Previously I wrote on the sorry events surrounding the aftermath of the loss of favour of the last Emperor of Shan; however, this was by no means the only catalyst for the chaos that would come.

For many thousands of years, up to this point other influences had renewed interested in our Eastern Azure Great World. In part, this was due to the previous emperor’s sons, those who did not ascend to the throne, making friends widely among their peers when they departed the world for other pastures. It was also, in no small part, due to the recent collapse of another great hegemony – the Ten Songs Celestial Starfield.

A titan of that era and several prior, it had long been embroiled in matters beyond the borders of the vast region of the supreme cosmos the sages call the ‘Martial Axial Region’. Now, though, those wars came home to our Martial Axial Region, and there was a great invasion from beyond our borders. One of the old enemies made a great expedition and the influences of the Grand Dukes of Heaven, the Duke of Shu, the Duke of Kong and the Duke of Teng, along with the Queen Mothers of the South and West sent forth their own to do war alongside the powers of the Ten Songs, summoning a multitude of heroes from ten thousand worlds, including our own Azure Astral.

Excerpt from the Annals of Shan

By Seng Mo – Elusive Scholar.

~ Han Shu – Ruined Valley ~

Han Shu found himself drifting in darkness, accompanied by the sound of a woman swearing at great length in languages he couldn’t understand. That went on for several moments as he struggled, before realising he had no control over his body, which was somehow being dragged upwards even as everything else around him was–

A crippling sense of vertiginous distortion in his surroundings nearly rendered him unconscious a second time–

“YeAreghhhHHHH!!!”

His inarticulate, instinctual scream was mainly mental as the yang energy swept over the world drowned out his confusion and everything else for a moment.

“Disrupt Everything!”

“DisRupT EvErytHing!”

“dISruPt EVeRything!”

“Disrupt Everything!”

The echoes of the howl and the phantasmal words that came with it reverberated through the whole world. His qi scattered and everything kept twisting without end for several more seconds before he finally managed to get a grasp on himself. ‘Normality’ returned and he managed to stop silently screaming and make his mantra deal with the pain brought on by the searing heat that was now permeating everything around him.

'Bright, Iron, Beginning, Worldly, Gift'

He managed to complete the cycle, and his circumstances eased fractionally. The local qi was turbulent to the point of being poisonously chaotic, but between his mantra and the Nine Origins cultivation law he was able to eke back enough to ensure that his life wasn’t in further danger. The downside there, though, was that he realised for the first time that he had taken a huge amount of punishment.

Half the bones in his body had been shattered and were healing. His qi armour had apparently protected him from the initial impact, but likely depleted his qi or close to it – and had been low anyway thanks to the fight. That he was still alive was in no small part a testament to the rejuvenative powers of his mantra when it came to purifying poisonous qi and the Nine Origins Lotus Physique.

That, he noted, had broken through at last – another likely factor in why he wasn’t a corpse right now. His meridians had reorganised themselves, and he noted with some surprise that he had what he could only call a pseudo-dantian. Not so much a reservoir of qi but a focal point for the qi spread throughout his body, such as it was.

Where is the sword?

It was not in his hand, he realised with concern and immediately stopped trying to move around in the quagmire or whatever it was he was buried in.

And which way is up?

“Where your ass is,” Origin’s voice cut into his mind. “And the key is about six inches in front of your face; don’t dig down onto it.”

“How… am I talking to you if…?"

“If you are not holding the sword? You don’t need it; it’s just a fancy trinket. Our link is through the Ninefold Lotus Origins manual as much as that thing at this point,” Origin added.

“It is?” he had to admit that surprised him, especially after her earlier spiel about how the swords were not a thing to be wielded…

“I am in your head… I can see all your thoughts…” Origin added, a bit testily he thought. “Yes, I am indeed… testy, vexed, perplexed in an aggravating manner and so on. This is… well, it seems I have karma with this kind of thing, yet again.”

“…”

He schooled his thoughts and carefully worked his arm upwards through the mud until his fingertips finally touched cold metal.

Exhaling mentally, he warily traced the edge of the weapon, discovering in the process that his qi sense was even more useless down here than he had initially expected upon regaining consciousness. It was with a sigh of relief that he found the handle and grasped it… only to frown in confusion.

“Why isn’t it giving me warmth?” he asked Origin, confused as to why it wasn’t reacting as it usually did.

"And...why... am i calling you 'Origin'?" he asked abruptly... realising that he had been calling her that, and thinking of her as that, ever since her voice reappeared.

"..."

“That isn’t the sword; that is you being touched by my power,” Origin’s voice echoed a touch drily. “It only has that capability while I am attuned to the sword; currently I am linked through it to you… directly… which is not a long-term solution, but it would be… well, you have the Ninefold Lotus Origins manual."

“…”

"That is also why you are aware of... that name.”

He wasn’t sure what to make of that.

“Then don’t make anything of it, and accept that it is what it is… Now…” Origin, who had started sounding a bit vexed again, trailed off.

Rather than prod her further, he started another cycle. After a few moments her presence sort of returned and the sword became a bit cooler in his hand, somehow refreshing him ever so slightly as he continued the process of recovering enough qi to dig himself out.

Origin continued to mutter away, “Hmmm, this is… Ah… I see… Wait… what?”

“What?” he asked, noting the sudden shift in her tone with some concern.

“Oh Bug–”

Her voice vanished abruptly and a smothering cloak of oppression sank into him, drawing away all his qi in the blink of an eye. His cultivation base vanished and the physique symbol in his mind’s eye became no more than a shadow while his mantra just spun, unable to interact with his physical body. He was left alone in the crushing, smothering humid mud–

{CALL OF THE WILD}

The words didn’t belong to him… or Origin, but the world itself somehow. They rang… everywhere and with them the qi–

There was blackness. When he re-associated himself with his surroundings, his qi had returned.

“What…?” he managed to whisper in his head.

“It seems that…” Origins voice was fuzzy in his mind… “It seems that– … What exactly?” she sounded almost confused for a moment, which was… concerning to him – on all sorts of levels.

“BE OVERTURNED!”

In the same instant that Origin spoke again, the words swept through the ground and everything literally turned upside down. He had a singular desperate moment where he was certain he was finally about to die, then he was flying up through air rather than dirt for a single, disorientating moment–

Falling through air…

Upon trying to orientate himself, he found that his perception of distance had been thoroughly ruined by whatever that vast roar had done–

He hit the ground hard enough to make his consciousness waver. The strength of the qi reinforcement rolling through the quagmire of burning soil actually made him bounce and flip twice before–

-Heavenly fates, go–

He barely saw the shattered tree trunk that crashed straight into him before there was blackness. Beyond roundly cursing the injustice of the heavenly fates, all he could think in that moment was that he really had no destiny with trees.

~ Kun Juni – Somewhere in the now-ruined valley ~

Kun Juni snapped awake and had a moment of panic because everything around her was black and far too hot to be comfortable. Blind panic subsided after a moment though, and was replaced with more nuanced panic as she tasted dirt and concluded she was buried. She became more pained, as cognisance of her own state settled back into her. Her body was rigidly locked in a quite unpleasant rag doll position in the soil which was also exerting a remarkable amount of qi-pressure on her and it turned out that many of her bones were broken as well.

‘Devoted, Path, Lotus, Body, Bestowal.’

Instinct, as much as anything, drew her to her mantra, using it to get a grip on her inner state. Without it, she would already have been badly poisoned by yang qi. She also recognized a lingering sense of icy discomfort in her bones.

-My qi was dispersed?

She shuddered, and reviewed her cultivation foundation. To her relief, she could tell that other than some traces of yang qi poisoning, which was already fading, her meridians were still fully intact. Her dantian had actually coalesced even further and was fully of swirling misty qi that rather resembled the rain outside. Her qi capacity had taken a jump as well.

After watching that for a moment, as much to calm her mind as anything, she pushed out her qi sense and found that she was… very buried. After a few moments of fruitless endeavour she gave up on that and acknowledged that the saturation of yang qi through the landscape was such that her qi sense was useless. Thereafter, it took her almost 5 agonising minutes to get enough qi accumulated in her body to try to excavate herself a little – or at least try to.

Two problems immediately presented themselves:

First, she was buried in a muddy quagmire – the earth was loose and fell in around her with the slightest movement, frustrating her ability to free any space at all to re-adjust her limbs.

Second, the soil was… hotter than she had first realised… and only getting warmer. A quick bit of mental math suggested that if this was continuous and exponential at its current rate, her qi would soon provide her no protection from it at all. That she wasn’t already poisoned to the point of being crippled was down to her mantra and her cultivation law – however, they were starting to reach the limits of what they could sustain.

-I didn’t survive all that just to be cooked like a root vegetable, she swore, before considering the third problem.

-Which way is up?

She stared at the darkness in front of her for a full thirty seconds before finally working that out. The heat was coming down from above and was at her back – she was thus somewhat postured as if she were lying on her stomach.

She was able to shift some dirt into her storage talisman, but she had to be careful. Dying by briefly opening up a void and then being crushed by the weight of the dirt collapsing on her would be a singularly embarrassing way to go. Having cleared some space, the first thing she did was eat a Core Formation grade replenishment pill and one of her last Nascent Soul grade Poison Purification pills to properly stave off the threat of being poisoned to death by the rampant yang qi in the short term.

After that, she set about digging her way out using her storage talisman until that was full and the shifting infill meant that dumping what she took in was largely impossible. After that she had to resort to moving dirt by hand.

Her qi-armour, reinforced by the pills she had taken, was just about able to protect her from the soil, which literally was burning for the last two metres. All the organic matter mixed through was slowly combusting to form a toxic smog of exotic qi types that any movement of soil agitated and released. By the time she finally clawed her way out, she was mentally exhausted and her qi-reserves were nearly as bad as she had started. She dragged herself onto a burning trunk, wincing at the heat as much as the periodic shockwaves that were shaking the valley, but it was better than standing on the ground for long.

Her clothes had been annihilated by the metal qi that nearly killed her before the entire valley had turned itself upside down. Looking through her talisman, she realised with a grimace that any she still had were going to catch on fire within a few minutes of exposure to this environment anyway. Their luss cloth reserves were nearly non-existent now as well. She was so caked in mud anyway that modesty was entirely relative in the very short term in any event.

She ate a body mending pill and a Qi Refinement qi replenishment pill to help her recover while she cautiously took stock. Now that she was on the surface, the yang qi suffusing everything was very familiar. It would take her a long time not to have flashbacks regarding having a jar of blood broken in her face, and this place now felt like the blood pond where Ling had first encountered it.

That laid the blame for this new environment firmly at the feet of her friend – probably. Whether in a good way or a bad way though, she wasn’t sure.

There was certainly still a battle ongoing nearby; however, it was on a scale that she wanted nothing to do with, beyond getting away from as fast as possible. This degree of devastation had likely brought out everything that was within a few miles of their location at this point. Anything that wasn’t dead was probably in the process of seeking answers – either from their attackers, or whoever was responsible for the landscape being in its current state.

A particularly large shockwave agitated the yang qi and made her skin blister even through the mud. Heart Shifting Steps, which she had taken to using as a matter of course now to supplement her cultivation, suddenly told her that many places were–

Throwing herself off the log, she hit the ground, ignoring the horrible burning feeling as the entire landscape recoiled under her. She barely managed to stay on the surface and was carried a dozen or so metres before everything stabilized again, allowing her to stagger to her feet and scramble out of the small quagmire of fire-swamp she had ended up in.

Yang qi rolled through the ash clouds and steam from the ground, released by the rolling shockwave to form a constricting, lung-searing, eyeball-burning, skin-blistering and perhaps most annoyingly – hair-smouldering – miasma that she was barely able to resist with the help of a quasi-overdose of purification pills and all the different parts of her cultivation. Even then, it was only because it was diffuse and directionless.

There was what she guessed was a ‘principle’ here, but the ambience was not being touched by it thankfully. Qi sense was still useless as well, so all she could do was try to match where she remembered being before she was buried with where the mountains above her were now. The landscape itself was changed beyond all recognition. Most of the forest was gone – collapsed and burned, withering and charring. Little fires flaring up as leaves of sturdier species withered and burned for a little longer. The yang qi was also feeding on the innate wood qi of the forest – yang devouring yin at a disturbing rate.

