The greed of those who seek knowledge beyond their ken tends to know few boundaries. This is especially true when considering the millennia-long efforts to unpick the treasures left in the long and complex shadows of those who managed to crawl out of the ruin of the Heroic Age and yet endured despite all that those great powers could shovel on them.

For, just as so many have fallen into darkness forgetting that ‘what you bind may also bind you’, it is even truer to say that it is rarely the ‘things we do not know’ that ruin us, but rather the ‘things we know for certain’.

~Astoria Galadris Belmont, Principal Arch Magister of the Green Tower.

~ Han Shu - ??? ~

The black cracks finally receded, or at least vanished to a point where he could not detect them, though Origin remained sitting there staring at the darkness above in silence.

Time… It was hard to say it if moved or not in truth, so after a while, when he felt confident, he got up and went for a walk around the strange shadowed space. It was mostly as he recalled, but there were subtle differences. The plinths were gone – replaced by shadowed altars that almost resembled temples or maybe mausoleums, statues now seated before their entrances. There were still twelve but any trace of the ‘weapons’ was gone, beyond the ones the figures themselves occasionally held. Now though, they all had other symbols associated with them as well.

Most were seated, but others were reclining, or standing. Their forms were strange, almost lifelike, all deeply unsettling to look upon and, other than Origin and Divide, refused to linger in his memory beyond the vaguest sense of majesty and occasionally dread.

Divide’s statue, reclining naked as he had seen her before, dark hair carved of some kind of nearly black-red stone, her skin pale and luminescent white, had two swords in white and black stone. She herself held in her left hand a strange, twisting object that hurt his eyes just to look upon it – it was gold, that much he gathered, and shifted forms almost at random as she ‘contemplated’ it and he moved to look at it from different angles. At her feet was a pitch black jar of wine and a basket of red-gold fruit. In her other hand, she held a lantern in the shape of a clay lamp graven in twists of black and white stone, holding a golden flame.

Origin’s statue was similar, carved of white stone, dark hair falling across her shoulders. Though she was ‘naked’, darkness cloaked it in strange ways, giving the impression of robes, even where they were none. Beside her throne, which swept up behind her like dark wings, was a bow, a long sword and a shield.

Even her face was somehow obscured, his gaze always drawn to the swirling yantra pattern that adorned her brows, resembling something like a constellation or maybe a crescent moon. In her right hand, she held a lantern that was carved like a pale lotus, but at its heart the flame was like a black moon, a flawless sphere of darkness that held an unsettling corona that merged with the petals of the lotus. In her left, the gown of shadows twisted as she gestured towards the ‘flame’.

Behind and between the ring of twelve temples were what looked like shadowed walls that rose, black on black to blend into whatever was above, within the strange, blacker than black sky.

In the middle of the space was a large tree-like pillar, its trunk carved into twelve faces, its branches vanishing into darkness above. On each of those faces he did find representations of the ‘weapons’, along with scenes carved around them that put him in mind of those he had seen before. There were also hundreds of not thousands of strange, shifting symbols that flowed through the contours of the pillar. Looking at individual faces was… okay, he found, but if he accidentally looked at the whole thing his eyes unfocused almost immediately and he found he had to sit down.

“How… how come it looks like this now?” he asked at last, arriving back near Origin, trying not to accidentally look at the whole thing.

“It is not designed to be looked at by someone with your perceptive capabilities,” Origin said after a moment, still not looking away from the ‘sky’.

“That could be said of this whole place in truth,” she added after a moment’s further contemplation and a soft sigh. “This place is as much a reflection of how others see us as how we see ourselves. Such things are frequently over-complex and not always how we would hope either…”

“How come the other temples are almost unviewable?” he added, glancing at the other four on this side.

Of them, only one was even easily discernible as more than a shadow – a woman holding a sword in her left hand, a spear reclining against the side of her throne that looked remarkably similar to Juni’s albeit with a longer handle. In her hands was a twisting void of a lamp that was like an hourglass of shadows carved so finely he had a hard time even seeing it clearly. The aura she gave off was one of inevitability, with a depth to it that made his mind shake with dread.

“They are not, currently… in residence, I guess you could say. It is a pain, because those three in particular,” she waved at the three shadowy temples with their barely visible figures… “Those three are the ones most invested in this current incarnation of ‘here’.”

He wasn’t sure what to make of that, so just nodded, before remembering to ask the other thing.

“The people?”

“Oh… them?” she nodded. “You can’t see them because they are just ‘Soul Imprints’ and you have no means to perceive them as you currently are.”

With a wave of her hand, the space around them shifted faintly – the darkness intensifying somehow. The nearest of those forms he recalled seeing before reappeared.

To his ‘Mortal’ eyes they now looked strange and warped, presumably because he was unable to see their qi. Some looked terrible, others fair, but all those with line of sight on him now had a haunted ‘hunger’ in their eyes. A sense of greed and desperation in their gazes that made his skin crawl.

“They can see us?” he blurted out, trying to look away.

“You thought them dead?” Origin said with a hint of amusement. “They are trapped here, for eternity, their consciousness lingering on – to them, you are a tasty snack, a hope with which they might escape their torment.”

“Why?” he frowned. “What did they do to deserve such a fate?”

“Mostly, they annoyed things they should not have,” she laughed a bit mockingly. “Do not feel sorry for them, there are no innocents here, even the best of them were fools or utterly insane.”

“Do they actually have a hope of leaving here?” he added, finally managing to look away from a purple robed man with brown hair and an oiled beard whose face was locked in an expression of profound disbelief, even as his eyes felt like they wanted to devour him whole.

“Leave? Here? They are utterly insane, deluded as well, in thinking they might be freed. Maybe if they kowtowed three times and cried out for home… but they are frozen, and none of them have any arms or legs!” she smirked.

Looking back at them… he realised to his immense shock, that that detail was in fact true. Their forms were shrouded in darkness, giving them a faintly ephemeral look, but few had feet, just melting into the firmament.

“Their physical bodies are long gone, lost in other places.”

Reading between the lines of that, he guessed hear earlier answer was a bit of a dark joke, but it did make him wonder what they might actually need to do?

“You wonder how they could genuinely escape here?” she murmured, reminding him, yet again, that ‘inner thoughts’ didn’t really exist unless Divide was there for some reason.

“Yes…?” he nodded, trying not to look uneasy. “If it is not forbidden to ask?”

“Hah… it is no secret,” she laughed, a trifle unpleasantly, truth be told. “The way left to them is to correctly acknowledge their faults and pass on, entering the next life to start over.”

“…”

“So they… linger here because?”

“They believe heaven has left a way!” she laughed, rolling her eyes in derision. “As I said, they are utterly insane, and hope is as much their cage as anything else – truly it was the last stone cast in that ancient conflict, but easily the most deadly.”

“…”

He found that viewpoint oddly disturbing – quite terrifying actually…

“Hope as a weapon?”

Origin nodded, although didn’t explain directly, just adding, “You can consider this a valuable lesson actually. While the heavens ‘do’ leave a way because nothing is truly unsolvable, what that way is, is merely a matter of perspective. If you really annoy the wrong person, well… consider your own circumstances and how that is unfolding.”

Shuddering, he could only nod as the figures faded away. It was a curious, and quite elucidating, view into how that kind of ‘thing’ worked in the eyes of a clearly ancient and powerful being who had a distinctly different world view from humanity in some ways, despite having many of their more… colloquial trappings.

“So… what is this place called?” he asked after a long pause.

“A fucking tomb,” Origin grumbled. “A mausoleum to my sisters’ bad taste in interior design, bent by aeons of others impressing a certain viewpoint from the outside. Its original name was the ‘Throne of Extinction’.”

“Extinction?” he failed to hide the concern in his voice at that.

“And this is why names are not helpful at times,” she sighed, seeming amused. “Your view on ‘Extinction’ is just a facet on the whole. ‘Extinction’ is just a part of the Samsara, as you call it. You could call it the ‘Throne of Origin’ as well, but that meaning has been quite thoroughly suppressed and warped as to also be nearly pointless. Almost as much as the ‘Throne of Gifts’ or the ‘Throne of Change’ have at this point.”

Looking around, and turning over what she was implying, he suddenly wondered…

“Isn’t that awfully like Yin and Yang in their most fundamental forms? Creation and Destruction… Beginnings and Endings?”

“It is,” she nodded. “Although the Throne of Yin and Yang also exists – Yin and Yang are actually more holistic, and a different Throne in some sense. To your mind, this would be called the ‘Throne of Primordial Creation and Destruction’. The thrones of Yin and Yang are pretty famous in their own right – they take the form of a pair of black and white jade pendants that were birthed from the primordial intent of the ebb and flow of the Star Ocean.

“A facet of the Jewel of Celestial Flow is buried down here, incorporated into a genuine reliquary, not like the copy a part of my self was sealed to – she takes the form of a spear…”

As Origin spoke, a swirling weapon manifested briefly out of the darkness – a haft eight paces long with a curved blade maybe a metre in length, a white and black tassel around it.

“The jewel is part of the weapon?” he asked, curious now, because this was the first time she had really spoken about such existences.

“Hah… suddenly I regret opening this doorway for you!” Origin chuckled. “The spear itself and the facet of the jewel within is famous, or infamous if you like – its root of power relates to Yin and Yang in their forms, regarding the ebb and flow of creation and destruction using the harmonious cycles between them. The original jewels though… those are sought-after treasures and rarely leave their inner universe in the tumultuous heart of the Star Ocean. Anyone capable of reaching them would know enough to not have designs on them.”

“Like the shades you showed me earlier?” he added, resisting looking at where some of the nearer ones had been with a shudder.

“Yes,” Origin nodded.

“But… if you are…here?” he frowned, wondering how to put the slightly weird thought that had just slipped through his mind…

“…”

“That is a surprisingly intuitive question to have,” Origin said, replying even as he tried to work out how to easily ask if there was more than one… throne of the samsara?

“Yes, there are. There are different interpretations of the same thing in different eras, even in the same era. Which is ‘supreme’ and how that is calculated is not a thing you need be concerned about though,” Origin added pensively. “Different interpretations hold sway in different places; here your interpretation of the supreme samsara is a bit different and we have no interest in rising to that battle. We were driven to… twice. Neither ended as anyone hoped, and although some of us ruled for a time, those of us here were never beloved by others as some were, nor were we ever beholden on the goodwill and needs of those lesser than us.”

She trailed off, sounding almost wistful.

“That was long ago though, and far from here – better that we live in solitude. I just wish they would not have determined that we live in this solitude!” she waved a hand at the rather sinister surroundings.

“If you want a relatable analogy, this place is a shared abode that requires a consensus to make substantial changes to. The three who you can barely see over there want to keep it like this, because it reminds them of the past and the one who made it and the time it was made in.

“Divide, who has been in here for basically forever, has been angling to change it because not only is it dour and maudlin, but it has a lack of a view and nothing to do. I, who was largely stuck as a stupid sword for an unconscionable length of time, am a bit more patient than she. It, it comes with our natures… but would also be quite happy to see it changed. It was never her intention for it to sit like this for eternity and it looked nothing like this back then.”

He wasn’t sure what to say to that – it made sense, but the idea that a bunch of ancient beings had house-sharing issues was…

“You find it disturbingly mundane…” she added with a weary laugh. “I cannot blame you, but not everything must be earth-shattering in its origins. The issue really is that those three spend so little time here, that the place is effectively like the room of a relative who they can re-enter to remind themselves of others now long gone.”

Scowling, she stared harder at the ‘ceiling’. “Now, to keep that analogy going, it has rats in the ceiling and a leak in the floor, but the other grieving relatives refuse to redecorate because that wasn’t the point in their eyes, the run down state reflects their mood and they, who are not having to watch the rats and mop up the flooding, also expect us to understand.”

“…”

“So… why?”

“Why do we?” she sighed again. “Several reasons. If you want to be facetious, there was a certain emotional phase; even we are not immune to self-pity on occasion. This place is a reflection of our hearts and also how others see us. While we have never been beholden to others and were not ‘made’ as some were, or ‘brought about’ as others, ever have folk sought to understand us and put personification to the things we represent. When you add in, over the aeons, those aforementioned outside perspectives and such, it had just acquired more and more of the trappings of a mausoleum.”

He could understand that aspect, but it was weird to see it play out with a bunch of ageless ancient entities instead of grieving relatives. He stared at her, because an introspective ancient entity was not…

“Even you are doing so,” she chuckled, “even if you do not know it and cannot help it. Some, arrogant descendants, might seek to change it, to make you see what they wish, because you view them, and that would be in their eyes a privilege. That is why you saw what you saw before…

“Because I accessed this place through that sword? Which was a key…?” He glanced at her statue, wondering…

“It is a symbol; the statues are… complex. Do not dwell on them overly,” she said with another sigh. “Yes, however. You saw what you saw because of what kind of thing they invoked that aspect of me into. I was a key to a prison that they wanted to have a lock no evil could break – and what greater lock than the primordial samsara, turning eternal.”

