…Things relating to Karma and Fate should not be forced. Some of you sitting here have experienced that first hand and paid the price required. More than, in some ways, but it’s something that’s always eluded those old robbers and ghosts who scammed their way heavenward and who like to think themselves particularly smart for their achievements. They too easily forget the wisdom of their betters who survived far longer on the dark paths through the abyss of magic, and upon whose footsteps they frequently trample. Subsequently, it is all too often that they try to take and command rather than accept what comes and use it appropriately.

There is an old saying, really it’s as old as the first person trying and failing to catch a fish and spearing their own foot in the process, but it has a kind of applicability that speaks to many levels across this lecture, regarding Karma, Fate, Manifest Destiny, Good Fortune and whatever else you want to lump in there: ‘Accept what is given, receive what is due. But be careful what you bind, lest it instead bind you’. It is also a maxim far too many generations fall into darkness and are thoroughly abandoned through forgetting.

Excerpt from ‘How to Anger People and Influence Gods’: Lecture series to the Academy of Unified Magic’s for Amaltharia.

~By Arch Magister of Amaltharia – Elaria Vesperina Everkind Marcella Grey & delivered by Magister Alwen Elvere

~ Lin Ling, Mysterious Cavern ~

Lin Ling sat in the middle of the cave and stared at the doorway. The calamity above had stopped some time ago, but that didn’t really help. She had teleported into this place blindly, but it appeared that she really was trapped here. The ‘exit’ to the room had, unnoticed by her, been closed off in the collapse. A fault in the rock had sheered slightly and the cavern exit was now truncated into a minor fissure that tapered to a gap so small you would struggle to shove parchment through it. She had crawled around its edges cautiously for hours, hoping to find a way out, to no avail.

If there was a bright side, at least the voices in her head had receded to a muted babble. Her mantra had finally got them under control. So she was no longer afflicted by random urges to hit her head off of things, like the fate-thrashed walls, as they argued about how dead she was right now.

So she was left mostly alone with her own thoughts and with this possible doorway. While it might be a vain hope, that was all she could think of it as. A way out. If she could just work out how.

As a thing, a carving, it was certainly exquisite. Strange runic symbols traced fluidly around its rectangular frame. Their form was something she was still debating in her mind. The fluidity of the lines and complexity of the patterns meant that every time she stared at a bit of it, another bit intruded and it seemed to be something else. Sometimes animals, sometimes plants, leaves and vines, occasionally flowers, sometimes just weird patterns, waves, water, clouds? The leaf motif was strong in the overall design, at any rate. The central bit was blank. Only when she looked at it really closely was it clear that the grain of the rock was just a little different.

There were also remnants of what she guessed was some sort of illusion or obscuration formation around the cave. It was very broken, presumably another casualty of the events that brought her here. She had found one of its formation points while searching for the exit. It was so profound that she had thought it just random rock scratchings until she really started looking and found more bits. At a guess, it was probably created by the thing that had lived in the cave? The scratches seemed like they could be claw marks. Whatever that had been. She had only caught a glimpse of it before it was turned into... Well, cave décor was the nicest way to look at it.

As a result, the air now stank. At this depth, the qi and innate heat of the cavern from the rock around it was enough to ensure a fairly grim environment.

-This enclosed place did not need the addition of a small lake of blood soup to its ambience.

-It certainly doesn't need fire qi attuned blood and viscera soup.

Wincing as her thoughts twisted and became just a little more manifest than she was comfortable with, she resisted scratching at her flushed skin. It would do nothing for the itching from exposure. The saving grace was that the excess qi from the remains was being rapidly absorbed by the rocks as far as she could tell. It was the main reason why the Beast Hunter Cadre paid so much to use Moon Runes for the shelters this far into the range. Their decay rate was still measured in decades rather than millennia, but that still meant they only required periodic maintenance. There was no point in carving formations more than a few metres underground. Millennia of experience from the Hunter Bureau, through the Herb Hunters and Beast Hunters had proven that. They vanished within hours, even if Immortal Realm or greater experts came and inscribed them.

If the thing was a formation of some description, she had no way to feed enough qi into it to make any difference. She stared around the cave again. It was actually not a bad place to cultivate from a certain perspective either. The qi bleeding out of the monster remains seemed to be in two components; the aforementioned fire qi and a second, significant metal/water orientated energy. She was really only able to stay here thanks to her Physical Cultivation. That was what was doing most of the heavy lifting when it came to supporting her body while her Spiritual Law gnawed away slowly at the poisoning.

Using the first chapter of her family’s cultivation art, the 'Seven Spirits Thunder Light Manual' helped to alleviate the qi poisoning a bit and allowed her to get some benefits from the metal and water qi. However, her realm was terrible, and her spirit root... embarrassing; Her Spiritual Foundation was only in the middle of Qi Condensation and her version of the Lin family cultivation scripture was the 'basic one'. In a way, nobody would ever believe you could survive at her spiritual realm this deep.

She wasn’t sure she believed it either, honestly. The sheer good fortune of landing where she did, when she did… if she had landed literally anywhere else in this cave, she would be decorating the floor like the other occupant.

-It’s only survival so far. A nasty little voice pipped up.

“Shut up!” she muttered absently.

Still, if she cultivated here for a few days, she might actually make progress to late-tier Qi Condensation and advance her physical cultivation towards the peak of Physical Foundation.

-That would bring me almost to the same realm as Juni, though still not as good as Arai and Sana…

That thought made her trail off in anguished frustration again. Had they survived everything that happened after?

-They might have survived the fall?

-You know you doubt it. That was almost a mile straight down…

-Onto rocks.

-They would have bled out at the bottom or the forest has gotten them.

-Or Di Ji and Din Ouyeng went after them.

“Fates take you! Go Away!” she hissed.

The voices retreated, but it was only retreat.

‘Scion, Path, Lotus, Body, Gift’

She tried to use her mantra to forestall them a bit. They were a symptom of qi poisoning she kept telling herself. Oversaturation was certainly the only reason her spiritual law was responding at all.

“…”

Slapping her hands to her cheeks, she stared at the ceiling again, letting the mantra do its thing and continue to try and get her own bodily condition back under some semblance of control. Only when she was sure that the voices were not going to return, did she focus more directly on her spiritual law, starting to resynchronise the flow of qi that came from it with her breathing.

…

By the time she had forced around three cycles of her spiritual law – and a few hundred of her mantra – she noticed that it was taking far longer than she would have liked for the bulk of the qi from the beast’s remains to be absorbed. Three cycles was six hours or thereabouts and the qi was still largely present.

If anything, to her it now seemed like the initial absorption had been the fluke and that did not bode well for her future prospects in this cavern. The stable rate of its ambient diffusion was far lower than she was comfortable with.

Idly, she popped another purification pill into her mouth. They didn’t make a lot of inroads against the symptoms, but at least they were keeping the damage from new qi poisoning to a tolerable equilibrium. She could ignore the itchy stinging and slight ache of cold in her bones.

Checking her storage talisman she again confirmed for herself that there were only 14 purification pills left. The problem would come when she ran out, about a day from now, given her current rate of use. It might be possible to push it to two, she supposed, but that assumption had been predicated on the diffusion of the ambient qi continuing at the rate it had… or gambling that the symptoms of poisoning would not worsen at a quicker rate.

Thankfully, her vision was at least improving as the hours flowed by. She had thought all light had vanished, but now it seemed that there was a faint luminosity still remaining in the blood, focused around where it was pooled and scattered. It was just much fainter than it had been. As a result, she didn’t have to put much effort into enhancing her vision with her mantra to see clearly enough for it to be a dark evening outside.

…

She cultivated for another ‘qi cycle’ while she weighed up the possibilities of what she could achieve with what she had left.

Unfortunately, the conclusions were not positive. In the end, there was nothing really that she possessed that could extricate her from this mess. Her talismans were almost exhausted, her charms were all used in the flight to lure out threats or stall them long enough to make their pursuers trip or slip or get tangled up in them.

