…When we first entered that inner place, the world was transformed, hidden in its essence from us, as if behind a pane of glass. All that we could see and breathe and touch was as if an illusion, cast by the greatest of hands. At first we feared this was some terrible trap, or that we had fallen into a place destitute in some fundamental aspect of its being. However, this was not the case.

When we finally perceived the truth of it, I could only salute in four directions the person or persons who crafted this land, for crafted it absolutely is on some level. They are true masters of the ‘Simple Things’; their art, writ large upon the foundation of this place, is certainly unsullied by any lower purpose, remarkable in its simplicity yet breath-taking in its application. For our initial misjudgement, I can only apologise in my heart to them.

Brother Ha has already filled five scrolls with his comprehensions regarding what we have so far seen. I can only lament the lack of bravery by which I missed the opportunity to bring some of the younger generation with us on this endeavour. What heights might they ascend to if they could see but a tiny portion of the wonder of this place.

~Excerpt from the personal writing of Lu Fu Tao.

~ Jun Sana – Still on a Certain Ruin Covered Ridgeline… ~

Despite their best efforts, the divination platform-altar-thing resolutely refused to present any further strange ‘visions’. They spent nearly an hour poking around carefully with it, testing out the other ‘mansions’ around the Taiji on the floor, but the best either of them managed was the discovery of some additional perspective-bending carvings on the altar pediment itself.

“I am about ready to call it quits with this,” she declared at last, staring at the various scenes. “If I look at any more of these I will go cross-eyed.”

“It is a bit like that,” Arai agreed. “I guess we should get some food as well; it’s actually been quite a while since we last ate.”

Glancing at her own scrip, she found that was indeed the case. They had eaten some food early in the climb, but…

“Seven hours, huh,” she remarked. “Feels like it should be less.”

“It does,” Arai agreed. “Keeping track of time is definitely…”

“—Tricky?” she finished.

“Yeah,” her sister replied, suddenly sounding rather tired. “It’s the lack of a change between day and night I think.”

“I guess breakfast then,” she remarked with as much levity as she could muster.

Near as she could tell, it should be some time ‘before dawn’, not that you would know it, given the perpetual rainy-morning vibe where they were.

“Hah, yeah,” Arai replied, rolling her eyes. Shaking her head, she went over to a handy bench – there was certainly something to be said for the lack of ruination – and took out a selection of spirit fruit, some bread and a soup cake. Thankfully, water from their storage talismans still served as water, so while she prepared the soup, Arai made a simple pot of tea using ward-stones, then they sat in silence, nibbling on a fig each, watching it all cook.

It was an undeniably strange atmosphere. Both calm, almost idyllic and yet… the sense of being unable to settle was like an itch. They ate in quiet contemplation, not speaking, just listening to the gentle sound of rain on leaves.

“It occurs to me, that running through those events in real time might actually help,” Arai mused at last.

“Run through…” she paused mid-bite of her spirit fruit, then realized her sister was talking about who was responsible for throwing them over. “Oh, walk back through what we were doing, given its almost that ‘time’ of day?”

“Uhuh,” Arai agreed. “We know feng shui works in here in some capacity, so…”

“—It may help,” she concluded.

“Yep,” Arai nodded.

There was an undeniable advantage in understanding that the Dao of Feng Shui was more than just staring at an expensive compass and then translating the reading from an almanac that someone else had painstakingly calibrated it to. One such lesser-understood element, according to their father at any rate, was the degree to which elements of feng shui… just ‘worked’. His explanations had always felt a bit cagey to her, but the key thing he had impressed was that the fundamentals had little, if any requirement of ‘qi’ or even ‘cultivation’ as a whole. Things like sympathetic resonance, feng shui compasses, almanacs and the like all worked in lower worlds apparently, where their users, more often than not, were just skilled mortals.

Subsequently, something as simple as walking back through events in similar circumstances, could be leveraged to help support a divination. As her sister alluded to, it didn’t even really require qi or anything like it either. Just an understanding of how those forces worked in nature.

“Where were we anyway, at this point?” she mused, checking her own jade tablet, counting back the hours as best she could.

“—on our way back from the heaven-blaze pines if I recall,” Arai answered after a moment's pensive consideration. “Though that feels like a small life-time ago.”

“It does rather,” she agreed after a slight pause. “Though there isn’t much point in anything earlier than when we got here.”

“True,” Arai conceded, looking around with a resigned sigh. “Very true.”

After that, they sat around in silence for another half hour, drinking the rest of the tea, largely lost in their own thoughts. For her, that was continuing to try and puzzle out what the fates was going on with her mantra.

‘Spirit’ and ‘Soul’ were still not fully behaving themselves, but both existed within her. It was a quandary that made her want to hit her head off a rock. She tried dozens of different iterations and tricks, going right back to the first days when she was originally being taught by their mother, but nothing really seemed to stick.

“—Shall we give this a go?”

She was shaken out of mulling over one of those basic exercises by Arai tapping her on the shoulder.

“…”

“Yeah.” She nodded, standing up.

Together, they walked over to the middle of the paved area. Before everything flipped on its head, they had been divining the auspicious points for the teleport formation.

“Somehow, I still have the compass,” Arai muttered, producing the spirit-wood artefact with a wry shake of her head. “I don’t even recall putting it away.”

“So, we were… hmm,” she started to talk, then trailed off, noting that Arai’s compass was… “Your compass is dead,” she pointed out.

“…”

“So it is,” Arai frowned, giving it a tilt, then staring at it more closely. “And it’s not just non-functional either, its actually dead. The alignment is broken.”

Curious, she pulled out one of her own compasses from her talisman and considered it pensively. The readings were nothing if not odd, but it certainly worked, for a given value, anyway.

“So, it’s not this place,” Arai mused, “though we sort of knew that already.”

“Uh-huh,” she agreed, somewhat absently, because a fleeting thought had just nudged the edge of her memories.

Arai started to say something more, but she held up a hand to stop her, even as she tried to call the recollection back.

“—I am telling you, it's not that way…” her father was saying, sounding a bit exasperated as he leant on a table, talking to Han Murai she thought.

“You say that,” Han Murai declared, “but the compasses are giving strange readings.”

“Yes, that’s expected though, they are stock ones, right?” her father replied, then noticed her standing there, listening curiously. “Ah, Sana dear, can you run along and get us some more of your mother’s delicious jasmine tea?”

In her mind's eye, she gave a very bad curtsy and skipped off quickly, swishing the stick she was carrying at weeds, followed by the amused laughter of her father and Han Shu’s uncle. The tea was not in the kitchen, as it turned out, so after a fruitless ten seconds of searching – a near eternity of focus for a seven-year-old – she went back outside, in search of her mother.

A further quick search told her that mother was not in the garden – though Arai was – so she went back inside. Her search eventually took her to the front courtyard, where mother turned out to be talking to two young teenage girls; one selling clams and river-fish, the other what appeared to be lotus roots, seeds, and leaves.

“I can has into giving new clam from special clay?”

She stared at the young teenager holding the basket of clams, confused for a second, then realised she was speaking Easten and the ‘recollection’ she had was that of her seven-year-old-self, who was not exactly fluent at that point.

“Yes, from special clay, two hand giving clam,” her mother replied drily.

After a moment, the words sorted themselves out as ‘do you want to buy these new clams, they came from a special spot’, and ‘yes, if they are special, I’ll take two kilos of clams’.

“Ah, Sana!” her mother spotted her and gave her a broad smile, that even after all this time still made her heart quicken with joy. “Do you want to check Luyi’s lotus roots, you have been practising your plants, right?”

“…”

“Father is looking for the tea,” she replied, delivering that message first. “I looked for it but didn’t see it.”

“Ah, of course,” her mother sighed. “I’ll get to that momentarily. Anyway, lotus roots!”

“Yes mother,” seven-year-old her agreed, going over to the other girl's bundle and starting to look through them.

“So, about these other clams,” her mother said, pointing to some palm-sized white ones in a pot.

“White-moon clams, big sister,” the clam-seller said. “Don’t suppose you are interested in them as well?” she added hopefully.

“Yes, I don’t imagine people want to pay as many spirit stones as they are worth for them.”

“Yeah,” the clam-seller sighed, looking a bit dejected again.

“How about you look from another perspective?” the lotus-root seller suggested, her accent marking her as very local.

“Another perspective?” her mother raised an eyebrow.

“You don’t necessarily have to eat them Big Sister Jun” the lotus-root seller pointed out. “Could put them in pond, help with water purity.”

“That is true… and they are cheaper than more fish,” her mother agreed. “In that case, I’ll take all of them, if only to save you having to carry them around.”

“Big sister is the best!” the clam-seller declared, giving her mother a hug.

“Yes, yes, big sister is good,” her mother agreed, patting the girl on the head.

“Do I not get a pat on the head?” she muttered.

“You’re good too, my little gift,” her mother added, ruffling her hair with a warm smile. “Now, let’s look at these roots you picked out.”

“——Well?” her sister asked, shaking her from the recollection.

“…”

She opened and shut her mouth, still trying to work that out herself. The mind worked in strange ways at times, though that memory was especially odd. Why she should have brought it to mind, right here and now…

A part of her just wanted to shove it away again—

“No! No, no, no!” she ran her hands through her hair and groaned, the familiar, ‘natural yet not’ feeling of being nudged away, just like in the Red Pit, returning.

Taking a deep breath, she took a step back, mentally—

“Shit! It’s that fate-thrashed obvious!” she cursed, realising what it was in the same instant.

Taking another deep breath, she focused on her mantra and considered, carefully, how she was using it, or rather letting it get on with what it did, itself. They were both at the peak of Physical Foundation, at the point where their mantras would work passively just as well as if they were focusing on it.

“What is?” Arai asked.

“Why it’s not working!” she groaned.

Arai just stared at her, clearly not following, but that was fine.

The key was actually another ‘simple’ little thing, so long in the back of her mind it was also second nature. The basics of the basics. Mantras worked off the subconscious, off the intuitive and the second nature. Mother had always said it was instinctual, but not necessarily like a hunch, or gut feeling; that was slightly different. In any case, the important thing was perspective. A different perspective. It was easy to get caught up in a pattern – a theme, even – regarding how Mantra mnemonics worked. ‘Body’ related to ‘the body’, for example. ‘Soul’ she frequently let just do its own thing, because it was almost impossible for her to really intuit what a soul was and the mantra just did its thing.

The problem, now that she looked at things from this slightly different angle, was that something was working against it. The manipulation was nothing to do with her mantra, or the environment, it was something far more insidious.

“…”

“Spirit, within my Heart the bridge of Renewal is my Body within which my Soul and Spirit are connected within the Heart the bridge of Renewal is my Body within which my Soul and Spirit are connected…”

She murmured the words out loud, watching how it flowed.

The trick was to ignore the first mnemonic – another sideways thing their mother had talked about. A mantra had to have between three and five active mnemonics, but actually, there was nothing stopping you repeating one, or moving the starting mnemonic along in the ‘Long Form’ so long as you could still frame it correctly.

In this instance, what she had done was re-define ‘Spirit’ and ‘Soul’ in slightly more abstract ways. Now, ‘Spirit’ became the desire to overcome the dodgy recollection and ‘Soul’ the profound essence that needed to be found.

To her shock, it also worked the first time, even if it was almost headache inducing.

The difficulty was that it required almost complete focus, compared to how it normally went. The inertia of familiarity, born of tens, if not hundreds of thousands of repetitions of those mnemonics in her mind’s eye was as much a hindrance now as it had been a help.

Arai was still looking at her sceptically.

“Okay, let's do this,” she declared.

“Mmm… okay,” Arai agreed after a moment, seemingly resigning herself to not receiving an immediate explanation.

Putting a hand to her sister’s forehead and the other on her heart, she slowly started to move with her, making sure she was completely in-sync with Arai’s movement as she retraced her steps…

“Got it!” Arai declared, opening her eyes after they had almost returned to the cliff edge. “It was ‘Brother Ji’ who sneak attacked Sir Huang!”

“Ah, good,” she gasped, sitting down on a handy rock.

“—Motherless Monkey, sis, what the fates did you do!” her sister gasped a moment later, scooting over to half-kneel beside her as she stared up at the swirling cloud, taking deep breaths.

It took her a moment to realise that blood was streaming out of her nose.

“Ah, I twisted the meaning of ‘Spirit’ and ‘Soul’ a bit,” she replied, then gave Arai a quick summary of the memory while her sister wiped the blood away. "Where did you find the clue, anyway?”

“The reflection in Sir Huang’s hair tie,” Arai replied, sitting down beside her. “It’s made of metal and caught the shadow with enough clarity that I could discern that the attacker was wielding that black-ish bladed sword ‘Brother Ji’ used before.”

“In that case, your turn to get a nosebleed,” she chuckled, sitting up.

“…”

Arai gave her a sideways look, then muttered her mantra under her breath a few times, likely getting the hang of the cadence of the mnemonic flow she, herself, had used. Once Arai had done that though and placed one hand on her heart and the other on her third eye, she took a deep breath and sank back into the memory of that moment.

Re-focusing on her memories, she followed her sister’s instruction and within a few seconds had a wavering, shadowy awareness of a figure in a red and purple robe, hanging in the air just behind Sir Huang, the short blade in his hand out-stretched, just about to make contact with Sir Huang’s neck. It was like looking at a ghost for a split second, such was the speed of the movement, but it was still there, captured egregiously in the twisted reflection.

The longer she stared at it, the more aware of just how obfuscated the moment she was in she became as well. While much of it was still murky and unclear, she could now see Ha Mangfan and Din Ouyeng clearly, near Ling Luo.

Juni was halfway across the distance, her bow drawn, already loosing an arrow at Brother Ji.

Lin Ling and Han Shu were both staring, in shock. Lin Ling had her hand clasped over the spot where the skitterleap talisman was, likely in the process of trying to trigger it.

“I… am Di Ji, and I am so pleased…”

The words made her skin crawl as ‘Brother Ji’ spoke them, in that disorientating moment within the attack. There was certainly more, but by that point, all three of them had been cast adrift into the mist and she had lost track of Sir Huang as she desperately grasped for Arai.

Exhaling, she opened her eyes again.

“I am Di Ji…”

“I am Di Ji…”

The words hung in her mind for a few seconds, before her mantra crushed the disturbing resonance that came with them.

“It was all three of them,” Arai said, before she could.

“Yeah,” she agreed, feeling tired.

The worst part was, in a weird way, that Ling Luo appeared in on it, somehow. That would hurt Ling Yu.

