While Valinkar drowned in Evil and the Daughters of the Isles rampaged through our northern reaches, amid the common folk arose a holy daughter, one who had claimed to hear the word of our lord. She struck a great victory at Delbar and then at Meltras and liberated dozens of towns in a single campaign, spreading her name widely as a hero of the common folk.

Thereafter, claiming revelation, she, took for her banner the sign of six golden eyes of holy manifestation, shining like the sun, and was hailed as Saintess by Tyrus the Wise, Lord Bishop of Meltras. Rousing the downtrodden populace to fervour, she swept down the coast, overturning the forces of the Sea Peoples in a furious assault that culminated with the liberation Jerikhal itself where she urged all the faithful to join her in the fight against the darkness in our lands.

Our surviving leaders, believing themselves suddenly in the superior position, a Saintess emerged and the will of the common folk once again resurgent, feted her and showered her with honours. Caught up in their fervour, they ignored old counsel and cheered as she led the good folk of our land to execute the heretic prisoners of the sea peoples before the ruins of the great cathedral of Jerikhal. Those few who remained, she turned over to Consul Nervral, son of the disgraced Neron, who had now landed with his legions, seeking to redeem his grandfather’s legacy through deeds of war. Then, mustering a great host from our lands, she marched for Valinkar, declaring an end to darkness in our lands and prophesying its deliverance from darkness upon the 91st day of the siege.

Excerpt from the incomplete text of ‘The Broken Dream’

Author Unknown.

~ Lin Ling – Jungle Clearing ~

Crouched on the edge of a crumbling massif, Lin Ling watched the disturbance unfold in the distance, far across what was turning out to be a miniature rift valley. After vacating the previous valley they had found that the craggy maze of jungle and rock pillars had rapidly widened out and started to descend into this broader open region. The clouds swirled low over the ridges, obscuring the more distant topography, but for the miles she could see, it was all sub-tropical forest split by several rivers winding between scattered rock pillars that vanished into haze and lower cloud as it continued to descend.

Everywhere she could see fires glimmering in the clearings or along the river banks and quite a few distant ones were re-directing towards that distant combat almost ten miles away on the other side of the valley where it broadened out. Unfortunately, even with her remarkable night vision it was impossible to make out more than a few unnatural cracks of lightning that had first drawn her attention and now, the thunder of drums as camps below reacted. Since then, the haze and the rain had also closed in again, turning the green maze into a drenched hot house once more.

“Any idea if it’s them?” Juni asked, coming to kneel beside her.

“Could be,” she sighed. “Even with my vision I can’t see squat that far away in this darkness.”

“Odds are…” she trailed off and narrowed her eyes as a swathe of trees exploded a mile away from them, a vast gout of green-gold fire exploding skyward and sending strange rainbow ripples through the rain, scattering bits of burning landscape for hundreds of metres and even dispersing the low cloud above them slightly.

“…”

“That...?” Juni also peered into the rainy gloom in that direction. “By the Nameless Fate, I hate really this rain,” she sighed after a moment.

“If they don’t know that by now… then I can only concede they are blind,” she agreed, staring at the distant forest through the low cloud, willing the wind to shift a bit…

“Ah… Hook Bats,” Juni somehow spotted them before she did, a wave of shadows, many of them with little halos of green fire flickering across the treetops, as they fled their burning nest on the pillar. “Could be that was the other disturbance as well?”

“While Ur’Vash are somewhat primitive, the memories don’t consider them to be generally stupid. They won’t run towards a disturbed Hook Bat nest,” she pointed out. “Likely the fighting there just disturbed a nest, possibly someone managed to critically injure one of the few shamans actually out here. In any case… there have been almost no shamans or anything like the memories consider arts users in what we have personally encountered up to now…”

“At least since exiting that battlefield…” Juni reminded her.

“Well… yes,” she conceded. “Anyway… I take it you finished clearing up here?”

“Yep… here is your share,” Juni sighed, passing her a bulging hide.

Turning, she looked at the ruins of the group behind them; it had been maybe twenty Ur’Vash, from a tribe that was mostly covered in armour made of bones and favoured white and black and red war paint in designs that resembled crude screaming faces and staring eyes. Opening it, she considered the collection before starting to absorb them, weakest first. There were seven Qi Condensation heart-cores as the memories called them, two at Golden Core, one Soul Foundation and one Nascent Soul one.

“Most of those out here are surprisingly low realm,” Juni added. “They also had this… charming thing…”

“Makes sense,” she nodded, eyeing the bloody bundle which would be a banner made of flayed pale hide in all likelihood. “The memories have been somewhat more forthcoming since I worked out the right questions to ask. These war bands are mostly made up of youngsters, note the lack of tattoos? That isn’t down to their strength, but their life experience. Older, more experienced Ur’Vash get more tattoos. In terms of actual strength, you or I are well above average. The main danger to the others, Han Shu excepted, is their lack of adjustment to the strength of this place.”

“A problem we don’t have,” Juni agreed.

“It could be another bunch of Ur’Vash, maybe the Spider tribe as reinforcements on that side… like they do here,” she added, waving her hand off to their left.

In the distance, there, there was another pitched battle going on around a pillar about a mile away where the gout of green-gold fire had erupted from. Arrows were exploding through the treetops regularly and there had been two blasts of green-gold lightning from the sky already. That fight did have shamans. A good reason not to go near it, even if they would likely be able to get a lot of cores to help advance their strength in the process.

“They do have arts users,” Juni noted critically, as another bolt and a replying nova of purplish fire flared across the distant tree tops.

“Yep, the memories are pretty clear we should avoid those; the Ur’Vash send their juniors into war regularly… but their arts users hold high positions and tribes value them as the links between generations. Any we meet will be Nascent Soul or higher in strength,” she explained, relaying and synthesising another rather confused set of comprehensions fed to her by a later memory from the blood. “All of them will be old monsters as well, who have guided their tribes for centuries. The good news is that they are not common and so long as we don’t start doing very exotic things…”

“…”

“Like flashing talismans around and turning hundreds of square metres of forest into burning butterflies?” Juni chuckled darkly.

“Yes, like that,” she agreed, rolling her eyes in the darkness and crushing the last of the depleted Qi Condensation heart cores to dust in her hands.

“Ah… a third battle started,” Juni pointed back the way they came.

Below them, there were drums thumping in the darkness again. Following Juni’s gaze, she caught flickers of torches in the forest streaming away towards the gorge they had traversed some thirty minutes earlier. Moments later, there was a series of chained detonations, arrows exploding in all likelihood and the shrieking roar of some angry beast.

The camp below them, which she had been considering as their next target abruptly scattered their several fires as a group of Ur’Vash riding a centipede shot out of the trees followed by half a dozen heavily armoured Ur’Vash painted in grey and black lines. The two sides crashed over each other, the new arrivals rapidly dispatching the ones wearing bone armour with red and black war paint.

“So they are indeed opposed,” Juni observed.

Reinforcements were streaming out of the forest for that below them still to crash into the centipede group, who were tearing up the camp with experienced ease as their giant centipede swirled around the perimeter shredding unlucky Ur’Vash as it went.

“What does your chart say?” she asked, to give her eyes a rest before she strained her meridians.

“Cloudy, with a likelihood of deeply inauspicious death,” Juni scowled. “Just like the last four times I tried. Something is totally screwing with qi based divination in any case, has been for a while.”

Nodding, she considered the first of the Core Foundation grade heart cores and started to rapidly absorb that as well. “We will have to go that direction anyway it seems...

She trailed off as a distant furious roar rocked the treetops.

“Well that’s not at all ominous…” Juni grimaced.

Peering into the distance, she saw… There was another roar, and this time she caught the distant flicker of martial intent that came with it, making her skin clammy and her heart skip a beat.

“That is not an Ur’Vash we want to meet…” Juni muttered.

“No… it is not,” she agreed.

Her gaze was torn back to the distance as another distant tree exploded in an eruption of reddish gold flames, silhouetting a distant pillar outcropping well out into the valley, diagonal to the far valley wall.

“That… could be them…?” Juni frowned. “Most of their fire arts have been animal themed… and purple or greenish-gold?”

She nodded, pushing as much qi as she could into her vision and trying not to feel queasy as it shifted and the colours blurred momentarily. The rolling waves of low cloud was still messing with, as was the rain. She fancied she could make out scattering, burning sparks that were not from the explosion…

“Looks like more burning Hook Bats,” she commentated to Juni, who almost certainly could not see quite that far.

“If you say so,” Juni sighed, rubbing her temples. “I cannot see a thing at that range; it’s just blurry darkness and rain beyond seeing that initial flare through the rain.”

“How is your cultivation progressing?” she asked, changing the topic. They couldn’t really advance until the conflict below sorted itself out anyway.

“Advancing… rapidly,” Juni replied, turning another heart core into dust as she finished absorbing it. “If it continues at this pace, it will be several times bigger than what I would probably have had at the peak of Qi Refinement, having just broken through to it… You?”

She turned her sense inward… Her dantian’s structure had restabilized for now, thanks to the cores she had been absorbing at every opportunity. Part of her still hurt, inwardly, knowing that she could have broken through to Golden Core, or maybe even Nascent Soul courtesy of that Blood Rage, had the dumb lizard not… The memories shivered, sharing her annoyance at that, and the angrier, more recent memories sulked.

“Still expanding. I have no idea how many rotations the pseudo core made, but the memories were pretty clear that I shouldn’t force it to form, just keep letting it expand and collapse until it absolutely cant any more….” she mused.

-Now I wish I had paid more attention to core-formation stuff back home… but realistically speaking it should have taken me until I was in my late twenties to form one… she acknowledged inwardly.

“Really?” Juni turned to her, looking surprised. “That’s almost exactly what… my law from the talisman says.”

There was a slight pause there, but now it was just them… Removed from the problems of talking around the others, there were few secrets really worth hiding and Juni had become a lot more open about the talisman.

“I have to admit, I didn’t pay much attention to Core Formation aspects… Likely after I formed my core with the Ling family law I would have had to abandon their texts anyway… just because…”

“Hmmm…” Juni nodded sympathetically, understanding what she didn’t really have to put into words there.

Both them paused their conversation as she heard another series of howls… Down below a second bunch of Ur’Vash had swept out of the darkness, supporting the bunch from the centipede tribe. These actually carried a banner, their black and red tattoos visible under hides of bear and wolf type qi beasts. The banner itself was a large white wolf hide whose eyes glowed as a burly Ur’Vash beside it hammered on a drum.

Only when it was clear that it wasn’t going to spill up here did they go back to their conversation.

“Clearly when we cleaned out this ride we provided an opportunity for this lot,” Juni observed. “If they were shooting arrows down from up here, things would be going a lot differently.”

“Indeed,” she agreed.

“Anyway, it does differ,” Juni went on, returning to their previous topic. “The method that is commonly used focuses heavily on your mentality. You use your law to draw the qi in your reservoir to compress in on itself, drawing it into a rotation using your control over it, and at a certain point it will gain its own momentum and the tribulation will form and you then use the lightning to refine the core, much like a pill in a furnace. Succeed and you form a core that has been tempered, fail and your core breaks and your cultivation falls down to Qi Condensation again.

“I can see why this way would work better though. However it requires a law that generates a truly preposterous amount of qi… or needs a much more qi-enriched environment than we are usually familiar with. You would be cultivating for decades to reach Core Formation this way outside, and that’s with the cultivation laws we are using.”

Juni trailed off, looking perturbed.

“What?” she asked.

“Well… it’s been bugging me for a while actually,” the older woman signed. “Neither of us have particularly good spirit roots. They are not terrible in the grand scheme of things…”

“Unless you are from the Lin or Kun clans and expected to use their laws,” she pointed out.

“True, although that’s more to do with you than me,” Juni sighed again. “Yours is just unsuited and the Lin clan are traditionalists… Mine is really sub-standard. If I wasn’t in the Kun clan and my father didn’t support me, I wouldn’t have formed a Core until I was in my fifties and likely not succeeded in becoming a Nascent Soul cultivator until I looked like an old bat…”

She said nothing, just nodding. Talking about this was not an easy thing.

“Anyway…” Juni shook her head and went on… “It’s like this law just doesn’t care, in fact, which is mildly terrifying, to the point where I can’t decide if I have just misjudged the root my whole life and this law is uniquely suited to me, or… my Earthly Physique is actually fusing with and enhancing my spirit root directly somehow. I hesitate to say it’s purifying it, but the divination aspects of the law…”

“That’s still better than me,” she said with a rather warped smile… “I… got all my memories back after the blood rage.”

“Oh.” Juni stared at her, then just put an arm around her and gave her a hug.

“I… I can’t work out how they did it either; my spirit root was fundamentally voided by an old monster when it took my…” she trailed off, exhaling and staring at the death below for a second before continuing. “Well… the blood used the blood rage ritual to substitute the blood for my spirit root… all the way back then, but at the same time, it feels like it only happened in the fight back there?”

“Oh.” Juni stared at her sideways, looking somewhere between concerned and impressed.

“What happened afterwards is weird… but the reality of that is I have those memories, back then… of now… like the two moments are somehow inextricably linked in a loop… That should be impossible.”

“As in, you… did the same thing with Di Ji… and that replaced your spirit root, but back then…?” Juni stared at her dully.

“I dunno,” she shook her head… “Having the memories intact isn’t… I… It isn’t what I’d hoped.”

Juni just hugged her again. “When we get out of here, we will find a way to make him pay. If I go to Grandpa Zheng and bow to him three times… he may be able to do something.”

Collecting herself, she sighed, happy at the sentiment, but the memories told her far too much about the youth who had violated her. Not about him specifically, but about the influence he had belonged to – Long.

“…”

She caught herself and looked back at the twitch reflex of ancestral rage in her mind’s eye.

-Nope, not getting caught out there – Not again.

“…”

The ancestral rage regarding L-

“…”

They stared at her almost innocently. A collective of ancient lizard kittens holding caps bearing the seal for good fortune, with cute shining eyes. Clearly they wanted to talk... complain, RAGE about that influence, but after the first time, when she had fortunately been able to just stab an unfortunate Ur’Vash many, many times to assuage the bottomless wrath that surfaced, she wasn’t going to go there again in a hurry.

“Anyway… you were saying?” she smiled brightly and Juni just looked at her a touch oddly.

“Has your qi replenished?” Juni asked at last.

“Oh… Yes,” she nodded, reminded of the core she had in her hand.

Considering it, she drew the Soul Foundation energy out of it and watched as it was swept into the shifting cycle within her dantian, barely making a ripple. The lost efficiency was regrettable, according to the memories.

-It’s not exactly like we are short, she shot back at them, and they are much more abundant than suitable spirit herbs.

-See? This is a smart little predator, one of the Ochirioptrix line memories snickered, feeding her a rapid fire series of memories of very pissed feathered… lizards ripping apart unfortunate primates with great vigour.

-Yeah… thanks… she sent back at them, trying not to sound too sarcastic now. If she really focused she was sure she could taste ancient monkey in her mouth right now.

“I guess this has reached the point where we can clean it up?” she asked, considering the Centipede.

“My ‘Bright Blaze’ talisman is… well I’d rather let it try to recharge,” Juni said, holding up a rather sorry-looking hand-sized talisman she had shoved in a scavenged bag at her side.

Again, she felt a pang of frustration at the loss of all the custom talismans she had gotten from Grandmasters Li and Mang. Shifting through her own storage device, she considered what she had as she considered the strength of the centipede. The memories suggested young adult, which to their eyes was somewhere around Nascent Soul.

The only Ur’Vash at that sort of strength were two of the armoured warriors carrying halberd-like weapons made of centipede limbs and bows. The other two archers of the centipede tribe and all archers of the serpent bone, as she decided arbitrarily to call them, tribe had been killed in the short, brutal skirmish.

Eventually she selected a high quality Dao Seeking grade Yin Life talisman, wondering where they had picked it up as it had arrived with her after one of the later gear reorganisations between repression fields. It was a very nasty thing; you could never buy one on the open market in West Flower Picking town that was for sure. The corrosion aspect within it had some links to fate-severing of all things. The downside was that it would require her to attach it to the centipede directly.

“If I deal with the centipede, can you slow down the elites?” she asked Juni.

“So long as this deeply useful restriction on soul sense remains, yes…” Juni nodded.

They both paused as a second tree in the distance exploded in a fountain of flames, briefly visible through the rain thanks to the shimmering corona of light it scattered.

“Further out this time…” she noted, “And in the general direction we need to go as well…”

“Chances are high it is them; hook bats would make an excellent mass diversion so long as you can stay ahead of them,” Juni agreed. “And it was what we used when running away from Di Ji and that… other one...”

“Yeah… Din…” she trailed off, narrowing her eyes suddenly. Turning her gaze inward, interrogating her memories she found she could place the face, but not the name… and yet she had known it as recently as…

The old memories in her mind’s eye also peered inwards and she… It wasn’t pain exactly, but they were unamused as knowledge slid this way and that… skittering away from them for several bizarre, timeless seconds until they finally gave up… and…

She almost spat blood as the oldest memories grasped her and forced her to look at her own moment from a different perspective. Outside, looking in and she somehow retained the understanding that something was messing with her memory.

“What’s wrong?” Juni asked, frowning.

“Memory… outside… something, relating to Din…” she managed to gasp, aware that she probably looked like she was having a small-

Juni shoved her out of the way, off the cliff in fact, as an arrow from below passed through the space her head had been and then tumbled off after her.

