"...The structure of worlds and dimensions is complex enough to have an entire library filled out concerning it. As such, condensing it into this single talk, such as I endeavour to do here, is always going to leave matters open. However, I shall endeavour to do my scholarly best by the topic and keep you all awake in the process.

There are three levels, usually: 'Lower Worlds', 'Middle Worlds' and 'Higher Worlds'.

Everyone knows this.

‘Lower Worlds’, also sometimes known as 'Mortal Worlds', are the most common... and the most constrained. Their energies are not any thinner than a 'Higher World', but the Principle that governs them can be tyrannical and almost impossible to shift.

‘Middle Worlds’, or 'Great Worlds', are elevated above them. These are lands with higher dimensional range, more malleable energies. Their base line can, most usefully, be considered in the scale of those worlds of the 'Martial Axial Regions' of the Omni-Causal Construct, wherein they are oft called ‘Immortal Worlds’. Alongside them come 'Throne Worlds', These are basically 'Great Worlds', but their Truth, rather than developing naturally, has been either fashioned or refined by artificial means. 'Mortal Worlds' elevated a dimensional step, to that of 'Great Worlds', are also considered under this umbrella.

The higher tier is separated into two informal layers. The lower one is the 'Supreme World', with which most of you will be familiar. These are to 'Great Worlds', as ‘Great Worlds' are to a ‘Mortal World'. They are far fewer in number, and cast long shadows, controlled as they are by Source Sovereigns, existences at the peak of the Venerate Step.

At the peak are the jewels of the crown of the Omni-causal Construct. The 'Treasure Worlds' – or realms. These are rare beyond compare – more precious even than the Regalia of the Divines. Each one contains within it an immutable representation of a fundamental concept of the Causal Construct. They are the pillars upon which the very reality of the pyramid of worlds is stacked and indeed the most famous are called 'The Seven Pillars', after the seven tenets of wisdom. They are also held by many, who should really know better, to be the template from which the Mortal Coil of the Omni-causal Construct is cast and recast in full.

What few know, is that above and beyond this... there also exist other places. Places of remarkable history and mystery. The 'Star Ocean', that ancient men called 'Abzu'. The 'Final Shore', to which all things eventually return. 'The Throne', 'The Silver Plain', 'Elysium', 'The Uncreated Place' and the 'Low Land' are all such domains.

It is of these Seven, and their relationship to the Seven Pillars that I will talk to you about today."

Introduction from ‘On the Order of The Realms’ – A talk to the Amaltharian Royal Academy

~By Maria Renhallan, with contributions from Aris Belmont.

~ Jun Arai – The Perilous Realm ~

Arai groaned and rubbed her temples as she sat on a rock by the frozen lakeshore. Various failed attempts at the arrays were scattered about, drawn on flat rocks, of which the lakeshore had a gratifyingly large amount. It made for a depressing and fraught tale, she could only think, as she reviewed her progress for what was now the seventh time. That progress wasn’t much either. At least not in the direction they dearly wanted, which was a means to alleviate their food issues while they continued to seek out or wait out an exit from this place.

At least she was now able to draw the thing without it doing nothing, or exploding in her face. That had been the first problem. Simply getting the shape right. Really, she should have expected that. It was one thing to be confident in understanding how to draw formations, but these were patently not formations, despite their obvious similarities.

“Uwaaaa,” with a wince she stood and stretched her legs a bit as they were starting to get stiff in the cold.

The theory behind them, once you got past that small issue of ‘how’ to draw them, which was as close to a physical manifestation of the old saying ‘it may sound simple but doing it isn’t easy’ as she had ever seen, was surprisingly simple. It was basically like an anchored formation in the outside world. Which was to say you created the formation core, and it became a fixed point that altered anything that interacted with it.

Sadly, that was where the easy stuff had ended.

Staring around, she resisted the urge to kick over a pot of pulped spirit herbs as she sorted back through the failed attempts in her head.

“Right… let’s see how this went,” she added out loud.

The whole thing was being recorded by her jade scrip, so she could review it later for further ideas. And also in case she blew herself up, though she was trying not to think about that too much.

“We tried mixing up the grade four and five yang herbs. That didn’t work.”

“High sympathetic resonance of catalyst materials is, in and of itself, not enough it seems.”

These attempts had been something of a dead end, and a painful waste of otherwise valuable herbs as well. She was the first to admit that neither was much good at actual alchemy. However, compounding was something both of them were good at, and their practical herb lore was well above average. So she had been initially quite optimistic that this would work, and they had had little issue finding what they thought they might need out of the wide array of collected herbs they still had.

“The reason why this expensive pot of concerningly toxic herb pulp refuses to work, is, I can only hypothesise, because my own qi reserves are utterly pathetic now.”

“On a related note. If anyone ever sees this other than the two of us, I again have to state that I find it preposterous that what may well kill us both here is not this mad endeavour, but the fact that my qi reserves were almost completely integrated before I ever stepped foot in here.”

She stared at the scrip, considering wiping that last comment, before just letting it pass. Somehow it was cathartic to just complain to the thing at times. Much better than wondering whether she should start inventing voices in her head to make herself feel better.

Giving the pot a final glare, she walked back past the pile of herbs and qi wood. Most were so high grade that they couldn’t even attempt to refine the qi in them.

“On another unrelated note. It appears that the suppression on everything else here, ourselves included, doesn’t, in fact, extend to the herbs here.”

She held up a nine-star grade herb, a ‘Solar Star Orchid’, for emphasis.

