There is a custom, among the Yin People that wearing charms of jasmine or mulberry evokes good fortune for the wearer and will ease their passage through daily life.

~Observation, on the customs of the Yin Peoples, by Scholar Shuhang.

It is a truth that should be universally acknowledged, that where three or more awakened spirit herbs get together in a single valley, nothing good shall ever come of it.

~Saying, attributed to Seng Mo

~ Han Murai* – West Flower Picking Town ~

*Han Murai is Han Shu's uncle, (aka Han Shu's mother's brother). He is an official in the West Flower Picking Town Guard. Last seen chapter 14.

“Yo… Danshu, what will it be today?”

“Usual… and do you have any of the nice fried mango pieces? My daughter loves them!”

“For little Mei? Sure thing!”

“You’re a blessing, Yunli!”

“Ha-ha… what if your wife hears…”

“…”

“Do you want something, Sir?”

Han Mei Murai stirred himself from half-listening to Corporal Danshu Fang as he watched life hurry by in the rain-drenched square before the Queen Mother’s Shrine. He turned to the other ‘junior official’ in his squad, Corporal Kun Yu, who had called over to him.

“…”

“I’ll have a fried fish,” he said after a moment’s contemplation of the stall vendor's menu beside Corporal Kun.

“One fish for the Sergeant,” the blonde-haired young woman said with a grin. “Do you want anything with it?”

“Some spicy sauce would be good, Miss Fei,” he replied after a moment's further consideration. “And maybe a cup of tea if there is any on the boil?”

Fei Yunli waved at another youth, her brother he thought, who was crouched rather unhappily under an umbrella, at a portable stove beside the stall. With a somewhat put-upon sigh, the youth poured out a cup of tea from a metal pot on it and held it out to Corporal Kun, who happened to be nearest.

Fei Yunli stared daggers at the boy, who pointedly ignored her, then gave them an apologetic smile as Corporal Kun claimed the cup of tea.

“My sister’s boy. He spends far too much time in the teahouse thinking he has means that are not provided by someone else,” she confided in Corporal Danshu, with a stage whisper loud enough to be heard halfway across the plaza. “He has no way with people… so she sent him here to learn something useful.”

“You mean learning how to break a wine jar over your friend’s head and slap a serving girl’s ass are not ‘useful’ life skills?” Corporal Danshu replied, rolling his eyes.

“Only if you want to learn about new and unusual ways to give others’ money to the Civil Authority,” Fei Yunli muttered.

“It is truly hard,” Corporal Kun agreed, all of them ignoring the now glaring youth.

“It is,” Fei Yunli sighed, before turning to him with a less jaded smile. “Your fish, Sir Han.”

“Thank you,” he murmured, stepping over to both pay the one iron talisman it cost and claim the cup of tea from Corporal Kun.

“So, what does the morning hold for us?” Corporal Danshu asked him as they took in the square.

Sighing, he glanced at the talisman currently tied to his wrist.

“The aftermath of a fight at a teahouse – the Green Moon near the Green Fang Pagoda. What looks to be a mugging, but the report suspects a monkey gang, and given it’s near the Han estate, I am fairly sure that is the case… And one of the alchemists down by the Yuan Canal, Old Ji, is claiming someone tried to break into his stores last night.”

“Uggh… this weather,” Corporal Danshu groaned, scuffing his foot through a puddle.

It was not particularly heavy rain, more misty drizzle for the most part, but it was absolutely ‘from the east’ and its effects were deceptively strong.

“It does bring out the worst in folk,” he agreed, sipping his tea, idly sending his soul sense out to investigate a crate of spirit fruit on the far side of Fei Yunli’s stall.

Even that took effort and focus, and in return he could barely perceive what his eyes could see clearly anyway.

“The monkeys are a menace,” Fei Yunli interjected. “I heard some of them actually robbed a herbalist in the Seng District the other day and made off with all his spirit fruit.”

“Sounds about right,” Corporal Danshu replied, rolling his eyes.

“Anyway, I don’t suppose you know what the disturbance earlier was about?” Fei Yunli asked, changing the subject. “My grandpa swears it’s a bad omen, but I bet it was something alchemical.”

“…”

Frowning, he turned to look north, over the river, towards the Market District. The ‘disturbance’ was something he was trying not to think too hard about. The black clouds had come and gone within moments, but between the deeply inauspicious vibe they had given and the fact that the associated disruption had been squarely in the Ha clan’s district, he could see a problem miles off.

“It might well have been something alchemical,” Corporal Kun guessed, giving Fei Yunli a smile as he agreed with her.

“Possibly,” Corporal Danshu agreed with a more non-committal shrug.

“Speculation does nobody any good,” he reminded both of them.

Guards had something of a position of responsibility in that regard and it was very easy for rumours to spiral out of control in awkward ways. The last thing that was needed, especially in the current climate, was some stupid piece of gossip about the Ha clan, for example, having shady exemptions regarding alchemical pills that caused tribulations.

“Yeah, yeah, the town is on edge, there are problems, we know,” Corporal Kun muttered.

“Haii…” he sighed and flicked some water off of his broad-brimmed hat.

Not for the first time, he wondered if someone had put Corporal Kun in his squad because they wanted the Kun and Han clans to have a falling out. It wasn’t that the lad was bad, it was just that he was… well, a product of his background and occasionally forgot that he was only a ‘Corporal’.

Corporal Danshu, who was a lot older than Corporal Kun, and had been part of his ‘squad’ for a number of years now, gave the boy a poke to the back of the head on his behalf.

“Aye, there are,” Corporal Danshu agreed. “And it isn’t our job to add to them!”

“…”

“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir,” Corporal Kun muttered after a moment, giving him a salute and not looking at Fei Yunli, who also flushed a little.

Shaking his head, he waved off the apology and took another sip of his tea.

“So, which one do we go to first?” Corporal Danshu asked him, glancing at the talisman on his wrist.

“The Green Moon Teahouse, it will be fairly straightforward,” he replied after a moment’s thought.

“I dunno, you said it was the aftermath of a tea-house brawl?” Corporal Danshu replied, with the sceptical tone of someone who had seen a few too many of those. “Any idea on who was responsible?”

“Local gang and a group of cultivators from Blue Cliff had an altercation over several prostitutes,” he clarified, skimming the rather scant explanation. “We are to call by and talk to the owner. Officially it’s to check that there is no further escalation, but…”

“—someone in the Town Authority wants to check that the teahouse is paying its ‘taxes’, I’ll bet,” Danshu grimaced. “Any identification on the cultivators beyond that?”

“Nope,” he replied, passing his talisman jade over to Corporal Danshu, who skimmed through it, shaking his head while they waited for the food to finish cooking.

“—I’ll take four fried fish, Miss Yunli!”

He glanced over at the next customer and found it was a young girl sheltering under a battered umbrella, painted with cherry blossoms, a basket of flowers slung over her shoulder.

“Ah, Yuuna, I was expecting you earlier,” Yunli replied, giving the girl a bright smile.

“Oh, you know how it is…” the girl sighed.

“See, its coz we sell stuff to beggars—” Yunli’s nephew sat down on his ass with a grunt as Yunli kicked him in the small of the back.

“Don’t mind the boy, he has no idea how the world works,” Yunli scowled, passing the four fish to the flower seller.

“Hey, that was uncalled for!” the youth muttered, sitting up and glaring back at Yunli.

“It was perfectly called for,” she sniffed, adding a fifth fish to her order.

Yuuna, meanwhile, had put her basket down and was carefully rooting through it.

“Do you want the same flowers as usual?” she asked after a moment.

“Sure, whatever you can spare,” Yunli replied as Yuuna took out a carefully wrapped bundle of jasmine flowers and then a second of rock-rose.

“Ohh… the jasmines are lovely,” Yunli murmured, unwrapping them to reveal three trailing plants. “Perfect for today.”

“I thought you might like them,” Yuuna agreed.

“You’re accepting… flowers as payment?” her nephew asked, aghast. “Aren’t those the ones that will go in the family shrine?”

“…”

Yunli stared at him for a long moment, then sighed and shook her head, turning back to Yuuna.

“I can pay with talismans, if it will get you in trouble,” Yuuna muttered.

“Don’t be stupid,” Yunli replied brusquely, “And ignore that idiot.”

“—Can I buy a flower or two?” Corporal Danshu added.

“Eh, of course,” Yuuna murmured shoving the basket in his direction with her foot.

“My daughter will look wonderful with… ah, I suppose I’ll take a jasmine... Oh, and you have mulberry and cherry as well,” Corporal Danshu murmured, crouching down to take a look.

“We don’t have much in the way of cherry,” Yuuna said a little sadly, he thought. “Big sister brought those from the Cherry Wine Pagoda…”

“…”

“What happened?” Corporal Danshu asked, looking back up at her with a frown from under his broad hat.

“She died,” Yuuna said with a deeper sigh.

“Oh, my condolences,” Corporal Danshu muttered, apologetically. “I didn’t hear about any flower sellers dying recently?”

“She… was part of the group that went to Jade Willow,” Yuuna said softly.

“Oh,” Corporal Danshu grimaced.

“Nasty business that,” Fei Yunli agreed, sympathetically.

“I heard there was going to be an investigation,” Yunli added.

“Probably,” he agreed, looking at the young girl, with her stoic expression and thought about what he knew of that, none of which was good.

“For what?” her nephew sniffed. “The Ha clan did what nobody else would do and ‘dealt’ with it. Good thing we had those young nobles there to uphold duty and honour.”

Kun Yu actually nodded as well, which just made him groan a little on the inside. The public view on it was, indeed, that the Ha clan had done a ‘good deed’ by exterminating such abhorrent bandits. Doubly so, given the rumours swirling about how those bandits had even planned to target the Dun Princess. Conversely, the Hunter Bureau was being painted as ‘tactless’, ‘uncaring’ and ‘incompetent’. Some local rumours even hinted that they were facilitating the plot.

Yuuna stared at the boy like he was a strange fungus, then passed Yunli a sprig of jasmine and mulberry.

“Heh,” Yunli snorted a laugh and took the little charm, affixing it to her hair.

“Stupid superstition,” her nephew muttered, with all the self-awareness of a brick. “What next, will we make a shrine to monkeys?”

“With his gifts, that might not be a bad idea,” Corporal Danshu muttered around a mouthful of his fried fish.

“Brave of you to assume the monkeys want to take any responsibility there,” he murmured.

“Pfft!” Corporal Danshu coughed and nearly spat out his fish.

“Your nephew and Miss Arai said prayers for her…” Yuuna added, glancing at him. “And paid for a memorial ritual for the flower sellers who...” she trailed off again, her adult tone lapsing back into that of a sad, far too worldly young girl.

He had to concede that that was very Han Shu, although the real driving force, knowing his nephew’s slightly… laid-back mentality was almost certainly Jun Arai. Both of Jun Han’s daughters were conscientious beyond their years and took after their late mother in all sorts of ways.

“We… uh, wanted to give him a token of thanks…” Yuuna said a bit awkwardly as she started to rummage around in the satchel she had just taken off her back. “But he has not been about of late?”

“Ah… he and Jun Arai are off in Blue Water City, helping with the investigation,” he answered at last. “He was invited to help the Ling clan investigate matters with the auction, due to his expertise.”

