“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.

“I don’t much care where—” said Alice.

“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.

“—so long as I get somewhere,” Alice added as an explanation.

“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”

-Excerpt from ‘Alice in Wonderland’

By Lewis Carroll

Part 1 – In which our intrepid heroines make a terrible discovery, and are asked for a favour.

“This is a disaster, Hong,” Little Fen grumbled, crossing her hands and staring at the empty cupboard.

“What is?” she asked, glancing up from the leaves she was washing in the sink at Fen who was poking through the cupboards.

“The infestation has eaten all the ingredients for soup!” Fen cursed, shaking her head and slamming a cupboard shut.

“They have?” she frowned, dropping the greens back in the cold water, and went over to the shelves on that side of the kitchen.

“Yep! No spices, no liquor either, no salt…” Fen muttered, continuing to work her way around the cupboards, closing them with disgusted *clacks*.

“No spices?” she asked, opening that cupboard up and sighing.

There were indeed no spices either, and in the corner was…

“Ewww!” She avoided making eye contact with what was in the corner of the cupboard and looked for a cloth to wipe it up.

“Even here! All gone… only the Star Salts are left,” Fen snarled, then cursed as she hit her head on the underside of a cupboard top.

Fen frowned, then threw her arms up in disgust. “Even the flour is off… as is…”

“It is?” she looked at that cupboard, and found that it was indeed [Censored].

“Were we out that long? Could it be the Ghoblan?” she added, wondering if they had managed to creep in again and left some stuff behind to make a point after they chased them out the last time.

“The walled vegetable garden is still here, so that’s a point against…” Fen replied, sounding muffled as she crawled inside another one of the cupboards and pulled off the back this time.

“Ah! It’s the wards… so that’s how they got in,” she said, pulling the bottom up off the one she was in front of and staring at the charred, melted mess that had once been a set of preservation runes.

“Yep, looks like it is the wards!” Fen sighed, sitting back on her heels.

“I guess it is related to that lightning strike?” she said, dropping the spirit herbs back into the sink again and staring out the window at the courtyard beyond.

Fen just sighed and kicked something, before scrambling out and shaking her head and holding up a handful of something vile. “Even the dried noodles got zapped – although… I guess that explains it.”

“Ewww, throw it away!” she shuddered, automatically blurring whatever it was, some kind of long deceased bit of pond life, in her vision so she wouldn’t have to engage with how many tentacles it had.

“The lightning bolt brought in pond life,” Fen grumbled, still shaking her head in disgust.

“Maybe? Could it also be because of the other weeds creeping in? I swear I saw ephemeral vermin around the potted plants earlier. Do we even grow hibiscus?”

“We do, but not here,” Fen muttered. “Where did you see it?”

“By the pots when we came in…” she frowned and walked over to peer outside. The pots by the door, which held ‘Singing Lavender’, were humming gently in the breeze – no sign of any hibiscus as expected.

-Maybe I did just imagine that, the idea that there should be ephemeral weeds in here is a bit, she mused.

“This is the worst,” Fen added, looking around again and opening another cupboard, before sighing and closing it with a bang. “She is going to ask for Altharian food again, I just know it, and there is only that one dish that has noodles in it.”

“You know, this vendetta of yours…” she muttered, opening the cupboard under the sink and quietly closing it again.

“Spicy Noodle soup! This is love; it is life,” Fen said a bit too piously, ignoring her words.

“Yo! Wassup?” an ominously familiar voice said, making them both turn to see a familiar face leaning in the doorway.

“Oh… it’s just you,” she sighed, looking at the woman with her dark red-purple hair and dark gown. “What do you want? We are in the middle of a crisis.”

“What I always want,” she grinned, “to help.”

“…”

They both turned to look at her rather dubiously. ‘Her’ help, only came in two types, as far as she had ever seen – the kind that made you want to cry tears of rage or the kind that made you want to make others cry tears of frustration because you had run out.

It crossed her mind briefly, that the perpetrator might well be the person in front of her, but the apple trees in the orchard were still okay, as far as she had seen on the way in… and in any case, the person being accused of the crime – how was she out here anyway?

“Huh, you’re out of noodles,” the woman frowned, peering around the kitchen curiously. “Still sustaining that grudge huh?”

“You can’t lecture us on grudges,” she pouted, not falling into the trap of naming the guest before she named herself.

“No… I cannot, this is true,” their guest chuckled. “Won’t stop me though.”

Songshu – who was one of the few who could safely pull off that trick – appeared, thankfully, at the interior door of the kitchen.

“Ah! Di-”

“I’m Divide at the moment,” the woman said drily, cutting off Brother Song.

“Divide…” she repeated, trying and probably failing to hide the judgement in her voice.

“Right…” Fen said equally blankly.

“How can we help you?” Songshu said, apparently taking her desire to be called ‘Divide’ in his stride. “And can I say, I am… glad you are able to travel about again.”

Songshu barely paused at that, which made her applaud inwardly. She could not have done such a feat of restraint.

“There is a bit of a mess going on outside, so I want to borrow these two,” Divide said with a playful grin.

“Ah, yes, I saw the weather is a bit inclement,” their senior brother sighed.

“Yes, the issue is we have sprung a leak, so to speak,” Divide sighed, coming into the kitchen and purloining a fruit from the table.

“Oh?” she blinked, because that was probably not good, and more to the point…

“How come you are here?” she asked at last. “Weren’t you stuck in that hate crime to classical architecture?”

“Big sis hit a lucky break and got herself extricated from the shattered hulk of Undrehallen,” Divide shrugged. “As such, yours truly is no longer forced to watch rocks moulder.”

“Ah, that explains quite a bit,” Songshu nodded.

She resisted looking outside. It did, if ‘Divide’ was able to roam freely again…

Divide shoot her a ‘look’, which she returned, sticking her tongue out, before Songshu cut back in. “So what do you need our help with?”

“It strikes me we can help each other,” Divide said with the kind of smile that would have made the ‘heroes’ of old sweat and proclaim that suddenly they needed to help their old ma’s darn tunics or something. “We – that is, myself and little sis – need to go into the depths to haul the other three out – our house has a vermin problem and a leaky roof.”

“It is a mausoleum to causal reality,” she pointed out. “It’s kind of meant to be creepy, dank and maudlin?”

“Only because those three luddites are of a state of mind. It’s not like anyone is even dead, except maybe my aspirations and memories of what a blue sky looks like after several aeonspans spent sitting in it,” Divide scowled.

“So what do you need us to do?” Fen asked, still poking through cupboards.

“Well, we need to have a conference, so that’s going to lessen the suppression at a rather awkward juncture.”

“Ah,” Songshu nodded, as did she.

“We are not minding those things down below,” she stated flatly.

“…”

“You wound me, wound me!” Divide said a bit theatrically.

“…”

All three of them stared at her, until she had the grace to look slightly awkward and the dark corona around her purples flared white.

“You need to go get supplies I guess?” Divide mused, looking around.

She nodded. They probably would, given that the infestation of pond life appeared to have gone through most of the cupboards. Hopefully it would not have seeped further. All they had at the moment was what they had scavenged on the way back from looking into the stupidity with the thieving monkeys that got out of their cage.

That would need dealt with as well, and sooner rather than later, what with all the outsiders running around in the outer estates, causing chaos.

“So, what do you need us to do?” Fen said, standing up, dusting herself off and kicking the last empty cupboard shut with some venom before dropping two more [censored] things into a handy bucket.

Songshu and Divide both glanced at them with a frown.

“Stuff crawled in with the lightning bolt before,” she sighed. “Got straight into the pantry, as they are wont to do.”

“Basically, the two of you go outside, get what you need, make a mess and make sure that some attention is critically diverted away from here for a while,” Divide explained with a nasty grin. “I trust the two of you are up to that?”

She opened and shut a cupboard, just in case the stuff in it might materialize again of its own accord – it did, sometimes, but there was no joy to be had it seemed so she could only sigh. There was certainly a catch in there; there always was when it came to ‘Divide’, but she did have a point in a way. The dancing spiders had been active recently and the stupid lizards had stirred briefly. The last thing that they needed to do was make the real vestiges outside the orrery shards more visible.

“So… go outside, divert some attention?” she checked matters off on her fingers, “get stuff for soup…”

“I would say don’t kill anyone, but we are in the Martial Axial region,” Divide sighed, a bit leadingly she thought.

“…”

Songshu shot her a sideways look that wasn’t quite a scowl. “Make sure that you fix anything you break, and I expect you both back here by dinner.”

“…”

“Fine…” Fen sighed.

“Any special requests?” she asked, glancing at Songshu.

“We just can’t seem to grow peaches… It’s never the season,” her senior brother sighed.

“Peaches…” Fen said, blankly again.

“Fine, we will see what we can do,” she nodded, adding it to the list in her head. “Anything else?”

“…”

“Nah, just make sure you divert attention away from the damn mountain, not to it.”

“Kay,” she nodded, adding that to the list as well.

Part 2 – Wherein our heroines begin their journey, formulate a cunning plan and meet an old acquaintance.

As they walked down the path into the valley Fen found herself using the sign by the gate to hit nuts at the birds in the trees before the sun rose. Their singing, always so damned cheerful, always so prideful as well, was annoying at the best of times, but now she was particularly put out by it.

“Why do I get the feeling…?”

“FUCK YOU, YOU SUCK, STOP HITTING US WITH OAK APPLES!”

“Are we are being set up here?” she asked, punctuating her question by hitting a pop-jay in the head with an oak apple.

“Because nothing she ever does is without an angle?” Hong said, not bothering to look up from her ‘list’ which she was still considering.

“That said, we are getting a sanctioned trip outside the borders of the estate, so don’t…”

“I know…”

“OUCH! STOP IT!”

She hit another bird in the ass with a beech nut, watching it fly off into the gloom, screaming obscenities at her, with a degree of satisfaction.

“Look! Just-” she hit that one in the head with a rotten fruit, watching it pin-wheel away in a flurry of feathers.

“I know… don’t mess it up,” she sighed. “I’m still in a bad mood over Alexios I guess.”

“Fair,” Hong nodded. “Although taking it out on the birds for singing out of tune is a bit much…”

“Meh!” she shrugged, casting about for another few fallen fruits and finding nothing worth the effort sadly.

“So, how are we going to get out? Usually we get sent straight into the depths.”

“I was wondering that,” Hong mused, still staring at her list before pausing by a tree to scribble something else on it but not elucidating herself further.

“…”

They walked on and she continued to penalize the feathered vermin, although they had all started to retreat out of visual range, so she was forced to resort to trick shots, bouncing things off trees and rocks to keep on hitting them.

Many had called the forests here pretty, but when you spent as long as they had in this place, it all got a bit samey, she had to say, especially in the darkness, when it was cloudy overhead. Her ill mood was certainly related to Alexios – they had never been that close, but in the aftermath of this place, he had been a friend and someone to talk to about old times on occasion, even if he was a grumpy sod, prone to fits of futile anger. That he had been killed by the use of some star-fried chicken’s core, by an illiterate monkey no less, was a bit insulting though.

“If we are going outside, we should look into that,” she said absently, bouncing a seed pod of a scavenged explosive vetch off a distant oak branch and into a hollow where one of the birds was distantly cursing them.