“This solar star orchid, while a nine-star grade herb, should have had its qi density repressed to Golden Core. That is a three-star grade. As you can see, if I bleed a portion of the sap from an ancillary stem, the phenomena—”

Pausing for dramatic effect, she held the herb up as a little corona of golden fire seeped down its stem.

“—is dense enough to strip the skin off of my hands if I am not careful.”

As far as accidental discoveries went, it was hardly an unsurprising one. Their respect for the problematic nature of many of these herbs that had survived two attempts by this place at inadvertent culling was really very high. Poking about at them pointlessly had not been high on the agenda, so it had gone entirely unremarked that these herbs, varying from Dao Seeking all the way up to Golden Immortal in qi quality, were unsuppressed.

“What is also interesting, is that just like us, they are also having their qi forcefully sapped away somehow. This is, however, happening at a much slower rate. I guess that’s because unlike us, they had some actual attainment in their foundation.”

She stared at the orchid before replacing it in its pot. If they ever decided to just end it all and be done, all either of them would have to do was eat one of these raw and that would be that. A sad thought indeed.

Shutting off the scrip for a bit, to save its capacity, she considered the rest of the pile of herbs. It was dwindling quite rapidly. Sana was sorting out more back at the rock shelter, but they would run out sooner rather than later if she didn’t manage to crack this, more problematic phase of making the arrays work in a way that wasn’t an uncontrolled explosion or turning the rock they were on to slag.

Checking her own condition, she sat down and started another round of meditation to slow her metabolism for a bit and try to force some artificial economy into her qi usage. Simply put, that meant using none at all or, because that was impossible, reducing the requirements of her body on her qi reserves for controlled bursts and then work in the times while it was bounding back. This problem, and reality of it, was one they had talked about a lot in the last weeks, particularly when there was nothing else to do.

It was something of a quirk of the way mantras behaved that focusing on negative emotions while cycling your qi could in fact slow your cultivation given the right mental impetus. Normally, this was not a desirable thing, by any measure. Yet now, it was the only tool at their disposal. To be wielded carefully within this kind of circumstance to slow her metabolism and make her body deliberately more disordered and less efficient.

The undeniable truth was simply that they were haemorrhaging qi at a slow, but gradually increasing rate. Part of this was due to the way their cultivation worked, and part of it seemed to be because the qi in their bodies was faintly out of sync, or maybe equilibrium, with their surroundings. Simply put; this place put pressure on their internalized qi and was forcing it out or leeching from their bodies somehow.

Normally, Physical Cultivators exchanged qi using their mantra. The mantra then used it to reinforce the body. The whole process was a bit like breathing. The mantra channelled the qi, circulated it into your body’s bones, then back out via your bloodstream, through your organs, muscles and so on. This was known as the ‘Containment Realm’. Slowly, over months you would exchange all the unrefined qi that was present in your body for refined qi and once you had condensed enough of that in your bones it would become a permanent core of vital qi.

This was why Physical cultivators at Containment Realm could live almost as long as some cultivators who were at Golden Core. What was important here, was that impurities from the process were lost via breathing, through the skin and via other bodily excretions, or just passed out of your body like a shadow exhalation of breath at the conclusion of each cycle.

When you reached the peak of this process and your bones were saturated, you broke through to ‘Physical Refinement’, which was a sort of intermediary point between Containment and Foundation. During this process, you no longer had to sit for hours each day using your mantra actively or stuff yourself on spirit food like a glutton. Instead, the mantra gained an element of its own agency and, using the core of vital qi you had built up, started converting qi on its own. This could be qi you acquired by any means, such as through food, breathing or just being in qi rich environments. Unlike before, it would also utilise and streamline that qi refinement process in a somewhat selective manner. In accordance with what your body needed, as best the mantra was able to meet it.

Using the mantra, physical exertion, stress and so on all sped up that process. At this stage, you could also reverse the process briefly to expel poisonous qi your body couldn’t refine. Some mantras, such as their own, could even do this somewhat passively.

Eventually, your flesh, organs and blood would reach capacity and you would enter ‘Physical Foundation’. At that point, your mantra would merge with your spirit root, or if you had no spirit root, condense as one directly and start the process of transforming that spirit root into a mantra seed. A process largely analogous to converting your dantian and spirit root into a golden core.

However here, their problem was that this place contained no qi that they could actually inhale with the mantra, and their body was slowly exhaling unsuitable qi constantly because the refinement process of existing qi in their body was unstoppable. Both of them were at Physical Foundation, and close to the peak at that.

Right now, their bodies were speeding up their metabolism to try to account for the lack of qi. A purely instinctual process, but eventually they would run out of a means to supplement that, and all the qi locked away in their bones would have been drawn from their organs, flesh and blood and so on. So her body would, eventually, become entirely depleted of refinable qi and they would suffer severe meridian shock at best.

This was being exacerbated by whatever was actively pushing qi, including their vital qi, out of their bodies in this place. Subsuming it and them into the place in the process. Once they ran out of qi they would either have to attempt to cross from Physical Foundation to Mantra Seed earlier and risk catastrophic failure or become catatonic while their body slowly refined on a perpetual deficit. Not death, but a state close to it in all likelihood. Under normal, outside conditions, this was still a risk, but the loss rate meant that even if you did nothing at all you would live for almost 400 years before your body exhausted its remaining vitality. In here, the pressure that had been ratcheting up slowly was now draining them at over 100 times quicker than in the outside world.

And they were still ‘mortal’. The lack of food and water would kill them through attrition long before they broke through and catalysed their Mantra Seed.

-In short? It was a Big Problem.