The way she said the last words were almost mocking, again.

“And now you will wonder, again, what I am,” she shook her head, still not ever having looked at him.

He swallowed, a trifle nervously, because that had been preying on his mind. Divide was somewhat esoteric…

“That is underselling it,” Origin actually laughed properly. “My little sister defies a comfortable definition, almost as much as I do… Long have people sought to put names to us, importance and such. Even when their better instincts should tell them otherwise. A disproportionate number have ended up here as well… one way or another.”

“…”

Somehow, he got the weird feeling that he was also included in that.

“…”

“It hasn’t ended badly for all of them…” she added, suddenly sounding a bit defensive…

“…”

He decided to say nothing to that, recalling that Divide had said he was not the first ‘resident here’. The way she had couched it didn’t seem to imply that the others had met bad ends either.

After that, Origin largely seemed disinclined to engage in further chitchat, just continuing to stare up at the darkness, almost as if daring it to try something. He looked up at it as well for a while, but could see no sign of the lightning or the black cracks. All he got as a sense of feeling utterly dwarfed by the cavernous void.

Eventually, he went over to the pile of food, which had replenished itself with more roots and such and carefully scooped some water out of the bowl that now held it, taking care not to disturb some of the silt in the bottom. Today he noted there was fish not meat, so that basically predicated a fire, which was possible, thankfully. There was a large pile of brushwood beyond the table, all of it bone dry and resinous. He could probably eat the fish raw, but it would not be that pleasant.

Having to eat and drink periodically was surprisingly taxing in this place, he was discovering – mainly because it was easy to lose track of time in its unchanging state. Despite having only walked around a bit, sat in meditation for a while and talked to Origin a few times, he had trouble saying if a few hours or days had passed.

The act of preparing the food was a helpful time-waster in any case, helping to distract him from the potential circumstances beyond this place. Origin had outright refused to talk about those, saying that it was better for him to just worry about himself, in here, but it was impossible for him not to worry – both about Lin Ling and Juni, and also about Ruo Han and the…

He cut off his thoughts as a sense of feeling watched made his skin prickle. Looking around, he didn’t think it was Origin – she was still watching the sky – and there was nobody else here either.

Sighing, he went back to chopping vegetables to make a soup fish soup, pondering the series of events that brought him here.

By the time that was all done and he had spent some more time wandering about, just looking at things and trying not to be unnerved by ambience, he found himself back by Origin… with another question, one only tangentially related to ‘current’ events, he hoped.

“Can I ask why the Ur’Vash hate humans so much?”

“…”

“Mmm…” Origin hummed pensively. “I am not really the best one to ask about that; it’s more Divide’s kind of thing. The grudge is old though, and somewhat multi-layered.”

“Oh…” he sighed, feeling a bit down for some reason.

“…”

The silence that radiated from her was almost oppressive in its own right for a moment, before she spoke again.

“Fine, I guess I see the problem. You are not sure what, if anything, to do, and the nature of this place means you can’t really find things to do?”

“…”

He grimaced, looking apologetic. “I tried sitting in meditation, but my thoughts just won’t settle. I was never good at that, even if people thought I was rather laid back.”

“Well, I guess explaining ancient history of a land far from here is a good way to pass the time in an uncomplicated manner,” she sighed, pulling a jar of wine out of nihility and taking a swig.

“…”

He tried not to look either embarrassed or awkward at that, but she just waved her hand, conjuring a bench out of nowhere for him to sit on.

“Regarding the Ur’Vash, their grudge against humans in the most recent instance is because they are where they are, although like all sorry tales, there is more than enough blame to go around.

“The Ur ‘Peoples’ have their origin in the ancient city of ‘Ur’ where they were made in the image of the Children of Keramos, the ‘Urukhal’, who are now mainly known as Ur’Khal, owing to some strange naming convention…” she sighed and shook her head, before continuing.

“Those ancient sorcerer lords – beings you would call ‘Venerates’, I guess – raised up servant peoples after their ancestor Keramos’s great ‘achievement’ of giving life to clay. They bound them to various roles: the Vash were warriors, the Inan and Sarun served their creators like they were ‘gods’ or worked as diplomats, the Akan tended fields and made crafts and such. Their caste overlords exploited them and they grew wealthy on these achievements, conquering others and amassing great wealth.

“In any case, there were some wars and the various tribes of Ur were freed from their bondage or captured by others. A few stuck around and fought or carved out their own niches, but some managed to find ancient remnants of the Urukhal through their gestalt links that the Sorcerer Lords of Ur had successfully implanted in their own ‘tribes’ of ‘Ur’. Those ancient arts led them to a distant land, adrift in time, where they made a new home for themselves, unknown to almost all.

“Entirely separate to that and much later, there was a huge war that brought about an end to the era of human history on Aertha Sol called ‘The Heroic Age’. In the aftermath of that, various powers fled and formed Aertha Majoris in the hope of escaping the waning power of the world or just to get away from the new world order which was very big on an ‘our way or burn’ philosophy to ruling.

“Unfortunately, while making a new supreme world from scratch is not that hard, the stupid buggers decided to take a few shortcuts. For their template, they went hunting to the antiquity of Aertha Sol and picked an era bounded by various natural catastrophes that had basically scrubbed the world clean… and lifted it wholesale – scrubbing the world of that era clean of all life in a vast crumbling natural apocalypse for millions of years.”

“Wait… their actions caused the very apocalypse they selected to…?”

“Somewhat… it’s complicated,” Origin sighed. “At any rate, the era they picked was unbeknownst to them, the one that the peoples of Sun, Sea and Stars had first emerged in… and also where the fleeing tribes of Ur had wound up. Neither were particularly amused as I am sure you can imagine.”

“So the refuge they sought got dragged back?” he muttered, not sure if he should be impressed or aghast at that level of bad luck.

“If you’re wondering how they got to be so unlucky? The Ur peoples in the service of their Sorcerer overlords did quite a few rather scummy things and offended a fair few old powers. The curses directed at those overlords mostly fell on them instead – they were after all viewed as disposable. When you add in their ancestral connection to the Urukhal and the debacle around ‘The Defiler’, the whole thing is just a succession of people lifting stones to throw at others only to drop them on themselves.

“By the time my awareness of them came to the fore with the creation of Undrehallan by an obscure group of mystics who were hunting down and imprisoning a group called the ‘Longevity Cult’, I think Aertha Majoris had been occupied for about five millennia. Our kind do not need or really desire interaction with the lower orders – it is unfortunate that our ‘power’ has always fascinated the wrong sort, and I found a shard of myself bound to the prison they made.

“From what I understand though, those controlling forces had also come to Aertha Majoris and were seeking to conquer it as well, although with mixed success. The various powers didn’t see eye to eye and Human Empires spend as much time fighting themselves as they do others, as do elves for that matter.

“In any case, the Ur got the short end of a very pointy stick – those on the central continent were seized within a generation. The great powers that seized those lands served a very dangerous old bastard and also had a fascination with the trappings of both my clan and the clan of the woman who most here consider to be ‘mother’. As such, the strength of those old Sorcerers was always on their minds, even if they despised everything they actually stood for.

“On the northern continent though, the land is, as you have seen, not exactly hospitable or easy to deal with. The human forces settled the middle and mostly left the Ur’Vash and Ur’Inan to their own devices… until evidence of Mana Lodes in the Dark Peaks in the north-west of the continent came to light. At that point, several enterprising families banded together and effectively began a huge crusade to seize them.

“It took them about a thousand years, but in the end, they colonised the coast, seized the most profitable areas and in the process drove the Ur’Inan into the depths. The Ur’Vash escaped into the jungles or hid in the centre of the planes, trusting to the powerful, ancient alignments of the land to shelter them.

“I am guessing it didn’t go as they expected?” he asked.

“No… No, it did not… It went as basically nobody expected,” Origin sighed. “The Humans of another vestigial influence of the 'Heroic Age', the 'Eternal City' did what decadent empires do and imploded – in the process they gave birth to a third face for the ancient calamity called the Defiler.

“When the dust settled, the Orcneas had re-arisen. Akalaraltis, the Lord of Corpses, had nearly obliterated a third of the western side of the central continent. Asuraerleth of the Six Eyes… who you met, obnoxious brat that she is, had basically ruined the human-occupied areas along the western coast of the northern continent for a generation as repayment for another ancient grudge and the Ur’Vash were firmly in the sights of the new powers in control of the lands all around.

“Much as in the central continent, it was a short, sharp, brutal war and by the time they were done, about 10 million Ur’Vash were imprisoned in a vast Arborundum Mine beneath the Dark Veils called ‘Undergrove’ where they were exploited for their labour at first, but then just used as blood sport by the forces in control of those lands to train their successor generations and temper their strength.”

“So how did they end up here?” he asked when she finally fell silent again and took another swig of wine.

“There was another disaster, this one purely fiscal as I understand it – the Dukes, whose families controlled those lands, ran up huge debts waging pointless, if popular, foreign wars on the other side of the world and ran away to join the powers on the Central Continent, leaving behind a ticking bomb of a spirit vein mine and a prison full of severely abused, enraged and partially demonified non-humans. The new dynasty tried to make amends – intending to repatriate many to the southern continent – but before that could happen, subversive agents, in order to inconvenience the new dynasty, spread various tales and there was a massive ‘revolt’.

"In effect, the same people who had ruined them, now sprung them out of their prison – many rampaged across the surface, taking up strongholds in the mountains to the north of the plains you traverse, but most just fled into the endless tunnels and darkness beneath them and waged a vicious war of retribution on anyone else they could for just over a millennium, until the collapse happened.

“I imagine that a bunch of them close to the surface escaped during that catastrophe – a thing which I know next to nothing about in terms of the specifics unfortunately – and, when the dust settled, by some good fortune set themselves up here,” Origin finished. “More than that, you likely have to ask Divide when she comes back.”

“…”

“Suddenly I feel kind of sorry for them,” he muttered.

“You would be on a very small list,” Origin said with a disgusted expression. “The Ur’Vash’s old ancestors excel at repaying gratitude with grudges. A few have understandings with Divide, but most are just as power-hungry and unscrupulous as everyone else. They learned the secrets of their ancient forbears and had no scruples using those same magics as the Sorcerer Lords of Ur did.”

“So why did that Ur’Vash break the sword?” he added. “Wouldn’t it have been better to leave you as you were?”

“…”

Origin was silent for a long moment, then laughed. “Yes, it would – that little brat was stupid, let her arrogance and her knowledge lead her astray. Few end up falling afoul of us because of what they don’t know; mostly it is the things they know for sure that thoroughly damn them. She seems to have managed to evict my little sister, whose statue you see over there.

“I suspect she feared I was Divide – she has had links to a few uncouth bastards over the years, that Starkadr among them. Grimvak and her ilk just want power. Probably she feared that if I was Divide I might be wielded by Starkadr or something. The vast twisting of everything played a part as well – it is just regrettable that you find yourself here, although that is also a bit of good fortune in a way.”

“It… is?” he asked, rather sceptically.

“You have your life, and you have favour with us. Even gods would give their firstborn children… a few actually did…” she scowled for a moment, “for that kind of good fortune.”

The sensation of being watched returned for a brief moment and he shivered, feeling like something was peering down the back of his neck

“Faugh…” Origin sighed abruptly, the darkness intensifying slightly. “What is taking her so long!”

“…”

He wasn’t sure, in the end, how long it took Divide to return in real terms. He had eaten maybe ten meals and meditated for a long time in between, occasionally plagued by the sense of being ‘watched’ as time went by. Origin chatted a bit more about this and that, explaining a few further details about the Ur’Vash and their ancient history.

The ancient being that the eagle tribe had summoned was indeed something akin to a ‘Roc’, although it also had a closer link, Origin confided, to the origins of the blood in Lin Ling. She didn’t talk much about that though, and in fact steered clear of any topic related to ‘him’, ‘his circumstances’, or ‘circumstances outside’ quite aggressively.

{I thought sister was kidding when she said we picked up a guest.}

The words shifted through the place all of a sudden, accompanying two figures who shifted out of their statues in a strange manner. The first was Divide, the second was the tall, pale woman with hair so dark red she fancied it almost black. Her eyes were dark as well, like eclipsed suns, but the corona around the irises was a fiery red.

“Is this your ‘settle down and adopt cats’ phase, big sister?” her voice modulated slightly and the ethereal edge vanished, even as the woman acquired a dark, shadowy robe in the same style as Origin and Divide.

“Ha. Ha,” Origin snarked back. “He is here because I dislike seeing people die pointless and avoidable deaths. Given his previous state and my inadvertent part it in, if I’d left him not only would he have been unable to pass over – unless I killed him myself – but all our karmas would have been subtly corrupted, irrespective of what I did at that point, just for being associated with the injustice of the act.”

