…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 breathtaking 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 Arai & Sana ~

As they sat on a small hillock looking over the distinctly unpleasant landscape through which they had spent the last few days travelling, Arai had to admit she was growing concerned. They had made it out of the treeline and were now traversing a substantial upland bog with occasional bodies of water, which, with low-lying trees, curtains of cloud sweeping across and an utter lack of any kind of wildlife, was actually managing to be more oppressive than the creaking, water-drenched forests they had left behind two days ago.

“I have never liked this place,” Sana muttered.

“It’s hard to credit that eliminating the danger of being eaten by a qi beast hasn’t made it any less obnoxious," she agreed, looking sideways at her sister. Sana had never been to the original version of this little slice of swamp hell as far as she was aware.

“Anyway,” she continued, “how can you dislike a place you have only looked at from a distance?”

“I don’t have to wade for days through this stinking bog to know that I won’t like it,” her sister sniffed, then sighed and assumed a more serious tone. “It’s much bigger than it should be as well: this should be the dense, treacherous connection between the High Valleys on this side of Thunder Crest and the Inner Valley ring, winding between the God Bewitching Jasmine Grove, Thunder Crest Ascent, that fire lamium hell-hole and the other blood ling grove. Instead..."

Her sister trailed off, staring around them glumly as she made another attempt to squeeze muddy water out of her boots.

She considered that in silence. The bog was bigger. A lot bigger, in fact. Maybe it just hadn’t been so noticeable in the enclosed forest, when they were focusing on the present in case danger leapt out from somewhere, but here it was clear as could be, given the perpetual mist and low cloud: the valleys here were several times the size they were outside. She had no idea if the mountains were also bigger, she hadn’t seen more than shadows in the cloud.

What didn’t help was the strange feeling she had that this scale for the landscape was, on some fundamental level, much more suitable – or even, dare she say it, harmonious – compared to ‘outside’. The Inner Valleys they were used to were almost all twisting, maze-like gullies and gorges, opening up somewhat only near the Fissure Peaks. These valleys, on the other hand, were closer to the densely forested vales of the Blue Water Mountains on the coast south of Blue Water City.

“If this keeps up, the plan may have to shift," she agreed eventually.

“Mmmmm, we are taking about three times as long to traverse this place as we might have, even with the vastly reduced apparent danger," Sana stared at the exit they were heading for.

The original plan was to cut along the edge of the valleys, taking advantage of the absence of the God Bewitching Jasmine, and traverse this bog, also decidedly lacking in the deeply territorial snapping xuanwu, then descend into the series of broad valleys on the eastern side of Thunder Crest that demarcated the boundary between the Inner Valleys and the Great Mount itself. This plan would have had them finally arriving in the vicinity of the anomaly field between the Great Mount and Fissure Peaks within seven days of entering here. In the process, they had hoped to find some evidence of an exit from this region where the two famous expeditions had both struck into the interior and located anomalies.

“That said, how?” she sighed softly at the edge in her sister's voice.

That was indeed the issue – How.

How could they change course at this point? It had taken five days to get to where they were and, while she had told herself many times already that the ‘seven days’ timeframe – mentioned in records of both the Blue Water Sage’s journey and the previous Duke’s expedition – was in no way guaranteed to be a ‘thing’, that unreliable piece of information was really all they had to go on. That, their understanding of where the anomalies were located, and the less comforting understanding that basically nobody ever came back from the ones further in than the Low Valleys, as far the Bureau records they had access to indicated.

Neither of them spoke again for several hours as they continued on through the bogland, the terrain not presenting any actual danger but still making for slow and arduous progress. With qi restoration medicines in such short supply, neither of them felt compelled to waste their precious reserves on walking across the surface. Not that she was even sure she could; the qi in this place, such as it was, was beyond weird.

Their cultivation was another oddity. She was used to cultivation being odd in the valleys, but this wasn’t quite the same thing. It was hard to say if it was the qi that was the problem or them, but whatever it was, it was impossible to replenish any qi from the world. Outside of their enhanced strength and durability, they might as well have been mortal for all the good being a Physical Foundation cultivator was doing them. For now, it wouldn’t be a problem. But if they were stuck here—

She stopped thinking about it, feeding the worry into her mantra. That at least was still behaving itself, -for now. It was also going to be a problem down the line though... -fates. She fed that to the mantra as well, shaking her head glumly, and focused on the moment. The bogland here was treacherous enough, even without creeping existential dread as a distraction. At least the peat moss in here wasn’t acidic; outside, the mire was a toxic morass that would strip your skin in seconds without appropriate fortification against exposure to the yin earth, yang wood and yin water endemic to the vegetation and water. Of their ‘group’ of seven , only Han Shu had ever saved up enough to get an entire set of clothes made from luss fibre.

By the count in her head, it had to be close to midnight on the fifth day when they finally made it out of the bogland and started to cut back across what should, theoretically, be the eastern slope of Thunder Crest. This was the fastest route into the valleys below Chain Spire and Fissure Peaks as far as they could reason out. She was thankful that this place wasn’t messing with their endurance at least; if they had been forced to stop and rest, or worse, had to devote time to sleeping, this would be quite a bit harder than it already was.

As they walked up the slope of Thunder Crest, aiming for one of the intersections of the high ridgeline where they could bypass the winding valley they were in entirely, the clouds rolled down again. Soon the mists were obscuring everything within ten metres, the ambience becoming damp and stifling, worse even than the mists on the ridge they had first encountered. They had walked into this shrouded cloud forest for a good thirty minutes, passing trees and shrubs and clambering over rocks, before realising that they were somehow never really gaining altitude. Backtracking, they exited the mists within about two minutes and again found themselves on the treeline of that same valley, overlooking the dense, tangled sub-tropical vegetation that swept out beneath the low cloud.

“What, by all the holy and unholy fates alike?," she finally pronounced.

“You ask me, but do you think I have the ear of the fates?” her sister grumbled.

Nervousness was giving way to a certain fractious stress in both of them at this point. Not at each other, that would just be stupid, but at the landscape itself.

They stared at the mountain slope in frustration.

“Try again?” Sana grimaced.

“Might as well move a bit further along the valley first," she hissed, wiping water from her face. Walking in the misty forest was like taking a hike in a forest-themed bathhouse, so her clothes were constantly soaked and clinging to her body unpleasantly.