This was, she reflected glumly as she focused on controlling and slowing the flow of qi around her body and through her organs, why the sages and ancient elders all considered the ‘method’ a dead end. That was why they hypothesised that the method was fundamentally missing ‘something’. That the laws were less suppressed in Yin Eclipse than other laws was held as a lucky circumstance.

The true tragedy of their situation, though, was the devil in this little detail. ‘Breaking through to Mantra Seed’. This was one of the ‘secrets’ of Physical Cultivation. Something that couldn’t be taken, or pried at for whatever reason, unless you inherited that aspect and received the correct teachings.

Their mother had been one of her generation’s three inheritors for her clan. She had been well above Mantra Seed in terms of her Physical Cultivation, at Unity Physique, in fact – the Physical Cultivation equivalent of Dao Seeking. However, thanks to the machinations of her extended family, she had passed away when they were still just starting the process of Physical Refinement. The means to advance their mantra from Physical Foundation to Mantra Seed would have been passed down to them, should have been passed down to them, but it had been seized back by their Grand Uncle within the Ruan clan, taken by force the very day their mother died.

They had debated before if they could just abandon the mantra, pick one as Ling and Juni had from Old Ling in the Hunter Pavilion. Sir Oudeng, a benefactor of their mothers, had also claimed to know someone who could help, but that wasn’t much use now. However, it was a vestige of their mother. The thing she had almost certainly died for, and protected them with. Additionally it was, in every respect, a truly excellent physical mantra. It was also, she considered, an insurance of sorts.

While they held it, they were still potential ‘inheritors’ through their mother. The uncertainty surrounding that status and their father's swift actions after their mother's tragic early death had protected them from any egregious reprisals since then for not 'submitting' to their filial duty to their mother's clan upon her death. If they discarded it, however, they would likely be seized by the clan as soon as it became known, and treated as 'illegitimate' female heirs were in their mother’s culture.

Part of her wanted to believe in their father's strength there, but it was impossible not to be concerned that they would just be stolen away at that point. Then their fate would be miserable. Sold off as diplomatic chattel at best, or just killed outright if their life since then was found to have brought ‘shame’. Or perhaps they would die just because they were an inconvenient vestige of their parent's perceived transgression, or for refusing to do their 'filial duty' in the past and 'voluntarily' return when their brother was seized. Whatever their fate, those elders would simply hide behind the shield of ‘betraying the lineage’ or something equally hypocritical to avoid condemnation.

Nobody with the power to go against her mother's clan's status in Xah Liji city would likely care over the fate of two Physical Foundation girls.

-Did they even know someone with that strength in any event? she thought darkly

The dull negative thoughts swirled around for a while longer, making her qi sluggish as she hoped. A rather ingenious manipulation of 'Intent' in many respects. Also, on another level darkly funny that dwelling on the painful memories would actually be beneficial here. As it was, using them in this way almost bordered on the acts of ascetic self-masochism that Dharma Cultivators used when interrogating their mental state.

She completed her circuit and exhaled. There was barely any breath, so it only misted the air for a second before dispersing. Resolutely, she quashed the dark feelings and adjusted her mental state.

The icy mists of this place were particularly inauspicious. Especially on days like this, where the cloud closed in and the clear sky was only on the horizons.

Sighing softly, she put the jadework scrip aside. Almost three hours had passed in a blur, just watching the moments replay as she meditated. Reviewing what was on the slip again about the arrays and what Maria had shown regarding formations. Wondering if there was another way, somewhere, within all this information, while the negative thoughts regarding their current situation spooled in her mind. It was there, tantalizingly close, her instincts told her. Concealed in the words of those spoken discussions. But now they were up against a merciless clock, in a race against their own bodies and unforeseen circumstances, it was frustratingly hard to step back from the moment. Knowing what you had to do didn’t make it any easier.

It really didn’t help that the isolation, mist and emptiness of the snowy landscape was finally eating into them. Sana cried at night when she thought she was lost in meditation. She was sure she did as well in her own less constrained meditations – the ones that veered closer to nightmares as she walked the fine line between depressing her cultivation and courting a psyche deviation. Neither of them talked about it though. Some things simply didn’t require words, especially here in this icy hell.

Strange to think that the act of watching the others, be they echoes, trapped memories or the real occupants of this place had done almost as much to forestall the darkness as did the little glimpses of clear sky, or the harshest of self-discipline. Since that day, they had not returned, and the sunshine was rare now. Now, weeks later, the land shifted more with each day. The mists swirled, odd animals hooted and cried out in inexplicable places in their icy vale. The isolation was slowly becoming another kind of creeping prison.

She sat there watching the mists flow and swirl in the chill evening. For once, as if to make a mockery of her dwelling on them, the cloud did recede, so she got to watch the sunset into the haze to the north, its light dimming until the stars slowly came out. Once they brightened she finally started to make her way back to their rock shelter, watching the endless chasm of the night sky.

~ Jun Sana – Rock Shelter ~

Sat in the rock shelter, Sana stared out at the cold stars, glittering away in the newly darkened sky. Arai was still out there, probably just watching the stars. Her sister had been doing that quite a bit, and it… it worried her. Though they were not that far apart in age, a matter of hours at best, over the years her elder sister had taken that position seriously. Sometimes it had been annoying, sometimes it was funny, and mostly it made her dependable. She was, she self-acknowledged, a bit used to coasting on that. Being able to play the younger sister, indulge in flights of fancy, and be whimsical. Be the one who could do and say the stupid things in the expectation that her sister would be the counterpoint in most things they did. To see her sister, who was the person who kept them both somewhat grounded, so… lost in this fate accursed isolation was…

She didn’t actually have words to describe the feeling, even though it was also her constant companion. Their constant companion, as they struggled, desperately. Not against some evil shadow or oppressive force. There were no evil cults from the stories here. No terrifying trees from the inner valleys. No qi beasts. Not even the devouring darkness of the dark pits below the Yin Eclipse mountain range. They were in a life and un-life struggle with their own bodies. All because of a quirk of fate and some greedy clan elders half a continent away who likely wouldn’t even care about their passing, if they even learned of it.

