The cumulative battle of the second campaign of the Huang-Mo war came on when the heir of the Shu clan, the favoured scion of the Wise Emperor of Shu Shu Tenjin, after much beseeching from all sides, finally entered the fray and in a series of dazzling strategic manipulations succeeded in cornering Mo Xiao, the demon daughter of Binary Ruin on the Supreme World of Kang's Origination in the territory of Ten Thousand Stars Bureau.

Almost immediately the great powers of the Huang, Kong and Fang declared their intention to stand for justice and supported Ten Thousand Stars Bureau, declaring that no retaliation by the Mo clan would reflect on them.

Cut off from her clan, Mo Xiao and Shu Tenjin fought a peerless battle in the skies above Kang’s Origination. He, merely a Dao Ascendant, fought brilliantly, aided by three stalwart companions: Huang Fei, Kong Lihua and Fang Zihao. Over the course of 100 days, the Four Righteous Heroes as they became known, systematically exposed all her schemes and stratagems, even exposing her status as a Dao Venerate. In valour, strategy, means and methods the four displayed to the heavens that they were the match of their opponent in every way until as last she was brought down and grasped.

Hailing their achievement, many clamoured that she be bound so she could wreck no further havoc – however the Heroes refuted this. Shu Tenjin was particularly vehement, refusing three times and stating that Mo Xiao must recant and acknowledge her crimes. While many praised his manner, all spoke forth, elders and juniors of influences alike, worried that the young Prince and the other heroes and heroine, would in their naiveté let the villainess slip through their grasp, for she had displayed so many stratagems up to this point that few knew where to look.

In truth, many were also keen to see a great price paid and for the villainous Mo to lose much face, and with Mo Zhao and others blocked by the might of the righteous powers, others saw an opportunity to strike a fierce blow against the vitality of the Mo clan. Still, Shu Tenjin did not relent and was in the end commanded by the coalition of those righteous powers to stand aside and they determined that she, the villain, had to suffer penalty. The Mo clan had to pay reparations to every world slighted in the war and Mo Xiao had to become the concubine of Huang Gan Murong, a recently ascended scion who had ferocious momentum within the Wise Emperor of Huang’s court.

Thus, did the second campaign of the Huang Mo wars come to a close.

-Excerpt from ‘Ten Thousand Eyes of Blood: A treatise on the origins of the third campaign of the Huang-Mo wars’

By Kong Feishan – Scholar of Kong.

~ Yergak, Hunter of the Moon Sickle Tribe – Sickle Serpent village ~

Yergak of the Moon Sickle Tribe sat on his watchtower on the perimeter of Sickle Serpent village, annoyed at the world in general. It was a bad time to be a village watcher or a scout, honestly. He swigged another mouthful of the local brew, which was pretty noxious – probably brewed out of spider ichor or something – and scoured the grasslands beyond the field boundaries. Three outlying camps had been burnt to the ground in the last two days. Reports were sketchy of the perpetrators though.

Initially the settlement elders had proclaimed it was a rival tribe. They had boundary conflicts with the Blue Serpent tribe and the Hundred Legs Tribe, but those were usually restricted to some brawls and the occasional hunting party getting cut up if they strayed too far to the north or south.

The current Chief of Chiefs, ‘ruling’ this portion of the Vashlagh, was from the Hundred Legs tribe, the younger brother of their current shaman, who occupied a huge stretch of the Badlands to the south east, both above and below ground. He disapproved of tribes under the ‘Hundred Legs’ banner trying to eliminate each other outright – not out of any particular desire to be a good War Chief, no, but just because eliminating tribes that did stupid things was a perk of his position, and he enjoyed it.

As a result, such conflicts rarely escalated past a few bloody brawls and the odd murder so as not to give him any credible reason to act upon it. It annoyed the Hundred Legs tribe enormously and so the various tribal elders of this region who ‘advised’ the idiot had adopted it as an unofficial governance strategy. The common rumour was that they hoped he would get bored and vacate the position to someone who read things before hitting stuff.

It had worked for about four years now, in that the only serious danger to the tribes in this region was the random reappearance of the various ‘warbands’ for the most part. At least it had until a few days ago when someone started burning up fields first of the Blue Serpent tribe and stealing everything vaguely shiny in the process.

He sighed again, surveying the landscape warily again, unable to shake the sense that he was being watched.

Now, they apparently had moved on to here if the scouts from the south west were right. The real issue was that they didn’t just steal ‘shiny’ stuff or ‘yellow’ stuff. That was what raids usually did – they took a few prize animals, maybe looted your stores a bit and pissed in the faces of anyone who got captured, or beat them up a bit and demanded even more shiny stuff. That would be understandable.

Instead they were stealing everything and appeared to set great delight in setting everything else on fire. They also seemed to like killing Ur’Vash watch-scouts in inventive ways.

“Mother of earth, this watch-scout does not want to die in inventive ways, definitely not,” he muttered, taking a swig of the brew and scowling.

Below, there was the sound of horns and drums.

He watched as a column of young tribal warriors with a symbol of a blue serpent on their banners trotted through the fields, their weapons very clearly sheathed. One of them cupped his hands and hollered:

“I want to speak to the tribal leader! I am Ukrash, Warrior of the Blue Serpents Tribe.”

He gave a wave to the war band and several waved back. For what it was worth he also then waved into the village to sign that he had heard the request and that the group appeared to be on the level. Any idiot with ears within half a mile would have heard in any case.

One of the bow wielding scouts, proper elites – a few would accompany a band like this to ensure that they didn’t do anything too inflammatory when dealing with other tribes – jogged over in his direction. The scout ascended the watchtower with practiced ease and squatted down beside him with a toothy grin.

“I am Gezrak, Hunter of the Blue Serpents Tribe. I see you,” the hunter said formally.

“I am Yergak, Hunter of the Moon Sickle Tribe. I see you.” He replied in response and offered the Blue Serpent tribesman his drink.

It was important that rituals were observed. They might beat each other to death with their bows 30 minutes from now, but for now, there was a truce and presumably information to share.

“You have been tracking the perpetrators of the raids to the south?” he asked.

“Yes, or some of them at least. It is… odd. Our trackers continue to follow it as best they can,” Gezrak took a swig of the drink and stared at it dubiously.

“It is indeed dubious, made by a young fellow in the village. He has promise; I just wish he wouldn’t splice it with weird things,” he muttered, pouring Gezrak a second cup. “Spider brew should be, well… spider brew.”

“Hah! I agree,” The other hunter nodded, although he still took another swing of it, because it was refreshing on a muggy, hot day such as they were experiencing.

“Three outlying camps to the north were plundered and burnt over the last few days. The scouts reported seeing what they believed to be two females with dark hair, or possible females, wearing thin cloth over their faces, fleeing with loot, having butchered a huge portion of our spirit herds in that region.”

“Females?” he frowned.

“Well, they had the attributes of them, even if they dressed in strange attire, a lot of cloth, no tatoos, pale like a mountain orc. One scout thought they were ugly, and this was why they did what they did – covering their faces” Gezrak muttered, his amused tone making it clear what he thought of that scout’s ‘theories’.

“That was all?” he asked.

“Nah,” Gezrak went on. “They butchered a bunch of them, took only the cores and left the majority of the meat. They also set everything on fire.”

“Interesting,” he mused, weighing that up with the reports filtering in from the edge of their own territory where it abutted the Blue Serpents and the much larger Grass Stalker tribe.

“This territory has also experienced some difficulties?” Gezrak half stated, half questioned, not looking to the south-west.

“Hah,” he nodded wryly. There was such a thing as secrecy, but it was impossible to hide the huge pall of smoke off in that direction.

“The ones who raided us did not appear to be female,” he sighed, “or at least the ones seen by survivors were not. They were scrawny, wore robes and had long hair, carried metal weapons – blades and spears. They burnt several fortified farmsteads, killed most of the forces guarding them, and harvested most of the crops first, even the ones that were unripe.”

“It is frustrating,” Gezrak agreed.

“Still, our elders are considering if this is provocation from another tribe, or something that has spilled over from the Hundred Legs’ war against the jungle savages?”

“We thought so, until two days ago,” Gezrak sighed. “Someone devastated an entire lake of unripe water lotus and its accompanying serpent pond. Got past all the guards, avoided any notice at all and somehow killed every juvenile serpent in it; even so, they took only the cores, even though they were not a year old, leaving meat and scales and venom alone.”

“Ah,” he nodded – that would provoke a rather irate response from the Blue Serpent tribe’s elders.

“That is annoying,” he commiserated drily, because in truth, that was what others raiding the Blue Serpent tribe tended to do – mess with their ponds, “But it hardly warrants this level of response?” he gestured to the decamping group of a hundred young warriors and a dozen elite scouts, including what appeared to be a shaman apprentice.

Unbidden, he found himself scanning the distant grassline again, beyond the edges of the fields, feeling watched once more.

Hunter Gezrak took another swig of the brew and handed it back, shaking his head. “Five days ago one of our junior chief candidates, the son of an influential local village elder, went missing, then two days ago, two more chief candidates who were sent out to test their mettle on cleaning up the wreckage were kidnapped and crippled. They were deliberately dishonoured, their mana cores smashed, their cocks crushed and left for dead.”

“Not given an honourable end,” he grimaced, making a holy sign to the Mother of Earth.

“Indeed,” Gezrak nodded, looking out at the grassland beyond the farms as well with narrowed eyes for a moment.

-Did he also notice something?

Gezrak shook his head after a moment and continued relating his tale. “The last two were able to return to report that their attackers considered us demons,”

“Faugh, is it the Grass Scorpions? Please don’t tell me it’s those lunatics,” he groaned, immediately thinking of one culprit mendacious enough to act like this given the tribal war going on in the mountains. Several elders in their village had already raised that possibility, or that it was the Flesh Tearers.

“No actually, that warband was reliably sighted about 400 miles north east two days ago; that was the first thing the shamans checked. They annihilated a large warband of the Mountain Thumper tribe almost down to the last warrior. They can move fast…”

“But not that fast,” he nodded, sighing inwardly, relieved at that news at least.

“In any case, the two junior chiefs were able to learn some matters of use in the brief interactions they had. Those who raided us were part of a bigger group that appeared to be some days ahead. They appear to have been sent out as scouts to see if anything valuable was here and were… disappointed with what they got. Also very dismissive of the things of value our tribe has worked for generations to maintain,” Gezrak muttered, grinding his teeth.

“Ah,” he nodded, “So it is a warband, but a new one nobody knows?”

If that were the case, it would indeed be a matter to concern their tribe as well. Warbands could be big or small, but they all usually shared one common trait, or at least they long-lived ones did – they were an evil bone to choke on unless you crushed them fast.

“It looks like it,” Gezrak sighed. “Both junior chiefs were made honorary elder warriors and given a merciful death. Their families called for the invaders to be hunted down and their skulls offered to the Blue Serpent Totem so that those who died may be reborn as warriors of the great serpent. It is a loss, in various ways, and the elders of the tribe see this as a personal assault on the standing of the Blue Serpent tribe. As such, we were sent here and another band from the Blue Serpent pond tracks the warpath.”

“It is good that they died honourably,” he commiserated Gezrak. “To take the mana core is one thing, but to not give a merciful death and leave them to the beasts, that is a killing dishonour of two generations,” he spat over the edge of the watchtower and offered the other hunter another drink.

In truth, the death of the junior chiefs was probably good news for their Moon Sickle tribe, who had occasional territory disputes with the Blue Serpents. However, it was politic to agree in this instance, especially if it was a new warband that had spun off from the lizard-infested jungle hell to the south.

“I shall offer a toast to both your tribe’s new honorary elders and their path to the great serpent,” he murmured, pouring them both out more drink.

“I hope your tribe is not so ill-hit as ours has been,” Gezrak mused, accepting the cup and drinking it.

-Like heck, we both know that in other circumstances this would the most hilarious thing, he chuckled inwardly.

“These invaders are not Ur’Vash. Even if they are of us, they show no respect.” Gezrak nodded in gratitude, put the cup down and gave him a companionable thump on the shoulder before descending the tower to relay the informal information gleaned, that their Moon Sickle tribe was probably as badly hit as the Blue Serpents were.

-We didn’t lose any brats of note, but almost a hundred hunters and junior warriors are missing, he sighed. The emissary of Moon Eye village who came in the day before had been almost frothing at the mouth.

Returning to sitting low, he once again started to scan the distant grasslands, where they merged into the southern Badlands.

-Earth mother curse this sense of being watched. It’s not a serpent is it?

He wished he could properly scan with his mind’s eye to read the disturbances in the landscape, but the village had wards against dangerous beasts and those had been fully activated now, just in case. The downside was that it happened to mess with their sight as well. Even so, there was nothing that obviously stood out.

-No oddly placed bird calls…

-No silences or areas with a bit too much noise either, he concluded, listening to the vibrancy of the land nearby.

That just made the sense of being watched all the more annoying.

-I definitely do not want to become dead like the others in the outlying watch towers yesterday.

All missing their mana cores, their tribal tattoos defaced and their eyes, ears and teeth removed after death and burnt. Their corpses had been brought back and were laid out in the towns’ totem house, their families seeing to their rites as best they could – death and defilement in that manner was akin to a curse against two generations, reserved only for true criminals undeserving to become ancestors.

He hadn’t mentioned that to Gezrak, but the other had certainly held back information as well.

…

The next day, at dawn he found himself standing in the centre of the town. Ten elite hunters of their Moon Sickle tribe’s ‘Moon Stalker band’ stood alongside him and 30 other tribal hunters and a few veterans who had not gone with their warband to fight in the jungles to the south.