She had food for days, which was something, and fasting pills for weeks. She also had a lot of medicine pills, mainly because she had been holding a portion of Sana’s as well, but that was it. No teleport talismans, no shifting talismans. Her remaining anchor talisman was near done as well – starting to fragment at the edges – its charm looking like it was carved from brittle pastels rather than the solid imprint it had before.

To distract herself from the ominous conclusions, she turned back to the remains of the monster, beast… occupant – whatever it had been. Now she had a chance to look at its remains scattered across the cavern, it had been some kind of large lizard thing near as she could tell…

-Quadruped based on the scattered bones, those had survived the wave.

-The skull was half destroyed.

-Its brain exploded? She winced at that thought.

-Quite large, maybe 30 metres long.

-Fragments of its carapace were scattered around.

Finishing her current qi cycle, she went closer and tried to turn one over. To her shock, it was so heavy she couldn’t even budge a fragment the size of her torso. Opting for a smaller piece she tried again.

And again.

And again…

Eventually, some further exertion and a bit of ingenuity allowed her to rock and spin a more convex bit of bone on the floor, but it required so much energy that she nearly collapsed after.

-Well, it did survive until the wave of golden-white essence… qi stuff, a voice chirped up.

“Maybe I should just start talking to myself,” she muttered glumly to the world at large. “Out loud… Will you go away then?”

-No.

-Nope.

-Haha.

-Never.

-Not a chance.

-We are you.

-Why don’t you go away instead?

She put her head in her hands and groaned for a moment, trying to face and refute the worrying reality that her own fractured mind was, apparently, giving her sass…

-Sad.

She kicked a rock, only to end up hopping away as it proved to be an immobile piece of cavern floor.

To distract herself, she turned her attention back to the beast while continuing to work on her Physical Cultivation cycles. The shockwave had left no obvious trace of its passing, beyond the explosion of the creature into meat paste and fractured bone. The distortions afterwards had just moved the meat soup around and sifted it more thoroughly.

“I wonder what realm you were.”

-At least Immortal, a more helpful voice suggested.

-Di Ji and Din Ouyeng were at least that strong.

She snorted at that. Whatever this poor beast had been, it was going to be well over Immortal. Thirteen-star at least. She was deep underground, nothing weak survived here. Even if the suppression maxed out at the peak of Golden Core – even someone at the peak of the world would only be ‘that’ strong here – there was some differentiation, powerful beasts had many tricks and not everything was suppressed.

That said, dwelling on that question made her regret that she hadn’t paid much attention to what those cultivation realms were. Her detailed knowledge largely ended at Immortal and her common knowledge at Ancient Immortal. Above that there were… Dao Immortals and Dao Lords, then something to do with Sovereignty, but they were so far away and so powerful as to be just ideas akin to the questions like ‘why the sky was blue.’ Also, their power and strength was largely irrelevant here in Yin Eclipse, especially in the depths.

Other parts of her mind were also working away as she considered everything. A few of those were starting to formulate the edge of an idea as she stared once again at the meat soup.

It was still remarkably qi rich, even by her truly basic ability to tell.

The meat remains themselves seemed to be utterly normal, but there was still a faint haze above it that spoke of its hidden reactivity with the surroundings. She tipped out the contents of her spatial talisman, considering once more the various other bits of kit she had. There were several gourds, a few large squares of luss fibre fabric, a pestle and mortar, torches, kindling and various bits of camping kit and some lengths of rope. She considered the luss fabric and looked back at the ‘doorway’ across the cave. It was possible to reach it without actually wading through the meat soup. She hadn’t tried that yet.

-No reason to bait a terrible death quite so obviously.

Some minutes later and she had tied a thinner length of rope around the pestle, weighed one end down with a rock and was carefully aiming the pestle into the edge of the meat soup from a safe distance. Upon proximity contact with the haze, the rope dissolved instantly in a flare of qi and the pestle started to corrode visibly.

-Ouch. Well that idea is a bust, definitely a bad end there, she thought glumly, watching the pestle as it continued to melt on the surface of the ‘meat soup’, slowly spreading like oil on the top.

Considering what was left, she took one of the precious pieces of luss fibre fabric and twisted it into a crude rope. This time, edging as close as she dared, she flicked the end of the ad hoc rope into the edge of mess, holding her breath.

It steamed a bit but didn’t corrode visibly, however, she still waited, watching it carefully for quite some time before she was finally happy the luss fibre fabric wasn’t going to corrode significantly.

“Hah. May the fates take your ignorance, stupid voices! It clearly is well over Immortal,” she muttered, nodding happily.

-Way, way over Immortal.

As it was, ‘Luss Fabric’, despite being a rather useful tool, was largely unheard of outside of the Hunter Bureau unless you were in the business of walking around places like her current location. She had gotten the pieces she was now relying on from the logistics hall of the Hunter Bureau in Blue Water City and they had cost her a dozen pieces of seven-star herbage, though that appeared to be worth it now.

The expense mostly came from the difficulty of working with and preparing the luss fibres and the scarcity of the supply. The cloth was largely monopolised by alchemists, the few craftspeople who tended to work with the Hunter Bureau and spirit herb farmers. It never really spread or got much publicity as a result – just another weird fabric made from a nasty hard to find material in a nasty unnavigable place.

You could make clothing out of it if you wanted – Han Shu had had some underclothes and a loose set of travel gear commissioned because of its corrosion resistance properties, which had been hideously expensive, apparently. However, if that clothing couldn’t be 'enchanted' or 'shaped', or have formations anchored on it, or talismanic sigils woven through it – or even hold qi – no cultivator was going to care for it, especially not when you just reinforced common clothing with your qi for the most part.

So it remained a minor local oddity. Outside of places and circumstances like this, cultivators would just use their qi to resist the corrosion, she guessed. Or die hideously. However, if it was this good, she retrospectively considered, it would explain why the means of its production were a classified secret and not just a case of the Bureau being overly protectionist in the face of the Blue Gate School.

The next question was how to apply it to the wall. Eventually, she made a brush of sorts out of a torch and one of the pieces of luss fabric. It was crude and incapable of any form of precision, but precision hopefully wasn’t necessary for what she had in mind. Some further experimentation proved her minor telekinesis art, ‘Lin’s Tenfold Hand’, was incapable of doing anything meaningful under the suppression. She had expected that to be the case after the attempt to move the shell fragment, but it did no harm to check. She tied two of the pieces of fabric together and cast them out into the meat soup, letting them get coated in the horrible stuff. Finally, she picked her way around the outer edge of the bloody lake to the doorway, taking care to stay clear of the haze.

Judging the distance, she pulled the fabric out of the haze. It was, she noticed, starting to corrode, but it contained a much more manageable puddle of the stuff. With a much smaller aura of haze.

-Drat.

-Way, way, way above Immortal.

“You never know, maybe Heaven has eyes and it will last long enough,” she muttered to herself with a grimace.

Sighing again, she shook herself. Just her own voice in her head. For the moment, anyway. Considering the pool one final time, she swallowed three purification pills, then added a Yang Shifting medicine pill for good measure. Wrapping her arm in another square of the cloth, she pushed her hand into the haze with the ad hoc brush, scooped a bit of the meat paste from the loose bag of luss fabric and swiftly started to apply it to the wall.

Starting at the top, she painted out the design around the rectangular frame as fast as she could. Her arm already starting to go numb. She painted it down to the ground and then across the base. Then drew a line of the meat soup across the rock and into the haze, finally joining it up with the bag. For good measure she flipped the bag around a bit, making sure the contents spread to the edge of the nearest extremity of the horrible lake before finally retreating.

-If this idea worked…

She retreated back to the arborundum vein and started to treat her arm as best she could. It was badly blistered, even through the fabric, though she had expected that. Luss cloth was good, but it was not a miracle worker.

Eating another Yang Shifting pill to dull the pain, she watched the door carefully.

