From our own world, the greater strength of the Shu and the Meng also sent forth their greatest peers, including two of the most dazzling stars of that era – Ancestor Iron of the Shu Pavilion, who had newly ascended; Imperial Ancestor Fu, Paragon of two eras called together what remained of the Seven Sovereign Ancestors and set forth as well; and finally, the Old Ghost of Hao, whose own grandmother had stood at the side of the Divine Sage Teng when he ascended beyond heaven in the first era of our world, exited his seclusion, having successfully crossed Dao Ascension and also set forth at their side.

Before they left, these three, all imperial advisors held conference on the state of the world, concerned by the short reign of the Moon Tomb Emperor and the instability it had caused. In the end, they pushed for two neutral parties of high esteem, Mu Shanshu and Tai Weimin to support White Swan Dowager Empress to select her husband’s successor.

Their deeds in that war would echo across an aeon-span, and yet, what transpired upon their departure would leave only the taste of ashes upon their return. Hao turned from the world and went back to war, disgusted with his descendants and Ancestors Shu and Meng found their hands irreparably weakened by the faith they had placed in their scions that remained, such as their influence was fractured in the eyes of the world.

Excerpt from the Annals of Shan

By Seng Mo – Elusive Scholar.

~ Shu Tian – Blue Water City~

Sat in the Myriad Blossoms teahouse, Shu Tian found himself sighing as he watched Old Gateway Ancestor Shu Shen pour over their game board and turned his gaze back to the plaza. Weeks ago this place had been a festival of colour as the people welcomed an imperial princess… Now… it was a festival… but nobody was laughing, except for one person.

Tai Yanmei.

A girl who was 97 years old… and a peak Dao Sovereign.

It was a name even he knew, the girl who would have been Saintess of Northern Xue… but for Xue Suyin.

The question of who had sicced her on the Imperial Court was one he could pretty much guess, because he had been alive longer than most and knew what tune the dark heart of the Ha clan really marched to, but to most this was just another calamity that had descended from the blue to plague their lives. The only difference was that the people of Blue Water City were rather enjoying the shoe being on the other foot for once.

“It is a useful distraction at least,” Huang Leng sighed, leaning back from the game he was sharing with Shu Shen and conceding.

“I will also admit that it does my heart a power of good to see Huang Teng’s flunkies getting embarrassed like this.

On the stage, Tai Yanmei was dragging Huang Zhou, also a Dao Sovereign like her, around by the arm forcing him to do a funny dance as he screamed in pain and tried to extricate himself from her attack. It was futile really, because though someone like Huang Zhou was talented, compared to Tai Yanmei, he might as well have been a street drunk fighting a martial paragon.

Tai Yanmei was someone who even his backer, Huang Teng avoided. Huang Hao, Gan Hao as he was sometimes called, also avoided her like the plague and nobody called her out, mostly in the hope that the girl would just go about her own business and not intrude in their competition. By common agreement at this point, the ‘Saintess candidates’ did not interfere with the youth sovereign competition. This was a rule made exclusively, as far as he was aware, to make sure that Meng Fu and Mo Xiao could never again perpetuate the horror that followed the wider implementation of the Heavenly 100 Ranking.

It had been deeply amusing at that time, even for someone of his relatively lowly position, to see the horrified realisation dawn on the faces of so many ancient elders that the rules of their farcical competition had such a loophole in it. As far as he was aware, they had had to pay a nigh fantastical price to the God Slaughtering Hall and the Vast Obscurity Grove to secure the goodwill of those primordial ancestors truly capable of actually instructing either aeon-skipping mockery to step back. Tai Yanmei certainly wasn’t a calamity on the same scale as those two, who had various unusual and mysterious means to make time slip by them on the other side of the road whistling nervously and ignoring them, but to the current generation she was still a problem that could not be solved. A bit like death, or the anger of old elders.

She had actually been declared a Saintess candidate to stop her humiliating people far and wide. The problem was that nobody had told Xue Suyin, another remarkable scion of North Star Grotto’s recent generation, this, and so when she had come out of her seclusion, she announced her own interest in succeeding Xue Qian to the role and then promptly been challenged by Tai Yanmei about ten seconds later.

That ‘great event’, undertaken in front of an adoring crowd of almost a hundred thousand of the most eligible and talented youths in ten thousand Starfields, had been a farce that every elder who knew Tai Yanmei by reputation could have foreseen. Tai Yanmei had taken one look at the crowd, exchanged two moves with Xue Suyin and then conceded, telling the latter she was welcome to all the ogling she wanted and that she had never been interested in being a celestial kitten adored by uncounted billions in any case.

Then, before the stunned crowd, she had declared her involvement in the Young Sovereign Tournament and left while the elders of the North Star grotto were still searching for cloths to wipe up their spilt wine. That she was not already the current Young Sovereign at this point was simply because more than half the ancient elders behind the influences on the Heavenly 100 ranking had all colluded to send their juniors into self-improvement or pocket worlds for the last decade or more.

That had been ten years ago… and she was 97 now. Since then, she had nearly killed six Dao Ascencion juniors from various heavenly clans, crippled four others, and given two more psyche damage sufficient to force them into self-meditation for centuries. She had even gone so far as to travel to the Palace of the Heavenly Ming, the stronghold of the Duke of the East, to challenge their crown prince in person after he refused to be called out.

“I… I…”

Huang Zhao tried to yield… again… only to fail miserably because he was thoroughly in the grip of the girl’s technique.

“I FIGHT!” he screamed, saying the exact opposite of what he meant while she continued to push his meridians to the point of pseudo collapse.

“Won’t they complain that you should have done… something?” he felt compelled to point out.

“What can I say?” Huang Leng sighed. “I recorded the whole scene… if only so I can show it to my mother, who will probably frame it over the clan gate for the next generation when Huang Teng becomes Young Sovereign, just to spite his mother Huang Qiaoli.”

Out on the stage, Tai Yanmei finally bored of toying with Huang Zhou and spun him on the spot, shattering the armour he was wearing and dispersing his clothes into dust before throwing him down on the stage and pushing his face flat to the ground with her slippered foot.

“What do you say?” she asked.

“…”

Huang Zhou, groaned, but wisely said nothing.

“…”

Tai Yanmei sighed and taking her foot back, kicked him off the stage before turning on her heel and walking back towards the Myriad Blossoms teahouse without further comment.

“Do you think they will let her go in when they open up this interior space?” Shu Shen mused.

“No chance in hell,” he said blandly.

“How is that advancing anyway?” he asked, glancing at Huang Leng.

“You ask me, but who do I ask? I’m just the Huang clan envoy; even my cousin doesn’t know squat, and she is Empress,” Huang Leng scowled. “In fact, the less I know the cleaner I feel, given the aftermath of all this mess.”

Sighing, he could only agree there. The greedy eyes turned to this place were only getting wider and more important really. The ones overseeing matters now were the Kong clan Envoy on behalf of the Imperial Court, the Azure Astral Sage, who had shown up the previous day to stabilize the matter of the control of the province and Huang Wen, the sworn brother of the eponymous Huang Teng who had been appointed official representative of the Huang clan’s interest at this point. That Huang Wen was currently seated on the veranda of the Golden Dragon teahouse, watching with a glassy expression as one of his more talented ‘minions’ was embarrassed regarding his inconsequential talent.

Various other parties had seats at the table, but this was basically a collaboration between the Imperial Court and the Azure Astral Authority to try to head off any involvement from the Cardinal Courts. Tai Yanmei’s appearance overnight, like an evil mushroom sprouting in the middle of their lawn, all but cemented the eyes of every one of them on this place now. Even the Heavenly Shu clan had contacted him to impress that he was to uphold their interest until a proper representative arrived… for whatever good that would do.

The misfortunate ones had been the smaller fish, in so much as there were any small fish left in this ‘pond’. The Kun clan had fled to the Moon Tomb Gate, the Lin clan had vanished into the night and that left a small local clan, the Han, and a Civil Envoy of the Military Authority who had been a Mortal World Ascender. Both had also largely vanished. Unlike the other two though, he was sure their disappearances did not mean their good fortune, for their scions had already been branded by that whole mess with ‘rebellion’ that now felt like a small lifetime ago, even to him.

“You have no thoughts on this, Old Shen?” he asked the diviner.

“If the tide turns enough, people will start finding themselves drowning even on dry sand and wondering why the water is dry,” the old man said blandly, reordering the board.

“Too true,” he agreed.

~ Ruo Han – Devastated Valley ~

Crouched in the darkness as the ‘normal’ weather resumed, Ruo Han watched the hundreds of bonfires burning in the ruined valley, trying not to let his hands shake.

“Figures the repression would come back after a while,” Jin Chen muttered sourly beside him.

“…”

He had to agree, that that was somewhat typical of the way the day had gone, but that wasn’t the problem, if you could call it that.

“Where do we even go from here…?” he muttered, before sighing as he hadn’t meant to say that out loud.

Without access to qi, his ability to keep his own emotions in check was just as bad as everyone else’s it seemed.

“…”

Jin Chen just stared at him with a haggard, mud-splattered face, saying nothing. He didn’t need to, really; the look said it all. They had gotten this far because of the hunters, and now… looking at the devastation and the battlefield that the valley had become, it was hard to see either Lin Ling or Kun Juni having survived that. Teng Chunhua had gone to scout, ostensibly to look for Han Shu and the others as well, but even she hadn’t returned and now the battle was done and darkness had all but fallen.

“What do you reckon even made this…?” Jin Chen added dully.

“…”

That was an excellent question in its own right. They hadn’t encountered much in the way of bigger qi beasts on their trip through the mountains, mainly, he suspected, thanks to the instincts of Lin Ling and Kun Juni… The howls of rage that had ripped the valley apart had not been some low realm qi beast. The hunters had talked briefly of some things they had seen traces of in higher valleys, towards the storm-wracked interior of the mountains here, but they had provided little in the way of details.

“Well… some of it was clearly done by talismans…” he hazarded.

That had been the main hope that the others had survived really, until the last detonation anyway, that had singed both valley walls and looked to him to be one of the ‘White Flame’ series. Either ‘Phoenix Blast’ or, given the scale of the explosion, ‘Feather Spark’. Even two miles away from the detonation and thirty minutes later he still felt singed. The return of the repression a few minutes ago didn’t help there either, and the yang strength that permeated the landscape was still present, even with its return.

How the demons were tolerating it was a mystery, but then again, demons were demons presumably, even when repressed.

“You don’t say…” Jin Chen muttered, “However, talismans don’t howl like the heavens are trying to fall on us or do all this, even if you threw out an entire wallet of Immortal grade ones at once…”

“What do you want me to say?” he sighed, annoyed suddenly. “That we appear to have dodged death because the demons that attacked us might have woken up a dragonling or something like it? It doesn’t help, even if I say it out loud.”

“…”

“Sorry…” Jin Chen muttered, looking downcast… “But… there is no way they survived that right? We nearly died and we were much further away than they were…”

“Just full of cheery thoughts…” he agreed, watching the nearest of the distant fires. It was difficult to make out, but probably there were a few hundred demons all dancing around it now. “They are already sweeping the valley looking for things,” he added.

“Great…” Jin Chen sighed. “And even Miss Chunhua hasn’t come back.”

“Who hasn’t come back,” a female voice hissed out of the darkness barely ten paces away from them.

He flinched and narrowly avoided biting his own tongue as Teng Chunhua, followed by a very singed looking Han Shu slunk out of the shadow of a ruined tree trunk to arrive beside them.

“It is a good thing half those down there are drunk or deaf from explosions,” the hunter scowled, looking at Jin Chen mainly.

“You survived…” he felt relief flow through him as Han Shu slumped down beside them.

“No thanks to some of these fates-blighted trees,” Han Shu hissed.

“What of the others?” he asked Teng Chunhua – if Han Shu had survived, then…

“They should have been on the other side of the river…” the woman murmured. “Do you see a river down there now?”

“…”

They considered the ruined valley, barely illuminated by bonfires. A vast tract of the valley they had traversed through the previous day had been transformed into a charred, warped pseudo-swamp of flattened charcoaled trees and ridges of glassed sandy loam. The waves of earth that ripped apart the valley had depressed the land level enough and changed the valley floor to the point where much of the area was rapidly filling with water from the destroyed river margins that had meandered through the valley as well.

What remained of the aforementioned river vanished into a festering quagmire of shadows, broken trees and corpses about a mile further on down the valley. Between that, the rain and the smell of burning vegetation and flesh, it was a pretty horrible environment made all the worse by the warped dispersal of some distorted and decaying Qi that was being broken apart into poisonous vapours by the that terrifying Yang Qi.

He could not even recall how it had looked before, he realised. They had still been in the trees when everything went to hell… the first time.

Behind them, the forest they had come through was just a line of blazing fire, creeping into the darkness and making everything around it impenetrable. Here and there glimmers of fire flickered off water, or water actually burned. To call the whole thing a ‘Naraka Hell’ seemed quite apt. It even had the bloodthirsty demons to go with it.

“If anyone survived, it would be Juni and Ling,” Han Shu stated flatly. “We owe it to them to look…”

“…”

Teng Chunhua looked… conflicted but said nothing.

-Shit, so that’s how it is… he immediately understood what the problem was there.

-For all that they seem to have their disagreements, they went through a lot together. His loyalty isn’t to us… or keeping us alive; it’s to his friends.

“I hope they survived as well,” he agreed, for what it was worth.

Han Shu stared at him, but said nothing, before turning his own haunted, concerned gaze back to the valley.

Teng Chunhua sighed and they exchanged a flurry of hand signs so fast he got one in every ten at best. The gist of it was clear though. She was unimpressed with their chances of getting back across there, even in the dark, with that horde crawling all over and searching for two people likely buried under a swamp.

-With the return of the repression… would they even be able to survive being buried? That thought had occurred several times now, not that he was going to voice it near Han Shu. At worst, Han Shu will go on his own…

He could see the denial on the younger man’s face… although it was tinged with something else as well now… uncertainty perhaps? Or the early stages of actual grief over the loss of his friends.

-Fates I feel old, he murmured inwardly.

He did. Despite their similar appearance, minus the scraggy beard and mud, he was over three times Han Shu’s age, and twice Teng Chunhua’s although he would never comment on that out loud. He was still young for a Nascent Soul cultivator, if you discounted the ‘generation’ side of things, but his experience in life was greater than all the rest of their group combined pretty much.

-Not that it equipped me for this…

Thunder rumbled overhead and the sound of raindrops hitting mud all around them became the backdrop once again to the descending dark.

“Could it at least not rain?” Jin Chen sighed, pulling his latest iteration of a crude hat back on his head.

“…”

“Indeed,” Teng Chunhua grumbled, glancing upwards as water splashed off her face, raindrops leaving smoking trails in the mud that coated her.

