“If I ever lay eyes on Di Ji again, I will make sure his fate is such that he cannot dream of peace though he lives through ten thousand lifetimes! And you… ‘Brave’ Paragons of the ‘Blue Morality’, hiding behind the skirts of the Divine Kong! You who protect him this day from the justice of My Heavens. Do not think you will escape. Even if I have to stalk your ten generations I will see everything you have ever built brought to ruin in this world.”

~Lady Kai, to the assembled Heroes of the Imperial Court.

~ Ha Kai, Cherry Wine Pagoda ~

Pacing in a circle around the innermost court of the Cherry Wine Pagoda, Ha Kai found himself wondering if somewhere, he had made a slight… miscalculation.

“Why would a brat from a Meng influence…

“Why… why… why…

“Too many questions that lead to more questions…”

The longer he stared at the whole mess, the less sense it made. Lan Huang had clearly forgotten, or been induced to forget the perpetrator of his trip back.

Focusing on the talisman he had given Shi Xiaolian, he tried to contact her… and got… nothing.

Well, that wasn’t quite true, there was a link, it was just inauspiciously unstable to the point of giving even him a headache. Even if he could force the connection, Shi Xiaolian would not be able to communicate back simply due to the way the suppression worked.

“Grrrraaaaaah!”

His reflexive utterance of frustration made the cherry trees in the courtyard shed their indigo leaves and promptly start growing new ones, mango yellow this time.

“…”

“Unless… maybe that’s the point?” he concluded, stopping pacing and stared up at the grey clouds scudding overhead. “Too many fate-thrashed questions.”

He considered the mango-coloured cherry trees, the statue and the stele, then turned and stalked off towards the more public areas of the Cherry Wine Pagoda.

-The person who ambushed Lan Huang was from the Seven Star Pavilion… or claimed to be.

-Lan Huang was also very sure he managed to raise the suppression…

He walked on for a few courtyards pondering that problem. There were a few ways around the suppression, or aspects of it, but none of them were things a junior… or most seniors for that matter, even people like him, could use, or would try to use.

-You circumvent a bit with laws… he mused; But that takes time. Decades at the very least if your comprehensions are already excellent.

-However, none of those involved in this, on our side, are the type, or old enough…

-One of the Dao Immortals or Lords propping up the Five Fans?

The legacy of the Yeng Brotherhood was… complex. In truth, Shi Xiaolian and others knew it much better than he did, that was why he had let her go to Misty Jasmine Inn, and agreed to send some of the pagoda’s iron core with her.

-Yet more questions… questions… he sighed, glaring at a ‘fake’ stele on the way past.

The problem was, that this was not their style, although again, that didn’t rule it out. People did change, especially vengeful, spiteful malcontents like that.

“…”

-What about truths…?

Again, a part of him wanted to say that was ‘unlikely’, but as a self-proclaimed ‘scheming old man, of many years’ his own involvement in this put paid to that. ‘Unlikely’ did not mean ‘implausible’. There were a few Dao Ascendants, maybe even some Peak Dao Eternals who could twist the suppression a bit.

The issue there was the Ling clan… they were really not good to poke at.

-The Seven Star Pavilion and the Seven Sovereigns…

Stopping, he massaged his temples and took out a different talisman, carved of ancient wood, in the shape of a phoenix and considered it pensively. This one did work.

-I guess I should start there, he mused.

Thankfully, the owner didn’t owe him money, or have any particular grudges relating to lost games and such.

“Brother Tan, are you engaged in anything pressing?” he asked politely, sending a faint thread of his intent infused qi into it.

“Why… Pagoda Lord Tai, this is a pleasant surprise!” a chipper voice on the other end of the talisman replied after a few seconds. “How can I help you? Though, if you say this is about that gale… I can only plead ignorance! You know how these things are…”

“Eh, no, it’s not about that,” he replied drily, shaking his head and starting walking again. “I want to ask a few questions about the Seven Star Pavilion.”

He was sure it would come as something of a surprise to many people, some quite influential, that anyone in the Ha clan, even an ancient ancestor, could directly contact not only an Old Ancestor of the Seven Sovereigns School, but a core disciple of the Meng clan as well. That was the gift and the curse of living a long time. You gained friends and acquaintances in some very interesting places, and the Ha clan of this era was not that of the previous one, let alone the time when the Meng clan had held much of Eastern Azure in their beautiful, arrogant, and very… esoteric… fist.

Meng Tan was from an era much later than that, but he did have connections and associations that went right to the heart of the Seven Sovereigns. With such an impeccable background, he was uniquely placed to answer a few difficult questions.

“The…. Seven Star?” Meng Tan replied. “In Meng City?”

“Uhuh,” he confirmed.

“Okay… guess, but it’s in something of a slump in recent times, Meng City being what it is,” Meng Tan replied. “Why has that place garnered your attention, Brother Tai?”

“I want to know everything about Ji Tantai,” he said. “He should be a disciple of that pavilion.”

“A junior?” Meng Tan’s tone turned pensive. “What have they done, that it has drawn your attention?

“Taken a curiously unprovoked cheap shot at an elder, in Yin Eclipse,” he replied, because there was no point in hiding that. “One of our more valuable and long-serving ones.”

“…”

Meng Tan was silent for long enough that he wondered if the Elder was going to refuse, or at least request him to give a few more details.

“Okay…” Meng Tan said at last, sounding pensive. “I’ll send you what we have… however…”

“Don’t worry, I want answers, not a smoking pair of shoes,” he retorted drily.

-For now, at least, he added, though only to himself.

“Ha… Yes, okay,” Meng Tan replied, sounding more amused. “It may take some time though… given it’s a small sub-sect and all that… a day or two at least?”

“Thank you, Brother Tan,” he replied, “I appreciate this.”

“Not at all,” Meng Tan replied, and a moment later the connection was broken off.

Considering the talisman in his hand, he sighed softly to himself. In his heart, he really wanted to say ‘a few hours’, but the truth was that it would likely take a while for the right person to be found and the right questions asked. It was just the reality of a big sect.

Furthermore, he knew full well that Meng Tan was doing him a solid favour even considering the request. The usual position the Seven Sovereigns School had in regards to outsiders wanting ‘pieces’ of those under their banner was somewhere between ‘naff off’ and ‘may a monkey bugger your mother’.

Sighing again, he walked on, exiting the courtyards into the main area of the teahouse—

“Pagoda Lord! PAGODA LORD!”

The current manager of the pagoda, given Shi Xiaolian was currently off solving problems, came to a running stop in front of him, breathing hard.

“What is it, Xiomei?” he asked the young woman, offering her a hand which she waved away.

“We… have a big problem,” she replied, once she had her breath back.

“What’s happened?” he asked, frowning, wondering what had gotten her so worked up.

*—Chime*

Before she could continue, Ha Feirong’s talisman also chimed.

“Pagoda Lord…” Ha Feirong’s voice was as grim as Xiomei’s was slightly panicked and held a hint of well suppressed panic as well.

“What’s happened?” he asked, holding up a hand apologetically to Xiomei.

“Yun’s talisman just—”

The hair on his arms stood up as a massive spatial distortion landed, basically on top of the Cherry Wine Pagoda. The formations protecting the whole distract distorted and tore apart like damp paper as a wave of suppressive, chaotic qi consumed everything. The cherry trees turned briefly kaleidoscopic in their colour scheme and the edges of walls, doors… well, the edges of everything bled odd shadows.

It wasn’t the only one, either, two more such distortions were descending, followed by a forth that rolled over half the town, like an evil omen of chaos and death. The grand formations protecting significant portions of the Ha, Military and Market districts collapsed in the blink of an eye, followed by many of the estate formations well, none of them capable of resisting the ambient qi of the High Valleys when infused with the penetrative properties of chaotic spatial qi.

For a split second, he saw a vision of the great hall of the Ha clan, an injured body materializing out of thin air, with a defunct ‘Heaven Shifting’ talisman on its leg, held there by a bloody palm print.

-Oh may the Dun Emperor be pissed on by monkeys!

The problem was, he was seeing double, triple actually.

The talisman link to Feirong was dead, even if the scene being played out was…

“—Young Master… Yun…” the body, which was clearly not Ha Yun, he could see now, gasped, as Ha Feiyuan, Ha Chang Mei and Ha Mofan all rushed towards it. “Betrayed by… Blood Eclipse… Hunter Bureau… did… this… all… a plot… Jade…”

“—The Hunter Pavilion… they betrayed us…” the ruined form of Ha Cao Caolun whispered to his weeping father, while Patriarch Dongfei and others looked on, the words reaching him through the unsettling synchronicity of the spatial fissures. “Blood Eclipse… bandits… Jade Willow Village… Jun Arai…”

Reaching out with his soul sense, he found it could barely leave the Cherry Wine Pagoda, courtesy of the renewed impetus of the ‘Rain’s from the East’.

“Go to Feirong, ensure he doesn’t do something totally monkey-brained!” he yelled at Xiomei, who was a high enough realm that she was also able to get some inkling of the scenes, even if the words and specifics would elude her.

“—Lin clan…” the Din clan scion rasped as two Jade Gate Court Elders arrived beside him, their expressions furious, while half of the nobility of Blue Water City looked on. “Targeted… princess… Blood… Eclipse… Demon Saintess Song… did… revenge!”

“Uh… Pagoda Lord…”

Xiomei’s insistent, quavering voice, and the fact that she had grabbed his arm to draw his attention, snapped him back from the scenes of various elders scrambling to arrive beside bloody bodies of Ha Yun, Ha Caolun and… a youth in Din clan robes.

Looking up, he saw darkness swirling in the now cloud-shadowed dawn sky, like a hidden leviathan, not yet descending, but continuing to build, feeding off the auspicious strength of ‘New Yang’ entering the world.

“What the…”

The epicentre of the inauspicious up strike was…

-The first spatial distortion!

Up above, the red-tinted sky was twisting; silent, invisible death slowly setting its sights on anything and everything touched by the spatial fissures.

-Lan Huang got ambushed…

A certain forbidden talisman, the kind of idiot thing someone might actually think it was a smart idea to take as a last resort yet never actually intend to use, surfaced in his mind.

It was also the kind of thing you could trick someone into using…

“Motherless whoreson of a Din ancestor!”

Without looking back at Xiomei, he fled back into the feng shui maze, racing the up strike of the inauspicious shift in Worldly Laws that was already being drawn, like a creeping shadow into the firmament of the world around them, to where, very likely, Ha Yun himself had just landed.

~ Ha Leng – ??? ~

Ha Leng smashed into the ground so hard he saw double, and both visions involved courtyards and cherry trees, and for some strange reason, dancing animals in the sky.

“—be going first, Yun…”

The impact took away any breath with which he had tried to scream in pain even as what he had thought would be his final words hung in the air around him.

In horror, he watched as the precious, and very forbidden, soul bound, ‘Mortal Excession’ talisman he had been activating… disintegrated in his hand, melding with his body—

He wondered if this was what it felt like to be eaten alive by sage cutter ants. That was apparently a horrible way to die.

The ‘Mortal Excession’ talisman in his hand was a forbidden thing that would call down a supreme tribulation on the spot it was triggered. It did that by briefly elevating your cultivation by a Supreme Step.

The ‘Mortal’ would become ‘Immortal’.

The ‘Immortal’ could achieve the ‘Dao’.