…

Moments stretched into minutes and then almost an hour as she fought first with annoyance then with dull disappointment.

Finally, after a whole hour had passed, she sighed and settled down to start another few cycles of physical cultivation to help with the qi overexposure and distract from the fact that her attempt to re-activate the door had not, apparently, worked. Normally this would be impossible, but there was so much qi in the air that even the suppression wasn’t able to prevent her law consuming it, even if the law itself wasn’t working at more than one percent of its actual efficiency.

…

Time blurred by in an unquantifiable way. When she opened her eyes again, she felt hungry and drained. Inspecting her arm, she found it was still red and sore, though the numbness had faded at least.

Checking the rest of her condition while she stretched, she found she had done nine cycles of spiritual cultivation. Her body wasn’t stiff, given how hot this place was, but it still felt… fuzzy?

In any case, that was almost ten hours of cultivation. The quantity of qi in her dantian had increased noticeably, moving closer to late-stage Spirit Condensation. Minor realms were not really a thing in a Great World, but in circumstances like this, they did at least provide her some subtle measure of progress.

Checking the rest of her body, she found that her physical cultivation had also improved somewhat…

-Surprising, it's phenomenally hard to shift at the peak of physical refinement…

Not a voice in her head, just her own thoughts being strange.

She rubbed her temple, still paranoid that those might come back and glanced across at the meat lake… and froze.

“Where did the haze go?”

Across from her, the meat soup lake now looked like dried up mudflats, the haze that had been shimmering over it now vanished.

Getting up, she walked over cautiously and tossed an empty gourd at the edge of it. Nothing. It bounced off the crusted surface. Looking towards the doorway, her heart rate started to quicken. While the outer bit was still as it was, now she could see dimly that there was a second set of images on the inner part of the rectangle.

Making her way around to it, she looked at the design. It seemed like it should be a Moon Rune, but it was like no rune she had ever seen. Twisting and curving in ways that didn’t quite conform to the normal rules of geometry.

-Great. Another formation and now the meat soup appears to be dried up.

She walked to the edge and with great care tried to lever up a piece of the caked substance. It gave slightly under the pressure from the luss wrapped torch. Pushing harder she pried a piece up and…

She couldn’t even scream for a few seconds. There was just pain. Skin searing, flesh flaying pain.

-Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!

Finally, she got enough air in her lungs to start actually screaming as she rolled away.

-You’re a stupid… Inca—“Aiiiieeggggggh—!”

Clawing for one of the Yang Shifting pills she smashed it straight onto her face, smearing its soft inner core across her injury as fast as she could.

-Idiot! Idiot, stupid idiot!

The pain subsided rapidly as she carefully felt the damage, starting with her eyes. Her vision was still okay, thankfully. That was good. The blotches faded slowly away, allowing her to see her surroundings again somewhat clearly.

Elsewhere, it was mostly just superficial, much more painful than physically damaging or so it appeared, she could only thank the fates.

“The poisoning is starting to mess with my judgement,” she spoke out loud, to be certain it wasn’t a voice in her head.

Wheezing a bit, she took one of the luss sheets and wrapped it around her head and shoulders.

-Should have done that first, she cursed herself. Too fate-thrashed Stupid.

Taking the final sheet, she used it to grasp the edges of the 40-centimetre lump of congealed, scab-like icck.

-It was a scab, part of her mind pointed out.

With one swift motion, she pulled it up and slapped it against the wall, ignoring the somewhat disturbing, wet *thwack* sound it made. Even draped in the resistant cloth it made her skin itch, but she focused on ignoring that. Pressing it hard against the stone, she smeared it around as best she could, counting to ten under her breath, before scrambling back… just in case.

From several metres away she inspected her work.

The rune was now covered with fresh red gunk. However, as she looked on, the haze visibly faded away, the blood caked on the wall drying really rather quickly and crumbling away, becoming something like dried clay as it did so.

-Not enough, it seemed.

In the end, it took 16 lumps and two more near misses with the lake of meat to get a proper reaction from the ‘door’. By the time she was done, she was out of medical pills and shivering badly, a burning cold now deeply rooted in her bones, even though the room was almost as hot as a bread oven. Trying not to think about how badly poisoned she was, she watched as the faintly shimmering effervescence flowed all the way across the rectangle, highlighting a design that was growing ever more complex, until at last it reached what she could only think of as some sort of critical… complexity?

Her heartbeat was thumping in her ears now.

-It actually succeeded?

-Heaven does have eyes!

The whole rectangle of slightly different stone simply crumbled into dust and blew away. In its place, what was left was a dark, rectangular passage.

-You know it does, you’ve seen the lightning.

She ignored the voice and swept up all her remaining stuff back into her storage talisman. Her clothing was in something of a state by this point. The normal stuff was almost dissolved, so all she could do was wrap herself in as much of the luss fabric as remained untainted by the meat lake.

-You’re concerned about modesty? Now?

“Shut it. It’s a state-of-mind thing,” she hissed under her breath.

Peering into the opening, she found it was indeed a rectangular corridor, sloping downwards slightly as it vanished into the depths. It was impossible for her to make out its end, but it certainly extended for several hundred metres. In the dim light, she could just make out the ever repeating designs extending from the frame along its angles. The stone itself was faintly textured and now she was in closer proximity to it her darkvision could make out that it was different from the normal bedrock of the cavern.

She had gone several metres into the tunnel, luxuriating in the relatively cooler air, before she thought to look behind her in case—

She sighed in relief, putting a hand against the wall to steady herself, and shook her head.

The entrance hadn’t closed… or done anything particularly mysterious, for that matter.

-My judgement is soooo shot…

-If I keep doing these things and only worrying about them afterwards… she wanted to refute that thought, but it was true…

As she made her way cautiously downward, she observed that the darkness almost seemed to have a character of its own. There was no hint of mist or fog, barely even qi for that matter, except what came from behind, but the gloom was thick… almost clinging. It made her feel a bit uneasy, as if she were walking in a place far removed from the world itself.

Eventually, though, her progress led her to another ‘doorway’, or what looked remarkably like one. She stopped at the entrance – or was it exit? – of the tunnel, staring at the doorframe for a good few minutes, however, no matter how she looked she could see nothing untoward with it.

-That’s not reassuring… It could just be a trap that’s so formidable you won’t see it until it goes boom.

-Or zap.

She ground her teeth in annoyance. The darkness of the tunnel had given her far too much time alone with her thoughts and paranoia. They were starting to gain a bit of personality again.

Peering out cautiously, she saw that the floor ended abruptly about a metre out from the doorway. Glancing up, she saw the shaft vanish into darkness above. There seemed to be a path around the outer edge. Stairs up to the left and down to the right with what appeared to be a platform every ten metres on each side, staggered upwards.

There was no wind she could feel, or movement of air, barely any qi either for that matter.

The oppression of the shaft, both in the density of the gloom and the way it was set out, without any kind of safety railings, gnawed at her mind a bit as she crouched in the doorway considering her options. Up or down was a surprisingly weighted question – with problematic permutations. Yet another downside of teleporting blind: was she above the valley level?

Her teleport talisman could have taken her anywhere within a dozen miles of the location she had been in.

-Unlucky that you didn’t appear above ground?

-Is it though? She shot back sourly. If I’d been above ground would I have died in the fire and fury of whatever was happening above?

The voices were predictably silent on that point – they were rarely, if ever, useful.

-Fate-thrashed freeloaders.

Up seemed obvious at first thought. But then again, going up in the inner valleys was only good to a point. If she went up there and found it opened onto one of the ridges on the thunder line, or fates forbid on the actual slopes of the Thunder Crest itself, she would, in all likelihood, be dead before she ever knew what killed her.

As for down? She had survived the cavern she teleported into due to a fluke, nothing more, nothing less. If she had appeared anywhere else, she would have died to that wave of white-gold death. If that hadn’t happened and she had still landed where she had, the ‘beast’ that became her eventual salvation would probably have chomped her down whole before she could do anything.

