…The fate of those races that dwelt beneath the earth at the fall of that era is rarely written of in this newly proclaimed time of enlightenment. Early texts make much of their contribution, and we know that they had cordial relationships with many who would go on to stand at the top of our current age… yet when we interrogate the records that came after that time, when the dust had settled, and the Chronicles were being compiled, those races might as well, with a single stroke, have been crossed from history. Some given to myth, others to darkness and those who were their allies never spoke of them again…

Excerpt – ‘Upon the Shores of the Undren Mare’

~By Charles Edward Carter, Historian.

~ Kun Juni – Mysterious Depths ~

As Juni walked through the caverns, it was hard to feel like everything wasn’t staring right at the base of her neck. She had lost all track of time, caged in this gloom. Had it been days? Not weeks, probably, unless she was out cold for far longer than she realised. It had taken her quite some time to pull herself back together. What didn’t help there, in a rather twisted way, was that she knew that without the strange transformation to her mantra that Valash had effected, she would still be lying broken on the ground.

Shaking a little, she banished that thought swiftly.

She had got the voices under control, there was no need to invite them back through cracks like that.

Thankfully, she had found her storage talisman and hunter pavilion pendant. They had lost their tie and had been lying in the loam right beside her, of all places. That said, if she hadn’t knelt on the pendant, they would probably still be lying there, lost in the gloom and the rubble of the floor for all time.

That thought rattling around her head also didn’t help.

Another wafting shift in the hot, dark air of this cavern made her flinch and press herself against the rock next to her. However, the imagined tentacles sweeping out of the darkness to grasp her and drag her back to that lake and the ruin of the village never appeared.

It took a few moments to still the thump of her heart though. Despite banishing the voices, she was, she knew, most definitely not over the trauma of her close ‘encounter’ with whatever that horror had been. Even if the mind was remarkably good at suppressing things that were dangerous to its continued operation, the darkness here felt… ill. Ominous. Oppressive. Like she was in the presence of something unspeakable just outside the range of her perception that wasn’t quite paying attention to her at just this moment but could if reason presented itself end her at any moment it chose if it would just focus.

Also, there were ruins down here.

Not simply tumbled piles of stones, but things recognisable as buildings. Walls, trenches, managed spaces, all abandoned to the creeping dark and the fungus.

She had avoided them where at all possible. They gave her a properly ominous feeling with their sloped sides and geometries that somehow both felt skewed and tried to skew her in weird ways when she went near them. The worst had been the rock face in a ruined theatre-like space hewn from a rise in the cavern floor. She had stumbled into it by accident to find it filled with twisted openings that somehow called out to her. Tried to entice her to enter, and when she had resisted, stalked her, always presenting gaps between rocks or in walls that were just for her.

Without her mantra, she would have remained there. Whatever Valash had done to it had transformed certain aspects of its utility almost beyond her means to comprehend. There had been no sign of them for a while at least, but she was still paranoid about it, just in case.

Really, the root of all her stress was vision, and lack thereof. Without light beyond a bit of bio-luminescence from fungi and mould, she had been forced to rely upon qi-enhanced darkvision and her very limited grasp of ‘Intent’ based spiritual sense to navigate. Neither was without their issues though.

Her qi-perception only extended for a meter or so around her in this oppression and was putting a lot of strain on her outer meridian channels. It was also hard to use while moving, with everything turning into an amorphous sketch of shifting lines and illusionary shapes if she made a sudden motion or had to react to something unexpectedly.

Relying on the standard Qi Condensation realm technique for enhancing her vision, on the other hand, turned the world into a twisted mass of grey, white and black. While it allowed her to see somewhat further, it also meant that she was effectively colour blind, and the gloom still ate up her sight after a few metres.

Attempts to adapt both had also met with… issues.

It was possible to extend her qi-perception significantly by abusing the qi-resistance properties of the rocks this deep and just send out weak pulses and wait for them to return. That had allowed her some early progress but also turned out to be unspeakably dangerous in retrospect. It had already disturbed a colony of strange fungus monsters that she had only escaped because they were slow ambush predators. That had directly led to her being more reliant on her qi vision as she tried to not draw attention to herself, which in turn nearly led to her being eaten by that fate-thrashed wall of humanoid outlines.

Unfortunately, in the arithmetic of survival, risking those threats with her qi- enhanced vision seemed a better option.

However, she had barely gone half a cavern further when a strange, subtle shift in the air in the cavern system made her pause.

Trying to focus on the gloom around her, she stilled her heartbeat and hid her presence with her mantra as best she could, looking carefully for whatever it was that had spooked her instincts… and saw something moving in the distant gloom.

As she watched, the shadows coalesced into a hulking, shrouded form, maybe three metres tall. The only tells regarding its presence were visual, near as she could tell, for it made no noise at all as it moved.

-No, that wasn’t right…

Somewhat removed in distance as she was from it, it was impossible to make out its features beyond being vaguely upright and maybe having only two long arms and a somewhat elongated head; however, as she watched it became clear that it was in fact projecting a sense of ‘silence’ around itself somehow.

For several agonising minutes all she could do was cower, her heartbeat frozen, focusing on being one with the rock against which she was pressed and hiding as much of her presence as she could with her mantra. It was a great relief when it did finally move on, heading in the direction she had come from, heading deeper into the caverns.

-Malingering fates…I really was an idiot to try the qi pulse thing, she berated herself silently. Things down here almost certainly hunt with qi-sense.

-I suppose that really only leaves the third option, she groaned mentally.

Up to this point, she had avoided forcing her vision directly – using her mantra on her ocular meridians. However, that close encounter had effectively tipped the balance towards that. She would much rather risk permanent meridian damage than die to some unspeakable deep dweller in this place.

‘Path’

The mantra started to direct qi in her body towards her ocular meridians.

‘Body.’

She focused on her eyes, carefully. In theory, her mantra shouldn’t explode them directly, but this was doing manually what the qi condensation technique was designed to do, except now she had none of the training wheels provided by the art to protect her should she misjudge a qi flow.

‘Bestowal’

That was one of the changed words. Before it had been ‘Gift’, though now she wasn’t quite sure what to expect with the change, beyond hoping that its ‘use’ had not shifted to the point where she had to rethink this whole idea. That said, she almost gasped as it took effect, watching her darkvision shift in subtle ways, somehow untangling the hazy fog of twisted lines that had been hanging in the middle distance.

When her vision settled and she had managed to convince a part of her rather tormented psyche to maintain it without her having to think on it too much, the result was much better than she had expected. Really, whatever Valash had done to her mantra was outside of her expectations. The gloom was still all-encompassing and diffusive, but she could make out vague outlines of things now. The key thing, at any rate, was that she no longer needed to do thoroughly suicidal things like sending out random bursts of qi into her surroundings.

Her progress after that point was, much to her relief, a lot smoother. She soon worked out that so long as she stuck to the colossal main caverns, the combination of this slightly less crappy qi vision and various faintly bio-luminescent and qi-luminescent fungi and plants that the ecosystems in the deep caverns mainly comprised provided enough to pick out most obvious threats so long as she took it slowly.

The main source of her worries thereafter, were mostly the periodic open ruins that many of the caverns contained. She avoided them where possible, but even so, some encounters were unavoidable since most were situated in highly defensible positions through the caverns: on high points, on outcrops, in lakes, around exit and entry points… and choke points through cave systems.

Many of them also contained remnants of the Sar’Katush and near as she could tell, it seemed that their society had either been in the thrall of that… thing…

She shivered and shrank her shoulders a bit, trying not to think about it. Couldn’t powerful creatures tell if you spoke their name?

-Or thought about them too much? a rebellious little voice added.

She paused to stare at her psyche for a second, but it was just her own thoughts echoing back at her, nothing more insidious.

-Another thing to be wary of now, she thought grimly, staring around at the vestiges of the current settlement she was carefully skirting.

Forcing your ocular meridians was a fast way to have a minor break. Excess qi affecting the brain beyond what your physical condition could handle was very bad.

Shaking her head, she made her way onwards again, taking care not to look directly at the wards on the rocks around it. The evidence of the Sar’Katush’s downfall was everywhere, really. She was more inclined towards believing they had been riven apart by the ‘thing’s’ influence, then enslaved. Not just because of the words and actions of Valash and her children, but because of places like this.