About a mile further up the valley, they tried again. The same thing occurred: they walked through the misty forest for almost twenty minutes without reaching the higher ridgeline that should have been there, and then backtracking brought them out again after barely two minutes of walking back down the slope. This continued in various themes for the next two hours. Even trying to scale the cliffs directly, when they reached that point, just saw them climbing endlessly once they entered the higher cloud line only to exit it within a few minutes upon descent, as before.

“So it seems it’s impossible to go above a certain altitude?” she eventually pronounced as they squatted on a lower rocky outcropping with a good view further along the valley edge.

“Certainly seems that way," Sana agreed, munching slowly on a piece of fried bread to replenish a bit of energy.

“Have you noticed that our ability to get nutrition from our own food, that isn’t food pills, is also decreasing?” Sana said after a long moment.

She had. It was just another thing on the list of reasons to try to get out of here, and quickly at that.

“I have," she grimaced. “It doesn’t make sense… surely our storage devices are closed spaces?”

“We took everything out in the cave though," Sana pointed out.

“…”

Her sister was right there. She groaned and ran her hands through her damp hair. It was knotted and matted, almost as much of a mess as her mental state.

“Let’s not go there,” she said eventually. “First, we get to the river.”

It was well after dawn on the sixth day by the time they finally arrived at the banks of the East Fury Torrent. The river originated in the East Fury Peaks and ran a twisting path north, down through a series of valleys and cataracts parallel to the Great Mount’s western slope. It apparently originated in a Yang Water Spring high in the East Fury Peaks and, in her humble opinion, to call it a torrent was perhaps underselling it.

It was a raging flow of water, more akin to a perpetual debris avalanche that just happened to contain some water as it tore through chasms and cave systems on its way through the valleys. It would finally exit into a series of deep pools near Chain Spire, which for a variety of reasons had a higher body count than anywhere else within a hundred miles of them. Its course also changed on a yearly basis due to the yang qi in its flow, able to carve even the preposterously durable rock of the valley substrates like it was soapstone. This also meant that it was a convenient track through the impenetrable depths of this region, its variable level frequently leaving flat, rocky shorelines that acted almost like highways to get deep into the interior if you entered the range from the north.

“Well... this was expected, I guess," she said as they stood, overlooking the much less riotous torrent which was present instead of... all of that.

It still twisted through the valley, fed here by a few tributaries that probably originated in the bogland far behind them, but there were no stone shelves, at least not on the same level as they had hoped.

“It will still be quicker than struggling through the understory,” Sana sounded... resigned.

“True, true," she cast about, wondering if it was worth making a raft.

-Probably not. There will be waterfalls, and without being able to replenish qi I don’t fancy a trip over any of those.

Thankfully, the progress was better than either of them expected in the end. Devoid of external threats like qi beasts, dangerous spirit herbs or the possibility of surges in the river itself, they cleared two valleys in rapid succession, heading north along the banks. As they went, the vegetation slowly started to change, transitioning away from the sub-tropical jungle towards humid deciduous forest. The altitude also started to decrease, mile by mile. Finally, they were faced with an immense cataract in the river and the broad, open grassland that should have been the Shadow Vale.

Seated on a rock next to her sister, taking a few minutes to relax, she stared out at the view, which was definitely impressive from this elevation, rolling hills undulating either side of the river as it wound northward. To the west, the forest rose until it was wreathed in mist and a swirling wall of cloud. To the east, craggy slopes with more deciduous forest ascended beyond the river, also vanishing into first mist, and then cloud which in turn rose until she couldn’t focus on it, swirling and roiling in colossal shapes. She looked up, staring at the grey gradation of the shadow within it that was probably the perpetually rising slope of the Great Mount. Between these monumental cloud banks, she was faced with the broad expanse of a blue sky, the sun hanging at the zenith.

“No moons either, not that I was really expecting to see them. Rather, isn’t it weird that there even is a sun if this is an anomalous dimension? Just how big is it?”

“True," Sana exhaled wearily and stood up. “None of the others I know of in the Low Valleys have a sun, they just get light or dark arbitrarily.”

The descent of the cataract was easy enough, since the cliffs were not as steep as they should have been. The geology made it seem like this valley was much more rift-like than she remembered from the descriptions she had seen. As they descended, the mists came back, slowing their progress to a literal scrambling crawl as they endeavoured not to slip into the river below and end up swept down by the swirling flows. Compared to the mists of the forest, the mist off the river was cold and clinging. The temperature – or rather, the fact they could feel the temperature – was another thing they were slowly becoming more aware of, the longer they remained here. It had been so subtle at first that she didn’t really notice it, and had only become somewhat obvious while they were traversing the bog.

She was only been certain, though, when they were well along the river.

Something here was slowly and subtly eroding their tolerance for hot and cold. By rights she could, outside here, stand in near-boiling water and not even flinch. The humidity of the valleys was an annoyance, but qi provided some small relief . Here though, with her qi no longer providing that buffer, it was like walking through a green, leafy sauna... and that wasn't even the worst of it...

Hunger was also becoming more noticeable.

It was with a deep sigh of relief that she finally put her feet onto the muddy sand at the edge of the lowest of the cataracts. After that point, the mists persisted until they had made it almost half a mile further downstream, at which point they finally receded, giving way to…

“What. The. Fates. Just—” Sana’s voice quavered.

She stared, rather blankly, at the blue sky. Clouds built up high in the distance, and the sun shone down on the rolling hills before them, covered in dense, almost chest-high grass. The huge ramparts of cloud to east and west were gone, and to her right was the familiar outline of Thunder Crest Pinnacle. It was the first time she had seen it unshrouded by its tumultuous, lightning-drenched storm, outside of some ancient images from scrolls in the pavilion. She could clearly see a dark tower halfway up its summit, jutting at an odd angle out of the mountain as if it had been stabbed in there somehow by some primordial giant.

However, none of that was what was insistently drawing her attention, or had made her sister cry out in shock.

The foothills of the mountains rose precipitously, with well-forested slopes and valleys, a natural extension of the transition towards deciduous semi-tropical forest from the much more evergreen jungle they had been in. That made sense… but the Great Mount was gone. The immense, thirty-three mile high peak, which should have been there, which was clearly if somewhat inexplicably visible except for its highest extent from almost anywhere on the sub-continent and even a bit beyond it... was nowhere to be found.

“I…”

She trailed off, standing mutely beside Sana. She had no words really. Part of her just wanted to crouch down with her head in her hands and gibber incoherently.