“Ohh…” Yuuna nodded, clearly impressed. “That’s good, I was worried after Meiyu said she saw him and Miss Arai being escorted by the Ha clan the other week.”

“Now who is spreading rumours,” Corporal Danshu mouthed at him.

“…”

In fairness, that was nothing but damage control. People did repeat things and ‘Han Shu is helping the Ling clan’ was a fate-thrashed sight better than ‘Han Shu got arrested by the Ha clan’.

Han Shu’s involvement in the whole mess was turning into something of a point of contention within the Han clan itself, given he had been the ‘face’ of that ‘tactless’ and ‘uncaring’ Hunter Bureau in the aftermath of that ‘terrible tragedy’. Han Shu’s actions, some felt, were trying to align them with the Hunter Bureau and in direct opposition to the Ha clan. A view held especially among those who were ‘close’ to his older brothers, Bao and Jiang.

That the Lady Ling had come to see the formation of those two’s Soul Gold cores, and spoken to Elder Cangfan… barely cancelled that out, somehow.

“Oh, where is it…” Yuuna muttered, continuing to rummage around in the bag.

“Ah, it’s okay,” he said quickly, aware that she did not have much, and giving anything to Han Shu was… positively profligate on her part.

“No, no… it’s from… Ah!” Yuuna pulled out a small, battered wooden box and passed it over to him.

He almost refused, but looking at her serious expression, could only sigh in the end and take it with a small bow. When he tried to store it away in his ring, however, it refused.

“…”

Nobody else caught the failure, thankfully, so he just shoved it in the small bag at his waist where he kept things like his talisman wallet and a few useful defensive artefacts.

“Thank you,” he replied, “I’ll see it gets to him.”

Yuuna gave him a further polite bow.

“—Ah, Sir Murai, a good morning to you…”

He turned to find that an old man wearing a broad grass hat, with a bundle of fishing-tackle slung over his shoulder, had come up behind him.

“Old Fu,” he saluted the old man, by way of greeting. “On your way to your boat?”

“Way back, actually,” Old Fu replied, producing a box of fish from a storage device. “Miss Fei here is a customer.”

“It is delicious fish,” Danshu interjected.

“It is,” Kun Yu agreed. “Miss Yunli is very talented.”

“Oh you…” Fei Yunli rolled her eyes. Her nephew also rolled his, but with an entirely different intent.

“Have you bought your fish?” he asked Kun Yu, who had mostly been chatting away to Miss Yunli while they talked with Yuuna.

“Oh, yes,” Kun Yu replied, again forgetting the ‘Sir’, though, given Danshu never used it, it was a bit hard to call him out on it.

“Fao, take that box off Old Fu and make yourself useful.” Yunli told her nephew, who had been quietly watching Corporal Kun flirt with her with a look of effected disdain. “Fish do not debone and gut themselves,” she added, more pointedly.

“Well, we will leave you to it,” he said brightly to Old Fu, as the nephew stared at the crate of fish with an expression of mild horror

“Aye, have a good day,” the old man replied. “Hope it’s not too horrible.”

“We can but hope…” he agreed as Danshu went over and claimed his fried mango slices.

Giving Yuuna a final wave and Miss Yunli a final polite salute of thanks, he turned and set off across the plaza, the two corporals falling in beside him.

“So, once we check out the Green Moon, then where?” Danshu asked as they made their way onwards, between the early morning market stalls, across the damp, misty square.

Despite the unpleasant weather, people were still making their way to the Queen Mother's Shrine, for early prayers, the bell of the temple ringing gently every few seconds. Early morning shoppers and those on their way to work north of the river were milling around stalls, looking for good deals or, like they had been, simply buying breakfast.

“So, why are we off to this Green Moon Teahouse?” Kun Yu asked, stepping around a hand cart full of water-filled jars holding shield crabs.

“Follow up over a brawl…” Danshu replied, launching into a quick briefing based on what was in the talisman.

Happy to let Danshu do the explaining there, he took a bite out of his own fried fish, savouring it in silence as they walked.

“Flowers, get your divinations here!”

“Fresh fish… caught just an hour ago…”

“Peaches for sale!”

“Ceramics from Blue Cliff, the ‘New Year’s Collections’, fresh off the boat!”

That last one made him glance over, reminded of the fact that Qing, his own wife, had been talking about buying a new tea-set. Currently, she was away visiting his mother and the Mei family for the New Year’s celebrations, wisely avoiding the politicking of the Han clan.

“See something you like, sir?” the stall-tender, a bright-faced youth wearing a teal robe asked.

Danshu and Kun Yu both glanced back at him, but he waved for them to continue on. They would not get that far ahead, anyway.

“How much for the ling patterned one?” he asked, pointing to a set enamelled with flowing azure clouds and little silver jasmine blossoms.

“Oh, good eye, sir,” the stall tender murmured. “One spirit stone per piece.”

“…”

Wordlessly he picked the first one up, and then another, turning them over in his hands, considering the quality, which was largely excellent, and the maker’s marks, which were genuine. It was a brave person that openly peddled counterfeit goods in a major market square. It was not unheard of, however, and this kind of weather did rather lend itself to such scams.

“Package a full set up and deliver it to this address,” he said with mild resignation, putting the teapot back on its rest and taking out a personal talisman with his home address on it. “Do you want payment now, or on delivery of whole set?”

“Usually, we take a quarter up front,” the stall tender replied politely. “But for a member of the guard…”

“Here,” he passed five spirit stones over without comment.

That was a fair amount of money for the average ‘citizen’ of this district, but as a Nascent Soul cultivator with a good position in the Civil Authority, his guard’s salary alone was twenty a week. True, most of it went towards his wife’s cultivation, but being part of the Han clan did have its perks in keeping the cost of running a small household down.

“We will deliver the rest today,” the merchant said with a happy smile, quickly imprinting a binary talisman. “Your seal here, sir…”

He took out seal from his storage ring and imprinted his personal seal on the talisman beside the merchant’s. The youth then peeled the talisman apart and gave him one half with a further polite salute.

“A pleasure, sir,” the youth said politely once he had inspected it.

“Likewise, have a good day,” he replied, returning the salute and setting off again after Danshu and Kun Yu.

“What were you buying?” Danshu asked as he caught them about twenty metres further on, inspecting a stall selling talismans.

“Tea set, for Qing,” he said.

“Ah, drat, I should have thought of that…” Danshu groaned.

“On a corporal’s salary, even a Master Corporal’s, your wife will poison you,” he joked.

“That’s true,” Danshu sighed wryly.

“A tea set?” Corporal Kun, who was merely twenty years old, unmarried, not in a relationship, and afflicted with the status of growing up in a large clan, asked.

“When you grow up, lad,” Danshu said drily, clasping the youth companionably on the shoulder. “You will discover that contrary to what the tales tell you, love is really a new tea set and a box of pastries for your kid. Anything less and you are in big trouble.”

“Spoken like a true Scholar of the Dao,” the old man manning the talisman stall remarked with an amused chuckle as he put a box of low-grade talisman papers on the table.

“We have these, quite affordable.”

Danshu took a few and then nodded and passed the old man a handful of iron talismans.

“For little Mei,” Danshu said drily as he stored them away. “She said she wants to try painting talismans to help her mother out.”

“Could do worse than to have a talisman painter in the house,” he replied drily.

“Too few kids today fancy it,” the old man sighed. “They lack… how do you say?”

“Dedication?” he replied drily.

“Haha… yeah,” the talisman seller chuckled. “They should invent a talisman that draws itself while you drink and chase beauties.”

“I did see someone draw one with a sword once,” Kun Yu muttered.

“Were they drunk at the time?” the old man asked rolling his eyes.

“…”

“Or trying to impress a beauty?” Danshu added.

“Drat…” Kun Yu, who had likely seen that at some ‘dao discussion’ or other, sighed disconsolately as all three of them laughed.

“It’s required if you want to become a sergeant,” he added as they set off again.

“What is?” Kun Yu asked, turning to him.

“Being able to draw talismans that are at least third grade,” Danshu replied, before he could.

“Oh…” Kun Yu nodded.

“Gotta be able to do basic alchemy as well,” Danshu added drily. “If there is one thing I’ve learned to respect about West Flower Picking’s criminal underworld in the last decade… it’s their capacity for innovation.”

“…”

“Poisons, trapped spirit herbs, strange drugs, you think this place is fairly law-abiding,” Danshu went on, “but that’s a fate-thrashed mask.”

“It’s not that bad,” he reminded Danshu. “Not nowadays anyway.”

“True,” Danshu nodded. “Thirty years ago, when I was a kid your age, Yu, this place was a nameless accursed hellhole and a half. First year I started, was the last of the Three Schools Conflict. Think I saw… sixty bodies in the first month alone, a third of them guards.”

“…”

“They were bad times,” he agreed with a deeper sigh. “Easy to forget that you have actually been in the guard longer than I have...”

“Aye, you joined in the recruitment after, didn't you?” Danshu added with a grin. “An exceptional candidate for ‘Junior Sergeant’, right, with a letter of recommendation from Old Cangfei...”

Kun Yu raised his eyebrows and he coughed awkwardly. In truth, it wasn't anywhere like as preferential as Danshu was humorously making it out to be. He had simply been promoted to Junior Sergeant at his first attempt at the exam, at a time where the Town Guard was rapidly expanding their ranks after that conflict.

“Anyway,” he said, changing the topic. “We should move a bit quicker, or it will be…”

“Huh… were there exercises planned for today?” Danshu asked abruptly, interrupting him as he made to chivvy them on.

“I didn’t hear anything about…” he started to reply, before the hubbub behind them drew his attention.

“—Hey, what’s going on?”

“—Isn’t that…?”

“Armoured carriages?”

“Ah, watch out…”

“Shit, there is a limit you know!”

“Fate-thrashed rain...”

“Monkey sons!”

Turning to look back across the square, he saw two large, armoured personnel carriages with the insignia of the Town Guards from the Pavilion District Division rolling off the Wusheng Bridge at a surprising speed. Immediately behind them were four slightly smaller ones, bearing Ha clan insignia, and, bringing up the rear, a further larger carriage from the Market District’s Guard Division. There were actually guards sitting on top of most of them, which in this weather, only happened if they were full, or expected trouble

They watched the convoy roll straight across the square, in their general direction, and cross over the bridge heading towards the Western District’s Gate.

“Wonder what that’s about,” Kun Yu muttered, staring after them.

Wondering that himself, he took out his talisman, but there was no notification of anything that would have sparked that kind of mobilization…

“There is another group coming,” Danshu pointed out.

Looking up, he found Danshu was right.

Another Guard Personnel Transport was crossing the bridge, followed by two more from the Ha clan, while a Civil Authority Municipal Guard’s command carriage brought up the rear. This convoy went across the square and took a hard right, rolling almost right by them, down Blue River Boulevard, the main street that led to the Wusheng Lake, Green Fang Pagoda and the western edge of the Seng District.

“Definitely something going down,” Danshu observed as they watched it move off, the guards on top not even giving them a sideways look.

“Any idea what’s going on, Sergeant Mei?” a young woman managing the stall selling bread across from them asked.