Hard to believe she had once thought snow a pretty thing. A rarity in Blue Water Province, seen once every few years, if at all, unless you went high into the mountains on the coast where it never melted. Here its white blanket was as oppressive as any cavernous gloom. The sheen in the starlight, that might have been a breath-taking sight to her just short weeks earlier, felt like a mirror into the darkness of her mind. Giving her nowhere to hide.

As if to punctuate that point, she threw a rock into the icy snowfield below their rock shelter. It skittered and bounced across the frozen waves of the snow before finding some softer bit and vanishing as if it never was. It almost felt like a metaphor for their whole experience here. Shaking her head to dislodge the fugue she was slipping into, she wrapped her thick robe around her a bit more closely and returned her attention to the jadework scrip.

It was currently replaying the scene of formation drawing from the second day of discussions with Elaria, Eleanora, Maria and Edward.

“Preposterous, really,” she muttered out loud, watching the scene with her head on her knees. “Here we are, stuck in an anomaly, with no food, barely any water, a few fate-thrashed starvation pills, a small fortune in pricelessly worthless spirit herbs and only some ridiculously profound and odd formations laws to try and engineer a way out of this mess.”

Saying it out loud didn’t make it any better really.

She flicked back to the start of the diagrams and watched Maria draw them again. The sequence of numbers was what she stressed somehow. It appeared to relate to the number of connections, but half the theories they spoke about were so weird and without any founding in common knowledge that they were just strange words.

Flipping it back to the start and watched her draw them again, trying to reason out as best she could what in the fates a ‘Principle Number’ was, and why all of the relationships between these shapes in the array had to conform to whatever in the nameless accursed theorems a ‘Golden Balance’ was.

“Idea three,” she said, swapping in one of the functions on the scrip to record her own voice in addition to the scene. “Does Golden have any relationship to Golden Immortals founding their principles?”

Even as she said it, she thought it sounded stupid, but by this point, she had long since stopped dwelling on that side of things. Ideas were ideas until they were not. Instead, she skipped ahead a few minutes, to where they started talking about something she was somewhat familiar with. Feng shui and divination. Here it did help that Maria’s explanations were simple and concise. Almost as practised as Eleanora’s had been, but with the benefit of her being able to follow the topic somewhat.

“… so if you were taking the theoretical approach from before,” Maria was speaking now, walking around two exemplar sets of symbols and links. “… Those would be the golden numbers. But here, if you take from either of the more intuitive approaches to this kind of construct, as espoused say… by formations experts of the Star Lotus Society or Clan Ryuujin. These same numbers and their relationship to the connections allows a sympathetic and auspicious relationship to form between the succeeding links. In balancing them like so…”

“How the fates did I miss that before,” she hissed.

She had listened to this section half a dozen times in the past week and barely registered this short section between the talking about feng shui and then about the means of drawing on fundamental forces in arts.

Staring at the frozen images, she realised a small piece of their missing knowledge regarding those symbols and how to draw them was locked away, not in the numbers, but in what they represented. Harmony. Golden wasn’t the important word. Balance was.

“…”

“Two, three, five, seven and eleven,” she repeated the numbers back.

It took a moment of wracking her brain to work out why they seemed familiar in the context of formations. A dim memory of Grandmaster Li talking about…

“Absolute links. They are all absolute links in formation cores. They can only be split by the original and themselves.”

It was such an obvious thing, that she wondered why she hadn’t seen it before. Only absolute points could sit together to become formation cores. Large formations nested them with extra links and elemental aspects to form yin or yang arrangements. The connections themselves and their stability were however determined by links within the absolute point.

She looked at both the array that had been drawn and the formation, just in case she was imagining. Plotting the links took her far longer than she would have liked, though it was a complicated formation. As her initial hunch had led her to suspect, though, you could only arrange the cardinal points of the arrays they were deconstructing into those numbers. Extra links were just that, additional influencing points on the original core. So a formation with six points had to either have either five, three or two links dedicated purely to its core.

Belatedly, she realised her mouth was hanging open and shut it. The whole crux of the point was that whether as formations or these arrays, they had to have an inner balance. If they couldn’t sustain their own inner balance, they would collapse and only through that inner balance could they have any feng shui and thus exert any influence.

With a sigh, she flipped the entire talk right back to the start, to watch it over again, now armed with new knowledge with which to try to make sense of things. Next on the list was why curved lines were different from straight ones in the frameworks they were making. Somehow she suspected that wouldn’t be rendered up in quite so serendipitous a manner, but at least it gave her something to do while she waited for her sister to stop staring at the stars.

…

After that first proper piece of the wider puzzle slotted in place for her, the next few days sadly returned to a tedious slog through poorly understood logic of esoteric systems almost certainly far far above her realm grade. In other circumstances, she was sure that sages beyond this place would be tearing their beards out and spitting blood at the very idea of such a hoard of knowledge being stumbled through by the two of them. That actually helped to keep her mood up.

