The end of the first campaign of the Huang Mo war came with the climactic clash between Mo Zhao, the Celestial Demoness, Dao Mother Binary Ruin, granddaughter of God Slaughtering Lunatic, and the heroine of Huang, Saintess of Emei, Huang Guo Wuli. These two Heavenly Venerates clashed on the very spot where the whole conflict began, and while neither fell, no side could clearly claim victory. The obvious loser, was, in the end, Red Splendour great world, where Mo Zhao, in a final act of pettiness, damaged the stability of its sun, forcing Huang Wuli to seal it away with her own two hands or let it collapse into a stellar nightmare that would have distorted the star map of a dozen surrounding powers.

Thereafter, things appeared calmer for a while. However, the forceful manner of the Mo clan’s actions did not sit well with many righteous factions and so, determined to make some final restitution on their pride, the errant daughter of Mo Zhao, Mo Xiao, was tracked down to a minor little great world on the edge of the Kong, Huang and Meng clan’s territories.

Two attempts by influential friends of members of the younger generation of the Huang clan were made to embroil Mo Xiao in troubles met with failure after failure as they vanished without trace. Finally, after an eighth such mysterious disappearance, a Celestial Venerate revealed that Mo Xiao, who many had held as a member of the younger generation, was in fact a Worldly Venerate who had been using her realm to assassinate juniors of righteous factions. With this revealed, the Huang and their allies were enraged and, supported by many other righteous factions, started to search for Mo Xiao to demand restitution.

So began the Second Campaign of the Huang-Mo Wars.

-Excerpt from ‘100 Heavens of Death – The Second Campaign of the Huang-Mo Wars.’

By Scholar Fei Quan.

~ Ha Yun – Somewhere in the Badlands near Valinkar ~

“I am,” Ganlan Meixiu shook her head and smiled. “I am just not one from your world.”

-Another Great World sent cultivators into this trial?

That was the first thought that flickered through his head. Reality, however, asserted itself and the logical explanation occurred a moment later.

-Idiot, probably she is from a lower world, an Immortal ascender that is either an independent cultivator or doesn’t want to say what sect she is from.

There would almost certainly be a few like that drifting around given the number of participants.

-Still, the fact that she is here means she is from our generation, which likely makes her a talent of some big sect. I wonder how she fell in with these demons?

He glanced around at the others who were mostly just kneeling around, looking at the horizon or frittering about, gathering sticks and such. A few were sat nearby, skinning some small rodents and what looked disturbingly like a scorpion the size of a cat.

-That said, she is remarkably familiar with these demons… Has she been here a while? That was the only rational explanation for her apparent familiarity with these people.

-The fact that they all speak a kind of Easten as well…

“…”

Ganlan Meixiu stared at him for a long moment, then just shook her head. Somehow she seemed a little bit put out by his lack of response.

He smiled as best he could, trying to ignore how naked he was.

“…”

“I suppose that is a topic for later,” she sighed, shrugged and turned back to looking out over the rolling hills at something he couldn’t see.

They all stood around in silence until it was almost awkward before she spoke again, this time to a female demon with horns on her head and a mask covering her face: “Mayumi, I assume you can’t find any others?”

“You think this is easy? Whatever happened last night has thrown all the alignments into chaos. They are settling slowly, but Heian-kyo was not built in a day!”

“I suppose we have no idea what that was about either,” Meixiu muttered.

“The sky shook, the eye of dreams narrowed, the heavens are angry and we mortals can only bow lower,” an old masked demon, seated on a nearby rock, smoking a pipe of all things, replied.

“So you said three times already, old geezer, like I didn’t see the same sky as you,” Meixiu sighed, rounding on him.

Looking over at the old demon, he noted that behind him was the rock he had originally been lying beside. Its flat surface held a large painted figure of a woman, outlined in white, with dark hair, constellations patterned across her whole body. Her forehead was marked with a circle. The real oddity was that she had six arms: Two held a moon aloft; one held what looked like a rope that transformed into a river of stars; another held a white circle and the last two held a lotus and a crude lamp with a flame of white inside it.

“It is as you say, Honoured Ash’Kald,” the old demon said, blandly.

“That someone or something managed to tweak the noses of those terrifying old ghosts is beyond doubt.”

“…”

Meixiu shook her head and just went back to watching whatever she was watching, leaving him sat there, rather awkwardly in silence, as she muttered to herself, pacing back and forth and staring at the sky and the hills again.

“The question is why!”

“If it is because of their dumbass territory dispute with the mountain tribes, I swear I will hang that warchief by his own guts… Maybe I should just do that anyway…”

The others seemed totally disinterested in him, just going about small tasks and continuing to prepare food. So he went back to pondering the rock, which was the most interesting thing here in a way.

All around the woman were painted in constellations in a riot of various animals and figures, painted in such a way as to follow the contours of the rock itself. In fact, the woman was also painted in the same way – her form given curious relief without a single bit of stone ever being carved as near as he could tell. Before her was a small bowl that held some burning herbs and in another pot, a bunch of fruit.

Below it, painted in yellow and white was a swirling design that almost looked like words.

After staring at it for a full five minutes about all he had discerned was it carried a weird intent of some kind and it clearly wasn’t Easten. Looking around a bit more carefully, he also noted that there were a bunch of rocks scattered nearby that were far too regular looking… In fact, the rock that the woman was painted on was kind of regular as well.

-Is it the ruin of a small building?

He peered around for a while longer, turning things over in his head. He was still wondering about that when a figure shoved a wooden bowl into his hands.

“You, eat,” the grass-cloaked, masked figure said flatly.

The food, which had come from the nearest fire, was, for lack of a better word, rustic. A muddy brown soup with chunks of meat in it he chose to believe were small rodent rather than scorpion. What was surprising was that it was rich in qi – as rich as a low grade replenishment pill, in fact.

That reminded him that he had a storage ring.

-Or I did have a storage ring, he acknowledged. Bizarrely he had no sense of its presence, but it was still ‘connected’ to him somehow.

-Figures, as a cultivator she is not going to leave us with storage rings.

Grimacing, he took a mouthful of the food with his fingers and was surprised to find it salty and faintly spicy. By the time he was done savouring the taste, he realised he had finished off the whole bowl and was wishing there was a bit more besides.

-I am hungry? That was a surprising revelation in its own right, but the saltiness of the soup also made him realise a second thing.

-I am thirsty… I should not be experiencing thirst as a Golden Core cultivator.

He had a moment of mild panic thereafter until he managed to discern that his core was intact and, as far as he could see, he was hale and healthy beyond feeling weak, drained and having a bunch of nasty bruises from the exploding arrows.

“Um… Senior Meixiu?” he asked.

“Yes?” she glanced over in his general direction from where she was still seated, staring at the horizon.

“Why am I feeling hunger? As a Golden Core…”

Her laughter cut him off, leaving him confused.

“What is so funny?” one of the other demons asked her.

“He asked why he is hungry,” she replied in Easten, once she had stopped giggling

“…”

There were a few confused looks before the one who had asked also started to laugh, although in a less amused way, and nodded, as if that made perfect sense somehow.

“In short, the realm of this world is much higher than whatever place you came here from,” she chuckled. “You can probably supplement things for a while with pills and such, but once they run out you will need to start eating and drinking again. Maybe sleeping as well if you’re really weak or run out of stamina.”

“But…?”

“But you can persist on qi?” she nodded, cutting him off. “You can, but how is your absorption rate when balanced against the amount your body is now burning here.”

“I…”

“Well, you won’t work that out for a bit I guess; you’re only at Core Formation. It’s an acceptable core, although your foundation for it is kind of trashy. You must have come from a pretty low realm world?”

“I came from a Great World,” he refuted, because Eastern Azure, while it had its issues, was not exactly a low realm great world by his understanding of it.

“Meh, it’s useless to argue with frogs about the wells they croak in,” the horned woman laughed a bit dismissively from where she was sitting nearby, tossing stones onto some kind of chart in what was presumably a divination art.

“Ignoring her,” Meixiu waved her hand, “you can cultivate just by walking around and breathing in this space. The issue is that every aspect of your existence here will burn qi, literally. The reality of this place is much more clearly defined. Until you become an Immortal you will need to eat, drink and whatnot, at least semi-regularly. Even after that, if your foundation is on the weaker end of things.”

He wasn’t sure what to make of that. It made a weird kind of sense, but…

“In any case, whatever was perpetrated last night, east of us, seems to have temporarily exacerbated the issue. It will probably stabilise after a while, but until then, everyone is just a bit more mortal because of it,” she sighed and a few of the other grass-cloaked figures spat in disgust, clearly unimpressed with current circumstances.

“What… about the others?” he added, glancing over at where the other cultivators were arranged in a sort of line in the shade. All of them were still unconscious.

“They will come around when they come around,” she shrugged. “Probably not until we have travelled a bit further, it must be said. Whether they live or die depends on what happens when they wake up.”

“The ones with me-?”

“Over there,” she pointed behind him and he turned around stiffly, realising that there were in fact another bunch, also slumped against a rock, all unconscious, which included ‘Brother Ci’.

“So why am I the only one awake?” he wondered, searching for anyone else he recognised and drawing a blank.

“Because you are pathetically weak, and thus much easier to fix,” Mayumi interjected.

“I would have put it a trifle more diplomatically,” Meixiu mused, “but that is the essence of it, yes.”

“But you shot at us…?”

“Ah…”

There was some laughter from those nearby and Meixiu, Mayumi and the old demon all shook their heads as if this was some great joke.

“That wasn’t us,” Mayumi sneered.

“If this lot was shooting at you, you would be dead,” Meixiu agreed.

“But… I…?” he frowned, because those memories were very patchy, he had to admit, tinged with strange flashbacks and bizarre recollections of his battle with…

“I recognise Senior May-umi’s voice from my memories?” he pushed, trying to work out how to pronounce her slightly odd name in Easten.

“She delved you, to see what the deal with your injuries was after you didn’t wake up,” Meixiu nodded. “Don’t think about it too hard. You are young and your mind is… squishy, shall I say. You suffered some extreme trauma as it is, and whoever put you back together did an interesting job.”

“It’s remarkable he was walking around without drooling,” Mayumi grunted, adding something else in a language that he couldn’t grasp, but which made the others laugh.

“If I were you, I would start working out how you offended whoever did that,” Meixiu nodded drily. “Because certainly by the standards of what was done to your memories, that person was not your friend.”

The question of what had been done to his memories after the ridge line was indeed-

The memories in his head wavered for a moment and he felt faint and dizzy.