“Nope, sorry… Kanna,” he apologized, recognising her as an acquaintance of his wife, largely because she used his family name, not his clan one.

“I bet some alchemist did something,” an old man who was selecting some pastries muttered.

“Aye, they are always causing disturbances for others,” the younger woman beside him agreed, rather archly. “With their explosions and the waste…”

“My spirit stones are on someone spawning a tribulation inside the town… you saw what happened earlier, right?” another nearby vendor interjected with a knowing nod.

“Those dark clouds, aye,” Miss Kanna agreed.

“Could still be alchemists,” the younger woman muttered. “Can’t trust them at all…”

“That was the last time I saw them move even one of those…” another youth standing by the next stall muttered in agreement. “Used one to close the Yu Bridge that time.”

“…”

“I’d say it was some fight over something in the market district,” another customer at the next stall added. “Remember the ‘book incident’ a few days ago?”

“Oh yeah…” Miss Kanna sighed. “I wanted a copy of that…”

“Then why are they sending that many guards here?” the old man asked.

“I dunno, maybe some people ran away?” someone else suggested.

“What do you say, Sergeant?” the old man, who, as he recalled, had a shop in the Seng District, asked him rather pointedly.

-Monkey balls, he groaned to himself. That was the cue that they should have moved on twenty seconds ago.

“I know as much as you, I am afraid,” he replied tactfully. “In any case, we must be about our business…”

“Ah, of course, of course,” the old man nodded, stroking his beard

“Have a good day Miss Kanna, everyone…” he added cheerily.

“You too, Sergeant!” she called after him. “Give my best to Qing!”

“I will,” he promised, speaking over his shoulder as he quickly ushered Danshu and Kun onwards.

“Should we not try to encourage people?” Corporal Kun muttered after they had moved on somewhat, leaving the people eagerly discussing what might have happened behind them.

“Of course,” he agreed, as they set off down the Blue River Boulevard, towards the Green Fang Pagoda and, laterally, the Han clan estates. “However, anything we say to them will be repeated as a Dao-sent truth to half the district before we have gone a hundred metres.”

“…”

“Oh,” Kun Yu muttered. “That armoured column was going in the direction of the Seng District…”

“See, its statements like that that’re why you should just say nothing,” Danshu said drily. “That old man grumbling about alchemists has a shop in the Seng District.”

“Yep,” he nodded. “And is something of a ‘concerned citizen’.”

Corporal Kun flushed.

“Anyway, for all we know, they are going to Green Fang Park or the Wusheng Lake Shrine, or escorting some dignitary to the Green Fang Pagoda,” he added, thankful that because of the rain and the early hour nobody was near enough to hear. “Or they are escorting some treasures or rare herbs you can’t put in a storage talisman…”

“Oh…” Corporal Kun nodded.

They walked on in silence, eating their breakfasts.

Thanks to the humid, sense-obfuscating rain, and the early hour, there were very few people about outside of the market squares, so it only took them a short ten minutes to arrive at the square before the Green Fang Pagoda. Much like the Wusheng Plaza, the Green Fang Plaza held a market at this hour; stalls selling food for locals and those going to and from work interspersed with those selling talismans and pills, many manned by outer disciples from the Pagoda which loomed over the square.

“What’s the best way to get to Green Moon from here?” Danshu asked, consulting the map on his talisman. “The teahouse is fairly close to Wusheng Lake, right?”

“About halfway between the pagoda and the lake,” he confirmed. “We can take Green Fang Boulevard—” he pointed to the south side of the square, where the street ran parallel to the vast walled compound of the Green Fang Pagoda, “—the teahouse, if I recall, is off Western Fang Street, on Blue Blossom Square.”

“Isn’t that the area they call the ‘Blue Blossom District?” Kun Yu asked, raising an eyebrow, as they started down the tree-lined Green Fang Boulevard.

“Hah… yes,” he conceded.

They walked on in silence again, continuing to slowly eat their breakfast, watching people under umbrellas hurry past, dodging puddles and the odd cargo-wagon, until they arrived at a second smaller square that was the western exit to the Green Fang pagoda.

Here, there was another small market, selling all sorts of goods and food.

“Seems even good spirit vegetation is going up in price,” Danshu remarked as they passed by one, selling, among other things, crates of lotus roots for an iron talisman per-kilo. Almost double what they had been a few weeks prior, in the dry season.

“The knock-on effects of that ‘auction’ in Blue Water City are really wide ranging,” he replied, giving the stall vendor a polite nod as they passed.

“Is that petition to re-district still doing the rounds?” Danshu asked at last, as they started down Green Fang Boulevard, stepping around a group of three young women who barely gave them a second glance as they passed.

“Uh-huh,” he nodded. “Why do you ask?”

“Oh, my wife mentioned it the other day,” Danshu sighed. “Someone wanted her to put her seal to it.”

“Redistrict?” Kun Yu asked, sounding curious.

“Seriously, do you not read any briefing papers?” Danshu asked with mock horror.

“…”

“In fairness, unless he was a house-wife or an estate manager, that one has likely passed him by,” he chuckled, giving the slightly-abashed Kun Yu a companionable pat on the shoulder. “In short, it’s a source of some… vexation, shall we say, that the Blue Blossom Square and the streets south of it have become the epicentre of what is basically a cut-price Red Blossom District. The emergence of a second entertainment quarter, this one south of the river, right on their doorstep…”

“Is not popular among the class who like their leafy suburbs and high walls,” Danshu concluded, jerking his head back in the direction of Blue River Boulevard. “They are more than happy to patronize those establishments, but fates-forbid their daughters see a girl less fortunate than them on the street outside their gate.”

“Oh… I can see that,” Kun Yu nodded. “I just thought it was there because of the canal giving this neighbourhood easy access to three different districts?

“Well, yes, it is,” he conceded, because that was a large part of it. “The main thing, though, is that Blue River is an old district with even older money in it, and the Deng clan have been trying to get into it for a while,” Danshu added, picking up the explanation again. “Most of those who live here are local clans, whose roots go back to before the current province was founded, if you believe what they spout about the Blue Water Sage.”

“Ah yeah, I know that,” Kun Yu pointed out somewhat archly.

“Yeah, well, the thing is, before the Blood Eclipse ruined half the town, the ‘entertainment quarter’ south of the river was where the Deng clan’s district is now.” Danshu elaborated with a broad grin. “They claimed that bit of ‘premium’ real-estate dirt cheap off the back of all that upheaval and built it back up, then realised they turned the second most profitable two-square-miles in the whole town into leafy, high-walled estates…”

“And… no one mentioned that?” Kun Yu asked disbelievingly.

“Hah—” he had to pause for a moment so as not to choke on the last of his fried fish which he had been quietly nibbling while they walked.

“What...?” Kun Yu muttered as Danshu snorted back his own laughter.

“There is an old saying – never interrupt your enemy when he is making a stupid mistake,” he said, shaking his head in amusement. “The Deng clan were so pleased with how they ‘claimed’ their district and carved up the Seng and Yeng’s most lucrative real-estate in the process… that they never stopped to ask why the Kun and Ha clan hadn’t already done it.”

“…”

Kun Yu stared at them both dully, likely trying to work out if they were pulling his leg. Truth be told, he would have doubted the story as well, but Jun Han had sworn it was true.

“The way you make money in this town is either selling herbs, procuring them, or facilitating their consumption,” Danshu elaborated.

“I know…” Kun Yu glared at the other corporal, before realising what Danshu was hinting at. “Oh… it’s hard to do that from a high-class residential neighbourhood…”

“Uh-huh,” Danshu agreed, rolling his eyes. “And the Ha and Kun clans have had the Red Blossom District and the docks sewn up for longer than our ‘glorious’ Emperor Blue Morality has been on his throne.”

“And so, this neighbourhood was the next best thing,” he concluded, waving absently around them at the small estates-turned-teahouses with their walled gardens repurposed into shady lounging areas, separated by taller apartments and the odd store for various goods.

“So… the entire Blue Blossom neighbourhood… is the Deng clan’s initiative at making a cut-price Red Blossom district here?” Kun Yu frowned.

“Well, that was the plan, but it’s too close to the Seng District for them to exert a lot of control,” he supplied with a sigh. “So what they resorted to instead, was leveraging this place to crash the desirability of the Blue River District’s eastern half for smaller clans and families that don’t support them.”

“Oh… that’s kinda scummy,” Kun Yu muttered, with the ignorance of a clan child blissfully unaware of just how shady his own faction’s real-estate dealings were in the western part of town.

“Yeah, it is,” Danshu agreed. “And that is why a large body of folk in this neighbourhood want the border for the Blue River District moved. It’s largely symbolic, but it’s also deeply embarrassing for the Deng clan.”

“Uh-huh,” he agreed, looking around the square they had just entered, his memory telling him they should have almost reached the teahouse.

“It is over there,” Danshu remarked, pointing to a three-story building across the square, with an extravagant sign on the outside which read ‘Green Moon’.

A group of workmen were labouring outside, fixing a portion of the wall on the ground floor, clearly someone had been liberal with their use of explosives.

“Not subtle,” Kun Yu remarked drily as they headed over.

“No… it probably lights up at night as well,” he added.

That was actually why the square was called ‘Blue Blossom Square’. When the trees came into flower at the start of the first dry season, the blossoms trapped sunlight they were exposed to during the day and released it at night to attract moths and such.

“Seems it was quite the altercation,” Danshu mused, taking in the damage to the lower story as they arrived at the door.

“Aye, they were,” one of the workmen, who was taking a break nearby, agreed. “My nephew drinks here regularly and apparently there were a good two dozen at least. Trashed half a floor.”

“Told you, they are never simple,” Danshu muttered.

Nodding to the workmen, he led the way inside and found that the workman had not been over-exaggerating. A gaping chunk was missing from the second-story balcony above them while a fairly large pile of smashed furniture was being stacked up along the wall by two youths. A middle-aged workman, with a life-earth cultivation law, was also working on tearing up parts of the burnt wooden floor, and a third youth was busy scrubbing scorch-marks off the now exposed stone paving beneath.

A few regulars were sitting around a table on the far side, sipping wine and eating snacks, watching the damage be fixed, while a dark-haired young woman wearing a rather revealing, low-cut, red and white gown embroidered with iris and lily blossoms plucked somewhat listlessly on a guqin in the corner.

“What do you reckon?” he asked Kun Yu as Danshu went over to look at the ruined furniture.

“As in what caused it?” Kun Yu frowned. “I’d say… low-end mid-grade fire-attributed talisman? Perhaps a barrier of some kind that deflected damage rather than emitted it?”

Looking around, he nodded, agreeing largely with that interpretation. Most of the fire damage was contained and a few pieces of the smashed furniture were only half burnt in a way that suggested little radiation. The area of floor damaged was also fairly circular.

“Got a good eye, kid,” the workman pulling up the floor observed.

“What was the fight over?” he asked as Kun Yu and Danshu both continued to take in the damage.

The workman just shrugged apologetically. “Can’t rightly say, sir. We just usually fix up stuff around here. Got a call earlier and here we are. Was pretty sustained though. They started on the second floor.”

“Was over a girl,” the youth scrubbing the floor interjected.

