~ Part 2 ~ ~ Ha Kai – Watching from afar ~

“Motherfucking scammer!”

“…”

Sitting on the edge of one of the stone tables, Ha Kai watched his father pace back and forth in front of the scrying rift, cursing under his breath.

“Useless, lowdown son of a Dun whore!”

“Um…”

“Stay stable for fuck’s sakes.”

As expected, the rift did not, continuing to ripple and distort amid swirling clouds which occasionally transformed into nebula-like spatial distortions.

“Useless… I should hang those upstart Dun monkey-sons by their shrivelled...”

“Is it okay for him to curse like this?” Lan Huang asked, a little uneasily as his father continued to snarl obscenities.

Ha Leng, sipping his wine, had the slightly glassy look of someone who understood he was hearing something he should not, but didn’t know quite how to rationalize it.

“It’s fine,” he replied with a sigh, as much for Leng as for Huang.

Lan Huang didn’t look entirely convinced, he had to admit, which was fair. He was still somewhat lacking when it came to his understanding of this place and exactly how hard it was to find. Not to mention the actual depths of his father’s accumulation. The best the old ancestors of the Dun Clan could probably achieve was to egg on the inevitable tribulation in the rather futile hope that it incinerated the old man. It was good that they had hopes and dreams though, he supposed.

“Do you want a hand with it, father?” he asked anyway, if only to stop the old man from repeating his insults.

“Gah!” Ha Tai Wen shook his head in disgust, then waved a hand, grasping a jar of wine out of nowhere and drinking directly from it.

“Is the problem that it won’t resolve onto what you gained from Ha Leng?” Lan Huang asked, considering the constellation-like scrying rift with interest.

“No… that…” his father waved absently at the rift and it snapped back into focus, showing the sprawling ruins on the plateau, wreathed in cloud. “That side is fine. It's just that this is… yesterday morning. Not today.”

“Ah,” he sighed, understanding the problem now.

“Er… yesterday?” Ha Leng asked, his voice shaking.

“Yes, we are running into a problem that… is not often discussed when scrying at distance from… where we are,” he explained. “Which is to say… distance and its relation to the moment you are looking at are, um…”

“Relative?” his father sneered.

“Yes, relative,” he agreed.

“I don’t follow,” Ha Leng muttered. “How can distance affect when we are seeing something?”

“…”

“Ah, never mind,” his father sighed, realising that line of conversation would do Ha Leng about as much good as a hole in his dantian.

“Sorry,” Ha Leng muttered.

“Can’t you just roll it forward?” Lan Huang asked, “If we know it’s… erm, yesterday, Ancestor Wen?”

“Sadly it’s not that easy,” he remarked. “Can you re-associate the fundamental alignment of the scrying array?”

“You think this old man was born yesterday?” his father muttered, testily. “Already tried that. Some other Dun-cursed malignancy also…” his father trailed off and stared at the rift with a gloomy expression.

“…”

“Uggh… Cranea?” his father called out, to the world at large.

“Yes, Lord Wen?”

Ha Leng yelped as a beautiful young woman with waist-length, curly dark-brown hair slid into focus, perched on the marble wall of the raised bed that held the nearest of the cherry trees.

She had a girlish charm and was currently dressed in a western style robe from the Shu continent, embroidered with swirling patterns of cherry blossoms and stars. The only obvious ornamentation she wore was a sprig of multi-coloured cherry blossom stuck in her loosely plaited hair.

“I did not realise there were… others here,” Lan Huang remarked, covering his own surprise well.

“Ah…” for a brief moment, he was unsure how, exactly, to introduce her.

The ‘her’ standing before them was certainly not her real body.

“I am… a friend of Lord Wen’s wife,” Cranea said blandly, hopping off the wall and walking over to pour herself some wine. “As to this body… it is a companion to the one you… lost.”

“Oh…” Lan Huang stood and saluted her politely, managing to hide his awkwardness. “My apologies Lady Cranea, I meant no disrespect.”

“Not at all,” she said with an amused smile. “I gave no introduction, after all.”

“L-Lady Cranea,” Ha Leng stammered, also saluting, as formally as his nerves would seemingly allow.

For being as far out of his depth as he was, the boy was actually coping quite well. Some of that would be shock, and the suggestions given to keep his cultivation stable, but as the saying went, you could only lead horses to water.

“Aw… how cute,” she giggled, patting Ha Leng on the head, like he was a small child.

Ha Leng for his part, actually blushed.

The boy’s awkward reaction was actually rather funny, he felt. Thankfully, Cranea had made no allusions to her actual ‘identity’ – an awakened spirit herb. The puppet body, in this case was almost an insurance policy for her, because it hid her nature and her cultivation, a necessity anywhere outside of this place. The Ha clan, the Ha family in fact, had a few but even they kept a low profile and didn’t venture widely. As the old saying went – ‘the only thing more pitiable than a woman with a good fortune core is a spirit herb that yearns to live free’.

In Cranea’s case, that last bit was probably moot, because she had already been a Dao Ascendant spirit herb when he was barely Leng’s age, and a formidable one by the measure of that era. He had no idea what her cultivation was now, beyond being fairly sure it was above his own, though she was not Venerate at least.

Before Ha Leng or Lan Huang could say anything further though, a flash of red-golden lightning sizzled across the periphery of the scrying rift. The peal of thunder accompanying it shook the visualisation to the point where the rain-drenched ridgeline it was currently showing began to revert to nebula-like clouds, cast in strange shadows.

“Huh…” his father stared at the after-images of the sizzling golden lightning, frowning.

“What’s wrong?” Lan Huang asked.

“Familiar,” his father muttered, stroking his beard. “That lightning…”

“—Anyway, how can I help?” Cranea asked his father, losing interest in Ha Leng. “Beyond joining you in mocking that thrice-cursed scammer and purveyor of fake goods?”

“Can you go see if there is a decent map of Yin Eclipse in the library?” his father asked her.

“Why… didn’t you start with that?” he asked dully, resisting the urge to put a hand to his face.

“…”

His father pointedly ignored him and turned back to the rift.

“…”

There was a slightly awkward moment as Cranea didn’t leave.

“Yes?” his father asked, glancing back at her.

“If it’s just where you are, I don’t need a map for that,” Cranea replied with a slight smirk. “The boy here landed in Phoibe’s grove and they ran past the ruins of old Caer Abarath, where the shrine of the Kybilae once sat. The ridge you are trying to scry holds the ‘Seat of the Moon’ and the altar of the Five-Fold Hegemony.”

“Oh. Maha—”

“Mahavaran…” his father groaned, beating him to it.

“Mahavaran?” Lan Huang repeated, not following.

“It’s an old ruin, from the Seng Dynasty,” he replied.

“That’s…” Lan Huang looked at him dully.

“Old?” he supplied, somewhat amused by Lan Huang’s reaction.

That was a bit of an understatement really. Even to the first Dun Dynasty, never mind the Shu-Shan or the Early Yuan, it was a mythological place. Nowadays it was probably only remembered by a few old people like him and his father – and in the ancestral tales of groups like the Yin People.

“Yeah…” Lan Huang nodded.

“Seng Dynasty?” Ha Leng asked, his curiosity overcoming his nerves.

“From when the Meng clan still controlled the Four Azures,” he replied, giving the boy an encouraging smile.

“Uhuh,” his father nodded wryly. “Before the mountain fell, Mahavaran was a seat of learning.”

“Before…” Ha Leng stared at his hands, moving his fingers as he tried to count, then just gave up, looking a little unnerved.

“It was founded there...” his father continued—

“—Because it was particularly auspicious,” he interjected quickly, before his father absently explained a bit of information that would get poor Ha Leng and probably even Lan Huang in some bother outside this place.

It had been founded there to take advantage of a nexus in the primordial feng shui of Eastern Azure – it was a Gateway of the ‘Eastern Mansion of the Eye of Worldly Fortune’, in fact. Not a particular secret in its own right, but dangerous knowledge, more so because the Dun clan had expended a lot of effort to subvert the Eastern Mansions and refocus them on the Jade Gate.

“Ah, yes, of course,” his father nodded.

“Yes, that Mahavaran,” Cranea confirmed.

“Reducing the margin of error to a ‘day’ is not bad in that context,” he noted drily.

“Indeed, it is only what should be expected of you,” Cranea added with a knowing smirk.

His father gave Cranea a rather judgemental, sideways look, which the woman affected to ignore.

“In any case, that’s a rather… unfortunate coincidence,” he pointed out, changing the topic quickly.

“It is, rather,” his father agreed, folding his arms. “I will still need an old map though…”

“Why? Just focus on the lightning,” Cranea suggested innocently, swirling a cup of wine she had claimed, as the after-image of another reddish-golden bolt flickered across the clouds before them.

“…”

His father glared at her then turned back to the image and made a series of strange symbols with his hands.

“Focus on the lightning she says,” his father muttered under his breath. “Like it’s that easy, she says…”

The viewing rift distorted, the constellations simultaneously seeming to stand still in their orbit and somehow flow sideways—

After a few moments, the river of stars being created by the dancing fish began to scatter outwards, turning the disk-like rift into something approaching a spherical projection.

The full shift took about a minute to complete and by the time it was finished his father was visibly pale. When it was concluded, they were standing in the middle of a projected field about ten metres wide.

“Well, this looks more promising,” he observed, as their surroundings stabilized and became a flat, rock outcropping on the edge of a ridge-line, overlooking smouldering, rain-drenched forest.

“What did this…” Ha Leng gawked, taking in the devastation below them.

“Mmm…” his father, who had been helping himself to some wine to recover, narrowed his eyes, looking this way and that.

“Heaven-blaze pine by the looks of it,” Lan Huang replied, before he could. “This is why you don’t drop them.”

“Riiiight…” Ha Leng took a deep gulp of his wine, holding the cup in two hands to try and hide how they were shaking.

“He was harvesting them earlier,” Lan Huang murmured so only he could hear. “I don’t think it sank in at the time just how combustible they are.”

“Ah,” he nodded, hiding a wry smile.

Tracing the swathes of fire, he could make out at least two separate origin points as well, heading in this direction, which was somewhat promising.

“It seems at least one of the hunters, Lin Ling maybe…” Lan Huang trailed off as the scenery around them shifted abruptly, resolving itself into a view of a different ridgeline.

“…”

Taking in their new surroundings even he had no words, because this one was properly demolished for a hundred metres in every direction. A significant portion of the ridge-top had simply been swept off into the forest below. Almost immediately to the right of where they had ‘landed’, someone had struck the ridge hard enough to form a twenty-metre-deep fissure that stretched halfway across it, its sides as smooth and glassy as the obliterated ridgetop all around them.

What vegetation remained was still mostly on fire, or smashed beyond all recognition, while, further out over the next valley, he could make out multiple plumes of smoke through the rain.