“At least you managed to recover some use of limbs before…”

Jin Chen glanced at his arm and scowled. It was still nearly crippled. Hao Jun had managed to regenerate his leg thanks to a pill she had provided, but his other injuries were still severe. All of them had suffered meridian damage to a degree as well. Jin Chen and Hao Jun would take weeks of recuperation to be fully better.

Liao Ying had, by contrast, gotten off a bit more lightly on first appearances, but her body was wracked with yang qi poisoning – it hadn’t gotten to her spirit root, but she was not going to be using much qi at all for days at least.

His own spirit root was his good fortune in this landscape – minor yang fire and yin earth feeding yang metal and yang water. For a mixed root it was one of the few that didn’t have complications associated with it due to the body being an innate vessel for life. The most common of the ‘lesser’ succeeding elements spirit roots in effect. The key thing though, was that it trended yang and the root of its strength lay in the minor earth and minor fire attributes that started the cycle.

The strength of yang in the landscape had been feeding his cultivation rather rapidly as a result… until the repression returned anyway.

He stretched his own arm, wincing at the lingering pain that those arrows had caused… they had even dealt damage to his Nascent Soul somehow.

-With any luck, the fates will have seen fit to have incinerated them body and soul down there. He hoped fervently.

“Fates…” Hao Jun arrived, scrambling out from under the rock they had taken shelter behind to survey the valley. “What are the odds anything actually survived out there?”

“Distressingly high,” Teng Chunhua scowled. “We should move on…”

“…”

Han Shu glared at her and she sighed softly. “Just a bit, we cannot stay here.”

Indeed, a moment later, chanting and drumming echoed as the wind changed. They crouched down as a column of figures trotted past some twenty metres aware. A gaggle of almost 40 of the demons, long-armed, muddy and ape-like carrying torches made of burning branches, drums and scavenged weapons. Alongside them ran an indeterminate number of the smaller, muddy demons carrying spears and bows. The group vanished into the darkness of the ruined forest, obscured far too rapidly for comfort by the rising humid mists and the renewed rain.

“Nameless fates…” Liao Ying hissed under her breath. She had apparently arrived with Hao Jun, seeing no reason to remain cowering below the muddy rock like a terrified crab.

She had swapped out much of her clothing, but what she wore was still badly singed… not that any of them were in a position to be concerned about that right now.

“Far too many survived…” Jin Chen’s voice sounded a bit hollow.

“It’s not that… There are more arriving every minute,” Teng Chunhua said. “I saw them coming out of the forest back behind us, and also down the gorges across the far side of the valley while it was still a bit clearer. There is a whole tribe of these demons…

“Ur’Vash,” Han Shu said wearily. “They are called Ur’Vash.”

“How do you know that?” Liao Ying looked puzzled.

“…”

“Some of them speak something like Easten…” Han Shu explained after a short pause. “I heard them talking about themselves and using Ur’Vash.”

“Do they…” Hao Jun’s expression turned even sourer, something he would not have believed possible.

Pointlessly archaic history surfaced in his head, unhelpfully reminding him of another reason people like Hao Jun from those old families disliked the Easten tribes and the Easten Continent in general.

-Ah, of course, the Hao clan has a long history with the Demon Wall, going all the way back to ancient figures like ‘Old Ghost Hao’ who was said to have first set it up.

That war had been going on in some parts for longer than the Dun dynasty had sat on the throne.

“I think that’s a bit of a stretch; plenty of objectionable people speak Imperial Common,” he pointed out to head that off quickly.

“…”

Hao Jun scowled at him as well, but said nothing further, thankfully.

“Quiet,” Teng Chunhua signed and they all hunkered down in the shadow as another group milled past, following after the first.

Mostly they appeared to be primitively armed. He saw no evidence of arms like he had seen on that band of smaller demons. These all wielded crude clubs studded with blue-black glass, spears with bone points made from broken trees and a lot of burning torches. It would be easy to dismiss them as savage, but he was under no illusions as to their physical strength and the way that group had nearly ended them without even a fight still haunted his mind.

The ones they had fought initially had been Golden Core at the very least – maybe higher given soul sense wasn’t working. At the time he had almost felt the spiders to be the bigger threat, especially after they started using physical manifestations. The archers had disabused that theory though, and now, in their weakened state, he was certain that these demons… Ur’Vash as Han Shu termed them, were easily stronger than they were individually. Never mind fighting a whole mob of them.

Looking at the group as it passed, he could only see them getting dragged down and dying horribly as they were. They might be able to kill a few with superior weapons, but none of them were martial cultivators and all of them were injured in some way.

“Even if we were able to use talismans…” he groaned then realised it was Jin Chen who had spoken, not him and felt inexplicably relieved.

Teng Chunhua and Han Shu were having another rapid signing conversation he noted. Something about talismans.

-Was she asking about the others talismans?

-Talisman… talisman… oh.

It took a moment to work out the difference, she was asking about what were presumably status marks on their pavilion talismans. Han Shu just shook his head though. Of course, they had lost their hunter talismans, unlike Teng Chunhua.

“Can’t you at least talk out loud,” Hao Jun muttered. “It’s rude to leave us out of the loop.”

Both Han Shu and Teng Chunhua turned to stare at him with expressions that dented even Hao Jun’s targeted obliviousness, before they both turned back to look at the darkness. Eventually Han Shu scowled at her and nodded curtly, not looking at all happy.

“So, after get out of here…?” he signed badly.

“First we leave, then worry about secondary–”

Teng Chunhua was cut off as Han Shu spun and cut down at her back. They all stared as a small demon, plastered in mud, blood and purple paint that none of them had noted, collapsed dead only a few paces from her, a blue-grey stone knife clasped in its hand.

“…”

He spun, and slipped backwards with a curse as a blade lashed a hair’s breadth from his shoulder. He reached for his treasure weapon and cursed, because it had been stored in his dantian… and so was currently out of grasp because of the suppression. Instead he grabbed the demon and smashed its head into the tree trunk while trying to ensure it didn’t stab him a second time.

It spat teeth and blood and squirmed in his grip as the others also scattered. Jin Chen, left alone, because the other attacker had gone for Hao Jun he realised, grappled his demon and wrested the blade away from it, snapping its fingers back one at a time to free the blade. It went limp a moment later as his friend stabbed it in the head twice.

Han Shu had killed two more with his blade while Teng Chunhua had wrapped her legs around the chest of another and trying to make it stab its own face with a bone blade.

The scuffle was over when Hao Jun finally brained his, leaving them with six dead, child-sized demons painted purple with bone and stone weapons… and several flesh wounds for their trouble.

“Poison?” Han Shu asked, checking the wounds Teng Chunhua had incurred.

“Mild paralytic, I had purification pills already in my system… They still seem effective,” she grimaced, looking at a stab wound on her arm.

“Let’s get out of here,” she said, standing up.

“…”

“If you go alone, you might find them, but you might also die… and only Ling Yao has a storage talisman that can hold bodies under this suppression.” Teng Chunhua said flatly.

“… You want to do this openly?” Han Shu scowled.

“Well, they should know whose priorities are what,” Teng Chunhua said pointedly.

“What is the problem?” he asked, already knowing it, but, in a sense, agreeing with Teng Chunhua. “You want to look for Miss Juni and Miss Ling?”

“They are probably dead,” Hao Jun scowled.

“In which case, I will recover their...” Han Shu’s face hardened… “Them… and bring them home.”

“…”

“If they are dead they are dead, like everyone else in this festering place,” Hao Jun spat, “you want to endanger the rest of us for corpses? Even if they were your friends… do you even have storage rings that can store them?”

“They would go look for us,” Han Shu said simply, seemingly choosing to ignore Hao Jun’s rather undiplomatic addendum.

“You, shut up,” Teng Chunhua said flatly to Hao Jun. “You wanted to know what the deal was, but some things are not your business…”

He frowned at that… he could understand why you would want to recover a friend’s remains, or at least confirm their demise but… that implied there was even more to it… the oath thing she had said earlier?

“While I sympathise,” he cut in carefully, “and agree that abandoning them is not an option… it is needlessly dangerous, and we have no means to dig for them…”

“You saw what…” Han Shu signed… trailing off, shaking his head.

“Saw what?” Hao Jun scowled.

“…”

Teng Chunhua frowned though. “All those were Immortals…”

“What about Immortals?” Liao Ying frowned, as did he, wondering what they were talking about.

“It’s not important…” Teng Chunhua said decisively. “I understand your concern Han, but if we all die, it does nobody any good, going now is needlessly dangerous.”

“Remember what I said before?” he scowled.

“I do… but please…” Teng Chunhua said, suddenly sounding a bit forlorn herself.

“If it was you… or I… there is a responsibility… we swore oaths for this… to heaven itself… you know what I am talking about?”

“I do…” she sighed. “But even so…”

Han Shu sighed… “Shit… she was right…” he groaned suddenly... “It really does claw in everywhere.”

“What does?” he asked, even as the others looked confused.

“…”

“Fine… we get out of this repression, go up to the ridge line and see if we can’t scope out the next valley before we decide what to do next.” Han Shu said flatly.

“Who died and made you-”

Han Shu somehow covered the distance and hit Hao Jun in the head with the pommel of his sword even as Teng Chunhua grabbed him by the arms and pulled him back.

“I know your upbringing makes you predisposed to be an ass, but try to show some respect?” Liao Ying scowled, dragging the stunned youth upwards.

“You…” Hao Jun groaned.

“…”

-I know people are jarred… but this is…

“A formation?” he signed to Teng Chunhua, frowning and suddenly reminded of their previous fragmentation.

She stared at him, then at back out at the dozens of bonfires and thousands of demons in the valley. He followed her gaze, watching the dancing and the distant chanting. The drums were utterly unsettling in how they echoed through everything, even cutting through the rain and the storm he realised.

“What do you think…” she said with a scowl.

“It’s been a stressful few hours, but remember that slaughtering formation from before?” he added, just to drive the point home to the others. “Clearly, something is trying to mess with us… and while I may not be a great expert in feng shui… that is a battlefield… the landscape is full of Yang energy and these are clearly demons? Do I need to draw this out for you with pegs and string on a wall?”

“…”

Hao Jun scowled, but had the good grace to look embarrassed. Liao Ying and Jin Chen nodded wearily.

“Good. Glad you can all see clearly at last,” he hissed. “Now, Han Shu and Miss Teng are right… at the very least let’s get to higher ground so we can see what is what!” he commanded. “Unless you think I am a ghost and you’re in charge Hao?”

“…”

Hao Jun and the others all had the good grade to shift a bit.

“Glad you recall I have some status here,” he added, pulling Hao Jun up by the arm.

“It’s been a bad few hours, but show a bit of upstanding spirit…” he hissed to the younger man. “And maybe save your anger for the demons?”

“Yes… Junior Elder Ruo,” Hao Jun muttered after a moment, saluting him.

-Great… just great, he complained inwardly, but it was better than nothing.

As they made their way up the slope, scrambling over trees and trying to keep an eye out for more demons, he managed to quietly ask Teng Chunhua about the details of her disagreement with Han Shu. Some of the details thought he got… but there was clearly more nuance to it.

“You mean… other than them being friends who work together? It’s a Bureau thing,” she signed slowly, “Teng School … less concerned by it. High rank Pavilion Official, responsibility for others. At eight star, if accept responsibility, swear oath to heaven.”

“Oh,” frowning, he had to admit that while he knew a fair bit about the Hunter Pavilions, it was mostly related to their role in subjugating beast tides on the Argent Southern continent. The nuance of their inner workings was largely a mystery to him.

“The Teng School is less concerned by it?” he asked, resorting to speaking because he needed both hands to climb.

“Yes…” Teng Chunhua sighed. “I work for both the school and the South Grove Hunter pavilion. As a seventh rank hunter, I am not considered an official; even so, most eight and nine star ranked hunters in South Grove don’t swear those oaths. Only traditional pavilions tend to put a lot of store by it. West Flower Picking pavilion being the main one. They do most body recovery on the south western region of the province that is not handled by the Beast Hunters or the Military Authority Auxiliaries.”

“Oh… it’s like the Legions’ mandate nobody above the rank of commander should be left dead in the field?” he got what she meant now…

“Yes, it’s exactly like that.” Teng Chunhua agreed. “It is a Field Leader’s prerogative to see that all soldiers who fall in service to an Authority Legion are repatriated,” she explained, as they climbed through the tangled vegetation and started to work their way up the rock wall. “It’s also a pact of sorts, an understanding that if you did go missing, others would come look for you.

They climbed on in silence, watching handholds and making sure the others around them were not straying. Both Hao Jun and Jin Chen were recovering from serious body injuries after all. Eventually, after reaching a ledge and making sure they were not sharing it with anything difficult, Teng Chunhua continued her explanation.

“Even beyond that though… our current circumstances are problematic. Eight and Nine star hunters are a serious investment in knowledge and resources for a pavilion. Even in our generation, where they waived the realm requirements, they didn’t waive the responsibilities you have regarding the position. It’s a reason why many don’t follow through and even if they rise that high are content to stay as simple hunters or move on to elder positions directly.”

“… or just leave the pavilion and enrol in a sect or return to their families,” Han Shu added, scowling.

“Or that…” she agreed. “In any case, it’s about more than strength, and those that rise that high… the pavilions take steps to ensure they don’t skip out. You have no idea of how horribly political the Hunter Pavilions in our province are. The only people in our generation who rise to the top of the junior rankings are usually those with close associations with the Fan clan who control the bureau. Ha, Kun, Deng, Ju, Mun, Lu… none of them will promote past five star rank.”

“You’re a seven star ranked hunter though?” Liao Ying added.

“The Teng School has been controlled by the Imperial Court for a generation. Our pavilions are basically a shadow structure. Our rankings are tolerated by Blue Water City but our eight and nine star ranked hunters are just better hunters. We have none of the extra privileges of rank… even after they cut away much of it… that Han Shu here… or Kun Juni… even Lin Ling have.”

“Without getting technical–” Teng Chunhua scowled and suddenly waved for him and the others to be silent.

“What is–” She physically clamped her hand over Hao Jun’s mouth to shut him up and pointed up, signing for them to climb fast.

“What?” he signed.

“On the cliff... climbing…” Han Shu signed.

Narrowing his eyes, he peered down the slope below them and, sure enough, there was some odd disturbance of the vegetation here and there and distant… drums?

“Wait,” he signed, straining his ears, wondering if he had imagined it, because while there were plenty of drums from behind them, these were different... and adjacent to…

A rock dropped from above, then another. Their overhand was not in the best place for onward climbing, but it was sheltered from above and below. Above them, now… he could clearly hear more and different drums.

“Above?” Han Shu signed.

Teng Chunhua nodded and warily peered up the cliff, making every effort not to be seen. A moment later she snapped her head back in and pointed left, urgently. Without comment they all started to move along the ledge as rapidly and quietly as they could. He drew the stone dagger from his belt as more rocks scattered down from above and the sound of drums became…

Four figures swung onto the ledge right behind them – hulking, masked demons covered in black and red war paint. The designs on their arms resembled centipedes… The second one down carried a torch, allowing him to see that their armour was made of centipede carapace… as was the mask, which had been painted with three swirling red and black lines that interconnected in the middle.

