"…It is a common theme amongst those who are mortal to look at the sky and wonder what the final frontier of their existence is. Is it space? The eternal void between the stars? Or is it the void between their own ears that they fill with impossibilities about the void beyond the stars. Unfortunately I am here to tell you that you must look further still, for even upon arriving at that distant shore, you will be met with exactly the same question that led you there. ‘What else is there, and why has it brought me here, to this desolate place?’

The answer which so many seek. The reason why you have all enrolled on this course is really, stupidly simple.

Karma.

Karma is the lure and the web by which you are here. It is the glue which anchors you, which drives you to new heights and tears you down when you fly too close to the sun. If the Mana Tides of the Seven Fundamentals are the currency upon which the mortal realms are formed and the power of the very dimensions themselves the bridge between the Immortal and the Eternal, then Karma is the web and the weave that binds the Simple Masters of the lower dimensions to Esoteric Savants of the higher ones. Comprehension of its existential geometry is what separates the Great God from the True God, the True God from the Outer God and the Outer God from those who walked the first paths.

Karma is the wage by which the war on that highest stage is fought. Paid in and out, to bring in the new and see out the old. To excise the improper and exclude the darkness that seeps.

Some would tell you it is about good or bad, righteousness versus evil, but I can tell you this is their ignorance. Their lack of perspective. In its balance is nothing so facile as good and evil, right and wrong, light or dark, truth or untruth. All these things are malleable and subvertable if one has enough perspective. To this end, just consider what can and cannot be touched by {Unlimited Wish}. Even this mighty hammer of the supreme divines cannot do more than pluck weakly at the strings of Karma, giving tunes already written in its weave.

Karma is above all these things, behind them, beyond them and before them.

Karma is the cage which holds the whole acausal construct together.

Gods fear it, Ghosts flee from it, Tyrants are unmade by it, Despoilers are ruined by it and those who Defile are purified through it.

Forget this at your peril.

For if you do, it will bind you so firmly that you will never see its web even as it drags you down and strips you of everything you could ever be..."

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

~delivered by the Arch Magister of Amaltharia, Elaria Grey.

~ Kun Juni & Lin Ling – Mysterious Halls ~

Kun Juni made her way carefully along the walkway through what she presumed the steles had called the ‘High Halls Atrium’. In other circumstances, it would have been hard not to be overawed by the scale of the architecture and the workings around them. However, right at this moment appreciation for monumental rock carvings and a remarkable dedication to floral scrollwork was very much taking second place to paranoia for both of them. Lin Ling was moving ahead of her, checking very cautiously over the edges of the walkway in case there was another of the weird stone beetle things.

After their… encounter, neither had found themselves all that talkative once the initial shock had worn off. They had made some early attempts to see what was up here, driven by nervous adrenaline and a desire to do something, but after a few hours that had become unsustainable. There were a whole bunch of reasons that she didn't want to dwell on. So they had rested for about two days, she reckoned, huddled in the gloom of that octagonal space. Lin Ling had been in a particularly bad way for a lot of it. Particularly on the first day, after they had time in the unfortunate quiet to dwell on things.

The young woman, who she considered a good friend, had spent much of her time huddled up talking quietly to herself. Certainly, whatever had occurred between their separation, reunion and proper reunion, along with its means, had had a deep impact on her psyche. By the end of the second day, she was somewhat better. Both of them had been, as much through the remarkable power of mental self-denial and abuse of their mantras she suspected. But it hurt her in many ways that despite being over twice Lin Ling’s age she had no idea what she could say to the younger woman. She had been in the thrall of someone who had made a concerted effort to…

-Don’t go there, she admonished more concertedly to herself. There is a time and a place to worry about it, and it’s not here. Definitely not right now.

At least, by the end of the second day, she had found herself improving. The voices hadn’t really returned with any serious intent either. Lin Ling was at least sufficiently recovered for them to make some proper progress through the halls beyond the shaft that they were now traversing. The aforementioned ‘Atrium’ to the ‘High Halls’.

Those Halls, and this much larger one, were mostly vast and open spaces. Immense columns in the style of tree trunks supporting the roof and lots of carvings in the leaf and branch motif and flowers. It would probably look spectacular if lit up. Possibly an architectural wonder of an age was buried down here, but neither of them was willing to risk the chance of something hidden on the ceiling or in some crack or crevice deciding that they were prey.

And there were things down here. Those accursed beetles for starters. They were about the size of her fist. Like little black flat disks in her qi enhanced vision. If ignored or left unmolested were seemingly harmless. However, when surprised they emitted what appeared to be some kind of shockwave that attacked the soul directly. It was, in fact, possible to pick them up carefully if you had a really steady hand. Lin Ling had tried that, thinking one a weird qi stone, and then been startled to discover it was a beetle with legs and promptly thrown it away in case it was dangerous…

They had managed to get out of that hall with only some minor injury, thankfully. Nose bleeds and a terrible headache. Fortunately, the thing hadn’t followed them. It had taken about 10 minutes for it to settle down. They had seen more since then, now that both of them knew what to look for. Some as big as her head. She couldn’t see what they ate, but they just sat docilely, usually on the edges of things or just around corners. They definitely liked corners and door ledges, which meant that every doorway they went through, they had to check carefully first because they had small lips. And it would be a really stupid way to get badly injured by standing on one or accidentally knocking one off onto your head.

She was just about to ask Lin Ling how she was doing when there was a… ripple in the space all around them. It rolled through the hall and passed through them before she could even react, something whispering within it, tugging at the edges of her consciousness before it was suppressed by the gloom.