Refocusing on her memories again, she found that much of the recollection was still absolutely terrible as well. The ‘understanding’ she had from the moment within that reflection was barely enough to counteract the lingering sense that Mangfan was still the real perpetrator.

Examining how her memories twisted in loops trying to justify that made her feel dirty inside. It was every bit as nasty as the worst moments in places like the Red Pit.

“Everything about that moment is just… scary,” she shuddered. “The perfection within the moment…”

“I wonder if that’s why my compass died,” Arai mused.

“An absolute alignment?” she frowned.

“Yep, except it was meant to ensure our death, and I rather suspect it flipped.”

“That’s why they are dangerous,” she agreed.

The lectures their father had given on ‘Absolute Alignments’ were mostly to explain why bought compasses were not great in life and death circumstances. Absolute Alignments were basically a rejection of a fundamental tenet of the celestial order – that ‘Heaven’ always left a way. Death in Eight Directions was the famous one, but there were others. The key thing though, was that they were fickle.

“Like a slippery fish in the dark, didn’t Father say?” Arai nodded.

“Uh-huh,” she sighed, staring up at the sky. “Though if this is ‘heaven leaving a way’ it’s got a cruel sense of humour.”

“Ha-Haauu…” Arai half-laughed, half-groaned.

“So… Di Ji huh,” she said at last. “Isn’t that the name of that total criminal from a hundred years ago?”

“The one Mother once described as an enemy of all women?” Arai added.

That was another childhood memory. One of the few times she had ever seen her mother really, and by really, she meant really, angry.

They had been playing with some kids in the plaza outside their house, and it had become a game of ‘black and white’. Or to put it more simply, ‘cultivators and rebels’. During that, some brat had started to declare that ‘Di Ji was going to get them’, because they were cheating.

Mother, who had been nearby for some reason, had overheard and slapped the boy so hard he was left unconscious. She had then dressed down his father, when he complained, and given everyone a lecture about ‘who’ exactly ‘Di Ji’ was and why no child should ever speak his name, especially not in relation to young women and girls.

“…”

“Enemy of all women is maybe underselling it,” she muttered.

~ Jun Han – Misty Jasmine Inn ~

“I didn’t think it was possible to dislike this rain more than I already did,” Kun Yunhee grumbled, taking in the gorge from the steps of the shrine.

Standing beside her, watching the rain splash off the paving in the small courtyard, Jun Han found he had to agree.

The ‘Rains from the East’ were difficult enough at the best of times, but whatever had occurred in the Jasmine Gate had somehow allowed them to find a new layer of unpleasantness within the ‘Yin Eclipse experience’ he had not thought possible. Officially, their task here was to keep a look-out while Priestess Ying helped the injured using the shrine pool. In his case, however, it was also to get away from the bandits and their smirking indifference to their captivity, as it kept reminding him that Arai, Sana and their friends were still out there, unaccounted for.

Mostly, though, it was to see if being under shelter helped ameliorate the effects of the ‘jasmine rain’, as most were now calling it.

It had not. If anything, trying to evade its effects just made experiencing it worse. “How can the humidity somehow be more… more?” Yunhee complained, pulling at her light robe that sat under her armour, which was almost stuck to her like a second skin at this point.

“The worst is that floral scent,” he muttered.

The suffocating humidity and the almost poisonous lethargy it instilled in his qi if he relinquished his concentration would have been bad enough on their own, but the floral fragrance carried with the rain and mist was…

It was almost indescribable.

Short of screaming inarticulately, he didn’t think he could find any words to do the discomfort it caused any kind of justice.

It was at times distracting, others alluring, then, just when he thought he had managed to ignore it, that became a sort of curse of absence where he found himself suddenly missing it, only to then feel disgusted and distracted when he realised it had never been gone.

That had even filtered into getting into shelter from the rain itself, which just made you more aware of the crushing humidity and everything else that came with it. He half expected to start encountering biting qi-insects at this point, just to complete the descent into abject misery.

“Ugggh,” Kun Yunhee just shuddered. “I think I would still feel horrid, even if I was stark naked. It’s like… armour, hate, I just can’t.” she groaned, running her hands through her lank hair.

“It is rather miserable, yes,” Priestess Ying agreed, stepping out from the shrine to join them.

“How are the injured faring?” he asked, partly to distract himself from wanting to tear his own armour off.

“The pool gives some respite from this, but none of them are in the best mental state anyway,” Priestess Ying said with a sigh, wiping sweat, and with it quite a bit of mud and blood, off her face. “As to their injuries, they are… well, they are what they are really.”

That was about all you could say. No further survivors had shown up either, though the list of the missing was still growing. The Five Fans' assault, for all that it was brief, had been ruthless in that regard.

“—Hey, how is it going?”

They glanced over to find Ling Fei Weng, who had just called out, was making his way into the courtyard.

“It’s raining,” Kun Yunhee grunted. “Ask me when it’s stopped.”

“Aye,” Ling Fei Weng sighed, walking up the steps to stand beside them in what passed for the shelter of the overhanging roof. “How are the injured, Priestess Ying?”

“About as you might expect,” she sighed. “Any more survivors?”

“No, just dead bodies,” Ling Fei Weng replied, sounding drained.

He could only feel for the Ling clan expert. Most of those dead out there from the Ling clan were people he knew, some quite well.

“Ling Tao is looking for both of you,” Ling Fei Weng added after a moment. “I am basically here to take your spot.”

“She still over by the teleport?” Yunhee asked.

“Yep,” Ling Fei Weng nodded.

“I guess we will talk later then,” he said with a sigh, bowing politely to the Priestess.

“I am sure,” she agreed, returning his and Yunhee’s bows. “Stay safe.”

Giving her a smile that was half-hearted at best, he nodded again to Ling Fei Weng and set off down the steps, Yunhee following after him, still tugging at her armour.

Out in the gorge, they made their way over to the teleport platform, where Ling Tao was standing, talking to Old Xian and Diaomei, whose expressions could only be called… unhappy.

“Ah, there you are,” Ling Tao waved for them to come over once she spotted them both.

“How can we help, Lady Tao?” he asked, giving her a polite salute.

“Please, no salutes,” she sighed. “We are just waiting on Han- ah, there is he.”

Following her gaze, he found Han Ryong walking over to them from the looted warehouse.

“You wanted to see me, Lady Ling?” Han Ryong said respectfully.

“Yes. Aii…” Ling Tao sighed and stared up at the rainy sky for a moment. “Let’s walk over towards the shrine a bit. Standing near those idiots—” she glanced over at the more important bandit prisoners “—is making me want to follow Priestess Ying’s suggestion.”

“—to feed them Immortal Peaches then turn them into a banner?” Diaomei asked with a nasty grin.

“In this rain, shoving them under some upturned pots would be enough,” Old Xian muttered.

“Mmm, true,” Ling Tao agreed. “Although I dread to think what blighted fungus they would mutate into.”

“Fair point,” Old Xian agreed.

“Baisheng, call me when they get the thing stable!” Ling Tao called over to Baisheng, who was sitting on an upturned pot on the teleport formation, with an umbrella for shelter.

“Of course,” the old man confirmed, giving her a wave.

With a further sigh, Ling Tao gave the bandits one last, gloomy look, then starting to walk back in the direction they had just come from.

Somewhat confused at this point, he followed her in silence, until she came to a stop in the courtyard they had just left. Ling Fei Weng, who was still chatting with Priestess Ying, also looked somewhat bemused.

“Sorry,” she sighed, seeing his and Yunhee’s odd looks, “I could have just come over here, couldn’t I?”

“It has been that kind of morning,” Old Xian said sympathetically.

“It has rather,” she agreed.

“Do you want me to stay, Lady Tao?” Ling Fei Weng asked politely.

“Ah, it’s fine, I just wanted to be out of obvious earshot of those villains,” Ling Tao sighed, walking over and sitting down on the edge of a column base set into the steps. “Anyway, I suppose I am paying the price for not having spoken earlier.”

For some reason, she looked at him when she said that, in a way that made him suddenly rather uneasy.

“And now this abnormal rain is here,” she grumbled, staring out at the rain bouncing off the plaza. “Context or problem, problem or context, talk about circumstances making a mockery of good intentions.”

“You could hardly have foreseen this, Lady Tao,” Diaomei murmured.

“What happened?” he asked, trying to push away the sense that something was wrong.

Those gathered here all had ties to the missing group led by Kun Juni, and the fact that she was clearly uneasy didn’t bode well.

-Only Lin Ling is without representation, he thought, with a pang of pity, I suppose that means I am here on her behalf as well. I owe Lin Fanghai, never mind Arai and Sana, that much, certainly.

“What happened?” Ling Tao gave him a wan smile. “Good question. Greedy old men who only care about themselves happened. Is it a blessing or a curse I wonder, that I never grasped their gift for distance in the face of self-interest?”

“If you had, you would not be here,” Old Xian remarked drily.

“True, I would be fawning over that pathetic prince and his ego,” Ling Tao agreed with a bitter smile. “Ignorant of what I never had.”

“Anyway,” Ling Tao added, with a further sigh, “Basically, the duke, blast his puppeted limbs, and those around him, want confirmation about the Five Fans, specifically he wants to speak to those of you who can confirm that Esoteric Green Fan, among others, was actually here.”

“—Ah,” Yunhee grunted.

“Somehow, they got wind that you, Diaomei, and you, Han, are both here,” Ling Tao continued, looking at each of them in turn. “—and with your previous occupations, and connections to people Cao Leyang trusts, well, they deem it to be a fortuitous thing.”

“Faugh,” Diaomei just sighed, sounding resigned.

“I… see?” he muttered, somewhat surprised at that.

His ties with the Cao Estate were… ephemeral at best, now. His current post was basically a retirement job, after Cao Hongjun stood down as duke, and while he had maintained a fairly cordial relationship with Cao Leyang in those days, the duke had sent him exactly two letters since then. The first was to congratulate him and Ruliu on the birth of Arai and Sana, delivered alongside a small token of acknowledgement from his father, the latter a personal message when Ruliu died.

“You have links to the duke?” Han Ryong asked him, quietly.

“When I first arrived in Blue Water Province, Cao Hongjun took me under his wing,” he explained. “I ended up in his household until I met Ruliu, at which point I moved to West Flower Picking Town. After that I was under Cao Leyang’s command as part of the Provincial Security Bureau until he became duke.

“Oh…” Han Ryong gave him a somewhat sideways look, no doubt because the ‘Provincial Security Bureau’, as Cao Leyang’s personal project, had been a fairly clandestine setup. “That explains a lot.”

“—That they want to do this, because the Deng clan are more concerned about Misty Vale, which has also come under attack, than here, where we have had all the misery in the world… is just typical I suppose,” Ling Tao added sourly.

“Misty Vale got attacked?” Yunhee asked.

“Yes, just like here,” Ling Tao replied. “By the sounds of it, the garrison fell before it even knew what hit it, and the town probably as well.”

“That’s the land route out of here,” Han Ryong frowned.

“And the largest standing garrison in the region,” Ling Fei Weng added grimly.

“It is,” Ling Tao agreed. “However, that is a fairly minor thing…”

“That is min—?”

“—Is this about Juni’s group?” he interjected, his anxiousness to discover the fates of his daughters warring with the creeping thought that he really, truly, did not want to hear where this was going.

“Yes,” Ling Tao replied, not meeting his eyes and just staring out across the rain-drenched courtyard.

“Are they okay?” Han Ryong asked, uneasily.

“Honestly?” Ling Tao sighed. “We have no idea. Just remember that the evidence we have is… prone to multiple interpretations.”

As far as replies went, that did not inspire confidence. Something about this was starting to make him feel deeply uneasy. A soldier's intuition and, much more worryingly, a father's.

“—though if this is someone’s idea of a bad joke, I will ensure that their punishment is immortalized in arborundum,” she muttered under her breath.

“…”

“Are you sure you don’t want…” Old Xian asked her, putting a hand on her shoulder.

“No,” Ling Tao shook her head, giving him an apologetic, if rather wan, smile, before looking at each of them in turn, her expression... complex.

“Simply put, there is fairly... compelling evidence that Ji Tantai kidnapped Ling Luo, and that he... may be Kong Di Ji—”

“—or have a close relationship to him,” Diaomei quickly added.

“Well, yes,” Ling Tao conceded. “Although how that works… Anyway...”

“Di…Ji?” he repeated, hoping, praying, he had just misheard. That uneasy feeling, like a pit had appeared in his stomach, well on its way to becoming a sink-hole, threatening to drag him down into the depths of the underworld.

“As in… the Kong Di Ji?” Kun Yunhee reiterated, her expression curdling. “That was captured near Eastern Myrtle Village, by Cao Leyang?”

Han Ryong and Ling Fei Weng both had expressions like they had eaten shit, and he was sure his wasn’t any better.

“Yes, that Kong Di Ji,” Old Xianfang confirmed with a deeper sigh.

“Well… shit,” Yunhee declared, running a hand through her matted hair.

“So, how does this…” Han Ryong started to ask, then trailed off, his expression paling. “Oh…”

“Di— Ji Tantai and Ling Luo chased after…” he trailed off, his mouth suddenly dry. “Arai, Sana...” he stared at Ling Tao, feeling like he had been punched in the gut—‘Young Noble Ji is a HERO, how dare you slander his good name like this!’

In life, there were memories that stuck with you. Treasured ones, like the day Arai and Sana were born or the day he met Ruliu. Momentous ones, like the day he underwent his immortal crossing and the events afterward. And nightmarish ones. Like sitting in the darkness, holding Ruliu’s hand, as she slipped away, or the day of her funeral, when her relatives took away Ruo, or…

—He found himself staring up at a furious young woman, nineteen, maybe twenty years old, her dark brown hair dishevelled and her expensive robe flickering with formation symbols.

Or the day Cao Leyang encountered Kong Di Ji, in Eastern Myrtle Village.

“Young Noble Ji is a hero, how dare you slander his good name like this!” she screamed, grinding her foot into his stomach hard enough that the ceramic-weave armour he was wearing over it started to fracture.

“A mere servant, dares to—”

A hammer blow struck her, sending her flying away, into a building, hard enough to demolish it.

“No… you idiots…” groaning, he rolled up, coughing up blood, just in time to see the armoured vehicle, that had shot her, that should have been able to stand up to a barrage of immortal-realm talismans, vanish in a cloud of metal, unstable qi and shredded soldiers.

“DIE! DOG OF THE AUTHORITY!”

A black-haired young girl in a dusty, torn dress, barely fifteen and not even at golden core, ran screaming out of the ruin of a building, a butcher’s cleaver in her hand… and smashed it against his arm.