The one a metre from him stared at them one after another, then launched itself directly at them.

He kicked it in the leg and twisted as best he could, diverting it into the wall even as the second one threw something past them and he heard rather than saw Han Shu cut it. His opponent recovered well and grasped for his arm, trying to drag him off balance. In return, he hit it twice with a palm strike, aiming for its ribs, and could only grimace. It was like hitting rock for all the good it did.

In response, his opponent sent a vicious fist at his face, making him duck–

The blade blossomed out of its shoulder, making it grunt. Behind him, Liao Ying was drawing a second one, even as a fifth figure landed on the narrow ledge.

He parried a blow and the demon, the Ur’Vash, pulled out the knife and stared at it, then at him and then slashed at him with it. Barely afforded space, he dodged back and found Liao Ying, who put a hand to his back even as she tried not to get in his way. Beyond her, he heard the sound of metal deflecting off rock followed by the sound of dislodged rocks.

The demon sent two more punches at him, pushing him further back and then tried to stab him again. He warded desperately, cursing that he had never spend much time focusing on unarmed forms as each impact made his arms hurt.

-The last time I had to punch something meaningfully… was it Qi Condensation? He banished the irrelevant thought as his opponent harried him again.

Below them, the drums and chanting had intensified. On the edge of the swamp were two groups of the demons. One group was muddy and disorganised, and comprised of straggling masses of demons, many carrying burning torches. A rough eye count of those suggested maybe over a thousand. The other group of demons were in comparison, they had banners made of dead centipedes and other long insectoid creatures, compared to the spider theme of the other group.

His opponent didn’t give him any time to consider them though, because they swarmed forward again, trying to grasp his arms and push him down. He kicked them in the stomach then between the legs only to…

-Female?

That was surprising, but in that moment his opponent, who had still been somewhat inconvenienced by the attack it seemed, head-butted him, sending him reeling into Liao Ying behind him, who grunted and then stabbed around him.

There was the clink of stone meeting stone and his opponent hissed and kicked him. The blow made him see stars and taste blood in his mouth even as Liao Ying gave a muffled squeak of pain. Rolling over, he found her slumped down, the blade in her shoulder… his opponent staggering back bleeding copiously from her own arm.

Hao Jun was cursing and wrestling with another while Teng Chunhua and Han Shu were trading blows with another, who was trying with all its might to stop Han Shu using his sword.

“Chen?” he asked, realising that his friend was–

His attack gasped and spun as Jin Chen scrambled back up the slope and stabbed at the armoured figure behind her. Spinning, she aimed a kick at him, intending to send him flying. All he could do was grab a nearby rock and throw it. It hit the female demon in the back, making her stagger, and Jin Chen grabbed her arm, sending her pitching down-slope into the darkness.

The one beyond snarled and drew its weapon, only for a dagger to blossom out of its neck as a small purple demon swarmed out of nowhere stabbing it viciously before biting at its flesh. The stabbed demon grabbed the small one and pushed it physically into the rock. There was a sickening, cracking sound of splintering bone as its head caved in and its body flopped. The demon pulled the dagger out and snarled at it, then lunged towards him, directing a kick at Jin Chen in the process.

Jin Chen barely dodged, sliding down the slope a bit. He ducked low and managed to get a shoulder into the gut of his attacker, blocking the charge. Behind him, Liao Ying scrambled up and slashed at its arm. She must have made contact, because it grunted and he felt warm blood running down his neck.

Capitalising on that he grabbed its arm and twisted, forcing it back. Their tussle ended abruptly when Jin Chen caught it around a leg and sent it down slope after the female one. He barely managed to avoid falling with it, courtesy of Liao Ying who dragged him back up.

“Clear!” Teng Chunhua hissed.

He grabbed Jin Chen and bodily dragged him up as they scrambled after Teng Chunhua and Han Shu.

Below them the chanting and banging of drums was intensifying as the two sides wavered back and forth. Ahead of them, down-slope, he saw three more giant centipedes with…

“Of course they also have archers,” Liao Ying groaned ahead of him.

She was not wrong. Each centipede carried three archers along with two others and a presumed controller. In style they were not dissimilar to those who had been riding spiders, but the demons were more lightly armoured and carried bigger bows.

As they made their rapid, onward ascent, the two sides reached some kind of crescendo and the centipede tribe all charged forward as one, attacking the remains of the spider tribe. Moments later, the line that had been sweeping out of the ruined forest below them also met even at a hundred metres distance, through the rain and the gloom, the ferocity of the clash was clear.

The sides fought in an insane, frenetic, howling melee for almost a minute before fracturing apart again as somehow the spider tribe came out ahead. Amid chanting, smashing of weapons against shields and a lot of screaming, the two sides closed on each other again for a second time as archers started loosing arrows from above. The first blazing arrow landed in the swamp and there was something approaching a hiccup and it detonated with enough light to illuminate half the battlefield below them.

Combatants nearby staggered away screaming, clawing at their faces as their skin melted. The centipede tribe surged forward, hacking at them even as the spider tribe went… berserk, frothing at the mouth, blazing figures charged screaming in every direction, determined to take down as many opponents as possible. He saw two arrows hit a demon, blowing it clean in two, only for the demon to keep on crawling until a third arrow hit it in the head, obliterating most of what remained.

The two sides broke apart again, the centipede tribe still falling back, shockingly. Despite being better armed and apparently more organized, they were still suffering worse it seemed, having gotten the worst of the engagement somehow. Even then, the casualties on both sides were disturbingly lacking. There were plenty of damaged limbs and wounded, but very few actual dead on the ground.

A second wave of arrows swept over, exploding through the ranks of the spider tribe that were massing to attack again. Arms screaming, he hauled himself up, now bringing up the rear and arrived at the next ledge just as the ranks below split apart a second time. This time the exchange seemed to be more equal... until he spotted a crab spider that had arrived at the centipedes, ripping two of them apart as the archers scattered, peppering it with projectiles.

“How… are they still fighting like that?” Jin Chen panted. Liao Ying was rubbing healing ointment on his shoulder while Teng Chunhua and Han Shu were screening both ends of the narrow ledge.

“No idea...” he grimaced, wishing he had their endurance.

After few moments’ respite, they started to climb again… sticking to areas where they could not be exposed easily to the battlefield below. Both sides were now using archers extensively. Fiery bolts shooting hundreds of metres in both directions with pinpoint accuracy. It was truly a battlefield now as well. Two more waves of the centipede tribe had descended down this ridge line and were punching into forces below.

For their part, the spider tribe were just rampaging at random near enough… although he could see more organised groups further out, towards the middle of the valley in the areas illuminated by rings of fire. Those gave him a strangely creepy feeling even as they drew his gaze oddly when he looked in their direction.

Abruptly, an enraged howl split the valley, making the actual trees shiver. He winced as it made his soul shiver…

The shock of the repression vanishing again nearly made him fall. In the same instant that it vanished the intensification of the battle below erupted like a volcano. Soul sense seemed sealed, but waves of intent echoed everywhere even as the shout from above continued to echo, forming sounds that tried to claw into his skull and scream inside his head.

The howl made the spider tribe go… at a word… berserk. Some of them actually started frothing at the mouth and convulsing as they charged forward. Many burst into green fire, ploughing through the centipede tribe, ripping bodies apart as weapons which had drawn blood now splintered off their skin.

Those almost unstoppable juggernauts rampaged through the centipede tribe’s warriors aiming for their qi beasts for the most part. As they watched, frozen by the shock of the shout, he saw one that was physically decapitated fight on for a full 10 seconds before it fell. Others died with dozens of spears stuck through them, with their faces melted from thrown venom, biting their enemies to death.

All around them, the melee combat descended into anarchy, punctuated by small combats between elites from the different groups that splintered trees and deformed the ground. Mostly they seemed to be body cultivators; there were precious few arts on display.

A strange twinge in his head reminded him that he had been using a divination talisman before the repression returned. Somehow he had forgotten to take it off…

“Fates… above…” Hao Jun whispered beside him… “They never fought like that when we…”

“And I’m eternally thankful they didn’t,” he muttered back. “Each of those berserk fighters is at the level of a Golden Core cultivator in terms of their physical vitality, he judged.

“Your soul sense is back?” Hao Jun asked, looking happier than he should have.

“Nope,” he grimaced. “I am just going off the fact that my Golden Core is back but my Nascent Soul is still somehow pushed away and untouchable. If I didn’t know I had one… I’d doubt–”

An arrow shattered off the rock next to his head, making him swing away. Up above, he saw a second figure pointing down at them and yelling in their guttural language.

Making a rude gesture, he grabbed a rock as it fell and cast it back up. The archer was hit in the head and fell with a scream, saved from the long plunge only by its compatriot who grabbed it smartly.

Nobody needed to be told to climb – they shot up the slope as fast as they were able, given the lingering effect of that howl. Arriving at the top, he found six of the demons. The first thing that stood out was that they were not wearing garb themed after insects. Instead, they were garbed in spotted yellow and black beast hide cloaks, their headdresses fashioned from the skulls of the feline style qi beasts. The resemblance to tigers or maybe jaguars was quite striking. All of them were covered in blue, yellow and black tattoos in the same kind of style and wielded bone clubs set with flat stone blades made of a black, glassy rock.

Trying to pull his treasure weapon out of his dantian, he was met with failure for the second time and groaned…

-Idiot, of course it would fail if your Nascent Soul and Soul Foundation are still repressed!

Recovering, he drew a random sword, designed for use with one of their formations, out of his storage ring and blocked the–

The blow sent him sprawling and bent the sword, which was horrifying in its own way, given it was an Earthly grade artefact fit for a Nascent Soul cultivator that had been forged by an Immortal realm artefact refiner back home.

{Autumn Winds}

The wind element talisman, courtesy of Liao Ying, swept across the rocky outcrop, sending three of the demons into the void directly. Two dodged, including the one who had bent his blade by tackling him to the ground, showing remarkable situational awareness. Another crashed into Hao Jun, smashing him down and stamping on his leg, breaking it. The remaining one, who had grasped a rock, sank its feet into the ground and tore that weight up, casting it directly at Liao Ying, forcing her to abandon her channelling of the talisman and dive away. The one that tackled him rose and grasped him, raising a fist the size of a dinner plate…

“…”

The 30 or so seconds of forward intuition dissipated as his qi bottomed out and he was still on the cliff, watching the battle below.

“Fates… above…” Hao Jun whispered beside him… “They never fought like that when we…”

“Left, quickly!” he hissed, scrambling into cover and dragging the surprised Hao Jun with him as the others followed his warning.

Waving silently he told them to keep going left, keeping the ridge of the shallow cliff above them between them and where he now knew there to be a very problematic bunch of demons. Only when they had scrambled into the cover of an overhanging tree did he wave for them to stop.

“What is it?” Teng Chunhua signed.

He shook his head and just pointed through the gloom. They peered up and a moment later saw one of the demons dressed in a jaguar skin, carrying a bow squatting down by the edge, peering over in their general direction.

“…”

Everyone pressed themselves flat to the cliff until the shadowed form receded.

“Fight them?” Jin Chen asked as Hao Jun peered upwards again.

“Nope,” he hissed, palming a replenishment pill and swallowing it with a grimace. “I forgot I had a divination talisman still on… It triggered when that one shot an arrow at my head, showed me roughly speaking about the next 30 seconds before my qi ran out.”

“Oh… how did we do?” Liao Ying muttered.

“You nearly got thrown off the cliff, I had one of our formations swords bent like a tin spoon and Hao Jun got a leg broken.”

“…”

Slowly, they made their way onwards until they were about level with the group, who were stood or crouched in the shadow of a rock that had recently slumped next to the cliff edge, watching the battle below with interest. He carefully surveyed the surroundings… looking for more. It was Teng Chunhua who saw them in the end, waving unobtrusively and pointing further along, to where two more with bows were sat further up, conversing in low tones and keeping a careful lookout.

“All of them are at least Nascent Soul I would guess,” he murmured, dropping back down into the shadow of their own rock.

-What I wouldn’t give for my soul sense to be back, he sighed. Although that would be a double-edged sword almost certainly.

Han Shu nodded and motioned for him to be quiet. He nodded and they warily made their way onwards, skirting along the slope, further over the ridge. Soon though, they had to stop again, not for demons… but for spirit herbs, as it turned out.

“Careful,” Han Shu hissed, pointing at the tangled mass of greenish-brown flowering vines that sprawled over the path ahead, carpeting all the vegetation on the slope. “We can go under them, but don’t get cut, and make sure you eat a purification pill.”

“What do they do?” Hao Jun asked.

“They have a poison in their thorns that contains traces of yin fire… very unpleasant and has a soul suppressing element. Handy in that you cannot penetrate them with soul sense, but also deeply unpleasant in that they have an innate soul-repelling aspect.”

“I’ll go first,” Han Shu said after a moment… “then Hao Jun, Jin Chen, Liao Ying, Ruo Han and then Teng Chunhua.”

The others nodded, even Hao Jun, and they moved off one after another, threading through the bushes. Han Shu had not been kidding either, Ruo Han noted as he carefully moved, but still picked up a few scratches as they scrambled down into the avalanche gully. Each and every prick was excruciatingly painful, sending hot and cold flashes through his body at the slightest contact. Even Han Shu and Teng Chunhua got stung occasionally, he noted, which somehow made him feel not quite so bad about his own misfortune.

Stopping in the bottom, they all ate more poison-dispersing pills and then began to ascend the gully itself, under the cover of the vegetation, away from the sounds of battle, drums, horns and a lot of enraged screaming that were carried on the wind.

~ Lin Ling – Devastated Valley… Still. ~

“Heaven clearly has it in for me,” Lin Ling groaned as she pulled Juni up after her.

“In for you?” her friend complained. “You at least keep strength under this… Why did it even return?”

“…”

The memories shifted and suggested it might have something to do with the destruction of the banners and the flayed robe. They had been quite a bit more useful than they were before, she had to concede.

“Probably the banners and the robe were linked to it somehow…” she repeated what had just been relayed.

“Ah… figures,” Juni sighed, sitting on the ledge and recovering her breath.

Across the valley there was a pitched battle going on. The mists concealed much of it, but a second wave of burning arrows had just lit up parts of it briefly for her, showing Orcneas clashing with other Ur’Vash in the distance. Those who had been pursuing them had mostly diverted to that conflict now, which would probably turn out to be a mistake the Orcneas would regret…

-You think they know regret? An old voice chuckled…

-Regret is a thing for others, according to those abominations… They think everything is just another opportunity for slaughter, another of the memories snickered.

To their left, and also below them, two other groups of Ur’Vash were having an argument about who was going to win the battle below. That the two of them had not been spotted was largely because it was dark, nobody was looking up, the cliff was strewed with vines and the repression had returned with a vengeance as far as she could see. Even so, the latter point was just reality taking a dump as far as she was concerned at this point.