Not even pain, just utter disorientation and a feeling like the hall had flipped on its axis several times in a single second. She wasn’t sure how long it was before she managed to recover her sensibilities. At which point pain did finally intrude cruelly once again. Her mind felt like someone had shoved spikes in it. Her face was lying in something wet. She pushed herself up and felt warmth running across her neck, face, breasts even as the twisting pain in her chest and throat subsided. Her qi vision was muted and woozy. Her mouth tasted of wet salt.

Blood. She stared at her hands in the gloom. Distorted as her vision was, she could see they were covered in blood. Looking at the ground, it finally registered that she had vomited up what had to be half a bucket of blood. Her mantra was already healing the damage dealt, but her arms and legs were still shaking faintly under the shock.

Ahead of her, Lin Ling was collapsed just like her, twitching slightly. She struggled over to the other girl, fighting the numbness. She was still breathing, thankfully but blood was bubbling out of her mouth and she was also bleeding from her eyes, ears, and nose. Fighting inaction she rolled her friend over and compressed her stomach. With a sobbing gurgle, Lin Ling vomited out a disturbing amount of blood.

-Really, the mantra was doing sterling work in keeping her functioning right now, a voice in her head added. Her own, thankfully.

Fighting her own symptoms, she rolled Lin Ling over and fumbled a medicine pill in her mouth. The younger woman just continued to twitch and didn’t swallow. With a grimace, she took the pill back, crushed it up and shoved it into Lin Ling’s mouth once more, holding her friend’s nose until reflex made her gulp. She ate her own medicine pill immediately after, feeling it burn all the way down before it took effect.

Only now investigating her own body’s condition, as best she was able, she shuddered. Whatever it was, had nearly fused her meridians!

-Fused meridians, massive disorientation, vomiting blood, feeling of having spikes run through your bones, temperature dissociation. She ran through the rapid symptoms and felt her mouth go dry.

-Soul setting mushrooms? Shit. Shit. Fate-thrashed nameless thieving fates. The ripple had carried their spores somehow?

-Not quite, stop panicking and think again, a saner part of her reassured her.

Taking a deeper breath, she thought about the symptoms again.

-Secondary exposure. Not spores, just nascent intent? Swept through the halls with… whatever that was.

She stared around in the darkness. The last residues of her panicked use of her qi vision making her face feel like the inside of her skull was being scraped with knives.

-With her meridians damaged so badly and her… her…

Grasping for thoughts, or continuous thought as she fought the after-effects, she cursed inarticulately for a few moments even as she watched Lin Ling’s breathing normalise.

-She… my… soul… couldn’t...

She clapped her hands against her temples and hissed in frustration, directing her mantra more emphatically.

She couldn’t feel her soul properly at this realm...

She. could. not. feel. her. soul... properly. at. this. realm.

The thoughts stabilised and everything was back to normal, as far as she was able to perceive at least.

Understanding… knowledge that had deserted her before was there again. While feeling the first vestiges of her ‘soul’ energy required breaking through to Mantra Seed or Golden Core, medical knowledge from the Hunter Pavilion told her that the nebulous headache and blurry feeling was the damage done there.

With her meridians still a mutable smear in her body, there was no way she was trying to put qi through her ocular meridians again. That she hadn’t done irreparable damage in her panic to get to Lin Ling was already a stroke of heaven blessed good fortune.

-And there you thought things couldn’t get worse, she muttered in her own head.

-We’re blind, on a raised walkway, in a huge hall with fates only know what, with maybe spore clouds of a bunch of terrible mushrooms drifting at random...

Suddenly she wanted the dark and the sludge things back.

There was a blur, something… fuzzy twisted in her otherwise pitch dark view of the world and cold pain started to seep through her chest and up her neck. She tensed, expecting a second wave. Instead, she realised two things; She really had inhaled a bunch of soul setting spores, and there was light in the hall.

Ignoring the quiet ephemeral light for the moment, she focused aggressively on trying to see how bad the poisoning was. Thankfully, she had only been exposed to just over a dozen spores. Her mantra surrounded and oppressed them one after another. It was actually an advantage that her meridians were so heavily injured. The spores were mired in the ruin of her throat and the top of her lungs, slowly influencing flesh rather than having been inhaled straight into her external meridian system via her lungs. When the last spore was annihilated, burned out of her body directly by vital qi from her bones under the influence of her mantra, she took a bit of the few scraps of cloth she had and bound it tightly around her mouth and nose. Their spores were mercifully bigger than the weave of the luss fibre cloth.

As her eyes recovered and she adjusted to the new reality, the light turned out to be nothing overtly threatening. She could now see lines of gentle light running in a fuzzy manner down the sides of the walkway. She looked around for a few moments before pain and disorientation overwhelmed her again. Fighting down annoyance, she fumbled another medicine pill, sipping some water with it, only to be betrayed by her ruined internal organs, half vomiting it back up. Wincing, she chewed it, which was suboptimal, and fought the gag reflex as she forced herself to swallow it, eventually relying on her mantra to overwhelm her body's rebelling instincts. Her vision swam and a faint itchy warmth started to flow through her core. Eventually, however, her body’s core functions recovered enough so that she could mostly see without bleeding from her eyes and had enough motor control to not fall off anything to her probable death.

No longer hampered to quite the same extent, she once again took in her surroundings. The dim light flowing from and through the walkway edges gave enough radiance that she could see the extent of the hall in a fuzzy fashion. It was bigger than she had thought.

-And a lot prettier. Revise your estimation, this isn’t simply an architectural wonder, this whole place is like a work of art. Her mental voice cut in a bit more prominently.

There was a groan and a hacking cough as Lin Ling resurfaced from her short healing coma, brought on by the pill she had fed her.

“What. The. Actual. Fate-soiled. Ever-cursed…” She croaked out.

“If I didn’t know that this place was probably… definitely a death trap, I’d think we sold a realm plane in a past life,” Juni croaked back in reply.