“Motherfucker, I refuse to remember it like you tell me!” she screamed, crashing into the ground as qi boiled out of her body, hexagonal patterns swirling through it form a ghostly shell around her as she surged towards the centipede.

It screamed soundlessly back at her and surged forward to meet her.

They met in a collision that made the area around her shake, the centipede actually coming off worse as her strength temporarily surged thanks to the influence of the yang blood. She was aware of an arrow smashing into one of the Nascent Soul archers, making him stagger as Juni sent half a dozen arrows after soft, unexpecting targets in rapid succession.

Her initial instincts there had been right, based on what the memories knew about ‘Bright Fortune’ and things related to her. Her friend, who had grown up in the Kun clan, expected to become a key talent in their current generation had been trained extensively in the ‘five peerless weapons’ – Staff, Sabre, Sword and Spear and Bow. Juni, who was also the very best of them at divination and feng shui, if not formations themselves, was thus a genuinely skilled archer even before she started to marry that with the movement art she got from the talisman.

Arrows crashed down, exploding everywhere and scattering confused Ur’Vash who had not been expecting that degree of response. For her part, she surged forward at the centipede a second time, grasping at its legs even as they bit into her qi cloak in turn.

The qi infused with traces of the blood was not as effective as the blood itself, but it was still a calibre above her current realm and the centipede realised its mistake within moments, its whole body cracking and shattering as it shed its skin and flowed backwards.

Biting her tongue, she pulled another technique from the memories, who had some very interesting understandings of how arts could be triggered and spat blood into the air in front of her, drawing a symbol in one smooth motion.

‘Fire – Surge’

Her blood boiled and a sheet of white yang energy exploded out of the blood she had sent out as she stimulated it. The centipedes venom spit met her own attack and the two exploded forcefully. Rolling away, she grasped a hapless Ur’Vash with her hand through the qi cloak and tore it in two, growing a third hand with the cloak to grasp its heart core, which she refined directly to recover some of what she had lost.

The efficiency of the blood at breaking down the vital forces of others was her great advantage here. The cloak cost vast quantities of her qi and put enormous strain on her meridians, but in return, so long as she could tolerate it and keep getting new sources of qi, it almost became a cultivation method in its own right, drawing qi and refining strength from the world around her with every breath she took.

Two arrows hit the centipede, exploding with enough force to stagger it. That was another interesting discovery – the craftsmanship of the arrows did matter. The best made ones drew out more of the effects of their bizarre colour forms and the yellow ones had some of the very best craftsman ship. Each one was nearly a masterwork in its own right when she had considered them while looting corpses.

Taking advantage of the chaos, she palmed the talisman, pushed qi into it and shot for the centipede a second time. It snarled and circled back on her, sending another swirling cloud of venomous mist over her. Stumbling, she let the cloak weaken, the poison colouring her skin a little. Thanks to its emphasis on yin fire and earth, she would have been in trouble eventually given sustained exposure to it, but now it was just another advantage to leverage.

It pounced, rolling over her and she punched it, imprinting the talisman and activating it in the same instant.

{Devouring Talons of Hwang}

The echo of the talisman’s mnemonic triggering nearly stunned the whole clearing as a psyche-searing shadow flowed outwards from it. The nearest Ur’Vash didn’t even have a chance to scream as their bodies melted and rotted away. The Centipede thrashed for a few moments and then curled up, its ichor steaming out between its chitin plates.

Picking herself up, she looked around and found that it had cleared out the whole battlefield in an instant. Both Nascent Soul Ur’Vash who had been hunting for Juni were now slumped, their flesh sloughing off their bones, and most other Ur’Vash were now just skeletons.

“Well, shit,” she cursed, letting the qi cloak fade away and looking at a nearby one.

The heart core inside it was almost gone already, consumed by the corrosion. Running over to the Nascent Soul Ur’Vash nearest to her, she stabbed it in the chest with the spear and cut out the core as quickly as she could.

Juni, who arrived beside her a moment later looking around with a complicated expression, hurried over to the other one and tried to salvage that as well. In the end, they had two cores that were basically ruined.

“That was the ‘Yin Element’ talisman?” Juni said eventually, looking around at the devastated clearing.

“It was,” she nodded glumly.

“Bit of a waste, all told,” her friend observed.

“Probably, but it is what it is,” she sighed, absorbing what remained of the core and letting the dull fragments trickle through her fingers into the rotted grass. Nearby, a branch fell off its tree as the corrosion reached the point where its trunk split and it could no longer support its weight.

In the distance there was another roar and the drumming from the other side of the valley intensified; the clouds above them were all suddenly streaming away from the far side of the valley and the scattered fires in their clearing all dimmed and then were snuffed out–

Gasping, she pushed herself up, sweating profusely. Juni, nearby, was leaning on her spear looking like she had been punched in the stomach.

“That… was… Martial… Intent…” her friend panted, palming a qi-recovery pill.

She nodded, not trusting herself to speak in case she vomited. It had been far far stronger in a martial sense than the leader of the spider tribe she had fought. Comparable to that ‘Half Blood’ that had known about the memories.

Exhaling, she jumped for the nearest tree, scrambling up it and looking out across the distant treetops. Another gout of flame exploded about five miles from them, sending its rainbow haze across treetops. The rain above had, if anything intensified after that roar. The distant ridgeline was now a wash with torches, thousands of Ur’Vash streaming down it to the point where it was visible even in the current conditions.

“Call it a hunch… but those explosions and the hook bats are certainly related to the others,” she said, jumping back down.

“Yeah… there is something else going on here though,” Juni was frowning. “My divination art is going… for lack of a better word… crazy.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

Juni frowned, and pulled out a sheaf of bamboo talismans and her chart and tossed them down.

She observed them fall and the readings on the talismans and where they had scattered.

“…”

“Okay, I know a fair bit about weird stuff that can happen… but that is impossible,” she stared at the manual perfect reading in front of them. “Death in Eight Directions, Bounty from Heaven, Venerate the Way, Salvation of The Throne. Auspice of Glory… and this one I don’t recognise?”

“Favour of One,” Juni said simply. “Inverted so it is yin rather than yang.”

“A Fate Seizing Layout?” her own voice sounded disbelieving in her ears.

“Not simply that. It’s the Fate Seizing Layout.” Juni said, equally disbelieving.

Crouching down, Juni tossed the rocks she had collected for ‘Nine Earthly Stones’.

“…”

“Yep… ‘Good Fortune – Overturned, The truth, of One – unbound, Villainy over all, Calamity Despoiled’,” Juni hissed, sitting back and staring at the sky. “What the fates is actually going on?”

She closed her eyes for a moment, thinking… “Is this new?”

“…”

Opening them again, she stared at the sky again.

“What do you mean?” Juni asked.

“Well… there has been something messing with qi-based divinations…” she said… “Was it this place…? What if it was… us?”

“Oh…” Juni looked at her.

Wordlessly, she pulled out the talismans for Arai and Sana and stared at them. She hadn’t checked them at all since they met up with the Argent Justice group… and now two things stood out.

“The talismans updated,” she said softly, turning Arai’s over in her hands… “But...”

“What?” Juni said dully, coming over to stand beside her.

“This isn’t Arai’s talisman anymore… It’s yours… and this one is Han Shu’s…”

“Impossible,” Juni said, taking it. “We destroyed them and yours was lost.”

“We used the sword to destroy them, yes, but these are cloned?” she turned hers over, looking at it.

It was clearly Arai’s talisman; it still had her mark carved… but now it belonged to Juni, or the information on it was ‘Juni’s from before they had entered into this place. The most recent message on it was the message from the West Flower Picking town governor, telling all high rank hunters to report in to support the Ha clan in the trial undertaking. Opening it up, she considered that the breakdown was… unreal actually.

Place

last shift

Name

Influence

Score

2*

+8981> X/? > 1

Kun Juni

Unknown

8,431,210

Overview

Qualification Errors:

Out of Dimensional Range. Required 00:00:21:23:21

Resource (Adjusted)

Environment

Equipment

Qualifier 1:A+ Spatial Anomaly

431,210

300,000 ex

8,00,000

1,000,000 ex

Resource (All)

Equipment (All)

Spirit Herb

31,210 +

Artefacts

8,000,000 +

Unknown

400,000 +

Talismans - Exclude

290,412 ex

Pills (Al-G) - Exclude

521,001 ex

Pill (DtXf) - Exclude

181,201 ex

Pills (CvR) - Exclude

721,610 ex

Trying not to let a vein throb in her temple, she opened up the details of ‘Juni’s entry and looked at the specifics of its 8,431,210 core.

Frowning, she stared at Sana’s which had now become ‘Han Shu’.

Place

last shift

Name

Influence

Score

1*

+8980 > X/? > 1

Han Shu

Unknown

8,431,210

“Huh…” she stared from one to the other, before realising what had clearly happened.

“It’s cloned… but from my talismans inventory?” she wanted to rub her temples suddenly.

Now the 8kk equipment score made sense… she had been trying not to think about the sorry bundle inside what remained of her luss cloth in a far corner. Juni had gone ahead, but when she picked up the spear… she had also grabbed the purified remains of the abominable ‘robe’ crafted from cultivators’ forms. It had been a surprise when it actually stored away. Her intention there had been to give it a proper burial someplace that had good, auspicious ground, when they were out of this forest and a quiet moment to assuage whatever might remain of the lingering ill will from it with proper rites. That the ‘contribution’ considered it an artefact worth that many points – in its current form – was quite concerning.

“Why… does it have that score?” Juni asked… “The blood?”

“…”

“I… uh…I took what remained of that to bury it,” she admitted.

“…”

Juni gave her a long look, which she probably deserved, then nodded.

“In any case this is not a good deed,” Juni agreed.

“It isn’t,” she agreed. “Outbound transmissions have all stalled… but there are still successful readouts… to a locus.”

Pulling up that, she was surprised at how many additional features Arai’s talisman had unlocked compared to her own. They should have been of a rank. Focusing on the inner workings of the talisman she pushed qi into it.

“Ling Luo-” Juni replied dully.

{Jun Han: First Greetings Gift on Behalf of the Birth of your Eldest Daughter – Jun Xiuying}

{CAO HONGJUN}

The words inscribed at its heart hammered into her mind, almost like a rebuke as she touched the inner settings of the talisman, drowning out what Juni had been saying about Ling Luo. In that instant she got a bizarre snapshot, thanks to the ancestral blood, of what had happened. Arai and Sana’s talismans were not standard talismans; somehow, inexplicably their father had been given Good Fortune talismans by the previous Duke of Blue Water province, Cao Hongjun, when Arai and Sana were born?

“Ling!” Juni was crouching beside her.

“I…I’m okay… I know what has happened though…” she panted, shaking her head as the words continued to echo.

-But…Xiuying? Oh… it’s ‘Arai’ written in ‘Formal Imperial’ characters.

“Did you know that Arai had a Good Fortune talisman bestowed by Lord Cao Hongjun,” she grimaced.

“…”

“Yes,” Juni looked awkward. “I found out when we got out of the anomaly, when we were arguing about destroying the talismans… I had forgotten that you took them back.”

“…”

She wanted to complain, but looking back on it, that did explain why Juni was sure that it would be hard to subvert them… except.

“Someone clearly managed to subvert them in the end,” she sighed. “Bugger. Han Shu was right.”

“I…”

Juni opened and shut her mouth a few times, managing not to swear by biting her hand in the end before turning and walking in a short circle looking pained.

“Oh well, I will owe Han Shu an apology it seems,” Juni groaned. “I assumed that someone of Cao Hongjun’s status would not get involved…? Especially regarding the stories of how he has rejected all speculation about events thirty years ago.”

“I mean... that’s not unreasonable,” she agreed sourly. “He IS the Grand Marshal of the Military Authority overseeing the whole of Eastern Azure back on Shan Lai…”

-Got there off the death of my clan as well, the old bastard, she added inwardly.

“Does that mean that the Azure Astral Authority has decided to move properly?” she added, following that through to its logical conclusion, only someone high up in the Authority could order a person like Cao Hongjun. “Was whatever they thought we found enough for them to convince someone of Cao Hongjun’s stature to get involved personally and try to locate his talismans?”

“…”

Juni nodded, looking as shocked as she felt before finally speaking. “But then why are the talismans cloned?”

“They think Arai and Sana are dead? They are trying to locate wherever we are?” she guessed. “But then why the ‘Fate Seizing Layout’?”

“Nobody should know about the talisman I found,” Juni mused. “Your blood… only Di Ji and us…”

“Your sword-staff,” she felt compelled to point out.

“That’s just a normal thing though, just made of really good materials…” Juni looked confused.

“Should have thought to check the breakdown before,” she sighed.

“True, but we were… a bit overawed then,” Juni agreed. “And had bigger problems than the specifics of what was what… though even then, I think my equipment score was only like 300,000 or something. No idea what Han Shu’s was… but our scores were not that dissimilar.”

“Which means that his sword could likely disguise its score,” she mused. “I know what Di Ji pinned on my score as well.”

“Oh?” Juni frowned.

“He had a bowl that held 99 spirit roots of various female heirs of ancient clans throughout Eastern Azure,” she said. “After that… I managed to briefly run away, but my talisman remained with him, so it could also be the Bronze Cube he had later, but either way, that accounts for most of my original score.”

“I see…” Juni frowned. “In any case... that means someone is searching for us with the intention of stealing… Han Shu’s sword most likely?”

“That seems the most reasonable guess,” she agreed. “As I said, nobody should know about your talisman, the blood is clearly this 400k in resources…”

“You’re sure?” Juni asked.

She took a jar out and drank it, grimacing at the iron taste and glanced at the score again before handing the talisman to Juni.

“Ah, I see, it reads 389k in the breakdown now,” Juni nodded. “Yeesh, that vile robe is really something then.”

“So… that leaves the sword. Enough people probably saw us fighting in the square that time, especially those other ones from the Argent Justice sect.”

“You think they met up with others and word got around that someone had a sword capable of killing immortals?” Juni asked.

“Yep… let’s get moving….. Ah… shit…” she trailed off as a barely felt repression slid away from her psyche that the memories had identified as a repression on a soul sense she didn’t have, except very tangentially through the memories. It mostly manifested as an awareness that their surroundings had gotten more dangerous suddenly.

“What?” Juni asked, stopping again.

“They just stopped restricting soul sense,” she explained.

“How can you even tell?” Juni asked… “The memories?”

“Basically, yes,” she nodded. “It certainly means we shouldn’t linger here.”

Juni looked around the ruined clearing, filled with skeletons and rotting vegetation. It was a good thing her sense of smell was somewhat optional thanks to her mantra, so she could filter out the stench. Otherwise, they would have left long ago, just for that.

{One with What Is}

Focusing on the visualisation art she glanced left and then right before picking left and started to run between the trees, keeping low. Juni followed after, her presence also fading away slightly, before waving to her to head a bit further left.

-Ah, of course, her movement art is actually good at this stuff, she acknowledged. Whereas I am just going by good eyesight and gut feelings.

Cutting that way, moments later she saw tens of shadowed figures and three more centipedes through the trees to their left. Shaking her head, she adjusted her pace and waved for Juni to take the lead but Juni just shook her head.

“I can’t use it with qi; that makes it go very weird right now. Better if you lead,” Juni signed back.

Nodding, she ran on, following Juni’s occasional directions as they ate up the ground, tracking after the turmoil ahead of them. There was no point in fighting, so they just ran flat-out, evading groups, most of whom paid them little heed. They were just two Ur’Vash females running flat out in the jungle, looking like they were going somewhere and not wearing enough visible tattoos to mark them clearly as either side.

“Camp ahead,” she signed to Juni, who waved for her to head ‘right’ around it.

Cutting that way, she stumbled abruptly as a distant soul sense caught her and tried to smash into her consciousness with the intention of dispersing it. Beside her, Juni also gasped and crumpled to the ground. Staggering up, she thanked… the symbol in her mind’s eye mainly, and the blood for her still having a mind to stagger up with.

“I thought…” Juni rasped but she cut her off, because it wasn’t just them that was suffering; the whole camp ahead of them had died where they stood pretty much.

“So it had that kind of weakness,” she panted, cajoling her mantra to help her expel the last of it and then grabbing the still stunned Juni.

A second sweep came a moment later and she focused desperately on the mnemonic. Her mind started to fuzz disturbingly as something grasped this way and that, searching for… life… she guessed. The probe of their area went on for a full ten seconds before vanishing.

“Somebody… didn’t like the idea of forces sneaking into their backline?” Juni groaned, wiping blood from her mouth.

“Could be… or–”

She trailed off as a third sweep, this time not really focused on them, but sweeping ahead, in the direction of a bright flare she had just spotted through the trees that lit up the night sky.

“Or they are after Han Shu and the others?” Juni said, looking in that general direction. “Without that art of yours we would be… if not dead, very badly inconvenienced.”

Looking back at the camp, she saw several figures had staggered up and were looking around drunkenly. One pulled up a comrade and shook them back to consciousness. Moments later though, three figures on centipedes surged out of the darkness into the camp and started tearing it to pieces.

Exhaling, she tugged Juni’s arm and moved onwards. The answer to ‘why’, turned out to be more prosaic than she expected though, as after two hundred more metres, she started to find dead hook bats… everywhere.

“River, ahead,” she signed to Juni, hearing the rushing water before she saw it. Behind them, drums started to pound on the ridge they had come from.

Arriving at the edge of it, it turned out to be a concealed drop in the landscape itself. The rushing water was a waterfall pouring over the ridge from a large cataract that swirled out of the forest and over the lip into a broad shallow lake. To her right, about two miles away in the rain, she could see the still burning form of a large tree. Further on past it, near a rising stone pillar on the far side of the mid region of the valley, was another burning swathe of forest that the group had presumably set fire to with the intention of luring out hook bats.