It was a sobering thought – to know that your survival up to this point had hinged on little more than random talisman tosses and you had no idea if ‘face’ or ‘symbol’ would see you alive or dead.

The crux of the problem was – and she kept coming back to it – that she had no idea how far ‘underground’ she was. With a teleport talisman like the one she used… she could be miles below the surface or have hopped straight into the heart of one of the mountains.

“Do teleport talismans travel vertically the same distance they go horizontally?” she muttered out loud, staring into the darkness.

Based on what she knew of this land and the layers beneath it, she doubted anyone had ever been crazy enough or lucky enough to test that and survived the trip.

-Remember distance in this place can be ‘relative’ as well as ‘absolute’…

“Fates!” she ground her teeth again. Talk about picking a moment to be ‘useful’.

It didn’t help that the voice that supplied that was absolutely right. There were plenty of places in these fate-forgotten valleys, let alone the depths, where you could walk 100 metres to the left and only take 50 to walk back to where you were originally. She had been falling downwards when she used the talisman as well, and her intent had been away. So the direction was probably diagonally downwards, or maybe diagonally upwards, factoring in what little she knew of their inner workings, which was part divination charm, part spatial shift. Nobody wanted talismans that randomly materialized you inside walls or in mid-air, after all. Except as offensive weapons, maybe. So down could lead anywhere, really. Not much of a choice.

She pondered on it for a short while, then decided to risk downwards a little bit. She could always go up if it looked too dangerous. Sticking close to the wall, she made her way around and down one set of stairs. Halfway along the wall, she paused. There was a rectangular door inscribed into the wall there. Unopened, it held a similar-looking but subtly different rune. Over the doorway this time rather than on it. On a whim, she went back up and checked her own door. It was the same. The rune was the same as the one on the door she had opened.

-Great, she sighed, fighting the gloom. So the likelihood of all the ways out being sealed were high.

“There is no way I have enough with me. It took over a dozen lumps to open the one in the cavern,” her words sank into the shelf and vanished into the darkness.

-Maybe don’t talk out loud in the mysterious shaft that leads to fates know where? A somewhat mocking voice suggested in her head.

It took self-control not to flinch. She stared warily around, just in case that hadn’t been in her head. At least she wasn’t getting any worse.

-Just my subconscious acting out…

‘Scion, Path, Lotus, Body, Gift’

She focused on her mantra a bit and the sensation of mild dissociation in her mind's eye faded correspondingly. On the other hand, one of her father’s witticisms flitted through her mind: ‘He who seeks nothing gets nothing.’

It took a while to return to the cavern. Compared to the trip down, the incline up the tunnel was just steep enough that it was strenuous in the face of the qi slowly percolating out from the cavern above. Returning to the entrance to the cavern itself, she found it much as she had left it. Part of her found that reassuring as well. It would have been typical of the stories of these places if going back through the door had landed her in a different cavern entirely. What was notable, however, was that the haze was slowly starting to return over the desiccated ‘meat lake’. In places, it was almost back to its previous levels.

-I will need to work fast…

…

An hour later she was back in the shaft, close to a thousand lumps of congealed meat dumped in her storage talisman. The ‘blood’ and ‘blood paste’ had been more complex. Neither was storable as a liquid inside her remaining ‘Reservoir Gourd’ – a special container designed for holding qi-infused liquids of a singular type – when she tried to absorb some. Bizarrely it was, however, storable in one of the simple clay pots she was using for water. What was even more confusing there was that it didn’t even corrode the clay.

-If I knew that back when I was messing about with…

Shaking her head she pushed that thought away.

The blood was still cripplingly hot and highly reactive, despite being supposedly saturated with thunder and water qi, with far less fire qi than she had expected. In any case, she had transferred much of the water into the reservoir container and now had two 100 litre pots of the blood in her storage talisman as well. It was undoubtedly the most valuable thing she had ever found in these mountains and valleys. Even if she couldn’t sell it down the line, it was a terrifying weapon that she could throw at someone or something as probably the province’s most valuable ‘blood bomb’.

Disappointingly, the bones had proven to be unstorable, as had the shell fragments. Even the teeth of the thing had been unstorable, although she wrapped several in one of the pieces of luss cloth and stashed them in her bag for now. Each one was nearly the size of her forearm, although not particularly sharp. The skull, which was about 4 metres long, had still contained at least thirty, with quite a few more scattered across the cavern once she started looking.

The search had at least demonstrated conclusively to her that the beast had been omnivorous. It certainly explained how it had survived down here at least. She had a claw as well, she had only found one, and it was dense enough that it might be discarded if she needed to move quickly or do a lot of climbing, irrespective of its potential value.

Pushing the stray thoughts about the weight of her ‘pack’ away, she considered the first doorway for a moment, before deciding to leave it for now. As she continued to descend, she noted that each side had a doorway mid-way around the level platforms. All of them seemed of a muchness, with only slight variations in the rune over the door until she had descended some fourteen platforms and found one sufficiently ‘different’.

Trying to ignore the oppression of the void behind her, she studied this ‘doorway’ carefully. It had a pattern in the middle that if you squinted at it really hard might have been a mountain or might have been a particularly stylized triangle.

“Well… nothing ventured, nothing gained,” she muttered under her breath.

-It will be hilarious if it explodes and throws you out into the darkness, a much less helpful voice muttered mutely in the depths of her mind's eye.

“Why is it only the snarky bits of my subconscious acting out?” she mumbled under her breath.

Shaking her head in annoyance, she double-checked her luss cloth hand and arm wrappings then pulled out a lump of the congealed blood and directly slapped it onto the rune in the middle of the door. Once all the blood was squeezed out of it, like a really gross wiping cloth, she stored it and swapped out another.

This time, it only took eight lumps before she got a palpable reaction, and reassuringly it was the same kind of reaction, with the faint, shimmering effervescence-infused pattern sweeping out like it had before. She stepped smartly back to the side of the door and watched as the pattern expanded to cover the whole doorway, glimmering in the darkness.

*Shuuuuussssssshhh…*

With a sighing sound, the door dissolved into ‘dust’ which flowed into the doorframe and vanished, leaving a darkness behind it that seemed almost solid—

The decision to step back rather than go through immediately was abruptly vindicated as the ‘solid’ darkness beyond the doorway twisted and collapsed outwards, forming a small avalanche of dust that swept out of the corridor, pouring over the edge into the void. The dust river ran for several minutes before abating to the point where she was confident it wouldn’t sweep her feet out from under her.

-Did it seal up the entire tunnel? Warily she peered around the doorframe, up the slightly sloping passage, but nothing untoward appeared after the dust.

It took about ten minutes, near as she could reckon, for her to traverse the tunnel itself, the rock dust drifting almost to her knees once she got further in. Weirdly, it didn’t puff or drift in the air as she half pushed, half waded through it, yet neither was it obviously dense. She pocketed some of it in a pot, anyway, just in case it might have some future use. The qi signature in it was...exotic.

The end of the tunnel turned out to be a small chamber with stairs going up to a larger double door, which, to her relief was already open. To her eyes, she could see the faint glimmers of qi running across the walls from the passage to it, suggesting that it had opened when she unsealed the lower door. Thinking about it, she guessed that that act had broken whatever ‘seal’ locked the dust in place, a bit like an airlock in a pipe. Beyond the double door she could just make out a further cavern-like space.

With trepidation, she looked into it, cautiously, in case it held another creature like her original cavern had.

Thankfully, however, it did not. Instead, she was treated to what appeared to be a room about 40 by 60 metres, with a ceiling of maybe 20 metres at the peak?

Her impression, as her eyes adjusted, was that the room was in fact geometrically rectangular, with a large inset at the far end. Beautifully carved rock columns ran around the edges, shaped to follow the natural bedding of the stone up to the ceiling which was, itself, carved and moulded to step across the contours, like an inverted pagoda. The motifs of the mountain and the triangle flowed around the angles of the room. They twisted around the columns, where triangles morphed organically into the familiar leaf motif. Everywhere she looked, in fact, the craftsmanship was exquisite.