“…”

“How?” the new arrival asked dully.

“A bunch of mortal humans are in the process of doing what mortal humans do when you give them a veritable cornucopia of tools to warp, distort and disturb the natural alignments of the causal construct. Do I need to draw you pictures and join them with red Elysian linen thread?” Origin growled.

“No… it’s fine…” the new arrival sighed, while Divide just ignored them both, went over to the table and swiped a fruit to munch.

Listening to the exchange, he suppressed a shiver. She had talked about that before, but her comment just there had reinforced that point, which he had not really dared to ask and rather aggressively not thought about.

Because he had actions with her, had… whatever had been done been inadvertently exacerbated slightly because his world’s governing forces-?

-Obviously.

“Yes,” Origin said, casting him a sideways look. “And yes, I am stronger than them, but that’s not necessarily a blessing.”

His skin prickled, thinking about that strange, disturbing memory of the devouring chill in the void. Would that have been an eternity close to the other phantoms here?

-But I was basically blameless… or I assume so, unless being lucky…

“Yes, that does count!” Divide said cheerfully. “The heavens you come from are fucked up beyond belief. Almost as bad as places where the Ecclesiarchs and the Hierophants hold proper sway.”

“How do you know that?” he mumbled, as much to distract himself from that casual revelation. “And how does the ‘heaven leaves a way’ thing factor in?”

“The way would be that you accept your fate and become their puppet for nine generations, giving everything to them, and at the end you get to go into reincarnation,” Origin sighed. “Just because that saying exists, doesn’t mean the way is at all ‘good’.”

“Anyway, myshelf, and libble sis here, the two of us, are still ‘outside’,” Divide said, speaking about a mouthful of the fruit before swallowing. “I am in the vestige at the heart of the ‘great mount’ as you call it, while little sis here is in the depths of the under-realm… It was the 5th layer beneath, I think?”

“Yes, I’m a lot further down, thanks to that cunt of an orc witch. The dancing spiders make for miserable company.”

“…”

The other two stared at her for a moment, before Divide just shook her head. “Anyway, there is little to stop us seeing the way your world ‘works’ if we desire it. That said, I stopped watching when that mortal world got lifted up – it was giving me a headache, and ‘Yin Eclipse’ as you call it is already a handful to watch without seeing how fucked up the world beyond it is.”

“You can see… outside?” he asked, shocked somehow at that, even though he felt he perhaps shouldn’t be.

“Somewhat,” Origin shrugged. “Divide is the only one who can do it easily, though most of us can choose to do so for short moments. The issue is that doing so radically lessens the suppression.”

“It also makes the mountain within more ‘visible’ to difficult, prying eyes,” Divide sighed. “Mostly I spend my time making sure that the things below don’t get enough momentum to crawl out, and that the mountain itself slips by without anyone who might actually be able to get into the eye taking an interest. More for their self-preservation than anything else. For the sake of just ignoring the outside world, the outside world can be subtly directed to ‘ignore’ this place which stops us having to waste effort mopping up problems left and right.”

“It’s hardly infallible though,” the younger sister sighed. “This place is bad enough when you consider half the things, artefacts and entities scattered in the surface zones… never mind the things that are sealed in the ruinous depths by me, or the other three in the shards… or the old bell. Let alone the shit that came down when it fell.”

Origin glanced back at him, with an amused expression. “To trot out another analogy – the whole of Yin Eclipse is like a huge manor estate. Once it was big and opulent and well-tended, but now, it’s old and leaky and there are crazy people in the basement. The outer walls are still strong as anything, but its innards are old and dilapidated, smashed about in a few regional wars – oh and it fell out of the sky onto its current plot in a freak whirlwind or something.

“Most of the original occupants died in the landing and the place is now hideously overgrown with weeds because the remaining occupants – people like us – are largely too busy keeping an eye on the crazy downstairs, trying to fix up the few remaining liveable buildings and also ensuring that the neighbours, who are either curious about their new neighbour or want to come see if there is anything of worth in the ruin, don’t cross the perimeter. Or if they do that they don’t find the buildings inside.

“If we have to stop that, to look at what the neighbours are actually doing, like… properly, the crazy downstairs is liable to come crawling, slithering or shuffling up the basement steps, or skulk out of a drain somewhere.”

“The suppression… is you?” he stared at the three of them blankly, just unable to comprehend that.

“Yep!” Divide nodded far too cheerfully, seemingly amused by the fact that he was now having to hold his hands to stop them from shaking. “There is a bit more to it than that, but you can consider it as something like our soul senses, focused on a very specific bit of dimensional real estate. It is mainly pressure from me, but there is a fair amount of Sister Causal.”

“Never call me that again,” the other woman said, with an expression of mock horror and mild annoyance.

“If I am Origin, she can be Cetana,” Origin said, cutting off both of them.

“…”

The other woman, ‘Cetana’, considered this for a moment, before sighing and nodding. “It will do. The weird grammar is hidden by a language barrier at least.”

Thinking about the lay faith and the cycle of the samsara, along with what Origin had said before, he could only stare at them respectfully. After a long moment, he caught himself and, cupping his hands, bowed deeply to Cetana.

“Han Shu meets Lady Cetana.”

“He isn’t as surprised at that revelation as I thought…” Divide pouted.

“…”

Origin looked at her sideways. “We talked about the samsara earlier… although not in detail.”

“That is another reason why this place needs a redecoration,” Divide sniffed, even if it is somewhat nostalgic to be back where we are.

He got the impression she meant the grassy plains outside, which raised an interesting possibility…

“Even if the ‘sword’ was just a thing… is the core of this place also somehow in the place we were?”

“…”

“…”

“This is a disturbingly smart cat you picked up, sister,” Cetana said finally.

Divide gave a snort of a laugh and sat down on the edge of the table to avoid having a proper laughing attack. Not for the first time, he found he was not at all sure how he viewed being compared to a cat.

“…”

“Well, he has several lives, so there is that in favour of the comparison,” Divide giggled. “Running through them fast though!”

He wasn’t sure he liked that either somehow.

“Viewing humans as pets is not a healthy mentality to follow,” Origin said blandly.

“But they view us as tools at best, or at worst things to be dominated and refined… Our lesser Kith and Kin were – are – terrorized by them in this regard, and have been since the second generation, pretty much,” Cetana said sourly, sitting down on another couch that appeared out of nowhere.

“It is exactly because people think like that, that we cannot and should not,” Origin said a bit more firmly...

“I know, I know, it’s just…” Cetana sounded annoyed and… sad somehow.

“It is vexing,” Divide said with uncharacteristic pathos.

The dark corona around her eyes had flashed white as well for a second, although it was back to black again so fast he thought he maybe imagined it. The feeling of being ‘watched’ was also back as well, even though he had not thought about anything odd…

“…”

Origin gave them both long looks, before just shaking her head again, “Well, back to business, because in the minute I’ve stopped watching, we have already started to grow weeds again.”

Their gazes all followed her pointing hand towards the small collection of pink lotus blossoms that had innocently appeared in the large jar of water, drifting above the surface a trifle aimlessly.

Four sets of eyes looked at the ghostly splashes of colour. He looked upwards and the dark ceiling now held a subtle haze, almost like… clouds?

“Oh for fuck’s sake!” Divide snarled and swept her hand upward.

The hazy feeling shimmered and retreated before her grasp ever got there and the sensation of being watched diminished slightly – the flowers lingered though.

“I see what you mean. This isn’t simply on a level of being a superficial problem, is it?” Cetana said slowly.

“No… no, it is not,” Origin said flatly.

Cetana turned to look at him directly with a pensive frown. “He is the gateway, but this… is not related to him really… is it?”

“No, not originally,” Divide said with a disgusted sigh. “However, the nature of his arrival and the means by which an annoying headache was averted have not helped matters.”

“What is that?” he asked, because the flowers, while ‘pretty’, gave him a weirdly creepy feeling and the sensation of being watched was getting stronger again.

“Manifestation phenomena,” Cetana muttered, staring at them then at the now empty ceiling. “It is the controlling forces of a world growing ears on walls when someone badmouths them… or contravenes their rules…”

“Usually,” Divide nodded. “In normal places, they tend to only appear for judgements, but they can also appear as an acknowledgement of particularly profound epiphanies or suitable advancements – the old ‘maiden and ten thousand lotus blossoms’ thing. In the world outside though, only those who are already favoured will see that kind of baptism. For them to be here, where Han Shu can see them, means that the thunder upstairs is actively seeking him out still.

“They don’t come when we are looking?” Cetana frowned… “And the path they are coming by is obscured?”

“It’s not that; fate is seeping in that isn’t innate to this world, putting roots into places, trying to draw power.”

“Someone is fishing?” Cetana’s frown deepened.

“Yes. It will require some poking around to work out what the original issue was. It could be related to the judgement that descended, or those old thieves outside not taking the hint, but it could also be something more insidious.”

“The dancing spiders did stir before,” Cetana nodded.

“Yes, I was aware, and dealt with it,” Origin sighed. “That is why Han Shu is here with us.”

“They are the gift that keeps on asking for more gifts,” Divide sighed. “But my worry is that it is Undergrove.”

“…”

Cetana stared at her for a long moment. “Are you serious? Defilers or the unchained are no joke…”

She trailed off and then twisted to become properly angry-

{THAT MALIGNANT LITTLE SOUL SPAWN OF A SPIRIT!}

Space fluctuated, as the shadow of the darkness around them became all-consuming. Only the area around him stayed as it had been. The horrific intent within it, made him feel empty somehow, like he was standing on the edge of a vast void, with nothing below him, aware of the drop but with nothing there to keep him except-

He saw the shadow.

It was the void, beyond the starless sky.

Monolithic.

Intangible.

The inexorable inertia it carried towards everything was so vast as to be incomprehensible.

The things it drove.

The things it touched.

From great to small were…

Were…

Were...

-His mind blurred and he heard two people swearing behind him.

Their voices shifted through each other. One was a kind and gentle voice dragging him back into the world. The other harsh and cutting, pushing the darkness away… from… him…

He opened his eyes-

“Don’t move for a second,” the voices merged, and he placed it as Divide.

His whole body hurt, was in agony in fact. Intuitively he knew he was nearly dead, a breath away from it somehow.

“For maker’s sake, sister!” Divide’s voice held a cold, judging tone to it that had not been there before, even as the pain receded. “I didn’t save him just for you to…”

“I… S-sorry,” a mortified, small voice whispered nearby.

Abruptly, a feeling of warmth flowed through him and the world was right again… He…

“Don’t think about it,” Origin’s voice was also there, her hand pressed to his heart, he realised. “It’s not something mortality is meant to perceive. If you could do that and survive without our intervention you would likely qualify to become a Living Saint, or a Bodhisattva directly!”

“What… did I just see?” he gasped, because his body still felt like it had been hit by a very big hammer.

“The Edge of Causality, the state of inertia that pushes the cosmos forward, condensed into the mantle of original retribution,” Divide muttered.

“You just saw a shadow of the edge of an aspect of genuine omnipotence,” Origin said a trifle more tartly, with a sideways look at the still-mortified Cetana. “Don’t think about it. It will vanish naturally from your mind. If you try to hold onto it, it will break you beyond even our capability.”

He tried to breathe, and the oppression pushed against him, trying to crush him from within and without even as he desperately tried to-

A pair of hands grasped his face and turned him around so he was facing Divide, staring into her eyes.

“Just… look at… me…” her words drifted melodiously into him, even as he felt the weird sensation of pressure fading away. With it went the dull ache and he found he could breathe normally again. After two breaths, all that was left were the spots dancing in his vision.

“I… I am… sorry…” Cetana mumbled, not looking at him, and looking quite genuinely mortified. “I… saw… what I… I can only apologise.”

“It is not in your nature to be forgiving,” Origin, who he had never even seen move now stood beside the younger woman, holding her head against her stomach in an almost motherly manner.

“Still… I should not have,” Cetana sniffed.

“It’s fine…” he managed to gasp.

Beside him, Divide actually laughed, presumably because she had seen through him easily and knew a part of him very much ‘did not think it was fine’. He wasn’t dead… but clearly she had nearly killed him by accident, just by losing control of herself or not paying due attention to his mortal status or something…

“How did that even happen though?” Divide asked, her manner snapping back to serious almost mid-laugh.

“….”

He nodded… He wasn’t sure what had caused it, but anything that did so was probably something worth getting angry about…

Briefly, he pondered about asking what would have happened had he actually died, but thought better of it. He was suddenly very certain he really didn’t want to know that answer.

The ‘void’ had been all-consuming.

He carefully didn’t think about it again for a few seconds… because even that… gave him an uneasy… pressure somehow.

He stared at the begonia flowers that had just bloomed on the tiles about 2 meters away from him.