The rumble of earth and the tremors provided ongoing commentary to the distant battle as well, which was once again intensifying. All around her she was aware of the dull thunder of drums, distant shouting and the occasional thump of an explosion or flash of light through the mist. She scrambled over the swathe of burning ground and, grabbing a convenient fallen tree, started to haul herself up with the intention of seeing if she couldn’t find the others and also get a better view of what was going on–

Something, a hand in fact, grasped her leg. A figure, covered in stinking black mud and wearing scraps of smoking hide and arm guards made of spider chitin, surged out of the ground and dragged her down. She kicked it with all her might and was relieved to see it stumble back even as she cursed herself for not seeing it, lying in mud. Such had been her preoccupation with working out where she was that she had assumed she was alone here.

The figure snarled at her and punched back at her with a fist that was almost the size of her head. She rolled away to the side and it snarled again, saying something in a guttural language she couldn’t understand. The intention that came with them, though, was actual ‘Intent’. She felt them sink into her mind, making her consciousness go foggy and her qi turn chaotic as she staggered back, grasping for stability.

The figure leapt for her again and she desperately struck back with her own qi before recalling that sensation of external manifestation she had achieved with her mantra. Her kick collided with its leg, making it stumble and curse her. Following up, she used ‘Heart Shifting Steps’ and managed to kick it between the legs.

It howled, staggering and trying to lash out at her.

She tackled it, pushing qi into her hands and used a technique from the first part of ‘Eighteen Earthly Lotus Palms’.

{Blossoming Lotus Seizes All}

The strike sent a pulse of qi into its body, its aim to damage its outer meridians and allow her to grasp some of the qi within and turn it on its bearer.

It coughed up purple-black blood and screamed in fury, throwing her off and into a nearby fallen tree before lunging after her, covering the distance in a single step even as she crashed into it. She tried to dodge the stomp but its martial intent was clearly superior to her own. Even with Heart Shifting Steps to minimise the damage it still landed – making her scream in agony even as the tree trunk behind her splintered and she was flattened into the quagmire.

The figure roared in triumph, reaching down and dragging her up–

A deafening roar of rage and pain spiked into her mind, rupturing her eardrums, making her eyes go red and shaking her inner organs within a centimetre of critical damage. The world turned upside down and they were both thrown dozens of metres through the swamp as the ground rippled outwards. Trees splintered and rocks shattered or just got buried as they both crashed into the slope of a newly thrown up mud hill.

Sliding to the bottom, she staggered up and grabbed a nearby branch, launching herself desperately at her attacker, who had hit a tree trunk nearby and was groggily trying to rise in the knee-deep mud. The spiked branch from the tree splintered on contact with its skin, but she managed a follow-up strike with another of the arts from the talisman.

{Echoes of the Mountain Lotus}

The distortion to its qi made its body flex as the strike, aimed at its heart gate, tried to disperse the qi straight out of its body. It screamed and its body blurred beneath her, kicking her away a second time. This time she managed to roll forward and it crashed down behind her. Spinning, she repeated the attack, but this time on the ground, and was rewarded by everything within a few paces of both of them wobbling chaotically.

Her attacker slipped, clearly as unable to use qi to secure its footing as she was and she grabbed another branch and tackled it a second time. This time she stabbed for its mouth. It bit the branch, but her luck was clearly a bit better this time because it didn’t break. She put all her weight onto the spike of wood, impaling it through the back of its mouth. The body spasmed, she guessed she caught its spine somehow, and it grasped her by the arm and threw her a dozen metres away.

Crashing down into the smoking mud, she scrabbled for something else to use as a weapon and found a rock the size of her fist. The figure had torn the branch out of its mouth by now, though she could see its left arm twitching awkwardly as it staggered forward towards her, again screaming something in the same guttural language.

She shoved as much qi into the rock in her hand as it could take and threw it. The figure swatted it away and in the process provided the final impetus to make it destabilize. The explosion left a smoking burn scar across a third of its body and several deep cuts which also bled with purple-black blood.

It charged her again, with remarkable dexterity for its current condition.

Heart Shifting Steps allowed her to barely dodge, deflecting the worst of its attack and enabling her to hit it again.

{Echoes of the Mountain Lotus}

This time her attack landed more successfully and its torso deformed a bit under the strike. It snarled at her and staggered forward, grasping her even as she hit it again.

{Blossoming Lotus Seizes All}

It succeeded in tackling her to the ground and then promptly vomited blood and gore all over her as its internal organs finally ruptured. A third hit to its side with the same technique finally found its heart and it coughed weakly and slumped down.

Struggling out from under it, she saw it was already regenerating.

“Seriously, what are you, a battle puppet?” she hissed.

Grabbing its head with both hands, she mustered as much qi as she could and focused on manifesting her mantra like she had when she nearly crippled Sheng Zhao.

{Blossoming Lotus Seizes All}

It screamed and howled and warped and thrashed before finally collapsing as wave after wave of her qi, supported by her manta, tore through its head. It took almost a third of her qi reserves to kill it as well.

Exhaling, she considered the figure. It was clearly afflicted by yang qi poisoning, but despite being remarkably durable it had barely used any qi at all beyond what had to be a soul attack with its initial challenge? That put it at Soul Foundation at the very least…

-And yet, there is no way I could have beaten a Soul Foundation cultivator in an unarmed grappling match, mantra or no, she thought glumly. Unless…?

It took a bit of effort, but she was able to cut into its body, below the ribcage and rummage around in the gore or a few unpleasant moments to find its dantian… which was missing.

“Huh,” was all she could say to that. “No way was this bugger mortal… unless it used a mantra?”

A quick check though got her nothing there either and with the sound of drums and distant calls starting to become more prevalent all around her, she didn’t want to linger here. Considering it a further moment, replaying their scuffle in her head, she finally recalled that it had tried to strike at her heart twice in the fight. In a battle between cultivators that was useful for disrupting qi, but rarely fatal unless the trauma dealt was catastrophic…

It took a bit more effort to rummage around in its innards but she finally grasped its heart and dragged it out of its body. It had a crystalline accretion on it that was totally devoid of qi.

“Ah…” she considered the heart and then tossed it down with the body and wiped a bit of the mud off its face.

Not a mortal, it had just had its qi totally dispersed. Now that she thought about it, she had been remarkably low on qi when she recovered consciousness as well. The figure was clearly not like her though. Its face was broad and its jaw robust it had a somewhat hooked nose and dark grey-green skin, high cheekbones and deep set eyes. Had it not been for its skin colour it might have passed for a very brutish body refinement cultivator? The other thing that stood out was its pointy ears…

“A demon?” she mused, looking around again. “It makes sense I suppose.”

Another shockwave made her flinch, but this time the ground merely shifted a bit and the yang miasma swirled about. A moment later there was a series of red flashes – lightning bolts. Those did make her hair stand on end, even at a distance of a few hundred metres, and the light from them exuded a stifling pressure that made her qi chaotic for a brief moment.

-First thing: try to recover my weapon, she thought grimly, reminded of the fact that that spider had tried to steal it away.

After that... her goals were, she had to admit, somewhat nebulous. The key thing was to find out what happened to the others, starting with Lin Ling, and then get out of this facsimile of a Naraka hell and find the others, fast.

-Anyway, weapon first… The question is, where in this hell that used to be a valley is it?

Pushing out her qi sense, she resisted kicking something. While it was not as limited as below, the miasma drifting over everything was about as good at blocking it as the worst of the wet season rains back home. It was certainly buried as well, although that was less of an issue – it should still have some trace of her qi on it – assuming the lightning hadn’t scrubbed it.

In the end, she found herself once again turning to ‘Heart Shifting Steps’. Even then, it took several minutes of wary, headache-inducing searching around her surroundings, paranoid over other potential attackers, to find trace of it. The disturbed qi and yang qi didn’t make it easy; she only got the induction of its direction because of the purity of the qi she had provided to mark the weapon. The art itself suggesting somewhat vaguely that it was maybe a hundred metres to her right. That also happened to be in the direction of the ongoing combat.

At that point, as if to thoroughly emphasise that all the things were trying to screw with her at this point, she had only just finished collecting herself and stabilizing her qi when the sky above her gave a vast, dull rumble. Moments later rain started to drop out of the sky whose rainclouds were starting to return, she noted glumly.

Looking around with a humourless chuckle, because what this place really needed was of course more water, she set off – skirting around fallen trees and avoiding the other figures who were struggling out of the mud as best she could. There were quite a few scattered around, she soon realised, no doubt dispersed much like she had been.

It didn’t take her long to run into more of the demons, though, as she made her way through the steaming, festering mire of ash, smouldering trees and loamy mud. They were scattered for the most part, confused and in the process of regrouping. Many were about her stature, all male as far as she could see. Their bodies, where not plastered in mud, were painted as if they were skeletons and then augmented with brutal-looking symbols and tattoos in red, white and black all over their bodies. Most, like her, had lost the majority of their garments… if they even wore any at all.

The only ones she saw wearing anything like armour, made mostly of spider chitin, were the ones impressing order on groups of the demons, mostly through a lot of shouting and, when that failed, extreme violence. Without exception those gave her the vibe of something approaching Golden Core Cultivators, making her very glad that qi sense was thoroughly messed up out here thanks to the yang qi miasma.

Additionally, many of those she saw were manifesting signs of yang qi poisoning. This was especially prevalent among those with fewer tattoos, mostly on their arms and legs, who all appeared to be Qi Condensation or Qi Refinement. While they were re-arming, mostly with wooden clubs and spears, many were having to pause and vomit blood or showing signs of over-aggressiveness.

There were also smaller, grey-green skinned figures amongst them, largely of a strength comparable to her from what she could tell. At first she took them to be children, but soon she revised that thought to them being another group entirely, likely subservient to the bigger figures who were ordering them around with impunity.

They were mostly about the height of Lin Ling, or a bit shorter – again with pointy ears and hooked noses, sharp teeth and red-gold eyes. They also sported nasty looking tattoos where she could make them out from her hidden scouting point beside a shattered tree.

She watched for a few more moments. The larger demons were moving around, hauling the smaller ones out of the ground like they were root vegetables, with jeers and laughter – corralling them afterward and preventing the obviously spooked smaller ones from fleeing.

Grimacing, she slid carefully back down behind the smashed tree and made her way further away from that group. Her current condition was such that she didn’t fancy fighting her way through the kind of numbers she was starting to see. There were certainly far more of these demons than had been apparent when she was buried.

-How long was I out? she found herself thinking as she slipped past the far side of a tree trunk from another recovering band.

There was no real sight of the sun, and…

It took her a moment to recall that she had a time count on her jade scrip. Hauling it out, it told her that it was in theory about an hour before sundown. Looking around she found that… well it wasn’t improbable. The whole landscape had a somewhat eerie vibe with the mist and the constant flashes from explosions and now the rain that was heightening the gloom.

There was a huge roar, behind her this time, and a series of explosions. She ducked down and saw the mists scatter briefly as a centipede some 20 metres long did some kind of attack, sending a pressure wave–

It washed over her, making her skin blister and ripping the air from her lungs even as she cowered in cover. Flattened into the mud bank, she cursed all qi beasts in her heart as a large remnant of a tree, thrown by its tail she presumed, crashed down nearby like a small meteor. The miasma flowed back a moment later, even as she tried to shake off the queasy feeling that had come from the roar and the unnatural chill permeating her limbs.

-Soul Shock.

Based on the size, that centipede thing should be at least a Dao Seeking monster, maybe even an Immortal one. Fumbling for her talisman wallet, she cursed for a moment, thinking it lost with most of her garb – until she remembered that she had had it in her storage talisman all along and exhaled. Checking what she had at hand though made for sad viewing: Most of her offensive talismans that remained were Nascent Soul or lower. Of those at Dao Seeking, she only had some ‘Metal Cage’ talismans and a ‘White Flame Phoenix Blast’ talisman that was… well it would certainly make a hole in the landscape. She had a few Immortal grade ones – a ‘Blaze Spear’ talisman with all its charges and a few metal element ones. The rest were all utility talismans. No stealth talismans, for what they might be worth in this environment, and, beyond the Blaze Spear talismans, probably nothing remotely able to deal with a monster like that now that she had spent her corrosion talisman.

Only when she was sure that the thing was not going to come in her direction did she continue onwards. Unfortunately, she had only made it another 30 or so metres, some halfway to her general destination, when a group of smaller demons scrambled over a tree to her right and immediately spotted her, just as she was in the process of hauling herself through a smashed tree.

One of the demons gave a hoot and a yell and threw a rock in her direction, even as she squirmed through the gap and rolled down the slope. Seconds later, three larger demons scrambled over another rock ahead of her.