“For fuck’s sake,” Mayumi snapped, turning to stare at him with her unsettling mask. “What did we just say?”

-Right… mind squishy, he groaned inwardly, holding his head in his hands in case it decided to fall off.

“Then who attacked us?” he mumbled, to try to turn his thoughts away from that.

“An Ur’Vash scouting party, of the Ten Tigers tribe. Likely they came to see what had led to the restrictions on that place vanishing. There is a big tribal battle going on out east, kicked off day before yesterday between the mountain, jungle and plains tribes. They were probably passing by and feared that the ancient graveyard otherwise known as ‘Valinkar’ had been disturbed or the mountain tribes had a hand in it. They shot you all up and were likely taking you back for questioning. They dislike us about as much as they dislike your lot, truth be told.”

“It’s what they deserve for forgetting this place is our land, not theirs,” another of the masked figures sneered as they grabbed a smoking rodent out of the fire.

“True, but they think like people who build houses,” Meixiu chuckled. “It was the same back home. When you build a fancy house, suddenly everything you can see from the roof becomes yours… and anyone else there now works for you. It’s like a congenital disease.”

“Only until you shoot them off the roof and burn it down,” another snickered.

“Very true,” Meixiu nodded. “That is the price you pay for building them usually.”

“…”

Listening to that, not entirely sure what to make of it, he found himself returning to what they had said before about eating.

“Uh, if it’s recovery, I have pills…” he ventured warily. “Perhaps…”

“You want to trade? Unless you can make them, what you brought is worthless,” Meixiu shrugged. “Inferior goods contaminated with otherworldly energies. They will sustain you for a while, but in the long run do more damage than good.”

He self-examined that while he was familiar with alchemy, he knew next to nothing about it practically speaking. Even his herb-lore was largely academic, the majority of his missions since he was promoted to five star rank being just excuses for the Ha clan to extend their branches via the West Flower Picking town’s Hunter Pavilion.

-Except, he shivered inwardly, if she looked through my memories they know that already, so why are they even?

“Certainly, there are probably some useful things in your storage talisman, but that is a discussion for later,” Meixiu mused.

“Uh, then, can I ask why you rescued us?” he finally asked.

“…”

“Because I felt like it?” Meixiu said blandly.

-Like I believe that, he complained inwardly.

“…”

“Okay, I guess because you lot are an oddity. This place is vast, but nobody has ever made it in here, not since… well…”

“Not in a very long time,” the pipe-smoking demon chuckled.

“So you want to know how we got in here?” he asked, suddenly nervous, because even the leaders among the groups back in their camps had not seemed to know.

“Ah, I know that much, that’s easy – there was a big dimensional distortion and poof, you all landed in the jungle I would guess,” Meixiu said.

“Ah… but you said you were from another world?” he was confused now.

“Yes, I am not a native of this one, just like you,” she nodded.

“I…” he trailed off and sighed, no longer sure what to say there; he had assumed she was just someone from their trial, who had fallen in with this band…

-Could she be someone who fell into an anomaly a long time ago and ended up here?

That seemed like a distinct possibility.

“That still doesn’t answer what you…”

He trailed off as Meixiu turned, waving for him to be quiet, and stared off into the distance again.

“It seems they are done,” she said finally.

“Ah, at last. How long does it take to chase down some orcish vermin,” Mayumi sighed.

“Half a day when they scatter like cockroaches and run for dark corners, it appears, not that this can be considered at all empirical,” Meixiu laughed in a way that made his skin cold.

In the distance, there was a faint rumbling and a sense of shifting qi. It flowed around them and a moment later two scorpions, maybe ten metres long each, melted out of the rock of the hilltop and disgorged half a dozen more grass-cloaked figures carrying bows.

“Took you long enough?” Mayumi snapped to a tall figure who was leading them, dragging a…

It took him a second to recognise that it was a body, missing its arms and legs. The grey-brown skinned figure had a flat face, slightly pointed nose and pointy ears. It was also still alive.

“This one runs like a rat,” the grass-cloaked figure grumbled, tossing the figure down hard enough to make it bounce on the rock and groan in pain.

“Didn’t get any more?” Meixiu asked.

“Boy shaman made death ritual and fled back home with a few important ones. Unless you want us to chase them through the night it seemed a bit pointless,” another scrawnier figure beside him added. “In any case, this is one of the junior chiefs of the Mountain Thumper tribe.”

“Quite a long way from home, isn’t he?” Mayumi frowned. “A pity the shaman got away; they are useful.”

“Their tribal war has not be going quite as well as they intended. Apparently the Hundred Legs and the Thunder Eagle tribes took a big injuries,” the taller demon growled.

“Who are they even fighting anyway?” Meixiu asked, still staring off into the distance amid the rocky hills.

“Six Eyes and Blood Eclipse tribes, mainly,” the scrawny demon shrugged.

“They will be at it a while then,” the old demon interjected. “Unless that bitch Asuraerleth shows up.”

There was much spitting on the ground and making of obscene gestures around the ‘camp’ at the utterance of the name.

“Yeah,” Meixiu mused. “Or until the Blood Eclipse tribe’s old lunatic starts bringing out his ungrateful dead. Then they will call it quits and go home claiming a big victory and act like everyone doesn’t know they had to run away from his big serpent.”

“Depends on whether the failure in the wards that were caging away the ancient Death Watch on these lands was just local to here or if it goes all the way along the Badlands,” the scrawny demon added.

“Well, in that case, they are going to be staying in those festering, lizard-haunted jungle valleys far longer than they planned,” Mayumi noted, spitting in the fire.

“That would be amusing,” Meixiu agreed, before looking sideways at the old demon and Mayumi. “However, rather than dividing off, I rather suspect the opposite has happened.”

“…”

“What, that the entire Krista Tonnitrue region is now… here?” the scrawny demon sounded somewhat perturbed at that, even as he struggled to work out why that name seemed familiar.

-Krista… Tonnitrue? It sounded like very old Easten, which would make it... ‘Thunder’ ‘Symbol’ or ‘Sigil’?

He was momentarily surprised that his recollection of those pointlessly boring lessons regarding the ancient history of Yin Eclipse even remained in his mind at this point.

-‘Crest’… As in Mount Thunder Crest?

He turned to stare at the distant haze of swirling clouds on the horizon that were probably the mountains and jungle valleys they had come from.

“Is there an East Fury?” he asked, almost without thinking.

“…”

Many heads turned to look at him.

“The East Fury Peaks are about 5,000 miles east of us, beyond the desert that once used to be Evershire,” Mayumi frowned.

“South Grove Pinnacle?”

“Belaris Mons is about that far, but further south-east. Nobody has ever gone near it and lived as far as I am aware. Anything that goes within visual sight of the peak keels over dead. Happily that’s also right on the far side of the Evershire desert, so might as well be the edge of the world for all anyone can care,” the old demon mused, peering at him intently. “Why? These are not names a brat like you should know?”

“Could they have walked out of an anomaly?” the scrawny one frowned. “They look a bit like members of-?”

“No, they are fresh blood,” Meixiu shook her head. “I mingled with them a few times and learned a fair bit.”

“What other names do you know like that?” the old demon asked, turning to stare at him from behind its mask in a way that made him suddenly very aware of his nakedness.

“…”

-Have I just made a terrible mistake? He muttered inwardly, curling up a bit under their intent gazes

“Snowjade? And Golden Promise Spire?” he ventured warily now.

“Snow Jade…?” Meixiu frowned… “Ah, the Nepheris Mons… the Ice Nephrite mines in the peaks in the Belthorne Mountains. That would likely make the other the Soul Gold mines from the mountains on the coast near Renlath?”

“I believe they were called as such at one point,” the old demon mused.

“Interesting, interesting,” Meixiu murmured.

“Most of those are just ideas on the horizon now,” the old demon mused. “Or forbidden areas like Belaris Mons and East Fury, reachable only if you no longer value your life or travel through very unstable lands.”

“Ah.” Meixiu frowned suddenly.

“There is a problem?” the old demon frowned.

“No… One of my soul clones was just grasped and dispersed. It seems that someone actually took that bait,” Meixiu said.

“Dispersed?” Mayumi frowned before waving a hand.

The others swirled the grass cloaks and the fires dispersed as everything scattered as if the camp was abandoned. In a single fluid motion they all dived for ‘cover’ and pulled the grass cloaks over themselves leaving him, Mayumi and Meixiu standing there alone.

Meixiu considered her appearance for a heartbeat and tossed off the grass cloak, pressing a hand between her breasts. Her loose cloth tunic shifted and became the garb she had worn before. Mayumi sighed and her cloak became a bit more substantial somehow, blending into the rocks around them. As he was still gawping, she took two steps over to him and bit her lip, then drew a strange symbol on his back with her blood that sank into him and made his body flush.

Space rippled and a moment later ten masked figures dressed in travelling robes led by a youth in dark green and grey robes stood in the midst of the camp.

The leader, who appeared to be young despite his face being covered in a mask, glanced at him and the green pupils of his eyes sank into its mind-

His limbs turned to lead and he collapsed like a puppet that had lost its strings, unable to move.

In that instant he was suddenly seeing double somehow. In the first instance he saw what he just had. In the other, the ten now wore Sheng clan robes and the youth was a fresh-faced scholar in his early twenties with blue eyes and dark hair wearing the robes of member of the Sheng clan’s Azure Astral Dragon sect.

-How am I?

-Ah, whatever she drew on my back?

It was like there was a second ‘him’ isolated inside his head now, looking out and able to see clearly what was going on.

“So it was you,” the youth mused, his gaze now locked on Meixiu, who had been frozen in the act of standing up next to him.

-She has my storage ring in her hand? He blinked in surprise for a second time.

The new arrivals apparently did not notice either Mayumi or the old demon who was still sitting cross-legged on his rock, puffing his pipe as if nothing was wrong.

“Clearly this wench is part of a group conspiring to rob others, Brother Pei,” one of the group said with a salute to the leader.

“Well, this was somewhat unsought for, but it is an opportunity,” ‘Brother’ Pei mused, looking around, his gaze again falling on him for some reason.

Clearly dismissed out of hand, he could only watch as the youth walked over to Meixiu who appeared to be frozen in place. Without comment, he tore the front of her garment open and grasped the necklace around her neck, pulling it off the chord. Even from his current vantage, he could make it out as the one she had taken from the room, leaving the blade for him.

The youth scanned her a second time as the others fanned out, picking through the ‘ruined’ camp, and then grabbed a bag from her waist, opening it and tipping out almost thirty storage rings into the air where they swirled around his hand as he considered them then the various cultivators who were lying naked around here.

