the low cloud, billowing clouds of corrosive smoke merging with the mist. In the distance, she could just make out the shadow of the far ridge with its ruins—

A scatter of lightning bolts struck down amid the burning forest, accompanied by the enraged screams of the tetrid stalker.

“I’d hoped they would have lost some ground,” Han Shu signed as he paused on the next ledge to offer a hand.

“They aren't gaining much though,” she sent back, grabbing his hand and letting him toss her upwards.

They hit the lower ridgeline a few moments later, the ground levelling out and the undergrowth becoming thicker again. Wincing, she charged straight through. All any of them could do was trust to the barrier charms at this point to save them from anything overt.

-Better to die to a herb out here than be caught by Di Ji, a dark thought added.

-No! she refuted her own thoughts. Better to live and take this to grandmother. Or Ling Tao. Or the Cherry Wine Pagoda…

“One has teleported ahead!” Lin ling hissed, arriving beside them. “It’s waiting on the upper limit of the west valley wall—”

*—Kaaaaccccccssssssssk!*

Behind them, there was an enraged shriek that made the air quiver and the world around her swim.

The way the sound travelled felt wrong for a tetrid.

-The spider queen?

The calibre of the soul strength that came with the noise was phenomenal in any case. Even at this distance, it was all she could do to stay conscious as they all stumbled. The qi-infused laughter cut off for a moment, followed by a series of ground-shaking detonations that far exceeded anything they had yet felt.

“Bah!” she scowled.

“We have another problem…” Han Shu pointed behind them…

She looked in that direction and saw that the misty clouds, in the direction of the Great Mount, were lightening. No longer iron-grey and murky in the gloomy dawn light, but turning paler and slightly ethereal, as if the sun were starting to shine through them, properly.

“…”

“Oh come on…” she groaned. “NOW it moves? They are going to make us race the shadow?”

“I very much doubt they have put that much thought into it,” Han Shu muttered.

“Let’s hope,” Lin Ling agreed, spitting over the edge of the cliff in disgust.

“I left them a surprise though,” she added. “Should buy us some more time, so let’s get going.”

There was nothing more to say, really, so they turned and sprinted flat-out through a tangle of greenery until the edge of the ridge appeared out of the mists like a spectre—

Another thunderous howl echoed through the trees behind them, from the direction Lin Ling had come from.

“You woke the moon loon Senior Ying spoke of?” Han Shu said accusatorily.

“I did,” Lin Ling giggled, with an incredibly nasty grin on her face.

The whole ridge behind them shuddered. The mists warped and for a second she caught a glimpse of a four-armed furred ape hanging on the edge of the cliff a hundred metres away. A moment later a figure in purple appeared in a flash of twisting space, on the lip of the lower ridgeline, in full view of the ape.

“You dare disturb this seat? Wretched things!”

“Oh, fates it even speaks,” Han Shu winced.

Before she could reply, a vast arc of purple lightning struck down on the far side of the ridge. Without hesitation, she grabbed them both and jumped down into the greenery below.

All of them hit a tree and she managed to stop their fall with the anchor talisman for a brief moment, then used it to drop down and down again, wincing as a vine lashed out to grasp at her arm as she did so.

A nova of what she was sure was soul sense erupted a moment later, making her miss her footing on the last branch—

Han Shu’s hand grabbed her collar, preventing her from smashing into the forest floor, at the same time as Ling cut the vine surging down after them.

She landed with a grunt after he let go, quickly taking stock of their surroundings, pulling up the map on her scrip and trying to orientate herself in her head. By the time the other two landed, she had found their location. The valley was narrow, mostly unremarkable except for some swampy bits on the far side.

“Senior Ying’s notes say nothing much here,” Han Shu signed. “We cross directly, climb the next ridge…”

“And then head south, towards the Jasmine,” she confirmed.

“Yeah…” Han Shu grimaced. “That will take us south, towards Misty Jasmine Inn…”

“Okay,” Ling nodded, clearly not as worried about the Jasmine as Han Shu was.

Behind them, another explosion tore across the ridgeline, matched by a scream of fury from the moon loon.

“…”

Shaking her head, she swallowed another pill infused with fire qi for her blood and earth qi for her bones. The rush of extra energy spilled through her like a torrent. Her arms were almost glowing and her skin turned translucent under the overload of elemental energy. Lin Ling followed suit a moment later, as did Han Shu.