“…”

They stared at each other for several seconds, then one of the large demons threw a crude javelin it had fashioned at her. Thanks to Heart Shifting Steps she dodged it easily enough – however, one of the other large demons turned and yelled something in their guttural language and a moment later almost two dozen smaller demons, mostly at Qi Condensation, scrambled over the logs and the rock to line up behind them.

The javelin thrower pounded a fist to its chest and pointed at her as the smaller demons spread out, clearly intending to encircle her. Based on what she could see, the javelin thrower had no armour and little in the way of qi. In fact, that was the general state of most of this group – out of qi and badly poisoned. The previous fight had been hard because she was qi-depleted and surprised as much as anything.

She palmed a replenishment pill and swallowed it, snatching up the javelin – it was better than nothing. One of the others, who had a stone blade for a weapon, snarled at the thrower and punched it, pointing in a way that needed little translation. The third figure snarled and unlimbered the club it had fashioned from a length of tree trunk, stalking towards her.

Left with no other choice, she adjusted her footing on the slope and moved to meet it, making sure she kept the ground advantage. Her opponent’s first strike didn’t aim at her, but rather the wooden javelin, clearing intending to rectify its companion’s error.

She swept the blade aside and stabbed at it, positioning it between her and the rest of the group as best she could – using its bulk and frenzy as a shield against other projectiles. It had not escaped her notice that many of the small demons were hefting rocks and what looked like crude slingshots.

Parrying a second lashing strike that was also aimed to break the javelin, she stabbed it in the shoulder–

A small demon somehow arrived beside her, tackling her around the waist and making her eat a full blow from the club to the arm. The small demon was shockingly strong as well, almost as strong as the large one she had previously fought.

-How in the accursed eye of heaven did that get close? she swore in her mind as she spun on the ground and tried to kick it away.

It had waltzed right through her qi perception as if it wasn’t even a thing.

She saw it had weird wavy purple tattoos on its limbs in the moment before the big demon clove down on her with its club again, apparently caring nothing for its compatriot that was trying to push her down.

{Blossoming Lotus Seizes All}

She pushed her qi into it, again using the mantra manifestation and this time focusing on ‘Bestowal’. It turned out the small demon’s control over what remained of its own innate qi was pathetic in comparison to its wiry strength. It twitched and vomited blood as she pushed it in the way of the strike and rolled out of the way. The club blow smashed into the slope and she snared the legs of her attacker, making it evade and misjudge its sideways swipe as it stumbled slightly on the muddy slope.

As she finished sliding, she saw three more small demons already dropping down from above, almost on top of her.

Wincing, she used another of the arts from the Eighteen Earthly Lotus Palms.

{Blazing Lotus Phantasm}

A phantasmal lotus appeared beneath her drawing on the yang energy saturating everything. Her qi-reserves plummeted and a small blizzard of blazing lotus petals appeared as its petals unfurled.

Demons burned, small ones fleeing in every direction, shrieking in agony even as the club-wielding one tried to strike her again. Fury wracked its expression now as it ignored the severity of the fire consuming it to slam the club down hard enough to create a small shockwave and put cracks in the wood.

Heart Shifting Steps provided her the opportunity and she grasped it with both hands before it could rip it out of the mud. Pushing her own qi into it, she sighed as it combusted into ash with a crack of destabilizing qi and scattered. The shockwave made its possessor stumble backwards even as she resisted the worst of it, tackling it to the ground and hitting it several times with her fists. There was no real technique there, all she did was send qi through her strikes into its body with the intention of ruining its meridians and stopping its heart.

“Gaaaahgh-!” Involuntarily, she screamed as a stone dagger sank into her back, aiming for her heart.

Another of the small demons, one who also had wavy purple tattoos she noted and who had avoided her ‘Blazing Lotus Phantasm’ entirely somehow, had arrived behind her and stabbed her. She caught it by the arm and hurled it at the other two large demons who had also managed to evade the worst of the damage.

The one giving the orders laughed, caught the small demon by the head and threw it straight back at her. The demon gave a manic shriek and drew a second stone dagger from its belt as it shot back towards her. In response, she snatched up the javelin and smashed it into the flying demon, breaking the crude weapon to splinters and deforming its torso, sending it spinning into the air to land who knew where with a fading howl of pain.

The demon that had thrown the javelin now charged her directly, trying to stab her with another one. She skipped back and used Heart Shifting Steps again, only to find that the qi-diffusion in the area messed with it this time. The dodge was successful, but she ended up slipping and found two more small demons jumping from nowhere at her.

{Echoes of the Mountain Lotus}

This time she didn’t bother grabbing them, just slapped her palm on to the ground and used the mnemonic as if it was a qi art rather than a martial technique. The shockwave swept over everything within three metres of her. The small demons deformed in the air, bleeding from their orifices, and collapsed twitching when they landed. The large demon staggered and also spat blood, choosing to throw that javelin at her instead.

She was about to dodge when the last demon suddenly stood over her, already stamping down on her breasts. With her options limited, she resorted to the defensive art from the first chapter of the Eighteen Lotus Palms and manifested ‘Body’ from her mantra.

{Returning Lotus Gate}

For a brief moment the qi in her body flowed through a second circuit, somehow passing through her heart gate twice in a single cycle. In the process, her qi in her body that was being used to form qi armour functionally doubled and took on a faintly metal attribute. The stamp planted her in the mud and made her ribs creak but did no more. Its follow-up blow, stabbing between her breasts, drew blood but little else.

{Blossoming Lotus Seizes All}

Grasping his leg, she used that martial technique as if it was an art as well. This time it wasn’t quite as successful, her qi cycle still not having stabilized from the metal art she had just used. It still managed to catch her attacker off guard, damaging the meridians within his leg as she managed to slide out from under it.

Pushing her qi into her legs she leapt for the javelin thrower, relying on her qi defence and momentum to catch him off guard. The strategy mostly worked as she intended. She crashed knees first into its chest and propelled the demon several stumbling steps backwards.

Hammering it in the face with both fists, she managed to execute ‘Echoes of the Mountain Lotus’ in its lesser variation, making the demon convulse as they both crashed into the ground. Its scream of rage caught her by surprise, because there was qi manifested through it. The pressure smashed her backwards, sending her tumbling, even if it did little lasting damage to her qi itself which was starting to recover from her earlier, rapid expenditure.

Coming to a stop, she quickly palmed another base-building pill to help her recovery and scrambled to the side, warned by Heart Shifting steps in the same instant that the blade wielder arrived beside her again, smashing at her with the…

-Do they want to catch me alive or something? she wondered as he narrowly missed her with the back of his blade.

“…”

The demon stared at its blade, looking… annoyed and then flipped it over.

-Nope… it was just caught up in the moment… she realised dully.

Rolling up, she grunted as two more of the infernal undetectable small demons shot out of nowhere, tackling her legs. Two more, badly burned and quite detectable, scrambled towards her, frothing at the mouth. Off to one side, she saw another of the small demons shoving a mushroom into the mouth of another comatose burn victim.

{Blazing Lotus Phantasm}

This time she got the mnemonic right and the blazing lotus emptied most of her qi, exploding in a shockwave that outlined everything within twenty metres in blazing golden-white fire for a heartbeat. The little demons all collapsed, thrashing as they succumbed; however, the large demons just went berserk. The one nearest her screamed in apoplectic fury, veins standing out on its body as its muscles corded and then charged for her, tackling her to the ground and pummelling her viciously, clearly intending to set her on fire as well.

{Blossoming Lotus Seizes All}

{Blossoming Lotus Seizes All}

Trusting to her qi armour to handle the worst of it, she sent two pulses of ‘Blossoming Lotus Seizes All’ into its body, trying to get the ‘other’ aspect of that art to work in her favour.

{Blossoming Lotus Seizes All}

It took a third before she finally got the rhythm of the mnemonic just right in its martial form and the disrupting rhythm of the attack, which had turned her opponent’s qi chaotic, pulled some of what had been orphaned back into her, where her mantra and the symbol greedily claimed it for her own.

{Blossoming Lotus Seizes All}

A fourth strike finally got its heart and it succumbed. Even as she tried to push its still-thrashing corpse that hadn’t quite acknowledged its death off herself, other demons that had escaped the lotus arrived beside her. Without conscience, the blade-wielding orc ran the thrashing corpse on top of her through, clearly aiming to pin her beneath it.

Another large demon had appeared at this point, she realised, as she mustered more qi and tried to use the body to protect herself: a club wielder who smashed its weapon down at her head directly. Moving as best she could, she deflected it with her qi armour and spat blood as she overdrew her reserves for the first time.

Inhaling, she grasped a bit of her vital qi and focused on her defence again.

{Returning Lotus Gate}

Intent was almost 30% of most of these techniques, she was coming to realise, and the follow-up attacks met her and were repelled as the art returned them with interest, hurling both large demons across the muddy hollow.

Panting hard, she pushed herself up and ate two more base building pills – that had been far too much qi expended. Both attackers struggled up, but she noted that all the small ones, bar the mushroom-distributing one which had fled she guessed, were dead at this point. Both larger demons snarled, the blade-wielding one finally returning to its senses.

Heart Shifting Steps warned her even as it threw back its head and howled something in its guttural language. Cursing, she charged forward–

When she recovered her senses, she was pleased to find she was only mostly buried. The surprise shockwave that had turned their little combat arena over had been entirely unexpected in that instance. Struggling out of the dirt, she saw an arm twitching and scrabbling nearby and lunging for it sent a series of pulses of her qi and her mantra manifestation into its body, not stopping until she was sure it was dead.

Looking around, she saw no sigh of the other one. After eating another three Qi Refinement grade recovery pills and wincing as it tasted far too sweet – a sure sign she was both overdosing them – she rushed onwards her destination with much less subtlety than she had before.

Even before she arrived at her destination, she saw that it had a small group of small demons in it who were scavenging bits from a very crispy spider. Covering the last 20 metres with a single leap using her old movement art ‘Kun Skips on the Pond’, she crashed down amongst them and immediately executed ‘Blazing Lotus Phantasm’ as a martial form rather than a qi art. In this yang rich environment it was by far the best attack she had and the most qi-efficient for large groups, it seemed.

The demons screamed and died, their skin charring away and their flesh searing in seconds as the ‘Blazing Lotus’ martial intent twisted the surroundings.

Casting around, she looked for the resonance with her own qi and found it, several metres from the dead spider. Hastening over, she dumped all the earth back out of her storage talisman and then pulled several square metres of it into the talisman at a go until she finally uncovered the sword-staff, buried about four metres below the surface.

Turning it over in her hands, she was relieved to see it was apparently none the worse for its brush with Immortal grade lightning and stored it away in her storage talisman… and then face-palmed.

“For what did I do all that fighting for, when I could have just dumped the contents of my storage talisman out on them?” she muttered to the world at large, eating another recovery pill.

She was drawn back from that rather vexatious observation by guttural yelling behind her. Presumably the other demon had not been buried, or their battle site had been discovered. Off to her left, the drums had intensified as well. Their sound was certainly being blunted by the yang miasma, but even with that there was still a low key sense of unease that the sound carried, akin to a soul attack.

She turned around and found six more of the smaller demons carrying various weapons, daubed in purple just like the spiders, stealthily scrambling over a collapsed tree aiming to sneak up on her. They had made it within ten metres of her before she even spotted them, and even now, they still didn’t show up in her qi perception properly when she was looking right at them.

“…”

Without any preamble she withdrew the swordstaff again and charged straight for them, covering the distance between them in a matter of moments. Yelling in anger, they scattered, trying to flank her. Rather than bother with any specific martial technique she focused on Heart Shifting Steps and used that to find openings. Her first thrust stabbed a small demon through the head. The follow-up sweep to the right bisected two more as she turned in a half spin. Flipping the haft in her hands she smashed the butt into the chest of a fourth that had been leaping for her from her left-hand side before stepping back, inhaling as she did and warding against the remaining two who were coming in from the left with it.

They both came up short, faced with the unenviable prospect of facing down her, who had a metal weapon with clubs that were basically sharp stones bound between split lengths of wood.

{Kun Overturns the Waves}

Exhaling, she finally executed a martial technique, letting her qi flow out through the blade as she surged forward using Heart Shifting Steps. Too late, both small demons scrambled back, trying to run away from either side of her. The martial intent carried with the qi washed over both of them like a phantasmal wave and they were cut in two.