For a brief moment at least, your firefly-like life would be fully drawn out according to the most auspicious path your destiny might have taken you. Then you would die amid the fury of heaven that descended upon you. A dozen or more Heavenly Tribulation bolts would arrive at once to smite you off the face of the world... You and everything else within a hundred miles that you had just implicated.

His body itched like there was fire worming into his flesh.

His bones were turning to icy lumps inside him, and he was keenly aware that his blood should probably not be boiling.

His thought processes crumbled as the talisman burned away.

He had a moment of regret that Ha Yun’s determination to save him, rather than himself, had very likely just demolished a significant portion of West Flower Picking Town – assuming that was where he had ended up, making him a posthumous criminal against the whole region, before the talisman’s hooks sank into his spirit root…

The expected tribulation never came.

“…”

Instead, something dispersed every bit of qi in his body. The activation of the talisman was forcibly cancelled by someone or something, although such a thing should have been impossible as far as he was bleakly aware.

Muted voices echoed around him. The words were lost in the still reverberating spatial distortion that he was currently masquerading as, but it was certainly complaining about something. At quite some length as well.

Something pressed down on his back and he felt a rush of cool, soothing energy wash away the gnawing of the spectral ants. A hand, he belatedly realised as sensation returned to his skin. He hadn’t realised until this point that his body was numb and that the pain was entirely in his head. Colour was restored next, followed by the ability to not have to think about every single breath he took.

“Easy lad. Don’t choke on your vomit,” a faintly familiar voice spoke above him.

-Don’t vomit?

He was confused until he felt the energy twisting around inside him, doing something inexplicable that made him feel like his stomach had just fallen out of his body and was dragging him down to hell with it. The numbness and tingling flowed back for a few confusing, terrifying seconds and then receded in a tingling wave of tiny sparks that scattered around him like a swarm of little fireflies.

“…”

Involuntarily he emptied his stomach all over the stone tiles; blood and the remains of the bread, soup and spirit fruit from breakfast mingled nastily on the ground.

Belatedly he was aware of the hand holding him by the collar of his rather ruined clothes, stopping him from collapsing face-first into it.

The hand hauled him properly upright and sat him down, a bit like a puppet that lacked any strings, on a stone couch beside a stone statue.

Looking up at it he saw it was of some sagacious-looking fellow in a weird robe and a very strange broad-brimmed hat that resembled the ones they wore on the western continent a tad. To distract himself from the fact that his body was becoming uncomfortably itchy as the cool energy swirled around inside him, he tried to look around him.

With colour returned to the world, he could better appreciate how bizarre a place he had ended up in. The how of that was still a bit bleary. There was a largish ornamental-style pagoda rising above him. It looked like it was made out of a huge stack of colourful, many-armed demonic figures, to the point that the roofed layers within it seemed almost like an afterthought of the designer. As if someone had at some later point reminded them that a pagoda should also have a bunch of floors and roof tiles.

The place he was in, which the pagoda was in, was a broad plaza with large, low-lying stone flower beds. Everything was carved in ornate and esoteric ways with dancing figures, demons, gods, devils and ghosts cavorting in an endless dance across every panel and tile. Beds of spiritual flowers in a riot of colours grew everywhere. Around it was an ornamental lake, filled with lotus blossoms and water lilies. A crane strutted amid the lily blossoms. Somewhere behind him, he heard the trilling call of a peacock?

The buildings on three sides, which rose to two stories in height, were constructed of white stone with red dragon tiles on the roof. A style that was oddly reminiscent of some of the old ruins they had been looking at in Yin Eclipse.

In front of him… the plaza ended in a balcony overlooking the sea. To either side were picturesque limestone cliffs.

The whole place was like some mortal’s idea of an Immortal’s garden. Except that every tree within sight… was a cherry tree. He wondered briefly if there was still some problem with his vision. Cherry trees should not be that eye-searing shade of lime yellow. Even the bark made his vision swim a bit.

“Easy, easy. Take deep breaths… don’t panic. Your qi is still unstable. You will feel some emotional—”

The kindly male voice speaking beside him vanished in a fog of surging, confused panic that exploded from somewhere inside him.

-Yun sent me somewhere!

-Is this place a sanctuary of the elders of the Ha clan?

-Is Ha Yun okay?

-Where is Yun?

-Did he come with me?

The ‘Ha Yun’ of the past two weeks had been slowly mellowing. He had known his friend for almost fifteen years and in the few days out here, under the influence of Sir Huang, his childhood friend had been closer to the seven year old kid with a snotty nose who dreamed of being a great sage and slaying demons beyond the realm wall, than he could remember… since, well… since they were both that age.

His surge of strange jumbled emotions faded as quickly as it came, and was replaced by a mind-crushing emptiness.

Yun…

-My friend is dead.

-My friends are all dead.

The last moments of Ding, Jiao, Mao and Mun flitted through his mind, followed by…

“The Din clan…” he rasped.

-Killed by treachery from the Din clan.

-It was stupid of the clan elders to try to grasp the leg of such an influence across the ocean.

-Is this karmic justice?

-Is all of this punishment for going against the Bureau?

-Did one of those old monsters of myth that transcends the very strength of the world itself notice our clan’s arrogance and cast their thought down?

“Easy… Easy, that’s it…” the kindly voice beside him said. “Get all the confusion out. Don’t think about it right now... You suffered a huge soul injury and your realm has… erm… that’s interesting.”

“My realm has...?”

A persistent voice in his head finally managed to make itself heard, jabbering insanely and pointing with far too many arms.

-My realm is wrong.

-My body is wrong.

-Very, very wrong. Far too strong.

-This amount of energy rolling around inside me should have exploded me into a bloody mist!?!

-I should be condemned ashes at the bottom of a crater in West Flower Picking Town.

“And why am I staring... at myself?”

The disorientation… he spun on the spot—

“Still your thoughts. Your disorientation will pass,” the kindly voice said again, and the hand supporting him sent another wave of qi through him.

When he calmed down, he finally noticed the three men watching him.

He froze, like a small animal meeting a predator, before realising that of course there should be people here if this was the mysterious ‘elders’ sanctuary’ of their clan.

Except... he had never seen these people before, and he was sure he had seen all of the—

Clearly, the qi being put into his body was doing something to him, because he didn’t climb vertically three feet in the air and kowtow, or run screaming… or faint.

“Junior meets Honoured and Serene Seventh Old Ancestor,” he managed to force out, as he recognised the middle aged figure, dressed in a white, knee length tunic, a purple cloak… or perhaps robe, in an odd style, draped around his body.

There was a full-length painting and statue of the man in the Ha Family shrine, which Yun had taken him into secretly a few times, when they were younger, to admire the various arts on their pedestals and the portraits of the old ancestors.

His mother’s lineage was descended from the renowned old man’s daughter’s third son, just as his own father came from the Fifth Old Ancestor, Ha Erlang.

“Not at all. Not at all,” the sagacious, Confucian-looking old man beamed broadly.

“Uh…”

He stared blankly as the wrong person answered him. Almost in passing, he noticed that the sleeves of the Confucian scholars robe were badly burnt and his hands were a bit red.

“I don’t believe this is Ha Yun,” the middle aged man in a purple robe, he ‘knew’ as the Seventh Old Ancestor, remarked drily.

That mans’ gaze, which was scrutinizing him like he was a humorously shaped vegetable, made him want to prostrate himself again. The third elder, of middle age, with a military-looking demeanour and a well-trimmed beard in a rather outdated style, flipped the sleeves of his deep blue robe and coughed a bit awkwardly.

“This is Ha Leng, father,” the Confucian sage replied blandly.

“He is one of Ha Yun’s childhood friends,” the blue-robed elder added.

That was the kindly voice that had been helping him, he realised, although there was also something oddly familiar about it… beyond that.

“Leng… interesting, interesting! Is that from Erlang’s bunch?” the purple-robed, sagacious Old Ancestor mused.

“Junior is indeed descended from Honoured Old Ancestor Ha Erlang Shan,” he fought back a grimace of embarrassment. “Junior cannot bow to Old Ancestors, forgive my impertinence!”

“Mmm…. well, at least my talisman saved somebody,” the purple-robed ancestor sighed.

“Yes, well, we are fortunate I can run fast,” the Confucian elder muttered.

Behind them, on the table, a talisman on the table suddenly shook and started to glimmer faintly, and all three turned to look at it.

The Confucian elder picked it up, then threw it back down in disgust. “It seems, father, that your talent for correctly predicting ridiculous situations continues with rather disturbing success in every venture except our games.”

“How bad is it?” the blue robed elder asked.

“Bad,” the Confucian elder groaned, sitting down on the edge of the table and running his hands through his hair.

“Hmmm…” the younger-looking, purple robed elder picked up the talisman, which he finally recognised as a life jade and shook his head. “I think it is necessary for this old man to take a look…”

The younger man stood and came over to stand beside him. This close, the casually imperious air around him was stifling. It made him want to prostrate himself on an instinctual level.

“Young man, do you mind if I take a look inside your mind’s eye a moment?”

-On the other hand, what he is asking is...?

“Err? What does honourable and wise Old Ancestor mean?" he asked, picking his words as carefully and politely as possible.

-Does the elder, ancestor want to scry my soul? Am I actually in trouble here because I am not Ha Yun? Or because of the talisman…

Panic rose in his body like a surging wave, turning his qi turbulent once again. The cool energy was actually really quite hot, and—

“Oh, you won’t get anywhere like that, revered teacher, that’s like asking a goldfish what it thinks of the sun in the sky,” the military-looking, blue-robed old man shook his head wryly. “Not to mention your aura is still oppressing the poor lad.”

The Old Ancestor standing beside him stared at him with a frown. The imperious aura vanished abruptly, as did the subtle pressure.

“Even that much? The youth of today sure are coddled,” the purple-robed elder sighed.

The kindly-sounding blue-robed old ancestor sighed. “What revered Great Teacher means is that he wishes to look through your karmic links and view the last… few minutes or so of your experiences before you arrived here?

“The time between when I was unceremoniously punted off that fate-cursed cliff—

“Uh… off the cliff…” he stared at the blue-robed man.

“Ah, yes, I suppose introductions are in order,” the blue-robed elder said drily. “I am Ha Lan Huang… who you have been calling ‘Sir Huang’ for the last two weeks.”

“…”

“Your… Sir Huang?” he repeated, dully, even as his mind did, finally place the faint edge on the accent the elder had.

“Yes…” Lan Huang said. “Anyway, as I was saying, Second Original Old Ancestor here, Ancestor Tai Wen, wants to look at your memories, from after I went over that cliff, up until Ha Yun’s life-bound talisman here inexplicably had a nascent deviation, just after he used the life-saving talisman the Seventh Old Ancestor here, Ancestor Tai Kai, gave him on his childhood friend, rather than himself…”

“Ah…”

“Sorry…” he mumbled as all three stared at him, suddenly wanting the comforting suppression of that imperious aura back to fog his thoughts.

There was a lot to process in that statement, some of it quite… troublesome, but—

“Ha Yun is alive?” he asked, latching onto the immediately relevant bit of information.

“That…” Old Ancestor Kai frowned, looking… perturbed.

“That remains to be seen,” the blue-robed, kindly Ancestor, Ancestor Huang, said with a worried look.

“That—” he gulped, his throat was also dry and parched.

He blinked and forced out his other worry, having improbably survived up until this point. “That sounds dangerous?”

“Mmmmm… it is a bit, yes. Difficult too,” the youngest-looking, but in fact, most senior Ancestor here beamed.