“Welp, whoever did this ran face-first into trouble,” Cranea observed, scuffing the freshly scoured, slightly glassy rock surface with her slippered foot.

“W-what did this?” Ha Leng, once again the voice of knowledge sought, managed to ask, looking around with wide eyes.

“Monkeys,” he replied, pointing to several paw-prints melted into a nearby rock surface that looked like it had been hit by lightning… several times.

“Monkeys?” Ha Leng repeated, looking around in shock. “Like the one that was making a nuisance of itself?”

“Yeah, no…” Lan Huang shook his head.

He raised an eyebrow at Lan Huang. No mention of monkeys with regards to the Misty Jasmine Inn had been brought up that he recalled.

“Familiar,” his father, who was now staring into the chasm, muttered under his breath. “And these Law traces? But there is no way…”

Another bolt of red-gold lightning flashed in the distance, off to the south-west, accompanied by a dull rumble. Out in the forest, flames flared up in a few places. A moment later, a shockwave containing traces of yang, life and spatial qi washed over them.

“Hmmm…” his father turned to stare out in the direction of the lightning bolt and the fires.

Their surroundings shifted once again and they now stood in a smouldering forest ‘clearing’. Ahead of them, the forest funnelled into a large gorge where the valley split, while to their right a large waterfall tumbled down into what might once have been an idyllic lake, but which was now a smoking, yang-polluted quagmire.

The clearing itself was dominated by four stelae carved with twirling flowers, half-consumed by the jungle.

“More stalkers,” Lan Huang observed grimly, pointing to a charred, deformed mess of chitin, half-infused into a still cooling rock that held traces of lightning laws.

“This is absolutely ‘them’, isn’t it?” he muttered, glancing at his father.

There was only one group of monkeys he could think of which was capable of this degree of unbridled devastation, used lightning and earth laws and could rip whole parts of ridge-lines apart.

“Them?” Lan Huang asked, raising an eyebrow.

“The ‘Iron Hide’ monkey tribe,” he supplied. “So called because they favour decorating themselves with red-ochre war paint…”

“It does look like it,” the old man agreed. “Lightning, earth and spatial laws… and what also appears to be a centipede?”

Absently, his father pointed to the ruined form of a large centipede that lay, half buried in a tangle of trees, off to their left.

*Kussssssaaaaaaaaaaak*

“Aiiiieee!”

Ha Leng flinched as a small tide of tetrids scrambled out of the ruined tree-line, behind them—

The tetrids died as the ground around them twisted and distorted – thousands of hitherto hidden webs sundering their bodies apart. Those that survived were rapidly grasped by limbs from the ground as several large, mud-covered spiders unearthed themselves—

A tsunami of noxious acid, imbued with corrosion laws and a remarkable soul sense, exploded out of the devastation to their left. In the midst of it, a masked youth in a green robe appeared, like a ghost, crouching on a smouldering Kobbin tree, surveying the clearing.

The ‘battle’ lasted about five seconds, the tunnelling spiders no match for the sheer volume of the acid and its toxicity. Even the famously resistant rocks of the valley wall smoked under sustained exposure.

“W-what…” Ha Leng gawked, staring around.

“A tetrid that has a soul-manifestation. A male one as well… that’s not good,” Lan Huang observed grimly as another three large, adult tetrids melted out of the devastation and started to tear at the spider corpses. “Must have been what was following us.”

“Are the tetrids… fighting the spiders?” Ha Leng asked at last.

“Yes,” he confirmed. “The species hate each other and cannot co-exist.”

“Those are cave spiders though,” Lan Huang added.

“They are…” he agreed, staring at the corpses.

Tunnel spiders of that size didn’t really live close to the surface. They had to have come up from the larger underworld caverns below. The problem there, though, was how ambush predators from that hellish darkness came to be fighting tetrids on the surface.

“Maybe the pursuit disturbed a nest?” Lan Huang mused. “The devastation from those heaven blaze pines might do it, if some of them fell into a sinkhole. Not to mention, Kun Juni’s knowledge of the hidden dangers up here was impressive.”

“They also used a Dao Sovereign grade Skitterleap talisman to escape,” his father added absently, scanning their surroundings.

“They had a…” Lan Huang started to speak, but a further red-gold bolt split the surging rain clouds above them, drowning out all other sound for a few moments.

The feeding tetrids all paused and looked up at it, then went back to their meal. The ‘manifestation’ stared into the gorge for a moment, then looked back out at the forest.

“Umm…” Ha Leng tugged his arm, urgently. “Pagoda Lord…”

“What?” he turned, and flinched at the sight of a flawlessly beautiful ‘woman’ sitting on a smoking rock. She ‘looked’ like a cultivator, with lustrous black hair and pale skin, dressed in a revealing silk robe, patterned with ever-repeating black eyes, but she was anything but.

“Is… she also a tetrid stalker?” Ha Leng asked.

The woman didn’t quite turn to look at Ha Leng, but her attention did flicker to the area where they were ‘standing’.

“…”

The spider queen stared at the spot where they were with narrowed eyes, but nothing of her ‘intent’ reached them, and after a moment she moved on to the tetrid stalkers, who were all focused on her now as well.

The manifestation had tilted its head to one side—

Both the woman and the tetrid stalker met in the middle of the clearing, and as he expected, the stalker collapsed at the first blow. Its soul manifestation was shattered with a single palm from the ‘woman’. The adult tetrids in the clearing tried to retreat, but found themselves bound by web-like shadows… and died in mere moments, slain by a terrifying mix of dark, soul and corrosion laws.

“That’s… Yushuki!?” Lan Huang hissed, his face pale, putting a name to a moderately infamous ‘threat’ of recent years.

“She has a… name?” Ha Leng asked, looking nervously at the woman.

“Uhuh,” he nodded. “She was moderately infamous for butchering a bunch of elders from the Moon Tomb Cult a few millennia before Blue Water City was founded. She also took part in some of the wars over control of the Tang Straights and supported some local influences…”

“S-supported?” Ha Leng repeated.

“Traded things that can only be found in the depths for stuff which is hard to come by but beneficial,” Lan Huang added, grimly.

“…”

“Like, alchemy pills and such?” Ha Leng asked, with an innocence that was almost depressing.

“—yes, though mostly what they were trading for was furnaces,” Lan Huang explained, distaste dripping from his every word. “Cultivators with rare spirit roots and physiques that could be used to promote their strength.”

“Oh…” Ha Leng stared at the spider-woman and shuddered.

“It was only in the Huang-Mo wars, when the Huang clan took exception to them having set their eyes on their clay-pot scions, that they had to retreat back into the mountains,” he continued.

Nowadays, as far as he knew, she slumbered, promoting her cultivation, and with the suppression preventing any kind of soul-presence, it was rare to encounter her unless you were insane enough to seek her out in those dark, hellish depths.

“Now she is one of the powers that controls the ‘web pits’ in the East Fury Rift…”

That she was out here, killing tetrids… was testament to why it was suicidal to raise the suppression carelessly. If she also, somehow, learned about the trial? Thousands of juniors would probably die, most of them in nightmarishly unpleasant ways.

Ha Leng started to speak again, then stopped.

Thirty-three tetrid stalkers emerged around the edges of the clearing, forming an equally spaced crescent shape. All of them were swaying… in concert, their forelegs moving in decidedly inauspicious—

Half the clearing vanished in a crack of collapsing space and chaotic soul intent and Yushuki’s ‘form’ dissipated with it.

“…”

“—Yes, they can use formations,” Lan Huang supplied, while Ha Leng just opened and shut his mouth, trying to find words. “Tetrid stalkers may be vile, but they are not stupid.”

“Oh…” Ha Leng stared at the spot where Yushuki had been standing, then looked around at the tetrids as they continued their unnerving, circular dance.

“Did… that kill her?” he asked at last.

“Nope,” Lan Huang replied, sourly watching the horde of hundreds, if not thousands, of lesser tetrids stream past them, into the gorge, under the cover of the freshly wrought devastation. “That wasn’t even her Da— Nascent Soul, just a projected manifestation of law-infused qi with a tiny shard of consciousness attached.”

“…”

Ha Leng looked like he wanted to ask more, but at that moment a tetrid stalker almost ran right through him, making him jump to the side and collide with the barely visible bench.

“It is a bit vivid,” Lan Huang agreed with a half-smile, offering the youth a hand as he hopped in a circle, trying not to swear.

Cranea just shook her head in amusement, then, once the now rather red-faced Ha Leng had recovered himself somewhat, passed him a fresh cup of the sweet wine—

The ground and trees all around them shook slightly. The traces of yang and fire qi suffusing the rain and helping the forest burn intensified subtly.

“That’s probably not good,” his father muttered.

“No, it’s not,” he agreed, watching water droplets fall through his hand.

The aftershocks were still rumbling, but the small horde had not so much as paused for them.

“The tetrids don’t appear especially concerned with it either,” Lan Huang observed as his father started to move them off into the valley.

“That’s… quite disorienting,” Ha Leng muttered under his breath as their surroundings slipped by.

“—It is,” he agreed, giving Ha Leng a supportive smile. “But you get used to it.”

“Ah… I… uh,” Ha Leng flinched again and seemed to recall the company he was in. “Sorry Ancestor Kai, I didn’t…”

“Nonsense,” he murmured, patting the boy on the shoulder reassuringly while Lan Huang chuckled and passed Ha Leng the plate of spirit-fruit.

He could probably have used qi or Intent to calm Ha Leng’s nerves, but that would actually do the boy no good at all. Wine and spirit food was a much better solution really.

“I rather fear that Xiaolian is going to hate me when I tell her about this,” he sighed, watching the tetrids stream past.

“Indeed, a force like this in the hands of bandits cannot be ignored,” Lan Huang agreed, his own amusement at Ha Leng’s reaction vanishing. “It has echoes of the chaotic times before the province was consolidated.”

They both watched the tetrid horde, taking the measure of its strength. Most of them were Golden Core, but there were enough Soul Foundation ones in there to be concerning. The vast majority were newly hatched as well, from what he could see. Less than a week old, and already well on the way to maturity.

“This is why soul arts are so disliked,” he declared at last.

“And not because they are a menace to any and all society in the hands of emotionally stunted teenagers who can toss fake suns at each other?” Lan Huang joked.

“Heh…” he couldn’t help but laugh regarding that point, as did Cranea, while his father just rolled his eyes as he focused on moving the scrying field.

“—Drink?”

Refocusing on their ‘actual’ surroundings for a moment, he found Cranea was offering him a cup of wine.

“It’s not something strange,” she muttered, when he didn’t immediately take it. “Though Little Brother Leng here does seem quite taken with the hengberry spirit wine.”