He stared blankly as the metal bent on his armour, not that she cared, continuing to smash it against him—

“—YOUNG NOBLE JI DID NOTHING WRONG!”

The scream made his vision waver, such was the force of soul strength behind it. The girl attacking him collapsed like a broken puppet, killed by the shock of the attack.

Only intuition stopped him from being hit as a blonde-haired beauty, a quiver of arrows at her waist, appeared beside him, her short blade scoring his armour—

He caught her arm and threw her down, not holding back this time… only for the Golden Immortal woman, who was a tenth his age – just to add insult to everything else– to smoothly slip out of his grasp and roll away. He followed her and kicked her in the side, grimacing as even that barely staggered her—

“Captain Han!” Sergeant Fei, a young soldier in his early forties yelled from nearby as he led a squad of their troops out of the ruins—

“Get—” he barely managed to say, before the woman thrown into the building appeared beside Sergeant Fei… and tore his friend’s head off, then casually used it to hit the corporal beside him, so hard his body partially exploded.

“You think you are special?” the woman who he had just kicked sneered as she stood up, wiping blood from her mouth. “An old man like you, who barely made it to Golden Immortal by the time he was two hundred, dares to oppose young hero Ji?”

Spitting out a mouthful of blood, he looked around at the chaos of the ruined village.

At the several armoured vehicles burning nearby.

At the corpses of dozens of his friends, soldiers whom he had led for years, their hopes and dreams naught but bloody smears in the rubble.

At the massive martial formation that hung, over half the village, like an executioner’s blade.

At the lunatic before him, her clear eyes radiating such an obsessive desire to ‘protect’ her young noble that it made his skin crawl.

“I thought we were done with this, after the Blood Eclipse?” he bemoaned to the world at large, as the brown-haired woman also refocused on him… and threw a severed arm at him.

He dodged it, only for it to explode anyway, splattering his armour in gore. In the same instant, the blonde-haired girl drew her bow and aimed at him… and froze, as a Dao Cage appeared around her.

The brown-haired woman, spun, looking for the perpetrator, giving him an opportunity to charge her down.

His armour absorbed two blows in quick succession, as together, they crashed into a gore-covered pile of rubble that had been the wall behind Sergeant Fei’s squad—

“Young Nob—!”

He headbutted her in the face, which stopped her scream, at least, however her hazel-green eyes still reflected that sentiment, that ‘Young Ji did nothing wrong’, with such a fervent certainty that it left him feeling physically sick, before she kneed him in the side hard enough for him to cough blood over her—

“He... He did nothing wrong!” she snarled, tearing at his armour, trying to head-but him back. “Young—!”

Again, he tried to interrupt her, slamming them both into a slab of masonry—

“Young Noble Ji did nothing wrong!”

Somehow, she still managed to scream again, and this time, it was impossible not to see the features of his own daughters overlaid with hers. Their hazel eyes, their dark-brown hair... screaming at him, begging... pleading with him to just understand how Young Noble Ji was everything to them...

“—Hush, it’s just a nightmare,” he flinched as Ruliu's voice whispered gently in his ear.

Groaning, he tried to banish the haunting, horrible words and the girl’s crystal-clear gaze from his mind as his wife placed her hands on his head—

“That girl Xua... what did she do to you?” Ruliu muttered, her tone becoming more vexed, and rather angry as a gentle warmth flowed into him, from her hands…

“Ruliu...” he reached out for her hands, grasping them, only for her features to melt into those of Priestess Ying, who was crouching before him, looking concerned, her fingers touching his temples.

“Are you—?” she started to ask him, however before she could finish the sentence, he doubled over and vomited onto the pavement.

“Is he okay?” a young woman… Yunhee, he realised, as his awareness of his surroundings slid back into focus, asked, her voice tinged with worry.

“Brother Han...” Han Ryong was also kneeling nearby, his face pale, while behind him Ling Fei Weng and Diaomei were both looking on, concerned.

“Yeah, he… got a serious dose of an unpleasant art,” Priestess Ying replied, her qi continuing to flow into him, banishing the last vestiges of that resurgent nightmare.

“I am fine now…” he said with a grimace, taking a deep breath.

The worst part of that nightmarish memory was how much… more it was now. Back then, he had had no children. Now, with twin daughters, the same age as…

“Young Noble Ji did nothing—”

With an inarticulate snarl, he slammed his head onto the paving, hard enough to make it shake, banishing the mocking, haunting, accusatory, words.

“You… crossed paths with Kong Di Ji?” Ling Tao, who was also crouching beside him, asked, her voice tinged with real worry as she also put a hand on his shoulder, helping him sit up again.

“I…” he took a deep breath, then another, to banish the lingering queasiness, before wiping the blood from his nose and replying.

Even now, almost a century on, it was hard to talk about it.

“I was with Cao Leyang, at Eastern Myrtle Village. We arrived after... to try and contain it.”

“You were at...” Yunhee looked like she had been punched as well, as did Diaomei.

“Oh…” was all Ling Tao said, squeezing his shoulder sympathetically. “I’m sorry.”

It was a running joke, amongst those who guarded towns, that tea-house brawls were never simple. That day in Eastern Myrtle was like a nightmarish parody of that observation.

When they had rushed to support Cao Leyang, they found the village already in ruins, while Di Ji and his ‘allies’ had turned its populace insane, hurling a wall of bodies – men, women, children, even dogs and chickens at their men. Of those four hundred soldiers, a hundred of them under his command, twenty-one had survived, including himself. The village itself had been flattened, its population decimated, the few survivors so mad that they had almost been beyond help.

“Sorry,” he mumbled, managing to banish those vivid, nightmarish memories before he could be sucked into them a second time and looking around at the shocked, worried expressions of the others.

“This fate-thrashed weather,” Priestess Ying cursed softly, continuing to send qi into him. “Just take deep breaths and focus on what you were a moment ago, not her, but on the other…”

“—My wife,” he replied, woodenly, wondering suddenly how much she had seen.

“Ah…” Priestess Ying sighed. “To be able to undo what Xua Ziyi did to you—”

“You...” he looked up at her, momentarily shaken out of his fugue of memories about Ruliu, by his surprise at her statement. “You know who that was?”

“Xua Ziyi… as in?” Ling Tao started to speak, then trailed off, frowning.

“I…” Priestess Ying glanced at Ling Tao, then at him, before just sighing again and nodded. “Yes, she was a… is… She can only live in regret, with what she did, and what happened to her. Di Ji took everything from her.”

In his heart, he knew it was not Xua Ziyi's fault.

That she was as much a victim as the others. Like the blameless girl who had attacked him with a cleaver.

Or the old elders of the village who had self-detonated, screaming Seng-ist slogans as they did so, to ruin armoured vehicles.

Or the children who stabbed guards trying to haul them to safety, with treasures they should never have had…

Di Ji had delighted in seeking out skilled cultivators whom he could use yet dispose of easily. However, he was infamous for seducing and controlling young women, and few, if any of those who passed through his hands had not suffered… profoundly.

Again, Arai and Sana’s faces hung before him, cast onto those tormented women. He knew, better than anyone, just how talented his daughters were.

-I put them in the Hunter Bureau… what if I had just run away with them that day, gone to another continent, gone into Yin Eclipse, gone to the…

-And now they are right in the palm of a monster like Di Ji.

It hurt just thinking it. His daughters, his beautiful, kind, sincere daughters were out there in the hands of that… that…

-A monster who should be...

-Young Noble Ji did nothing—

It took all his effort not to punch himself in the face. Priestess Ying grimaced and the sense of ‘wrongness’ receded—

“That art is a menace,” Priestess Ying muttered, sighing deeply. “It was a mistake for them to ever give it to a girl like Xua, no matter how ‘suitable’ she was.”

“Is he also touched by ‘Favour with a Smile’?” Ling Tao asked, her tone… gloomy.

“Uhuh, Jun Han here got a face full of it from the inheritor of this generation, and something about this fate-thrashed weather… or maybe it’s something else… is stirring it up, like mud in the bottom of a pond.”

“Sorry,” he grimaced, taking another deep breath. “I shouldn’t…”

“To care is never something that should be apologized for,” Old Xian said a bit gruffly. “It is those worthless dogs in Blue Water City, who quietly seek to make excuses for Di Ji’s reputation, not to mention those who sought to profit from it ever since, who should be haunted by what happened in Eastern Myrtle. Not young lads like you, who did the best they could to salvage something from it—”

“Shit!” Ling Tao cursed suddenly, standing up. “Motherless…”

He watched dully as she turned and kicked the pedestal of a pillar behind her hard enough to dislodge a few roof tiles above them in the courtyard.

“What is it?” Old Xian asked, concerned.

“Those motherless… That girl Xua Ziyi is the heart of half their fabrications and their excuses!” Ling Tao hissed. “They will claim that any evidence he gives is questionable, that that fox girl, forgive the term, Diaomei—”

“It’s fine,” Diaomei murmured, from where she was looking on, with concern.

“—That it has affected him,” Ling Tao concluded.

“Which it has, in a sense,” Old Xianfang sighed, sounding annoyed.

“Indeed, no lie here, Lord Duke, we swears the words is straight!” Ling Tao parroted with a sneer. “I bet that whoever asked for this corroboration knew Jun Han was there, and will use this to claim that whatever testimony he gives might be questionable… using it as an excuse to do as they like!”

“Um…” Ling Fei Weng started to speak.

“—And I cannot stand in front of them either,” Priestess Ying muttered, cutting him off.

“You… can’t?” Old Xian asked, quizzically, turning to her.

“Indeed, you cannot,” Ling Tao said with a frustrated sigh, scrunching her hands through her sodden blonde hair.

“Um, can I ask?” Ling Fei Weng cut in, looking concerned. “I mean, um, how is Di Ji… alive? Wasn’t he fairly publicly killed by Kong Di Yao?”

“Purportedly,” Old Xian answered, with a grimace. “Although there was always scepticism on that front. That boy shone too brightly, and had far too much importance attached to him, to be discarded quite that easily. Ji Tantai has also been confirmed as using an art from Dewdrop Sage Valley, that Di Ji ‘acquired’, if I understand it?”

“Really?” Priestess Ying frowned, glancing up from where she was still tending to him.

“Yes,” Ling Tao confirmed. “My teacher is one of the few people who has…”

“I have seen Di Ji,” Priestess Ying said softly.

“You… have?” Ling Tao asked, surprised.

“I have,” Priestess Ying confirmed, with a regretful sigh. “Once I saw him at a Dao Discussion, before… everything occurred, when his reputation was still intact. Then much later, after Xua Ziyi and others fell under his influence, in Wubei Town—

“Wait… you were there, in Wubei Town?” he blurted out, unable to hide his own surprise.

Wubei Town, on the province’s north-western border, had fared rather better than Eastern Myrtle, in its 'encounter' with Di Ji, though that was a bit like saying being poisoned was better than stabbed. Basically, while staying there, the Iron Crown Duke's heirs had claimed they became the target of a ‘rebel villainess’, who various influences and witnesses had christened the ‘Blood Eclipse Demon Saintess Song'…

Somewhat ironically though, that allegation, and link back to the Blood Eclipse, had backfired massively. Fearing a resurgence of the Yeng Brotherhood, provincial officials had investigated rather more thoroughly than those disgraced heirs had likely anticipated. Very quickly, provincial forces began to suspect there was something more at play than simply over-zealous scions hunting ‘rebels’.

In a sense that was considered by many to be the ‘beginning of the end’ for Kong Di Ji, though it had also been the start of a bad run of events that eventually saw Wubei Town devastated in the Three Schools Conflict.

“I was,” she confirmed. “Sadly, I failed to kill him in the aftermath—”

“You... actually tried to kill him?” Kun Yunhee asked, shocked and not a little awed.

“Aaiiii... I did,” Priestess Ying replied with a bitter, almost self-mocking grimace. “It was... well, he was able to get away.”

“Did he...?” Yunhee trailed off, looking at Priestess Ying with a complicated expression.

“—give me these scars?” Priestess Ying asked, before shaking her head with a sad smile. “No. Despite his many crimes, Kong Di Ji did not do that.”

“—In that case, given you are familiar with Xua Ziyi and that art, can you look at this?” Ling Tao asked, passing Priestess Ying a Jade.

While Priestess Ying took the jade and pondered what was on it, he took a few further deep breaths to refocus himself.

Some of the initial shock had worn off now, thanks in no small part to her healing, and while the gut-wrenching feelings of helplessness were still there, in his heart, he knew dwelling deeply on them was a bad idea. Self-pity would not help his daughters, or their friends, or anyone else stuck out there.

Looking around, the others were all rather shaken as well, especially Han Ryong, who was sitting on the steps, stony-faced, no doubt worried about Han Shu and Ling Fei Weng, who was likely concerned about Ling Luo. Yunhee, by comparison, was looking at Priestess Ying with mild awe, while Diaomei and Old Xian were just watching passively, their expressions gloomy as they watched Priestess Ying and Ling Tao consult the jade.

“That is certainly ‘Favour with a Smile’,” Priestess Ying said at last. “And the youth at the back… no wonder they stepped through quickly and matters transpired that I didn’t cross paths with them in the short time they were here.”

“Could it be someone other than Di Ji?” Ling Tao asked her. “Maybe?” Priestess Ying conceded, after a further short pause. “It is… I want to say ‘odd’ that Kong Di Yao would be travelling with the very person he is famed for having ‘killed’, but knowing the Din clan and the Di family, I don’t doubt that that whole scheme could be a ruse, to avoid embarrassment and spit in Lady Kai’s eye. They certainly trashed Xua’s reputation thoroughly in the aftermath.”

“—With the tales of him being bewitched by a fox demon and that Lady Kai was just trying to cover her tracks?” Ling Tao mused.

“Among other things,” Priestess Ying sneered. “The Din clan’s main talent, I have come to believe, is that they have a heaven-sent ability to talk anyone into believing that festering dog-shit is actually a dao-jade covered in mud.”

“That I could believe,” Old Xian agreed sourly.

“So,” he started to say, before having to pause to again wipe blood from his nose. "So, if Ji Tantai... is Kong... Di Ji, or related to him in some way, what do we do?"

“That is the million-spirit-stone question,” Ling Tao muttered.

“Didn’t... you say that those monkeys were going to help Han Shu and the others?” Han Ryong asked, hopefully. “Perhaps they might be able...?”

“...”

“Shit,” Ling Tao groaned, pinching the bridge of her nose.

“Oh, monkey balls,” Old Xian groaned at the same time.