Ancestor Kai coughed, looking awkward, “What my esteemed father means, young Leng, is that it is likely to be a very bad day, in due course, for the idiot who has tried to pluck away at things that they should have been self-aware enough to otherwise leave well alone.”

The horrible smile that that so-called... Brother Ji... Di Ji had had as he stood on the cliff edge swirled back into his mind.

Sir Huang vanished off the cliff with the two young women, the Hunters.

The terrifying golden rings…

The futile deaths of his friends… sworn brothers Mao, Ding and Jiao—

All of that welled up in his mind’s eye again. The conviction in the dying Ha Yun’s eyes the moment before he vanished. His own determination to give his life, to try to help his best friend survive.

“In that case, revered Ancestors, this filial—”

“Ahem,” the Original Old Ancestor coughed a touch awkwardly. “Stop grovelling lad, have some gumption for Christ’s sake. I’m not a god. Anyway, I’ve seen what I needed to.”

Staring dully at the Original Ancestor, he blinked a few times. “Done—?

“I… Ancestor I don’t understand. I thought you needed—?”

“See!? “ Ancestor Kai suddenly guffawed out loud and pounded the table. “This is why it’s amusing to run around among the kids occasionally. They have such wonderfully idiotic notions about how things work.”

Ancestor Wen’s eye twitched slightly. “You think this seat needs to resort to such mediocrity? This seat is not those ‘Three Morons’ of the Imperial Court.”

“N...n-no... Not at all S… Supreme One,” the words came out in a staccato stutter.

Ancestor Huang rolled his eyes while Ancestor Kai kicked his feet on the floor in hysterics, tears rolling from his eyes.

“Still your levity, boy—”

He flinched as the imperious aura swirled back for a split second. The world rippled and the cherry trees faded out of focus. He realised he wanted to puke again as the swirling resolved itself and the cherry trees turned an eye-warping orange.

“No, not you, child. This idiot!” Ancestor Wen was suddenly standing beside ancestor Kai, whom he clipped across the head with a fan he had produced from somewhere, in a decidedly ill-humoured manner.

Stalking back around the table, Ancestor Wen sat down and poured himself a cup of wine with a gloomy expression,

“Well?” Ancestor Kai asked.

“I hate being right,” Ancestor Wen sighed.

In the following silence, it was impossible to say anything. A stifling oppression had started to permeate the whole place. Even the other two ancestors seemed affected by it.

The Original Old Ancestor flipped over a few cards on the table absently. “Ah. It’s the Long Nine Dragon. I seem to have karma with it somehow.”

Ancestor Huang winced slightly, but Ancestor Kai managed to catch his eye and imperceptibly shake his head without his father noticing.

“It seems the culprit is the wage of your inaction that time, boy,” the Original Old Ancestor glanced at his son.

That was shocking in its own right. He had shoved that thought to the back of his mind, where it was sitting in a dark corner, holding its knees and gibbering faintly. The younger-looking man, ‘Ancestor Wen’, had another name. ‘Old Freak Ha’.

–The Old Freak Ha.

There was nobody else he could be. Nobody would dare to impersonate him. He was slumped here in front of someone who could walk sideways even in front of the Imperial Seat.

The Ancestor Wen stared at the wine cup in his hand, then took a sip of it before sighing more deeply.

“Never mind what I, your father said back then, Kai Lan was right, you should have just crushed that brat, like the cockroach he was, for the crime he perpetrated. If you had done that—”

“Di Ji?”

Ancestor Kai’s voice hissed through the world. The trees exploded into colourful shards. The lake was twisted into a blizzard of shattering water and lily blossoms. The mountains on the horizon and the rolling waves of the ocean crumbled into ruin in eerie silence. In the sky above… he felt like he was staring into the void, a horrible shadow descending towards him, filled with myriad dancing animals, just as he had thought he saw in the brief moment when he teleported.

His vision shrank as he was pulled upwards towards it, his psyche crumbling as phantasmagorical words sang in his ears—

The world snapped back into focus. Ancestor Huang was standing beside him, his actual hand on his head. Warm strength suffused his body, dragging him down out of that horrific, primordial abyss in the sky.

The world was reset around him. The pagoda and lake were gone, as were the mountains, though the rest of the estate remained. As did the sea-shore view. In its place, the estate was surrounded by a vast garden with lines of cherry trees in a weird shade that dreamed of being mauve.

In the midst of all this, a frail and quavering voice spoke up. It took Ha Leng a second to realise it was, in fact, his own voice. He had finally found the courage to ask what had weighed on his mind for several minutes now. Well, one of several.

“Honoured Ancestors… what in the fates did… Di Ji actually do to you all to offend such persons as your august selves? And… wasn’t he killed by Di Yao?”

“Yes, he purportedly was,” Ancestor Kai said, his expression gloomy.

“So uh…how is he still alive here and now?”

“…”

“As to what…?” Ancestor Huang sighed. “It’s more a case of finding people outside of the umbrella influence of the Imperial Court that that Nameless-bestowed little carbuncle of maleficence didn’t offend in his ten years of running rampant.”

That wasn’t really an answer, he was going to point out, when Ancestor Huang’s eye caught his and he received a subtle suggestion to not prod the topic unduly.

“Should I tell Lady Kai that your regard for her is so great that it would break the very firmament of worlds?” Ancestor Wen chuckled, watching as the sky and its constellations of animals mercifully returned to normal again. “She would probably appreciate the gesture…”

“Please father, do not go there…” Ancestor Kai sighed, putting his head in his hands.

“Uh… when you say ‘Lady Kai?’” he asked, nervously.

“Kai Lan… that Kai Lan. The one who threatened to hang the whole male younger generation of the Imperial Court by their impotent manhood’s from the Gate of Wisdom over what Di Ji did to her disciple,” Ancestor Huang said.

“Aiiii,” Ancestor Wen shook his head and sighed deeply, taking another drink of his wine. “Ahh, to be young again, and feel love so keenly.”

“…”

All of them stared at him, askance. Ha Leng just found that he was confused now, Ancestor Huang was looking a bit oddly at the father-son pair, while Ancestor Kai was glaring at his father like he wanted to hit him with the nearby wine jar.

“In any case,” Ancestor Wen sighed and stood from his seat, “now that that brat’s father has helped him wriggle out from under the rather austere and short-sighted Judgement of Heaven, to the point where he is willing to be this blasé, even after all the mess he caused you, he will certainly have some card in hand that makes him difficult to deal with.”

“You need look no further than how matters are already playing out to see that…”

Ancestor Kai and Ancestor Huang both looked like they had just swallowed a bitter pill as Ancestor Wen started to pace back and forth.

“I… don’t follow,” he asked weakly.

“Well, Ancestor Huang here moved against Di Ji… and got thrown off a cliff, into an anomaly, in trying to flee from him, you nearly destroyed half a town—”

“Uh… oh… sorry,” he grimaced.

“Don’t be,” Ancestor Wen said with a grimace. “The tides of chance twist around that boy in very inauspicious currents. “You came quite close to being an actual threat to him, as did Yun… Were you not here…”

“…”

“Well, if there is a miscalculation on their part, it is that they are not aware of who is watching,” Ancestor Wen muttered. “Though as a result, everyone who could now reign in the Ha clan is stuck here, or presumably stranded in Yin Eclipse…”

“Can’t you just… leave here?” he asked.

“Hah…” Ancestor Kai clenched his raw, blistered hands in his hair for a moment. “I am marked by a Heavenly Judgement, for a few hours at least. Ancestor Huang has a soul injury and…”

“—and as the person bound to this abode, I have to at least wait until you stop sparking,” Ancestor Wen sighed.

“How is that…” Ancestor Huang asked…

“I had to pull the child talisman out to cut off the path of vengeance to young Leng here. The Cherry Wine Pagoda still got hit by three bolts.”

“I meant in regards to West Flower Picking Town… what you said before,” Ancestor Huang said.

“…”

“It’s bad,” Ancestor Kai sighed. “I gave Xiomei instructions to keep Feirong’s group on a tight leash, but the Cao and Ji are going to be all over this like a rash. When you factor in that the optics of this are… shockingly bad when it comes to fanciful interpretation… They have painted a target that covers everything from the Blood Eclipse, to the colossal balls up at the start of this generation with the Shu clan…”

“…”

“That said...” Ancestor Tai Wen sneered. “That brat had some Good Fortune before: he did his dicking about when I was off-world. Even if we are rather awkwardly stuck here in the short term, maybe there is still an opportunity here to spit in Kong Di and Din Bao’s soup without them realising?”

“Ha… ha…ha haha…” Ancestor Kai, who had been stared at his father with a rather gloomy expression, rather incongruously, burst out laughing.

Ancestor Wen rolled his eyes and also started to chuckle rather darkly as he looked up at the sky. He could only watch in confusion as the old ancestor walked over to the edge of the balcony and spread his arms wide.

Before his eyes, the world re-arranged in accordance with Ancestor Wen’s rather sinister laughter; storm clouds swirling above and trees rustling in the wind in eerie mimicry, carrying the laughter into the very fabric of the world itself.

Out over the ocean, the horizon between sky and sea started to shift and twist.

Ha Leng found his gaze drawn, inexorably, in some strange way, to the heart of the distortion as one after another, the ghostly forms of some of the strange celestial figures— a pair of youths, a pair of fish, a beautiful woman with flowers in her hair, a horse and a bow all combined…

The fish swirled around each other, rising out of the ocean, even as the maiden appeared behind them, accompanied by the youths. With their hands, the youths seemed to grasp the very firmament itself, opening up a vast fissure in the vault of heaven. The maiden, meanwhile moved hers in a vast circle, somehow drawing sea and sky together through a glittering wheel of stars, up which the fish swirled, like dragons rising to heaven…

“Actualize! Eye of the Thrice Venerated Sage!”

The words Ancestor Wen spoke seemed to draw out something… strange in the horizon. The arrangement of the figures solidified and the great pillar was grasped by horse, which was now had the upper body of a man, as if it were a great staff. The woman opened her arms and the youths grasped the fish, suddenly ripping the pillar in two, forming an eye-like fissure, within which dark storm clouds and a roiling aurora of multi-coloured starlight twisted for several seconds…

“Ucch… reliquated piece of junk…” Ancestor Wen grumbled, staring at the scene, clearly dissatisfied. “Never works first time…”

“Resolve, Eye of the Thrice Venerated Sage!”

The storm clouds rolled outwards and the fissure in the sky occluded abruptly, appearing on the one hand, to be only fifty-odd metres away, over the roiling ocean… and yet simultaneously encompass the entire horizon.

As they looked on, the scene within it shifted. The Aurora seemed to solidify into mountains, then ridgelines, while the clouds falling through it became drifting greenery and a wall of rain. Glittering stars in the sky, which before had been picking out strange shadows within the void, resolved themselves into ruins on top of a sprawling plateau, which after a moment he recognised, somewhat to his surprise, as those he had spent the night sheltering in.

~ Ha Yun – Ruin on the Ridgeline ~

His head felt like someone had cleft it open with a sword and stuck it back together again. He tried to remember who he was and got nothing for several agonising moments...

The pain that was building inside his body was rising, from a sharp ache that pulsed back and forth to something more akin to fracturing glass digging into his flesh.

Abruptly he became aware of another 'pain'.