In several of the settlements, she had seen skeletons on altars, sacrificed then abandoned. Others had held piles of bones in dark pits, or in strangely orientated buildings that seemed to bleed their geometry in unpleasant ways in the darkness. Here, in this one, something or someone had hung a line of small Sar’Katush skeletons above the exit. Only the heads and a few bits of the spine were still up here. The rest of their remains scattered on the surrounding ground. The altar she had passed in the middle of the settlement was also piled high with skulls of various creatures, including Sar’Katush… and even humans.

…

Given the darkness and the unchanging gloom, she found it hard to say how long she walked for in the end, but eventually she found a series of offshoot caverns that seemed to actually lead somewhere and didn’t make her skin want to crawl off her body and hide under a rock, sobbing quietly.

Here, mercifully, it was somewhat easier to navigate. The enclosed spaces certainly helped her spiritual perception, making it more valuable, while the broken ground and regular shelving seemed to have made it relatively unappealing to the ruin makers, so there was little in the way of such dangers and those that did exist were easily bypassed.

The progress she made with her mantra, in the periods she had to stop to rest were also remarkable. Whatever it was that the strange meeting had brought about by the changing of those two mnemonics it had easily doubled the efficacy of anything she did with them.

It was effective to the point where it genuinely unnerved her, in all honesty. A part of her really wanted to seek out Old Ling in the pavilion and tell him about it when she returned. He was the most authoritative source she had regarding mantras that would not immediately clam up and start talking about ‘inheritance issues’, not to mention her teacher. However, it was also hard to shake the feeling that what she had seen and what had found her – changed her – touched upon something about this place better not talked about.

Eventually, as she made her way onwards, she also managed to locate a relatively harmless algru patch, nestled in a cavern near a spring of water flowing across one of the shattered slabs of rock she was traversing. This, at last, allowed her to fix her storage talisman, plaiting several of its strands together as she caught her breath and replenished her qi while she sat in the darkness. The tie made the skin on her wrist itch somewhat, but it was more than worth it to ensure that she didn’t need to hold the talisman all the time.

Like that, time continued to pass. She navigated through several more fissures and caverns, slowly making her way upwards until almost unlooked for, she found the first stele.

She nearly walked right past it before something about the unnatural regularity caught her attention just beyond the stable edge of her qi-perception. For a heart-stopping moment of panic she nearly thought that she had, unawares, walked into another weird vestige… or that it was the return of those horrible humanoid holes. On the contrary, though, the stele was just a carved stone set into the outcropping in the middle of the cavern.

The thing consisted of a weird scrollwork border and originally what should have been about eight lines of text she estimated. Something had tried to score out the text with claws, but as she looked at it….

‘Cavern Nine.’

‘West of Shaft Two.’

‘Dangerous Zone IV—‘

‘Access beyond this point forb—‘

‘——wards—‘

‘Anyone below realm—‘

‘—Big Mystic Hundred Leader.’

The information simply appeared in her mind’s eye as she looked at it. Some of it was blurry, presumably due to damage caused by the vandalism, near as she could guess. It took quite a while for some of it to settle out in her mind as well. Especially the last bit – ‘Big Mystic Hundred Leader’.

The stele was clearly some kind of artefact, at any rate, leading her to reason that if she took it at face value it simply couldn’t communicate it correctly to her. Something about the phrase just didn’t exist within her frame of knowledge.

Her best guess was that it was some cultivation realm or other kind of rank. However, the organisation of the words made very little sense to her. No matter how she wracked her brain, she could think of no realm that had that kind of name. That at least suggested that the realm, assuming it was such and not just a title, was at least above Golden Immortal. She was fairly confident she at least knew most of the different common use terms for the major realms below that.

Pensively considering the rest of what was on the stele, though, there was certainly valuable information there. A shaft suggested a stairwell, although which way west was—

Giving her something of a shock, she observed the floral pattern on the stele shift abruptly, right before her eyes, swirling on the right-hand side and then popping out somehow, becoming a three-dimensional projection of a scroll-like arrow while simultaneously never truly seeming to leave the flat surface of the stele.

-Weird, and useful… an errant thought in her head acknowledged, even as she fought again to recover her composure which had been shaken a bit by the unexpected change.

Turning to look in the direction indicated, she couldn’t help but sigh quietly in relief as well. The stele was not asking her to backtrack, ‘west’ apparently being the direction she had been heading.

…

About an hour’s scrambling and struggle through the gloom of twisted caverns, newly damp fissures and slumped roof fractures later, she located the next stele.

The trip to get there was unpleasant, to say the least. A highlight being the particularly awkwardly placed fungi in the cavern before the stele. They had exceptionally corrosive secretions on their caps that bled into the humid air of the cavern, forming a horrific miasma across much of its ground level. In the end, she had to clamber across the wall and ceiling, a ceiling that turned out to be a vast algru mat.

It still stung, even now, as she waited for the stele to sort itself out in her mind’s eye. A good portion of the skin had been flayed off her arms and back in the few close encounters she hadn’t been able to avoid.

-I hope nothing out here hunts by scent for blood, her psyche muttered darkly.

She rubbed her temples a bit, grimacing. There was now a persistent, chilly prickling sensation behind her nose that told her she was properly starting to overburden her ocular meridians

‘Cavern 7: Southwest of ‘Shaft Two’ and far west of ‘Shaft One’.’

‘Danger. Do not pass left if below [Thunder] [Immortal] realm.’

-Well that clears that up, she reflected, as the words sorted themselves out in her head with a great deal more coherence than the previous stele had.

After a further few seconds of her wondering which direction ‘left’ was, the stele helpfully clarified that that was the direction she had just come from.

-I can only hope that that ‘danger’ is the Sar’Katush, she mused, looking around again.

-Strange that it uses’ ‘Thunder Immortal’ though. That’s a very old term indeed for that realm. Not used since the previous aeonspan, her memory supplied helpfully.

She stared back at it. Her memory autonomously volunteering stuff like this was a possible symptom of the voices coming back. Assuming it was correct though, that likely meant the lizard people, the Sar’Katush, or the environment their ruins were in had been considered a Golden Immortal rank danger by whoever put up these ancient stele…

In more recent terms, that was a ten-star rated ‘danger area’ in the nomenclature of the Hunter Pavilion.

Something about that still nagged her, as well. Her memory had been turning various bits and pieces of things she knew about the depths for quite some time as she walked. The Sar’Katush seemed somewhat similar to the rather sketchy reports of several groups of bipedal creatures recorded as attacking several forces in the war thirty years ago. Those had had five eyes and some very vague descriptions… They had also been considered as a ‘thirteen-star’ ranked threat.

-Maybe the five-eyed ones were the chosen that Valash talked of?

-The thing in shadow had five eyes. Maybe that’s a mark of the ones who fell?

“Uggh.”

“Maybe I should stop again and rest…” she muttered, massaging her temples a bit harder.

After some further consideration, she did indeed stop for an hour, using the opportunity to transcribe some of her observations up to this point onto a jade-work scrip in her talisman.

-Maybe I can get some merit points for sharing a few bits of this experience… a part of her murmured.

“Heh! Heh… ha,” her quiet laughter at that thought sank into the small cavern like a rock in a pool, eaten by the darkness without leaving as much as a ripple.

Just thinking about ‘merit points’, or the ‘Hunter Bureau’ and its politicking… or anything from the world above was amusing at this point. Those things seemed to pale into insignificance in a place like this.

-Lets survive first… worry about other things once we are no longer jumping at shadows, she rebuked her own thoughts, not that they did so much as twinge in response.

For some reason that just made her sigh again, more deeply.

The path onwards was, sadly, no less vexatious than the path up to the second stele. The following caverns held more fungus and finally another huge mat of corrosive algru expanding across slick, wet, fissure riddled rocks of the floor and ceiling, which tried very aggressively to look totally innocuous in order to bait the disturbance in the air it could detect into walking into it.

As she caught her breath and tried to manage her meridian strain, brought back again with a vengeance as she peered at every divot and crack in the floor in case it held more algru, it occurred to her that she hadn’t really seen anything down here that you could consider ‘animal’ life.

There had been the fungus monster and the strange shambling fungus horror – She had seen traces of another to confirm that was what that was, at least – but there was next to nothing else. No spiders, centipedes… no insects at all really that she had seen, not even roaches or crickets. Thinking about it, she supposed that these depths were either too isolated, which didn’t bode well for her chances, or simply too inhospitable. What with the heat, the gloom and the predominance of fungi and algru – both could have ‘seasons’ when the caverns would be filled with toxic spores if they behaved anything like the ones closer to the surface – she supposed that only the hardiest and most durable creatures remained… she had seen a few snail tracks for instance.