“Ah… uh!” Ha Leng, who had been in the process of pouring himself another cup of wine, flinched, nearly spilling it.

“It is there to be drunk,” he replied encouragingly, shooting Cranea a look that said ‘don’t bully the poor boy’.

She just rolled her eyes and pushed the cup towards him. Taking a sip he found, to his relief, that it was just spirit-fruit wine and not some disgusting, fizzy, cherry-flavoured miracle of inauspicious alchemy. His father brewed the weirdest things sometimes.

“Indeed, just help yourself, you are a guest here,” Cranea added to Ha Leng. “Consider this place as if it were your own home—”

His father coughed into his own wine at that comment, but didn’t say anything.

“Are you sure they ran into here?” Lan Huang asked after a further moment as they continued through the vegetation-choked valley, keeping pace with the tetrids.

“Yes,” his father nodded as another sheet of red-gold lightning flashed through the rain ahead of them. “The formation is tracking the signature of their skitterleap talisman.”

“It… can do that?” Lan Huang raised an eyebrow.

“Of course it can,” his father sniffed. “It’s only a—”

A centipede… or the remains of a centipede some twenty metres long spun through the air, through their projected window, into it and made Ha Leng duck instinctively.

It crashed into a tree behind them—

A furious howl rang out, while in the same moment a bolt of whitish-silver lightning bisected the scrying field, making his view of their surroundings waver chaotically. Off to the side, Ha Leng vomited his wine onto the ground as the ‘world’ around them and their view of the valley distorted, trees transforming into strange shadows, their leaves shining like forests of lanterns.

“Unpleasant,” Lan Huang muttered, shaking his head from side to side, trying not to look at the decidedly mind-melting spatial collapse “That resonated with…”

“—Your soul injury?” his father finished.

“Yep,” Lan Huang grimaced.

“Sowwwwy…” Ha Leng moaned, pushing himself up.

“Don’t be, that was… judgement lightning,” he muttered.

“I thought it looked familiar,” Lan Huang spat.

“Just keep looking at the floor,” Cranea added helpfully, patting Ha Leng on the head. “It will pass…”

After a few moments, everything did indeed settle back into something resembling ‘stability’, but when it did…

“Um… we are not where we were,” he observed, taking in their new surroundings.

They were no longer in the forested valley, but on the edge of a broad, placid lake. Much of the water surface was covered by large, oddly familiar, spiny water lilies, bordered by stands of half-submerged trees and swathes of swaying reeds.

“No… we are not,” his father agreed. “This is where the last—”

He was sure his father had been about to say ‘skitterleap’, but that was lost as the mist around them warped, unnervingly—

A second silvery-white lightning bolt crashed down from the sky, scattering the mist, revealing…

He stared blankly as a white-furred old monkey, crouched on a fallen tree, opened his mouth and inhaled, drawing the bolt into his body.

“…”

“That monkey…?” he managed to ask, not quite believing his eyes as he looked at the old monkey, whose coat was now sparking with partially refined judgement lightning.

“Uh-huh,” his father nodded mutely, clearly as surprised as he was.

He had expected one of the Iron Hide tribe, not… the infamous old simian now crouched before them, shaking sparks off his fur.

“That’s Ji Tantai!” Ha Leng interrupted, pointing accusingly at the youth wearing the red and purple robe of the Seven Star Pavilion. “That bastard Mangfan—” he pointed at the cultivator in a green travelling robe.

“—You is killing me, me has to ask, why you wasting time playing with little children in backwater land, instead of challenging old ghosts and scheming villains for big throne that very chilly on buttocks and promotes with a congenital itch on back of neck?” the white-furred old monkey asked, almost mockingly, eyeing the four cultivators with a toothy grin.

“That’s Din Ouyeng,” Ha Leng added, while the monkey spoke, pointing to the youth in a blue and white robe and broad-brimmed hat, who was currently carrying a broad-bladed spear. “Which must make the last one… Din Kong—?”

Ha Leng’s words were cut off by the lake around them turning to mist, filled with enough judgement lightning and unstable yang qi to almost break the transmission of the scene for a second time in as many minutes.

All around them, the dense carpet of giant lily pads haemorrhaged qi as yang-corrosion gnawed at them. Stands of trees exploded into flame and reed beds became afterimages of drifting ash.

In the same instant, the old monkey split into three identical clones, each of which shot off in a different direction—

“YAAAAAAAAAAHHOOOOOOOoooooooo…”

Even expecting the howl, he had to admit that the old monkey’s reputation as one of the genuine ‘old monsters’ of Yin Eclipse was well deserved. Just the act of viewing the scene before them put his qi in a state of mild turmoil. Thankfully Lan Huang was beside Ha Leng, so this time the boy was protected, but even so, both paled.

More concerningly though, the treasure in Ji Tantai’s hand exploded in a corona of golden fire that enveloped the four—

A white-furred paw warped out of the mist and hit the barrier so hard it physically deformed, scattering a nova of golden-yang flames everywhere.

Two other clones of the monkey appeared, in the same instant, kicking and punching it from opposite, highly inauspicious points—

The three monkeys unleashed a combination of blows that made the whole valley ring like a bell… and somehow, preposterously, the four cultivators survived a blow that he would probably have had issues with.

{Phoenix Flower Flare}

In reply, Ji Tantai cast out a talisman that turned into a searing maelstrom of wings and yang fire, consuming two of the three monkeys—

“Weak.”

The old monkey appeared, out of the mist above them, his staff already stabbing down, embodying the manifestation of half a dozen laws in one singular, devastating attack…

Space around the group turned sluggish and suddenly the old monkey found his attack flowing… backwards.

“Oh, those idiots,” his father sighed, putting a hand to his face.

He had to nod, because the monkey that was caught in the attack just grinned—

Ten more monkeys appeared out of the chaos, transforming out of rocks, ruined plants, the mist, even thin air, stabbing their own staffs at the barrier. A few were slowed, but with each resisted attack, more and more appeared, ten becoming thirty, becoming ninety… the number tripling each time as they continued striking inwards, manifesting at a speed so bewildering that even he struggled to count—

{Fruit and Flower Style: Dragon Turtle Soup}

The attempt at stopping the attack via the artefact manipulating time and yang intent collapsed. The corona twisted, its flames seeming to grow extra flames—

Everything turned white for a brief moment as different interpretations of ‘Yang’ played rock-paper-explosion in the spaces between reality… and reached a rather disturbing draw.

Silvery white rain splashed down all around them.

“BASTARD THING FUCK OFF!”

Ji Tantai snarled, wiping blood from his nose as the white-furred old monkey was sent tumbling across the water—

A naked, bearded old man appeared like a literal ghost behind Ji Tantai—

{Almighty Palm of the Heavenly Mountain}

He stared, in disbelief, as an art that nobody on Eastern Azure should know, in this day and age – an art of the ancient Tai clan – was blocked by a phantasmal golden flower, before it exploded into a constellation-like barrier.

“Meng clan… huh,” the old man remarked.

“What an interesting treasure you have there, boy.”

The speaker, a dark-haired, naked woman with an enticing body and the flower of a white water lily in her hair appeared, sitting on a rock, staring at the four youths with undisguised greed in her eyes.

{Sundering Seal of Shan}

Simultaneously, a voluptuously beautiful, very naked, black-haired young woman, also with water-weed and a white flower trailing in her hair, landed in an explosion of water behind the monkey, enveloping him in a cage of blue-green fire.

“Tch.”

The monkey spun his staff in a circle and a second version of him appeared beside the woman, who appeared to be from the Teng clan of all things—

A third woman, her reddish-gold hair also adorned with a white flower, stood up, literally, out of the shallow water. In a single, smooth motion, she both caught the monkey’s blow and stepped inside his guard to plant a palm strike against his chest that sent him flying into the mist like he was a small child. She considered the staff, then turned to look directly at them, her pupils shimmering with a haunting, and familiar, greenish-azure flame – a signature art of the Xue Heavenly clan.

“She… can that cultivator see us?” Ha Leng asked, uneasily.

The woman narrowed her eyes… and cast the staff, as if it were a spear—

Ha Leng flinched, which was probably warranted in fairness. The monkey’s staff was a legitimate treasure, and if that white-furred monkey was who he thought…

He swayed to the side slightly and let the staff pass by him, rather than through him, on the grounds that it was better to be safe than look stupid. It impacted a rock about ten metres away, which split like it was a rotten log.

“…”

All around them, dozens more cultivators, most covered in mud, all with white flowers either in their hair, or lotus-like tattoos spiralling around their limbs, were standing up in the shallow water. Even the four cultivators looked properly unnerved now, though he suspected they didn’t know just how big a festering shit-pit they had just landed feet first in.

His gaze travelled to the nearest shrivelled lily pads. He had not looked closely at them before, but all of their undersides were covered in vicious spines.

“Giant lily pads, covered in spines, choking up water…” his father muttered, clearly arriving at the same conclusion he was.

“There is no way that this is that Resurrection Lily… right?” he asked, not believing his own words, even as he said them.

“It is,” Cranea confirmed, staring around with palpable distaste.

“Resurrection Lily?” Lan Huang asked uneasily, eyeing the hundreds of smoking giant lily pads.

“An old threat, largely forgotten in this era,” his father replied, before he could. “It was a significant factor in why Physique Laws… erm, Physical Cultivation is now considered something of a dead end.”

“Uhh…?” Ha Leng, and even Lan Huang looked surprised at that.

“One spirit herb is responsible for…?” Lan Huang asked sceptically, looking back at the devastation.

Before he, or his father could explain further, a faint chime drifted through everything, swelling into a strange, resonant chord of something like flute music, melding with the patter of rain and the faint lapping sounds of the still rippling water.

Silver-white jasmine flowers bloomed everywhere, like shining rivers of stars. In the blink of an eye, they had spread across every tree, leaving gently drifting petals hanging in the air as the tumult and chaos faded away and the roiling mists calmed…

“Uh…” Ha Leng stared, slack-jawed at the figures standing on a tree-line some twenty metres away that had absolutely not been there a moment before.

“Ah… bollocks,” Lan Huang managed to utter, sounding a bit strangled.

Three young-looking girls, two armed with void-stone-tipped spears, were standing knee-deep in the shallows, green and purple lotus flowers in their curly dark hair. Another, crouching nearby, was tearing a tetrid stalker apart with her hands, rooting for its core.

Behind them stood a stone monolith about two metres high, dominated by a stylized figure of a cheerful, dark-haired young woman, her feminine form picked out by rather eye-watering, red and black triskelion-like designs. In her left hand she held a broad-bladed spear, while on her right was a three-eyed raven.

The ancient script below her read ‘She Who Allots Judgement’, though a different reading of the same words would have been ‘Justice through Slaughter’ or ‘Righteous Ruination’.