Finally, her qi perception did warn her about something, allowing her to spin back to the right and intercept the lunging spear strike from a larger demon that had climbed over a nearby tree and leapt to attack her.

Spears clashed and she felt her hands shiver as she got the worst of the match of strength, twisting away and guiding the strike around her, collecting it on the flat of the blade. She then equalized the odds by just turning her own blade 90 degrees and dragging it back towards her, cutting the wooden haft of the spear in two.

The demon, who was also wearing some spider chitin painted with six golden eyes over its skeleton body paint and red tattoos, trembled in rage and suddenly burst into green flame of all things. Screaming inarticulately, it pounced for her, trying to tackle her to the ground.

She tracked his charge and stabbed the demon through the arm–

It howled, grabbed her weapon and tried to physically flip her up in the air. Having expected something like that, she charged forward, using the ‘evasive’ art from the Eighteen Earthly Palms – ‘Misty Lotus River’ – to buy her a momentary opening.

The mists twisted around her and the art briefly influenced the ‘Yang’ aspect of the landscape to form an illusion of her being disarmed. The demon charged straight through the illusion and she swept her weapon at his side, trying to exploit its blind spot. Even then it still managed to pirouette with remarkable dexterity and send a flickering strike at her with the wooden haft of its spear. Only her qi perception gave her the faintest chance of sensing the blur as she invoked the Eighteen Palms’ defensive art.

{Returning Lotus Gate}

The blow still sent her sprawling, her qi vanishing into the ether as it was burnt to resist the damage dealt. There was no qi with the attack, but martial intent blasted into her body, making her bones rattle and her organs shift very unpleasantly. There was no question that a few more blows like that would not be in her best interest.

Rolling up, she managed to parry the next strike that lashed in. This time it didn’t make the same mistake and after matching her strike immediately withdrew the haft for a second strike.

She parried long this time, forcing it to back up or be stabbed in the gut before dropping the blade and deflecting the strike she had baited upwards.

{Kun Rises to Heaven}

There was no question of her messing about now. She executed the keystone of the Kun Clan’s martial sword form and tried to manifest her mantra with it. Her qi swirled and her own martial intent manifested a rising wave of water that crashed into its midriff. She could immediately see the advantage of the Bright Lotus Earthly Scripture’s close combat art in terms of mantra manifestation as well. Her mantra’s impact on this strike with her family’s art had been minimal at best, and it had only cut her opponent’s chest shallowly.

Her qi perception shifted again, warning her of a second combatant. Sweeping the blade behind her, she turned in a half circle and met the charging demon who was almost behind her, blade raised. Her momentum carried her inside its strike, allowing her to plant a palm on its chest.

{Blazing Lotus Phantasm}

This time, she timed it properly and the surging current of yang attributed qi in their surroundings swirled inwards with it. The ethereal, blazing lotus formed around her palm and exploded into hundreds of petals on impact with her attacker, sending him flying back into the mud. Her enemy screamed briefly before the flames took all the air from his surroundings and thereafter just thrashed as he burned away, inextinguishable in the current surroundings.

Her other opponent had recovered by this time and now bounded back at her–

“Nameless mother-molesting–!” a thrown javelin from a small demon, painted purple – again – splintered on her back.

-Dangerous… dangerous… she remonstrated with herself. Sticks might not do much, but a qi-infused stone blade might. Especially if she didn’t see the fate-accursed thing coming.

In that moment, her first attacker was back on her, shoulder charging her and sending her sprawling even as it made another grab for her weapon. She stored it and took the hit, swallowing back the blood that rose in her mouth from the force of the impact. It leapt after her, still shrouded in the strange, phantasmal greenish fire, swinging down with a… spider limb of all things.

Gritting her teeth, she waited until the last possible moment and summoned the swordstaff. Its remarkable instincts nearly allowed it to dodge, but she still managed to half sever its head, including its spine. It stumbled, the wound already starting to heal, but it was all the opening she needed and with a second sweeping cut she properly decapitated it and kicked the head away before stabbing it through the heart. Even then, it continued to thrash and flail in the mud for a full twenty seconds before finally falling still.

By this point, the one who had survived her initial melee, who had carried the stone blade, had also arrived and was now standing on a large fallen tree. With guttural shouts it directed the others, some thirty or so she noted with rising concern, to back off.

This was met with hoots of derision and another large demon, also wearing spider chitin armour painted in the same way, but with extra black, made an obscene gesture with its manhood before jumping off its own tree and walking towards her. The smaller demons banged tree trunks and hooted and jeered as her new opponent thumped its chest with its free hand and pointed at her with its own crude stone blade.

In reply, she ate another qi-replenishment pill and emptied the entire contents of the soil in her storage ring over it when it closed within a metre. To add insult to injury, she then stabbed it straight through the head. Rather than be angry, those who had been looking on all fell about laughing and hooting at their compatriot’s misfortune.

Its body suddenly exploded with greenish fire as well and it ducked off her blade, the wound healing back in moments.

-Great, she complained inwardly and pushed as much qi as she could into the mnemonic for ‘Blazing Lotus Phantasm’.

{Blazing Lotus Phantasm}

It struggled out of the pile of dirt just in time for her to set the entire area for ten metres around her on fire. Those watching on continued to laugh and jeer generally even as she dodged backwards away from its enraged attack. For all that it was on fire, poisoned with yang qi and also qi-depleted, it had clear skill with the weapon and was still faster than she was. Without the help of the Heart Shifting Steps, she was under no illusions as to how long she would last here, she recognized as she evaded an upward and then a downward strike as it rolled forward, trying to use the mud to extinguish the fire.

Fortunately, all that did was feed it, thanks to the yang qi permeating everything. Even so, she was surprised that it simply threw the blade at her with an enraged scream when it rose and instead charged at her like an enraged bull.

It dodged under her blade as she thrust it out, moving to the side using ‘Heart Shifting Steps’ in conjunction with ‘Kun Skips on the Pond’.

She kicked it in the arm and used the force of the impact to launch herself past it, slicing the blade down to sever its left leg from behind. That imbalanced it enough for her to stab her blade through its back, severing its spine and partially eviscerating it in the process. Even then, it still didn’t die, rolling over and grasping her leg before she could evade.

The grip was strong enough that she felt her shin bones crack under the pressure as it physically threw her metres away to crash down in the smoking mud.

Before she could do anything else though, another rippling surge tore through the landscape.

Staggering up, she used ‘Kun Skips on the Pond’ in its martial form to attack her opponent, only to be thoroughly thwarted when the ground was yanked away from beneath her. As if she was caught in a riptide, to her dismay she found herself pulled, along with everyone and everything else, back towards the origin point of the wave.

In the process, she finally got a clear look at the cataclysmic battle unfolding in the distance.

Hundreds of the large demons supported by maybe a thousand of the smaller ones were fighting using formations that summoned phantasmal beasts. She saw at quick count two spiders, a centipede, a giant rat thing and a snake or worm that were all grappling with two huge constructs made of earth that resembled a cross between an armoured tortoise and a pangolin – although erring more towards a pangolin, it had to be said – with a lot more spikes and a tail shaped like a flail.

To her left and right, on several raised patches of ground, protected by barriers, were groups of demons wearing robes made out of… human skin… Around them were arrayed horrible banners that on first glance looked to be puppet-like things, but on closer inspection proved to be cultivators, brutally bound in some way to form living totems.

As she watched, they fired off another barrage of red bolts that made her skin crawl. Their target was a third figure, shrouded in a miasma of yang qi so dense she could barely make out their form as the figure crouched atop a rapidly forming third construct. Its immediate opponent was a figure with golden hair, wearing black and white painted carapace armour who was riding a nightmarish meld of spider and scorpion. The beast glimmered with dull red brands that hurt her eyes to look at and was bleeding ichor from dozens of wounds, including two missing limbs.

The shifting ground stopped and she watched dully as a fourth construct surged up and crashed into a formation of a hundred demons chanting and dancing beneath a banner made of some kind of spider bits off which hung the burning heads of six cultivators who were all screaming silently. With a single sweep of its tail, it sent the front rank flying in a bloody mist even as those behind kept howling, stamping and dancing in unison without any fear or interest in their self-preservation.

Out of the banner came a shadowy crab spider that connected with the construct, sending it backwards a few paces and putting a huge gash in its shell.

Between the formations, much less organised bands of less armoured demons were also pushing forward, occasionally screaming and bursting into pale green-black fire as they grappled with the constructs, hacking at their legs with blades and clubs, or tried to snare them with ropes.

Two things were immediately clear in any case as she was inexorably drawn inwards towards this horrible battlefield. The first, was that there were more demons arriving every second. Second, if this lot beat out their opponent, she was dead; there was no chance of fleeing this kind of force unless she could fly… or teleport. The figures with the vile robes on the rocks were certainly immortals and the banners… Those were also likely captured immortal cultivators.

The wave of earth finally abated, depositing her and a jumble of others almost on the edge of a formation of dancing demons controlling a centipede as a fifth construct formed and rolled straight at another formation to her left like an avalanche. Figures on a rock nearby screamed and a wall of spikes smashed up out of the ground, forcing the thing back. Even then its tail still smashed down in that formation, killing a third of it and scattering the more.

The formation she had ended up in was, she realised, in quite a bit of disarray as well. The waves of rolling earth had broken the rhythm of their dance and the centipede spectre was being pressured badly by a construct. Her indecision was finally cut short when those who had come with her started to recover themselves.

Two larger demons screamed and charged at her. Grimacing, she ate another qi replenishment pill and pushing her qi into the swordstaff, spun it and planted it blade first in the ground.

{Echoes of the Mountain Lotus}

A shockwave that took the form of a ghostly golden lotus scythed out around her. Anyone in contact with the ground when it passed over them had at best, their qi disrupted and at worst their legs broken or even severed.

Spinning, she decapitated a nearby dancer and impaled another as she darted through their formation. There was no need to waste qi on it, the weapon itself was more than enough in the present context to do what needed be done. Within a few short moments, the qi flow within the whole group that was focused on the banner destabilized. With a crack of green fire, the totem, which stood behind a demon who was pounding a drum frantically, exploded.

Caught unawares by the blast, the green fire that washed over her was… vile. It whispered into her mind in a way reminiscent of the darkness in the depths and tried to flow into her body and control her. The lotus symbol in her mind eye that held the essence of the cultivation law shimmered and blocked the worst of the attack. Still, her qi depleted rapidly as she struggled with the green fire until the drummer focused on her, howled in rage and abruptly changed to a different, even more unsettling beat. All the green fire now flowed towards it and started to enter the drum.

{Heart Shifting Steps}

Blurring across the distance, she stabbed the drummer before it could pound the final notes on the drum with the bone drum sticks. Her strike overturned the drum and carried the drummer away from it and the now rapidly degrading totem. Crashing down in the mud, she tore the spear sideways and spun in a circle to split the drum. She made it just in time as it turned out, the drum emitting a horrible wail as the green fire that had been coalescing in it scattered.

Dozens of ghastly spirits roiled out of it. The aura from them made her limbs go cold and her bones feel like they were being frozen from the inside out. As one, they screamed in rage and tore through the remnants of the formation. Where they touched demons before dissipating, the demons’ bodies withered and scattered into sparkling black dust.

The remaining dancers all howled in incandescent fury and piled after her.

{Blazing Lotus Phantasm}

A blazing lotus took out the first few, but even then they still came after her with mindless ferocity. The first one that reached her she decapitated, and found that it still kept coming after her for maybe ten seconds before collapsing.

Twisting away from it, she stabbed behind her, then swept the butt of the spear around her, connecting with another of her attackers hard enough to shatter its leg. The demon frothed at the mouth and smashed its club right into her chest in response, sending her staggering back. The rest of the pack roared and all pounced at her. Left with the choice of trying to melt them all or escape with her movement art she chose the latter, dancing back just far enough to leave her in attack range of the group, catching two of them with crippling strikes as they charged after her even as she used ‘Echoes of the Mountain Lotus’ a second time to cripple a few.

Rushing for the next formation circle, she went straight for the frenzied drummer who she decapitated and bisected in a single arcing sweep before immediately fleeing for the circle after that.

She got two more drummers before the demons on the nearest rock behind the barrier were able to get a grasp on what she was doing, but by that point three of their spectral beasts fighting the constructs had been rapidly overwhelmed and dispersed. That was probably all that was saving her from the ministrations of the skin robe-wearing demons, she guessed. They were now sending bolts of black lightning from their staffs at the maelstrom of yang qi that was enshrouding the spider rider and its opponent rather than focusing on her.