{JUST FUCK OFF!}

Divide screamed in rage, smashing the things out of existence with what appeared to be a series of palm strikes, but he never even saw her move. Space simply truncated between her and the flower as they dispersed into nothing. He wasn’t sure what she had done, but if her name appeared largely descriptive of her power, and this place was related to Samsara, he could hazard a rather terrifying guess-

He truncated that thought even as he became aware of the space above him twisting weirdly, even as black roses appeared, growing out of the floor all around him.

“What. The Actual FUCK?” Divide hissed turning this way and that. “This settles it. We are fixing this before anything else scuttles in.” She blurred, pulled an actual broom out of somewhere and swept the roses away.

“I agree! This is getting a bit stupid…” Origin nodded. “You two, go grab the other three, or at least drag a piece of their attention up here in a way that doesn’t cause issues with the things they are suppressing.”

“Yes Ma’am!” Divide gave a mock salute and stepped smartly over to stand beside Cetana, still with her broom in hand.

A moment later both of them vanished with a ripple and they were left in silence. He sat there in silence, but after two more attempts at any kind of meditation made another hazy cloud appear and then various flowers bloom, he stopped.

“What is going on?” Origin hissed, even as she swept away the flowers with a broom of her own, sending the dispersed flower petals off into the darkness were they dispersed like fireflies-

Around him several white bell-like flowers uncurled.

“…”

They both stared at them before Origin just stamped on the cluster which vanished in a faint ripple.

After him merely looking at the pillar in the middle of the room also spawned twisting vines of flowers over the nearby table, he was certain it was a more general thing.

“Is this because of what they did to my body?” he asked, nervously.

Origin stared at him, then slapped her head. “You, stay here. Don’t look, don’t think, don’t do anything. This will only take a moment for me to…”

He nodded, shuddering at the thought of his body… old body… somewhere in those grasslands, locked in spectral-

“Shit,” he groaned as something almost led him by the hand-

He pushed it away, even as the horrible thought that this was all just an insane hallucination-

“No, no…”

It refused to go way, as soon as that seed had been planted something was worming inexorably through him, dragging a part of him, leading him to believe that this was all a hallucination in his head. A projection of his own insane-

The world around him wavered, even as he bit his own hand to stop himself thinking of anything other than-

-Insane… I am…

Origin was holding him by the shoulders, forcing him to stare at her.

“Are you incapable of keeping an irrelevant thought in your head or something?”

“…”

“After Divide went to all that effort to break you free from that abandoned husk of mortal flesh, why are you accidentally thinking about it and nearly re-associating yourself with it!?!”

His body was screaming at him even as the force kept trying to drag him back while worming into the place he had been. He felt heat, pain, grass… metal… explosions?

Origin stared at him dully… There was genuine annoyance on her face, although nothing crept out in terms of aura. He was sure he would die without a corpse anyway if she did what Cetana had done somehow.

{Oh, for the love of…}

He returned to himself, sweating… The world was normal, but he had felt the heat of the grasslands for a second and heard what sounded like... battle?

“Sorry…” he winced… “It’s just that… the mind doesn’t work like that… It… Thoughts wander… and you try to make sense of them….”

“That’s not it,” she looked disgusted. “This… they are lifting a…” she trailed off, a disbelieving look on her face.

“How the fuck does that girl have…? What is this even? Era Denying Tribulation?”

“E-”

He never even managed to speak because she had put her hand over his mount and somehow the idea of conscious thought was weirdly dissociated within him-

The feeling passed and Origin exhaled.

“What even is this? Is this a cosmic rake stepping contest or something?” he had no idea what she was watching, or even what that meant, but the disbelief in her voice was palpable.

Because he was standing there with another person, he could only say that time was ‘weird’, because it felt like he was stood there for far longer than he actually was, amid a swirling, blooming field of flowers that didn’t dare to come with in a metre of Origin.

Origin sounded a little haunted now.

“Okay, you need to listen to me very clearly,” Origin said grimly. “Don’t think about anything-”

There was an implicit command in there, although it was so subtle than he might have imagined it.

“Dammit, I should have gone and let Divide stay,” Origin muttered, even as he tried to do what she said… and got nowhere. In fact, it almost felt like he was going backwards and the association was just…

“It doesn’t help!” he gasped. “It’s just making it worse somehow!”

“…”

“Faugh!” she snarled, and the flowers around them scattered, consumed by shadow, even as more tried to focus on his location.

“Sorry…” he grimaced, aware that without her here he would have been somehow pulled back long ago.

“It’s not you. It’s the infestation upstairs. They are excellent at what they do and in this case what they do is draw your attention inexorably towards anything that is ‘you’. You are your own fishing lure,” she sighed.

“But… why?” he groaned. “What did I do to actually incur this…? I know… what you said before… It’s a shitty world...”

“They are trying to re-associate you with your body, rather accidentally, because they are using a good fortune spring to draw out the ill fortune of another act and stack it on you.”

“I’ll fortune of another act?” he risked asking.

“Your friend, Lin Ling is undergoing a tribulation and they are trying to wrap her up as a tasty dragon-flavoured snack and take her home as well.”

“They what!?” he gasped, outraged.

“Cute, but you don’t have any outrage to spare,” she muttered. “Compared to her, right now you have actually managed to cross several very watched threads. The problem is that the ‘lock’ on your body is trying to work out why something interfered with it on a fundamental level. It cannot resolve the problem directly, so it’s angling for the next best thing, to make the whole thing so obnoxiously problematic that the causal forces of the world around it will force a resolution in its favour because it is the path of least resistance to the least problematic outcome.”

“Uh… my being chained for nine generations and dying horribly as a puppet is the least problematic outcome?” he groaned.

“Yes, in this case,” Origin grumbled. “Basically, If you think too hard about your old body, which it is trying to lead you to do, it will try to require the nearest familiar soul signature – which would be you– in this place and that kind of fundamental link was what Divide went to all that length to properly obfuscate…”

“So… I’m in danger until…” he trailed off, not wanting to vocalise that exactly.

No further flowers appeared, however, which made him sigh in relief.

“Until it blows up in their face or the tribulation ends…” Origin trailed off.

“How does she have Karma with her?”

The disbelief in her voice was palpable suddenly.

“With who?” he was confused now, and even more afraid somehow, even if he didn’t know…

“The thing in my body is... afraid?” he goggled. “I can feel it twisting somehow. It’s… it’s…”

Black lilies blossomed right beside him, which Origin swept away with a hiss.

“It’s not. The fate lock is still trying to work out why something interfered with it at a fundamental level and ‘resolve’ the problem; it’s just attempting a slightly different angle,” Origin sighed.

“As it stands, this is going to require those three luddites after all – this goes beyond ‘vermin-proofing’. If they get a fate lock on this place…” her tone turned grim.

“What will happen then?”

She just stared at him, looking a bit frustrated, all but radiating a ‘don’t ask questions you won’t like the answers to’ vibe.

“Well, the tribulation… will likely not go as they expect,” she added, rather distantly. “This kind of thing, messing with a mortal step tribulation to this degree in a supreme world, the kind of crazy deviations…”

“Will Ling fail?” he shivered, hoping she wouldn’t, wondering what kind of tribulation it actually was. Was she seeing black lightning or something?

Almost immediately, he realised his mistake, as the twisting pressure above intensified-

“Unless you want to die horribly, don’t think about it!” Origin almost hissed, right beside his ear, making him flinch.

They stood there for a short eternity, in the dark, Origin right beside him, staring grimly around, before the pressure finally subsided and she exhaled.

“Well, that is one way to drop a rock, I suppose,” she mused. “Saves me doing anything about it immediately, at least. They are almost at the point where you could consider their…”

She trailed off and stared at him… then suddenly started to laugh.

“What is it?”

“They have planted themselves…” she said, “thoroughly planted themselves, and they don’t even know it!”

“How?” he asked really confused and a bit annoyed again for some reason.

“Well, they did their manipulation of your friend’s tribulation in a place affiliated with the Great Mother of Bright Fortune, but that’s not the best bit – it’s what they did to you!”

“…”

Seeing his disgruntled look, she shook her head. “Sorry, it is really quite funny though. Mortals call them ‘physiques’ but really they are a kind of feng shui alignment as you might consider it, within the body. Your old body gained one from the manual; however, it has mutated, transformed. Before, it was a ‘True’ Physique, but now it has warped to a form of ‘Mortal’ Physique.”

“…”

She cut him off before he could ask what that meant.

“What was done to you is so much overkill that it’s close to farcical, and they have gravely underestimated the degree of your accumulation to this point. Just the 1000 odd deaths in that moment would be enough to provoke one mutating, but that talisman was meant to cripple you on a level that would inconvenience a World Emperor.

“It can hop souls so long as they have the same root, irrespective of dimensional distance, so long as you give it a decent stab at a potential bridge. The result, is that that True Physique has basically become a cursed Physique – a lodestone of karmic misfortune at this point. The names people give them are a bit unhelpful, but Mortal Physiques tend to thrive off tribulation, strife, the promotion of strength through experiencing the mortal condition and overcoming its limitations.

“You push them, and they push back. The harder you hit them, the harder they spring back. They are the idea of progression through overcoming all obstacles, no matter what the odds, made manifest. When you add in the issues that surround self-fulfilling prophecies and divination… do you know what happens if you divine absolute death enough times with the same compass and don’t manage to break it?”

“…”

“Wha…?” He stared at her blankly, trying to process that. “So my… body has been turned into a cursed object?”

“That is an excellent way of putting it, yes,” she agreed. “That body has basically been refined into a calamity attractor.”

She trailed off as a solitary golden peony blossomed between them, swirling and multiplying rapidly outwards towards him until Origin reached out and did something inexplicable. Rather than disperse, the peonies scattered like reflections on water and a shadowy form of another woman stood there.

It was impossible for him to look directly at her – she was a twisted hole into the void that shimmered like sunlight on water – and yet, at the same time, it was impossible for him to not look, for in her presence there she was even more alluring than even that Divide had been that one time.

He got no idea of what words were shared between Origin and the other Shadow, but after a moment, the peonies swirled and faded as if they had never been, the last one dancing on Origin’s palm for a moment in a swirling little gyre of golden flame before vanishing. Only when the last traces had left, did Origin exhale.

“This… is why you don’t fuck about with the fate of Supreme Worlds,” she sighed. “You never know what shadows lurk in the accumulation of the truly ancient ones.”

“Who… was that…?” he managed to ask, because where she had been he still had a faint splodge of eerie ephemera burned into his eyes.

“An old power, very old,” Origin said softly. “You would do well to remember her symbol, that peony. Never cross anyone carrying one, or they will ruin your day so thoroughly you will never know how you came to ruin.”

“What about Lin Ling?” he asked, still worried about her.

“…”

A bunch of black orchids swirled out of the nihility nearby, only to be swiped away by Origin in a single fluid step and swish of the broom.

“Your friend survived,” Origin said, casting him a sideways look before sweeping another little clump of daisies away.

Moments later a second clump appeared, which Origin just stared at for a whole minute, until rather disconcertingly they wilted all of their own accord.

“Let’s hope they are quick,” she scowled, waving her hand as a book case appeared out of the shadows. Pulling a book off it, she tossed it over to him.

He grabbed it and grunted, because it was surprisingly heavy. The front was ‘Latan to Aeolic: A Diction of Words and Letters.’

“What will this do?” he frowned, opening it and finding it was a very mundane book.

“Teach you Aeolic, one of the ancient languages of Aertha Sol. Your path to cultivation was cut off, but only as you know it. While you wait for those five to get their act together, you may as well do something profitable, starting with learning how to think in that language.”

“Think…?” he asked, puzzled by what she was asking him.

“That seal can latch onto a lot of things, including thoughts, but that is predicated on it being able to understand your thoughts,” Origin explained.

“But won’t it be able to get this because I know Easten?” he asked, seeing the immediate problem there.

“Your old body knows Easten but not as it is in this book. You will have to learn that variant as well, though it should be faster given they have a common root. It will get nowhere with Aeolic unless they haul you back into your old body and rip it right out of your head,” Origin went on, a trifle curtly now, which made him wince. “In truth, the less questions you ask, the better.”

He could only nod apologetically to that, though it was… frustrating.

“Explanations can come after the problem is solved,” Origin said with a sigh, sitting down and returning to staring at the ceiling. “Explaining it beforehand is not beneficial to you, both because of the risk that it associates too closely with what you already know, and more importantly, the longer this goes on, it is only going to become more problematic.”

~ Juni, Lin Ling and Teng Chunhua - Edge of the Great Savannah ~

Juni followed after Lin Ling and Teng Chunhua as they picked up the largest trail heading east out of the far side of that battlefield, which was soon re-joined by the other groups heading east. After some consideration, they decided to check out the smaller groups to the north-west, who appeared to be moving slower, considering the converging trails they ran across.

As they went on, she continued to work on using ‘Bright Lotus Eyes’ as best she could and occasionally supplemented her qi with a the various higher quality spirit herbs. Both Teng Chunhua and Lin Ling were also refining them at a near constant rate as they went along as well – the former to try to stabilize her new foundation and make auspicious gains, the latter to recover her remaining longevity.