Without further comment, she started off as fast as she could, sprinting through the understory. It took them about a minute, running flat out, to reach the far side of the gorge.

Timing her jumps up the rock fall at the base, she took care not to lose any momentum before launching herself upwards at the last one and effectively running up the cliff face, using the excess qi in her body to pull herself towards the face, abusing the hunger of the rocks.

-Come on body. Hold together for a bit longer, she grimaced.

She could feel her foundation fraying at the edges even as she did so.

-Old Ling would have called this kind of climbing cultivation… a part of her remarked. And laughed when I complained.

All three of them arrived at the top at the same moment. She barely had time to react, however, to an ‘uki kantis’ tree that broke her path as she hit it feet-first—

Ha Shu, just to her right, grasped for her as she was thrown back… and missed!

-Oh shit! she screamed internally as she hung in the air—

There was a flash of light all around her, such that she thought it was Lin Ling who had thrown a talisman at her…

“—JUNI!”

Lin Ling’s shriek of horror disabused her of that idea almost immediately; however, in the same instant that the golden light faded, a strong hand caught her by the back of her robe and catapulted her upwards so fast she spun twice before smashing down on the top of the edge of the clifftop.

Her saviour landed a moment later, followed by a pale Han Shu.

‘You make big fuss…’ the monkey, who she recalled had called himself ‘Ochre Lightning’, intimated with a grin, looking back the way they came. ‘Old Ape not like rough mornings!

‘And this morning, very rough.’

“What did you…?” she started to ask, but the monkey just grabbed her by the arm, then grasped Ling and pointed to Han Shu to grab him.

Han Shu did—

The world around them flashed gold and she tasted the sweet, acrid smell of lightning.

Gasping, she pressed her hands to the rock, breathing in and out, until her vision stopped swimming.

Her clothes were smoking, she realised, as were Lin Ling’s and Han Shu’s.

“You can teleport…” Lin Ling mumbled.

‘Of course,’ Ochre Lightning grinned, pointing to the lightning bolts painted on his body. ‘I fast, like lightning.’

“…”

Standing up, she realised there were three more monkeys there, sitting on rocks, waiting, looking for all the world like three reclusive old experts, which she suddenly suspected they might well be.

‘Red Sister sent us. We move faster than she can…’ the monkey who had identified himself as ‘Ten Centipedes’ added, grinning ferociously.

“They do very stupid thing, raise roof for everyone,” the old white-furred monkey covered in red ochre swirls, who she had never laid eyes on before, added, actually speaking out loud as he leant on a long spirit wood staff.

‘We show them what it means to annoy wrong thing up here,’ the last, who was female and painted in white and red cloud-like swirls, intimated with a toothy grimace

-Can we understand them better because soul sense is now usable? she wondered.

‘You run. Leave stupid cultivators to us,’ Ochre Lightning added, motioning for the three of them to get moving.

“Okay,” she gasped, palming a ‘Lightfoot’ talisman.

“Thank you…” Lin Ling added.

“We are in your debt,” Han Shu agreed, wiping blood from his mouth.

“Is nothing. You save little one, have good heart. This is honour, for you, for Red Sister,” the old monkey grinned toothily. “Back then, they attack her, she good to us, now, they come again, we good to her.”

-They come… again?

-The bandits?

A part of her wanted to ask what they meant, but really there was no time. Exhaling, she bowed quickly and then, without looking back, took a staggered run at the far edge of the ridge, triggered the talisman as Han Shu headed after her, and then threw herself out into the misty void—

She hit the canopy after several seconds of falling into white shadow, making contact with a branch that broke the speed of her fall, allowing the talisman to trigger, reducing her weight enough that she was able to roll off it without breaking anything.

She smashed through three more before the inertia of the impacts turned the talisman and her current barrier to dust as she tumbled down the last ten metres, going sprawling through vine-strewn undergrowth.

-Nothing broken, she gasped as she rolled up, looking around, before adding, please be no horrible vines this time—

Twenty metres to her left Lin Ling landed, cratering the ground and scattering vegetation and forest detritus. Han Shu landed a moment later using the same method she had, cursing as his roll ended against a jutting rock.