“When is it not!” the workman grinned. “Joys of youth and all that.”

“Mmmm…” he nodded politely in noncommittal agreement.

“Any particular…”

“Aii, how can I help you, Young Master Kun?”

A young-ish woman, who looked to be in her early thirties, wearing a red and green gown that was not half as flattering as she probably thought it was, appeared at the door of the rear of the common room. She addressed Kun Yu, but he was fairly sure she had been hanging around for a few seconds before that. Likely scoping them out, given the weather’s obfuscations of soul sense.

Kun Yu glanced at Danshu, then at him.

“We are just here with Young Master Kun,” he replied politely, before Kun Yu could say something to break that misconception. “Are you the owner?”

“Who’s askin’?” she frowned, looking him over.

“Depends if you are the owner of not,” he replied drily, making no move to take out his Sergeant’s talisman just yet. Something about the whole scene was rubbing his instincts slightly the wrong way and if she seemingly wanted to mistake Kun Yu as the leader of the group, he was not going to correct her.

“See, there was a bit of disturbance,” Danshu added, which got some sardonic chuckles from the regulars.

The woman rolled her eyes as she headed over to the serving counter and poured wine into some cups, offering the first one to Kun Yu, who took it, but didn’t drink.

“There was,” she said after a moment. “Broke the tables and chairs something horrid.”

“And the wall,” he noted. “Not to mention the balcony up there. Young masters having or had a disagreement?”

“Aye,” she nodded, again giving absolutely nothing away.

“Physical Cultivator?” Danshu signed unobtrusively to him.

He didn’t bother to reply. Danshu was almost certainly right, though. You got used to looking for the signs, especially in this weather. In the woman’s case, she was pretty much the only person in the room not visibly affected by the humidity. “So, are you going to show me a talisman, or are you here in a strictly informal capacity, Sergeant?” the woman asked, giving him a discerning look and taking a sip of her wine.

Sighing, he took out his rank talisman and put it on the counter so it was clearly on display.

“We are here to check up on the aftermath of… this,” he said, given she had decided to stop playing. “Are you the owner?”

“Zhong, go find that useless slob,” the woman commanded, jerking her head towards the stairs.

The youth who had spoken earlier sighed and abandoned his scrubbing. Danshu flashed his own Master Corporal’s talisman and headed off after him.

“That’s not necessary,” the woman muttered.

“I suppose you must recognise me from somewhere?” he asked, ignoring her comment.

“It’s not like we are swamped with senior guard officials,” the woman pointed out.

“Give it time,” he said drily.

“Ah yes, our dear Deputy Ha will soon surmount that lofty position,” the woman murmured, managing to make the whole sentence seem like a rude joke. “One can only hope the town is prepared.”

Based on her attitude, it was hard not to feel that she, and probably a great many others, were quite looking forward to having someone more… political in charge. Captain Tai was a former military man and despised corruption and wastage. In that regard, the last few decades had seen something of a new dawn in terms of civil security within the town. It had made the guards… respectable again, after the debacles with the Deng clan in particular. The ‘cost’ of that respectability, though, was a decided lack of popularity among those who much preferred their problems to be solved with a handshake and the exchange of spirit stones, rather than some official process with ‘records’ and ‘accountability’.

“—Well, if it isn’t Sergeant Han, a veritable man about town!”

He glanced up as a portly man with a bushy beard, dressed in a silk over-gown, as if he had just gotten out of bed, swept into the common room, followed by Danshu.

“I am Guanbo!” the man said, offering a hand for him to shake.

“The owner?” he asked, accepting it and finding that the man was a Soul Foundation cultivator.

“I manage it,” Guanbo replied with a toothy grin. “I see my dear Lotus Blossom here has gotten you wine. Be a dear and go get some food as well, will you? The least we can do is offer the fine boys from the guard some breakfast.”

The young woman stared at Guanbo for a long moment, before heading back into the depths of the Inn, shaking her head slightly as she did so.

“A fine woman, lucky to have her, if you know what I mean,” Guanbo chuckled, wiggling his eyebrows.

“…”

“I assume you are here about the disturbance earlier?” Guanbo continued, not seeming to mind his lack of reply.

“Uh-huh,” he agreed.

“Well, you can rest assured, it is all sorted. There won’t be any trouble. Just a misunderstanding at the time, you understand… no hard feelings afterwards.”

“I see,” he replied casually, wondering suddenly why it almost felt like Guanbo had been expecting him. “That’s good.”

“Good, good,” Guanbo beamed.

“I do still have to file a report though,” he pointed out. “They sent us here to check on the clean up and you know how the higher ups are…”

“Dedicated,” Guanbo sighed. “Very dedicated.”

“That they are,” Danshu agreed tactfully.

“Well, as you can see, it’s all being fixed. Damages have been sorted, very reasonably. As I said, no hard feelings, just a misunderstanding.”

“Uh-huh,” he nodded. “The report said the altercation was between a group from Blue Cliff and a local influence?”

“I wouldn’t go so far as to call them an ‘influence’,” Guanbo chuckled. “Just some enterprising lads. Got in a bit of a tizzy over a young lady with some good lads from Blue Cliff here to celebrate one of their own forming a Golden Core.”

-So, a gang then, he mused.

“The original report noted no arrests and that they agreed to pay damages…”

“Yes, very understanding once it was all sorted out,” Guanbo nodded.

“What was the original disagreement over?” he asked absently. “The original report was a little… conflicted on it.”

“It was?” Guanbo blinked. “Hmm…”

“These things happen,” he shrugged. “Vice-Captain of Administration, Yu Feihua, apparently had to sign off on the reports…”

That was… if not a lie, probably rather unlikely. He doubted Yu Feihua had really looked at that report, but the key thing was her reputation. She despised shoddy paperwork and tended to send squads back out to re-do statements if they screwed up.

“Dedication in action,” Danshu agreed, playing along.

“That is rather unlucky,” Guanbo agreed as he took out a recording jade and put it on the counter.

“I believe they struck up an acquaintance with a young lady who was especially enamoured with the lad who formed his golden core… and that rubbed a group of local fellows up the wrong way. Harsh words were said over alcohol and well…”

“—Now you are looking for new furniture and giving the local builders business,” Danshu interjected drily.

“Yes, although both parties were generous… as befitting their excellent reputations…” Guanbo gave him a subtle sideways look again.

“Of course,” he replied blandly, making a show of checking the jade, which he had never turned on in any case.

“Food…” ‘Lotus Blossom’ returned at that point with a platter of fried meat, spicy rolls and some soup.

“Would you and your men care to join us?” Guanbo asked with a broader grin.

“Yeah, sure, why not…” he agreed, sitting down at the counter and waving for Kun Yu and Danshu to join them.

They ate and talked fairly aimlessly about this and that for almost ten minutes, until he pointed out apologetically that they had to do a few more bits of checking to resolve the matter of the potentially misfiled report, before they went on their way.

Guanbo took that entirely within his stride and told them to go do what they needed to do, so he led Danshu and Kun Yu up the stairs to the second floor to have a look around.

“What do you reckon?” Danshu mused once they were sure nobody could overhear.

“Original report suggested an altercation over a ‘prostitute’. It’s possible that one group was rude or something,” he mused, taking in the devastation on the second floor.

“They chopped a table to smithereens over that?” Kun Yu noted, eyeing a ruined table by the wall.

“Looks like a blade art,” Danshu frowned. “Remnants of Martial Intent suggest a Golden Core Martial Cultivator did it.”

“Hmm…”

He walked over to the edge and looked over. The impact point down below was about where someone might have been if they were tossed off and then triggered a talisman for protection on the way down. The hole in the wall also suggested that the follow up attacker had been at least Soul Foundation.

“There was no mention of any casualties,” Danshu remarked, coming over to join him. “And I don’t see any death qi…”

“Yep, which is something at least,” he agreed, watching one of the workmen outside come in and ask the old man if he had a spare hammer.

In that regard, it all looked very straightforward… except something about the scene was still nagging at him subtly in a way he couldn’t quite pin down.

“Do you want me to check the upper floor and the back areas with Corporal Kun?” Danshu added.

“…”

“Let’s go back down,” he mused.

Heading back down to the common room, he found Guanbo still eating, ‘Lotus Blossom’ massaging his shoulders.

“Everything satisfactory?” the manager asked, around a mouthful of roasted meat.

“We will need to give the entire premise a cursory glance,” he replied apologetically. “Just in case the vice-captain asks us to swear something. And see the terms of operation.”

“Of course, of course…” Guanbo nodded, clearly expecting at least that much. “Perhaps my dear Lotus Blossom here can take you and your corporal to look around, while Young Master Kun and I check the terms?”

“…”

He had to admit, Guanbo was a cunning operator.

None of them were wearing their rank insignia openly, but both he and Danshu had something of the presence of guards who had been at the job a while. Kun Yu, however, was fairly green and wasn’t displaying any sign of his rank, beyond his robe advertising him as being from the Kun clan. He also had the faintly superior bearing of a youth brought up in a large clan.

Likely Guanbo was hoping that if he got the youth alone, he would either say something useful, or could be easily bribed.

“Mm… I don’t think I need to bother with paperwork,” Kun Yu replied, thankfully taking the hint. “Sergeant Han, you deal with that.”

“Sir,” he saluted formally.

“Ah, of course, of course,” Guanbo grinned.

“In that case, please come with me… I will show you around,” Lotus Blossom murmured, gesturing for Kun Yu to follow her.

Danshu just sighed and followed after, like a good, respectful corporal, leaving the two of them behind.

“He seems fairly new,” Guanbo remarked, taking another gulp of his wine and standing up.

“He is,” he deadpanned, sipping his own wine and then putting it aside as it was not very good.

“…”

Giving the common room one further glance, he nodded and let Guanbo go ahead of him, down a corridor, through a rear courtyard with a small pond, an ornamental pagoda, a plum tree, and a blue flowering camellia and into a fairly opulent ‘office’ on the far side.

“Given I am sure Young Master Kun will want to be… thorough, in his searching,” Guanbo remarked, going over to one of the couches that were in the middle of the room and sitting down. “Would you care for some… additional refreshment while we wait, Sergeant?”

“Just some spirit wine,” he replied politely.

To his credit, Guanbo didn’t force the issue by asking again and simply clapped his hands.

A moment later a voluptuous, dark-haired young woman wearing a revealing light gown embroidered with blue jasmine flowers appeared in the doorway.

“Blue Jasmine, wine for the Sir Han,” Guanbo instructed her. “And, hmmm… yes, I guess I will have wine as well and a few refreshments.”

“Of course,” the young woman murmured, sashaying over to the table by the wall and putting two cups and a jar of wine on a tray.

A moment later, a second, golden-haired young woman in her late teens, also wearing a similar style of robe, slipped in, carrying a platter of refreshments made up of various rolls and freshly-sliced fish, which she put on the table before retreating to stand silently by the doorway.

“Blue Jasmine is one of my best dancers,” Guanbo chuckled as she came over to the table. “Her poise and manner… just exquisite, don’t you agree?”

“She has style,” he replied politely.

“Sir Han is here to follow up on that fracas last night,” Guanbo added as she poured out the wine. “You were dancing at the time, were you not?”