To distract herself from wanting to smash rocks with her scrip rather than read it, she eventually returned to watching the early discussions by the lakeshore. Her initial intention here was to use them to improve her grasp of the language. So it was something of a surprise to find a bunch of surprisingly offhand clarifications of discussion points at the stone circle hidden away in various bits of ranting by those on the beach to Elaria and Marcella about students and their assignments at the school.

As such she got a fortuitous, if entirely unsought for, breakdown of this place's element theory and a follow-up primer on array construction aimed at people who all concerned on the beach felt had their brains oozing out of their noses. All from simply wanting to memorize some longer words that might be relevant. Some of it was still pretty abstract, but looking at the very basic arrays and their ‘spells’ she could sort of follow how they worked. It was a bit ‘Wood make fire, fire burn bright, and therefore drier wood make hotter fire’, but as a starting point that was exactly what she – they – needed.

So it was somewhat to her annoyance that her train of thought on one of the more complex five-link formations was broken by a triumphant yell followed by the sound of a small explosion from the nearby frozen lake.

Scrambling to her feet and hastily making her way down the slope and across the brow of the lower hill to see what was wrong, she half expected to see carnage and her sister half dead. Instead, what she got was Arai standing beside a faintly smoking flat rock with a small crater in it, marked with a series of melted pockmarks in the middle of a now fading design.

“I got one to work!” her sister yelled.

As she made her way down to the lakeshore, Arai ran over and grabbed her hands and dragged her along in a little dance of delight. It was somewhat funny, but also not, part of her thought, given their current concerns. A part of her was also annoyed, irrationally, at the incursion into her own self-designated role of ‘specialised whimsy’.

“You blew up a rock. We can’t eat exploded rocks. Probably,” she said with a scowl, then immediately regretted the snappish outburst.

Her sister didn’t seem to notice, or maybe just didn’t care. “I didn’t get that one to work, I got one of the other ones to work.”

“Oh. The examples,” she said somewhat automatically as she cast her mind back to them. “The ones from Eleanora’s discussions?”

“No… the ones from Maria’s," her sister clarified, considering her handiwork.

“Oh.” She hadn’t spent much time with that, for all that they were much closer to the formations manuals they knew.

That was probably why, she reflected with a soft sigh. She had been pushing herself to understand the more advanced concepts. Much of the latter half of what Maria had talked about held a lot of commonalities to working with the elemental ward stones, with similar elements and principals involved. They were already familiar with formations, manuals and stratagems to suppress and divert energy from one type to another. It was a fundamental tenet of successfully capturing more dangerous spirit herbs in a land that tried to subsume everything after a while.

It seemed that while she had been using her familiarity with those systems and methods to unpick the array frameworks, her sister had just sidestepped that entirely in the search for ‘arrays’ that actually ‘worked’.

The design her sister had on the rock was...?

“This is one of the ones that they talked about, that change the type of a 'thing' from one state to another,” her sister explained, rightly taking her blank stare as her trying to work out which one it was. “I worked out that word.”

“Word?” she asked…

“Oh. You remember the one. ‘Transformation’ of…”

“Ohhh,” she shuddered.

She did remember that, she had set it aside several times now, it kept giving her a headache.

“Yeah, well, it was bothering me because she kept talking about it. It’s ‘state’. It sounds identical to ‘State’, but it’s actually state. As in relating to the way a thing is. Like, if it’s a solid or a liquid.”

“…”

She considered that. It worked, surprisingly, in the context of those discussions.

“How did you work that out?” she asked, curious.

Arai shrugged. “Context matching, I set the really helpful dictionary you made to just brute force all the words it could logically be given the wider context of the topics around them.”

“Anyway,” she walked back over to the still smoking symbols…

“This is an example for basic state alterations. It’s basically an anchored explosion ward if you…”

She watched as her sister took the faintly smoking pot containing a mixture of pulped ‘Yang Fire-Thorn’ sap and a few balancing materials, and then carefully drew it into a single symbol with three absolute links.

“If you put it like so,” Arai drew another symbol, one of the ‘base’ symbols from Maria’s explanations and skipped smartly back. “Now, throw a rock past it”

Curious, she obliged and was rewarded with a flash of heat and light in the afternoon chill and a thwack. The rock now had a head-sized crater in it while chunks of broken rock rained down around them.

She stared at it and sighed, her train of thought broken for this. It was… “That’s... progress I guess... But you can’t eat proximity moon runes.”

“Call me if you make an edible explosion.”

Feeling a bit sorry for herself, she turned and decided to wander up to the top of the hill to do her check on the ‘stable points’. Once that was done, she sat back down and started reviewing the transcripts relating to the ‘transformation circle’ as she had now decided to call it.

~ Jun Arai – Frozen Lakeshore ~

Watching Sana stalk back up the hillside, muttering to herself, she could only sigh. Sana’s mental state definitely preoccupied a not inconsiderable part of the back of her mind now. The prolonged isolation and enforced proximity, combined with their current circumstances, were certainly starting to take an unpleasant toll on both of them. Talking about it wasn’t easy either. But then, neither was stewing in it.

“It’s an awkward quandary, isn’t it,” she muttered under her breath.

She turned back to the array and knelt down beside it again. The catalyst used to power it hadn’t taken anything from the rock itself, which was encouraging. That was another mark in favour of the theory that the physical aspects of ‘stuff’ from their place was somehow separated from this one by an almost impregnable wall. Really, she had only started on this avenue of investigation to provide a proper break from poring over the discussions themselves, it having occurred to her that no amount of theorising would help if it turned out that the reason why her more direct attempts at that array were being stymied was because they were incapable of making any of them work here.

A part of her did acknowledge that wading into this, as she was doing, was probably deeply foolish. As much as she might want it to be, this almost certainly wasn’t one of those stories where some youth found the teachings of a mystical old master and got an all-access pass straight to the Immortal realm.