-Shit… did I get marked somehow? His mind trembled faintly under the calculating gaze of the Din clan disciple.

“What shall we do with them?” another masked figure called over, gesturing widely at those Meixiu and this group had, if not rescued, collected.

“Well, they can serve a purpose, certainly,” ‘Brother Pei’ mused, looking around at the various cultivators.

{Jade Chain of Nine Fates}

Walking up to Ganlan Meixiu, ‘Brother Pei’ planted a talisman between her bared breasts, his hand lingering just a hint longer than it need to before he withdrew it. Green serpents flowed across her body, sinking into her eight gates and her third eye.

“Kill everyone here except Ha Yun,” ‘Brother’ Pei commanded Meixiu.

Without comment, she walked past him, towards the nearest cultivators who were lying next to two of the masked figures his ‘eyes’ were trying to tell him were from the Sheng clan. Arriving beside them, she reached down and pulled up the scholar who had been translating runes in the ‘tomb’ and-

He stared blankly, just as shocked as ‘Brother Pei’ when ‘Meixiu’ exploded into gore and her body seemed to flow through itself, reforming in the blink of an eye, holding the two masked cultivators beside her by their necks. In one smooth motion she bloodily tore the two unfortunates’ heads off and sent half their spines and innards scattering across the rocks where they screamed soundlessly and flailed as a bizarre twisting eye symbol made of ‘Meixiu’s’ blood shifted on their faces.

“You have big balls, brat, messing with me,” Meixiu, now totally naked and splattered with blood, sneered as she turned to look at the youth.

“H… how!” the youth, stunned, exclaimed in a strangled manner and made a strange seal with his hands, which did nothing.

“…”

“A hidden Ancient Immortal!?!” one of the others sounded shocked as they all scrambled up and drew out their own treasures.

Clearly panicking now, 'Brother Pei' pulled out another seal and cast it at her, talismans appearing in front of all the other cultivators as well.

{Nine Jades Auspicious Lock}

“Do you only know how to use talismans made by others?” Meixiu chuckled, stamping her foot on the ground.

{Isolate – Land – State – Transform – Auspicious – Bend – One}

{Sanctuary of One}

A strange formation-like pattern of symbols blazed on the ground around her, seeming to melt into the land all around them. The seals the cultivators held emitted nine shimmering jade dragons that surged towards her, connecting with her body in the instant before the formation seemed to complete.

Meixiu screamed as the strange seal swirled around her, the dragons’ heads aligning with her eight gates and her dantian, their tails all finishing at the point where her third eye would be in her forehead. Her body seemed to ripple and then she fell silent.

“Thankfully this demoness has no other means,” another sighed, looking relieved.

“Who has no other means?” Meixiu had lifted up her head again, a truly disturbing smile etched across her face now.

“Ah?”

“What?”

“…”

“D…devil-!”

The uncanny sound of her laughter echoed around the rocky hilltop even as her body exploded into gore a second time and reformed yet again, with her now standing right next to where she had been as if nothing untoward had happened. The bizarre afterimage of the dragon lock hung in the air beside her for a few seconds before dispersing into shards of green glass that then burned away a moment later.

“A ‘Fate Locking’ art, well, it is to be expected,” she seemed almost disappointed. “Do you lot only have talismans and strength based on the comprehensions of others? I feel embarrassed to acknowledge myself as a practitioner of the Heavenly Path in your presence.”

“…”

The group of attackers just stood there looking poleaxed as Ganlan Meixiu wiped some of her own blood off her face, looking from one to another with what could only be called amused mockery.

“How…” ‘Brother Pei’ sounded confused. “Your soul…”

“Ah, you are referring to the name I was awarded when I arrived in that land, lost and alone,” Ganlan Meixiu sounded off somehow, and there was a lilt to her voice that had not been there before. “An old fisherman pulled me out of the water, found me clinging to the last remnants of that floating coffin that they dared call a ship and from then on I was Ganlan Meixiu.”

A strange, twisting rune shimmered in the ground beneath her feet.

“Anyway, it seems you have only cheap tricks so it is my turn,” she tone made the air quiver unnervingly all around them and suddenly the ground bloomed, reflecting it everywhere.

{Growth-Vitality-State-Transform-Isolate-Bloom-Sever}

{Chaotic Overgrowth}

A shimmering formation-like arrangement spun out from around her feet. Withered grass turned green and the parched trees blossomed. Vitality hummed as the air around them became humid. The symbol itself became a shifting green flame that reflected in her eyes for a moment and then became a mirage of a little lamp over her head holding a strange green gold rune that read ‘Emerald Land Mortal Physique’.

The cultivators, who had all started to charge at her, screamed as their qi turned chaotic before his dissociated eyes. One after another, they were consumed by the fearful disorder of the surging qi in their vicinity, their struggles rendered useless in the face of the sheer inability to control the energies within their bodies as far as he could see.

“Mother! I-!”

“No… I….”

“Please, have…

“Nooo!”

“I-!”

Their last words were swept away amid the rustle of new life blooming as the land seemed to devour them whole. Their bodies collapsed as the grass flayed their flesh, vines cracked their bones and bugs consumed everything that remained even as bizarre, screaming forms silhouetted in verdant vital fire shimmered in the air like mirages for a-

“DON’T DISPERSE THEM!” Mayumi, who had almost been forgotten, even by him, called out from where she was seated.

“Ah, bugger. That’s an excellent point,” Ganlan Meixiu replied, looking a trifle annoyed, and the vitality surging through the surroundings abruptly reversed itself.

Before his shocked eyes, their bodies pulled themselves back together as the very vegetation that had ruined them before now bound their bodies up again, undoing the catastrophic damage dealt in the blink of an eye. Even the two she had ruined before were whole again as they lay crumpled around the camp.

“You… you… what…?” ‘Brother Pei’, who was pale and drawn, struggled up, finally noticing Mayumi.

Two others also managed to rise, their shaking hands holding treasures that were clearly trying to replenish their vital qi.

“They are suitable for my needs,” Mayumi chuckled, picking up an innocuous clay jar that had been sat beside her.

He had previously thought it was just a water or wine jar.

“You… demon… our heavens…” ‘Brother Pei’ gasped.

“Will what? Judge me? You think this is your world?” Mayumi grinned, getting up and walking over to them before unplugging her jar, which he observed had a rune on each side.

Their surroundings twisted faintly and the restrained cultivators were drawn into it, leaving all their clothes, storage rings and even, he was shocked to see, treasures that had been in their bodies scattered where they had been. With each one that was pulled into the jar, the symbol, carved on four sides, blazed bright and brighter until at last ‘Brother Pei’ was also absorbed.

Mayumi closed the jar with a *thock* sound, cutting off the lingering sound of their screams abruptly, leaving only the rustling of wind in leaves and the chirp of insects.

“…”

“Interesting,” Ganlan Meixiu said, picking up the leader’s talisman that had been hidden in his robes.

She stared at it for a long moment before tossing it back down, allowing him to see it carried the mark of the ‘Jade Gate Court’ and belonged to a ‘Din Pei Feng’.

She shook her head and looked around the hilltop.

“Everyone okay?”

“Kids today sure are hasty,” the old demon chuckled as the others all sat up, dusting off their cloaks.

“Maybe…?” he mumbled, finding he could move again, even if his limbs now held a rather familiar and quite unpleasant chill as he rubbed them to get feeling back. The sense of dissociation had vanished at least.

“Greedy hands make for greedy ends, as my teacher would have said,” Meixiu muttered, picking up what remained of her ruined gown pensively and then looking back at the rings in her hand.

Mayumi shrugged, patting the jar, and checked it was securely closed. “I guess I should thank them though: all of them had manifest souls and all sorts of accumulation. With this I can actually make some progress on my Hundred Ghosts Jar. I’ve been stuck at 31 since, like, forever. Perhaps we could look into hunting down a few more of these morons?”

“Are you surprised?” the scrawny demon chuckled, “You must have a shaman from every tribe within a thousand miles in that pot by now.”

“If the opportunity arises,” Ganlan Meixiu mused, looking at him pensively now.

-Shit, if they were from the Din clan, did Din Ouyeng send them to bring me back? Because of the memories of that time?

That thought, now he had a vague idea of what had happened on the ridgeline, was… not a pleasant one.

“In any case,” she sighed, tossing the rings into her pouch along with the talismans and waving for the others to gather up the rest. “We probably shouldn’t linger. If they have friends, the next lot might not be that incautious.”

The old demon nodded and vanished in a wisp of shifting space.

A moment later, the hill below them shifted and he felt his legs go weak again, as half of it slowly stirred to become… a scorpion. It was almost 70 metres long and everything they were sat upon was in fact on its back, including the painted shrine nearby.

“I don’t believe we ever introduced ourselves, Ha Yun,” Ganlan Meixiu said with a remarkably girlish giggle for what he could only assume was an Ancient Immortal as it started to move.

“This is my friend of many years, Mayumi, a shamaness. The old chill geezer is ‘Old Grass Scorpion’, the ‘Chieftain in Name’ by… well, default. And I, Ganlan Meixiu, am the strategist of our little Grass Scorpion Warband.”

~ Arai & Sana – Cailleach’s Hold ~

Symbols…

Arai sat on a rock, staring at the one she had drawn on a slab in the harvest area at the rear of Cailleach’s hold. All around her were other slabs, scattered mostly at random, covered in them. Each was drawn as best she could manage, and that was the problem in a way. The longer she stared at them, the more she found.

In the first instance, this had been born as much out of a desire to be able to teach Rusula. That said, the primary objective in the back of her mind was really to improve her own comprehensions in at least some of them to the point where she had less reliance on the recordings in her jade tablet.

“Naive,” she groaned to herself and stretched, glancing up at the sky.

It was some time after noon, it seemed. Someone, Sana in all likelihood, had left her a bunch of food nearby, which was nice at least.

“Naïve, naïve, naïve!” she repeated three times more for good measure before just rolling backwards off the flat rock to lie flat on her back, staring at the sky above as her voice echoed around the sinkhole.

“On the one hand, Grandmaster Li, I must salute you, because you were not exaggerating when you said that the fidelity of recorded moments was as good as reality. On the other hand, this ignorant daughter has a hole in her head and failed to see the nuance in your words.”

She lay there for a full five minutes, just doing nothing, before sitting up and dusting herself off with a sigh.

“Well, I suppose it is what it is,” she complained to the world at large. “Do not the sages say ‘one who complains of good fortune too much in the morning may find themselves feasting on shit for dinner’?”