“Look into?” Hong glanced up at the sound of the distant flash of light in the darkness and accompanying cursing that was carried on the shockwave of the explosion.

“That malingering monkey’s troupe,” she shrugged. “They are never solitary, always in pairs at least. If we hadn’t had to clean up the mess down there, all my cupboards might not have been slimed by pond life,” she grunted, also annoyed at that.

“Ah, yes that is true,” Hong nodded in agreement, looking up at the dark, cloudy vault of heaven above, just visible between the swaying branches of trees. “I suppose we can. Would that go under salt? Or spice?”

“…”

She pondered that, before shrugging. “We can see when we find them?”

“Seems fair, spontaneity is the spice of life after all,” Hong nodded, turning the paper over and starting on the back.

They reached the bottom of the path and arrived at the edge of the fields, currently without crops beyond some spring greens. The pre-dawn mist curled, faintly luminous between walls and across the distant rivers and lakes.

Here as well, the feathered vermin were also making their presence felt, but as soon as they exited the forest and passed by the threefold circle of stones most of them fled with depressing haste. She still hit two on the way past that were a bit slow, smirking as they planted themselves into a tree, making obscene symbols at her with their soul manifestations.

“The crops are at least okay,” Hong noted, looking around at their fields, which were recovered from the worst of the devastation.

“The variants are hardy enough,” she noted, peering over a wall at the rows of sorrel.

Even with the time that passed and their talents, the land here was not good for growing easily edible things. Plants tended to get smart and weeding them was a pain. The last two times she had grown wheat, the plants had all run off before gaining maturity, and the rice… the less said the better about that.

As such, they were left with those plants that didn’t domesticate easily and just grew wild in this climate naturally.

“’Tis more the season for valerian though,” she added, plucking one of the purple-pink flower heads in passing from by the wall and shoving it in her hair.

“We should at least make an effort to blend in,” Hong added, considering her own attire. “Or we will get another lecture about ‘plausible deniability’.”

“…”

She considered their last such lecture and sighed, nodding.

“What form did we take before?”

“It was pretty close to these ones, so I guess the garb is all that needs changing,” Hong mused, looking at her ankle length tunic of pale linen that was draped attractively across her body.

Within a hop and a skip, then a playful pirouette, her garb swirled into a bare-sleeved woven dress covered in scenes of wild animals running playfully through lakes and forests, in colours of green, white and gold. She followed suit, matching the designs with added floral patterns, using the stole that came with it to put straps on the sign so she could sling it over her shoulder.

“Are you really going take that along?” Hong asked her dubiously, eyeing it.

“What, it’s a serviceable weapon; it’s dangerous out there for young ladies to wander unattended!” she protested.

“…”

Hong just stared at her, her dark eyes swirling for a moment as if trying to work out how serious she was being. She wasn’t but it was a whimsical enough tool to use and having brought it this far, even if it was on a whim, she wasn’t going to admit that it was a bit weird and discard it.

“Well, I guess it is what it is,” Hong sighed, pulling out the list again and considering it as they arrived at the river.

“How is the list?” she said, peering at it.

“Done… I think,” Hong said passing it to her.

She skimmed it –

‘Recipe for Spicy Soup’

Get spices.

Get salt – lots of salt – group associated with killing Alexios?

Get spirit grape liqueur – might be problem?

No noodles. Will need flour, water, eggs, more salt? – same source as before???

Plausible Deniability???

Don’t make a mess!

If you break it, fix it.

Extra spicy?

…

?Profit?

“…”

“This is your plan?” she asked dubiously, handing it back.

“It has seven things on it, which is enough” Hong shrugged, flipping the paper over and starting to scrawl on the back again.

“That is true I suppose,” she conceded, watching as Hong drew the various parts of the chart, pausing only to kick the odd rock out of the way on the old road down the valley.

“In any case Di – ‘Divide’ – said to cause a distraction, so if we make it a bit less specific, there is more latitude,” Hong shrugged. “I can already see one rather cunning way we can solve the spice problem as it is.”

“You can?” she asked, surprised, because given the way things were playing out with the lightning and invaders, she had rather expected ‘salt’ to be their first port of call.

“Oh yeah…” Hong snickered. “It already gave me a resonance, though I shan’t comment in detail because of the priors. Wouldn’t do to spook anything.”

“Priors are the worst,” she agreed, sharing Hong’s annoyance for the prying of ignorant people who really should know better. Such poking and prodding had a remarkable tendency to undo good plans.

“They are, but in this case, it will work in our favour,” Hong giggled plucking a stalk of fennel out of the verge to nibble. “We will be able to get spice and salt in equal measure – greedy monkeys are gullible like that.”

“Uhuh,” she nodded, and kicked up a stone off the road.

In a single smooth motion she batted it with the sign, watching it skim out across the river for a full thirteen hops and hit a heron on the far side with a pleasing *Klonk*. The shocked bird was sent flying in a cloud of feathers and fled honking.

They walked on in silence through the dark, Hong drawing on the back of the list, which was becoming a bit crumpled and she, looking for more feathered lizard vermin to pester.

“Do we need duck?” she asked, spotting a cluster about half a mile away, through the pre-dawn mists who froze in fright at her words, such were their acute senses.

“Only if you want to carry it around,” Hong said absently. “Better we catch things when we go out.”

The group of ducks exhaled and fled in silence, twisting space directly to find a different shard to swim in she assumed.

They walked on for a while in silence towards the ford, letting the sounds of the last hour of night swirl around them, sans annoying bird calls, because news travelled fast she supposed.

“Hold up,” she frowned suddenly, looking at the ford ahead of them.

“Eh?” Hong glanced up and then also paused. “Well, that is a surprise. What is that old coot doing here?”

“You ask me, but who do I ask? You?” she said. “This guy always gives me a headache; how come he is in here?”

“Wasn’t he disturbed? Probably he came here to fish or something boring. Maybe he will just…” Hong muttered.

“Ah, young ladies, it is a pleasant surprise to see you abroad so early in the day!” the old man, dressed in dull black and grey robes and sat on a rock by the ford, said cheerfully as he was fishing away.

“Old scholar,” she nodded.

“Old coot,” Hong muttered.

“It has been a while, young ladies – to think we would meet again on this narrow path,” the old man said. “Perhaps you might have the time of day to chat a while?”

“…”

She looked both ways down the river, before sighing. The next ford was not until they got to the waterfalls, and that would mean a long backtrack tempting but…

“Not an option,” Hong sighed, mouthing behind her hand. “We have a schedule to keep to of sorts.”

“We do?” she muttered, back, glancing at the old scholar again. “Talking to this guy is such a pain!”

“Ho, ho, ho,” the old scholar fishing in the river chuckled good naturedly.

“…”

“You know what happens to creepy old men who accost young ladies at river crossings on dark and moonless nights?” she pouted.

“You young ladies… You have quite the manner today,” he said with a raised eyebrow.

"They wind up with me sat here, washing their guts out of the linen they soiled for being so inconsiderate, while I, fair maiden that i am, cry tears of sorrow over how the stains will never wash out!"

“…”

The old scholar paused at last, and stared at her a bit harder, before recovering.

“Be nice, Fen,” Hong muttered. “He is just here fishing and wants to chat.”

“You do just want to chat don’t you?” she said a bit more brightly to the old scholar.

“…”

“Perhaps a game of chess?” he ventured at last.

“Fine,” Hong sighed. “But if I win, you give me a boon I can use as I like?”

“And if I win?” the old man grinned.

“We will pretend like we never saw you fishing here,” Hong said with an even more radiant smile.

“Seems amenable,” the old man said, putting his rod on its stick and patting the rock, which turned into a flat chequerboard with pieces.

She sighed and followed over to watch Hong crouch down beside it, considering the pieces.

The old man waved his hand for Hong to go first – she did, moving the middle pawn. Frowning, the scholar moved his piece to match. With a smirk, Hong then moved her king up behind the pawn.

“…”

The old man eyed her dubiously, then sighed. Hong just smirked even more.

Shaking his head, the old scholar also moved his king up, and what proceeded thereafter was, in the annals of ‘chess’, she expected the kind of match that would make ‘experts’ weep tears of blood just to witness. Hong did win in the end, with her queen being basically the last piece on the board bar one.

“I had forgotten that for all that you play the cute little girl, you excel at this,” the old scholar chuckled.

“And I had forgotten that you are this bad at chess,” Hong snickered.

“Aiiii… so cruel, you won’t give anything to an old man in his elder years, will you?” the scholar said with mock sadness.

“Nope!” Hong grinned. “Be thankful I don’t drag your creepy self behind a wall and break your legs with Fen’s sign just for being here…”

He turned to look at her and she found herself standing back on the far bank.

She rolled her eyes took a step forward, only to find herself on the bank again.

“You cheeky bugger! You can let me cross, or else…”

“Or else…?” the old scholar frowned.

She hefted the sign and pointed it at him. “I knew it was a smart idea to bring this on a hunch, seems I am vindicated somewhat.”

Hong just put her hand to her face. She was sure that the old scholar’s sneaky nature…

-Yep, absolutely that.

“Your studies have not really been progressing right?” she called across, putting as much derision into it as she could and pointedly considering the faded writing on it. “Do you recall how these stories go? When the plucky heroines meet the old watcher guarding the gate who asks for unreasonable things?”

“…”

“As I recall, they tend to end badly for the heroines,” the old scholar chuckled.

“It can be arranged for you to be made a ‘woman’ very easily,” she said with a bright smile, wondering if she should not have just washed his guts in the river while he wept tears of regret from the get go.

“Our kind do not have such anatomical weaknesses,” the scholar muttered, looking a bit put out for the first time.

“That can also be arranged,” Hong muttered.

“How about this,” she called over. “We trade one move each, from where we stand, and the one who comes out worst will shed tears of regret?”

The old scholar looked from Hong to her and back again then started to laugh.

“Okay!” the old scholar said, standing up and spreading his arms. “Let me see ‘young lady Fen’s style’! Let it not be said that this old man is ungenerous and would hit a girl first.”

“Bad idea,” Hong muttered next to him.

Rolling her eyes, she pulled out one of the remaining oak apples and, tossing it up in the air, spun on the spot and smashed it with the sign.

“You should have gotten the cheap shot in –”

“Eh--?” he glanced at her, frowning.

The rest of his reply was cut off as he vanished, leaving a black and red edged silhouette of broken space as she hit him between the legs with the oak apple from one of the ‘Oaks of Taranis’ that grew on the slopes below the Pagoda and its estates.

When the distorting space settled, Hong sighed, brushing the last of the twisting black and red lightning away with her hand.

“I never got the blessing,” Hong complained, picking up the fishing rod and releasing the trout that had been caught into the river before considering it and the list contemplatively and picking up it and the basket.

“If that kind of hit was enough to do more than embarrass that old scholar, he would have died long ago,” she pointed out. “In any case, we will likely meet him again in due course. He owes me some tears, and he is nothing if not someone who stands by the words he speaks!”

Part 3 – Our intrepid heroines enjoy a song and dance and gain a lead on a suitable source of salt.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” she asked, looking at Hong who was contemplating the perpetually reorganizing stones on the hill overlooking the lake.

“…”

“You have asked that four times already, in the last 5 minutes,” Hong muttered, still considering their shifting patterns.