Turning on the spot, she looked behind her and closed her eyes for a long moment. Opening them again, reality had sadly not readjusted itself to her desires. East Fury’s nine peaks rose behind her, their own perpetual thunderstorm also dispersed her sight clear across its distant peaks.

-Are those bridges? And towers? Their style was so odd that she had to squint hard to be certain.

“Why can we see South Grove Pinnacle?” Sana said, pulling her arm insistently.

She turned her head and found Sana was right. Beyond the peaks of East Fury was the jagged crescent of South Grove Pinnacle, its perpetual miasma also gone, revealing a vast, distant complex of white stone, glimmering in the sun, set into the crescent peak of the mountain. Further east, beyond the first rising ridge, she could make out the shimmering crown of Golden Promise Spire. Between them and it rose a complex of buildings in a multitude of styles, all red and white stone, with peaked roofs and cylindrical towers in an unknown style. Much of it seemed ruined and scattered; trees grew through it, and in one place it looked like a part of one of the smaller mountains on the eastern slope had collapsed and buried a part of it. However, what remained was still vast; the nearest red brick building had to be thirty stories high, the towers behind it rising even further before ending in jagged edges of collapse.

Still further east, beyond the red and white buildings, on another mountain slope was perhaps the tallest building she had ever seen. It dwarfed the scale of the Blue Pavilion in Blue Water City. A huge pagoda, with… 333 floors. Her ability to do math fast courtesy of her cultivation wasn’t dulled, it seemed.

In the distance, she could even make out a further huge peak, shining silver against the sky, which was probably Snow Jade.

Further continuing the circuit, the next two peaks, which she didn’t recognise, held shattered towers in different styles. One had what appeared to be a giant clock dial on it, with a dozen rings of what were presumably numbers and, from what she was able to make out through the clouds that billowed around it,far more than the usual number of hands.

Finally, after completing the circuit, she was left with Chain Spire. At first glance, it was almost mercifully normal, until she looked closer and realised that vast portions of its upper reaches, shrouded in ice and snow outside, were, here, covered in carved terraces and buildings. Gardens were cunningly disguised amid the slopes and forested ridges as they descended, before finally vanishing into the distant forests.

“All the ruins are above the lowest cloud strata," her sister observed. Her voice was still a bit…

“Yes," she turned on the spot, taking it all in.

There were other ruins as well, the vestiges of a vast city hidden in the forests to the north-east, towards Fissure Peaks, its towers and walls collapsed and eroded by age as they perched on the far end of the massive valley.

“It’s not what I expected at all," her voice felt unnaturally quiet amid this immense landscape.

Each of the peaks had to be miles high: the smallest of them was nine, ten at the very least. The greatest that rose, veiled in even higher strata of clouds to the north-east, beyond the ruined city, could be as high as twenty.

“What in the merciful fates is this place?" her sister still sounded nervous.

It was hard to be unawed by this view, both its oddity and its seemingly natural flow from ruins to mountains to forests to towers and halls and back.

“It’s like one of the great sects from the Imperial continent, that you read about in the scrolls they sometimes sell in the market. Although, speaking of scrolls and stories...”

She spun on the spot again. “I don’t see the crystal building that the legend about the Blue Sage mentioned?”

“Umm… sis...”

Her sister’s voice, now containing a certain edge, cut through her own musing.

She glanced at Sana.

“What?”

“Umm… The sky, I think—”

She looked up and saw the sky was turning. Mesmerized, she watched as the clouds flowed out from the direction they had come and swirled around the dome of the sky above them. One after another, the montane peaks and their disparate ruins were subsumed by the swirling white river.

And the world kept turning.

It was like being stuck in the middle of one of those children’s lanterns, which you spun to see the animals move.

“Oh…” her sister stumbled, sounding queasy.

So it wasn’t just her. Her mind caught up with the motion of the world and the ground felt like it was tilting beneath her. A wave of dizziness swept over her, as the sky rolled onwards.

“Oh, fates—”

Her sister sounded nauseous, but she couldn’t spare any effort to look at her, since she was also firmly caught up in the stomach-churning twisting sensation of the world pitching and tilting around her.

The mountains moved.

The sky rolled on.

The clouds spiralled and billowed.

The ruins reshuffled themselves.

Collapsing to her knees, she grasped desperately at the ground, but it twisted in her grip, slipping away from her, mocking her desire for stability as it pitched and warped weirdly.

She tried to scream and found herself vomiting instead as the nauseating sensations overwhelmed her.

The sense of disorientation only grew more and more intense as she found her gaze inexorably drawn to the surrounding transformations. She wanted nothing more to bury her face in the earth and sob, but reality clearly had other ideas.

Vertigo became all-consuming, a crippling persecution by this place upon her psyche as it grabbed her attention somehow and forced her to face the changes unfolding in the landscape around her.

Buildings slid into one another, through one another, over one another, transformed into new buildings or reverted into old ones seemingly at random.

The landscape flowed backwards, somehow streaming away from the surrounding changes. Valleys combined and changed, altered and inverted. A ruined hall gained extra towers, the white and red city acquired the clock tower, but not quite at the same scale or perspective. A grey building with huge windows and the grey tower from one of the mountains slid into each other and reordered, forming an entirely new building with a great square spire that jutted out of one mountain like a new peak.

The mountains themselves were splitting apart and twisting like the prisms of a child’s toy, over and over and over and over—

The motion of the world overtook her senses entirely for a moment and she was lost in a blue void. No land at all, just twisting sky until Thunder Crest Pinnacle dropped over the horizon of her twisted world and the land pitched back into a perspective in which she could see it again.

By the time the third full circuit of the river of clouds had swept her along with it, the central group of buildings that had been scattered through the forest had all collected on the slopes of Thunder Crest Pinnacle. The peaks started slotting back into the spinning lantern of vertiginous chaos, one after another.

First came Snow Jade, now containing a smaller collection of towers, stairways and buildings cut into its heights, forests coating its slopes even as those heights were subsumed by a vast blizzard of snow, leaving it dusted white and sparkling again.

Next came North Crest Ridge – a series of crown-like spikes now at its peak framing a tower of glossy black stone – which should have been between the Fissure peaks and the Great Mount, a part of her broken mind pointed out. Thunder Crest Pinnacle, followed after, a vast complex of workings now rising up its face and another immense black tower at its peak.

South Grove Pinnacle rose like a great behemoth from the depths of the chaos, its crescent crown now containing the complex of grey buildings that had littered half the landscape before.