…

The third stele she found about two hours later, after that though her progress slowed massively, stalled by a linked complex of huge, twisted caverns beyond it which effectively transformed into a fungi jungle on their lower levels nurtured by a series of scalding yang-rich springs that bled out of a fissure on what she thought was the eastern side, fusing with a broad shallow lake that was a rather unpleasant shade of yellow in the dim qi-luminescence.

The fourth stele, somewhat unusually compared to the previous caverns was very obvious at least, set up on the higher level of the cavern which stretched out at the top of a cliff above the fungus forest, visible as a regular anomaly in the middle distance, silhouetted by the qi-luminescence. It even had a path up to it which threaded along the edge of the forest.

She navigated a very small portion of it, initially, braving the foetid humidity — enough to make her skin blister even as it sweltered — and the crippling drain on her stamina, but soon stopped as her paranoid eye caught the tell-tale shape of a 'Soul Setting Fungus' hidden amongst the crevices above those carved steps, waiting for the unwary.

Eventually, she retreated almost to the exit and instead scaled a far ledge, preferring to brave algru ambush and predators in the rock fissures than either the foetid, skin blistering humidity or the risk of surprise mushroom death to get to the stele on the upper level. Even so, it was a grim trial, requiring her to clamber across almost a hundred metres of fissure riddled cavern wall, slick with water, to reach the western edge of the upper portion of the cavern.

Not that she had really expected any different, but the upper level was mostly more of the same, disrupted slabs and clusters of fungi and algru breaking up the floor. Everywhere she found evidence of the calamity above: fresh breaks in rock and recent pools of water interspersed by swathes of damage caused by slabs dislodged from millennia old perches.

The stele itself cheerily told her that this was ‘Cavern Twenty-nine’. The warning that accompanied it informed her that exploration of this region was not recommended unless she was at least a [Special/Named] [Immortal]. That one took a bit of puzzling, with her best guess being that it meant ‘Chosen Immortal’.

-Which is still terrifying, but does theoretically mean it’s getting ‘less so’ she thought wryly.

Again delivering ‘bad’ with ‘good’, though, the stele appeared to have been defaced by something with claws, which had put a lot of effort into its attempted vandalism. Thankfully, though, that didn’t seem to hinder it supplying her information. So far, only the first one had been so badly damaged that bits of the ‘projection’– as she had come to think of it as – were missing.

The specifics of the danger warning were also somewhat concerning, proclaiming that there might be: ‘large devouring things immune to material damage’, which only sounded more ominous each time she considered it.

She was also starting to get a grasp for how the wording on the stele was structured. She stared at that last warning again, relating to the ‘devouring things’, scanning it pensively.

What had become a small, awkwardly descriptive sentence in her mind was, as far as she could make out, only one or two words. Clearly, whoever had written it had possessed names for some of these entities that were colloquial enough to not require description, but which she didn’t know of.

The longer she mulled that over the more certain she became. It certainly explained some of the other long descriptions she was getting, not to mention the apparent difficulty the stele had in presenting some of the lines to her.

Not for the first time, she wondered how they worked. They weren’t reading her mind, of that she was fairly sure. Her mantra should have reacted to that. It cared not a whit for whether the force intruding was Qi Condensation or Immortal. Whether you could resist it or not, they always reacted. That alone made them worth it for exploration in the Yin Eclipse Mountain range, not to mention the bane of the provincial gambling industry away from it.

Still, it left her with a quandary. The stele helpfully pointed out into the darkness as the route towards 'Shaft Two'. It also pointed out into the darkness when saying ‘deadly danger’, and she noted, it also suggested the same back the way she came.

She had admittedly moved through the previous part of the cavern complex fairly quickly, sticking to the edge and avoiding the suspiciously open areas on the right-hand side that didn’t have a lot of fungi in them prior to the proper emergence of the fungi forest in this cavernous space. That could mean that whatever was ‘dangerous’ was or maybe had been there, unless the fungi forest itself also classified as Immortal grade threats.

On some further consideration that was also plausible, the Soul Setting Fungi she had glimpsed, an Immortal-grade spirit ‘organism’ outside Yin Eclipse, merited a ten-star warning – as a starting point – all on its own. When you factored in the ubiquitous suppression down here, even affecting the fungi from what she could tell…

-Speaking of suppression…

She pushed out her intent-infused qi perception. It went to about 1.1 metres now. A paltry increase of 10 centimetres in days… On one level it seemed such a minuscule gain for fighting constantly with the suppression. On the other hand, her perception range in West Flower Picking, outside the town wards was good for her realm, almost a half a mile. That meant she had gained close to a hundred metres in its radius for this torment. Her mantra supported qi-vision was also much more solid.

She was still mulling that over when she felt something barely clip the fuzzy edge of her perception bubble where she was pushing it to its limit.

“…”

Stepping back smartly to the rock wall beside her, she pushed her perception outwards, sacrificing range behind her to push it out further to bring the culprit into a monochrome focus of sorts.

It looked a bit like a rock. Well, it contained lots of rocks, it seemed – something with a mucus-like membrane about 50 centimetres across and 20 high. It wasn’t very fast, but if she hadn’t seen it move slightly, she might have missed it as just another rock with some algru mutating on it.

As soon as her sphere swept over it, it convulsed and spat a rock at her.

She barely dodged by throwing herself flat on the ground—

There was noise, pain and excruciating light.

Acting purely on instinct, she dived back the way she came, or tried to.

The blast of light and noise had completely disorientated her, she realised.

-Fates-may-you-be-made-to-eat-monkeyshit! Obscenities spooled through her mind as she stumbled over a rock and fell hard.

Something hit... clipped her leg—

The explosion flipped her over the rock entirely and she crashed into the ground some distance away, gasping. Thankfully the blast, while powerful enough to shake her to her core had not been infused with any qi or intent.

‘Body.’

Fighting her instincts, she desperately cycled her mantra, even as she focused on clearing her vision, pushing back against the blinding effect of the light—

There was a sickening sense of dissociation in her midriff and blood welled in her mouth as she crashed into something hard, a rock had smashed into her side, near as she could tell.

Her body screamed at her, rebelling against her desires to move away.

-No explosion—?

Almost as soon as the thought formed, she was pitched upwards as the rock that had just hit her, and which hadn’t exploded on contact this time, promptly did so.

She landed hard on her back, vomiting blood and flailing inarticulately as her ears rang. On instinct, she desperately rolled away from the place she had landed.

This time the rock smashed into the space where her head had just been – and exploded on impact. She wanted to scream in anger and frustration as much as fear but there were no words anymore, no air in her lungs.

-Your lungs are missing their bottom third, a dispassionate voice in her mind supplied. Your left leg is shattered in three places and your ribs are currently perforating your intestines.

-So only my mantra and qi are keeping me alive…

Fighting pain and panic, she reached out to her mantra.

‘Devoted… Path… Lotus… Body… Bestowal’

Qi from her bones flowed into her flesh, reinforcing it, knitting wounds back together and putting bones back where they should be.

-So… fast!

She hissed in mental admiration as her changed mantra did in a heartbeat what it would have taken tens of agonising seconds to do before – and it did it with so much less. Whatever the change from ‘Gift’ to ‘Bestowal’ had done, the impact on her self-recovery was ludicrous.

-And I am glad of it! Valash of the Sar’Katush. Whatever the fates you did, you have saved my life twice now!

Another blast sought her out, flattening her into the ground. How was it finding her? She cast her perception—

-You only have spiritual perception, her psyche pointed out. Everything else is being suppressed or concealed by the mantra…

“…”

She cancelled her spiritual perception and rolled away across the ground as best she could.

A rock smashed speculatively into the area near where she had just been.

Swallowing back her pain – she couldn’t ‘breathe’ yet anyway, as her lungs were still repairing themselves – she suppressed the outward emittance of her qi as best she could.

This time, the rock exploded just as she was pushing herself up, the pressure wave pitching her over.

-What kind of fate-thrashed rocks has it been eating? she snarled mentally, working hard to block out the pain.

Her mantra completed its cycle of work on her body, lessening the pain a bit. The tightness in her chest was still there, though.

-The damage of that impact to my lungs and chest must be immense, she thought grimly.

Her bones also felt itchy – like ants were crawling out of them. That would be a symptom of her vital qi flowing out of them, merging with the life essence swirling inside her meridians as it started to work on her broken ribs and ruptured diaphragm—

Another rock hissed out of the darkness about five paces in front of her.