“Are you reaaaaally sure this is a good idea?” she reiterated, making it five, just in case so the inauspicious number wouldn’t blight matters.

“Stop being obnoxious in four directions,” Hong retorted. “And yes, I am sure – this is the quickest route to get to where we need to go to get to the outside.”

She considered the shifting stones again and sighed, looking around at the rest of the landscape.

“You know… was there always a lake there?” she pointed at the large, circular lake.

“Eh?” Hong glanced over and frowned. “No… but this place is what it is, who can say which ‘period’ it is currently, and we are close enough to the old school periphery that someone exploding something out here would be not inconceivable I guess.”

“Weird,” she mused, considering it again.

The crater had a faintly familiar aura, but at the same time, she couldn’t place why it was familiar. That said, given the things and focus of events on this edge of the mountains in a historical sense, there were any number of plausible reasons for that. The most likely one, given the shifts of the area, was impossible anyway – the ‘Book of Changes’ would come nowhere near them and in any case, the aura around the crater was subtly different.

“Hmmm, we will need to find the stones here,” Hong sighed, stepping away from the shifting mandalas of the rocks.

“Great…” she scanned the pre-dawn hills, before pausing on the far side of the lake again.

“Curiouser and curiouser,” she mused absently, considering the rather unusual swathe of spirit vegetation growing around the far shore.

“What is… Oh… That is rather odd,” Hong agreed, noticing the clumps of shrubs and small trees growing in the grass and up the sheltered slope of the hill. “Is that high-gold sycamore?”

“It does look like it,” she agreed.

“…”

“Oh well… a thing to look at later,” Hong said, clapping her hands together. “Right! Stones… little stones! Where are you!?”

Her words echoed across the hills cheerfully, getting no reply.

“That never works,” she pointed out. “Like… neeeeevar.”

“There is always a first time,” Hong sighed, looking around again.

…

It took them almost thirty minutes of poking around to find the stones, accursed things that they were, surrounding a thorn tree on the top of a small hill, barely visible in the tangled grass except for the three large uprights.

That was the problem with the gates to the low kingdoms, they had a paranoid streak a mile wide. As such, they had to find the same hill three times, before she felt the faint twisting distortions beneath that told her this was the ‘right’ hill.

“So… what now?” she asked, sitting down on one of the smaller stones, ignoring the sense of unease it tried to project towards her.

“I need… Ah… We have some time, so I guess I’ll finish off the list,” Hong mused, staring at the cloudy sky.

Given Hong still didn’t seem to want to elaborate on that, she nodded and sat down to make herself a reed flute out of some bits she had nabbed after crossing the river. The gates would only transport at sunrise and sunset, unless you wanted to really poke and prod them. There was a means to make them move at the zenith hours, noon and midnight, but the results could be unpredictable unless you were commanding from a position of strength, and here, in this place neither of them wanted to accidentally wind up with that kind of ‘responsibility’.

“And we are done!” Hong said eventually, stirring her to look up from carving the last holes in the flute and see what she was brandishing on the back of the list.

“Have you just made…?” she stared at the seven connected sequences of aspected alignments that created what was, to all intents a very crap ‘River Chart’.

“A River Chart?” Hong nodded. “Yep, we need a pan if you want to make salt after all, and water for it – this will provide both!”

“I occasionally forget that for all that you took ‘Hong’ as a name when you learned we were down in the martial axial regions, that red really is in your nature!” she grinned.

“Much like you, for all that you wear that pretty face, are just a little savage at heart?” Hong snickered back.

“Touché,” she acknowledged with a wry shrug, considering what she had done to the old scholar.

“So, I say, if the sun isn’t going to humour, I guess we have to call it by wind and rain?” she added, staring up at the dark sky, still obscuring the first rays of sun.

“Seems fitting…” Hong agreed. “I’ll do the drumming if you carry the tune? Seeing as you’re making a flute?”

She considered the flute and nodded pensively. She had not been intending to go that route, but sometimes events just took you in directions – the wisdom was knowing which ones were worth following on, and given Hong had decided to use a River Chart to get them out of here, having some music for the journey seemed fair.

“The question is do we do this as we are?”

“Of course!” Hong laughed, “Where the fun in doing otherwise, and anyway, Oliva would sulk, and she is the only one who gives offerings worth a damn these days.”

“Point,” she conceded, blowing on the flute experimentally and pulling out the reed to make a slight adjustment. “What about a drum?” she added.

“…”

Hong cast around and then skipped off with remarkable speed in the direction of the nearest lake and got some willow withies, binding them in a circle with a degree of skill that would have made a master artisan do a double take. After that, she swiftly plaited strong reeds over them and pulling the whole thing tight, flicked it to check that the threads were tight enough to thrum.

“Haven’t you just made a harp?” she pointed out.

“Indeed,” Hong agreed, snapping a branch off a tree and banging it with another one experimentally until she found two that made a reassuring ‘Thock’ sound that had a reverberation to it.

“…”

She watched, resisting the temptation to throw something at her friend, as she did a strange shuffling dance, banging them together in a way that was utterly offensive to any and all musical sensibilities. That said, that was kind of the point, because the music of the low places was not what you would think. It was the music of children, of strange and eccentric things and of the natural world itself.

That was also why she had been throwing things at stupid feathered vermin who were disrespecting their origins.

Blowing through the flute a few more times, she worked out quickly what notes were what. She had mostly tuned the thing to the point where most normal ears would bleed if she played it in company, but that was also kind of the point, because there was symbolism at play here.

“Shall we?” she asked, as Hong finished her rough circuit of the inner stones, working out where she needed to step.

“Might as well. If we arrive later it will be awkward,” Hong agreed.

Lifting the reed flute to her lips, she started to play as Hong tapped on the crude sticks, banging them off each other and also the rocks, easily finding the rhythm to make her notes carry as she also started to dance across the tops of the outer stones.

Their keening tune and dull rhythm, a song without name and a dance nearly forgotten to time, reverberated throughout the little hill and across the wider glen, growing in strength as it blended into the sounds of rustling grass, hissing wind in trees, the distant water rushing over rocks, the cries of animals, mostly telling them to ‘shut it’, and a few brave feathered lizards complaining about how tuneless she was in comparison to them.

By the third circuit, the land and the sky were randomly twisting above, as she found the resonance with the alignments, while Hong continued to carry the beat, making the stones resonate in the right pitches as she stepped adroitly through the swirling alignments, guiding them one after another.

It was not ‘magic’, not as the fools in the academy would have considered. An expert in feng shui would have understood what it was, as would a geomancer, because there was nothing thaumaturgical about anything going on; it was just finding the similarities between those points and moving between them, and at a certain point, the stones they were dancing across were no longer in the grassy glen beneath the Perilous Gate, and instead on a hill between shining lakes amid the first rays of sun on a vast grassy plain.

The rain falling from the cloudless sky around them steamed and turned into mist as they came to a stop and considered their surroundings.

“Oh… so this is where it was,” Hong said, staring at the form of the old grass scorpion, who was sat on a rock, his fingers in his ears, glaring at them both.

“You two…” he said carefully.

“It is us, Little Fen and Crazy Hong,” she grinned. “Old Moon Scorpion.”

“It is rare that you get to travel out… If you have run away, I will have to do my bit and report you,” he said narrowed eyes.

“Where are the others?” Hong asked, looking around at the very deserted camp.

“They have gone to play with some poor souls who have no idea what mess they have just walked into.”

“Ah, outsiders?” Hong asked brightly.

“Oh, that is genuinely cruel,” she applauded, suddenly understanding what her friend intended to.

“I told you. We need salt, we have water, and a pan, now we just need the fuel,” Hong grinned.

“…”

“What exactly are you two hoodlums planning?” the scorpion asked sceptically.

“To make fools cry, as only we can,” she snickered.

“I gathered that much, but you should not cause too much of a…”

“It’s fine,” she waved her hand. “We have an exception – came from uh… a well-placed source – do you want anything from the outside by the way?”

“Outside?” he blinked.

“Yep, we are going outside – we need to cause a distraction,” she nodded seriously.

“Ganlan was tempted to try sending someone out, given that outsiders are coming in, but the auspices on that are not… good,” the old scorpion mused. “As such they were merely content to harvest souls for the shrine here,” he gestured to the painted rock.

“Oh, so that’s what that’s about,” Hong nodded, peering at the painting of the Mother of Dreaming Moon on the upright of this ‘Dreaming Gate’.

“And you have Retribution and Fortune there as well, a solid gambit,” she noted, looking at the other two.

“Yep, in case anything goes wrong and a genuine power walks in here,” the old scorpion nodded. “Although now the pair of you are here…”

“We can take the Fortune and Retribution roles,” Hong mused. “It will be a good way to ensure that the tracks are covered.”

“So, how do we make this work?” she asked.

“Hmmm… we will need Oliva I suspect,” Hong sighed. “Has she broken through yet?”

“To Dao Aspirant?” the scorpion shook his head.

“Hmmm, that’s a pity,” Hong frowned.

“How about we do it like this…” she grinned.

Interlude – Sheng Quan.

“Senior brother!”

Sheng Quan looked around and resisted the urge to curse as the diviner, Fei Munsheng, was making his way over with a triumphant expression on his face.

“It is near here! The auspicious readings are correct,” another diviner added, a bit more superciliously.

His scepticism as to whether this was real had, he hoped, largely been born out… until now it seemed. It was one thing for the royal family on Shan Lai to be determined to get the very best for the Crown Prince so he could challenge the two Huang brats and the Teng scion for a seat at the top of the heavenly hundred, but this was a bit much he felt.

The prince had not come here personally of course; that would have made it a lot easier in truth, because he would not have to be here and could be doing something useful… like refining spirit stone bricks to drop on his feet, because based on recent events that felt like how this was heading.

“So, what do the new divinations say?” he asked Munsheng, who was looking like a cat that found all the cream.

“There is a resonance near here, an actual resonance,” Munsheng hissed, taking him to the side and wave the others to put up a perimeter

“Speak normally please, a resonance to what?” he asked, pulling his arm away.

“…”

“Uh… to the thing we have to get, for the crown prince,” Munsheng suddenly became evasive again.

-Drat, he sighed, as his latest attempt at prying what this was all about out of the diviner shrivelled away again.

That was why he was sure this was a terrible idea, in truth, not because a new territory war between the Imperial Seat on Shan Lai and the upstart Imperial Court on Eastern Azure was necessarily a bad idea, but because nobody was actually explaining anything – and that stank of politics within, rather than without.

That was also why they were currently dressed like they were from the Jade Gate Court and Four Peacocks Courts right down to the masks people were wearing. Disguising yourself as rival sects was not that uncommon, but he disliked that kind of subterfuge as well, when used like this, because it was just pointlessly over-complicated.

-We were sent in here directly by a World Venerate advisor of the emperor for fates’ sakes, in an ‘alliance’ with the Imperial Court and the damn Huang clan. We could just do this openly and it would be as effective!

“Right, so ‘this thing that we must get for the crown prince that cannot be spoken of’,” he asked, quashing his exasperation. “You say there is a ‘resonance’?”

“Yes… uh… Daoist Sheng,” one of the other diviners, noting his stress on that and wincing slightly, nodded.