That said, the room itself was otherwise rather disappointing, although she self-acknowledged she was very happy with ‘unthreateningly disappointing’ at this point.

As she made her way through it, taking care not to disturb anything, she noted the series of openings at various points – doors to other corridors, shrouded in darkness. Everywhere, bits of furniture carved out of the same stone as the rest of the room were scattered around, some broken, most just upended. The inset at the far end appeared to be something like a vast fireplace. Standing before it, she even found that it was still filled with chunks of black rock, almost like… coal?

After a few minutes of wary study, she felt rather stupid, because it actually was coal. Normal, mundane, everyday coal.

To either side of the fireplace were entrance ways that looked like they led elsewhere.

Shaking her head, she turned her attention back to the wider room once again and began to study the rest of its contents in more detail. To her left, where a table had been turned over, she saw a broken plate, made of thin ceramic, or maybe some type of stone—

Something clattered in the darkness and she bit back a yelp, jumping backwards in case it was something dangerous, her heart pounding.

When she collected herself; however, she found that it was just a stray cup that her foot had brushed. Picking it up, she turned the cylindrical, rather plain looking object around, finding that it was made out of the same material as the scattered plates. Behind the table were other plates, cups, some containers and various implements made of a dull material that looked like something between smooth stone and metal that didn’t seem to have corroded with age.

Considering that, she noted that while it was hot, her surroundings were also bone dry and clearly had been for a long time. How long, it was hard to say, but her intuition suggested that it might well be older than the Blue Water Sage, which meant some 30,000 years of more… at the very least. Squatting down to look at some of the implements more closely, she noted that even the knives were made of the same ‘stone’ – sharp as well, if her eyes didn’t deceive her.

She considered taking some of the cutlery but thought better of it for now. There was nothing unusual about them, but the oppressive feeling of the darkness was still making her instincts murmur ominously, for all that her surroundings appeared to be nothing more than long abandoned and a living space of some manner.

Cautious exploration of the first and then several more side passages revealed just sealed doors interspersed with occasional open plan areas. Open rooms and the smaller halls had more tables, chairs, stone shelves, crates and vessels – all of them empty. Finally, though she found one of the stone doors that was half-open, frozen somehow in the process of rising out of the floor. Steeling herself to look inside, it turned out to contain several hundred empty jars, a few stacks of stone crates and two piles of a dull greyish-black mineral ore. Staves of some knotted ancient wood, untouched by age, were stacked in a stone barrel.

Curious, she tried to move a piece of the ore, which turned out to be even denser than the creature’s claw, and to add insult to injury, also refused to go into her talisman either, in spite of being devoid of any kind of qi. The spirit wood was similarly immovable and unstorable.

Moving on, she found a few more open rooms; however, they were all equally boring. Some had stone beds, chairs and tables, many in mild disarray as if someone had taken the place and given it a big shunt up and sideways. Nothing else remotely organic other than that piece of wood and a few crates of the coal turned up anywhere.

However, in one room, at the end of a side corridor, she did find a few stacks of blank grey slabs, about 1 centimetre thick and maybe 30 by 20 centimetres in size, carelessly amassed against a wall by a table. Unfortunately, no matter how she looked at them they were just blank grey stone slabs a little heavier than they should have been. They also refused to enter her storage talisman.

That was starting to become a theme, as she explored further and found two more stacks of them on shelves in a further open room on that corridor. In the end all she could suppose was that they had been rendered defective somehow.

Some of those rooms also contained what looked like objects related to working the stone slabs; stylus, various fine working tools were stored in stone jars or scattered around where they had rolled off tables and under beds. In one she found something that looked like a chisel made out of a dull greenish copper-like metal that she couldn’t even budge in the slightest from where it fell, as if it were welded where it fell.

-Was there some kind of anti-theft formation on this entire place? She looked as best she could for tell-tale signs, but really it was almost disturbingly mundane, beyond the exquisite stone craft that went into the carvings that swirled everywhere.

Still, with that thought, she stopped poking around too much. The idea of her storage talisman randomly imploding, or exploding, was not a nice, or happy thought.

Eventually, though, she found what appeared to be a larger room with a larger bed and several stone chests.

Some previous rooms had had stone blocks that looked like chests, but she had been unable to see any way to interact with them and she was loath to start dripping blood randomly on things. The one by the bed in this room, however, had a design like the doors on it. After some consideration, she cautiously put some of the icck on it. At first, nothing obvious happened, but it was soon clear that something was draining away the qi in the stuff, albeit rather sluggishly, so she applied more as required.

In the end, it took 49 lumps to open. Which was, on one level, just a little bit concerning? However, when it finally did open, after almost an hour of sitting there feeding blood to it she really wanted to just flip the thing over and be done with this place entirely. It held a bunch of what were basically rugs made of wool, preserved for aeons somehow in the chest, along with an admittedly excellent quality sheet made out of something similar to Jingnen spirit cloth. There were some open containers, beautifully carved from wood, containing exactly nothing.

Among the rugs, which she carefully placed on the bed, she found some other curios. There was a small doll made of some kind of stone, wearing a style of clothing that was utterly alien to her, its face painted in a humorous expression. A wooden sword which turned out to be just that – a small toy practice sword, possibly designed and weighted for a 7 or 8-year-old child. There were also several other doll-like things and finally, wrapped up in a square of silken cloth as if it were wearing a cloak, an ‘animal’ made out of wool and the possible Jingnen spirit cloth that looked just like a little lizard with a cute expression. At the very bottom of the chest, also wrapped in a silk cloth, was a wool and Jingnen doll of a man wearing armour, in a heavy if plain style. He had a kindly expression and a humorously big moustache. Along with it was a small book bound in dark leather.

The book was mostly blank on inspection, a few pages had strange symbols on them in a rather shaky manner, and one had a truly odd drawing in an abstract way that seemed to depict four people; a man, woman and two children standing by a lake with a tree in the background. Some of the other filled in pages were childish drawings of trees, mountains, people in the landscape, something she took to be someone practising their letters, and a series of pressed flowers which she took care not to damage.

Sat on the edge of the bed, she put the book back in the chest carefully. It was clear what it was. A curio that a parent might keep of their child’s first letters or such. The toys spoke to that as well. A young boy’s first sword, held onto by a father as a keepsake, a girl's first letters or doll kept by the mother or father?

Taking in the room once again, it was certainly the largest such room by a long margin. Certainly big enough for two people, so perhaps both parents. The stone-carved wardrobe also turned out to be unopenable. She tried with blood to no avail. There was a bedside table, with a mirror frame set above it, but no mirror. The upturned chair nearby again spoke of the distortion that had wracked this place. Presumably the mirror had broken in the process of whatever had caused such disturbance to the whole complex.

It took her some time and a bit of lateral thinking to finally identify the mirror shards themselves. She initially failed to see them in her darkvision due to the way it didn’t reflect ‘light’ but instead read shape and form by ‘Intent’ thanks to the stimulation of qi within her ocular meridians. Colour was almost a post-visual process, supplied by her own intuition. Useful in many circumstances, not so much now.

There was no evidence of illumination in the room that she could see, but the leaf motif ran across the walls and ceiling. Given the prevalence of the motif, she had started to wonder if that wasn’t actually some kind of defunct enchantment. Some buildings in Blue Water City had similar means of illumination.

There were also engravings on the walls, not that that was unusual at this point. The ones here depicted scenes both familiar and alien. Most depicted life in some vast city. A place where buildings looked oddly blocky and the skyline was dominated by towers with conical roofs. One scene had a pagoda of sorts in it, with a star or sun in the sky and a moon to one side. Another depicted a garden with various stylized trees and plants, while figures played by the water or danced by the same pagoda, near as she could tell. The detail on all of them excellent, but there was nothing to give any frame of reference to age, location or anything else for her.