This one was very dissociated, for all that it was excruciating. It felt like someone had dumped a bunch of white-hot spiders down his neck. Spiders which were now busy ripping at a spectral part of him, gnawing at everything that made him... him. Just as the parts of him that the spiders were ripping away were properly about to disperse, a warm wave of energy swept him up and swirled all of 'him' around in a strange and disorientating way.

The spiders, now made of bone-chilling ice, flowed backwards, their wave-like motion putting things back in place again, turning over his whole being in an instant and threading him back together—

A name shifted back into his consciousness.

-Ha...? ...Yun?

It was followed by a torrent of images, shapes, memories and sensations...

-Young Master... Ha clan...

-Saved... Ling... Luo...

-Betrayed... Herb Hunters...

-Lin School...

-Indigenous... Yin Eclipse...

-Brother Ji... Din Ouyeng... Friends...

-Death... Betrayal...Herb Hunters.

-Hunted…

-Trial...

Ha Yun opened his eyes with a jolt.

-I should be dead, was his first thought.

The second and third thoughts were crudely truncated by light and noise as his senses were overloaded.

“Wh—?”

He tried to speak and pain flooded back into his world. Something felt like it was hammering at the inside of his skull, his limbs were alternatively ice and fire and every bone in his body felt like it had molten lead for marrow. There were also two Ha Yuns in his head. One, the smaller one, was screaming in horror. He tried to focus on what that other him was trying to tell him, but it just didn’t take for some reason.

“Easy, Brother Ha…” a concerned, soothing female voice whispered by his head.

He felt warm qi flowing from feminine hands into his body, soothing the pain. The fire cooled, the ice started to warm and the twisting agony in his bones was reduced to a dull ache.

“W-what happened?” the voice that spoke was his, but…

“Don’t worry, Brother Ha, you are okay now... the injury you took defending Fairy Luo during their betrayal was… extreme,” Young Noble Ji was squatting nearby, looking at him with concern. He held several strange talismans in his hand.

He had a strange rush of euphoria that someone that important was concerned about him. About his well-being.

“F-Fairy Luo?” he realised belatedly who was holding his head.

Ling Luo was bending over him with a look of deep concern on her face. Tears marred her perfect features and her eyes…

He found himself lost in her gaze for a few seconds before he reasserted control over his emotions.

His mind caught up with what Young Noble Ji had said.

“B-b-betrayal?”

He tried to sit up but Fairy Luo still held onto him, so all he succeeded in doing was flailing weakly in her lap...

“Don’t move, Brother Ha, your injuries are still healing,” her soft voice further soothed his confused state.

She was right.

He did need to lie here and heal for a minute, with his head in Fairy Luo’s lap. It was a very nice view, after all.

The other voice in his head that was trying to get his attention receded a bit more.

“You took a serious soul wound. You are lucky to have survived,” Young Noble Din said from where he sat nearby, looking through a storage ring. “Without your exceptional foundation and Brother Huang’s action… even Brother Ji would have struggled to save you… and even then, he had to use a precious treasure.”

“Save me?” the voice, his voice, sounded confused as it rang oddly in his own ears.

Closing his eyes, he tried to recall what had just occurred. The events leading up to his injury were blurry and fragmented.

There was a memory of triggering the barrier….

Someone had attacked Sir Huang?

-No… Sir Huang was attacked before…

He stared up at the overcast sky.

Sir Cao and… Sir Teng had attacked them… someone?

He had been injured in the… aftermath?

“Ha… Leng?” he asked... at last.

The name was hard to dredge up and felt… strangely remote.

“I haven’t seen him since your barrier collapsed, in the aftermath of that talisman…” Young Noble Din Ouyeng said with a sigh.

“Ah yes…” Fairy Luo agreed, sounding… tired suddenly. “His body isn’t here… maybe he managed to teleport away from that Old Freak…”

“His body?” he struggled up, shaking off Fairy Luo’s kind hands. “Old… freak?”

Looking around, the ridgeline was in ruins.

Rocks were melted.

Walls of buildings had collapsed.

A third of the stone seats around the plaza were warped and smooth, as if exposed to terrifying heat.

Something had sheared off a portion of the outcropping above them.

Off to the east, another two hundred metre swathe of ruins and trees were just… gone. All that was left was swirling dust and an unnaturally flat surface extending diagonally to the edge of the ridge where it truncated oddly.

Finally, he found the row of corpses, lying nearby. There were three… that he recognised anyway; Sir Cao, Ha Ding, Ha Mao and maybe… bits of Ha Jiao or perhaps it was Sir Teng…?

No Leng… No… Mun… no…

“No…”

He stared at them blankly.

“They… died?”

For some reason, that thought was… disturbing, in a way he knew that it shouldn’t be.

They were his… followers…

It was their… their job to protect him, anyway. That they died like this just… meant… that they had fulfilled their duty?

Something about that felt wrong, but he couldn’t work out what it was though. Perhaps an aftereffect of this soul attack messing with him?

“Fang?”

Another name slipped into his mind and he looked around for another body, but there was no sign of a ‘Fang’ there.

-My…

“Now, now, Yun…” Ling Luo, kneeling beside him, put a hand on his shoulder. “Just take few deep breaths and calm yourself.”

He nodded, but couldn’t take his eyes from them.

Their bodies were ruined beyond belief. Sir Cao had a hole through his dantian and was missing an arm and both legs below the knee. Someone or something had smashed his face to pieces. Ha Ding and Ha Mao were bloody and cut to ribbons, their arms and legs stacked on top of their torsos. Ha Jiao’s head was also there, still holding a horrified expression.

The small voice in his mind was growing louder and louder the longer he stared. It was unhappy that they were dead?

-No… that doesn’t seem right.

He shook his head and tried to banish it.

-This is not right…

Psyche breaks were bad.

Very bad.

Especially before you manifested a Nascent Soul. All cultivators learned that quickly. Such deviations frequently led to heart demons, or even ‘Demonification’, if serious enough – where an aspect of a person’s psyche fractured sufficiently that your subconscious took control, and you became a broken slave to your basest desires.

“We cannot let this betrayal go unpunished,” Brother Ji moved to stand beside him and clapped a hand on his shoulder.

Din Ouyeng nodded grimly, “Indeed. At least Brother Kongfei, Brother Caolun, Brother Mangfan, Sir Teng and Young Lady Juni are pursuing them…”

He blinked, realizing that there were other missing faces as well, that he had missed in his shock.

-That’s not right… why would Juni…? A part of him protested.

“Well, now that you are up and about, we must chase after those lowborn, indigenous dogs and their sympathisers,” Fair Luo said, her tone cooling.

“Indigenous?” he was confused for a short moment.

-Oh. They mean the Yin Eclipse people.

Eastern Indigenous was the derogatory word the people from the central continent used to describe the lower orders on the Yin Eclipse sub-continent and parts of the Easten continent. He looked around, still confused… there were more people? No? Should be more people?

“Where are the… Herb Hunters?” he finally found what he wanted to ask after several awkward seconds of grasping.

“Don’t tax yourself, Brother Ha,” Fairy Luo said, her voice becoming concerned again. “You might exacerbate your injury.”

“They fled,” Din Ouyeng glowered.

“Fled?” he asked, frowning… because that didn’t seem…

“Come on… let’s have you come sit over here…” Fairy Luo added, slipping an arm around him and helping him up.

He was suddenly keenly aware of her voluptuous curves pressing against him. The flush of heat from her qi aura made him giddy. Part of him complained that it was deeply inappropriate for… him…? That voice died into silence. If Fairy Luo wanted to grab his arm and hold him close, that was just fine.

“It is as you suspected back at the shelter, Brother Yun. That indigenous boy was leaving signs for rogue cultivators to follow us.”

“As I suspected?” he felt that he was missing something here…

“Yes. You told me at the time that there had been a spate of unusual issues with Herb Hunters from your town's Pavilion,” Brother Ji, who had taken his other arm as they made their way over to rock where he could sit down, added, giving his shoulder a squeeze. “You did suggest that they were responsible for sabotaging the teleport formation… I am sorry I didn’t take your warnings more seriously.”

He tried to recall this in his memories of the past few days… but it slipped away like fog and phantoms of half-remembered dreams.

-Fate-thrashed soul injury!

After a moment of intense concentration, he was left with a pounding headache… but could indeed just about recall sitting in a room… with a fire… near here?

-Ah?

He had been talking to Sir Huang… with… Caolun, and… Mun?”

-Mun was injured? Poisoned somehow…

Snippets of the conversation flowed back to him somehow. He had been worried about…

The lamium, they had been in Portam… ‘The ruin’, and tried to go back, then someone had sent them a bogus message and they had been caught in the teleport trap. Chu Fang was missing.

Caolun had been worried that the Herb Hunters had deliberately misled them.

He had been… angry that the Hunters didn’t do more to look for Fang and to help Mun…

-Mun died… because of them?

-Sir Huang didn’t… believe him?

More memories slotted into place…

-They led us through all sorts of dangerous places.

-The Hunters.

Even his memories of them were fractured.

The Jun girls and Kun Juni were… pretty… certainly easy on the eyes…

Competent herb hunters, but Juni had a chip on her shoulder about her clan and the Jun sisters were… pawns of the bureau politics…

He knew he disliked them… they were part of the ‘problem’ with the local bureau as well. Just like Lin Ling, who was a brat, promoted to spite others.

As for Han Shu…

He had no…

Han Shu… was… an indigenous dog, promoted out of spite over people like him.

Part of him was confused.

-I never..?

...never?

“…”

Just thinking about it made his stomach twist. Deep down, he had never liked folk like Han Shu. They played the imperial ‘game’, but it was all a façade, as today had so brutally shown. They didn’t respect the Imperial Authority or the Rule of the Emperor as all civilised people should. They also practised their strange heretical cultivation arts that inexplicably worked better in these fate-forsaken mountains.

“After… Mun died, you confronted them,” he looked at Ling Luo, who had tears in her eyes again. “Brave Hero Fang saved me from being blown up by one of those blaze pine seeds…”

“Blaze…?” he stared around at the devastation and swirling threads of yang rich energies suffusing everything.

Certainly a blaze pine exploding could do that, as he recalled…

“—if he hadn’t pushed me clear that girl and her blonde friend, who wormed their way into my cousins good books would have killed me…” Ling Luo continued.

“Cousin?” he repeated blankly.

“Oh… Ling Yu,” Ling Luo said with a grimace.

“Oh…”

He stared at her blankly, still not sure what to make about that. The whole thing just gave him a huge headache. It made him want to lie down and shut his eyes.

-Maybe when I wake, this will all just be some drunken nightmare…

-I’ll be back in the Singing Lotus teahouse…

“To think the treachery of the Lin school ran that deep,” Din Ouyeng muttered. “That they would side with villains like the Blood Eclipse and their Demon Saintess.”

“There is no proof of that,” Young Noble Ji pointed out.

“Faugh!” Din Ouyeng scowled. “Put aside your Meng hat for a minute and see it clearly, ‘Brother Ji’. That Arai girl was in Jade Willow when Kongfei and the others went there, that old expert was from those Yeng bandits everyone is up in arms over as well… at the very least, this is revenge for the Ha clan destabilizing their scheme!”

“…”

“Yes… I suppose so…” Ji sighed and nodded.

“It is lucky your friend Leng had such a powerful talisman on him…” Ling Luo added, the conversation circling back to that at last, though he could barely remember what he had said a minute ago, never mind that…

“Still, I really want to know how that Lin girl got her hands on a ‘Skitter Leap’ talisman of that calibre,” Ji said with a grimace.