“And what do you advise we do?” he asked, looking around at the camps and the groups already moving out to explore the various ruins scattered around the hills and trying not to feel like he was talking in circles.

-I cannot protect you morons if you don’t even tell me what I am to guard against, he complained inwardly.

“HELP!” a woman’s scream cut through the air, making everyone turn.

“HELP, HELP!” a second shriek, imbued with qi, followed.

Sweeping out his soul sense, he found the source, three women, dressed in ragged dresses, one with an arrow stuck in her shoulder, were stumbling down the last bit of a slope from the grasslands beyond. One had red hair and green eyes, the other dark hair and dark eyes and the third had golden hair, olive skin with blue eyes. All of them could be considered beauties in their own way. Behind them, he saw a figure cloaked in grass for a second, raising a bow-

Narrowing his eyes, he struck, but before the bolt of Soul Law could reach the target, it had loosed an arrow which hit the red-haired woman in the leg.

She screamed and went down, before being grabbed by the dark-haired girl, even as another group, from the Lu clan, rushed over, casting talismans at the ridge and a barrier-

He ducked back as an arrow ghosted past him. His intuition told him all kinds of problems came with it, starting with how it had gotten that close to him without him seeing it. He deflected it away from Munsheng who jumped in fright, even before the arrow, exploded with enough force to make him wince.

The one that he had hit with soul law was gone – he was certain it had died; it had barely been an Immortal – and yet that arrow had held esoteric principles that allowed it to escape a Dao Lord’s notice until it was mere meters away?

“Dangerous archers…” he frowned, looking at the ridge.

Sweeping further out, he saw no sign of anything else either – some wild animals, birds, even some Immortal realm qi beasts keeping a very wide berth, but nothing that could have ‘claimed’ the body, which didn’t bode well.

“Archer?” one of the other diviners shuddered, looking at the smoking scar on the ground.

“It’s dead,” Sheng Dian said from behind his white mask marked with ‘ancient’. “Not that dangerous if someone like Quan here can block it either.”

“…”

He shook his head and didn’t rise to the bait. They had five Dao Lords in this group, suppressing their cultivation down to early Dao Immortal, of which he was the only outsider really. He was here because of political connections and because the Military Authority had threatened to cause problems if they were not given some angle in this. The others were all from the Sheng and Fei clans and beholden to nobody but the interest that led them here.

They made their way through the ruined town to the others, who were clustering around the women. Someone was treating the girl who had been shot through the leg, who was…

-Weak?

He stared at the three of them. The golden-haired woman was strong, an Ancient Immortal in fact, but the other two were contradictory – that was really the only way to describe it. Both had early stage Nascent Souls, but the comprehensions in them were obscure. Their cores were much higher quality than their spirit roots should have supported, and their accumulation was shallow in temporal terms, even if the balance of it was surprisingly deep.

-Ah, did the one I killed want to just capture them? but then how did…?

Looking at the golden-haired woman, who was panting hard and looking drained, he considered her state for a moment before understanding what was going on in mild shock. Her qi was rebelling, nearly undergoing some kind of deviation, even as she worked to pull the arrow that was red out of her shoulder.

-The other arrow was purple and yellow and it avoided my notice and exploded, while this one is black and red and it’s making her qi behave weirdly…

“Give me that arrow,” he pointed at the one in the hand of one of the Lu clan disciples, who flinched and handed it to him with a bow.

Looking at it with narrowed eyes, he considered the materials first. They were unenhanced, but undeniably high quality for what they were. The shaft was made of some kind of spine, carved with fluting so anything that it pierced would bleed out. The tip was some kind of animal bone that easily scratched his Spirit Iron bracer as well. Even the fletching was from an Immortal realm spirit beast. The paint on it was very mundane.

-A form of Martial Intent? But I didn’t feel anything like that?

-Dharma Intent? He felt a faint chill suddenly.

-No… not Dharma Intent, colours as power, the red of war, vitality surging… Heart Force?

“Who was pursuing you?” he asked the Ancient Immortal.

“I… demons,” she shuddered, grasping her arms as if cold and looking a bit haunted.

“Demons…” one of the Golden Immortals nearby sounded dubious, but they could all see that she was a ‘senior’ so were not too dismissive.

“What sect do you belong to?” Munsheng said, looking between the three of them.

“Ah… th-thank you for saving us, seniors,” the youngest one, who looked maybe 15 stammered, clearly in shock. “W-we… are from the Ha clan.”

“The Ha clan?” he covered his surprise, but a few others around did murmur in a shocked manner.

“Y-yes,” the other girl nodded vigorously. “We are allied to the D-Din clan, who are p-part of your Court…”

He recalled belatedly that such a thing was true as far as he was aware from being briefs regarding the twisting politics of the Blue Water Province.

“You are from our Ha clan?” another voice cut in as a group in purple robes embroidered with foxes and peacocks came over.

He glanced at the Golden Immortal, who was, discounting their ‘hidden’ group, quite strong among those present – from the Imperial Continent in all likelihood.

“Y-yes,” the dark-haired girl mumbled, quailing under the glare. “I am Ha Fenfang. My parents were within the Ha clan of West Flower Picking town, and this is Nen Hong, my friend…”

That was the truth, near as he could tell from looking at them.

“We met senior Ganlan near here…” she trailed off, looking around nervously.

“They have what we want,” Munsheng’s voice whispered in his head.

“They do?” He blinked.

“The resonance is undeniable,” Munsheng replied. “It is on the girl Nen Hong, and it is likely responsible for their rapid progress: both have cultivated to Nascent Soul in a matter of a few months.”

He could see that himself, that their accumulation was very rapid. There was also a strange obfuscation as he tried to look at their law – it slipped away from him strangely. He guessed he could probably seek it out if he grasped them, but that was not necessarily needed. Not yet anyway.

“Why were they pursuing you?” Sheng Dian asked, stepping forward.

“Uh… we… uh…” Nen Hong quailed back, and ‘Ganlan’ finally sent out her strength to shelter the other girl a bit.

“Are you also part of the Ha clan?” Dian said, turning to her and pushing her strength back rather crudely.

He grimaced behind his mask. Clearly Dian was still smarting from both his ‘failure’ in leading the capture of Lu Ji, who had turned out to be a much thornier prospect than anyone anticipated – a Dao Eternal at 2 generations – and also because he had then managed to loose that priceless divination lantern under strange circumstances. without his connections to Ancestor Astral Song he might not even be here right now and that was leading to him being more forceful and invested in the success of this endeavour than was perhaps… ideal, it seemed.

“No,” she shook her head. “I just happened across these two, near here. Shortly after that we were attacked by those demons.”

“What is your name, and what influence are you from?” Munsheng added, subtly sending out a bit of his Dao Intent.

“Ganlan Meixiu, I am a disciple of Dreaming Moonsky Pagoda,” Ganlan Meixiu said softly, being drawn along with the suggestion.

Looking around, he could see the others shaking their heads, so it had to be a smaller sect, obscure, maybe from another region. She was an Ancient Immortal though, so perhaps she was one of their leading seniors, come to the trial to test herself or just to make a name within the generation he assumed. That wasn’t important really, what was more so, was how Sheng Dian and Fei Munsheng planned to handle this.

“How come someone as weak as you is here taking part in this trial?” he asked her.

“Weak… uh…” Ha Fenfang shook a bit. “We don’t know anything about any trial, honoured seniors. We were gathering herbs near a place called Jade Willow Village for the Ha clan and somehow ended up here.”

“…”

The others looked perturbed, but he could sense no lies at all there either.

“It is true that Jade Willow village is a place of our Ha clan,” one of the group with the Ha Golden Immortal muttered.

“It is?” the Golden Immortal frowned.

“Yes, we uh… some of the things sold in the auction came from a ruin near there,” that disciple whispered, so quietly most would not have heard.

“Ah, that thing,” the Golden Immortal nodded.

“We… uh… we were beset by Deng clan bandits,” Nen Hong mumbled.

“You had items from there?” Munsheng asked, his eyes narrowing.

“Easy, don’t provoke a fight here,” he sent… to all of them.

Most nodded, but Sheng Dian smirked and just ignored him.

-Shit, he is going to seize whatever they have, I just know it… he groaned inwardly.

“We… just want to go home. We don’t mind giving you everything. We don’t even know what it does really,” Ha Fenfang mumbled.

-And ‘that’ was a lie, he sighed. Not that he could blame them, likely they knew that they had maybe just fled from the wolf pack, straight into the tiger den.

They would also have no way to know what, if any, means a cultivator like he, or most others here, had to determine lies, so basically everyone here now knew that they both had something, knew what it did and had directly lied about it.

“She is part of our Ha clan,” the Golden Immortal from the Ha was also sweating a bit now, looking around. “I trust you all will show some decorum?”

-You just want it for yourself, he chuckled inwardly, slightly amused now.

“Our Jade Gate Court has an alliance with the Ha clan, Brother Yong. Of course you can rely on us in this matter,” he interjected smoothly, before Dian could do something precipitous.

“If they can be convinced to give the items over to us for safe keeping, willingly, that will be best,” he sent to the others.

“There is no question of them living,” Dian said simply.

“…”

“Oh come on,” he groaned and repudiated them straight up. “Just wipe their memories of the specifics? Surely that will be enough.”

“No. Make a play of ‘taking’ whatever it is, then send them back through. We will deal with it here,” a melodious woman’s voice murmured in is head.

“Dao Mother Black Jade,” he saluted her mentally.

“…”

Nen Hong was staring at him apprehensively still, so he could only sigh.

“We do have an agreement, do we not Brother Yong?” he pressed Ha Yong.

“We… do,” the Golden Immortal nodded, acquiescing to his subtle suggestion.

“Hand it over,” Sheng Dian said with a very disingenuous smile now.

“Are we really going to send them back?” one of the others whispered through their shared link.

“Yes,” he nodded. “Unless you want to go against Fairy Black Jade?”

There was silence, which he expected. Nobody here was going to annoy a World Venerate.

He held out his hand, and the girl, Nen Fenfang passed him a reed flute of all things. Sheng Dian snatched the ‘parchment’ from the girl Hong without comment.

“Take them to the transport point,” he said to Dian.

“…”

The other youth just sneered, and almost dragged all three along with his qi as the others made way for them, believing them to be Jade Gate Court disciples. The ‘other’ Sheng and Fei clan groups were watching with ‘sullen scowls’ from the middle distance, already having been ‘pushed out’ of the majority discourse, in what amounted to a rather farcical play for the others so they could retain the strategic high ground according to Munsheng.

That said, he watched the trio depart, glad his frown was hidden behind his mask. It was hard to shake the weird feeling that he had been given the flute deliberately.

-Did Munsheng or Dian actually try to twist things a bit? He didn’t really trust either as far as he could kick them.

The faint hint he had gotten off that strange scrap of paper made the hair on his arms stand on end. By comparison, the flute he now held was a very weird thing indeed. It was ostensibly a normal flute, but there was a subtle resonance within it that the longer he stared at it, the more certain he became that it had belonged to a truly remarkable being.

Part 4 – Thereafter, our valiant heroines extricate themselves from danger using a method most fowl.

“Truly, in every group, there is a moron with eyes bigger than their stomach…”

Fen’s giggling laughter echoed in her head as they followed after the youth who clearly intended them no good, even if they hadn’t heard the whole exchange the group had had… both exchanges in fact.