“I was,” the young woman purred, passing him a cup of wine “The young masters were very valorous.”

He filed that away as interesting, if only because he had expected Guanbo to side somewhat with the ‘locals’.

Accepting it, he affected not to notice her very subtle attempt at using mantra manifestation on him as her hand brushed his.

“What do you think?” Guanbo asked him.

“She is certainly alluring,” he agreed, playing along, mostly to see where Guanbo was actually taking this.

Guanbo gestured subtly and Blue Jasmine sat down on the couch next to him. The golden-haired, younger girl, came over and sat down beside Guanbo, passing him a piece of fish, which he ate with relish.

“To alluring opportunities,” Guanbo declared, by way of a toast, before downing his cup with a satisfied sigh.

Silently, he returned the toast and took a sip of the wine, which was flavoured with several yang-attributed flower petals to give it a certain kick. Looking at the food, most of it was yang-attributed as well, while the leaves garnishing it were from the persis plant, as probably was the spicy dip – both mild stimulants that saw use as low-grade aphrodisiacs.

Knowing what he did about spirit food, he was fairly sure that the dish was designed to complement the herbal wine.

The whole setup was too odd by half. What should have been a rather routine ‘Are you in danger of being exploded again? No? That’s good!’ check, had somehow led to Guanbo taking great pains to ‘wine and dine’ him, having somehow known to expect his presence.

“Master Guanbo… sorry to disturb you…”

Guanbo turned as the lad, Zhong, appeared in the doorway, looking uneasy, and gave the manager a deep bow.

“What?” Guanbo scowled.

“There is… erm, Xu is here,” Zhong muttered, apologetically.

“Xu huh…” Guanbo sighed, standing up. “My apologies, Sir Han, please wait here, I am sure this will only take a moment.”

“More wine, Sir Han?” Blue Jasmine asked, placing a hand on his arm as he watched Guanbo leave with the palpably nervous Zhong.

“…”

“Sure, why not,” he replied, mulling over what to do next.

“Here, Sir Han,” she murmured, again trying it on somewhat as she passed him the cup of wine, radiating alluring, demure innocence as she did so.

“You were there when this altercation took place?” he asked her, accepting the wine but ignoring the attempted influence.

“Ah, should we not wait until Master Guanbo comes back?” she murmured.

“I have heard what he has to say,” he said, giving her a sympathetic pat on the arm in return. “Rather, I am more interested in what you have to say.”

She glanced at his hand, but it was just that, a sympathetic hand on the arm.

An inexperienced Nascent Soul cultivator might have been tempted to return the ‘favour’. However, not only was he unwilling to lower himself to that level, he was also well aware of how annoying Physical Cultivations could be. There was a reason why so many poorer women with them turned to less respectable professions, and it was not just because the gains were shockingly good if your mentality was strong.

Blue Jasmine was only in her early twenties, but was almost a Soul Meridian Cultivator, based on what she had just displayed in trying to influence him. To try and subtly influence her in anything approaching a near-peer contest of soul strength would be difficult to the point of being pointless.

Which, on reflection, was certainly one reason Guanbo had called her here.

“I dunno, I just dance,” she replied, shifting so that his view of her ample bosom was… much better.

With a sigh, she suddenly slipped down the couch to lounge almost against him, close enough that he could smell the perfume from the blue jasmine flowers affixed in her hair and sense her breath in the humid air.

“…”

“You’re not buying it at all, are you,” she murmured softly, taking the wine jar and refilling his cup.

“Nope,” he said sipping his wine. “How many exploded teahouses do you think a sergeant in the guard sees on a yearly basis?”

“Fair point,” she sighed, shifting slightly to look up at him, the alluring atmosphere around her melting away, at least from his perspective.

He could only assume that Guanbo had someone watching the room, likely recording it as well, such was the way these places operated.

“What is it you want to know?” she whispered softly.

“What happened here last night?”

“Are you sure you really wanna know that?” she murmured, shifting her posture slightly to look up at him, giving him a very distracting view in the process. “I think you would much rather spend a few minutes cuddling me and then go on your way.”

“…”

“Average of one a week,” he continued, maintaining eye-contact with her. “And I’ve been in the guard for… almost two decades.”

“…”

Blue Jasmine stared up at him with clear, alluring eyes for a further few seconds before she looked away sighing deeply.

“Fine, the group from the Blue Cliff came to celebrate their friend getting a golden core and wanted to find a… girl… suitable for him to improve his foundation. A bunch from the Xuafan Association got involved and tried to scam them… it came to blows.”

“That I had pretty much guessed,” he replied quietly. “What’s the catch?”

“Five spirit stones says you’re weeping in my bosom in ten seconds,” she murmured, shifting to pour a cup of wine for herself.

“…”

“Fiiiine,” she pouted, downing the cup in a single gulp. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you, Sergeant Han Mei Murai… The youth ‘leading’ the group from Blue Cliff was a Chen Bei…”

“Chen Bei?” he frowned, realizing at last what had been bothering him about the scene in the common room.

-The qi-traces from the talisman match those the Han clan make.

“Uh-huh,” she nodded, running her fingers along his arm. “Along with your nephew, Han…”

“Oh, come on…” he groaned, downing the rest of the cup of wine as the bits slotting together at last. “Jiang or Bao?”

“Han Shu,” she replied, sounding amused.

“Wait what?” he repeated, just about managing to keep control of his voice. “Han… Shu? Really?”

“Yep,” she murmured. “I am fairly sure Han Shu was the name on the talisman they gave to the guard when they came. He certainly guaranteed the damages. Brown hair, ruggedly good looking, in his mid-twenties? The one who works at the Hunter Bureau?”

“Who else was with the group?” he asked, fighting off a grimace as she refilled his cup.

“Mmmm…” she held his gaze for a long moment, then passed him the cup, using the opportunity to lean a lot closer. “Han Xiaobo was the boy who had formed the core, along with a Han Chen Fei, from Blue Cliff… and uh, Han Fei Shi and Han Ji Bao? There was another who they claimed had a Soul Gold Core, but he wasn’t that interested in staying with them.”

“…”

“I see…” he murmured, filing all that away to follow up on back in the Han Estate.

There was no way Han Shu, who was still in Blue Water City, could be any part of it, but knowing the other Han clan juniors, he had a pretty good hypothesis. Han Bao and Han Shu were pretty similar in terms of height and build, and it was very possible someone had taken a spare talisman from Han Shu’s room, thinking it funny.

“—and what about the girl they... conducted business with?” he added, knocking back his wine and trying to ignore how nice she smelled.

This mess had the makings of a potentially huge headache for the Han clan as a whole, and not just poor Shu’s reputation.

“Girls,” she corrected absently, helping herself to more wine. “From the Xuafan Association. They don’t work here, but Guanbo is happy to…”

“Facilitate privacy?” he guessed, quite familiar with how that worked.

“Indeed,” she murmured. “Xong Mei was I believe the name of the girl in… question.”

“Let me guess,” he sighed, accepting another top up. “She was a physical cultivator and they tried to pass her off as a virgin, but… all Xiaobo got in the end was a good time?”

“Actually, no,” she murmured, rolling her eyes. “Xiaobo had a very good time by all accounts. The disagreement was on the payment for the night’s entertainment as a whole.”

“And Guanbo…?” he asked at last, wondering how much worse it could get.

“—believes you are here on behalf of the Han clan, to ensure that their golden boy’s reputation remains ‘unsullied’,” she giggled.

“And you are telling me this…” he asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Favours are favours,” she replied sweetly, shifting again to look up at him with wide, innocent eyes. “Who knows when a lowly tea house dancer might need a virtuous District Sergeant to say a good word on her behalf?”

“…”

“I did say you would probably prefer the cuddle,” she smirked, putting a finger to his lips, pressing herself a bit more suggestively against his side, one of her legs now half over his.

Thinking of the headache this was going to cause back in the Han clan, he could see where her confidence on that assertion came from. Even ignoring the involvement of the Xuafan Association and whatever ‘evidence’ of the previous night’s events Guanbo had in his possession, purchasing a ‘girl’ to improve your foundation was all kinds of unsavory. Not to mention, the echoes of those sordid events in the last century and a half still rang all too clearly in certain quarters.

There was only so much ‘needling’ Bao and Jiang, spurred on by their out-of-town friends, could send poor Shu’s way before something had to give. The fact that they threw a festering pile of monkeyshit like this on his lap-potentially ruining the future prospects of one of their clans new Soul Gold Core cultivators in the process?

His sister was going to go… utterly spare.

With a sigh, he accepted another refill of his cup and stared up at the ceiling, wondering if any of the 'concerned citizens’ he knew, who sometimes helped the guards with various matters, could be persuaded to drag Chen Bei and Han Bao into a dark alley and give them a proper kicking.

“If you are open to a bit of... business,” Blue Jasmine murmured.

“..."

“Not that,” she giggled, giving him a playful poke in the chest and then leaning in to whisper in his ear. “It would not be difficult for your nephews, who are fairly well known about town, to have an... interesting experience or two?”

“…”

“Ah, Sir Han, I am so sorry for that,” Guanbo exclaimed, sweeping back into the room, interrupting before he could reply.

Blue Jasmine shifted a little, but made no move to return to where she had been, before Guanbo departed. In the process though, she let her robe fall slightly open.

“I trust you have not been bored while I was otherwise engaged,” the manager added, sitting down on the other couch and giving him a broad grin, his eyes lingering on Blue Jasmine’s now largely exposed bosom.

“It was… informative,” he replied blandly, resting his right leg on his knee, mostly to block her lounging even more lasciviously on him.

“Dancing is her great gift, but she is nothing if not a girl of many talents,” Guanbo added, stroking his beard.

“…”

“Do you wish for wine? Master Guanbo?” Blue Jasmine asked, matching his gaze with an unfazed smile.

“Hmm… yes, I think so,” Guanbo sighed. “Mundane affairs have rather parched me.”

He watched as she slipped off his couch and went around to sit beside the manager, who immediately put his hand on her thigh as she poured him a cup of wine.

“Do you have the terms of use scroll?” he asked, deciding to move matters along before he was forced to watch something unsavoury.

“Ah… business after pleasure, a man after my own heart,” Guanbo beamed, producing a scroll. “I think you will find it all in—”

A faint tremor shook the whole room, dislodging a wall hanging over one of the tables in the process.

“…”

“…order?” Guanbo’s smile slipped as a faint shift in the humidity of the air brought a sweet, pungent tang with it that he recognised as the signature of a lightning strike.

A moment later, a dull rumble echoed in the air as the sound caught up, telling him it had occurred less than a mile away, well within the city limits.

“A tribulation?” Blue Jasmine frowned, turning to look outside.

“I would assume so,” Guanbo sighed, passing him the scroll.

Opening it, he found it all in order, as expected, including a waiver to ‘facilitate’ but not ‘purvey’ the delivery of personal services.

“As you can see, I pay my taxes,” Guanbo grinned.

“Indeed,” he agreed, continuing to skim the particulars, mostly for show it had to be said. It was a very incompetent owner of one of these establishments that got caught out on that.

They sat there, in somewhat awkward silence for almost a minute, with Guanbo ostensibly letting the dancer feed him morsels of food, while really keeping half an eye on him.