“I feel like utter shit.” Lin Ling groaned.

“We got caught on the vestigial edges of an eruption of soul setting spores. We were lucky,” she explained.

“… Oh.”

There was a long pause. “… Monkeyshit.”

“Your eyes okay?” she asked.

“Yeah...I... maybe not. You see weird fuzzy light?” Lin Ling looked about, her concern very visible on her face even with her own compromised vision.

“Yes, there is now light,” she said in as comforting and supportive a tone as she could.

She did not need her friend to think she was going even more crazy right now.

Lin Ling shook her head a few times then got a pill from her storage talisman…

“Oh... I had those stolen as well,” her voice sounded a bit weird as she stared into nothing for a moment, still holding the talisman.

She sighed softly and gave her one of her own dwindling supply of Golden Core Grade ‘Body Mending’ Dan. Lin Ling took it without comment and crunched it up in her mouth, shuddering at the vile taste.

They were going to run out of them soon if this kind of fate-thrashed monkey balls kept happening.

-We really need to get out of here, her mental voice added.

“We go back?” Lin Ling eventually asked.

-Good question, she thought, but kept that to herself.

Turning around to look back the way they had come, the light behind them flowed up the wall and made a large, glowing and ominously familiar symbol. It was the symbol she now associated with ‘door locked, try harder’. The opening they had entered the hall through was now a solid wall with a massive faintly shimmering glyph on it.

“May a monkey run up and slap me with its balls,” was all she could manage to curse.

“What?” Lin Ling’s vision obviously wasn’t fully back yet. She sounded nervous.

Juni considered she probably wouldn’t appreciate a bad news/even worse news attempt at levity and just told her straight.

“The door behind us is sealed shut.”

“Oh….” Lin Ling was silent for a good twenty seconds before she just echoed her reaction with a slightly hopeless tone.

“Monkey balls.”

…

They sat there in silence for a good ten minutes before either of them felt recovered enough, or confident enough in their surroundings, to advance onwards. Much to her relief, there was no sign of any remnant spores in the area. They were quite dense, and they were on the second layer of the hall, so presumably they had all dropped downwards. Peering over the edge of the walkway that led across the upper level, she saw light glimmering across the gloom below them. The pillars supporting the ceiling rose like glittering trees to either side. Misty in the gloom. The hall was easily four hundred meters across and two hundred high.

Now the way was helpfully lit, it took them a few minutes of walking to get out of the ‘Atrium’ and into a long, upwardly sloping tunnel that a stele helpfully proclaimed led to the ‘Central High Halls’. The confines of the tunnel helped a bit with her vision issues. Despite earlier promise, her distance vision still hadn’t fully recovered. Nor had her ability to focus clearly on stuff right in front of her for that matter, forcing her to not focus on anything as she walked. Forgetting made her world close in rapidly and she was left with a headache-inducing haze for several moments. Turning her head too fast also got her nasty cases of double vision.

Within the tunnel, their progress was only lit by two strips of lighting that ran along the middle of the floor and ceiling. In the dimly lit gloom, it was possible to make out alcoves that might have been more robust lighting, set with strange crystal and faceted to enhance dispersal. For all that the tunnel was without difficulty, their progress was still painfully slow as they stumbled along. She was even warier of the beetles and other such things now. The few she saw all hovered just outside the edges of lights. Hidden in the deeper darkness of cast shadow.

The next hall, as far as she could make out, was in the form of a giant cross. The four directions all had doorways that were open, or at the very least lacking in the huge seals that closed off the way back. Lin Ling stumbled along beside her, still muttering darkly to herself. She occasionally found herself half-listening to the younger girl’s inner monologue that wasn’t quite as inner as she perhaps intended. She still seemed to be trying to piece back together the shards of the last few days.

Stood in the middle, it was almost like being in a dimly lit primeval forest. As her vision gradually recovered she was better able to discern that not all the motif patterns were lighting. There was also a subtle variation between walls, floors and ceiling. Floors were greenish or red, ceilings were blueish. Walls and columns were usually a swirling mix of blue and gold. Presumably, there were multiple stages of activation.

“What way do you want to try first?” she asked Lin Ling.

“Any way I guess,” was all she got in response.

-How useful, she sighed inwardly.

After some consideration, she made a very crude divination with some bits and pieces from her storage talisman. While the result could not be considered inspiring, it suggested that right was a ‘lucky’ direction, relative to the others she could pick.

However, on arrival at that exit to the grand hall, she was faced with the vexatious reality that the lighting didn’t extend into whatever was beyond. Without any form of darkvision, she was in no hurry at all to go blind into darkness.

-So much for divination down here, she castigated herself.

Traversing back to the left-hand exit, she was even more struck at the similarities between the great columns holding up the roof and some ancient primeval forest. Sadly she couldn’t focus that far away, so the upper reaches were still just a maze of misty, fuzzy, wobbling effervescence in the dim light. The floor, on the other hand, she was starting to be able to make out, and it was beautiful. Inlay of blue, white, green and even black marble ran beneath her feet, arranged in sweeping patterns to resemble waves or clouds. They swirled up the columns, blurring into the gloom and the lines of the ancient fluting before vanishing into darkness. Slowly, she was struck with a peculiar and awing thought. Was it possible that this wasn’t a cavern, but a space hewn fully from the solid mass of the bedrock?

“Well, at least this one is lit?” Lin Ling rasped, as they stood in the left-hand doorway.

“Yeah, the last one wasn’t. Sorry for not saying, your vision still not right?” she could only apologise for not keeping the other girl informed.

“It’s getting better... It was… hurt somehow before I think as well somehow,” Lin Ling whispered, massaging her temples. She had been doing that a lot.