At the bottom of the circle was East Watch, the lesser peak between South Grove and Golden Promise. The great grey tower and hall now stood on its slopes, jutting out above the ridgelines, the tower rising almost as high as the mountain itself. Below it, the terraces and valley gardens swirled out of the chaos to populate its lower slopes.

Next came the great city and Chain Spire, the red and white building twisting through it for a moment before it partially vanished, leaving only the white behind.

The red, she saw a moment later, had not disappeared but rather was somehow now present across from it, on Golden Promise Spire, as part of another city of red crystal and blue peaked roofs, the construction all rounded towers and alien arches and spirals.

Bridges flowed outward from nothing and connected Golden Promise to the East Fury Peaks, one after another.

Everything hung, impossibly motionless, amid the twisting chaos for an agonising second. She felt like her eyes were being pulled out of her head as the world tried to make her focus on both the still bits and the chaos that bled through everything else.

Then everything suddenly slotted together, stacking one piece over another. Mountains bled through each other and the world finally relinquished her from its horrible grip.

…

…

Even after she had stopped sobbing from the disorientation and was certain that the spinning of the world beneath her was all now, legitimately, just in her head, Arai remained limply on the ground for several minutes.

Her body was cold and trembling, an odd sensation that took her a few seconds to place... Her qi had run out of control and was seeping out of her body into the ground! In a panic, she grasped her mantra and screamed at it to lock everything that remained inside her body. With great reluctance, it sluggishly responded and started working with her body to stem the flow of that precious, irreplaceable energy. The cold was settled deep in her bones, and the base of her skull felt...

-Soul shock.

She scrunched up her eyes and tried to push away the feeling that a small demon was sat on the back of her back, hitting the top end of her spine with a pointy hammer.

There was something sticky all over her face...

-Uggh. She was literally lying face down in her own vomit. Gross!

Rolling over, she finally dared to open her eyes a fraction, and was instantly given cause to regret it, having forgotten that the sun was directly overhead.

When the blotchy spots vanished, she pushed herself up on her knees and managed to not immediately fall over. The disorientation was still lodged firmly within her body, it seemed.

“I want to die," Sana moaned nearby.

“Preach it, sister," she made a face.

-My mouth is sour? Oh, the vomit again.

-Water. Need water.

After fumbling with her storage talisman for a second, she finally got a jar of it and gulped some down, and then promptly vomited it all back up again, having forgotten that it was chilled.

When she had finally calmed down and stopped randomly punching the ground and screaming with impotent fury at the whole ordeal, she sat up once more and properly tried to take stock of herself.

The qi in her body that wasn’t locked into her bones and flesh had bled by almost half, with was disastrous in its own right. The ache in her bones also remained, so it looked like the soul shock was here to stay. There was a terrible sensation of prickling in her face, and a throbbing in her temples. Meridian strain; ocular and vascular by the feel of it as it extended down her neck and was also present in her breast. That made sense, given the disorientation. The rest of her external meridians, those she had properly opened at least, seemed fine.

“What in the name of the heavenly daughter's virginity was that," her sister whispered from nearby.

“Language," her voice came out in a nauseated rasp.

“Bite me!" her sister spat back at her in Easten, which had much better swear words for certain contexts. That one in particular was suggesting she kiss her ass.

She ignored it. The disorientation was real, and they were both stressed.

It was a few more minutes before she felt comfortable doing more than just sitting there with both hands firmly on the ground, taking deep breaths with her eyes closed. Her hands and feet were still trembling from the latent soul shock.

“Are you feeling better?” she ventured eventually.

“I feel like a monkey just dunked a pot of its faeces over my head," her sister groaned.

“You also have soul shock?” she looked over at Sana and shook her head, as the answer was obvious.

Her sister was pale as a sheet and shaking intensely, with glassy eyes and heavily dilated pupils, although she at least had managed to avoid falling face down in her own vomit.

She wiped her face with a handful of grass and then inspected her clothing with a disgusted wince. Pulling off her top, and then undergarment as both stank and were badly stained now, she put them to one side. Fortunately, they were near the water still, so it was easy for her to crawl over and, after a moment's contemplation, just fall face-first into the shallows. She luxuriated in the sensation of the icy water for a few moments before pushing herself up and scrubbing herself vigorously with some water weed and sand. It wasn’t pleasant by any means, but it shifted the smell. For good measure, she gulped down a few mouthfuls, noticing with a slight grimace that it still refused to give her any rehydration.

By the time she was done attempting to clean the worst of it off the clothes she had been wearing, Sana had recovered enough to stagger over and sit down beside her on the shore.

“I never want to experience that ever again," her sister said eventually.

“You and me both," she agreed. The vomit really wasn’t washing out of—

“Did you also puke?” she asked Sana.

“Yes, I was lucky I fell backwards though," her sister gave her a sympathetic shoulder hug, then continued with a frown. “Something happened with the qi stability. My control over the qi in my body went nuts for a moment, and there is a lot of black crud in…”

“I hadn’t bothered to look too closely," she grimaced.

A few more minutes of scrubbing rendered no appreciable change to the state of that top and undergarment, much to her frustration. The only thing that would stink up stuff like this should be—

“Impurities," she said eventually.

“Uhuh," her sister agreed. “We puked because of the food we’ve been eating, I think.”

After some more futile scrubbing, including getting a yin earth spirit herb and trying to use the sap from that, she finally gave up and consigned that top to an empty pot in her storage talisman.

“If hunger and temperature are returning here, I really hope it just stays at that,” Sana said after a moment.

“Oh," she grimaced as she pulled on a new top. “Yes, our metabolisms haven’t actually shifted that I can feel, it’s just something is messing with the qi here.”

“So what now?”, her sister asked, skimming a stone across the swiftly running water.

“First, I think we find a hill and see what the heavenly monkeys have actually done to the landscape.”

It took a surprisingly long time to find a hill in the rolling landscape with sufficient vantage to let them see much over the undulating, chest-high grass. For once she was glad there was no other wildlife: between the spiders, the ground-crawling things and the flying bugs, this place would be an insect hell outside, one in which they would never see half of the things coming.

She wasn’t sure what she expected from the view when they eventually found a rocky outcrop with some trees that gave a decent vantage point, but it certainly wasn’t what they got. The valley was, at a word, transformed.

The majority of the ruins were condensed, in a much more reasonable and ordered manner, on the eastern side of the wide vale in which they stood. To the distant north, between Chain Spire and East Ridge in the general direction that the river now flowed in, she could see the faint glimmer of tall spires over the rising forests, obscured by a distant ridge. That was probably the city; the enormous pagoda and the great grey hall and clock tower rose through the mists above the cloud level and she could see distant glimpses of red brick and roofs in a wide variety of colours and styles. Other, smaller ruins were dotted through the forest and slopes all around them.