Beside it, someone had shoved a wooden pole into the shallow water and hung a signboard on it, which read: ‘No Bathing, No Shenanigans, No Stealing, Don’t Litter, No Birds. NO MONKEYS!’

“No birds?” he muttered under his breath, reading it and wondering why, of all the warnings, that felt the most… incongruous.

'No Monkeys' made sense though, given he now knew where they were, exactly, in fact.

“It has been a long time since vermin or that weed dared to come this far in…” one of the awakened spirit-herbs observed, leaning on her spear, surveying the chaos before them.

“Yes, there is a sign and everything…” the green-purple lotus without a spear remarked, folding her arms.

He realised that Ha Leng was tugging his arm, insistently and pointing…

Following Leng’s gesture, he saw… a youth, covered in pond-weed and looking very-much the worse for wear, struggling to get up in the shallows, near the spirit herbs.

“Han Shu…” Ha Leng mouthed.

“If that is Han Shu… where are the other two?” his father muttered, looking around.

“…”

“Yeah…” Lan Huang agreed, looking around uneasily.

“—I even added a no-monkeys warning, after the mess with that emperor and his six dancing morons…” the girl in the water muttered as the spirit herbs continued their conversation in the background.

“Six…dancing morons?” Ha Leng, thoroughly out of his depth at this point, half-asked, half muttered.

“Yeah that’s…” he started to explain, then realised that, actually, explaining the insanity that had nearly ruined the Early Yuan was not at all easy when you had no frame of reference for that era.

As an unguarded anecdote, however, it also marked all these innocent-looking ‘young’ spirit herbs, most of whom were only around the equivalent of Ancient Immortal, as being far from simple.

“That was a long time ago,” one of the others remarked.

“Perhaps they have devolved to the point where they can’t read?” an eye-catchingly proportioned young woman, whose curly, dark hair was bound up in a garland of mulberry flowers, suggested as she dropped out of a tree.

“It is possible,” another, slender beauty, with several flowering reeds stuck in her hair agreed, slipping out of the reed bed to his left, a bundle of arrows and a bow in her hands. “They are ever this way…”

Listening to their comments, he felt a pang of embarrassment on behalf of cultivators in general. Though in fairness, the smarter examples rarely ended up in a place like this – the Jasmine Gate.

“…”

The reed’s comment caused some awkward shuffling among the other awakened spirit herbs. The one in the shallows actually face-palmed, then the text on the wooden sign shifted into a series of very simple pictograms that probably a new-born babe could work out in short order. The murderous intent on the ‘no birds’ and ‘no monkeys’ additions somehow… intensified as well.

“Someone is—”

A vast shockwave of greenish-gold fire rolled out of the mire behind them, reminding him that the four cultivators had been fighting the bodies controlled by the Resurrection Lily while all this was going on.

The rather unfortunate herb hunter, Han Shu, screamed and tried to seek cover as the vegetation around him shrivelled up and the water started to smoke.

“Tch!”

The ‘young girl’ in the water made an obscene hand gesture and, in the same instance, a profound sense of ‘wet’ obfuscated everything, completely checking the momentum of the fire—

“I can’t believe that that actually worked…” Din Ouyeng muttered, walking out of the inauspiciously swirling mist.

“Mmmmm…” Ji Tantai, who was following behind, considered the orb in his hand with a frown, then looked at the bank where the spirit herbs were.

“There really is a grove of awakened spirit herbs in this place…” ‘Ha Mangfan’ added, landing nearby with a splash in the water, sounding… disturbingly pleased.

Frowning, he glanced back the way they had come, because the Resurrection Lily was not so simple that these four could just wrap up a fight like that so easily.

-Unless it deliberately let them think so?

Considering the four, and the kind of talent that the Lily targeted, none of them were likely to enter into its eyes, except maybe ‘Ha Mangfan’, who seemed to have a mantra of his own. Though it was nothing exceptional from what little he could garner. In fact, looking at the youth, he had to admit that he might, legitimately, be from the Ha clan based on the nature of his spirit root.

“What happened to the monkey?” the other green-robed youth, whose identity Ha Leng had seemed less certain about, asked.

“What monkey?” Ji Tantai asked, frowning.

“…”

“The…” the green-robed youth trailed off, looking thoroughly confused.

Ji Tantai, Din Ouyeng, and Ha Mangfan all stared at him like he was an idiot.

“The monkey is right… there?” Ha Leng pointed, somewhat uncertainly, at the aforementioned monkey, sitting on a smoking log a few metres away, looking on with a gloomy expression, munching on a spirit fruit to recover his qi.

The awakened spirit herbs were also watching the four cultivators now, their expressions warring between pity, confusion, and amusement. In fact, even Han Shu was apparently able to see the monkey.

“Well, if you will mess with soul and time laws, you will get bitten by them,” his father remarked drily.

“Mark that down as another reason not to mess with the suppression,” he agreed, noting that more and more awakened spirit herbs were…

He stared dully as a white-blonde-haired young woman with a pale blueish-white lotus in her curly hair dashed over and crouched down beside Han Shu. As they looked on, ‘she’ put a hand over his mouth and unobtrusively started to drag the boy backwards, away from the epicentre of the conflict.

“Truly that old monkey has balls,” his father remarked, as they watched the transformed monkey... get barely ten paces before the mulberry noticed him.

The mulberry looked back at the transformed monkey, whose gaze also flickered imperceptibly towards them for a moment, before sighing and turning back to the cultivators and the Resurrection Lily. The woman with reeds in her hair and another slender woman with a garland of willow leaves on her head also glanced sideways at them, then the monkey for a moment, before also letting it drag Han Shu away.

“…”

The interaction was so subtle he nearly thought he imagined it.

“So, the monkeys are helping…” his father mused, watching the pair rapidly vanish into the swaying vegetation, taking the revelation that there were three awakened spirit herbs here that could see them entirely in his stride.

In truth, that didn’t surprise him especially either, given what he knew of the place. The Jasmine Gate… had a certain reputation, but that was really just a mask that hid a far more terrifying truth. That the Jasmine Gate was basically a sect, comprised entirely of spirit herbs, hiding out in Yin Eclipse. Complete with its own experts and territorial concerns…

“Well, Priestess Ying did seem to have some agreement with them,” Lan Huang noted. “And she was quite friendly with Han Shu as well, now that I think about it. Not to mention, the Hunters did save a young monkey…”

“So… there is indeed a whole community of awakened spirit herbs in this place,” Ha Mangfan remarked, looking on with clear interest as several more spirit herbs slipped out of the trees behind them.

“Is that mulberry the tree I think it is?” he muttered, wondering if she was indeed ‘that’ mulberry. There had been a few in Tai Shavaran…

“I am right here, you know?” the mulberry pouted, folding her arms. “It’s been a while, Young Master Tai, you seem to be keeping well?”

“Eh!” Leng and Huang both flinched.

“…”

“What am I, chopped wood?” his father sniffed.

“Yes,” the reed-woman retorted, which got a snicker from the willow.

“I mean, the monkey got further than any of you would,” the willow added with an eye-roll.

“Do we capture them now… or wait?” Din Ouyeng mused, looking over the group of spirit herbs like that was already a forgone conclusion.

“You… want to capture us?” one of the lotus girls asked disbelievingly, while the others snorted or shook their heads.

“Aiiiii…” the woman with reeds in her hair sighed and smoothly drew her bow, threading a reed-arrow and loosing it at Din Ouyeng.

He watched with interest as the arrow hit Din Ouyeng and just broke apart… like the common reed it appeared to be.

“Hmmm…” his father eyed the reed, frowning.

“Really, no matter how you try, a spirit herb will be just that; a spirit herb,” Ha Mangfan remarked with a mocking chuckle. “You should just accept your fate now.”

He had to admit, it was a masterful attempt. The force of the implied suggestion within the soul attack was backed up by a genuine treasure and the strength of his mantra manifestation, however Ha Mangfan was still just a junior.

“Not bad,” the lotus girl who had been tearing apart the tetrid remarked with an amused smile. “I—”

Her words were lost in a deeply disorienting shockwave of clashing law comprehensions that left him seeing green and blue splotches in the mist as dimensional distortions disrupted the scrying rift’s ability to associate with where it had been.

“Owww… Motherless—” Ha Leng dropped his cup of wine and then bit off a curse as he held his head, but seemed otherwise okay after a few moments.

“What the fates was that?” Lan Huang asked, rubbing his eyes as they found themselves standing back in his father’s abode.

“The monkey got attacked again,” Cranea remarked with a slightly judgemental sigh, picking up Ha Leng’s cup and replacing it on the table. “If I was going to guess, it’s the Lily, given that boy, Han Shu, is a mantra inheritor.”

“Why would it go after him, though?” his father muttered. “Is he somehow related to that Han clan?”

“Nope,” Lan Huang shook his head. “A small, local clan from West Flower Picking Region. He has some Yin ancestry I would guess. Nothing to do with Han Ouyeng.”

“…”

“Mmm…” Cranea just pursed her lips. “Who can say how that weed rationalizes its world view.”

“True…” his father agreed, turning his attention back to the rift… only to frown.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“The link is being deliberately obfuscated again. I just tried to focus it…”

“On the skitterleap talisman?”

“No, on Ji Tantai and the Din group,” his father muttered.

“What about the others?” he raised an eyebrow.

He watched the swirling mist as his father continued to manipulate the formation for several seconds, but to no avail.

“Can you make a link?” his father asked Cranea after a moment.

“…”

Cranea held up her hand and closed her eyes… then opened them again.

“Curious. I cannot,” she declared, sounding put out.

“…”

His father scowled and focused on the rift again—

Their surroundings snapped back into focus, showing Han Shu, standing waist-deep in water in a clearing in the forest, with two young women, surrounded by mangrove-like trees wreathed in jasmine. The brown-haired young woman he recognised as Kun Juni, the daughter of the Kun clan lord, having seen her at the Ha clan gathering in West Flower Picking Town. By process of elimination, that made the blonde-haired teenager Lin Ling.

“They… they all survived?” Ha Leng gasped.

“So it seems,” Lan Huang agreed, looking pleased, though that faded after a moment as he muttered. “They are touched by a soul attack…”

“Yeah…” he agreed, fighting back a sigh.

“Let’s go,” Kun Juni was saying, rather urgently.

“Yeah,” Han Shu nodded, agreeing… though he made no obvious move to do so.

“Then… why are we not going?” Lin Ling asked, looking confused.

“…”

Kun Juni closed her eyes, taking a few deep breaths.

“Soul attacks…” Kun Juni said at last. “This is a soul attack, isn’t it?”

“Their perception is good for their realm,” his father mused. “Not bad. The Hunter Bureau got some interesting ones it seems. I can see why they caught your eye.”