His memories showed Lin Ling and Han Shu fleeing in a cloud of purple butterflies. He had assumed that was just a weird issue with his memory. He was sure Juni had vanished at the same time, and yet they said she had chased after the other two?

“Brother Huang’s noble sacrifice bought us time to use your elder’s barrier at least,” Din Ouyeng added, more warmly. “Thanks to that, a few of us are here to tell this sorry tale at least…”

“Sacrifice?” he managed to ask.

“The tetrid stalkers that attacked… he fell with one, as did the Jun Sisters…” Brother Ji said grimly.

-Tetrid?

Closing his eyes… he found he did indeed have fractured memories of that… of Sir Huang… and Jun Arai and Sana…

“I… don’t recall a tetrid?” he muttered at last, putting his head in his hands.

“It was when you were focused on your barrier,” Ling Luo said helpfully, from beside him.

“I….” he found he wasn’t sure what to say… there was still a splitting pain in his head, almost like he was having an argument with himself.

-Too right you are!

-This isn’t right… It’s all wrong…!

-WRONG, WRONG, WRONG!

-Wake up, you stupid son of a monkey! Have some critical thoughts for once in your life!

The other voice snarled and cursed him furiously even as his returning cognisant solidity pushed it down.

-Wrong…!

“You will need some time to recover,” Ji said with an encouraging smile, giving his shoulder a final squeeze before stepping away.

He felt the residual warmth of Ji Tantai’s qi pass into his body, healing his wounds a bit more and calming his mind.

In the distance, there was a dull rumble of thunder.

“It seems the others have caught up with them,” Din Ouyeng remarked, glancing at a talisman in his hand.

“Let us see if we cannot sort this out,” Ji said. “I know our influences have not had the best…”

“That’s underselling it,” Din Ouyeng sniffed, looking annoyed again.

“Please,” Ling Luo said, with a grimace. “Young nobles, surely we can be in agreement that to survive this… we must work together?”

“…”

“Y…yeah,” he nodded, mostly just to feel like he was somehow making a useful contribution at this point.

“Fairy Luo sees clearly,” Ji Tantai said with a sigh.

“Yes…” Din Ouyeng agreed, wiping a stream of blood from his nose and standing up.

“Fairy Luo, Brother Yun, please stay here,” Brother Ji said, waving a hand. “Thankfully, here will be safe from beasts, so we only have to fear malcontents.”

A barrier of golden fire sprung up around them.

Ling Luo took out several talismans as well and started to set up a small formation.

“We shall be fine here, Brother Ji,” she said with a firmer nod.

“We will chase after the betrayers and capture them so the Ha clan can see justice done,” Din Ouyeng added, picking up his sword. “The Ha clan is, after all, a good ally of my Din clan.”

“Thank you Young Master Din, Brother Ji,” Fairy Luo saluted them. “Please uphold justice on behalf of the Blue Water City as well.”

He found himself also saluting the pair and wishing them good luck, while promising to look after Fairy Luo, for what it was worth.

“Ah… it seems they have run into difficulties,” Din Ouyeng muttered, glancing at his talisman.

“…”

Brother Ji sighed again and picked up his spear.

He watched the unlikely pair of collaborators hurry off, still feeling a bit strange. However, the discordant voices in the back of his head were finally fading away. That was a relief. He had been concerned about that and whether it was a sign he was having a Psyche Break.

~ Lu Ji – Ling Estates, Blue Water City ~

“Headmaster Lu is in the Chang Garden…”

Lu Ji, sitting in the shelter of a pagoda on the edge of a small ornamental lake in the aforementioned garden, sighed and stared over at a crane, poking through the shallows.

“Is solitude to worry about my own issues not too much to ask?” he mused to the bird.

The spirit animal stared back at him with an expression that said clearly – ‘Don’t get me involved in your problems, I’m just here for the fish’.

“…”

The words he had just heard had been spoken by a servant in the hall between the gardens and the teleport plaza. At his realm, though, it actually quite easy to pick up on bits of ‘intent’ like that. Knowing people were ‘talking’ about you or ‘asking’ about you was a rather handy trick to be able to use.

“Good, take us to him!” a woman’s voice, much more strident in her ‘intent’, commanded.

“Dear… please be…” a man’s voice, calmer, but still with a real edge on it interjected.

“Don’t dear me!” the woman snapped

“Oh great…”

He stared out at the rain, recognising that pair of voices. The woman was Ling Bai Lanying, the wife of Lord Ling Jiang, while the man was Ling Jiang himself.

“What do they want?”

‘Seriously, I don’t know! Stop talking to me!’ the crane complained, stalking off along the water margin, bobbing its head. ‘Stupid cultivators…’

Ignoring the bird’s attitude, he swiped the golden and black crystals away – they would cause too many questions – and replaced them with some food and wine. Thanks to the constant buggering about with the auspicious aspects of the world at large he had not yet had an opportunity to merge them in any case.

While he waited for the pair to arrive, he pulled out Ling Tao’s communication talisman and stared at that.

It had been about thirty minutes, give or take, since Ling Tao led a military force capable of ruining a middling-sized sect in short order, up into the mountains, and the lack of news was making him… well, not nervous, but not as confident in her endeavour as she seemed to be. The Yeng Brotherhood were no laughing matter and if they had managed to resurge properly, as the evidence was rather concerningly suggesting, they were likely in for a bad few months, the issues with the ‘gift’ notwithstanding.

It annoyed him, on a personal level as well, that as her teacher, he could not shoulder at least some of this burden for her. Unfortunately, it had been centuries since he spent more than a few weeks at a time in Yin Eclipse’s High Valleys, and so his ability to manipulate ‘Laws’ up there was… embarrassingly bad. All his presence there would do was provide an awkward target of opportunity.

“Headmaster Lu is just over here…”

Glancing over, he saw the female servant had finally appeared. However, she was leading not just Ling Jiang and his wife, but also his younger sister in law, Bai Lanli and two other older men; elders from the Bai and Qing clans.

-The Qing clan huh… Well, this is definitely about Misty Jasmine Inn then…

Standing up, he saluted them politely, noting that Ling Jiang looked… at a word, unhappy.

“How can I help, Lord Jiang?” he asked, gesturing for them to take a seat in the shelter of the small pagoda as they approached.

“To what do I owe this...?” he was about to say ‘pleasure’, but that was probably a mistake.

Bai Lanli appeared to have been crying, though she made an excellent effort to hide it.

“...visit,” he finished lamely.

“Where is my sister-in-law?” before Lord Jiang could say anything Bai Lanying spoke, her voice taut.

“Ling Tao?” he blinked, not expecting that question.

Ling Tao had a lot of time for both her nieces, but the simple truth was that her relationship with their mothers was a bit… standoffish. Mostly that originated in petty, domestic things that marred every clan, but the gist of it was that both women saw in his disciple, the shadow of a path never afforded to them. Both had… difficulties with their daughters and their roles in the clan as well, and somewhat resented, he suspected, that Ling Tao was more able to give them what those girls needed than they were.

“Uh… she is… dealing with a problem, at Misty Jasmine Inn,” he replied carefully, glancing at the Bai and Qing elders again.

“A problem… at Misty Jasmine Inn?” Lord Jiang’s eyes narrowed.

“Yes,” he said. “Have you heard about the talisman errors…?”

“…”

Lord Jiang’s expression just turned gloomy and the Qing and Bai elders nodded curtly.

“Well call her!” Bai Lanying said, folding her arms. “Whatever she is doing is not as important as—”

“Ah, you misunderstand, Lady Lanying,” he cut her off politely. “Misty Jasmine Inn is the forward base in Yin Eclipse—”

“—I thought teleportation up there wasn’t possible, due to the Prince’s advisors dispersing the Dragon Gale,” Bai Lanying muttered.

“Lord Baisheng went with her,” he answered, glancing at Ling Jiang, who should be privy to a few more things than his wife. “As did a few other experts, there have been some… concerning developments…”

“When did she leave?” the Bai elder asked, frowning.

“About half an hour ago,” he replied, ignoring the man’s tone.

“…”

“See! Uncle!” Bai Lanli turned on the elder who had come with her and almost poking a finger in his chest. “I told you, you useless bastard, that the omens were not good, and you still went over my head and allowed Luofan to go up there!”

“Lanli, please,” the Elder said, blocking her hand with a pained expression. “Have a care with your words.”

-Ah, her son and the Qing boy… Aofang, were both among those the elders suggested could go up there, to acclimatize for the trial…

*Chime*

“—Teacher…”

Ling Tao’s voice echoed in his head, through the talisman, although it was distant and distorted.

“—Sorry, the link is… —uh… —bad,” Ling Tao supplied.

“Ah, your timing is quite good…” he sent back to her, then grimaced, as his qi was drawn into the talisman at a rate that was… disconcerting.

It took some effort not to curse Fanshu directly as his qi stabilized. It was a testament to Ling Tao’s talent and foundation that she could even make the link, frankly.

“Actually, going… to pass… —you … Lord… —Baisheng,” Ling Tao added, her voice understandably fading in and out.

“Aunt, can you do something about that?” he asked.

“…”

“Yes,” Lu Xiao, who was the person who had refined the talisman for him, replied. “Give me a moment.”

“What is the problem?” Lord Jiang asked him, probably having noticed his qi take a significant, sudden dip, as he was not really concealing his use at the moment.

“Ah… Uh, sorry for the distraction,” he apologised. “Your sister just contacted me, and the connection to her location is… rather unstable.”

“How fortuitous,” Ling Jiang grimaced.

“Ling Tao?” Ling Jiang frowned. “I actually need to speak to her…”

“Yes, we do,” Bai Lanying agreed, folding her arms. “My sister has questions!”

Hiding a grimace, he focused on the talisman link. It was getting more stable, but—

“—Sorry about that…” Lord Baisheng said, still sounding distant, but now perfectly understandable. “Headmaster Lu, this is a bit unorthodox, though I must say your talisman is quite something…”

“Ah, it’s a gift from my aunt,” he replied, evasively.

“I see… that makes sense,” Lord Baisheng mused. “Her means are always peculiar, you may have to go get her.”

“I’m already here…” Lu Xiao’s voice echoed in the link. “What is it?”

“…”

He had to work hard not to rub his temples, because now the strain of being the ‘middle man’ was quite excessive.

“Headmaster Lu…” Bai Lanying’s tone took on a certain edge. “We…”

“Please, give me a moment,” he held up a hand to forestall the groups desire to continue trying to talk to him.

“The Inn has been attacked,” Ling Tao said simply, sounding a bit… choked. “By the… Yeng Brotherhood. They are working with the… Five Fans—”

“Motherless—!”

He caught himself, but Lord Jiang, his wife, and the others, even the clan elders took a half a step backwards before he got his Intent under control. Bai Lanying in particular, looked like she had just been slapped. The connection didn’t break from his own reaction, but his aunt did curse him quietly.

“Sorry,” he apologized, to all parties, taking a deep breath.

He had expected something like that, but the tone of her voice…

“What is wrong?” Lord Jiang asked him, having recovered enough to speak.

“How bad is it?” he asked, ignoring those around him for the moment. “I have your brother Jiang, his wife Lanying and Bai Lanli here, plus a Bai and a Qing elder—”

“…”

“Monkey-shit,” Ling Tao groaned, cutting him off.