Abruptly, she felt bad for ever opening the chest. This place was clearly someone’s bedroom, and the mementoes within precious recollections of a life long ago.

-Is it even possible to close it again? She stared at it pensively.

It would be sad if she, having opened it, had now condemned those things inside to slowly fade away. The mementoes would crumble, the beautiful woven rugs with their scenes of flowers and strange animals would dissolve away. Everything would return to dust in the oppressive quiet of this place.

Her early flash of annoyance at the contents was thoroughly buried at this point. She hadn’t come to this place hoping for treasure or glory.

All she wanted to do was leave here.

To not die, alone in the dark with only the voices in her head for company until the end.

She slapped her cheeks and took a deep breath. The oppressive darkness was getting to her, she knew intuitively. Staring at the various items again, other instincts in the back of her head were also starting to draw her attention. Certainly, she agreed with the one that told her that taking something, anything in fact, away from here was a bad idea. Even though there were no remains of anything living she had found, nor any evidence that death had occurred, a part of her definitely felt that it would be almost like desecrating a grave, or an ancestral memorial…

Looking around, she evaluated the feelings that permeated the place for the umpteenth time. The ‘qi’ and ‘aura’ – while oppressive, all-encompassing and stifling – did not have the same twisted and inauspicious edge to it that she was familiar with from the various death-zones across Yin Eclipse. Nonetheless, the longer she sat here, the harder it became to refute the conclusion that taking any of the things from that chest would be a very bad idea.

In the end, she put it all back in the chest as it had been when she found it, closed the lid and wiped off the remains of the blood as much as she safely could from the symbol. She offered a small, heartfelt prayer to Tian, and then Buddha for good measure, that the life of the people who treasured the items had been good and fulfilling, before leaving the room quietly, pausing only to bow once again at the doorway.

Traversing back down the corridors to the central room, she looked through the remaining rooms on either side. They held much, much less – more sealed chests mostly, the lack of runes on them confirming to her that she had no way to open any, and now much less of a desire to do so now in any case.

The only place left un-explored after that was the two passages to either side of the fireplace. After some consideration, in the end, she picked the right one first – because reasons, basically – however, in the end, it turned out not to matter, as both led to the same place.

Compared to the hall she had just left, the one beyond the two corridors was octagonal in shape, about 40 metres across and built around a broad circular platform. Discounting the passage she had just entered, two others branched off from the hall on the far side.

However, she had to stare at the platform and the pillars around it for a good moment before working out why something about it had struck her as somewhat odd.

It was inlaid with arborundum – worked arborundum – and vast quantities of it as well.

The precious material was flawlessly carved into trefoil leaves and flowers that seemed to connect together, flowing from the columns onto the platform and finally joining up as a stylized corona around a bunch of the circles of runes in the now-familiar style she had seen on the doors. They were all also set in arborundum, as far as she could tell, although the form of the material was slightly different.

The whole construction, decoration and platform projected an aura of stability and a permanence very much at odds with its delicate swirls and shifting lines.

The roof was high. The columns around the platform spiralled up and connected to the ceiling above the centre of the platform, leaving a space about five metres across. To her eyes, it seemed to just be a blank stone ceiling, which was odd, given everything else was carved and adorned.

Just the fact that all of it was constructed from that rare, treasured material was already remarkable, however the scale, detail and presence of the whole central edifice from floor to ceiling was such that she could only record the whole thing with her talisman, given how lacking her ability to comprehend it was. If nothing else, she supposed, as she watched the talisman work, it would be a not horrible memory to keep of this place. How often could you say that you stood in a place like this, that wasn’t trying to kill you or keep you?

-You don’t know that it won’t do either of those things.

She exhaled and rubbed her temples, ignoring it, and choosing instead to look around at the rest of the room.

In truth, compared to the centrepiece, it was much less remarkable… almost functional, truth be told. The walls were carved, as usual, depicting scenes of different places: mountains, a raging ocean, a forest, several different cities, even a desert. Walking around, she did note that each one seemed to have a specific rune associated with each particular location, usually incorporated centrally into the panel. There was nothing else in the room that stood out beyond those carved panels though, as she completed a circuit.

Investigation of the other passages rapidly showed her that the left one leading out of the room was a non-starter. It led to a small room that was, in fact, another sealed door, like the ones from the shaft, but without any obvious ‘rune’ to use to open it.

The right-hand passage; however, proved more promising. It sloped upwards for a bit, then became a series of steps which went up a short spiral shaft some 40 metres before opening into a circular room of similar dimensions to the previous one.

The bulk of the room was taken up by several radiating rings of shelves carved out of stone, set into the walls and then in two concentric rings around the outer portion of the hall with periodic gaps to walk between them. The walls above head height were decorated with a series of beautiful carvings depicting a ring of mountains with swirling clouds and lush forests. The scenes were picked out beautifully in marble, jade, jasper and various other absolutely normal minerals.

The dome of the room was a starry sky, crafted of carefully graduated bluestones all the way to black basalts. The sun and moon were both visible, while the stars appeared to be set in glittering arborundum. Between the stars, picked out in some kind of silvery material that held genuine iridescence to her qi-enhanced darkvision, were strange shapes – constellations, she realised after some pondering. Considering them, she looked in vain for any she could recognise but had to draw a blank in the end.

The shelves of the room were stacked with more of the grey tablets. Experimentally, she tried to take one from a shelf, but it wouldn’t budge, no matter how much she strained.

- There is absolutely some anti-theft mechanism on this place for stuff not already in containers, she thought to herself.

Considering the place as she stood there, it was clear that the hall was some kind of repository. She considered trying some of the slates to see if the beast’s qi-rich blood did anything to them, but decided against it in the end. That had already been attempted in an early room to no apparent effect. The blood hadn’t even corroded it in the slightest, although it blistered her hands just from the proximity.

All evidence she had seen so far seemed to point towards the complex being a place largely devoted either to the crafting of or work with the slate tablets in some way, though.

Clearly they were special, but she had no way to determine for what. Frustrating, but it was what it was. Like being able to see riches inches away, but never able to touch them. She had no intention of seeking riches here in the first place so nothing of value was being ‘lost’ a part of her told herself. Certainly not after looking at the contents of that chest.

In the centre of the room was a lectern, carved from the floor and several chairs, badly scattered and several showing breakage. The entire floor at the centre of the hall contained what appeared to be a…

She walked around the circumference considering it.

Yep, it was clearly a map… or a drawing of a landscape, at any rate. Not one she had any knowledge of either. In the face of her darkvision it was quite grey and white which told her that it would be quite colourful under actual light, were she capable of making any.

Unfortunately, her torches had been turned into paintbrushes and she had very little talent with fire arts. Conjured light such as she was able to generate was pathetic down here, she had tested that in the shaft on the way down, the darkness consuming it to the point where using it would possibly be dangerous as it obscured everything outside of about a metre distance while providing her with no genuine illumination.

Instead, she wandered over to the lectern, as that was presumably what it was, and considered it curiously. There was nothing was on it, nor was there were any obvious means to do anything with it.

Sighing, she leant her elbows on it and stared out across the room, letting her eyes rove across the carved scenes as she pondered what to do next. However, as her gaze traced the scenes, following them back across the wall above the entrance, something caught her eye.

Frowning, she squinted at the landscape panel… then froze, staring at it.

Unfortunately, the distance was such that in the gloom, it was tricky to confirm that she had just seen what she thought she had. Mouth suddenly a bit dry, she made her way over to the panel, standing before the shelves below it, squinting up at it.

-Too low.

Casting around, she eventually opted to pull herself up on the nearest shelf to get back to that eye line and looked again at that part of the landscape. Amid the trees and valleys were carvings of people – children playing.