This hall, set out as the other ante-halls had been, was much smaller and only on a single level. To either side sealed doorways spoke of other connections, forever closed off to them. Looking at the fuzzy light coalescing ahead of her, her heart also started to sink.

Arriving at the end of the hall, her worst fears were confirmed as they found themselves stood staring at a shimmering golden sigil the size of a small house.

“Monkeyshit… it’s also sealed.”

“Fates-cursed-nameless-scourge!” was all she got in reply.

“Quite,” She agreed softly.

…

An hour later they were stood back at the original right-hand passage, pondering the gloom of the passage beyond. The divination turned out to be right, as both of the other passages out of the grand hall had been sealed off one hall beyond.

“I wonder why this passage is dark,” she mused out loud.

“I wish you would stop talking to yourself,” Lin Ling grumbled from where she was sat nearby.

She quashed a momentary burst of annoyance. The only reason she was doing so was to keep the other girl in the loop after she had complained several times of not being consulted. They needed to take a break anyway, after the effort of walking so much so soon after being so badly injured.

With that in mind, she left Lin Ling sat against the last column and investigated the doorway more closely. It was only when she risked going a few meters into the gloom that she found why the corridor was so dark. Much like the ruined stele, something had ripped out a bunch of the motifs, leaving scarred lines, hidden expertly on the edge of darkness. Unlike back in the caverns, whatever had done this had been able to cut through those black crystal threads as well, leaving them twisted like lethal knives sticking centimetres out of the stone surface.

Curious, she noticed that there was also some present on the floor, remnants presumably of the vandalism. Picking a piece up and turning it over in her hands, it was smooth and not black, but rather dark green.

“We could try putting it back together?” Lin Ling said from beside her.

It took a supreme effort not to physically climb into the air or scream. She was sure she flinched visibly before quelling her surprise.

“How do you plan to do that?” she asked, trying not to sound condescending or vexed.

“Mmmm…” Lin Ling stared at the break, then grabbed a pot of the blood from her storage talisman.

She watched as the younger girl decanted a bit of the lethal liquid into one of the bowls and then, taking a bit of normal cloth, tied the bowl in place under one set of the distended crystal threads. To her surprise, after a few moments, the blood started to glimmer and smoke as whatever energy was flowing through the walls found a conduit to pass. Moments later, the motif on the side wall of the tunnel lit up like a tiny series of threads unspooling into the darkness.

“It probably won’t last long, so we should walk quickly,” Lin Ling added, turning to limp off down the tunnel as if she wasn’t even there.

Left standing there for a few seconds, she just exhaled softly.

-Don’t get annoyed, the poor girl has suffered a lot. Probably more than you have.

-Probably, an insidious little voice whispered, making her close her eyes for a moment and set her mantra off after it like a pack of dogs.

After a quick check to see that Lin Ling’s re-found competence hadn’t been matched by something spectacular like leaving stuff behind, she made her way after her friend.

The tunnel itself was much the same as the last. Just a lot longer. Along the way she noticed a few dead beetles, their carapaces glowing faintly with spider webs of purplish lines that had their own eerie inner luminescence. Soul setting fungi spores. At least there were none in the wider environment that she could detect. More concerning was Lin Ling not giving any regard to them at all.

-What if she is still being influenced by that youth somehow, a voice in her head muttered.

She was about to grasp for her mantra, before realising that it was her own third thoughts intruding and that they had a rather valid point. If she wanted to be that paranoid.

-You should be. Her mind added of its own accord.

Thankfully the light didn’t fade out halfway along and leave them in debilitating darkness. Eventually, the tunnel opened out into a broad room that was staggered across three octagonal levels. It was also lit under its own impetus. In its familiar aspects, it mirrored the room at the top of the shaft they had entered these halls by. It was just three times the size.

“Well this is more promising, it’s like the one we came up through,” she said, standing beside Lin Ling.

“En,” the younger woman grunted, looking lethargic again.

“Shall we stop here and take a look around?” she tried not to sound like she was chivvying Lin Ling along, but the idea of unconstrained wandering was making her nervous.

“There’s a chance that there are other ways out through the far side, even if...” her gaze travelled to the wall on her right.

The door exit there was sealed. Properly sealed. The stone almost looked fused, like it had collapsed inwards somehow and then been melted and reformed to form one unified access where there was previously a door.

“Even if the main one is sealed…” even to her own ears her voice sounded unconvincing.

“Yeah. Sure,” Lin Ling sighed.

She glanced sideways at the younger woman. In the gloom, her expression wasn’t really readable, but the manner she was getting from her right now was… shrunken. It wouldn’t be good if she withdrew in on herself. She still had no real grasp of the extent of the other girl's psyche break either.

To distract herself, she looked around the hall. There were stairs down, illuminated well enough that she thought she could make it without an embarrassing tumble. Heading in that direction she had to pause, however, because Lin Ling made no move to follow her. Sighing softly, she walked back and took the other girl by the arm and led her directly.

When they stood on the floor level they both stared at the area between the shaft and the stele. There was a body collapsed there. A sword slammed into the floor. The body was very still and slumped down.

It was…jarring to see another person there. Even one that was presumably long dead. Walking over to it, she found that the condition was really quite good, not that that necessarily meant much. It held an unsettling aura of yin energy and not quite… death. It was also oddly familiar.

She stared at it for a few moments, but nothing came to mind. It didn’t help that her memory was a bit fuzzy still, a lingering influence from the soul strain and her close brush with the soul setting spores.

-Still no sign of where those came from, her mind chipped in.

That was indeed still worrying her. Worrying her a lot, in fact. The last thing they needed to do right now was stumble into a hall full of them. As much to distract herself from that, she crouched and, after waiting for her vision to stabilise, considered the corpse. It was a youth or at least youthful-looking. After some consideration and careful investigation in case, there were soul setting spores or some other exotic mushroom remnant on him, she reached out and touched it cautiously. It was icy cold, so cold she nearly froze her fingers on his flesh.