“That bad, huh?” he muttered.

There was what he could only term ‘awkward silence’ from the other end.

“It’s bad,” Lord Baisheng said at last, sounding tired. “I can…”

“—No, please, let me…” Ling Tao’s voice cut back in

A shadowy image swirled around him, showing Misty Jasmine Inn… as his disciple was currently seeing it.

Misty Jasmine Inn was shrouded in rain, but even with the disrupted quality of the image, he could tell there had been a serious fight. The feng shui was… chaotic and the traces of Laws he could detect were scattered and uncontrolled; drifting phantoms of arts and comprehensions. Several buildings were partially demolished and the martial experts from the Ha and Ling clan were currently dragging dead tetrid corpses around… along with quite a few cultivators.

“You are getting… that?” Ling Tao asked him, her tone grief-laden.

“I am…” he confirmed, taking in the scenery around him. “How many casualties?”

“…”

Ling Tao turned so he could take in the area before the Inn itself. There, almost seventy corpses were laid out, in rows.

All were male, most stripped of their gear or entirely naked. The majority were the Ling clan, comprising the bulk of the soldiers sent up. The next largest group were the Ha clan, mostly youths, with a few elites. He recognised a few from the Cao and Ji families. Off to the side, there were also Ling, Bai, Jiang, and a few others as well, those covered in robes with their clan markings painted on them.

“That’s a lot of dead…” he observed with a sigh.

“It is,” Ling Tao agreed unhappily. “And the majority are from my household…”

That was also true. His disciple had had to front the expertise to bail out the West Flower Picking Region largely from her own estate within the Ling clan. To have lost this many capable experts in a single day was a nasty blow in its own right.

“—We are getting side-tracked,” Lord Baisheng interjected gently.

“Ah, sorry,” Ling Tao muttered and the scene faded away. “We are going to send you the transmission sequence for the teleport array, I need you to look at it—”

“—Though it may require… your aunt’s expertise,” Lord Baisheng added. “Having looked at it from this end…”

“I should start charging people fees,” his aunt complained on the other end of the link.

“…”

“Okay,” he murmured. “Let me… connect the talisman to something a bit sturdier though…”

“—I’ll deal with it on this end,” his aunt cut in. “Most of that infrastructure is already set up to look at… the ruin.”

“If it’s bad news… I can tell them?” he told Ling Tao.

“It’s… fine,” she replied with a grimace. “Lady… erm… can you boost this so I am… able to … project a…”

“Yes,” his aunt confirmed. “One moment…”

A moment later, a projected image of Ling Tao appeared, standing about a metre tall on the table, looking tired and vexed in full battle armour. Around her, the Misty Jasmine Inn teleport platform was just about visible as a shimmering background.

“Sister… what is going on?” Ling Jiang asked her.

“—Yes!” Bai Lanying interjected, folding her arms, looking down slightly at Ling Tao. “What has happened with my little sister’s son! His life jade is showing a discontinuity error...”

Ling Tao looked around at the group and just sighed.

“…”

“Firstly, the Inn was attacked,” Ling Tao said after a pause. “Thanks to some unexpected good fortune, we were able to beat off the initial attack, but—”

“—Attacked?!” Bai Lanli interrupted, jumping up and leaning on the table, her voice shaking.

The projection wavered faintly.

“Please, the connection is really tenuous,” he reminded her, as his aunt cursed idiot children in the back of his mind.

“…”

“As I was saying,” Ling Tao, said, once the image had stabilized again. “—The Inn was attacked. The parties responsible appear to be the Five Fans Federation—”

“The Five Fans…” Jiang repeated, his tone flat. “You can confirm that, sister?”

-This is going to go nowhere… he sighed, as Ling Tao was interrupted again.

“Oh yes, Bai Sheng and I both had run in’s with Smiling Fan and Esoteric Green Fan,” Ling Tao said with a brittle smile.

“Bai… Sheng?” the Bai clan elder frowned.

He stared at Ling Tao, his own concerns only deepening now.

“How did this happen?” Lord Jiang asked, leaning on the table and staring intently at his sister.

“If you would let me finish, without interrupting…” Ling Tao said flatly.

“…”

There was some awkward shifting among the group around him. They did fall silent, but, nobody looked particularly repentant.

“—As I was saying, the remnants of the Yeng Brotherhood appear to have joined forces with the Five Fans,” Ling Tao reiterated. “They infiltrated Misty Jasmine Inn, largely posing as juniors from the Ha and Ling clans—”

“—they infiltrated as what!?” Lanying asked.

“—along with a few soldiers and at least two elders—” Ling Tao trailed off again, glaring at Lanying.

“Which elders?” Lord Jiang asked, scowling.

“Oh, don’t you worry about that, dear brother,” Ling Tao said, her expression turning frosty. “I’ll deal with that…”

-Which means she doesn’t trust the people around her own brother? he mused.

“—What about my Luofan!” Bai Lanli repeated.

“…”

“They are still sorting out the injured and recovering bodies,” Ling Tao said turning to look at Bai Lanli which he took to be something of a diplomatic ‘non answer’. “We have a few confirmed survivors so far…”

Recalling the scene Ling Tao had just shown him, most of the dead had been male.

That certainly fit with the approach of the Five Fans. They only took useful prisoners – high value targets or beauties – who could be sold on the northern continent or sent east. Anyone else they just tended to kill.

“If someone wants to cause chaos, killing a bunch of people from influential clans is a good way to start a whole world of trouble…” his aunt mused.

“That isn’t answering…” Bai Lanli scowled.

“…”

“See, I distinctly recall telling the elders, several times, that sending people up here to prepare for this idiot ‘trial’ was a terrible fate-thrashed idea that was going to cause all sorts of problems…” Ling Tao retorted, her expression hardening. “Shockingly, today has proven me to be right, in every way.”

Looking on, he again found himself vexed that it was her up there and not him. His disciple did not deserve to be the person standing at the front of this mess.

The politics of the Ling clan sending ‘extra’ people up there had been something he stayed clear of. Ling Tao had, indeed, been adamant that this was not some opportunity for juniors to play around, and the tragic scene he had just seen vindicated her assertions entirely.

That said, when the fingers came to be pointed, the old elders who had been starry eyed over the auction, and this preposterous trial, would certainly try to push this back on her.

That old age did not necessarily bring a particular increase in competence was… frustrating, but not that surprising. Most of them were the ‘young masters’ of yesteryear; a generation or two previous, who had got their opportunities from the clan, then scurried off on some self-aggrandizing adventure and come back alive. Usually to great acclaim and with a beautiful young wife in tow. As a result, well over half the ‘elders’ in clans like the Ling and the Ha did sweet bugger all in the day to day management of those powers. They also tended to treat their influences like disposable income, much as they had when they were juniors.

Their role, usually, was to show up every now and then and either act like a puffed up peacock, or swat some problem with enough prejudice that the memory of the event stuck around for a good while in the public consciousness.

It was a problem the Lu clan had as well and even the Blue Gate School, despite his best efforts, was not immune, as recent events were showing.

The Elders, in this case, certainly wanted face and returns for what Ling Tao was trying to do, so they could then claim a major hand in its success. The trial and its opportunities, however, were also a great opportunity, from their perspective, to advance their factions, their descendants or just make a fast spirit stone. The former also put them majorly out of pocket and had caused some significant embarrassment in regards to the auction. The latter was basically a heaven-sent opportunity that could be blamed on someone else if it all went to shit.

“Sister…” Lanying scowled. “You can cover your own ass, beautiful as it is, even in that armour, later…”

“…”

“There is no easy way for me to say this…” Ling Tao sighed. “Ling Luo is up here.”

“Luo is…” Lanying’s expression turned blank.

“Wait… what?” Ling Jiang blinked.

-Ah… that’s why they want the information from the teleport formation… he surmised, having not yet had an opportunity to ask her about that.

“That’s impossible,” Lanying said, dully. “Luo is here, at your estate… I spoke to her yesterday, she was showing around some of her friends from the Imperial Continent, doing the job Yu was meant to be doing, entertaining the group who came to visit yesterday… She can’t be up there—”

“She arrived—”

“—Dear…” Bai Lanying turned back to Ling Jiang, her expression torn between anger and fear. “You assured me…”

“I did,” Ling Jiang said coldly.

“…”

Ling Tao, having just been cut off, looked like she wanted to say something there, but forced herself not to, taking a breath instead. “Luo arrived yesterday, right before the gale dispersal… with a bunch of others from the Ling, Bai and—”

“You said the Inn was attacked,” Ling Jiang cut in, to his eye, almost like he wanted to move the topic on from that.

-Jiang, you idiot, if you actually caved to Jingfang or Mu Bao…

Both of those two Ling clan elders were, in his eyes, the likely culprits for this mess. Dushan was another, but from what he recalled Dushan was already up at the Inn. That either put that elder as dead, or a traitor – likely the latter, given Ling Tao’s words earlier.

“How many survived…” Ling Jiang pressed.

Ling Tao just sighed.

“Luo, is she… okay?” Bai Lanying said, her tone flat and her knuckles white on the table.

“That we have found, so far?” his disciple replied after a moment. “Two elite disciples from the Cherry Wine Pagoda, the priestess of the shrine, Kun Lianmei, two herb hunters… a girl from the Bai clan and Qing Aofan, though only because he was likely too valuable to kill.”

-The priestess? he blinked.

-She was there? And they still suffered this many casualties?

“—A girl?” the Bai elder cut in, sounding concerned as well now.

“…”

“I can’t say I know her,” Ling Tao replied. “She hasn’t really spoken much… None of them have. Outside of the ones from the Cherry Wine Pagoda, who are all… children of difficult circumstances, most of those here are just clan disciples…”

“What does that mean,” the Qing clan elder sniffed.

-That at the very best their mentality has taken a nasty slap to the nethers, he muttered to himself.

“If it helps, she has dark hair, is kind of petite and has a chrysanthemum seal between her breasts,” Ling Tao added, ignoring the Qing clan elder. “She was wearing a green and white gown, with silver chrysanthemums when she arrived yesterday.”

“Bai Shunhua,” Bai Lanli and Ling Lanying both turned pale.

“…”

“—Okay, I have the teleport data,” his aunt’s voice cut through the commentary. “Reconstituting… Ah.”

His aunt stopped speaking abruptly.

“What’s wrong?” he asked her.

“The outgoing teleportation from the Ling platform is… odd,” his aunt replied. “I’ll be back in a minute, I need to go look at it in person.”

“Can you get anything from it?” Ling Tao asked.

“…”

“A few images, kind of sketchy and lacking in definition,” his aunt answered. “This is the best of them…”

A moment later, a somewhat distorted image of a group of youths arriving on the platform at Misty Jasmine Inn appeared, cast back through the talisman link by his aunt.

Besides Ling Luo, who he easily recognised, there was Bai Shunhua, who stood out from the description, another woman in Shen clan robes, nobody had so much as commented on up to this point… unless Ling Tao had been about to before Jiang cut her off. There were also three Ling clan youths, one in light armour, and another pair, in fairly nondescript green and purple robes respectively, their hats also pulled down against the rain.

The youth that really caught his eye, though, was the blonde-haired one, dressed in a red and purple robe, chatting to Ling Luo, Bai Shunhua, and the Shen girl as if they were lifelong friends.

The robe was one he recognised though – from the Seven Star Pavilion, marking the youth as a core disciple. The odd thing about it was that he wasn’t sure why the youth himself was naggingly familiar.