“I wouldn’t praise the Bureau,” Lan Huang muttered, biting his lip as he watched the three struggle. “They are all protégés of ‘Old Ling’.”

“Ah, of course,” his father nodded. “That fellow, I have not crossed paths with him in a while.”

“Well, they all keep a low profile,” he reminded his father. “Not everyone has a place like this to retreat to…”

“…”

“Hmm… protégés or not, they still have a problem,” his father added, brushing away his comment.

Considering the trio with a sad sigh, he had to agree there as well. It was remarkable that they had survived up to this point, but their options were fast running out. Knowing you had been affected by a soul attack was one thing. Breaking it, given the resources of their pursuers… quite another, and in fact, the attack itself was feeding into that, in a truly sinister fashion.

Han Shu was trying to walk forward, but basically failing. The helpless look on his face saying more than any words—

*KUUAAAAASSSSK!*

The cry of a tetrid stalker echoed through their surroundings.

“That tetrid huh…” his father sighed as they watched the qi around the group turn turbid and the oppressive atmosphere of the misty, humid swamp rebel against its domain to restrict them further.

“Not again…” Kun Juni gasped, staggering up and grabbing Lin Ling, who was barely able to move.

“Fate-thrashed…” Han Shu, who had been struggling the hardest, trailed off as the tetrid stalker, its physical form almost the size of a large wagon, stalked into the clearing.

“Can’t… we do something?” Ha Leng asked, sounding rightfully horrified as they watched the insectoid behemoth pick its way across the vegetation-choked pool towards the struggling trio—

A strange, eerie, flute-like chord resonated through the ruins.

Everywhere, flowers started to bloom.

The stalker shifted from side to side and then leapt forward, covering half the distance to the trio in an instant, scattering water in a massive, obscuring splash as it did so… and vanished without a trace, amid swirling lily pads and water plants.

“Uh… what?” Ha Leng stared dully at the place where the stalker had vanished.

Ha Leng’s shock was mirrored by the three Herb Hunters, who were also standing, frozen, staring at that point.

For a moment, he thought that the stalker had actually done something quite smart, and steeled himself to watch the three hunters vanish in a haze of blood and broken limbs… however that didn’t happen.

Instead, a moment later, a flailing limb, trailing pond weed and lotus roots, broke the surface. It desperately tried to gain some purchase, but to no avail and within seconds was drawn back down beneath the surface, leaving only swirling arcs of flowering lotus pads and now vibrantly blossoming golden gourd-wort—

With an eruption of water, accompanied by a small nova of deeply inauspicious qi, the corpse of the tetrid floated to the surface… in pieces, its ichor fouling the water.

“…”

“Yes, that is what usually happens to things that wander in here,” he said, giving Ha Leng a comforting pat on the back.

“Right…” Ha Leng mumbled.

As they looked on, the lilies and gourd-wort were now rapidly flowing away from the cloud of ichor around the tetrid... He also noted that several of the nearest lily pads had started to acquire familiar red veins.

“Blood Ling contamination…” Lan Huang hissed, even before he could remark on it, his words echoed by Kun Juni.

“…”

All around them, spirit herbs were now fleeing the vicinity as well.

Ha Leng watched, expression slack, as dozens of flowers in the immediate surroundings stood up, rising out of the water to reveal childlike girls with flowers in their hair. The majority ‘appeared’ to be seven or eight, but a few were teenage in appearance.

Quite a few held weapons. Spears tipped with the bones of hunted Dao realm qi beasts were the most common, though there were also daggers, of what appeared to be corroded Orichalcum given the greenish-gold tint, bows, a few stone swords, and even a chakram or two.

Within moments they had all retreated to the edge of the pool, scowling, leaving only a few contaminated leaves behind. A few were rubbing their arms and legs, while others were making obscene gestures at the corpse.

“—Sup…” Han Shu, standing a few feet from them, flinched backwards as a girl with a pink lotus flower in her hair sidled over to him, holding out a basket of clams for him. “Wanna clam?”

“Uh…” Ha Leng stared blankly at the girl, who was now showing the trio her wares – a selection of surprisingly exotic freshwater clams and shellfish – with a hopeful expression, then at the other awakened spirit herbs.

“Now is not the time…” a young woman, with several beautiful whitish-blue iris flowers arranged in her blonde hair appeared right beside the clam-proffering girl and hauled her away, radiating ‘big sister’ vibes.

“Um… we don’t mean any—” Han Shu started to say.

“Evidently,” the iris sniffed, looking the trio over as her ‘big sister’ vibes intensified. “We are not savages, you can go that way. Don’t pick the plants.”

The hunters turned as one to look at where she had pointed, off beyond a wall.

“I can show ‘em the way!” the girl with the clams cheerfully volunteered.

“You…” the iris looked mildly vexed.

“Might as well,” the girl with the bow, who had purplish-brown grass flowers affixed to her hair like a pair of wings, remarked, sounding amused. “This looks like it’s going to get messy. There are other contacts to the west, and the roof has been raised.”

“Don’t go too far, we will relocate to the plaza of the Gentle Mistress,” the iris-girl admonished the clam-selling girl, who had now put the basket on her head and was checking her balance.

“Uh-huh, uh-huh,” the girl nodded, somehow avoiding the basket falling, then waved for the three Herb Hunters to follow her.

“Are we… actually?” Lin Ling asked the other two using sign-language.

“Do you want to try running?” Kun Juni signed back.

The three turned to look at the dozens of awakened spirit herbs now quietly observing them—

*Kuaaaaaaaaaassssh*

Another cry, from a different tetrid stalker, echoed through the misty swamp in the direction they had previously been in. The clam-selling girl gave the three a pointed look, then motioned for them to follow her. Off to the side, he saw that several of the older weapon-wielding plants were already moving off in the direction of that second cry.

“What… is this place?” Ha Leng asked as they watched the three hunters leave, escorted by the girl who was now humming a jaunty tune.

“You thought every valley in this place was like the ones you have seen?” Lan Huang muttered.

“Well… umm,” Ha Leng started to reply, then stopped, looking a bit embarrassed.

“Rather, this, right here, is why you do not casually raise the suppression,” he sighed.

“Yep, this is not a good deed that Ji Tantai and Din Ouyeng have done,” Lan Huang agreed, eyeing the groups of deceptively innocent looking herbs as they organized themselves, no doubt having flashbacks of his own to the era prior to the founding of Blue Water City. “Not a good deed at all...”

“No, it is not,” he agreed, gloomily.

There had been several instances back then, when people learned the hard way that spirit herbs were no pushovers.

Spirit herbs that genuinely focused on gaining strength, like the Resurrection Lily, were apocalyptic existences in their own right, but any spirit herb could become a terrifying menace if you took your eye off it for a while. They could slumber happily, for millennia after millennia, building accumulation of a calibre only the most masochistic of cultivators would chase after. Some could even transfer shards of their nascent consciousness through generations, or reincarnate themselves after a fashion, using their seeds or other stranger methods of reproduction.

That was the primary reason why ‘qi purity’, not ‘cultivation realm’ was considered a real measure of strength up here.

“They cannot manifest like this… if the suppression stays at Golden Core?” Ha Leng asked, almost hopefully.

“Well, not as such,” he replied, his mind going back to his trip into the Red Pit, wondering how to explain that, as with most ‘rules’, there existed dangerous exceptions.

Many of those who were here, now, were likely the descendants or remnant members of those communities that had spread out to the west during those years and only started to retreat back into the mountains a few millennia ago when the pressure on their secretive little territories became too intense.

Unlike those herbs born and nurtured here, they could leave if they wanted to, and could even ‘unshackle’ their brethren from the constraints of their valley abodes.

Ha Leng had the expression of someone who didn’t really understand, but also didn’t really know how to articulate what he wanted to ask.

“Can… I ask, why they are all naked?” Ha Leng muttered at last.

“…”

He stared at Ha Leng, then sighed.

“Because it’s distracting,” Lan Huang answered, rolling his eyes.

“Erm…” Ha Leng fixed Lan Huang with a slightly accusatory look, clearly not quite sure if the elder was messing with him.

“Well…”

“—VILLAINS! HEAVEN HAS EYES AND FOLLOWS YOUR EVERY MOVE!”

The words, yelled by Din Ouyeng, rolled across the valley like a thunderclap.

“Persistent,” Lan Huang noted, looking back the way they had come.

“Rude, too,” he muttered, listening to the echo of the words vanish into the mists of the valley.

They carried quite a remarkable amount of soul-strength. Far more than any junior should have been able to muster, even with the help of treasures.

“It’s a good strategy though,” his father remarked. “Use soul attacks to mess with their perception. It will also hamper the spirit herbs to a degree as well.”

“Dangerous, though,” he noted. “It will draw them far too much attention.”

This place had thousands of awakened spirit herbs and not all of them were of the ‘sit back and watch’ garden variety.

“Yeah… I am wondering about that,” his father muttered, staring at their surroundings. “Son, did anything about the altercation earlier strike you as… odd?”

“Many things did, father,” he replied drily.

“Ha, ha,” his father rolled his eyes. “No… it should be drawing them a lot of attention, but in fact…”

“…”

“But it’s not,” he finished, staring at the tetrid’s remains - how had he missed that? “They were standing there, like morons, between that fate-thrashed Lily, a bunch of awakened spirit herbs and that old monkey, and yet nobody so much as laid a hand on them unless they engaged with them first in some way.”

“Exactly,” his father agreed, folding his arms and scowling.

“—whereas that tetrid died, not even understanding what killed it, pretty much,” he continued, still staring at the remains floating in the shallows.

Abruptly, a searing flash of silver-white fire flickered, like lightning shadow, through the swirling low cloud.

The rain, and in fact all of their surroundings, shimmered, casting strange multi-coloured distortions in every direction. The wall behind them blurred, its outline shifting disturbingly, as if several different buildings were trying to occupy the same bit of space...

The rift wavered, but didn’t collapse this time, although he did notice a trickle of blood running from his father’s nose.

“Was that a dimension quake?” Lan Huang asked, rather uneasily, as the outlines of the trees and buildings stopped trying to play eye-watering illusory tricks and everything settled back as it had been.

“Yes, it was,” his father confirmed. “Though just a localized one, thankfully.”

“What’s… a dimension quake, Ancestor Kai?” Ha Leng asked him quietly.

“Uh… like a spatial quake, but worse,” he replied absently, trying to work out why that flicker of white fire had felt… familiar.

Ha Leng looked at him, his expression rather amusingly torn between likely wanting to ask for more information and being pleased with what he had been told already.

“What did you make of that white fire?” he asked his father after a moment.

“…”

His father, however, didn’t reply immediately and instead just stared at the remains of the tetrid, frowning.

“Father?” he prodded the old man verbally.