Almost by happenstance, she spotted one of the crab spider archers that had started this whole mess off aiming towards her. Seeing a chance for some actual revenge, she dived for cover and palmed her ‘Blaze Spear’ talisman.

With a flash of molten white metal, the spider and its rider, along with a good portion of everything between her and it, vanished in motes of drifting light. Not hanging around, she pulled out the Dao Seeking grade ‘White Flame Phoenix Blast’ talisman and put it on a tree beside her and fled in the opposite–

The sizzling bolt of black lightning hit the ground near her, its aim likely thrown off by the yang miasma. Even so, the shockwave from its impact sent her crashing down into a group of the small demons who were as caught off-guard as she was.

A moment later the talisman ignited and she pressed herself flat to the ground in a hollow between some rocks, squirming down into the steaming, bloody earth for some protection. She felt the exposed skin on her back melt and her bones itch as she cycled her cultivation and her mantra as forcefully as she could. Screaming was impossible because there was no air for her to even breathe in.

~ Han Shu – Fringe of the devastated valley ~

Consciousness returned, along with an awareness that it was unpleasantly hot…

Grimacing, he tried to move and found that the reason it was unpleasantly hot was due to him lying face down in what amounted to a bank of slowly combusting vegetation. Pushing himself up, he disentangled his legs from the branches and looked around. It had started raining and based on how gloomy it was becoming amid the yang rich mists, it had to be almost close to sundown.

Everywhere was devastated, near as he could see. The density of yang qi was, if anything, even greater than it had been before. Persistent ground tremors also told him that the conflict that was the cause of their woes was still ongoing.

“By the fates… what caused this?” he muttered, half hoping Origin might explain, but he was met with silence.

“Look! Other one…”

“Too weak for banner!”

“Kill… make offering!”

The voices made him turn to find several muddy figures scrambling over a fallen tree. All of them were about the size of children, carrying metal-tipped spears, spiked clubs and wearing muddy armour. That last bit in particularly confirmed to him that this was only going to end one way. Sighing, he drew the sword off his back and used ‘Martial Lotus Momentum’ to cover the distance between him and the arrivals.

The nearest one attacked him and–

The attack from the side was totally unforeseen – a second, smaller figure, painted almost entirely purple, nearly stabbed him in the head with a greenish purple metal dagger. Hissing in shock, he spun and cut at it even as it dodged backwards laughing.

*tcch* he spat on its bisected body, enjoying the look of shock immortalised on the demon’s face at its unexpected death.

The other small demons had paused at this point, eyeing their dead compatriot and him somewhat more dubiously. They still approached, but did so much more cautiously, fanning out and holding their weapons properly.

Two charged in from the side, stabbing for his legs to block his momentum. This time he expected the ambusher and rolled forwards into their attacks. The blade hissed past his head and he cut upwards only to meet no resistance–

The shadow cut down at him from the front–

{Yuan Shi’s Lance}

A crackling bolt of teal lightning arced through the air and hit the small demon squarely in the chest, turning it into a blazing candle. The others were all snared a moment later and died thrashing as he recovered himself and saw the source of his salvation – Teng Chunhua.

She arrived by his side, looking very scorched, scanning the surroundings for danger.

“Thanks…” he panted, pushing himself up.

“No problem,” she helped him up. “We don’t want to–”

His own instincts made him duck down even as she also did. The flash of light shifted the evening shadows in the misty rain bizarrely and sent thousands of tiny rainbows scattering everywhere. From where he lay, he saw a whiter than white point twisting in the valley below–

Even sprawled as they were, the shockwave and the blast of heat that came with it made his skin itch. Trees were dislodged and on the cliff to their right a few large bits of rock fell down, succumbing to the tremor that accompanied it. The rain steamed and the thunder of drums dimmed away in that direction.

“What about Juni and Ling?” he asked.

“No idea. I was hoping you might know.” Teng Chunhua grimaced.

{Oh, fuck off… this is why I Hate Defilers}

The words made his consciousness waver for a moment and then everything blurred. Gasping, he pushed himself up, Origin’s words singing unnaturally in his ears.

“You need to get out of here,” Origin hissed.

“What…?” he groaned. “Defilers?”

“Defilers?” Teng Chunhua echoed him, looking confused.

“The demons, the things you are calling demons, they are called Orcneas. They worship a very difficult thing. I had no idea they were in here, but something is poking about for big catches and they seem determined to bite, so I won’t be able to do anything to help you for a while unless you want to attract a lot of bother. Get out of this valley fast and don’t make fuss.”

“What about Juni and Lin Ling?” he asked Origin, however her voice was already gone again.

In the distance there was another huge shockwave and the ground quaked. Several bolts of red light sizzled in the gloom, even at the distance of a mile they made his skin crawl.

“Whatever is going on down there…” Teng Chunhua looked pale. “We do not want any part of it.”

“We can’t leave the other two down there…” he muttered.

“If they are even alive… we were all buried and this place is heaving with monsters. Whatever that talisman did, it clearly disturbed something that finds everything else in this place to be very disagreeable,” Teng Chunhua hissed, grabbing him and starting to drag him along with her. “I agree we shouldn’t leave them, assuming they are alive, but we also can’t leave the other lot alone as well…”

He picked himself up and hurried after her, scowling. “If I have to make a choice between your cultivators and my friends… I will go save Ling and Juni every fate-thrashed time.”

“…”

Chunhua glanced at him and sighed. He could see the conflict in her eyes.

“I can’t stop you,” she acknowledged. “However, this place is…”

She trailed off and he arrived beside her only to be pushed back into the shadow of a tree trunk. They watched as almost 50 demons… the orcneas as origin had called them, rushed past, led by a figure in red and black painted chitin armour who was carrying a stone club. The banner they were carrying made his skin crawl… because it was a male cultivator, identified by his beard. The heavily mutilated body was missing its lower half and a livid red rune had been inscribed onto his chest. They had been impaled on a cross and he saw several other heads, male and female, swinging from the arms of it, tied on by their hair. Two more banners were being carried by other Orcneas, just tattered flags made from whole flayed skins daubed in unsettling symbols. Both banners were topped by a silently screaming head that had been tied onto it using their spines.

They passed without noticing them and Teng Chunhua exhaled only when they were a good hundred metres away.

“As I was saying, there is a small army out here now, bands like that everywhere… I don’t know about you but I am not made of talismans,” she hissed.

“How come they didn’t spot us?” he frowned.

“According to Ruo Han, all soul sense is totally suppressed.” She replied, starting forward again. “Probably the chaos that is the ambient qi and all this yang qi doesn’t help either. Most of them seem like body refinement or martial cultivators as well.”

“So where are we going?” he asked.

“The others are holed up in a gully about 60 metres above us,” she pointed into the smoking slope ahead of them. “Hao Jun and Jin Chen are basically crippled.”

Behind them, there was another massive flare of light. They both ducked down again as the shadows turned weird in the rainy evening mist. There was a roar that was less ‘noise’ and more an attraction of sound, the yang qi in the ground surged, welling up and flowing momentarily towards some distant point.

“Something clearly has it in for this place,” she muttered, eating a purification pill. “The roars earlier almost sounded like some kind of great beast…”

~ Kun Juni – Ruined Valley ~

The heat, the blinding white light and the sensation of skin-shredding pain continued for far too long – far, far too long.

‘Devoted, Path, Lotus, Body, Bestowal’

‘…’

Her mantra cycle was barely enough to keep her healing through the damage for however long it was. It could have been 30 seconds or 5 minutes; she was barely able to think constructively in the heat beyond guiding her qi with the mantra and using it to reinforce her flesh over and over, turning yang qi that tried to invade her body and sear her meridians into qi armour.

When it finally passed, the silence made her wonder if her hearing was somehow damaged as she lay there in the dark with only the sound of her blood thundering in her ears for company. However, after moments that finally faded and she found she could hear the distinctive pings and cracks of rock cooling around her, the hiss of rain falling and even the dull rumble of thunder overhead. The talisman she had used was the strongest she had at that realm, and probably the strongest area effect talisman still in her possession – not counting its natural synergy between the ‘White Flame Phoenix Blast’ talisman and the yang-polluted environment. That the battle around her was still ongoing was terrifying in its own way.

There were several more huge explosions and one further flare of yang heat that made her skin itch even after she ate more purification pills.

She still hid for an additional few minutes after they finally subsided, although the shockwaves continued, taking the opportunity to replenish her qi reserves at last. Were it not for the fact that this was a toxic superheated wasteland infused with distorted elemental qi and that the hollow she had fallen into was now half filled with rubble and burnt corpses – were it not for all that – it would be an ideal cultivation land; such was the density of yang qi.

The respite also gave her a few moments to appreciate more fully the nature of the Bright Lotus Earthly Scripture’s cultivation art and how it was ensuring she didn’t keel over incapacitated from qi poisoning. The ‘Bright’ represented yang, the ‘Lotus’ represented elemental balance, and the ‘Earth’ represented yin, drawing the two together in a harmonious way. The result was that it was leveraging the yang qi and balancing it through her innately feminine aspect to ensure that while she was suffering some ill effects from the environment, it was at a level where she could tolerate it thanks to her mantra and a steady supplement of qi-purification pills, for now at least. Her dantian had also increased its capacity over the course of this desperate melee, she noted. The degree of increase was quite remarkable really.

Eventually, she saw no point in prolonging matters further and scrambled out of her cover once the last of the shockwaves had subsided.

The landscape was, she discovered, warped and mutilated by her actions beyond what she had expected. It had only been a Nascent Soul grade talisman, but clearly it had synergised better with the yang aspects of the landscape than she had figured. Some trees had managed to survive, but those near the epicentre all burned in some capacity. The ground for a hundred metres in every direction was covered in a thin crust of pseudo glass that spoke to a rather high sand content in the loam–

“Aaaghh… Ah… ah!”

She scowled and had to stop after a few metres and wrap some luss cloth around her feet before continuing because it properly burnt her feet and stuck to her like resin in a few places. Her qi-armour did little to lessen it as well – a side effect of whatever was going on with the twisted alignments and the saturation of the yang qi from Lin Ling’s blood from what she could see.

The nearest rock outcropping had lost its barrier and was just warped glass and a few twisted trees and lumps that might have once been demons. Further over, she could see the faintly glowing husk of another spider. The horrible totems and banners themselves still persevered, although all were now on fire, yang flames eating into parts of them slowly. Those fuelling them though, the dancers in their formations, were largely dead – mostly reduced to carbonised husks.

Heart Seeking Steps sang in her mind and she ducked back into cover as a red lightning bolt earthed near her.

{Red Judgement of Heaven}

Even though it landed some twenty metres distant, she felt her skin crawl and a strange whispering in her ears–

Heat and light consumed the world a second time and what remained of sound vanished as well briefly for a few seconds. When it returned it was as a dull ringing in her hears. Peering over the rock she had been conveniently beside, she saw that the outcropping where the second lot of robed figures had been was gone. In its place was a misshapen, glowing lump of melting stone on which two figures flailed and burned amid pure yang fire.

The last of the constructs was finally collapsing. The scorpion, which it had been fighting, was torn into three pieces, and of the rider there was no sign. At the epicentre of the fight, which now seemed to be largely concluded, the eight horrible totems and drums made of skinned people stretched over animal skeletons or exoskeletons that remained were slowly burning up. In the rain-drenched dusk, they resembled macabre candles of pure yang fire… or maybe lanterns. Their flickering light gave the whole dusky scene a very eerie feeling.

Nearby them, she saw another of the spiders slowly hauling itself out of a massive, melted runnel out of what had likely been a small lake. Its shell was cherry red and she could see practically see its life force ebbing away as the yang poison cooked it from the inside out. Other things still lived as well – one of the grey ape-like beasts was twitching feebly, its body hideously burned, half buried in the collapsed remains of another construct that had been partially turned to glass, imprisoning it.

Beside it…

She darted over and arrived in front of the demon who was lying right on the edge of the lake. It was the ‘leader’, she assumed. It had certainly been the one doing most of the pointing and shouting earlier from the rock nearby. It had also been the one summoning that awful black lightning. The robe it wore made her gag. She was no stranger to horrible things at this point… but the sight of it made her skin crawl – that it was totally unharmed just made it all the more ghastly really.

Its wearer was burnt to the bone and she could see yang qi poison slowly being expelled like a haze as it healed. Without pausing, she slammed the spear through its heart, where its core should be, and then cut downwards.