In the middle were the bodies of a dozen youths and two elite hunters, Rezva and Lezvakoth, along with one of their Sickle Serpent village’s junior shamans, Umak, son of Haz, who had been leading the recovery effort and been sent out to scout the damage done.

All were dead in the same way, although two had been left, only barely alive when they were found. Their testimony corroborated that of the Blue Serpent group whose leaders were sat nearby. Two females, dressed in strange robes wielding metal weapons had fought the group then fled with trophies when the relief forces got near. Their conversation, in a variant of the holy tongue of the ancestors, according to the shaman, implied that they found the scouting tedious and killing the warriors nasty and demeaning.

…

An hour later, they set out with the Blue Serpent hunters and made rapid progress through their tribe’s border territory and into the Badlands proper. Within the first day, news filtered from ahead that the advance scouts had found two more looted and destroyed outlying camps and a farming village that had been razed to the ground, their occupants, those who had survived, had been left with nothing and largely fell in with their band as they made their way past.

…

By the second day, he found himself leading a small team of hunters from their village, a handful of their own younger warriors and six blue serpent warriors. One of a dozen such bands arrayed ahead of the main force and already, he could see the problem that had exacerbated the opportunity this new warband or group had seen fit to exploit.

Their Moon Sickle tribe was not a big one, but it had roots, and even thought they had sent a warband of almost a thousand warriors to fight in the south, they had only lost maybe a third of the capable hands from any one village. In comparison, many of these smaller influences, which were what seemed to be being hit the hardest, were comprised of only a few scattered villages and the odd warrior hall. They were heavily beholden to individual strength or the protection of the Hundred Legs tribe, Grass Stalker tribe or even their own tribe.

With so many warriors called away to the renewal of hostilities with jungle savages and the much more maligned mountain tribes who occupied the halls beneath the ‘Great Pinnacle of Judgement’ to the south, these settlements, camps and other outposts which were usually the focal point of boundary squabbles had all been rather rapidly evacuated. Most local chiefs had taken the opportunity to send off their most egregious troublemakers to learn what a real war was, or had just had their forces conscripted by the Hundred Legs tribe. Now it turned out that had just opened them up in their soft underbellies to this new and inexplicable threat.

It was not a problem for a Hunter to worry about, and the fact that he was seeing it meant that the elders certainly saw it, so all they could do was follow the trails, be supportive where they saw opportunity and mark down interesting spots where their tribe could make inroads with these groups when this mess was all over. If they could pull in a few people from these settlements that would be more amenable to them rather than the bigger tribes, it would be a good deed and the elders of their tribe would certainly welcome the extra hands.

…

“Well, this is new,” one of the hunters from the Blue Serpent tribe muttered as they stood on top of a ridge in the twilight, looking down at the devastation below.

“More familiar though,” Argok, one of his tribe’s hunters, added, staring down at the battlefield arranged below them.

The small fortified outpost had been thoroughly incinerated. They had spotted the plume of smoke from miles away. The damage here was very different in scale and scope compared to what they had seen elsewhere. He let the others fan out, skirting through the ruins of the buildings, checking the dead while he pondered whether or not this was in fact part of their pursuit at all.

“This should be Grass Stalker territory, border of it,” one of the Blue Serpent warriors gave a toothy grimace.

It was. He recognised the designs, still visible on some of the charred walls marking it as one of their border outposts from where they secured tribute over other, smaller local settlements.

“Hey! Boss, come see,” a voice rang out. He and the three warriors still with him turned to see one of the other Blue Serpent tribe members waving an arrow and beckoning for the warrior beside him to come over.

Making their way through the ruin they all gathered around to ponder what he had found, even as Argok and Hukluz, another of the Moon Sickle tribe hunters, also came over holding arrows.

“You make of this?” he held up the arrows…

“This… Black Thunder tribe?” one of the Blue Serpent warriors muttered, turning their arrow over.

“We found arrows from the Mountain Thumper tribe… and armour,” Argok held up a shield.

“Grass Stalker tribe have rather bad reputation with their neighbours to the east,” a Blue Serpent warrior mused.

“Grass Stalkers have a bad reputation with everyone,” he pointed out.

That was met with much nodding and muttering of agreement.

“Maybe, but both Mountain Thumper tribe and Black Thunder tribe are from Far East, around edge of mountains.”

Argok gave a toothy grimace. “Grass Stalker tribe raid widely in last few years, I hear elders of several villages’ trade daughters for sons with War Chief up north, end up doing a lot of fighting on the Badlands beyond the cursed towns. Perhaps some young tribesmen coming back the other way decide to stop and settle a few scores?”

“Ummm seems likely,” Hunter Hukluz agreed dropping another bit of burnt armour… “This from Peak Breaker warband…”

“Oi… you is coming over here!” one of the younger Moon Sickle warriors, poking around in the ruined building behind them, called… in common dialect, rather than his own tribal dialect. “Is also our quarry here?”

“You are not crude orc, born in forest who play with rocks and stick lizards with spear. Speak a real tongue, show pride of Ur’Vash…” one of blue serpent warriors yelled over, mockingly miming having a big jaw.

“Yes, however your mother big fan of my crude rocks and big stick!” the warrior called back, scowling.

The others laughed, even as they picked their way over, the one whose mother had just been insulted glowering a bit. The object that the warrior had found, however, was not what he expected. In the middle of the ruin, imprinted onto a part of the fallen roof was a half destroyed piece of parchment with strange runes on it. In a way, it put him in mind of the scrolls and other treasured artefacts that the shamans sometimes used in big, important battles or tribes kept to deal with truly dangerous threats.

“It looks very odd,” Huklurz conceded, squatting down and peering at it while the brash young warrior was kicked in the head a few times behind them.

It was, he had to agree. The flowing runes on it were alien to him and he could almost taste the fire mana that emanated off its remains.

“Whoever do this have arts like a shaman… or tools to match,” he sighed, thinking of all the other instances of things being set on fire they had encountered up to this point.

“You think other fires were similar?” Argok asked.

“We can only send it back,” he agreed, waving for the Blue Serpent warrior and the Moon Sickle warrior to stop hitting each other. “Zabok, right?” he asked the young warrior, who nodded wiping blood from his nose.

“Take this back to the main group, show to the leaders of our bands and have them get one of the shamans to look at this. It appears our raiders are not so simple.”

“Magic,” one of the other younger warriors who had come over said upon seeing the talisman.

A few of the others also looked around uneasily at that thought, taking in the burning and appraising it in a new light. The Badlands were a bad place for dealing with magic: the ambient mana here was unstable and many of the beasts were drawn to it. Most settlements used wards to restrict their incursions and stabilise things, most villages had shamans, who were dangerous, but at least they had control.

Proper magic users of the tribes were made to live in places with very little grass and a lot of rocks, mainly due to their tendency to set everything on fire, explode everything or call down lightning out of the sky by accident. The Moon Sickle tribe had two such old geezers, both reclusive and eccentric, who lived on a rock tower on the southern side of their territory. They had few apprentices, mostly experimented on dead animals and occasionally blew things up that came to close – Ur’Vash or animals, it rarely mattered.

“Do we pursue?” Hunter Takgos asked, looking around a bit more uneasily now.

“Put up symbols of truce on armour, then we go seek out nearest Grass Stalker village?” Huklurz suggested, rather edgily. “Hope they don’t think we are responsible?”

“That is a smart idea. Are you actually an Ur’Vash…” one of the blue serpent warriors snickered.

“It’s why we shoot things with bows, while you have to walk close and hit it with your thick skull” someone called out from nearby.

“You only shoot things with bows because your arms are so scrawny you can’t lift a spear…” another of the Blue Serpent warriors shot back raucously.

-Uggh, a curse on this lot, he sighed inwardly.

“Ohkay okay!” he yelled before someone decided to make a fight out of the verbal sparring. “We do what Huklurz who is now a ‘Smart’ Ur’Vash suggest. Maybe get a drum out and strike up merry tune as well?”

That got some confused looks from a few of the younger Blue Serpent tribe warriors.

“That way the sneaky grass-smoking bastards will at least hear us coming and make it much less likely that in a few hours they will be explaining to Great Hunter Koz and Shaman Wecc why they are returning our corpses stuck full of arrows!” Argok sniggered.

That half joke brought more laughter, but he noticed that a fair few of the warriors were looking like they wished they had shields rather than their signature two-handed serpent fang studded clubs. Two had already surreptitiously picked up charred shields from where the gear of the unfortunate Grass Stalker garrison was scattered amid the twisted, charred forms of their corpses even before Argok finished speaking.

…

It took them only a few hours to find the first Grass Stalker band who were heading in their direction. The encounter went as well as could be expected and they were not shot at too badly on sight and there were no fatalities. He did note a few of the survivors applying bluer war paint surreptitiously though.

According to the leader of the Grass Stalker group there had been two raids in the vicinity of their territory, one by a small number of a tribe to the west, who had appeared in some confusion, been mistaken for interlopers and run towards the badlands. The second, however, fit a familiar pattern he was coming to recognise – a grass farm had been ruined, its settlement demolished and everything remotely ‘shiny’ taken, the corpses defaced or just outright missing.

They had been sent out to see if they could track down the latter perpetrators. He could only assume that they didn’t want to chase after a Mountain Thumper shaman or Black Thunder reavers and had decided to repay that grudge with some extra raiding when they next went east.

Shortly after that, their main warband arrived and they made camp for the night while the various leaders conferred. Near as he could gather, the paper Zabok had found was of great interest to the various shamens, because the Grass Stalker shaman along with their band eventually left with it, presumably to go find one of their mages.

After that, they sat around on the edge of the camp, keeping watch and toasting Zabok’s good fortune to get respected by the Great Hunters for his find as the various leaders conferred at great length and quite loudly.

On their side, the news from the other scouts was also encouraging – the main trail of the mysterious warband had been reacquired after Shaman Wecc consulted the land spirits and then presumably sent many animals to the embrace of the Mother of Blood to get some coherence out of his questions.

The bad news was that it led straight into the heart of the Grass Stalker territory with no sign of deviation, so there was no question regarding cooperation. The next few hundred miles to the north and east were all Grass Stalker territory, this being their closest point to most other tribes in this region, where their territories adjoined the meandering edge of the badlands.

That night, he found himself watching the grass again; however, the feeling of being ‘watched’ had vanished… and he wasn’t sure he liked that. His hunter’s instinct told him that that was probably not a good development.

~ Lin Ling – A Grass Stalker Settlement ~

Squatting on the white adobe roof of a building near the edge of the settlement, hidden in the shadow of an actual trellis of vines, Lin Ling considered the ‘small town’ laid out around her, looking for a target that was actually worthy of her consideration. Currently, she was dressed like an ‘Ur’Vash’, daubed in drab colours, accented by blue swirls that her memories told her were ‘lucky’ and purple geometric patterns. Lots of purple.

Trial and error had demonstrated that in places with lots of Ur’Vash the purple was, in fact almost as effective as her ‘One with what is’ for keeping her hidden… so long as she didn’t get rumbled for a ‘non Ur’Vash anyway’.

Their hit and run tactics, aimed at stirring the surrounding tribes up to follow tracks down and ensnare the huge band of cultivators had, in truth, hit a bit of a snag until quite recently.

“Aiiii…” she sighed.

“Why couldn’t we have started off on the border of this Grass Stalker tribe? Things would have been so much easier,” she complained quietly, listening to the chatter of Ur’Vash going about their business in the town all around her.

Firstly, the response to their early poking and prodding had been breath-taking in how underwhelming it was. Secondly, there were cultivators already roving around – more than they had expected in truth. They had also been distressingly competent with their looting and good at covering their tracks.

Not only did they pick their targets well, they took the bodies with them, or disposed of them properly. Most seemed to possess blink talismans, movement formations or actual teleport charms as well, which so long as they had soul sense and spirit stones meant they could leapfrog across the landscape with near impunity.

The two she had been lucky enough to stumble across in the act had teleported in, complained a lot, scouted their surroundings, usually found the nearest bunch of spirit animals or a hunting camp, exterminated it and then used the proceeds to teleport again or head off in the direction of the main band as fast as possible, usually facilitating that with high grade stealth talismans and arts to hide their passage.

“Truly cursed, that we find the only competent tribes in the damn landscape,” she muttered, moving on the next roof, while taking care not to get spotted from below – not that many people out and about at this hour were looking up in the tangled mess of things crossing the streets to provide shade during the day.

The real reason this didn’t seem to kick up more of a fuss she had not worked out until they landed in an actual tribe’s territory and she had been able to stalk around the edges of a few scout camps. Those overheard conversations had made her realise that there were quite a few tribes around here, and some were more influential than others.

Most of those they had run into had just been eking out a living on the edge of the Badlands, or had bad reputations as raiders of more fertile territories governed by towns like the one she was now in. As such, their misfortune had been met with much collective shrugging and a few tactical land acquisitions and that was it. For the larger clans, their main fastnesses to the north or north-east were several days’ brisk jog away, meaning they had little interest in what was happening here.

She had investigated a few small settlements of both of them, but seen nothing worth destroying that was likely to elicit the right kind of response. They had also been much more vigilant than she was comfortable with, likely due to the proximity to the edge of the Badlands.

In the end, it had taken her kidnapping a bunch of Ur’Vash who had gone to investigate their camp destruction and letting them go again rather strategically. In the end, it was the misfortune of the party they had run across that they had been very descriptive in their suggestions regarding the things they would do to Juni and Chunhua when they got free that proved the tipping point – even then, the pair had largely drawn the line at killing.