“Left out of this valley or right?” she signalled, getting her bearings as best she could from the map she had looked at last night.

-We should be in the Jasmine gorge? Certainly, she could see scattered creepers in the trees, though at this hour and in the mist they were not flowering. That teleport threw my sense of direction off though.

“Left,” Lin Ling signed back. “Isn’t this the area just beyond the God Bewitching Jasmine—?”

“Left it is then,” she signed affirmatively, not even bothering to debate it.

From what she recalled of the maps, going up the valley and through the exit off to their right would lead towards one of the main swamp valleys where various parts of the East Fury Torrent met. It had several sections of treacherous bogland and a lot of flooded caves. In terms of the threats involved, there were also snapping Xuanwu there, but the Bewitching Jasmine to the south of them was a much nastier prospect for an ignorant pursuer, rushing after them.

There was a roar behind them and a massive detonation shook the whole forest, sweeping away the mist like a receding tide. A figure impacted the far ridgeline, its four arms twitching weakly. In the sky behind them, a second sun rose up, scattering tendrils of Yang energy. She recognised the sigil in it grimly.

“Sun Seizing talisman,” Lin Ling, who had clearly been to the same auctions in Blue Water City, yelped.

A moment later a second figure, in blue and white, flickered over the ridgeline and she understood how they were keeping up.

-Sky Shifting talismans?!? she groaned, starting to run.

“Is that…” Han Shu asked, glancing over his shoulder as he started after her.

“A very high grade ‘Sky Shifting’ talisman,” she signed grimly.

Behind them, the terrible ape, a ten-star active threat, howled and hammered its chest.

Before it could even react, a warping distortion in the sky over the valley extended out and hit it full on, very briefly forming some kind of giant spear out of refracted light. She saw its body twist and distort for a second before exploding into pieces. Something hazy flitted out of it, into the forest behind them, and vanished without a sound.

“Are they made of talismans?” Lin Ling gasped, looking more than a bit panicked. “What realm are those two actually at?”

“—What happened to the monkeys?” Han Shu added, ducking around a tree to her left.

“I—”

“AHOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”

A vast, sky-shaking howl rolled out from the ridgeline before she could answer either question. The distant figure of ‘Din Ouyeng’ in blue and white turned—

*KRAAKOOOOOM*

The whole valley shook as a reddish-golden bolt of lightning, shaped like a serpent, tore out of the ridgeline and reformed itself into a monkey with red and gold ochre lightning bolts painted across its body as it caught Ouyeng. Both figures vanished into the treetops, stray bolts of lightning sizzling down randomly, turning distant trees into steaming candles.

“You were saying?!” she signed, aware that there was only a dull thrum in her ears now.

A moment later a giant centipede, almost twenty metres long, its segments painted with red ochre symbols, rolled out of the trees, dark qi flickering out of the gaps in its carapace. A crouched, furred figure in a broad grass hat was just visible on its head, pointing towards where Ochre Lightning had gone.

“Right… killed centipedes…” Lin Ling mumbled, just as shocked as she was.

In a crack of light, the purple-robed figure of Di Ji appeared, a spear in his hand, qi already focusing on the treasure—

The trees on the ridgeline vanished as a black line spun out of nowhere, hitting a barrier around Di Ji, which scattered easily—

A huge Koppi tree crashed down not thirty metres away from them, its trunk smashed like it had been hit with a hammer.

“Grandfather of Heaven!” Han Shu swore as a second tree dropped down a moment later, and a third.

Off in the distance, she saw the old monkey appear in a flash of white and black, the staff returning to its normal size as Di Ji was forced to parry the blow wildly.

“They… even have their own treasures?” Han Shu gawked.

“Less staring, more running!” she snapped, collecting herself from her own moment of shock and grabbing both of them by the arms.

“Yeah… right!” Lin Ling nodded, ducking as another bit of ruined tree impacted in the forest ahead of them, scattering branches everywhere.

As one, they charged for the malignant gorge that held one of the entrances to the territory of the God Bewitching Jasmine.

Behind them, another bolt of red-gold lightning sliced down, this time from the clouds that were slowly darkening above. The flash of its impact scattered bizarre shadows through the forest, casting everything around them into stark relief. The thunder that came with it shook water from the trees and again made the air taste sweet for a few seconds.