-Soul setting poison?

Considering the symptoms carefully, it did indeed seem to be affected by the same thing that had nearly doomed them. A corpse being affected after the fact by soul setting spores was… unusual, but not impossible.

“It’s also poisoned like us?” Lin Ling who was sat nearby observed

“Yeah...” she nodded.

“Does it have a storage ring?” Lin Ling frowned.

She glanced at the other girl, frowning, before turning her attention back to the corpse.

A quick search of the body recovered a jade talisman that looked similar to the ones they carried.

-Was this a Herb Hunter or a Beast Cadre elite who made their way in here at some point?

The talisman had no soul seal on it, so it was easy to open. She emptied the contents out and stared. They were familiar... Really familiar. She opened her own talisman and looked at the water jars, the pill jars; the style, the decoration, the designs were all similar to hers and Lin Ling’s. There were two other things in there. One was a jade script. She looked at it and saw it was a list of names. None of which she recognised. She pushed a bit of qi into it and…

When she awoke she was lying on the floor, shivering. She realised she could see just fine. The fuzziness that had been lingering in what she was certain was her soul had vanished and the whole area for metres around her was bathed in a gentle, almost holy light radiating from the talisman in her hand.

‘Ancestral Memorial Talisman.’

The three words surfaced in her head as she focused on it.

Somebody was shaking her, really quite hard… and… shouting? She collected her thoughts and realised it was Lin ling.

“BY THE CELESTIAL MOTHER OF THE WEST, DON’T YOU DIE ON ME NOW JUNI! DON’T YOU DARE LEAVE ME ALONE DOWN HERE!”

Coughing, she managed to stop the other girl shaking her like a dust rug and sat up. The other girl almost collapsed on top of her, hugging her and sobbing.

She looked again at the tablet in her hand. It was indeed an Ancestral Memorial Talisman. Her father held their clan’s one. It had some mild restorative effects, but nothing on this level. This was practically a sacred object. The level of faith and fortune associated with it was frankly astonishing. She turned to the corpse beside her once more, pondering.

-It was also poisoned with the soul setting?

Without really thinking about what she was doing, she pushed the talisman into the hand of the corpse and channelled a tiny bit more qi into it. It just seemed the right thing to do somehow.

Before her eyes, the icy cold dwindled away. The rigidity of the corpse vanished, and it flopped to the ground, blood dribbling from its orifices.

“Err…” Lin Ling had recovered enough to notice how odd that was.

-Flowing blood? From a corpse? Not possible. Her mind denied it even as reality blithely showed her that her denial was pointless.

“It has a pulse,” Lin Ling supplied.

She looked at her, askance. Really, she was all over the place at the moment.

Not really doubting Lin Ling, she still checked anyway. It did indeed have a very slow heartbeat.

In trying to roll him over, she noted, somewhat to her surprise, that they were still holding tightly to the hilt of the sword. Frowning she made to move—

-Bad. Don’t do it, very dangerous.

The instinctual warning pulsed through her mind from somewhere, making her pause at the last moment. She stared again at the sword which really was quite plain, now she considered it properly, and in an odd style.

“…”

She could see nothing overtly wrong, but…

“The sword is an artefact of the people who built this place, probably,” Lin Ling’s voice cut through her thought process.

“How do you know that?” she continued to stare at it.

It looked like a Jian, but it was too large. The hilt was wider and flatter than a Jian as well.

“Remember I told you about that remnant with the living quarters? Well, it had –a lot– of carvings, and I… found… something…” she trailed off looking confused.

“Err… it was in the carvings probably, I saw weapons that looked like that being wielded by soldiers or something,” she finished a bit lamely.

“Anyway. I’m almost certain it’s of this place,” Lin Ling reiterated.

Something in the certainty of her friend’s voice finally put her thoughts in order and she shuddered. Randomly picking up artefacts lost in this fates forsaken darkness, what had she been thinking. Even if it wasn’t from here, it was clearly this person’s treasure weapon. Certainly, it would have some kind of protection.

“Well, in that case, help me out here,” she said, shaking off the ill thoughts.

“Why? It’s just a corpse, isn’t it, are we going to take it back or something,” Lin Ling asked?

She turned to stare at the other girl.

“You just said it had a pulse... and checked it? Are you okay?”

“I… uh...” Lin Ling frowned, looking perplexed.

She turned back to the corpse and stared at it. Of course, it was a corpse. How stupid, she was imagining corpses having heartbeats now…

“Why are you bleeding?” Lin Ling asked her after a moment.

She looked down at her hands, at the blood… and then checked herself.

“I’m not bleeding,” she frowned.

Belatedly she checked the body again and noted the blood running from its eyes and nose and mouth.

-Corpses don’t bleed, certainly not ones riddled with the effects of soul setting fungus, her mind whispered.

She was really going to have to get a grasp on that soon.

“Corpses don’t bleed.” She said woodenly.

Lin Ling frowned and reached out to take its pulse. “No, they do not..."

“It even has a pulse!" Lin Ling snapped abruptly, glaring across at her. "Why were you saying it was a corpse? Are you damaged in the head!?”

She opened and shut her mouth, before standing up and looking away, into the darkness. It was a struggle not to swear, even though something was telling her that there was a bunch of problems here.

A pill bottle clattered by her foot.

-Had it tumbled there when she was investigating the corpse?

-WHAT CORPSE!

-IT’S CLEARLY NOT A CORPSE!

-Are you mad, you just found out that…?

A bunch of voices in her head all piped up at once, making her close her eyes and exhale slowly.

As much to distract herself from their yammering, she picked the bottle up and turned it over in her hand. The name on the outside said ‘Mortal Reformation Pill’.