Another cloud of black shapes was swirling in the middle distance, shrieking and diving as they moved in their general direction, away from a third blaze. Moments later a wave of soul strength swept across everything. Her vision wavered and she coughed blood into the water in front of her before managing to recover. When she did, the swarm was not much diminished.

“So, either they suck at targeting soul sense, or something else is going on,” Juni gasped, staggering up.

-Some of it is soul sense, but that last one was the presence of the land rejecting intrusion into its alignments, an old voice in her blood hissed sibilantly.

-Alignment? She asked, understanding what they meant… kind of… but?

-Some being or beings is trying to pick up the vitality of this land and make it theirs, it explained as she placed it as the one who had explained the bulk of the symbols to her and had the nigh unpronounceable name of ‘Epidechirteriaeos’. This… ‘Fate Seizing Layout’ as you call it, has been noticed by things best left alone.

-Thank you… she sent back, grimacing as she steadied herself.

Wiping blood from her nose she had the presence of mind to grab Juni to stop her falling into the water beside them.

“T-thanks…” Juni panted, holding her head.

“According to the blood, we were almost feng shui’d to death there,” she explained.

“Alignment Break?” Juni groaned.

“Yep, apparently related to the Fate Seizing Layout,”

“Is that what this is…” Juni sobbed, holding her head. “A curse on their nine generations, may they all die of cock rot.”

She was about to agree, when she saw a figure hurtling across the treetops, from the edge of the escarpment near where they had crossed it over the heart of the centipede tribe’s war camp. The rain was physically deforming around it as it bounded from tree top to treetop. A huge Ur’Vash, nearly two and a half metres tall wearing white centipede carapace armour, grey, black and gold war paint and carrying two wicked looking weapons made of centipede limbs. She had no trouble seeing them at this distance either, because the world itself fairly warped to ensure her vision was drawn to them clearly.

Moments later, she saw a second figure, further over, carrying a black bone cleaver… or maybe club – it was hard to tell with the shape – covered in gold and blue drawings of eagles grasping thunder that seemed awfully… familiar?

-Thunder Stalker, very old tribe, hunted my descendants who conquered the sky, catching them and warping them into tools of war, Ochirioptrix hissed.

-oh…

That also helped her place why the designs seemed familiar; there had been that wall carving showing what she now knew to be something like Ur’Vash.

-Ur’Khal, warlords among other tribes, Ochirioptrix added before vanishing again.

Both gave her a dangerous feeling in any event. Dragging her gaze away from them, she saw the hook bat swarm had called up friends in the same instant that the instincts in the blood hissed of ‘danger’.

“Oh may your…”

This time, the soul attack was the genuine thing, just as the first one had been, crashing across a huge swathe of the forest between here and there, decimating and stunning the rising swarms before they could get out of hand. It deadened her limbs, making her perception waver–

When she recovered her sense of her surroundings… she was in cold water. Flailing, she found the surface and swam away from the noise until her hand dug into sand, allowing her to pull herself up. Juni was not that far away, also pulling herself out, looking bedraggled.

“You… what happen!”

She turned to see a group of Ur’Vash wearing rough cloth and carrying metal weapons standing nearby.

“You not of tribes… you…” the leader, a male that the instincts pitched as being ‘about’ Soul Foundation, raised his bow and shot at her.

“Oh get out!” she snapped, drawing her qi cloak around her and casting the spear at him, even as Juni, who had somehow retained her mask, pulled the bow out of her talisman and sent two arrows at him in turn.

The cloak fully formed around her as she jumped forward, crashing into one of the charging Ur’Vash and sending them flying. Rolling up, she dashed for the spear, shouldering a second of the warriors out of the way. They were not powerful she realised, Golden Core at best, as she put a third one through a tree and then swiped two more into the lake behind her with the tail that the qi cloak had manifested conveniently.

“I’ll rip out your bones and offer your heart to the earth father!”

The female Ur’Vash roared a challenge at her and bounded at her faster than she would have credited. Soul sense hammered into her, but this time she shrugged it off thanks to the qi cloak.

The more she used it, the more she was coming to realise that it was somewhere between qi armour and the kind of manifestation that she had seen other qi beasts like the spiders use. She couldn’t use soul strength, she had no foundation for it, but the blood itself had an innate aspect of soul to it because of the ancestral memories. As such, the form was able to resist relatively untargeted attacks.

The female Ur’Vash’s eyes abruptly shifted to Juni who had started shooting white and blue arrows. Rather than grab these, the female chose to dart back. One of the arrows exploded and the whole collection shredded the forest around them.

Other Ur’Vash were charging out of the rain drenched forest now as well. In the form’s heightened awareness, her qi sense caught what she realised were crude shelters.

-We would have to crawl out of the waterfall on the side with an actual war camp right on its shores, wouldn’t we, she complained inwardly.

One cut at her with a metal axe that managed to penetrate her qi cloak enough to leave a scratch on her flesh. It didn’t do the axe any good though, because the yang blood rapidly started to eat into the metal, even as her qi cloak there started to darken and take on a more material form for a few seconds before the wound healed.

-Nope, not going to stage two… she grimaced.

That could happen if she was wounded enough. The catalyst was her own blood, or the blood from the jars. The downside was that it would eat her vitality rapidly and unless she had a way to replenish it… like with the blood from the jars, she would rapidly become incapacitated unless she risked handing over control to the ancestral memories again and allowing the blood to rampage again.

Grasping her attacker, she threw them bodily into the trees, scattering others, and then took both hands and smashed them into the ground, sending her qi rippling through the land. Everything within ten metres rippled, trees splintered and her qi reserved flowed away rapidly as the shockwave scattered the wave of attackers, knocking weaker ones out with the pressure wave and making even the stronger ones stagger.

“BREAK!”

The roar echoed through the forest, imbued with yang intent, borrowed from the blood. The female Ur’Vash staggered back, looking pale. Surging forward, she stabbed at her with the spear aiming for her heart–

The kick sent her spinning.

Before she could right herself, she caught a glimpse of an ancient old Ur’Vash as he blurred right beside her, his leg already flying out–

Her qi went chaotic as she was sent flying back out of the forest, crashing down on the beach.

“BURN!”

She spat blood and screamed, sending a wave of yang intent with the yell, infusing the faint mist of her own blood and turning it into a white sheet of death that swirled through the clearing turning rain to mist and then mist into more fire–

Beyond it, she saw the old Ur’Vash – who now that she had light didn’t quite look like any other Ur’Vash she had seen, swarthier, with broad, hooded brows, dark earthen skin and a white bushy beard – did something and most of the blast was scattered–

Not waiting to see what would happen she saw Juni already fleeing for the darkness and followed her as fast as she could.

Two ferocious soul senses swept past them as she caught up to Juni, making them both grimace and stumble.

“Well, that was instructive,” Juni signed.

She nodded and pulled out one of the Nascent Soul cores, drawing qi from it.

Behind them there was a sudden burst of danger in her mind’s eye and she tackled Juni, sending them both to the ground.

An arrow shot through the air where they would have been, travelling a meter further before exploding violently with a bone-numbing soul power that tried to cancel her consciousness.

{One With What Is}

Grabbing the comatose Juni, she used the disguise art as fully as she was able.

{Flickering Steps}

Reminded that she did, in fact have a movement art, she used it, pouring vast amounts of qi into it and regretted that she had discarded it before as being ‘mediocre’. The yang strength in her body surged and the world distorted around her as she skipped across the pool below the waterfall. All around her mist surged as the water boiled with her passage. Landing on the far side, she turned her mantra inwards, hiding her qi as best she could and fled into the shadows.

~ Starkadr, Old Elder of the Vashlagh ~

Starkadr, Old Elder of the Vashlagh, sighed as the pair somehow managed to evade his perception at the second attempt. Their emergence from the pool had been surprising, but now he had seen the blonde-haired one spew thaumic mana-breath across a third of their impromptu camp, he had a good idea of what was what and no intention of chasing after her into the night. Not with all the rest of the chaos going on.

“Grandfather…? Will Thrar…” his great granddaughter Althildr asked, cradling the form of her beloved, a promising tribal warrior in whom he had placed strong hopes…

Dispersing the remainder of the energies that were causing havoc around the camp, he walked over to Thrarkil and pushed some mana into the brat, neutralising the thaumic poison in his body.

“He will live. He was fortunate you were present to catch those arrows though, or he might not have been so lucky.”

She nodded tearfully as he considered the arrows which had been cast aside nearby after she snapped them.

“Mountain Biter tribe…”

“Primitive Orcs… followers of the dark defiler,” one of the nearby Vashlagh warriors, having found another, held it up for him to see. “Do we not pursue?”

He shook his head, looking back in the direction of the distant battle with the Six Eyes Tribe. The encounter clarified quite a lot about the current circumstances, bizarre as they were. The girl had been odd, he hesitated to call her a half blood, because she had only Calderon blood in her veins, but she was clearly in human form… which meant that she was likely born with that form. Technically that did make her a half, but only until she answered the call in her blood and he was in no hurry to fight an angry wrym right now.

“No… do not, but spread the word to other camps: not every archer in the darkness is of our people. That alone will cut down on their effectiveness if they do decide to attack anything.”

“But they attacked us…” one of the other elder warriors in his ‘escort’ grumbled.

“…”

Althildr had the grace to look awkward.

“Who is in command here?” he murmured, stroking his beard with his good arm.

“No disrespect, Elder,” the warrior muttered in apology.

“If you must know, that was likely the big turd that the Orcneas kicked, that allowed us to pinpoint their emergence so clearly. If anything you should be sacrificing gold and animals to her and calling her prosperity.”

“What are they then grandfather…? The archer was… odd, but the other? How could something that weak force the dread defiled?” Althildr queried.

“Hah,” he had to laugh there. She was trying to put on a brave face, having been ‘saved’ by him it seemed.

“There is bravado, and there is understanding your limits, Althildr,” he rebuked her gently. “Neither of those two is simple…”

He trailed off as another wave of perception surged through the distant swarm of bats disturbed by a tree exploding.

“That is a matter for later though. Angrad!”

A few moments later, Angrad, leader of his escort, trotted out of the trees from where he had been tallying up the injured.

“My Lord Starkadr.”

“Take the rest and head towards the battle line. We came here to discover how those Orcus-worshiping scum got out of their box. Both Erugrush and Ragnus appear to have been… side-tracked, so you are now in command.

“My Lord,” Angrad bowed slightly and turned to the rest.

“PACK UP. LET’S GO CLEAN SOME ORCNEAS GUTS WITH OUR AXES!”

His bellow echoed through the surrounding forest and hundreds of crouching warriors who had been stirring to readiness hefted their long axes and stood, abandoning shelters and small fires to start their advance again.

“What of the disturbance?” Angrad asked.

“Leave that to me,” he growled. “Ensure that my grand-daughter and her beloved do not meet further mishap.”

“My Lord,” Angrad nodded again, before turning and walking off again.

“Did they really fight Orcneas?” his granddaughter muttered, peering into the rain-drenched gloomy forest where the half-awakened Calderon child had fled. “That was… not strong enough surely. It was barely able to hold its own with me; I would have killed it if not for the archer and even she was… weak.”

“Weak, were they…?” he chuckled again. “The archer is already an enigma: her aura is of this place, just as we are… and she carries Fortune in her eyes and her feet. As to the other, you would not have killed her. That was a Calderon child, born to a lesser form, but her blood is as pure as I have seen in many a year, purer even than some in the old kingdoms, before our kind were forced out by the human tribes. Had you pushed her, she would have called to the rage in her blood and then even I would have had to treat it seriously.”

“Wyrm?” she stared at him dully, then looked back into the dark forest.

The other warriors who were still nearby, who had heard, breathed a sigh of relief.

“Look on the bright side,” he chuckled, glancing around. “You all get to paint the dragon’s eye upon your breast and wear it with honour, for even if it was child, it was still of that ancient species. There may be a time yet to deal with it, but it is not here and now.”

“…”

There was another ripple as arcane fate twisted unnaturally, trying to subvert the geomancy of the land they were stood upon. He pushed out his perception and stabilized the land around them, protecting those nearby from the backlash and scowled again.

“Follow after Angrad quickly. Do not leave his side.”

“Yes, Grandfather,” Althildr said more demurely now.

“You lot, go with her,” he waved to the others who all sighed in quiet relief and hustled the young woman and Thrar away quickly, in case he decided they should go after a Wyrm.

“We are ready to depart,” Angrad’s voice echoed in his ears from distance.”

“Lead them off, as I commanded,” he stroked his beard pensively. “Something is messing with the rules up there, and something is messing with the way ‘things should be’ down here as a result. That eagle worshiping meathead is indeed impetuous, but Ragnus should not be so easily beguiled… Be wary, this may yet be the work of those old evils who slunk out of the Humans’ cage all those years ago.”

“Understood,” Angrad’s voice turned grim at that, as it should.

Shaking his head, he drew a thick, star-metal blade from his body. It was not a reliquary weapon, but it was something only a step or two short. A weapon forged for him by Volundr, returned to him when he was granted pardon and released from Evergrove to serve at the Everkind Empress’s whim.

“Ahh… How long has it been, since this place fell from the sky…?” He considered it pensively, the rain running down his face as he stared up at the sky again. “And now I stand at another great lady’s whim.”

-Much less kindly as well.

“…”

He avoided looking directly at the nearby trees. The Wytch of the Ironwood was not someone who took slights lightly.

“I always did let my tongue run away with me…” he chuckled. “Hero or villain, really it all depends on who you annoy, doesn’t it...”

Time flowed differently here and he rarely left the depths these days. The agreement struck all those years ago was that his blade remain his in return for opposing the defiled progeny of Kratha, now called Orcus, who had emerged in the Vash clans after the great collapse, when they despaired upon learning that they had traded one cage wrought by men for another, even crueller one.

Both above and below were terrors that men and god alike feared. Especially the one below, lost in the depths of Undergrove, sat at the heart of the seal he had been so lucky to evade. A few moments less and he would have been caught like so many others by that betraying spirit.

Silent thunder, audible only to those with ears to hear the heartbeat of the world, rumbled overhead again… Something had really twisted the skies above into a knot… Not forestalled judgement, an out and out subversion of the rule of the world if his eyes did not deceive him. He sighed and strode through the forest, his strides eating up the distance to the chiefs of the Thunder Eagle and Hundred Blades tribes.

Within minutes he caught up to the two as they raced across the tree tops, following their quarry.

Both Ragnus, Chieftain of the Hundred Blades, and Vashaek, War Leader of the Thunder Eagle tribe, were warriors at the peak of the 7th Circle as the humans liked to call it, but talented as they were, neither had the sense to see him if he didn’t wish to be seen. The order of the world itself was current limited to the peak of the 9th, and even then you could only arrive at that threshold if you were born here by braving judgements few would risk. By comparison, his august and heroic self, who had, he had to concede, been around far too long, had been making his way through the 12th circle before he ever landed in here.

-Even so, I have to wonder how she did it, he mused considering again the half-awakened Calderon.

The Six Eyes tribe was not simple and had a few genuine old freaks among their number and the girl had had Asuranaleth’s prized spear in her possession. That was carved from the leg bone of a primordial leviathan unearthed in the depths. It was not crystallized loci, like the roots the humans had mined out, but it was second only to it. By comparison, the human girl had carried a blade marked by the forges of Undrhallen, the mighty workings beneath the Black Tower that had stood in these lands for millennia before the Academy ever became an idea.

-It takes a lot to push unawakened ones to the wall… Calderon are named for volcanoes, but someone like that vile old elf should know how to hunt them safely…

There were no clues in her mana form either, except that it was not a wyrm… or a drake.

-A Land Tyrant perhaps? That was a more disturbing thought; those were rare and even their devolved forms could walk sideways in old lands like these.

Strolling along behind them, he put those thoughts from his mind for now and observed the group who were fleeing frantically. All of these were human, with means to burn as well.

-What on earth brought you lot here… that is the question.

He felt something try to touch his truth and warp it, connect his ‘Fate’ to the chase playing out before him and make it the focus of his ‘Destiny’ as well. It was fairly mindless, but the strength made him pause even as it washed over him and tried to get him to display the strength of his weapon.

“Attack the boy, make him manifest his weapon…”

Gritting his teeth he quashed it, frowning at the strength and the intention behind it. The origin was above his realm certainly.

-From the outside?

“Attack the Boy. Make Him Manifest his Weapon.”

It surged back, a ghostly net trying to snare his limbs. Such was his realm that he had some understanding of this kind of play and ploy. Shaking it off again, he saw that the weapon Ragnus was carrying was his father’s old battle club, made from the claw of a celestial eagle from the shores of the star ocean. It was an ancestral weapon of the Thunder Eagle tribe and was being pulled along in this weird flow of manipulation….

Focusing, he saw silver threads swirling around Ragnus… and Vashaek for that matter. They were somewhat aware of the problem it seemed, especially Ragnus, but neither had the comprehension, or the clarity in the moment to see what was going on. Something up above was making them dance on strings for its ends.

“Attack Them, Draw them Out. Make. Him. Manifest. His. Weapon.”

This time words surged, not one person, several. He had a dim reflection through the threads of another place, a cauldron filled with the blood of mortals, old men in white robes floating in the air focusing and chanting… scrolls in the air forming connections to this place…

-I don’t dance for old thieves, only beauties! He snarled and forced the threads away a third time.