“Well, this seems to be in order,” he declared at last, putting it down on the table between them, along with his wine cup, and standing up.

“There is no rush,” Guanbo pointed out. “I am sure Young Master Kun will come find us when he is satisfied with his…”

A second ‘shift’ in the air made the hair on his neck rise. A moment later a second dull rumble left ripples in the wine still in the cup.

“…”

“Regretfully, the day is long and not exactly empty,” he replied politely, straightening his robe.

Guanbo sighed and nodded, then clapped his hands.

A few moments later, the golden-haired teenager from before appeared in the doorway, accompanied by a second young woman, with curly dark hair, wearing a loose silk gown embroidered with camellia blossoms.

“Where is that boy, Zhong?” Guanbo asked them with a frown.

“Dunno,” the golden-haired girl replied.

“No idea, sorry,” the dark-haired beauty shrugged.

“Oh well, go find Young Master Kun and tell him that the Sergeant here has finished his checks,” Guanbo commanded her. “Misty Camellia, stay here.”

The golden-haired girl curtseyed again and then left at a brisk trot, her companion coming into the room and standing demurely by Guanbo’s couch.

Sighing, he sat down again and reclaimed his wine—

“Lian, see to Sir Han, would you? I am sure that wine is almost finished,” Guanbo remarked, absently stroking Blue Jasmine’s cheek.

Misty Camellia - Lian - gave him a half-glance of appraisal, then slipped over to the table at the side of the room and claimed another jar of wine.

While she brought it over, he made a show of checking his command talisman while Guanbo ‘teased’ Blue Jasmine and had her feed him treats.

As he had expected, there were a few more notifications of ‘incidents’ – a reported robbery on an alchemist’s warehouse in the Yeng District, two more robberies in the docks and a fight at a teahouse in Red Blossom. There was nothing about the mobilization they had seen earlier, or about tribulations…

Almost on that point, there was a distant flash of azure that lit up the courtyard and sky outside for a moment.

“That was certainly a tribulation,” Guanbo mused, looking up.

“Uh-huh,” he agreed, counting the seconds in his head.

Six seconds passed before a distant peal of thunder arrived, confirming that that one, at least, had been outside town. It was a rare day in this month where there were not a few, especially in the mornings.

Misty Camellia sat down beside him, close enough that their bodies were almost touching, then leant over to top up his wine. Like ‘Blue Jasmine’ she was also wearing flower-themed perfume, aptly smelling of camellias. Also, like Blue Jasmine, she was a physical cultivator, though her aura was… subtly different. More restrained.

“Is she more your type?” Guanbo chuckled, making him realise he had been staring at her slightly.

“Your establishment is blessed with beauties,” he remarked, while both women rolled their eyes.

“What is a teahouse without its flowers,” Guanbo mused, absently stroking Blue Jasmine’s hair. “Lotus, Jasmine, Clematis, Camellia, Plum… all remarkable in their own way.”

“Right…” he murmured, accepting the cup from her.

He had to admit, Guanbo was putting on a good show of being a very generous host. Parading ‘beauties’. If this was how Green Moon pulled in juniors to squeeze them it was a solid strategy.

“Ah, Zhong, there you are!” Guanbo said sourly as the youth, Zhong, appeared in the door.

“Sorry, Master, I was running an errand for Lotus Blossom. Young Master Kun and the corporal are in the common room.”

“Aiiii… regretful, it seems Young Master Kun is eager to be on his way,” Guanbo mused, standing up—

“Ah, you dropped your charm,” Misty Camellia murmured, bending down to pick up Yuuna’s jasmine and mulberry charm that had fallen off his hat.

“Oh, thanks…” he crouched down to retrieve it at the same time she did.

“Let us—” Guanbo was cut off by Blue Jasmine who dragged him down as a barely visible blade of qi sliced through the space where their heads had just been at previously.

Beside them, the couch collapsed as a second narrowly missed both him and Misty Camellia, splitting the back open in the process.

Intuition made him grab Misty Camellia and dive for the floor by the table, as a third blade passed almost through where they had just been. It would not have been a fatal blow, but it would certainly have been a serious inconvenience to both of them.

“—our time,” Zhong grinned, appearing beside Guanbo and grabbing him like he was a child.

{Righteous Boxer’s Five-fold Fist}

The martial art, a standard one taught to all officers in the guards, made Guanbo spit blood and stagger backwards, tipping over the couch.

“Fates-thrashed…” Guanbo gasped, waving his hand, stopping to stare in shock as nothing appeared.

“AIEEEEEEEIiiiiigiggGGGGggghHhhsasa…”

With a horrific shriek, Zhong collapsed, grasping at his stomach, all attempts at attacking forgotten. Wiping blood from her nose, Blue Jasmine sat up, her grip on his ankle shifting to his arm as she pinned him down.

Focusing on his own storage ring, he tried to equip his armour and stared as nothing happened.

“Shit, you have a formation on here?” he hissed at Guanbo, who was still looking at his own hand in shock.

“I… it shouldn’t be active!” the portly manager snarled, then desperately rolled out of the way as another barely visible blade of qi tried to impale him.

Beside him, Misty Camellia doubled over, then collapsed as half of her side vanished in a spray of blood and qi. Blue Jasmine was also forced to roll away from Zhong by a further blade that sliced silently through the air, leaving only the faintest of qi-traces. A proper assassin’s art.

Gritting his teeth, he grabbed a barrier talisman from his belt and tried to use it… only for the talisman to flare and fail, further proof that there was an alignment disruption formation focused on their location.

“Sergeant Han, retreat, we cannot neutralize him…” a voice called out from the courtyard.

“…”

“You…” Guanbo, gasped, wheezing as black blood dribbled out of his nose. “Are you trying to—”

Horrible, excruciating pain rolled through his body. It was as if he had been stabbed in every orifice at once and was simultaneously drowning in grasping, ill-intentioned hands. Even with the punishing military training the guards endured and the fact that he was a realm over Misty Camellia, her art still left him feeling disorientated and profoundly unclean, like he was a criminal in his own body.

Two shadowy figures who had entered the room screamed and collapsed, grasping their heads as the mantra manifestation cut through their defences effortlessly, revealing themselves to be two of the workmen who had been outside.

Everything went still after a few moments, the only sounds in the room their ragged breathing and Zhong, moaning in agony on the floor, his teeth grinding audibly.

“Bastard…” Guanbo wheezed glaring at Zhong. “Don’t deviate the little shit.”

Blue Jasmine gave the manager a sour look, then turned to Misty Camellia.

“Are you okay?”

“Y-yeah,” the other woman gasped, rolling over, and sitting up, uncaring now that she was effectively half naked thanks to the attack that had hit her. “Hard to kill, ya know?”

“Is there anything on him?” he asked, staying low and moving around the ruined table.

“Nope,” Blue Jasmine replied after a moment. “Zhong was a dirt-poor brat who stole food from the kitchens…”

“And who has a Nascent Soul at the age of twenty-one,” he added, inspecting the youth up close. “He was definitely only Qi Refinement when I saw him earlier.”

“…”

Guanbo was glaring at him now.

“What? he grunted. “This is not me,”

“This brat used a military art from the guards…” Guanbo sneered, his gaze transferring to the other two attackers, twitching on the floor. “And what are they, undercover guards? Assassins?”

“You think the Han clan can afford assassins?” he muttered, going over to the nearest one. “Maybe I should look at your paperwork after all.”

Misty Jasmine had to look away, while Guanbo's glower deepened.

“Either way, this is clearly a stitch-up by someone,” Blue Jasmine interjected, sending another pulse of mantra-infused intent into her captive, who sobbed even more miserably.

He had a fair idea of what she was doing, based on the brief flash of the manifestation he had experienced, and it was… fate-sent justice of a sort, probably.

Outside, there was another distant boom, followed by two others in quick succession.

“You okay?” Danshu appeared in the doorway, Kun Yu and the golden-haired girl right behind him, both looking around with concern.

“Yeah…” he nodded. “Seems you were right… exploded teahouses are never simple.”

Blue Jasmine snorted, hauling the youth up and slamming him down on the table.

“Z-Zhong?” the golden-haired girl stammered, looking at the youth, then at the other two.

“That’s the boy who was out front,” Danshu frowned. “And… two of the workmen?”

“Yep,” he confirmed.

“…”

“Right…” Danshu muttered, looking around. “Any casualties beyond them?”

“Did you see any on the way here?” he asked.

Danshu and the golden-haired girl shook their heads.

“Then no, although it was a fortunate thing,” he muttered, looking at the slightly crumpled charm that was still clenched in his fist.

Danshu stared at the two comatose ‘workmen’, who he could now see were quasi-Soul Foundation, and then went and crouched down by one, quickly riffling through his clothing.

“Can you disable the formations?” he asked Guanbo, who was wiping blood off his face with a kerchief.

“I tried already,” the manager growled. “My talisman doesn’t work anymore.”

“They… he attacked you… uncle?” the golden-haired girl asked, staring at the twitching bodies on the floor and then Zhong, who Blue Jasmine was still holding over the table.

“Yes,” Guanbo sneered, walking over to the other workman and crouching down to search him.

“This one has nothing special,” Danshu sighed, standing up and tossing a few iron and bronze talisman coins, several basic utility charms, on the table next to Zhong. “Just a concealed blade that isn’t even a treasure.”

“I can’t hold him for long,” Blue Jasmine added, as Zhong’s struggling intensified. “I got lucky with the surprise attack. His nascent soul is already trying to fight me.”

“Let me,” he sighed, getting up and making his way over to the table.

Stopping Zhong’s head from shaking with one hand, he placed the other on the youth’s forehead, covering his eyes, with the focal point of the meridians in his palm centered between his eyebrows.

Focusing his soul intent, he sent a second careful pulse of martial-intent-infused qi into Zhong. There were all kinds of ways of protecting yourself, and indeed, Zhong had several soul-bound treasures designed, among other things, to do just that. It was his misfortune that mantra manifestations were all uniquely nasty.

Reflexively, he reached for an unbinding talisman and then stopped, because that would be useless with the alignment disruption formation in effect.

“Even talismans don’t work,” Kun Yu muttered, holding up a disintegrating divination charm.

“Who did you get to do the formations?” he asked Guanbo, who was still riffling through the other unconscious attacker's clothing, with about as much success as Danshu, by the looks of it.

“Master Liwen,” Guanbo replied sourly, sitting back on his haunches and staring around glumly at the devastation of his 'office'.

“Top rate then,” Kun Yu observed, looking around with a sigh.

“Yes, Young Master Kun,” Guanbo confirmed, nodding gloomily.

“—And they cover the whole property?” Danshu added, looking around with a grimace of his own.

“Yep,” Misty Camellia confirmed.

Focusing again on Zhong, he found himself standing in something approaching the youth’s sea of knowledge—

“Not bad, old man,” Zhong’s voice hissed, mockingly, in his ears as a fast and brutal counterattack, like a shadowy sword, aimed straight at his ‘sense of self’.

“Not bad, boy,” he shot back, something about Zhong’s tone really grating on his nerves as his own Nascent Soul countered, though the brief contest was a lot closer than he would have liked.