She soon worked out that the ‘trick’ to it turned out to be much like that for using ‘Heart Shifting Steps’, in that it had a very basic version and a quite focused, more intensive version. The issue, though, was that, much like the former, ‘Bright Lotus Eyes’’ most basic form was much harder to ‘use’ and she didn’t have an equivalent of a handy ancient ruin devoid of all qi to fall back on to brute force the issue.

Still, as they followed the various trails, she found she had quite a lot of time to work on that, because she was now, in effect, the junior partner among the three – weakest in terms of cultivation, although with the best weapon admittedly.

It was a novel experience, to not be the one leading. Compared to the fully attuned Teng Chunhua, she lacked the edge the other’s soul sense provided to help the frequent attenuate danger from prowling scavengers, even when she drew upon Heart Shifting Steps.

Lin Ling now had better vision and her principle was also affording her abilities close to that of a divination art. As a result, her friend had all but taken over her previous job of being the scout, leaving her to basically walk between them, being the controlling point for the compasses they were using and occasionally pronouncing they were being obfuscated on whatever trail they were on.

Unfortunately, it was also quite stressful, mostly due to the speed they were now moving at as they criss-crossed various trails and because she had forgotten that Lin Ling was someone who just did things and tended to expect others to follow, only explaining choices when it was convenient or required. She suspected that part of that trait had been rather exacerbated by her recent experiences as well, not that it helped.

On the other hand, her more supporting role gave her that needed opportunity to practice the various things she needed to, so she buried her mild vexations and just got on with it. Her archery worked disturbingly well, if rather taxingly, when she started to combine ‘Bright Lotus Eyes’, ‘Heart Shifting Steps’ and her various Kun clan archery forms.

In the instances where they had run-ins with packs of scavengers, she was able to quite comfortably hit Soul Foundation beasts from several hundred metres away with blood-tipped arrows, which, given she was still technically at Qi Refinement, was a martial feat that would make her elders back in the clan sweat a bit she suspected.

The first group of trails ended in a bloodbath about ten miles from the battlefield; they found the remains of almost 800 Ur’Vash, laid out in orderly rows in the middle of the ruined landscape. No cultivator remains were present but a stele had been erected in the middle of the battlefield inscribed with a version of the Amitabha Pure Land Nirvana Sutra.

Annoyingly, they still ended up losing time, mainly because the Ur’Vash had retreated in every direction as near as she could see and there had been several smaller skirmishes nearby. As such, it was almost dusk by the time they re-found the trail. Following through the darkness, they managed to push on for an hour before finally being forced to take refuge in a convenient outcropping due to the huge number of predators and scavengers converging on the nearby battle sites.

With her ‘Bright Lotus Eyes’, she was able to pick out two three-headed serpents in the gloom even before they started idly scanning for targets. Even compared with what she had witnessed in the battle, their soul senses were tyrannical and even Lin Ling sweated a bit as they sat silently in the shadow of the rocks for almost three hours just focusing on ‘One with What Is’.

Another shock was a strange half-gorilla, half-porcupine creature that made its way up the trail they were following, snuffling and growling. It paused to consider their outcropping for several agonizing minutes. Both Teng Chunhua and Lin Ling judged its strength to be above even the serpents they had just seen. Lin Ling confided that while she was pretty confident in killing it – because it was a Yang-attributed beast – it would be better not to risk a confrontation, if only because the serpents were also still lingering, not to mention other predators beyond their perception.

At dawn, they left quickly and followed the trail for several more miles before finally discovering the monster beast from the night before in the remains of a small camp, pounded flat. Its demise was all the more disconcerting because they had heard next to nothing the previous night. It had been skilfully dismembered, its core taken along with several bones, the skin and choice cuts of meat and spines.

After some contemplation, they took what remained of the spines while Lin Ling put the meat into pots and added her own blood to it, starting to recover her store of yang blood for arrows and such. The spines themselves also made for excellent throwing weapons, being over a metre long and ruler straight with a sort of innate yang poison within them.

It wasn’t until well after noon of that day before they finally got within visual range of those they were following. The group of 23 cultivators was indeed being led by the bald, bearded monk and his two companions. It also included the group they had run into in the ruins of the camp, as well as the ‘Senior Ran’ who had intervened. There were a few injured, but nobody any of them recognised, confirming they didn’t need to worry about that group anymore at least.

The return trip was fast, although not without event. Over the course of the rest of the day they found two more groups – both of whom had managed to fight their way free to some degree. Neither had the prisoners and one even managed to spot them, immediately targeting them with a lightning bolt talisman which Lin Ling blocked with one of her vocal arts with consummate ease before they retreated.

They stayed the second night near the edge of the original battlefield, which was still surrounded by small camps of Ur’Vash. At some point in the late night though, a vast lightning storm started to flicker away to the north, continuing for several hours until just after dawn. She passed most of the time just using ‘Bright Lotus Eyes’ to examine her surroundings, working on using it in concert with ‘Heart Shifting Steps’ as the talisman instructed.

The next day, even after starting as early as they could, it still took them until midday to find the next trail, which was heading roughly north, into the savannah. Unlike the others, it was remarkably diffuse, despite the apparently larger numbers. Near as they could guess, it comprised close to 70 cultivators – had they not known that the Jade Gate Court were fleeing generally north-east she would have been concerned they were following them.

Evening saw their progress, which had been reasonably rapid despite the diffuse trail, truncate abruptly in a colossal battlefield. Lightning scars swept through swathes of incinerated Ur’Vash, many wearing centipede chitin armour.

Everywhere, the surface of the ground, which was entirely devoid of grass, had strange, mandala-like ripples and at its heart almost three square miles of land were artificially flat, various weapons sticking out in haphazard ways. Death qi radiated out of the ground – thousands of sinister little plumes the only memorial to what she was fairly sure was a very large host of Ur’Vash buried beneath the twisted ground.

“So… not a thunderstorm,” Chunhua said uneasily as they stood in the middle.

“No… not a thunderstorm,” Lin Ling agreed.

“With this kind of power, why didn’t they just flatten the Ur’Vash on the battlefield before?” Chunhua frowned, looking about.

“I can think of several reasons,” she mused, “the most obvious one being that the perpetrator didn’t trust the Jade Gate Court…”

“Or just didn’t want to waste such a powerful talisman helping the wider group,” Lin Ling agreed.

“If it wasn’t with talismans, whoever did this was likely an Ancient Immortal, maybe several…” Chunhua nodded. “That thunderstorm lasted hours…”

Looking around, taking in the details of the scene, that was what stood out, in truth. It was much more coordinated – the ripples and eddies of the aftermath of the moves were still visible in some cases and she could see hints of where formations had moved – large formations for that matter.

“They fought several thousand Ur’Vash by the looks of it,” she said, looking around at the devastation. “They appear to be the centipede tribe from up north, who didn’t really take part in the battle?”

“Yeah,” Lin Ling agreed.

“They also used a lot of formations,” she added, following the arc of another with her vision.

“How can you tell that?” Lin Ling raised an eyebrow.

“I have an Ocular Art that can read qi signatures,” she replied with a shrug as she continued to survey the rest of the battlefield.

In these circumstances she was starting to see why the talisman was very clear that she needed master of this art to at least ‘little success’ before even thinking of Core Formation. Watching the shifting tides of qi as they settled was odd, but the process was actually supplemental to her qi cycle directly, she was starting to realise. Every now and then, odd snippets of knowledge would drift in as well, almost like a form of visual geomancy.

Lin Ling looked at her with a strange sense of appraisal, while Teng Chunhua just looked… resigned. She felt a bit bad for the other woman over their earlier obfuscations but now there was no real need to hide much of this from her anymore. She was largely welded to them from her experience within the battle anyway.

Chunhua gave her a dead-eyed look. “Were you guys properly lying to Ruo Han and the rest that time?”

“Lying? Nope,” she said with an eye roll. “I’ve had enough experience with dodgy cultivators before getting stuck here to know that almost every cultivator above Golden Core has a means to tell if people under Golden Core are lying or being false. And once you bring soul sense into the equation, unless you’re a Soul Cultivator or just have a weird Mantra like Arai and Sana did, my experience was that people can read most lower realm cultivators like an open book.”

“That is true,” Teng Chunhua nodded, staring around, “but how do you know there were thousands of Ur’Vash?”

“There are thousands of plumes of death qi swirling up,” she waved a hand generally. “Not to the point where they are dangerous to us, but…”

“…”

Chunhua looked at her with a rather unnerved expression, as she supposed she might, given it was dusk and death qi was what it was.

“Anyway,” she went on, “we didn’t lie, but there were certainly strategic omissions of elements of the story that were… unnecessary to get the general gist of the experience to people like Hao Jun.”

“Which turned out to be a fate-thrashed good thing too,” Lin Ling added, “given we have no idea what might have been pried out of their heads.”

“That said,” she sighed, “the grey slate tablets were with Han Shu and Liao Ying…”

“That at least doesn’t matter,” Lin Ling remarked absently.

“It doesn’t?” she blinked.

“Nope. There is no way they can get into them,” Lin Ling confirmed, with remarkable confidence.

“And how do you know that?” she asked, because Lin Ling was looking rather pleased with herself.

“How so?” Chunhua asked, curiously at the same time.

“Since I advanced the ancestral memories are much more easily interrogable. From them I can tell you that those kinds of tablets tend to have a thing called a ‘soul lock’ on them,” Lin Ling explained. “As the name suggests they tend to be attuned to a specific person’s soul, in this case the person who had owned the tablet. You also had to speak or enter a phrase known to them, in a language nobody here will be able to speak or write, and have sufficient understanding of souls to be able to divine the attributes of whoever owned it however long ago that was, not to mention they likely contained something utterly banal, like written stories or recorded images of their family or something. Those grey slates are basically like our jade tablets. It’s like if you had looted a random house back home.”

“Ah,” she nodded, understanding what Lin Ling meant now. “Even if you looked in every scrip and tablet in half of West Flower Picking, you’re going to find 10,000 collections of random crap, notes, recipes, appointments, pictures, family stuff… and maybe if you were lucky one shitty cultivation law.”

“Yes. Even if you consider that that place was probably a school, or a research workshop maybe, it would be in the system of that ancient land this place originated from, which we would find almost indecipherable,” Lin Ling finished.

“I find it more terrifying that the memories you have in your blood are actually able to give you even that much,” Chunhua said, looking at her askance.

“It’s not as big an advantage as you would think,” Lin Ling sighed. “Sure, it’s got useful stuff in there I can use, like the words of power in that ancient language of primordial beasts, but that only works because I have the blood and the memories. For other stuff, a lot of it is just… animal stuff: instincts, things you can eat, some stuff about spirit plants that are -very- interesting, actually, but in terms of general knowledge about cultivation it’s got nothing.

“The methods the owners of the memories used are wildly different and so nebulously organic that even trying to classify a hundredth of what I can get into something usable gives me a terrible headache – not withstanding only a third of the memories are even cooperative for the most part. Even then, there’s just so much of it and it’s so repetitive – not to mention that repetitive stuff has remarkable prominence compared to many of the things that are ‘useful’ to us.”

While they continued to work their way around the battlefield, looking for the trail or any signs that this was the right one to follow, Lin Ling spent some further time explaining and somewhat reiterating various things to them and occasionally ranting about how annoying it was to have the memories of hundreds of ancient dragon lizards in her head, doing ancient dragon lizard things. Given how prominent memories seemed to overlap, that meant that they gave a huge prominence to stuff like eating and sleeping while occasionally deigning to look at other things for a second or three before dismissing them as boring or useless or just plain disinteresting.

The younger woman also confessed it put immense pressure on her Sea of Knowledge, and while the memories were fairly passive at this point, only the older ones were regularly useful.

The memories of the ‘actual’ dragons and such mostly ignored her or, if she did try to unpack one of those memories, were about as much help as a hole in the head for various reasons. Mostly, what she was left with was the synthesised wisdom of the non-dragon lizard aspects and some comprehensions, along with the more helpful aspects of the very old ancestral memories who were more willing to work with her. When Lin Ling couched it like that… it did indeed sound more hindrance than help in a weird way.

Teng Chunhua, by turns, also explained a bit about what had happened to her – she guessed it was promoted by feeling like Lin Ling should not be the only one coughing up explanations. The Yin Parasol qi had done something to her core, she thought, although it was hard to say what. What was weirder though, was that in the process the ‘One with What Is’ visualisation had also slightly merged with it during her advancement, which even Lin Ling acknowledged was… unusual.

In the end, it was nearly blind luck that saw them recover the trail, after two hours of searching this way and that. By the time she stumbled across the strange space to one side of it, she was beginning to worry that the sustained meridian strain she was enduring was provoking her to hallucinate qi signatures at this point, such was her continued use of ‘Bright Lotus Eyes’.