“Ah… Ancestor Kai,” Ha Leng murmured, giving his arm a polite tug and pointing. “They are back…”

Turning, he found that the mulberry, the iris, a vibrant young woman with clematis flowers in her golden hair and a voluptuous, brown-haired beauty with dark-purple flowers braided into her curls were now all standing on the edge of the water.

The purple-flowered young woman caused him to do a bit of a double take, and not just because she was… striking.

“Is… that a blood briar?” Lan Huang hissed, recognising the flowers as well.

“It does look that way,” his father agreed. “Rare to see one that mature.”

“Their presence is not tolerated by others, due to their… unique traits,” he elaborated, for Ha Leng, who remembered to give him a salute of thanks for the explanation this time.

“It has been a while, Morea,” his father remarked, giving the mulberry a polite salute as the two vines waded into the pool and started to remove the contaminated remains of the stalker.

“It has, Brother Wen, sister,” the mulberry murmured, turning to look at them and in doing so, confirming that she was indeed ‘that’ mulberry. He had wondered briefly, earlier, but it was not like there was only one mulberry spirit tree in this place. “Is she doing well?”

Cranea just nodded politely by way of reply.

“I… yes, she is,” his father replied after a momentary pause. “I’ll tell her you were asking after her, in my next letter.”

“It would be nice to catch up, but leaving is… well, a challenge,” Morea remarked, rolling her eyes. “Not that pleasant either, honestly.”

“Understandable,” his father nodded.

“So, what do you make of our interlopers?” Morea asked, walking around the pool to stand beside them while the other three spirit herbs, after giving them a brief look, got on with removing the remains.

That all three could detect them in some way was probably down to Morea, he supposed. Much like the Resurrection Lily, she was an existence from another era, who had… fallen into obscurity.

She was not some eye-catching landmark, like the Life-Breaking Aspen or God Bewitching Jasmine, nor an existential threat to anything she set eyes upon, like the Resurrection Lily or the Blood Ling groves. In fact, despite her comment a moment before, he had never known her to genuinely leave the borders of Yin Eclipse. Not even back in the days of the Tai clan, or when the Meng clan were still supreme arbiters of the world and society outside was much less hostile to her kind.

That said, only an idiot would mistake her for being weak. She had been a Dao Ascendant realm spirit herb back when Tai Shavaran was still just a fortress enclave, trying to reclaim a bit of the hellish chaos that this land had been back then.

“Hmmmm…” his father hummed under his breath, looking around at the jasmine flowers in the trees. “A group of cultivators like those four should have died like dogs within moments of setting foot in here, and yet they have defied expectations, almost unnaturally.”

“…”

“They are looking for this place,” he suggested, that thought having been quietly growing in his mind for a good while now.

“Hmmm, yes,” his father agreed. “Yet their actions… odd. They are somehow in the eye of causality, but unaffected by it – There are a few artefacts that can do that, but none of them are common.”

“None would be in the hands of juniors either,” Lan Huang added.

“—There are a lot of things they seem to have, that juniors should not…” his father muttered darkly.

“—I don’t understand why they raised the suppression though…” Lan Huang continued.

“You cannot enter here, not truly, unless you have soul law comprehensions founded in this land,” Morea said drily. “By lifting the ceiling, dangerous as it is, they can walk in, with a route…”

“Which they found, courtesy of that monkey and the Resurrection Lily, by chasing those Herb Hunters,” he concluded.

“So it seems,” his father mused. “Not to mention… the blood ling contaminated tetrids.”

“Yes…” Morea’s expression twisted into a grimace. “There are thousands of them infiltrating from every direction. North and south, even the western entrance. Those that die spread their corruption irrespective of whether we leave their corpses intact… Just their presence alone will start to twist our lesser sisters and brothers and scar the land.”

A dull rumble transmitted through the ground, making the water ripple and leaves fall from some trees.

“The chimeras are strong, as well,” Morea added. “Many have crossed the Immortal threshold, albeit by false means.”

“False Immortals?” Lan Huang raised an eyebrow.

“It’s possible,” his father said. “All it requires is a sufficiently powerful tetrid and for the sacrificial insects to reach Nascent Soul. If they are born at soul foundation and you had a Dao Step Tetrid Queen… you could raise them to that realm in weeks with the right resources.”

“It was done with alkyr, back during the tribal wars, before Blue Water City was founded,” he reminded Lan Huang.

“But only in limited capacity,” Lan Huang replied. “A resurgent Yeng Brotherhood with a blood-ling contaminated swarm-tide of false immortal tetrids is not a joke.”

On that, Lan Huang certainly had a point. Once this was done with, there would have to be quite a bit of cleaning up done in the dark and dusty corners of Blue Water City and its surrounding provinces he suspected.

“In any case,” his father mused, “The key thing is why they are seemingly able to avoid… becoming the victim of their own actions—”

A blue-green lightning bolt arced down, striking somewhere towards the middle of the valley. The jasmine flowers on the trees around them trembled faintly as the thunderous shockwave passed over them.

“That was…” Lan Huang narrowed his eyes, staring through the trees.

“Judgement in a bottle,” he agreed.

“…”

In the distance, there was another explosion and a faint shockwave of inauspicious qi washed over them, carrying hints of corrupted soul intent and death qi.

“I see they also worked out how to make tetrids explode in inauspicious circumstances,” his father muttered.

“Indeed,” Morea murmured as a further distant rumble dislodged a few leaves and made the jasmine in the trees shimmer eerily, the raindrops scattering multi-coloured shadows of qi.

“So, where are those malcontents who are proving remarkably adept at avoiding becoming the victims of their own actions?” his father mused.

“…”

Morea just stared at his father until he sighed.

“Right, stupid question, always follow the lightning,” his father muttered.

“You think you can actually run!?!”

Din Ouyeng’s voice rang like an inauspicious bell through the valley.

“I give them points for persistence, even if their style is lacking,” Cranea muttered, poking her ear with her little finger.

“Keeping it simple and to the point helps,” his father remarked sourly.

Morea just sighed, and after a glance at the three spirit herbs still sorting out the pool, stalked off through the water in that direction. After a moment, their scrying rift followed after her—

Silver fire flared through the mist ahead of them, matched in the same instant by an eruption of golden-hued yang flames that carried distinct traces of parasol qi.

“They really are doubling down on the—” his father’s words were cut off as their surroundings physically jumped, the water turning into mist for a split second before everything crashed down around them.

The viewing rift wavered again and Ha Leng groaned, but otherwise it remained stable.

All around them, trees were shedding leaves like the season had changed, while the jasmine flowers shimmered ominously.

“Parasol qi, huh…” his father muttered.

“Where did… the woman go?” Ha Leng asked, shaking his head.

Looking around, he found that Morea had indeed vanished.

“…”

“Son of a Dun whore,” he groaned, putting two and two together. “Parasol qi…”

“It. Is. Inevitable! As rebels, you can only accept that you will be delivered unto justice!”

“Yes, they absolutely would be that stupid,” his father sighed as another inane, if potent, statement by Din…

He stared at his hands, then up at the jasmine flowers, cold sweat running down the back of his neck.

It should be impossible for that kind of manipulation to enter his father’s abode.

A quick sweep of their surroundings within it didn’t reveal anything odd or inauspicious though, despite him now being unable to recall in detail who had just shouted.

“Who just shouted?” he asked Ha Leng, taking care not to let any of his unease creep out.

“D…the attacker?” Ha Leng said, looking confused, as if this was the most obvious thing in the world.

“…”

“Shit…” Lan Huang groaned, putting a hand to his head. “The dimension quake?”

“No…” his father shook his head. “That cannot shake this place…”

“But we experienced it?” Lan Huang pointed out, still looking pale.

“Hmmm…” his father just narrowed his eyes. “Their treasure is…?”

Their surroundings shifted and suddenly they were standing… near a monolithic stone, some fifteen metres high, its surface etched with esoteric carvings that were, if you had the eye for them, remarkably similar to those that graced the sky in his father’s personal abode.

Painted on it was a four-armed female figure with white-gold hair, wearing a robe in a style his mother and those of her generation had favoured, decorated with blue and white stars that artfully picked out her voluptuous feminine curves. In her hands she held a lantern, a harp, a jasmine flower and a small bird, though the critical detail was actually the golden crown of oak leaves and the crescent moon above it.

Before it, two ancient statues had been arranged, on a crude block platform with an altar positioned before them.

“What… Who… is that?” Ha Leng asked, sounding slightly awestruck.

“Who, the woman on the stone or the statues?” he asked absently, still trying to work out what was going on.

“…”

“The statues belong to two ancient experts who were venerated in Mahavaran,” his father answered as they started forward again. “They are… were protectors of this land. This is not their original location.”

“And the painting, Ancestor Wen?” Ha Leng asked.

“…”

His father paused to stare at it, not quite looking at Cranea.

“She is… a power of old,” Cranea said, softly, looking up at the painted woman. “From the time before the mountain fell.”

“From… before?” Ha Leng repeated. “There were other statues… in the ruins we saw… are they the same? Potnia… and uh… Mistress and… ‘Bearing Fruit’ and such?”

“Ruins?” he raised an eyebrow, looking at Lan Huang.

“Portam Rhanae it was called, beyond the Misty Jasmine Inn, in a hidden valley,” Lan Huang supplied.

“You… went into Portam Rhanae?” Cranea turned to stare at Lan Huang, then at Ha Leng.

“Y-yes…?” Ha Leng replied, stammering a little under her gaze.

“And saw… the statues?” Cranea pressed. “And the gardens and temple?”

“Uh… we didn’t go into the upper city,” Ha Leng said quickly, flushing. “We were just tasked with clearing the lower areas, by the massif!”

“Why… what is there?” Lan Huang asked, looking wary now.

“Don’t bully him,” he murmured to Cranea. “He has been through a lot…”

“Hmmm…” Cranea gave him a sideways look, then considered Lan Huang and Ha Leng, before abruptly turning to look off in the direction of the middle of the valley.

“What is it?” his father asked her.

“Distraction,” she said suddenly, waving a hand at the scrying formation. “Take us… there.”

His father narrowed his eyes and their surroundings shifted so that they were now standing on the edge of a different lake—

A woman stood, on the water, wreathed in shining silver fire, facing the three youths and dozens of adult tetrid stalkers.

“…”

“I underestimated you, boy from the Din…” the woman smirked. “But you screwed up. You actually brought a connection point to a treasure like that in here, and delivered it up to me?”

“Hao Tianxun…”

He stared at the woman, whom he had known when she was alive, his mind momentarily blank. Now he knew why the silver fire was so familiar. It had been her signature art. A heavenly flame, refined from execution lightning and turned into an innate art when she crossed over to become a Dao Immortal. Along with Ghost Lantern Hao, she had been one of the pillars of the Hao clan of the southern continent, before they became dogs of the Imperial Court after the fall of the Shan.