“If we survive this, I will put up a shrine to monkeys, right beside a curse altar for that squirrel!” Lin Ling signed.

Nodding, she glanced at her scrip, then pointed left.

“LITTLE VERMIN!”

An enraged yell tore through the valley, nearly making her stumble. A sense of something trying to peer into her mind, carried on the words, left her slick with sweat.

“Soul sense…!” Han Shu gasped, staggering against a tree.

“How far to the fate-thrashed Jasmine?!” Lin Ling asked, swallowing a recovery pill.

“Not far,” she muttered, looking around. “Further to our left, the valley turns and then there is a waterfall… The gorge is to the west of that…”

Lin Ling nodded and pulled out a formation core, shoved three Spirit Jades into it and then hurled it overarm into the forest behind them.

“A Yang Burst Formation,” she said. “It will do all sorts of unpleasant things to the greenery.”

Taking out a core of her own, she repeated that and dropped it in a fern nearby, then started off through the trees. Han Shu withdrew a bow and started shooting formation arrows into trees.

As she had said, the entrance to the death zone was depressingly close by. They only had to run for a minute, flat out, beneath the trees, before the noise of the waterfall started to drown out the furious battle behind them. The gorge where the jasmines grew was very innocuous, marked merely by four stele carved with twirling flowers that were half consumed by the jungle, just beyond the waterfall, which fed a lake linked to the cavern system below.

“Well, no backing out now,” Han Shu muttered, as they hurried past the stele.

“I am sorry Mother, Father… Maybe your daughter is going to die without a corpse,” she prayed under her breath as they ran into it.

The gorge itself was a place of strange beauty once you crossed its green, misty threshold. All the trees held brilliant coronets of silver flowers, and the air was thick with their scent. Here and there in the walls, you could make out carved arches, detailed with strange geometric patterns, but none of them were foolish enough to enter those places.

“Be careful,” she grimaced, looking up at the hypnotically beautiful flowers…

The signs that both of them sent back were not worth translating.

~ Sir Huang – ??? ~

Lan Huang let his vision re-adjust and stared at the moving sky, with its weird celestial law in the shape of an ever-evolving spiral of different farmyard animals, and wondered if he had, in fact, been caught by the anomaly.

He tried to speak, but only inarticulate sounds came out for a few moments.

-Oh, soul shock…

He closed his eyes, and found that the weirdness faded somewhat, even if the pain did not. It had been a while since he suffered proper soul shock, he realised.

Bits of events filtered back, slowly, as he focused harder on his sense of ‘self’ beyond the all-important aspects.

-I am back in my… physical body…?

He tried to sit up, and failed, in humiliating fashion.

-I guess… my connection to the puppet was severed when I went through the anomaly?

A part of him tried to recall the—

-Nope… no… no, bad idea… aaaaaaaaahhhhh!

He had a moment, where he re-experienced what he could only describe as feeling like he had been caught inside a huge bell when someone struck it. The resulting distortion had severed his remote connection to the puppet forcefully it seemed.

Carefully taking in the state of his body’s connection to his Dao Soul, he found, to his relief, that the damage was not too bad. His Dao Soul would heal fully, but it still felt like he had been scalded, and then hit in the head by a hammer.

When he opened his eyes again, he found two men standing over him, both looking concerned in different ways.

“Where is my puppet?” the younger asked, frowning.

“What happened?” the older, Confucian-looking fellow asked, his expression concerned.

“…”

He closed his eyes again, and focused a lot harder on his ‘self’.

“Ancestor Wen, Ancestor Kai…” he groaned, recalling who they were, and then, laterally, why he was here, on several different levels.

“That was unpleasant. On so many levels,” he moaned, trying to sit up—

Physical orientation temporarily failed him, again, and so he just decided to stay lying on the warm, sun-baked terracotta tiles, staring up at the evening sky.

The buzzing wasn't going away.

“What happened?” Ha Tai Kai asked him. “You lost connection to the puppet?”

“Of course he did!” Ha Tai Wen snapped.

“Ah… sorry…” he closed his eyes again for a moment, trying to recall those last moments, before the connection broke.

There had been falling… the other two, the promising young Herb Hunters, Jun Arai and Jun Sana, had tumbled off with him…

They had tried to use some kind of teleport art, a really high-rank one, surprisingly so… but it had not initialized for some reason…

-No spatial Laws, a part of him interjected.