Shaking her head, she started to climb again, carefully moving metre by meter, with Juni following after until they made it to a narrow gully hidden by ferns where they could ascend bit more rapidly.

Another scuffle broke out, making Juni pause below her before she waved for her to keep climbing. Those arguments were a blessing in a way. She had thought it stupid at first, until she saw the half dozen watching Ur’Vash elsewhere, and worked out the dynamics. The young, brash Ur’Vash were here for the show; the older armoured Ur’Vash, the Hunters and Warriors with proper weapons, who were skulking in the vegetation-strewn mists along the edge of the ridge, ensuring that their charges didn’t come to harm, were the genuine threat.

“These aren’t like the others?” Juni signed to her, arriving beside her again.

“There are about as many types of Ur tribes as there are humans,” she signed in reply. “However, it’s hard to say… The memories didn’t pay much attention to them… Their own lineages were already rare and mythical things when the Ur tribes were mostly born. Ur’Khal they know something of but even those they avoided, preferring not to risk contact at all. For their part, the Ur peoples mostly avoided them as adults, instead robbing nests and capturing them when they were still in eggs or as newborns to raise. Those memories are cut off somehow. Not part of what I possess.”

Juni nodded silently and they returned to watching the battle unfolding below. On this side, the fight was mostly a scattered melee, isolated bands descending to pick individual challenges. Skirmishes basically to sound out the opponent while cooler heads watched and planned. While the memories told her that Ur Tribes rarely unified and fought over everything, tooth and nail… They would not balk at taking opportunities to demolish a particularly problematic neighbour. Especially if it was one like this, that was giving the rest of them a ‘relatively’ bad name.

In that regard, it was quite difficult to pick out reality from suggestion with the memories. They had a certain viewpoint… but it could be quite alien at times. Their views on the Ur peoples as a whole were not high. They were thieves, predators and despoilers, irrespective of their worship of the warlord called ‘Orcus’. That, in their eyes was just the natural conclusion of their warlike nature and their tribal gifts. What was unequivocally clear at least, was that these Ur peoples had no love at all for the ‘Rhi’ or ‘Ri’ peoples, and hated humans almost as much as they hated these defiled Ur folk.

“What is this Orcus they are chanting about?” Juni signed.

“Oh…” she listened and indeed the Orcneas were chanting a crude hymn to their defiled lord.

“Uh… it’s called Orcus… where their name… Orcneas comes from… it’s complicated and the memories are a bit conflicting, but basically they are like a big evil, demonic sect that’s synonymous with a whole region in the eyes of the wider world… but in reality only a very small vocal minority are actually a part of it.”

“That’s not hugely helpful though…” Juni signed wryly.

That was true, she had to concede. According to the memories, the Ur’Khal were a tribe originally created for war… Ur’Vash and Ur’Akan in the same vein for ancient cities in a different world. Others… had different purposes, like the Ur’Inan and the like, but the memories had again been disinterested in those, and the most comprehensive ones knew only of Ur’Khal, whose actions were indelibly linked to Orcus through their warlord Kratha of Ur, sometimes called Mo’Kratha.

“As far as I can see, all of them are likely to try to kill us or capture us on sight…” Juni signed. “If, as you say, these Ur’Vash tend towards fighting and killing, and occasionally eating anything that moves, as a demonstration of their power and superiority… or just capturing them to breed with… one is not necessarily any better than the other.”

“…”

“True,” she signed back wanly.

“In any case, I think we can only go up,” Juni added. “We will be spotted sooner rather than later if we go across the face any further.”

She nodded, glancing down towards the base of the cliffs where scattered, bodies of arrow-pierced Ur’Vash lay, barely visible. Several groups had tried to slink down already who she could only assume were opponents of those up here seeking to join up with the Spider Tribe, because they had been shot at without mercy.

“The biggest problem though,” she signed as they started climbing again now that they had recovered a bit of stamina, “is that this lot below are certainly going to view us as demons summoned by the Orcus-worshiping Ur’Vash.”

As a realisation, it was one the memories were quite concerted over.

“They don’t know what we are?” Juni frowned.

“Oh… they do, but humans are just a different kind of devil where they come from,” she signed back.

-Damn water falling down from above… She paused to curse the slick surface and had to grab Juni’s arm to boost herself up a pace to find a new secure handhold.

Finding one, she continued to elaborate. “The memories suggest our people don’t have the most stellar reputation when dealing with races that are not… like us… or even with our own kind for that matter.”

“I see,” Juni nodded… following after her. “But why would they think we are in league with those demons?”

“Because plenty of humans turned to worshiping the same ‘evil’ as those down below, and they are, by all accounts, even worse than the Orcneas… There is more to it than that… but now is really not the place to have a long discussion on how horrific the world histories unspooling in my head actually are,” she pointed out.

“That is fair,” Juni agreed, passing her on the other side of the crevice and pausing to allow her to clamber up again so as to avoid having to jump vertically to find a new handhold that wouldn’t give under the water flowing from above.

“Basically… unless we meet the Lao Zhu of Ur’Vash up here, who sees peace in all things and watches the heavens traverse as they should, most of them will see us as the enemy… either the enemy summoned by that lot… or even worse… the enemy who put them all in here,” she muttered, clambering back onto her side of the gorge and wedging herself in.

“So far I’ve only seen shit fall from the sky,” Juni grumbled, climbing past her again.

“You and me both,” she agreed, following after her and trying not to snag her hair on a trailing vine in the process.

-Indeed, ‘miracles’ might fall from the sky in stories… but here only shit is falling with any regularity. Having survived that ordeal below I’ve likely used up my allotted quota of the former in any case, such as it might have been.

They kept on climbing as carefully as they could, staying in the shadows of the crevice where they were obscured by the spirit vegetation and the water scattering down from above for another dozen or so metres until Juni, who had overtaken her momentarily, stopped dead as a huge roar echoed up from below and her cultivation base returned to her in its entirety the next moment.

The symbol in her mind’s eye shifted slightly and the soul-based component of the enraged yell dissipated. The words that came with it were largely inarticulate, but the intent contained anger over the destruction of the banners, all but confirming that they were responsible for releasing the repression.

“Your cultivation came back as well?” Juni hissed down.

“Yep,” she nodded. “Climb faster, I guess.”

“Yes, Lao Zhu,” Juni snickered above her and started to ascend much faster than she had before.

Shaking her head, she clambered after her, making the most of their good fortune. The top of the crevice brought them out onto a minor break in the cliff where it became a vegetation-covered escarpment some twenty metres across. A nearby waterfall scattered mist, explaining the perpetual drizzle…

A raindrop hit her head and she sighed…

“Rain…” Juni remarked from below her.

“Well at least it obscures the view,” she pointed out as they looked around warily before pulling herself over the lip and helping Juni up after her.

Looking around, she orientated herself to the battle again and the groups below. With her qi returned, her night vision was superlative once more and she could see clearly the carnage unfolding below, not that she really wanted to. The spirit vegetation here was dense and tangled, dominated by vines, ferns and hardy trees that could tolerate the shallow, damp soil… Combined with the mist they would have to be very incompetent to be spotted at least.

“So, what first?” Juni signed.

“…”

“Find some bows and a bunch of arrows,” she signed. “After that, things become a lot easier… in theory anyway.”

Nodding, Juni glanced both ways then silently pointed to their right in the direction of a second waterfall.

Looking that direction, she saw what Juni had noticed: the area they were on broadened out. It didn’t take long to find an Ur’Vash crouched beside a tree scouting the cliff below. It was very vigilant, but unfortunately for it, she pretty much blended the entire valley’s qi signature to her own, so she was indistinguishable from the spirit vegetation for the moment.

She was about to move forward, when the memories made her pause… and…

…She slunk through the bushes… adjusting her sense like so… holding her form low to the ground, hiding from the shadow that hunted. They were kin of the name-maker, but not like him, not worthy… where he gave, they only took… and their kind were not welcome here. The shadow that hunted swept its invisible eyes across the forest and she was still, her feathers blending with the greenery around her. Her mind stilled, becoming one with the world and the shadow that hunted saw not what it saw. It passed within a pace… and she leapt, her claws disembowelling it, her jaws at its throat before it could scream, feeling its life pass in her claws before it even understood what had killed it…

The memory passed, courtesy of the ancient being called Ochirioptrix and she ‘understood’ how it had hidden from the shadow that hunted. Another memory married that ancient, instinctual knowledge to a kind of symbol that was a visualisation technique in three symbols...

‘Isolate – State – Oneness’

Suddenly she had a stealth technique that was… remarkable, she realised as she considered the nature of it. The symbol set became something like ‘One with What Is’ in her mind’s eye.

{One With What Is}

“What?” Juni sighed.

She shook her head, wondering how she could transmit that technique to Juni… because as far as a stealth technique went that hid soul sense the memories told her it was outside of functional classification. They came from a time when ‘realms’ as she knew it were not a thing… There was only strong and weak, predator and prey, the world as they saw it and all the things therein.

“Stay back. I’ll deal with this,” she sighed.

Pulling out the black spear, she smeared her blood on it and waited for it to dry while she put the visualisation into her mind’s eye. It did nothing for her qi… but even though she had no grasp of her soul, the memories were clear that with this, her soul presence, that was already slight, would be such a little thing, and inconsequential, that be it mighty predator or meagre, skittish prey, neither would see her coming.

Keeping low, she slunk through the underbrush closer and closer until she was only two meters away, sat beside a rock, about as still as one. Bizarrely, the means for this were now coming not just from that apex, bird-like predator that Ochirioptrix belonged to, but also the memories of the ancestors of the blood as well. The adults of the species were not exactly herbivorous although that did seem to be their preference, and had been able to prey on quite a wide variety of non-lizard and mammal things.

Even more curiously, she also got some sideways information about the world itself and ‘souls’ through the blood memories supporting the technique. Before maturity… ‘The Immortal Realm’ as she couched it, they could barely leave the soul without sideways means, such as the spiders had used. The calibre of this world meant that such manifestations were hard to use and much more vulnerable to subversion if improperly founded… which explained a lot actually, including why Ruo Han hadn’t been able to manifest his Nascent Soul.

Pushing that tangential thought away, she picked her target point, the nape of its neck.

-Had Juni been able to sneak this close it would have been easier, she reflected, but it is what it is.

The Ur’Vash stirred uneasily, perhaps spooked by her brief consideration of how to kill it somehow. She let it sit for a few minutes, looking warily around and shifting and hefting its bow as it split its attention between those it was meant to be observing below and the misty gloom around her. Several times she felt a familiar brush of a presence on her, like a second shadow, but she remained calm in her mind, just as she had in the memory, waiting out the shadow that hunted, just another bit of the surroundings.

Eventually it calmed down, and put the bow down. In that moment she struck!

The spear passed through its throat, severing its spine and interrupting its core meridians.

Her second strike, within the same heartbeat went straight to its heart, before it could recover its sensibility, disrupting the physical manifestation of its control and preventing it from attacking her that way. The blood on the spear did the rest of the work.

Moments later, she hefted the body, grabbed the bow and retreated as silently as she had come, back to the dense vegetation between the waterfalls where Juni was lurking.

Passing Juni the bow and arrows, she turned to the corpse and pried out the Nascent Soul grade core from the wound and stored it away before it could contaminate the area with its death qi.

“That was straightforward,” Juni signed, inspecting the bow.

“Yeah… I have something to show you as well,” she signed, picking up a flat rock from nearby and drawing the symbols on it.

“What is this?” Juni peered at the bloody design.

“A visualisation technique, courtesy of the memories… it will hide your soul presence, making it blend in with the surroundings in an auspicious way. It’s disgustingly effective as you will no doubt see.”

“…”

Juni sat there, staring at the rock for a moment then closed her eyes. It was strange to watch the other woman’s form sort of meld slightly with her surroundings for a moment before snapping back into focus.

“What in the name of the heavenly daughter is this technique?” Juni said dully.

“The memories just provided it…” she shrugged. “Right now we need every edge we can get…”

“Oh I am not doubting…” Juni sighed… “How effective is it on higher realms?”

“The memories are confident that children can use it to sneak up on adults if they are good, which is their way of saying that so long as we are competent, even an Immortal will struggle to see us unless they are actually looking at us. It only works for soul strength though, and if our mind is shaken…”

“It ceases to be effective,” Juni nodded. “However… it works with my mantra…”

“It does indeed,” she said blandly…

“Terrifying, and I thought I had a monopoly on crazy…” Juni murmured, starting to look through the arrows.

After a moment though… she frowned and looked at them again… “These are no good… We need enchanted arrows?”

“…”

“Oh,” she eyed the fletching and the colours… having pushed that preposterous piece of information away before when it was provided. “Yeah… I should have explained that… but…”

“But?” Juni frowned at her.

“Well it’s the kind of logic an idiot child would use…” she finished lamely.

“I see…” Juni stared at her.

“Well… Ur’Vash have a sort of… gestalt… link. It’s inborn… but you can consider it like a kind of intent that is shared on a certain level. Uh… like a Dharma formation!” she grasped for understanding and finally found it in a weird place. “Anyway… colours are related to that. Red is associated with and vigour… Blue is associated with Good Fortune. Black with durability and strength, White… with death? Which somehow relates to Moon Mushrooms… I know… Yellow... is weird, it makes things explode, but is also the colour of magic and authority, as is green; the two are related somehow. Yellow is also associated with prosperity… and purple…”

“Purple?” Juni was looking at her a bit weirdly.

“Purple is somehow associated with obfuscation… because nobody looks at purple things because either they are totally ludicrous, or too important to look upon directly. There are a few other colours in there as well: Mauve is somehow also related fertility and grey with judgement. Orange… is just held to be the negative side of Good Fortune, being neither Blue nor Yellow.”

“What kind of logic…?” Juni replied

“Very old logic apparently. Apparently our kind used to have a similar set of understandings. Red was authority, White was mystery, Black was death and blue was wealth. Green for us was fertility and purple was royalty because of how hard the colour was to make.”

“I… see…” Juni said dully.

“Anyway, it gets better,” she chuckled, “Because this only works for Ur’Vash and their kind in association with other Ur’Vash.”

“So you mean to say... Arrows painted purple, are only stealthy when used by Ur’Vash…” Juni said staring at her in disbelief.

“Yes…” she rolled her eyes... “Although! … those memories do suggest that painting yourself purple and blue does make you much harder for the Ur peoples to spot… which would have been handy to know before,” she added.

“So the Ur’Vash wearing qi beast skins of something like a leopard further down the cliff…?” Juni asked.

“Should be both exceptionally dangerous and very important,” she supplied. “Or a tribe or group that picked those colours and that animal for that association. Apparently those dharma connections they innately have make associations more important for them.”