“That weed has Hao Tianxun’s body?” his father muttered. “This… could be a problem.”

“You think you have any real ability in this?” Din Ouyeng declared, rather arrogantly. “A stolen corpse that has some arts from the Hao clan?”

“…”

“As in Ghost Flame Saintess Tianxun?” Lan Huang asked, incredulously. “Protectoress of the Shan Empresses?”

“Uh-huh,” he nodded grimly.

“That herb… has a Dao Venerate Corpse?” Lan Huang’s disbelief was palpable.

“Uhuh…” he nodded again, struggling to process that himself.

His father calling this a ‘problem’ was perhaps the understatement of the millennium. Doubly so, because Hao Tianxun had not been just any Dao Venerate. It was no exaggeration to say that even if her origins were humble, and she had not been long at that realm before she vanished, her talent in those times was honestly compared with the likes of Ju Shan and Meng Fu.

“You think me some ‘corpse’ from the Hao clan?” Hao Tianxun replied, sounding oddly amused.

“Even if the corpse is, you are just a thief hiding behind it,” Din Ouyeng retorted. “If we claim that body and return it to the Hao clan, do you think they will let you skulk up here unmolested?”

“…”

“Now that I would pay to see,” his father muttered.

“Yeah, I don’t think that will go how he imagines,” he agreed.

The Hao clan of the late Shan was most emphatically not the Hao clan of today.

“Boy… do you know what your clan did?” Hao Tianxun asked, with deceptive joviality.

“…”

Beside Din Ouyeng, Ji Tantai narrowed his eyes and suddenly darted backwards, dragging Din Ouyeng and Ha Manfang along. The other cultivator in green travelling robes withdrew a talisman—

A halo of water and rain exploded outwards from the group as Hao Tianxun’s grasping palm was met by a Dao Cage barrier… which held for all of two seconds before collapsing. That was, however, enough time for Ji Tantai to hold up and activate a compass inset with a shimmering golden orb which emitted a sonorous clarion call that rolled over their surroundings—

{Murali’s Blessed Land}

Everything that the manifestation touched – the water, the spirit vegetation, even some spirit herbs that had been too slow to escape – gained shimmering golden ephemera. The ‘vitality’ within their surroundings fairly crackled as yang life energies infused everything.

“Nuwa’s tits!” his father swore, rather crudely, pulling their own vantage back rapidly, towards the edge of the lake, so as not to be caught up in it.

“They have a relic of Meng Murali?” even if he said it out loud, he found he didn’t actually believe what he was seeing as dozens of luckless spirit herbs screamed and writhed in the lake, golden veins slowly spreading across their manifest forms as they attempted to flee.

Meng Murali had been a paragon of the Four Azures. A disciple of one of Meng Fu’s sworn companions, one of its ‘Seven Sovereigns’ in fact, who had stood beside her when she founded the Seven Sovereigns School. But she had died, even with the pure blood of a Phoenix running in her veins, unable to overcome the silver death that separated the realm celestial from the heavenly gate…

“So, that is why you are so confident,” Hao Tianxun giggled. “The Seven Sovereigns sure does treat their disciples well…”

Ji Tantai just waved a hand in her direction.

Immediately, some of the herbs who had been closest to the epicentre stopped their ‘struggling’ and charged towards Hao Tianxun, shrieking like mindless maniacs.

Simultaneously, Din Ouyeng spun the unassuming-looking spear he was now holding… and the clouds above the valley twisted into a shining, white-jade spear, along which lightning crackled ominously—

“Motherless dog-sons,” his father hissed, making seals to further reinforce the stability of their scrying formation.

A moment later, the manifestation from the weapon arrived, like a literal thunderbolt—

Their view of the lake distorted for a moment, then stabilized to reveal that Hao Tianxun looked none the worse for wear.

“A Dao Weapon…” Lan Huang hissed, after he had taken a deep breath, his eyes fixed on Din Ouyeng’s spear.

“Mmmm-hmmm…” his father nodded pensively. “It’s a work by Kong Jurai as well. This Din Ouyeng clearly has some roots within the Din clan.”

“…”

Examining the spear more closely, he saw that his father was indeed correct. The haft and blade were indeed finished in a style favoured by Kong Jurai, with a repeating motif of swirling clouds that harmoniously formed the refiner’s name.

“As in… Sage Jurai?” Lan Huang asked, his expression incredulous. “Not an apprentice, but the actual Refiner God Jurai?”

“This brat is truly vicious,” his father muttered, eyeing the spear gloomily.

“—And not a bit ridiculous in his means," he added with a sigh, shaking his head in mock disbelief.

“Indeed,” Lan Huang scowled.

“How come it did so little damage?” Ha Leng asked, looking confused as the battle before them unfolded. “The ridgeline before… was ruined and yet this barely disturbed the lake?”

He glanced sideways at Ha Leng and then back at Hao Tianxun.

Before he could reply though, Hao Tianxun tilted her head to the side and grinned wolfishly—

Din Ouyeng and the others all flinched backwards, triggering expensive talisman barriers to pre-empt the expected direct attack…and yet Hao Tianxun didn’t actually move. Instead, she just clasped her hands to her breast—

“Tch…” Ji Tantai bit his lip, looking annoyed suddenly, and the compass in his hand projected a shining, golden parasol flower that enveloped the area around the four cultivators.

In the same moment, hundreds, then thousands of tetrid stalkers surged out of the trees, dancing in bizarre, hypnotic patterns that he recognised instantly as a strategic martial formation designed to help harmonise with the yang strength from the compass so Ji Tantai could use it more… efficiently.

“Ah… that’s probably not good,” Lan Huang muttered as they watched the projected ‘blessed land’ almost triple in size in a single instant as a haze of yang-attributed parasol qi enveloped much of the lake surface.

“Indeed… it’s—Eh!?” his father cut off what he had been about to say as thousands of ethereal parasol flowers bloomed on the corrupted vegetation touched by the ‘blessed land’ and the ceiling of the suppression collapsed, reforming at the immortal threshold.

“What in the name of the ever-loving Son? Did that boy get unfettered access to one of the Meng clan treasuries?” his father hissed.

“That’s a…?” he found himself wondering the same thing, as the feng shui of the alignments across the lake shifted in a somewhat familiar if truly subversive manner and turned chaotic—

Seven shining golden flames, each holding a manifestation of a parasol blossom, formed out of the manifestation of Meng Murali’s domain, encircling Hao Tianxun—

{Seven Star Parasol Sovereign Seal}

As they looked on, the cloud of yang-attributed parasol qi rapidly organized itself into a red-gold facsimile of the ancient zodiac, caging her in a spherical prison of surging yang vitality.

In terms of dealing with a stronger foe, it was a good strategy, he had to concede. Most Meng-created sealing arts relied on turning the victim’s own strength against them using profound feng shui, while the parasol qi corrupted their body and twisted it from the inside out, refining them into a fruit to be consumed—

To his right, he realised his father’s mouth was hanging open, his expression frozen between disgust and shock…

“What…?” he was about to ask what was wrong, when he saw the familiar, shimmering silver flame that had appeared in Hao Tianxun’s hands as she stood within the seal.

Just the glimmers of the prestige of Hao Tianxun’s heavenly flame, of which she had been so proud, were enough to evoke a terrible, and familiar, sense of foreboding within him.

As if a sword was resting right against his neck and every shadow held unseen blades.

In the blink of an eye, the momentum of the seal had faltered, several of the nearest tetrids actually exploding as silver shadows licked over them.

“Is that…” Lan Huang hissed, his face pale, his hands grasping the back of Ha Leng’s bench so tightly his hands were bleeding.

Ha Leng was simply frozen in terror, his hands trembling.

“An Innate Domain?” his father, having recovered from his own moment of shock, said softly as Cranea went to attend to Ha Leng. “Yes, it is a reflection of a Truth made manifest.”

“Motherfucking—” Ji Tantai’s own horrified exclamation was swept away as the compass in his hand shook, emitting a torrent of parasol qi into the lake around them, to resist the prestige of Hao Tianxun’s flame.

Din Ouyeng, meanwhile, had slammed his spear into the lake and was using it to reinforce the barriers around them, supported by Ha Mangfan and the other Din cultivator, all of them as pale as Ha Leng.

Under the renewed onslaught of parasol qi, the seal around Hao Tianxun wavered inauspiciously, just about managing to keep her heavenly flame in check but in his heart, he already knew what the conclusion of this fight would be.

Ji Tantai and Din Ouyeng, as they continued to fight to keep the seal stable, could not possibly know that their likely failure rested on an almost farcical coincidence.

“It is ironic,” he muttered, “That their failure here should hinge merely on the fact that Hao Tianxun was alive to witness the day when the Kong and Ming colluded to ensure Meng Murali failed her Heaven’s Gate tribulation.”

“It is a bit, yes,” his father agreed, accepting a cup of wine from Cranea, who just rolled her eyes.

“The politics of those days are no less bizarre than what we experience now,” his father added as both a somewhat recovered Ha Leng and Lan Huang opened their mouths to ask the obvious question.

Accepting a cup himself from Cranea, he took a deep sip to steady his own nerves…

“The real question here is…” his father trailed off, and he had to fight the urge to throw his own cup at him, as Hao Tianxun suddenly threw her arms wide and cast her flame up into the sky, where it became a blazing silver wheel within the seal—

The ambient movement of qi in their surroundings ceased for a moment… then the whole world became a phantasm of silver-fire, with Hao Tianxun as its Empress, holding the very essence of judgement in her hands as she brought them back together—

“The World… According to Hao Tianxun…”

A corona of silver fire swept out along with it, enveloping everything within a hundred metres of her.

Even though it only encompassed her Principle and the natural laws of the place they were in, it ate into the suppression, in a way that Ji Tantai’s treasure-spawned domain could only dream of doing, carving out, in the world around them, a kingdom for her alone.

A dominion fused from what she had perceived, grasping a thread of the natural truth encapsulated within the silver death that awaited those who challenged the very apex.

The world faded to shades of grey as every surface bled colours no mortal was ever meant to see as the very concept of ‘time’ was briefly scoured from their immediate surroundings by the full force of her Intent crashing down.

The seal, which Ji Tantai had expended such effort to reinforce, wavered, then exploded outwards with enough force to vaporize much of the water in the lake and turn the exposed mud for tens of metres in every direction to glass.

The martial formation that the tetrids had been maintaining was overwhelmed in the blink of an eye, destabilized to the point where even tetrids beyond the range of Hao Tianxun’s silver fire collapsed, twitching, bleeding yang qi and corrupted ichor. Their end was… by far the better.