After walking for several more minutes she started to recognise the tell-tale signs that they were in fact stuck in the same kind of fog that had prevented them from going over the Thunder Crest ridgeline. In contravention of the wisdom of the sages, because she was getting quite fed up with this place now, they kept walking for a while longer, until the familiar sense of stifling breathlessness began to pressure them. Retracing their steps, it took less than a minute to return along the pathway to the edge of the grassy vale.

With no other real options left, they made their way back across the grassland, following the road, until its undulating passage led them past a broad hill with a pile of stones on it and a solitary tree with bronze-coloured leaves. Judging it as good a place as any to take stock, they sat down, dispirited.

She watched as Sana started to look through their storage talismans once again, as they had been meaning to do for a while now. The inventory in the cave had been a quick thing, and both had been stressed and anxious at the time. While her sister worked at that, she went over to look at the tree, quickly finding it to be unusual in many ways. The bark might as well have been steel when she poked it, the branches were twisted and gnarly, and it had thorns. A lot of thorns, in fact, hidden in the foliage. Anyone sticking an arm into the tree at random would suffer egregiously. No fruit or flowers, not even any buds that she could see either, though that latter observation held true for everything in the strange place they were on.

“Ahh, Sis— SIS!”

Sana’s voice took her away from poring over the leaves of a low-lying branch, trying to decide what kind of species it was.

“I think we have a small problem. Or will have soon,” Sana said as she looked up.

“Ohh?” she frowned, walking over to the orderly stacks of stuff from their talismans. Before, she hadn’t really bothered to look through the pots. Now Sana had everything, bar the blaze pines and a few other herbs spread out on some broad flat rocks.

“We only have about fifteen days of food left each," Sana supplied.

“I thought we had more than that," she stared at the piles.

“A bunch of the herbs are..." Sana held up one of the bags of more edible spirit herbs.

She opened it and stared dully at its contents, which were wasted and spoiling.

“That should be impossible.”

“It should," her sister agreed. “I think our storage talismans’ timelessness functions are no longer working.”

She took her talisman and stared at it, turning it over in her hands. There was nothing overtly wrong with it that she could see. The formations on it, admittedly beyond her ability to understand as she had no understanding of ‘space’ in that concept, appeared intact.

“You think this is another case of the qi being weird?” she frowned.

“Probably," her sister was looking even more vexed as she skimmed through things now. “Looking at the herbs which won’t perish and the fasting pills, we can probably stretch things to twenty days apiece.”

“But many of those are borderline poisonous if consumed excessively, their nutritional value is a secondary function of the other things they address, like qi imbalance, poisoning and such," she stared at the piles, tallying up the stuff that could be taken without concern for side effects. It was not an encouraging amount.

“Two-thirds of my food pills were in my bag," Sana sighed. “You never opened the jars. I took a lot of them out to use the sealing capabilities for some other herbs, and I was going to shuffle them over to Ling that evening since she has a much larger collection of suitable storage vessels.”

Squatting down, she shook her head sadly. ‘Little things make big problems’, as their mother used to say. Looking through the rest of the herbs, which Sana was sorting by grade and type, she sighed again.

“Neither of us is really skilled in anything other than basic pill craft. Do you want to try making extra nutritional pills, with six- and seven-star mutate ingredients, from scratch?”

“Not with the inability to replenish qi," Sana exhaled and stood up.

“If we could get out of this place I'd be… less worried... there will probably be something up there," Sana pointed to the buildings in the far distance.

“Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that, and I have a thought I don’t much like." She looked around pensively as her brain tried to turn half-formed thoughts into coherent words. “You recall how we got in here?”

Sana chucked. “Well, we walked and climbed a bit.”

She snorted in amusement. “No, before that. We fell. Off the ridgeline.”

Sana rolled her eyes. “And your point being? Other than to remind me of what I see half the times I close my eyes, at least before that horrible experience earlier on.”

“Anyone who's walked out of ‘here’, assuming we are, basically, in the same place, went in via the North Fissure valley system, tracking along the other end of the river. If the Blue Water Sage went over the ridges, it’s never mentioned. The records of the previous Duke's expedition are frustratingly scant, but, while there was mention of them securing the ridgelines as retreat points, they still found an accessible anomaly along the northern edge of the Inner Valleys. A long way... that way."

She pointed up the valley vaguely and kept talking. “Neither record mentions this place. Or anything crazy with the sky, or the mountains. Or the clouds. But—”

Pausing for breath, she rapidly put the succeeding thoughts in order.

“—The Blue Water Sage found a flower meadow filled with medicinal herbs and thick with fog. In it was a crystal building containing whatever mythical ability they want to claim depending on the story.

“They stayed for seven days and then managed to use some special geomancy art and the great sage’s wisdom to escape.”

“Or were thrown out, depending on the different versions that are common knowledge, anyway,” Sana added.

“Yes, or were just kicked out after seven days," she agreed.

“I know this as well as you do," Sana squinted at her. “Where are you going with this?”

“Just bear with me. It’s a process," she muttered.

“Anyway, the Duke's expedition entered a rift closer to East Ridge while retreating under the onslaught of a bunch of twelve- and thirteen-star grade mutate lizard things. They entered directly into a courtyard that lead to a series of halls, where there wasn’t much of interest bar the last hall and a bunch of altars and weapons.”

“Mmmmm," Sana nodded along. “As father told the story, that time he made us swear an oath to Tian Beyond Heaven, they had to take some test. They didn’t fail, but it seems they didn’t pass either and while the old Duke managed to enter the hall with the altars, he didn’t get a treasure...”

“Remember how father described the hall?” she pressed.

“It was a ruin made of a dense, grey stone with great windows that—” Sana turned and stared into the distance... at the great grey ruin, with its vast spire and huge windows.

“No way," her sister hissed incredulously.

“The common understanding of half those records is that the descriptions are ninety percent allegory. But that’s way too much of a coincidence," she said triumphantly.

“So,” she continued, “when both parties left, they arrived on the montane edges of the Yin Eclipse Mountains, close to South Grove Spire.”

Turning, she shaded her eyes, looking for the particular bit she had seen before. “There.”