It didn’t help that they kept losing ground to the main band of cultivators while all that was playing out. She reckoned the trail they were following now was at least two days old, probably three. However they were moving, it wasn’t with teleports, but the strength of geomantic obfuscation being deployed around them was disturbing the whole landscape subtly for miles around. They were also no longer moving in straight lines, which was probably the only reason they had not been completely left in the dust.

As such, they had followed after the main trail, causing what disturbance they could. That, combined with some strategic redirection towards the work of other cultivator bands moving through, had finally been enough to get on the nerves of the two largest tribes behind them. Unfortunally, those tribes had sent out less than two hundred Ur’Vash between them. Their numbers appeared to have grown along the way as they gathered in survivors of other cultivators’ depredations – but it was still paltry.

She had been about to despair until they hit this territory and realised they had sent out almost a hundred warriors just for that burned outpost. That they had then nearly shot two of the bands scouting for those chasing behind to pieces with arrows had made her want to cry, fearing she would have to start over from scratch.

Hearing nothing of use, she moved on, crossing another few roofs, taking care to stay in the shadows, and approached the first of the larger buildings, a walled compound containing a square of white-painted, adobe mud brick buildings a story higher than anything else nearby, proudly flying Grass Stalker banners.

The entire town was warded: defensive alignments designed to repel beasts and restrict unwanted soul sense built into its very foundations. That didn’t seem to be that unusual either – most settlements she had passed that were more than three buildings and a well took that approach.

They were a combination of feng shui alignment and formation. It was quite convenient that they gave her an ‘odd’ feeling, likely because of the blood, even though she had no soul sense. The irony was that it also made endeavours like this possible because her main problems here were a lack of soul sense herself and issues dealing with it in others.

Landing on a nearby roof, she sought out a vantage point to see over the wall. The courtyard was filled with racks of spirit grass, drying under covers in the night air.

“Thank-”

She nearly thanked the fates, then didn’t, because they had really been batting for their side of late she couldn’t help but feel.

“At last. Spirit herbs are a thing we can use a lot of!” she murmured, making an auspicious sign instead and started to consider the guards on the warehouse itself.

They were certainly what she needed right now for her cultivation, so it really was their misfortune.

After a full circuit looking it over, she arrived on a different roof, having a much better picture of it.

It was large and well-fortified, as expected, with several Ur’Vash lounging around, looking kind of bored, drinking wine and tossing bones in some kind of game next to the only entrance to the warehouse compound.

Based on the tattoos, she judged the guards to be mostly equivalent to Soul Foundation or maybe weaker Nascent Soul cultivators. They might be weaker, but she was more willing to be pleasantly rather than unpleasantly surprised there. In any case, while the average Nascent Soul Ur’Vash was physically imposing, akin to an expert Body Refinement Cultivator and freqently possessing martial intent, her experience to this point told her they were nowhere near as obnoxiously dangerous in their means as a Nascent Soul cultivator could be.

That awareness from the memories was a welcome one – even if they struggled to explain the specifics of the Ur’Vash’s actual cultivation method, beyond comparing it more favourably to their own natural advancements rather than the means commonly followed by cultivators of developing and nurturing a dantian.

As such, she settled down against a chimney, by a stack of bricks likely designated for roof repair, and became just another misshapen lump in the shadows, watching and waiting for the right opportunity.

For all they had seemed crude and warlike in the forest, she was getting a much better understanding of their means and methods now she was walking among them, even compared to what the memories had shown her. Their filter could be weird at times, she was coming to accept. What they had been correct on at least, was that the Ur’Vash here were very tribal, or perhaps clannish was a better way to put it.

She hesitated to say they were particularly good or evil for that matter, in and of themselves. From what she could see, even in this town, they fought, disputed and regularly had proper fights, over all kinds of things. Even so, while violence was pretty common, people rarely died and the settlements had proper social structures.

That said, apparently tribes did, it seem, fight tooth and nail on occasion, like in the jungles they had escaped from. In those instances, from what she could infer from various discussions, they showed no mercy at all, decisively exterminating problems. Tribes would see every male killed and all the females enslaved if it was deemed necessary to wipe out a tribe directly. There had been a lot of talk about that regarding the random group of other Ur’Vash who had shown up via teleport of all things, annihilated the outpost and then run off into the Badlands.

They also used Gu, and Corpse Arts, from what she saw in the Blue Serpent territory, while the Moon Sickle banners had definitely been made of flayed Ur’Vash skin. The totem of skulls in the Blue Serpent village was another reminder, along with the mercy killing of the two crippled Ur’Vash – a thing she hadn’t yet told Juni and Chunhua about, because they would likely get angry about it – especially after they considered not killing the pair after the things they said and had attempted before being beaten down to be a rather generous action at the time.

After two hours of sitting there waiting, the guards on the compound finally changed. Ten more minutes of observation told her that the new batch were really unenthusiastic about their job vigilance. They sat there drinking and playing dice at a table in the courtyard, the loser having to go do their own and the others patrols, lamenting that they would get in trouble if they invited some women to keep them company. In truth, she had to acknowledge that for all their grumbling it seemed like a rather cushy job.

In the end, she waited until the second hour after midnight before finally making a move, slipping through the darkness and using her strength and an anchor talisman to quietly climb over the compound wall and make her way silently into the upper story.

The entire thing turned out to be a drying hall, filled with herbs, grasses and mushrooms. It only took her a few minutes of practiced observation to conclude that they were well-graded, organised by species and quality – mainly around three and four star, ie. Golden Core and Soul Foundation, herbs.

The next hall turned out to also be a drying hall, but for four, five and even quasi-six star spirit grass. The amber and bronze blades of vegetation, glittering in the light from the village at night, hung in carefully packaged and arranged bundles designed to efficiently dry and preserve them. She investigated the entire hall thrice to make sure there were no wards or alarms before swiftly gathering them all into her storage talisman. The other three upper halls were the same by and large and she cleaned them out rapidly and silently before making her way downstairs.

Here, her progress was a bit slower, because there were two patrolling guards, wandering around very aimlessly, complaining quite a bit to each other about how they were stuck here, when they could be in a tavern having fun with an Ur’Vash woman – or three. They were quite descriptive and enthusiastic, to the point where she seriously contemplated stabbing them both as she stealthily slunk along behind them, emptying crate after crate as she checked for wards.

Two smaller rooms did, in the end, have proper protections, so she bypassed them initially, determining to leave them to the very end, just in case.

Even the unwarded rooms, of which the ground floor had nine in total, yielded some surprising hauls. One room had a bunch of beast hides for five and six-star ranked, Dao Seeking and Immortal realm spirit beasts. Another had several crates of serpent scales that were similarly graded and three boxes of beast cores, corresponding to Golden Core, Soul Foundation and Nascent Soul grade.

All went into her talisman, unnoticed by the two hapless guards who soon completed their circuit, debated going upstairs before deciding that the door was ‘locked’ and just went back to the group to gamble and complain about women.

Returning to the warded room, she sat down and patiently started to disarm them.

It took a bit longer than she would have liked in the end, but between her already quite good formation craft, knowledge of feng shui, a crude compass of three, and the knowledge of the strange symbols that had been imparted, she managed to get rid of most of them after some twenty minutes of painstaking work. The final two, on two of the small crates themselves, she resolved by spending charges of a dispersal talisman Teng Chunhua had given her.

By the time she was done she had to acknowledge that whoever had put them there had known what they were about and was clearly a formations master of some repute. Certainly without the talisman and the memories she would have likely exploded the last few.

That said, the effort proved entirely worth it, because the contents of the room itself, when she was finally in a position to appraise them went beyond her wildest expectations.

There were two small crates of ‘Longevity Lingzhe’ – Yang Life attributed mushrooms, prized for their recuperative and rejuvenate properties – that were a fairly random mix of grades from Soul Foundation, four-star grade, all the way up to a few that were quasi-six-star grade, possessing a purity of qi akin to an Immortal realm Pill.

The two boxes she had to expend talismans on held a curated collection of spirit herbs of Immortal qi purity she easily judged to be proper six-star grade herbs, with the pride of the place belonging to a seven-star grade variant of a Sundew Peony you could have sold for at least 7 or 8 Earthly Jade back home. She didn’t even dare take it out of its box before storing it, for fear that its qi purity would disturb the whole neighbourhood.

She finally returned upstairs and cleared out the rest of the herbs before making her exit down a rear wall and back into the town as a whole, in search of other opportune targets. As an afterthought she dropped a damaged talisman she’d discarded, a long-expended Golden Core grade stealth talisman. According to Teng Chunhua, they had belonged to Jin Chen, who had been happy to trade them for some pills. The older woman had clearly intended to trade them in for new ones at discount when they got back, proving herself every bit as thrifty as Arai or Sana in that regard.

Moving through the town, she continued to search for other targets, eventually finding a small herb merchant with very minimal warding. The owner didn’t appear to be home; however, a youthful Ur’Vash was present in a back room vigorously entertaining a very bosomy female, both apparently high on some kind of incense that the memories suggested was quite good for cultivation in that manner.

She strategically chose to ignore their comments there and swiftly cleaned out what she could from that shop as well, which held more of the same, though mostly goods relating to alchemy and compounding from what she could see. The basement held several cases of the incense and a sort of gum substance the memories told her was another processed herbal compound made of the grass. For good measure she took that as well, figuring they could probably find some use for it, and then made her way onwards.

On the western side of the town, she found a second shop, one that specialised in beast parts and butchery. Its basement was much more heavily warded, to the point where she had to exhaust most of the rest of the charges in the dispersal talisman and even risk her alignment break talisman. Even after that, there were a few boxes she couldn’t open – she could, however, store them without any issues, it seemed, so she simply cleaned everything out, which nearly filled up her talisman completely.

As a parting gift, she quietly and artfully turned over the shop upstairs, taking care not to disturb the sleeping old Ur’Vash in the back room and then, observing that the majority of his ‘currency’ was not beast cores but ‘beast teeth, artfully spread then across the counter and floor along with the cut tokens of beast cores.

Her intent was to make it appear as if she had robbed the store – which she had – and upon discovering that there was only ‘teeth’ and valueless scraps of core for money, tossed it. As a final gesture she discarded another fragment of expended stealth talisman where a crate had been, scattering the rest of it like it had naturally come away and the thief had not noticed.

Deciding to call it there, she ghosted through the town and lit upon her final target, which was really too good to miss. The chief’s house, unlike most of the other white-painted, adobe mud brick buildings, was painted a vibrant yellow. Knowing the natural sources of yellow dye in this landscape, she was sure it had cost him a hideous amount of effort to get that much paint.

Setting three largely expended ‘Bright Flare’ Talismans, the Nascent Soul versions of the Bright Blaze talisman on wooden parts of the superstructure, she set them on a delay of about a minute and fled as fast as stealth permitted.

She had just made the town perimeter when the smell of burning earth became strong enough to rouse notice. Finding some shadows, she cleaned off the mud and ‘war paint’ using her qi, changed into Teng Chunhua’s dress, shoved a few bits of jewellery in her hair and, having stashed her ‘Ur’Vash garb’ in the talisman, hopped onto a roof by the wall and roared with all the impetus she could manage:

“VILE DEMONS! THE JUSTICE OF OUR EASTERN AZURE WILL FALL UPON YOU FOR YOUR EVIL WAYS!”

Her words echoed across the whole town, startling distant livestock, sending roosting birds screaming and silencing the raucous parties in the few taverns still open. Two arrows smashed into a chimney nearby and she ducked away.

{One with What Is}

Using the art, she jumped for the wall and then fled along it. She had gone maybe ten paces when the sense of the wards that suppressed soul sense faded away somewhat and three separate soul senses swept out, trying to pin her down and failing due to the art.

Jumping onto another rooftop, making sure she was clearly visible, she skipped away from three more arrows that exploded violently, and withdrew a handful of Soul Foundation attack talismans.

{Zhong’s Righteous Lance}

{Bright Blast}

{Roiling Earth Turtle}

The lightning bolt smashed into one of the watchtowers while the fire and earth talismans scattered many of the martial attacks-

{Flickering Steps}

She got off the roof and over the wall just in time as the building she was on lost much of its roof to a hammer imbued with martial intent someone had thrown in her general direction.

{Bao’s Bright Blast}

She fired off another Golden Core grade fire talisman and skipped smartly to avoid two arrows fletched with blue and white.

“And with that my work is done,” she remarked with a grimace, hurling herself off the wall, then stored the dress and, unheeding of her near nakedness, shot through the fields, pausing only to kick over a water trough and roll through the muddy puddle it made for some quick camouflage as over a dozen soul senses started to scour the area-

Moments later several arrows arched high in to the air above her, carrying with them tethered lanterns on kites that drifted in the sky, casting illumination across the fields as she scurried through the darkness, suppressing her qi, relying on ‘One with What Is’ and her mantra to keep her hidden from the senses sweeping this way and that.

Moments later the thunder of drums echoed out from the south side of the town, telling her that the emptying of the warehouse had probably been uncovered.

Casting about, she darted out of the scrub into a relatively open bit of ground and pulled out a used ‘Blink’ talisman, pushing just enough qi into the Dao Seeking grade talisman to make it start to dissolve. Letting the useless thing drop, she suppressed her qi again and swiftly made her exit, making sure to stay clear of anywhere she might leave tracks until she found an actual animal trail through the brush and swiftly moved down it, away from the scene of her ‘crimes’.

~ Yergak – Golden Grass village ~

“Today I is seeing with own eyes, motivational speech of lunatic,” one of the Blue Serpent warriors muttered from where they were seated at the edge of the central square of Golden Grass village, watching a farce unfold.

“YOU ARE A FAILURE!”

“SHAME OF THREE GENERATIONS!”

“BE GLAD YOU CAN ONLY DIE ONCE!”