And so, she found herself needing to look at the spot three times and matching things up in her memories just to be sure that she was indeed seeing what she was seeing. There was a sort of inauspicious scar dispersing strangely into the surroundings and, within it, the blurred absence and distortion of a qi signature that she was somewhat certain might belong to Ruo Han.

Calling the others over, they stood and stared at the spot in the twilight, trying to ignore the little eddies of mist that were starting to swirl over the battle site as the sun set and the power of yin rose with the moon.

“It could be,” Lin Ling said after a long while, pacing this way and that. “In this regard, my principle is still not as good as two arts…”

“This does look like it was a point where they defended more obviously,” Teng Chunhua added from where she was kneeling by a rock.

The other woman held up a talisman for them all to see – a remnant of some kind of barrier she guessed.

“Ah! Here!” Lin Ling hopped over a rock and waved for them both to come and look.

Making her way over, she focused more concertedly on the ‘Bright Lotus Eyes’ and watched the shifting miasma of qi signatures as best she could until, between one footfall and the next, they ‘set’ for a brief moment, showing her a warping diorama of outlines for a brief, nauseating moment. It passed so quickly she was again wondering if she was hallucinating and the swirling absence that was everywhere only obfuscated things further, but in that instant she was sure she had seen maybe a two dozen figures.

Some had been throwing stuff, others just moving, a few crouched around three more on the ground, including one where the inauspicious feeling had been dispersing. Walking over to one of the others, she found the faintest traces of some kind of inauspicious distortion there as well.

“What is it?” Lin Ling asked, coming over to stand beside her.

“Sorry,” she shook her head. “What did you find?”

“Campfire, or the remains of one, scooped up and tossed in the lee of a rock,” Lin Ling explained. “You?”

“There appear to have been three people lying here. One may be Ruo Han, and this one the signature is so faint I can barely get anything, but it might be Jin Chen?”

Teng Chunhua came over and stared at the area as well, carefully using her soul sense in the gloom before nodding slowly. “Could be, it looks like a shred of his qi, but it’s degrading fast and very mixed up.”

“No sign of Han Shu?” Lin Ling sighed.

She looked around, narrowing her eyes. There was a large area where she could detect basically nothing nearby, almost like it had been swept clean by the same shifting absence that was responsible for the burial of so many of the Ur’Vash. Her eyes were nearly bleeding and the headache she was experiencing was quite acute before she finally convinced the blurring distortions to settle again and found that there was, hidden within this swirling space, several more ‘forms’. Two lay on the ground, one, almost invisible, was crouched over them, three more doing something and…

When she sat up, Lin Ling was fumbling for a spirit herb to feed her, looking very concerned.

Putting her hand to her face, she felt blood – tasted blood – on her lips.

Carefully, she checked the condition of her ocular meridians and sighed. They were okay at least, even if the headache was now close to a migraine.

“Are you okay?” Teng Chunhua asked, also concerned.

“Yeah, I just looked at something a bit weird,” she sighed, trying to piece it together in her head after the fact. “Remember when we found that distressingly inauspicious spot?” she asked Lin Ling.

“Oh… yeah…” Lin Ling nodded, grimly.

“Well, it turns out looking at that with that eye-based art is not a pleasant experience,” she shuddered. “I’d bet spirit stones Han Shu was here and someone, an expert – probably a Golden or Ancient Immortal, based on the profundities of the qi and intent – was also here.”

“Well, it’s something at least,” Lin Ling sighed. “Any idea which way?”

Without comment, she pointed somewhat north. The faint trace of inauspicious distortion flowed away that way.

There was no question regarding whether they spent the night near the battlefield – by the time the moon was well risen, she was almost able to see the phantasmal afterimages of death and destruction, mirrored in its light with her eyes: Ur’Vash drowning in dirt, dragged down by surging waves as shadows of what she assumed were cultivators danced through them in blurring constellation-like patterns.

Just walking near some of them made her skin crawl and her legs grow weak and even Lin Ling professed that her ‘instincts’ said they should not linger. It didn’t help that her connection to the Ur’Vash also seemed to extend to these shades, so she could feel their fear and terror quite abjectly.

There was no righteous rage here, no fury to propel them forward, no sacred symbols to buoy them. Instead, they had attacked the cultivators and those at the heart of the force or someone had overturned their momentum and drowned them in the wave of their own ferocity, then quite literally drowned them in the dirt.

They finally stopped to rest for a while on another rocky outcrop, near the trail, such as they were able to follow.

The information in the talisman told her that at the very earliest she shouldn’t expect any kind of stable core to coalesce before 24-28 rotations. She stared at the details properly now… because it gave very concise instructions as to what to do to get past many more rotations than that. Key among them was, indeed, spending a lot of time using the ocular art, and also the movement art. She should also seek out sources of qi with innate affinities towards lotus flowers and sources of rich soul power.

The talisman stressed that absorbing soul power at night, in Yang-attributed auspicious locations, was the most optimal way to get the most out of the core and achieve a proper breakthrough.

Almost as if to confirm that point – in the early hours of the morning her qi once again acquired sufficient density to collapse into a core once more, twisting for 15 rotations and then collapsing outwards, sending a wave of golden lotus blooms… and now some peonies, flowing across the surroundings, drawing in auspicious energies into her meridians, her blood and finally her bone marrow where they gently synchronised with her Mantra Seed.

~ Ruo Han - Edge of the Great Savannah ~

Ruo Han regained functional consciousness with a horrible jolt. The last thing he really remembered clearly was some utter asshole from Argent Imperial Hall sealing up his Sea of Knowledge and Nascent Soul up – effectively locking him in a black void of spectral agony.

For a panicked moment as he tried adjust to his surroundings…

-Solid ground, flat rock… grass… so not back in the sect?

-Heat… the smell of iron in the air?

-Dissociated noise…

-Oh, screaming, a lot of screaming.

He tried to move and couldn’t – for a moment he panicked, wondering if they had severed his limbs, because he was unable to feel them…

-Idiot, soul dissociation is a thing! his thoughts helpfully reminded him after a moment.

His Nascent Soul had been sealed in a sensory deprived box to starve itself of qi and that had actually damaged his own innate links between it and his dantian in some way. It wasn’t quite a forced deviation, he grasped, but it was deeply unpleasant…

-And now the pain is very real… the more dissociated thoughts commented a bit disturbingly.

-Very reals.

-So real

-Very pain.

-Much unpleasantness…

He forced them back into one normal voice and found only regrets as he discovered he could feel his limbs, even if he was unable to move them. The screaming and the inability to see were starting to become... a problem though.

-Feels like I was brutally beaten…

‘You rebellious piece of shit, you think because that Cang Di spoke up a bit you are safe? You brought disrespect onto our…’

‘Where is it? What treasure did you all find…’

‘Where is his storage ring…’

‘Unlocking array… ah… monkey shit in it-’

-I was brutally beaten, he groaned, as the dissociated memories of his non-Nascent Soul consciousness resurfaced.

They were very unpleasant, and remarkably fractured. The Argent Justice Sect and the Argent Hall had apparently believed they found some ruin or something, that they had more treasures like…

-Motherless sons of dogs, what kind of bullshit misfortune did we land in? he gasped, as they sort of organised themselves.

The sight resolved itself when someone bodily grabbed him… and he realised his body had been lying face down on a rock and he had been loosely blindfolded.

“Uggh, I hate these arrows so much…” a man’s voice groaned as he was dragged forward and then dropped again.

The blindfold was removed, by a second blurry person who looked a little familiar upon shifting into his field of vision. The person who had carried him was a youth with a scrawny beard and a reddish brown robe, carrying a blade. Another figure, in white that hurt his eyes, was pulling something from his shoulder.

He closed his eyes for a few moments and breathed deeply, which hurt… a lot.

When he opened them though, his vision was better, if a bit woozy, allowing him to see-

Five people in green robes were racing towards them in a formation, all wearing white masks with ‘golden’ on them-

He was slumped against a block of some destroyed building-

Before he was sure what he had seen, the ground ruptured somewhere behind him and he was thrown bodily down, tasting blood in his mouth before darkness welled up around him.

…

When he came to, a familiar face was peering down at him and it was no longer daytime.

“Liao…?” he gasped, making out her face as a bolt of lightning flared somewhere nearby, oddly silent.

“…”

She said something but he realised he couldn’t hear what she had said. The pain in his head was almost crushing, as was the pain in his chest, he realised. His qi was utterly turbulent and what remained was barely under his control.

“Don’t speak… badly injured,” she signed for him, her blurry face seeming to grimace.

His hearing faded back in over the next few moments, allowing him to hear the screams and the crash of lightning. The ground suddenly shifted and the world seemed to spin in a way that made him want to be physically sick for several moments before everything settled and the screaming mostly stopped.

-I was the one screaming… he realised with a jolt of horror

-Just how dissociated am I?

He tried to push himself upright and realised he was probably more badly injured than he realised. His body was devoid of qi, and even his bones had had all of it expelled. His Nascent Soul was actually haemorrhaging it because of the imbalance and there was some strange, invisible distortion within that system that was interfering with it. Qi was just dispersing directly rather than flowing back into his body.

Inadvertently, he coughed up a mouthful of blood and the pain in his chest deepened for a moment.

-Shit… what happened to me? He groaned.

“What… happen?” he managed to rasp.

Liao Ying said nothing, just hauling him up with the help of someone else, a youth in a scrawny blue-grey robe.

“Nameless accursed Jade Gate Court is what happened,” the youth spat. “And your worthless sect.”

“My…?”

“It wasn’t our fault,” Liao Ying snapped. “We are as much victims in this as the rest of you.”

“Hah…” the youth sighed bitterly, even as he got a better look at the battlefield they were on.

It was indeed a proper battlefield – like the one in the valley, which felt like a small eternity ago and yet also, only last week in a rather disturbing way. Hundreds of screaming demons…

-Ur’Vash…

He shook his head. It didn’t matter what they were called, because they were everywhere, charging across the flat area towards them-

As he watched, shocked, the ground swirled and rippled all around him like ocean waves and pulled them under, leaving only occasional twitching limbs and the odd weapon visible.

“Senior Song is scary…” the youth muttered. “Wish she had used this in the last battle.”

“Ah! There you are!” a woman’s voice cut through the chaos and he found himself being dropped on the ground again.

“Sorry, everything is so chaotic…” Liao Ying sounded tired.

“Faugh, it’s the hassle of keeping cats in check,” the other woman sighed. “I wish we had not run into those other two groups; they are just causing trouble by sideways means.”

“That is unfair, Fairy Liling,” a man’s voice from nearby grumbled. “Without our Pill Sovereign Sect and the Four Peacocks Court, you would be in quite a bit more trouble…”

“Your other bunch are only helping because you think that Han Shu really does have a treasure,” she sneered.

“…”

Another wave of disruption swept over everything, cutting off whatever reply came. When the world stopped spinning, he groaned and tried to avoid coughing up more blood and found he was being carried again.

He was perilously close to a proper psyche break and associated qi deviation from what he could see. His ability to diagnose his own body was shockingly hindered as well by strange phantasmal blockages…

-Seals… my body is sealed, he realised at last.

All eight gates had blockages in them, and that seal was continually disrupting his ability to control any qi with his Nascent Soul or form Soul Intent within his Sea of Knowledge.

Groaning he tried to stabilize it but got nowhere, even as they dragged him on.

-How stupid, I got ‘freed’ only to die from my qi rupturing my own meridians and critically crippling my Nascent Soul in the process?

A second, much more cautious pass all but confirmed that. His body was sealed in such as way that his qi was being deliberately dispersed, while his Nascent Soul was only half-sealed somehow. It was tempting to say that it was half-assed, but he knew it was not.

-Argent Punishment Eye.

-Fuck your nine generations, you worthless bastards! He cursed the Argent Justice and Argent Hall in equal measure…

Everything stilled, even sound fading from the world for a moment as the sky above surged strangely, as if mirroring the swirling river of churning land that was swirling around them. Above them, the very vault of heaven shook-

{Storm Dance: Celestial Blossoms}

The waves distorting the land swirled up around them as his eyes were drawn to the source of the formidable technique. Nine women in blue, green and gold robes were dancing with fans in the middle of the chaos, illuminated in the surging flashes of hundreds of silent lightning bolts. Everywhere the bolts hit, strange floral ephemera scattered, consuming Ur’Vash that had somehow evaded the churning earth and leaving only smoking corpses in their wake.

Suddenly, Ur’Vash emerged from the darkness, almost on top of them, screaming. One of the women in a white robe nearby spun and decapitated three with a thrown chakram. Liao Ying stumbled back even as the youth who had been helping him cut at two more with a flowing strike that was profound enough that he was sure it had an Immortal Principle behind it.