It snapped back to consciousness and gave a horrifying scream that punched through her mind like a spike, making her momentarily forget who she was, what she was doing and why she was there.

[SACRIFICE YOURSELF, WRETCH! BECOME MY MEANS… I WILL RISE THROUGH YOU – I COMMAND IT!]

The words, reminiscent of the horrible utterances of the lizard thing sank into her mind like vile tendrils of defilement.

[YOUR STRENGTH BECOMES MINE! GIVE EVERYTHING TO ME THAT YOU MIGHT LIVE ON THROUGH MY GLORY!]

The lotus symbol blazed in her mind’s eye, trying to resist the terrible grasping strength–

In desperation she pushed her mantra at it, manifesting it, and suddenly the tendrils recoiled.

She dredged up every shred of will she still possessed and, using her mantra, manifested it to push back against the invading soul intent which had so greedily devoured all of her inner self.

“What…? Impossible…! You… you… YOU!”

It met her mantra again, but this time like it was water scattering off a rock. It snarled and tried to grab the rock, ripping it out of her body directly. In that instant, she was treated to a truly bizarre experience as her mantra snapped back into her mind’s eye and with it everything else. The horrible invading intent recoiled and dwindled away to nothing with a final scream of rage and denial.

Sobbing, she pushed herself up and staggered back to the abomination. Grabbing her sword-staff, which had fallen nearby, she proceeded to stab it over and over until the very last of its vitality had ebbed away.

Looking around, she saw that the other demonic combatants nearby were also both very dead. One was missing most of its head and an arm and burnt to a crisp. Others lay, scattered. Their faces twisted in rictus of rage and disbelief while some were just dismembered body parts. Ruined, melted torsos, corroded bones and misshapen qi cores which were burning away in rather disturbing ways. Scowling she kicked one of the heads away and then flinched as the whole area shuddered under the force of a nearby impact.

The howl that came with it made her qi turn turbulent. Even as she recovered, she turned to find an archer, having crawled out from near their burned spider was standing up, aiming an arrow at her-

{Heart Shifting Steps}

The explosion it made after it missed her still sent her sprawling, crashing through a glassy outcropping, spitting blood.

-Oh-fates-I-will-flay-your-nine-generations-and-make-a-flag-of-your-hide! she screamed in her head as the horribly familiar sensation of yang blood searing her flesh returned from her waking nightmares of the darkness below.

She was in the lake bed, with the other combatant, the one responsible for all this ruin. Gasping, she drew out the ‘Blaze Spear’ talisman and sought her target even as another arrow exploded off the source of much of this chaos, making it rage again.

It was staggering towards another demon, oblivious or uncaring of her arrival. Its body was a ruined mess of spikey bone plates that had been melted and corroded by ichor and venom and also badly cut by the blades of the two large demons it appeared. A spear made of glassy black bone was impaled deep into its side, with an arm still holding it. Looking around, she saw no corpses obviously missing an arm either…

“Well that doesn’t bode at all well…” she grimaced, scrambling up and then ducking again as another arrow hissed over and exploded nearby, blowing chunks off a glassy outcropping that turned out to be a half-entombed piece of a scorpion.

-The spear-wielding demon rode a scorpion?

Sweeping out with her qi perception, she immediately regretted it. The density of yang qi here and the disturbance to the ambient qi was such that her perception was warped and dispersed after no more than a metre. Looking around, even with the mist rain, rapidly deepening evening gloom and the fires everywhere, her visibility was ten times as good as her qi sense.

It did, however, warn her of the heavily tattooed demon that had staggered down into the shallow crater they were in. It was horrendously burnt, its skin looking more like burnt rock than living tissue, cracked and flaking with copious amounts of purple-black blood running everywhere. The red tattoos, which covered its arms fully and swirled across its chest, were, she noted, underneath his skin somehow and carried a luminosity that defied the gloom.

Looking around, it fixed on her and with an almost mindless snarl stumbled forward, pulling up its stone-bladed club to strike at her.

While she still had the advantage, at least theoretically, she dashed straight for it, cutting not at it, but at the club. At the last moment it moved with unnatural speed, smashing its weapon into hers and sending her flying straight back, towards the cause of all this mess, which looked something between a pangolin and a turtle, but with more claws and sharper teeth than both usually had.

She barely got any warning from Heart Shifting Steps, or her qi perception as it reacted to her proximity. Half the tail, which disintegrated badly even as it flicked it in her direction smashed down nearby as she rolled away. Her mantra barely kept her conscious from the aftershock of yang qi that came with it. The demon also dodged, and she kept rolling, becoming covered in black mud as she desperately trying to dodge the follow-up stamp it made towards her.

The blow hit her, but it was weaker than she expected. In response she lashed out with the blade of her weapon, biting deep into its leg. It bared pointed teeth at her and twisted, uncaring for the injury, kicking her in the side.

She went flying, the qi in her body sent into chaos again, and crashed down a few metres away. Swallowing down the blood in her mouth, she tried to orientate herself for the follow-up attack that never came. Sitting up, she saw that the figure had collapsed, its left leg, which it had kicked her with, partially shattered like it was made of glass. What remained was sloughing off its bones that were literally burning due to yang poisoning.

It was still clawing towards her, snarling inarticulately. Weighing up her options and that insane speed, she again found herself considering the ‘Blaze Spear’ talisman. She got no chance though, because with truly preposterous speed, the demon suddenly surged up and shot straight at her, its tattoos blazing and even deeper red, screaming even as more of its body fell off as it swung the remains of the club down at her. She managed to block the attack – which sloughed part of its arm off without her even doing anything.

(Echoes of the Mountain Lotus)

Gasping as she recovered from the impact, she executed the attack, as much for its shockwave as anything and watched its remaining leg ripple and then half break apart. It collapsed in the mud, thrashing towards her even as she saw three more badly burned, tattooed demons stagger down into the edge of the crater.

One of them made to move towards her.

The others, and then a fourth who had appeared, began to move towards the creature, which had staggered back again, looking even more pitiable, but had finally removed the spear from its side she noted.

-If you are Lin Ling… I have no idea what happened to you… but please don’t be dead, she prayed.

She had suspected it, in a sort of irrational way earlier, without really believing it, but given the yang blood that was pooling everywhere… this place might have been the twin of the blood pool from the cavern as far as its qi aura went.

“If that is the case… we worry about it next…” she declared to herself, swallowing down another two recovery pills and yet another purification pill to stave off the lingering side effects of the yang qi that were finally starting to build up in her system.

“First, there are demons to kill…”

~ ??? – Ruined Valley ~

They… he fought against the instincts in his mind even as the three orcs attacked him with everything they had. One had managed to injure him, sending the annoying instincts in his mind wild in pain and anger, trying to wrestle with his control for the body. Pushing memories and faces of silly primates in front of him, showing him darkness and death in the depths, scenes of joy and a silly little primate family,

-Stupid. Why do you want to hold onto such things? he snarled back at it, managing to move a limb to swat one of the orcs into bloody paste.

It screamed at him, showing it scenes of primate friends, hiking through forest… rather inexpertly.

Shaking his head, he pushed the voice away again. It was foolish for it to want to hold onto such things when it could now be a part of him… a glorious ancient being born aeons ago… and right now he needed to focus on not dying to the insanity that the evil old orc had tried.

The memories, buzzing in small, primate words, inconsequential to its ears, tried to deluge him in their own mediocre rage and pain before changing track abruptly and sending euphoria and joy, trying to say it had helped her before… that this was somehow-

-Foolishness, he sighed – pushing the returning voice away again. The primate’s memories were not really his, he had awoken from his slumber and found it there, then it had brought death…

-It was already generous of me to allow you to partake this much of my power, little monkey… he growled inwardly.

It pointed to his own memories of–

He smashed an orc down and managed to breathe yang fire into his chest. A not-orc who had appeared somehow, screamed in agony nearby. Looking at it, it felt like a human, but then some elves and humans looked so alike… and that vile half-elf had left it like this. He would not be fooled a second time after that vile betrayer’s honeyed words.

He made to strike at it with its tail, but the memories that were not his howled–

She did the only thing she could and used her mantra to make her qi go chaotic. The tail collapsed into a mess of blood plates and the human who had come to help her evaded death by a hair, lying groaning in the quagmire as it tried to eat a pill, its arm bent at a bad angle.

Alexios the Great and Powerful – that was what the memories of the beast in the cave called themselves, and they were full of disdain and hatred for humans – weak, pathetic humans who had killed his friends, killed his mother, left him to die alone in a foreign land where his blood could not sing and he had no connection to the land. Its rage, and bitterness was immense… and it was already clawing its way back into her psyche.

A thrown spear hit them, exploding and sending a wave of strange disruptive force through them.

Alexios snarled furiously and her control almost slipped again as she–

She found the Ur’Vash–

-ORC. They are vile things; no Ur remain, only the fallen scions, stupid primate. Even those who tried to seize back their fate, failed at that. Cowards who could not master their destiny and chose to run rather than overcome it!

She tried to push it away, having long recognised it as the brashest and angriest of the voices.

“Foolish. You cannot control this… It is enough for a thing like you to live on through me!” the creature snarled.

She smashed an orc down and crushed it into the ground with her limb, which she had just about reconstituted from the collapsing cloak around her. That much was true, the quality of qi was well beyond the mortal primate girl’s capability to control.

She, on the other hand… had some means…

Her name she no longer recalled – who she had been then was long dead and her shell had been lost to hellish oblivion in the hands of…

-Focus, she nearly lost control back to the earth dragon, or whatever it was.

“YANG SHIELD TYRANT WHO IS GREAT AND POWERFUL!” It screamed its name back at her, reminding her that dragons had… quirks… if you could generously call them that.

The poor girl’s struggles had touched her because of that. She had seen another struggling as her beloved had… however long ago it was.

Its rage became even more somehow, the qi of the area becoming chaotic… The other girl, was barely hanging on–

Chaos swirled through them as a red lightning bolt punched through their shared body and she lost control.

He managed to deflect it for a brief moment, cursing the stupid arrogant female mortal who dared to take a name of a beautiful creature and friend to his people, associate itself with the People of Lir.

The last of the orc shamans who dared to dream of refining him staggered back into the combat. Mustering what he could of his qi, he half charged for it, calling upon his ancestral memories for strength…

-You… want our strength now? Little brat? An ancient voice… Azunamaxaruthnus, Tyrant of Rivers and Plains raged back at him.

-You make a mockery of our pact… another ancient voice grumbled.

“Old things, you want me to die here?” He snarled and the voices

-Dead… all dead… what good is your arrogance… one of his own ancestors rebelliously snarled.

-This old Ochirioptrix has no interest in you either. Others will come… a sinister, high-pitched voice added, reminding him that that group had always been too smart for their own good.

The others, however, mostly acquiesced as more orcs arrived running past the shaman – screaming and wild eyed, lost in their own death rage. He hammered the ground and they died, ripped to shreds by the ground they defiled by their mere presence. The shaman staggering even as its cast was interrupted.

“Forgotten thing… go back into the aeons whence you came! Yours is not this world!” it screamed at him.

“Your place is a trophy, adorning the throne of ORCUS!”

The blood remembered Orcus… both of them, the lord of earth and oaths had been a noble figure, worthy of respect. The warlord, born of Keramos’s clay, who had fought him, on the other hand…

“Irrelevant,” he snarled back at them.

They did like to supply such useless things at times. Old things grew senile like that. He focused on gathering his mana to obliterate the old shaman who was now grasping a banner from another orc–

It screamed, and even he was surprised that its meagre arts allowed it such a trick. Had he not been limited by the vestigial shell of the mortal primate, he could have ended this fight within minutes of it beginning. That alone made him angry; her foolishness in not accepting her place right then and there might yet damn him to a fate worse than death, having already crawled out of that grave made by the powers of the world made by that evil primate once.

The shaman wrapped itself in a shell of bestial mana that gave it the powers and durability of a great crab spider queen. He felt a pang of pity for her – she was of a race as old as he was… presumably they had torn her down when they infested the depths of the Great Savannah and refined it to their vile ends. The mana within it was ancient, so likely it had been enslaved for thousands of years. A fate he was determined to avoid.

He stumbled forward, cursing the injury the evil elf had dealt, his words becoming attacks directly to hammer into the shaman. The old orc’s form had twisted now, extra arms growing out of his body and an additional four eyes opening up on its body as it used the stolen potential of the ancient beast to transform itself. Threads of death swirled off its new limbs, trying to snare his body even as he turned the earth against it once again – pulling on the potential of his blood that was slowly accruing again to forestall the attack.