“When you sweep this lot up, that Sheng Quan will be a useful tool,” she mentioned to Ganlan Meixiu, who nodded pensively.

They followed Sheng Dian, answering his questions as their status befitted. There was no need for any lies or obfuscation; she just explained cleanly.

“Yes, Honoured Disciple, it is a cultivation scripture.”

“Yes, Honoured Disciple, it came from the hands of an ancient and powerful being.”

“It is called Seven Secrets River Chart, Honoured Disciple.”

“No, Honoured Disciple, we have not done much with it.”

“Yes, the flute came with it, Honoured Disciple.”

Their answers alternated while Ganlan ‘answered’ a few pointless questions from the diviner. As someone with a mortal physique, and hers was quite spicy as they came, all he was doing was walking into a huge problem for himself.

Their solution to getting in was quite ingenious, she had to admit, in a sticky resin and moss bodge fix to your leaky boat kind of way. The ruined settlement itself appeared to be Aldrahaal, which placed them almost squarely in the middle of the Great Savannah, on the east-west trade route between Evergrove and Jerikhal. It was notable in this instance only because it held a greater teleportation hub that they had managed to fix up.

Dian was talking to a group nearby who were putting what looked like fairly impure mana Celestial Mana stones into the charging array, so she ignored him and considered the circle itself.

“What do you reckon?” she asked Fen.

“This kind of stuff was never my thing,” Fen sighed. “Give me a good dance and a merry tune any day and I’ll travel the whole world over, but all the maths and calculations just leaves me cold.

“Same,” she nodded with a sigh. “However their bodge makes me a bit worried, because while they won’t sustain many transfers with such crappy mana stones, they can still bring quite a lot through.”

“We’ll handle that,” Ganlan said, looking around.

“Strip!” Dian commanded them all, “and remove your storage rings, any bound treasures and unbind everything.

“…”

They stared at him, and she sighed, frowning, before doing as he commanded. The alternatives didn’t really fit with the ‘scene’ they were building in any case. The key thing was that they leave and it not be overly marked by any great strength. What happened outside was a whole other matter and given they were using unconstrained greater teleportation, they were just asking for trouble in any case.

Ganlan resisted and then gasped as Dian pulled out a talisman and pointed it at her.

{Nine Ensnaring Azure Serpents}

The array twisted round her and she grunted. Breaking out of it was possible, but the problem was that without acknowledgement from the other end, there would be no link.

“Shit,” she grimaced.

“Well, plans never survive first contact. Mayumi is capable,” Fen said.

“That’s not the problem, as such,” Ganlan grimaced. “I’m on the Aspirant threshold. Do you know what will happen if I go out into those thieving heavens?”

“Ah… hmmm…” Fen stared at the other woman, while she, who had realised the problem a moment sooner, resisted the urge to rub her temples.

“This also counts as a distraction though?” Fen pointed out after a moment.

“I distinctly recall plausible deniability being on my list,” she pointed out.

“Oh, we can just do it like that,” she said, glancing at the teleport again and rapidly formulating a plan while looking up. It mainly involved her scuffing the lines in the array by her feet as Sheng Dian and two others stepped onto the dais as well holding all their gear, even the purloined sign and fishing rod.

“Do it like-”

They hit the ground with enough force that her bones should have been badly smashed, was she not… her, and used to such things. The shimmers of void fire swirled around the three of them briefly and two separate halls slid into focus.

In one, with its grand, lapis lazuli columns, thirty three Venerates were seated in a circle, focusing on an array while a grand figure sat on a seat flanked by various other dignitaries watching on as Sheng Dian and the others arrived at their destination carrying most of those goods.

In the second, there were nine venerates focusing much harder.

The two scenes wavered a second time and she almost let her shopping list fall through to the 33 while they ‘hit’ the ground amid the nine before changing her mind and forcibly preventing the inauspicious ‘fortune’ link to the chart – the point was, after all, for this not to tie back to the mountain in a way that would be obvious to someone with actual eyes.

“What the hells?” the woman leading the circle of nine blinked in shock.

Standing up, she dusted the void fire off herself, while Fen took care of the rather unfortunate Ganlan, who was cursing in her native tongue and deeply regretting not having crossed over already.

“What is this?” the white robed old man said staring at them blankly.

“Bah, now I really wish I’d gotten that blessing,” she sighed, reaching out and grabbing each of the nine and dragging them forward, thoroughly suppressing their auras while she ‘stepped’ into the shadow of her current self.

[Unconstrained Teleportation is Bad for Your Health, Oh-Kay?]

Her words sank through them, even as their physical forms twisted bizarrely under the influx of pure thaumic degradation. All of them struck at her physical body, given that was really only at Golden Core. She had to sigh as it was turned into a bloody smear.

[Cute, you think that actually makes any difference?]

They staggered back, staring blankly at her shadowy, winged form.

[You just killed a mortal girl, aged 15, with your full strength, inside this world? Do you have no care for your future potential?]

The green-robed man suddenly started to laugh. “Demonic thing, you think that matters?”

Chains swirled out of seals set all around the room, worming into her ‘body’ and theoretically ‘chaining’ her as far as the group in the room were concerned at least.

She ignored him and looked up at the sky, which was doing its level best to look the other way and whistle awkwardly, just as she had hoped.

Ganlan was staring at the group with an expression of deep discomfort on her face, as she should. All of them were currently focused on her rather than Fen and Ganlan, but it would only take one errant sweep for them to realise that Ganlan was not an ordinary practitioner of the Heavenly Path.

[What demonic thing?]

She snickered, and the ‘shopping list’ twisted out of her shadow and fell down, the aura of the chart she had drawn on its back thoroughly exposed.

The barriers of the room just about held, but those inside recoiled and the chains holding her were undone as the seven glittering symbols drifted eerily in the air above.

{Seven Secrets River Chart}

“This… This…” the man in green stared blankly, even as the woman Black Jade and the other youth beside her staggered back looking shocked.

“River Chart!?!” the three old men in white actually squawked as one, viridian feathers briefly manifesting behind their ears as they lost control of their bodily transformations slightly.

“Wisdom Scripture!” the old man in a grey and gold robe she vaguely recognised as that of an old sorcerer from the Kong clan gawped.

[You think any of you old things, so lacking in potential, have any meaning to me?]

Her sneer echoed through the room, twisting everything faintly as her shadow gained seven sets of wings, picked out like starry rivers behind her to emphasise the point.

[We crossed paths by chance, and you have slain my rightful inheritor. I refuse to acknowledge any of you – better I be consigned to oblivion than return to the war above as a tool for you greedy heavens who refuse to see justice done!]

At the same time, another figure appeared in the room – a majestic, bearded old man in a blue-green hooded robe bedecked with stars, his face hidden by a white mask that read ‘Ancestor’. Behind it, she could clearly see the greed in his eyes as he stepped through the shadow of ‘Black Jade’ and grasped for the ‘scripture’ properly, preventing its ‘collapse’ which she had been faking.

The seven symbols twisted, cracked and shattered, sending out a wave of distorting energy for a moment before the old man leading the three from the Kong clan gave a forlorn scream and cast a strange grey jar at it.

She watched with a certain degree of amusement as his greed and desperation not to see such a ‘precious’ thing vanish before his eyes overcame his good sense, just as Fen’s own influence through the ‘Reason’ she applied to the situation compelled it to – ‘Greed’ was just another path to the ‘Red’, the frenzied havoc of chaos and slaughter that laid men low as surely as anything Divide or Myriad Gifts had ever accomplished.

Fen narrowed her eyes and she shook her head. “There is no way I am going to keep this to these charlatans!”

This time, she moved herself, setting her own ‘Reason’ to the nature of the chart briefly. With her direct attention, the desire of all present to have possession of and grow through its possession was also enhanced, as was their desire towards it.

The accidental, or later, deliberate destruction of the scripture was, after all, not what she wanted here – the recipe for ‘Spice’ was harder to manufacture than ‘Salt’ in many ways, and having chanced upon a means to achieve both in equal measure, she was hardly going to sabotage her own efforts.

The ‘chart’ shifted faintly and the channel opened back up. In the process it thoroughly cracked the space around them, tearing a massive rent in the space across the whole room. In the same instant a shadow wreathed in red and black lightning pierced through one of the robed men from the Kong Clan, manifesting as a twisting scorpion.

He gave a wretched scream as the space around them continued to distort, dragging more and more of the room into it, while the scorpion of lightning, holding the venerate in its claws continued to stab and stab.

In the chaos, she noted it also snagged Ganlan with a limb and made for ‘Fen’ as well, before relinquishing her under the pretence of having been deflected by a talisman. In that same instant, Fen just let her ‘body’ get caught in the combined attack of the Huang Venerates, obliterating it and ‘killing’ it in the eyes of the world and also marking them as ‘sinners’.

The penalty for a Venerate killing a Mortal in unjust circumstances was steep enough that she actually marked their truths in the off chance they did make it to the Celestial Threshold and she had a chance to spectate on the chaos that they would meet. At the very least they would have to spend quite some time cultivating good karma to blot out the dark when they realised their mistake.

The scorpion vanished into the rift a moment later, leaving the two of them standing there, where their ‘bodies’ had ‘died’ and the group – with both peacocks and stupid monkeys having eaten a nasty demerit at the hands of the three in azure robes in terms of what was on display, facing off with the ‘Scripture’ now locked in the middle of the room.

Fen considered the barrier for a moment. “This is also interfering, if they keep this up our efforts will be strangled.”

She nodded, agreeing there. If these three groups kept the knowledge of their acquisition to themselves, it would be a disappointing outcome. The group inside would not be able to disseminate things, even with Ganlan sort of knowing what they intended.

“Ah!” she narrowed her eyes and looked in the general direction of the centre of the town, having found a suitable set of crowbars with which to further stave the spokes of the wobbling wheel before them.

[NOoooo! I'm TOO YOUNG TO BE MADE A TOOL!]

It was very melodramatic, but at this point that didn’t really matter. The twisting strength of the ‘scripture’ erupted outwards, feeding off the chaos unleashed. Seven twisting currents of distortion swirled out from it, rupturing the barrier in a few places and for the briefest moment scything outwards.

They washed over abodes of the groups from a few other choice influences – Turquoise Pond, North Star Grotto and Vast Obscurity Grove. All of them would be far too savvy in their own right to become enamoured of a knock off version of a scripture already sub-par to what their own ancestors could put out if pushed, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that they would have some short term involvement and the seed of doubt would be planted in the eyes of the three groups here who were truly afflicted.

Silver shards of glittering dust that only they could see twisted in the air, drifting away from the actions of group as they continued to tussle.

As they realised the barrier was broken and rapidly traced how far the distortions had washed, red also started to manifest.

“It’s not as much as you might expect,” Fen pouted, starting to attract the silver towards her and coalesce the ‘Silver Karmic Salts’ the event had called into creation within the celestial firmament as a result of all of this into a silver rock about the size of a small apricot.

With a sigh, she reached out and did the same for the swirling trails of red dust drifting from the eyes and mouths of the groups, turning ‘Red Karmic Spice’ into a red-orange crystal the size of a grape.