What made it worse was that those stories did… actually happen.

-There was one… what... ten years ago?

-An inner disciple of a little local cultivation school, the Seven Jades Society, if she recalled right.

It took a moment more searching of her memories to recall his name – Wei Zhaohui.

They had sold his ‘story’ of ‘good fortune’ in scrolls for down on their luck people to read. Probably they had a knock off copy of one of those versions of the story back home, another vestige of a childhood that felt far further away than it really was at times.

Wei Zhaohui had stumbled across the long lost cultivation cave of a vagrant Golden Immortal cultivator and by some miraculous stroke of luck not been incinerated by accident or slaughtered by malignant intent. Instead, he had found a piece of that Golden Immortal’s ‘Intent’ which had, apparently, allowed him to cultivate all the way from the peak of Qi Condensation to the peak of Nascent Soul in a month.

Afterwards, Wei Zhaohui had become something of a local celebrity within the province and had joined the Blue Gate School shortly after, that little local school unable to keep a student of the younger generation that was suddenly more powerful than many of his teachers…

-Well, it was good to dream, she thought wryly and refocused on the chaos around her.

Most of these attempts had come to nothing in any case. If she excluded the earlier failures and melted rocks, she had three successes now. All with really basic formations that caused an explosion by affecting the air in proximity to a rapidly heating catalyst. In this case, the yang thorn sap. This had at least shown her that the earlier issues she had been running into had had a depressingly simple cause. She had been overthinking things and trying to do too much at once.

For the very basic formations with one symbol and a few secondary links, it was sufficient simply to paint the array frame on the surface and then pick and apply the right symbol.

It was drawing the symbols right that was the really hard part it turned out. Throughout the last few days, she had had cause over and over again to be glad that Sana had decided to record the entire moment so that it would retain field depth as a three-dimensional image. If she was working from flat images that didn’t preserve stroke gradient and particle flow within the drawings in the air she was sure she would still be melting rocks a year from now.

The other remarkable, no, amazing thing about the symbols, frameworks and whatnot that went into these formations was that they didn’t require any qi input from her at all. That in itself was highly unusual. It certainly wasn’t how formations worked beyond this place. Instead, following the discussions, she had worked out that the two parts of the formation required a degree of material harmony. The subsidiary symbols had to be drawn with a ‘Qi-Catalysing’ substance, the aforementioned sap. The framework and links had to be drawn with a ‘Balanced Attractor’ – like stabilised ‘Creeping Vetch’ pulp. The absolute point was then drawn with a ‘Qi-Gathering’ substance or compound, currently the dilute sap of the sun orchid.

The central symbol was the activation point of these formations. The outer symbols were the components that either were combined or added additional steps to the formation. In this case, delaying its activation. Another one she had found could extend its duration. The links determined how they were combined. There seemed to be limits, which she was still getting a grasp on. She couldn’t make a continuous small explosion. She had, in the name of the Empirical Dao, tried that. Just to see if it worked. Increasing the duration of the explosion turned out to make it weaker.

And that was the secret to the sets of numbers Maria and Eleanora had talked about extensively. They governed how many links the absolute points could have and remain in harmony. She had been intending to tell Sana about that, but now she had left in a bit of a mood, so there was always later. Hopefully, it would cheer her up a bit.

As she made her way over to turn off the recording of the space and let what she had compress itself to save space, she considered that that was also related to the ‘Golden’ thing… Rule? She was erring towards Principle now. That seemed to relate to the specific geometries of the links themselves, in relation to the nodes in the formations as much as the number. It had taken copying a bunch of the shared patterns and lines that Maria had talked about, drawing them out on rocks, before the pattern within them finally clicked. She was definitely thankful at this point that the mental acuity and innate pattern recognition that came with advancing your cultivation realm wasn’t dulled here. It was also somewhat similar to the ‘Principle of Balance’ that some of the more advanced formations manuals talked about.

-Another regret there, she thought wryly, that she had been nowhere near rich enough to buy any of those and had only been able to study them in Grandmaster Li’s workshop one time.

She sat there, waiting for the scrip to finish its function, composing her thoughts so she could record them as well.

Making the formations work became much more obvious once she started breaking the rules of what she thought she ‘knew’. To start with, she had been loath to do so, because changing formations like that was a fast way to end up dead or badly injured. Still, she had no real choice now, so risk-taking and trusting that what the groups in the recordings were talking about was correct was all she had. So far, apart from the early melted rocks, nothing had gone properly weird, so that was something at least.

“Next, I will try swapping out the component symbols while keeping the ratios the same,” she said, starting the recording function on the scrip once more.

“Based on the discussions from day four at the lakeside, when they complained about students blowing things up, the major and minor parts of the formations need to be in specific balances. It is adjusting these set ratios of links that change the parameters of the formations within their original function.”

It had been a fortunate discovery of two days prior that that was an actual table. Marcella had drawn it out on a rock for one of the junior teachers and explained where the students were going wrong. They had missed it initially because the conversation about someone fighting a dragon had been more interesting.

The take away, and the thing she wanted, or perhaps needed to test next, was how exacting the changes had to be. The implication in the beachside talk was that if they were out by a lot, they just didn’t work, but if they were out by a bit, they could make the formations go wibbly. Nobody in a recording went into any detail on that, but considering the rocks she had melted, it was probably stuff like that—

“MOON RUNES!” came a shout from the hilltop. “THEY ARE LIKE THE FATE BLASTED MOON RUNES!”