“Ah,” Priestess Ying grimaced.

“Uh...?" Han Ryong looked confused, as did Kun Yunhee, and Ling Fei Weng for that matter, though Diaomei just sighed softly.

For his part, he had a sort of hunch on what their worry was, but a part of him was not sure whether that was a good or a bad thing.

The question of the 'monkey tribes' and their threat to the peace and security of Yin Eclipse was a high-level strategic concern, one that Cao Leyang had had quite a lot of engagement with, as had the forces under his command in the aftermath of the Blood Eclipse. Most of his personal dealings had been with ‘fern cloaks’, but chilling tales of retributions existed in historical record if you knew where to look.

“You think they will fail?” Han Ryong asked, finally sounding a bit nervous.

Looking at his friend, as someone who had two teenage daughters able to hide their emotions, he could see the tell-tale signs Han Ryong was relying rather forcefully on his own mantra inheritance at this point.

“Mmmmm...” Priestess Ying didn’t look all that confident, suddenly, he had to admit.

“What is the worst that could happen there?” Ling Tao asked, frowning.

“They provoke the Iron-hide enough that they come out of the massif in search of answers, or just outright killing people,” Old Xian muttered, his expression gloomy. “Likely they won’t stop easily either. This has the potential to be as bad as the mess with the Eastern Blaze Cult.”

“Eastern Blaze?” Priestess Ying asked, curious. “I can’t say I have ever heard of them.”

“Oh, it was well before your time,” Ling Tao grimaced. “Back in the chaotic period after the Huang-Mo wars. There were various… incidents. The most famous… infamous, perhaps, was that perpetrated by the Eastern Blaze Cult, who wanted to relocate to here from the Iron Crown Province. As a result, the monkeys, who had largely stood aloof, were provoked to the point where they began playing an active part in pushing back against the settling of clans and external powers. Propping up many of the local tribes that owed allegiance to powerful qi beasts and awakened spirit herbs in the process.

“Because of that, it proved impossible for the old powers that had existed since before the time of the Blue Water Sage to ever be fully pushed out of the province and caused Cao Hongjun a lot of difficulties in his early years as Duke.”

Moving over to sit on the steps, beside Han Ryong, he couldn't help but notice Ling Tao didn’t sound quite as annoyed about that last bit.

“How are you holding up?” he asked Han Ryong, who had gone back to staring at the courtyard, while Ling Tao and the others talked about the problems with monkeys.

“Eh… um, I should be asking you that,” Han Ryong replied, giving him a sideways look. “I just feel so… helpless,” Han Ryong muttered at last. “Like… there should be something more we can do?”

“That is the difficulty,” Yunhee agreed, gloomily. “At least Yin Eclipse doesn’t care what kind of cheating bastard of a ‘young noble’ you are.”

“There are worse outcomes to this than 'angry monkey tribe gets sic'd on rampaging criminal',” Diaomei observed, both to them, and to Ling Tao and Old Xian. “The ones that were here seemed quite... reasonable?”

“The Iron-hide tribe are reasonable in the same way snapping turtles are,” Old Xian muttered. “Provoke them, and their response will make the Meng clan—”

“—Oh bugger that dog-bastard's ancestral generations...” Ling Tao trailed off and stared up at the rain, mouthing curses silently at the sky above as they all turned to look at her.

“What?" Old Xian asked, frowning.

“—What’s wrong?” Priestess Ying asked.

“Ji Tantai, Di Ji, whoever the fates-accursed ancestors he currently is, is a member of the Seven Star Pavilion and there is enough circumstantial evidence in this that it is possible to paint a disturbingly plausible picture pointing to the Meng clan.”

“Gah, all we need are those crazy monkeys starting a war with a hegemonic power,” Old Xian grimaced. “Not to mention they are setting up this crazy trial.”

“I’d have a bit more faith in the monkeys than that,” Priestess Ying muttered, giving Old Xian a sideways look. “Though the trial is, indeed, likely to take on a rather unpleasant dimension.”

“And speaking of Ar—” he caught himself and shuffled Han Shu’s name to the top of that list. “—Han Shu, Juni and Lin Ling, not to mention my own daughters, all of them are capable and well trained, with as much experience in surviving up here as anyone,” he added encouragingly.

“Indeed," Ling Tao agreed.

That was what he had settled upon to keep his own state of mind... coherent. He knew his daughters, knew what they could do, how well they had struggled to better themselves, and most importantly, how well Ruliu had taught them—

“I know...” Han Ryong groaned, putting his head in his hands. “But I... half the people here didn’t even get a chance to put up a fight and...” Han Ryong trailed off, staring at the wet paving where the blood from his own nosebleed earlier was almost all washed away.

He didn’t have to say what the ‘problem’ was, because they had all been staring at it for over an hour, body by body. Useful people survived. Important people survived, if they were useful.

It was a cold, cruel way of looking at the world. One built on the shoulders of bastards like Di Ji, and the old villains behind those like him. The people in Eastern Myrtle had not been 'important’ in the eyes of Blue Water province, at least until the actions of Di Ji and his companions, willing or otherwise, had obliterated them. Then they had become a posthumous symbol of a certain kind of atrocity, and even that legacy was twisted and miserable in its own way.

-What would I do, if Arai and Sana come back like those broken girls in Eastern Myrtle?

As a thought, that was, in his view, thoroughly cursed and only partly because of the weather.

Even more so because he realised, looking around, that poor Lin Ling was basically an after-thought in this, that, in a strange, twisted way, he was representing her as much as his daughters.

-Their lives would be ruined... but at least they would be alive.

He took a deep breath and forced both those thoughts, each deeply unpleasant in their own ways, out of mind, aware that the weather was also starting to really make some inroads into his mental state. “So, what do we do now?” he asked Ling Tao. "If, as you say, my association with the aftermath of Eastern Myrtle is a... problem."

“Hmmmm..." Ling Tao looked pensive.

“Knowledge is power, it might be informative to see who set that up?” Old Xian mused.

“Well, it’s not like my estates were locked down,” Ling Tao sighed. “This happened too suddenly for that, so it could be as simple as someone just telling their mates they saw something interesting. Though equally, the Five Fans has clearly gotten ears and eyes in the Ling Estates, so…”

“On that topic...” Priestess Ying cut in, looking a bit awkward. “I worry that you might have another problem. That group who came with your niece stayed well out of my way, and thinking back on it, I neither gave them, nor anyone before that much cause to do so...”

“Could just be paranoia?” Old Xian frowned.

“They didn’t care coming here, based on that image,” Priestess Ying pointed out. “You should be prepared for some… interesting aspersions to be thrown the Ling clan’s way, perhaps,” Priestess Ying muttered, looking a bit embarrassed. “Depending on who is behind this.”

“If that does come up, my teacher will deal with it,” Ling Tao said. “Though I wonder if they would be…”

Ling Tao trailed off as one of the masked, male cultivators from the Little Dragon entered the courtyard and gave her a polite salute.

“The setup is done?” Ling Tao asked him.

“Yes,” the masked man confirmed. “They are still calibrating, but Lord Baisheng said to come when you are ready.”

“Very well,” Ling Tao sighed.

“So, am I…?” he started ask, wondering what she intended to do in regards to his participation.

“We can only play what is in front of us,” Ling Tao said with a resigned sigh. “Ying, do you want to come with us and watch this farce from a distance, or wait here?”

“I suppose I’ll come watch,” Priestess Ying said drily. “I can check on the injured who are still out there.”

“I’ll stay here then, keep Sir Fei company,” Old Xian mused. “You can always call if you need me.”

“In that case,” Ling Tao remarked turning to the rest of them, “Shall we get this over with?”

“Ah watch out—”

Yunhee pulled him sideways as another roof tile, that had been teetering precariously, slid off and bounced on the steps right beside him.

“Sorry about that,” Ling Tao said with a sigh, glancing up at the roof.

“It’s fine,” Priestess Ying said drily. “There is a large stack of spares the Blue Gate School left up here years ago in the hall over the wall. The bandits only stole the decorative ones that cap the roof ridges.”

“They even stole the roof tiles?” Yunhee muttered, shaking her head in disbelief.

“Uh-huh,” Priestess Ying.

“Once a bandit,” Ling Tao observed as they headed out through the gate.

The gorge was as it had been, the two groups of bandit prisoners sitting in the rain, guarded by two of the Ling clan Little Dragon experts and Meihua from the Cherry Wine Pagoda. Shi Lian was sitting on the edge of the teleport formation, sipping a drink, while Baisheng was where he had been, sitting cross-legged, resting his chin on one hand.

Bai Sheng and Xiang Meilan were sitting with the wounded not in the pool, under the cover of the re-rigged canopy, nearby.

“I will not be sorry to see the back of this place,” Han Ryong muttered.

He gave Han Ryong a pat on the shoulder by way of agreement as Ling Tao led them back over to Baisheng.

“You could have waited a bit longer,” Baisheng remarked.

“We had reached a point where everything that needed to be said, was said,” Ling Tao murmured, flashing him and Han Ryong an apologetic grimace. “What kind of setup are they using?”

“A visualisation field,” Baisheng replied, gesturing to the formation that someone, Shi Lian probably based on the principle within it, had drawn out on the platform. “With an anchor point on their end. Simple but effective given the distance and the disruption.”

“A Huang clan pattern,” Priestess Ying observed, stepping up on the edge to get a better look as they made their way up.

“Yes, Lord Huang Jinfang is helping,” Baisheng replied.

“Huang Jinfang, that’s a big name,” Priestess Ying mused.

“Meihua!” Ling Tao called over to the woman from the Cherry Wine Pagoda, waving for her to come as well.

“Once the field is activated, you can just stand within it to participate,” Baisheng added, presumably in case none of them were familiar with it.

“What do you need, Lady Ling?” Meihua asked, arriving at the steps.

“The Blue Duke wants to speak to those who can positively identify Smiling Fan and Esoteric Green Fan, among others,” Ling Tao explained. “You may not be needed, but still…”

“Ah, of course,” Meihua nodded, giving Ling Tao a polite salute.

“They are signalling that they will initiate the connection,” Baisheng noted.

He watched as the area around the formation on the teleport platform started to draw in ambient qi, shimmering faintly in the rain for a few seconds, before the middle of the platform wavered faintly.

Priestess Ying hopped off the platform and went to stand a few metres beyond it, as the field expanded to a radius of about ten metres.

“That’s a bit bigger than I thought,” Ling Tao frowned.

“They are putting a lot of qi in from their end,” Baisheng said drily. “I guess they want to impress, given the circumstances.”

Ling Tao just shook her head at his comment as their surroundings continued to waver—

Like a mirage out of the mist, he found himself standing in a somewhat familiar hall, on top of a large table, in fact, given the perspective of the connection was a bit off. He immediately recognised Cao Leyang and Lu Ji, the headmaster of the Blue Gate School, standing alongside Lord Ling Jiang and another rather pale-looking woman who was holding his hand tightly, who he assumed was the lord’s wife, mother of Ling Luo.

Within moments the projection had encompassed the whole of the hall on the other side, holding quite a few more people than he expected.

Off to the side, he picked out generals Ha Cao Lei and Cao Weng, along with Commander Tai Cang, who had been Cao Leyang’s deputy in the Provincial Security Bureau, not to mention the older brother of West Flower Picking Town’s current Town Captain. Tai Cang gave him a subtle nod back as their eyes met.

Across the table from Cao Leyang stood a tall man in a red and blue robe emblazoned with the Huang clan crest, accompanied by a scholarly-looking youth and a dark-haired young woman, both also dressed in Huang clan colours and an auburn-haired beauty in a white gown embroidered with silver moons.

The Imperial Astrologer he recognised from his robe, while the old man beside him in a Deng clan elder’s robe was also vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t place a name. The youths behind him in gaudy robes were a mystery though, as were the handful of other officials and elders standing around watching.

“Duke Leyang,” Ling Tao replied, giving Cao Leyang a polite salute, before turning to the tall, bearded man wearing the red and blue robe. “Duke Jinfang.”

“Lady Ling,” Cao Leyang, who was dressed in a light robe, looking much as he always did, with a close-cropped beard, his long, blonde hair cut short at the sides and tied back in a martial knot, replied politely.

“It has been a long time, Lady Ling,” Duke Huang Jinfang added politely. “You look well, under the circumstances.”

“Thank you, Your Grace,” Ling Tao replied with a further polite salute. “I understand we have you to thank for this link?”

“I can claim little credit,” Duke Jinfang said drily, nodding to the youth in a white and red robe standing beside him. “Young Lord JiLao feels we must improve the impression that was previously made.”

“Young Noble JiLao,” she murmured, giving him a polite salute. “We keep meeting in eventful circumstances, it seems.”

“I’ll bet he does,” Lord Baisheng muttered softly off to the side, which made JiLao glance at the old man then wince.

Rather than be offended, however, Huang Jinfang just rolled his eyes, while the girl beside him actually smiled slightly, as if this much was expected.

On the other hand, the Imperial Astrologer immediately scowled, rounding on Lord Baisheng.

“—You should be more respectful of Young Lord JiLao,” he declared. “Are you aware of who you are addressing so impertinently?”

Lord Baisheng stared at the Astrologer like he was a worm that had learned to speak for a few seconds, then ignored him.

“I trust the drain is not too bad on the other end?” Huang Jinfang asked, also acting as if the Astrologerhad never spoken.

“It’s tolerable,” Baisheng confirmed. “So long as nobody tries anything exotic.”

“So, what kind of force attacked?” Cao Leyang asked Ling Tao.

“A well prepared one,” Ling Tao replied, running her hands through her hair for a moment so it was not plastered over her face in the rain. “Though it pains me to say it, they infiltrated the expedition in the inn to a rather problematic degree—”

“—So Headmaster Lu claimed,” a middle-aged man in Ha clan robes with a long, well-styled beard remarked sourly.

“That’s Ha Ji Fugang,” Shi Lian, who had come to stand beside him, murmured. “An all-around smartass.”

“So I see,” he replied, looking around at the others, making sure he kept his face neutral.

It was hard, frankly, even though he had experience with these kinds of meetings. The thought that one of the old men here had subtly tried to plant him with the events of Eastern Myrtle kept cycling through his head. The Lin Clan had historically held power within that region, but with defectors leading up to and since the Three Schools Conflict, and the fractured politics of the Ducal palace, knowledge of his involvement could really have come from anywhere. However, his eyes kept being drawn over to that Deng official, standing beside the Imperial Astrologer, pondering that sense of familiarity.