-His weapon? That much filtered through the backlash as the threads came a fourth time.

His gaze lighted on a youth carrying two of the girls. He had brown hair, a tanned complexion and ragged robes that looked rather burnt. On his back he carried a plain scabbarded black sword in an eastern style. There was no way he, who was barely in the 2nd Circle, should be running away from Ragnus and Vashaek, even if you accepted that the whole place was currently restricted to around the 3rd Circle give or take, thanks to whatever broken way the Six Eyes tribe had somehow subverted the vast disjunctive cage from the old war they had managed to re-activate centuries ago.

By comparison, the other bearded youth, in a ragged blue-grey and silver robe, was in the 4th Circle. He was carrying two other stunned youths in similar robes. The technique of ‘Air Walking’ he was using was reminiscent of the inner arts of the people of the far east, who had occasionally traded across the great plains of their world of old kingdoms.

They had been able to walk in the heavens and dance with fire birds and dragons. In fact, their whole style was… reminiscent of the powers of that place. The weapon itself was surely some exceptional treasure. It would be a shame to leave it in the hands of such a weak huma–

“…”

He caught himself before he could raise his blade, seating. The threads had come in via his very thoughts.

-You think yourselves like the old storm father? he hissed.

This was direct manipulation. The circumstances of this place were trying to force him into direct conflict with the boy for some reason. They had been able to puppet the two warleaders, touch the hordes below and twist their…

-So that is how the old things escaped their cage… the means by which this place touched the world were twisted from the outside and their purpose defiled. Were these humans drawn to the Orcneas? The turbulence of their passing draw in the Calderon girl?

He stared up at the sky again as another shift distorted it like silent thunder. This close to the epicentre it was almost undetectable, but the echoes beyond turned the forest chaotic for a moment, sweeping over the distant battle… even shaking the collapsing seal, loosening it yet further…

-Seal…

-Seal?

-The world should be sealed…

Taking his weapon, he cut his palm and drew upon his face the design of freedom and sent him outside the physical unreality of this place to seek more clearly what was going on. His form shifted as he forced his way through the barrier. The crossing cost him a portion of his longevity, the series of old runes blazing his eyes as he crossed over and resumed his original, crippled birth form.

Now he stood over the valley almost ten metres tall, the wounds of his missing arms tormented him still, even as he cut at the phantasmal thunderclouds above.

“Great Father of Mountains, Great Mother of the Snows! I, Blood of your Blood, call your names! Your flame to kindle the valour of my bones once more!”

His grand strength surged, the momentum of his ancient people surged forth as his blade, which had met genuine gods in battle and cut down the monsters they wrought, smote the threads daring to grasp at his future.

“THOUGH I MAY BE OLD AND HAVE LOST MY ARMS, YOU DARE TREAT WITH ME SO?”

Even with only two of his eight arms remaining, his blow achieved enough force to send a shockwave through the shattering distortion-

“Ah… that can also work?” one of the old men in the room looked surprised.

“Eh?”

He stared at the thread that had snaked around his arm, guiding the strike heavenward. The thunder flickered outwards, swirling down and the connection solidified abruptly.

“Stupid demon, you have saved us a lot of effort…” another of the old men grinned, reaching for him with a strength that was close to what he had possessed at his pinnacle…

“Vile thing. You dare treat with this old giant…. I will make a tomb of your dreams and offer up your soul to the mother of snows!”

“Seriously, did I sell a planet in my last life or something, this is just…”

The shadows around him shifted and the world shattered it was a glass window that just took a rock. The moment shifted and he was in two places at once, now staring at a woman whose hair was like starfire and whose flesh radiated the ethereal light of the star ocean. The seed of the original lotus was drawn on her brow and the stigmata of the final end reflected within her silver eyes as never-ending back circles that swirled into infinity. Origin, holding the blade of causal extinction in her hands, stared at him with ominously furrowed brows then looked upwards.

“I suppose this also works… Is it not a saying of those martial stars… ‘anywhere one seeks the path, the heavens will leave a way’?”

The words were gentle… and ethereal, but they contained a horrific finality to them that made his soul shake…

-Oh shit. Fuck… Fuck… nope… mother of snows, please take these old bones down to Hel already…

A second figure appeared, in the distance, on the distant heights of the Yin Eclipse Watchtower, the anchor of their ruin… wherever it was. Her hair was darker, purple-red, wings like black blades, the sign of strife upon her brow and chaos in her eyes.

The third figure arose moments later… red hair fading to black around the edges, draped in a shadowy robe that consumed the eyes with the endless starry sky therein. The wings behind her, lines like spears that twisted as if they were black holes in the void, radiating out like a sunburst, and the sign of inevitability reflected in her eyes.

To the south and with a dread clang two other shadows appeared, the first was an old Buddhist monk in a travelling robe, carrying a bell that extruded a sense of seizing heaven and earth and cracking it asunder.

-Oh sweet mother of light and dark, have mercy on this old villain…

He bowed closing his eyes but his companions’ arrival could not be denied.

A dream reflected through shadowed waters, the ghostly figure wore robes and a veil that flowed like an endless river, misty oblivion cloaking pale skin and golden hair. Behind her, her vast shadow reflected twelve wings, formed of uncounted souls chanting oaths that bound life, fate and death together, decrying those who would break them.

Origin stared back at him and the others… ‘Division’, Inevitability, Sealing, even that most August and Dreadful Queen herself all considered him briefly.

Original Extinction’s smile made his blood run cold.

“Ever there are heroes to shove their sword in where unwanted… I am impressed at the depth of detritus that has washed up in here in all honesty.”

“Well… you know how they are…” ‘Division’ murmured. “You don’t pay attention for a few aeons and suddenly everyone’s a wizard.”

“In any case, it seems a door has been opened,” Inevitability muttered.

“It seems you three gentle maidens will have this well in hand after all,” the Sage of Sealing sighed.

“So it seems, how curious, perhaps the destiny of this sad place is finally shifting?” the aspect of the most August and Dreadful Queen mused.

“Yes...” another voice chimed a touch acerbically out of the distant night sky. “But get on with it, because the aftermath from this is going to be torrid. You cannot act like this again for a while.”

“It seems that unless we execute all those in here, this new gate cannot be closed either,” the Sealing Sage mused.

“…”

There was pensive silence and more unamused eyes staring at him.

“The pride of greedy men is often their ruin,” Inevitability purred.

“We cannot act freely it seems; however, we can make those who would fish for opportunity here think twice about how close they stand to the water,” ‘Division’ giggled in a way that made his skin crawl. “

The shockwaves settled out and the reality of the world beneath became fundamentally ‘more’ as the last vestiges of the ancient cage on the land collapsed and ‘Thunder Crest’ fully re-joined the greater anomaly again.

The sky above rippled and then stilled.

Origin stared at it, then at the boy frozen in two moments before him. The thousands of threads over his head knotted together into one, becoming an attractive shade of red. In that instant she grasped it and yanked downwards.

The sky warped.

The blood cauldron rippled and its contents swirled upwards, twisting into a line that stretched into infinity.

Those ‘controlling’ screamed in anguish as their own destinies were caught up in that thread and bound to maintaining the link.

As they wailed and fought to extricate themselves, their energies were caught up in maintaining a link between not one but two separate spaces.

The thread passed through into that place and one of the screaming figures, an old man in a white robe fell back, blood pouring from his orifices, staining it red.

The red thread flowed on, through that new link, into yet another place, connecting to a barely visible bearded figure, sat in some kind of palatial room in a pristine white robe.

The shimmering gaps overlapped and the contents of the blood cauldron scattered outwards like the ephemera of a collapsing star.

The three places snapped back together and the world deformed, shards sliding apart to form the figure of an old man with a long white beard and drooping brows and the symbol for ‘Huang’ in gold on the back of his pristine white robe.

“W-what…?" The old man stared around dully. "That is not what should happen?”

The old sage who, to his shock, he realised was strong enough to be considered close to a true leader of men in the line of those most ancient heroes, venerated by all, evoked an almost humble and erudite demeanour as he looked around in confusion.

“Most bizarre, Most Bizarre… What are those brats…?”

“Boy from the Huang, you have a big appetite, colluding to disturb my sister’s karma.”

He never saw ‘Division’ appear, but suddenly, she was standing beside the old man, an arm draped over him, her red-purple hair falling over bare shoulders, wearing a deep black dress that hugged her form in ways that truly disturbed the mind…

“G-G….G-aaaaaahhh?” the sage screamed and tried to stagger back, only to find he was standing in a circle of dark paving stones some three metres wide as the world continued to distort around them.

He watched, shuddering as the old man dashed forward, his face the same colour as his beard and the world around him overlaid itself bizarrely for a moment.

The sage screamed and tried to stagger back, only to find he was standing once again upon the same circle of dark paving stones as the world continued to distort around them, watching a shadow of himself, his future self, stumble away into probable oblivion.

This time he had the awareness not to run and instead began to plead. “P-please… I didn’t know. I- I was only asked by the Young Master to…”

“Words are cheap; actions have consequences,” ‘Division’ giggled, pressing a finger to his lips to shut him up. “Too bad, your young noble’s arrogance has cost your Huang family a Mantled Venerate old Elder today… I mean… you’re kind of untalented, but can your Huang clan actually afford this loss?”

“P-please let this unstudied junior live…” the old man mumbled, tears actually rolling down his cheeks now.

“Should have thought about that before you tried to warp the destiny of this place and its people to ‘uncover’ such a wonderful treasure as the key to our throne,” Origin said a trifle sourly. “Thanks to you, we are thoroughly perjured with this place’s fate; whatever happens next is really going to mess up your future prospects.”

“Aha… ah… auh?” the old man’s mouth opened and shut, his words failing, making him sound like a simple fool as the Origin became visible to him as well, he assumed.

“Don’t forget these guys all have ‘nine generations’,” ‘Division’ snickered.

“…”

Origin and Inevitability both cast a look at ‘Division’. She just looked behind her as if they were not staring at her.

“Please…” the old man begged.

Origin’s face hardened and she reached out, tapping her index finger against his forehead, a glittering silver thread becoming affixed to it. As she took her finger away, that thread swirled and twisted around her hand for a moment into a wholly natural but simultaneously utterly stomach-knotting looking symbol. Raising her other hand, she touched her own forehead and out of the lotus symbol flowed a silver thread that swirled into the same symbol, overlaying the two and then flowing back down it into the forehead of the helpless old man where it and his original karmic thread vanished as if they never were.

“I mean, Huang Ji,” ‘Division’ frowned. “I can call you Huang Ji, can’t I? That’s not rude or something, is it?”

The old man, Huang Ji, shook his head frantically.

“Good, Good… Little Ji, if your Huang clan has lots of upstanding juniors in your nine generations of familial descendants you have nothing at all to fear… right?” ‘Division’ whispered in his ear as the unreality of the moment intensified under her aura. “I mean… how bad could the collective karma of your future generations really be?”

The way the old man’s face found new shades of pale to acquire and how he shivered like a leaf in a hurricane told him all he needed to know about that.

-Well, if you will mess with these terrifying…

“…”

-Beautiful Celestial Guardians…

“…”

“However, before you take up permanent residence here, you can see just how big a shit pot your upstanding juniors’ shining eyes have landed you in,” Inevitability added, stepping out of the shadows to become visible as well.

“Three… Impossible...” the old Sage stared at them with dead eyes. “There are three of you here? What… what is this place?”

-Hel, but not as you know it, he thought sourly.

‘Division’ glanced at him, her dark eyes peering through him.

“I know I gave you a lot of patronage before, but there are limits,” her sultry voice echoed in his mind, making his soul shake. “I like that about you – that you speak before actually thinking on occasion and act in the most quaintly surprising ways at times – but don’t overdo it. Even that decrepit bitch Ironwood can only give you so much succour.”

The shards swirled and closed up around the old man, Huang Ji, without him ever getting an answer from them, that he heard at least. The scene dissolved, ‘Her’ terrifying warning hanging in his ears and he was still stood there, about to take half a step forward to attack the boy, in part at the urging of the old thief who had just been dragged away by the Beautiful guardians, watching protectively from the deepest shadows behind the Hel men had once called ‘The Dark Lands’.

~ Han Shu – Jungle Valley ~

Mid-leap between one tree and the next, Han Shu felt the world lurch-

He came to on the ground, groaning. Liao Ying lay nearby, moaning in agony and trying to pull out a splinter of wood as long as his arm from her leg. There was no sign of Teng Chunhua anywhere as he struggled to move and found that he had broken his leg. His qi was also completely dispersed. Bits of trees were still raining down around them.

The two Ur’Vash who had been pursuing them crashed down into the clearing. The blow had clearly come from Vashaek, whose club-cleaver weapon was buried in the splintered remains of the tree he had just alighted upon. The feeling of being pulled towards fighting the two Ur’Vash charging after them had also vanished, he realised.

“Finally… you cannot run any more, human devil!” Vashaek growled, ripping his club out of the tree and stalking forwards.

He reached for the sword and realised, to his horror it was stuck in the ground a few paces away. Grasping for his qi, he found it truly was gone.

“You two are causing a big ruckus.”

A third Ur’Vash appeared, strolling out of the trees, dusting twigs off himself. Compared to the other two, this one was basically an old man, with dark skin, broad bushy brows, a thick white beard and his hair plaited back behind him. Though he was bare-chested he also wore armour, proper armour on his forearms and shins and a cloth skirt around his waist with scales of metal over it.

Gasping, he used the moment of their distraction to claw for the sword–

The old orc stood on his arm. He had never seen him move, which should have been impossible if the repression was…

“You two drag the whole army out of position, do more good work for those old Orcneas evils in twenty minutes than they achieve in twenty years.”

-Origin?

He tried to focus on the sword, recalling that her voice had seemed to come from the Ninefold Lotus manual rather than the sword itself.

“Enough of that. That sword is one thing, but you are just a human. Do not push it,” the old Ur’Vash said to him in flawless Easten. “You understand my words right? Boy?”

He could only nod weakly.

Clawing for his mantra, he found it slipping away like fog…

-Shit… shit…

The blade rested at his throat, stopping him moving further. It looked awfully like his sword he realised.

“Closer to… Juni’s spear,” Origin’s voice whispered, sounding distorted.

“Why you all the way out here, letting all those remnants escape?”

“This… this is a human,” Vashaek growled, pacing forward.

“I do believe it is; they are not unique in the world you know,” the old Ur’Vash said a touch sourly. “Just because you have never seen one outside your nightmares doesn’t make them all special.”

-Is it speaking in Easten for our benefit?

“Not quite… Easten as you call it, Lataan, as it was known before, is an old tongue that has its origins in several places…

“It is a language where words have meaning, so these folk, who live by the honour of their word, value it highly…

“Don’t… do anything stupid… something just…” her voice slid out of his focus again.

-You don’t say… he thought back grimly.

“Do not… tell… lies in it,” her words, now remarkably forceful, left him feeling slightly woozy.

“So what do you intend, Old Elder?” the other Ur’Vash rumbled, walking over to Liao Ying and picking her up by her hair.

“I do not yet know, Ragnus,” the old Ur’Vash mused. “There is much that is odd out here, and there another danger lurking out here as well.”

“Another?” Vashaek frowned.

“The thing that tore the Six Eyes tribe a new asshole is still out here. If you see a blonde, elfin-looking girl dressed like an Ur’Vash who does not know what tribe it is from, do not engage it and let Angrad know.”

-Lin Ling? She survived?

Amid the fear of his circumstances, that knowledge managed to buoy him up somewhat as he continued to grapple with his inability to touch his…

“Even with the seal returned?”

“That seal is designed to prey on things like it, but it still ruined the Orcneas that had grasped the Six Eyes,” the old Ur’Vash said flatly. “Do as I say and take your war bands back to where they are meant to be.”

“You are old elder, yes, but this is not thing you have grasp over. You are here for the Orcneas; Humans are…”

“Do you want me to cut off your cock and make you wear it as a necklace for the rest of your life, Vashaek?” the old Ur’Vash scowled.

“He is not wrong though, Starkadr,” a fourth, much smaller, stooped Ur’Vash, replied as it tottered out of the shadows. The new arrival was ancient looking, shrouded in a cloak of pure white marked with black wavy lines, their skin painted to match, supporting themselves on a thorny staff of burnt wood.

“Grimvak,” the old elder Ur’Vash, named as Starkadr, growled, apparently not pleased to see them.

“The boy called forth to the End, and It that Ends answered him. They are no friend to us.”

“Ancient Death Walker,” the other two bowed now, sounding respectful.

“Humans are the task of our tribe; this is the rule the Ironwood has set down.”

“Oh… that… explains it.” Origin’s voice hissed, sounding angry now and making him understand that her issues speaking to him likely somehow related to this new arrival. “Great… just… great… this… why meddling with fate… terrible idea.”

-What is?

His words died in his mind as the old Ur’Vash, Grimvak’s gaze somehow forced him to look. His mind frozen, he was able to understand, he found, but unable to form rational thought.

“I see. So one of the old keys got shaken free,” Grimvak tottered over to the sword, narrowing his eyes at it.

“You know which one it is?” the old Ur’Vash asked Starkadr.

“I do,” Starkadr growled, looking worried now. “It…”

“Do not fear the darkness so,” Grimvak snickered and, raising the burnt wood staff, smashed it into the blade, shattering it like glass. “It is just a key, a thing, give it nothing and it has nothing.”

Starkadr flinched and he stared dully, the expected retribution not coming.