“What did the one you killed have in the way of tattoos?” Juni asked, frowning… “I killed little Ur’Vash? That were very hard to see with earthy coloured wavy tattoos on them… which in retrospect could have been umber purple. They were able to totally avoid my qi sense until they were basically within stabbing distance.”

“Oh…” she frowned, throwing that one to the memories who returned a name ‘Ghoblan’… followed by a bunch of warnings that they were even more problematic than Ur peoples and not to be underestimated. Not related either, even though they looked similar.

“As to the big ones… the Ur’Vash… they were mostly covered in Red, Black and… White tattoos… so I guess that explains how so many survived, if those colours represent vigour, durability and death,” Juni said.

“Pretty much,” she agreed. “The small ones could be Ghoblan. I don’t recall seeing any… but that might have been after… Those memories are hazy still. Your interpretation fits; they believe it makes them stronger… though the designs are also important, as much as the colours.”

“I guess the take-away is that their arrows are not likely to work for us?” Juni sighed, looking at the yellow fletched ones and the bow with its garish red lightning bolts and blue swirls around its staves. The string was painted black, she noted.

“…”

The memories seemed divided on that. Some suggested curious ambivalence and an implication that their belief was not what was important; others were pretty clear they likely wouldn’t work.

“Maybe… but I’d avoid using the yellow arrows… just in case,” she suggested.

“…”

They both stared at the yellow arrows some more.

“That is probably for the best, yes,” Juni agreed decisively, flicking through them and separating out the eight yellow ones in the large quiver and tying them together.

“Do you need to practice the visualisation some more?” she asked.

Juni looked pensive for a moment then shook her head. “I can practice as we go, unless you suggest we stay here for hours.”

“…”

Rolling her eyes, she stood, looking around for a handy crevice to dispose the body into. “Nah, we have hung around here for long enough. Let’s see if we can get more arrows, another bow, and find out of the others are still alive.”

“That last bit should be achievable…” Juni frowned, pulling out the divination chart. “You go dispose of the body.”

Nodding again, she hefted it up and made her way further into the bushes. It didn’t take long to find a crevice that wasn’t flooded and dump the Ur’Vash into it. Returning, she found Juni looking pensive, slinging the arrow pack onto her back.

“Well?” she asked as Juni tested the bow a few times.

“Alive…” Juni grimaced, straining to draw it and just about succeeding. “However, the divinations were not that clear on their prospects. I couldn’t get anything from Han Shu directly, but that’s likely related to his sword I think.”

Leaving the waterfalls behind, they picked their way swiftly along the ridge, their speed getting better as Juni became more familiar with the concealment visualisation. They had made it maybe 300 metres when the missing sentry was finally noticed and an undulating call was raised. Moments later several different shadows swept across their surroundings, making them hide, utterly still, in the shadow of the spirit vegetation they had been moving through. To her relief, however, nothing lingered on their location and they were able to continue on quickly.

Rather soon after that though, they were forced back down the cliff, by the simple rational that their ledge on the escarpment ended in a river gorge that fell away into mist, the far side a sheer wall that rose as a new massif.

Thereafter, their progress slowed again as they had to thread their way past different groups as best they could until even that route was cut off, as a raging torrent of a river that swirled along the cliff below them and back down to the valley floor appeared while the escarpment beyond rose as a sheer massif wall that cut off further progress in a narrow gorge.

“You know…” Juni said, staring up at it. “I may not be the best scholar of montane landscapes… but the river here is running back into the valley… and the river we followed was running this way…”

“…”

Considering the somewhat combusted forest in the darkness below she considered her memories…

“I admit, when I pinged everything with my qi sense, I was less concerned about the geography and more with finding if you and Han Shu were alive,” she acknowledged at last.

“While that is flattering,” Juni conceded, “I don’t suppose you paid much attention to the wider geomorphology before you radically rearranged the sedimentary and vegetative aspects of it?”

“Look at the Big Kun Miss, using fancy words,” she shot back.

“Look at the Little Lin Miss, trying to be smart…” Juni shot back, peering over the edge into the rain drenched gloom below.

“…”

“We can cut back across here and trace the far valley wall back; either we meet them coming back this way, see the mess they made, or find the river and the route they have likely taken,” she suggested, choosing to be the bigger woman and ignore that.

The trip down the cliff was much faster than the one up it, it had to be said. The forest this far out was still a bit disrupted from her battle, but not much, thankfully. The worst of it was flooding and a few fallen trees that they easily avoided.

There were relatively few Ur’Vash in the forest as well to begin with; all were easily avoided, at least until they got back towards the business end of the valley. In the misty gloom she started to see the fires appearing on the ridge above the plateau escarpment on both sides as they were working their way along… and there were -a lot- of them. The thunder of drums and distant war chants almost drowning out the rumble of the returning thunderclouds in the distance.

Soon the fires and patrols became unavoidable, however, and they had to start killing sentries to make their way through undetected.

The first was easy enough – Juni shot it through the heart with an arrow just as she used Juni’s swordstaff to decapitate it.

The second, though, allowed her to see first-hand how weird their superstitious views about the role of colour could be. They traded arrows for several minutes as it searched for them with what she assumed was soul sense to no avail, until finally, Juni finally shot it in the head with an arrow. Swiftly making ground, she discovered to her shock that the Ur’Vash was not stunned but rather stone dead as if it were a mortal who had been shot in the head…

“It is clearly just an arrow,” Juni said, staring at the offending blue and white shaft.

She could only nod, mutely… However, that wasn’t even the weirdest bit…

“Its qi core and its soul foundation are totally dispersed…” she added, holding up the crystal embedded beside its heart.

“So… it kills them, but it also disperses their foundation in the process?” Juni shook her head and shoved the arrow back in her quiver. “As long as we don’t get spotted the arrows work…?”

“It feels like that shouldn’t actually work,” she conceded.

“It could be that they don’t believe there to be anything other than Ur’Vash out here?” Juni hazarded a guess.

“...”

She had to concede that was possible, as they made their way onwards. On the other hand, it raised a worrying possibility that even the memories were unable to reliably refute.

-What if one of them shoots us with a white and blue arrow, believing we are Ur’Vash?

It was such a preposterous idea… that she was unwilling to dismiss it out of hand… which actually made her more concerned as they hurried on, because the worry over that uncertainty highlighted just how they might, in fact, actually work via some form of acquired intent. That had a name in the cultivation world – Heart Force – and it was more feared in its own way even than Dharma Intent.

In any case, after that their progress sped up enormously, even if their following engagements trended towards the occasionally bizarre. Rather than yellow shafts being the most problematic as she came to expect, it was in fact blue fletched arrows that made both of them want to weep on occasion. Twice they shot them at Ur’Vash only to see them miss rather randomly and get them spotted. After the second time, Juni spent several minutes with her divination chart muttering darkly about ‘Good Fortune’ before finally tying up all the blue shafts with the yellow ones.

The other arrows functioned much as expected through. White ones didn’t kill outright… usually, but wounds that were inflicted with them carried all the hallmarks of Martial Intent that overwhelmed the opponent. When Juni started using martial intent with them though, they simply became normal arrows… Arrows with black shafts punched through pretty much anything, and were close to unbreakable as they found out in a rapid skirmish with a group that wore bear pelts and a lot of red and black war paint.

That skirmish also proved irrefutably that once they were spotted the arrows lost any utility and just became normal things. Fortunately, the spears they had were able to make short work of almost any melee they had to do, along with Juni’s new martial form and her own massively increased physical prowess.

After two hours of slowly picking their way back along the base of the valley they eventually arrived at the point where it ran around a craggy massif pillar. To get there, they had to scramble back up the escarpment somewhat, bypassing part of the quagmire forming from the orphaned rivers not far beyond their original battle site.

“That’s a big camp…” Juni observed, looking along the gorge they would likely have to follow.

The battle was still ongoing, evidenced by the trading of blazing arrows from the ridges above them and the distant clash of weapons and flashes of red and green fire through the now quite heavy rain.

“It seems we may have been the catalyst for a bit of power reorganisation…” she remarked dryly, munching on another of the Lion Flower Roots and smearing the purple colouring on her arms and legs haphazardly.

By this point they were also being broadly sought by various groups who had been filtering in behind them. During that time, she had made several rather interesting discoveries as well. The answer to being ‘spotted’ turned out to be much as she expected… things worked so long as the fiction that they were ‘Ur’Vash’ was retained.

So now, the both wore crude masks made of wood and some reeds, in a style quite a few orcs were wearing, daubed in some designs lifted from a tribe they had passed that seemed quite strong. Modesty had been something of a casualty as while Ur’Vash womenfolk numbered among the combatants, they made few concessions to what they wore. Unwilling to be quite that invested, both of them now sported hide tunics and skirts, some chitin armour, her bone spear and Juni’s bow. With the mud, blood and darkness, and now the purple dye from the lion flower roots, they could past for small tan skinned Ur’Vash of an indeterminate group.

The success of that strategy was writ large by the series of small conflicts that were still on going in their wake – made all the more amusing by her being able to hear and understand most of what was being said in passing. From the shouts and cries behind them, various tribes clearly didn’t believe their sneaky, cowardly or skulking neighbours when they denied that they were not responsible for the chaos being caused.

“But yes… it is a big camp,” she agreed.

It was indeed… There were hundreds of fires and ad hoc sheltered as bands prepared for combat or rotated out of the distant battle. Below them, Ur’Vash were busy killing prisoners they had ‘captured’ from the spider tribe that had suffered so grievously at her hands in the valley. Looking out over the valley in the direction they came, however… she could see an even bigger war camp glimmering beyond the haze. Drums pounding and guttural chants praising Orcus resonating in the distance.

“This place is going to be a meat grinder,” Juni appraised, considering the narrow route between the two valleys and the forces massing either side.

“We didn’t see any sign of the others…” she sighed.

“And crossing that way… is not likely to be an option,” Juni agreed, looking across to the other side and the rising escarpment that rose up in a series of pillars into the rain clouds and the night gloom.

“That said… if I was Han Shu…” – Juni pointed across the escarpment and along it – “I’d go up around the ridge, keeping to the middle zone where it’s hard to get in from above or below, and try to get out of here as fast as I could.”

She considered that, the memories agreeing that that was the fastest way out… The problem for them was that they had no way to get across the few hundred metres of valley between them. Thousands of Ur’Vash of a tribe venerating centipedes and the ‘Jaguar’ tribe were forming up to fight the spider tribe and another that they had spotted on the far side who wore lots of bones.

“I don’t fancy trying to cross the valley here,” Juni looked out at the war camps again, grimacing in the darkness.

“I guess we go up this side and hope we can go parallel to them then?” she suggested, looking up at the dark, misty cliffs above them.

There were some fires at the top, but contact at this point was basically unavoidable… it was merely a choice of which way would see them fight the least.

“That… seems like what we will have to do,” Juni agreed.

~ Han Shu – Valley Ridgeline, Overlooking Devastated Valley ~

The arrow hissed out of the darkness.

-Betraying fates… I really hate you right now… this enmity I will not forget it!

Han Shu swore and barely deflected the shot that hissed out of the darkness while dodging between the strikes of two of the Ur’Vash. One he kicked in the leg hard enough to make it stumble and that finally opened up a moment where he could sever the arm of the other and shoulder it sideways, sending it off the edge into the void.

Soul sense had come back… but in the end it wasn’t them that spooked everyone, but something behind them on the far ridge line, according to Ruo Han. They had been caught within moments, in any case, a dozen rapid scans of Nascent Soul Ur’Vash catching them followed by a wave of attackers from the higher escarpment.

He ducked another screaming Ur’Vash that leapt from above and then cut a second who had scrambled down after it, leaving it bleeding out on the rocks. These ones were daubed all over in red and black tattoos and wore crude bone armour. They were also fast, and monstrously durable, able to shrug off blows from Ruo Han and Hao Jun’s treasure weapons that should have crippled them for all that everyone still seemed to be suppressed somewhat.

They ignored wounds that should have crippled them, fought with limbs still missing… one had nearly killed both Liao Ying and Jin Chen in their previous skirmish, even after half its head and been sliced off. Sustained by the raging green fire somehow for almost half a minute before Hao Jun managed to knock it off the edge into a gully… where it had started fighting other Ur’Vash coming up.

Another arrow hissed from above, his qi sense barely warning him off it as he pivoted and cut upwards to sweep it away. The black blade met black shaft and shattered it after a mere hit of resistance. Behind them, he could hear the hooting and chanting of more Ur’Vash arriving in the darkness… along with the clatter of displaced rocks from above that spoke of those descending the cliffs as well.

Suddenly another one was in front of him, almost sprouting fully formed from the darkness, charging him down with a black and purple shield painted in a snarling devil face. He smashed the sword into it, splintering it and cleaving the demon apart in a single blow before stabbing at the one behind it.

A third came from the side and he spun, cutting its weapon in two with the lashing sideways cut, before moving to meet his own stroke and draw it back through their neck, putting the tree between him and another.

“Monkeyshit!” Hao Jun’s yell nearby made him spin, but the youth was just gesticulating at a treasure that was a paper lantern with a silver flame inside it.

“What’s wrong?” Liao Ying, who had also paused to see asked.

“Soul sense is being sealed again,” Hao Jun scowled, the treasure vanishing into his storage ring.

“…”

Liao Ying just shook her head and then swatted an Ur’Vash with the fan she was wielding, sending it sprawling away in a dismembered pile from the wind blades on the treasure. He could see how that would be annoying though. Hao Jun had been much more effective wielding that lantern than he had with a sword, turning demons left and right into blazing silver candles.

That the scion from the powerful clan had a rare treasure that allowed him to properly utilise Soul Intent while still at the peak Soul Foundation really shouldn’t have surprised him he supposed. Even so, there was still a huge gulf between Hao Jun and Ruo Han, who used his intent with total precision to assassinate a few powerful Ur’Vash archers and that was it.

While he couldn’t prove it, he was sure that the demons had identified the clear threat posed by Hao Jun’s lantern and likely moved again to suppress it, deciding that limiting that outweighed their own use of soul sense.

“At least it affects us all equally!” he sighed, spinning in a circle and looking for the next threat, which turned out to be from above again.

An Ur’Vash in red and black, wielding a two handed bone club, leapt at him from the rocks above, screaming in wide eyed rage. He met the strike with the sword, sundering the club and stepping inside the strike itself to half bisect the attacker. Spinning away, he left it for someone else to deal with and met another shield-wielder straight on, stabbing through their shield, cutting sideways to take out their arm and then kick them away.

To his left, Ruo Han used a wind art that cut several more who were swarming up the cliff towards them and then retreated rapidly in his direction as three arrows hissed out of the darkness to explode in his path. The barrier the older man put up mostly sheltered Jin Chen who was still badly injured and Liao Ying, but everyone was still peppered with sizzling rock.

“There are almost a hundred swarming down the cliff,” Ruo Han panted… “We need to get back down into the valley.”

“Yes!” he agreed, looking around for Teng Chunhua.