“I am informed that the Ling clan was mostly responsible for that,” the Deng official added, a bit archly. “Did not one of your elders mastermind the whole thing?”

Ling Tao, however, didn’t rise to the provocative nudge and simply stared at the Deng elder impassively as a response.

“This does raise quite a few questions as well,” a Confucian-looking man in a green robe embroidered with golden leaves mused.

“Indeed it does,” the Deng official agreed. “Starting with why the Ling clan unilaterally took it upon themselves to shoulder this burden, if they were incapable of seeing it through…?”

“It is possible that the Ling clan has been acting in false pretence from the start?” Ha Ji Fugang mused.

“This does pose us a lot of difficulties in regards to the Emperor of Shan Lai’s request,” The Imperial Astrologer mused. “Though thankfully their Advisorial Excellencies have confirmed that the Imperial Court is willing to defend righteousness.”

“The majority of the infiltration was via the groups of juniors that the Ha clan forced into this endeavour,” Ling Tao replied drily. “And the same goes for the Ling clan elements.”

“That rather smacks of you making excuses, Lady Ling,” the Imperial Astrologer retorted.

“Although it is understandable I suppose,” the Deng Elder conceded, giving Ling Tao a knowing look. “Such responsibility must be a real burden. I do wonder what your husband thinks.”

Listening to them just prattle on, as if this was not some urgently called conference, arranged at great expense, he found he could feel his nascent soul acquiring internal injuries. He was no stranger to these kinds of meetings, but the degree of dismissal was… concerning, even with the knowledge that at least one of those here had, or did intend to, try and manipulate his own participation for their own ends.

“Quiet!” Cao Leyang said, slapping a hand on the table, interrupting everyone “Show some decorum and let Lady Ling speak uninterrupted!”

“Your Grace, Your Grace,” the Deng official murmured placatingly. “The severity of this incident necessitates that we, your advisors, treat it with appropriate scrutiny. We are only doing as our posts instruct!”

“Yes, and right now, your post instructs that you are seen by this seat and not heard! Or I will see to it that the cost of this meeting is taken from your Deng clan!” Cao Leyang snapped, before turning back to Ling Tao. “Apologies, Lady Tao, that was unseemly in the context."

“Not at all,” Ling Tao replied with a polite bow to Cao Leyang. “I am sure these events are very overwhelming to your advisors. Especially for those who lack practical experience in such matters.”

Both the Imperial Astrologer and the old man from the Deng clan scowled at her.

“So, what of the losses sustained?” Ha Ji Fugang said. “I am led to understand the Cao family has confirmed the deaths of Ha Caolun and several others, by turncoat hands. What is the damage there in Misty Jasmine Inn, have you captured any—”

“I cannot speak for Ha Caolun, he was not at the Inn at the time,” Ling Tao said simply. “However, in terms of losses, it would be faster to just list those who survived.”

“Well, do so?” Ha Ji Fugang said after a short pause.

“Lord Fugang,” Cao Leyang growled, rather pointedly.

“...”

“Ha Caolun… is dead?” Shi Lian muttered, biting her lip and glancing at him. “Wasn’t he supposedly part of the group that’s in the wind?”

“Yeah,” he nodded grimly.

That the Ha clan knew that already was… possibly down to their talismans, but at the same time, the Ling clan seemingly knew nothing about Ling Luo… and the Shi family had been in the dark until they came up here.

“Have any other losses been reported?” Ling Tao asked, clearly pondering the same thing he was.

There was some considered silence around the table as the various officials resolutely failed to report.

Ling Tao stared around and sighed, deeply. “Until we are clear on the perpetrators and their overall goals, all I can say is that almost all the survivors of this attack were women."

“I suppose you have some idea on that?” General Weng added. “Advisor Lu has already shared some things...”

“Then I will be fairly brief on that point,” Ling Tao replied. "The bulk of the attacking forces were led by experts from the Five Fans, they were supported by veterans of the Three Schools and Blood Eclipse conflicts. Their methods are... well they fit with the Five Fans, which is to say, they killed everyone who could not be sold for a profit."

“And prisoners?” General Ha Lei asked.

"Some," Ling Tao replied. “However, it is my understanding you are here to ask questions of those who fought with Esoteric Green Fan and his disciple, Smiling Fan.”

“Yes," Cao Leyang agreed, glancing at him and Diaomei briefly before turning back to Ling Tao. “Lady Tao, perhaps you could give us an account of the attack, first?"

“Of course, Your Grace," Ling Tao replied politely. "Though I would hand the narration of the initial attack on the Inn by the bandits to Diaomei, given she was a first-hand witness.”

“Ah, yes, of course,” Cao Leyang agreed, gesturing for Diaomei to come forward from beside Ling Tao.

Diaomei’s narration of the early morning’s events was fairly dispassionate, given her intimate involvement in them, but it left little room for doubt regarding how well prepared the attackers had been.

She didn’t dwell overly much on their identities, but on her description of the tactics and the way the group went through the inn. How they had set up formations in advance, even subverting supposedly secure formations on doors and the like, to raiding rooms, painted a concerningly compelling picture of the skills of those involved.

Their ruthlessness was another key element she emphasised, especially in regards to their pursuit of their goal, which had apparently been to secure the whole Inn, then use it to trap more groups, even into the trial.

At that point, Ling Tao took over, explaining how the response group had been assembled and acted to relieve the Inn, though she glossed over the far-casting and Lord Baisheng’s role. The assault itself didn’t take long to break down either, largely because most of the groups had encountered the same kind of thing, emplaced formations, exploiting earlier sabotage, hamstrung by residual defences due to the attackers underestimating a few key things.

Listening to her, he felt that was another very good reason to avoid prisoners being paraded in front of this lot, beyond the obvious, partisan issues.

The Five Fans had long-standing roots on the central continent and if Priestess Ying really was, as he was starting to suspect, the rumoured ‘Demon Saintess Song’ from Wubei Town, that was the kind of awkward accusation he was sure the Deng and Ha would have a field-day with. Especially if Ling Tao was right and they also decided to poke holes in his unfortunate intersection with Xua Ziyi.

“So, that brings us to the other reason for this,” General Weng mused, considering his group in particular. “The last first-hand testimonies relating to Esoteric Green Fan that are remotely reliable are almost sixty years old, and his disciple has managed to slip through all kinds of nets.”

“Yes,” Cao Leyang nodded. “The question of what powers are actually backing up that bunch has been floating around for almost as long.”

“Certainly, this does bring it somewhat back into the current political frame,” Ling Tao agreed. “With the attack on the auction, what went on elsewhere in the province leading up to it, and now this.”

“Quite, it is clear that some destabilizing influence is trying to leverage matters, and if we can shed any light at all on it…” General Weng sighed. “The influence of the Five Fans as a holistic entity can be debated, but Green Fan and Shadow Fan both have means beyond the expected.”

“You can add in that Green Fan was rumoured to be associated with that criminal Di Ji,” Deng Kong muttered.

“That was never proven,” the Imperial Astrologer pointed out. “If you told people that Di Ji consorted with monkeys and served the Ming at this point, most people would just go ‘as expected’.”

Somewhat to his surprise, Deng Kong shot the astrologer, who he had largely been siding with to this point, a rather nasty look.

“I wonder, does he have some relative that was caught up in that?” Yunhee signed to him unobtrusively.

“He does,” Shi Lian confirmed. “His grandniece was one of the group who went missing in Wubei town.”

“Oh, the abduction blamed on the Demoness Song,” Yunhee signed with a sigh.

“So, we know from the battle what realm the Esoteric is now?” Cao Leyang asked.

“He was able to use laws,” he answered. “And was controlling a major feng shui formation… with a talisman clone.”

“Was he a clone all the time?” General Weng sighed.

“I wonder how they got talisman clones good enough for up there,” Tai Cang muttered.

“No, his clone was destroyed and then his real body appeared,” he replied. “At least as far as I am aware. Perhaps those who were in the courtyard can share more on that?”

“He was not a talisman clone, he was one of those who covered the retreat,” Ling Tao replied after a moment’s thought.

“And can you confirm that there is no way you might be—”

He sighed, finally seeing where the issue about Xua Ziyi was going to come in, feeling a bit frustrated on that point, then frowned, as something odd caught his eye.

“What is it?” Cao Leyang asked as he turned slightly, looking left and right, for what it was.

He wasn’t the only one, either. Shi Lian had turned her head, as had Ling Tao, her eyes narrowed—

“Watch it!” Meihua yelled as she ducked to the side, a distortion scything past her that left a trail of scattered rain before finally hitting the teleport platform and revealing itself to be a metal throwing knife.

Three more followed in quick succession, followed by two yin-earth talisman arrows, falling almost vertically, though Ling Tao just shattered those.

“Well, it took them long enough,” Ling Tao sighed, “Secure the—”

The tetrid slid over the lip of the platform so quietly he barely noticed it, until its qi started to destabilize… at which point it froze on the spot, sealed in a shimmering blue cube.

A second one appeared a moment later, which Baisheng also promptly sealed.

“…”

“What is going on?” General Weng asked as the other onlookers watched the chaos unfold.

“We have been… anticipating an attack for a while,” Ling Tao scowled. “They do have their timing down well.”

“Those are tetrid stalkers?” Deng Kong eyed the sealed cubes with distaste.

“Yes they—”

Two large explosions, from the western perimeter, were followed by a spatial distortion that rippled through the rain.

“Lady Ling!” one of the masked guards from the Little Dragon came racing over—

He flinched as Ling Tao casually caught the masked man by the arm and slammed him into the edge of the teleportation platform.

“Really, at least put some effort in,” she muttered, tearing the man’s mask off to reveal a pale-faced youth with cold eyes.

“What shall I do with him?” the female archer asked, coming over.

“Toss him in with the other elite prisoners,” Ling Tao commanded.

Behind them, there was another explosion, and then a flash of unstable space disgorged some thirty bandits, all wearing light armour, this time painted with a red circle on them, who rapidly spread out across the plaza.

“Blood Moon Gang, wonderful,” Yunhee groaned.

“They are far from home,” he observed.

The Blood Moon’s base of operations was almost beyond Teng province, in the mountain spurs on the eastern edge of the forbidden region.

Two arrows narrowly missed him, even as he scanned them for targets, a third did hit Ryong, who staggered as his armour absorbed the blow.

The female archer next to Ling Tao sent an arrow streaking back into the mist. A moment later there was a flash of unstable qi.

“Missed,” she grunted. “They have personal displacement charms.”

Han Ryong nodded, then sent two arrows of his own into a pair of the bandits who were racing in their direction. Three more died to arrows from above in the same instant. At that point the female archer, Meihua and Ryong opened up properly, sending about an arrow per second into the group, who fell within seconds.

“Dispose of those corpses!” Baisheng yelled a moment later, pointing at the dead bodies littering the ground. “They are—”

His last words were lost as a dozen of the corpses twisted and then started to get back up. Each one now projected a creeping, inauspicious vitality that he had never sensed before.

“By the Grandfather of Heaven’s ill humours!” Ling Tao cursed. “First blood ling trees now this?”

“What are they?” he asked, wondering why they seemed oddly familiar.

“That’s parasol qi, these are basically corpse puppets intended for aggressive area denial,” Ling Tao scowled. “If you don’t have laws, stay at range and shoot them in ways that will make it hard for them to———”

Her words were lost in a vast shockwave that picked everyone bar Ling Tao, Baisheng and her archer up off their feet and sent them sprawling on the ground.

“They just tried to crack the Dao Cage,” Baisheng chuckled, standing up. “Let me deal with this.”

{Azure Yuan Flower Garden}

Every corpse within eyesight gained its own personal blue cube, as did several figures who had been completely invisible, and almost thirty tetrids at rough count, who had been moving in on their position trying to flank.

“That’s one way to deal with it,” Han Ryong muttered, sounding impressed.

“It is,” he agreed.

“That’s a lot of tetrids,” Huang Jingfan remarked from the viewing field, eyeing them. “Some quite high-level ones as well, are they spawning them at…?”

“Golden Core, looks like,” Baisheng mused. “And mutating them with blood-ling qi so that they can use soul sense that much easier.”

“More coming,” Meihua called out. Looking off to the side, he saw the tell-tale flickers of spatial distortion, near the complex the Ha clan juniors had been using—

The teleport triggered thirty metres up in the air and half over the building, scattering…

The corpses, the qi within them already destabilizing, went everywhere while the tetrids that came with them leapt left and right as they scattered.

Baisheng just shook his head and the bodies were again enveloped in shimmering blue cubes until they exploded, at which point the cubes vanished and the qi dispersed harmlessly.

A third spatial distortion triggered off to their right, and he watched, somewhat without suspense this time, as that repeated. Ling Tao and the other archers shot a few tetrids, then the corpses and remaining tetrids got cubed by Baisheng until their qi destabilized.

“On the one hand, it’s certainly an effective tactic,” Shi Lian observed.

“It’s just not any good here,” Yunhee agreed.

“…”

Baisheng, who was standing nearby, looking up at the cliffs, suddenly pulled out a talisman and threw it at the rows of bodies they had been guarding. A shimmering, spherical Dao Cage appeared over them, just in time to block several dozen talisman arrows, each of which exploded in a flash of inauspicious yin vitality he had come to associate with parasol qi by this point.

After that, two more distortions landed, in quick succession, both of which Baisheng, Ling Tao and then Xiaofang and Shi Xiaolian largely tidied up on their own, with the rest of their various groups either guarding the injured, keeping an eye on the bandit prisoners or shooting tetrids from a distance.

A third arrived a short while after that, but then there were no further ones.

The whole ‘assault’ had lasted maybe ten minutes at most, much of it witnessed by the duke and the other advisors as well.

“Well, that was a nice range-finding attack,” Shi Lian muttered as they made their way back over towards the teleport circle.

“—As you can see, they have resources and a willingness to be mendacious,” Ling Tao was saying somewhat sourly to Cao Leyang as they stepped inside.

“Yes, they do,” the duke agreed. “What bothers me is that parasol qi.”

“Yes, it is a bit… unusual,” Ling Tao agreed, neutrally.

~ Jun Sana – Ridgetop Ruins ~

Following the revelation about Ji Tantai being the one responsible for tossing all three of them off the cliff, Sana found herself, not at a loss, exactly- because that was a traumatic revelation to process in various ways- but rather, unclear as to their future direction.

Rather than linger in the cliffside plaza, where her sister had stayed to ponder the divination shrine as the morning progressed, she expressed her intention to look about a bit more and meandered back through to the courtyard where they had spent the night.