“Erm, isn’t this a really good pill?” she muttered out loud.

It was a proper panacea medicine. You could buy it or get it made in Blue Water City if you had enough money, but it cost either a small fortune or a literal tonne of high-grade herbs. Herbs you would probably have to supply yourself. She recalled dimly that Old Ling had given one out once as a reward for a particularly arduous body recovery task about two years ago… who... She couldn’t recall who that was. Which was odd.

She turned to Lin Ling. “Who got the 'Mortal Reformation Pill' from Old Ling two years back?”

“That thing? Why do you ask? Err... Who was there? Wouldn’t have been Arai... or Sana… I didn’t... You didn’t. Dun Mu wasn’t high enough rank…” Lin Ling frowned.

“Shi Mu hadn’t returned by that point,” she counted them off on her hand. “Ren Kalis didn’t want to take the request, said it was too dangerous… so why…”

“Uhhhh…”

“Hummm… that’s really fate-thrashed odd,” she counted them off on her hands again.

Lin Ling frowned and held up the pill bottle, turning it over. “It was definitely awarded... right? This has our Hunter Pavilion seal on the bottom?”

She took the pill bottle back and flipped it over. It did indeed have the seal on the bottom of the bottle showing it had come out of Old Ling’s special stash.

Handing it back to Lin Ling, who had started looking through the other pile of pill bottles, she turned her attention back to the body. It took a bit of effort, but she was able to lift it up without messing with the sword.

Her first impression was of a youth a bit older than them, with dark hair and a weather-beaten complexion. She checked his eyes. They were dilated and filming over slightly. She licked a finger and held it under the body’s nose. No breath. It was literally a breath from death? Preserved somehow by the sword or a weird side effect of the soul setting poison?

She examined the body again with a more speculative eye. Its physical condition was terrible. She wasn’t the best among their group of eight at this kind of thing, but… eight?

-Were there eight?

She rattled off the names of the high-rank elite hunters from West Flower Picking Town and came up with seven; Herself, Jun Arai, Jun Sana, Lin Ling, Dun Mu, Dun Shi, Ren Kalis…

She was sure there was a last name on that list. Almost as an afterthought, she even dragged on her mantra, hoping it might make some difference. Even then something was still fogging her mind slightly as she tried to focus on recalling the last name.

“I wonder who Han Shu is?” Lin Ling mused.

“Han Shu? No idea,” she replied without thinking... “Why?”

“It’s branded on the pill,” Lin Ling held up the dull red, marble-sized pill. “The pill also bears the personal mark of the second generation headmaster of the Blue Gate School on it. See here.”

She held it out for Juni to look at the seal incorporated into the pill.

They both turned to look at the body. “Is this some old monster from the last generation of the Blue Gate School? Lost down here for thousands of years…” Lin Ling whispered.

“Uhuh.” She stared at the other girl. Now Lin Ling was doing it again. First, she had kept thinking it was a corpse, now she was forgetting… other… odd...

She really focused on the moment. Everything felt sluggish in her head. As if something was telling her to stop resisting, that it didn’t matter, to just let it go.

“Preserved on the point of death for that long…. What kind of realm is that…?” Lin Ling whispered, sounding faintly awed.

Shaking her head, she forced that assumption out of her mind and looked at the body again. It was…

The other point of familiarity that had been nagging at her, why she assumed it was someone from the Hunter Pavilion in fact, that resurfaced to help her tormented thought processes.

“This Han Shu is wearing luss fibre undergarments. In the Blue Water City Hunter Bureau pattern. He was really well geared for down here…”

She looked at the pill in Lin Ling’s hand. Then back at the corpse and came to a decision.

Before Lin Ling could react she plucked the pill from her hand and opened the body’s mouth, pushing it inside and manually working the jaw which didn’t resist. Frowning, she pulled her water jar out and scooped a handful of water into its mouth, holding his nose and mouth shut. He didn’t swallow, but that didn’t matter. She was sort of aware of how this kind of miraculous pill worked and this should be enough.

“What on earth did you do that for?” Lin Ling gawped.

“If he’s not dead, the pill will work on him,” she pointed out.

“But…” the other girl was still opening and shutting her mouth.

“It was his anyway, for some reason he wasn’t able to use it. Whoever he is, be it some old monster, or some expert from our pavilion, we need to get out of here, and someone who managed to get in here is probably our best bet.”

“Uhuh… did you just forget what happened with… that… Youth?” Lin Ling stared at her in horror.

“Well…” she frowned, suddenly realising her friend might have a point.

-You’re forgetting about what that pill does. Why it’s considered a forbidden pill, her mind whispered.

“…”

“But…” Lin Ling paused as if considering something… “But doesn’t a Mortal Reformation Pill, literally, reform your mortality? Like… it burns your entire cultivation base to heal you?”

She stared at Lin Ling like she was an alien species just crawled out of an outsider rift.

“Monkey balls.”

~ ??? –??? ~

He wasn’t sure what death was like as he looked around, but he was fairly sure that this was maybe not it. He was drifting… his last moments had been...

Odd... that was the only way to consider them, really. He tried to look around.

He stood on a flat plane…

He was drifting….

Everything felt very… not empty… distant. It was hard to focus, either on himself or on anything much actually.

He tried to focus on where he was, but it slipped away.

And away…

And away…

Some critical part of him seemed to be slipping away, growing dimmer with every passing breath.

-Except I am not breathing, a stray coherent thought whispered.

There was a creeping cold darkness as well, not inside him but around him. Slowly flowing. He tried to move away from it but it seemed to be linked to him.

There was also a warm dark. It wasn’t anywhere near as big, but it was latched firmly to his chest, as if it was sat on top of him, protecting his heart.