Of those caught within the immediate radius, the nearest tetrids didn’t even burn, they simply became ghostly shadows cast in silver, dying without even comprehending what had ended them.

Those further away exploded into silver smears of fire as their cores destabilized and the qi within their flesh broke down at a level so fundamental a few actually summoned grey lightning that struck their charred corpses.

The cultivators fared… somewhat better, in that they did not die, but the golden flower and the corona of parasol qi melted away like mist in the summer sun as Hao Tianxun arrived before them. Din Ouyeng summoned a white-jade shield that barely blocked her blows, but even it could only slow her as the terrible flames ate into their flesh and attacked their qi and souls, as she grasped for Ji Tantai—

The scattered parasol qi around them erupted with fresh vitality, transforming into a huge spectre of a regal, six-winged phoenix with iridescent red-green plumage he vaguely recognised as having served Meng Murali, forcing her back and preventing her from delivering the killing blow to Ji Tantai.

*Kuwwaaaaaaaa*

A vast, clarion cry echoed across the lake as the phoenix spread its wings and screamed at Hao Tianxun.

Amid the scattered, charred corpses of the tetrid stalkers and corrupted vegetation, hundreds, then thousands of flower-buds emerged as the parasol qi resonated with the phoenix’s call.

Within a blink of an eye, thousands of ethereal parasol flowers were blooming, rejuvenating the domain in a matter of moments.

Looking on, as Hao Tianxun’s exterminating attack rolled backwards, collapsing in on itself, he had to wonder. He had asked Meng Tan to check the background of Ji Tantai, but it had never occurred to him that the boy might be a genuine Meng clan scion in disguise.

In the blink of an eye, the flowers reached full bloom, at which point almost all the gains Hao Tianxun had made had been neutralized and the four cultivators stood where they had been, totally unharmed. The seal around Hao Tianxun was also partially restored, forcing a kind of equilibrium with Hao Tianxun’s domain.

More tetrid stalkers were already racing out of the flooded forest behind them as well.

“W-what just happened?” Ha Leng stammered, watching the silver and gold flames ripple back and forth like a phantasmal aurora on the water’s surface, neither really able to gain any superiority.

“They…” he had to pause to think about his answer, because the Meng clan got very prissy about people knowing certain things.

“—Is that really your trick?”

The speaker was not Hao Tianxun, but a voluptuous beauty with a radiant white lily-flower placed artfully in her dark, curly hair, sitting on a handy rock, watching with her chin resting on her knee.

The manifest form of the Resurrection Lily collected a few golden flames in her hand, rolled them over her fingers and then, before the slightly disbelieving eyes of the four cultivators who had just cheated death, ate them.

“Parasol qi… tastes like dogshit,” she mumbled, making a face after a moment. “And people call me a weed.”

Lan Huang and Ha Leng both turned to stare at her. She met their gaze with clear, innocent eyes until both were forced to look away.

“Is this bastard a bottomless cornucopia of rare treasures?” Lan Huang complained at last, if only to disperse the increasingly awkward silence, as Ji Tantai produced a silver-blue-bladed sword covered in vine-like patterns and pointed it at Hao Tianxun with a gloomy expression.

Din Ouyeng meanwhile, said something he didn’t catch to Ha Mangfan and the other cultivator, who both sighed and took out bows and quivers of arrows—

“Yin Eclipse is Yin Eclipse…”

The words were not loud, but they carried a sense of… antiquity that made the hair on his arms stand up.

The four cultivators staggered, their faces pale. The momentum of the ‘blessed land’ wavered like a candle caught in a gust of wind, just from the intent put forth by the whispered words.

“…and the forests take the weak.”

“And… their time has run out,” Cranea muttered, turning to look towards the depths of the valley as the softly spoken words echoed through the misty trees and flooded glades.

The tetrid stalkers, who were streaming out of the forest at this point, faltered and lost direction, their formation nearly collapsing.

“Our Forests…”

It reverberated within cliffs and gorges from the highest peak to the deepest pit, smothering the cry of the spectral phoenix.

“Our Valleys…”

The mist surged, transforming, before their stunned eyes into a blizzard of mulberry and jasmine blossoms as it swept through the flooded forest.

“Our Yin Eclipse!”

The last was spoken not by that one voice, but by hundreds, if not thousands, and while it was just as ‘soft’, within it was a sense of profound prestige that was simultaneously suffocating, alluring, thoroughly terrifying and possessing of a deeply disconcerting sense of… longing.

Ha Leng’s mouth was hanging open, while Lan Huang had turned white as a sheet. Even his father looked genuinely uneasy now.

The blizzard transformed into a literal tsunami of blossoms and crashed down over the lake, forming into… Morea, now clad in a diaphanous, figure-hugging robe of dark-gold silk, embroidered with silver jasmine and apple blossoms, those same flowers garlanded like a crown in her hair.

Her presence, both commandingly regal amid the swirling blossoms and yet also alluringly seductive, was such that it was impossible not to be drawn to her.

Ji Tantai pointed at her and cursed, then redoubled his focus on restraining Hao Tianxun’s domain. Din Ouyeng, by way of response just shook his head grimly then spun the spear in his hands. Above them, the overcast sky twisted in on itself and another massive spear of spiralling cloud started to form.

Ha Mangfan and the other cultivator meanwhile both ate recovery pills and then, at Ji Tantai’s direction, began loosing arrows at her, even as the tetrids not part of the formation also raced forward.

For her part, Morea just sighed softly and the jasmine blossoms around her transformed into a fabulous round shield, decorated with a triskelion design surrounded by jasmine, apple and pomegranate blossoms.

“That’s…” Lan Huang stared, entranced, at the bound artefact that was far beyond anything yet displayed, except perhaps the old monkey’s staff, as arrow after arrow smashed into it… and was transformed into explosion of flower blossoms.

“Yep, they are just plain scary,” his father muttered as Morea now manifested a spear in her right hand, tipped in soul-searing orichalcum and hafted in black aspen wood, decorated with mulberry flowers, and stabbed a wagon-sized tetrid stalker with it.

The stalker exploded into a cloud of petals a moment before its soul also suffered the same fate, followed by another, and another as she advanced across the lake, continuing to effortlessly block arrows as she did so—

Din Ouyeng’s spear strike finally arrived, like a meteor, when she was about halfway to their group.

In the same instant, the spectre of the phoenix also finally made its move, emitting a piercing cry that held a prestige far in excess of what it had displayed when blocking Hao Tianxun. Ji Tantai, for his part, held up the compass and a massive flare of parasol qi exploded out of it, melding with the phoenix and the domain to envelop the area where Morea was—

The colours seemed to bleed out of their surroundings and the hurricane of mulberry flowers turned sluggish, the blossoms starting to fade and wither…

Morea’s ‘body’, standing on the lake exploded into… a chaotic smear of qi.

“Ah… was that… meant to happen?” Lan Huang asked dully.

Ha Mangfan and the other cultivator charged forward, towards where she had been, using short-range teleportation talismans, clearly intending to grab the treasures.

“I am not…” his father, who was frowning so hard his eyebrows were nearly merged, started to say, only to trail off again as the entire lake surface distorted, subtly.

Morea reappeared, like a ghost amid the collapsing curtains of fading mulberry flowers—

In the same instant, Ji Tantai spat blood onto the compass in his hands. The phantasmal phoenix spread its wings and, with a piercing scream, launched itself at Morea, projecting a shockwave of yang strength that pushed against the very limits of what the suppression currently allowed.

The blessed land bloomed again, ten thousand parasol flowers burning like celestial lanterns on the water, thousands of flares of yang qi swirling up through the falling blossoms to form a second ‘Parasol Sovereign Seal’.

And yet… at the heart of it all, Morea simply held out her arms to the oncoming maelstrom and smiled, like a mother greeting her children—

“Behold Gandharva, The Dream that Waits.”

The words she spoke were soft, gentle even, as she stood among the falling drifts of fading mulberry blossoms and the searing carpet of parasol blooms.

And yet, before them, the whole world grew still.

The tumult and chaos faded into insignificance, before the sheer… allure of the words and the dream they evoked.

They were the words of a mother, to her children, telling them that the nightmare was over.

Telling them of a time, both long gone and yet still to come.

Of a dream that lingered in the heart of every being; encapsulated by a gripping, inexorable desire, to return, not necessarily ‘home’, but to a place of peace and tranquillity in their heart that they had once known, and yearned for once again…

And yet…

They were also terrifying.

The proffered hand, the gentle allure, the mother's embrace… the dream awakened.

Jasmine and Mulberry.

The dream and the promise…

Even separated as he was from them, by uncounted miles and the profundity of his father’s abode, it took all his control not to grasp for them.

To step forward and… accept the path Morea proffered.

To let the suffering and the struggle end.

Morea stared at the four cultivators for a long moment as they struggled to resist, then simply lifted her arms...

The remaining tetrids collapsed, like puppets bereft of their strings, their souls drifting up to merge with the gently drifting veils of mulberry and jasmine, now joined by myrtle and chrysanthemum, lilies and lotuses, apple, willow and even pomegranate.

The whole valley seemed to shrink, the world of flowers slowly spinning, inexorably drawing out all of the invasive qi into a shining river of parasol blossoms that was slowly subsumed by the resonance of the words she had spoken.

Even the ‘blessed’ land that had been set up by Ji Tantai was not immune, the cultivators able only to watch helplessly as their stratagem was overturned in an instant. Their attempt to nullify and subvert the mulberry domain, just as they had Hao Tianxun’s, foundering on two simple, yet profound miscalculations.

Firstly, that nothing in this world was truly absolute, and even the vivacious, parasitic parasol qi, with its seething yang nature, yearned for the release her words promised. And secondly, that the qi itself had a kind of base awareness, and having been sealed in treasures for so long, simply yearned to be free.

The phantasm of the phoenix itself dissolved into parasol blooms with a single, mournful cry that were swept up to join the sea of swirling flowers above, the stagnancy it had been beholden to an anathema to its very being.

Still, the compass in Ji Tantai’s hands continued to expel qi, like it was a bottomless well, attempting to saturate the domain, until at last… almost improbably, the momentum of her domain did indeed turn sluggish once more—

Morea considered Ji Tantai, then, with a sigh, spread her arms as if to throw an armful of flowers into the air—

“Scatter…”

The whole valley seemed to drift upwards. The world of flowers melded with the mists, scattering in the four cardinal directions, carrying with it a soporific aroma of the flowers of the valley, while the jasmine chimed anew, so loudly he fancied they might hear it in Blue Water City.

Staring up at the haze of the blue morning sky, now just about visible beyond the remaining mist and drifting flower petals, he suspected that the lowlands were about to experience some… profoundly unusual weather, even by Yin Eclipse’s rarefied standards. Given the momentum of what she had done, and the placement of the Blue River valley, it might even reach the coast.