Partly, she had to admit, it was because standing within sight of the edge of the cliff was a little unnerving. She had never had a problem with heights until now, but the feeling of ‘falling’ forever that a few subsequent trips through those moments of recollection gave her made her suspect she might have developed a… dislike of them. However, it was also because she had become genuinely curious about the transience in the building styles and what other curios might be in this place.

There was still nothing remotely threatening either, though she continued to reserve judgement on that. Yin Eclipse was nothing if not consistent, in serving up what on first appearances seemed like remarkably ‘unthreatening’ places that were, in fact, terrifying death-traps once you discovered their ‘quirk’. She had not yet found the ‘quirk’ of this place, and while it was theoretically possible that Yin Eclipse had finally outdone itself and they had found the one totally harmless anomaly in existence, she would only believe that when they worked out how to get out.

She wandered through the square, poking into the odd corners of buildings until her scrip told her it was almost lunchtime, by which point Arai finally came to look for her.

“Find anything?” her sister asked, coming over to stand beside her, staring up at the statue of the two-tailed squirrel.

“Strange plants, fog and the suspicion that I am missing something?” she replied, with as much levity as she could muster. “You?”

“That it is possible to get a headache from staring at feng shui puzzles for hours,” her sister replied with a wry grin, referring to the patterns without beginning or end on the carvings. “And what do you mean by ‘strange plants’?”

“Okay, well, strange is maybe an overstatement,” she shrugged. “However, look at the trees and shrubs.”

“What about them?” Arai asked.

“They are the same as the ones down at the bottom, where we fell,” she remarked. “Same species, same kind of distribution. I almost want to say it’s ‘as expected’ but knowing what I do about Yin Eclipse… I think it's more likely I am missing some odd, yet critical piece of information about how this place works.”

“You and me both,” Arai sighed. “I tried to make a few compasses, given the two I had on me are both—” her sister made a breaking motion. “—no longer for this cruel world.”

“Ohh?” she asked, having not really gotten around to sorting her own ones out. “What are the results like?”

“Strange,” Arai mused, taking out a ‘mortal’ compass, functionally a step up from a beggar’s’ one, which she had apparently just made from plants with the five elements. “A basic five elements compass worked, but all it showed me was that a five elements compass worked, if you follow?”

“I think so,” she frowned, taking the compass, so termed because even someone without qi should be able to use it, and turning it over in her hands.

As her sister said, it clearly worked. The different elemental parts pulled towards… elemental sources, in this case the wood went to the tree a few paces away, but it didn’t really tell her more than that. There was nothing to intuit from it in regards to whether the plant was dangerous, or edible, or in harmony with its environment. Just that the broad-leafed shrub had a vaguely ‘wood’ or ‘life’ alignment. Given the ‘qi’ in it was just weird anyway, that was – to put it bluntly – unhelpful.

“It’s basically a dowsing compass, that’s all they seem to show,” Arai shrugged. “I know divination works and feng shui is clearly able to influence this place, but… the compass basically tells me nothing beyond what I can see anyway.”

“So, its failing to found?” she suggested, turning it over.

‘Founding’ a compass was the step required to make something like a five-elements dowsing array, like Arai had seemingly made, more than that. Usually, it was as simple as infusing a bit of qi and intent into it, or, if it was a mortal one, ensuring that the natural harmonies matched correctly. The latter were much harder to make, but Arai had tried her best with what she had and neither of them were unskilled.

“Any idea why?”

“No,” Arai sighed. “As I said, the material components work, it just feels like I am missing something.”

“That could be said for this whole place,” she pointed out.

Curious, she took out a spirit herb from her storage ring that had wood alignment and tried the compass on it. The results were ambivalent at best.

“I tried that,” Arai noted, seeing her poking at the herb pensively. “The results are as you see.”

With a sigh she sat down on the lip of the raised pool. Arai sat down beside her a moment later and put her arm around her.

“So, what do we do?” she asked after they had sat in silence for a few minutes, just taking in the plaza.

“I…” Arai started to speak, then stared into the silence. “I… don’t know. Finding out what ‘happened’ was a goal, I guess… I was hoping that that divination thing might help…”

When her sister lapsed back into silence, she felt a bit bad for asking the question. ‘What next?’ was something she had been trying very hard to avoid thinking too much about, partly because she had no idea where to start.

“Sorry,” she muttered.

“—Sorry,” her sister murmured at the same moment.

She could only laugh a little at that, albeit rather sadly.

“I mean, the divination was certainly not us, here,” she noted, closing her eyes and trying to recall it.

Somewhat to her surprise, she found it was not difficult. Both she and Arai were standing, naked, waist deep in a shallow lake, with her holding the piece of the burnt lump of rock.

The shore behind her was some distance away, but it held trees and shrubs. The obvious thing that stood out though, was that, wherever they were, it was either a big valley, like the one they had had to boat across, or somewhere…

“My thought was that it was near the Jasmine Gate,” Arai said with a grimace.

“Because of the openness and the lake?” she guessed.

“Yeah,” Arai sighed. “The only other place would be beyond the Rainbow Gate, but both of us don’t look much different than we do now. Just…”

“Shocked?” she supplied.

“Yeah,” Arai grimaced.

“I suppose then we can check out the various places immediately around here,” she suggested. “We passed through two large valleys, and while the lake in our vision was somewhat temperate, that could just mean it’s further into the area where we were traversing before the teleport?”

“Or it’s on the edge of the massif,” her sister added.

“What, you think just walking to the edge would get us out?” she muttered, mostly joking.

“…”

“I mean, do you have a better idea?” Arai replied helplessly. “It’s that or stay here and hope something changes.”

“Maybe… there are more things like that divination formation?” she mused. “That hasn’t reacted again, has it?”

“It has not,” Arai confirmed. “And there was nothing where we were the night before?”

“Nope,” she reaffirmed helplessly. “And there are no real traces of the later fixes on the buildings here.”

“…”

Arai nodded slowly and passed her a vine-wrapped parcel of cloud-rice and pickled mangosteen. Accepting it gratefully, she took a big mouthful and munched it down quickly, surprised at how hungry she was. It was only at the third mouthful that she thought to try using her mantra on it.

“Spirit of my Heart become the gate of Renewal within my Body within which the Soul of nourishment is…” she muttered around her food, then nearly spat it all out, as she failed to properly complete the mnemonic, having made the ‘sentence’ far too complex.

“You okay?” her sister asked her, passing her a jar of water, which she gratefully took a gulp of. “What are you trying to do?”

“Spirit and Heart of my food become the force of Renewal within my Body and Soul,” she mumbled, taking care not to choke on her food as she did so.

That second attempt was much more successful, and she almost immediately felt a boost to the efficacy of her qi absorption.

“I…” she swallowed another mouthful down. “Just tried using the perspective shifting trick on my mantra to help with the qi in the food,” she replied. “It works, although the boost is pathetically small.”

“…”

“Spirit and Heart of my food become the force of Renewal within my Body and Soul,” her sister mumbled around a mouthful of her own food. “That is interesting,” Arai mused, helping herself to a drink of the water as well.

She watched the effect on her own body for a few moments, then ate another mouthful, this time chewing much more slowly. As she half expected, that did, in fact, improve the effect even more, but by such a small margin that she had to roll her eyes.

“I hope the others are okay,” Arai muttered after a long moment.

“They had the Skitterleap talisman,” she pointed out, glancing at its now seemingly defunct mark. “Juni was running for us as well…”

“Yeah, but…” Arai started to speak, then bit her lip and stopped.

“They had the Skitterleap talisman,” she reaffirmed, grabbing her sister’s hands. “And Juni and Han Shu are both good fighters. Not to mention you have the rest of the Ha bunch. Do you think they will just take that lying down?”

Arai met her gaze for a long moment, then sighed and nodded, for which she was grateful.

Her view on it was, she knew, fanciful, but the alternative was… not something she wanted to think about. Equally, her older sister wasn’t someone she wanted to see thinking about that kind of horrible possibility any more than she did.

They ate in silence after that, each lost in their own thoughts, watching the rain patter down on the paving and the trees.

“So, what shall we do with the afternoon?” Arai asked at last.

“Do you want to spend more time on those patterns?” she asked.

“…”

“I dunno,” Arai sighed. “All they are doing is giving me a headache in a sense. I guess I’ll record the whole thing… then we poke around here a bit more?”

“Sure,” she nodded. “I’ll come give you a hand with that then.”

The recording took the better part of an hour, she reckoned. Mostly because the patterns and statues were… impressively detailed, in the estimation of Grandmaster Li’s jade tablets. After a quick test to see if the feng shui puzzles had translated correctly, they went over to ‘Sir Huang’s’ body.

“Do we bring this as well?” she asked Arai as she hauled it up, over her shoulder.

“I… I mean it’s a bit bulky, but it’s manageable so long as we are not climbing cliffs,” her sister pointed out. “And actually, we can probably drop it over any edges without worry, given it survived the drop it did.”

“Hah…” she had to roll her eyes at that.

With a sigh, she walked over to where Juni had been before they went over and put her hand on the rock there.

“Please be okay,” she murmured, mostly for her own peace of mind. “I…”

In that instant, she felt a faint, familiar tug… on her arm, as if something was…

It vanished as fast as it came, leaving her staring at the ground, wondering if she imagined it.

“What is it?” Arai asked,

“I…” she stared at her arm, with the Skitterleap talisman, and then at the compass she still held in her other hand.

Carefully, she withdrew a bit of blood from her arm that was touched by the qi of the Skitterleap talisman and then placed the middle of the talisman against the cut—

This time, she got a subtle, if rather diffuse, tug as the compass, only able to douse detected more skitterleap qi. Turning, she wondered if it was her sister’s talisman, but Arai was on her other side, looking a touch confused.

“It turns out your basic compass can douse the Skitterleap talisman’s qi,” she told her sister drily.

“Oh for fates’-sakes,” Arai sighed. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

“We had other issues,” she replied with a helpless shrug of her own, heading over in the direction the compass tugged at her, until she arrived on the mid level of the seats around the plaza, near where she thought Ling and Han Shu had been.

“Two signatures,” her sister remarked, having quickly put together a second simple compass of her own. “Has to be Ling and Shu?”

“Yeah,” she nodded, looking around. “The question is, can we find where they went?”

“By the looks of it…” Arai stared at her compass and shuffled a few feet away, before glancing over at the cliff. “It even picks up our attempted uses. The question though, is did they try to use it to follow us, or did they use it to flee from here?”

“I guess we can only look?” she suggested, “Though I am not that hot on climbing down the cliff again in the first instance.”

“Me neither,” Arai said drily. “The obvious route is straight away from whatever happened here, and Ji… Di Ji would have been ahead of them, not to mention Ling Luo and whoever else was in on this. So…”

She turned to look around as her sister mused and eventually pointed off to their right.

“If I was going to run away from bastards like that, I’d pick a direction where there were nasty surprises. Isn’t there a spider den south-east of here?”

“There is,” Arai confirmed, rooting around in the vegetation nearby “Those fissures are something Juni would likely recall.”

“…”

“Something else?” she asked, watching her sister.

“Getting stuff for a compass,” Arai grunted. “Touched by the qi, before it dissipates.”

“…”

Feeling a bit silly, she nodded and set to helping Arai.

It took them about five minutes to make the compass, which was very basic and, again, unable to ‘found’, but thankfully did pull reliably towards other instances of skitterleap qi.

Thanks to her sister’s bright idea regarding the compass, the trip through the town was fairly quick as they had a fair idea of where they were going. It took them about an hour, and only one instance of dropping the puppet over a cliff, to get down into the valley where the spider-queen’s nest was. There, however, she found… another oddity.

“There is heaven-blaze pine qi here,” Arai observed, looking around at the aggressively mundane forest. “And yet… it’s really diffuse.”

“Also, do you notice how… vibrant this vegetation looks, compared to elsewhere?” she mused, taking in the shrubs, which actually looked like they were growing, as opposed to merely existing.

“That… that’s true,” Arai nodded, looking around them. “Over there in particular, where there is a huge concentration of it, relative to what this compass can detect anyway.”

Following the normal compass, she found Arai was right. There was a splash of phantasmal resonance with the heaven-blaze pines qi that centred on…

“And there is a trace of the Skitterleap talisman’s signature too!” Arai exclaimed from nearby.

“So they landed here?” she guessed, looking back the way they came. “That’s…”

“—and presumably Ling or Juni tossed out a pine to cover their trail,” Arai nodded.

“But this is weird on a whole other level,” she pointed out. “What is this place, actually, if we can find traces of this here after all, yet there was nothing—”

“There was the talisman trace,” Arai pointed out. “And we were able to divine something sympathetically… so clearly there is some link?”

“Yes, I know,” she sighed fighting the urge to roll her eyes. “But you get what I mean, right?”

“I do get that there are parts of this that don’t add up, yes,” Arai agreed.

They walked on in silence, searching for further traces of skitterleap qi, until another oddity that had been gnawing at the back of her mind finally… just settled into place, as they arrived at the first of the ‘fissures’.

“Sis… come look at this tree,” she called over to Arai, who was peering into its depths, a little apprehensively, gesturing to a very mundane tree that was identical to the vast majority growing through the ruined town they had left behind.

“Yes?” Arai asked, turning to look in her direction.

“The vegetation here is the same as on the ridgeline,” she replied, walking over to the edge of the fissure and looking in.

It was a bottomless void as far as she could see, but not so wide that you couldn’t cross it at full sprint, with a running jump, in a few places.

“Uhuh…” Arai replied noncommittally.

“No. Sis. Look around you,” she urged, before taking a second quick look around herself, in case this was just a fluke and she was about to make an embarrassing mistake.

“…”

Seeing no immediate evidence to the contrary she continued speaking: “I mean it’s literally the same. We are still in the same ecosystem!”

Arai frowned and glanced around; the cloud was still dense here, so all but the closest vegetation in the fissure-riven gully was obscured by mist. “I mean, yes, we are still on the…”

Her sister trailed off, and stared around, her frown deepening.

She said nothing, waiting patiently for the spirit stone to drop. Her sister wasn’t stupid.

“Oh!” she exclaimed. “Everything is simple herbs and grasses… There is some low-lying under-scrub over there. Ferns and oily trees with gnarled water-resistant bark. It’s all montane… evergreen and…” her sister trailed off, staring around with a look of dull comprehension in her eyes.

“Yep!” she agreed, waving her hand expansively at their surroundings. “Never mind where we came up initially, which I think is the same valley as this actually, but the last time we came we walked around the edge of here and it was full of common broadleaves. There are still waterferns and tree-gnawing vines here and there—” she paused to point at the ferns on the edge of the chasm and the tangles of dark-green, trefoil-leafed vines enshrouding them.