Those kind of sayings had always struck her as funny, back a lifetime ago when she flipped through them, learning her letters. They were markedly less funny now, it had to be said.

Grabbing the food, which was a meat stew with fried bread, she ate it and considered her progress for the last session. Setting aside the question of the ‘ancient’ symbols – those from the various sequences Eleanora, Maria and Edward had shown – she had decided to instead focus on the series recorded from carvings around the academy. For starters, the degree of ‘knowledge’ that had gone into carving them appeared to be substantially less, and they were also much more straightforward, in a derivative sense, compared to the ‘ancient symbols’.

Nowhere was this clearer than in the symbols she had spent most of the morning considering: ‘State’ and ‘Isolate’.

Both of them sat in what she had come to think of as the ‘controlling’ group of ancient symbols, along with others like ‘Link’, ‘Transform’, ‘Flow’, ‘Gather’, ‘Focus’ and so on. All those symbols were heinously dense when she considered their intent, giving her a headache akin to staring off a cliff edge into ever-shifting half-darkness when she meditated on them for the most part.

‘Link’ had been another candidate, but it was hard to use in imprinted arrays and its derivative symbol was just a simplified version of the ancient one. By comparison, ‘State’ and ‘Isolate’ showed up three separate times in the ancient symbols yet all their variants in the derivative sets were, as far as she could see, descended from a singular one – the sequence Edward had drawn.

This was why she had gone to those two symbols. All three ancient ones had similarities, yet very subtle differences that made her eyes feel like they wanted to bleed and to work out why, she could only look to the difference between the ones in Edward’s sequence and the academy hall.

The academy sequence had three variant symbols, ‘Formative State’, ‘Neutral State’ and ‘Destructive State’, all of which could be found in the old symbol in various ways. By comparison, ‘Isolate’ had a complete sequence of its own that had nine she had recorded and she was sure after a week of staring at that symbol and the ancient one she had found another two besides.

The reason for this, she was pretty sure, was because ‘Isolate’ could mean quite a few different things, and popped up in all sorts of weird places in the arrays she had access to through arts books.

Frequently it was actually integrated into other symbols to form hybrids that did a very specific thing. ‘Fire’ and ‘Isolate’ merged together in a very specific way was a key part of the root array used to make the ‘Flame Blast’ art from the manual she had given Rusula for example. In that case, as near as she could tell ‘Isolate’ and ‘Fire’ had been merged to manifest the basis for the blast itself by controlling when the fire qi exploded.

That pattern was reflected through all the other arts in the book, so it was clearly a comprehension of the creator of the arts themselves. When she had tried it, however, she had melted a rock into a puddle of glowing goop that made the surroundings taste faintly of lemons for two days. If she walked near that spot she still fancied she could still hear phantasmal clicking and crackling sounds of some unknown yet probably rather vital aspect of ‘reality’ breaking – three days later.

Today, she had at last managed to find the commonality between ‘Neutral State’ and ‘State’, which was a mercy in a different way, because meditating for too long on that symbol made your mind go a bit weird. ‘State’ seemed to have a close affinity for feng shui. Much like staring at compasses for too long could make your thoughts turn to mush and lead to you seriously divining which boot you put on first in the morning, staring at the ancient version of ‘State’ for too long put you at odds with your understanding of the world around you in bizarre ways.

“If you continue to stare into the middle distance, I am going to take you back home and sit you down facing the wall,” Sana’s voice cut through her reverie again and made her sigh.

-Indeed, staring at ‘State’ for too long is dangerous in a different way alright.

“What’s up?” she asked her sister, who was now perched on a rock nearby, munching on what looked like a lotus seed biscuit.

“I ran out of clay again,” Sana sighed.

“Again?” she raised an eyebrow at that. “Didn’t we bring back like… half a ton between us just three days ago?”

“Furnace go boom, much boom, more boom than clay,” her sister said vaguely.

“Maybe you should sit here staring at rocks and try setting fire to grass instead?” she asked.

“…”

Sana took in the depth of her endeavours for a long moment.

“Nah, you’re good,” her sister said blandly.

“…”

Her hand twitched towards a rock, but she resisted it. Not only would it be petty, but her sister’s principle was able to do some downright weird things. Pezvak had shot arrows at her for a whole morning and declared that her strength was innately blue in a way that made him feel orange. Having to smash her own rock to dust would be embarrassing.

“Well, this still makes more sense than the Ur’Inan colour philosophy. The fact that Rusula gets better at arrays if she draws them in blue is just…” she mused.

“I’ve given up questioning that in a weird way,” Sana sighed. “When it became apparent that it works for us when other Ur’Inan are around is also kind of creepy.”

Old Bones had explained that to them, over a jug of alcohol, confessing that they were not the only ones who found that trait of the Ur peoples downright weird at times. In a way, she supposed, it was just as rational as mortal feng shui and in fact had quite a bit in common in that regard. That that also had a vague relation to the ancient ‘State’ symbol was something she was deliberately not engaging with for now. One complex idea at a time was enough.

“So… you need my presence to haul dirt?” she sighed.

“Well, I figured you might fancy a change of scene. Oh, Cailleach wants to see us as well.”

She gave the rock with its ‘State’ symbols another look and shuddered inwardly.

-Yep, it’s possible to stare at that for too long.

“Ookie,” she hopped up and stretched again. “So, same valley as before?”

“Maybe, probably the same river at least,” Sana nodded.

“You are heading out for more clay?” Cailleach asked, looking from one to the other.

She avoided jumping, because Cailleach had almost appeared on the spot, or at least arrived unnoticed.

“Yes,” Sana grimaced. “News travels fast I see.”

“Well, things are no longer exploding regularly,” Cailleach chuckled, looking around at the slabs. “It does not take a genius to work out you either succeeded or ran out of materials. I expect I would have heard about it already if you succeeded.”

“…”

Not for the first time, she had to wonder about Cailleach, because while she was a gracious, if elusive host, she occasionally had days like this, where she was… curt. That said, they were guests here, so she had scrupulously avoided so much as asking about it directly and just kept those thoughts to herself.

“Anyway, I have two things for you,” Cailleach went on. “You did us something of a service and you are guests here, who, the odd explosion aside, demand remarkably little.”

“It is nothing, Lady Cailleach,” she bowed politely, wondering at the context of that somewhat.

She watched as Cailleach surveyed her efforts, looking pensive for a long moment before turning back to them and pulling out two hide scrolls and what appeared to be two stone pendants.

“First thing is this,” Cailleach tossed her over one of the scrolls.

Opening it, she saw a complex diagram that connected seven symbols in a swirling arrangement that looked somewhere between a flower and a geometric pattern.

‘Isolate – State – Self – State – Link – Sever – Isolate’

She considered them for a moment and found that they slowly arranged themselves in her mind’s eye to form a singular symbol.

{Sanctuary Link}

“The two talismans go with it,” Cailleach’s voice cut into her reverie. “Put your vital qi, soul intent and a bit of your principle on them.”

“…”

They both eyed her, not exactly dubiously, but curiously.

“They allow me to find you and for you to communicate over long distances. It is limited to a few words, but if you run into trouble outside venturing away from the foothills of this peak for some reason, it will probably save your life.”

Bowing politely, she accepted her talisman and Sana accepted hers, putting a drop of blood onto it and then sending a thread of her soul intent and principle into it as instructed. The symbol on the pendant, carved in the shape of a dragon swirling around a mountain, shimmered for a moment.

“To send a message, you just need to focus on that person in your mind’s eye and so long as they also have a talisman attuned to this scroll, you can speak to them using 20 words or less.

“Test,” she pushed her qi into it and sent a message through it, intending for it to go to Sana.

“Test,” the echo shimmered next to her as the other talisman received it.

“Works,” Sana sent.

“Works,” she got back a moment later, a ghostly, hollow echo of her sisters voice radiating out of the talisman.

“Can you make the words received silent?” she asked.

“They are silent; you are just hearing them like that because of the way this place is,” Cailleach shrugged.”

“…”

“Thank you,” she bowed politely.

“Thanks for the talismans,” Sana added, also bowing.

“It’s nothing…” Cailleach waved her hand idly, looking around again at the various array symbols she had been carving, even pausing to pick one of the ‘State’ ones up.

“When you come back, I will find some time to talk to you both about those arrays,” Cailleach mused, looking at it for a moment, then at the place she had ‘corrupted’ a few days prior. “I cannot claim to be a great expert in their use, not compared to some anyway, but I can at least prevent you from making more incidents like that.”

She had to laugh a bit nervously at that, as did Sana.

“Well, the second matter sort of relates to that as well,” Cailleach added, recovering the first hide from her grasp and passing her the other one.”

Opening it, she found a diagram for what looked like a jar, with an explanation regarding a series of runes and the pattern that had to go around them.

“These are not easy to make, but this is a blueprint for what we sometimes call a ‘ten ton jar’,”

“It’s a storage device?” she blinked.

“Yes, although it doesn’t work in the way you are perhaps hoping,” Cailleach sighed. “As I said before, no complex storage device formed via enclosed pocket spaces will work down here. Even I cannot make one and my comprehensions regarding spatial laws are better than most.”

They both nodded, a bit sadly in truth. That was a conversation they had had early on and Cailleach had explained when they were talking about ‘treasures’ that there was in fact a blanket restriction on this whole place. Only those ‘authorised’ were permitted to have storage devices. It was a feature of the seal that caged the whole place, according to Cailleach.

Originally, the reason was quite logical if rather scummy. The place had been a mine, then a prison and in both cases had contained lots of things that the owners didn’t want unauthorised people walking off with. They had inscribed those restrictions into the very bedrock of the land.

Later, that restriction had actually been reinforced, albeit for a much more utilitarian reason – the space of this place was fundamentally unstable. Thanks to the damage done to the Spirit Vein by the mining, complex pocket dimensions and their ilk had become serious liabilities. If they collapsed, destabilized, presented oddities or just became disrupted they could cause chain reactions that had the potential to devastate whole sections of the mine with spatial avalanches as they resonated with bizarrely compressed or uncompressed spaces.

This had then been repurposed by the academy for the additional reason of teaching students how to work in these environments without relying on such devices.

“So, what does this jar do?” Sana asked, peering at it.

“There is a loophole of sorts,” Cailleach chuckled. “This is not a ‘pocket dimension, but rather a twisting of existing space slightly. They are much more stable but can only hold a single thing.”