-Where I would have been if I’d kept going at the same speed I was a moment ago. Or a little more cautiously, she though, suppressing a shiver.

A moment later, it exploded in a pulse of blue-green fire.

This time, by dint of some distance from the point of impact, she got a better look at the explosion and the rock as she took cover. The rocks were about a fist in size and coated in the same mucus as the main one. She could sense no qi from the one she saw at all, despite the fact that the injuries to her were clearly able to cut through her body’s own defensive qi like it was wet paper.

-Is it something to do with the friction and impact that makes them explode? A bit like an alchemist’s explosive?

She moved away from the explosion at about half the speed she would have been moving in that direction originally and was rewarded for her paranoia when another rock slammed into a boulder about a meter to the left. Even ducking for cover before it landed, the explosion, which was several times bigger than before, bowled her over.

This time she went with it, rolling several times to dissipate the force of impact then scrambling as fast as she was physically able, tangentially away from what would have been her eventual resting point.

A rock scythed into the darkness overhead.

"You’re fate-thrashed smart for a nameless-accursed ball of mucus and rocks aren't you!" she hissed to herself.

The rock, which had travelled into the middle distance somewhere to her right, exploded a moment later. The flash of light in the air illuminated the cavern for 30 metres in every direction.

A second rock hissed out of the darkness ahead of her, hitting her in the shoulder and flipping her twice before smashing her into a rock outcrop she had just been about to skirt.

Agony consumed her. Incendiary, bone searing, flesh warping agony spread through her shoulder as something ate into her flesh, feeding off of the qi within her body. Her arms spasmed and her chest constricted, even as her mantra responded, forcing out the corrosion and knitting the wound back together even before she had finished falling.

-Of course there would be more! How the sovereign hells did I manage to avoid these atrocious things up to this point, she sobbed in her head.

Her left arm was still tingling and the pain in her shoulder, even after the corrosion had been purged, was so acute that it was unbelievable. Thankfully, her vision at least was somewhat recovered, not that she dared use any qi to enhance it now.

-If that hit me in the head… that didn’t bear thinking about.

-Don’t sit there thinking like a moron. MOVE!

For once she was glad of the errant voices of her subconscious returning. Her body was moving of its own accord even before they had fallen silent again.

Another explosive rock landed where she had been, pushing her over as she scrambled clear.

The lunging dodge was aided by a further explosion that flipped her forwards. Pain in her legs came and went even before she hit the top of a large flat rock. Somewhat fortuitously, it seemed to slope away, protecting her in both directions she was now getting bombarded from.

A second corrosive rock smacked off its edge a moment later. Chips of melting rock catching her back as she ducked further into cover.

A third rock scythed over the top of the rock, with mere centimetres clearance as she watched it—

It exploded right above her, only instinct making her turn away as it rained shards of razor sharp rock down all around her.

-Oh Fates! Seriously!?! In the name of the blood bound fate, they can blow them up whenever they want? Part of her wanted to stand up and just shake her fists at the fate-thrashed things in outrage.

-Can the other one, the one throwing acid rocks, also do that? a more coherent part of her psyche muttered nervously.

She groaned and stayed put, dangerous as it was. She needed precious moments to heal…

Two more rocks shot over and exploded nearby, both in the air. A corrosive rock arced over a moment later and hit the ground with an ominous hiss a moment later.

-So they don’t just do straight shots either? What the unbound fates is this shit!

The bubbling pool it left a meter ahead of her was smoking, she noted glumly.

-Is that some kind of alchemical lime?

A third explosive rock came over a moment later, skipping off the top of the rock and rolling down beside her.

“Fates—!”

Sheer fluke, as it bounced off a divot in the rock, stopped it from falling right in her lap, instead diverting it over the side to land on the ground—

She ducked the other way as a cloud of smoking shrapnel and blue-green fire swept over the rock. Mercifully, it did little more than blister her skin and give her a few grazes.

Seconds passed by and no more rocks came her direction.

-How fast can they move, she wondered?

The one that fired explosive rocks hadn’t been that fast on the edge of her detection.

-Unless... that was bait?

They seemed able to sense qi. It had barely brushed the fuzzy edge of her detection radius she recalled. If she hadn’t been pushing out it would never have been clipped and the first rock would probably have incapacitated her instantly, maybe even killed her outright if it exploded in her face.

Shuddering at that thought, she looked around quickly, trying to use the dim light from the burning craters to get her bearings in relation to where she was before, cursing in her heart that she hadn’t spent more time looking at the layout of this upper part of the cavern. She had been too focused on the stele and wondering if there were more soul setting mushrooms around its vicinity…

By the flickering light, she could just about make what appeared to be the near wall, though it could be a large fallen slab she supposed. In any case, it was surprisingly close if it was the wall, barely thirty metres away.

The cavern itself was close to 500 metres across from what she had seen below, but up here, she didn’t want to bet against it going quite some distance in the other direction. Certainly, there was no far wall in sight as she traced it into the gloom, now cursing the loss of her natural darkvision thanks to the fires.

The previous few caverns had all been about that size... usually kind of square as well. That suggested regular fractures in the bedrock, and given she had been regularly going through fissures and gorges as she went, it was likely that the caverns were simply gaps where a colossal fault undulated beneath the mountains. Several had had sitting water, which she had avoided…

-Now is not the time to wonder about that, she grimaced, marshalling her thoughts somewhat.

-If I go back the way I came… down into the forest I might get blocked off by them, they are already hard to see… she mused, desperately turning over the permutations in her head.

-Also the idea of dodging their shots in the vicinity of exploding mushrooms and Soul Setting Fungi is not appealing, her subconscious further qualified.

Nodding, she grimaced. The only way was forward.

-Starting with relocating from here…

She peered nervously around the edge of the rock. There had been no explosions for a good ten seconds now. They knew she was somewhere around here, she was sure of it, and if they could see by qi and were able to roughly predict where she was based on her movement speed. That meant they were more than smart enough to hunt her down in this dark hell, strewn with rocks, any one of which could be another one of the things.

-That assumes those were the adults, of course… Remember what the stele said?

She really wished her brain would stop throwing up the '—and what ifs'.

Her pondering was cut short as three explosions, landing in quick succession, rattled an outcropping to her right. The last one noticeably bigger than the previous ones. Another air burst explosion cracked about halfway between her current rock and that one, right over a neatly placed little gully that might offer protection to a cautious quarry trying to make its way safely to some better cover.

“…”

She turned around and stared directly up at the corrosive rock thing, because that was surely what it was, carefully peeking over the edge of her rock. Up close, it looked like a rocky slug and a sludge thing pretending to be a rocky slug. A few rather concerning mushrooms grew off it in tasteful places. It was also several times larger than the others.

It pulsed, its visible form twisting slightly—

She charged away from the rock without a second thought as the whole area behind became awash with the lime-like substance.

-Desperate measures time. Please fates don’t see me dead for this, she prayed fervently.

She pulsed her qi once as powerfully as she dared and then skirted back around the rock as fast as she could. Now on the same side of it as the sludge creature, she could see its size properly. It was bigger than her, rocks cementing its mucus and stone body, mimicking armour… and it also had quite a concerningly large colony of exotic mushrooms—

It instantly spat half a dozen rocks at her, but she was moving just too fast.

{Flickering Steps}

Having eschewed it up until this point, she finally used a movement art, the most basic one she possessed – ‘Flickering Steps’. It was a basic manual, quite robust and ideal for use with physical foundations that was supplied to everyone in the Hunter Pavilion who was promoted to a five-star rating. Now, it propelled her towards the wall in the distance, her surroundings blurring slightly as she charged over rocks—

Several large airburst explosions seared the rock and, as she had hoped, caught the corrosive sludge full on.

-Explosion get!

She mentally pumped a fist as there was a horrible moment of collapsing ‘nothing’ behind her and then the entire area around her former rock became a miniature tornado of blue-green fire.

The blazing, now very angry sludge thing rolled after her with a remarkable turn of speed, spewing smoking rocks in every direction. She avoided most of them thanks to the natural incline of the cavern floor where she had ended up and just about made it behind another rock.

Exhaling, she sent out a directed pulse of qi sense, this time cast diagonally away from the sludge, then vaulted back over her source of shelter and dashed backwards away from the wall again, but not quite in the direction she had just come.

The now thoroughly enraged blazing rock sludge spewed a vast jet of burning corrosive quicklime stuff in her general direction as she fled across the open space. Her inertia carried her past the worst of it and fortunately, none hit her legs.