“And yet… there are no broadleaves of any species here now, not that I see,” her sister observed, looking around and nodding now. “The qi is still yang earth and yin water, with a background of balanced wood and balanced water if you ignore the weird ones we can’t grasp.”

“Exactly!” she nodded earnestly. “And the trees are all common boreal cloud forest species, or at least variants of. It’s nearly impossible to tell which with the total lack of flowers.”

“Uhuh,” Arai agreed. “In the valleys, the ecosystem changes according to the qi flows through the strata below them.”

They both peered down into the fissure, then around at the forest again.

“I recall… uh, I think it was Old Oudeng saying that they feed off each other, and that is why you get those weird pockets with almost no transition between them, except maybe a ridge, or a thicket of particularly spiritually-resistant shrubbery for the most part.”

“We could check this…” she frowned, pulling up her map. “There was that route into this valley from the north. Juni avoided it when we came towards ‘Heart Break Ridge’ because it has that spider hole at the far end, and it would have forced us to cross these fissures, at an hour when spiders would have been coming out.”

“Ah, that path,” her sister nodded.

“Right,” she nodded, projecting the map for her sister. “It’s not actually that far from here. About… 600 metres to the north.”

“Okay,” Arai agreed, after a few seconds’ contemplation.

Crossing over the fissure, they headed off, away from the trail, until eventually they reached the escarpment wall, where a fracture gully ran off, roughly north-ish. It was actually somewhat further than she had anticipated, or, she supposed, recalled.

Juni and the others had definitely not come this way in any case, according to the compass. Though, she doubted they would have anyway. There was ‘dangerous’ and then there was…

“Well, that’s fairly concrete,” Arai mused, staring into the gully. “This should have been a little yin wood ecosystem.”

“With all kinds of nasty ‘active’ herbaceous cultivars,” she agreed, stopping in the middle of the entrance to the water-cut rock gully, which was about five metres wide and tapering steeply vertical.

“The path that ran on the other side of this gully right under the wall was impassable,” Arai mused. “As you said, it’s why Juni brought us up onto the ridgeline by the other route in the first place… to the ruined town. To avoid that as much as to avoid the spider fissures, with whatever was following after us.”

Both of them looked at the aggressively normal gully, with a mix of water-loving creepers, ferns and overhanging cloud juniper higher up.

“This is just a normal cloud forest,” Arai concluded at last, looking back in the direction they had come from. “It’s all just normal cloud forest.”

“Yep,” she agreed, spinning around on the spot. “A totally normal, nothing untoward cloud forest. Just like you would expect to find in the high montane valleys, south of Blue Water City.”

“Except the species are weird, the qi feels like ‘it’s’ either missing something, or we are missing something, and there are no living things, other than the plants. And nothing is in flower. At all,” Arai added dryly. “Oh, and there are traces of heaven blaze qi and the qi signature of the Skitterleap talisman…”

She coughed lightly and rolled her eyes. “Yes…Except for that.”

Arai looked up through the cloud then back at the compass. “Their trail leads back south… so if we follow it, it should take us roughly towards the eastern edge of the Jasmine Gate?”

“Or the valleys immediately beside it,” she agreed. “Which also have some big, shallow lakes.”

“They do,” her sister recalled. “And some nasty threats as well. There are also no records for them on this side.”

“If I was looking to lose some serious pursuit, I’d run for there. It’s inhospitable if you don’t know the trick, and Han Shu can help them make it through,” she noted. “And that would take them back towards Misty Jasmine Inn, and into totally uncharted, at least in modern terms, valleys, where they would have an edge on their pursuers anyway.”

“It’s a direction,” Arai agreed, setting off back the way they had come, occasionally looking up at the escarpment rising above them with a frown.

“What?” she prompted at last, after they had walked for about 500 metres and her sister had continued inspecting the cliffs with a deepening frown.

“I was just thinking about what Senior Ying said that time,” Arai replied. “You recall, in the river gorge before Portam Rhanae, about formations and the way valley walls work?”

“…”

“About them being walls of compressed space, which is what makes them so hard to break or breach?” she asked, casting her mind back.

“That’s the one,” her sister confirmed. “It was the heaven-blaze qi that got me thinking, about the… durability of these spaces and how the suppression works.”

“Are you suggesting…” she trailed off, staring around again. “That it’s possible this place is the reason why the valleys are so… hard to shift?”

“Maybe?” Arai sighed, “But your observation about the cloud forest being the same makes that fall down…”

“I mean, not necessarily,” she pointed out. “There are clear similarities after all, and the vitality of this place was definitely improved in the areas where that qi ended up…”

“If that is the case, though, how do you think we actually get out of here?” her sister asked, quietly.

“I was trying really hard not to think about that, you know?” she muttered, shooting Arai a dark look.

~ Lu Ji – Blue Water City, Ducal Palace ~

Standing in the duke’s strategy room, watching the last of the tetrids and the parasol qi tainted corpses get tidied up by Baisheng and the other old experts at Misty Jasmine Inn, Lu Ji felt the beginnings of a serious headache forming.

Parasol qi was not normal.

There were not a lot of sources for it, certainly not in those quantities, and nobody was going to be growing a parasol tree or ten that had that quality as far as he could see.

“Your Grace! Your Grace!” everyone in the room turned as a breathless messenger envoy came rushing into the room and saluted the duke and generals

“Urgent message, Your Grace! From West Flower Picking Town. Special Authority Communication, Direct from the Military Authority Captain!”

Everyone paused to stare at the messenger, even those who didn’t know what the code ‘Special Authority Communication’ meant.

That was code for a serious emergency, to be sent through the direct channel to the duke. Only North Fissure and West Flower Picking had that right, as they were the closest places to the true danger zones in the Yin Eclipse Mountains, Thunder Crest Pinnacle and Chain Spire.

“Go on” Cao Leyang instructed the messenger, frowning.

“Your Grace,” the messenger saluted once more. “Reporting a serious incident in West Flower Picking Town!”

“The Ha clan has formally requested censure authority in West Flower Picking Town. They are claiming that rebels have assassinated multiple young masters and officials, furthermore, a number of herb hunters have aligned with the Yeng Brotherhood and remnants of the Lin School to subvert the delivery of spirit herbs for the gift to the Emperor of Shan Lai.”

Everyone local to the province stared at the messenger, because those words, while they made a report…

“Say what?” General Weng managed at last

“The…” the messenger started to repeat the message, before Cao Leyang held up a hand for him to stop.

“Who authorized this?” Cao Leyang asked, staring at the messenger.

“A serious incident in West Flower Picking Town?” his disciple, who was still on the communication line from Misty Jasmine Inn, asked.

“Lady… Tao,” the messenger saluted her briefly, before looking back at the duke. “Umm, Your Grace…”

“Who is asking for censure authority?” Cao Leyang repeated.

“Uh… Ancestor Cao and Ancestor Ji…” the messenger replied, giving General Weng and the Ha clan official a sideways look.

“…”

“That is presumably Ha Cao Fanfang and Ha Ji Fanguang,” he supplied, more helpfully, considering the messenger, who was actually from the Ha clan’s Cao family, he thought, based on the sideways looks he had given General Cang and the Ha clan Official.

“Your Grace,” the messenger shrugged, apologetically, passing a sealed scroll to Cao Leyang. “The request has three official seals of the Ha clan… who is behind it specifically, I cannot tell you I am afraid, here is…”

“Lord… Lu!”

He turned to find a second messenger, an official in fact, from the Ha clan, had just hurried in. Somewhat surprisingly, it was also someone he recognised.

Ha Kangfei was a sworn brother of the current Clan Lord and a former core disciple-turned-elder of the Blue Gate School until he stepped aside a few decades ago to become the estate manager for the Ha Family’s compound in Blue Water City.

“May I?” he asked Cao Leyang.

“Of course,” Cao Leyang nodded, waving for him to go talk to the new arrival while Generals Weng and Cang pored over the Censure Authority Request with the other officials.

Giving Cao Leyang a polite salute, he went over to Ha Kangfei, who was waiting by the door, taking in those in the hall with a pensive frown.

“Sir Kangfei,” he murmured, taking the official by the arm and leading him a little way away from the others. “What is your message?”

“Uh, Lord Feirong couldn’t get a hold of Lady Ling, so he asked me to seek you out,” Ha Kangfei replied softly as he sheltered their conversation. “Their estates have come under serious attack, as has the Cherry Wine Pagoda. Several female disciples were abducted… and...” Ha Kangfei paused to swallow as his nervousness overtook him. “Uh… the target of the attack was his wife and young daughter, Ha Sungmei.”

“Were they successful?” he asked, frowning.

“No, Lady Chang Mei killed the first wave herself, though she was injured. The Clan Lord and Elder Erlang, who has exited his seclusion early, then arrived and the rest were… killed or forced to retreat. Since then, however, we have had no further communication with West Flower Picking Town.

“I would have come sooner, but first I went to your residence, and they said you were at the Ling clan, then I heard you were here at the palace…”

“No problem,” he sighed, giving the Kangfei an apologetic pat on the shoulder as he mulled over his message. “Was there anything in your message about the Shi family, explicitly?”

“No word,” Ha Kangfei replied apologetically.

He frowned and stared into the distance. Technically the Shi clan ‘ran’ the Cherry Wine Pagoda, so the attack on them was implicit in a sense. The Pagoda Mistress, Shi Xiaolian, who was basically from the same generation as him, if not anywhere close to his realm, was also up in Misty Jasmine Inn, though that fact should be known to virtually no one.

That immediately suggested to him that this was somehow related to what was going on with the Five Fans and Misty Jasmine, or a different arm of the same stratagem.

The deliberate targeting of Ha Chang Mei and Ha Sungmei was something he could picture into that as well, at a strategic level. This had to be about more than just current events, and while he had never met the young girl, by all accounts she was perhaps more talented than her brother, Ha Yun. Ha Chang Mei was also a valuable ‘piece’, given her position in his disciple’s tapestry of alliances between the Ha Family and the Ling clan.

“What about Ha Yun?” he asked, looking over at the other officials as they debated back and forth, most in favour of honouring the Censure request it seemed.

“Young Master Yun…” Ha Kangfei looked, unhappy. “Several… juniors managed to teleport back, at the cost of their lives, from Yin Eclipse, and the evidence they brought, suggests that Ha Yun may already be dead.”

-Ah, he was part of the group the Ha clan sent up, to Misty Jasmine Inn, he recalled.

What was more interesting there, was the information that a few juniors had somehow teleported back. This was the first he had heard of that.

“Who escaped?” he asked, mulling over the likelihood that that too was part of this whole mess, to serve as some kind of provocation.

“It’s…” Ha Kangfei grimaced.

“It wasn’t reported in detail to me, I am sorry, Lord Lu,” Ha Kangfei replied, looking embarrassed. “The body that appeared in the Ha Family Hall was found by Elder Mofan, Lord Feiyuan and Lady Chang Mei. It used a talisman that was gifted to Ha Yun as a last means of escape, but it was… not Ha Yun. They died almost immediately, but managed to pass on that the Blood Eclipse had infiltrated the Hunter Bureau, and were trying to target the… Jade Gate Court.”

-How convenient, he mused to himself.

“What about the others?” he asked, moving on from that as he considered how this was mapping out with a sinking feeling, especially given how Ling Luo was also seemingly mixed up in this.

“Others?” Ha Kangfei repeated, confused.

“You said ‘the body that appeared’,” he murmured. “That would imply others appeared elsewhere?”

“Ah… yes,” Ha Kangfei sighed, rubbing his temples.

-Interesting, he mused, keeping his expression neutral as if he had not noticed the slight hesitation in Ha Kangfei’s voice in replying.

Something else had been there, with it, a slight sense of being ‘led’, that was depressingly familiar.

“I cannot verify it, you understand,” Ha Kangfei replied, apologetically. “Another, purportedly Ha Cao Caolun, arrived at the Ha clan’s main estate, in West Flower Picking Town, before Patriarch Dongfei and Ha Caolun’s father…”

“Who is a driving force behind this censure request,” he mused, glancing back at the table, where they were still discussing that.

“Yes,” Ha Kangfei conceded. “He claimed that the perpetrators were apparently Blood Eclipse bandits, who had been at Jade Willow Village, and then said… something about a… Jun Arai?”

“What about Ha Ji Wufan?” he asked, glossing over that bit of volunteered information for the moment. “Or the Shi Family?”

“Nothing,” Ha Kangfei replied, uneasily looking around the room at the elders. “But the Ji family is moving to support the Cao family. I assume the Shi will… either stand aside or align with our Ha family.”

That didn’t surprise him in the least, given how the internal politics of the Ha clan in the province broke down.

He also knew already that Wufan was ‘missing’ from Misty Jasmine Inn, and that all the Ha clan juniors up there, who were not female or in possession of the lucky chance of their lifetimes, had perished, with the brunt being borne by the Shi family. That meant that somewhere in this, someone wanted to take a serious punt at the future prosperity of the Ha family and its allies in the West Flower Picking Region.

Off to the side, he saw Ling Tao still standing there, watching, as they cleared up the aftermath in Misty Jasmine Inn, but unfortunately, his aunt’s talisman was being used as the focus of that communication link, so he didn’t want to use it to talk to her directly.

It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Huang Wuli Jinfang, but rather that he didn’t trust the edifice he represented. The Huang clan’s goals, as opposed to the Wuli’s, were, indeed, for a stable and controlled Eastern Azure, yes, but the nature of that control wasn’t something that factored into his Aunt’s plans, and certainly not into the ancient old ancestors’ who held ultimate responsibility for the Ha family lineage.

Both those old men were touchy and dangerous, and he suspected strongly, given the way the Cherry Wine Pagoda had moved, that at least one of them had acted in some capacity.

-Could someone be trying to set up a confrontation between the Ha and Meng clans? He found himself wondering, suddenly.

That would be a machination he could see the Din clan happily trying to engineer, for a whole host of reasons.

-That said, he stared up at the painted ceiling of the room, thinking.

In a way, he felt rather bad for Ha Feiyuan and Ha Feirong, because Ha Kangfei was a good friend of theirs, but…

He reached out and poked Ha Kangfei in the forehead, his soul sense scything into the other man’s mind, scattering his meagre mental defences in the blink of an eye…

Ha Kangfei stared back at him in horror as he examined the man’s life in almost traumatising detail.