They watched as the Yuugor, son of Qavoz, Chief of Golden Grass village, stalked back and forth in front of the ruins of his large house, waving his hands and basically screaming insults at random.

“THIS ENMITY I REMEMBER FOR NINE LIFETIMES!”

“Do we even remember two lifetimes?” Huklurz muttered, nibbling on a bit of dried meat he had bought earlier.

“Shush,” he waved his hand. “We listening to genius here! What will you do if he decides this place only need one smart Ur’Vash?”

“…”

Huklurz looked a bit affronted, but wisely shut up.

The Golden Grass village chief was a clear proponent of motivational speaking from the ‘if you do not find the perpetrator who burnt my beautiful house down I’ll put your heads on spikes’ school of thought.

“THIS IS SHAME ON WHOLE GOLDEN GRASS VILLAGE!”

“SHAME ON GRASS STALKER TRIBE!”

“SHAME ON IDIOTS WHO HAVE NO EYES!”

The chieftain waved furiously at the far side of the square where the flayed, dismembered and discarded bodies of most of the warehouse guards from the previous night were currently arranged, to punctuate that point.

They had been publicly executed for their failure with large portions of the town looking on and howling in condemnation of their crime. In a way, it was probably fair, as the Golden Grass village likely had to give contributions to the main settlement in the region. The cleaning out of the entire warehouse was thus a huge blow not just for the prestige of the village but the entire region and a serious economic problem for them.

On the other hand, the Grass Stalker tribal powers on this frontier of their territory were not well-liked, so when word of this travelled as it probably already had, it was going to be one of those tales that just never died. A bit like the one about a shaman from the Hundred Legs tribal region who wound up getting transformed into an olive tree shaped like a giant cock by the Grass Scorpion warband.

“I also hear that herb barter get cleaned out as well,” Argok muttered, appearing beside him, an old man who specialised in butchering spirit beasts.

“Ah, that explains why angry old Ur’Vash was lecturing chieftain’s nephews on skinning people earlier,” Takgos, another hunter of their band added.

“I am guessing that was the woman was the herb barterer?” he added.

“I think so. She look very sexy when angry though,” Argok snickered.

He let them mutter on, merely keeping an eye out that they did not talk too loudly. In truth they were not the only ones anyway. Personally, he thought it was a bit stupid really. Accountability was important and the guards had been lax, lazy and stupid in guarding the warehouse.

However, the perpetrator had snuck into town, looted the main warehouse, two well-stocked shops, burnt down the chief’s house and spouted some nonsense about vile demons they probably heard in the next territory. The female, dressed in very eye-catching white no less, and clearly not Ur’Vash, had then escaped under the collective noses of all the elite warriors and hunters present, the town’s three elders, the chief, his wife, the wife’s sister – the shamaness, two junior shamans and the leaders and shaman of their own bands as well.

They had somehow done this while emptying several tons of mana-rich spirit herbs, and fled into the night.

-What are seven Ur’Vash guards going to do that that lot could not? He sighed inwardly.

-Truly it is a bad time to be a watchguard.

-By Mother of Dreams, I swear to never say anything about watching eyes near a Grass Stalker elite, he added for good measure.

Better that that remain unknown or this idiot chief might try to spread the blame a bit further. He was pleased to see that the others in his band seemed to have reached similar conclusions, looking on with deadpan expressions of veterans well versed in the art of knowing when to say nothing, see nothing and spontaneously know nothing.

In the end, the shouting went on for a full hour. It was mostly the chief going on at great length about how big a slight it was on the whole village, over and over… and over. Mercifully, when it was finally over, and the various other authority figures convinced the chief to take his outrage somewhere a little more private so they could discuss matters in detail, they were all left to their own devices.

“It funny,” Argok chuckled as they sat around in the sun drinking and chatting. “I swear he is actually more pissed about his house than the warehouse.”

That was probably true in all honesty, the yellow paint on the white adobe had been scorched and where it remained, was mostly orange. Several sweating Ur’Vash were working frantically with various tools to get rid of the ‘orange’ or paint it over with other colours. A chief’s house being that inauspicious colour was… hilarious, actually. Just so long as it wasn’t their chief’s house.

“Well, you know what they have to make that yellow paint out of?” one of the Blue Serpents warriors chuckled.

“Centipede bile,” he grunted, “5th advancement at minimum and you only get about a bucket per centipede.”

“Aye, it has to be bled, can’t come from corpses. Then gotta mix it with those shellfish from the salt lakes near the southern badlands,” the warrior added with a weird grin. “My cousin made some once, for the door arch of his house when he get married. It stinks for weeks and the smell haunts everything.”

“Ah,” one of the younger hunters winced, as they all turned to look at the rather large shell of a house.

The damage was nothing if not comprehensive. Likely most of it would need rebuilt from scratch, never mind the questionable colour.

It would have cost the chief a huge amount of effort to paint the whole house with that colour, and probably quite a bit of the village’s wealth in the process. This was the kind of misfortune that made people start to question if the right family was in charge of the village given the kind of ill omens involved.

“Really, problem is he have to move back in with wife’s relatives; Grass Stalker’s very traditional like that,” Argok added. “Can you imagine politics of village where chief, clan priestess and shamaness all have to live with their parents under one roof?”

Several people shuddered and made auspicious signs regarding the well-being of the town generally.

“More likely parents move to other village,” Takgos added, which got some quiet laughs.

…

Early mid-morning, the news also filtered in from their own main band that they still had not made ground on those they were pursuing and that they had diverted somewhat away from this region. The elite hunters who relayed the message were questioned at length by Yuugor and the Golden Grass elders. What was said remained unknown to them, but he could guess most of the contents he was sure. Their quarry was maybe a hundred strong, based on the scattered accounts of numbers, was running faster than they were, had shamans and was able to obfuscate their trail extensively – confusing incautious pursuit in various ways.

The consensus among most of them was that they had to be mounted and the degree of holistic devastation and speed ended up requiring several different confirmations during the course of those meetings by the various parties leading the pursuit that there was, indeed, absolutely no way, under any reasonable circumstances, this could be the Grass Scorpion Warband.

The idea that they might be haring off after that relict natural disaster that had plagued the Great Plains of the Vashlagh for as long as the great tribal histories recalled this place didn’t bare thinking about. He only knew them by reputation mercifully – the only living members of the Moon Sickle tribe who had ever encountered them was the elder of their old magus. By reputation however, they were basically impossible to deal with and any tribe foolish enough to catch their interest invariably had to pay a terrible price before they got bored or find some other unfortunates to torment.

The meetings went on for long enough, and involved enough shouting that he, along with quite a few others, was starting to become a bit concerned. Thankfully though, when the deputations returned, a little out of breath, Chief Yuugor did some more enraged motivational screaming in refrain of his earlier lengthy exertions, promising to lead a mighty hunt to bring this vile devil to justice on behalf of all Ur’Vash.

The majority of the warband thus departed that afternoon, without even getting a feast of much in the way of genuine hospitality from the Golden Grass village. Among the various compromises required turned out to be the appointment of Yuugor’s youngest son as the ‘head’ of the warband and Yuugor getting first crack at any loot recovered and that the golden-haired mage be captured alive for Yuugor to punish personally.

So, a short while later he found their group sent out to check in detail the area where the mysterious female mage with pale skin and golden hair, wearing woven cloth, had fled over the wall, left some kind of mana signature in the general direction of the river then vanished again.

“Yeesh,” Argok sighed, scuffing his boots in the dirt of the ruined field. “It almost looks like the guards did more damage than she did.”

Looking around, that was true, however…

He found his gaze drawn again to the water trough at the edge of the field. It was particularly odd, knocked over as it was. He had to wonder if someone hadn’t tripped over it and then…

“What do you make of this?” he called over to Argok and Takgos, who were both nearby.

They came and stood, looking at the tipped-over water trough and the muddy screed. If you stared at it in the right way it almost looked like someone had fallen flat in the mud?

“What about it?” Argok frowned.

“You think this looks like small Ur’Vash rolled in mud?” he mused.

Takgos, who had started to check the small shelter behind it, paused to consider the diorama.

“Hmmmmm, it does have that look. No livestock in here, the water is rather horrid as well. Odd to trip over it though…”

“Yes…” he frowned, drumming his fingers on the wall as he considered the area again. “It almost looks like a person trying to put on mud… hide from sight?”

“If squint hard, mud kind of purple?” Argok joked.

He gave the other Ur’Vash a kick. “What, you think we are chasing a sneaky jungle orc or a Ghoblan?”

“Sneaky warriors do wear purple…” Argok pointed out dodging away from his boot.

“But it only work for Ur’Vash, Ghoblans would know. That pale female does not seem to be Ur’Vash so purple would not hide it,” another old hunter, Dergazt, who had caught up, added.

“Could just be one of the Golden Grass searchers got annoyed?” Takgos suggested.

“True!” Kulbax, one of the younger Blue Serpent warriors, added. “And anyway, how is a non-Ur’Vash going to know about the importance of the nine truths of life?”

The others nodded, but he ignored them for now.

-There are not really any tracks over here?

Looking back at the walls which were maybe 50 metres away he pondered how he would get away in a hurry after making a big fuss like that.

-A diversion would be the best way. Let your pursuers outrun you?

Looking around, he had to acknowledge that the mud was kind of purple… and the group were overlooking an obvious problem.

“Ah, you think this person savvier than appears?” Dergazt had come to stand beside him.

“Mmm,” he agreed. “If you took off the white cloth and rolled in the mud, in the darkness, with the wards they might actually get mistaken for an Ur’Vash?”

“There would have been a lot of people running around very chaotically,” Dergazt agreed, “but still raised the question of what they are. If it was a powerful Ghoblan, they can sometimes use illusions to confuse.”

“Are you trying to curse us? A Ghoblan warband?” he groaned.

“Faugh,” Argok spat nearby, overhearing Dergazt’s comment.

It was understandable: the Moon Sickle tribe had experience with Ghoblan on the northern part of their territory. Large forces of Ghoblan were almost as bad to cope with as a tribe banner and, if really pushed, were as obnoxious to deal with as a roving warband, as well as harder to catch.

“But they rarely leave their burrows and when they do it’s rarely to make this kind of indiscriminate mess?”

“Could be something disturbed by the war to the south,” Dergazt shrugged as they continued to look for anything out of the ordinary.

“That is what the Blue Serpents seem to think, at any rate,” he conceded.

“Or blue devils,” another hunter spat.

“Now you are just saying evil by sideways means,” Dergazt spat and made a sign to the Father of Names. “Anyway, this isn’t them.”

“How can you be sure?” one of the Blue Serpent warriors asked a bit bullishly as they stared around at the field.

“Not enough flaying involved,” he grunted, recalling the family stories his own grandfather had shared when very drunk about the campaign on the northern edge of the great savannah over a century ago.

“Also the town is still here,” Dergazt agreed. “They would have run off with all the women as well.”

Shaking his head, he left them to their speculations, which were only being rehashed for maybe the fiftieth time in the past week and continued to search.

“Ah-!” he finally spotted what he was after, it was nothing more than a bunch of broken twigs, but it was smeared with mud.

They followed the few other scant signs for a few minutes before finally ending up where the ‘mana signature’ had been briefly felt by the Golden Grass village junior shaman who had come out here earlier. The area had been poured over quite a bit…

“For a tribe with a reputation for being sneaky bastards, their plains craft is really shoddy,” he muttered staring around at the tracks left in every direction.

“Well, it was mostly settlement dwellers who did the poking around, a lot of enthusiasm and not a lot of skill,” the older hunter mused. “Remember they are famous for that mind-melting grass of theirs and theft of others’ hard-earned yellow stuff for the local Chief of Chiefs”

“Don’t say that too loudly around town. It is hard to reattach your skin,” he joked.

While Dergazt poked around the disparate trails to see if any of them were not made by plains Ur’Vash hyped up on outrage, he sat on a rock, just looking at the scene, trying to see if something was… off.

The ground had been trampled around and there was no sign of any onward trail after several dozen town searchers had stomped through here hitting bushes and screaming impotently. They were still doing that in the distance, disturbing nothing but birds.

He watched as a bunch of the aforementioned birds alighted in the area, pecking at the ground, one pulled something out of the dirt and had actually made to fly off with it before he recognised what it was.

“Ai, Sky Mother watches,” he hissed, swiftly unwinding his auxiliary ranged weapon, a sling, and downed the unfortunate bird with it, watching as a piece of muddy, rectangular, parchment-like material half the size of his hand drifted down.

Dergazt appeared moments later carrying his arrow and the bird.

“Nice shot!” the old hunter chuckled. “Did it shit on your head or something?”

“Ha, no.” He shook his head in amusement and held out the parchment for Dergazt to see. “It was about to fly off with this.”

“Huh-!” The old hunter frowned, considering the scrap. “It is the same as the other one, but…”

“But no fire mana,” he agreed.

“Yes. This one is really odd; I have not got much mana sense in my old age but this gives me the distinct feeling of being in two places at once,” the old hunter mused, licking the edge of the parchment carefully.

Annoyingly, their own junior shaman, the two others they had ‘collected’ along the way and the reasonably approachable one from the Blue Serpent tribe had run off to the village’s young chief.

“Who we give this to?” he mused.

“I think taking it back to town obvious mistake,” Dergazt muttered, still considering it. “All shamans run off with hot heads and I not like Golden Grass attitude.”

“Yes,” he nodded, “I agree there.”

“That said, you’re the boss,” Dergazt grinned with the look of a subordinate determined not to be put on the spot.

“…”

-If we take it back, this will likely make the Golden Grass hunters look bad, he sighed inwardly.

“We take it to Meklaz,” he decided after a moment’s further consideration.