-Whatever that… punk did, totally fucked with all sorts of things at layers…

-Punk…?

He hauled his still-rather-tormented thoughts back to that point.

-And why am I, a Dao Sovereign, unable to recall… recall…

His head felt like it was splitting, which wasn’t really the case; it was his Dao Soul that was really suffering.

“I… can’t remember,” he said dully. “I was attacked, by… a… and it’s just that.”

“Let me see…”

Ha Tai Wen knelt down beside him and carefully put his hand to his temple.

He experienced a faint sense of warmth, like he was lying in a relaxing bath… and his memories, which had been really badly jarred, settled back as they should have been.

“…”

“Better now?” Ha Tai Wen asked him.

“Yes,” he managed, finally able to sit up, and accepted a cup of wine, which he greedily drank, not even caring that it was the horrid cherry wine. The swirling animals above were gone as well. In their place was the blue-ish skies of West Flower Picking Town and a ring of cherry blossoms telling him he was in the courtyard in the Cherry Wine Pagoda where he had ‘refined’ the puppet body.

Replaying the final moments when…

“What in the fates…?” he muttered, putting a hand to his temple. “How can I not remember the name of a random… no, not random… bastard who did this?”

“Hmmm… yes,” Ha Tai Kai mused, his expression pensive. “How indeed…”

“Even your memories are unclear on that point,” Ha Tai Wen muttered, sitting back on his haunches and staring at him pensively.

“There was an unusual fluctuation off him…” he mused. “It almost felt like he was able to lift the suppression, fully. I want to say that should be impossible, but sadly, I know better…”

“Lift the suppression you say?” Ha Tai Wen muttered. “That’s what it felt like?”

“In the brief moments, yes,” he agreed, giving his head another shake, because the sense of dissonance as he pushed at that was also…

“…”

“I think we should not do this here,” Ha Kai murmured.

“You may be right,” Ha Tai Wen sighed.

“Right, young Huang, you now have a choice…” the old ancestor mused.

“I am going to take you to a place. Once you go there, you will never be able to skip away from our Ha clan again. If you do, I will kill you, and seal your soul, barring it from reincarnation.”

“Uh…”

He stared dully at the old ancestor.

“FATHER!” Ha Tai Kai groaned.

“What my father means is that the solution to your problem involves a personal secret. Him showing it to you is a great acknowledgement of his esteem towards you, and the important role you have played for the Ha clan over the millennia.”

“Yes, that,” Ha Tai Wen said blandly.

“And the alternative is?” he asked carefully.

“That buzzing sense of tormented dissonance is likely the new you,” Ha Tai Wen sighed. “The injunction on those events… is rather fundamental.”

“Do what you have to…” he groaned, putting his head in his hands as it resurged subtly. “What your son gave me was already enough to ensure that I, Lan Huang, will not step away…”

“Good enough,” Ha Tai Wen said, putting a hand on his shoulder—

Their surroundings did not change, except for the sky, which became dusky, with celestial animals wheeling through it once again.

“I didn’t imagine that?” he asked.

“Nope. The puppets are linked to this space, to avoid unfortunate accidents if one gets lost,” Ha Tai Wen said as Ha Tai Kai helped him up.

“Can you recall now?” Ha Tai Kai asked him.

“…”

He closed his eyes for a moment and found that he could, and that it was…. disturbing.

“I can,” he sighed.

“I think I was just sneak attacked by a Golden Immortal punk,” he said softly, not sure whether to laugh or cry. “And I have almost no idea how…”

The puppet body would have eaten the strike easily, even with it having been struck where it had been. However, being tossed off a cliff, to then fall through an anomaly, was pretty much a done thing in that awful place. It was also a shame about the two girls, Arai and Sana. They had both had talent, and surprisingly good spirit roots for people who just focused on physical cultivation.

If they had fallen through the same thing he had, he could only hope it wasn't a killing anomaly. If they had missed it though… their teleport talismans had failed. Maybe they had some other treasures, but he doubted it, honestly. A fall from that height would have crippled them to the point where death would have been… inevitably, really.

Both old ancestors looked askance at him.

“I’m sorry?” Original Ancestor Ha Tai Wen said dully… “I don’t think I quite heard you right?”