“Surprised human boy?” the ancient Ur’Vash looked at him mockingly. “You wield this tool, yet know not the rules that bind it? This is just a summoned thing, a mirage made manifest, cheap tricks before this Sorceress.”

“Even so… you would anger those that it represents?” Starkadr looked genuinely uneasy now, he noted.

“When have they ever been friend to us?” Grimvak sneered. “Vile things, there is no place for what they represent in our lands. Vashaek has done a mighty deed this day. His duel was not lost, he did not run, not one step back… and the eyes that watch from it cannot move on us; their rules are not so malleable as ours and this is just a summoned shadow.”

“Fuck, I hate these old… bastards the most… How is an old freak like this in here?” Origin’s voice snapped into focus in his head again suddenly, associated with the Ninefold Origin manual.

“The question is where it came from…” Grimvak’s icy blue eyes bored into him… “There should be none of these left here. It took a great cost to evict that damn spear back then, and even now, millennia later, that place where it was still kills everything that goes within visual sight of it as a matter of course.”

-What is going on? he asked, confused. It is just a summoned thing?

“…”

For the first time, Origin actually seemed to hesitate. “The vessel was forged, so it is not… as such. That form was bound to me and used to anchor an ancient prison in the depths of a place called Undrhallen,” Origin murmured. “But it does appear that the outside meddling has had some unintended consequences.”

“Vashaek spoke great words, and should be allowed his great deed,” Grimvak said. “You, Starkadr, were commanded by the Ironwood to deal with the Orcneas. Should you not be dealing with them?”

“Fuck you, deathless old hag,” Starkadr snarled. “There is more going on here than you understand. There are meddlers from outside now.”

“All the more reason to end these humans now, before they can call their god. Remember what happened before?” Grimvak snarled. “There is a reason we suffer none to live and refuse them passage unto death. Or do you wish to test Volandr’s blade against a herald of that tyrant a second time? As I recall last time it tore four of your arms off and incinerated your family’s two generations entirely, leaving you to be chained in Undergrove for their mewling brats to gnaw on for sport.”

“…”

He watched the old Ur’Vash’s expression twist–

{Argent Heavens Ghost Light Talisman}

Blazing sutras swirled upwards from the forest thirty metres away forming a vast swirling, Tai-ji symbol. Lines of silver runes swirled out from it as an octagrammic formation rolled out over the whole valley. Silver flames swirled above the head of every Ur’Vash within miles, lighting up the forest in every direction with thousands of silver candle flames.

{Argent Devouring Lance}

A silver beam split the sky above, which swirled mysteriously, creating a path for it to fall directly onto the Ur’Vash named Ragnas, who was still holding Liao Ying’s body by her hair.

Grimvak waved… her hand and the formation wavered for a second.

{Disjun-

{Ghost Hao’s Guillotine}

The artefact he had seen Hao Jun arriving on shrieked out of the forest, forcing Grimvak to swing her staff and block it. The artefact smashed into a thousand pieces, all of which swirled back around and shot straight back at her, turning into an uncountable number of ghostly little spinning discs.

“ENOUGH!”

The bellow from Starkadr, made the whole forest echo. The qi around them turned chaotic for a second and the vast formation crumbled. He watched dully as the old Ur’Vash cut out lazily with his blade.

{Starkadr Cuts What He Cuts}

Every tree within a mile of them turned into chopped wood, the fires over the Ur’Vash’s heads, still burning where most had fallen, drifted upwards and were snuffed out.

Amid the ruin, two figures were dragged out and locked in the air by Grimvak, who had lost her cloak and was indeed a her, he could now see.

“So, more humans… always more humans,” she spat, staring at the bedraggled forms of Ruo Han and Hao Jun.

Ruo Han was badly burned but still alive; Hao Jun, however, looked like he should be dead. He was missing an arm and a leg, an arrow stuck through his chest, upon which blazed the dying embers of the ‘Argent Heaven’s Ghost Light Talisman’.

“Sorry… brother Han...” he gasped weakly.

“Storage devices as well… This is truly a day where our Vashlagh has been delivered good fortune,” Grimvak reached out and he watched dully as Ruo Han’s hand was flayed and the ring on his finger landed in the old Ur’Vash’s hands. Hao Jun’s moved away from him, but then twisted bizarrely in mid-air just as it arrived before Grimvak…

“Screw your mother, old demon. If I’m going to die, you’re dying as well…” Hao Jun hissed and the storage ring exploded-

“Idiot,” Grimvak, sneered and grasped the exploding ring with her bare hands, cupping it away.

The explosion made the others stagger and shook his bones. Threads of shattered space spidered out between her frail hands, flaying the flesh from her arms and outlining her in a bizarre set of colours that no mortal should ever see sober he suspected. A few artefacts, pill bottles and talismans scattered in the air after she opened her hands, letting the ruins of Hao Jun’s ring pour out of her hands to lie scattered on the ground.

“You think I have not seen humans before?” Grimvak cackled. “I am ‘She who Walked out of Hel’, little boy. You will have to do better than that if you want to make death seek me out a second time.”

“Wonderful, just wonderful,” Origin’s voice in his head was laden with anger now.

-Can’t you? He asked.

“What... kill this old Hag? There are rules and there are rules. Unless they attack me directly, I cannot act on them until the key reforms or they pick up the sword.”

“Grimvak, do you understand who you are offending?” Starkadr growled, dusting himself off from the aftermath of the silver beam of light.

“She is your problem, not ours. You must adhere to our rules; this is called Vashlagh, not Starkardrslagh. You serve my mistress, not your gilded human swan now,” Grimvak sneered.

He tried to focus on what had happened before, even as he continued to struggle with why his mantra wouldn’t.

“It is because of what Vashaek did. You lost the duel, even though he cheated thanks to the help of this old Hag,” Origin sounded quietly furious, her words making his mind feel like they were being buried in midnight shadows. “This… I will remember. They dare to call words things they hold sacred, yet are willing to stoop like this?”

-I lost my mantra because of it? he thought dully.

“No, you are suffering backlash; this and that are different,” Origin clarified, making him mentally sigh in relief. “It is keeping you alive right now; do not interfere with it.”

-Alive? He was confused and then realised that while he could move… his legs were…

“Don’t think about it! It will fix itself; you don’t need extra trauma to bury subconsciously with it!” Origins voice somehow snapped his focus back to the moment, forcing him away from thinking about that.

“Brother… Han...” Hao Jun was also close to death he could see. His qi, such as it was, was still bleeding into the talisman he had triggered.

“All… I can… do…” Hao Jun gasped and his eyes went unfocused. Around him, there was a sound of cracking space and a shimmering jade talisman emerged from his forehead that read ‘Hao’.

*tcch*

Grimvak plucked it out of the air somehow, trying to crush it between her hands only for her eyes to widen.

“DARES TO KILL HAO! I, DAO FATHER GHOST SAGE, DECLARE ALL DEMONS SHALL BURN!”

A thunderous voice shook the whole forest as the life talisman exploded in a flare of silver lightning. Grimvak’s body was silhouetted against it for a second as she was cast back into the gloom. Every Ur’Vash within two hundred metres was turned, hit by spidering bolts of Exterminating Yin Lightning, turning them into ash ghosts for a second before they faded away.

Starkadr blocked a bolt with his blade, deflecting it away somehow while Vashaek howled and golden lightning surged out from his tattoos, trying to deflect those headed his way. That impact sent the Ur’Vash flying away into the gloom even as Ragnus tossed Liao Ying’s body aside, into a bolt of lightning, and then fled, only to be caught as well and turned into a blazing candle.

“I, RAGNUS, WILL MAKE A CHAMBER POT OF YOUR SKULL!” the centipede-armoured Ur’Vash screamed as he flailed in the silvery fire, which was eating away at his body now. “THIS EMNITY WILL NEVER REST!”

He staggered forward and then threw both weapons at Hao Jun.

{Tiger of Liao}

Liao Ying, forgotten by everyone, let her own ring fall from her grasp, her words drifting quietly in the clearing as the symbols on it swirled off and formed a red and blue tiger that rolled over Ragnus, tearing at his body, deflecting one of the thrown blades in the process. The other arrived before Hao Jun… and was caught by a hand that extended out of the air, followed by a youth in silver garb.

“Cousin… sorry I was late,” the youth murmured apologetically, rapidly surveying the scene that was momentarily frozen in tableau.

Abruptly, the whole space around them twisted and rippled outwards as the new arrival waved his hand. Seal-like symbols slid out of the air, forming a ring that reflected onto the ground as the forest around them vanished like mist, replaced by rolling grassland.

Ragnus howled and suddenly appeared beside the youth, grasping the weapon that Liao Ying’s summoned tiger had intercepted, swinging it back at him.

“Ancient Imm–?”

The youth’s words died on his lips as the blade split him in two. With a horrified scream his soul was cut as well by whatever Ragnus had done.

“DARES TO KILL HAO! I, DAO FATHER GHOST SAGE, DECLARE ALL DEMONS SHALL BURN!”

Almost on refrain, an identical talisman hung in the air, silver fire swirling out of it consuming the stunned Ragnus where he stood as the ghostly form of the youth clawed itself back together, grasping for the talisman.

“Fuck… these idiots…!” Starkadr snarled.

{And What Starkadr Cuts, Stays Cut!}

The blow tore the shifting space around them to pieces as the form of the old Ur’Vash called Starkadr changed. Now a towering ten metre figure loomed over them, vicious wounds visible where six of its eight arms would be. Its eyes were like dark pools, oppressing everything as the blade slammed down on the talisman.

“N-!” the unfortunate cultivator, who had apparently been called by Hao Jun somehow, did not even have time to scream before the blade obliterated him, the talisman and the silver fire itself.

The shifting space around them crumpled to the sound of clapping hands and mocking laughter.

“Oh… for fuck’s sake,” Origin’s voice in his head sounded more disbelieving than angry now.

“Such a good play. In truth, I hoped to snare that half-awakened lizard girl, and get my spear back… but this is actually better!”

The figure who spoke was breathtakingly beautiful, if you discounted her teeth which were filed to points and the rather unsettling set of six interlocking eye tattoos on her face. Her hair was pale gold and plaited in a very elaborate way, her deep purple eyes, high cheek bones and full lips were only marred by a faint set of claw marks that were already fading. Her upper half was naked, which was the only reason he knew she was a she. The oddity, he noted, bizarrely was that her right arm was much paler than the rest of her body.

“Asuraerleth,” Starkadr snarled, staring down at the new arrival.

“How surprising, how surprising, to see you here Vashaek… Shouldn’t you be supporting your brave allies in fighting at the other end of the valley? And is that smoking corpse I see Ragnus…? How bizarre, I swear he should also be up there…?” the woman giggled, walking into the clearing.

“No sign of that Death Jogger or whatever she’s called…” the figure looked around, amused, ignoring Starkadr, “Did she get embarrassed and run away to hide her shrivelled tits?”

The vast form of the Ur’Vash shrank down until it was only three metres tall, still twice the size of the new arrival, not that she seemed at all fazed.

“And here, in the middle of it all… humans… making a mess, just as they should. Isn’t this nostalgic, Starkadr?” Asuraerleth snickered. “I feel like we have been here before somehow… Ah, of course.”

The woman turned to look at the broken form of Ruo Han. “No fancy talisman to draw you back from the brink this time. That was surprising, I must say, to see you accidentally discover me only to almost die to those Crag Hunter fools in their quaint little hides.”

“…”

He was confused for a moment, until he remembered Ruo Han warning them about the group on the heights wearing jaguar-like beast hides and leading them around, thanks to that talisman.

“Really though, that was fortunate, to waste that precious talisman like that when you could really use it now…” she snickered. “Should you really be staying here by the way, Starkadr…? Isn’t your precious great granddaughter back there? Can your protégé kill my old devils and keep your sweet… sweet grand-daughter from harm?”

“I wondered how that girl had killed you…” Starkadr sneered. “Turns out you ran away. Isn’t that against your religion?”

“My religion? Oh dear…” she put her hand to her mouth and covered it as she laughed.

It was a horrible, jarring sound that slid into his psyche and made what left of it sob, until Origin, now silent, seemed to intervene.

“I may work with these Orcneas, but they just take my name…” the blonde woman giggled. “Just because my blood was not pure, you think I am like that weak-willed old fool Taranaleth or that rabid megalomaniac Akalaraltis? I am Asuraerleth, Immortal of the Six Eyes, Bright Butcher. I spat in the face of the Midnight Empress herself for the insult her people levied against me and she could only step aside. She could only watch as I gave her sisters’ bodies to N’Evral and sold what remained of their blood thereafter to those mortals who coveted it.”

“How the fuck is an obnoxious bitch like this in here as well… Who is next? Nadria of Yessuth, Baradanus of Jerrikal?” Origin groaned.

He wasn’t sure how to take that…

“See, this is what happens when you poke things you shouldn’t.” Asuraerleth said, coming over to kneel beside him.

She pulled up his head and stared at him long and hard for a moment before dropping him again and turning back to look at Starkadr and Vashaek who had recovered. He could almost swear in that instant she had been addressing Origin rather than him.

“Got no words for me, Eagle Boy?” she added, leaning forward suggestively after turning to look in Vashaek’s direction. “Want to show me the conviction of your weapon? Be a big boy? Like your grand pappy?”

Before Vashaek, who was now shaking in rage, could say anything, Starkadr had stopped him, holding out his blade.

“Don’t be stupid. That boy was weak, unprepared, and outside forces were twisting the moment.”

“You do not–” Vashaek hissed, grinding his teeth.

“If you initiate a ‘Duel of the Fates’ with her she will rip your arms off and shove them up your ass, then make you eat your own cock before sending you crying back home in humiliation while she makes clothes of your hide to gift to the firstborn children you will never bear.”

“You speak like you know that treatment… personally?” Asuraerleth laughed again and shook her head. Her every movement was unsettling and beautiful; even the words and the way they flowed had a sort of terrible timbre to them now. A chaotic cadence that let them linger in his mind, twisting unsettlingly.

“Did that gilded whore Sannae not let you have your arms back when she freed you? Or maybe she just couldn’t stomach fucking something that looked so much like a spider?”

In the distance, there were horns blaring and drums thundering now. The sky lit up with a wave of green lightning bolts that ravaged the ridge behind.

“Well…?” Asuraerleth leered.

“Get back to the battle line!” Starkadr snarled at Vashaek.

This time, the other Ur’Vash just stared at him.

“Ah… whatever, dead here as good as dead there,” she stood before Vashaek, blue seals rising out of her body, in the form of eyes that moved everywhere, red pupils rapidly filling in-

Starkadr’s blade cut at her and she bent backwards, dodging it effortlessly and at the same time hitting Vashaek in the chest with a back-handed blow–

The forest recoiled, his bones broke, his mind wavered and there was agonizing darkness, punctuated only by Origin’s distant cursing.

…

Only when he opened his eyes was he sure he had lived, inexplicably. The result, he was sure, was the cockroach like performance of his mantra…

“You think those words, that false promise from a long gone, decrepit monkey, were what saved you?” A hand coolly grasped his neck, dragging him up to her eye level.

“You all live, because I desire it, little human. Your kind are needed here. You are the staves that will turn the wheels of their little utopia to ruin.”

This close, she was flawless, every part of her drew his eyes, made him desire her even as agony consumed his face and his vision vanished into purple fog, drowned in her eyes.

“I expect great things, little monkeys… Do not disappoint me…” her mocking laughter echoed as her form in that purple haze faded away and horrific whispering darkness returned.

…

…

…

He wasn’t sure how long he lay there, unable to move, unable to perceive anything at all beyond her mocking laughter until at last it merged into voices, speaking in imperial common.

“Here… there are some over here!”

“This is… is this Senior Hao!”

“What happened here…?”

“Ah... Senior Hao is dead… this sword?”

“Alive! This one’s alive…”

“What sect?” another distant call.

“Argent… one of the branches… Justice, maybe?”

“Must be… someone… Ah! Senior Tai! SENIOR TAI OVER HERE!”

…

“Are they even worth healing?”

“This is the one… there. He is responsible, and that is his sword!” a familiar voice cut through the chaos as he fought to keep conscious…

-Argent Justice?

-Zheng?

-Sheng?

Something grasped him and he was dragged up, finally able to see his surroundings. His legs worked again, he realised belatedly, but the force that was holding him gave him no recourse to fight back. A youth in a silver robe, akin to the one that had been killed earlier, was standing nearby, hand upheld as silvery chains coiled around his arms.

A dozen paces away was the sword, still broken in two, but now with Hao Jun’s cousin’s body arranged such that it appeared to have bisected it. The shattered remains of the talisman scattered nearby painting an ominously false scene. Hao Jun lay not ten paces further over, a sad, confused expression on his face, his eyes glassy in death – sole remaining hand still outstretched in the direction of his cousin and Ruo Han.

Ruo Han for his part, lay next to Hao Jun, missing an arm and badly burnt.

Liao Ying was lying almost naked, sprawled over a nearby rock, her stomach ripped open and her Golden Core shimmering weakly in the wound.

“There is another over here!” a voice called from behind him. “Also Argent Justice, looks like!”

“Monkey lovers… these are some of those who ran away… aren’t they?” someone else called out… “That is that Junior Elder from the outer sect… Ruo Hun?”

“Han… I think,” someone else corrected.

“They are… Senior Brother Hao,” Sheng Zhao, who he now recognised vaguely, replied, standing in a blue-grey and silver robe next to another youth, with curly dark hair tied up in a scholar’s knot and an inadvisable beard.

“I recognise that youth. He was the servant of the demoness who nearly killed a bunch of us and plundered the treasure we found in that ruin I mentioned.”