-You so need to buy Old Ling any fates-blessed alcohol he wants for the rest of your life if you get out of this, a voice in her mind giggled.

Mentally she could only agree. Since she had joined the Pavilion, almost two decades prior, he had driven her to the point where she was nearly the equivalent of a Golden Core cultivator. That harsh training and unrelenting pressure was certainly repaying the effort now in helping to prolong her life… that and whatever Valash had done—

A bunch of smaller explosive rocks dropped out of the sky. With a sick feeling in her stomach, she noted that they almost all avoided the burning sludge.

-Fates! They can work together?

In the darkness ahead she saw something twitch and threw herself sideways, crashing onto the sharp rocks and rolling through a bunch of mushrooms—

There was an agonizing pause and then they didn’t explode or cover her in spores of horrible death—

Silence washed over her and she was physically kicked away by a contemptuous, invisible force that preceded the roar of a proper explosion.

Crunching down into the floor of the cavern some 15 metres away from the mushrooms she had barely a moment to register that she hadn’t landed on hard rock, before the reality of her situation caught up to her. Desperately she kept rolling as an algru colony bloomed underneath her, thousands of little frond-like tendrils attempting to instinctually snare her. Beset by the deeply unpleasant sensation of a million tiny hooks sinking into her skin and shredding her flesh, all she could do was keep rolling, her momentum sustained by sheer bloody-mindedness and her mantra as images of what might happen to her if she got caught there spooled through her head—

There was an alarming sensation of emptiness…

Instinctually, she threw out her better arm and clawed in the air behind her to grasp the edge of whatever she rolled off. Her foot clipped water beneath her and she afforded herself a glance down to check that she wasn’t about to drop into the jaws of some other abominable existence.

“…”

Contrary to her panicked expectations, the dark waters below her barely rippled and nothing untoward exploded out of the shallows to consume her.

‘Devoted, Path, Lotus, Body, Bestowal’

Panting hard, her heart pounding in her breast, she cycled her mantra as forcefully as she dared while she hung there, focusing on the continued explosions behind her. The auditory chaos seemed to suggest that there might be recriminations of a sort between the three – or more – sludge demon rock things. Although if they were smart or had some way to communicate it might iron itself out quickly, at which point they would undoubtedly start actively seeking her out again, with an added grudge to settle.

She decided to risk cycling the mantra properly. If the worst came to it she could drop into the water and take her chances.

‘Devoted, Path, Lotus, Body, Bestowal’

It took an agonizing minute for her mantra to do a proper cycle. When it concluded, the explosions were still being traded so, after a moments reflection she took a deep breath and did another one. After that, her body’s condition was indeed a lot better, especially her shoulder which had been sniped by the acid rock creature, that she could at last move freely again, even if it hurt a great deal.

-You shouldn’t stay here longer. What if they are using the explosions to creep up on you, her subconscious prompted her nervously.

She was starting to get paranoid that they were exploiting the explosions to sneak up on her, she had to admit.

-How to get out of here. How…

Her thoughts skittered through a bunch of options: swimming was probably out; running across the water was very risky, to the point where it was probably better not to.

Looking along the shoreline, this part of the cavern had a few outcroppings in the water. The biggest one was actually only some 20 metres distant, then several smaller outcroppings further to her right…

She swept them again, frowning, wondering why it seemed familiar…

-Is this part almost a mirror of the other side, with the fungi forest… but flooded?

Instinctively, she looked down again. fungi could grow underwater down here, and some of those varieties, like ‘Dead Man’s Lanterns’ for example, were even worse than the Soul Setting species… not to mention the Moon Mushrooms…

Continuing her rapid sweep, she grimaced, squinting at the distant outcroppings, fighting the gloom and her lost darkvision as it interfered with her ability to unpick the weird rock geometry and hard to judge what was what beyond dim outlines. The fires burning in the cave above didn’t help matters either, with the strange flickering shadows being cast.

-They have treated me as rational prey so far, a voice in her head pointed out.

-So… be unpredictable, second-guess them, she mused.

They were hunting actively and appeared to be reasonably smart, although it was within the limits of her ability to cope. She had eventually managed to play them after all.

-Or so you hope…

-Thanks for that vote of confidence, subconscious, she glowered.

The stele had pointed across the cave, in the general direction of the largest pillar and the cave wall beyond it, in any case, so that was the eventual route irrespective of whether she went to the wall or across the water somehow.

-Across is absolutely the more mentally bent choice by any rational measure, she thought glumly.

With a grimace, she dropped down onto a rock slightly adjacent to her by the water and then leapt along the shoreline. The distance wasn’t the issue, but both rocks were barely submerged so…

She signed in relief as she landed on the head-sized bit of rock, not underwater. Landing with a splash was the kind of thing that got you dead by things unseen. Two more leaps took her to the larger set of rocky outcroppings, further along the shoreline. From there she sprinted and leapt between smaller outcroppings as fast as her bruised, tormented limbs would permit. Only when she was a good fifty metres from where she started did she allow herself a brief glance backward.

The explosions were still going on in the background sporadically; however, there was also a suspicious lump at the top of the small cliff that she was almost sure hadn’t been there when she rolled over it and

-The cunning little shits.

-Joke’s on them though. Just got rocks for brains, her subconscious sniggered, sending a mental projection of an obscene hand gesture behind her.

Shaking her head, she continued on along the shoreline as fast as she dared, keeping an eye out both for more mucus-covered rocks and things like algru colonies which could easily be hiding in the shallows.

In the end, she made it to the far cavern wall where the water lapped against it without incident, though that only served to make her more paranoid as time dragged on. The explosions had finally stopped in the distance, which didn’t help her peace of mind either. Hidden in the shadows she looked out across the shingle beach, which was largely devoid of anything interesting other than some large rock outcroppings and a bunch of what she was sure were more explosive mushrooms in their shadow. Something like that had certainly been what threw her over earlier. The ones she could just about make out did not appear to be a variety she recognised either.

-We will next time though, her subconscious commentary assured her.

Thinking about the geometry of the caverns up to this point, she appraised the route ahead of her. The water’s edge lapped right up against the cliff, while a wave-cut ledge was just visible below it. That was a possible route, but it would be treacherous in the extreme to navigate. One problem was things that lived below the waterline. Fauna like ‘Lash Limpets’ and ‘Spine Snails’ were ubiquitous dangers in those kind of environments and both could make your day very unpleasant if stumbled on unawares. The other issue was that she would have no visibility above her head and there was no question of risking any kind of qi-perception in such an exposed place.

It would be like putting a lantern over her head and screaming ‘shoot me quick’.

In theory, nothing on the far side should be able to detect her that far away, assuming the suppression worked the same way for them as it did for her. Then again, the maxim of survival in this place was certainly ‘assume nothing, suspect everything.’

-They certainly are the thing that the stele warns about, her subconscious added.

-You don’t say, she shot back.

In any case, they were listed there as a threat above Immortal, so suppression or no, she was certainly not going to risk it. After some more consideration, she made her way to the wall and climbed up a convenient crevice to try to get a better view of the cavern. To her left, around forty metres away in the gloom, was an obloid shape that drew her gaze.

-Really? There’s two stele in one cavern?

She squinted at the gloom for a full five minutes, finally taking the time to let her vision re-adapt to the now much lighter cavern, courtesy of the still burning fires in the middle of it. The area around the stele, across a narrow strait of the lake below, was peppered with what looked like normal sized rocks, ranging from half a meter to one meter. They were textured as they should be if a bit ovaloid and lacking in fracture irregularities. Some had a tell-tale glisten that hinted at the presence of algru and the occasional mushroom.

“…”

A quick rock count showed eighty between her and the stele, in that short space of ground beyond the water. While they were, to all intents, excellently camouflaged there was only one demerit against their strategy…

-It’s amazing that they have such an obvious flaw, her sub-conscious agreed.

It was indeed a pretty big flaw when you considered the bigger picture of an environment like this. Any rock that fell in here would be roof shatter and thus quite angular. Everything was faulting angular as well. Big outcroppings were all vaguely rectilinear or cuboid – rhomboid if they tilted when they fell. There was no evidence that the cave's water level had risen… or that there was a lot of flowing water in here. The shoreline was clearly the long term water table, as evidenced by the rock-cut ledge where it was eating into a fault line that seemed to run across the whole cavern at that level. The colonies of algru and fungi thriving were also clearly long-established, both above and, as she had suspected, below the waterline, where she could now make out a few sinister looking shadowy reef-like formations.