The air around Zhong wavered and Blue Jasmine turned a bit paler.

“Here, use this,” said the golden-haired girl, who had gone over to Guanbo’s office table and picked a jar out of the ruins and was now placing it carefully on the table

Looking inside as she opened it, he found it was spirit alcohol… with the core of some kind of yang-attributed spider in the bottom.

The infusion gave off a decidedly ominous vibe that put him in mind of 'burning eye spirit wine'. A beverage typically created by raising several spiders in a jar until the last one reached maturity, at which point it was drowned in potent spirit alcohol and left to steep until the body was dissolved.

The resulting infusion, formed from the death-qi of the spiders and accumulation within the core of the last one standing, was widely considered to be in the same class as things like ‘lash-rose wine’ and ‘persis milk’. Substances that oscillated between alchemical poison and alcoholic moon-juice depending on the context of their use.

“Keep his head still,” Misty Camellia instructed him as she gingerly poured some into a cup.

Raising an eyebrow, he did as she asked. Even drinking the tamest versions of ‘burning eye spirit wine’ tended to induce severe and frequently nightmarish hallucinations, so he had a fair idea of where she was going.

“Okay, bring him up,” Misty Camellia murmured to Blue Jasmine, who grimaced and did something obscure with her qi.

“Haa… you should just—” Zhong managed about four words before Misty Camellia poured the cup of wine, now infused with her presumably mantra-touched qi, over much of the youth’s face.

“Stupid bitch, I’ll… I’ll… I…” he snarled at her, then trailed off, his pupils dilating.

“Probably he needs a second dose,” the golden-haired girl remarked critically, coming over to stand beside the table as well.

“Caoxi,” Guanbo spluttered, standing up “Do you know how expensive that stuff is?”

“Uncle’s life is worth more,” Caoxi sniffed. “Not to mention I never liked that Zhong.”

“You what…” Zhong rasped, struggling to form words as he glared at Caoxi, then at Misty Camellia, fighting his attempt at keeping his head still “What? W-what have you…”

“Keep him steady,” Misty Camellia smirked, scooping another cup carefully out of the jar.

Zhong immediately shut his eyes and mouth and tried to pull away from him.

He had to admit, the youth had some strength for his age, as it took most of his effort to hold him in place on the table.

“It will be hard to force him to open them…” Kun Yu observed

“Oh… wait for it,” Caoxi sneered, folding her arms while Blue Jasmine just rolled her eyes.

After about ten seconds, Zhong’s eyes snapped open again, his complexion pallid and his breathing ragged. In the same instant, Misty Camellia poured the entire cup smoothly into his open left eye.

“You wu.. w-will… I’ll— I… llccudeeedsssnwaaaak…” his threat became an inarticulate gasp of gibberish and his body went slack.

“What was in the jar?” Kun Yu asked, frowning.

“Better to maintain ignorance, for now,” Danshu said blandly.

“Yes,” he agreed, not looking at Guanbo, who had given up searching the unconscious cultivator, and the golden-haired girl who was ‘possibly’ his actual niece.

Possessing ‘burning eye spirit wine’ was not technically a crime... but using it on someone 'unwillingly' certainly was, and the ‘interest’ taken by higher-ranked cultivators in those possessing such substances tended to be fairly... punitive.

“That will keep him down for a few hours at least,” Misty Camellia sneered, though in his eyes, her statement was probably a bit conservative.

If the spiders used in the brewing had come from Yin Eclipse, and the entire process had taken place within the forbidden zone, the traces of innate suppression trapped within the wine would make a mockery of the imbiber’s soul defences. A ‘wine’ like Caoxi had just used could lay out a peak immortal cultivator if they were incautious and even a mild case of such poisoning could lay someone out for weeks.

Indeed, focusing on Zhong once again, he found that the qi from the wine had effortlessly penetrated his defences, as if they were not even there, carrying Blue Jasmine’s mantra infused attack with it. Zhong’s nascent soul was now mired in a nightmarish mire of mental misery, that only a someone with her kind of life experiences could conjure.

“Fates yes,” Danshu muttered, shaking his head.

“Oddly fitting as well,” he remarked, recalling that Han Shu had been bitten by one. “Han Shu got bitten by one on a mission at the end of last month. It laid him out in bed for a week.”

“…”

“Physical cultivators are something else,” Danshu murmured.

“Fate-thrashed right we are,” Misty Camellia snickered, giving Zhong a vicious jab in the side.

“Did he have anything?” he asked Guanbo, jerking his head towards the other cultivator.

Guanbo glared at him, but shook his head, tossing a few talisman coins, a half-eaten roll in rice paper and a small dagger onto the table beside what Danshu had found.

“So, just ‘workmen', Blue Jasmine sighed, staring at the two bodies.

Picking up the dagger, he turned it over in his hands, but it was just cheap, qi-infused iron, like you could buy in any number of shops. The talisman coins were as well, and the paper talismans intended to help with tasks like anchoring wooden beams in place or moving large blocks of stone were unmarked.

That was indeed the overwhelming impression, except for the bit where Zhong had clearly used a standard martial technique taught to the guards...

Frowning, he went over to the one Danshu had searched and knelt down by his head, projecting a thread of soul sense into the unconscious workman—

Before he could send a thread of soul sense into the man, however, three out of breath youths and a young girl dressed similarly to Caoxi appeared in the doorway.

“Caoxi!” the girl gasped, hurrying over to the golden-haired girl.

“What happened here, Master Guanbo?” a dark-haired youth with a moustache, wearing robes similar to Zhong’s, asked, looking around with a frown.

“What do you think happened, Dong Fang?” Guanbo spat, giving the moustache’d youth a sour look.

“What happened to Zhong?” the second youth, who had reddish-brown hair tied in a loose knot asked, with wide eyes.

“There was a fight?” the third added dully. “And… are those the workmen?”

He stared Dong Fang, wondering why his intuition was…

“Xua, go get Lotus Blossom,” Guanbo commanded the reddish-haired youth “Seun, you—”

A dozen ghostly blades scythed through the walls of the room as if they were not there, aiming for him, Guanbo and the women. Grimacing, he snatched a stone-ware jar off the floor next to him and used it to block one of the blades, finding to his relief that it was a random relic from Yin Eclipse—

“What are—!” the girl next to Caoxi screamed as ‘Xua’ punched her in the stomach, sending her sprawling into Caoxi.

“Get him—!” Dong Fang snapped, pointing towards Zhong as Xua turned towards Misty Jasmine, who had managed to evade two of the blades. “Help the Guards retreat!”

“…” Seun stared at him, Danshu and Kun Yu who had also barely avoided the blades, and then moved with the speed of a viper to arrive in front of Kun Yu. “Sorry, young master Kun,” Seun murmured with a malicious grin, “I guess it’s just—”

Misty Camellia grabbed Seun by the arm and he staggered, then spun, trying to hit her with a backhand strike. She dodged, then gasped as the floor abruptly became the wall—

“Fate-thrashed alignment disruption talisman!” Danshu’s curse mirrored his own as he went sprawling, fighting desperately against the disorientating distortion of the room around them. Even with the punishing military training the guards endured, the effects of the subverted formation were nothing short of obnoxious.

Someone screamed, a man’s voice, but he had no opportunity to worry about it as a shadow blade appeared, almost in his face, forcing him to dodge as best he could—

He realised, too late, that there had been no ‘intent’ to target him in the blade. Turning, he saw it slam into the head of the unconscious ‘workman’ and fragment in a puff of cheap enchanted metal and gore.

“I hope your mother—” Guanbo’s curse was cut off by a second scream, Guanbo’s in fact.

Pushing himself up, he was immediately forced to dodge another of the blades—

The kick took him in the side, entirely unawares.

The alignment disruption formation seemed to shift, melding with the boot in his ribs, turning what should have been a mildly painful blow into something akin to being hit with a sledgehammer.

“—Tcch, tough bastard ain’t you?” his attacker chuckled as he rolled as best he could with it, crashing into a ruined couch hard enough to spit blood.

“Think you is a big man, eh?” his attacker sneered, his other foot pressing down on his arm, pinning it painfully over a couch leg and preventing him from countering “Sergeant eh? Not all that, just a frog in a backwater well…”

“Just kill him,” someone else remarked, sounding amused.

Twisting his head, he managed to see the speaker was ‘Xua’, who had hauled Blue Jasmine up by her hair.

“Aiii... we have to ‘help’ the guards, remember?” Dong Fang, who was standing over the crumpled Guanbo, noted, a bloody, guard-issued blade in his hand resting against Guanbo’s neck.

Trying to look around again, he found Misty Camellia was lying in the ruins of the table… and there was no sign of Zhong, or ‘Seun’ for that matter, anywhere.

“I guess we can take the girls though?” Xua remarked absently, his eyes lingering on her exposed body before travelling to Misty Camellia, who was sprawled on the floor, groaning in pain.

“Mantra users are a headache though…” the unknown speaker muttered, moving into view, dragging Caoxi and the other girl by the hair.

“True,” the one pinning him down remarked, kneeling down beside him and starting to pat down his robe.

“Both of them are desirable,” Dong Fang replied, after a moment’s thought. “That said…” his eyes travelled to the jar of ‘burning spider eye wine’ that had rather miraculously escaped the devastation. “There is no harm in making a bit of a statement…”

“Ah, that can work,” Xua chuckled, shoving Blue Jasmine down in the ruins of the table and tearing off the rest of her ruined gown. “Come hold her down...”

The cultivator in the dark blue robe who had grasped Caoxi, shoved her down beside Misty Camellia and walked over to Blue Jasmine, putting his hands on her shoulders.

“I hope you enjoy this,” Xua chuckled, lifting up the jar, “Because—”

The jar of burning eye wine exploded in Xua’s hands, dousing him in its contents and sending him thrashing to the floor. The core within hung in the air for a brief moment, shining very ominously, then flew into his mouth—

{Burning Eye Spider Pit}

Xua’s body spasmed and a wave of hundreds of small black spiders flowed out of his orifices, racing over the floor in every direction—

The cultivator holding down Blue Jasmine tried to dodge, only to find he was now being grasped by Misty Camellia and Blue Jasmine.

“Bitccc—!” his snarled exclamation ended abruptly as he spasmed and collapsed on top of Blue Jasmine, at which point he was promptly swarmed by the spiders. “I’m going to throw you in a pit with a mad monkey!” Dong Fang cursed, retreating backwards in a blur, barely out-pacing the swarm, swatting several of the shadowy spiders off his leg as he went.

Taking advantage of the confusion, as the swarm spread in every direction, he grabbed the ornate stone-ware platter that the food had been on and smashed it into his attacker's leg.

“You—!” the youth staggered, grunting in pain and he felt a sharp discomfort in his shoulder, then his assailant collapsed on top of him, gasping in agony as the spiders overtook them both.

Pushing the cultivator off of him, finding to his relief that the spiders ignored him entirely, snatched up the weapon that youth restraining him had had, and hurled it after Dong Fang—

He barely avoided the scything blade that appeared right in his face, forcing him to fall, sprawling on the ground.

“Motherless dog-spawn!” Blue Jasmine cursed, pushing the dark-blue-robed cultivator aside and hurling the remains of the wine jar out the door, presumably trying to hit the fleeing Dong Fang as well.