The scene itself was idyllic. There was a tree near the lake, and various adult figures sat around enjoying what appeared to be food and wine. The details picked on them were curious. One, the man with the moustache, wore a crown. Another, a woman in green with golden hair, had a long, two handed sword leaning beside her, next to a tree. A third woman with hair of white marble and a dress with wings of white and blue was plucking a harp of gold, while an older man with a big beard was waving a pot of wine. Nearby, a tall woman with hair set in red jade was comparing two golden apples with another woman, nearly identical except for the way her hair was plaited.

The craftsmanship of the figures was wondrous, but that wasn’t what had caught her initial skim past, what was making her throat dry. She scanned the rest of the scene, finding the children again…

The children were chasing a bunch of animals about. The girl leading the charge held a wooden sword, her long flowing locks picked out in jasper and gold. Chasing after came a younger girl with hair picked out in copper and red jade, a lizard the size of a dog, with plates on its back, perched on her shoulder, pointing imperiously after the pursuit. The third, older girl had dark hair, deep jasper, and was floating in the air. A gaggle of other boys and girls followed along behind… all of them were chasing…a squirrel with two tails, carrying what appeared for all the world to be a small jar it had just liberated from the party—

She fled from the room and nearly jumped down the staircase, her breath was ragged and her heart palpitating so hard that her whole body was shaking.

It was not until she had almost careered out of the complex entirely, narrowly avoiding falling over a chair in her mindless shock, that she got control over herself again. All she could do was find a corner to sit in where she could observe every exit and entrance from the main hall.

It took several long moments to regain control of her emotional state, staring dully at her surroundings.

While the place was not particularly dark, or spooky even, she reckoned that the darkness and claustrophobia combined with the stress and probably some lingering effects of the qi poisoning from before was combining to make her far more jittery than normal. Add in the nearly oppressive mundanity of this place and seeing that fate-thrashed squirrel had been just enough to tip her over the edge.

She shivered. It couldn’t be the same squirrel. There had to be a bunch of them. Maybe stealing pills was a feature of that species? That was—

-You know what the odds of that being true are? a nasty little voice whispered in her mind.

Shaking her head, she blocked it out.

She didn’t know what to think, frankly: same squirrel? Different squirrel? it was all the same. This place was about done with, anyway. There was nothing she felt comfortable taking with her, and nothing else to see or discover within it.

It still took her a long time before she felt comfortable enough with her control over her emotions to make her way back to the central shaft. Jumping at unforeseen shocks next to a deep void into fates knew where certainly wasn’t a good idea.

~ ???, ??? ~

Had she been an existence at something like the Dao Ascendant realm, she might have managed to catch a glimpse of the young girl that had observed her carefully ever since she opened the chest in the room and picked up the curios. At first she had a steely look on her face, as only a young child confronted with the unknown might have, and clutched a motherly doll, a fatherly knight and a little lizard close to her chest. In her other hand, she held tightly onto a wooden sword. She had observed the older girl’s arrival and trip around this scriptorium level first with alarm, then worry, then finally bemusement as both her own memories settled and she observed the girl.

By this point, any Dao Eternal would have long since fled the complex due to the gradual change in her aura. The oppressive dark was not a dangerous thing, but it grew as she became more attuned to the moment and watched with increasing amusement as the girl smeared blood on random things and occasionally kicked stuff, treated every little thing like it might explode and lead to her imminent demise or turn into some eldritch horror and as time went on looked lost, frustrated, annoyed and confused in equal measure.

The girl’s tension was building so much with the stress of her circumstances that it was unsurprising that she had a minor psychological break. That it had been over the squirrel was a curious coincidence.

-Could the squirrel have actually lived on?

If anything was able to, they guessed it was probably that semi-talismanic nuisance.

The girl had also been dressed like an absolute vagabond who had been scalded. She had thought her a looter or thief at first. The fear practically fell off her initially, though she was surprisingly intuitive. After observing her trip around the complex, it was also clear she was far too weak to be a looter – barely in the first circle and practising some very basic spiritual art as well. Although… they noted, she had words in her heart.

She hadn’t taken the mementoes from the chest either.

They were a fixing point for the connection. A thing from when both of them stayed here when they were very young, from when her parents had first brought them here to stay and taken her into the great vale beneath the tower of Chronominthian.

Her father, a man of the people who had held the dream of being a ‘Formations Arcanist’ in his youth – before destiny overtook his path – had spent a happy summer here with his children working with the community of Array Arcanists here that were devising the second great suppression sequence. What they had made of such a great figure humbly working away alongside them, utterly devoid of the ego or trappings of his position, they had never said, but he was always treated with a camaraderie that was lacking elsewhere in a life such as his and for that alone she felt that this place was special.

Her mother had been tolerant of the time and respected his space, happy her children were getting time to just be children. Although she had spent a lot of time telling various people to sort things out themselves and stop bothering them on their ‘holiday’ she recalled.

The scriptorium levels in the heart of the mountain, of which she recalled this shaft held levels 5 to 38, had been where they worked on the first prototypes using duraminium ores and ‘Verdant Throne’ Loci as substitutes for the final materials. The suppression here had made it ideal to test such creations and meant that any repercussions could be easily dealt with without significant risk of injury or death. The formation library the girl had wandered about was part of the actual suppression system that stretched throughout the whole complex. Each library a facsimile of the grand whole. That construct had been a marvel of the age, such as it was, by the time it was completed.

That said… her gaze flickered in the direction of deeper places.

There were other things down here too… less auspicious ghosts of bygone eras. Dark secrets and shadows lurking in the deep places. Places where elder men had buried their dead and where terrors from beyond had made their abodes in the broken shells of the forsaken and the betrayed…

It had been a rich, if dangerous, hunting ground for students of the grand academy when she was older, seeking real responsibility and purpose amid the frustration and petty politicking of her daily life at her parents’ side – where their presence was becoming a target for that same petty politics and pursuit of power. So they had returned here, she, first to research, then to teach… and they had both had been able to revisit their old friends from childhood, walk through the valleys and vales and find respite from the pressures of their positions…

This place was apart from the great academy in that regard. It predated it and had always had its independence, not that that had saved it in the end. Thinking back on how it would be so catastrophically and opportunistically ruined by the escalation of that politicking between great powers angered her to this day.

The things lost then could never be recovered. Not that she hadn't tried – at great length – in her rage, once she resurfaced from that place.

Still, some vestige of them both had remained here, in these halls, and perhaps other elements of it, wherever it had landed, like a great sunken ship on a cosmic sea bed.

It was an apt analogy on many levels. They were not a ‘ghost’ as such, but a connection to its origins and its eventual fate, whatever it would be that echoed through, if not eternity, something close to it.

She had never sought this place out after it fell for just that reason. Although it was a marvel of the age, containing treasures and knowledge at its height that would be hard to match anywhere else within the myriad cosmos, to her, it was nothing more than a tomb, or perhaps a memorial to a lost moment that could never be recovered. No matter how many times she chose to walk the path to the apex.

It also crossed too many dangerous waters.

Far too many old things still had associations with the dark below this land.

The sin that stained the roots of the mountains of the Perilous Realm and the Dark Veils was close to indelible, and that didn’t even touch the great labyrinth of Chronominthian, or these old halls built to cage it. Never mind that she had gutted its old evil and torn out its roots of eldritch ruin long since. Serving them up raw for the whole world to see.

No… to sever her connection to it would cost her more than she would gain in the end.

She frowned and returned to her parents’ bedroom, such as it was. The blood on the chest was nearly gone, its vital energy absorbed by the rune lock. She ran her finger through it, tasted the blood. It was familiar. She looked at the lizard doll in her hand and then looked back towards the entrance and sighed softly, sadly.

They had had few friends here when she first visited.

She would make more eventually, friendships and associations that lasted beyond a lifetime. However, the Ankalderon had been one of the very first, one for both of them, although it had always… preferred…

The girl shook her head, and sighed softly… sadly.