“It will only grow though; we don’t have to harvest it now,” she mused, turning it over in her hands and looking at the scripture, with the two rivers of red and silver swirling through it, connecting to all those there.

“The goal here was to create a new supply we can use for a while, given how much that pond spawn defiled all the stores back in the pagoda.”

“Fair, and when they realise that what they have in their hands is literally a recipe for ‘Spicy Noodle Soup’…” Fen giggled.

She laughed as well, wondering how that revelation would go down when it eventually became apparent and some person with actual eyes to see decoded the list on the other side. In the Heroic Age, such a thing might not have worked, but here, she was fairly sure that the revelation that their cherished scripture was in fact a seven step plan to acquire ingredients for soup would only spawn a further catastrophe.

“At that point, I fully expect some overly smart, yet adorably gullible, scion to actually try making it!” she sniggered.

“…”

“…”

Before she could comment further though, the scene around them wavered bizarrely and, with an ominous cracking sound, everything turned white.

Part 5 – After an unexpected detour, our heroines show resourcefulness in completing their secondary task.

“…”

She stared at Fen with her arms crossed, trying not to look vexed.

“…”

Fen, for her part, had the expression of a person for whom the fun of events was wearing off slightly. Idly, she snagged Olivia – Meixiu – who was shivering from the cold.

“Ah, I see…”

She scowled, and waved her hand, cutting the pulse of the transfer that was ‘responsible’ for them being sent here in advertently. Sheng Dian and the other two were deposited directly into her hand a moment later. Idly she waved her other hand and their garb, the sign and the few other items like the ‘harp’, ‘basket’ and the ‘fishing rod’ drifted over to them.

“How come I am here?” the young woman from the Emerald Isle muttered, her qi misting the space around them as perspective shifted oddly around them all.

“…”

“That is a fair question,” she conceded, looking Fen who just shrugged.

“They used some heavy-duty space-buggering talismans a moment ago, Meixiu was in the teleport stream and the old scorpion will not get there for a short while?” Fen hazarded.

She considered the chart, trying not to sigh, before turning it on its side. “Noodles I guess?” she ventured.

“Noodles?” Olivia just looked confused now.

She considered what was on the recipe, which was ‘Flour, Water, Salt, Eggs…’, and then looked around at their surroundings again and failed, sighing deeply.

In every direction was boundless void. The swirling maelstrom of ‘Eastern Azure’ twisted away maybe 10 billion miles to her left – the east – its accretion disk about the size of a dinner plate, blending into the swirling azure nebula that covered the entirety of the vault of heaven. Another planet, strangely visible even at this distance, was about 5 billion miles to her north.

“No matter how you look at it, we are in the middle of bumfuck nowhere,” Fen said, drifting sideways slightly and grabbing the horrified Sheng Dian.

“So… do we walk back? Or try teleporting?” Olivia asked, dusting ice off her robe and trying not to shiver quite as obviously as she looked at the two other disciples from whatever influence they all belonged to haemorrhaging qi.

“Well, if we are out here, we can look into some bonus ingredients. It will certainly fulfil Divide’s request that we attract some attention away from the mountain,” she mused, turning the chart over and letting it float in the air beside her, while looking sideways at Sheng Dian.

As it was now, their physical forms looked identical, but none of the three were at all capable of perceiving them clearly unless she wished it, which she didn’t, so they were two shadows in the void pretty much. The same went for most of their belongings. Unless she willed it, there was no way for them to connect to the weird hodgepodge of stuff with them, because, rather amusingly, it was utterly outside of his world view that this was even possible.

A triumph for the conceptual idea of plausible deniability. It was much easier to just deny the circumstances subtly than it was for him to find a way to explain why they were here, now, with this stuff, in these circumstances.

“W-who are?” Sheng Dian mumbled, forcing his words out between chattering teeth even as he fumbled for his ring.

Absently she held it up for him to see – making him flinch even more.

“I should say that of you, your teleportation caused me some inconvenience!” she hissed.

“Won’t that uh… attract notice?” Olivia muttered.

“Yep,” she nodded, watching space shift around it faintly. “I am counting on it.”

“You know, folks get snooty about doing what you’re about to suggest…” Fen said brightly, her tone rather at odds with her words. “That said… do you even have a tool for this?”

She wordlessly held out the old scholar’s fishing rod, which she had grabbed in lieu of a blessing.

“…”

Olivia stared from one to the other and then very warily edged backwards in the void, reminding her that the young woman had been fished out of the ocean after a shipwreck as far as she recalled.

“Ookie,” Fen sighed, picking up the sign and looking this way and that. “But if we haul up a megalodon, I’m going to tell Divide this was your terrible idea.”

She rolled her eyes. “Just get on with it!”

Fen hefted the sign and then planted it with a firm stab into the firmament… and nothing happened.

“…”

“Oops!” Fen looked embarrassed, then spun the sign in her hands before planting it two paces further right.

This time, there was a definitive reaction. The sign vanished as the sharp wooden point split the void to the sound of vast rolling ‘thunder’. It wasn’t sound, because there was no sound in the void, but rather the sensation of cracking space reordering itself so Olivia could appreciate its full majesty by ‘pretending’ to be sound.

Pulling up the sign before it could fall through the fissure, Fen picked it up and drifted about a hundred metres to her left and repeated the same trick. In the end, they had a roughly octagonal hole about 100 metres across that hung rather ominously in the void, twisting the surroundings faintly.

Olivia, who now sat on her shoulder, like a small, rather disturbed fairy, holding onto her hair for safety, was watching on wide-eyed as the central area of the broken space destabilized a bit as Fen speculatively made it wobble.

Hefting the sign, she gave it a few experimental swings before spinning on the spot and using both hands to smash the sign edge right into the middle of the octagonal panel, which shook ominously but did no more.

“We are where we are,” she pointed out. “You’re not gonna be permitted to freestyle this, as amusing as it would be.”

“Boo… stupid fundamentals, this sister will remember you,” Fen pouted, tossing Sheng Dian and the others to her, and hopped back to the edge, considering the damaged area of space.

She drifted sideways for a moment and then drifted backwards, holding the three, who were now pale and shaking, even if she was temporarily stopping them from bleeding out qi, as Fen took a few proper swings with the sign, narrowing her eyes.

{Perilous Sign Style: Ninefold Severing Strikes}

In a single instant she lashed out with the sign nine times on each point for a total of 81 times before rebounding and, with a single downward cut, unleashing all 9 cumulative sets of 9 slashes’ stored potential at once on the octagonal fissure-

There was an absence of noise – in effect a flash of anti-everything that was probably briefly visible in the next starfield – as Fen’s blow split the firmament properly, twisting everything in on itself and dropping the remnant into the mire of crashing space below. The Hyper-Dimensional Shatter Wall bled almost immediately, oozing unformed potentia in colours no mortal should ever witness for a few seconds, and doing so in more directions than most people understood there to be dimensions, before stabilizing into a gloomy rippling puddle of pulverized space that held faint traces of white that drifted like chum in the water.

Taking the fishing rod, she peered over the edge, warily in case something peered back, then passed it to Fen, unslinging the ‘Harp’ instead. This was not its intended use, but it made for a handy hand scoop. Kneeling down, she swept it a few times through the water and tossed up a handful of strange, twisting things that slimed bizarrely when they came into contact with the void, but otherwise didn’t do a lot.

Taking the hook, she threaded them onto it while Fen held the rod and then cast the line out into the dark swirling waters, watching as the hook, weight and bait vanished into the gloom.

“Uh… when I heard stories of my seniors going fishing for pond life…” Olivia muttered.

“This was not quite what you expected?” Fen chuckled, coming to sit nearby and inspecting the damage to the sign board, which was rather minimal.

“No… it was not,” Olivia muttered, eyeing the water nervously.

“Actually… this is a service. We can solve two problems at once!” Fen grinned obnoxiously.

“We can?” she asked, wondering where Fen was going with this.

“Yep, Ganlan here needs to break through, doing it here is impossible, but I can take her down there…” Fen said with a smirk.

“…”

“Don’t kill her, and be back quickly. If I have to explain to Divide or one of the others why you are not back here-”

“It’s fine,” Fen said, plucking Olivia off her shoulder and then just falling backwards into the chaos with a mock salute.

“You… what are you…” Sheng Dian mumbled.

“…”

She considered the three and wondered if she shouldn’t just throw them in as well. All of them had rather grim karma as it was. A lot of misdeeds and various other villainies. All very righteous of course, in their eyes, but this far out, there was no writ of earthly heaven to shelter them.

The chart shimmered faintly, telling her that it was finally taking root in the hearts of those nine-

Her thoughts were distracted when there was a tug on the line. Narrowing her eyes, she saw a swirling shadow in the dark waters and then a moment later the line really yanked itself. The space around her creaked faintly and she dug her feet in, carefully stepping back as she wound in the line.

It struggled a second time, trying to pull her back even as space fractured around the line as well, sending little crackles of black and red lightning out even as Sheng Dian and the others watched, too terrified to even speak now.

The third time, she got it to just by the surface and grinned, because it was about what she had hoped: a Sky Swallowing Sea snake. They were fairly ubiquitous but they had two useful traits. Firstly, they had pools of purified water from the star ocean in a special organ that helped with refining the objects they swallowed. Secondly, they reproduced weirdly and always had thousands of eggs in special pouches down either side.

Hauling it out of the water, she grabbed it carefully and tossed it in the harp-turned-sieve and branded it with her perception.

By the time Fen returned with a bedraggled but advanced Olivia in tow, she had caught four more serpents and a Shattermist Cod, storing them all in the fishing basket the old scholar had been using.

“We are done here,” Fen’s voice murmured in her ear, appearing beside her like a ghost, the slightly larger form of Olivia sitting on her shoulder. “I got a few other things down there as well. The depths here are basically untouched – some fairly nasty stuff too.”

“We leave it or not?” she mused, considering the pool.

“Well, this qualifies as the kind of thing that will certainly distract eyes away from the mountain,” Fen mused with a nasty laugh.

“This is true… and if we leave these three here, with something to ensure they don’t die before someone finds them…?”

She wordlessly picked up a crayfish she had grasped.

“It’s your lucky day. Watch over this lot until someone comes for them then you can go back through, okay?”

“…”

It stared at her, then at the things it would have happily snuffled up without comment, then back at her before nodding its eye stalks once.

Putting it down, she watched as Fen collected the sign and then headed off with Oliva. As a final act, she drew a line in the air that any idiot would be able to find with a bit of searching and mirrored it to the noodle portion of the chart with a smirk before following after them.

Part 6 – Departing the scene of the crime, our heroines consider the question of a suitable liqueur.

A short time later found the three of them walking down a street of the city on the coast near the mountain, which she believed to be called ‘Blue Water City’. Considering her list, Hong provisionally crossed off ‘Spice’ and ‘Salt’ in both instances. They had a shortage of Star Salt still, but there would be other odd things in the fish that were now stored, looking like a bunch of bracelets around her wrist.

Noodles was somewhat up in the air, but Fen had found several bushels of various sea-grass in the shallows of broken space which were now stored in the various rings Olivia had had on her person as it turned out. That really left the question of nabbing some extra liqueur or similar as the only thing to resolve.