The weak little primate was still yelling away, trying to distract, as was the older, even more cowardly primate who–

-Who is a coward, dead thing? she hissed, finally grasping back control for a second. At least I acknowledge my time has passed and want to do some good with my final moments, not linger on in a stolen body.

The shaman fell, screaming as she eviscerated it, tearing at it with everything they had. Her opponent screamed and clawed at her in turn, stabbing deep into their body with a black dagger, even as it summoned a phantasmal shadow of green fire in the form of a twisted spider that assailed their being through the mind. Against a lesser foe it would have been fatal – as it was, the girl still nearly succumbed as the foolish lizard sought to have them fight its battles, barely sheltered by the strength of her Physique Law… Were she herself, she could have resisted it more…

“Weak primate… if I had completed my transformation and you had just accepted your place…” Alexios roared again, trying to wrest back control, drawing again on their bodies accumulation.

The old orc… demon… whatever it was now… found an opening in that and staggered up, the green fire streaming off it like serpents now, worming into her body even as they tore at it.

Old memories, the Mountain Tyrant and others… even older still, who truly deserved the titles of ‘Great and Terrible’, hammered sense into all of them. Her ‘Archetype Soul Seal’ shifted and moved according to their instruction while the primate girl’s promise from the other even more obnoxious thief of a mud-born monkey __________ from all those years ago surged to protect them as best it could.

The orc… demon… whatever it was, recoiled under the force of her scream and–

The other orc screamed and stabbed her in the side with something… the spear! The shockwaves that came from its impact scattered much of what remained of the outer layers of their body–

He wrestled control back at last, and attempted to use his tail to obliterate the verminous mud-born thing that had just injured him in that manner even as he pinned down the foolish shaman whose darkness was now being purified by his yang nature.

“Gone!?!”

The realisation that it was gone made him howl in fury. He was reminded suddenly that there was another primate in the fight! Spinning, he found that primate had staggered away, terrified of his roar and was pushing mana into a shimmering piece of paper that hung in the air before it…?

There was a terrible sense of instinctual danger and the world went white–

~ Lin Ling – Devastated Valley ~

Lin Ling opened her eyes with a horrible jolt, and had a terrible panicked moment where she wasn’t sure what she was…

Was she…. whatever she had become…?

Or was she her…

‘Blessing, Path, Lotus, Body, Gift’

The familiar refrain of her mantra mnemonics was like a blessing from heaven. Whatever had happened, there had been a point when she had barely been able to hang on. The consciousness that had emerged to try to subsume her had been like the worst combination of the voices from the psyche break she had before…

-Alexios the Great and Powerful… that name echoed hauntingly in her mind, even as other voices moved to do something...

-At this point I could write a treatise on psyche breaks and insanity and people could call me a sage, she complained inwardly. It was only that experience… in the dark, that had kept her… her. That and the sheltering strength of her True Physique and the Mantra. That she could move her mantra again was all the confirmation she needed to know that she was… herself again. Lin Ling was Lin Ling.

She tried to move her body but found she couldn’t.

-Ah, stupid… she remonstrated with herself.

Her inability to move was because her body was intact in name only as far as she could see. At least she had arms and legs – and no tail.

The symbol in her soul, which now seemed to have a much firmer grasp on the blood memories than she recalled, gave her a sense of apology. There was a consensus opinion through it that sometimes things got out of control, that Blood Rage was dangerous for a reason… and that their opponents had not been quite what they thought. The orcs had tried to subvert her psyche and in the process allowed the memories of the owner of the blood to take control… made it hard to control the instinctive reaction.

“…”

She tried to review her recollections of the battle, even as she worked to recover some means of movement.

-Oh there had been something like that…

She had a fractured memory of the beautiful demon…

-Half-elf, a memory, who she now knew by name as ‘Ochirioptrix’, not of this species but somehow connected to it, distantly whispered. A corrupted thing of blood born in an earlier era.

It had called some strange weird flame and used an artefact made of greenish-purple metal to do something… That was just before her memories really started to shift out of her own control and… the original possessor of the blood had taken over…?

Understanding memories flitted through again. Older, wiser – and rather embarrassed, in fact – voices explaining that their later generations had been overly prideful.

That self-superiority was easy to exploit when young and not self-aware. It was the kind of self-superiority complex that would make a young noble bow down in awe and worship that species as a teacher for a lifetime, she thought sourly, reviewing the calming memories of what had almost taken her over.

It also had a deeply rooted hatred of lesser races, who it saw as having stolen their ancestral lands and pillaged it to within a hair’s breadth of its integrity. That hatred, in the memory of the one called Alexios, she could somewhat understand… even if she was not exactly pre-disposed to be sympathetic to it now. It also made their connection in that moment uniquely susceptible to the threat that had been lurking behind these ‘orcs’ as many called them.

The way the memories described it… made her sweat mentally. Before, she had gotten some scattered grasp of it, but whatever had changed now – she suspected they were trying to make amends, in fact – they provided her with a very succinct explanation. ‘Defilement’ was as much a conceptual idea made reality as anything else. It got its hooks in everywhere and twisted. High or low, nothing once exposed was easily immune unless you could free yourself from the chains of a world thoroughly. Even then, that aloofness just opened you up to another kind of defilement. In short, once it wormed into you, it was like termites in a tree.

This particular ‘brand’ of it was, according to the memories, one of the most bothersome to deal with, because it just wanted to see the world brought to ruin. The ‘Orcs’, who it turned out should be called ‘Orcneas’ by rights, venerated an ancient Warlord of the Ur’Khal who had killed a great power called Orcus and stolen his name, becoming corrupted through his power. The tribes of Ur’ – a race crafted by a great being of far antiquity – had fallen first. ‘Khal’ had been corrupted by their warlike nature and dragged down many from the ‘Vash’ and ‘Akui’ – this branch of defilement focused on death, chaos and ruin.

In that war, the people of ‘Orcus’ – the ‘People of the Earth’ – had also fallen after their Queen had broken her oaths in her grief. She, however, despite becoming an abomination, did not ‘die’ as the warlord of Ur’Khal did. So it was not until later, when others of that race had fallen through ‘Arrogance’ and ‘Pride’ to the shadow of that defiling idea that a second branch had formed – focused on the arrogance of their superiority and the control of all things through it.

Later, humans and others had through avarice and boundless greed led one of their most excessive rulers to ‘fall’ to that idea. That had been long after memories of ‘Orcus’ had become just a bad myth and the ‘orcs’ a brush to tarnish all the members of those tribes in the eyes of humans. Their debauchery had given rise to the third branch, the most horrific of the three in a way, for it was all about excess, avarice and greed.

Exhaling, she let that information settle, wishing in a way she was still ignorant.

She tried to move again… and regretted it with every fibre of her body as even the symbol suggested that it was maybe a bad idea.

Most of her muscles were flesh jelly, her bones broken under the strain. They had been… reforming somehow… in not entirely human ways. She shivered, then froze…

How was she able to…?

Memories swirled in her mind’s eye. The first, of several figures by a stone circle. The second from a large hall with windows where a woman with red hair was talking to a hall of… students? In her mind’s eye, techniques a bit like moon runes emerged, dozens of symbols from a memory from the beast, whose blood she had acquired… followed by others who did the actual explaining, rather apologetically.

Other memories followed after, explaining in more detail a few other unanswered questions she had. Her realm had been… well she wasn’t sure what it had been, but it had dropped back down now. What she had gained was apparently a temporary boost – an overdrawing of her body’s potential which had been linked to the ancestral blood. That also explained why she hadn’t experienced a tribulation. She herself had not ‘gained’ power, or advanced through any realms.

The blood had just used her as the catalyst to unlock a portion of its extant power she would never have been able to otherwise. That was why the ‘rage’ was needed. Powerful emotions coloured the way it worked apparently. That she had taken the form of the creatures was due to the strength of the manifestation.

It had three stages, the memories explained.

The basic one was just a shrouding of her body in qi, a form of qi armour that had attributed of their strength.

The second stage was what she had started at, where that cloak merged with her blood to form a facsimile of the beast, drawing out a portion of its power and allowing her to access abilities well beyond her means, and for the blood’s memories to touch the world through her.

The third stage, which had nearly consumed her, courtesy of Alexios, was that transformation becoming reality. Her body had been in the process of transforming into an idealised form of the creatures. That allowed for the greatest synergy, but held the most danger, and the defiled had managed to exploit that, they lamented. Twisting a curse on their later generations in an unexpected way because of the naivety of Alexios.

With that in mind, she stared at her dantian… which was fully formed, and at the core that spun within it that spun in a sea of fire for a few more seconds before collapsing back into molten yang qi, making her whole soul sea shiver and her body ripple. She had no idea how many rotations it had just made; however, she did know that in that moment she could have reached out and made it ‘set’. Intuitively she also knew that if she acquired enough suitable qi, she would likely get there in days… a week at most–

“So I gained some cultivation?” she asked them.

There was some… shifting of memories and understanding arrived again. She had indeed benefited, although not as much as she might have she realised. The culprit here, once again, was Alexios, it turned out; he had used much of what she had accumulated without care for ‘her’, only his own survival.

“…”

That understanding did not help her mood…

-Nope… not at all, she sighed–

The memories, almost by way of apology she felt, told her that once she got her own soul intent, she could use the first and second stages of this process more ‘competently’. She had survived… they pointed out, which was already impressive, for a human girl of her age. Though Alexios had done her accumulation some damage, she was now properly a half-blood of their ‘family’ and once she developed a principle out of it that was ‘hers’, she would be safe from having her memory seized unless she went right off the deep end.

Something hit her, and she opened her eyes abruptly to find an Orcneas standing over her, lifting its club again. It was horribly burnt, dead in all but name and only propelled by expending its own vitality and the consuming rage its faith in its ruinous, malevolent and chaotic god provided it with. Fighting was going on around her, and thankfully she found she could now move – even if her injuries were still rather horrific.

What was important, though, was that it was slow.

Rolling to the side, she kicked it in the leg, gritting her teeth as her body complained. The enraged Ur’Vash crashed down beside her and she grasped it, sending a pulse of qi into its body that made its bones bubble. It thrashed and its flesh burned for several long seconds before finally expiring.

Pushing herself up, a decapitated head of another Orcneas bounced across the glassy mud nearby and she realised she was not alone in the lake. A woman, badly burnt and nearly out of qi, was wielding a sword-staff that was familiar… to cut down another. She grasped for a name and it took a disturbingly long second to arrive at Kun Juni…

Her friend…

“You’re still alive…” The memories of ‘Alexios’ shivered faintly as she recalled that he had tried to kill her friend, threatening to drown out the euphoria she suddenly–

Another Ur’Vash tackled her, surprising her. She wondered for a moment how she hadn’t spotted it, then saw the purple designs on its body and the memories provided her a preposterous explanation she almost wanted to disbelieve on pure principle.

Grasping the Ur’Vash by its smouldering hair, she sent a pulse of her qi into it. It died – screaming – even as she turned her attention back to the bit where ‘Alexios’ had tried to kill Juni. The symbol was the thing that interjected, seemingly having arrived at the point of being the ‘intermediary’ between her and the blood memories now.

The grasp she got through it was that the memories of the lineage were a guide – not a ‘reason to be’, whatever that meant. They were there to teach rather than consume, although the latter was… possible, in the young, or in difficult circumstances like she had experienced.

She shivered and thought that it was a scary race that had a teaching tool like that… The symbol seemed to nod somehow, but pointed out that it had carried her almost the entire way to Core Formation in the matter of an hour and before that a week and a half of fighting on the edge.

-Maybe scary is warranted, she conceded. What kind of realm are the young of this species…?

Memories shifted abruptly and knowledge surfaced from the deep pool within them showing them born from eggs at Core Formation, forming Soul Foundations within days once their physical forms stabilized and then 'principles' within weeks or months.

Gulping, she pushed that to the back of her mind and re-engaged with the melee going on around her.

She pushed off the dead orc…

-Okay… that is going to be confusing… what do I call them? she complained to the memories.

-…

There was an awkward silence back and then they suggested that because they were all apparently from the tribe of ‘Vash’ they would be ‘Ur’Vash’. Nodding, she cast around, looking for a weapon. Finding none, she tore the arm of the corpse of the Qi Refinement Ur’Vash and de-fleshed it with her bare hands to claim the upper arm bone as a club.