All in all, the environment and ecosystem here appeared relatively stable, albeit erring on the side of being a bit too toxic for stuff that wasn’t a mushroom or a mould to survive for any length of time.

There were also no notches above the current ledge across much of the cave that she could see. Certainly none in the wall she was currently on or on the one where she had entered. That told her that the water level – if it rose – never rose that much… or frequently or for long enough to make any lasting impression.

So, unless someone had artificially rolled a few hundred rocks that big out there for artistically tasteful decoration, every rounded rock she could see – and she could see a lot of them, in the dim near darkness of the cavern – was probably a rock sludge thing.

Fortunately, now she was on the wall she could make use of her superior durability and stamina to just climb along the edge of the cavern, over the water below, and then down to the exit directly. It was much better to shred her hands and feet on the stalagmites, stalactites and flowstone columns that were forming on the periphery over the uncounted millennia of runoff from somewhere further up in the cave system than try to tip-toe through the death-trap below.

She was about to make her way towards the probable exit when she noticed something else. There were two waterfalls that ran out of the roof of the cave, one was about 40 metres behind her… she had considered them as possible exits as she made her way over here, but decided at the time it wasn’t worth the risk with her obstructed perspective at the time. However, now that she had a better vantage point, she could see that the opening of the nearer waterfall was a bit wider than it first appeared. The slight slope of the fracture fault the water ran out of had led to years of erosion wearing down that channel so a ledge had formed above its flow on the near side. Under the dim illumination of some nearby mushrooms, it looked to be about one meter wide and high and accessible without going into the water.

It would have been impossible for a mortal, simply due to the overhangs and constant water falling all around, maybe even a purely spiritual cultivator who had to rely on their own body. However, for a Physical Foundation cultivator of her strength and experience, she reckoned it ought to be possible if she was patient. Braving the field of sludge rocks was pretty definitive suicide in any case.

…

It took nearly two hours of climbing and several stops to cycle her mantra before she finally made it there, hauling herself cautiously into the opening, a hand’s width from the dark roiling waters pouring over the edge beside her. This close, she could feel the faint agitation of qi in it, even with the dense suppression on her qi related senses. The misty spray from it was rich in yin qi and also a bit corrosive. She hadn’t looked too closely at the water in the cave beyond, nor actually entered it, but its corrosion was probably strong if it was eating these rocks away under its own power. Suddenly she was very glad she hadn’t decided to brave swimming across that lake.

Edging her way inside, she was gratified to see that it opened out significantly further along. There were mushrooms and some ‘normal’ algae on the ceiling, though that was expected in this sort of place. Thankfully, there was no algru. She was getting rather tired of that nastier mutate sibling of common algae after a dozen of those large caverns. Still, she eyed it suspiciously as she worked her way past. The algae could still be terribly dangerous if you got it on you, but, and this was important, it wasn’t going to crawl off the rocks and try to feeler you to bloody paste.

-Usually, her psyche clarified.

“…”

She gave it a wide berth just in case and crawled out into a long cavern. The roof was only about a meter from the floor at best. The flowstone columns were a bit of an oddity. She stared at the ceiling, trying to work out how they got here but drew a bit of a blank. There were fissures, sure, but the columns seemed kind of at random in relation to them. The grooves on the floor, stepping upwards from the flow of water rushing through, spoke more obviously to her.

Clearly the water level moved around here, based on the grooves in the floor. She watched very carefully in case there were more of the sludges up here. She wasn’t sure if they could climb walls, but they seemed able to do nearly everything else. There was nothing obv—

“…”

She sighed mentally.

Beside a column was a seriously suspicious ovaloid shaped rock about half a meter wide that had algae on it in a way that didn’t quite seem right if it was dumped there by the river. She thanked whatever fate had made the things just that little bit unable to truly merge with their surroundings here in a properly natural manner.

??? – Deep Caverns ~

The small shadow watched the girl clamber out of the cavern by the somewhat unorthodox route of the waterfall with an amused expression. They had both come down into these layers because of that infernal bit of stupidity inflicted from above… expecting to just have to deal with a few errant ruins that had been disturbed. To find humans down here was… disconcerting, truthfully.

“What kind of idiot explodes a Grand Circle Magister’s core over this slumbering eldritch death pit?” it muttered sourly.

“The kind that makes more work for us?” its comrade, sat nearby nibbling on a slime core it had snagged in the mess below, observed.

“Really that girl is lucky,” it sighed.

“She is at that,” its comrade agreed.

It looked back at the field of slimes, doing slime things below, as they had been doing for millions of years. It was somewhat amusing to think that it was actually their current place in the ecosystem, almost uniquely at the top of the food pyramid for once, unlike in their native realms, that was leading to their stagnation.

Anywhere else they would have any number of predators after them. Their cores were a rare delicacy, after all, excellent sources of refined mana. As a result, their colonies would be in a nearly constant state of replenishment. There was so little to eat down here that things capable of killing them and consuming their cores were also very few and far between. That poor lost little lizard had been the main thing keeping the population under control…

“Now that Alexios is dead, we will have to take steps regarding this nest,” it observed sadly.

“Such an ignoble end. The boss will not be happy,” its companion clenched its paws.

It recalled that they had been a good friend of the little lizard all those years ago. The aeons sure were cruel to the undeserving.

“True,” it sighed.

“Mmmmm,” its companion nodded. “Anyway, if we introduce anything down here, it has to be able to handle the other apex predator, never mind the slimes.”

It considered that pensively.

The creatures were functionally immortal in terms of their longevity. Unless something killed them, they would survive for millions of years just off slowly devouring and converting rock and the occasional mushroom or algru mat into energy… one molecule at a time.

They preferred organic, or at least mana rich organic prey, because it was supremely good for building their slime base, allowing them to grow bigger with each prey consumed. Eating mushrooms and algru worked, but only in an incredibly inefficient sense. That the only readily available nutrition pool, the fungi, was ironically, above them in the food pyramid but totally passive for the most part, so both inedible AND incapable of seriously culling them, created the perfect environment for their near-stagnation in evolutionary development. Unfortunately, anything a bit more active would be much more vulnerable to the fungi.

“We could just go kill the parent core,” its companion suggested pensively.

“Let’s leave that as a last resort. The ecosystem here has a sort of equilibrium. Even Alexios wasn’t impacting it a great deal, having far outstripped the need to grow off their cores.”

“I didn’t mean it like that, I just meant that if we take out the parent core, it will set back their current evolutionary cycle while one of the others evolves into a new parent core.”

They both considered the field of rocks in silence for a moment before its companion gave rise to another suggestion.

“It’s also possible that they just reach population stagnation, and that’s that.”

“Indeed,” it reflected.

Because nothing was killing them and they could only eat rocks and algru, the slimes were only able to propagate by splitting their parent core, which had long ago reached critical mass for its qi capacity and grade, also disturbingly high for slimes it had to be said. So at a certain point, unless more died, in theory, no new members of the colony would be split off from the parent core deep in the heart of the cavern system that had taken in the adaptions of the previous generations through their fairly unique form of innate symbiotic genetic link. Otherwise, they would have long been indistinguishable from the natural geomorphology of the caverns, and any predators seeking them out would have to be able to sense their cores directly to locate them.

“Really that girl is lucky as anything. If they had been left to adapt normally, she would have died before she ever saw the first slime,” its companion murmured.

“That would have been a pity. It’s nice to see humans down here.” It agreed.

“Well we should get on with this,” its companion murmured. “If we are late, brother might make the big mistress’s dinner. I still owe her a millennia more servings of spicy noodle soup.”

“One day she is going to make you regret that grudge,” it observed.

“Bite me,” its companion giggled. “We have been stuck in this place thanks to her for over 200 million years already, only able to leave like this, allow me my petty vengeance.”

“If you’re not careful, she might serve you up for dinner,” it observed wryly. “That would make me sad.”

Its companion laughed, nervously.

“So if that other interloper isn’t down here, then where the hell is it?”

It stared at darkness, considering the possibilities.

“Let’s go check out the cages over shaft two. Cultivators are suicide obsessive when it comes to ancient remnants. That boy had a Great Circle Core and was able to use Planar Portal to breach the outer shell, despite being a 7th circle runt.”

“He also killed Alexios…” its companion stared at the core in its hands, then crushed it effortlessly between its shadowy paws.

“Don’t worry, when we catch up to him, you will be able to make him regret the choices he has made in this lifetime,” It patted its companion on the shoulder.