Ha Kangfei was a trusted friend of Ha Feiyuan and Ha Feirong, and had excellent access to the inner workings of the Ha Family, at least in Blue Water City…

He had been someone who managed matters for them here, and also accompanied various Ha clan scions, primarily golden core and soul foundation juniors, as an elite escort to parties and auctions and the like.

And there, in that, he found what he expected to find, even if he had quietly hoped he would not.

Missing moments, subtly hidden, in evenings out. In meetings with friends, not well remembered… in moments with his wife, at auctions, even official functions, when he had been an elder for the school… and all through it, like a silent infection, traces of ‘Favour with a Smile’.

Sighing softly, he traced them back to their origin, and found… Ha Kangfei’s wife and daughter.

The original perpetrator was unclear as well, even to him. Ha Kangfei had never met them in person, but they were a remarkably skilled user of the art. Once he had been touched by it, the manipulation had been enough to ensnare him, not over weeks, or even months… but years. His daughter appeared to have been born touched subtly by the infernal art.

“Shit,” he sighed, lowering his hand, feeling… sorry for the man, whose only fault really had been his position and his friendship to Ha Feiyuan.

“L-Lord Lu?” Ha Kangfei stammered, staring at him, knowing he had done ‘something’, but clearly unsure what.

He considered the man, wondering what to do. Whoever had sent him here had been supremely confident, and was clearly very good at using the art. The trace of Favour with a Smile had touched him, likely to try and influence him sympathetically, and only foundered because its user was unaware that he was already savvy to how it worked.

-Which rules out Di Ji, he mused with a mental sigh.

Di Ji had been… was, undeniably, a piece of excrement in living form, but he had rarely been stupid, when the long view of his actions was taken. Yes, he had ridden his luck at times, but that was also a kind of judgement, and one that took years, if not centuries, to get good at.

He had also rarely made the same mistake twice, which was one reason it took so fate-thrashed long for him to run into someone like Cao Leyang.

The bigger issue was that this further obfuscated the accusation that it was Di Ji who was a mastermind in this, somehow.

-Is that why Kangfei got sent? he wondered suddenly. Whoever is pulling the strings is tying up their loose ends with further obfuscation?

Ignoring Kangfei, he turned to consider the rest of the room.

“What’s wrong?” Ling Jiang, who had come over to stand near him, asked.

“…”

“Nephew,” his aunt’s melodious voice murmured, in his head, holding a certain edge to it. “This is something you should see…”

“Uhhh?” he managed to reply, slightly disorientated, because she had spoken to him directly, rather than through the talisman, which in the middle of the Duke’s palace was a genuine feat.

Doubly so, given she was sharing her perception with him—

He pushed away the scene of the Duke’s hall to focus on where his Aunt now was, which was a rather grandly upholstered suite within an estate, with a balcony looking out across the river from the central district towards Little Harbour.

It was also the sight of a massacre.

Six corpses were scattered across the room, with another smeared over the balcony.

The only survivors were three female cultivators, who were crouched against the wall, naked and shivering, their eyes darting between the dead bodies and him with a mix of incomprehension, fear and… pleasure.

He stared down at ‘his’ own body, or rather his aunt’s . She was wearing a tasteful blue and cream gown embroidered with panels depicting gold monkeys chasing blue kirins, that had not a speck of gore.

Only the jasper-coloured blade – crafted to look like jade, but actually arborundum – she was leaning on would have told a bystander that she was the perpetrator of the bloodbath all around them.

The other two occupants of the room were a pair of masked, brown-haired young women, dressed in pretty blue and white gowns.

The women, sisters in fact, he knew as the rather long-suffering Xiao Ling Hua and Xiao Ling Mei, a pair of orphan siblings originally from the Ling clan, who his aunt had taken a shine to, back before the foundation of Blue Water City. They were technically Elders of the Blue Gate School, though neither had really engaged with the school since his grandfather’s time, and largely ran his aunt’s estates.

Ling Hua was currently flipping through some papers on a table, while Ling Mei was holding a naked golden immortal—

“You will…” the youth gasped, blood bubbling from his mouth as he tried to speak. “Regret… heaven is… vaster than…”

“He is not wrong, heaven is indeed—”

A shimmering blade of light infused with yang, fire and water laws slipped out of the beams of early morning sunlight falling into the room, striking for—

His aunt spun and caught it, not with her blade, but with her free hand, the attack wavering like a mirage as the perpetrator was caught by her.

“Uh, yes, I am aware,” she deadpanned, drawing the assassin out of the mirage of light, revealing a male figure in a dark green robe, wearing an expressionless black mask.

Before the luckless Dao Lord could even scream, Lu Xiao’s hand closed around his mask, shattering it, revealing a horrified, youthful face with well-trimmed beard—

The form in her hands wavered, suddenly and then everything went white, everything around them fading into shadows amid a swirling haze of law-infused qi.

Nobody said anything as, after a moment, the ‘fire’ faded away, the momentarily immolated estate sliding back into focus around them as his aunt idly waved her hand in the air. Within seconds, the room was as it had been, while, before the horrified eyes of the Dao Lord, Fu Dengbei and the three young women, the briefly incinerated corpses reformed, their injuries flowing back together, their bodies’ injuries fading away before their eyes.

“Ahhhh—!” a naked, dark-haired youth screamed, sitting up, grasping at his neck.

“Mother!” another gasped, scrambling backwards, his eyes wide.

“—Elder!” a third, who had been splattered into the wall before, sobbed, his hand clutching a talisman he didn’t have.

The other three, who were all naked as well, flinched, then stared at his aunt and her two companions like small animals caught by a pack of apex predators.

“You were saying, about Heaven being vast?” his aunt deadpanned to Fu Dengbei, who was trembling like a leaf now.

“Who is this?” he asked, stepping ‘out’ of her and forming his own projection, making Fu Dengbei, and the Dao Lord both flinch.

“Ah, Martial Brother,” Ling Hua murmured, giving him a friendly nod.

“This is Fu Dengbei,” Ling Mei added, holding up the trembling youth. “Sometimes known as ‘Gang Boss Fu’ or ‘Young Lord Fu’, but to many simply as ‘Brother Fu’.”

“He will be of great interest to your good friend Ling Jiang, no doubt,” his aunt added, giving Fu Dengbei an amused look. “He is… well, you will see…”

He walked over to Fu Dengbei, who was looking genuinely terrified now, and cupped the youth’s chin, considering him.

“Headmaster Lu… please,” Fu Dengbei whispered, staring at him pleadingly. “Uphold Justice, I am a victim here! I have powerful friends… anything you need…”

As the youth spoke, he felt, once again, that faint ‘tug’ on the edge of his awareness, as the attempt to influence him with ‘Favour with a Smile’ slipped off him like water on an oiled canvas.

“Anything I need?” he asked drily, considering Fu Dengbei’s memories.

Someone had made a fairly good attempt at providing him with wards, however before his aunt, they might as well not have bothered. What was interesting, there though, was that the ‘method’ itself was built on a seed of parasol qi, though that was now thoroughly dispersed, likely by his aunt.

“They are really doubling down on the Meng clan thing,” he mused, ignoring the youth’s begging now, as he pondered his ‘life’ such as it had been.

A daughter from a poor family catching a young master's wandering eyes and hands. An unwanted child whose caring grandparents couldn't sustain real prospects. A comfortable position as a guard to another young master ending in the disaster of a deadly tea house brawl, and scurrying into the Underworld for fear of consequences...

In one respect, it was fair to say that the tragedy of Fu Bei, as Fu Dengbei had once been known, was that his story was not that exceptional, really. However, there, his sympathy for Fu Bei ended, because the choices ‘Fu Dengbei’ and his ‘friends’ had made after…

Slavery and its ilk had been banned in the province since its reconstruction, outside of criminal penalties, but that didn’t stop there being a market for certain things. Fu Dengbei, with his ‘good looks’ and ‘easy charm’, had become the leader of his ‘group’ and had then spent several centuries building up a network in Teng Province and Blue Water Provinces, that catered to all sorts of vices and illicit opportunities, so by the time the Five Fan’s emerged, their influence was already well established.

To call the youth before him an ‘enemy of women’ was underselling it, honestly.

“Uhuh,” his aunt nodded.

“Kinda funny really,” Ling Mei added.

“I guess,” he conceded, reflecting that this was certainly how the genuine perpetrators of these events intended to worm out of the unstable alchemical bomb that was Di Ji’s legacy in Blue Water Province.

Some ninety years ago, Fu Dengbei had joined the Five Fan’s, though his acquisition of ‘Favour With a Smile’ had in fact come through an illicit auction he attended as their representative, in Teng province.

That also explained the odd effectiveness of the art, he found, as he considered those memories. Fu Dengbei had not simply ‘learned’ his comprehensions from the manual he had acquired, or been led to acquire, but had them ‘instilled’ into him, by it. Becoming an unwitting vehicle for the superior ego infused within. That was why he had felt traces of laws in what the Golden Immortal had attempted a moment ago.

In any event, with the aid of the manual, Fu Dengbei had risen rapidly through the ranks of the Five Fan’s. His natural charm and streetwise demeanour allowing him to be a face for them who could move among well-to-do juniors, recruiting some and luring any number of young women into his clutches.

In that regard, from the youth’s memories, he could see he had been both depressingly effective and disturbingly enthusiastic in that endeavour.

That was how he had laid his hooks into Ha Kangfei’s wife, and also many, many others after. Even managing to cross paths with Ling Luo and several others to try and get an audience with Ling Yu and his own disciple…

That alone meant that his fate was going to be miserable beyond words when Ling Tao got back.

Absently, he turned to look at the others in the room. The three young women had been invited out by ‘friends’ the night before. Fu Dengbei’s memory left nothing to the imagination there, as to what had been going on here when his aunt arrived.

“—And he got himself a nice fox bloodline as well,” Lu Xiao mused, eyeing the trembling Fu Dengbei.

“Yes, I saw that memory,” he murmured, not bothering to hide his distaste.

As far as the bandit’s memories went, that acquisition was… rather cherished.

With a sigh, he turned to the assassin, who his aunt was still holding like a bedraggled monkey. He was clearly a talisman clone, but that counted for little having been grasped by someone like his aunt—

The ‘crack’ of distorting spatial qi made him turn to look over at Ling Hua, who was poking around at the back of Fu Dengbei’s table and drawers.

“Ah-hah! Found it!” Ling Hua held up a scroll, which she had just plucked out of a broken drawer in the back of the dresser, along with a sheaf of other papers and some jade scrips.

“You worthless…” the Dao Lord hissed at Fu Dengbei as Ling Hua riffled through the rest of the hidden space’s contents. “The instruction was to write nothing…”

“And yet, like a good little criminal, young Fu here trusted your side about as far as he could kick you,” Lu Xiao murmured, dropping the Dao Lord on the floor, where he tried to move, only to find he could not.

Ling Hua came over to Lu Xiao and handed her the initial scroll.

“Please… I’ll give you anything you want…” Fu Dengbei gasped, as his aunt started to read it. “I can explain it all…”

“You already have,” Lu Xiao replied absently as she continued to read.

“I… I am innocent!” Fu Dengbei pleaded, again trying to use the art, to no avail. “I was made to do it… the Meng—!”

Lu Xiao paused in her reading to stare at him for a long moment, then just snorted and shook her head.

“I’d say save it for someone who cares,” she murmured. “But you won’t remember your past life, so…”

“How charitable of you to allow him to enter reincarnation,” Ling Mei chuckled, as Lu Xiao went back to reading the list.

“I am nothing if not merciful,” his aunt mused, after a short pause to finish it, at which point she eyed the other youths with a pensive expression.

None of them met her gaze, simply cowering in silence on the floor.

“Here,” she added, after a moment, passing the scroll to him. “The duke will be most interested to see this, as I suspect, several others in that meeting, Deng Kong not least.”

“Ah…” he glanced at the list and felt a pang of sympathy for the old bastard for the first time in a good while.

At first glance, it was a list of ‘targets’ that the Five Fan’s had deemed worth Fu Dengbei ‘compromising’. Both Deng Kong’s daughters were on it, as was Ha Kangfei’s wife and daughter… and quite a few others besides.

“…”

He got to the end of it and then had to stop, because his intuition told him there was something…

With a colder eye, he read it a second time, then looked at his aunt, frowning, even as Ling Hua passed her another sheaf of papers.

“Most of these people are juniors, or at least not older than a hundred,” he observed.

“—And they all have special physiques or spirit roots,” his aunt murmured, riffling through them, then passing them over.

“…”

He read the list a third time, frowning now, then checked the other documents, which were letters mostly, several pushing for favourable betrothals and a few copies of family lineages, including one for the Ling clan, as well as the Kun clan.

“What are they looking for?” he asked at last, because to him, this all read almost like a shopping list.

“That’s what I am wondering,” Lu Xiao mused, considering the Dao Lord, who flinched under her pensive gaze. “Anyway, those will help your case with the Duke, I imagine.”

“Indeed,” he agreed, noting that another of those summarized lineages was the Cao clan’s.

Closing his eyes, he refocused on the duke’s conference hall and then looked down at the scroll and the papers that had appeared in his hands.

“What’s wrong?” Ling Jiang asked him. “You have been standing there, looking into space for…”

“I was getting something… useful,” he said, passing the scroll to Ling Jiang, along with the purloined Ling clan family tree.

Ling Jiang opened the scroll and read the list, his expression outwardly neutral, though he could sense the seething anger off the other man.

“What is it?” his wife asked.

Wordlessly, Ling Jiang passed her the list, which she read, her expression turning flat as well, while he considered the family tree with a scowl.

“Is this what they wanted my Luo for?” she hissed at last, passing him back the list and staring at the other document.

“Marriages and alliances favourable to those who have been compromised by the Five Fan’s,” Ling Jiang nodded, glancing over at Cao Leyang and the others.

“…”

“What’s the problem?” Cao Leyang, who had also noticed their change in demeanour at this point, asked, leaving the table to come speak with them.

He handed Cao Leyang the list and the Cao clan family tree.

Cao Leyang read the family tree, then the list, then, lowering it, stared up at the ceiling.

“How did you get this?” the duke asked at last.

“You can tell him it came from me,” his aunt murmured in his head.

With a sigh, he produced a jade talisman, depicting a two-tailed squirrel, holding a pill bottle over its head as it ran and passed it to the duke.

“…”

“Well, today just got a lot more complicated, didn’t it,” Cao Leyang declared at last, turning to look back at the group of advisors arguing over the censure.

“It did, I fear,” he agreed, because half the officials here had some connection to that fate-thrashed list.