“Where is she?” he asked.

“Miss Teng? She was behind…?” Ruo Han frowned and turned, realising that Teng Chunhua was indeed not with him.

Thankfully, she appeared a moment later, sliding over a nearby rock, looking bloody but otherwise unharmed.

“Sorry, I got knocked over by an arrow,” she grimaced, swallowing down a pill.

“We were just saying we need to go down,” he suggested.

“Somewhere with cover would be good, yes,” she agreed as Ruo Han’s talisman barrier stopped another two arrows.

Liao Ying nodded, summoning another talisman.

{Argent Sundering Blades}

A wave of silvery wind blades tinged with metal qi swirled into a bunch of Ur’Vash who had just scrambled up over the edge. A few were sent howling off into the darkness but most of the new arrivals hunkered down and blocked them with shields which they then discarded as they splintered.

“Kill the wytch!” one of them screamed in excellent Easten.

Their attackers roared and screamed, several charging ahead wielding axes and cleavers made of centipede limbs. All of these new arrivals were naked and plastered in red, black and blue tattoos that greatly resembled various verminous insects.

The ones with a lot of blue serpents on their arms all charged for him, again.

He was starting to wonder if the tattoo colours had as much relevance as the shapes now. Those with black seemed harder to kill. Those with red had both exceptional vitality and were very dexterous, and those with blue…

Well, those with blue, as best he could feel from fighting with them were all preposterously lucky. Time and time again they got weird deflections, strikes that missed, slipped at opportune moments to evade his strikes in ways even the sword couldn’t counter it seemed and more besides.

{Cut Number One}

Suppressing a wince at the name of the technique, he pushed qi into it and decapitated the first to arrive, following through and taking the arms of a second and then the weapon and head of a third in a single blurring cut.

{Cut Number Two}

The retreating target of his follow-up strike tripped over its decapitated compatriot and his technique utterly failed to find any mark, nearly making him overextend and get stabbed for his pains as a second Ur’Vash scrambled in from the side.

Parrying that, he resisted cursing as that attacker somehow managed to meet the flat of his blade and they were thrown apart.

{Cut Number One}

He started the sequence again and resisted the urge to spit blood as the target of his strike, who had originally tripped, was distracted by an arrow hissing down from overhead, totally robbing his strike of its arriving intent in the process and again making him cut air.

Behind him Teng Chunhua stabbed one of the ones that got past him with her spear; she had picked up a shield as well, as had Jin Chen, he noted.

Another Ur’Vash ran at him out of the torrid darkness screaming unintelligibly and threw an axe at him. This, he barely cut, sending the two halves spinning away. One hit Ruo Han’s barrier in such a way that if he had not been using it, it would likely have hit him in the face. The other nearly took Hao Jun’s leg off… again.

“Watch it!” Hao Jun screamed, lashing down with his sword and sending a wall of silver fire that sprouted spark like swords into the night, consuming three more of the attackers in the process.

Shaking his head, he moved towards the onrushing attacker, meeting him with a lunging dash and severing an arm even as the Ur’Vash smashed its club into his side, sending him sprawling–

The stamp arrived in a blur of blue and yellow tattoos, crashing down onto his chest and making him spit blood as his qi turned chaotic–

{Blaze Spear}

White heat seared his body only for the leg to not vanish as expected. There was a scream in the distance and the beam of white light vanished. Lashing wildly with the sword, his attacker stepped over the blade, making impossible distance to recover itself. Staggering up, he saw Liao Ying being helped up by Hao Jun, who was pale and shaking, blood also streaming from his mouth.

Other Ur’Vash were coming from ahead of them now, carrying torches and wicked bone sickles. Quite a few also had bows and many were obviously female… their bared bodies painted in hypnotic patterns of Blue and Gold their faces covered in wooden masks that resembled rocs or eagles, right down to the feathers in their hair. The banner they bore, made of feathers the size of his arms, was fashioned into wings that met in a crude yet familiar drawing of a bird grasping a bolt of lightning in its claws.

-The ruin we passed through showed robed figures fighting a tribe whose symbol was an eagle?

“That one is stronger than me!” Ruo Han yelled in warning, pointing at the one who had stamped him and then evaded the ‘Blaze Spear’.

-You don’t say, he grimaced.

Everyone might be suppressed to Golden Core as far as he was aware, but the kick–

The kick blurred at him as the Ur’Vash clan only in a crude loincloth and some feathers to go with his war paint seemed to distend briefly.

{Martial Lotus Momentum}

He pushed all the qi and intent he could muster into it, even drawing in his mantra and the kick still found its mark, sending him crashing backwards and landing in such a way that he couldn’t cut the leg with the sword.

According to Ruo Han, Principles also seemed to be messed with here…

-But only so much, it seems, he complained inwardly as he rolled up. Assuming that is what this is, of course.

This time, the Ur’Vash came not with a kick but with a two-handed overhead strike from a bone scythe-axe. He met the blow with his sword, slicing it in two and ducking the head that spun off into the void.

The kick that came after, he failed to dodge – it landed on his chest, made his ribs scream and pop and sent him crashing down mere metres from the edge of the cliff.

*Fuagh*

The Ur’Vash looked at his ruined weapon with some disgust and then threw it straight at Hao Jun, who barely managed to block it with his barrier. The talisman itself exploded into sparks and dissipated a moment afterward, making Hao Jun cough up blood and go slightly red-eyed.

An instant later, the Ur’Vash covered the 15 metres between them in a single step, smashing its foot down. He cut for it this time, and stared dully as it somehow stepped through the strike, utterly unharmed, and reached down to drag him up, face to face.

“Little Human. You out of depth.” The Ur’Vash snarled at him in crude but perfectly intelligible Easten.

-Oh… Monkeyshit from Heaven-!

He tried to cut at the Ur’Vash, really hoping that the sword spirit would choose this moment to reappear. His opponent just caught his arm, blocking the strike. Ruo Han raised talisman–

{Hong Fei’s Thunder Lance}

This time he saw…

He wasn’t sure what he saw actually.

The Ur’Vash grew a third arm and the lightning swirled into its hand like a tame animal. The talisman scattered into ash a moment later and Ruo Han staggered back looking horrified.

The arm vanished and the lightning bolt vanished with it–

Pain wracked his whole body as metal qi rampaged through it.

‘Bright, Iron, Beginning, Worldly, Gift’

Every shred of defence he was able to eke out of his mantra, he sought, and it was barely enough.

“Interesting,” the Ur’Vash grinned broadly. “You fight well, kill many Bear Breaking Tribe.”

With a roar, it cast him away, sending him crashing down, away from the rest of the group, towards the blue and yellow painted Ur’Vash who were watching in silence.

“Kill many of my Thunder Eagle Tribe!”

“We kill many of that evil spider tribe as well…” he spat back in Easten even as the Ur’Vash walked towards him.

On the way, he saw a ghostly arm blur down for a split second and pick up the black bone cleaver from the ground before snapping back to its original form.

The Ur’Vash just laughed.

“You hear that… Human kill many Orcneas!”

The assembled Ur’Vash all laughed, then started to stamp and chant gutturally.

His attacker struck out with the new blade so fast it was barely an afterimage.

{Martial Lotus Momentum}

{Cut Number Three}

He parried the strike, aiming to get off his attacker’s line and sweated as he was repelled and the black cleaver… didn’t break.

Striking a second time, the Ur’Vash met his strike easily and followed after him far too leisurely as he sought distance.

Behind him more of the Thunder Eagle tribe were arriving… hundreds scaling down the cliffs, routing the other Ur’Vash to mass in a great ring around them, blocking retreat in both directions. The others were struggling back, having been scattered somehow.

-When did that happen?

Scanning desperately, he saw that Hao Jun was near the cliff, sprawled and bleeding. There was no sign of Teng Chunhua or Jin Chen either. Ruo Han was staggering up, fumbling for another talisman, shielding Liao Ying…

Slowly the guttural chants shifted, morphing as they waved banners and stamped and shuffled this way and that.

“Kill! – Kill! – KILL-!”

“Death! – DEATH – DEATH!”

“Death to the Humans!”

“Death to the Despoilers!”

“Death to the Tyrant Bringers!”

“Death to the Defiled Ones!”

“Death to the Oathless!”

They echoed all around the ridge as more and more Ur’Vash got a grasp on the chants. Those from below had had also made it up and were staring a touch dully at the new arrivals, he thought. Absently, he saw Teng Chunhua, who was sprawling on the ground only a few paces from where he was now, stab at one, sending it sprawling.

“How do they know Easten!” she gasped, staggering up.

“I have no idea…” he grimaced…

“Old Tongue… thing tribe learn before come here. Trade with wild mans, war with wild humans, humans almost like orcs, very hard to kill… respect gods, war against world! NOT LIKE THE OTHER HUMANS! THE WEAK HUMANS WHO COWERED IN THEIR FORTRESSES AND PRAYED TO THEIR FALSE IDOLS!”

The Ur’Vash suddenly spread its arms and laughed, a huge booming sound that drowned out the storm itself.

“I VASHAEK, WHO CALLS THE THUNDER, OFFER ALL YOUR HEADS TO THE HEAVENS’ HUNTER! THE BREAKER OF DAYS!”

“Oh. Shit.”

The Origin’s voice echoed in his mind abruptly. It had none of its usual… ethereal tone…

-And now you appear? He thought inwardly, before realising that she could hear his inner thoughts quite easily.

“…”

“Let’s pretend I didn’t hear that.”

“…”

-Sorry…

“Right, well if he’s just paying lip service this is going to backfire on him hilariously… but if it’s more… repeat after me and don’t get a syllable wrong.”

Words streamed into his head, translating themselves in a strange tongue that echoed with such an antiquity as she spoke it that it made his mind shake.

“Ubomi bam Ndithembisa kuye owenza iingoma!”

‘My life I promise to the one who makes the songs’

“Iphupha elingenasiphelo, ngesiqalo esitsha. Intando yam liLizwi lam!”

‘Dream without end, for new beginnings, My Will is my Word.’

Kneeling down, he grasped a handful of the mud in his hands and drew three lines down each cheek then three slanted lines on his forehead and then slapped the rest over his heart as Origin instructed him.

The Ur’Vash faltered briefly, the look on its face slipping as he uttered the words in the strange tongue.

“Good… Good…” it said eventually. “Good… so you do know the ways of the True Gods. Perhaps you are worthy opponent after all to offer up!”

“Umphefumlo wam uyacula!”

‘So my Soul Sings’

The last singsong syllables echoed in his head as a strange strength flowed out of the sword and into him. It was similar to those haunting, terrible memories of the depths… of the spiders, but at the same time it was subtly different… more attuned to him.

-What is this? he gawped as boundless strength flowed into him, warming his body and suffusing him limbs.

“You… cannot escape now… I am sorry…” Origin sighed softly.

“Sorry?” he blinked.

“This… fight… it should not be yours; this little thing is foolish, he has evoked an old bond, older than perhaps he knows… and there are rules which must be obeyed… especially here in this land that carries old sorrows. I cannot step aside… and you as a bearer of this key are bound to it.”

{This is why I hate defilers: they twist everything.}

Her words echoed in his mind, ethereal again, but now the pressure that came with them twisted the world around him.

“This battle now… it is dangerous beyond your understanding. You cannot run from it under any circumstances.”

As her words faded away, they blended into the very wind and rain itself, echoing in the mists in the darkness. They rose out of the depths of the mountains, through the forest below to arrive with him…

The sky shook the thrum of the thunder above becoming something akin to a great, sonorous bell ringing.

The echo of the darkness of the forests and the depths of mountains met with it and the two rang together, completed for a moment.

The Ur’Vash, Vashaek, charged with a roar, his black stone blade splitting the air directly, leaving a shadow in the world as it passed.

{Blossom of the Lotus, Ninefold the Witches’ Song, Dream for Me, My Mother of Dark Forests}

He parried, somehow guided by the words that echoed, spoken by Origin rather than him. Even then, his arm went numb as the sword rang with a beautiful chord. Except… it wasn’t her words he realised, or just her words… There was another in there as well. The shadow in the forest, crouching by dark waters…

{Dreaming of First Meetings, I Stood Upon the Waters}

The space between them opened up and he struck first this time, flowing along with the words, caught up in the strange momentum of their song. Vashaek screamed and head-butted the sword blade, which somehow barely drew blood as his body’s tattoos shifted and scattered sparks, forming a shimmering circular pattern in the form of a grand bell behind him for a second.

{Watched the Burning of Our Promise, Saw the Death of My Father’s Dark Delights…}

He felt the bones in his arms creak, and the ground crater under him as a terrible destructive force tried to flow out of the bell only to be met with something behind him that made his breath constrict as it rose out of the gloom to enshroud and shelter him.

The orc wiped the thread of blood away and stared at the sword before throwing back its head and laughing.

“GREAT! A WORTHY WAR! WORTHY OF MY PRESENCE AT LAST!”

“I, VASHAEK, WHO SEIZED THE THUNDER, SHALL SLAY YOU, YOU WHO WOULD BRING IT THAT ENDS INTO OUR WORLD AGAIN!”

Its voice roared and split the entire valley, making birds rise in the night, and fires miles away flicker somehow. Ur’Vash that had been chanting and dancing and stomping were struck mute and staggered back, breathless as a towering intent erupted out of the Ur’Vash. His stature rose as he stalked forward, rising from two... to three to almost four metres in height.

The blade that cleft down at him in a mighty sweep seemed to carry a momentum that overturned the very sky itself, twisting it into the blade and making the valley shake like it was stood in the middle of a thunderclap. In that instant, he fancied he saw a vast bird, wings wrought of the sky clutching a serpent of lightning in its claws descending down at him, locking the whole world in its predatory grasp.

{Yet here I stand… upon those waters… All I held but Ash and Dust… an End to Joy, the Birth of Sorrow, My Memory alone, to shed tears for what we wrought... }

The heavens fell, but they were inconsequential as the song whispered around him. The bird fell, screeching in fury as the years bore down on it only to find itself drawn downwards in turn, splashing into the river as he watched. It foundered and flailed, losing its direction and strength as its life ebbed away.

Dully, he reached down and plucked the poor bird out of the current before it drowned. Lifting up his hands… he released it back to the sky and the eagle soared once more, given new life from old as the years fell away from it again and it rose back to the clear sky.

The world around him collapsed. The whole mountainside shifted down around them, destabilized by the strength of the strike. Yet above there was starlit sky and all around them calm.

Vashaek staggered back… seeming astounded… then howled again… somehow seeming even more overjoyed at this. The strike of the weapon drew the whole mountain down with his leap, the bell behind him shaking furiously as it resonated with the sound of the vast avalanche.

“Fucking battle maniacs… really the worst…”

Origin’s voice jarred in his ears faintly as he was led to dodge to one side before finding the surging song again and following its call. Above him, the mighty Peng swirled in the eye of the storm and descended a second time. This time, there was no grand vision, just a hunter with a weapon who struck out, aiming for it with a cast spear.