She pointed at a large round tower that was on the west side of a large complex of ruins above the cloud line. “If you smashed the top of that, and pushed it halfway through the mountain, it would be just like the ruin below South Grove.”

“Now that you mention it," Sana nodded, staring at the ruins across the valley as well. “And that red building, those red stone buildings. Don’t they excavate a lot of nigh-indestructible red stone blocks about that kind of size in the deep caves near Golden Promise Spire? The school there sells them to the central continent, as I recall.”

“Indeed. So, what if – and I really hate myself for saying this – what if there is a right way and a wrong way to enter this place?”

“How do you come to that conclusion?” Sana stared at her quizzically.

“Remember the 'Field Theory'?” she prompted.

“Oh... The one where it’s argued that the gorge walls and valley walls and the ecosystems they contain are a bit like walls and fields? Each gorge usually holds a single ‘Thing’, ‘Affinity’, ‘Type’ or ‘Theme’, without any particular regard for any kind of established understanding of environment or biome.” She nodded as her sister reeled off the theory that those within the Hunter Bureau who believed the Yin Eclipse Mountain Range to be some long abandoned celestial herb garden espoused. “The Aspen, the Jasmine, the xuanwu, the blood lings, the heaven blaze pines, the different lamium, the ginseng and so on.”

“Yes," she went on, “The commonalities are not immediately obvious, but if you look hard enough, you will find them everywhere.

“So, what if entering via the North Fissure route is a bit like opening the gate and just walking in? Or finding the gate ajar perhaps, and walking in. Us getting thrown off that cliff, on the other hand...”

Sana stared at her pensively. “I follow you now. Us entering as we did, and so many other people, would be like somehow climbing over or falling off the 'wall'. When you factor in that almost nobody comes back from the random anomalies they stumble through, apart from in the Outer Valleys where the openings are stable or have been forcibly stabilised, or those two in North Fissure...”

“It’s a theory, anyway," she conceded. “But you only get thunder on the ridgelines, and the cloud blocks most access beyond a certain altitude, even outside. The actives rarely go over the ridges, or through them.”

“And you have the repression,” Sana added. “No flying.”

“And then there’s the inability of anything here to provide nutrition,” she sighed. “Although I don’t think that fits necessarily.”

“No.” Sana agreed, “I think your other thought on that – when we were making our way down the river, talking about the hunger – is more likely. We know already that there are temporal anomalies in the High Valleys, like there the one that killed Senior Elath just after we first started, and the one that Old Ling warns everyone about, that you get taken to see. Our storage talismans not behaving correctly also suggests that something here is messing with spatial or temporal laws in some way.”

“I can just see those bodyguards of Ha Yun’s rolling their eyes already at that theory...” she chuckled, mimicking the Ha clan elite. “What do you think you know about laws, girl? Just because you know some words?”

They both fell into silence again, staring off across the grassland. Eventually, she spoke up, sounding even more tentative than she had been with the other theory.

“What if this whole place is a giant temporal anomaly?”

“Like the Stopping Pit?” Sana said doubtfully.

“No…” she frowned... “Not quite… more like…”

She had to admit it was hard to think about stuff like this, really. Spiritual cultivation was not a thing that either of them really focused on. They both had spiritual roots, and they were apparently fairly decent ones, but their mother had been quite categorical when they were young that it was better to learn her family's physical cultivation mantra and reach a certain level of capability in that before doing anything with spiritual cultivation. That was apparently a secret understanding passed down through many of the established Easten family tribes, as was the emotion-feeding trick with their mantra, for that matter.

Their mantra was apparently also one of the really good ones, so they had both practised it without complaint and never spoken outwardly about it to others. It was with some frustration that she slipped into the tangential thought that it was only their brother's bragging about it in the wrong company that had led anyone to realising it was anything more than what it appeared to be from the outside. It was fortunate for them that he had never known the true depths of their knowledge of it compared to what he learned, given the tragedy his words had eventually set in motion for their family.

Sadly, amid all those secret teachings their mother had passed on to them, understandings concerning 'time' were not among them beyond the obvious pertaining to a Physique Law cultivator's innate longevity. Up to this point she was forced to admit she had at best considered concepts around it rather shallowly, not that any cultivator really thought all that hard about such things before they crossed the Immortal Threshold. She and her sister had accepted that they would live a long time: with cultivation in the Physical Foundation realm they would already live to be maybe five hundred years old, if they stopped cultivating yesterday and did nothing for the rest of their mortal lives.

Their mantra seemed even better at this than usual as well, thanks to the 'Spirit' and 'Soul' mnemonics which would, according to their mother, lead to them gaining one of the traits of a Nascent Soul cultivator at the peak of Physical Foundation. Their physical ageing would slow in their late teens and stop somewhere in their early twenties. Both of them would then look about that age, except for a bit of grey hair, until the day they died, be it thirty, three hundred or three thousand years from now. So, she was certain their mantra had a sort of intuitive link to time, despite their mother's silence on that point. Beyond this, however, she had no frame of reference to try to hang any of these ideas about it off of;, at least until she had properly started considering the weird way that nutrition was working here, and the fact that the plants weren’t flowering.

It was that latter point that had been nagging at her, insistently, as they made their way onwards. She had looked at every plant she could, and they were all mature, but none of them were old. The trees, for example, were mature, but none of the fallen trees were old. It was unclear what had felled them, but it wasn’t visible old age. Weather maybe? They had only been here for a week, and seen rain, sun, shine, even wind, so storms were definitely possible.

She collected her thoughts a bit better and continued talking. “So, you know how our mantra will stop us ageing when we reach ‘adulthood’.”

“Uhuh,” Sana nodded a bit noncommittally.

“Well, what if the same kind of thing is happening here, but… for everything?”

“…”

Sana stared at her dully.

“I am the first person to admit we know fates-thrashed all about time. But there are weird things here. The nutrition, the plants don’t grow old and don’t flower. Flowering would require dying. Something is dissociating them with reality. New plants grow, but I’ve never seen a seed?” She trailed off, then picked out the thoughts she needed and kept going, throwing fragmentary ideas into words.

“Like this is a moment? Like you hear about in the stories, a space dissociated with reality, or more like severed? Adrift somehow? If we consider the anomalies and the way we got in, if time had truly stopped, I doubt we would be alive or conscious. But we can eat, think, breath, do all that. The wind blows… the grass moves, and so on, but the only nutrition that sticks is what we brought with us and the plants just don’t age—” it was said so easily that she nearly just went on past it without thinking, as you sometimes do.