One of the woman to their left screamed suddenly and a silent explosion threw her down, even as more arrows scythed out of the gloom, effortlessly punching through the barrier that was around them. He tried to dodge one, but it was impossible in his current condition and hit him in the shoulder, slamming him into the ground and pinning him there. Numbness spread from it almost instantly, making his vision twist and his already tortured qi turn on him further.

-Poison?

-Evil things, they followed us from the mountains?

-Or are they just everywhere?

-I don’t want to die

-Die… die… DIE!

-I should just die and give Hao Tai everything…

The voices in his head snapped back with enough force to make him cough up blood as his Nascent Soul shook again. Especially that last one,

-What by the nameless monkey devils from the east did they do to me?! he sobbed, trying to free himself.

An Ur’Vash loomed over him and then vanished in a bloody blur as something impacted it. The head dropped with a dull thud beside him, even as a youth with a beard, looking pale and drawn, stepped over him

“Senior Zi!” someone nearby sounded relieved as the youth shook his head and looked around before vanishing to reappear beside another Ur’Vash who had somehow made it in and immediately cut the intruder in two with a sweep of his blade.

He was hauled up again, this time by a woman in white who had come after ‘Senior Zi’, and dragged on, Liao Ying running nearby, looking pale and drawn as well. In the chaos he saw another formation of women in white swirling through the Ur’Vash, obliterating more charging Ur’Vash in a small maelstrom of flying chakrams.

-Nine Auspicious Moons? he wondered weakly.

On the other side, four youths in travelling robes and loose leather armour wielding axes struck in concert at another shadowy force of Ur’Vash, their attack illuminated for a brief moment as a phantasmal axe cleft into the charging group, scattering dozens of the armoured figures-

Everything upended and the world vanished in a sea of green fire and screaming, his own and others’.

…

When he came to, he was being dragged again, by Liao Ying, or at least someone who wore her storage ring. He reached for his own and realised it was gone, even as that memory of it being forcibly broken from him using the sects unbinding art resurfaced again. That moment of clarity also made him realise he was almost naked… and badly burnt.

He was also leaving a trail of blood…

It took him a moment to realise it wasn’t simply because he was injured, but because he was literally bleeding blood from his pores as qi imbued with his own soul intent – which he had no way to control because of whatever was snaring everything up in his body – was continually bleeding out of his body now and had begun to corrode his 12 outer meridians.

His Nascent Soul was also starting to break down he realised with horror, helplessly expelling white puffs of qi mist even as the now-teenage version of himself tried desperately to block off the phantasmal equivalent of meridian gates in his soul even as the seal thwarted him at every turn.

When he resurfaced, it was to hear Liao Ying pleading with someone, “Senior Song! Can’t you do anything? He… that Hao Tai did something to his soul…”

“Faugh!” someone else, next to him, who he couldn’t see – a man, apparently – spat in disgust. “He is actually undergoing forced deviation?”

“How? He was fine before?”

“You think they will let treasure fall into the hands of others?” the man snapped.

“They… they?” Liao Ying was nearly weeping, even as he struggled to keep a grasp on what remained of his qi. Suddenly, he felt a pressure encompass him, a surging, invisible force flowing through his body.

“Somehow I sympathise with that Cang,” a woman’s voice, cool and melodious above him murmured. “Even if I have my disagreements with that Shu Pavilion, it is truly the shame of a lifetime to be in the same generation as such trash.”

“They are coming again!” someone else, a young woman maybe, yelled, even as the darkness constricted him further, dragging him down. “Do they just not break?”

“The others stood there, screaming and dancing and jeering the fates-accursed Retribution Hall,” another woman muttered. “Do you think we can scare them half as much as that scared us?”

“…Retribution hall?” he croaked…

“Ignorance is bliss lad. Treasure it well,” another voice from nearby muttered.

“Senior Zi…” Liao Ying reproached him politely.

“That Hao Tai is part of the reason we are in this mess…” another voice muttered. “Had we known we were being dragged 500 miles to be mired in whatever inauspicious fate this mess is, we would have told them to shove it back there by the forest.”

“Never mind whatever accursed thing that terrifying beast was, an actual dragon? How did they piss off a dragon…?” another voice drifted in.

“Or these enraged, murderous demons. Screw them, they-”

“They call themselves Ur’Vash…” he winced.

“Ur’Vash, then…” the voice nodded, accepting the identification. “Anyway you Nine Auspicious Moons also-”

“ENOUGH!” the melodious woman’s voice snapped. “They are trying to trap us in a slaughtering formation. Get a grip.”

“…”

“In any case, you should be thankful,” another woman snickered, “you did get to see an exquisite example worthy of jade scrolls of the heavens trying their very best to kill something and fail spectacularly, replete with several spectacular visual metaphors.”

“Yeah, you should be like Senior Cang and actually gain some comprehensions!” someone else snarked.

“Enough already-!” the woman who was probably ‘Senior Song’ hissed.

“Okay, fear is it? Keep them stable, Quan, or you will join them – this daughter is going to show them fear-”

The rest of her response was cut off for him by a vast surge of green fire that swept over them all. It was dispersed, but the accompanying shockwave made his head swim. Having a body with no qi in it really sucked, he thought as proper unconsciousness claimed him.

…

He recovered consciousness and found himself lying on grass now. This time there was no screaming. It was early morning, there was no thunder, and it was still disgustingly hot.

There was no sign of the battlefield, he saw. He checked his soul condition and winced. His soul was basically out of qi. Someone had tried their best to block the seal and its damage, but it was… rough, a stop gap attempt at best, he could intuitively tell. That was concerning in another way, because he couldn’t see the inner workings of said countermeasure at all, suggesting it involved a fairly profound principle, and that the thing making the seal was… maybe related to an even more profound principle?

He tried to move and found that was basically impossible, such was his condition. What he could see told him that he was sheltering in the shade of a tree beside a rock in a camp. All around him, weary groups of cultivators were sitting around little fires or actually sleeping. There were a few battered tents erected here and there.

Turning his head, he found Liao Ying sitting about three metres away, poking a fire that held some edible spirit roots and a pot of something that was bubbling away.

“Sister Liao…” he managed to say. His throat was raspy, badly injured, and he also noted he could barely hear on one side...

-Damage from the shockwave?

“Oh, thank the fates…” she looked up and exclaimed. “You’re actually awake at last. I was worried you were going to regress like the others.”

“The others…?” he really didn’t want to ask, but felt compelled to

“They rescued about a third of the prisoners, you and me, Jin Chen, Han Shu and a few others the Court was… holding,” she explained, looking… tired.

“Others? Prisoners?” he tried to form a whole sentence but even that was exhausting somehow.

“They captured about 30 people from the ‘Bureau’ and blamed all our current misfortunes on them,” Liao Ying sighed.

“…”

He wasn’t sure what to make of that.

“Jin Chen is stable, but a lot worse than you – he had his core half smashed and they scoured his soul I think. As for Han Shu, they… well… he is source sealed somehow and the Jade Gate Court Fate Locked him. Denounced him as an enemy of the world and a villain that the Imperial Court would judge personally…”

“Wha…?” he tried to process that, but the words just went in one ear and out the other, making no sense.

-Han Shu is an enemy of the world?

“They wanted the root of the treasures we found. They got the manuals out of your ring, I think, but didn’t get anything from mine… I… was lucky I guess,” she trailed off, looking a bit distant and shuddering, before collecting herself.

“What… about-?”

She shook her head and quietly signed, “Don’t talk about them, not captured.”

He nodded slowly and leaned back exhaling.

“I see…” He felt empty, he realised.

“I guess this lot didn’t leave us because they also think we are connected to Han Shu’s sword?”

“…”

She sighed and shook her head, bringing him over a bowl of water. “I… don’t know. Some of them certainly think we have treasure. Others think they took us just to annoy the Jade Gate Court. Senior Sister Song doesn’t seem to like the Jade Gate Court very much…”

Kneeling down, she put it to his lips and helped him drink the lukewarm water. “Her instructions and those of Senior Quan were quite clear – you shouldn’t eat anything apparently, only drink a bit to keep your strength up.”

“Why?” he managed to ask after gulping it down.

“Senior Song and then Senior Quan tried to heal your wounds, but they couldn’t. Apparently you need to lose all your qi, then the seal will crumble so long as you don’t die. It’s a really evil thing that Hao Tai did to you…”

Pausing, she spat on the ground before making an inauspicious sign. “May his nine generations be afflicted by sin fire.”

“…”

“Basically, if you take in more qi, it will just exacerbate your problem. Your physical body has no qi, and can’t hold any more because…”

“They sealed my eight gates and bypassed my dantian, making… my meridians flow backwards…” he rasped, being clear on what that problem was at least, even if the specifics of it were vague.

“Yes,” she nodded, grimly. “And the means they used to do it are such that neither of them felt confident in undoing them given your current condition.”

“But… why?” he gasped.

“Basically? Hao Jun died, his senior brother died, Hao Tai had some conflict with Hao Feng… took Han Shu’s sword as well. They decided you were sinners who rebelled against the sect, working with Han Shu to plant Hao Jun and Hao Feng. That worthless bastard Sheng Zhao also survived…”

-Because of course, he sighed inwardly, not even having anger to spare for that trash at this point.

“Our sect has a rotten core in this generation, it seems,” he sighed. “So how did you escape what we did?”

“I…” she looked conflicted again.

“Sorry,” she sighed softly. “I am a blood relation of the Tiger of Liao.”

“…”

He stared at her, frowning, wondering what she was apologizing for – was it because of what happened to them? Or because she hid her status?

“The Tiger is my great great uncle. I was sent to the Argent Hall on a disciple exchange with the Hao clan and was only in the Argent Justice Sect until I arrived at Nascent Soul.”

He stared at her dully, trying to process that.

-Oh…

-So… she got spared because her family is too dangerous to annoy… Should I be pleased for her?

-Or annoyed…?

He quashed that disingenuous thought swiftly.

“Hao Tai tried to strike a deal with me…” she said in a small voice… “But he broke it, it seems.”

“I see...” he croaked, not quite sure what to make of that and now wondering what kind of deal he had actually struck.

“So… the cure is as bad as the disease pretty much…” he gasped, to change the slightly awkward topic as much as anything.

“Yes,” she sighed, sitting back and looking a bit lost.

Looking at his condition, he wondered if being angered to death was a part of how it worked.

“So… if I take in… more qi… either actively or passively, it goes straight to my Nascent Soul. There it will feed the forced deviation, flowing backwards out again, because of” – he gasped momentarily – “the partial seal, and eventually my meridians will rupture and I will become a cripple never able to cultivate again. Assuming the shock doesn’t kill me?”

“…”

She stared at him and just nodded blankly.

“Senior Quan said you had maybe days if you remained unconscious. Weeks if you awoke and forcibly stopped yourself absorbing qi.”

He nodded, understanding that rather grim point. “So unless I can expel all the qi from my body at a fundamental level and do so for my Nascent Soul as well, at best all I can do is prolong the inevitable because at my realm I cannot control the qi in my Nascent Soul just with Intent…”

She nodded and helped him drink more lukewarm water. “I see you understand it clearly then.”

“Sister Liao!” a younger woman walked over, wearing patched robes of the Verdant Flowers Valley that had been torn off at the knee to allow her to retain her modesty in mending the damage to the upper portion.

“Yes, Dao Sister Jing? Oh… it’s our turn for perimeter watch, isn’t it?” she nodded wearily.

“Yes, sorry…” the other younger looking woman said with a sigh.

“Don’t apologise, everyone has to do their bit,” Liao Ying said standing.

“Ruo Han,” he offered a weak greeting to her. “I’d salute, but…”

“It’s fine,” Sister Jing nodded. “I am glad you are recovering a bit, Daoist Ruo,” she said politely, if neutrally. “I… do not know about the allegations put against you, but from what Liao Ying tells us, you all experienced quite some trials…”

He couldn’t see her cultivation, but she did bow slightly, suggesting she was not an Immortal. Her reply was also polite, and a bit wary – which was to be expected, he sighed. He didn’t doubt that if treasures were involved, those who had held them would have done everything to subtly influence others against them.

Cloaking malpractice with a virtuous visage was almost a Dao path in its own right. People like Sheng Zhao would hold grudges the way others held spirit stones.

Curiously, he found the oaths he had sworn to the sect were a bit… hollow, on reflection. He had never considered them particularly since joining, but sat here in the sun, he found that they no longer held particular sway.

-Odd, because with how they treated us, unbinding us from those oaths is certainly not a thing they would do…

-I’ll have to ask Liao about that when she comes back, he decided.

-Or is it because this is a different world somehow? Juni didn’t think Heavenly Oaths were worth much…

~ Ha Yun – Edge of the Great Savannah ~

Ha Yun found himself standing on a stone wall overlooking the circle of stones within the small set of ruins on the rest of the hill the grass scorpion carried them all along on. It gave a good vantage point to watch the sun rise through the haze of the distant horizon. It was also far enough away from the camp that he didn’t have to think too much about the other cultivators or hear their discussions about ‘the tribulation’.