The avalanche around them warped outwards as the phantasmal bird, wrought of the storm was scattered across the sky by the black crack that the strike somehow sent through it. Lighting sizzled in every direction and the eye of the storm collapsed. He had no time to spare for those who were fleeing in every direction however, because the lighting returned, swirling around Vashaek’s weapon and striking at him again, even as the song led him to meet it… again.

~ Teng Chunhua – Collapsing Valley Ridgeline ~

Teng Chunhua fled the combat behind her; whatever Han Shu had said in response to the... Ur’Vash as they were apparently called, had basically turned the world insane. The space around them was totally warped and shattering rapidly as the two traded flickering blows that didn’t quite connect with the reality around them any more…

She made it halfway to the cliff edge, angling towards Ruo Han and the others–

[Sweet. Bloom. Red. Blossom. Jade]

‘Sweet. Bloom. Red. Blossom. Jade’

Her mantra echoing in her head told her she wasn’t dead… which was about as merciful as things seemed to get now. Triggering a short range blink talisman she reappeared 30 metres from her current painful location... which happened to be in mid-air.

Triggering it a second time, she landed on the top of the avalanche which was now careering down and unlike the unreality of the two combatants locked in some cipher-like struggle in its midst… it was very real and entirely dangerous.

Ur’Vash were caught up just as they were, some swept away, though mainly those who had been coming from below. Those up above, who, if her Easten wasn’t deserting her, were from the ‘Thunder Eagle’ tribe or something similar, had been reduced to some sort of psychotic frenzy, dancing, screaming and shouting as their tribe leader or champion fought on.

The same could not be said for the others. An enraged Ur’Vash wearing centipede armour who was being swept down with her, launched himself sideways at her as she tried to find her footing. She kicked it then pulled her spear back out of her storage talisman and swept at it, sending it sprawling–

One of the blue and gold Ur’Vash crashed down from above, sending them both skipping away. She found her footing but the centipede tribe Ur’Vash hit a rock and was turned into red-purple paste.

-This tribe… she tried to process that and failed. Are there even sides here?

In a way, they seemed like they were absolutely on another level compared to the ones from before.

The female Ur’Vash charged at her, bounding between the collapsing rocks, screaming what were likely obscenities in their harsh tongue. She blocked the strike and sighed as her tortured spear’s haft broke. Storing away the latter half, she drew her short blades and blocked its follow up strike, letting it send her back and trusting to her mantra and the suppression, which still seemed in effect, to do the rest.

She blinked in the instant before a rock hit her, arriving back almost at her original position and catching her attacker thoroughly off-guard. Her stab as she appeared behind the Ur’Vash was at arm’s length, but both her blades were poisoned with Fire Lash Lamium sap. Her attacker howled and thrashed, the agony of the Yin Fire poison overcoming its fury and making it grasp for safety so it wouldn’t be drawn into the roiling collapse that was still gaining momentum all around them.

Unfortunately, before she could finish it off, a second spear-wielding Ur’Vash jumped down out of the gloom at her. Checking the charge on her talisman she blinked again, stabbing at it and this time did judge it right, executing the unfortunate attacker with a single blow to the head as she landed right behind it. Using blink talismans was something close to an art form, one she had a few too many opportunities to practice on missions on Snow Jade and South Grove Pinnacles as well...

Two more scrambled out of the ruins of the rippling slope behind them. She stabbed one and found the other, one of the ones wearing a lot of blue war paint managed to lodge its spear in a rock and avoid getting crushed to death with its compatriot.

That finally bought her time to look around. Below her, the others were not faring well. Ruo Han was basically supporting them as they fled down the collapse, chased by dozens of Ur’Vash, who seemed to have little care for their own safety.

She darted after them, leaping from rock to rock as fast as she was able, using her remaining anchor talisman in short bursts to avoid being dragged under.

Landing beside the rearmost of that group of Ur’Vash, she stabbed and shouldered it into the morass of grinding rock all around them, uncaring of its survival just as the war above them intensified. The roar of… not really rage… roar of warlike intent? From the Ur’Vash that Han Shu’s… sword in all likelihood… was fighting, silenced half the valley. Trees shifted below her, fires miles away all flickered in unison as a shockwave passed out. She wondered why she hadn’t fel–

…

She clawed her way out of the avalanche.

“Screw your mother, you shit-slinging heavenly monkey! This Daughter HAS TALISMANS FOR YOUR SHIT!” she screamed at the world at large, glad she had had charges on her anchor talisman to use at the last second. “Incidentally? I have so had it with these mother-molesting landslides and getting buried by other people’s mother-loving attacks!”

-Sound travels faster than actual movement… usually. Thankfully we were ahead of the slip before the worst of that shockwave hit.

Breathing hard, she looked around and found that a vast, half bowl-shaped collapse had taken out a third of the valley ridge they had been on. The whole valley was still experiencing aftershocks as well, she realised as one made her stumble and nearly trap her leg between two shifting rocks.

“At least I was already on the top of–”

The blow to her back sent her sprawling. Disorientated, she found herself being towered over by a bloodied Ur’Vash in red and black war paint. Rather than dodge, she pulled out a lightning element talisman and just triggered it directly, watching the demon get thrown away into the darkness as it disintegrated. It was a waste of a talisman, but she was done with so much stuff right now she really didn’t care anymore.

A second one scrambled over the edge – this one she did stab, repeatedly, in the face until it stopped moving. The third one she slapped a ‘White Blaze’ Talisman on directly and then ran away; it exploded in a small blaze of yang fire and, having failed to remove the talisman, proceeded to chase after her through the ruins of the landslide.

It took two minutes to die as the talisman finally did its thing, which in the circumstances felt like five minutes too little.

~ Han Shu – New Valley, Same kind of thing. ~

Han Shu regained control of… himself… maybe?

He had a moment of confusion, then resignation as he recovered his faculties for the third time in a pile of earth and proceeded to pull himself clear of the vast avalanche.

“Still alive…” he grimaced, finding himself face to face with a group of Ur’Vash that had rampaged out of the forest, stark naked except for the bear pelts they wore, covered in black and red war paint.

He cut the first one down instinctively, stepping past its falling corpse to behead the second and then brain the third with the pommel of the sword before eviscerating it. Stepping back, he dodged the strike from a fourth’s club, severing its arm in the process and kicked the fifth in the balls before stabbing it through the stomach and scattering its guts over the landslide.

The sixth he parried, catching its club with the cross guard of the sword before pushing it back with its own momentum and killing it with a single thrust to the face.

The final one, rushing up behind him, died, disembowelled by an upward sweep of the sword as he turned on the spot. Its over-arm, two-handed sweep with its club doomed to never land.

The combat was over in 10 heartbeats… He collected himself in shock, realising that the benefits of the ‘war paint’ somehow still lingered even if the echoes of the strange song seemed to have dissipated.

Ahead of him he found Teng Chunhua getting chased by a burning Ur’Vash, several others darting out of the way and throwing things at her as their chase laid a trail of burning fire that dispersed her opponents. He cut down two of them before they were aware of his presence. A third charged at him, eyes wide in fury, stabbing out with its spear.

He spun around its strike, bisecting it and killing another attacker as they arrived with the rising arc of the sweep as it returned to his centre.

“You survived…” Teng Chunhua breathed hard, looking around warily for more Ur’Vash in the gloom.

“Yeah, remarkably…” he grimaced; the invigoration was also starting to wear off now and his body was seriously overdrawn, he was coming to realise.

“What in the fates… happened?” she said searchingly.

“Forbidden technique from my cultivation art… Really don’t want to have to do it again.” It was a lie… but somehow… he suspected, not far from the truth.

She gave him a long look… then nodded slowly. “We should look for the others?”

“I am half-tempted not to…” he grimaced.

“Still annoyed that they basically threatened you over going back to recover their bodies…” she sighed.

“…”

He grimaced, regretting the abrupt remark, even if it wasn’t far off his true sentiment at this point.

“You are better than that… We are better than that…” Teng Chunhua sighed. “Even if they don’t really get it… Ruo Han does at least… Look around you… it’s not like we have an opportunity to–”

“The duel is not yet done,” the Origin’s voice snapped back into focus in his mind, making him freeze. “Don’t get distracted… Remember what I said about fleeing combat?”

“But I’m not?” he frowned.

“It’s not just in your eyes…”

Behind them, he could see now that hundreds of the Thunder Eagle tribe were flooding down the slopes. Vashaek strode to the edge and looked down at them, stood on the edge of the forest.

“What are you doing!” Teng Chunhua said in a suddenly panicked voice… “You can’t mean to continue fighting him?”

“You think we can run away from him?” he remarked wearily as Vashaek stepped off the ridgeline and the world bent around him, delivering him to the base of the avalanche in single move.

“…”

“Fair point,” Teng Chunhua mumbled… backing up.

“Go find the others,” he grimaced. “Take them out of here if at all possible… I’ll… catch you up.”

“Right…” she stared at him dully for a minute, clearly not believing a word he said.

“Go!” he snapped a bit more urgently, shifting his sword grip.

She gave him a long look… then sighed and turned and darted away into the gloom.

“…”

He got a weird impression from Origin, but his opponent left him no time to dwell on it as he covered the intervening distance between them with a single strike.

{Martial Lotus Momentum}

Even though he tried, the strike somehow made itself unavoidable, as if it was imbued with the same qualities as his sword somehow. He was about to attack the weapon again when something caught him…

-Why am I attacking the weapon exactly?

“Attack the Weapon.”

Something in his mind…. Or something trying to influence his mind said forcefully he wanted to attack the weapon.

He fought against it, stumbling back as Vashaek snarled in fury and lashed at him again.

“Attack. The. Weapon.”

Instinctively moved to block–

{Martial Lotus Momentum}

It took his mantra to get involved, but he barely managed to dodge rather than stand and fight… and immediately tripped over a rock and fell, his movement art inexplicably failing him.

Vashaek grinned manically and struck out again and again… Each time something tried to drag him towards attacking the weapon.

“Attack it...”

“Attack the weapon…”

“Attack. The. Weapon.”

Each time he barely resisted it, desperately trying to dodge back only to find that a rock inexplicably interfered with the track of the dodge, a tree… another Ur’vash.

{Cut Number One}

He tried to find an opening… make an opening to attack, but there was none. Every move was met with a wall of approaching death. Utter inevitability in each action. Nothing he could grasp with his intent, no weak spot or mistake…

-Of course… this Ur’Vash is realms above me… It was on the wall carvings…

-It must be thousands…

-Tens of thousands of years old.

The futility of his situation grasped him like a vice…

“Puny human. Think you can speak words.” Vashaek sneered at him “Your kind abandon True Gods long ago, serve only self now. Your prayer cannot reach them.”

Something about this whole thing was wrong somehow…

He tried to quash his instincts, drawing on the combat form from the nine-fold lotus origins sword art, pushing his qi around his meridians in accordance with its method to calm his mind as he frantically dodged again.

[Unnecessary. Just attack the weapon… Nothing else is required of you, Han Shu.]

Something tried to pull at him… stop him using the art, told him it was unnecessary… that this was–

“SHUT UP!”

He screamed in frustration to try to drown out the feeling.

“No. You.”

It returned at him, stronger still.

The Vashaek sneered and struck at him again. This time he tried to use a form from the manual directly to dodge; however, Vashaek’s blade found an opening easily…

“Just. Attack. His. Weapon. Already!”

The pressure told him to swat away the blade…

-Bad… very bad… don’t do it…

-Iron is the Soul, Beginning, the blessing of Earth, within the Gift seek my strength…

-Reject it… This isn’t right…

-REJECT IT!

His inner thoughts started to fragment abruptly… screaming at him that this was very bad indeed.

-I don’t want to die…

In desperation he sliced out randomly and–

-I don’t want to die… just attack the sword.

Their blades met, he recoiled, Vashaek seized the opening and his hand pressed against his chest, smashing him down.

All the strength in his body fled. His bones broke, his flesh succumbed.

Vashaek laughed and arrived over him, stamping down on him directly. He tried to escape but his body was broken. The blow connected with his leg, shattering it. His flesh tore as Vashaek ground down on his injured limb.

“Just. Attack. His. Weapon. Han Shu.”

Screaming in horror, some part of his mind that was now cold and numbed to everything managed to seize the moment, swinging with the sword.

Something tried to interject.

“JUST. ATTACK. THE. WEAPON. HAN SHU.”

The words drowned out his whole world, echoing all-encompassingly.

-We don’t want to die… Just attack the fates accursed weapon… please… Han Shu… please…

Familiar voices echoed in his mind, impossible voices a world away whispered, pleaded, cajoled… drowning out something…

“Almost… the connection is…”

{FUCKING THIEF – YOU DARE TRY TO TWIST MY CONNECTION TO THE WORLD!?!}

The words, horrifying and ethereal, echoes cast from beyond any understanding of cognisance turned his mind to splinters. His body thrashed under the force of the intent that swept out of some other place… not the sword, but the manual in his mind, he realised with a jolt.

Splinters of his mind became splinters of his body, he was the fulcrum point between two vast forces for a split second. He could hear tearing, screaming, sobbing, death… flooding into his blood and mind somehow, bringing him perilously close to the point of physical ruin.

The world was still around him.

Vashaek frozen in place…

-No…

-just…

-moving…

-really…

-really…

-slowly…?

{Thank fuck for that…} Origin sounded… no longer like a kindly older sister… There was just anger in her voice.

{Gods-damned gestalt… first it does for Orcus… then it killed Sannae… now it nearly does for this Daughter? I will remember this, Keramos.}

“…”

“Talk about unexpected…” Origins voice regained its older sister tone.

-What…

-just…?

He tried to speak but found that his thoughts were unfocused and sluggish.

“…”

{Stop fighting it, don’t think it will hurt your soul… tormented as the poor thing already is…}

{That it is able to exert such a connection to its racial gestalt… in a world like this is frankly…}

{Not… here?}

{Oh… I see… I see… this sister sees now… so that’s how it is?}

{Someone actually dares to try to screw with ______ to poke around for people like me…?}

Origin’s inner monologue in this silent world became increasingly acerbic as she went on.

{Okay.}

{Okay…}

{You motherfuckers want to cheat like this?}

{This big sister will teach you all about cheating…}

Up until that point… he realised he had never heard Origin genuinely ‘angry’ before. It was an entirely new experience, and one he was certain he never wanted to experience again. There was a deep… seething antipathy in her voice. An all-consuming desire to destroy… no… extinguish everything.

{You want to cheat?}

{This Big Sister will accompany you to cheat a bit!}

{I have karma to spare for old thieves of destiny like you wretched frogs in your rotten little well}

Part of him felt like it was sinking away, even as he saw two scenes start to overlap in the ghostly half world he was now in.