That was not something to consider here. She owed the visiting girl to this relict place no such enmity or connection to such a memory. Instead, she turned her mind back to the little Ankalderon – Alexios ‘the Great and Powerful’ they had called him. Reared as a hatchling by the Arcanists, he had been a playful, loyal and gentle soul. Her mother had made the doll for their 7th birthdays – to celebrate making a friend at the appropriate age, she had joked. Now; however, it was just another chain to bind suffering to joy.

She spent a few more moments self-examining why she was actually perceiving this moment… through that particular set of connections.

Something about the girl, both her luck and her simple respect for the vestiges of a childhood long lost, when the world had been a far more innocent place had touched her and that particular relationship across the aeonspan, she guessed.

Such moments could not be hunted down, she reflected with a sad sigh – the true inner workings of Karma were very close to the absolute apex, after all.

Ruin was etched into the Karma of this place though, that much was certain. Her eyes could see it clearly, even now. This place had fallen into darkness and been lost.

The cost that those who had sought to extract for its opportunistic demise, all to reclaim the sins of their own evil, had paid had not been worth the sacrifice they invested in the end. The evil they wrought becoming simply another chain of suffering that dragged down so many others, snaring uncounted lives and lifetimes since in the hubris of their hunger.

Such a hunger it had been as well… such greed… avarice even, of those old robbers and ghosts and their rotten and blighted younger generations. It had only been eclipsed in the end, by the rage and retribution from those, herself included, for whom these hallowed halls had been a truly important place.

Even now the repercussions of that day were resounding far too loudly, even in the horror and the torment that came after. Remarkable, really. And utterly horrifying. The kind of tragedy of which new eldritch gods were born. -Had been born.

Staring at the box, she considered its contents one last time.

The vestigial connection had only been sustained for a moment and while it blurred real and unreal, fate and fantasy to a fairly remarkable degree it was reaching its natural conclusion and in doing so a little bit of its karma – and the karma of this place – would be resolved. For that alone, the girl would likely experience ‘Interesting Times’.

If she survived, might they meet again one day?

Placing a small hand on the chest, her ‘Intent’ flooded into it, reaching across the aeonspan. the whole chest glimmered faintly and the rune lock reset, sealing the items within in temporal and karmic stasis once more… whereupon her connection to the moment finally vanished away for good, never to return, and she opened her eyes.

...

...

The room around her was simple, spartan even, if you didn’t know that every part of it had been lovingly carved or shaped. Treasures beyond a lifetime going into its décor, the simple carved scenes on the walls depicting lives lived and occasionally lost.

A simple lantern floated overhead, elegant lines of black, white and gold in which burned a multi-coloured lotus-like flame that reflected into the pool beneath her.

The pool itself glimmered, reflecting a starry sky, not found above, beyond the lotus mirage that held no limits.

With a sigh, she sat up in the water and exerted some control over her surroundings once again, allowing her to stand on it.

Stretching a bit, she walked off the pool and it flowed after her, cladding her in a simple yet stylish dark robe that contained hints of that same starry sky. Glancing at her reflection in a mirror, she let her auburn-gold hair plait itself up behind her head, affixing itself with a hairpin in the form of a series of black swords. She stopped to touch a black sword that sat by the exit of the room but left it there. It would go where it willed, anyway.

Outside the room, she found her disciple Alwen Al’vere, seated at a table piled high with tomes, hurriedly transcribing documents relating to something or other in the Royal Academy, she guessed. The girl's own fate had been fairly bothersome. A meeting of happenstance in another world. She had died a hero there, taking a great foe of her era down with her…

-Heroes rarely lived, she reflected with a soft sigh, watching the young woman work.

It was only the changing tides of luck throughout the ages and happenstance, related to the dark shadow of the Vale of Dreams, the Unseen World, echoing through the mirrors of worlds that Chronominthian had eclipsed that led to their meeting…

It had been a moment that changed an era, that had enabled her to open a ‘Book of Translations’ to have them leave that place – fortune amid misfortune, or perhaps true calamity giving way to misfortune…

She glanced at the mirror and changed her mind with a wry shake of her head and a half-smile. Her thoughts today were not at the level where she wanted to present herself like that. The style of her hair tumbled back down under her considering gaze, transforming into a loose red-gold plait. If she couldn’t even put things about her own disciple in a coherent frame in her own mind, today was not a day to style herself that formally.

Shaking her head, she looked out at the city below, over the colourful domes and rising spires adorned with various flags and pennants – the white harp of Lir, the black sword on blue and gold of old Amaltharia, the green and gold cross of Renhallan, her own red lotus on black and white…

-We do like to linger in the past, she sighed inwardly, casting her gaze towards the table that was again piled high with notices of various things others thought she should be ‘aware of’.

Flicking through them, she rolled her eyes a little. The usual bunch of stuff. Most of it not things she needed to be more than aware of, banners, a few boundary raids… One or two, however…

-What kind of idiot steals Earthly Providence Lotuses?

“Alwen,” she got the attention of the dark-haired girl. “I will be going out for a bit. Probably to the Palace, and also to look into some means of sorting out the matter with the raiding out of the Martial Reaches... it seems the Ming heavenly clan is getting ideas about our western territories again.”

“Oh, Teacher!” the girl jumped up, “I—”

“It's fine – focus on your studies,” she said, inwardly amused at the girls fluster. “If you don’t know that stuff, you won’t be able to teach those kids how to make sense of it.”

Alwen nodded brightly, before speaking again, with more composure. “Was your…meditation successful, teacher?”

Smiling faintly, she appraised the girl. Alwen was still getting used to this new world she found herself in. Its power and glory held vestiges of what she had known before, but that was just a fraction, a shard of the whole. Here, in the High Heavensward, the Heavens were Unified. Even the power of Great Gods was not the apex in these lands. Even so, she was adjusting well.

She paused to look out over the city... watching her people as they hustled below, selling street wares, moving about their daily lives – enjoying a moment of well deserved, hard won respite.

“Something about it made me remember old friends… and a sorrow that will never pass...” sighing nostalgically, she considering the carvings that adorned this room, several of which depicted that time. “And I suppose a few moments of happiness long gone. So I guess it was acceptable. After all, it is all part of walking the path.

“If something relating to it actually resurfaces and those old thieves want to try burning themselves on it once again it will be an amusing show,” trailing off she shook her head and laughed, in a darkly amused manner.

“No matter how much they try to plunder, it’s just ill-gotten gains after all…”

Alwen coughed, awkwardly. “Teacher, when you talk like that, you really don’t look your age… and that laugh… people will misunderstand.”

She laughed at that, less nastily. “Age is what it is, Alwen. None of us are saints.”

The girl stared into the distance for a moment, clearly recalling the place she had come from and her own role in its grand fate. “No… I suppose we are not, teacher.”

Gesturing out at the city, at its great towers, sweeping parks, complexes and bustling streets. At the Imperial Palace and the grand harbour, past it to the great plains and towering mountains that rose like purple-grey and white-topped monoliths on the horizon she continued: “And while in this land, there are many who act their age, the vicissitudes of life seldom care about one's looks.”

Alwen winced. “Statements like that, teacher, do not help!”

She paused to consider the city a moment longer, choosing to ignore her student’s gentle ridicule.

“Still, I may however pay a visit to Maria. It does me no harm to consider the connections.”

Turning to Alwen, she smiled brightly. “You can consider this your lesson for today and maybe trot it out for the advanced class at some point just to really make their brains steam.”

Wilfully ignoring the girl's pained look, she went on. “Things relating to Karma and Fate should not be forced. You have experienced that first hand and paid the price required, more than in some ways, but it’s something that’s always eluded those old robbers and ghosts who scammed their way heavenward and who like to think themselves particularly smart for their achievements.

“They too easily forget the wisdom of their betters who survived far longer on the path than they have and try to take and command rather than accept what comes and use it appropriately. There is an old saying – ‘Accept what is given, receive what is due, but be careful what you bind, lest it instead bind you.’ That is a maxim far too many generations fall into darkness and are thoroughly abandoned through forgetting.”