People from Meng city did visit Blue Water City. The Cao clan had some distant links there as did the Kun clan, but they had little to do with things like the Blue Gate School. The Cao clan and the Ling clans had a somewhat complicated relationship, and the former Duke, Cao Hongjun, had been fairly explicit in the lines he drew, despite, or perhaps because of, the Ling clan’s grasp on the provincial bureaucracy. Furthermore, he could count the number of juniors from any Seven Sovereigns’ affiliated influence he had met in person in the last millennia or so, on one hand.

He stared at the image, trying to recall where he had seen him before. It was something about the smile, but in a static image…

“What is it?” Lanying asked him.

Waving a hand he showed the image of the group, manifesting on the teleport platform.

“There was someone from the Shen up there as well?” the Qing elder frowned, noticing that girl as well.

“Shen Meimei,” Lord Jiang said with a grim sigh. “She was staying with our household. Another friend of Luo’s.”

“…”

“—Wait…” the Bai clan elder, who had been considering the image, pointed at the two other youths, in the green and purple robes.

“What?” he asked, glancing at the man with a frown.

“Do… you have a better angle?” the elder frowned, ducking his head slightly and squinting at the rather grainy projected image, for all the good it did. “That… purple robed one, looks oddly familiar for some reason.”

“Not yet,” he grimaced, turning his attention back to the youth from the Meng clan influence.

“Can you provide a better image than this, aunt?” he asked Lu Xiao.

“I am working on it…” his aunt replied, sounding a bit annoyed now. “There are… well, some tricksy little smartass seems to have done something with a spatial artefact during or just before the transmission.”

“A… Oh…”

He stared out at the lake. In the middle distance, the crane turned to look at him and then waved its wings in disgust and stalked off, muttering about cultivators again.

-Of course there would be something like that in there.

“—Okay, I have it,” his aunt’s voice cut in.

The image in front of him twisted and abruptly gained remarkably in terms of its vividness.

“…”

The Bai and Qing elders both shot him slight, sideways looks, but neither commented overtly, sly buggers that they were.

Waving his hand through it, he watched the arrival of the group in a shifting halo of disrupted qi and the clash of discordant feng shui.

“It IS!” the Bai elder hissed, waving for him to stop the scene and go back.

Ling Tao’s projected form, watching on from the side was also frowning, though she likely could not see much of anything until they sent a copy back.

“Make it bigger,” the Bai Elder said.

Frowning slightly at the perfunctory tone, he provided the image more qi and it doubled and then tripled in size to take up most of the middle of the pagoda. In doing so, it further obscured Ling Tao’s view as well, but that was sort of secondary at this point, it seemed. The Bai elder nodded absently and then walked around to look at the two youths, his expression growing more and more perplexed.

“What is it?” Bai Lanying asked at last, her already short patience now basically non-existent.

“This… I have no idea how, or why, but I would swear that this is Di Yao,” the Elder muttered, jabbing a finger at the purple-robed youth.

“Di Yao?” he frowned, transferring his gaze from the smiling youth beside Ling Luo and Bai Shenhua.

“As in… Kong Di Yao?” Ling Jiang asked, sceptically walking around to look at the youth. “The son of the Imperial Grand Astrologer… who has been cryptically flitting through Blue Water City’s elite social circles for the past month as a guest of honour in Envoy Qiao’s household?”

-Ah, of course, he placed the name almost at the same time Ling Jiang spoke, however something else about that quietly tugged at the back of his mind, in a hard to define way.

“…”

“The son of the Imperial Advisor who is now sequestered in the city, here and now…” Ling Jiang added.

“When you put it like that,” the Bai elder grimaced.

Still staring at the smiling youth with Ling Luo and Bai Shenhua, he had to agree with Ling Jiang, that that did seem improbable. Kong Di Yao was someone who moved in the same circles as people like Huang Jilao, or Quan Dingxiang. However, as someone who had administered a school for a long time, he was also very familiar with the ability of juniors to perpetuate truly unexpected things for personal gain.

Frowning, he transferred his gaze to the youth, who did indeed seem to have the look and manner of Di Yao.

-However, if the son of the Imperial Grand Astrologer is up there… with the Din clan lot, in the middle of an actual attack…?

“You, servant,” Ling Jiang waved to the woman who had brought them there, who was still standing at a respectful distance. “Go find out everyone who my daughter socialized with, or invited here in the last few days!”

The woman bowed and hurried off.

“How would Di Yao…” Bai Lanying asked… looking perplexed. “Why… even?”

“You think he was invited here?” he asked the perturbed Ling Jiang, who had clearly made the same jump he had.

“Sister, is there any sign of him up there?” Ling Jiang asked Ling Tao, who was still standing there, arms folded, in the projection, watching pensively.

“No, no sight at all of any of the Din group, or some from the Ha clan,” Ling Tao replied after a short pause. “Ha Botan is missing, Ha Ji Wufan as well…”

“The scion from the Ha Ji family,” Ling Jiang muttered.

Frowning, he looked back across the group, regretting suddenly that he had not made more of an effort to go to some of those ‘banquets’. As far as he knew, Tao had gone to few of them either, saddled as she had been with the chaos in the Blue Gate School…

His gaze travelled back to the smiling Ji Tantai, wondering again why he found his manner so…

“…”

Ignoring the others, he waved his hand and let the image start moving forward again.

“Hey!” Bai Lanying complained, but he ignored her as well, continuing to watch the youth chatting away with Ling Luo, Bai Shunhua and Shen Meimei on the platform.

What he was seeing was somewhat... unlikely but his eyes certainly were not deceiving him.

The youth was using a heart force art, and not just any art either…

“Favour with a Smile…”

It was certainly that art. There were very few like it.

“Favour with a what?” Ling Jiang asked, watching him with a frowning.

“It’s an art, from Dewdrop Sage Valley,” he replied, staring at the youth, a haunting, horrible spectre of a thought rising in the back of his mind.

-Really, as if this day, week, decade even, can't get any worse. No wonder Di Yao as a name seemed familiar.

It was hard to tell if he was being made a fool of actually, or if this was some kind of calamitous pie dropping out of the sky for all of them.

“From… Dewdrop Sage Valley?” the Qing Elder frowned.

“Uhuh, it’s technically…” he trailed off, thinking. “Well, it’s designed to make people more sympathetic to you, but it requires a certain physique. For a man to learn it…”

“For a…” Bai Lanying pressed, as he trailed off.

-It can’t be that piece of human sewage… The old bastards protecting the shadows of that mess… are not this dumb…

“For a man to learn it, it has to be acquired through Dual Cultivation,” he replied with a grimace. “However, the only person who learned it, in this generation was Saintess Xua, of the Dewdrop Sage Valley, who had an Earthly Physique which was unsuitable…”

“…”

“—when you say it makes someone ‘sympathetic?’” Ling Jiang cut back in.

“It’s… a… heart force art,” he said at last. “With aspects that also focus on the soul and inner feng shui. It is a… it’s like the Bai clan’s ‘White Soul Eye’.”

“Like…” the elder stared at him, clearly wanting to know how he knew about the Bai clan’s secret Martial Divination Art.

He could only shrug, apologetically, to the Elder, having needed an example. The Ling and Lu clan’s had similar arts as well, but he was not going to reveal either to the Bai or Qing clan’s.

“Yet… this youth is clearly not this Saintess Xua,” Bai Lanying pointed out sourly. “Unless the Dewdrop Sage Valley has very strange ideas about what constitutes a Saintess.”

“No… he is not,” he agreed. “And Saintess Xua… well…”

“What…” Ling Jiang asked.

“…”

He stared at the smiling youth in silence.

The problem, was, that Saintess Xua had had the art seized from her, and her future prospects ruined, some hundred years ago. She had suffered a massive cultivation deviation as a result, and had ended up being confined to Dewdrop Sage Valley. The perpetrator of that act… was none other than Di Ji… or to give him his full name, Kong Di Ji, the adoptive son of the Imperial Grand Astrologer and, as a result, younger brother of Kong Di Yao.

“…”

“Di Ji seized it from her, a hundred years ago, and ruined her future prospects,” he said, glancing at Ling Tao and deciding that there was no way this could be dropped… gently. “She suffered a deviation and was confined to the Dewdrop Sage Valley once she was… recovered, from his clutches.”

“Di... Ji?” Ling Jiang repeated back to him.

“Wait… as in that Di Ji?” Bai Lanying’s face had turned to stone.

“Di Ji… as in…?” Bai Lanli’s already pale face managed to find new shades of white, the wine cup still clenched in her hand shaking slightly. “From one hundred years ago?”

“The… Di Ji?” the Qing elder looked at him dully.

“Yeah…” he nodded.

“I can’t see any trace of him using an art…” the Qing elder muttered, staring hard at the youth.

“It’s not an ‘art’, as such as a… well, it’s like a heart force compass,” he said after a moments pause. “Once you know what to look for…”

“So… this art was known by Di Ji… and now this Ji Tantai has it?” the Bai elder said. “Are you suggesting that… this Ji Tantai is Di Ji? I know we want answers, but that seems a bit of a stretch.”

“Yes…” the Qing elder agreed. “Are you suggesting that the person famed for killing that maleficent little shitstain on this, our generation… is standing right there, behind the person he is most famous for killed?”

“…”

He had not actually suggested that ‘Ji Tantai’ was ‘Di Ji’, not yet, anyway, for just that awkward reason. The fidelity of the image was still not great either. It was only because he had personally experienced that ‘art’ in the aftermath of Di Ji’s capture and also a few experts from the Dewdrop Sage’s influence from when he was a junior that he could identify the art with confidence.

“Perhaps this art made its way to the Meng clan by other means…” the Qing elder suggested. “They do have a certain… reputation, and are as adversarial with the western powers as they are with those of the central continent…”

“Mmm,” the Bai elder nodded, having also recovered his equilibrium somewhat. “Perhaps the Meng clan acquired it by some other means, or maybe even via Di Ji himself?”

“…”

Listening to the elders propose such ‘theories’ made him just want to put his head in his hands.

-Is it someone trying to hide behind this? a part of him wondered.

The chaos of recent weeks almost made a ploy like this seem… almost inevitable, a part of him suggested.

In terms of a potent distraction, the ‘name’ Di Ji, conjured up a lot of emotion. There were still significant parts of the Imperial Court, that if you got them in a quiet room, away from their ‘watchful peers’, might be induced to admit that they didn’t think Di Ji had, in fact, done a ‘whole lot wrong’. Not to ‘deserve what had occurred’ anyway. A lot of that was predicated on the fact that not only was he genuinely talented, but he had largely ‘offended’ people who ‘deserved it’.

It was a very convincing explanation, one which the others were already arriving at… and an oddly comforting thought. The Yeng Brotherhood were clearly trying to stir up old ghosts… and yet he didn’t buy it, not at all. Not how it was being so casually framed by current events’ at any rate.

The problem was the art, although even that could be explained away, he knew. The ‘War of Ideas and Ideals’ as it was sometimes called, by scholars who really should know better than to dip their egos in those murky waters, was depressing like that. He only had to look at the pair of still theorizing elders for evidence of that point.

Di Ji had had several followers and Saintess Xua had been in his company for a good while. There would certainly be parties in the Imperial Court who saw no issue with claiming this was just a derivative that then made its way out into the wild. Nobody would be able to interrogate Saintess Xua to find out, and Di Ji was… well, purportedly dead.