Sana came racing back down the hill and skidded to a halt beside her.

While she was still working out what her sister was on about, Sana had already scanned for a new rock and grabbed the pigment. She swiftly drew the same symbol set that she had just done, but in the way that the moon-runes went. In one continuous flowing motion—

When the ringing in her ears subsided, she found she was in a snowdrift five meters away. Sand and pebbles were still raining down all around them.

“You could have checked what it did before you blew it up,” she muttered accusingly, looking down the beach.

They both looked at the crater where the flat rock had been. It was substantially larger than her previous efforts. However, what was most noticeable was that the colour of everything around the crater for a meter was… blue.

“What did you do?” she said weakly, thinking back to the comments about ‘wibbly outcomes’.

“I put the intention of turning the rock blue into it while I drew the formation. Just like you would with a moon rune.” Sana said, sitting up in the snow, beaming.

It really was blue as well. The rocks, the sand, the snow, the smoke, the small flickers of flame. Everything was a rich, regal blue.

“…”

“And what if it had turned us blue as well,” she said, checking quickly that she wasn’t, in fact, partly coloured blue.

Sana had the grace to look a bit embarrassed and surreptitiously checked herself as well. “Err...”

“Oh well, no harm done!” she said with a wry laugh, dusting snow and rock chips out of her robe.

Sana also started to laugh, at first nervously, then properly. It was indeed a moment of surreal oddity.

She rolled her eyes, and they both laughed for a bit... Which did them some good to alleviate the stress of earlier.

Once they had both calmed down, they found a clean rock and sat down.

“So… moon runes?”

“Erm… yes,” her sister said, beaming again. “So after I saw you exploding those rocks, I realised that all the example formations behave like moon runes. I just made that connection a moment back. The only real difference is that the moon runes on the Beast Cadre hideouts and the warding stele around town don’t need a physically centred activation trigger.”

“If you set aside the fact that they are a formation. All the symbols behave like moon runes on their own right.”

“You can activate them by intention.”

“But in this case, you maybe shouldn’t have picked one designed to create an explosion,” she pointed out.

“…”

“Mmmm, yeah…” Sana scratched her head, looking embarrassed. “Sorry, I wasn’t thinking.”

Shaking her head with amusement, she considered her sister's epiphany. Moon runes drew their power from Dao Principles or even Dao Laws directly, acting as a physical medium to manifest a particular aspect of that law into the material world. They weren’t really formations as they understood them, instead closer to how talismans worked. Most maintenance of them in West Flower Picking was even done by the Pavilion of Talisman Makers rather than formations experts.

As she watched, the duration of the triggered effect ended and the beach slowly faded back to its usual colour. “At least it doesn’t seem to affect organic things or we would be blue as well.”

“Or it just doesn’t affect us?” Sana frowned.

“That’s not something we are going to test,” she said flatly.

“On the other hand… if these work, how come we are still utterly incapable of drawing in any of the qi ourselves or manipulating it?”

“Hmmm,” Sana nodded. “That is the crux of the overarching problem, isn’t it.”

Frowning, she turned to stare at the pale afternoon sky. “What exactly IS the fate-thrashed reality here. It’s clear from this that stuff is... well, has substance. We can break rocks, cut trees, move water, and even dig holes in the ground.”

“Melt rocks, and turn the beach blue,” Sana added, squatting down beside crater.

“Using intent, thanks to my mantra, also worked.”

“…”

“Intent doesn’t require qi,” she mused. “Although usually, you use it with it. It’s mainly narrative impetus to guide it.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” she slapped a hand to her forehead. Hard.

“How the fates have we missed this. We have both been using intent with our mantra since we got here…”

“But never externally,” Sana pointed out. “Because ever since the mist encounter we have been basically crippled for qi capacity and triaging what we had left on a day-to-day basis.”

She thought back quickly, and it turned out that Sana was indeed right. Neither of them had used any direct external manifestations of qi. Not since they were climbing out of the sinkhole, which felt so long ago as to almost be a different lifetime at this point, and might well have not been the same as this place in any case.

Staring at her hand, she walked over and got a rock from the shore. Picking it up, she imbued a sliver of martial intent into it and threw it at a boulder. It hit it with a *pock* and left a decent sized crater in it, no qi having ever left her hands.

“…”

“Sadly, you cannot live by intent alone,” Sana grumbled.

“Not with our foundations anyway,” she agreed glumly.

On the other hand, this opened up new possibilities. She turned to stare at the formations on the rocks again.

“The sword that day was able to have a flicker of qi on its edge. You can almost taste the qi in the mists, but we can’t interact with any of it directly. Qi is here, in this place, but it’s like it’s separated from us by an impenetrable veil."

They both knew this particular problem all too well at this point.

“Why…” she mused out loud, getting up to walk over to one of the rocks.

“We are also losing qi. Beyond the passive loss via impurities that our bodies cannot refine.”

“That happens outside as well,” Sana frowned. “There are certain areas on the slopes of the Great Mount and in the inner valleys and high valleys where qi sapping happens. And in the caverns below. Even in the normal valleys, it's impossible for spiritual cultivators to replenish anything, their laws just flat out don't work. Like a carriage wheel spinning in the mud.”

“Well, we had sort of concluded that this was a more extreme version of that suppression.”

“But as a counterpoint to that, the herbs are not suppressed,” Sana pointed out.

“Which suggests something different going on to what is talked about in the Bureau records,” she agreed.

This was more old ground, but it had been set aside for some time now. Just taken as fiat at this point, and neither of them felt they had the depth of understanding to try to pull at it more.