“The cages then,” its companion said with a final look through the gloom of the cavern system.

“The cages.”

As silently as the two small shadows had arrived, they departed through the shadows of unreality between the inner and outer worlds of the Yin Eclipse mountain range, leaving only a small pile of shattered core fragments from a slime and a faintly smoking paw print on the rock. Meanwhile, unaware that she had had a silent audience in her ordeal, or of quite how lucky she had been regarding the unfortunate slime colony and its accidental prison-home of many millennia, the young woman made her way onwards into the gloom.

~ Kun Juni – The Deep Caverns ~

Juni eventually managed to sneak past the sludge rock without eliciting any obvious reaction from it. As she continued up the cavern, she did encounter a few more, though all at least easily avoidable. Not only did they appear to be much smaller than the ones in the cavern below, but all of them appeared to be sleeping or something like it. Maybe hibernating.

Still, it was with a certain degree of relief that she finally reached the end of the cavern and found the fault where the flow originated.

Her relief was somewhat short lived though, as traversing the chute next to the roiling flow turned out to be almost as challenging as scaling the cliff had been. Thankfully, the rushing water limited the things that could grow in it, so the worst thing she had to avoid, outside of wet, algae coated rocks were a few small algru colonies on the damp face.

The cavern she emerged into was, in a word, vast. She couldn’t see a wall in any direction while the roof of the cavern was barely visible in the gloom above. She found herself wondering exactly how far she fell to end up where she did. Direction and time were a bit fuzzy even with the help of her jade-work scrip for the latter, but she knew she had been climbing steadily ever since leaving the caverns where the Sar’Katush had lived and a quick check of the scrip recorded she had covered almost 20 miles.

After some consideration, she decided her best plan was probably to continue trying to follow the flow of the waters in the cave system upstream. Logically speaking they had to originate somewhere, and was clearly flowing downwards. It would hopefully lead her to a cavern wall at the very least.

Decision made, she slowly started to make her way onward, watching carefully for sludge rocks and dangerous mushrooms as she went. There were some, she thought, although none made any effort to attack her. Her qi-enhanced vision was also getting steadily stronger she noticed, which probably contributed to that somewhat, as she could now see potential threats much more clearly. Her ocular meridians were being sustained by periodic cycling of her mantra, though she was suffering a fair bit for that advance, the dull ache behind her face an ever-present companion at this point. However, in the circumstances she couldn’t to bring herself to complain too much, given her world had now expanded to nearly seventy metres in every direction.

What was more surprising was that her Spiritual Law was actually a little less suppressed, if anything, down here, than it had been up above, not that she dared to cycle it here to test its efficacy.

-It would light us up like a new year’s altar, her psyche muttered.

She had to agree with that sentiment. It would probably light her up like a paper lantern for every sludge rock or worse in the whole cavern – much like her spiritual perception seemed to.

To her surprise, and somewhat against the run of previous experience, she actually found the proper ‘route’ down to the other cavern within twenty minutes of first starting to traverse the flow of the river through the cavern. The crevice in the floor that led down was marked by a surprisingly familiar looking stupa-like spire of carved rock that actually had stairs cut into it and had more than a passing resemblance to some of the ‘shrine ruins’ in the valleys above.

After some consideration, she decided to see if the stele was approachable from the exit and headed down it. The stairs were in what could only be called ‘bad condition’ if you were very charitable. They were slimy, cracked and she fancied that well over half of the crevices in the walls had algru in them that was watching her as she passed.

Quite a few steps had also been clawed out or torn up, making her even more wary as she crossed over those gaps. Superficially the perpetrator seemed to be the same one as the vandal below, which she somewhat suspected to be the Sar’Katush, or whatever they had since become. That said, she was not going to bet against there being other powerful creatures with nasty claws down here.

She arrived in a lower cavern and found a stele, just not the one she had expected. This one set in the wall by the bottom of the stairs. Furthermore, despite being rather clawed about, they took next to no time to disseminate much of their meaning into her mind’s eye.

‘Cavern XVIII (West): Danger Level – High: Big Mystic Hundred Leader. Acce––’

‘Access Cavern 9-A: Danger ––– High: Mystic Lord Right. Shaft Two – Access West >’

“…”

Considering what was written on it, it didn’t take long to work out that ‘Mystic Lord Right’ appeared to be the way she had come down. That also seemed the direction that led towards ‘Shaft Two’. The question was, ‘Mystic Lord’ – or ‘Mystic Lord Right’, there was something confusing about that she couldn’t seem to unpick – more or less powerful than ‘Big Mystic Hundred Leader’…

Absently rubbing her neck – the meridian strain was getting worse again it seemed – she offered another belated curse to the naming gods and vowed to find out more about higher cultivation realms somehow if she ever got out of here alive.

Despite its atrocious condition, the stairwell she had traversed to get down to the stele did, in fact appear to be quite safe, so after a careful check of the nearby crevices she retreated up it a little bit and spent some time cycling her mantra, trying to boost her physical condition a bit.

After two cycles; however, she stopped and just sat there in the gloom, doing nothing for a bit. The catalyst for this was the rather abrupt realisation that she literally had not stopped in at least two days… maybe three.

She had no food pills or fasting pills – her storage talisman had been basically empty when she found it. Dimly she had a memory of the small Sar’Katush taking stuff out of it, which presumably meant that much like her clothes and whatever spirit herbs she had had they were ‘lost’ in that strange timeless anomaly she had experienced.

Thankfully, Lin Ling had had most of the real herbs, she had been sorting them out on the ridgeline when Di Ji had…

Her stomach twisted at that memory and she spat on the floor in disgust. Just thinking about that murderous scum made her hard won and fragile inner equilibrium distort dangerously.

The problem, at any rate, was that the lack of sustenance, other than qi itself, was starting to tell. Not helping matters either, was her necessary burning of a fair bit of her vital qi to recover from the worst of her injuries from the sludge battle. She also hadn’t had anything to drink in as long. There was no water she trusted enough to drink down here that wouldn’t be so qi rich it was practically poison.

-So, first task for the next bit is to find some edible algae and hope it isn’t a mutate, she thought grimly.

At least as a Qi Condensation cultivator, alongside being a Physical Foundation cultivator, she was able to go for a good while without sustenance. Far far longer than a mortal could in any event and also longer comparatively than either a pure physical cultivator or spiritual cultivator could at her realm.

-Small advantages ho… She thought with a weary sigh, stretching and looking around again at the gloom that cloaked everything.

She should still have a few days’ leeway before it became a serious problem. If she pushed it, she still had about a week before her body started turning on itself and cannibalizing her own vitality under the pressure of this place.

-Unless we have truly lost track of time down here, and were out for a long time, her subconscious glumly amended.

She stared at it, sourly. It was unfortunate that her physical cultivation burnt nutrients really fast.

In the end, she rested for what she reckoned was almost five hours, sitting in normal, non-cultivator meditation. It was oft-overlooked, a thing she had in fact been told by her older brother Kun Talshin, when he taught her the various Kun family martial forms, but it really did help with her mental equilibrium. She didn’t feel refreshed by any means as she moved on, but at least she didn’t feel like she was the same staggering wreck of trauma that she had been when she arrived there.

Returning back up the stairs, she continued on through the cavern above, which in turn turned out to be so mundane in comparison to anything she had yet encountered that she started to worry she was missing something fundamental.

The path between steles was becoming more obvious as well, she found, finding the next one almost within an hour of starting to explore.

Situated on the far side of the cavern, about 400 metres from the ‘fissure’ with the stairs, it was labelled ‘Cavern 31-D’.The numbering system was absolutely bonkers, skipping back and forth seemingly at random and occasionally just shifting to glyphs or letters. She tried to rationalise some kind of grid or linkages but nothing logical sat easily over the names she knew so decided not to dwell on it. Perhaps if there was a map it might make sense.

‘Stele 31’, was also defaced by claws, to the point where it was perhaps the most damaged stele she had yet encountered.

Claws had raked out the entire text and something had tried to take the top liniment carving off, presumably with the intention of tearing the entire thing out of its rock outcropping. They had failed abjectly in that last act, she noted, the claw marks ending abruptly where the carving outline began. She found herself cheering the resilience of the carvings and wondered if she was going a bit mad in other, less quantifiable ways somehow.