“Hah,” Dergazt laughed, passing him back the paper.

“Meklaz was the one who sent us out here anyway,” he grumbled. “Seems only fair to make it his problem.”

“If you say that too loudly, maybe Meklaz make you Great Hunter, so you can have a short moment of fame before they put razor grass under your skin for making them look bad,” Dergazt cackled.

Shaking his head, he put the fragment carefully in his pouch and made his way back towards the town, the still-laughing old Ur’Vash in tow.

~ Lin Ling – Savannah near Golden Grass Village ~

Seated in a tree on the edge of a rocky outcrop several miles distant from the Golden Grass village, Lin Ling watched the band of almost 500 Ur’Vash fording the distant river as she nibbled on a Longevity Lingzhe. The settlement itself was still humming as Ur’Vash swept the surroundings, with more enthusiasm than skill it had to be said.

“Is that cloud of dust your handiwork?” Juni asked, arriving at the edge of the outcrop below.

“Yep,” she nodded, quite pleased with the response it had to be said.

Giving one final look across the river vale at the distant settlement where smoke was still rising, she slid down the tree and landed beside Juni just as Teng Chunhua also slipped out of the shrubbery to join them.

“They… what on earth did you do?” Teng Chunhua muttered, staring back towards the town

“I emptied their warehouse, burnt down the leader’s house and then taunted them a bit before running away,” she grinned, producing two more Longevity Lingzhe and passing them over.

“…”

“Want one?”

“Is that a five-star Yang Life attribute longevity Lingzhe?” Juni queried, taking it from her with a dull look settling on her face.

“Yep. They had a whole crate of them dried!” she giggled.

“Oh. No wonder they are off out there screaming in rage,” Teng Chunhua nodded, accepting the mushroom and biting a chunk off it.

“Mmm… probably needs to go in soup,” Juni mused, considering hers.

“You would think,” she snickered. “But no, these and a few others are rather incidental really. I burnt the chief’s house down – he had painted the whole thing yellow.”

“I don’t follow?” Teng Chunhua frowned. “What does it being yellow have to do with anything?”

“Did I not tell you about that insanity?” Juni asked, looking at the other woman sideways.

“Not that I recall,” Teng Chunhua mused.

-Ah, that was the difficult thing, because I haven’t really shared about the depths of information the memories have, she recalled. Probably Juni just ignored it to avoid difficult questions.

-I guess I will have to decide one way or the other on that… soon, she sighed inwardly.

It wasn’t that she didn’t trust Teng Chunhua; it was that she didn’t trust their circumstances as much as anything. Something had come sniffing for Han Shu’s sword and that youth back in the ruins had known they had treasures on them.

The scores on Arai and Sana’s talismans were also plaguing her waking nightmare. Those were in her talisman, but now in a pot inscribed inside and out with another of the weird formations the memories had instructed her in. One focused on isolating the state of the objects.

As such, the less Teng Chunhua knew regarding her secret, the better for now, she felt.

-Even so, there will come a point when I just have to trust her, she had to acknowledge.

“…”

She realised that both of them were staring at her now and that her silence had carried on for a little longer than was ideal there.

“Ah, the colour yellow is associated with wealth, prosperity and leadership, also magic, along with white,” she clarified.

“Also it appears to be what makes their arrows explode,” she added.

“…”

“While the two of you have been practicing the Dao of Field Arson, I’ve spent quite a bit of time poking around the last two towns. Most of the Ur’Vash there speak a variant of Easten. Write it too, so it was easy enough to pick some stuff up, even if it is downright weird at times. Take the blue war paint they all wear. They believe it makes them lucky, and because they believe it, it does.

“Red seems to relate to blood, vitality and vigour. Black is associated with strength, endurance, durability and power. Green with tradition. Purple is weird – seems to make them sneakier somehow, but also again authority in a way. White is…”

She trailed off, because she wanted to say ‘death’ and ‘magic’ but that was clearly not the case for these settlements where most buildings were rather reasonably painted white to deal with the oppressive heat.

“White is?” Juni prompted.

“Magic, mushrooms and in certain circumstances death,” she shrugged.

“Mushrooms huh…” Juni frowned. “That I can kind of see.”

“That…” Teng Chunhua just looked confused, having taken out a blue and white arrow to consider it, “makes no sense. I can see the symbolism side, but how does that give them actual power? These are just normal arrows painted in fancy colours.”

“Back in the forest I had any number of them slip inexplicably or avoid killing blows they had no right to,” Juni scowled. “And there were those smaller purple ones. They were able to get within feet of me without me noticing through qi-sense.”

“I was wondering if it was something like Dharma cultivation in all honesty,” she added.

“From their perspective… if you gave them a cultivation scripture, they would probably read it and go – What, by the nameless fate is this mumbo-jumbo!” Juni added. “We do that often enough as is.”

“Hmmm… when you put it like that,” Teng Chunhua nodded, but she still eyed them both a little dubiously.

-Yep, she knows I’m keeping secrets, she sighed inwardly.

“…”

“Okay…” she sighed.

-We need to deal with it anyway, and it will make the second part of this plan easier to explain in a way.

“There is more to it than that.”

“…”

Teng Chunhua looked at her pensively, while Juni frowned.

She pulled out a pot of the yang blood and sat down on a rock.

“I can’t explain it all, but… I suffered a mutation I guess, relating to long-term exposure of this blood. It belonged to a powerful, ancient spirit beast that I happened across just after it had died. I started using it as a tool to get past wards in the depths when we got stranded… and well, as I said, I suffered some kind of mutation when I broke through to Mantra Seed.”

“Your mantra mutated?” Teng Chunhua blinked.

“Among other things,” she acknowledged. “The… blood has instincts and memories associated with it.”

“It’s… ah… oh.” Teng Chunhua stared at her, then at the blood. “I… see. That explains…”

“They are difficult to interpret, but some of them relate to things like these Ur’Vash,” she added.

“You ended up with the inheritance of a spirit beast…” Teng Chunhua sounded a bit shocked, which was fair, really, given what she had just revealed. “Your contribution score?”

“Ah… no. That wasn’t related to this,” she shook her head. “I really have had my talisman stolen. That score is related to an artefact that the person who stole the talisman acquired.”

“I see…” Teng Chunhua didn’t look dubious now. She looked conflicted if anything and her instincts…?

-Did I make a mistake?

She had a moment of panic, before realising it was just the ‘less sociable’ memories, as she had taken to considering them, acting out again.

“Sorry, I shouldn’t have pried,” Teng Chunhua sat back, smiling wanly.

“I didn’t really want to keep secrets” she grimaced, “but with what happened to Han Shu…”

“And you still saw fit to share it with me,” Teng Chunhua muttered, looking a bit abashed now.

It was a weird expression to see on the older woman, who had largely been fairly inscrutable. That last bit was probably down to her mantra though, she guessed. Han Shu, Jun Arai and Jun Sana were all a bit like that as well at times as she recalled.

“Well-” Juni smiled slightly, before Teng Chunhua cut her off with a wave of her hand.

“It’s fine,” Teng Chunhua sighed again, “I understand. Thank you for explaining it and trusting me to this extent.”

“…”

“I have to admit that that my explanation is a bit self-serving,” she added, “because it makes it a lot easier for me to explain the next step of our plan.”

“So… what now?” Juni asked.

“Well, I seeded a few of those broken talismans opportunely; the Ur’Vash from the other two tribes are a lot more vigilant than these ones. They will find them if they look reasonably closely and come to the conclusion that a ‘Magus’, as they call them in Easten, which is the closest thing they have to a Spiritual Cultivator, is involved. At that point, things should escalate rather quickly.”

“How so?” Teng Chunhua frowned.

“These ‘Magi’ are not common, it looks like. Tribes make them live a long way away because their powers are powerful and unpredictable. They also tend to be powerful and reclusive eccentrics in their own right,” she elaborated, drawing on a mix of what she had heard from conversations and the memories views on them.

“So once they think someone like that is involved in this, they will start properly tracking down our quarry,” Juni nodded.

“Another Lingzhe?” she added, rather offhandedly.

“Sure,” Juni nodded and she passed a bunch out to both of them, which they stored away for the most part.

“Oh-!” she snapped her fingers, turning back to Teng Chunhua. “Do you have any decoy talismans?”

That was a small but vital component of their next actions. Her experience in the town across the river told her that she didn’t want to be running away from anyone stronger than those who had been in there. Decoy talismans would alleviate that somewhat and also mean they could maintain a disguise continually. Before, she hadn’t considered it worth the expense because the talismans were quite precious for their relatively low grade, but now there was no point in half measures.

“…”

The older woman frowned and pulled out her talisman wallet and then a bunch of other talismans in boxes from her storage ring, riffling through them quickly.

“Yes, I got a whole bunch of these things as part of the initial preparation for the trial, much use they turned out to be,” Teng Chunhua mused after a moment, holding up eight talismans.

Taking one, she found it to be the familiar one ‘Spiritual Illusionary Body Talisman’; they were part of the utility groups which tended not to be rated by their ‘realm grade’ but by their ‘quality’. As such, they were Spiritual grade rather than say, Nascent Soul ranked.

-A curse on you, Di Ji, she swore in her heart, seeing her two ‘Earthly Illusionary Body’ talismans vanishing into the darkness of the shaft with all the others in her mind’s eye.

“These will do,” she nodded, passing most of them back to Teng Chunhua.

“So, what is the next part of this?” Juni asked, eyeing the talismans.

“We hit another town,” she grinned. “However, we will also have to disguise ourselves properly from here on in, which is why I asked about the talismans. If they are scouring the whole landscape for cultivators and people dressed like cultivators it will be bothersome to move with just the stealth arts we have and we cannot rely on an ad hoc disguise like before.”

Looking at Teng Chunhua and Juni, she suppressed a sigh, burying it in her heart. Both of them were tall, athletic and well-proportioned, with dark hair, dark eyes and tanned complexions. If they wore masks, cut their hair a bit, hid the fact that they didn’t have pointy ears and wore less clothes than they currently were – with only a bit of extra war paint, they would pass for Ur’Vash womenfolk with little issue.

She, by comparison, was short, blonde, pale and a bit skinny with light eyes. The yang blood was giving her muscle, but it was more by way of definition than extra stature.

“Ah well, at least I will not be alone in feeling unclothed,” Juni sighed, giving Teng Chunhua a sideways look that the other woman pretended not to notice.

“Ha. Ha,” she snarked, tossing out a bunch of oily herbs she had scavenged.

“What are these for?” Teng Chunhua picked up the leafy branches.

“Your skin is still a bit pale,” she said, rubbing the sap on her arm, which rapidly stained a sort of reddish-grey, trending towards umber.

They spent the next 30 minutes or so basically just doing that and effectively faking a set tribal tattoos. That was the second part of her plan. She had originally intended to just copy a small tribe they encountered, but the memories had provided another, intriguing possibility, hidden in her observations of the two settlements so far. Ur’Vash were a separate race, but their relations to ‘humans’ as they would have termed the majority of the populace of Eastern Azure was closer than it first appeared. As such, the Ur clan, as they could rightfully be called was a grouping of peoples with a close kinship to three others in some ancient antiquity the Ash, Sar and Bel.

The Sar were out of the question for two reasons though: First, those of the Ur people with a close relationship to the Sar clan called themselves Ur’Inan, not Ur’Vash, and she had heard no mention of them in any conversation she had run across. The second was that Ur’Sar were seen as roving priestesses called the Daughters of Sar who followed a ‘goddess’ steeped in war, sex and death’ – largely in that order. In the absence of war, their ministrations as presented in her memory… were not appealing.

That left the Bel and Ash who had a strange relationship with the memories. The Ash she mostly discounted because their relationship was one of competition and again there was no mention of anything that seemed remotely linked to them in these settlements or anything she had seen prior to this point, associated with the Ur’Vash

The Bel, on the other hand had some history of integration with the Ur’Vash in the sense that those of the various tribes of the Ur clan had accepted followers and ancestors of the Ur’Vash had been some of their most willing adherents. Those followers had become bands, made of many races who travelled with the Daughters of one of the great mythical figures of the Bel clan. Sometimes he was called the Maker, Father Maker or Father of Earth. In that latter form she had seen him venerated with several street shrines throughout Golden Grass village. The historic name for them was ‘The Maker’s Dancers’.

The really key thing, though, was her memories also had a different perspective on those bands. They called him the ‘Giver of Names’, not because he had given them names, but because he had wanted to help the world attain a meaning beyond itself. He had seen and respected the strength of names. The Maker’s Dancers had been the followers, friends and acolytes of his daughters, so called because they were seen to dance across the land, travelling in harmony between earth and sky.

They were seen as omens of prosperity and good luck and were the origin of the Ur people’s veneration of Blue and Gold. Blue for the Sky and Gold for the sun were the colours of the Maker. However, they were also the colours of another, perhaps as ancient power.

If she wanted to be really honest, that was the deciding factor of all the factors – the Sundew Peony she had found in the storehouse. If she closed her eyes, she could overlay it with the lantern that the statue of that ancient being had held. The Maker’s Dancers were as much affiliated with her. Many would see them as a sign of good fortune, renewed prosperity and strength – but they were also heralds of change, upheaval and pivotal moments.

That was the end goal anyway, to pass as Ur’Vash in the first instance, but if someone poked too closely, chose to pierce the veil of careful obscurity they were crafting, they would find enough subtle hints in the tattoos and the war paint to lead them to that inevitable conclusion. That the three of them were ‘Maker’s Dancers’.

“We look barbaric,” Teng Chunhua sighed, looking at herself as they finished painting on the basic symbols.

“Speak for yourself,” she scowled, poking Juni in her stomach.