Sana grimaced back at her, looking frustrated. She nodded wearily.

-What does either of us ‘really’ know about the fundamentals of that stuff?

All their knowledge on it was gained intuitively from the places they had frequented. Their understanding of it probably exceeded that of those many realms above them. But that wasn’t theoretical knowledge. It was empirically practical. People of the realms who understood the theoretical knowledge saw no reason to go there and risk heightened death in those places.

“This place doesn’t feel like those places though,” Sana mused, staring at the distant swirling fog of the snowfield.

“Sure, we are haemorrhaging qi at a concerning rate, but feels more like we are a bucket with cracks in.”

“Or just not a bucket at all,” she said without thinking.

“Wait... What?” Sana said, frowning.

“Not a bucket?” she repeated.

“Fates! That’s it,” Sana almost shrieked.

“What is,” she asked blankly.

“It’s a spirit cultivation thing,” Sana said, looking flushed in the chill air. “Ling Yu talked about it on occasion. There are some special physiques people are born with that make them unable to hold qi. It just falls straight out of them – or passes right through them maybe. It doesn’t matter if they get a dantian or whatnot. They are incapable of retaining qi in their bodies for whatever reason.”

“But we have physical cultivation bases, that shouldn’t apply to us?” she murmured.

“No, no, no, no, no, no… what if we aren't the problem,” Sana said, her eyes saucer wide now.

“We are here, we can physically interact with stuff, our intent works. Yes, we are somehow obscured in form, but that might also be related to this. Everything we have brought in here seems to be affected the same way after all. The herbs are also losing qi as well.”

“The qi itself is the problem?” she said blankly.

“I’d bet spirit stones it is,” Sana said, her tone turning grim. “Remember our qi replenishment pills spoiled, even in the storage containers, and our talismans eventually broke.”

“At the same time, the reality of this place has been ratcheting up, shift after shift,” she added quietly.

“And as it does, more and more stuff relating to our side, that was fashioned with the qi from outside that cannot be exchanged, like the pills... stops working,” Sana said simply.

“So now the only things still working are complex living things, like us,” she said softly.

“Or the herbs,” her sister added.

“But the scrips still work,” she pondered. “Is that because…?”

“Those are enclosed artefacts, far beyond what the storage talismans are in terms of their technical scope," her sister agreed.

Sana frowned and looked at the scrip pensively. "I guess they are still fine because they also rely on formations and rune script. They will work even for mortals and have no requirements on environmental qi due to running off their own internal impetus. Not to mention, ours are the expensive ones that have their own feng shui alignments and everything.”

They stared at the scrip on the rock for a while longer.

“And geomancy still works here,” she said, understanding flickering through her mind.

A thought slowly surfaced. An old talk, in a teahouse, about the structure of worlds. It wasn’t a pleasant thought at all, not in this context. Their world was not a lower world, not by any means. It was in the middle of the great structure of realms, if you could set it out in a pyramid. The most numerous were lower worlds or Mortal Worlds as they were oft-times called. There the peak of power was the Immortal Realm. The power of laws constrained the world itself. Their space was rigid and absolute, but the density of qi was thinner. So anyone who crossed over to the Immortal Threshold had to depart them for a world with a higher qi density. If they remained the world would suppress them and reject their immortality, forever trapping them as quasi-Immortals until their enforced vitality burned out and their hard-won immortality was reclaimed.

But at the same time, it was possible for an Immortal to arrive in a higher world that would be too dense for their foundation to handle and they would see their cultivation collapse. This could also happen if their qi was too impure, or their Immortal Principle was somehow flawed. Their impure or incomplete qi would be reclaimed by that world, and they would have to discard all their accumulation and rebuild their foundation in that new world or perish. If someone under Immortal arrived in one of those worlds…? Unable to leverage their longevity being tied to their Immortal Principle to escape that terrible fate, they would die. An agonizing, gradual death of crippling ruin.

That was also why you had to step beyond Ancient Immortal to leave the confines of their Azure Great World if you were born here. Before that point, your qi was not pure enough to sustain you in the void beyond. It would leech out and you would perish just as surely as that mortal from a lower world ending up in a Great World. An incomplete vessel with incomplete qi.

“Is this place a higher world?” Sana said, so quietly it was almost lost in the world around them.

“….. If it is,” she said, the sick feeling in her stomach properly lodged there now.

Somehow, intuitively, she knew this was probably the fundamental truth of this place. Too many things didn’t add up. This was a lost vestige of a higher world. Or perhaps some scattered reflection of one. A world above a Great World or a Throne World. Either a Supreme World… or…

She turned to stare at where the school would be in the distance. A Supreme World with multiple Emperors and Empresses. She had just taken it as a cultural thing.

-But what if… No, that was impossible, her mind denied it flatly.

If that was the case, this place would have been buried in the influences of the entire world and every other surrounding influence. A vestigial remnant of such a world? Just the rumour of that would see every power in the world roll over…

Almost as if it were trying to torment her, her mind reminded her of the proclamation, signed by the Emperor, by the Kong clan. A trial for the fate of a generation. A trial for the glory of their world, for the glory of the Imperial Clan. Then again, that was not a problem for here and now. Here and now the issue was more immediate.

“If that is the case… it’s a death sentence,” her sister said softly. “If we are in a higher world, with mortal foundations…”

“No,” she said flatly. “It’s not.”

“…”

Sana stared at her, her previous joy at ‘working out’ the issue, now lost to the reality of her answer.

She stared around at the ruined rocks. “We keep trying. I refuse to let this fate-thrashed place be my grave. If we can make that formation work, it will give us time at the very least.”