When she finally found what appeared to be ‘Shaft Two’, it was a bit anticlimactic really. Heading in the direction roughly indicated by the stele, she soon found after several hundred metres that the cavern tapered down and then finally truncated as a half graven room fashioned out of the end wall. The style was pretty neat all things considered, with sweeping natural curves that followed the contours of the rock and carved pillars with a strange motif of triangular leaves or very stylized mountains.

There was a large open area on the floor in the middle. The rock around it appearing to have been carved down to make it a raised platform. One side had been fractured by a fallen piece of ceiling, ancient damage rather than modern it seemed, but the platform’s strange circular design was still discernible.

She found herself staring at it for a long time before working out what it was that was entrancing her so. It was inlaid with what looked like worked arborundum inlaid with another silvery mineral that she didn’t recognise. That meant that whoever made this was really powerful – ‘Speak my name but once and I shall hear you even though you be a million miles away’ powerful – based on the scant records about the rare and mysterious mineral that existed within the hunter bureau and the Kun clan that she was privy to.

What did exist in the collections of the great and powerful was from rare artefacts gleaned from ancient ruins and caches. Her father had a few pieces – a matching bowl and cup given to him as a wedding gift – for example. However, the ‘lay consensus’ on it though was that it basically un-minable, un-workable and unfindable.

People had looked in this land for it as well, Lin Ling had told her that much, but nobody had apparently found any that could be extracted since before the time of the Blue Gate School, or the Blue Water Sage.

-If you managed to pry up a bit of that somehow you could sell it for a small fortune, her subconscious added as she continued to stare at it.

Shaking her head, she sighed. It had been doing so well up until now, but that was a really stupid suggestion. Having survived up to this point, there was no fate-thrashed way she was going to die without a corpse trying to mess with what was probably some ancient ruined formation plate.

Leaving the likely ‘formation’ behind, she made her way to the door and the far end of the room and looked through carefully. Inside was a shaft that stretched both up and down. A meter-wide platform and stairs on each corner tracked vertically. The lack of any kind of guard rails between those using the stairwell and the void below was… concerning as far as initial impressions went. Staring back at the formation, it occurred to her that the odds of it being a teleportation platform in some ancient style was really quite high.

-No way was walking up and down that shaft popular when it was built, she thought wryly.

She could imagine even now, some poor person traipsing up and down it cursing their ancestors and trying to stare far away from the—

Whatever it was that hit her in the back burned a hundred times worse than the fate-thrashed rock sludge’s quicklime vomit.

For a second, as she madly dove for cover, she thought it was a sludge, wondering how it had made it behind her… and how she had missed it in the shaft? Her confusion was stilled, however, as she rolled behind the collapse that broke part of the formation and got a chance to see behind her.

In the doorway was a figure wrapped in burnt, corroded and torn cloths, a short length of wood that might have once been a torch clasped on their right hand.

Cursing in her heart, she swept her matted hair out of the way and scrambled for anything to use as a weapon.

“What in—!”

She hadn’t used it in days, and thirst and physical trauma had taken their toll, so her voice was raspy and sinister-sounding to her own ears.

The darkness bleeding out of the shaft behind the figure was, she realised, much hungrier and more oppressive than it had been before. It also felt… unclean somehow, like there was a faint film of scum coating everything that it touched.

It made her skin crawl.

Suddenly… and inexplicably, she was very aware of her nakedness and dirty condition.

“…”

Words she couldn’t really comprehend whispered in her ear, something was trying to… invade her psyche?

[…]

Her dreams… memories?

‘Devoted, Path, Lotus, Body, Bestowal’

Using her mantra for this was almost second nature at this point, so she pushed it at the vile intent trying to invade her. Whatever it was, was repelled somewhat.

It certainly seemed… weaker?

She had no idea who else would be down here at this depth, which by worrying process of elimination, left some strange abomination a bit like her encounter with the Sar’Katush or that shambling horror. If this was something else like that… she was probably going to die here.

That last sensation, however… the sense of ‘hopelessness… seemed…

-It’s too weak, her psyche hissed, at odds with her own ‘fear’.

-Far too weak… Nothing like the darkness from before.

-You... compare this... to… TO...!?!

-This… This is just as… unclean…

-Let us devour….

-Yes… We can devour…

She didn’t have time to worry at the weird nature of those voices. What was undeniable was that they were right. This new strength was nowhere close to that unspeakable abomination that had claimed the Sar’Katush.

-Get a grip!

‘Devoted, Path, Lotus, Body, Bestowal’

She focused on her mantra again and it finally managed to tip the balance back in her favour, allowing her to gain the upper hand in the panicked, psychological struggle within her own psyche and whatever had just tried to invade it.

The figure was approaching her warily now, its face hidden behind a cloth wrapping. The most she could say was that it was female, like her, and of much slighter build – enough of the rest of its garments were little better than rags to make that obvious. If she had to fight somebody, she guessed at least it had arms and legs… and wasn’t spitting rocks at her.

Charging forward, the figure dodged to the side with a weird blur.

-A Movement Art!?! Monkey shit! Why is there a cultivator down...here?

She shadowed it with a kick and the opponent blocked her leg, trying to counter by sweeping forward with the stick as if it were a short blade.

Vaulting backwards to avoid the contact, she was suddenly glad she had taken those hours to adjust her condition. Without that break she might be even worse off here than she was already.

Her vault backwards became a roll and she surged up to meet her attacker as she charged forward, the other woman’s attack becoming a surging knee and stamp forward—

“…”

That had about as much effect on the ground here as she expected. It also clearly surprised the other woman as well, who staggered, giving her an opening to strike.

Stepping through the smaller figure's guard she focused her mantra on her strike and made contact even as her opponent began to evade.

With a shrieking grunt, her opponent staggered back, rolling away and putting down a hand to stop herself.

She followed the attack up with a charging kick to take advantage of the opening, only to spin away as the stick jabbed out at her again. The blood that coated the cloth on it smoked faintly in the air.

-Was that what had hit her before? It still hurt like mad on her back.

Still, it was a clumsy opening. She grabbed the arm and spun her opponent around, stepping in a swift circle and hurling her across the room even as she twisted the arm to disarm her opponent.

She felt bones grind in her target's wrist as the wooden stick clattered away. She hadn’t tried to put qi through it, but her opponent’s durability was exceptional.

-Is she also at Physical Foundation…?

Her opponent glanced towards the stick then back to her then pulled out a… lump of congealed organic… something?

From somewhere…?

Her thoughts skipped a beat, confused, before she realised what it was and her stomach twisted…

-A storage item? Steaming dog shit.

She dodged the thrown lump of whatever it was. It hit the wall behind her with a dull thwack, sliding down and leaving a bubbling, smoking trail of blood in its wake.

Yeah, nope, don’t get hit with that, her subconscious usefully commented.

Another piece of meat appeared in her opponent's cloth-wrapped hands. The cloth wasn’t smoking and looked kind of familiar through her qi vision – a bit dark as if the qi arriving at it wasn’t all returning somehow. That understanding came courtesy of trying to spot rock sludge creatures.

-I guess we gotta take this close then, she must have it on an arm.

The second piece of sludge came flying—

Grimacing, she darted forward, closing out the angle between them rapidly, attempting to minimise the danger posed by more thrown objects.

The piece still barely missed her side as it went by, but in return, she was able to tackle her opponent and land a solid knee to her midriff as they both went down.

A further punch landed before her opponent smashed a smaller lump right into the side of her face—

"Nameless-fates-may-you-curse-her-with-blood-every-day-of-the-year!"

The screaming, incoherent stream of cursing that left her mouth under the impact made the air dim. It hurt so fate-thrashed much. Her ear was gone, half her face was burning. The strange ache that followed after it was-

-Yang. Poison. Pure fate-thrashed yang poison. Of all the things...

She stopped controlling herself and ripped at her opponent, pummelling the smaller woman into the ground as hard as she could. Grasping at the cloth covering her tore it away, prepared to punch her fully in the face as hard as she could… to reveal the fearful face of a young woman, her skin red and blotched from the same poison tormenting her.

The woman… girl screamed and tried to pull another lump—

In response, she ripped the rest of the cloth away as she smashed her back into the floor hard enough to make her opponent spit blood.

The girl staggered, squirmed free, but she thankfully managed to take her storage talisman in the process. The face that stared at her in the gloom was framed by familiar, messy blonde hair and azure eyes staring at her in befuddled terror and fear.

All she could manage to rasp out was: “Why the in the hell-cursed fates are you trying to kill me, Sis Ling.”

Lin Ling looked back at her with terrified eyes and croaked: “W-what… Who are you?”

“Kun Juni…?”