The cold darkness was slowly rising around him now.

He struggled harder against it…

He was slowly sinking into the plain now.

No… the plain was slowly rising up to subsume him?

The warmth was still there, holding onto his chest somehow, anchoring him in place even as the cold slid up past his chest… it was inexorable, timeless…

It might have been seconds or minutes, hours… days… years….?

Even though it had nearly dragged him under, the warm darkness in his heart was still pushing back in some intangible way. It almost felt like they were having an argument outside of his hearing… or perception? Intentions from it periodically flickered through to him though, and those were… disturbing.

-Shouldn’t I be more disturbed by this whole experience? He told himself.

Even as he thought it, the cold darkness froze that thought, shattering it, devouring it, pulling it away, as if it was not a thing he should have. It felt… Inexorable, unforgiving… and impartial. A price had to be paid.

-A price for what? Another stray thought was frozen, smashed and subsumed leaving only a lingering question in his mind.

-Something about silver? Starfire… beautiful starfire?

The cold darkness intensified abruptly and nearly pulled him under as he foundered on its surface.

The warm darkness that was no longer shrinking seemed to offer a counter rebuttal somehow. It also felt oddly impartial but seemed to argue that the price was balanced somehow.

The cold rejected this idea. The price was absolute. And this was its place. The warm shadow pointed out that actually, this wasn’t really its place. It did it in such a sweet way as well, that the hidden depth in there almost went past unnoticed.

By comparison, the cold dark was also immense, but its immensity was different somehow.

His sense of state started to drift again.

The complex exchange went on as the darknesses made weird counter-arguments that failed to really connect with any frame of reference he could envisage as he slipped in and out of the all-encompassing cold darkness.

Dimly there was a point in the darkness…

A… not a shadow.

A grain of silver?

It drifted oddly in front of him as if seeking something. Part of him wanted to reach out and grasp it, but at the same time, it felt like there was an endless chasm between it and him.

The cold darkness rose more. It was vexed now somehow? This was not the way the ‘rules’ went somehow?

More silver specks appeared, then seemed to abruptly dim.

The warm darkness around his heart… was he a he? It no longer knew.

It wasn’t even sure what it was.

The warm darkness blurred somehow and got angry.

It also implied something about rules which made the cold darkness push back again.

For a split second, it thought it was totally subsumed and the warm darkness would be pushed out even as a silver strand connecting out of the infinite void touched its forehead.

~ Han Shu – Mysterious Caverns ~

Its eyes snapped open. There was a yawning sense of dissociation while it came to terms with….

-It had died?

-It…? He…? Something… there was something about… it slipped away as if it had never been.

He stared at the ceiling?

-Was he in a box, why was the ceiling so weirdly tilted?

Reality fully settled in.

-No… he was looking at the... opposite of ceiling…? The floor? It was a very pretty floor, made with marble and everything.

-Where am I?

“Ahhh... He doesn’t seem to be getting any better after he did that half scream sighing thing…?” a female voice said.

-Err…. he was confused and thought for a second.

His body felt... numb... wobbly even, and there was a faint warmth suffusing it. It was oddly familiar, but he couldn’t connect to it. There was something heavy in his chest….

“Huaaaaaaa,” he remembered to breathe and the numbness and the wobbly feeling disappeared within a few painful deep breaths.

He lifted his head, which felt like a lead ball, and looked around. Two young women were beside him, visible in the gloom. One had been holding him up, it seemed. The other… had been pushing on his core acupuncture points? They were… familiar, but for some reason, one was nearly naked and the other wasn’t much better. Barely wearing a bunch of luss cloth sheets?

He shook his head slightly and asked again, this time remembering to speak out loud. “Who am I?”

“Ha-Han… Shu?” the nearest girl who was almost naked apart from some ragged undergarments, spoke haltingly.

She was very pretty, he found himself thinking in a kind of blurry way.

The brown-haired woman stumbled back, holding her head and looking as if she was punched, to sit down hard a few paces away.

The other one, with sandy blonde hair, also looked befuddled.

“You… you’re alive?” the blonde one wearing the luss cloth asked, looking confused… then more worryingly added. “You’re not some kind of evil primordial shadow puppet?”

‘Evil primordial shadows’ seemed kind of familiar to him somehow, which was also worrying on a moment’s reflection. He tried to think back to events before he… well before this.

He had been exploring caverns?

“…”

And why was his hand warm?

Han Shu, for he was certain that was, in fact, his name, looked down and saw that his left hand was holding a faintly glimmering holy talisman.

A voice murmured in his mind and a scene from somewhere resurfaced…

— The old ghost bowed down. “Please take our names from this place and light an incense for each of us. Write our names upon a stone… place it in a quiet field someplace… where the common folk pass by.”—

-The Ancestral Memorial Talisman!

Other memories started to well up around the recovery of that single memory.

—He had found the remnant.

A tower—

—There had been a... he looked at the sword he still held onto with his right hand.

There had been the old ghost and the sword—

The memories snapped back into clarity suddenly, like building blocks falling into place.

-Seeking.

-Explore.

-Vestiges.

-Memory.

-Sorrow.

-Sword.

-Deep Darkness.

-Hunger.

-Spiders.

-Running.

…

‘Try not to die, child.’

-Hair like starfire… and a declaration to fight to the end…

The words resurfaced from his mind like the land from morning mists. He had fought the spiders... The sword had done something? He had done something with the sword, and then there was darkness.

-Oh...

A final memory clicked into place. Find Kun Juni and Lin Ling. The fractured parts of his mind all finally reconnected and recomposed themselves. He found he had an enormous headache and darkness came back…

When he opened his eyes, he was lying on his back with two worried faces peering down at him.

“What happened?”

“I think he fainted?”

“Again!?”