If he closed his eyes, he fancied he could still visualise the vast, storm-like tribulation of the previous day, never mind the meteor… or the insanity that came after, the shadows fighting in the sky, the lightning dragons and the shadows of the vast, infamous Retribution Hall.

The grass scorpion’s back was bigger than it first appeared as it turned out. He had placed it at about 100 metres long before, not counting the tail which was rarely raised, but his view had been skewed, he had to admit. He had since walked from one end to the other and found it close to 400 metres by maybe 100 wide. It effectively carried a hill on its back, and the tail was maybe as long again. The claws themselves were the size of small houses, its legs each as wide as a pagoda.

There was something oddly haunting about the place – the stones of the buildings themselves were odd, repelling qi in ways that put him in mind of those rare pots that came out of ruins in Yin Eclipse, not to mention the antiquity of the stones. The large stone he had seen before was just one of three and each had a different painted figure.

The one he had first seen was the woman with dark hair, a form outlined in white, with constellations across her whole body. In the light of the rising sun he took in the other details again – the symbol of the circle on her forehead, the six arms holding the moons, rope in a river of stars the white circle, the lotus and the crude lamp, before moving onto the next one who was also visible from this angle.

This figure again she had six arms, but was very different in all other matters: her body was painted white, but had a swirling black stole around it that almost seemed like wings. In her hands she held a black sword, a barbed lash, a white-silver spear, a gold sceptre or ruler, a red axe and a lantern with a pitch black fire. On her brow was daubed a symbol in red that gave him a faint sense of inexorable retribution.

Hopping down, he walked around to finally view the third one, who at this angle just so happened to be cleanly illuminated by the rising sun.

The third figure was… he hadn’t asked Ganlan about her, because he wasn’t sure, but she was painted in golden ochre, her form outlined in black, with hair of gold and piercing blue eyes, her whole form outlined in yellow flowers amid dark water. In two of her hands she held aloft a burning gold flame that he was sure, just like her hair, was ‘actual’ gold adhered to the rock, in the form of a many-petaled flower akin to a peony. In her other hands she held a jar that spilled out dark water, a white sword, a white wheel of eight silver stars and a blue lotus.

“Still thinking about that?” Ganlan Meixiu’s voice made him almost jump in shock as he realised she was seated on a stone, staring pensively at that very image.

“It is hard not to, Senior Meixiu,” he grimaced, bowing to her.

“Please, I appreciate the formality but it makes me feel old,” she said waving her hand to stop him. “Do you want breakfast?”

The change in topic made him blink, but he realised she did have breakfast – a stone-baked flatbread and some kind of porridge made of mashed spirit herb seeds along with a jar of what he guessed was tea and a few slabs of fried meat.

Accepting a piece of meat, he sat down respectfully and started to eat only after she had.

“Such sights you will get used to as you advance on the path,” Meixiu sighed, looking at the rising sun beyond the painted figures.

“Right…” he mumbled into his piece of meat.

“Meifen, please bring some more porridge,” Meixu said absently, making him realise that Meifen was also there.

“Ah… there is no need,” he grimaced, feeling odd about seeing her wait on others.

Meixiu stared at him, then nodded and Meifen, who was garbed in a grass cloak bowed respectfully, hiding her grimace well.

“I guess your world only shows such scenes for pivotal tribulations,” Meixiu mused, cutting back to the original conversation point.

“Pivotal?” he frowned.

“Immortal, Dao Seed, Law Pillar and so on,” she said sipping her own soup.

“Ah… Yeah, probably,” he nodded.

“Yes,” Meifen added, “although black lightning is usually only from Immortal Tribulations. To see white… let alone black-gold for a lower step tribulation… or the hall…”

Meixiu nodded as if this was what she had expected.

“Senior Ganlan…” Meifen spoke up again, “can I ask what kind of thing actually broke through? Does this place really have… dragons?”

She glanced at them both silently and for some reason he felt weirdly judged, before she just shook her head and gave an amused sigh.

“Dragons, yes, they exist – but that was not one in all likelihood.”

That had been one of the topics of discussion among the others – Brother Feng and one of the ‘scholars’ had been certain that the black-gold lightning was in the form of golden clawed imperial dragons, which only manifested if dragons were involved, either through blood or some other means apparently.

She didn’t seem inclined to continue talking about ‘dragons’ and went back to contemplating the painting, which he could understand in a way.

Even back home they were rare. The only ones he knew of were on the Northern Continent, associated with the terrifying Moon Tomb Cult. That was an influence almost as infamous as the Seven Sovereigns School. A vestige of a previous heavens, before the Dun Imperial Dynasty forced out the tyrannical Azure Astral Authority.

“The others wanted to go investigate,” he asked after a long moment.

“Hah, they have cooled on that now. Enthusiasm has its bounds, and the ephemera at the end is not a thing that should be messed with,” Meixiu chuckled.

“The ephemera…” Meifen mumbled, also staring at the design.

He shivered as well, suddenly feeling a little cold, looking at it – recalling that wave of golden flowers that had reached even them, sweeping over the whole plains perhaps in the blink of an eye… and the horrifying, enthralling depths that were hidden behind their promise of prosperity and good fortune.

The flowers were clearly that, so did that mean the jar and the water was related to that darkness?

“Those flowers… do they relate to this painting?” he finally asked.

“…”

She stared at him pensively, then chuckled. “In a way… yes, I suppose they do.”

“What were they?”

“Hmmm,” she looked back at the painted mural.

“Do you know?” she said suddenly, looking to Meifen.

“I… um… are they crossing ephemera?” the other woman asked, looking a bit nervous suddenly.

“So you do know some things,” Meixiu said with a faint smirk, making Meifen blush before looking back at him. “When a powerful practitioner exceeds the world at specific points, they usually leave something of themselves behind at each step and that influences the nature of all tribulations that come thereafter.

“Tribulations have four major stages… usually: ‘Mirror of Fate’, ‘Eye of Judgement’, ‘Test of Will’ and ‘Judgement of Worth’… a fifth also sometimes appears, but only for supreme step tribulations. You also have minor bolts, in various colours from single shades all the way up to eight coloured for small realms or if your foundation was simply insufficient to stir enough of a reaction from the alignments of the world during a supreme step tribulation.”

“Oh…” he nodded, recalling that his father had explained something like that, though he had not given names and barely talked about anything other than the Duel of the Fates.

“The names are different,” Meifen asked.

“Names change,” Meixiu shrugged, “but that is not the point I am making. The nature of those steps is predicated on those who have come before. The nature of tribulation is a celestial plain of bones – All those who have undergone it from the great to the small leave a piece of them within it for future generations. The greater the achievement, the more profound the leaving.”

She turned to look back at the symbols on the stone before continuing - “At the Immortal realm that is just a trace of principle or something. At the Dao step, it can be anything from a shadow of their Dao, to the entirety of it if they fell and were claimed by the world… but above that the nature of remains changes. At the Ascendant Step, an echo of their truth will linger, while those who cross over the Sovereign Step usually bequeath some aspect of their ‘Reason To Be’ upon the world that raised them up – a baptism for all future generations, or if less generous a curse to weight them down.

He stared at her, processing that, even as Meifen seemed to be counting something off on her fingers…?

“There are six hands…?” she mumbled.

He was about to ask what she meant by that, when Meixiu cut her off with a wry chuckle. “Being inquisitive is good, but don’t cut yourself.”

“I…” Meifen frowned, but bowed slightly in apology.

“It’s fine. I mean that seriously, though. It is not good to pry, especially not regarding the supreme steps in a world like this; the mechanisms are not like you can conceive of and the traps are quite different,” Meixiu said, suddenly sounding much less amused. “I will not be called a sinner because something I said led you to such a fate.”

He blinked, and Meixiu also looked a trifle taken aback, before bowing again, more genuinely.

Meixiu shook her head again and turned back to the distant rising sun. “This is Arianrhod, the Bright Fortune Heavenly Empress – those flowers you saw represent her promise to all who came after her, her own kith and kin and any others as well: prosperity, good fortune, balance, retribution, ruination. She left behind her the means to choose freely whatever path might be taken, but the cost is that that those choices have consequences and cannot be unmade – they will haunt you, until you either exceed her or are crushed by your own decisions.”

“Is that a blessing or a curse?” he mumbled, a bit shocked at what she had just said.

“…”

“Yes,” she smirked.

“What about the other two?” he added, curious about them as well.

“We have found it,” Mayumi called over, interrupting before Meixiu could reply.

“Ah, it seems that other choices are here to be made,” Meixiu said with a wry grin, hopping off her rock. “If we have time, I’ll talk about the other two later. You can finish that off, between you,” she added, pointing to the food before leaving without a backward glance.

They both bowed, watching her depart. He was still unsure how formal he should be with her. Meixiu was disarmingly honest and didn’t seem to care too much, but the sight of her ripping an Ancient Immortal limb from limb would haunt him for a long time, he suspected. As would the scene of her and Mayumi interrogating said disciple from the Din clan the day before the tribulation struck.

He shuddered, just from being reminded of it. He had half expected that the demon, Mayumi, could take people back out of her pot, but the fate of the cultivator who had led that ill-fated attempt to grasp him back was thoroughly miserable. The old Grass Scorpion had done something and when the screaming was finally silenced, they had scoured all his memories and put them in a spirit crystal.

All that cultivator’s laws, techniques, secrets, misdeeds, everything had been hauled out by Mayumi using a strange flame that she burned his soul with.

“Do you know what they are planning?” Meifen asked after Meixiu to seek out Mayumi had departed.

“Are you seriously going to ask me that? After seeing what they are capable of?” he grumbled. “Not to mention after that talk about ‘choice’ just now?”

“…”

She sighed and nodded resignedly, thankfully seeing his point.

The other cultivators were basically camp servants. They were not mistreated, but the Grass Scorpions were clear that if they wanted to remain here, they had to be useful. Two of the groups had elected to leave at that point, and the scorpions had given them food and water, clothes even, and told them to get walking in whatever direction the liked, rather unceremoniously – they had not given back their storage rings.

That had basically killed that idea stone dead – several had complained about that, but all that had happened was that they were rebound and shoved in a ruined building where most of them still sat. That had revealed that the entire warband was strong. Meixiu had been quite open that most were equivalent to the realm he knew of as ‘Ancient Immortal’, and when that was openly revealed to the others, Meifen and a few others had had a hasty conference and agreed to just put up with things.

After all, aside from being bound up, nobody had been otherwise mistreated – of their ‘groups’, at least.

Bai Meifen and Brother Fang had both watched that interrogation as well and concluded, he guessed, that resistance was kind of pointless and that it was better to be in their ‘saviours’’ good graces.

“How did you get into their good graces anyway?” she asked eventually as they walked around the circle, eating the remains of the food Meixiu had left.

“I… They hauled us out, much like you, and whatever they did when they healed me… I guess they just felt sorry or something,” he sighed.

He had wondered that as well in truth – Meixiu had been vague on it, but he was pretty certain it somehow related to his memories of whatever Din Ouyeng and Di Ji had been involved in. It might have been his imagination, but he almost fancied it was because of Di Ji or something related to him, although he had not mustered the courage to ask her – it was unlikely she was a ‘victim’ given she didn’t seem to come from Eastern Azure.

They sat there watching the sun rise for a few more minutes before Meifen sighed and got up to go help with the campfires. Left with nothing else to do really, he went along with her, leaving the mysterious, slightly timeless circles of stones behind, and helped serve out food to others and then began to prepare one of the dead animals that had been brought in at some point.

Individuals or small groups of the Grass Scorpions came and went almost at random, uncaring for whether it was day or night as far as he could see, so he had no idea how many they were. There were at least forty, but maybe as many as 50 or 60. The idea of a force of 60 odd Ancient Immortals wandering around was quite terrifying in its own right, and certainly the ‘Old Grass Scorpion’ was a much higher realm than an Ancient Immortal. They also all rode smaller scorpions when out and about and those were unlikely to be any weaker than their riders, he guessed.

-A force of over 100 Ancient Immortals, just wandering around doing what they please.

He shivered, thinking of how blasé their ‘groups’ had been. He was pretty sure the Grass Scorpions could go through their entire ‘group’ of 400 odd cultivators like a hot knife through butter.

“Okay folks!” Mayumi’s voice suddenly yelled. “We have a lock, get everyone on board.”

There was some general hubbub as he made his way over to the middle of the camp.

“What is going on?” he asked Meixiu politely from where she had gotten another bowl of soup.

“The old scorpion has found one of the secondary teleportation points,” Meixiu said with a grin.

“Secondary teleportation points?” Meifen pausing behind him as the other cultivators also glanced around now.

“Ah, yes,” Meixiu said looking sideways at her. “Your world is sending a second wave of invaders here – it will land about three hundred miles to the north-west of us, it seems… so we are going to go introduce ourselves.”