The problem there, was that Heaven’s Path practitioners were about as good at brewing alcohol as those fellows back home and shared a similar philosophy in that it was good if you could also use its vapours to clean silverware.

“Really, do they sell nothing but rice wine?” Fen grumbled as they wandered rather aimlessly down a bustling street, peering at various jars and generally being ignored by everyone.

“There is also something here made with ‘mysterious roots’…” she mused, uncorking a jar and sniffing it. “Ah, it’s ginseng wine, interesting, but not what we need…”

“How dare you! This Blue Water City is the seat of our Imperial Court!”

“DARE? You charlatan invaders dare to claim such?” an angry male voice carried across the street, making her turn.

“WE DARE!” Another voice, stridently interjected. “Our Jade Gate Court is the discipline of the Heavens here. Your faded power holds no sway!”

“No sway? No sway? I’ll show you how your mother sways!” another younger voice yelled, followed by the sound of smashing furniture.

She stepped backwards as a bench exited the opposite building, a teahouse, and embedded itself in the wall between them.

“VILE VILLAIN, I WILL SEE YOU BOW AND CALL THIS SEAT GRANDDADDY!” another voice screamed.

“Wasn’t the Jade Gate Court the influence of that hopping monkey who stole one of the cubes with the nascent universe sparks?” she asked, peering, along with quite a few others, at the conflict unfolding across the street.

“I do believe you are right,” Fen nodded.

A figure in a blue robe exploded out of a teashop, chasing after a green-robed man who was desperately parrying a strike.

None of the combatants were particularly strong – the youth in blue was maybe 15 and had a soul manifestation. The one he was fighting was about 30 and at Unity realm, but being pressured simply because the blue-robed youth was wielding a rather well made trinket.

“Young Master Ling!” a woman’s voice snapped suddenly, and the entire street stilled as four women in veils wearing blue robes shifted out of nowhere. “Stop being uncouth!”

“Bah,” the group from the Jade Gate Court pushed themselves up out of the wreckage of the stalls, tossing a few things away and breaking even more stuff as they did so, she noted with idle amusement.

“Do you recall what that youth looked like?” she asked Fen.

“…”

“I do,” Fen nodded pensively.

“Want to do the honours then?” she asked, considering her list, and then looking at the various flows of her newly minted ‘Seven Secrets River Chart’.

“You want me to pretend to be that Di Ji?” Fen asked dubiously.

“He had all sorts of tricks and things…”

“He did… didn’t he?” Fen said, her smile transforming from one of amusement to something truly sinister before she got a hold on herself.

“So, how do we go about this?”

“Well… it can go a bit like this?” she mused, holding the chart up for a moment, before turning it upside down...

Interlude – Ha Leng

Seated in the Myriad Blossoms teahouse, Ha Leng took a deep sip of the tea and tried not to sigh, because that would be rude, and the other people at the table were so important it would not have been weird if he was asked to lie down beneath their feet and be the carpet.

Tai Yanmei was… disarmingly uncouth – this was the only way to describe her – and treated ‘propriety’ as a tool with which to annoy others as far as he could tell. In this instant, she was playing a game of Gu Takes All, with her ‘Grandfather’, while Tai Qiuyue looked on with a rather distressed expression.

The source of her discomfort was because Tai Yanmei was… bad at card games.

Very, very bad at card games, and she was playing against someone who didn’t much care for ‘face’ in this circumstance and was happy to just keep winning.

To call the second ancestor of the Ha clan a shameless old fogy was not something he was willing to do, under any circumstances, but he had to acknowledge that this series of games was broadening his horizons significantly.

“LISTEN! I YOUR GRANDFATHER AM DETERMINED I WILL RESERVE ALL OF THE TOP FLOOR OF THIS PLACE!” a male voice commanded imperiously.

Idly, he turned to watch the scene, because this was not the first time this had happened in the last few days… and froze.

“Uh… uh… Elder Huang…?” he pulled Lan Huang’s sleeve with a shaking hand.

The source of his shock was not the vibrant youth arguing with the woman below, but rather the three figures who had just walked in behind them.

“What is it?” Lan Huang glanced at him, then at where he was pointing.

“…”

He managed to tear away his gaze from the perpetrator of a crime, who was there in a purple robe, looking on with interest with a golden-haired beauty with olive skin and piercing eyes, dressed in a sheer dress on one arm and a red-haired girl who could barely have been 16, dressed like a courtesan on the other. There was a second problem as well, because he recognised her…

“You little villain!” Lan Huang snarled, vanishing and reappearing right before Ji Tantai, grasping for his neck.

Ha Nen Hong, who had been a flower seller from West Flower Picking town and was, far as he was vaguely aware, dead – even if her body had never shown up, screamed and scrambled backwards. He was also sure she had been a Qi Condensation cultivator, and not a very strong one, whereas now, she was clearly a Nascent Soul cultivator a bit weaker than him.

The others at the table had also turned, and were staring blankly at the two new arrivals.

“What the…?” Ha Tai’s cup of wine had actually dropped from his grasp, such was his shock.

“How?” Ha Kai asked, speaking to the world at large, standing up.

“This is the one who disrespected grandfather?” Tai Yanmei, who had been pouting, looking at her current, very unlucky hand, was now staring at the youth as well with the look of someone who wanted to take their difficulties out on others.

“S-s-senior?” Ji Tantai rasped, his face pale and his body shaking as he hung in Lan Huang’s grip like a seized fish.

“Uncle Lan, please allow me,” Tai Yanmei vanished in a swish of distorting space and appeared beside Ji Tantai, only for a shining formation of seven glittering rivers of stars to appear in the air behind him.

{Seven Mysterious Rivers Canon}

The words reverberated bizarrely, warming the air around them and giving him a faint taste of salt in the air, as if a sea breeze had just-

The strength of ‘Yang Water’ washed forward, attacking both Lan Huang and Tai Yanmei, even as Tai Qiuyue appeared before her charge, scattering it as it washed around her with a truly ugly expression on her face. Lan Huang had fallen backwards, gasping in shock as his hand dissolved away under the swirling water, which was becoming even more brine like and had an aura of strange corrosion to it now.

‘Ji Tantai’ vanished amid the swirling waters, leaving the girl ‘Hong’ trembling and looking lost as she pushed herself up.

“You little rat!” Ha Tai appeared beside Tai Yanmei, who was sweating faintly and shaking.

“This boy…” Tai Qiuyue sneered. “This accursed brat!”

Her following words echoed eerily throughout the whole of Blue Water City like a sibilant whisper.

“Ji Tantai, be delivered to this seat!”

The command physically twisted space such that he, who was at the epicentre of whatever she did, suddenly felt like he was standing on a very narrow pole over an impossible abyss of different vistas as the entirety of Blue Water City was somehow focused on her.

“FATHER! SAVE ME!” Ji Tantai no longer looked like Ji Tantai now, but a youth with golden hair and a beautiful face, who had arrived in front of the shocked hall of old elders and advisors in the Duke’s Palace and was rushing towards the Imperial Grand Astrologer of all people?

“Wha?” the Imperial Advisors and the Duke barely had any time to react before Tai Qiuyue stepped through the void directly, joining the two places together, and grasped ‘Ji Tantai’ directly only to find she had grasped some strange afterimage that adhered to her hands in a bizarre manner.

In doing so, his appearance seemed to shatter and there were two of Ji Tantai in one place. One that he recognised from their trip and the other that was very weird, like a merger of his features with another person. That person was familiar to him in that he had since seen pictures of ‘Di Ji’ when Ha Tai and then Tai Yanmei had scryed for him with no avail.

“DI JI!” a voice whispered through the void a second later and a shadowy hand grasped from nowhere, a flawlessly enchanting and beautiful woman following after it a moment later to grasp the perpetrator of many crimes even as Tai Qiuyue smashed the last remnants of the shadows and adjoined the floor of the inn to the inner hall directly.

“What is the meaning of this!” an old man in a grey and gold robe with a grand headpiece found himself hit by Tai Qiuyue so hard he hit the wall and his body physically deformed.

“Little celestial, bark only to apologise!” Tai Qiuyue snarled. “You dare to plot my charge like this? Your Eastern Azure is tired of existing with the living!”

“Senior sister?” the woman standing there now, who he also recognised, because there were few who did not know the foremost beauty in Eastern Azure, Lady Kai Lan, was also looking a bit perplexed as she held the shaking form of ‘Di Ji’ in her hands.

“Well, no matter, how do you intend to explain this?” she asked, rounding on the various Imperial Advisors and the duke.

“Ancestors… I…” Di Ji… whose form had sifted yet again in her grasp, somehow, inextricably slipped out of her grasp and shot for the Imperial Grand Astrologer.

“I… seniors, uphold justice! I do not understand what crime I, Ji Tantai, have been accused of!”

“Very good… very good…” a bizarre, many armed shadow behind ‘Di Ji’ suddenly whispered, manifesting and grasping for Tai Yanmei.

“This girl is very suitable very suitable, a prize before heaven! A prize!”

As it spoke the deeply unsettling words, it cast some kind of line at her from what looked… like a fishing rod? At the same time, a strange, otherworldly basket appeared in the youths arms, filled with a strange, twisting water that made his sense of his surroundings flow away strangely…

Tai Qiuyue struck directly at Ji Tantai, only for her form to abruptly waver and with a *pop* of distorting space, she turned into a small, very cute fox with sable fur and a bushy tail.

Space fractured. He screamed and when he opened his eyes, he himself, Lan Huang, Ha Kai, Ha Tai, Tai Yanmei, Kai Lan and to his surprise Ha Nen Hong were all sprawling in Ancestor Tai’s abode.

A moment later, there was an immense sense of distortion and the entire abode shook as something collided with it-

Part 7 – Arriving at a chance discovery of wine, our heroines achieve their goal.

Picking herself up, Hong shook her head, because no matter your realm, dimensional distortion could be disorientating when it jumped on you, and looked around… and then looked around some more, just to check she wasn’t imagining things. She then stared up at the sky, and pinched herself, before staring at the chart in her hands.

“Wow, they really do mess things up something spectacular!” she sighed and grumbled as she looked around her current location.

Her innate sense of her own time told her that she had been displaced a month or two back in time, which was not that bad, all things considered. The ruin, close to the edge of the mountains’ shelter zone, was dank and full of dripping water, while all around the eggs of some critter she half recognised but didn’t really care to name were seated. The body she was now in was her own… but rather adrift in time for a moment, it seemed.

Picking the chart up, she looked around for Fen but there was nobody there, except above her a large adult of the species was quietly preparing to pounce.

She grabbed it by the arms and legs and tossed it out of the room, beyond the barrier and out into the darkness of the rain-drenched valley outside before rummaging around for the chart. Her current form was naked… given she was a ‘corpse’ that had been dumped in here as food she guessed, however that splintered circumstance played out.

Ignoring the screams of the malcontents outside, she found it beneath some bloody bones and turned it over in her hands twice and then turned it the right way up-

With a grunt, she landed on the ground, still naked, but you couldn’t have everything, and looked around, shaking her head, playing along with the duality of the scene for a moment so it could resynchronise and not register her as an aberration to be hit by a lot of pesky lightning until she went away and looked at the problem.