Sana stared at her and parroted back. “The plants. Don’t. Age. But they still grow. That weird qi that is in everything that we can’t interact with? Maybe time somehow isn’t flowing forwards or backwards here, but rather it’s flowing sideways for the plants.”

They both admired their mental gymnastics to get to this point in silence for a minute.

-It is a theory, anyway, she reflected.

“We won’t know for sure unless we can get out of here and bring some with us,’ she pursed her lips and stared at the sky for a moment before continuing. “The main thing is, we can hypothesise that the reason we can’t interact with the plants is because some aspect of the rules in this place aren't working right, either intentionally on the part of… someone, or not. If you combine that with the idea that we are not here ‘correctly’ somehow, the issues with our qi also make sense.”

Sana sighed and stood up, sweeping the stuff back into their storage devices in a more ordered manner. “I guess we start by exploring this area properly then, maybe we will finally luck out and find something that actually provides answers rather than questions.”

Picking up her own talisman, she looked around. “Yep. And by my count, we still have a day and a bit before the seven days is up.”

“Yeah... I really do hope that you are wrong and that this place will just kick us out once seven days have passed. Although that’s assuming time really isn’t totally broken in some way we can’t even conceive of.”

She was sat on a rock, one of a dozen on a large, open-topped hill, in the pre-dawn hour of the seventh day as she calculated it, when it came. Sana was sat below her with her eyes closed, focusing on recovering from the last remnants of the soul shock, which, while receding, had stayed far longer than either of them would have liked. They had been taking turns at meditating on it; their mantra would and could fix the damage done, which was fortunate as some more common mantras didn’t have that capability, but even so they had to focus on it specifically for more serious soul-based injuries.

The only warning was a sudden shift in the air as it seemed to flow away from their position, dragging a chill in its departing wake. The cloud mist boiled out of the forests all around the valley, flooding like a white avalanche across the grasslands, blotting out the dells and smaller hills all around them. Within seconds they were surrounded by a sea of rolling white that lapped at the crest of their slightly taller hilltop, with its circle of twelve stones in a fairly haphazard circle. Visibility rapidly shrunk down to a few hundred metres in the time it took her to jump off the now unpleasantly cold rock and land beside Sana.

Contrary to what she expected, there was no eye-bending or soul-shocking disturbance to accompany this change, just a damp cold that followed with the mist and permeated everything. As she watched, with growing concern, dew condensed on the grass and rocks around them. Within moments her clothes were drenched and her breath was misting the air as if it were a cold daybreak at the peak of the Heaven Seizing Season. She kicked Sana to make her surface from her meditation, although her sister was already stirring at the temperature drop.

The breeze dropped away and the already unnaturally silence landscape started to become positively claustrophobic as the mist continued to swirl in.

“What the—?” Sana hissed, looking around.

As they both watched the roiling mists, she felt an additional, deeper cold somehow creeping through the fog.

In the swirling white, a shadow moved. At first, she thought it was just trees; some were still faintly visible on distant hills. Soon though, the shadow resolved itself and she found herself looking at a vague behemoth of muted lines shifting through the sea of mist. Long limbs of shadow moved with a terrifying, mesmerising elegance past their position at a distance of several hundred metres.

Her heart stopped as the thing, as if registering their petrified gaze, paused.

A line moved through the mist, extending up the slope towards them. The mists billowed higher and thicker, but never quite managed to reach the hilltop itself. She was unable to move a muscle, her gaze unfocused somehow under the tension of the moment, even as a deathly chill swirled through the fog towards them. She could feel the invisible death blistering her skin even before she could hear it, let alone see it. Herbaceous weeds and grass on the edges of the mist froze solid. There was a *snap* and a *pop* as a tree on the far side of the hill, with its base in the mist, exploded, turning into a twisted mess as roots, then trunk and finally branches splintered apart under the unnatural chill. All around them she could hear other trees shattering. A frozen branch scythed out of the gloom and hit the rock beside them, exploding like glass.

The twelve rocks all had a layer of frost on them now. Through her blurring vision, she thought she saw reliefs of animals and other figures on them. The blurring confused her for a second until she realised the ground was steaming. The hill below them was groaning. In the distance, she started to hear other creaks and cracks. Sharper, crisper sounds, Of rocks breaking in the cold. Heat was forced out of the soil below them and her clothes, already damp, were abruptly drenched by the sudden rising mist. She barely had time to register, with a growing horror, what was about to happen, when her clothing began to stick to her skin directly as the temperature difference swept across the entire hilltop.

As her muscles stiffened and started to break down under the force of the cold permeating her body, her bones started to throb and ache. It felt as if she had a fire in her bone marrow. It took all her control not to open her mouth: if this deathly air flowed into her lungs directly, what little qi defence she still had at this point wouldn’t save her. Her vision started to blur and distort, red bleeding in from the edges of her vision until she was looking at a world through a gloomy, dark red lens. Outside of her core organs, her whole body was numb now.

-Is... this how I die?

The thought was alien. She realised she had never truly considered before now that she could actually die here. Ignorance? Naïveté, brash confidence of youth?

The cold was smothering now. Something was outside the circle. She couldn’t see it beyond a faint shadow. Limbs. Colossal. Immense. Her mind simply refused to understand it. The shapes of its being were such that it seemed to play hopscotch with her ruined senses.

Then, almost as abruptly as they came, the shadowy lines and limb-like things shifted onwards. The fog calmed itself and all that was left in its absence was the *plink* and *creak* of stone and wood thawing and cracking as rapidly as they had frozen.

However, the sense of chill oppression that had come with the shadow did not leave, instead it coated their hilltop island like a thick drape. She didn’t know how long she stood there, immobile, frozen both literally and figuratively as she fought with every fibre of her being against the death that was trying to gently, silently, almost kindly carry her off. Her heart was barely able to beat and the air in her lungs was finally freezing, turning to liquid in the enclosed space. Only her mantra was keeping her body alive now.

Finally, after what felt like an agonizing eternity, the freezing oppression also dwindled away, allowing her natural healing to finally begin making a tiny bit of headway. Her vision, still red, started to return. There was still some remnant of qi shielding her core organs, although her mantra was trying to pull it out of her very bones now. She let it – vital qi was only useful if you were alive. The pain in her chest, of her lungs trying to collapse in on themselves, was excruciating. Moment by moment she focused on that, warming the liquid in them until it returned to its natural state, desperately trying to ensure that it didn’t expand too rapidly, or in the wrong place, and just explode her breast open. While it might not kill her outright, it would probably be the final straw that saw her die an agonising death of compounded problems.