“If it’s any consolation, they will think you are showing that skin because you are ashamed of your looks and are showing off your tits to compensate.”

“…”

Both older women stared at her levelly.

“What? Ur’Vash like a certain figure. Be glad you fit it to a tee except for a lack of pointy nose and ears and poorly defined cheekbones,” she added. “I, on the other hand, will look short, weedy and generally like a child that didn’t eat so good.”

Both just shook their heads as she made them turn around and taking a reed started to rapidly draw blue designs using a crushed paste of sap and flowers she had found in a pot in the herbalist's workshop and store. It was handy that he had all of those materials in store.

A short while later, having garbed themselves in various bits of cloth, making as many concessions to modesty as the common dress code of the Ur’Vash provided for, she surveyed them critically, pleased with the result. It really did help that both were physically well developed with good muscle definition from their years of working as herb hunters.

With masks and grass capes, they would indeed, in the first instance, pass for a bunch of female Ur’Vash hunters. The only real issue was scent, but unless they were rolling in the mud with someone that would be unlikely to pose a problem.

“Really, I hope this works, because if we get rumbled within an hour I will kick your ass before they kick ours,” Teng Chunhua sighed, looking herself over again and adjusting her garments to try to provide even more modesty.

“It will,” Juni nodded. “We were only caught that time because of that old leader and because our gear was seriously ad hoc.”

“Gah!” she slapped her head, having realised something really stupid.

-Idiot, how could I not pick up some gear that is in the craftsman ship of this region!

“What is it?” Juni frowned.

“I should have stolen bows and some arrows,” she groaned. “Not to mention a few other weapons,”

“…”

“Is that important?” Teng Chunhua asked.

“Yes,” she nodded, sighing deeply. “In the first instance most tribes have distinct ways of doing things. It’s subtle compared to us, because we have clan robes… but it would be like you walking around with a storage ring with the Ha clan emblem on. Weapons and things like bows and especially arrows are almost unique to tribes as far as I could see. The Grass Stalkers here use different materials for their arrows compared to the Moon tribe from before or the Snake tribe and so on.”

“Ah,” Juni nodded, as did Teng Chunhua. “It would be dumb to go to all this effort just to be caught out because we shot the wrong arrows at someone.”

“Indeed,” she agreed. “Which means I guess we get to test out these disguises a bit sooner rather than later.”

~Cang Di – The Great Savannah ~

“I mean, I have seen bloody stupid, and then there is this,” Zi Min sighed from where they stood overlooking the ruined settlement.

“That it was not perpetuated by the Jade Gate Court just makes my head hurt,” he agreed.

“Only in the sense that they disowned the idiots responsible and took all their spirit stones in recompense,” Qing Dongmei muttered.

The ‘small’ village of ‘demons’ below them had been attacked by one of the aggregating groups who had been moving to catch up. It had largely been independent cultivators as far as he could make out, with a few influences affiliated with clans loyal to the Imperial Court tagging along and ‘guiding matters’ – the Deng clan, Mu clan and Ji clan. They had also had a bunch of disciples from the Nine Auspicious Moons, who Qing Dongmei was rather displeased with.

“It might still have been perpetuated by the Jade Gate Court,” Zi Min added. “They were very quick to take charge of matters and help in identifying the dead.”

“…”

“How are your casualties?” he asked Dongmei.

“Three dead, six injured. Two of the dead were Immortals.”

The village itself had likely looked quite innocuous. It had been a walled compound, made of stone, mud brick and wood for the most part. The buildings would have been colourfully painted and the fields around it full of a crop of grass.

“What kind of moron sets a field of hallucinogenic spirit grass on fire?” Qing Dongmei added. “I am no alchemist and even I know that randomly combusting low quality spirit grass fields is a baaaaad idea.”

Down below, the Pill Sovereign Sect were remonstrating at great length with some of the other survivors regarding this very point. The crop, had it just been stolen, would have been worth several Earthly Jade back home, if not more. The alchemists were also angry, he presumed, because the crop appeared to be largely unknown to them.

“Colossally moronic,” the dark-haired woman standing near Qing Dongmei muttered, getting a few eye rolls from those near her.

As near as he could tell, the whole thing had been spawned by a combination of greed, idiocy, overconfidence and the panicked realisation that most of what they had brought with them was nowhere near as effective as it should have been all of a sudden. The initial probe appeared to have met with some success, according to the survivors – they claimed two of the Immortals had led a small group to infiltrate the village to steal goods under the cover of the soul sense restriction.

They had, apparently, failed, being detected somehow and half their number captured. The rest, caught off guard and expecting matters to be easier than they turned out to be, splintered. A few advocated to retreat and immediately call for reinforcements, but the majority, urged on by the friends of those captured, had instead immediately attacked the village.

At that point, they had discovered that the town had an iron core of protectors who were at least Dao Seeking, and led by a demon who was, by all accounts, a Body Refinement cultivator and martial expert. Because the highest realm living among the survivors was an Immortal and the leader of the band as a whole had been a Chosen Immortal, all they could say for certain was that that expert and two others, who had remarkably devastating arts, focused on area suppression, battle support and poisons were probably peak Chosen Immortals and maybe Golden Immortals.

Unfortunately, between the soul sense suppression that was still in effect and the contamination of the talismans, it was impossible to say for sure, even for him.

In any case, when you tallied up everything else – the village having a population of about 500, most of those above adolescence having proven to be at least Golden Core or Soul Foundation body cultivators, the demons being unexpectedly good with formations, the fact that the entire village was governed by truly insidious feng shui alignments and the clincher, the vast pall of hallucinogenic smoke the battle kicked up – it was a miracle of individual prowess that an ad hoc force such as the one that assaulted it had actually won.

The cultivators had persevered, but close to two thirds lay dead, most of the survivors were injured in some way and by all the evidence they had had to leave little off the table to achieve that.

“What kind of moron sees a walled settlement in this land – full of spirit beasts, weird ruins and possibly worse and thinks... yep, we can easily take this with 60 disorganised cultivators,” Zi Min added, half amused, half incredulous.

“Dead ones?” someone else from nearby added, a plain-looking young woman with dark brown hair and a scar on her face who was part of Qing Dongmei’s group.

“Unbloodied brats who don’t know what it takes to assault dark forces,” another from a minor influence added.

“And in the end, what little they got goes to the Jade Gate Court,” someone else sighed.

“And after that, all we are left with is a huge mess that implicates everyone,” he agreed, drily.

“People do tend to notice villages vanishing in an hour of sustained explosions and warfare,” Qing Dongmei agreed sourly. “Not to mention a good number of the occupants escaped.”

That was the key point really. For all that he had a great deal of antipathy regarding Kong Bo and a few other emergent leaders, they were versed in this at least. This settlement was established, he could see it in the land, and it had had a market, goods present amid the ruins which had no manufacturing base in the town. It was an idiotic thing, easily overlooked, but some of the warriors defending it had had metal weapons and armour, yet there were no mines nearby they had seen; the smithing capabilities in the ruined town were crude at best. There was food in the storehouses that was not grown here either.

In short, this place had a supply chain, and was probably some larger power’s settlement. They had mostly avoided the settled powers that they saw distant evidence of. It was a choice that had been unpopular among many who sought ‘opportunity’ here and had caused the Jade Gate Court no little unrest in certain quarters.

“They knew about this already,” Zi Mi mused, glancing down at where Kong Bo was ordering several people around, recovering various things out of a smoking building.

“They did,” he agreed.

They had, after all been uncommonly sharp in walking the other way from that forest.

“What do you make of the ‘Ancient Immortal’? Qing Dongmei asked.

“I think that if there was an Ancient Immortal demon as an old elder in a village of maybe 500 people, we do not want to turn over a town of 5000,” he scowled.

“It could have been bad luck?” one of the Nine Auspicious Moons’ disciples murmured.

“Hah,” Qing Dongmei just snorted faintly under her breath.

The other two nodded in silent agreement at that.

There was indeed such a thing as accidentally kicking over a box to find it was an iron brick, but both the poison user and the female who had literally been able to stop her fellow villagers dying for a full ten minutes, even the children, had escaped. That last trick was what had allowed them to scatter in every direction, fleeing into the brush and fields.

It had taken Kong Bo and the Jade Gate Court’s compass, when the main band diverted here directly, to determine that the ‘Soul Sense Suppression’ was an alignment built into the entire vicinity of the village. Unless they levelled the whole village, ripped up the entire land here and severed its vitality fully they had no way to nullify it. A mortal alignment. The village had burials amid its fields as well, set in auspicious points to anchor it. The demons who founded the village were almost certainly buried on this land as well, likely in the caves below the village that had been uncovered.

-Which raises another ominous question, He mused. If they can do that, for this small village, building it up over generations as near as I can tell – that means they understand clearly the concepts of land accumulation and sacred grounds. Does that mean these demons were also responsible for the town we were exploring… and if so, why did they abandon it?

“Problem?” Qing Dongmei asked him, noting his scowl he supposed.

“Just thinking that this place keeps posing questions that have hypothetical answers I can only term… unpleasant,” he sighed, starting to walk down the hill towards the ruined town.

The others all stared at him until he actually stopped and turned back to them.

“Well? Are you just going to let that lot poke around here at will? We are here as well?”

“…”

Zi Min rolled his eyes and started after him. A few moments later Qing Dongmei and the dark-haired woman with the scar who was faintly familiar he couldn’t help but feel came with him, followed by the rest of their group that had been standing around on the hilltop.

~ Teng Chunhua – The Great Savannah ~

Standing in the street, trying not to look utterly on edge, Teng Chunhua had to admit she was impressed at how well both Lin Ling and Kun Juni were able to bluff this. They had basically walked right back to the suburbs of the settlement Lin Ling had robbed blind not half a day before. Neither had inherited mantras either – without the ability to feed her emotions to her mantra she would never have risked this. In her own mind, while they didn’t look that different she couldn’t help but think this was a terrible idea. Even the fact that they were wearing masks, as many other warriors and hunters were, really didn’t help her nerves.

She had, in truth expected them just to steal some bows, but Lin Ling had shot that down and said they should just go get someone to make some for them. Now, the younger woman was arguing with a burly Ur’Vash about wood while Juni leaned against the side of his world area looking for all the world like just one more bored hunter among many.

In truth, they had attracted next to no notice, beyond a few appreciative hoots which Lin Ling had returned with rude gestures or ignored.

“You have very nice body, want to come have drink?” She realised another Ur’Vash had just sidled up to the two of them and was trying to pick her up – again.

-Do they think every unattached female is interested in sex or something? she complained inwardly.

“No,” she shook her head, checking the Ur’Vash’s tattoos.

Lin Ling had given them a quick rundown on what they meant as far as she ‘knew’ and how they related to rank. The Ur’Vash in front of her was from this village, denoted by the swirling golden patterns on his bared torso. The blue spirals marked him as what passed for a Golden Core expert, although she could grasp that from his intent anyway.

“Sure? I have good spider ichor…” the Ur’Vash added hopefully.

“No,” she added a bit more emphasis.

The Ur’Vash scowled a bit but stalked off, pausing some ten meters down the street to chat to another female Ur’Vash minding a stall selling grass cloaks. The vendor scowled at him and repeated the same gesture she had seen Lin Ling make a few times and then told him to buy something or scram.

The whole ambience was kind of weird – it put her in mind of the villages south of the Shadow Forest, inland from Teng Lin town. They were rustic, bustling and rather uncouth-

She shuffled off the street as a bunch of armed Ur’Vash with red stripes covering their arms and legs jogged past. A patrol of actual guards. Red stripes meant the equivalent of Soul Foundation. That said, their Martial Intent was still worse than hers was, and rather disturbingly hers was worse than Juni’s now, despite the other woman being a realm lower than her.

-Probably it’s down to her background in the Kun clan; they are famous for their martial manual after all, she mused.

-That said, both of them have their secrets…

“Bah,” she spat in the street and walked over to Lin Ling, who had now been joined by Juni.

-It’s not my business; who doesn’t have secrets, she sighed. If I compare it to my mantra inheritance, is their reticence to talk about things in the current circumstances any wonder?

The admission by Lin Ling that she had acquired a spiritual inheritance from that blood had been… less surprising than she had played it. It had surprised her, yes, but she had long suspected something in that vein – even if it wasn’t quite this.

The Argent Justice disciples had not, mostly because they came from a sect that was a rank above the Blue Gate School, never mind the Teng School. Such things were taken in their stride. They also didn’t know any of the hunters from before, like she did, so were not at all clear on their strength before. For her part, she had just gone along with what they had said.

She didn’t know Lin Ling very well, but Han Shu had been…

-Is a friend, she mentally corrected herself with a grimace.

-He is not dead… nope… if the fates have any sense of justice.

They had worked together on several missions she had led and she had always had a good impression of him. Similarly, she knew Kun Juni a bit better than the other might have realised in truth, because Juni actually fulfilled the role of an official in the West Flower Picking pavilion and so did a lot of work with other pavilions.

Lin Ling’s aura was utterly at odds with the Lin clan as well. They originated south of the Shadow forest and had controlled Teng Lin town before the debacle that had brought their downfall.

“Done yet?” she asked.

“Aye,” Lin Ling nodded, passing her two quivers of arrows.

Lin Ling handed over a handful of what looked like beast teeth and the Ur’Vash craftsman told them where they could find another craftsman who could fix up their blades.

Leaving the shop, each with a bow and several quivers of arrows apiece, they threaded after Lin Ling and soon arrived at another compound which was bustling.

“What is here?” she asked, wishing she was a bit better at Easten.

“Place to buy new blades,” Lin Ling shrugged, investigating a table that had a dozen or so carved stone blades on it.