The source of the problem was not, actually, anything to do with Fen, she could now sense. Rather, the thoroughly unguarded aftershocks of that dimensional teleport that took them out had crossed through the core of the ‘Abode’ she had just been dragged into. The abode itself had been thrown back out of the firmament by Fen – This trick could only have been achieved by Fen, and was probably not harmful to it, or the owner, who had a sort of arrangement with them, even if he didn’t know it.

The reason the two aligned up like that was really only because she was deliberately noodling things and had, it seemed, somewhat underestimated the bad juju of those involved.

“This is getting to the point where it’s starting to feel like hard work,” she grumbled, checking outwards.

The ‘Palace’ was annihilated, as was to be expected when a travelling abode of this level was unstacked right in the middle of it. The degree of devastation unleashed on central Blue Water City was quite phenomenal as well – as was the lack of casualties. They were not in the business of slaughtering innocents, so the ‘death toll’ had been distributed directly to the worst aspects of society within a thousand miles or so.

That said, Fen had turned half the populace into goats with a ‘talisman’, it seemed, and was now in the process of fleeing the enraged fox from North Star Grotto, throwing out various inconvenient arts that she was likely divining from the Jade Gate Court with great abandon, along with the odd ‘ancient treasure’ style effect to pose an actual inconvenience.

Above, she could also sense the descending strength of several powers from beyond the world already, two from a planet about 15 billion miles distant, the other from much, much further away, relating to the Huang clan. They, however, were looking not so much for the matters playing out now, but tracking along the route of the teleportation from before.

The tear had already acquired a miniature maelstrom and was stabilizing into an orbit around the heart of the nebula they were in. Its surface had also started to rupture outwards, caused by the density of the raw potential leeching out of the tears around its edge as it nurtured new conceptual forms within it.

She watched its progress for a few moments and then allowed herself a grin as three more swept from different places, aiming for the temporary hole in the firmament that was a ‘Star Ocean Tidal Pool’ to all intents and purposes.

As they did so, the sense of ‘connection’ with the disparate parts of the chart solidified as all the chaotic influence from different sources, many of whom should really have known better, became ensnared within the haruspex of the chart. Closing her eyes, she reached out and felt a ghostly web swirling around it, the array condensing tortured causal connections into manifest, material resource – a grey-brown flower-like paste that flaked faintly and twisted.

She condensed it into a ball in her hand, compressing it, even as she looked around at the abode and felt a bit embarrassed for its owner.

“Oh well, eggs must occasionally be broken in the aim of a higher cause!” she sighed, “I’ll let Fen leave the fishing rod for him or something.”

She was just about to quietly make her exit, when the chart in her hands firmly intuited for her that ‘wine’ could be gotten here.

“…”

Before someone could notice her or the others struggling up, she rapidly vacated the scene, grabbing only a wall hanging for modesty, and headed for the inner areas of the abode.

Normally, you would not be able to come into such a place unless you were bound to it, but given it was a thing that had been made on a whim by Scheming Shi when he was sent back to ‘school’ for being a nuisance, as much so he could troll the teachers, she knew her way around it better even than its current owner did. The main area was a cherry grove, of which she swept up quite a few and tossed into a sack – they were not peaches, but they were a good substitute given Songshu likely wanted to refine ambrosia or something equally boring. He was surprisingly traditional like that.

The original space though, which was sort of held within the layer but a bit tangential to it, grew olives. The olive grove was still there as well; Scholar Tai had even set up a means to make olive oil, which was… good enough to burn, she judged, tasting some.

He had also set up a vineyard, a bunch of grape presses and a quite extensive herb garden around one of the larger storage barns. It belied his humble origins and it amused her no end that he had actually wound up here of all places when they crossed paths again in the aftermath of the collapse. It was not the destination she might have expected but recalling where Saint Roberta’s had mapped with the original world, a fair few people from all over that continent had gone missing around that time.

In later eras, such a thing might have been remarked upon, but it had been a period of historic upheaval, population displacements and more. Towns mysteriously dying off, people randomly vanishing, ships lost at sea and the like would just have been dismissed as plague, war, witches and natural disasters for the most part. That a travelling philosopher, who had stayed behind after the end of the Heroic Age living out his days on a small Mediterranean island, having travelled west on a journey of self-discovery after growing tired of his life in Chang An wound up here, courtesy of that whole mess, was the kind of strange tale you just came to accept after a while – nor was he the only one.

Finally finding the key to the wine cellar, hidden in the spout of a humorous fountain of a nymph playing with some balls, she unlocked it and inhaled the rich aroma of oak, grapes, spices and citrus. Wandering down the rows, she finally found what she wanted, pulling out the chart and drawing a symbol onto the various kegs directly. Removing them from here would be too much effort, and she had made the chart anyway, not to mention stealing the wine would taint its karma.

A few more aftershocks echoed through the abode as she considered what to-

“Well, I wondered what this was, but it was actually a hidden abode?” a young voice mused.

She turned to find a pretty-faced youth with the ornate hat dressed in green robes with the symbol for ‘Din’ standing there and resisted a sigh.

Glancing at the list, she doubly crossed off ‘Noodles’ in her mind as well, because this was just about gnarled up enough for that at this point.

All around her, she could see the shifting threads of entanglement. Quite a few people had ended up in here it seemed, not that it would do them much good in the long run as none had good intentions it seems.

“Really, greedy eyes make for sorrowful sighs,” she murmured, impressed at how many errant individuals has already started to 'investigate' the emergent abode, even as her words made the young man jump in shock as she stepped out of the shadows.

“You… How are you here?”

“I… there was a flash of light and then I was here and I wandered a bit… and I lost Brother Ji…” she snivelled, holding the tapestry around her, smirking inside as she traced the threads of his ‘karma’ back to a familiar obfuscation.

“Brother Ji huh…” the youth, whose karma would have been rather dark even on a moonless night, narrowed his eyes.

-Shameless. There should be limits on a lack of consequences, she complained in her heart. The threads of fate quivered and did their best to pretend they had not heard what she said.

Focusing on their surroundings, she pulled everything out of the abode, dumping her, several thousand gallons of wine in casks, most of the buildings, the vineyard and a few very surprised interlopers in the middle of the main square of Blue Water City.

“Let it not be said, Scholar Tai, that I do not look after those who catch my eye,” she giggled, wondering suddenly how the other girl who they had played with that time was getting on in her own quest to get the best out of the minefield that was Yin Eclipse.

A moment later, the owner of the wine appeared.

“Senior Din Fuang,” she snivelled… stumbling backwards.

“You…” Din Fuang opened and shut his mouth several times, likely wondering how some random girl like her knew his name. That he was yet another Dharma clone was just the icing on the proverbial cake really.

Ha Tai, who was standing there looking at the contents of his ‘winery’, the ruins of the building it had been in and hundreds of priceless spirit grape trees transplanted into the middle of the plaza for all to see, had the appearance of a man contemplating terrible things to all nearby.

Before she could lose her body for a second time, she rapidly made her exit, fleeing between the barrels even as Ha Tai arrived beside the shocked Din Fuang and grasped him by the neck, before he could do more than yelp in surprise.

Considering the recipe, she hummed a jaunty tune.

‘Recipe for Spicy Soup’

Get spices.

Get salt – lots of salt – group associated with killing Alexios?

Get spirit grape liqueur – might be problem? Apparently not.

No noodles. Will need flour, water, eggs, more salt? – Same source as before???

Plausible Deniability??? – ^_^’

Don’t make a mess!

If you break it, fix it. – I am sure it will be fine

Extra spicy? EXTRA!

…

?Profit?

The city shuddered as space broke in a bizarre way above the remains of the ducal palace. She winced as a shockwave of chaotic energies swept over the surrounding area and a large portion of those nearby were turned into monkeys. Moments later, two shockwaves intersected, turning the blue sky dark as the three Heavenly Venerates, from the Kong, their local minion and the Xue, took the fight upwards so as not to ruin their chances of advancement by accidentally obliterating a few tens of million mortal souls.

She walked on, considering the list, which was now entirely surplus to requirements as they had the various karmic sources on their persons now, or held in the harp and fishing basket. In a way, the only unresolved issue was the 33 back on the other planet, but her intuitions towards this kind of thing were really quite well-honed.

“…”

“There comes a point where the balance of things will be so chaotic we will just do a lot of work for no gain,” she mused, turning the chart over and considering it before sitting down on a bench to wait for Ganlan and Fen to finish up matters.

Epilogue – In which our heroines conclude that they should just have ordered takeout.

“Two more bowls of spicy noodle soup!”

Jun Han – or, as he was currently called, Yuan Zixin – glanced over at the two young girls seated at the counter in the West Flower Picking town marketplace. Setting aside the fact that the things they were carrying were downright wierd - presumably stuff they had been sent to buy or fix, it was hard to shake the feeling that both were oddly familiar, but in all the chaos and change of the town in the last while, he had stopped trying to match faces to circumstances – it only made you maudlin.

“Put extra pepper in it as well!” the red-haired one said, ignoring the fact that her nose was actually running.

Further along, a blonde-haired woman with piercing blue eyes was staring into a bowl of much more conventional soup, holding her wine cup in both hands and looking a bit haunted.

“Did you not hear? There is another catastrophe in Blue Water City!” someone nearby was exclaiming, having just run out of a shop.

“I heard some young noble used a forbidden talisman, turned half the city into sheep!” someone else added.

“That’s insane!”

“Stop drinking before noon!”

“What is there to hear, you moron? Do you not have eyes to see?” another bystander grumbled.

While the question of ‘sheep’ was debatable, it was hard to miss the vast, swirling gyre of chaos above the world right now. It was mostly unfolding beyond the realm boundary, but in short, a bunch of folk-

Everyone winced as a lightning bolt smashed down on the other side of town, scattering off the barriers. Somewhere, someone overseeing the formation had lightly spat blood he guessed, because the stray bolt had punched through three layers and hit a distant estate outside town – one of the Ha clan ones…

A moment later a second set of bolts tore across the distant mountains, green and purple scattering off each other, followed by a series of thunderous booms that made everything shake.

“Sebiouzly,” the other girl drinking the spicy soup had to pause so as not to spill it, allowing her to talk even though her tongue was clearly numb.

“This ib gud!” she mumbled.

“I am glad you like it!” Ning Sora, who had made it, looked a bit nervous in truth, because the requested recipe was about as spicy as a normal person could likely take.

“You…” the red-haired girl also paused, holding her bowl expertly with one hand as another tremor shook everything else. “You know, it was actually a really good idea of yours to just throw that list to the dogs and order takeout!”

“Id ib aulwayz un obtion!” the dark-haired girl nodded, making him shake his head wryly.

-Seriously, life still goes on, huh? Young girls sent out shopping instead spend the money on takeout food.

“U 'as 'um mulk?” she managed to ask Ning Sora, who smiled at them prettily and passed her a large jug of iced milk which the girl proceeded to drink directly and with a sustained manner that would have impressed a seasoned drinker.

“Ahhhh….” She sighed deeply, slamming the jug down and grinning.

“Excellent soup!” she declared, which got appreciative laughs from the others nearby.

“Say? Do you do takeout?” the red-haired girl asked.

Ning Sora nodded. “Yep, where do you want it sent?”

“Well… it’s a little complicated,” the red-haired girl frowned… “Why don’t we have a talk, and see what arrangement we can come to!”