“That sword?” Senior Hao said, pointing at Origin’s blade where it was currently lying.

“No… that sword was with them already, but it is also a treasure; it was able to cut Senior Yan’s Immortal soul… and he is clearly only a Qi… Refinement brat. If you search their talismans though, I am sure they will have items from our sect and others…”

He groaned, trying to speak, to refute what that bastard was saying, but the words refused to come.

“You wish to speak?” the youth binding him said blandly.

“Ah, Senior Bo!” people turned and saluted a group of five more cultivators who had appeared, picking their way through the ruins of the ‘battle site’.

The leader of the group, ‘Senior Bo’, was a tall, imperial-looking man with a well-trimmed beard and hard eyes; his dark hair was held up in the imperial style. His dark green and gold robe had runic patterns around the hem that identified him as a member of the Jade Gate Court. The medallions hanging from his hair pin, though, held the insignia for ‘Bo’ and ‘Kong’.

The four behind him all wore similar, if less regal, robes and blank white masks covering their faces. Each mask had the symbol ‘Din’ on it in gold. Hurrying after them, came two more figures: One was a dark-haired youth in a white and blue robe, wearing a lighter gown over the top, also in the deep green of the Jade Gate Court, bearing the seal of the Din clan; the other was a demure woman veiled and dressed in a blue and white gown, her dark hair held up by a hair crown that carried the symbol ‘Ling’.

“Brother Din as well, auspicious, auspicious,” a few of the lesser cultivators from other sects who were poking around the battle site bowed again.

-Din Oyueng…!

His heart ran cold, to see the origin of their nightmare walking towards him without a care in the world.

“Oh… this is a surprise,” Din Ouyeng narrowed his eyes as he spotted him, not smiling at all.

“You… know this junior?” Senior Bo asked.

“If you recall, the matter of Brother Kong Ji and Brother Din Yao, Senior Bo?” Din Ouyeng stated respectfully.

“Ah, the Hunter Bureau brats who tried to have you killed by sideways means, using the suppression of Yin Eclipse, all so as to help the Azure Astral Authority,” Senior Bo nodded.

“The very ones,” Din Ouyeng agreed. “Because of them, Senior Brother Ji’s stratagem was almost ruined.”

“This would be the stratagem whereby your Revivalist Court was in those mountains, already searching when the trail was first announced…” one of the masked Jade Gate Court members remarked with a certain edge to their tone.

Senior Bo cast a sideways look at that figure and they bowed to him in apology, but not, he noted, to Din Ouyeng.

-Not a unified front then…?

“It seems clear then, what this is, in light of the news from outside,” another of the masked figures noted, looking around.

Sheng Zhao bowed deeply. “If this junior might speak, Seniors?”

“Go on,” Senior Hao waved his hand.

“We were also done evil by hunters associated with the Bureau who had infiltrated the Teng School’s confidence. Before, we thought them simply incompetent. As you are well aware, Blue Water province is backward; it is common knowledge that their standards have slipped as the corruption of the Bureau has become more overt. Now, however, it is clear that Shan Lai has deployed a great stratagem and aimed to sweep the entire Blue Water province before the young heroes of our generation–”

“Get to the point,” Senior Bo cut him off with a wave of the hand.

“Apologies, apologies,” Sheng Zhao bowed deeply. “A hunter from the Bureau, Teng Chunhua, was responsible for poisoning the minds of these juniors here, setting us against ourselves. Perhaps the Bureau has been working all along for this end?”

“Senior Bo,” Ling Luo bowed.

“Fairy Ling?” Senior Bo glanced at her.

“This Han Shu is also from an indigenous family with deep links to the Military Authority,” Ling Luo supplied. “Those with him were from the Lin clan and daughters of a Military Authority Civil Envoy, not to mention a miss from the Kun clan. While this unstudied junior is from the Ling clan, I hope you can see the truth in my words.”

“…”

Senior Bo nodded, stroking his beard and staring at him, then the sword, then the sky.

“In any case, it seems that this has fortuitously wrapped up some matters,” Senior Hao nodded. “It seems clear that my disciples were led astray by these rebels… This weapon has killed my clan juniors as well – you say it was wielded by this miscreant here when Junior Ning crossed paths with him?”

“Yes, Senior Hao,” Sheng Zhao bowed again.

“Han Shu?” Senior Bo, who had been watching from the side-line had now pulled out a talisman and was considering it, looking at him with narrowed eyes.

“…”

“Han Shu… oh… that Han Shu?”

“The one from the rankings?”

“No way… this boy is only Qi Refinement…”

“Could he be injured?”

“That Han Shu?” Senior Bo asked, raising and eyebrow and looking back at him… and then again at the sky.

-Oh shit… shit… Origin…? Lady Origin! he called for the sword, but it was silent in his head.

-Don’t tell me this lot have something to do with what I just experienced… Origin said people were… meddling?

-ORIGIN?

Her voice, however, was silent. Trying to quell his panic, he reached for his mantra, but it was still behaving weirdly…

“Ah, there are several on the list, it is true,” someone else remarked dubiously.

“He has no Bureau Talisman,” the disciple of the Hao clan who was still holding him prisoner with the silver chains noted. “He does have this though.”

His storage talisman was ripped off his wrist and grasped by the youth.

“What do you have to say for yourself?” Senior Bo addressed him now.

“…”

“Let him speak,” Senior Bo commanded and he felt the bar on his voice vanish.

“I am not a rebel,” he said flatly.

“And you expect us to just believe the word of someone with no identifying features out here and a deeply suspect cultivation?” one of the masked figures from the Jade Gate Court chuckled.

-You want me to say that Din Ouyeng tried to kill us… with Din Ouyeng standing right there by his sect seniors? He cursed directly in his head.

[Speak]

“We were betrayed by Ji Tantai… who also called himself Di Ji, and Din Ouyeng…” the words flowed out of him, somehow forced by the silver chains, even as he tried to resist it.

Laughter echoed through the clearing.

“Di Ji he says?”

“How rich… he knows some words…”

“Ji Tantai? Isn’t that some junior from the Seven Sovereigns… Why would we work with those idiots?”

Senior Bo waved the others to silence and the laughter faded away. “I see… go on?”

The compulsion to speak was gone again, but now that he had somehow been forced to reveal that… there was no option really but to just state the truth and hope that not every Senior here was as mendacious as Din Ouyeng.

“Two of my companions were thrown off the cliff, killed for no reason by them. The others were chased hither and thither. This Di Ji… abused my friend and junior.”

“I see… that is the limit of it?” Senior Bo asked.

-What else do you want me to say? He cursed inwardly, aware of how futile it was. Isn’t this using superior status to bully the weak and hide crimes?

“The accusation of rebellion is just the words of Din Ouyeng, who hid his cultivation and even his status from us until his companion killed my friends. He styled himself as a Din Clan junior allied with the Ha clan and revealed none of his exalted position. I trust that Senior Bo can see the reality of the situation,” even as he said it, it rang hollow, but it was the truth.

“…”

“Those are serious allegations to make against an upstanding sect like our Jade Gate Court, who have been a righteous pillar of the Dun Imperial Court since its founding. There is just one problem with your tale, compelling though it is. Di Ji is no longer among the living, as attested to by numerous old ancestors. While it is true he was a heinous criminal, even he was a victim, deluded by a demon fox as it transpired. He, or the fox that beguiled him, has been dead as long as you have lived. Killed by my junior brother Kong Ji Tantai no less.”

“…”

He stared dully, trying to process that… the impossibility of it.

Senior Bo sighed. “I can understand your confusion. This is not a thing at all widely known… Sadly you are not the first to try to pin blame on him where it is impossible. So, are you willing to swear before heaven?”

“Absolutely,” he said flatly.

“…”

The finality of his response clearly surprised them, because even Senior Bo blinked. Din Ouyeng, for his part, was just impassive.

“My Kong clan is not something you can lightly accuse, do you understand this?” Senior Bo said pensively.

-Kong clan? He stared dully at the senior… This ‘Bo’ is from the Kong clan, as is Ji Tantai?

“I will still swear by Heavenly Tian, that my friends were killed by Di Ji,” he said simply. It was a risk, but frankly it was the only way out of this he could now see.

“There is another problem there though,” Senior Hao was the one who spoke up this time.

“This ‘Ji Tantai’ I know of… He is a villain and a rogue, certainly, but he is also from the Seven Sovereigns School, who are our factional rivals, are they not?”

“This is true,” Din Ouyeng nodded. “I was not working with a Ji Tantai, but with brother Din Yao and Brother Kong Ji. I have no recollection of a Ji Tantai at all. This I swear by the Eyes of Heavenly Fate, who watch over all truth.”

“…”

Many eyes turned to look at Din Ouyeng, who had just impassively sworn an oath to heaven that he knew absolutely in his own mind was a falsehood…

-Shit… does this mean that my own oath I just swore to do could actually backfire?

“I see,” Senior Bo frowned… “That complicates things somewhat.”

“Setting aside this older question,” Senior Hao interjected, “there is still the allegation of my junior and the clear evidence that this youth had slain one at least one of my junior brothers, if as you say this sword was one he wielded?”

“It was, Senior Hao,” Sheng Zhao again asserted. “And given what we now know…”

“Yes… yes…” Senior Bo waved him to silence. “There is an easy way to check that,”

Frozen as he was, he watched one of the robed figures produce a strange jade compass that was shiny like a mirror and supported on several gold chains, inscribed by runes.

“Put some of his blood upon the compass,” Senior Bo said flatly.

The disciple from the Jade Gate Court walked over to him and the Argent Disciple restraining him drew blood from his hand and placed his palm upon the flat of the compass–

It went flat black and ice shot through the bones of his arm, making him gasp and his vision waver… He was plunged into dark water as something fearful opened its eyes and stared into his soul… The fury there was incomprehensible… but even more disturbing was the hunger.

Avoided Righteous Death…

The words that echoed in his mind made his psyche shake and shiver.

“Huh…” Senior Bo blinked, as if this was not the result expected.

“Uhh…” even the other Jade Gate Court disciples seemed flummoxed.

Din Ouyeng was now looking at him in a way that made his skin positively crawl, even though he wasn’t sure what exactly the compass had meant…

“I know you said he killed a bunch of juniors… but…” Senior Bo was staring at him like he was a bizarre mushroom now.

“Seniors… we should not linger here…!” a youth wearing Argent Justice robes scrambled out of the forest, interrupting the moment.

What is the problem?” he turned to the junior from the Argent Justice sect.

“Demons… dead in the forest… lots of demons, slain by our ancient ancestor’s ability… and listen!”

They stood in silence listening to the thunder and lightning in the distance. The battle was clearly still ongoing… not that this lot seemed at all aware of it.

“Fighting?” Senior Bo frowned, staring into the distance.

“The forest limits our soul sense though, so we cannot see more than a few hundred metres in this rain.”

“You were going to swear a heavenly oath…” Din Ouyeng tore his gaze away from the compass and turned back to him.

“…”

“Later!” Senior Bo snapped. “You two, go investigate. Report back quickly if there is some problem,” Senior Bo waved to two of the robed figures beside him who saluted and shot off into the darkness with immense speed.

“Give me that,” he added, holding out his hand for the compass, which the robed figure obediently handed over.

Senior Hao frowned. “If this is that Han Shu, he should have had some remarkable treasure on him…”

Many eyes turned to the broken sword.

“That appears to be just a sword,” Din Ouyeng pointed out drolly, his gaze still lingering on him.

“Indeed, it is quite ruined, even if it was an artefact,” Senior Bo muttered, distracted and now staring into the dark depths of the valley, in the direction of the battlefield.

Shaking his head, Senior Hao took the talisman from his junior.

Icy pain sank into his flesh; he would have screamed, except, he realised, his voice was sealed again and after dying a thousand times… it was not actually all that bad. However…

“Huh…” Senior Hao stared dully at the talisman that he had just tried to open, then looked back at him.

-How’s that, he scowled mentally. My talisman has a ward on it to stop tha–

Senior Hao focused on the talisman in his hand. A moment later, the jade that made up its superstructure cracked and warped and then shattered directly as the fundamental structure inside it gave out. The contents, various herbs, a few spare stone blades scavenged from the Ur’Vash and a huge pile of pills they had divided up after the squirrel’s rampage, spilled out… along with…

The ancestral totem of Mu Shansu and his heroic comrades landed in the muck, glittering faintly through its luss cloth wrapping.

“…”

All eyes found it immediately, because it was hardly unobvious, what with the ancient aura seeping out of it.

-Shit.

Wordlessly, Senior Hao bent down and picked it up.

“You said you were looking for treasure in those ruins?” another of the Argent Justice disciples nearby asked, glancing back at Sheng Zhao.

The faces on those of the Jade Gate Court were suddenly a bit ugly.

“Senior Hao. Senior Jiao,” Sheng Zhao saluted appearing to affirm, but… Han Shu had to roll his eyes; that reply was as close to a ‘no comment’ as it was possible to get. Instead, Sheng Zhao picked up some pills and considered them. “These are from our sect, belonging to some of my late seniors… see their marks… and these are from the White Storm Sect, The Red Sovereigns, Nine Auspicious Moons… Jade Song… even Dew Drop Sage Valley and Golden Auspicious Dragons… along with several others besides.”

The group looked on dully, alternating between him and the pile of pills as Sheng Zhao passed bottle after bottle to his seniors.

“These cannot have been gotten by good means,” Din Ouyeng nodded. “Let us divide them up and return them to their respective sects; it will assuage them that though their juniors clearly died to this stratagem, restitution can be directed properly at least.”

-What restitution! He raged inwardly as Din Ouyeng walked forward to stand before him.

-This is clearly you bastards framing evidence to fit your crime!

“What about the–”

“Ah!” one of the disciples who had grasped a pill bottle to store it away scowled. “These are all contaminated by spatial qi!”

“What?” Senior Jiao frowned, and stored the bottle he held… or tried to.

-Hah, idiots, you think those talismans are basic? He had a moment of catharisis as the faces of the various thieves trying to store the stuff from his shattered talisman all turned ugly.

“…”

Senior Jiao tossed the bottle to a junior and picked up a bit of the talisman, peering at it for a moment before his face twisted in anger and he threw it at Senior Hao. “You idiot, even if the materials are substandard, barely Immortal Grade, this is clearly the work of a Dao Immortal! This spatial qi will reside for hours! You bricked the entire contents of the fate-accursed talisman just because you couldn’t break the ward?”

“I…” Senior Hao looked blankly at the bottle in his hands.

“…”

“It seems we cannot resolve this here,” Kong Bo frowned, looking back at the forest.

“You lot, gather this up into some sacks. Discard what is useless!” Senior Hao commanded, his face now pale with anger and embarrassment in the darkness.

“You want to return?” Din Ouyeng frowned, belatedly adding, “Senior Bo.”

Some of the others nodded, and another, wearing the robes of the Jade Gate Court, added, “We are clearly not bound by that formation here… and the others may not have noticed our departure…”

“What are you all… Six?” Senior Bo snapped suddenly. “Out of the forest, now!”

Stunned by the sudden change in Senior Bo’s mood, he watched as the Elite disciple turned and grasped the air before him, rending a hole directly through it with the aid of a talisman that appeared a moment later. Beyond it, in the night air, were grassy plains. The fissure in space rapidly widened. The ground around them surged, sweeping most of the contents from his talisman through the rift directly. Others grabbed the bodies, storing those who were dead and carrying those that lived.

“What of the sword?” one of the disciples nearby asked, glancing at it where its fragments still lay.

“What of it? Pick it up!” Senior Hao snapped, not looking around from admiring the ancestral tablet he now held.

One of the juniors grabbed it and immediately tripped over his own feet, impaling himself with it and destroying his foundation in a single instant.

“You, grab it,” Senior Bo snapped to one of his masked companions.

The disciple pulled out a talisman, slapping it on the sword, then grabbed it–

They stared dully as the youth caught the hem of his robe, slipped in the mud and impaled himself straight through the stomach.

“Senior Shi?” one of the juniors rushed over and hauled the figure over, staring at it dully.

“What the actual… Senior Shi is dead?”

“A Golden Immortal died… just like that?”

“…”

He felt his skin prickled disturbingly as eyes turned back to him, some panicked, some angry, but many suddenly greedy or calculating.

“AM I SURROUNDED BY IDIOTS?” Senior Bo snarled, waving a hand in its direction, even as he focused on the rift. “Who said to pick it up directly?”

The ground that the sword was on shifted and the object itself was dragged straight through the fissure and dumped on the other side. He was dragged through a moment later by the Argent Justice disciple restraining him even as Senior Hao, holding the tablet, hurried through along with Din Ouyeng.

Behind them, he saw Senior Bo turning as several large many legged shadows surged out of the dark forest.

The rift snapped shut with a crack, catching an unfortunate disciple half way through it. He was sent sprawling and found he could move again, the silver chains that had bound him not surviving the trip. Their new surroundings were on a grassy hill in sprawling plains that stretched into darkness beneath the night sky. Behind him the mountains rose in the darkness, the broad valley they had fled down bleeding into the plains several miles distant. Only a small number of the group had actually come through, he realised. The rest were now running rapidly out of the forest.

Several flares of lightning and then a dull explosion echoed and a moment later two groups appeared in flashes of light and distorted space, jumping from the treeline to the hill beside them. Those still fleeing the treeline scattered again as two arrows exploded, blowing one unfortunate disciple into meat chunks and leaving another with no legs. His companion grabbed him only for an arrow to hit him in the back and then explode, sending his head and arms away.