In one… he watched in horror as Vashaek slammed the cleaver down into his body, killing him. He saw a shimmer of silver flow up into the sky, seized by something and a route made in the moment of his death, even if he didn’t understand how or what it really was, beyond that it was a ‘path’.

In the other, he sliced upwards with the sword, lopping off an arm…and then Vashaek smashed his skull flat and a silver thread flowed upwards.

He died a dozen times in the blink of an eye as something else wrestled with him, holding the moment of his death repeatedly. Each time, a silver thread swirled higher… and the path became a little stronger…

And each time… Origin did something inexplicable and the path reset, the after-images of the silver threads lingering but never connecting somehow as he died… again… and again… and again… and again...

Some part of his mind was sheltered, watching in a way that was almost detached from his circumstances, from outside his body.

-Wait… what?

He realised with a jolt he was outside his body in a different world.

Staring around, he was in a bizarre, otherworldly place, full of ethereal, misty shifting tides, swirling sobbing forms hunched over corpses – living Ur’Vash in the gloom with terrible injuries superimposed over them.

“Don’t look at them,” Origin said. “It is dangerous for you here. You cannot… unsee reality.”

He froze… and realised she was there, beside him, one hand holding his, the other holding the sword, which he still held in his hand, as that him died again, this time severing a leg before succumbing as his body was smashed to pieces by Vashaek.

“What… is this place?” he managed to force out.

“Reality… the truth,” Origin said simply and a bit sadly, gesturing into the distance.

He stared up and… stared… because the haunted world was not one world… but dozens overlaid. Shattered moments flowing together. The mountain peaks in the distance that he had first thought were the Great Mount… then come to think of as Thunder Crest was gone. In its place was a great tower, smashed down into a ruined land below them that was visible like the bottom of an ocean lagoon on a windy day. The tower itself had to be almost a thousand miles high, graven from blue-black stone and gilded in twisting, broken patterns of myriad colours. It was singularly there, the middle of everything… and also everywhere.

Every part of this place was linked to it, or linked to something reflected through it. The mountain was part of it… anchored to it via the memory in its rock. The shattered valleys were aspects that had been held within it. Others, echoes of the land it had been set to watch over for millennia. Other peaks were haunted ghosts of its compatriot towers… echoes of echoes overlapping in death, as if trying to return to the moment before. Painfully crawling backwards through time itself.

Chains of otherness twisted between the peaks themselves and all of them arrived at… the Great Mount.

In that instant, he knew that if he ever remembered the totality of this scene, he could only ever consider this to be Mount Tai, because it was impossible. The reality of Yin Eclipse was a monolith of smashed reality itself, twisting inwards like a vast cosmic eye straining against the phantasmal chains that held it down. Dimensions, warped worlds stacked together somehow, compressed and weighting down on the entire landscape around, held together…. It made his mind howl and gibber just trying to look at it, even in the distance where he couldn’t see any detail.

Everywhere, the shattered landscape was reflected, refracted and projected. A thousand eras, several worlds, dreams and rubble overlaid in cosmic collage within the mists and clouds around it… vestiges, tied to it like tattered flags. Some were huge, edifices of nothing, others tiny, but encapsulating whole worlds and at its heart three shadows. Illusions that if you looked at them just right… formed three lands.

The land they were in was one such shadow… vast and ever coalescing. Above it was a shifting cloud of mad potential, broken dreams and chaotic scenes and sights that flickered away like dancing animals in a child’s lantern while below… was death and darkness… screaming agony sealed away in an impossible cage that fled from his gaze every time he was drawn to it.

Through it all were two places, merged somehow. Ancient complexes and geology of another world, smashed through… Eastern Azure he realised in shock. The tower itself was really there, in parts. A relict lance pierced into the heart of their world. The uncountable numbers of anomalous shards glittering through it, anchored to the landscape like corpses from an ancient battle, all of them somehow tied to it, and to the mountains below it, the grave markers left by its fall.

Some were real… some were unreal, the whole thing was so immense and now that he could see the totality of it, even in this tiny, fractional moment, he could understand the suppression… for there were other things in its depths, that held real darkness… and the things keeping them there…

“Oh…”

The shadows that cast through those mountains, through the darkness, pinning it all down, sealing it away… came from forms like Origins… linked to keys like the one he carried. Lonely wardens abandoned to time, weighing down the suppression through their very ordeal and using it to seal horrors that fell into this place or had been here before it arrived in their world.

“All the anomalies are… memories related to this somehow… and what lies beneath is a prison…”

Between one moment and the next… he found himself refocused on his reality, memories of what he had just seen filtering away, leaving only a haunting understanding in the back of his mind.

“This place is nothing but a tomb of memories.” His voice was both loud and quiet as he stared blankly this way and that.

“Yes…” Origin sighed, shaking her head. “There is no treasure here, only curses, ill things and legacies too heavy to lift...”

“And it seems that our interlopers cannot keep up their gambit,” her expression twisted into a cruel sneer that seemed both utterly alien and at the same time… also as true a reflection of her in some way as the kindly, big sister manner she usually had.

“What do… you–?”

He trailed off as reality arrived back with him, plunging him into the truth of his distraction… His mind, such as remained, was howling and gibbering under the accumulated trauma of hundreds… thousands of bloody deaths… each more futile than the last. The chill grasp of a multitude of deaths gripped his mind in a cruel vice even as he saw that Vashaek was also cognisant of the fact that he was a pawn in a game not of their making.

The Ur’Vash’s eyes were wild with fury... and fear, locked on Origin as much as him, even as their terrible cycle continued under her absently watchful gaze. Behind it, a shadow was trying to hold onto the Ur’Vash, crying out to it in some strange way, the cleaver also fighting to resist in some way.

“Is… it… like you?” he managed to ask.

“Similar,” Origin said, still starting at the sky pensively. “It is like me… but also not… It has a rather different outlook, but it has been with this Ur’Vash brat for a long time and is trying to save its friend, even if it is only in a way its kind knows… to smash the thing causing the danger to pieces and stomp it to bits.”

She turned back to look at them both, frowning. “Wow… they sure are willing to burn a lot of capital for this… I may have to change the approach slightly.”

“{Sister}… might I bother you for a moment?”

“…”

A second blade slid out of the air. Long and sleek, it was nearly 2 meters in length. When she held it, darkness seemed to coalesce around it, forming an edge that seemed to never end, just grow so fine he could no longer see it. She swung it at the combat, and everything just slid apart, crumpling into nothingness. His soul screamed… his mind buckled and he felt, rather than saw, the world become fog around him…

“Run…” Origin’s voice hissed after him. “Your life depends on it!”

…

He staggered back, repelled by the attack from a frenzied blue and yellow tattooed orc, the chanting orcs stamped and danced around them, hammering drums.

-Isn’t this moments before Vashaek arrived?

“Run…”

He recovered his footing and fled towards the cliff edge.

Without pausing to stop, he grabbed the stunned Teng Chunhua who had just slid down her rock by the arm and raced towards the cliff edge.

{Martial Lotus Momentum}

Using the movement art to its maximum, he dragged her along beside him. Origin had bought him an opportunity somehow, even if he wasn’t clear what that was right now. Something had dragged watching eyes from beyond the horizon to their battle…

He shot by the Argent Justice disciples who were disengaging, preparing to deal with the next wave. Without any need for words they careered after him, down the avalanche gully that the various Ur’Vash had been coming up near them.

He had covered maybe half its distance, Ruo Han now keeping pace with him carrying Jin Chen and Liao Ying while Hao Jun was flying using a bizarre spinning disc-like treasure when a challenging roar echoed through the escarpment. The rocks in the gully rattled and the trees shifted before it. An Ur’Vash leapt from above and Ruo Han struck it down with a wind blade, sending its bisected body tumbling.

Another threw itself off and bizarrely dodged another wind blade because it slipped in the process, landing with a thud below and groaning. A third from above slashed down at him even as it missed its leap. The blade still clipped his leg… but he was surprised to find the pain less than it should have been even considering his mantra…

It wasn’t that his cultivation had advanced, he realised. Instead his state of mind was clearer, less easily shaken.

-Well that’s a terrifyingly hard-won benefit. Only had to die a thousand times in a thousand breaths to get it as well, he shuddered.

The gorge ran out ahead of them, not reaching all the way to the ground. Not stopping, he launched himself out into the void, searching for a branch…

{Martial Lotus Momentum}

His foot connected with a branch as he fell.

“What the fates are you–!” Teng Chunhua was screaming, he realised, as he kicked off the branch and aimed for a second tree crest.

{Martial Lotus Momentum}

Behind him the others barely kept pace, Ruo Han carrying only Jin Chen now. Hao Jun had stopped using his treasure – presumably it wasn’t a genuine flight treasure, or those didn’t work here; either could be the case. He and Liao Ying were Soul Foundation though, so they could just about air walk if required for short distances.

{Martial Lotus Momentum}

His next leap nearly made him miss the target tree branch. He got the barest touch of contact with it though, which was enough to catapult them onwards. This approach was unsustainable, burning qi like a devil was on his tail.

-Who am I kidding, that Ur’Vash is the strongest thing we have seen here I am pretty certain, and I include cultivators in that! He complained inwardly.

More… weirdly though, that locked moments of a thousand death was still somehow unfolding in a parallel manner. He was here… and he was there, same, yet separate…

They fled on, skipping from tree top to tree top as fast as he could, aiming for the far valley side. He was half out of qi now, Ur’Vash charging through the forest below and behind them. Fighting was breaking out here and there as bands of Ur’Vash smashed into each other and started skirmishes in the confusion as well.

He angled away and headed diagonal to the sounds of conflict. Behind him there was a terrible enraged howl and the trees shifted and flexed as something ‘severed’ dozens of trees and a lot of unfortunate orcs below him. He charged towards a tree that had resisted the attempt to interrupt their passage.

A second strike smashed into it and the tree collapsed as thousands of enraged shadows flowed out of it.

“Oh… Monkeyshit,” he managed weakly as the enraged swarm of Hook Bats scattered through the darkness around them, slashing at them indiscriminately as they sought out the destroyer of their home and then descended on the unfortunate Ur’Vash pursuing them.

He managed to crash onto a fallen branch and launched himself for another tree, colliding with the branch and nearly dropping Teng Chunhua. She had stopped screaming… well, cursing him mainly now. He hurled himself upwards through the tree, running up the trunk until he was in the crown at which point he took the opportunity to down half a bottle of replenishment pills even as he scouted the darkened treetops for other potential hook bat lairs.

-Wait… we can use this… Realisation dawned.

“When we run past that one…” – he pointed at a very suspicious candidate – “set the tree on fire.” He dashed off again…

Ruo Han smashed into a tree top nearby, followed by the others… They ate qi replenishment pills and took off after them again a moment later.

“Set a Hook Bat lair on fire?” Teng Chunhua, still clinging to his back asked him in horror… “Do you want to die?”

“Trust me,” he muttered as they traversed another tree.

“…”

Below him there was the sound of enraged combat again. Seconds later, a strike from somewhere behind obliterated the tree they had just vacated. Angling toward the tall tree he glanced at Teng Chunhua who sighed and sent a Golden Core grade ‘Bright Flare’ talisman over at it as they passed.

Diverting away again he fled across the tree tops.

*flwump*

Behind them there was a flat thump and the entire tree went up like a bonfire. It was superficial in some ways: the tree would survive; the orcs chasing, however, probably wouldn’t have a lot of fun fighting off several thousand homeless hook bats though.

Just as he had hoped, moments later a second swarm of enraged bats swept out into the canopy like a blizzard.

The sounds of pursuit trailed off, but still he didn’t let up. The Ur’Vash had come from this direction in all likelihood; this broad valley was probably leading them away from Orcneas territory at the very least, but it probably wasn’t leading them clear of Ur’Vash in general, sadly.

“Head for the pillar!” Teng Chunhua hissed, pointing to his left.

Nodding, he diverted that way, skipping ahead as another tree vanished in splinters, accompanied by 50 square metres of forest. Landing on it, he sprinted across its face.

{Martial Lotus Momentum}

This time he triggered it with his mantra… although it was largely unnecessary, he was discovering. The art’s mobility was borderline ridiculous for what was an entry level technique in the manual. Even in its current state it was comparable to a Golden Core grade movement art and while it was eating qi like crazy, it was also deepening his cultivation just like a spiritual law in the process, stimulating his qi to naturally cycle while he pushed it around to use the art… That was… He had never heard of an art that good, ever.

Ruo Han and the others flickered across the rocks above him, looking drained. Well, Ruo Han seemed okay, but the other three there seemed pressed, already injured, their meridians overtaxed, and suppressed as they were.

Abruptly, Ruo Han yelled down. “They dropped the Soul Sense sealing…”

“Then run faster,” he yelled back. “That just means we got beyond the range they can conveniently track us without it!”

Hao Jun looked like he wanted to say something, but he gave them no opportunity to reply and leapt from the rock face back towards the tree tops, charging from tree crest to tree crest. Abruptly, he felt the sword in his hand send a warmth through his body and a warning to not fall.

Seconds later a shadow clouded his mind tired, deadening his limbs for a heartbeat. The timely warning served him well and he crashed into the next tree top, then threw himself onwards. Behind him there was a scream and he saw Hao Jun stumble and get grabbed by Ruo Han who swore out loud and dragged both him and Jin Chen while Liao Ying threw herself after them.

“Why… are… we running so fast…?!” Liao Ying managed to yell…

“Because there is a really angry above Immortal realm Ur’Vash leader chasing after us with an artefact weapon!” he yelled back.

“…”

Five pairs of eyes fell on him.

Ruo Han and Liao Ying both accelerated rapidly. They hurtled over the tree tops in desperate silence.

“Again,” Origins voice whispered. “Liao Ying.”

“SOUL ATTACK!” he yelled to try to warn the others, diverting sideways to arrive beside Liao Ying.

The draining wave swept over them again and he caught her as she staggered and nearly slipped to fall through the trees.

“Thanks…” she grimaced, eating a replenishment pill and running on again.

He took the opportunity to eat more himself, for what good it did. It was like a bucket of water thrown into bath compared to what he needed as his qi dropped down to around a fifth.

They sprinted on in desperate silence. Counting down the time between the last two attacks…

“Again… Ruo Han,” Origin murmured.

“Ruo Han…! Look out!” he yelled. There was no point in hiding things that could save lives now. He could always work out how to lie about it later.

Ruo Han nodded, not questioning as they ran on. Ten seconds after, another wave appeared and Ruo Han grunted, blood running from his nose and eyes. He should be impressed that it was able to detect the attacks before they arrived, and he still had the memories of the other moment unspooling parallel to this.

His mind hazed and he cursed, barely missing his footing.

“Um, we are getting chased…” Teng Chunhua whispered in his ear. “There is a mostly naked Ur’Vash with gold and blue tattoos shaped like eagles carrying a kind of black club-axe thing and a grey painted, Ur’Vash wearing armour with two centipede limbs for weapons… running across the treetops after us… and they do not appear at all happy!”