“…”

He took the ‘idea’ and ruthlessly crushed it, offering up a silent curse to the guardian forces of that mendacious little dog shit’s legacy.

“What do you think?” he asked Ling Tao.

“…”

“I think this stinks, like ten-day-old fish,” his disciple replied, frowning. “Can you send the scene to us, I can’t actually get much of anything from it like this.”

“—A moment…” his aunt muttered. “I am still trying to get the thing you ‘actually’ need, the shift trajectories for the teleports…”

“…”

Ling Tao nodded silently and he went back to considering ‘Ji Tantai’ and ‘Di Yao’.

The whole thing made him regret that he had been so caught up in his own concerns. Ling Luo was someone who meant a great deal to his disciple. If he had just gone to one or two of…

-Wait a minute… as he ran back through that sequence of events, the death of his treasured little singing orchid, the upheaval... a truly creepy feeling started to settle in the back of his mind.

-There is no way…

Something in his own anger must have crept out, because Ling Jiang and Bai Lanying both looked at him uneasily.

Exhaling, he gave them an unhappy smile.

The longer he stared at the events, the more and more certain he became, however. Di Yao had been staying with Envoy Qiao… who plotted as easily as others breathed. The pieces of cover all fit together so elegantly he had to admit he was impressed. He was one of the few people, probably on the whole sub-continent, who had stood in the same room as Di Ji, when the fate-thrashed stain on this generation’s already lacking reputation was not wearing a disguise, mask or charm.

The only other who was definitely around was the current Duke, Cao Leyang… who had captured Di Ji at his father, the previous duke, Cao Hongjun’s order.

-Someone engineered that so I was out of the way?

The thought made him want to hit someone, hard. Perhaps Envoy Qiao.

Transferring his gaze back to ‘Ji Tantai’, he considered the youth’s appearance.

When compared to Di Ji… there was a resemblance, it was fair to say. Not so much physical, beyond the blond hair and the good looks, but something about the manner. The nature of the smile, perhaps. The gentle, easy charm that the youth had had, that allowed him to walk sideways into so much company, and out of so much trouble. The problem, again, was that the image fidelity of what he was looking at was terrible, and cursed with the spectre of Yin Eclipse’s suppression. The fact that ‘Ji Tantai’ was, purportedly, from a Seven Sovereigns influence only complicated matters, given how intractable they could be.

-Is it weeks like this that lead you to take up hobbies like cloud watching… or writing atrocious poetry? he wondered sourly.

“Perspective is always desirable…” his aunt’s words, which he couldn’t help but feel were slightly mocking in that context, echoed in his head.

“—My lady!”

He was stirred from pondering that by the arrival of another servant from the Ling clan.

“The young miss’s soul jade!” the slightly out of breath servant declared, passing Bai Lanying a box.

Bai Lanying opened it and her expression twisted.

The tablet was still intact… and showed the same distortion as the others. He had expected as much, really, but it was still confirmation that whatever was being attempted to obfuscate them was profound enough to be legitimately concerning.

“Well, that’s helpful,” the Bai elder muttered, eyeing it gloomily.

Bai Lanli and Bai Lanying both glared at the elder.

“So… what do you suggest?” Bai Lanli pressed. “My Luofan—”

“Can you send anyone up there to get our daughter?” Bai Lanying asked, turning to Ling Jiang.

“Beyond those already there?” Ling Jiang grimaced and glanced at Ling Tao, who was still watching silently.

“—perhaps we could start with this so called ‘Five Fans’?” the Qing Elder suggested. “I will make some enquiries with the Qing clan, see if…”

“—If the ‘Five Fans’ could be wiped out that easily, it would have been done thirty years ago, during the Three School’s Conflict,” Ling Jiang sighed. “Even if they have only been around some eighty years, their power and influence, and the experts they have attracted to their banners place them not far off a mid-tiered sect or a clan estate…”

“How were they allowed to get to—” the Qing elder started to ask.

“—Because they started off doing the dirty work of suppressing the non-settled influences, and hurt the right people, namely the Azure Astral Authority,” Ling Tao cut in.

-Not to mention, with the mountains right there, their bolt-holes are too much trouble, even for Duke’s forces, without a real…

“Indeed, we can start with the Five Fans,” he said, standing up abruptly.

“We can?” Ling Jiang said.

“Of course…” he nodded.

“…”

“LORD LING! Lord Ling!”

Before he could ask to look at it, however, a soldier, in armour, came racing through the gardens, making a bee-line for Ling Jiang.

“What is it,” Ling Jiang asked, looking peeved.

“A… Attack…” the guard panted, making a hasty salute.

“An attack?” Ling Jiang. “On the Misty Jasmine Inn…? If you are just reporting this now—”

“No, my lord, on Misty Vale!” the guard said, his face grim. “Rebels have seized the fortress and are already moving on the town.”

“Rebels?” he repeated, turning to Ling Tao, his heart sinking.

“It’s unclear who is responsible at this point, but the attack seems to have occurred before dawn. No alarm was raised initially, and it was only when the forces came back into the town that it was clear that they were not… our forces. By the time the village garrison mustered, the route in was completely in their control. The Deng clan are still fighting, but…”

“…”

“What do you think?” Ling Jiang asked his sister.

“I think that that’s the main route up to where we are,” Ling Tao said grimly.

“—Okay, I’ve compiled the images, they are on their way back to you,” his aunt interjected. “The coordinates are going to take more work though. It would be easiest if you took this circle out of the network temporarily…”

“Consider it done,” Ling Tao said flatly. “Take out the transmission link and do what you need to.”

“Okay,” his aunt agreed, and a moment later, there was a flicker of further communication, inaudible to him, presumably as she patched Ling Tao through to the formation controller for the estate.

Barely ten seconds later, the hair on his arms stood up, as the spatial anchors in the main teleport formation started to discharge.

“Sister… what are you?” Ling Jiang frowned.

“Getting the answers we need,” Ling Tao said simply.

“The clan elders will not be—”

“The clan elders can swivel for all I care,” Ling Tao retorted. “If someone ruins my best chance of finding where your daughter went, I will ensure that they live to regret it, irrespective of who they are.”

“…”

“Do we muster reinforcements—”

“No,” he held up his hand. “Don’t.”

“…”

Ling Jiang, the soldier and everyone else looked at him oddly.

“Don’t… reinforce Misty Vale?” Ling Jiang repeated.

“Whoever has been organizing this, has been walking a step or three ahead, in every direction,” he muttered, staring out over the lake.

“I am not following,” Ling Jiang frowned.

“Do you think Grand Uncle Tao is reachable?” he asked Lu Xiao. “Unless you want to act?”

“…”

“Now would be somewhat… awkward,” his aunt conceded, a bit awkwardly, he thought, though he had expected as much. “Are you concerned about one of those old villains?”

“The ones in the city, or the ones out east?” he muttered.

“…”

“Mmmmm…” his aunt just sounded pensive.

Her unwillingness to act overtly was… not that surprising. She had already been remarkably active and forthcoming as it was, in comparison to her usual self, the last few weeks. Likely that meant that something of her own interests was at a critical juncture. That said, her lack of an answer was…

“That’s part of it…” he groaned to himself.

“…”

“Took you long enough to arrive at that thought,” his ‘aunt’ replied drily.

“Someone went to a great deal of effort to move things around,” he mused. “And right now… I get the distinct impression that this has not yet landed the critical blow…”

“Very good…” Lu Xiao agreed. “Your sight is getting better… As to Fu Tao… maybe? That said… there are other avenues available. Leave it with me.”

“…”

“So, do you want to explain?” Bai Lanying asked him, looking annoyed. “Or are you just going to stand there looking distant?”

“…”

He nearly answered her, but then stopped, because the question of ‘who’ was responsible was bothering him a great deal all of a sudden.

There was an art to reading cause and consequence, and while he could claim to be no great expert, he was not a poor student of it. His aunt’s unwillingness to talk about it openly was a hint, as was the way things just kept… shifting. The whole thing was akin, in his mind, to a kind of illusory formation. The more you kept reacting, the more tied up in it you got.

“We are going to go see Cao Leyang,” he said decisively.

“…”

“He is currently—” Ling Jiang started to say.

“I don’t care,” he said, cutting off Ling Jiang.

He had intended to try a softer approach to the problem before today’s events. Now, though, he considered, he was tired of playing by other people’s rules. Particularly when those rules seemed to always cause problems for people just trying to do their best by the places they lived in.

“We have the images,” Ling Tao confirmed a moment later.

He watched as she projected them around her, the field of view around her enlarging rapidly so the whole thing could be displayed as if the group were actually arriving…

A moment later a vaguely familiar young woman in Ha clan robes stalked onto the screen and poked a finger at the brown-haired youth in Ling clan robes, standing behind Ling Luo. Not being part of the transmission, her voice didn’t carry, but he was able to lip-read her calling for someone else to come over as well.

“What is it?” Ling Jiang asked Ling Tao.

“…”

“It seems ‘Smiling Fan’ came through with this group,” Ling Tao replied, her expression darkening.

Ling Jiang, who was also certainly clear on the reputation of that elusive villain, looked equally angry.

“…”

It took him some effort to avoid poking his fingers together. It was genuinely impressive, in a twisted kind of way, how the different bits of this kept joining up in new and unusual interpretations. This revelation all but screamed that there might be some link between Smiling Fan and those who had accompanied Ling Luo. When matched with the Yeng Brotherhood link, the Di Ji link and the fact that Ji Tantai was from the Meng clan, it really made it look like the Meng clan was backing the Five Fans and making some kind of move to destabilize the province.

“Well, that’s a fairly conclusive reason to go bother the duke,” he grinned nastily.

“…”

Ling Jiang stared at the image and nodded.

Whoever had orchestrated this was certainly good, but a stratagem like this was not without its flaws. Now he was starting to get a feel for what was playing out, he was certain that there was at least one opportunity in all of this, to twist the carefully nurtured web of chaos quite unpleasantly, maybe two.

-After all, there is a reason they call it the ‘fine art of unintended consequences’, he sneered, then paused, staring back at the nearest hall, eyes narrowed.

“What about Ling Yu?”

Lord Baisheng, who usually accompanied her, was up in the mountains, as was Ling Tao, and Ling Luo was caught up in this. If you wanted to really spit in the eye of the Ling clan though, Ling Yu was the enigmatic target to aim for. Baisheng had left her with Lingsheng, but despite her very esoteric reputation, Lingsheng was still, only a junior…

-For that matter… what would happen if someone…

Ling Jiang and Bai Lanying both looked at him.

“…”

To his credit, Ling Jiang didn’t immediately run off, but the same thought had likely just occurred to him as well. For her part, Ling Tao, standing there, had actually put her hand to her face, although a moment later, Baisheng, off to the side, just shook his head for some reason.

“Although your concern is edifying, Ling Yu will be fine,” Lord Baisheng said, with a slight half-smile that somehow put him in mind not so much of his aunt, but her sister. “See to the Duke, leave my charge to Lingsheng.”

Ling Jiang stared a Lord Baisheng, then nodded, although he didn’t look that pleased.

“…”

Sighing, he picked up the talisman from the table and the projected image of Ling Tao went back to a hazy one in the back of his mind. Waving for the others to follow, he set off across the gardens, not towards the teleport circle Ling Tao had been using for this endeavour, but for the public one, on the city-side of the estate, where visitors usually arrived.