“Ah,” she understood now. “So it can only hold water or…”

“As originally conceived, no, it cannot even hold water,” Cailleach chuckled. “However, that is not a lot of use, I am sure you can agree. In any case, you are right, these jars are used to hold a single substance usually – up to a mass of about ten tons. They do this by bending the space within using the array inscribed on it.”

They both considered the diagram which was quite detailed in its instructions… pending a small problem.

“What language is this in?” Sana asked eventually.

“Wind Script,” Cailleach said. “Old Bones can provide you the particulars on learning it – probably some of the Ur’Inan, can as well.”

“So we have to make one?” she mused.

“Well, eventually, I suggest making your own, yes. It is a good practical exercise,” Cailleach nodded, smiling slightly. “However, we do have a bunch, two of which I can lend you. It seems nobody thought to give you one the last time you went out for materials.”

She resisted looking a bit put out at that – it was true that Old Bones and Cailleach had not been around to ask the last time Sana had gone out. The other occupants of the valley were not exactly sociable in any case, unless drawn together by Old Bones or Cailleach, and mostly avoided them, or were politely distant.

“There are a few quirks with them though…” Cailleach added, waving for them to follow her.

As they followed after her, into the storage halls off the side of the sink hole, Cailleach continued to explain how the jars ‘worked’. You had to be careful about what you put in them apparently, because they would just stop storing anything if you put two things in them. Secondly, even if the jars were just about portable, you couldn’t do anything about the weight which would reflect whatever was stored in it. Thirdly, they could only store a material according to its mass, not weight.

That latter point confused her until Cailleach explained what that meant. Mass was a measure of how much of something was in an object, whereas weight was just how heavy an object was. The latter could vary with circumstance, but the former did not unless you took some of the material itself away.

Apparently, these were things they would come to realise naturally, when they started poking around at the inner workings of spatial ‘rules’ and ‘laws’, but for now it was enough to know that the jars, if filled to ten tons, would literally require them to be able to lift ten tons of that material to be able to transport it back.

Finally, after quite a while of Cailleach rooting through various rooms, they found two such jars which she was satisfied could be emptied out. They were about the size of a 50l water jar such as she would have carried in her storage talisman long ago.

The jar sizes themselves were quite rigidly tied to the amount that could be stored as well, as it turned out. Smaller ones were much harder to make than large ones, tended to be much pickier about what constituted a ‘single’ material or substance and could, if you overdid it, be rather unstable unless working with exceptional materials.

Mercifully, Cailleach also demonstrated a much more ad hoc version for dealing with smaller sizes, which was in fact something she had considered herself as she thought about ‘State’ symbols. You could take a metre hide that was sufficiently durable and inscribe an array comprised of ‘Isolate’, ‘State’, ‘Gathering’ and ‘Cage’ and then deposit a pile of material on it. So long as the hide could completely enclose the material and you could provide it with qi, it would reduce the volume and weight by about half.

They could not, however, nest them inside each other and had to be careful unpacking them.

Cailleach warned them that that would make the two spaces destabilise and cause a small spatial collapse if you put two such arrays inside each other. It was not on the level of an actual storage ring breaking, like she had warned them earlier, but it was enough that they might lose an arm or a leg if too close, and probably cause themselves other unforeseen injuries.

“If these work, though, how come storage rings and the like don’t?” Sana asked, as they made their way back out with the two jars.

“Size, mainly, and the effort involved. Setting aside the fact that the jars are just examples of folded space, not a filtered pocket space anchored to an object. The prohibitions work on a very specific set of spatial signatures. If they made them too general you run into other problems and also it becomes harder to pinpoint things like storage rings with the wards restricting it,” Cailleach mused. “They double not only as a restriction, but a means to track every spatial pocket of that kind in this place within a certain tolerance.”

“So anyone with a storage ring could be tracked?” she added.

“Anyone with any kind of ‘storage device’ at that scale could be tracked, yes, and their location visualised.” Cailleach nodded. “It was a way to stop the ‘locals’ and basically anyone undesirable from possessing one. If you found one and didn’t immediately hand it over to a controller, the guardians would be deployed and eradicate that person and anything else they felt like on the way there, according to some of the survivors I met over the years.

“And before you ask, even I don’t know what the exact parameters were. They purportedly decommissioned much of it when the academy took over, and such rules were only used to restrict devices in very specific areas. As it turned out, that meant they just deactivated it and that vile thing was able to effect what it has. Before that though it was apparently good enough that no device smaller than a ten litre jar was good, though.”

“Why didn’t they care about larger devices then?” Sana asked.

“Because it’s hard to smuggle a large container out without it getting searched.” Cailleach sighed, pausing to stare at the sky above. “No teleport magic, no illusion magic, no spatial magic or anything like it. People tried, I am sure, but if you got caught, you got imprisoned here – for life. Everyone you were immediately affiliated with or knew would be interrogated. If one person stole from here, their whole family was likely to end up with life imprisonment here. Right down to their pets.”

“…”

“That’s… horrible” she muttered, with Sana nodding in agreement.

“Didn’t that mean people would frame others?” her sister asked after a moment’s further consideration.

“I would imagine both got imprisoned if caught,” Cailleach snickered. “Unless the person doing the framing had friends in the right places in all likelihood. Those in control didn’t care who was innocent or guilty. Just that they retained sole control over this cornucopia of riches and made it abundantly clear that it was for them and no others. Theft from this place was met with absolute retaliation until people just accepted that any designs on the riches coming out of here was impossible unless you were a Meltras, a Belthorne, a Renlath, a Reborin or one of their cronies.”

Thereafter, Cailleach explained a few other small matters regarding those events, then left them to prepare for their trip.

The excursion itself turned out to be rather rote, which was just fine by her standards at this point. They travelled about twenty miles into the mountains, along one of the winding valleys, until they found the bed Sana had been previously quarrying, exposed in a series of river-cut cliffs.

While the Ur’Inan spent some time hunting and foraging or just relaxing in the river, watched over by Pezvak, who had now recovered enough to venture out as well, they filled the two jars up.

It was interesting to observe how their ability to store only the singular material was really quite convenient in instances like this. Picking rocks of the clay was a rather boring job usually, because it had to be done without qi so as not to damage the unaligned nature of the material. Using the jars they could just shovel clay into it slowly, letting the jars’ limitation sift out the rocks as they went, speeding up the process quite significantly.

The main issue was, in fact, transporting the full jars back. Not because they couldn’t carry them – they were strong enough when using their mantras and qi to lift them – but because the frames they had made for them, while constructed out of spirit wood, were still far too weak.

In the end, they just had to carry it in their arms, which was rather tedious. The Ur’Inan for their part used some of the ‘storage hides’ to transport their own scavenged goods: fish, spirit herbs and some hunted qi beasts and cores. It was well after ‘dinner’, in ‘Hold Time’ terms at least, by the time they made their way back, sweating and exhausted.

It wasn’t until the afternoon of the following day, however, that Cailleach made good on her promise to talk about arrays with them. She sat, staring in a slightly glassy-eyed way at the ‘Isolate’ symbols again, considering the depths of the intent in the recorded version when compared to what she had drawn when Sana plonked herself down beside her and put her hands over her eyes.

“Gah!” she pushed her sister away, who then skipped out of range, giggling.

“You could just say hello like a normal person,” she griped, shaking her head.

“And here I was concerned in case you were crying tears of blood,” Sana pouted.

“Only on the inside,” she sighed, noting Cailleach stood nearby, looking amused.

“Well, I said I would talk to you about what the various academy runes represent, but in a way I changed my mind,” Cailleach mused, walking over to sit on one of the rocks. “Instead, I am going to talk to you about how they slot together and why they are the way they are.”

“Like, how they only fit with certain frameworks?” she frowned.

“No, actually, this is even more fundamental than that,” Cailleach shook her head, her white, plaited hair shimmering faintly. “My input on the ancient symbols, as you call them, would be more hindrance than help in truth. However, I am sure you have noticed by now that the symbols from the academy are rather… derivative.”

“We have,” Sana nodded.

“Have you worked out why?” Cailleach mused.

“Complexity?” she mused, considering Isolate. “The ‘ancient’ symbols all have their own kind of intent, which makes them remarkably malleable in a way. The derived symbols on the other hand are fairly singular and require you to put your own intent into them and then at a certain point the two mesh?”

“That’s… pretty good for where you started from,” Cailleach nodded. “Go on…”

“Uh…” she had to pause for a moment to put her thoughts in order again, then continued. “Well, the ancient symbols are dense – they look quite straightforward, but every little detail matters. They can be drawn more crudely, as we are doing, and they will still work, but they are nowhere close to as ‘efficient’ as they could be? So, the derived symbols were later generations simplifying those original, complex ideas down into chunks so others could learn them more easily, or perhaps so they could be used more conveniently for specific tasks, like the ten ton jars you gave us?”

“Good, you did think about that!” Cailleach nodded, looking happy.

“…”

She had to admit to being slightly relieved on that point-

“That is a good way of looking at it,” Cailleach nodded. “However, what if I told you, for a fact that all those academy symbols you are looking at there were derived from only five ancient ones.”

“Eh-!” It was Sana who exclaimed before she did.

“In fact, you have seen all five already,” Cailleach added, drawing a series of symbols in the air.

‘Myriad – Gathering – Transformation – State – Boundless’

{Unity Transformation Seal}

“Wait… that’s-!” she stared at the diagram that Cailleach had drawn, because it was remarkably similar to the one from which their symbols had been derived.

‘Myriad’ was ‘Metal’ and ‘Heavenly Yang’.

‘Gathering’ was ‘Water’, and also ‘Earthly Yin’ and ‘Fundamental Absence’.

‘Transformation’ could be read as ‘Emerging Vitality’ which was also ‘Wood’ or ‘Life’.

‘State’ was ‘Nascent Potential’… ‘Energy’ and thus ‘Fire’.

‘Boundless’ was ‘Matter’, which was also ‘Fundamental Order’… and ‘Earth’.

They connected together, flowed through each other and, now that she stared at them like this, had elements of each other within them. The elements themselves were almost secondary to the underlying principles.

“Uh…”

“And with that my work is done!” Cailleach chuckled, making to stand up.

“What! NO!” Sana almost shrieked, “You can’t do that, then just waltz off… explain ieet!”

She was still staring at it, wondering how something quite so obvious had not occurred to her before. The answer was itself rather obvious, she had to acknowledge at last. She had simply gotten too bogged down in the idea of formations again and been trying to keep things simple to the point where she was deliberately not engaging with things.

-And I even saw that State had a relationship with feng shui, she groaned inwardly.

“But this can’t have been all the symbols that the Academy had?” she frowned, thinking of what Edward, Eleanora and Maria had shown, never mind Elaria.