“…”

Feeling stupid, she discarded it and picked up the black bone spear that was lying not two paces away from her and used it to stab another Ur’Vash that had noticed her. Kicking it off the end, she swiped a third out of the way, watching it stagger back before reflecting that she knew nothing about wielding spears as weapons. Dropping the spear, she tackled it and punched it twice in the chest, letting her qi do the rest of the work.

After that, it just descended into a brawl in the muddy lake bed. The density of yang qi was such that even badly injured as she was, her qi was recovering very rapidly. Each one she killed also took the pressure off Juni, who looked to be in an even worse state than she was. How the older woman had even survived the aftermath of her battle with this tribe was…

What was clear, rapidly though, was that even in her injured state, her strength was monstrous. The symbol helpfully told her that her ‘True Physique’ had entered its ‘Emergent’ stage, whatever that meant. The memories clarified somewhat – apparently the damage to her body was such that it had already settled into her bones, even though she had yet to fully break through to ‘Core Formation’ as they termed it helpfully for her. The trauma she had sustained, emotional, spiritual and physical, was almost at the point of transforming it into a pseudo-mortal physique.

“Oh… fates no,” she muttered, grabbing an Ur’Vash who was trying to punch her by both arms simultaneously and head-butting it.

“You told me about those before… nope… no way!”

She was left holding its arms in a comically gruesome scene as it tumbled backwards screaming at her in mindless rage before… charging at her again! She smashed it in the head with its own arm then stamped on it, wincing at the sensation of squelching flesh beneath her foot.

The symbol actually seemed to laugh in her head at that sentiment. Looking around she saw that that had been the last of the Ur’Vash in the lake bed. Juni was now standing, breathing hard but looking at her warily, like she was potentially dangerous mushroom that wasn’t doing what was expected.

She did a quick check to see that she was intact… and didn’t have any odd mutations like bone plates or scales growing down her neck out of her hair or something.

Wiping off blood and mud she saw she did have faint hexagonal plate like tattoos drifting just beneath her skin somehow, on the backs of her arms, on her legs, on her back presumably as well… They faded as she watched thankfully, likely a manifestation of her qi armour.

“Ling?” Juni asked her carefully, not lowering her weapon.

“Apparently so…” she grimaced. The older woman looked a total mess, reminiscent of their meeting in the depths… In fact, back then too, she realised, she had been led to attack her…

Something about that memory… made her laugh a bit bitterly.

“This is… We… seem to have karma… when… it comes to meeting… looking like we crawled… out of blood pits,” she managed to say between hacking laughs. “Sorry… by the way.”

“That… does seem to be the case,” Juni agreed with a weary smile, looking around them. “What… happened?”

“…”

She stood there in silence, wondering where to start in all honesty.

“Erm… you know those stories about mythical beasts with special blood…?”

“Oh…” Juni nodded. “Like dragons, phoenixes and such… you did tell me about this before…”

“Yes…” she nodded. “Well… the blood I got contaminated with… that has erm… replaced my spirit root, I am pretty sure, seems to have belonged to some ancient species that has common ancestry with Earth Dragons… or something close to it.”

Even just saying it out loud… even while standing in what was to all intents at the epicentre of a small apocalypse… with the aforementioned memories in her head… it still sounded a bit unreal to her ears.

Juni looked around again and then back at her dully.

“Well… the memories in it… had an ability that allows me to turn into… into… the thing the blood came from… It didn’t like things not of its species all that much,” she finished a bit lamely. Explaining it out loud made her sound like a crazy person, even when she was standing in the middle of the aftermath. Even from a cultivation standpoint… that sounded like something close to a demonic art. Especially given how Alexios had behaved.

“I’m glad you’re alive,” Juni said at last. “When I got here, you were… some kind of large pangolin, just lying there in a pool of blood, barely breathing. Even when they started attacking you… there were too many of them… and that strange shell of qi you had tried to…”

The older woman looked… defeated somehow, she realised… or maybe just exhausted. Juni scrubbed her face with her hands, making lines in the mud that almost looked like tears. “Anyway… I am glad you survived… again.”

“We seem to be making a habit of this…” she agreed sitting down on another dead Ur’Vash near Juni.

They sat in silence, in the rain and the gloom, watching the still burning pyres of the banners until Juni finally spoke again. “My cultivation advanced… This calamitous landscape reorganisation you managed is very auspicious for yang-based arts…”

“It is at that,” she agreed, before finding her gaze drawn towards the shaman who had died last…

Her memories of that moment were very strange, because she had a sudden memory of another voice in her head… not one related to the memories from the blood. A woman’s voice. Memories suddenly flashed through her mind, of a desperate scramble in a palatial room covered in blood, of a woman with blonde hair on a bed… of… Ji Tantai… Di Ji… the two were weirdly merged in her mind, and of…

Her stomach knotted as she recalled what had been done, even as she considered the shifting, bloody robe and nearby banner that had defied all the destruction wrought somehow. The woman’s presence in her mind was… a riddle. If the memories knew anything, they also stayed silent and there was no real trace of her presence now, outside of that moment of confused memory, it seemed.

“What do we do about those…? They seem distressingly durable…” she asked, as much to distract from her own thoughts.

“They are… aren’t they?” Juni agreed, anger creeping into her voice.

“Maybe Han Shu’s sword…?” she trailed off, realising she hadn’t been able to sense Han Shu’s presence either. If Juni was alive… perhaps he was as well?

To her surprise, she found that her anger towards him had lessened… quite a bit. The perspective of events in the depths that her own, properly restored memories and the ancestral blood were starting to somewhat tastefully restore between them helped a lot there.

“Possibly,” Juni agreed.

They both stared at the robe. It defied any attempt at even being dirtied she noticed – the twisted forms woven into it seemed to pulse uncomfortably in her eyes. After a moment she looked away.

“Will something like that even fit in a storage talisman?” she pondered out loud… “Not that… there is any way I want to actually carry it.”

“Recovery pill?” juni asked her absently.

“Oh… yeah...” she grimaced, realising that her own storage talisman, that had been around her neck was missing.

Juni tossed her a bottle and she just emptied the whole thing into her hand, scarfing down all ten Qi Refinement grade pills in one go. Their energy flowed through her, dissolving rapidly into her yang qi and helping to heal her bones and organs more quickly.

“…”

Juni eyed her dubiously. “Another bottle? I have several hundred pills left…”

She coughed, realising what that must have looked like and shook her head. “Anyway… I don’t think it’s a good idea to take that robe with us, even if we did so only with the intention of destroying it…”

“Yep… the bad vibes my divination art gets off that thing are no joke,” Juni agreed. “It gives me a really creepy feeling. Like just being in contact with it would try to twist some part of me that I would never be able to get back. Like the darkness in the depths we found…”

Nodding, she got up and picking up the black bone spear, slashed it. The robe offered some resistance before the spear cut off a section. However, as they both looked on the two parts rapidly knit back together. She tried again, flipping the bit away, only for it to dissolve into reddish mist and reform on the robe a moment later.

“Immortal Vitality,” Juni shuddered.

As they contemplated this, she found her hearing, which had improved yet another step, caught by the sounds of very distant drumming and chanting. Even though it was over a mile away and mostly just unintelligible utterances, the rhythm and intent there was…

She had to close her eyes to focus, but after a moment she was pretty sure they were regrouping on the far side of the valley. More concerning though were the occasional warnings that were filtering through of other tribes coming.

“How many Ur’Vash are in a tribe exactly…” she muttered out loud.

“Pardon?” Juni looked around frowning.

“There are more coming,” she explained. “Regrouping on the other side of the valley, about a mile away.”

“Oh…” Juni’s expression shifted slightly and her grip on her weapon tightened.

Looking around, she tried to guess from her recollections how many she had actually killed. Hundreds certainly… maybe a thousand? Even those who were at Qi Refinement or Golden Core were disgustingly durable when you factored in their racial gestalt and the way they got stronger the more you killed.

Certainly, there were still a lot out there, many scattered or buried by her initial attacks. Those regrouping in the stinking, warped and now mostly incinerated new tropical swamp she had created would also be recovering their compatriots. Those who had time to adapt to the yang landscape, which some likely would, would be many times harder to deal with compared to this band.

“We should leave. Now,” she said to Juni.

“Yeah…” Juni agreed, standing up. The drums were starting to come closer.

The older woman stared one last time at the robe before wincing. “Do you have any of that blood left?”

“…”

She clapped a hand to her head and focused on her qi. It took a few seconds to find the mark on her storage talisman, which was indeed just lying in the dirt a dozen or so metres away. Recovering it, she checked inside and found she did have a few smaller jars left which was a relief. Her memories told her that Alexios had used it to form the constructs. Those jars were very useful to her cultivation. Had the idiot lizard used it all up she probably would have started looking for ways to see if those memories could be punished somehow.

“A few,” she said, pulling out a bit of luss cloth and using it to knot a cord for her talisman and tie it to her forearm.

She considered the robe and the banner, understanding what Juni was suggesting. It was able to melt nearly anything else outside of the stone containers they had put it in pretty much.

“The vitality of the robe should feed the yang fire,” she agreed, pulling a jar out.

Juni backed well away as a haze of yang law-infused qi swirled out from it. Now that she knew what it was, it was amazing she had survived contact with it so long. Later, once she had unknowingly had her spirit root reformed, it was more understandable… Likely some aspect of the divisive suppression of the darkness and the Arborundum vein had played a role there.

Splashing a bit over the robe, she watched it hiss and spit as the twisted forms that made it up contorted and pulsed in ways that would haunt her nightmares for a long time to come. Shuddering, she poured more on it, eventually just emptying an entire jar of the stuff over it liberally, watching it warp and burn away under the punishing power of the yang law. Her memories also told her that this curious form of etheric power, as ‘she’ considered ‘yang’ energy to be, had some aspect of purification associated with it in this world.

-Obviously… she shot back. This was absolutely an ‘evil’ artefact of course a ‘Pure Yang’ law infused substance like this would be an anathema to it.

She destroyed the banner as well for good measure, before considering the spear…

Picking it up she carefully investigated it with her qi sense, remembering it had been a possession of that vile elf. However, it was just a spear, much like Juni’s sword-staff was just a sword-staff. It was the materials that it was made from which were important, it seemed. She had thought it black bone, but it was in fact a combination of bone and wood – fused somehow. Testing it on a nearby rock, she easily poked a hole through it, even without putting qi through it. It also fit in her storage talisman, which was a pleasant surprise. She was getting just as tired as everyone else of things just not storing in it.

“Any thoughts on which way?” Juni frowned… staring at her divination chart for a moment before shoving it away with a disgusted sigh.

“No improvement?” she asked drolly, wondering what she had divined.

“Not that, the yang qi just messes everything up. The alignments in this place appear utterly chaotic.”

“…”

She tried not to look shifty. That would have been her, she was pretty certain. She had a rough memory of a method that the blood had guided her to use that was capable of that.

Skimming the walls in the gloom, she eventually pointed to a shattered cliff to their south east. “My qi sense is as messed up as yours is in all likelihood, but the plan was to head for that valley exit as I recall.”

“It was…” Juni agreed, turning again to look in the direction of the drumming which was still coming closer. “Unfortunally there’s now a small army of badly burnt… Ur’Vash you called them? Scattered between us and them?”

“Yes…” she frowned, “you have no idea of the others made it clear? I saw the ones from the Argent Justice Sect briefly, before the memories went… weird…” she said.

“Nope…” Juni sighed. “I only dug myself out about 20 minutes ago – if that.”

“…”

She grimaced. That meant they had either been caught up in the aftermath of Alexios taking control… or managed to flee. The latter would be best.

“First, I think we get out of the valley,” she said, looking at the cliff rising above them. “Once we have a vantage point we can start looking for a way across. This valley tapers rapidly and we can cross to the other side about two miles further up where there are waterfalls?”

“How do you know that?” Juni asked as she also stared up at the cliff.

“I… had a moment early in the fight where my qi sense was able to cover much of the surrounding few miles,” she explained.

“Oh… handy…” Juni muttered. “So I guess we are climbing this?”

“Unless you want to fight an army that is prepared for us?” she chuckled darkly.

“…”

Juni shot her a sour look and started walking towards the cliff. “I was joking, clearly.”

Rolling her eyes, she followed after her, and broke into a jog as the drumming behind them abruptly intensified and the shouting became much more… uniform… and more encircling.