“You okay?” Misty Camellia asked Caoxi, staggering over to the groaning girl, and pulling her up.

“Y-y-yeah… my head hurds,” Caoxi moaned.

“At least we are… alive,” Guanbo groaned, rolling over. “My fate-thrashed arm… not since I was in the army…”

“Well, they all got marked by the spider pit,” Caoxi mumbled, sitting up and rubbing her temples. “It didn’t splash you, did it?”

“Eh, this much is nothing,” Blue Jasmine muttered, wiping her face, then her hands and bosom on a torn cushion reminding him that physical cultivators’ resistance to such things was frankly depressing.

Pushing himself up, he found Danshu and Yu were thankfully both alive, if pale and a bit bloodied—

“—DEAR!”

The woman who Guanbo had been calling ‘Lotus Blossom’ came rushing into the room and dropped to her knees beside Guanbo. After her came two workmen, carrying clubs, and the young woman who had been playing the guqin in the common room.

“What happened ‘ere?” the older of the workman, who he had seen fixing the wall earlier, asked, looking around grimly, his eyes lingering on him, Danshu and Kun Yu, before focusing on Guanbo.

“—we saw Zhong being carried out by Seun and Dong Fang…” the younger workman added. “Yeah, they said assassins sent by the Han clan attacked…” the young woman who had been playing the guqin added, looking around with wide eyes. When she spotted the youth beside him, her face paled. “Even Xua got killed?”

“GET AFTER THEM YOU MORONS!” Guanbo snarled at the group in general.

“…”

“Easy, dear…” Lotus Blossom murmured, pushing Guanbo down as he tried to rise, veins bulging on his neck. “Your arm, you must…” she trailed off, staring at the ring on her finger, then around the room, her eyes narrowing.

“They subverted the formation,” Blue Jasmine supplied, sitting down on an incongruously unbroken chair and putting her head in her hands.

“It’s Zhong and that worthless bunch who are responsible for this!” Guanbo gasped, looking paler now, his previous outburst having seriously drained him it seemed. “Get after them and…”

“Don’t be stupid,” Lotus Blossom said coolly, putting a hand to Guanbo’s forehead. “Forget Zhong and Dong Fang for now. Your injury needs treated first.”

“I got them all with the special formation anyway,” Caoxi added, wiping some blood from her nose. “Maybe even Dong Fang as well.”

“Hmm… that will make things a bit easier,” Lotus Blossom muttered, checking Guanbo’s arm, which he now realised had been severed, likely by Dong Fang.

“Are you missing two of your workers?” he asked the older workman, gesturing towards the now headless body on the floor near where he had been.

“Aye, two went with Zhong earlier to help with…” the old man trailed off, narrowing his eyes as he stared at the corpse “Fate’s preserve me… those two useless lunks were part of this?”

Danshu, who had pulled himself up now, nodded grimly.

“I ain’t in on this!” the old man said quickly, noticing Danshu’s gloomy look. “I swear by the Three Pure Ones! Took em on recently, coz there’s been an uptick in business what with all the visiting folks for that Ha bigshot swanning about town…”

Outside, two more distant explosions echoed.

“What is going on out there?” he asked, rubbing his shoulder, which hurt, and finding he had been stabbed by one of the throwing daggers after all.

“Big problem in the Seng District, looks like,” the older workman muttered, quite happy to change the topic of conversation he thought, despite his protestations of innocence.

“The bridge at Wusheng Lake is apparently closed,” the younger added.

“Aye,” the older workman agreed. “Several of my fellows, who are living o’er there, were turned back earlier… big guard presence and even Ha clan militia and civil auxiliaries…”

“Civil Auxiliaries?” Danshu muttered, shaking his head.

“Well, that’s the armour they wore, apparently, but they were all young fellows. Being quite rough as well, if you catch my drift.”

“…”

“Jifang, do you want to get a few of your men and start clearing this up?” Lotus Blossom said, turning to the older workman. “I’ll pay extra of course.”

“No need, I’ll just get ‘em to do it,” Jifang replied, giving her a polite salute, then turning to the other workman. “Go get a few of the others, I’ll stay here and keep an eye out.”

“Yes boss,” the other workman muttered, hurrying off.

“What do we do about them?” Kun Yu asked, gingerly poking the slumped form of the blue-robed cultivator Misty Camellia had prevented from fleeing..

Wordlessly, he pulled off his over-robe and passed it to Blue Jasmine so she could retain some modesty, then took a better look at his assailant. The cultivator was dressed in a similar robe to Zhong, with nondescript features and dark hair.

“Is he one of your employees?” he asked Guanbo.

“I think he was a friend of Zhong’s,” Caoxi said after a moment. “He came by when Zhong was on the kitchen shift and they chatted and played cards. I only ever heard him go by the name of ‘Big Yong’.”

“…”

“What about him?” he pointed the cultivator in the scruffy blue robe next to Kun Yu.

“He came in a short while ago, ordered a drink…” the girl who had been playing the guqin replied. “I think he came by occasionally, but I wouldn’t call him a regular… Are they dead?”

“They may well wish they were,” Guanbo spat, “They better live long enough for me to cut the price of that jar of wine out of their bodies.”

Kneeling down by the one who had attacked him, he sent a careful thread of soul sense into the cultivator’s mind and winced as all he got was a nightmarish world of devouring spiders. Somewhat surprisingly, the cultivator himself was only Nascent Soul and not that much older than Zhong had been.

“Fate-thrashed formation,” he muttered, shaking his head as he recalled how the boy had basically kicked him about like a child’s toy.

“Yeah, can we do something about that?” Danshu interjected, putting a hand on a chair to steady himself. “We are just sitting ducks like this.”

“It is... unpleasant, aye,” Jifang agreed, from where he had taken up post near the door.

“…”

Lotus Blossom pulled out a jade from her bosom and examined it, then shook her head in disgust. “All the talismans have been invalidated. We will need to dig up the core to deactivate it…”

“Should be possible,” Jifan remarked, although he sounded understandably hesitant, likely because it had defences intended to stop that, for all the good they seemed to have done.

“How did Zhong even manage this?” Caoxi complained.

“He had enough treasures on him to be worthy of note,” he sighed, sitting back and staring out into the courtyard.

“Oh?” Lotus Blossom frowned.

“A fairly rudimentary, if effective, talisman to obfuscate basic mind-reading and soul-scrying. A jade charm to make his qi less ‘memorable’, a talisman to augment his soul strength, I think… and the last one was probably related to the formation here,” he elaborated. “No weapons, oddly enough, but those might have been stored in his ring.”

“That’s…” Misty Camellia counted off on her fingers and then sighed, wistfully.

“A lot of spirit jades, yes,” he agreed.

It was enough that he had to wonder if Zhong was actually a member of some underground sect. There were a few, though mostly they focused on smuggling herbs, not this kind of thing.

“How long had Zhong and Dong Fang worked here?” he asked Guanbo.

“Zhong has for about two years, Dong Fang eight months,” Lotus Blossom replied, not looking up from tending to Guanbo’s arm. “As far as we were aware, both were at Qi Refinement. They lived in the western district… didn’t have any serious vices.”

“Both unremarkable,” he nodded, expecting as much.

“What are you thinking?” Danshu asked.

“I dunno,” he muttered.

He had a few suspicions, starting with the framing of the Han clan and this concerted attempt to mire it in several layers of scandal. That would help both the Deng clan and the Ha clan, depending on how you viewed it. It would be easy to blame either of those two… or the Xuafan Association for that matter, if Chen Bei and Shu Bao had actually cheated them, or Guanbo had offended them in some way.

The problem, though, was what the cultivators had said, in that relatively unguarded moment when they had had the upper hand. ‘Help the guards’, ‘Take the girls’, ‘Mantra users are difficult’…

“Not bad, old man…” he murmured under his breath.

“What was that?” Danshu asked.

“Nothing... Just something Zhong said when I used my soul intent to examine him,” he frowned.

It was the tone Zhong had said it with. The condescension and the superiority practically dripping off it. That, and Zhong's age.

He had looked about seventeen, but his actual age was twenty-one. To have a nearly ‘adult’ looking Nascent Soul at that age was a statement of talent and resources, even more so than those artefacts of his in fact. Even the big clans in the region struggled to support more than a few such juniors in a ‘mortal’ generation of ten to fifteen years.

The longer he stared at the evidence, the more plausible the Deng clan seemed to become, especially in this neighbourhood… except that didn’t quite feel right, and he could not put his finger on why.

“Well, the first task is probably to get the core out somehow and take that to Grandmaster Liwen, then,” Lotus Blossom declared. “Don’t you agree, dear?”

“Yeah…” Guanbo scowled. “And he can give me answers on how a formation I paid twenty spirit jades for got subverted by a teenage son of a dog.”

“That should tell us about that Zhong’s means at least,” Kun Yu agreed “Not to mention, maybe a lead on who was responsible…”

“As you say, Young Master Kun,” Lotus Blossom agreed, though neither she nor Guanbo met his eyes.

“We can’t stay here, anyway,” he suggested at last. “Is there another room that is not right at the epicentre of this mess we can move to?”

“Yes,” Lotus Blossom nodded, helping Guanbo up. “My dearest needs a healer a well.”

They headed out into the courtyard, walking slowly so as not to fall afoul of the still lingering effects of the active formation, to find the workmen coming the other way. He watched as Lotus Blossom ordered a few to tidy the room, while Jifan told his subordinate to take two others and extract the formation core.

“What are we going to do about them?” Danshu asked him quietly, nodding to the sealed cultivators as two workmen carried them out of the room and laid them down in the courtyard.

He considered them for a moment, then pulled out his communication talisman… and found it too was ineffective within the range of the formation.

“Guanbo certainly didn’t skimp…” he sighed.

“Only in his employment practices,” Danshu muttered, his comment getting an amused snort from both Misty Camellia and Blue Jasmine, who were standing nearby, ignoring the sideways looks they got from the workmen. 'Singing Lily’, the girl who had been playing the guqin, had left earlier to bring them some new clothes.

“Any other casualties?” he asked the girl as she came back.

“A few ran, it seems,” she said, “but outside the attack on the Master Guanbo’s quarters, there doesn’t seem to…”

She trailed off as the rain around them shivered faintly. In the distance, he saw a plume of purple fire mushroom up into the sky… followed by a dozen other lesser explosions which rained down in the distance before the haze of the rain returned.

“…”

“Did someone just blow up an alchemist’s store?” Misty Camellia muttered. “That should be near Starlight Su Street?”

“The Starlight Alchemy Pavilion?” Blue Jasmine mused. “I know that old fellow is a bit shady in the kind of habits he keeps, but…”

“Do you want me to go out into the street and see if I can’t get out of range of this?” Danshu asked quietly. “See if I can call in and find out what’s up?”

“…”

“Okay,” he confirmed.

“If you go through the courtyard at the back, it will take you into the cargo courtyard,” Blue Jasmine added. " Probably faster than going out front at this point."

Danshu nodded and headed off in the direction she pointed, leaving them to watch the workmen continue clearing up the rubble, serenaded by the sound of rain pattering off the paving.