“No, you are quite right; it was commonly acknowledged that the academy had nine truly archetypal ones, though most came from royal bequethal. It was less than the Royal Academy at Gallicia or the Lothringar Grand School and quite a bit less than the Renhallen Imperial Scholastica who claimed to have 18,” Cailleach agreed.

“But we have a list of almost a hundred…” she frowned. “Unless some of those are greater than others.”

“They are.” Cailleach confirmed. “Most of those are also derivative symbols after a fashion, the comprehensions of those drawing them rather than the real, original things.

“Edward was Grand Duke of Evershire, one of the greatest battlemages of that era. Maria Renhallen a descendant of the founder of the Renhallan Imperial Scholastica. Crown Princess Eleanora Grey was a remarkable scholar of theoretical magics and one of the most influential in her generation among the northern continents three great powers. Elaria Grey, the 2nd Imperial Princess, the ‘Black Magician’ was the youngest ever Principle Elder of the Orthodox conclave. Despite their flaws, all of them were figures who could reasonably claim to stand at the height of that era in the history of Aertha Majoris.

“What you have in that tablet is valuable in a way, as much because it is associated with them and speaks to a greater than ‘expected’ knowledge of those methods than many ascribed to their associated powers.

“As such, what you have in your hands is important not so much because of what it is, but who is doing the telling. I could show you most of those symbols as well, or versions of them. So could Old Bones, if you were determined to force him to do something other than drink and fish all day, but we… do not have their brand recognition,” Cailleach scowled, her narrow face clouding over and the air growing a bit chill for a moment.

-Did she not get on with them? Or is there more to it than that? She wondered suddenly.

Cailleach had said she was associated with the academy. However, the scowl that Cailleach had just had reminded her rather concerningly of the weird look her father had sometimes got when he took to ruminating about the Ruan clan.

-And isn’t that somewhat at odds with what she said before? Sana’s voice shimmered in her mind.

“…”

“Anyway, we are talking about symbols, not them,” Cailleach added, giving her a level look before shaking her head.

“The key thing here, is that many of those symbols share a common root. Frameworks are… not quite what you think, although it is understandable you are using them like you are.”

Putting that from her mind, she turned to thinking about that – turning over what Cailleach might mean.

-Not what we think? We were using them to connect symbols…

-Wait…

“You can connect symbols directly, by finding the common points between them?” she muttered.

“The frameworks are designed to connect clusters of linked symbols efficiently when they become too large for common links?” Sana asked at the same time.

“You two are fast on the uptake; they would have hated you in the academy,” Cailleach chuckled, seeming quite pleased all of a sudden. “Those fellows loved to break everything down and feed it piecemeal, never trusting to the intelligence of their charges.”

She turned her eyes back to the five symbols and the framework Cailleach had drawn.

“It’s… not a five symbol array, is it,” she said at last, tracing different patterns through each symbol.

“It is not,” Cailleach beamed. “It’s a 25 symbol one.”

“You actually watched that process happen in reverse although it’s no wonder you didn’t understand it; the idea of ‘Returning to Origins’ is not a new one, nor one exclusive to the Heavenly Path. However, wherever it appears, it may look ‘simple’ but it is never ‘easy’ to effect.

“But we could never activate a 25 symbol array,” she pointed out.

“That’s why these ancient symbols are so sought after,” Cailleach explained, waving her hand around at her various efforts. “Five symbols linked as one, creating a common symbol that feeds all aspects, are one, more ‘original’ symbol. It is a practical manifestation of the idea of ‘Everything is returning to its origins’. The complex becoming simple. That is why they have a deeper intent because there is more meaning behind what is shown, up to the point where that ‘meaning’ acquires a form of its own.”

“So there is one original symbol?” Sana asked.

“Yes,” Cailleach nodded. “You are standing in it. It is all around you.”

“…”

Her sister just looked at Cailleach as if she wasn’t quite sure whether the old woman was messing with them.

“No, really, you would call it the Heavenly Dao, the people of Aerth Majoris by turns called it the ‘Omnicausal Construct’, ‘The Origin Spark’ and even ‘God’. The former are rather simplistic ways of looking at it, and the latter a farcical idea dreamed up by some old villains to better control people.”

“People worshipped these symbols?” she frowned.

The idea of worship and faith was not unknown to her by any means. Veneration of your ancestors for example or the signs of the Heavenly Dao, the Taiji and such. The Buddhists also had such methods as did Taoists who adhered to the philosophical aspects of the Heavenly Dao, rather than the practical methods of utilising its myriad manifestations.

“Yes, that is an excellent way to put it,” Cailleach giggled, “Although not in the way you mean. They worshipped the idea of symbols and believed that they were a gift bestowed upon only those righteous before their progenitor, who they called ‘God’. As a result, they co-opted the reality of things into a cage by which they could control others, dangling the promise of ‘God’ in front of them, while hoarding the knowledge that made up that idea only for them and their selective chosen.

“The people of that world were very good at making cages for others,” her mirth turned into a derisive sneer, leading them both to glance at the sky involuntarily.

“In any case, that is not a thing you need be concerned over. The point to be made here is that symbols can be linked, without frameworks, and that some symbols...”

“-are more linkable than others?” she finished.

“Exactly,” Cailleach nodded, not seeming overly concerned at her interruption. “You have already seen quite a few examples even if you never realised it until now.”

“The ‘spell books’,” Sana added, as she blinked, nodding as bits fit together now she actually had been provided a ‘corner’ by Cailleach to start organizing them off of.

“Yes, those are a rather proprietorial example; the ‘arts’ or ‘spells’ within them were distilled according to the comprehensions of their creators and then disseminated as such.”

That also, she realised, held the riddle of the different ‘State’ and ‘Isolate’ symbols.

“The ‘State’ symbol was present in association with fire, but should it not be present in all the elemental symbols?” she half answered, half questioned. “And it will be a bit different depending on whether ‘State’ came from the ‘Element’ or the ‘Element’ came from ‘State’.”

“Indeed,” Cailleach agreed. “This is how you turn symbols into ‘arts’ as you call them. You find the overlapping points and create a more comprehensive symbol out of them.”

“So… what we were doing before, was linking clusters of symbols with frameworks, when it would have been more efficient to overlay them directly?”

“Yes… and no,” Cailleach shook her head. “Your idea is right, but there is a reason a lot of later teachings use frameworks as you were. Try it and see with a simple set of symbols, say ‘Earth’ and ‘State'.”

They both took those symbols and considered them.

She linked them together in a sort of spiral using a circular framework and considered it for a moment before activating it and turning the rock she had done it on into rock dust with her application of intent. It didn’t take much of her qi to do.

Next, she tried to find the common points and link them directly. Even though she was really quite familiar with both at this point, she found she had to struggle quite a bit. When they finally did join, the efficiency of the ‘array’ was quite a bit worse than it had been previously, even if the qi expenditure was a bit lower.

“You see the issue?” Cailleach said, considering their efforts as her rock turned a bit friable and Sana’s cracked and the edges flaked.

“The former just requires us to know the symbols and understand how they join up… but the latter method is much more reliant on our comprehensions of the symbols themselves?” Sana muttered.

“Yes,” she could only agree there.

“Indeed, and at a singular level, the latter way is truthfully much more efficient. However it has two distinct problems. Can you see what they are?”

“Size,” she said promptly, because that was something she was struggling with already.

“Indeed. When you have to draw the links, keep things isolated, and make sure it all joins properly, size and efficiency are enormously important. You can get complex things very small, but that again takes a lot of practice,” Cailleach agreed. “And the second one?”

“…”

She thought back through what they had seen…

“Harmony?” Sana spoke up before she did.

“Yes, harmony. Some symbols are more sympathetic than others, and it can be hard to tell sometimes what was derived from what.” Cailleach agreed again.

“The first method doesn’t have to pander to harmony as much, but the downside is that more complex arrays become burdensome to draw and imprint?” she asked. “They are good for stable things you draw down and set out like formations, but harder to use in battle?”

“Very good,” Cailleach grinned. “They really would hate you in the academy, probably enough to make you teach arrays to first years.”

Setting aside that that seemed a bit counter-intuitive as an approach, unless Cailleach thought that they would mark her out as being ‘overly smart for her own good’, she considered the second way.

“The second way relies more on personal comprehension? So you can make smaller things, more personalised things, but the effect is much more closely tied to your personal strength?”

“Yes,” Sana agreed. “The first way the symbols are almost doing the hard work, are they not? Whereas if you have to find the common points, the harmonious points… isn’t… isn’t that almost like feng shui alignments?”

“Yep, so when you consider the symbols, you should not just look at them in isolation,” Cailleach agreed. “As a final gift for this session, I’ll show you a particularly interesting symbol combination that walks the line between those two points.”

She watched as the woman drew a series of three symbols in the air with her finger.

‘Isolate – Freedom – State’

{Freedom}

“What do you see there?”

Looking at the three linked symbols in their bizarre swirling shape, it took her almost five minutes in the end and Sana still got there ahead of her, which was a touch galling.

“Framework!” her sister said, pointing and tracing a swirling line in the air.

“The framework types are the sympathetic alignments. That’s why some are better suited to various symbols, isn’t it?”

“Yep,” Cailleach nodded standing up. “And with that, I do indeed believe my work here is done – for now. When you have grasped this a bit more, we will talk about the second thing I can show you. How to cast arrays from any part of your body.”

~ Huang JiLao – The depths beneath ~

*Drip*

*Drip*

*Drip*

If he closed his eyes, Huang JiLao thought he could, if he really taxed his abilities for self-denial, convince himself that the liquid all around them was water.

-Yes, red water, that just happens to taste of iron and salt.

“Come on, you call yourself a cultivator and this makes you squeamish?” Mo Xiao snickered from nearby.

“…”

They sat in the middle of what he could only call a hellscape. The masterwork of one person mainly, who was crouching down amidst the ruined buildings, next to a large spider-like thing, poking around in its guts looking for the ‘core’.

The ruined settlement in the cavern was redefining for him what the concept of ‘ruin’ was. Everything was plastered in blood, gore and occasionally, bits of falling demon. The initial attack had come from a horde of branded, rat-like demons, hidden even from Mo Xiao by whatever had sealed their soul sense until they came boiling out of the darkness to try and bury them in bodies.

There had been a few seconds of confusion – mostly Lu Xiao cursing and using a barrier of some kind to keep the area around them clear.

After that, the whole thing had been disturbingly academic.