Picking one up, she was surprised to find it was in a familiar stone – the deep blue-grey material that many of the ruins around south grove were constructed off.

Lin Ling traded a bunch more teeth and two beast cores they had gathered along the way to a bored-looking Ur’Vash and passed them both what amounted to a stone machete with a crude scabbard. They left again without lingering, as much because there was a small horde of people bustling around.

“Why are there so many people?” she signed.

“Doubts regarding town security, I imagine,” Lin Ling signed back and laughed.

“…”

She could only suppress a laugh at that. This place could probably defend against raiders very well, but it was poorly equipped to deal with a problem like them. Juni just shook her head and made to poke the younger woman, who easily avoided her finger to the back of the head. Without any further comment, they made their way out of town, only stopping when they were well clear.

“So, now that we have all this, what do we do next?” she asked, sitting down on a rock and adjusting the quiver across her hips for the third time.

“How does the trail look?” Lin Ling asked.

Juni pulled out a compass and she did as well. They had made them when it was clear that they had no chance of simply ‘following’ the trail itself anymore. Fortunately, the mysterious person was still seeding tiny bits of Yang qi that had the same signature as the blood. That allowed them to make compasses properly attuned to it that could track the innate connection.

With two compasses it was easy enough to work out with a bit of ingenuity what general direction it was running in. That was doubly fortunate because their quarry had started actively evading larger population centres as far as they could make out.

“Seems to be about a hundred miles north west-ish?” Juni frowned, glancing at her own compass then hers and consulting her jade tablet on which she had taken to plotting the general track.

“Hmmm…” Lin Ling looked pensive.

“You thinking we need to hit another town?” Juni asked.

“This reaction is what we wanted,” Lin Ling nodded. “However…”

“However, they seem determined to handle it themselves?” she noted, having also heard enough of the angry conversations around the town to work that out.

“Yeah…” Lin Ling grimaced, glancing at the two of them. “There is another town about a day’s travel north of here, a bigger one.”

“A bigger one?” she asked, thinking that this village was already plenty big. “How did you find that out?”

“I asked the bowyer,” Lin Ling said with a smirk. “He was quite chatty; apparently he has a daughter my age who wants to be a hunter.”

“Are you trying to make us feel bad about our earlier raiding?” Juni scowled.

“…”

She grimaced as well. However, it was disturbingly easy to recall the frenzied insanity of the bands in the forest and their relentless pursuit. They had also been not at all disposed to ‘cultivators’ and seemingly determined to kill them all in the part of the altercation with the old Ur’Vash she had witnessed before she was knocked unconcious. Matching that with this, made her feel a bit weird. Clearly, many of the local tribal influences were not as savage as they had first appeared – or maybe crude was a better way of thinking about it. She had seen what they had done to the ‘guards’ of the warehouse Lin Ling had robbed…

-Then again, justice back home could be brutal, we just don’t see it the same way because they hid it behind bureaucracy more often than not.

“Well, if we move as fast as we can, we should make it by midnight,” Lin Ling said confidently, tacitly ignoring Juni’s comment.

…

As it turned out, the reason Lin Ling was so confident in that statement was because the towns were linked by a road. Several roads in fact. They set out at a brisk jog through the afternoon, rapidly eating up the miles. She was still a bit unnerved by how good Juni’s movement art was, in truth. Her own ‘Jade Willow Steps’ was a good art, suitable for a Golden Core cultivator, and Lin Ling was also at Mantra Seed and liable to break through to form her Golden Core any day now as far as she could tell. Even so, Juni was able to keep pace with their rapid shuttling across the landscape with very little effort.

They passed few people on the road, all of them heading to Golden Grass Village from more outlying settlements as far as she could see. There were a few wagons, pulled by the black and white, horned horses that the Ur’Vash seemed to raise as both meat and beasts of burden and a few guards on watchtowers, but that was about it.

True to Lin Ling’s prediction, they arrived at the town about three hours after dusk, having covered almost thirty miles in the afternoon thanks to the road and the amount of resources they had to recover qi now. However, while the darkness hid a lot… it also revealed what she could only consider a ‘problem’ as they stood on the hill overlooking the town and its outlying suburbs and fields.

“That’s quite a large settlement,” she said at last, taking in the three sets of walls on display.

The nearest was about 300 metres away, at the bottom of the hill they were on, not very high, but well-lit and with watchtowers every half a mile. Beyond it was maybe two miles of dense agriculture, hidden in night shadow except for a few lights of farm buildings scattered through it.

Beyond that, the town itself had another low wall around its outer suburbs and a few towers. Inside that though…

“It is,” Juni agreed, looking sideways at Lin Ling who was crouched on a rock, peering at the distant lights.

The inner town was built on a low hill beside a lake, surrounded by a wall some twenty metres high, and made of mud brick and stone, with periodic watch towers. Beyond it buildings were scattered in curved streets, maybe rising to at least two stories. She could make out what were likely three different warehouses both in the lower town and upper one.

“How many Ur’Vash do you reckon live here?” she muttered, guessing it had to be well over 10,000, maybe closer to 15,000.

“The previous town was maybe 6,000 if you counted the outlying settlement,” Juni guessed. “I can only go by what I recall of census information from back home as a guide.”

“I would guess they have larger families,” she nodded.

“Hard to say, depends on how long people live,” Juni sighed.

“So, do we really want to rob here? Or are we going to find somewhere smaller?” She asked, quietly hoping they picked somewhere else in all honesty.

“We can go in and have a look,” Lin Ling said, hopping off her rock.

“…”

Thirty minutes later found them seated at a table in the corner of the second floor of a smokey, crude tavern in the inner town after just walking right into the town. She had expected some checks, but beyond a very cursory glance at their tattoos and one guard calling Juni ugly after she was asked to remove her mask, they had encountered no trouble at all. It cost two of the unusual beast teeth, carved with yellow painted runes apiece to enter, a price Lin Ling paid without comment, and after that they had been waved in after being told to show proper respect.

Thereafter, they had been free to roam unmolested in an official sense, where they liked and as far as they could work out, the town was having some kind of festival. There were some patrols, but they mostly broke up fights where it looked like Ur’Vash might die. Brawling, merriment and a lot of singing and dancing were everywhere…

It also helped that a lot of the Ur’Vash spoke Easten, it seemed to be the ‘common’ tongue, or perhaps ‘formal’ one. As such they could fit right in without worrying too much about how they sounded.

“Are you sure this place isn’t a brothel,” she signed, turning her gaze back from the nearby enclosure of the warehouse across the central square.

“…”

“They can at least cook,” Lin Ling mumbled around a mouthful of some kind of steamed meat she was gnawing on, choosing to ignore her actual question.

“As long as it’s meat or stew, sure,” Juni agreed, also seemingly determined to ignore that side of this establishment and nibbling much more demurely on her own leg of whatever animal it was.

Taking another bite of her own bit, she chewed it pensively, it was probably a bird of some kind but beyond that she couldn’t say really.

They had picked this place very arbitrarily because it was central to the inner town, close to the warehouse. The place they were in was fairly busy – mostly because of the two voluptuous, very naked Ur’Vash dancing on a table on the lower floor.

“This place is just as lax as the other town, just bigger,” Lin Ling mused, finishing her haunch of meat and turning back to consider the warehouse.

Two of them were standing around looking very bored, smoking some kind of pipe between them. A third was talking to an old man at a stall in the market that was still ongoing.

“Still awkwardly busy,” Juni pointed out, to which she could only nod as she kept on eating her own haunch.

The serving girl, again scantily enough clad that she was glad she had her mantra to avoid looking embarrassed on the others behalf, paused by their table noting the food was nearly done.

“You want more?” she asked, looking over what little was left of the repast.

“Sure,” she muttered. “We take some drink as well.”

The girl nodded and left without comment. A few moments later however, a young Ur’Vash boy scarpered over carrying two crude clay pitchers painted with various raucous scenes that had a slight haze over it and another. The serving girl followed shortly after, bearing a platter of a dozen roast haunches and a bowl of the spicy soup you were meant to dip them in. Juni had just drunk the last bowl, declaring it merely ‘kind of spicy’, an act that had put the table along from theirs into hysterics.

They spent a further three hours there in the end before finally judging the night quiet enough to make any kind of move. It was understandable, she supposed as she wandered around the perimeter of the warehouse, which was to be her target. The day here was infernally hot and even with the buildings painted in reflective colours standing in direct sunlight without a hat was like breathing with your head in an oven.

The locals seemed to take the temperature in their stride, and in truth, she was not that badly affected by it either. It was much better than the jungle they had been in for certain. Merely as bad as the Shadow Forest’s depths, with the distinct advantage of not being humid and for that alone she was thankful.

Juni and Lin Ling had both also headed off into the inner city to scout for targets. She had landed the warehouse simply because she had a storage ring rather than a talisman, which was less constrained in what could be put in it. And, as Lin Ling had pointed out, it was their only storage device that could easily store bodies to hide them if it came to that.

Completing her circuit, she sighed, annoyed. Getting in over the walls would be difficult; she had checked the wall and it had some kind of feng shui arrangement on it that made climbing it difficult. What that entailed she was not sure, but likely it would either raise an alarm or just make it more and more likely to fall the higher she climbed. Using qi to jump was also totally out of the question. Soul sense was blocked but she was sure anyone doing odd things with qi would not get far.

-So that means either the gate or a distraction, she mused inwardly.

She considered the guards, wondering if she could take more than one in a fight. They were Soul Foundation from what she could see, but with soul sense suppressed their main advantage of maybe having soul sense was neutralised to a degree. In the end, it was circumstances that provided because the guards changed and the new arrivals brought their entertainment with them. Suppressing her presence to the utmost using her mantra and ‘One with What Is’, she slipped through the shadows, through the gateway and into the courtyard while they were all laughing and talking in the square by the gates.

Once inside, she slipped inside and then immediately found shadows again.

-Of course they have guards inside as well, she grumbled, crouching by a pile of empty crates.

“Oi Oi! Change!” a voice echoed through the compound.

She watched as various Ur’Vash congregated from around the compound, a few looking like they had been asleep. Watching the changeover complete, she sighed in relief as the new arrivals basically all trooped into a smaller building and started to set up a game of some kind. The others took their company to a side room and started to entertain themselves and the rest just scattered about looking bored and occasionally poking their heads into doorways, clearly not invested in what they were doing.

Even that ‘effort’ didn’t last more than ten minutes and soon all but two guards who went onto the roof to sleep, she guessed, were back at the gate and guardhouse having looted some wine from somewhere.

Shaking her head, she started her exploration. The warehouse turned out to be for much more than herbs – there was food, hides, rooms full of pottery and such, stores of wood and even a room full of odd types of stone. Finally, she found the herb stores, which were basically crates of stacked grass in a room with a very crude ward on the door.

Disarming that, she emptied out every crate in the stack except for the top ones and then cleaned out anything else that was remotely valuable-looking on the shelves, leaving only enough to make it look at a cursory glance in the dark as if things were as normal. The majority of what she got was three and four-star grade, but there were a few five-star grade herbs on a shelf at the back.

Exiting, she closed the door and made her way onwards. In the end, she cleared out five rooms, including one with a small hoard of beast cores, disguising her passage with a few basic illusion talismans as she went. None of that would survive more than cursory investigation, but based on the commitment of the guards she had seen, she suspected they had this job because it afforded them time to party.

The ease of the whole thing did lead her to wonder why more people didn’t steal from warehouses, but on reflection this was only possible because of their spatial storage items. The Ur’Vash guarding the gate were happily using several of the herbs and drugs being stored here anyway, and taking wine from it, so probably there was a kind of agreement there.

Lin Ling had explained a bit more about the alignments that were blocking soul sense, and from what she had seen, she had added that she was pretty sure that they not only restricted it, but likely marked unfamiliar soul senses in some way as well.

That meant that without a storage talisman, anyone who stole more than a small amount would likely be caught fairly quickly – if only because it would be the guards or they would have had to go through the guards. At that point they would likely be caught anyway without soul concealing skills on the level of the remarkable technique Lin Ling had shared with her – ‘One with What Is’.

For that alone, she would probably have exchanged a toast and become the younger woman’s sword sister. The pair played it off as if it was some inconsequential thing, but she knew enough about those kind of arts to see through their feigned disregard. It was an art many taking part in this trial would not hesitate to steal from any of them by force.

Arriving on the second floor, she cleaned out two rooms up there as well, finishing on the roof where the two Ur’Vash who had come here were indeed sound asleep on rush mats in the cooler, fresh air further from the ground.

Placing down her decoy talisman, she set a few more talisman traps nearby, trusting that Lin Ling and Juni would have put target talismans and anchors near other targets and then, having made sure nobody was going to spot her, jumped off the roof to a lower building roof. Rolling as she landed, she slunk into the shadows then slipped down the side of that building into a dark alley and then staggered out of it, pretending to be a bit drunk, like the few other late revellers on that street.

It didn’t take her long to return back to the tavern and the room they had rented. A short while later Lin Ling arrived back, followed by Juni.

“How did it go?” Lin Ling asked her.

“The guards were more interested in their vices,” she chuckled, before signing, “It was depressingly easy to rob, barely any formations or anything – they are either supremely confident in their underlings or just don’t expect it.”

“You?” she asked them.

“Same pretty much,” Juni mused, signing, “Mostly low rank herbs. It was a drying warehouse and an herb compounding workshop for the grass they were growing in the fields. They seem to use it for everything from brewing alcohol to smoking, to feeding their animals or just as a crop to eat.”

“There were a few notable shops,” Lin Ling added. “Not easy to rob, but I was able to get a good few higher grade herbs. Afraid I used up all the rest of your dispersal talismans though.”