“Well… I think I want to faint as well honestly… how come this is Han Shu…?”

“Well, it clearly is Han Shu”

“I can see that, you idiot! But why is he clearly ‘Han Shu’ now when he was Han Shu before?”

“Ahh, I dunno. It’s giving me a huge headache just trying to piece that one back together.”

“Err…” he asked carefully “Who are you two saviours?”

The very pretty, and rather naked one with matted brown hair frowned and said. “I’m Kun Juni”

The blonde-haired younger girl wrapped in luss cloth said. “Lin Ling.”

He tried to connect the faces with the faces in his memory… it kind of fit? However, in the dim light, the two faces looking down at him were aged somehow, as if they had experienced and endured the vicissitudes of life far beyond their years. Oddly, they weren’t particularly untidy, which he found weird because he was sure he looked horrible...

But…

He took a shallow breath because there really was no good way to ask this question, and it had been plaguing some nasty part of his subconscious for a few minutes now.

“Why are you naked?”

Kun Juni stared at him blankly as if considering some options by way of explanation before blandly offering. “Because some lizard puppet controlled by some unspeakable horror beyond physical understanding stole my clothes and all my other kit while in a weird dream.”

“…”

It was hard to even know where to start with that.

-Then again, you fought weird shadow spiders with a magic sword and saw a goddess who called out silver sand that swept everything away, so maybe it all balances out, his mind pointed out.

“Err…” he let go of the sword and sat up.

Both moved back. Flinched back, actually. They were both, he realised, skittish in the extreme. Especially Lin Ling.

The warmth in his body dimmed a bit. The talisman in his hand had also grown dim again. He shrugged off his robe top. It was pretty torn up at this point and he noticed missing a large chunk at his side. He winced at the size of the hole and tried not to think about that too much. There were a few other holes, but they weren’t that important.

Putting the over garment aside, he realised that his body was really stiff, like he had been asleep for far too long. Checking the wound on his side, he found it gone, with only a faint scar and discolouration to show for the size of the wound. The injury on his leg was completely gone as well. He drew on his qi and finally paused.

There was basically no qi in his body... he had used the Nascent Blood Burn Pill and somehow... survived.

He should have been left with a dantian that was equivalent at least to his Physical Foundation Realm. It dawned on him that there was no qi in his bones either, his flesh, blood and bones were still tempered, but he was totally depleted. His vital qi might as well not exist.

That dantian should have been at the early stages of Qi Refinement after it stabilised, yet it was as if it had never even...

-Suppression?

At the same time, points of information connected in his mind and he belatedly remembered that he had that third pill. The one he gotten from Old Ling as compensation for that mission and the crap that came with it. He reached for his talisman and noticed it was gone.

Looking around, he saw the contents of his storage talisman stacked nearby fairly neatly.

“Err…” he asked carefully. “The Mortal Reformation Pill?”

Both looked, at a word... shifty.

“Ahh… well,” Juni started to explain…

Lin Ling stepped in, cutting Juni off. “You were nearly dead and afflicted with soul setting poison, we...err…we thought you were some old ancestor initially. From the Blue Gate School… actually, we saw the maker's sign on the pill… so we fed it to you. IT SAVED YOUR LIFE! You-can’t-hold-that-against-us!” she finished in a rush.

It sounded like she was almost having an argument with herself, even as she spoke to him. It seemed she had had her fair share of ‘troubles’ too.

“Oh… Uh-huh.” he found he wasn’t sure really what to say.

The pill had been horribly valuable. It was possibly the single most expensive thing he had ever possessed. Then again, pills were there to be used. It was a guaranteed life, whether you were a mortal or an Immortal. It had done just that as well, saved his life against all the odds.

In the silence between the three of them, he considered that he had taken the Nascent Blood Burn Pill in the understanding that it would be a minor miracle if he actually survived. That pill’s whole purpose was to burn his mortal potential and convert it into raw qi power until there was nothing left to burn at which point he would either have died or been crippled, with the interesting side effect of being left with a dantian he wouldn’t have had before. It was a proper forbidden pill. Had he taken the Mortal Reformation Pill before that wore off it would have been disastrous. Old Ling had been quite explicit about that point. At best the conflicting energies of the two pills would have just made him explode.

“Oh well,” he murmured, staring at his healed injuries again.

On a certain level, it didn’t actually seem important in the face of still being alive. He was, he realised, oddly calm about the whole thing.

-That’s the shock, give it a few hours, his mind grumbled.

-Remember that time you killed that bandit?

He did- and didn’t thank his memory for bringing that up. Looking around at the lit-up hall, he found himself wondering how long he had been out for.

-Probably you don’t want to know. His mind added unhelpfully.

Seeing that both now looked rather worried, he shook his head and sighed.

“The pill isn’t important, thank you for saving me,” struggling around against the stiffness he bowed to both of them three times, retreating into formality and such helped he guessed.

That obligation seen to, he pushed the outer robe towards Juni without specific comment. She looked at it for a moment before putting it on without saying anything. It went down to cover her thighs, although there were still some awkwardly revealing gaps, given the size of the wound opened up in his side. The other awkwardness there… he thought about some past events, firmly in the past, and sighed again. It wasn’t his place to comment directly, so he grasped for something neutral to resolve the awkward interaction in a way that wouldn’t make things difficult for either of them.

Fumbling with his talisman, cursing numb fingers, he added. “I think I have some spare trousers and shoes in my talisman.”

“Oh,” she nodded but didn’t move. “Thanks.”

It was actually Lin Ling who spoke up. “This is all very well, but do you mind explaining what exactly happened? How come you were here… near dead?”

He opened and closed his mouth a few times, looking from one to the other, and then back at the sword and talisman.

“…”

“That is… a rather long story...” was all he could find to say after several seconds.