Mo Xiao took the lead and just killed anything that came within arm’s reach, covering for the remaining two, himself and Lu Xiao, who cut out cores and stored them away as fast as they could. It was like walking along behind a travelling butcher. She didn’t use any arts, any techniques, not even a talisman that he saw. One cut, one kill, whether it was a rat, a rat demon, their giant rat things… the larger ash-coloured demons who came after, the spiders, the serpent with five heads, and the creatures made of thousands of twisted corpses...

One cut, one kill. However many times it took.

Now, in the present, they were stood around in the middle of the ruined settlement. Four of them: Mo Xiao, Lu Xiao, himself and what he assumed was the leader of the town. That old demon was missing his arms and legs, impaled by Lu Xiao’s blade against a building wall.

Looking around, he could only shudder.

He had fought some of them, killed quite a lot in all honesty – a few hundred at least, including two nearly as strong as he was. However, the other two had just gone through this place like a hot knife, asking no quarter, giving no quarter and killing everything that arrived in front of them.

-Even their children fought to the end, asking no quarter, just screaming in fury or futility maybe. Shuddering again, he looked away from a snarling face of a demon child, its body bisected nearby, eyes dim in death.

“What do you make of this?” Lu Xiao was standing nearby, staring at a large, rather crudely graven obelisk daubed in designs that looked to have been drawn in blood in the middle of the ruined settlement. It was a symbol that had been replicated widely throughout the whole settlement and beyond and rather put him in mind of a blood red sun being eclipsed by a moon. It was also oddly familiar.

“You’re the one with the map…” Mo Xiao chuckled, still rooting away inside the creature.

“…”

Lu Xiao just returned an obscene gesture and went back to pondering it. The column was maybe thirty metres high, two metres wide on each face and covered in swirling designs that put him in mind of a whole text made purely of moon runes.

They continued like that for a good while – Mo Xiao butchering the spider, Lu Xiao pondering the Obelisk and him… ‘watching’ the prisoner.

“Well, it seems this is actually a Dao Lord spirit beast,” Mo Xiao finally pronounced, hauling a core out of the spider’s back that was almost as large as her head.

“Myriad Elements Devouring Yin,” Lu Xiao pronounced after a quick glance at the core. “Would reach a small fortune outside.”

“Pfft!” Mo Xiao just laughed and stored it away. “Why would we sell it to those mediocre cretins back in Eastern Azure? It’s spoken for anyway.”

“He is healing,” he pointed out, so he could feel useful as much as anything, having just noticed that it had started to regenerate some of its wounds.

Mo Xiao had torn half its face and all its jaw off after it said something in a language he didn’t understand, but she clearly had. It had also tried to get off the wall once, which was why it now had no arms and legs. Rather terrifyingly, it had not escaped, which would be the rational thing to do, but attacked Lu Xiao, perhaps believing her to be the weakest of them.

Mo Xiao had then torn its heart out, core and all, leaving it shimmering on the ground, sealed away with some weird rune.

“Gugugugug…”

The old demon tried to laugh, as much as it was able, given it was still missing most of its lower jaw.

“Gu gug-ahaa-! An’gr… B-dha…” the demon on the rock somehow articulated.

“Shut up, you,” Mo Xiao said as she threw a bit of spider at it, making its body recoil under the impact. “You had your chance to be reasonable.”

“Guaaaaa---!”

It snarled at them all, seemingly undeterred. Even that inarticulate hatred made his limbs numb faintly. He had no idea what realm it was, beyond stupidly strong – it had taken Mo Xiao two strikes to incapacitate it. Even that awful nightmare spider, an encounter that felt like a small lifetime ago, hadn’t taken two hits.

“He has you there,” Lu Xiao laughed. “Hard to argue with that.”

“Ah!” she clapped her hands, making both him and Mo Xiao look at her. “I know where I’ve seen this design before… Well, well, talk about problems queuing up on a narrow road.”

“Ohh?” he asked, curious, because it was also weirdly familiar to him for some reason.

Lu Xiao looked contemplative for a moment before continuing. “150 years ago, there was an emergence of a demon cult linked with some talismans that a bunch of bandits found in a ruin north of Thunder Crest. ‘Blood Eclipse Cult’ they called themselves. They took over quite a bit of territory before people got savvy to them, before being ‘mysteriously’ wiped out.”

“When you say mysteriously?” Mo Xiao frowned.

“I am pretty sure that the Grief of Solitary Slaughter and the Flower of Solitary Slaughter were responsible, maybe the Song as well.”

“Yikes, that’s some big hitters for a little demon cult,” Mo Xiao chuckled, not seeming entirely serious.

“The Solitary Slaughter Sept?” he blurted out.

They were fairly infamous as a dark organisation. More selective than the Sable Sovereigns in what targets they hit, but largely a threat that existed because the Imperial Court had not worked out how to target all of them at once as far as he was aware. That they targeted the Azure Astral Authority as much as the Imperial Court also helped.

Even so, it was a great embarrassment to the Imperial Court that their main claims to fame in this era were the assassinations of the 4th Dun Emperor, the 1st Generation Sect Master of the Jade Gate Court and the 2nd Generation Sect Master of the Red Sovereigns. They also counted a Military Marshal of the Azure Astral Authority during the reign of the 6th Dynastic Emperor.

“They do things like that occasionally, yet almost never bother with the actual demons on the south-eastern continent, probably because they know it would please the Dun clan,” Lu Xiao mused.

“Kguaaaaaaaa—!” the old demon rasped again, miming spitting in his general direction.

He sat there in silence, recovering, contemplating their words as the other two continued to poke around the surroundings, ignoring the old demon for the most part while they looked in buildings and occasionally hauled up bodies to consider them.

“I can only say, this place is weird,” Lu Xiao sighed at last, returning with an armful of stuff and dropping it in a somewhat clear space to consider the ‘loot’.

“Spell books,” Mo Xiao mused, picking up one very crude-looking hide-bound manual and flicking through it. “Well that confirms one theory: these are certainly orcs.”

“That is the name for these… demons?” he asked, morbidly curious.

“Nah, it’s just what the people of a distant land call them,” Mo Xiao shook her head. “Demon is quite accurate really. They are a race created long ago in a land called Ur.”

“Gaaah haaa… Saaarrrr Deeesh,” the old demon impaled on the wall rasped.

Mo Xiao glanced at it, looking amused at whatever it had said before just shaking her head. “There are a few ‘peoples’, if you want to call them that. These appear to be Ur’Vash. The other main ones are Ur’Inan, Ur’Akan, Ur’Sar Ur’Shesh and Ur’Khal. Named after ancient cities of that land where they were brought into being.”

“These ones worship chaos and death, took the name Orcneas, from which others then started calling all such people Orcs.”

“Gugug….saahhrr!” the demon on the wall sneered somehow.

“Do you know God Slaughtering Lunatic, little clay thing?” Mo Xiao sneered, eyeing it.

“…”

“I thought so. Your kind are all bark and no bite, now shut up.” Mo Xiao giggled.

“Ss-har… Gugugh. Sss-sssla-u-ta-Ww-tch,” it rasped faintly out of its ruined throat.

“So you know her as well,” Mo Xiao looked amused. “Do you want to meet her? I can arrange it. She will be very interested to know that this little great world has your lot in its basement.”

For the first time the demon looked… afraid.

“So you are not so far gone you don’t know what you should fear. However, I am a bit insulted really. You fear that Sar clan maniac yet don’t fear my Mo clan?”

“Maaaaaoo?” it gurgled, almost sounding mocking.

Mo Xiao shook her head-

The demons eyes bulged and Mo Xiao stood before it, having never seemed to move. In a single, gratuitous move, she sank her hand through its neck and clasped its spine, using the other hand to rip apart what remained of its body.

“…”

Lu Xiao stared dispassionately as its face seemed to warp and waver bizarrely for a few seconds before exploding in green fire.

“Stupid thing, thought it could prolong things?” Mo Xiao mused, looking away in a certain direction.

“Well?” Lu Xiao asked, although he wasn’t sure as to what-

“Should be a Celestial Venerate, probably from the Huang or the Kong, although there is another in there that appears to be the Sheng if I read the art right. Very indiscriminate. We were definitely led into conflict, because of my blades in fact.”

“Really…” Lu Xiao sounded pensive.

“We can worry about it later. If I have to kill a few old men, I have to kill a few old men,” Mo Xiao sighed. “Certainly those four who just touched my fate, however briefly.”

“Do they know who you are?” Lu Xiao looked concerned now as he turned from one to the other, trying to follow the meta context.

-Someone is meddling from outside? Are they looking for me? Or Lian Jing?

-Ah, don’t be an idiot, he remonstrated with himself, and we were planted here fair and square; unless it’s Lady Shan or grandmother, nobody is going to be looking for me.

“Are they looking-?”

“For you or your little princess?” Mo Xiao glanced at him “Doubt it. You’re Huang Wuli’s grandson, but I doubt anyone has had the balls to tell her you are missing. Whatever they want in here, they certainly don’t want to share it with her. In any case, Ju Shan is someone whose qi I am familiar with.”

“As fun as this little trip down memory lane is…” Lu Xiao cut in.

“Not yet, they are still poking-” Mo Xiao sighed.

There was a sensation akin to a small mountain falling on him. The entire world went a few different shades of colour no sane person was ever meant to visualise and then everything snapped back together. In that same instant he felt as if something in the darkness, which had always been grasping faintly at the edges of his qi, intensified somehow.

Mo Xiao stood in silence, but Lu Xiao grunted and sat down, apparently more affected by this than he was, which was surprising in its own way.

“What just-?” he managed to ask, only to break off and close his eyes as the darkness of the cavern swam around him faintly.

Even with his eyes shut, he had a brief visual hallucination of a starry sky that was about as oppressive and vast as they came. Other echoes and distortions came with it, the sky shaking like a bell had just been rung and rippling in a way that reminded him of deep, dark flowing waters. The depths seemed to go-

Something grasped him and pulled him back, a hand actually slapping his face.

“Idiot, when I saved you, I didn’t do it just to have to explain to your grandmother why I am returning a corpse with death by cosmic enlightenment imprinted in its eyes!” Lu Xiao snapped.

Breathing hard, he refocused on his surroundings and found they were as they had been, a bloody hell of ten thousand corpses amid a ruined town, hidden in unquiet darkness.

“What just happened?” he mumbled, trying to work it out.

“The spatial matrix of this place just got a big weight added to the top of it, pushing everything a bit closer together,” Mo Xiao muttered. “At least it clears up that we are not entirely in the depths beneath Yin Eclipse… at least in the normal sense anyway.”