Half a second later, the entire treeline vanished in a sea of green fire cast by Senior Bo, who had just appeared halfway across the distance. After that, no more arrows came.

Blinking, he found his hand resting right beside the sword. Grabbing it, he suddenly found his movement frozen as Din Ouyeng turned and noticed him.

“Ah… ah… nope…” Din Ouyeng smiled faintly in the darkness, unobtrusively waving a finger.

-May a monkey fuck your mother, assuming you are not already the son of a monkey! He cursed.

Abruptly, on the hill behind them there was a pulse of shattering space and a second large group of cultivators appeared in a series of multi-coloured lines, teleporting down out of the sky. Most of them wore robes of the Jade Gate Court and the Argent Hall… although there were others in there as well that he didn’t recognise.

A heartbeat later, a second teleportation landed on the hill much closer to the Argent Hall group who had been re-organising around ‘Senior Hao’ some paces away. This group, though, was much more ad hoc, led by a tall figure carrying a rather plain-looking broad-bladed spear slung across his back.

“Sir Cang!”

“Fairy Dongmei!”

“Senior Ze!”

“Alchemy Lord Quan!”

Various salutes from cultivators echoed across the hilltop as the new arrivals stared around with the look of people not best pleased.

The plain-looking, dark-haired man was already walking towards Senior Hao, who was frowning now.

“How did you come by this?” the man identified as ‘Sir Cang’ words carried a dangerous edge to them as his eyes alighted on the talisman.

“What business of that is yours, Cang Di?” Senior Hao scowled, gripping the talisman as the other disciples of the Argent Justice sect backed up.

“Senior Cang,” Senior Jiao was also frowning now, stepping forward, rather than back. “This is–”

“This is a treasure that my sect junior recovered. Does the Shu Pavilion steal from others now?” Senior Hao challenged, holding the tablet even more firmly.

“Liar,” Cang Di said flatly, his words almost slapping Senior Hao in the face. Senior Jiao also took a step backward, looking pale suddenly.

“Sir Cang, this is improper,” Senior Jiao snapped, recovering himself.

“Do you have words to back up such an accusation?” Senior Hao added, scowling.

“Two reasons!” Sir Cang continued to walk forward, the air shifting oppressively on the whole hilltop now. He saw that the Jade Gate Court disciples around him had palmed talismans…

“Firstly… it has the mark of spatial collapse on it. Unless you broke the storage talisman of your junior to get it out, it doesn’t belong to you. Or does the Hao clan now rob their own juniors and then blame others?”

“…”

“A fine allegation,” Senior Jiao frowned, “but circumstance–”

“Secondly, it carries the name of the sister of my honoured sect master. Why does the Argent Hall have an Ancestral Talisman relating to Saintess Shu Liang? Are you trying to plunder lineages and dishonour the dead?”

“Ah…” Senior Jiao’s mouth opened and shut, suddenly robbed for words.

“You, a studied senior, cannot be unaware of who the dearly lamented and long missing Fairy Liang was… who her brother is?”

“Ah… um…” Senior Hao also looked uncertain.

“Brother Cang… there is no need for such unpleasantness…” Kong Bo finally arrived on the hilltop, followed by the others who had not made it through the rift.

“Brother Kong, why am I unsurprised to see you here…”—Sir Cang swept his gaze across the rest of the hilltop—“and ah, there is Daoist Ouyeng… and Daoist Weng… and Daoist Pei... It seems every Senior disciple of the Jade Gate Court of standing is here, how remarkable...”

“And after we all had that agreement,” the cold-looking woman with flowing dark hair and a shimmering white gown standing nearby added with narrowed eyes.

“Fairy Dongmei… a misunderstanding… a misunderstanding… We merely came to help Brother Hao here; one of his juniors got ambushed by rebels…” one of the youths beside Senior Hao said, bowing.

“Who is a rebel? I see only people who rebel against the words they speak,” the armoured man with long, fiery hair and drooping eyebrows and a hooked nose added.

“Senior Zi… how piercing of you… but truly, we did come here to help my juniors,” Senior Hao replied, glancing between this man and Sir Cang uneasily now.

“And where are these juniors?” Cang Di frowned, surveying the hilltop.

“…”

“We were attacked…” one of the Jade Gate Court disciples started to say before falling silent.

The space around him and the others abruptly rippled and cracked like glass as his gaze swept over them. For a moment, Cang Di was staring right at him, then his gaze swept past. Beside him, Din Ouyeng exhaled–

A second faint ripple washed over the space, making his blood surge faintly. The two other disciples holding talismans suddenly coughed blood and the space around them collapsed.

“…”

There was silence on the hilltop as everyone, even Sir Cang, seemed surprised.

“…” The woman, Fairy Dongmei, narrowed her eyes, not looking at Cang Di or him, but her own group oddly enough.

“Good barrier,” Senior Zi commented, a touch sarcastically.

“If you rescued these juniors… why hide them in a cage?” Cang Di asked, frowning.

“Ah… this one is a rebel, part of the Azure Astral Authority…” Din Ouyeng said smoothly.

To his concern, that actually made most of the others on the hilltop, even the new arrivals, nod.

-I know there is tension between the Imperial Court and the Azure Authority… but this is? What in the fates happened outside? he thought, deeply uneasy now.

“A Qi Refinement boy is a rebel worthy of being held in a Dao Immortal grade talisman cage?” the haughty woman asked dubiously.

“This is a matter for our Jade Gate Court and the Argent Hall, not Nine Auspicious Moons, Fairy Dongmei,” one of the disciples beside Kong Bo said flatly. “We are the discipline gate of the Imperial Court.”

Sheng Zhao, who he was swiftly coming to hate a rather great deal at this point, smartly stepped forward and began to speak. “He slew various people, consorted with demons, killed two of our Argent Hall’s Hao clan’s main branch and also helped lead astray Senior Din and his companions here, early in th–”

“Does the Hao clan need some brat with a rebellious surname to speak on their behalf?” the hook-nosed man’s words nearly sent Sheng Zhao sprawling.

Cang Di shook his head and stared at him then the others pensively.

“Let him speak,” Cang Di said flatly, waving in his direction.

He opened his mouth, but no words came out.

Senior Kong Bo looked pensive as well for a moment, then nodded.

“He still has to swear that oath in any case,” someone pointed out from nearby.

“Yes, Senior Din was willing to uphold honour and swore unprompted!” another added.

“Is what they say true?” Cang Di addressed him.

“…”

He turned over the events in his head quickly, wondering what the best way was if any… out of this mess.

“…”

“Well?” Cang Di asked, frowning.

He tried to open his mouth to speak, but found it still restricted somehow, his body just refusing to respond to his words.

“…”

Cang Di narrowed his eyes. “Let. Him. Speak.”

This time, the words Cang Di spoke, who he was now pretty sure was ‘that’ Cang Di, given the mention of the Shu Pavilion earlier, made the whole hilltop grow oppressively still. Every other cultivator took a step back and a moment later the restriction was lessened somehow.

“It… belonged to an old expert called Mu Shansu, he and his comrades and his beloved fell there. I found it in a ruin… We were chased there into the darkness below the mountains, trying to escape a calamity that unfolded because of…”

The words somehow failed to find form… He knew who it was, but was suddenly unable to say it.

“Because of…”

Next to him, he felt, rather than saw, Din Ouyeng’s sneering gaze even as the restriction slid back into his throat somehow.

-May demons torment your nine generations! He cursed in his heart.

“I… I… intended… to bring it… out here and build a shrine for it,” he managed to force out, pleased to see that the Jade Gate Court and Argent disciples were now looking at him with something tinging genuine confusion, as if this was not going quite how it should.

“A shrine?” Cang Di frowned. “That name… do you know who it is?”

“Last… sect leader… of Heavenly… Dawn … Sect,” he hissed, leveraging all the mental strength he could to push the words out.

-Who would have thought dying a thousand times in an instant would be useful like this! he sobbed inwardly.

“And how do you know that?” Cang Di stared at him, as if trying to see through him.

“He… he…”

[Do not speak]

The command flatly hammered into his mind, but compared to dying all those times the pain that came with it was miniscule, a vast underestimation of what he had experienced previously, let alone the haunting blonde devil called Asuraerleth’s gaze.

“He… told me… himself. Last wish… was that I… carry him and his companions… beloved…”

Memories from looking at the talisman, and the faint understanding of the relationships of the people on it to Mu Shansu, surfaced in his mind like shadows in night fog, rendering up a name.

“Shu Liang…”

[STOP. SPEAKING. CRETIN.]

The words ate into his psyche, even as he forced himself to finish. “I swore… to… carry them… out of the darkness… built a simple shrine… where the common folk walk… light a lantern for each of them…”

“…”

The others on the hilltop were staring at him as if he was a strange mushroom now, all except for Cang Di… who had a look that he could only call… haunted?

“I see…” Cang Di was staring at him

“This. It… was also something… I found… Mu Shansu,” he added, gesturing weakly to the sword. This time, however, to his horror, the words were not his own, but instead spoken through him, pieced together from words he had just spoken and parroted out his mouth by someone else.

Cang Di made to walk over, but then stopped, because the Jade Gate Court and Argent Hall had closed ranks behind Din Ouyeng, he realised, and Kong Bo was now frowning even more deeply.

“Be wary,” the masked figure holding his right shoulder said flatly. “He is still a dog of the rebellious Bureau.”

“Senior Pei sees clearly,” several other disciples nodded.

“We cannot have him attack Senior Cang and make a mockery of our Court,” Din Ouyeng added.

“…”

In fact, the others nearby also nodded as if this was entirely reasonable.

“Do you understand your situation, Bureau Dog?” the one holding his arm sneered.

“Y…yes…” his mouth moved, repeating the sounds.

-What do you think I am going to do? He wept inwardly. The one I want to stab to death is right next to me! The nature of the bizarre control was still tormenting him, especially since it didn’t seem, to be obvious to anyone else.

-And you are putting words in my mouth.

“I… Swear by the Eye of Heaven, I will not attack… Senior…Cang…” his voice panted out.

-That is clearly not an oath, he groaned inwardly. For starters there is a loop hole in it a mile wide... and the person puppeting me is the one who swore it... not me!

Unfortunatly, the subtly of that seemed to have bypassed most of those looking on, who were just nodding along and looking disgustingly self righteous.

"See, even Bureau Dogs must adhere to our Dun Dynasty," someone muttered gleefully nearby, just to accentuate that point.

The question of how bound by any kind of oath the sword itself was...in any case, was also haunting his mind now.

“Very good…”

His body slowly stood and reversed the sword, holding it flat across his palms. The scabbard did not appear not, which was probably down to it being damaged somehow.

Still trying to fight against it, he walked forward, with the two Jade Gate Court disciples at his back, and the barrier dissipated with a ripple. A dozen steps carried him and the two disciples, Din Ouyeng and Senior Bo, over to beside Senior Hao and Cang Di. His mind, racing away was starting to reach a deeply unpleasant conclusion.

The sword didn’t seem inclined to harm him, but Origin’s voice had not been heard since Asuraerleth had done whatever she had done…

-And she certainly did something, he sobbed inwardly.

Other than one time, before he entered the space where Origin ‘really’ existed, anyone else who had picked up the sword had died simply by grabbing it. Origin had been coy on why that was, but the aftermath of the events with that youth who had tried to take it were now playing out worryingly in his mind, along with her explanation of how the sword itself was just a key. The Old Ur’Vash had been dismissive about it…

With growing horror, he realised he had never gotten an explicitly answer out of her regarding whether the ‘killing’ thing was an innate feature of the sword rejecting others once it had bonded to a bearer, or related to Origin herself somehow… The idea that a sword he had given would kill Tian Cang Di, foremost disciple of their generation…?

He wanted to open his mouth and warn him, but the words wouldn’t come out and his face seemed to be frozen.

-Please don’t kill him…

-You bastards… are you not content enough to make me suffer like this? You want to use me as a borrowed blade to kill THE Tian Cang Di?

-Just why? he had to ask.

Tian Cang Di had many rivals in their generation, it was known. His great deeds outshone almost anyone else’s and he had been an insurmountable figure long enough that his life story was nearly a mythology, preached on street corners in most towns. Even in a place like Blue Water province, on the other side of the world from the Western Shu continent.

-They sell story books for children about him and his grand tales for heavens’ sakes!

-Mothers give votive offerings when their firstborn children are male in the hope that they might emulate him and rise to be a hero of their generation…

Panicked parts of his psyche were starting to diverge now, he realised with dawning horror. Without the mantra to quell them, and that had never been a strong suit of his mantra, even taking in account his ability to feed his emotional turmoil to it, the damage from the repeated deaths combined with whatever Asuraerleth had done and the aftereffects of the compass they had used were all starting to stack up, he was sure.

-They can’t believe this doesn’t look suspect?

-Trying to frame me for the attempt?

-But as I am… the second I show any kind of hostile intent, any one of these disciples would kill me with a palm…

-Maybe everything is still suppressed somehow?

Stray thoughts were starting to run riot on his mind now. Something about the symbol itself was just about sheltering his core, still, but even that was crumbling. His mind was still racing as he arrived before Sir Cang and his body bowed slightly, offering the half of the broken sword towards Cang Di, hilt perpendicular to them both, as was appropriate when offering a weapon formally to a senior under the watchful eyes of all present.

“Shu… this villain… offers… the sword found with Sir… Mu Shansu,” his words rang hollow in his ears.

-Who is a villain, am I in some play now??

-Mu Shansu said to be careful, that it was picky, that it nearly didn’t let him wield it… a horrified voice whispered, recalling that warning like an evil augury.

-I might as well just slit my throat now and be done now if the sword kills him.

-Is this related to the Imperial Court? I know only that Mu Shansu cursed this Kong Hao…

-And that he proclaimed the Blue Morality Cult a blight on the Heavens… another part of his memory helpfully served up.

-Shut UP! He focused, desperately, managing to claw a few bits back together.

-It shouldn’t stab him; it relates to… acquisition? He tried to grasp what… Origin… had told him before, and to his deepening unease found they slipped away like fog, held from him somehow.

Tian Cang Di stood there, pensively, considering him.

-Please don’t kill him… that refrain still continued

Even as he stared at Cang Di, another horrible thought emerged in the back of his mind, from nowhere almost.

-Din Ouyeng was there, when we got buried…

-There are ruins, caves beyond that ridge line. It is the main access through to the depths beneath East Fury, if you were insane enough…

-The caverns where we were would surely connect…?

-Was this whole trial just to find this sword… or somehow related to that old man Mu Shansu!?! Have I been walking around this whole time, with the treasure that ten thousand cultivators are all coveting somehow?

Cang Di continued to stand there, just looking at him, two paces away.

“Thank you,” nodding politely, Cang Di took the remains of the sword carefully in is hands… considering it carefully – and promptly grunted in surprise, the colour draining from his face.

-My whole family… the whole of West Flower Picking town will be dead without a grave…

“TREACHERY!”

He had no idea where the yell came from except that the words echoed through his body, scattering what remained of his qi.

“VILE MISCREANT!”

“BUREAU DOG!”

“SIR CANG!”

Cang Di, who had staggered back, caught his foot on a rock in the grass and fell over.

Shaken as he was, the sword tumbled from his grasp, slipping to the ground between them–

“…To ruin.”

Familiar, mocking laughter whispered in his ears as the blade hit a rock on the ground and shattered like glass into half a dozen fragments, leaving only the hilt and cross piece intact, which bounced back off the rock and landed nearby scattering fragments of silvery metal as they went. In the same instant, he experience a gut-wrenching sense of severance and something inexplicable intruded between him and the sword.

One of those beside him screamed and fell back as a sliver of the blade hit their leg. Another piece landed quivering in the ground beside Cang Di, nearly cutting him, all while others who had been rushing in scattered at the hapless, horrified scream of the disciple who had been stabbed.

“Assassin!”

“Villain, you dare attack, destroying your weapon to harm Sir Cang?”

“This is showing no face to the Shu Pavilion or our Jade Gate Court!”

“Unbound by oaths? Rebelling against Heaven!”

In the same instant as the shout stunned his surroundings, a hand arrived at his back and four swords were pricking at his vital points.

-Destroy what weapon? It was…

He was, to his shock, suddenly able to move somehow; the control that had been on his body earlier totally gone.

“He–”

The palm strike from behind smashed into his abdomen, scattering his dantian in a flash of agonising pain and robbing him of words. He spat blood as his qi recoiled as strength… His mantra, which was still operating beyond his touch, and the symbol in his mind’s eye shivered and his dantian started to reform rapidly, the ruined meridians reconnecting. The pain, that should have been crippling, was, he had to concede, nothing close to getting smashed by that accursed club over and over again.

“Who is a villain?” Tian Cang Di hissed dangerously. “You seek to act on my behalf?”

A terrible pressure oppressed everything. The night air became leaden and oppressive as Tian Cang Di stood up, shaking his head and looking half shocked, half annoyed. Most of those present, even the other ‘seniors’, were locked in place, pale and sweating. The four around him, pinning him down with blades, and the person standing over him, who was Din Ouyeng he realised, were all shivering faintly, straining against something.

“But… Senior…” one of the juniors nearby quavered, barely managing to avoid kneeling under the fearful oppression.

“You were…”

“All I see is a broken treasure sword that scattered after trying to draw some qi to repair itself?” Senior Zi, who was standing beside Din Ouyeng and blocking his path with a broad, two-handed jian, sneered.

“Is this the capabilities of the discipline gate of the Imperial Court?” another, clean-shaven scholar dressed in robes that looked a bit like those of the Pill Sovereign Sect of all things added.