“Figures,” she sighed. “They are there to be used, I suppose.”

“There was no trouble setting the talisman or traps though,” she signed, taking a swing of some of the wine she had taken. It was much better than what had been sold in the tavern.

“At least this wine is better,” she observed, passing it to Juni, who also took a drink and nodded appreciatively.

She leant back against the wall on her bed and sighed, signing again. “Hopefully the idea of using an illusion talisman and dropping a busted blink talisman works.”

“Mmm… so it is,” Lin Ling agreed. “In any case, it should do.”

She had to admit that the younger woman certainly sounded more reassured than she herself felt.

“Most of the Ur’Vash are body type cultivators – warriors,” Lin Ling signed. “The shamans are more like alchemists who practice a combination of Dharma arts and Gu esotericism. The true qi users, as I said before, tend to stay far away from major habitation centres on account of their tendency to blow things up or set them on fire a lot when they get angry from what I could gather on the way here.”

They sat there, drinking and talking about random stuff for about ten minutes before Juni finally finished the jar and passed it back to her.

“Well, shall we do this?” Lin Ling said at last.

“We are not going to leave?” she frowned.

“That would be suspicious,” Juni signed. “We do this by just not doing anything out of the ordinary. For whatever reason storage devices are basically non-existent beyond a few pots I’ve seen which just hold more stuff. Those don’t do anything regarding weight either.”

“Well, if we all get caught, I will haunt you,” she muttered, only half joking, really wishing she shared their certainty.

Lin Ling nodded and vanished out of the room.

They sat there in silence, Juni just breathing softly and she, sitting on her hands so she didn’t bite her fingernails in spite of using her mantra to keep her nerves in check.

“DEMONS! HOW DARE YOU KILL JUNIORS OF THE ARGENT HALL!”

The words, in Easten and Imperial Common boomed out, making the air around them waver faintly. There was no soul sense in there, just pure sound. A moment later she felt the flare of a detonation in the night air.

Seconds later she saw a ghostly white form flit through the air across a rooftop, Juni wearing a facsimile of her best robe, looking every inch the ‘big miss’ with her face veiled. The decoy sent two talismans flickering off at some distant pursuer.

{Zhong’s Bright Lance}

{Fei Huang’s Hammer}

The twin detonations echoed across the town, and immediately drums started to pound.

Wordlessly they left their room to find others also standing around in the corridor. Counting down in her head-

The building shook as one of the talismans she had set detonated on the roof of the nearby warehouse.

Arriving on the roof in the wake of the others, she watched as her own ‘decoy’, similarly attired, used an earth corrosion talisman – ‘Mu’s Devouring Swamp’ – on a large house that one of the others had marked.

“YOU DARE!” an enraged female voice howled a moment later as a third of the house’s superstructure turned to mud before the onlookers’ eyes.

Revellers scattered, fleeing the falling bricks and the wave of mud. An enraged, naked female Ur’Vash who was actually kind of pretty looking in a severe way scrambled out of the collapsed rubble of the large building opposite the warehouse, some hundred metres away.

“And… there we go,” Lin Ling murmured.

{One with What Is}

She activated the art properly and a moment later a vast soul sense swept over the whole town, originating from the woman who was wiping mud off herself and looking fit to murder everything. On the rooftop several people sobered up almost immediately - They staggered like everyone else as a wave of soul infused intent made her skin prickled and cold sweat form on her neck. The hot night air over the whole town wavered faintly and the drums and horns and distant festivities finally petered out, as if a cold bucket of water had just been dropped over everything.

Drums began to thunder off to the west and north.

“Wow… someone attacked Ezajara… That takes big balls,” a nearby Ur’Vash muttered, hugging their arms and sounding almost admiring.

“A pity she will crack them like eggs,” another added.

“And on a festival day when the writ speaks of peace…” a third out of town Ur’Vash mused.

As the people around them on the roof continued to mutter, either in the local tongue or in Easten, The three illusionary decoys all fired off their last talismans and fled into the darkness.

The roof they had last been on vanished in a blue-grey fireball cast by the woman, Ezajara a moment later. She saw the familiar *crack* and distorting ripples of the ‘Blink’ Talisman ‘collapsing’ beyond it.

The woman snarled and after casting about, her soul intent casting ripples even they could feel, threw another fireball high into the sky, which exploded, scattering light all over the town.

“Yep, some fool for it,” another out of town Ur’Vash chuckled.

There was another explosion as a talisman trap engulfed a second building, beyond Ezajara’s in fire.

“The chief!” someone else said aghast.

“The chief’s house,” Lin Ling signed as the various other watchers on the roof.

“Is it a rival tribe?”

“With the war on?”

“On the Earth Mother’s festival day? That is asking for ruin,” someone else shook their head.

Now, the town all around them boiling into life in a different way. There was a thumping of drums from other directions a moment later, presumably as other thefts perpetrated by Juni or Lin Ling became known. Stood with the others on the roof, they watched as more soul senses swept out, scouring this way and that as people cursed and the drums and horns blared in every direction now.

On the towers torches were now blazing and out in the field boundaries she could see every watchtower in her light of sight now fully illuminated as distant Ur’Vash pointed this way and that, waving flags, torches and shouting in the local tongue.

“Wow…” Juni muttered.

She could only agree because there were dozens of soul senses scouring this way and that.

-Thank the fates for this art of Lin Ling’s, she murmured in her heart.

Without her mantra, she knew her heart would be pounding in her breast.

They watched from the roofing stack on the rooftop as a group searching where the illusions had vanished found the talisman and gave a triumphant yell.

The female shaman, apparently called Ezajara, now garbed, stopped beating the snot out of the tribal chief who was also there now according to some of the onlookers on the roof with them and took the talisman and considered it in the square below them.

She couldn’t make out what was being said – mostly because of the noise all around them – though it was always possible that the shaman was blocking sound.

The shaman stared dubiously at the various Ur’Vash who were seemingly elaborating on various things, pointing at the warehouse, that roof, the burning buildings and so on, probably elaborating on the-

“ENOUGH!”

The shaman’s voice tore through the night air, silencing everything, even the drums and the alerts.

“BRING ME THE GUARDS!”

There some yelling and pointing and finally a bunch of the guards she recognised as the ones who had not been doing their jobs in the warehouse and instead having a raunchy party were dragged forward by several very burly Ur’Vash with black tattoos.

What ensued was a very public interrogation, followed by several more Ur’Vash being dragged or arriving from other places while the shaman stood by, her arms folded, occasionally giving instructions. Most of the discussion was in the local tongue which she couldn’t understand, but the body language was enough to make most things clear. Various Ur’Vash screamed back and forth for a full five minutes, led by the chief, who at some point had been brought a rather nasty-looking axe.

More Ur’Vash were dragged out of buildings and presented to the shaman, who then yelled at them for several minutes in what she was just about able to make out as a combination of threats and based on occasional comments from others on the roof in Easten, which appeared to be the ‘formal’ language, an instruction for them to send messages to the neighbouring towns about this kind of thing.

Shortly after, the guards of the warehouses were dragged forward by -very- burly Ur’Vash wearing black hide loin cloths and bone and leather armour coloured black and red.

-Dao Seeking, Lin Ling signed unobtrusively.

“…”

She didn’t qualify that with a response, mainly because she wasn’t certain she could do so without her hand shaking still.

As she watched, there was some remonstration between the guards, the burly Ur’Vash and the chief.

The gist of it seemed pretty clear, based on what she had seen earlier: the chief was likely of the opinion that the guards had not done their job and was clearly determined that they pay a-

She watched dully as the shaman actually punched the chief in the face and took his axe off him.

“What are you? A lazy, weak little goblin? Some savage orc who shits in leaves and lives in a tree!?!” she screamed in Easten.

“If you cannot find them, I CANNOT FIND THEM, THE OLD GEEZER CANNOT FIND THEM, WHAT HOPE DO THESE LAZY, CRETINOUS GOBLINS HAVE OF FINDING THEM!?!”

Her words echoed around the night, making her vision swim.

“You want to execute stupid orcs who think with cock and live with heads in jar taking other people’s teeth, maybe I should start with you?”

“Maybe we appoint one of your sons as town chief instead; they also have your only redeeming attribute, but also have brain behind eyes!”

“What kind of worthless chief lets his damn house get burned down on his ass while he is fucking with a whore in a tavern!”

That got some laughs on the rooftop, and elsewhere, although they were decidedly nervous.

-So the power here is the shamaness not the chieftain… useful to know, she shuddered.

The guards didn’t quite bow and scrape, but she could see they looked very relieved. Having seen the fate of the ones in the last town, she could perhaps understand why. Society here seemed quite… harsh on failure.

“What you all looking thankful for. You going to lead hunt. If you not find thieves I cut off your cocks and make you wear them around neck for the rest of your lives!”

“Sh-s-SHAMAN! Ezajara!” a younger Ur’Vash wearing a plainer version of her robe came racing through the crowd.

She couldn’t catch what else he said, because it wasn’t shouted until the shaman started screaming at various people again.

-What is she saying? She signed to Lin Ling.

-My grasp is a bit weak, but basically she has just been told about what happened to Golden Grass Village.

“You know what going on?” One of the other Ur’Vash who also clearly didn’t speak the local dialect well enough to follow also asked a nearby person.

“They say that town to south of here was raided yesterday, same people, pale yellow female. Maybe new warband,” Lin Ling added smoothly.

“Ah, new warband,” one of those on the roof spat.

“Big problem, hope it not Grass Scorpions,” another muttered.

Shaman Ezajara appeared to consider for a few minutes, while the slowly enlarging crowd of Ur’Vash in the square looked on. That discussion was broken up by another shaman coming running, holding a bird and explaining something frantically.

“Ah, they say that Moonless Lake village destroyed yesterday, bird just arrived and scouts were sent out,” another Ur’Vash added

“Moonless Lake?” someone else asked.

The discussion below about that was again broken up as an old Ur’Vash trailed by a rather nubile-looking woman strode forward, kicking people out of the way and dropped a bunch of empty boxes on the group.

She resisted looking at Lin Ling. The old Ur’Vash proceeded to remonstrate with the shaman until she punched him as well.

“You watch your tone, old man, or I drag you over to that rock and break your three legs to make you learn respect!”

The old Ur’Vash spat, but before he could say anything, two more Ur’Vash had arrived and started complaining at length as well. Soon the shaman was surrounded by half a dozen angry old Ur’Vash.

It was bizarre to watch the town get thrashed back into some kind of order up close. However, the size of the force that was organized, which included several old Ur’Vash that gave her uneasy feelings just looking at them, clearly very angry at the theft of their treasured herbs and beast cores, was somewhat beyond her expectation.

She had thought it might be like the previous town, where they just rounded up a bunch of energetic youths; however, these old Ur’Vash were positively vicious and clearly determined to see blood. The town had a much larger population than she had guessed at as well. She had thought it was around 15,000 Ur’Vash counting the outlying suburbs outside the walls, but by the time the sun rose, there were easily twice that massed as the various leaders sorted out what amounted to an impromptu army.

By the time they were done, there was a force of close to 4,000 Ur’Vash massed in streets around the centre of the town led by the various old Ur’Vash. From what they could gather, they were all influential old elders in various ways, probably like local clan leaders, and most seemed determined to bring their whole clans along.

At that point, the chief ended up getting involved again, presumably needing to preserve some face in this, and mustered a band of about 300 Ur’Vash with proper armour – likely part of the actual defence forces of the town.

They looked on as the shaman did a grand ritual – a dozen Ur’Vash, who she assumed had done something fairly heinous, or maybe just people who had succeeded in terminally annoying the shaman, were brutally slaughtered in the square while thousands of Ur’Vash stared on, drumming and chanting. The shaman took their flayed hides and using qi and blood wove them together to form a banner. She then used the blood to draw out a large formation in the square, centred on the twelve bodies, planting the banner in the middle-

*KRAKKOOOOOM*

The bolt of lightning that dropped from the night sky was entirely unexpected. Making her and quite a few others nearby flinch.

Qi surged through the formation as those nearby were thrown off their feet by the force of lightning bolt arriving. In the ruined crater the banner now had a weird… otherworldly distortion to it.

The drumming intensified and one after another, a hundred Ur’Vash stepped forward from the crowd, stripping naked while those around them cheered, shouted and stamped. One after another they stood before the banner, cutting their chests and putting bloody palm prints on it. As they did so, she saw glyphs begin to form on its unsettling flags.

By the time all hundred had touched it, the banner had a form of ominous physical pressure associated with it. Those of the warband mustered below were almost frenzied at this point while the others watching on from rooftops and streets were chanting, shouting, singing or just watching like they were in respectful silence.

The shaman picked up the banner and handed it to the old Ur’Vash she had punched initially. He bowed to her and then turned to the horde and gave a great roar, which the entire town echoed.

They watched in slightly unnerved silence as the entire horde poured out of the town and, after spending some time to reform and mass, in the pre-dawn light, set off at a pace that was-

-Is that like a ten thousand strides banner…? she finally signed to Juni who was stood beside her.

-It… certainly looks like it… Juni signed back. Her manner was inscrutable but she could see the shock in the way the other woman paused.

“…”

Lin Ling just shook her head in shock.

As they watched, the army broke into a slow jog and was actually gone from visible sight within ten minutes, eating up distance at a rate that was frankly shocking. An army-wide geomantic movement formation, made before their very eyes in an hour… it was the kind of thing she understood Military Authority Legion Battalions possessed.

Exhaling, she turned to look at the sunrise.

“That… was unexpected,” she said at last in Easten.

“Quite…” Juni muttered.

“Somewhat outside expectations…” Lin Ling agreed, also sounding a bit shaken for the first time.