-Wasn’t that kind of obvious, even before now? He muttered in his own mind, but wisely didn’t say it out loud as two pairs of luminous eyes found him in the dark.

“Well?” Mo Xiao asked Lu Xiao who had pulled out her compass and was considering it.

“Interesting,” she frowned. “A pity you killed that demon though, it might have been useful to-”

“Impossible. I know something of Orcneas. Any knowledge from them is tainted by its very conceptualisation. Ignorance is better,” Mo Xiao shook her head. “What is more concerning there is that that Blood Eclipse Cult you spoke of has a link to them.”

“Really?” Lu Xiao sighed.

“Yes. The strength behind them is something even the old elders of the hall, let alone mother, would be wary of. Their kind have deep roots in the wars of the early eras. Before the ascent of the Seven Thrones and the division of the Heavensward. Killing these demons wherever they are found is certainly a good deed, but meddling with their souls and the rationale of the way they see the world is not.”

“…”

“Okay, you don’t have to lecture me,” Lu Xiao sighed, more deeply. “In that case, it seems we will have to spend some time here.”

‘Spend some time here’ turned out to be three whole days, during which Lu Xiao directed them this way and that. He found himself mostly incinerating corpses, which turned out to be more time-consuming than expected because the realm strength of the place had, if anything, gone up thanks to whatever had occurred.

His status was still pretty beaten up in any case. The remaining damage from the mushrooms and the battle that landed him in here proved to be much more malingering than he had realised. Mo Xiao was fairly sanguine about it, however, stating that when his meridians recovered she could solve the rest of it with only a bit of discomfort on his part.

The main thing, though, was that his pills were suddenly much less effective, as were some talismans. When he asked Mo Xiao about that, she nodded as if this was expected and told him to stop replenishing his qi by outside means and rely only on those items they had collected in here.

It was not until the morning of the fourth day, as near as he could reckon, that Lu Xiao was finally happy with whatever the pair of them had been doing and he was recalled from taking a compass and going and standing for hours on end at various random parts of the cavern.

“So, at least we know what is going on,” Mo Xiao was saying as he arrived back by the central plaza and its ‘Obelisk’.

Half the plaza of the ruin had been torn up to reveal a large formation beneath it. The pair were stood on the edge, considering the symbols that made it up with some interest.

“Yes, this matches what is in the old record. By comparison almost none of the tunnels around here were as they should have been and those that were… were in odd places.”

“Spatial reorganisation…” Mo Xiao mused.

He peered into the shallow area they had exposed and looked at the formation. It covered about forty square metres as far as he could tell, and appeared to be inactive. The nearest symbol was a swirling glyph-like image that put him in mind of the ‘transformation of space’ in some weird way.

“What is it?” he asked, curious.

“A formation in an ancient manner that keeps this space stable,” Mo Xiao explained absently.

“It is pretty rare to see them used like this nowadays – the knowledge has largely been lost to lesser influences and regions or devolved to a state where few would make the immediate jump.”

“So… it’s a treasure of some kind – If it’s forgotten knowledge?” he queried.

“Well, that’s probably overselling it,” Mo Xiao chuckled. “Influences with actual heritage and antiquity, like God Slaughtering Hall and the other Cardinal Palaces… the vaults of the ‘Five Wise Emperors’ and such, have the sorts of knowledge this derives from.”

“Mostly they don’t care to disseminate it widely though,” Lu Xiao added. “There is no reason to share the things which got you to where you are today after all. This kind of thing is certainly what the Dun brat is hoping people produce, seeking reward.”

“Ignorant idiots,” Mo Xiao scoffed. “I bet the old advisors behind the Dun seat are laughing all the way to their spirit wine cupboards at the idea that you juniors would give them this for paltry treasures.”

“Probably not these though,” Lu Xiao frowned. “This formation appears very ordinary compared to the few I have seen elsewhere.”

“It is. It’s a twelve symbol array that is just designed to keep the old ruin in this cavern from having rocks fall on it unexpectedly; the rocks of this place carry traces of tectonic uplift,” Mo Xiao agreed. “You could do this with a formation such as we normally use and it would be just as effective.”

“So… then?” he was confused now. On the one had this was apparently a treasure, and on the other this was apparently not.

“Did they drop you on your head when you were a kid and send you off to be a scholar to make amends?” Mo Xiao scoffed at him.

“…”

“Be kind, those kind of big thoughts are not encouraged in later generations’ youths,” Lu Xiao snickered.

-And now I am not sure which insult is worse, he complained inwardly, staring at the symbol again.

In a way, it was oddly familiar in a slightly ephemeral way, as if he had seen something similar once.

“Ah well, at least it explains why here is here, after what happened,” Lu Xiao nodded.

The pair stared at it for a moment longer, then just turned on their heels and walked off towards one exit of the cavern with surprising speed.

“Ah… wait!” he scurried after them, surprised at how fast even Lu Xiao, who should be four whole realms and a step below him, was able to move when she tried.

“Why does it explain what happened before?”

“It’s a stability formation. The structure of space was reordered forcibly when the dimensions got compressed thanks to those idiots meddling outside,” Mo Xiao replied rather off-handedly. “This whole place is a maze of some sort – like a bunch of reflections of itself, laid over each other, slowly merging back together. The prominent one at any point is the most dominant reflection it seems. In this case… because of this stability formation, this town is ‘here’, and the demons built their settlement on it for that reason.”

“Uh…”

“It’s a collage of different ‘times’ of this place, with the most influential ones taking prominence,” Lu Xiao interjected. “Likely designed for the sole purpose of hiding the heart of the place away.”

“Quite,” Mo Xiao nodded, pausing before a cavern exit then shaking her head and walking on to the next one. “Thankfully those seem to be mostly reflected in the map Xiao here has, so we can still find our way to where we need to go it seems.”

~ Gezrak – Hunter of the Blue Serpent Tribe ~

Gezrak stood on the rise, overlooking what remained of one of the Blue Serpent tribe’s hunting camps. Half the valley was still smouldering; the heat of the fire used to annihilate a decent portion of it was strong enough to make inroads against the almost unburnable lash grass that was endemic to the Badlands here. Below him he could even make out ripple scars on fallen rock slabs where they had started to deform and below it, in the burnt grass, amid the smoke…

“We found a trail, Hunter,” one of the others below called up, pointing up the valley, distracting him briefly.

Shaking his head, he slid down the slope, rocks rattling down as he dislodged them with his passage and stopped himself with a grunt on the edge of one of the burnt areas.

“Send a group to go follow it,” he called over, picking his way through the smoking ground towards what he had seen.

At the lower vantage, with the smoke, it took a little while to find the body, a hunter probably, burned down to just charcoal and bones. Looking around, his impression from up above was borne out, the body was close to the epicentre of the burnt area.

“What is it?” another of the hunters, Ogazk, asked, jogging over, kicking up puffs of smoke and ash as he passed.

“Any other bodies like this?” he queried, grasping it carefully and pulling it over to look at the other side.

“We only found bones, scattered,” Ogazk, who had been parted of the band who came out to check on this camp initially when they didn’t return, frowned. “This one is a ways away from the rest. Killed when fleeing?”

That was his immediate assumption as well; however, the mana disturbance in the air around them was such that he could almost taste it. He wasn’t a ‘Great Hunter’, having not passed his 5th advancement, but he was not far off it.

“You think it a beast?” Ogazk added, looking around.

“Unlikely, given the other stuff,” he sighed, standing up and letting the body fall back.

“You three! Take this one over to the others. See if you can’t work out who it should be!” he called over to three junior hunters who were picking their way through a ruined series of tents nearby.

They groaned, but started over in their direction as he got up and walked over towards the centre of the camp, Ogazk following. There, the ‘other stuff’ was on clear display. All the animals that had been corralled or caged, a bunch of rock wurms, some grass scorpions, wandering spiders, various large rodents and even a horned jaguar were dead, slaughtered rather deliberately with only their cores missing. Nearby, two silos that held gathered mana plants from the landscape were smashed, their contents mostly gone and what remained destroyed beyond any use.

“It looks like a raid, but they didn’t raid like any tribe around here,” he frowned.

“Could it be one of the warbands?” a nearby hunter asked from where they were overseeing the butchering of the carcasses.

“Nah, they would take the meat and we wouldn’t find any bodies unless they decided to set this place up as their territory,” he sighed, checking them off in his head.

“Could be obfuscation?” Ogazk suggested.

“I almost want to say it’s a bunch of the jungle savages, but again, they wouldn’t burn the bodies; they would eat them instead, if they left any trace at all,” he added.

“…”

They stood around in silence, watching the thirty or so younger members of the band scurry about, salvaging what they could. It was precious little, truth be told. No building remained standing, not that they had been very stable constructions anyway. All the silos had been ruined or infilled. The few little fields those who had set and maintained the place between hunting expeditions were totally ruined… even the irrigation traps in the cliffs were…

“They destroyed the camp, deliberately,” he concluded.

“You don’t say,” another hunter muttered from nearby. “You very wise Hunter ind-”

Not bothering to comment, he kicked a rock in the idiot’s direction, enjoying the faint ringing *clonk* it made when it hit the side of his head and knocked him out cold.

“No, they destroyed the camp. We will have to set up a totally new one, and they made this valley largely unusable in the process,” he stated, pointing at the various disparate bits of vandalism.

“Ah,” Ogazk frowned, staring around. “That is good point, they even broke the catchments and put poisonous plants in the water reservoir.”

“Could be Mountain or Jungle tribe after all then?” one of the other hunters, Hezo, interjected as he sat nearby smoking some grass of all things.

“Could be, maybe they want to make a point, given the Hundred Legs tribe and the Thunder Eagle tribe have many disagreements,” Ogazk added.

Shaking his head, he left them to it as they started to debate which tribe might be responsible.

“Hunter Gezrak! Hunter Gezrak!” a distant shout attracted his attention as he continued to walk through the devastation.

Glancing up, it was in fact the junior shaman who had come with them, Yadzu. He waved for the young tribesman to be silent and made his way over at a brisk trot to where Yadzu was standing in the ruins of one of the larger hide and rock buildings.

“Communication,” the junior shaman held up a roll of hide.

Oh, he glanced up and saw the bird already flying away. Somehow he had missed its arrival in the smoke, presumably because he was staring at the ground too much. Taking it, he scanned it and sighed deeply. The message was simple.

‘Quez valley hunting camp has no contact. Junior Chieftain Wezvok missing.’

“It seems we are going to Quez Valley,” he frowned, passing the scrap of hide back to the junior shaman.