"my Spirit and Heart are supported by the Renewal of my Body and Soul…’"

The desperate battle against the cold raged on until all her bodily reserves of unrefined qi were finally exhausted. All she had was her cultivation base now. Her mantra fought a retreating battle, desperately buying time, organ by organ, trying to keep her alive: intestines, bladder, stomach, gall, kidneys, womb, liver, spleen and finally lungs. All fell until only her brain and her heart were properly functional, protected by the thinnest shell of her vital qi.

Devoid of anything else, she almost became her mantra. It was still too weak. Or she was too weak. Memories twisted in her mind. Called up by the mantra? Or because she was just fooling herself and she was dying? It was hard to say.

The qi protecting her heart finally thinned and—

“Oh, my dear daughter… do not cry.”

The words rose in her mind like a beautiful curse. Not the worst memory, but close to it, a part of her thought. Her mother sat in their garden, in the night air, looking pale, holding her hands. When she finished singing the haunting song, a lullaby, with words in a language she didn’t really understand, her mother turned to her and looked at her with concern.

“You must be strong for your sister. Mother… is... just… going to leave you all for a while.”

A hand grasped hers. She was dimly aware that she was lying on the ground.

“Don’t cry… if you both grow up to be strong, maybe we will meet again, my dear little ones. You must look after your father and brother…”

The hand… felt warm… her mother’s voice echoed in her mind. A sense of sadness gripped her. “… It seems that fate is indeed a cruel thing… your mother can only give you both this gift.”

Did she hear mocking laughter -My mother’s?

{A Thought through Eternity}

‘I Do Not Want You To Die In This Place’

The words hung in her mind like fireworks. It was a memory she had no memory of, and which subverted everything she thought she understood about mantras, but she didn’t care. Her vision returned, slowly and painfully. She was certain that her heart had stopped for a second but now it beat, albeit irregularly, starting to send some warmth around her body. Her mantra ate up the sorrow and torment of those old memories and turned them into fuel to fan the dying embers of her life. She claimed her lungs back first. Lungs and heart, to make blood flow.

Her clothes, still frozen solid, opened lesions where they had fused with her skin as she breathed. Just that was enough. It wasn’t pain, not yet anyway, but the sensation of the cloth taking her skin away with it had a sensation in her mind akin to tearing silk. She tried not to focus on it; coherent thought was hard enough without such distractions. Time passed by and her natural healing had finally gotten enough purchase to fight against the cold now, clawing back her life in the face of the very worst of the damage, even as the temperature rose around her.

Soon her body was soaked in both dew and icy sweat as the world around her warmed. This rapidly gave way to a slick of thawing blood: her skin was split all over and her muscles had deformed under the unnatural cold. The water in her body had almost all frozen and expanded, causing catastrophic internal damage even before the air had turned into liquid and formed voids of empty space that collapsed other places.

-It is frankly miraculous that I am still alive right now, a voice in her mind told her. She ignored it and continued to focus on triaging her internal injuries with what vital qi she had at her disposal. The fireworks of whatever her mother had done were starting to fade away, vanishing back into the recesses of her being bit by bit.

At some point, she found that the temperature was back to some kind of normal level, although it was still bitterly cold based on the faint sheen of frost her vision could make out covering everything—

Her nervous system, which had felt like it was stuck in its own fog, abruptly reconnected with the rest of her body. She had experienced serious numbness and the pain that came after once before, when she was stung by a thunder mutate lamium, but this made that experience seem like a rash from a normal nettle. It took all her control not to scream in pain. She wanted to curl up in a ball and sob, as every part of her body now simultaneously felt like it was burning, tingling, had been slapped and hit with a blunt object.

Sana was...

She was holding Sana’s hand somehow.

Within her memories, there was no recollection of that happening?

-Oh, I fell, and managed to grab her hand before everything froze completely.

Through her palm, she could feel her sister shivering ever so slightly beside her, in just as much pain it seemed. With this came a return of some of the other, more instinctual aspects associated with her cultivation, feelings honed in places like the God Bewitching Jasmine Grove and the Red Pit. Those instincts were telling her that if she screamed now, or made any kind of fuss, it would lead to their absolute deaths.

The shadow in the mist was still there, looming in the distance.

Eventually, the last vestiges of it did genuinely disappear into the gloom and the oppressive silence was once more complete.

With that threat finally departed, she turned back to the task of not dying. Even at this point, her life was still teetering on a knife-edge. Feeding the pain to the mantra, she started to run through some of the more esoteric aspects of physical cultivation, as explained to them by their mother. Different ways of pushing the mantra about, odd mnemonic tricks that would change the way it worked on the body, soothe the mind and even dissociate perception. Right now she certainly needed the perception dissociation trick.

After two cycles of the variant mnemonic, she felt her nervous system returning to normal in her hands and feet. Circulation was also being properly restored: her natural healing had gotten to the point where it was working on her muscles, mending the ruined blood vessels and nerves that ran to the periphery of her body. The temperature had also burst blood vessels in her…

-My…

She saw strange things and her sense of taste went funny for a few seconds. Her heart skipped horribly and nearly stopped, accompanied by a series of excruciating shooting pains throughout her body.

She recovered from the blood deviation with another cycle of the variant mnemonic, sweating mentally.

After the sixth cycle, she was able to move her eyes sufficiently to check out her sister's condition, although just that little bit of movement still left her feeling like her face was about to fall off.

Sana was slumped next to her, looking like a corpse caught in a blizzard. Her skin was still nearly blue and blistering where her clothes stuck to it, and, even though her body steamed faintly, her dark brown hair was still silver with frost. It lingered on her lips and eyelashes, giving her a strange, otherworldly look.

A broken voice in her mind noted that they made pretty corpses. She banished it to the mantra without blinking. Psyche breaks were bad, so it was convenient that they were yet another thing their mantra could deal with with abnormal ease.

Blood was starting to run from slowly thawing lesions; Sana’s eyes were still blood red, two large lines of blood running down her cheeks, and, as she watched, blood also started to run from her sister’s nose, ears and even scalp. No breath was visible, but she could feel her pulse through her hand at least.

Seconds stretched on until Sana’s eyes abruptly moved and met hers. Slowly they both crumpled, if such a thing were possible given their already ruined state, as their bodies’ enforced rigidity from the cold was finally banished.

The faint smile on Sana’s face was mirrored on her own.

-We... both survived.