“Screaming as if unmanned, over a broken weapon?” a woman’s voice snickered from the crowd, her comment met with nervous chuckles.

“Enough.” Senior Bo, who had been standing nearby seemingly unfazed, snapped. There was a sense of cracking in the air around him and the oppression dispersed.

“While I am ‘gratified’ that you are so willing to act on my behalf, step back,” Cang Di scowled, picking himself up. “It is as Brother Zi said: the sword only tried to draw qi to repair itself, yet my qi was perhaps too pure for it and so it shattered instead. Just what were you expecting to have happened, that you act this way?”

“…”

There was an awkward silence as the Jade Gate Court disciples, perhaps concerned that their ruse had been discovered, all collected themselves…

Cang Di reached down and picked up the bit of the blade. The formerly black metal was now grey and grainy, the part of him that was dissociated enough to still observe such things noted. Without comment, Cang Di bent the shard and it snapped gently in two with a flat ‘Crack’.

“Everyone calm down.” Senior Bo said flatly.

“Apologies Senior Cang, the difficulty we encountered in the forest appears to have somewhat shaken my sect's disciples… leading them to overreact. Especially given the current… limitations we all seem to be experiencing?”

“…”

The gazes on those around clearly didn’t buy that, he was pleased to see.

-But… limitations? Are their cultivations all really suppressed or something? He found that confusing, because they had been easily throwing around…

“At any rate, this is this and that is that. There is still the matter of other allegations against him,” Senior Bo went on, shaking his head. “Relating to the good name of our Jade Gate Court, and also the death of two Hao clan juniors.”

“That may be the case; however, I also have questions for him,” Cang Di frowned.

“You wish to consult about treasures before we deal with questions of life and death?” Senior Hao snapped. “Suddenly, my impression of Sir Cang is less.”

“…”

Cang Di narrowed his eyes, clearly annoyed at that jibe, before turning to look at him. “This boy… who did he kill…?”

“Two juniors of our Argent Justice sect, members of my Hao clan, Hao Jun and Hao Fang. He has also crippled two more sect juniors,” Senior Hao replied, looking serious now. “So, while I welcome Brother Cang’s concern, this is not a matter for outsiders.”

“You brought Qi Refinement junior brothers into this grand trial?” a woman from beside Fairy Dongmei asked incredulously.

“Senior Fang was a Golden Immortal…” one of the Argent Justice sect refuted.

“This Qi Refinement boy killed a Golden Immortal… What did he do? Anger him to death?” Cang Di asked, sounding faintly incredulous now, as he should.

“…”

There was some awkward shifting, likely because that would mean admitting that it was the sword that had done so.

“Everyone was suppressed to Golden Core outside, Sir Cang,” one of the Argent Justice disciples finally muttered.

“Yes… and in that horrible forest, with these bizarre anomalies that suppress our cultivation, who is to say what can happen?” Sheng Zhao added, bowing deeply. “We were led astray by these Bureau dogs… suffered many problems because of them and were nearly ruined by their stratagem, as you are all aware; what has occurred-”

“The matter remains, he has also accused my Jade Gate Court, and the Kong clan,” Senior Bo said, cutting off those speaking. “Serious allegations, regarding our good name and status, Sir Cang.”

“Indeed, his allegations have already required Senior Din here to swear an oath to refute them!” one of the other Jade Gate Court disciples stated, sounding outraged.

“Yes, Senior Din did so…” others nodded.

“A thing he has been most reluctant to do,” Sheng Zhao added, taking the opportunity to smear him, again.

-Your mother was reluctant! he cursed, still wracked with agony from the blow that had been intended to cripple him. What did we do to offend you?

“There are other ways around that,” Senior Bo said, pulling out the jade compass again. “Senior Zi, please?”

The hook-nosed Senior Zi stepped back, allowing Din Ouyeng to move again and the two disciples beside him… who he noted were entirely fine after being stabbed by the blade shards, moved as well.

“Our Court is the Discipline Gate of the Dun Heavens, Upholding Honour and Righteousness before all. The allegation is that you conspired to harm Brother Kong Ji and Brother Din Yao, whereas you in turn accused them of betrayal and murder against you and your fellows, in your own words ‘for no reason’, at the start of the Yin Eclipse grand trial. Yet both have performed righteous deeds that resonate with our world, uncovering evil and righting misdeeds of our generation to the acclaim of many, whereas you are marked as a rebel against the Imperial Court, found at the scene of grave crimes, and stand accused of rebellion, treachery, murder and banditry,” one of the masked disciples announced.

“In light of the circumstances as they are, we can only rely on more… oblique means, it seems, to assuage you all and ensure our court is not held to be overreaching,” Senior Bo said, sounding a bit resigned now. “This compass, is a child artefact of the Eye of Jade Judgement. If this Han Shu is speaking the truth, it will show it. If he is lying, or has performed grave misdeeds, it will also illuminate the nature of those deeds in the eyes of our world’s heavens.”

He stared dully at the compass that they had brought back out, even more certain suddenly that its previous pronouncement was no good thing.

“These charges and means of judgment seem a bit drastic for a Qi Refinement kid,” Cang Di remarked, frowning, “especially since you just tried to abolish his cultivation once already. Surely that alone is punishment enough? Any further questions can wait until we are not limited as we are?”

Wordlessly, two of the Argent Justice disciples dragged over a sack of pills and the talismans they had divided up from the aftermath of the squirrel’s rampage in the ruins.

“We recovered all these with him,” Senior Hao said simply. “There are a dozen sects here, including our own Argent Hall, the Shu Pavilion, the Thunder Gate… Pill Sovereign Sect and more.”

“…”

“As such, he was given opportunity to swear an oath before,” another of the Jade Gate Court piously intoned. “This I swear before the Eye of Heaven.”

“…”

There was quite a bit of muttering all around.

-What opportunity? Isn’t this cursing me with semantics?? He was now thoroughly enraged in his heart.

Senior Zi, the fiery-haired, hook-nosed man chuckled, looking at the pile of pills and talismans. “If it is just pills from many sects… I wonder what we might see if we emptied out some of your juniors’ rings, Senior Bo, Senior Hao.”

“What exactly was that oath in relation to?” Cang Di interjected, seeming rather sceptical.

-Thank you! He almost screamed in his head.

“This villain alleged that his group, who was tasked to safely guide Brother Ouyeng, Brother Ji… Fairy Luo and various juniors from the Ha clan, were in fact betrayed by Brother Ji, who he believed was called Ji Tantai. He claimed that this Ji Tantai was in fact ‘Di Ji’ and that Brother Din was working with him, that his companions were killed by this Di Ji and that another was abused,” one of the masked disciples added.

“…”

“Those are your words… Can he not speak?” Senior Zi added, glancing at him.

“Villain, repeat your allegations, so these seniors can see your falsity for themselves!” the disciple beside him and Din Ouyeng prompted.

He was about to just call out their obfuscation directly… when an ominous thought occurred.

-Are they trying to catch me out in a lie?

“Din Ouyeng and his companion Ji Tantai killed my friends for no reason, whereupon Ji Tantai revealed himself as Di Ji. The others were chased hither and thither. This Di Ji… abused my friend and junior. Din Ouyeng’s accusation of rebellion is just words. He styled himself as a Din Clan junior allied with the Ha clan and revealed none of his exalted position.” Just as before, the words he formed were his own, but it was not ‘him’ somehow, even if the words spoken were a faithful summary of what he had reiterated before.

Cang Di was staring at him pensively still.

-Please see I am being controlled… please… he pleaded, but nobody called anything out.

Din Ouyeng scowled. “Very well. ‘I was not working with a Ji Tantai, but with Brother Din Yao and Brother Kong Ji. I have no recollection of a Ji Tantai at all.’ – This I swear by the Eyes of Heavenly Fate, who watch over all truth.”

He watched dully as Din Ouyeng repeated verbatim his previous oath, looking utterly infuriated.

“As you can see… a grave allegation that Brother Din has sworn…"

"Di Ji has no association with these matters – This I swear by the Eyes of Heavenly Fate." Din Ouyeng added flatly.

-What the? That’s clearly a lie, he stared blankly ahead, trying to find the obvious loophole that might allow Din Ouyeng to state that…

-Unless it is because Di Ji has no relation to what is going on right here and now?

"Villain, you make Brother Din swear three oaths to refute?" one of the Jade Gate Court disciples spat.

“Uh… seniors?” Sheng Zhao murmured, pointing at him… “Shouldn’t his cultivation be crippled?”

“…”

“That speaks more to Daoist Ouyeng’s incompetence than the boy,” a brown-haired woman standing beside Fairy Dongmei snickered. “Are you not ashamed as a Golden Immortal?”

“Indeed,” Cang Di said drily, glancing at Sheng Zhao dismissively. “His foundation is clearly that of a Physical Path Cultivator; even if he has a dantian, mixing the methods is not uncommon in Blue Water province. As a Dao Seeking cultivator, should you not be embarrassed for your perceptive skills, even with how things are right now?”

“Even so… they do not recover this fast…” Din Ouyeng, who was standing beside him, observed, pulling him more upright.

There was some uneasy shifting around from the onlookers and a lot of shaking of heads, mostly among the Jade Gate Court and the Argent Hall and those on their side of the hill. He did, however, note that a few in the group associated with Fairy Dongmei were also staring at him hard and frowning now. A few here and there were commenting on how durable physical cultivators were, but even they didn’t seem to really credit that his cultivation was visibly re-forming its ‘dantian’ from a direct strike from someone like Din Ouyeng.

-Shit, all I need is someone noticing the symbol and such… he cursed in his heart, finding himself reminded that this had depths it could still plumb that didn’t involve his imminent demise.

-And… how things are right now…?

“…”

“If it is heaven’s judgment that you require… our Nine Auspicious Moons has an artefact that fulfils the same purpose.” Fairy Dongmei noted, narrowing her eyes.

-Thank you! How can someone not find this utterly suspicious at this point! he praised in his heart.

“You doubt the impartiality of Heaven’s judgement?” Senior Bo asked, raising an eyebrow as he turned back in Fairy Dongmei’s direction.”

“Certainly, you are going to great lengths to convince us that this Qi Refinement boy, with a bone age of 27, is a sinner to the extent that even a rabid dog like Di Ji was not condemned,” Senior Zi murmured.

“Convenient as well,” Cang Di added, looking less cooperative by the moment, “that all this has to take place during this strange bar on Soul Sense.”

-Ah… he recalled dully that that was also a thing. There still should be a huge battle going on inland, in the darkness, and the Ur’Vash had raised the restriction earlier just to chase him down, he was pretty sure. Now that that was dealt with, they had probably re-asserted it to deal with Asuraerleth if nothing else.

“Let us say, that this would not be the first time your Court has… put a costume on a cat and denounced it as a wild tiger for their own benefit,” another woman beside Fairy Dongmei added.

“Senior Liling,” someone uncertainly replied, and for the first time, the Argent Hall at least suddenly looked a bit uneasy.

“The Dewdrop Sage Sect has no face to talk here,” a disciple from the Jade Gate Court responded contemptuously. “Be thankful we do not arraign a villainess like you beside this wretch.”

-At least now I know why they are playing this out like they are… If nobody has soul sense, they are all having to take it on face value that… shit…

-But wasn’t I just… soul scanned? Another part of him queried, now genuinely confused.

-Am I not being controlled by something?

-Do I even have a soul now that can be scanned!?

-Ling was controlled bizarrely though, in ways that didn’t seem… normal?

-Is this not a soul art?

-Does the Ur’Vash barrier only stop people outwardly perceiving and using soul power? Confused ideas twisted in his head as he sought to make sense of the impossibility of the commands earlier against what was clearly the reality here.

“Takes one to know one; few are clearer than us on how your Court works,” Fairy Liling stated, folding her arms. “If you wish to disagree, you are welcome to take it up with Lady Kai Han.”

Cang Di opened his mouth, as if also about to say something, but Senior Bo got there first, holding up a hand and cutting off the murmuring from the Jade Gate Court. “You are speaking of your sect’s famous Nine Moons Auspicious Mirror?”

“I have a child artefact on me,” Fairy Dongmei said, producing a pale silver mirror about the size of a plate that presented a holy aura.

“…”

Senior Bo looked pensive, even as there were awed murmurings from those around.

“Very well,” Senior Bo nodded.

Turning to the disciples still holding him in place, Senior Bo stared at him long and hard, as if trying to see through him. The gaze made his skin prickle ominously.

-Please don’t see it… he prayed in his heart, wondering if there were other ways to see through a person that didn’t involve soul sense suddenly…

After some ten seconds, Senior Bo just sighed, then, shaking his head as if still puzzled by something, waved to the disciple who was holding him down. “Cast his blood upon that mirror. Let us see if he is indeed a sinner in the eyes of the auspicious fates.”

He found his arm drawn up and his palm cut and placed on the flat of the mirror–

It went flat black and the same icy feeling surged back out of the mirror, making his vision waver as his body was again plunged into dark water and the fearful, vengeful eyes, inexplicably hungering for him, found him once more.

AVOIDED RIGHTEOUS DEATH!

The words that echoed out of the mirror disturbing the world around them and there was a sound of shattering. When his awareness of the surroundings returned, Fairy Dongmei was being supported by two of her juniors, staring blankly at the shattered remains of her presumably rather priceless artefact, scattered all over.

“…”

-What? Why did it break?

That alone, he was sure was not a good deed. This Fairy Dongmei had seemed to be willing to stand up for what was right along with Cang Di… but, having just seen her presumably priceless artefact smashed on his behalf?

Cang Di stood there, looking shocked.

“Truly the Bureau has widened my horizons…”

“To have committed such a crime… now I have seen a dog.”

“This junior can certainly provide some clarity there…” Din Ouyeng added, waving Ling Luo forward.

“Sir… Din speaks truly, without him and Sir Ji… I would have died thanks to this villain,” Ling Luo exclaimed tearfully. “We trusted them to guide us, and in return, he and several others led us through a den of horrible creatures… trees that exploded and vile insect beasts… When we confronted them, they denied it, unleashed talismans and fled, tearing up the forest and disturbing all manner of horrors. We barely escaped with our lives.”

She trailed off, looking pale and holding her stomach. “I… was… cut in two by one of their stray strikes… only saved by Senior Ji… Many juniors from the Ha clan died… this you all know having met my friend Ha Yun… It is a pity… he is not here to also see this villain brought to justice.”

“Fairy Luo is a noble daughter of the Ling clan,” Din Ouyeng added. “She is someone independent of this mess, fortunate to survive by the blessing of heaven.”

The words around him echoed dully in his ears, framing past events he didn’t even recall. They had fled almost immediately and Ling Luo had been whole then…

“Indeed,” Senior Hao added. “Murdered many juniors, including my clan members and those of several others here, coveted goods, committed treason against our Imperial Court, offended old ancestors left and right, is it any surprise that he has incurred the anger of the world itself?”

“What right does the Shu Pavilion have to interfere in this matter at this point, I ask. That treasure can be debated, but this is clearly our internal affair,” the other disciple holding him agreed. “And Fairy Dongmei’s mirror confirms he has done enough to be considered a sinner before the Eyes of Fate.”

“I trust there are no complaints there?” Senior Hao added sourly.

Looking around with growing horror, he could see quite a few others nodding. Fairy Dongmei was still white and shaking, and those around her were now staring at him as if this was his fault as well.

“Well… that seems conclusive enough,” the disciple holding him remarked flatly.

“Wait–” Cang Di’s voice faded away as he felt a palm connect with his back for a second time.

Chains of silver surged through his body, mapping out his meridians in an instant before turning into silver fire. The sense that came with them was mind-crushing; it cracked open what remained of his psyche like a rotten egg even as he tried to scream. It wormed into his dantian, shattering it a second time. This time, the double awareness of himself and the sword somehow surged again.

The symbol in his mind’s eye surged and he felt his mantra trying to weakly put up some resistance to whatever was done. His dantian began to re-coalesce a second time as his vital qi was drawn out of his bones, the mantra flowing in reverse to try to preserve–

{Seal of the Jade Eye – Lock of Nine Generations}

It coalesced in his mind’s eye, silver-green fire flowing out of it into his bones, drowning him in agony as he felt his awareness of the outside world fade away into nothing. As the seal completed, an eye opened up inside his mind and the hungry darkness from before radiated out of it. With it came a terrible, mind-flaying intent that scoured through his memories and experiences, infiltrating everywhere before locking onto the symbol in his mind’s eye and then, upon spotting the Ninefold Origins martial manual, shivered with almost greedy anticipation.

-Origin! His first instinct was to cry out for her…

[So you had this kind of thing as well…] A voice murmured in his mind, [How amusing… and you thought that giving up those things to that Cang Di could save you?]

Awareness crumbled further as what remained of his consciousness found itself drawn around the symbol and the manual even as it slid through the greedy grasp like fog.

-H…How? A part of him wailed, unwilling to accept.

A moment later, that hungry eye settled upon it, and the whole seal in his body suddenly tightened.

[Well, no matter, it is done now…] The mocking laughter tore through him as darkness welled up around him, his hopeless question unanswered.

His last, lingering thought was strange and haunting...

He stood in a courtyard… watching a dark-haired, beautiful young girl only few years older than him make her first bows to several old men. Beside him, his brother, a few years older than him, was listening to his uncle talk about how he was betrothed to the girl…

She made her last bow, and somehow their eyes caught… and she smiled at him.

Juni…

That last thought, a sad, unrequited thing… sank with him into oblivion.